Clarissa's Blog

The problem of the global order we inhabit is not that there’s a big, scary master plan to do bad things.

No, the real problem is that there is no plan.

People keep saying Klaus Schwab. The poor old guy is pushing ninety and has no idea about anything. Schwab is just an old dude who enjoys running his mouth to attract attention.

Look at whoever your in-group suggests as the big evil mastermind, and you’ll see a doddering, confused old man or a doddering, confused Justin Trudeau.

The economic model we are slipping into is unsustainable. Not just for me and you. It’s unsustainable for the Schwabs and the Trudeaus, as well. And they have no idea how to get out of this bind.

The solution will be found, of course, but not from a place of deep anxiety that forces people to fantasize about omnipotent evildoers who control everything.

The first time in my life I had a conversation in Ukrainian was in January. I read a lot in the language in my teens, and I went to the Ukrainian theater with my Dad after the independence but I never spoke because there wasn’t anybody to speak with. And since 1998 I haven’t read either. A couple of years ago, when I wanted to publish in a Ukrainian journal, I couldn’t even begin to write. I wrote my article in English, and my Dad translated it for me. Now I speak fluently and wrote a 400-page book in the language since April.

People see the shiny part – a book, an interest from the publisher, a plan for another book. Nobody sees the grind. Even N asked me yesterday how come my sister and I are from the same family but I’m a lot more Ukrainianized and speak so well. I speak because I taught myself this year. I worked like a dog on it and I keep working on it.

It’s like this in everything. People say, “you are lucky, you have such a calm child.” Lucky, yeah. My kid inherited all of my sensory difficulties because why wouldn’t she? They have run in the family for generations. I’m working like an indentured servant since her birth to make it easier for her to process the inevitable sensory overload. Also, it’s really weird to see me as fortunate in the child-bearing department but that’s another issue. I’ve even heard “you are lucky you could give birth at 40 with no complications”. Well, let me tell you about complications because complications and I spent many years in each other’s company.

Everything is a grind. I’m not complaining, I like the grind. But nothing just happens. You work like a dog and then work some more. That’s life.

As I said from day 1, “anti-racism” means budget cuts and layoffs. Always, 100% of the time. It means absolutely nothing else whatsoever. This is neither a bug nor a feature. It’s the essence of the concept.

Anti-racism is an austerity measure that shrewdly silences objections by labeling those who protest as racist.

It’s very entertaining to watch people who are only realizing it now.

“Wait! This was supposed to be a good thing!”

You, poor innocent duckie.

LONDON — YouTube suspended the monetization of Russell Brand’s channel on Tuesday, saying he had violated its “creator responsibility policy,” just days after the British actor and comedian was accused of a string of offenses, including rape, sexual assault and abuse.

I have no idea who this guy is and what the allegations are but there can’t be a better illustration of what I keep saying about the collapse of the nation-state. All of the constitutional rights, the due process, the legal system that took forever to invent, put in place and hone are becoming redundant. Google and YouTube are our criminal justice system now.

It took the longest time for humanity to create such concepts as the presumption of innocence or freedom of speech. It took even longer to create societies where these principles are enshrined as foundational. We are now dispensing with these enormously important achievements to go back to a semi-feudal system where a bunch of dim-witted barons are the judges and the executioners of us all based on their whims.

I don’t know if to include George Saunders into the new book. He’s like an untalented Jennifer Egan but then I’m running short on postmodernists whom I can read without wanting to tear my hair out. Plus, he’s an incredibly good illustration of out-of-touch wokeism.

Zelensky has replaced half of his cabinet. It’s a normal thing in Ukraine where nobody wants the repetition of Brezhnevism, with its senile, doddering leaders who can’t be removed from their jobs except by death. The war is entering a new stage, so it makes sense to have new people with new ideas.

It’s strange to see this strategy criticized by people whose leadership freezes up, rambles off, and remains in the same job from AIDS to COVID.

A government job shouldn’t be a lifetime sinecure. People in government jobs for 60 years, that’s corruption. New people coming in at regular intervals to avoid sclerotization of government is not.

The owner of the large publishing house I talked to yesterday is younger than me by about a decade. She’s a regular person who worked for another publisher. Then she had an idea for a new type of publishing that her employer didn’t believe in (non-fiction not in translation but by Ukrainian authors). She started her own business, bootstrapped it from the ground up, and now it’s the largest publisher of non-fiction and classical literature in the country. That’s how it should be. Young people should have opportunities and not marinate in uncertainty until somebody pushing ninety finally decides to step down.

People are so weird. I love my school car line. Life isn’t supposed to be “efficient”. You are sitting there, either chatting with your kid or waiting to see your kid. It’s bloody paradise, in my book.

“Agony”! “Crazy-making”! So much drama over something there’s a million reasons to enjoy.

I wonder what the efficient Angie would rather do. The crazy, deeply, agonizing vocabulary does give some idea.

By the way, the best measure of real psychological health is the capacity to enjoy the different components of one’s daily life.

For the book about American literature, I’m going to do the realists vs the postmodernists and how the struggle between these two trends mimics the great American polarization.

The normies versus the pretentious crowd.

The stunned silent majority versus the angry wokesters.

Main Street versus the Met Gala.

Worrying over pronouns versus trying to make ends meet.

I don’t write about bad books, so both trends will be represented by excellent literature.

For the normies, I’m doing Richard Russo before he lost touch, Stephen Markley’s Ohio and Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead. Maybe Dreamland for the non-fiction angle.

For the chi-chi frou-frous, I’m doing Jennifer Egan for sure, and I have to think of more. Oh, Philip Roth, obviously.

And then I’ll do the books where the two trends cross paths. I’m thinking Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn. Maybe Elizabeth Strout’s Lucy Barton.

Each of the books will speak to an important event or phenomenon.

Ohio is the Iraq War.

Russo is deindustrialization.

Kingsolver is the opioid epidemic.

Flynn is the 2008 recession. And the foundation of #MeTootery.

Egan is the Silicon Valley, the transhumanism, all that.

Roth is the PC culture and the racial tensions.

I’m only now realizing that, of course, 90,000 words in Ukrainian take up a lot more space than in English. Because Ukrainian words are longer.

Jeez, some linguist I am.

Turns out that being a stubborn cow who always does things her way is not always a brilliant idea. I always contact publishers after I finish a book out of a misguided sense of pride, and that’s dumb. For instance, I know that with American publishers the expected length of a literary criticism book is 90,000 words, which comes to about 220 pages in print. So that’s what I did with this Ukrainian book.

Of course, today I discovered that 90,000 words with a Ukrainian publisher comes to 400 pages. Why I didn’t try to find out in advance is a mystery.

The publishers have taken the book for peer review. I was so terrified of talking to them that I broke out in zits, giving me a weird, adolescent look. Given that I had no zits in actual adolescence, this was unfortunate.

The first thing I did after the conversation ended half an hour ago was start working on the next book, which will be on contemporary American literature. I want it to come out before the election. It’s doable since I now know that it should half the length of the book on Spain. I have a great idea for it. After that I want to do contemporary Latin American literature for Ukrainians, and then I’ll calm down. Hopefully, the zits will disappear by that time, too.