I had a long and detailed dream where I was Carrie Bradshaw in New York.

God hates me.

A woman, a person of color and a Canadian walk into a bar …

The number of anachronisms in books is extraordinary. Teenagers sexting on their smartphones in 2003. People “working remotely” (instead of “working from home”) in 2005. Twenty-year-olds waiting for the morning paper to be delivered to their houses to find out the news in 2018.

Last night Ukraine repelled the largest missile attack in modern history including hypersonic missiles. There are many dead and wounded. It’s an extraordinary victory that came at a huge cost.

And then I go to Anglo social media and find out that a diverse bean counter resigned at Harvard to make space for a more diverse bean counter. And people are really celebrating. Yippee.

We watched the Ricky Gervais special for our New Year’s entertainment. Of course, N is s bit like that guy in Montana who came down to a gas station from his isolated cabin in the mountains in the middle of COVID and was spooked by weird masked humans jumping away from each other in terror.

“There are two sexes!” Gervais says. The audience is in stitches.

“I looked into a boat with refugees, and they are all young men!” Again, the audience is collapsing with laughter.

“I don’t understand, what’s funny?” N asks.

I had to pause the video and explain the whole thing with not being allowed to notice the painfully obvious. People are experiencing relief that somebody is saying something considered transgressive. It’s the same reason why Gervais uses swear language on stage. He’s our sacrificial goat. We experience catharsis when we see somebody perform a forbidden act. It’s another question why observing existing reality has become a forbidden act. The best parts of the show are when Gervais says these completely mundane, self-evident things. Because we need him to say those things for us.

And that’s not at all funny.

In the New Year, I hope we all get over it and start saying what we know to be true.

On New Year’s, the biggest holiday in both Ukraine and Russia, Russia is bombing the peaceful Ukrainian city of Odessa. The brave Ukrainian citizens are singing a favorite Ukrainian folk song in response:

If you aren’t inspired and energized by this, please check your pulse. You might no longer be alive.

The slogan of the year 2024 from the President of Ukraine: I must do more than I can. Let us all do more than we can in the next year.

In 1997, a young woman named Anu Singh murdered her boyfriend Joe. Her friends and acquaintances knew she was planning the murder and helped her procure the drugs she used to subdue and poison her victim. The murder took several attempts. Singh would drug Joe with Rohypnol and try to inject him with a lethal dose of heroin. It took days for him to die as she sat and watched him and brought friends to observe Joe’s agony. No motive was ever uncovered for the murder aside from Anu Singh’s desire to feel important and flatter her narcissism by controlling another human being in the most inescapable way.

Singh and her friends were law school students from well-to-do families. They were fanatical believers in freedom and choice, which is why none of them did anything to thwart Singh’s choice to murder her boyfriend.

Singh was arrested, tried, and served 4 years in jail for the murder. It was a strange jail where male and female inmates were allowed to socialize, so Singh – known to be very promiscuous – found several boyfriends during the pre-trial stage. When she was released, she went to continue her complex personal life at her parents’ lavish house.

Her female accomplice in the murder who procured the lethal drugs and stuck around to observe Joe’s agony didn’t serve a day in jail.

Helen Garner writes about this terrible story in a way that turns a true crime story into something much bigger. She sees similarities between Singh’s sexual, emotional and verbal incontinence and her drug-addled carelessness and Garner’s own lifestyle 20 years earlier. The horror unleashed by Singh and the utter indifference of the legal system and the people around her grips you even 30 years later. Garner doesn’t want to cause additional pain to Joe’s parents with whom she developed a profound relationship while working on the book but the young man’s dysfunction that leads him into a relationship with the abusive, immoral Singh is clear to anybody willing to notice it.

I’ll be reading more by Helen Garner in the new year for sure because this is a talented writer with a strong point of view and a brilliant writing style.

What better way to close out a year than to discover a new excellent writer? Helen Garner, an Australian author who is now in her eighties, is my most recent find. In this post, I’ll talk about her and in the next about a book of hers that will be my last completed read this year.

Garner attracted controversy in the 1990s because of her negative portrayal of the birth of the #MeToo-type movement in Australia. She saw that feminism was morphing into a philosophy that celebrated female fragility and thought it was a dangerous development. Garner was massively criticized for this but today we can see how right she was. The self-absorbed dramas of tender snowflakes who are shattered by unsuccessful dates yet utterly indifferent to actual suffering of women around the world are the order of the day.

Garner is a beautiful writer of the kind that can produce a shopping list that will keep you on the edge of your seat. She also has a very male sensibility which is deeply interested in the workings of the self and massively unconcerned with how others perceive oneself. And it’s mesmerizing to read a book by this kind of female author.

A male sensibility makes life a lot more enjoyable which explains the popularity of the trans movement among young girls. Obviously, bodily modifications can’t give you a different way of relating to the world but this is what these poor kids are chasing.

To understand what I mean by male vs female sensibility, let’s look at the famous concept of “men explain things to me” created by Rebecca Solnit and embraced by an extraordinary number of women under the title of “mansplaining”. The concept is based on an anecdote about a social occasion where a man lectured Solnit on a subject in which she considered herself an expert. This is typical female sensibility that places an extraordinary value on how the self is perceived by others. Instead of simply ending a boring conversation and moving on, Solnit feels wounded by it and delivers a passionate screed condemning her interlocutor… to other people. Because she cannot even comprehend her own self without constantly negotiating and trying to shape how different people perceive it.

Female sensibility sees the self through the eyes of another. It’s never just me. It’s me as perceived by an imaginary, endlessly judgmental crowd. In this sensibility, there’s always a barrier between my self and my perception of it. It took me forever to figure this out because, like Helen Garner, I have a male sensibility and it’s very hard for me to understand how the female sensibility works without getting massively bored.

This sensibility is a heavy burden but it doesn’t mean that women’s lives are harder than men’s. Given that the nature of civilization is anti-male, it’s harder to be a man than a woman in civilized societies. Helen Garner’s book Joe Cinque’s Consolation that I’ll discuss in the next post is the perfect demonstration of this fact.

Klara wrote a short story based on the most recent album by Taylor Swift. Every song is a stage in the main character’s journey. I’m very happy that she’s writing, and the spelling is beautiful. But Taylor Swift, people. Taylor Swift. I was hoping I’d get at least 5 more years before I have to hear her name in my house.