Remember the story about the very left-wing woman who had to put her daughter into a Christian school? It was in 2021. The public school closed down every time somebody tested positive, and the progressive mother had a demanding job. So they had to put the kid into a local hardcore Evangelical school.

It looks like, in the intervening years, the very decisive little girl has managed to convert the whole family. The mother who used to post BLM slogans and such on social media now posts stories about how “last night we prayed as a family and we realized that God’s blessings…” Every time I backtrack and check to see if it’s the same person.

I spent the evening at Klara’s Easter concert, so I’m all in favor of such transformations.

I didn’t pay attention to time difference, and it turns out that my talk at the British conference will be at 4 am my time. Everybody else at the conference is British or Irish, so I’ll be the only idiot blabbing maniacally in the dead of night. Everybody else will be cool and well-rested.

When I was in secondary school (which, as you can imagine, wasn’t extremely recent), we had this very mean geography teacher called Ludmila Ananievna. This is a highly unusual and very funny-sounding patronymic that I never encountered since.

Today I went on the school website because I want to give several copies of my book to the school library and I need the address. And what do I see? A new generation of students complaining about the mean geography teacher called Ludmila Ananievna. I never thought I’d be so happy to see the old bat’s name in any context.

She used to be on my case a lot because I was too mousy and quiet. Guess I got over that problem big way since then.

This week I’m returning a proofed article for the Journal of Canadian Hispanists, preparing a proposal for the Association of Ukrainian Hispanists, writing a talk for next week’s conference of British and Irish Hispanists, and hoping to be accepted for an event organized by German Hispanists.

And N has begun to learn Spanish in preparation for our trip to Spain in the summer.

I like you, Polish people, but what fresh hell is this:

Today my students were translating into Spanish the following micro story:

My wife told me to stop pretending I’m a a flamingo. I put my foot down.

Obviously, you need to get rid of both the flamingo and the foot because there’s no direct equivalent in Spanish. Students came up with brilliant translations that included soldiers, giraffes, and spiders. My course is really working because they wouldn’t have been able to do this at the beginning of the semester.

My friend from Africa discovered anti-racism. Started reading Ibram Kendi, watching videos and listening to podcasts. She tried to share her finds with me but I said it makes me feel like a prostitute who found a boyfriend. It’s exactly like at work but nobody’s paying me to do it.

Eventually, my friend decided to hang out with African Americans. But that didn’t go well. They said, “we like you even less than white people. They bought us as slaves but you sold us to them in the first place.”

“You are a college professor,” the friend told me. “Help me come up with what I should have told them.”

I said that while all that selling and buying was happening in Africa, my own ancestors were being bought and sold, too, so we were definitely uninvolved.

The friend said it’s OK to share this story online if I don’t use any names. Maybe somebody knows what to respond in this situation.

I am gathering a collection of twenty-first-century books that reflect conservative sensibilities, and the novel Mercy Among the Children by the great Canadian writer David Adams Richards is my most recent addition. This is a very, very talented book, my friends. It grabs you by the throat and never lets go. I’ll probably not be able to read anything else for days after finishing it because it still holds me.

Mercy Among the Children is set in rural New Brunswick in 1980s, and it not only speaks to the things that really matter but offers the best insight of any other work of fiction I have read into the genesis of wokism.

Sydney, an indigent working-class man with a sky-high IQ, dedicates his life to enacting a perverted form of Christianity which consists of him debasing himself in the most extreme ways. There is no humiliation or beating Sydney doesn’t eagerly seek. When he gets unfairly accused of pedophilia, he does everything to make the accusation ring true because it would hurt the feelings of the accusers if he openly declared them wrong.

“It is what I know, yet I have no right to force others to feel it,” Sydney explains in a perfect encapsulation of the idea that everybody has their own truth and these “privatized truths” all have identical value.

Sydney’s love of self-abasement wouldn’t be that bad if he were single. But he’s a married father of three, and his wife and children bear the worst of the abuse that Sydney invites. His wife is raped, his son beaten and humiliated, his daughter defiled but Sydney is beautifically happy in the knowledge that he hurt nobody’s feelings by accusing them of these crimes.

There is, of course, much more to the novel than the insight into wokeness. It shows how feminism can turn malignant and anti-family, how the Canadian tax system is an abomination that ruins people (you know what I mean if it ever had its clutches into you), how Canadian academics use aboriginals as a career-making topic, how environmentalism can be a ruse for money interests and help a corrupt government, and how hard it is to scratch your way to a truly Christian understanding of life.

And the writing, people. Such beautiful writing. It’s a book that I didn’t want to end because the pleasure of reading was intense. The novel is about Catholics. For some reason, the best Canadian literature I’ve read is either about Catholics or about Jews.

It’s a profound novel but it’s very dark. If you aren’t in the best place for heavy stuff, don’t read it now. It’s also the most Christian North American novel I’ve ever read. David Adams Richards is like a conservative, very Christian Richard Russo. For people who say there’s no conservative art any more, go read this dude. If this isn’t art, I don’t know what is.