Clarissa's Blog

The photographic evidence of the cat update:

I’m the green and white flowers on black in the lower left-hand corner. The cat guarded me faithfully for hours as I read but finally gave up and conked out.

“How is the cat doing?” an elderly lady at church asked me in a whisper. “She still alive?”

This goes to show that nobody had a whole lot of confidence in my ability to keep the animal alive for a significant stretch of time.

The cat is doing great, by the way. From the time we got her, intermittently she had a problem where she wouldn’t be able to hold down her food in the mornings. With the help of two veterinarians and one AI tool, I finally figured out what was causing the issue and managed to solve it.

We are leaving for Florida next week, and I got the girl from across the street to be our cat sitter. She is also a student at my department (French) because this is such a tiny town. There is no likelihood that I will not be a total neurotic about the cat the entire time we’re away, but this cannot be helped.

Klara is at home. I’m sick as a dog, mulling around, reading Chirbes. N is working. Neither of us is much fun right now, so what does Klara do all day? She reads, cleans her room, reads some more, plays with her fluffy bunny toys, reads, plays with the cat, reads. We have TVs. Netflix, Prime. She could turn on the TV at any time. I never forbade it or said anything against it. But it doesn’t seem to occur to her.

People often think that it must be a constant struggle. “Isn’t it exhausting to try to keep her from watching TV all day?” somebody asked. But I never even thought about whether I should have a TV-watching policy for the summer.

It’s only hard to avoid smoking if you are a smoker. If you never got into the habit, it takes no effort at all. Instead of creating a problem and then trying to solve it heroically and failing every single time, it’s best not to create it to begin with.

I also feel vindicated on this subject:

Tucker will endorse AOC for president yet, and maybe then the people who protest whenever I say that he is a leftist will finally be convinced. Or not. Changing one’s opinion on the basis of new evidence is something that very few psyches can afford.

Thanks to reading Chirbes’s diaries, I become more confident in my film criticism. He despised the movie Pan’s Labyrinth for the same reasons that I do. The movie has a cult-like following among pretty much the entirety of my colleagues, and showing it to students is almost obligatory. I almost died of boredom watching it and still haven’t fully recovered from its vulgarity, on the level of the plot, characters, imagery, and sound. This is exactly how Chirbes felt about this movie. I feel deeply vindicated.

I wanted to share a couple of pictures of what I see when I exit my house. This kind of greenery exists nowhere else in my neighborhood. This was completely my own vision. I love wild, crazy greenery that allows you to do something akin to forest bathing right on your porch.

The feeling of privacy is amazing. When I go out onto the porch, none of the neighbors can see me at all.

One of Rafael Chirbes’s greatest intellectual concerns was the suffering of Germans at the hands of the Allies in the closing years of World War II. I learned from him about the vast amount of literature, including memoirs and fiction, on this subject. I’m not entirely sure why this was of so much interest to him. Did he identify with the Germans because his own side, the Republicans, were the losers in the Spanish Civil War that they brought about?

I am not aware of any other non-German, Western intellectual who would be as profoundly devastated by the suffering of the Germans in World War II. Even if the issue is mentioned in passing, it never is articulated as the foundation of anybody’s worldview. Curiosly, Chirbes, whose French was at the near-native level, but whose German was rudimentary, read and thought very little about the suffering of the French during World War II. He loved French literature, of course, and read an enormous amount in the language, staying current on all of the recent award winners and bestsellers in France. But the writer’s interest in the devastation of World War II was mostly concentrated on Germany.

The entire issue of immigration hinges on one’s reaction to the following news item:

You either believe that violence and beheadings in Haiti and Syria are a disembodied force that occurs in those geographic areas without any human involvement, or you believe that people who are violent in those places will be violent in any other places. The authors of the AP article clearly think the former. The SCOTUS decision recognizes the latter.

To be a citizen of the world, a being without tribe, homeland, or God, is to be unprotected labor up for grabs.

Rafael Chirbes, Diarios

I’m 1,200 pages into the diaries, and it’s become clear that few things annoyed Chirbes as much as the concept of cosmopolitan citizens of the world. He knew that it was all one big scam.

Chirbes thought about nationalism a lot and deeply. He explains, for example, the differences between the Basque and the Catalonian nationalisms. The former, he explains, was a nationalism from below. Basque patriotism is that of regular people, peasants, workers. The Catalonian nationalism is the nationalism from above. It’s a favorite toy of the fancy people. The regional nationalisms of regular people, such as, for example, Chirbes’s native valenciano, were stamped out by the Catalonian nationalism of the wealthy bourgeoisie. 

In her book Little Soldiers, journalist Lenora Chu tells about a university professor in China who asks his students to put a paper bag over their heads and then gives them a minute to take off one object that they don’t need. The students take off all sorts of objects: eyeglasses, jewelry, shoes, etc. Almost none of them do the very first thing that occurred to me when I read about the experiment: take off the paper bag.

After conducting this experiment on thousands of students, the professor says that only three out of a hundred Chinese students respond to the prompt by removing the paper bag.

IQ is important, but other things vastly outweigh its importance.