Clarissa's Blog

To dig under all the verbiage, in the depths of the formless or deformed mass of clichés, to find true words, words that name rather than merely envelop. That is the writer’s job: to clean the grime that clings to language.

-Rafael Chirbes, Diarios.

I don’t hate AI. What I hate is when AI is used for purposes for which it should not be used. Knives are great, but not for sticking into people. That kind of thing.

This is the kind of thing I’m talking about, and mind you, this is very recent, from yesterday :

People sincerely believe this, and that is a disaster, both for the education system and for society.

By the way, this was the foundational belief of Soviet pedagogy. My mother was told by the Soviet authorities that the only reason why her students, almost all of whom were children of convicts and multi-generational alcoholics, were not proficient in algebra is that she was a bad teacher. That this kind of errant lunacy is still so widely believed in America is simply sad.

Theoretically, Chu knows that a successful neoliberal subject should be a quirky original thinker. Yet she repeats the hoary platitudes about the importance of being a nimble citizen of nowhere in particular.

This is the problem with nimbleness. It requires constant exertion. Chu is aware that the expression “global citizen” is démodé and shows reluctance to use it. But coming up with a truly original approach is too hard. Throughout the book, Chu rubbishes Chinese teachers for being opposed to originality and individuality. The teachers are, at least, consistent, however. They don’t prattle excitedly about the importance of freedom while living in a cage of a restrictive ideology.

Lenora Chu, a child of Chinese immigrants to the US, moved back to China with her American husband. They wanted to raise their 3-year-old son to be “a nimble global citizen with no attachment to a specific place.” Seriously, that’s how Chu puts it. In those words.

To achieve the goal of massaging the toddler into nimble  global citizenship, Chu and her husband put the child into a Chinese daycare. China is an authoritarian society stuck in the industrial era mentality. In their school system, children are terrorized into robot-like obedience from the youngest age. Chu was so shocked by what she observed at the Chinese daycare that she wrote a book about it titled Little Soldiers.

The book is built on the contrast between the disciplinarian structure of the Chinese school system and Chu’s mentality of a reflexive hatred towards boundaries. The curious thing is that neither of these ways of being in the world is well suited to the neoliberal reality in which both have to exist. Chu is a standard Western neurotic who is incapable of any form of self-containment. The products of the authoritarian Chinese education system are also incapable of self-containment, but for a different reason. They get used to being disciplined and controlled from the outside from their earliest childhood. Establishing and strictly maintaining internal boundaries is alien both to Chu and the people she criticizes.

The best American novel about love that I have ever read is, by far and without the slightest doubt, Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin. Baldwin was a genius, and pretty much everything he wrote was impressive, but I strongly believe that this novel is his absolute masterpiece.

Giovanni’s Room is not long. Every word in it is so necessary that the novel lands like a punch. It’s concentrated, it’s inevitable, it’s intense. This novel is love itself.

I remember reading it for the first time sometime in the early 2000s and finding myself unable to believe that the novel had first been published in 1956. Great literature is great because it doesn’t need to speak about you in order to speak to you. I’ve never lived in Paris. I obviously wasn’t around in the 1950s. I’m not gay, and I’m not a man. But this novel was more than a book. For me, it was an experience. For years I have joked that I feel like I’ve never really left Giovanni’s room. Once you feel it, you feel it.

We bought our tickets early for the opening night. It’s supposed to be about how tablets are bad for kids. Crowds of parents will storm movie theaters to watch this.

I really hope that the makers of the movie didn’t wimp out and make the tablet kind of acceptable in the end. Not that it will change anything in my life, since my kid already knows that she will be more successful asking me to get her a pack of Marlboros and a bottle of Jack Daniels than an iPad.

Ten is truly the best age. Klara is moving me into my new office. She already moved most of my books, and can you imagine how many I have? She carries them over in small batches and organizes them with a neatness of which I’m congenitally incapable. She organized my new desk, put up decorations on the walls, filled the drawers, sorted the CDs and the writing supplies.

Yes, I have CDs and they won’t be dragged from my cold dead hands.

She has also created healthy menus for us and took her dad shopping for the ingredients.

I am so happy I don’t have to pay for summer camp anymore. I now get a free helper and constant great company. This is so good.

Had he lived for a couple of years longer, Rafael Chirbes would have totally been one of us. Already in 2006, he was pointing out in his diaries that progressives had gone completely nuts. They defend radical Islamists, praise women in hijabs, yet are completely opposed to Catholics who are anti-abortion? That makes no sense, he says.

Chirbes was a person of deeply conservative sensibilities. The destruction of the old ways of life by modernity was something that he perceived as a profound wound.

The writer was from a very working-class family. Having any affinity whatsoever for the working classes ends up making you conservative because progressivism is extremely cruel precisely to this class of people.

I’m teaching Spanish 101 this month. There are 29 students in my class. This is week 2 of class, and we are learning to use adjectives correctly. Students are asked to create short descriptions of themselves and people they know. For example: “I’m athletic. My friend is kind. My teacher is old.”

Out of 29 students, 4 started the exercise by writing “I’m liberal. My father is conservative.” 0 students wrote the opposite.

Whatever you lead with in this kind of exercise is your salient identity. Of course, students know that “I’m liberal” is likely to get approval from the instructor in the course. But so is “I’m hardworking.”