I’ve been reading up on Frank Russell, the brother of the great philosopher Bertrand Russell and one of the husbands of Elizabeth von Arnim.

Frank Russell was known for two things: his very progressive feminist beliefs and his outlandish mistreatment and harassment of his many wives. It’s almost comical how he managed to advance the cause of women’s rights in the short breaks he took from bullying and persecuting women.

I’m having an unexpectedly busy July with a million things happening at once, and then I had to go and discover that Elizabeth von Arnim wrote many books.

A battle between pleasure and duty is about to ensue, and we all know which side is likely to win.

I didn’t listen to it myself but people are saying that Biden droned on and on about the global warming during his closing speech at the NATO Summit in Vilnius.

And then people get upset when I say that the NATO doesn’t really exist.

I’m not disappointed that Ukraine wasn’t promised membership because it was a complete impossibility to begin with but I am upset that this inane lecturing about global warming was unleashed on people. Nothing shows the complete evisceration of the very concept of the NATO better than this slide into ridiculousness.

A few days before the first session, facilitators circulated a short handout, “Why a White Space,” to explain “why we are meeting as white folks for these six months.” The handout, produced by the nonprofit Alliance of White Anti-Racists Everywhere, argued that white people need spaces where they can “unlearn racism” without subjecting minorities to “undue trauma or pain.”

https://freebeacon.com/campus/woke-or-kkk-nyu-hosts-whites-only-antiracism-workshop-for-public-school-parents/

I’m telling you, folks, this “anti-racist” stuff is simply a way to make it normal and acceptable to say things like “white spaces” and for certain white folks to avoid the company of non-whites because it makes them uncomfortable.

This article on civil forfeiture will wake you up in no time. What happens if police decides to seize your property? What kind of excuse – if any – is needed to do that?

Read and find out about a very bizarre legal practice in the US and how it may soon change. “Civil forfeiture” sounds soporific but the article isn’t in the least.

I’ve been thinking about the differences between Elizabeth von Arnim’s Vera and Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women.

The most admirable, dignified and memorable character in Vera is a 50-year-old spinster Miss Entwhistle. She doesn’t see herself as useless or rejected like Pym’s heroine. She’s a person of great dignity and quiet but unbreakable inner strength. Miss Entwhistle chose not to get married because she decided she was better off single. It’s clear that for her it was the right choice. You can feel anything but pity for her because she’s not in the least pathetic. But her admirable character isn’t written in a deliberate, pointed way, either. Von Arnim doesn’t try to prove anything or make a point. She creates a character whose dignity is revealed as something normal and expected. Pym, on the other hand, tries to make a point out of everything and comes off as fake.

It’s interesting to me that von Arnim could write about an unmarried middle-aged woman as an admirable, interesting person in 1921 but 30 years later Pym couldn’t. This tracks with something I long observed in Spanish literature. As we get farther away from the oppressive, patriarchal 19th and early 20th century, the more weepy, whiny, self-infantilizing and pouty do female characters become.

Something killed off interesting female characters in mid-twentieth century. It’s like there was a virus that wiped them off.

I also wanted to mention that out of the 16 members of our writing group, five are African American. This doesn’t reflect the demographic situation at our university as we don’t have remotely anything like 30% black faculty. We don’t even have anything close to the population-wide 13%.

This is something I noticed a long time ago, and it’s true for students, too. African Americans will grab at any opportunity and extract value from it, which is wonderful. Hispanic students and colleagues have the opposite strategy. I love them to bits but they just don’t go for the opportunities that are strewn around.

We are even being fed quite nicely at this writing accelerator. Our university is paying for it. This is the first time since I started working here in 2009 that the university noticed that some of us are not only tuition extracting machines but people with intellectual interests. To be fair, very few of us are, so it’s fine, I guess.

I always have mean, unpleasant feelings towards the idiots who prattle on about “the publish or perish environment in academia.” Oh, how I would enjoy spending a week being pressured to publish! Forget pressure. I’d love not being treated like a person with severe brain damage for wanting to do it. When I was naive enough to tell the Dean’s Office in 2015 that I was invited to a conference at Oxford, they treated me for months afterwards like I’d said I was speaking at a conference of pedophiles. Speaking at conferences means you aren’t 100% dedicated to tuition extraction, and that’s unacceptable. People kept throwing that conference (for which I paid 100% out of pocket) in my face forever afterwards.

I always thought I liked Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, a classic of the romance genre. But then I read the novel du Maurier ripped off to write her bestseller and found out that she had taken a fragrant bouquet and turned it into a herbarium.

Before there was ever Rebecca, there was Elizabeth von Arnim’s Vera, a real work of art that “inspired” du Maurier to rewrite it and make a hash out of it. I highly recommend getting both novels (Vera is free on Kindle) and reading them in chronological order. See for yourself which one your prefer.

Vera, a novel about a deeply insensitive, moronically narcissistic man who marries a young, naive idiot of a girl, is so well-written that you’ll laugh on every page. Von Arnim had a wonderful sense of humor. People find this novel to be dark and disturbing, and I’m sure that the conjunction of a scary plot and a humorous tone heightens the enjoyment for the readers. But the disturbing side of the novel is lost on me. I have a close, life-long experience of dealing with a clinical narcissist, and as a result I’m completely desensitized.

I understand, though, why du Maurier must have wanted to rewrite the extremely realistic Vera and turn it into a sappy Cinderella fantasy.

I’ll give just a couple of quotes, so you can see the delicious writing. A man is annoyed that an aunt stands between him and his beloved:

Miss Entwhistle was so little that he could have brushed her aside with the back of one hand; yet here again the strong monster public opinion stepped in and forced him to acquiesce in any plan she chose to make for Lucy, however desolate it left him, merely because she stood to her in the anæmic relationship of aunt. During two mortal days, as he waited about in that garden so grievously infested by Miss Entwhistle, sounds of boxes being moved and drawers being opened and shut came through the windows, but except at meals there was no Lucy.

And this is when a young woman’s friends discover she has a suitor:

The following Thursday evening, her letters in reply having been vague and evasive, they came again, each hoping to get Lucy’s aunt to himself, and on the ground of being Jim’s most devoted friend ask her straight questions such as who and what was Wemyss. Also, more particularly, why. Who and what he was was of no sort of consequence if he would only be and do it somewhere else.

A woman after an unpleasant conversation with a man feels uncomfortable that she had eaten breakfast at his house:

At the other end Miss Entwhistle was walking away lost in thought. Her position was thoroughly unpleasant. She disliked extraordinarily that she should at that moment contain an egg and some coffee which had once been Wemyss’s.

And my favorite:

All day underneath everything he did, everything he said and thought, lay indignation, and so he knew he was married.

Again, if I strain my imagination very strongly, I can somewhat intuit why people can be discomfited by the story in Vera. So be forewarned.

But it’s a brilliant, brilliant book. And it’s not in Spanish! It’s free! You’ll read it in a couple of days, I promise. I know everybody has a list of books they plan to read but this one is really worth it. The characters are out of this world. Even those who appear in just a couple of paragraphs are impossible to forget.

I also want to mention that every online source says that the marriage in Vera was based on von Arnim’s marriage to Bertrand Russell’s brother Frank. This makes no sense to me because Vera‘s heroine is an extremely naive, childish type, which is what makes the story work. When von Arnim married Frank, she was a widowed mother of five who had moved between continents and countries, spoke a boatload of languages, cohabited with famous personalities, and was 50 years old on her wedding day. So a blushing ingenue she was not. But hey, if every person upset with an ex came out with a brilliant novel instead of polluting social media with the boring details, that would be pretty great.

https://twitter.com/ZacBissonnette/status/1678423647415828482?t=O7DvbNeIGhD_S2AjNVPQnQ&s=19

DEI can go suck on a monkey toe but anybody who uses unpaid labor is a mega dick. That some desperate idiots agree to be exploited doesn’t make it less of a dick move.

Yes, they “freely choose” to work without pay. Just like we can freely choose always to pay people for working.