Clarissa's Blog

I just heard DeSantis dropped out.

And once again neither party can cough up a candidate who is not an elderly man in steep mental decline.

OK, let’s give it another 4 years.

It’s actually cold outside. For 15 years, I waited for a normal winter in this region, and finally it came. I walk around in my furs. Women who drive by roll down the windows and yell, “Beautiful coat! I love fur!”

It’s the Midwest. People live to give compliments.

Many people are upset that Harvard professor Derek Penslar has been appointed as co-chair of the university’s antisemitism task force. Penslar is the author of the famous statement “Veins of hatred run through Jewish civilization” and has made a career out of explaining how violent and nasty Jews have been throughout history.

In short, he has intimate knowledge of anti-semitism as a careful practitioner of it. Penslar was appointed by Claudine Gay’s substitute in the role of university president.

In the meantime, in Ukraine there now exists pizza with 4 different types of salo:

When I left the country, the restaurant culture was just being born. There was a little restaurant that opened next to my university. It was called Burger King but had nothing whatsoever to do with the well-known chain. The owner must have seen the name on TV and liked it. The place served home-made Soviet-style salads that were actually pretty good. We were just coming out of the USSR era, and going out to eat was a practice that people couldn’t even imagine, let alone embrace.

I was making large sums of money in translation back then and going to school full-time (which in Ukraine really meant full-time, and not 3 hours a day like it does in North America). I had no time to shop for food and cook, which still was a very Soviet process in 1995-98. If you wanted chicken, you had to burn off and pluck the remaining bits of feathers, remove the head and the feet, clean the scaly feet, cut off the nails, and so on.

It’s funny that today in America cooking everything from scratch 95% of the time makes you admirable and, in higher income brackets, cool and countercultural. But in 1996 I was countercultural by going to the Burger King that wasn’t to eat beet salad with walnuts and mayonnaise.

And today, look, they have fancy humorous pizzas and everything in Ukraine. That’s really wonderful.

Yesterday I told students that because of the weather and poor road conditions, they could stay at home and send in the class activity by email. The weather was quite nasty, and unusual for this area. I thought they’d all stay home.

But they all showed up. The wind chill, the sleet, Friday morning. Yet everybody came. And you know what? I don’t think they came for me, great as I am.

It’s because this is a translation course. Translation kicks you into the deep focus zone like nothing else. And being in the zone feels good. These are young people, and only one is an athlete. They don’t have much experience in the zone. It’s like I’m feeding them drugs in those translation activities. It’s almost unfair.

I have no idea why translation triggers the zone. Maybe these are two areas in the brain that are close together.

Another thing I noticed, working with tables, even the simplest ones that you can draw in MS Word, can kick you into the zone. I draw a lot of tables that I don’t really need because it works. Every test I design for my language courses opens with a table.

For that to happen, you need to undergo a major change in personality, though. Otherwise, I don’t think it’s sustainable. Can you imagine a “slacks and flannel shirt” man going “business suit and tie” permanently? That would require shoes, accessories. Probably, different friends. No, I can’t imagine.

And it’s OK, I’m still quite wordy myself.

I’ve been writing about this phenomenon for years. Trump could have issued an executive order to ban this practice but he didn’t. Of course, it would have ended up in SCOTUS but that’s great. A discussion of the so-called “birthright citizenship” at the Supreme Court level is long overdue.

Of course, Trump didn’t do that.

Is he promising any action on immigration this time around? I haven’t been following but I’m curious.

A job candidate for my department informed the hiring committee that she is dedicated to “decolonizing the classroom.” When the stunned faculty members asked what on Earth she meant by it, the candidate said that she asks students to turn off their phones while in class and concentrate on “the whole self and body well-being.”

I hate hiring.

Elena (Greta Grinevičiūtė) is teaching a contemporary dance class to a group of deaf students, which is how she meets Dovydas (Kęstutis Cicėnas), their translator. They hit it off immediately, upon which Dovydas tells Elena that he is asexual. Despite her amazement (and not a little skepticism), Elena falls into a complicated romance with Dovydas in which they both shift and grow in their understanding of what love really is. Slow, from Lithuanian director Marija Kavtaradze, is a lush and sensual drama that evokes the rush of affection and excitement and delves into what embodied love means.

https://www.vox.com/culture/23578435/sundance-2023-best-polite-eileen-passages-past-lives

What was even the point of seeking freedom from the USSR only to find a new USSR to obey? The only difference between this movie and the Soviet films about Komsomol members working hard to improve their productivity at a steel plant is that the Soviet films had popular appeal.

I found a website that collects each year’s most scathing book reviews, and it’s very helpful. Any book that departs from the left-wing dogma of the past two seconds gets torn to shreds. I found a list of books that are potential good reads there.