This is a charming children’s movie, my friends, that scrubbed out every trace of Roald Dahl and put the American sensibility of 2023 in his place. Some parts of that sensibility are good. For example, the frontier mentality of a persevering individual is at the core of the movie. It’s like a Wild West flick but cute and for kids.

On the negative side, there are the now obligatory racial hangups as the movie populates the Europe of 120 years ago with crowds of African-Americans. No explanation is offered for how they got there in such numbers. As with the Claudine Gay story, the blacks chosen for the parts in the movie are extraordinarily talentless. The lead part is played by an unattractive, overweight girl with a speech impediment and the affect of a dead fish who should have never gone into acting. (No, I’m not being mean to a child. I’m expressing my opinion about a product I paid for). I’m sure a crowd of mega-talented black tweens was available but DEI doesn’t like brilliant non-white people. They spoil the savior fun.

Timothée Chalamet is delightful, as always. He’s the perfect example of why it’s dumb to equate very feminine masculinity with gayness. Not the bougiest of gays can affect Chalamet’s easy and natural femininity. And it’s only because he’s so girly that his on-screen friendship with a child doesn’t seem creepy. Just a touch of masculinity would have made the movie weird and uncomfortable.

We have such a terror of discussing things relating to “diversity” that many people believe that gay men are wannabe women. This is utterly stupid, as gay men don’t want to be women at all and are not particularly feminine. Some affect femininity but it’s a parody, and not usually a very kind one. The proportion of feminine men among gays is the same as among straights because you’ve got to have the physique for it.

Going back to Chalamet, the phenomenon of women being attracted to very feminine men has always existed and is historically well-documented. I’ve seen no equivalent of men being attracted to masculine women. Maybe Xena, the Warrior Princess had some male fans but this was not a character aimed at a female audience. I find the outrage of men against the fact that Chalamet is a sex symbol to be very funny. They’ve been reacting this way back in the 1550s, as well, and it just goes to show that for all our sexual liberation we have not advanced much in our understanding of sexuality. We swapped one bunch of prejudices for another and arrived in the same place.

I didn’t go to the movie for myself, obviously, but if I have to sit through a children’s film, I want to get something out of it. So I got these musings about sexuality.

My sister says, “You and I always thought that we were much more North American than Ukrainian. We’d severed ties with Ukraine completely. But today we both feel that we are only truly ourselves when we talk with Ukrainians in Ukraine.”

It’s true. Ukraine changed enormously since 1998. But so did America. We left to be free. To speak and think freely and without constraints. And we were free. It was really great for a while. The fresh air of American freedom was incredible.

But then it started to change.

My nephew is 8, and he’s growing up to be such a typical North American guy, it’s funny.

He told his mother that there’s a girl he likes.

“What is it about her that you like?” she asked.

And he gave this very American reply that sounds deeply strange to those of us who are not from here: “She laughs at my jokes.”

The typical American girl reply of “I like him because he makes me laugh” is just as weird to us.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with any of this, of course. It’s just such a cultural difference because we’d never say something like this.

I’m doing a blind review of an academic article, and it’s very good. But the author accuses me of being “heavily influenced by Judith Butler”. I find that very hurtful. He also calls me a “classical Marxist.”

I’m either a Trumpist TERF, as some reviewers have suggested, or a Butlerian Marxist. Take your pick, people, and stick with it!

We are asked to nominate for a teaching award “faculty members who identify as wom*n”. I have no idea why anybody would want to identify as a weird word without meaning but I don’t identify as anything, so what do I know.

I hope nobody nominates me because I don’t want to be grouped with the people who “identify as”.

The first election stickers started to appear on cars in the campus parking lot.

In 2016, the first stickers to pop up were for Bernie Sanders.

In 2020, they were Warren stickers.

This time, Nikki Haley. This is a college campus we are talking about. Republican stickers are usually as rare as an intelligent DEI worker.

This Netflix documentary tells of an Israeli conman who swindled several EU women out of large amounts of money. He’d meet them on Tinder, pretend to be a billionaire, promise marriage and babies, and then experience “temporary financial problems” that would necessitate the girlfriends’ assistance.

When the women figured out what was happening and went to the police, it became clear that nobody would ever prosecute the fraud. The crook was hopping all over the EU. Which jurisdiction should prosecute him? No borders means no policing for criminals who move fast enough. As a result, the Tinder Swindler is living it up in Israel and continuing his cons.

What really got to me, though, is the story of one of his victims, a Norwegian woman called Cecilie. She’s been on… guess how many Tinder dates.

Over 1,200.

Then, she met the Tinder Swindler. And now she’s back on Tinder.

The crook weaseled $250,000 out of her. She’ll be indigent her whole life. And she still says, “But why not? It’s not Tinder that caused the problem!”

1,200 men. There’s no likelihood that they were all bad. You hear about consumer mentality in dating but then you see a case like this, and it’s downright scary.

An excellent documentary that is disturbing and funny at the same time.

My friends. I’ve got to ask. Are we some kind of idjits?

Some great new Anonymous Questions have landed, my friends. Here’s the first:

It’s a wonderful question but, folks, I’m not the person to ask. I have zero literary talent. I can’t talk about literary writing as anybody but a reader. If anybody is interested in the differences between different types of scholarly writing, I have a lot to say.

We have actual writers here, so maybe they can answer.

Here’s another question:

That’s a very important question because many people are experiencing this. Of course, nobody can cure anxiety over the Internet but there are ways to keep it at bay. Here is one useful strategy:

Be like a recovering alcoholic and make one day your main unit of time and your #1 focus. Plan your day carefully, dwell on how you want to spend its different parts. Whenever your brain skips to what will happen in a year, bring it gently to this day. Are you enjoying the day? What would make the experience more pleasant? At the end of the day, think back to its most enjoyable moments, try to relive them. If there was a particularly good cup of coffee, breath of air, feeling of warmth, think about them and decide how you will maximize such moments the next day.

This is a good strategy for all sorts of things. Writer’s block, lack of focus, feeling overwhelmed, pain management, grief. Concentrate on a very small stretch of time. Try to squeeze all you can from it.

Or a very small number of words. For writers: don’t write a novel. Write a sentence. For readers ” don’t read 5 books a month. Read 3 sentences but right now.

Every time you feel a tendency to lose yourself in future events, enormous projects and daunting plans, veer away and go small.

So I talked with the far-right Ukrainian publisher. To be clear, all Ukrainians I have been talking to are conservative by US standards but this guy is really what I wanted him to be.

The connection is for shit because people insist on using the stupid WhatsApp, so we were yelling at each other across oceans, “Mass migration! Gender lunacy! Soros grants! Nation-building!” It was so good.

“How could you not have found me sooner?” he vociferated.

We are talking again in two hours.