“Do you want some fresh green peas?” I asked Klara.

“I will not partake of these vulgar amusements!” she bellowed, and everybody at the grocery store looked at me, wondering what kind of weirdo I was.

She’s in the Anne of Green Gables stage, and her vocabulary shows it.

My book is being adopted as a textbook at one of Ukrainian universities. It’s so cool.

The book hasn’t come out yet but I placed it on Academia.edu, and people are already finding it.

The only thing remaining for the paper version to appear is the cover. The publishers are confused because they still can’t figure out the genre.

Speaking of conspiracy theories, did you see that the pro-Meghan Markle crowd (yes, they exist; no, I don’t get it either) are trying to get William removed as the future King by spreading rumors that he did something to his wife?

This is better than spying vaccine cheese.

I have no idea how it happens but I routinely and by complete accident run into Twitter accounts of people I know. And I don’t even know any people. I’m practically a recluse. There are supposed to be billions of accounts, but I somehow accidentally run into somebody familiar every now and then.

The way it happens is I read a comment to a comment to another comment, and when there are finally only two commenters left in the thread, one of them is a former colleague or somebody who used to read this blog but then got upset because my brain isn’t a 100% copy of theirs.

What I’m saying is that Twitter doesn’t recommend these accounts to me. I stumble on them in comment threads.

And yes, I now use a lot of Twitter because it became fun and useful after Musk took over.

The only Oscar win I ever cared about:

I won’t be watching the film because I would probably have a heart attack in the first 10 minutes. But finally decent people who deserve to win got an award.

And that’s good even though we all wish the movie never needed to be made.

Brought to you courtesy of President Reagan and his self-described amnesty bill that legalized millions of illegal immigrants for the price of $185. Seriously, that’s the “fine” they had to pay to get legalized.

The amnesty encouraged many more millions to cross the border illegally in hopes of a new amnesty. Also, many of those who arrived after the cut-off date for Reagan’s amnesty lied, claimed they had entered earlier, and were speedily granted legal status.

As a result, California is now sky-blue and we are oohing and aahing over its wokeness while pretending not to know who started it all.

The world was fast moving on, and from these autumn skies Mathew and Cynthia saw the new information age staggering
the previous ages into submission. Once or twice in their lives people from Mathew’s background would have a moment where
they would prick the national consciousness; they would be interviewed and condescended to, with such gaiety of dismissal it wasn’t even registered by our more educated countrymen. Overall, men like Mathew were laughed at, ridiculed or feared most of their lives. If there was bigotry against First Nations* they were accused of it (even though he had worked with First Nations men and women far more than those professors or writers who would accuse him). If there was intolerance they were accused, even though he had worked on roads and shared his bread with black men from Africville. Chauvinism they were accused of, even though he thought of Cynthia as his superior. The world had gone on, and had been parcelled into manageable concerns; and this world left him and his sister out. Well, in some way it still allowed for his sister, for her gender demanded it. But he knew that now, at thirty-three
years of age, time was falling away from him.

Mercy Among the Children by David Adams Richards (2000)

People still could write like this in Canada 20 years ago and get all sorts of literary awards. Not surprisingly, there were no defecating drug fiends in the streets either and people weren’t ratting out their neighbors for imaginary transgressions. It wasn’t perfect but it wasn’t whatever there is now either.

* Canadians hilariously and ahistorically call their pre-Columbian tribes “First Nations”, even though the concept of “a nation” was as alien to the aborigines as a computer.

Why, why is he doing this? What possesses Biden to humiliate himself like this to appease the tiniest of minorities that will vote for him anyway?

And these people make fun of MAGAs. MAGAs are imperfect – and who isn’t? – but they don’t go into fits over “magic words”. I’ve so had it with magic words. Laken Riley is dead no matter if you call her murderer illegal, undocumented or a blue fucking giraffe with pink stripes. Biden could have said, “A citizen of this country is dead and I’d rather talk about that and not play word games if you don’t mind.” Instead he pants like an old sick dog in response to some stupid journalist. It’s humiliating to watch.

The leader of the free world can’t even speak freely without having to issue groveling apologies for a single word.

That it has come to this. Is it really so surprising that people flock to a candidate who can speak whole sentences without retracting and apologizing?

If you have a difficult / stressful day or event coming up, it’s a good idea to sit down the night before and write out in detail how you want to feel during this event and how you are going to rescue some of it for your purposes. Describe the mood you want to experience during the unpleasant event and then put it on like a suit of clothing.

Don’t allow the stressful experience to drag you around like an object. Decide in advance that you are a person who remains cool and collected (or a person who uses stressful events to gather energy and ideas for your creative project, etc). Maybe you’ll need to bring an object that will return you to the imagined persona.

Claire McGowan’s novel The Fall shows that the difference between art and commercial crap isn’t talent. It’s courage.

The novel begins strongly, with honest, devastating descriptions of helpless, self-infantilizing womanhood. The main characters are Charlotte, a banker’s fiancee with a chi-chi job in PR, and Keisha, a mixed-race mother of a 5-year-girl who loses custody because she lets her boyfriend brutalize the kid in front of her. Charlotte is rich, Keisha is poor but both are comically pouty and inept at the most basic things in life. Both lisp through their twenties in the persona of cute little girls and eagerly hand themselves over to men who (mis)manage their lives.

McGowan shows how easy it is to drum up outrage over imaginary “racism” to avoid looking at the real causes of both white and black dysfunction. She demolishes the girl-boss mythology and does the same for the “black girl magic” narrative.

And then she gets scared of what her talent revealed to her. The second half of The Fall constitutes McGowan’s frenzied effort to downplay or outright deny the unpleasant truths she narrated in the first. Her ditzy, helpless damsel characters suddenly transform into heroic overachievers who pull themselves up by their bootstraps. The swoony PR diva Charlotte begins to work in homeless shelters for minimum wage to pay the bills. To make up for the transgression of noticing how frivolous cancel culture is, McGowan squeezes into the story a ridiculous bit of #MeTootery and uses it as a way of excusing Charlotte’s self-infantilization.

Things get so cliched that McGowan feels the need to endow each character with a romantic and financial happy ending. The abusive ogre Keisha snags a rich, handsome businessman who showers her with diamonds. We all know how much wealthy, successful men enjoy the company of rude, piss-poor women with non-existent hygiene habits. The princessy Charlotte willingly gives up designer handbags and £800 shoes and goes to law school while settling down with an unemployed chronic patient.

Let’s look at the contrast between McGowan’s The Fall and Emma Cline’s The Guest. Both writers are gifted and can speak to the most unpleasant truths that nobody else wants to notice. But Cline is unafraid of her own talent. She doesn’t panic in the middle of her novel and start piling up cliches to protect her readers from reality.