Vance has been completely pussy-whipped by his woke wife. At first, it looked cute how much he adored and deferred to her but now she’s gotten him to parrot all the far-left anti-American slogans. I feel sad for him but it’s something that often happens in men with absent or distant mothers. They appoint their wives to the role of “the good mommy” and self-infantilize into lisping little boys.

People will ask where all these great Canadian books I’m recommending suddenly come from. But it’s really simple. There’s a literary award in Canada called “the Scotiabank Giller Prize.” The banking industry in Canada is heavily monopolistic, so it’s always a “bank something” for every event.

The prize is good, though. Yes, it’s awarded to a fair amount of diverse crap. All of those novels about “the plight of the Armenian-Laotian-Quechua immigrant community in Canada.” These novels are all identical and deeply embarrassing, and I say it as a member of an immigrant community in Canada. Immigrants are typecast as having to write about being immigrants, and their novels always feature a pair of hard-working, earnest parents who want to preserve their cultural heritage, a rebellious teenager who just wants to fit in, an aunt with a spicy personal life that scandalizes the earnest parents but intrigues the rebellious teenager, and the wise old grandma who is traumatized by a long ago famine / civil war / genocide or some other atrocity.

I dislike these books not only because they are monotonous but because they make it sound like all immigrants do is sit there, thinking about how they are immigrants. And it’s stupid. One does a million things that have nothing to do with how one emigrated 20 years ago.

But once you weed out the books representing increasingly outlandish (pun intended) immigrant communities, the Giller Prize has some excellent authors. I’m discovering that Canadian literature is very different from US literature. This doesn’t mean it’s better or worse. It’s simply different. And I like it.

So prepare. I’ll probably be at it for a while.

This book tricked me into thinking it’s a Canadian version of The Diary of a Provincial Lady or Excellent Women. It’s prefaced by an article about the author, presenting him as this sweet, bespectacled teacher type who writes cute little books about daily life in picturesque villages. The novel is set in 1934-8, it’s narrated in the form of a diary and letters between sisters, and I prepared to have a cuteness attack of the kind one enjoys while reading E. M. Delafield.

Yeah, well, nah. The novel takes every convention of the “spinster of this parish” genre and tears it to shreds, together with the poor spinsters. Richard B. Wright is some sort of an incredible Canadian genius I never heard about until now. He writes about female loneliness and female longing with extraordinary realism and terrible cruelty. I’m not sure why he set his novel a century ago. Clara Callan and the rest of the sad spinsters from the novel would have been exactly the same today. But maybe that is the point.

It’s a brilliant novel, people, and it’s very mean. One hopes that the ending could offer some hope but the author added an afterword that crushes that dream, too. Also, Richard B. Wright visited our planet from a faraway galaxy where political correctness had never been invented. Dude had absolutely no idea what he was expected to think about female empowerment and all that. Clara Callan merited its author every literary award in Canada when it was published in 2001, and it definitely deserves the accolades.

Highly, highly recommended. Canadian literature rules.

P.S. The digital version is at $0.10 on Amazon right now. I promise it will be the best dime you’ll ever spend.

By a beautiful coincidence, my book came out exactly one year from the day I wrote the first 269 words of it. It took me a year to write and 20 years to prepare for writing this book because the very first reading I did for it happened 20 years ago.

Yes, I know how many words I wrote and on which project at any given day in the past decade. This is an answer to the question of how to write a lot and be productive.

So yes, it’s out, hard-cover, 336 pages, and I’m sensationally happy.

This has been happening since 2014, and the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations have gone to extraordinary lengths to silence the damage inflicted on US citizens who were simply doing their jobs.

What’s particularly curious here is that the three administrations were working in unison, betraying their citizens with zero qualms.

Remember: political partisanship is a mental defect.

This boy made a portrait of Leonardo Di Caprio out of 400 Rubik’s Cubes:

I find this unbelievably cool.

I hate to say I’m not going to read something but I don’t think I want to read this book. I don’t believe there’s anything new and interesting in it for me. To the contrary, I suspect it will make me angry.

The greatest harm that a screen does to a child is that the parent is staring at it instead of looking at the child. But nobody is willing to say that because it’s easier to format children than to convince adults to exhibit some self-discipline. Parents are the people who will buy the book, and Haidt can’t afford to antagonize them.

The narrative of “evil companies who hooked kids on purpose” is weak sauce and boring. We’ve heard all this before with Coca Cola, Barbie dolls (before they were rebranded as good for you), junk food, etc. Of course, companies want people hooked on their wares. Their responsibility is to their shareholders. They definitely can’t be expected to have a greater responsibility to children than those children’s parents.

This problem gets solved the moment the parents put the phones away when interacting with their children. That’s it. That’s all that’s needed. Don’t hold the bloody things in your hand – turned on or off, doesn’t matter – around children. These kids are miserable not because somebody said something on Snapchat but because Mom hasn’t had an uninterrupted day with them during their whole lives. Snapchat is horrible, definitely. But it’s not Snapchat that’s doing the damage. It’s the distracted, absent parent who interrupts every conversation with the child to stare at a little plastic rectangle. I’d like to read about that but it doesn’t look like anybody will have the guts. Or the readers if they do.

Today, Russia directed most of its bombing to the Western regions of Ukraine. Because that’s where the Catholics live, and it’s their Easter.

The Ukrainian Orthodox will get particularly harsh bombings on Orthodox Easter, May 5.

Happy Easter to those who celebrate today.

In Canadian literature, people are constantly getting lost amidst snowstorms and have to trudge for miles through deep snow. That already is a great argument in favor of reading these books. Another point in favor of reading more Canadian books is the existence of David Adams Richards.

Nights Below Station Street is one of his early novels. David Adams Richards was only 38 when he wrote it, and he was over a decade away from having the maturity and depth to create his masterpiece Mercy Among the Children. In Spanish, we call the kind of writing one sees in Nights Below Station Street “costumbrismo”, or a depiction of customs and habits of everyday life. David Adams Richards doesn’t make any grand pronouncements or tackle great philosophical issues in the novel but simply writes about life among working-class people in New Brunswick. The novel is extremely peaceful even when it speaks of dysfunction. Everything is ultimately as should be. Everybody is where they are meant.

I’m fascinated by this writer’s trajectory, and I’ll keep reading him. Especially now that it’s hot as the dickens around here, and it’s good to imagine some snow.

N and I especially love all the normal family stuff – picnics, trips to the zoo, dinners, badminton games, and barbecues – because we didn’t have any of it growing up. I mean, we had the barbecues and stuff, obviously, but none of it was happy. In his case, such events usually led to violence. In mine, there was no violence but anger, humiliation, and nastiness. N and I never thought we’d get a chance to enjoy what family life has to offer.

We exist in a state of being shocked and humbled by our extreme good fortune in experiencing a normal family life.