My Ukrainian instructor gave a talk today and we both cried like belugas during the talk. I wasn’t planning to because I draw the line at crying once a day. Twice is an overkill. But she showed some footage from the area my mother is from, and it got to me.

On the positive side, N’s favorite Ukrainian journalist read my interview, and N is very happy. He doesn’t want to be famous but he really wants me to be.

I promise to calm down and come up with something smart to say for my birthday tomorrow.

There was a massive strike on Chernihiv. Many dead and wounded. I have friends there. They were actually my father’s friends but I took over after he died.

With fingers in a spasm, I try to type out, “are you OK? Are you alive?”

My friends write back to say they are alive. I’m trying to make breakfast for my child but my eyes are so swollen I can barely see the pan.

I have one lecture, two meetings, a committee lunch, and an event after that. And I’ll be present, cheerful, and entertaining at all of them.

Tomorrow’s my birthday, by the way.

I have explained at great length why the formula “XYZ entity has a right to ABC action” is shallow and childish. I have explained that it holds no interest to me by virtue of its superficiality.

There are only two possibilities why you would want to keep trying to engage me in a conversation that I clearly and repeatedly dismissed as being too primitive for my liking:

A. You do not have the intellectual capacity to understand my explanations.

B. You are trolling.

You have my sympathy whatever the option closest to the truth.

To people who can understand, I want to propose an exercise. Whenever you start formulating a thought about rights, try to see if you can express your idea without using this word. “Rights” has become a lazy substitute for an amalgamation of concepts that nobody wants to untangle because there are inconvenient things hiding in there.

If you want to explore this further, you can’t do any better than reading Christopher Caldwell’s The Age of Entitlement. He talks about how the spread of invented “rights” eviscerated the US Constitution. Or at least, read this post from when I was talking about Caldwell incessantly. We do not need to invent the wheel when others have done it a long time ago.

I was doing poorly but then I went to the grocery store, and they had pickling cucumbers. So I pickled my guts out, and it helped.

It’s just a way of speaking. No actual guts went into the pickled cucumbers. The process of pickling is what helps.

I gave my first talk to Ukrainian hispanists today. It was good but one of the attendees was in Kharkiv, and we are at the time of day when nightly shelling usually begins. And I’m thinking there can be a missile strike at any moment. I didn’t fall apart at the talk because people have enough problems without me howling like a wounded monkey. But now after the talk, I did fall apart.

I don’t know why I’m such a goose. My child is completely safe, I’m safe. But this hurts like the bloody dickens.

Fucking stupid Russians.

It’s incredible how innocent people are. All single-sex, heavily masculinized environments do this kind of thing.

“Our enemies” do it in a much more… erm, direct way. I could post some videos that would dispel the mythology that this is somehow uniquely American but I won’t because they are very hard-core.

I find it kind of cute (if also somewhat bizarre) that somebody could have lived to adulthood and failed to know that the reason why people go into same-sex professions is to be homoerotic together.

(The NSFW link is under the fold).

Continue reading “NSFW Warning” →

WashU is very close geographically and much more prestigious. That’s why this is happening:

This kind of thing doesn’t happen at my university. Our students aren’t wealthy. They are from normal families. Not spoiled, not entitled. Just normal, good young people.

I’m about to start grading but I’m so overcome with gratitude towards my students that I might start inflating grades.

Do people have the right to get to the airport?

Theoretically, yes. But in practice, clearly not in this particular situation. The passengers could stand by the side of the highway and scream to the skies that they have rights. Or they can lug their suitcases themselves and pay with their health and discomfort for the right of a bunch of brats to harass them. As a society, we have reached a consensus to respect the rights of the angry brats and not respect the rights of the peaceful passengers or the cab drivers who won’t get their full fare because the brats don’t let them do their work.

Legally, the passengers should prevail. But there’s nobody interested in guaranteeing their rights. So do these rights exist?

People say I’m being legalistic with these questions. But the police, the healthcare, and the schools are defunded everywhere. Where will we go to wail about our rights at the rapidly approaching time when we’ll find ourselves abandoned by the disappearing institutions? My nitpicky questions about rights point to a crucial change that is taking place right now.

Last week, there was a big event at my school with all department Chairs present in our long, heavy robes and velvet hats. A very nice and well-meaning American photographer wanted us all to hug. It so happened that I stood next to a very religious professor of Physics who is Muslim. The idea of hugging a strange woman during Ramadan was clearly unappealing. I also needed no hugs because it was hot like the dickens, and I’m not a tactile person, to put it mildly.

As a result, the Muslim prof, whose English isn’t that great, was backing up into a corner with a desperate, “No, no hugs!” The photographer was chiding, “You should hug her, it’s disrespectful not to!”, I was bleating that I’m perfectly fine without hugs, and a handsy professor of performing arts was butting in with an eager, “I’ll hug her! I’m here to hug!”

This is a great metaphor for the typical American well-meaning need to butt in with its two-state solutions, peace talks, Budapest Memorandums, and other dum-dums that nobody else needs but everybody has to put up with and live with the consequences.

If you like the narrative style used by Rachel Cusk in Outline, you will enjoy Study for Obedience. Its author is a Canadian from Montreal, and the novel received the most prestigious literary prize in Canada recently.

In my ongoing journey across Canadian literature, I’d only done strictly realist novels before alighting on Bernstein, and Study for Obedience is my departure from that. It’s a very Jewish novel, but not in a typical humorous and playful way of Philip Roth or Mordecai Richler. Bernstein is Jewish like a primal scream or a ton of bricks falling on your head. This novel gave me the best (and also the only) glimpse into why English -speaking Jews are so massively and aggressively left-wing.

I looked at some reviews of the novel and discovered that most readers chose not to understand it. One review after another says it’s a novel about “xenophobia and exclusion.” I don’t know what else Bernstein could have done to demonstrate that the “xenophobia”* her protagonist experiences is a complete fabrication. For crying out loud, this character tells us that the entire population of the “xenophobic” village dressed in identical white tracksuits and gathered at church to signal their white supremacy to a Jewish woman who suddenly and mysteriously turned brown. Yes, let’s take that in a literal way because churches are filled with racisty white people dressed in white to make sure everybody knows how white they are.

There are two ways of being Jewish in the novel. One is the pragmatic, success-oriented kind that doesn’t want to burn the world down but instead enjoy it. In Study for Obedience, that type of Jewishness is silenced and beaten down by the enraged, resentful kind that wants to remake the world and curse it for resisting.

Unlike Cusk’s Outline, this is not an enjoyable book. It’s short but I read it for two weeks. The subject matter is unpleasant and so is the Jewish narrator, and it’s supposed to be that way. Study for Obedience is a novel about the ugliness born out of an experience of a genocide. And yes, every ethnicity experienced a terrible calamity (or a dozen) at some point in history. But just like not everybody is evolved enough to get beamed into the skies by reading a book, not everybody is at the level where a holocaust will evoke anything beyond bovine resignation.

I don’t know if I can recommend this book. It’s very talented and important but it was very unpleasant to read. It’s like you are suddenly beamed into the sick brain of one of those screeching “activists” at a BLM rally, and all you want to do is get out of there. I could barely read 5-6 pages of the book in a single sitting because it creeped me out to see the world through the eyes of these fanatics. They feel so sorry for themselves, it turns out.

In short, Canadians have a literature and a half. Everything I’ve read so far is very dark. And outstanding in quality.

Is there any French-Canadian literature I should be reading in translation, anybody? It’s the year of Canada in my reading life, and I’m very open.

* It’s actually Jew-hatred but, like back in the USSR, we are now too scandalized by the word “Jew” to utter it.