Clarissa's Blog

A younger person told me today that she admires me. That was the first time ever that I felt old.

At least, nobody has told me yet that I don’t look my age. That would be a real old person thing to happen.

People were so shocked by the Making a Murderer hoax that there’s now a whole little sub-genre of novels about manipulative makers of true-crime TV series. Daniel Sweren-Becker’s Kill Show is one of such novels. It doesn’t mention Making a Murderer but it appeals to the outrage we all feel against the makers of that famous early BLM-fest.

The problem with the novel is that the hoax it comes up with is significantly less egregious than the one in Making. It is tame and boring in comparison.

Also, the author likes to preach. Dude, we got it, manipulative TV producers are scum. You don’t need to go on for 30 pages, lecturing us about it. I truly wish more authors had some restraint and let the readers figure out what they think by themselves. Emma Cline’s The Guest is perfect in that sense. Cline avoids the temptation to lecture the readers with beautiful ease.

Verdict: moderately entertaining but too preachy and simplistic. Read Cline instead.

You are very welcome, dear friend!

As for scholarly writing, I could wax poetic for days but I’ll try to be brief.

The two main kinds are an article and a book. Everything else is a derivative of the two.

To write a scholarly article, you need an idea and a calculator. The idea should never be “I want to write about …” because that’s not an idea but a topic. An idea is, for example, “In her novel Frankenstein’s Mother, Almudena Grandes projects her neoliberal subjectivity of a twenty-first-century leftist back onto the dictatorship of Franco.” I first came up with this idea right here on the blog but then the article suffered significant travails because the edited volume it was destined for became a victim of a romantic split between its editors. In any case, the article is coming out in print in a couple of months.

After you get your idea fleshed out, get out the calculator. Think about how many words you can realistically write in a day and subdivide the intended length by this number. Then look at your calendar and mark the date when you will be done. I do not recommend sitting down to write anything unless you have a clear date of completion. The worst thing is to turn into one of those people who spend years “working” on the same article that no longer motivates or remotely interests them. They have the eyes of exhausted old horses that should have been put out to pasture years ago.

We are in literature, folks. Nobody is solving Fermat’s theorem or curing cancer. Whatever it is can’t possibly take several years. If it does, you are probably writing the wrong article in a wrong way.

Another piece of advice: in the name of everything holy, please don’t tell yourself, “today I’ll be working on my article / book.” That’s a road to bad, bad places. Say, instead, “today I will write 3 sentences about the extent to which Grandes was influenced by Ramiro Pinilla.” After you finish your 3 sentences, decide what tomorrow’s 3 sentences will be about. “Tomorrow I will write 3 sentences on how Grandes is much more influenced by Pérez Galdós than Pinilla.”

The brain resists the grandiose. It likes tiny, bite-sized projects. I can’t tell you how easy it is to write when you start every day knowing exactly what today’s 3 sentences should look like.

As for a book, it’s one of those things where the changes accumulate incrementally but are realized in a burst. I came up with the idea and a detailed plan of Neoliberal Love in a single afternoon. But I had been thinking about neoliberal subjectivities for at least a decade. I have all my secondary sources annotated and pretty much learned by heart at this point.

The Ukrainian book was written in a 5-month ecstasy of writing but it contains things I’ve been reading and thinking about since 2006. So my advice: read, think, discuss, and one day it will burst out of you like a geyser.

An article is planned, scheduled and executed. A book erupts like a flamethrower. But there won’t be a book without many carefully planned and severely executed articles.

I’m not sure if I’m answering what you wanted to know but feel free to specify if you were looking for something else.

We had a lot of snow today, and as a result, the Darwin Day was cancelled.

Markov was 42. It’s not very likely that he “just died.” Especially not on the same day as Navalny.

It’s sad, really. An adult man is terrified of having an opinion because he sees himself as too ordinary to resist manipulation by all-powerful rulers. And he declares it openly.

This dude needs to go get his sperm count checked out. It’s probably non-existent.

And organized the terror act in Israel on Putin’s birthday.

Putin is heavily into numerology and all sorts of occult crap. So reputedly was Stalin. He used astrologists to create his famous plan for the redesign of Moscow, including the subway system that useful Western idjits like to admire.

So… “consequences” now means something that happened before?

I should stop being so shocked by the extraordinary cynicism of these people.

I know people are wondering why there’s been a whole 15-minute stretch with no book news. So here they are. My interview about the book was picked up by many news portals and FB groups in Ukraine. Finally, when you enter the Cyrillic version of my name into Google, something decent pops up. Before, the only search results were of some woman in St Petersburg with horribly distended, silicone lips.

Those poor silicone women who look like there’s a pair of pelmeni attached to their faces. Whoever came up with the idea that it’s pretty to look that way?

Oh, God. Can we have the dementia patient speak instead? He’s bound to sound more coherent than Harris.