Clarissa's Blog

Today, Klara read a 120-page graphic novel beginning to end and ate 3 bowls of borscht.

I have achieved parenting nirvana.

I know it’s very annoying that I keep posting about all these fascinating authors and thinkers in other languages. Believe me, I do all I can to uncover interesting stuff in English. I scour new releases. I look and look and look. I read more in English than all other languages combined.

And it’s not all useless. I’ve found two recent worthwhile books in English in the past couple of years, Franzen’s Crossroads and Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead. Yes, this is slim pickings for the entire English-speaking world. But I’m not abandoning hope. There’s a new release by Richard Russo coming up. He’s been kind of blah and PC in recent years but he can come back at any time.

Obviously, if you’ve found some gems among new releases, I’m eager to hear about them.

People who can narrate their lives as a string of disadvantages are psychologically very unhealthy. Purposefully pushing such people into the medical profession is immoral.

This is what happens when people start seeing themselves as gods. They think it’s up to them to reward the suffering with the Kingdom of Heaven Earth. That in the process they will send straight to heaven the future patients of these fake doctors is of no interest.

Juan Manuel de Prada writes that back in 1972 – which is incredibly early and prescient – the great Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini warned that a new form of capitalism was being born that would move dramatically to the left. Pasolini said that this left-wing capitalism would use sexual freedom and a pretense of wide-ranging , unheard-of tolerance to impoverish many and enrich few.

Pasolini was a gay Marxist. And he was horrified by what left-wing politics and the idolization of sexuality were turning into.

The fireworks were really puny this year. I remember during COVID people really went all out. A lot of pent up everything was exploding.

Remembering COVID made me kind of sad. So did hearing the explosions. Plus, today I finished the novel Excellent Women about the lives of 1950s British spinsters, and the book is depressing. It’s well-written and even humorous at times but I found the lives of those poor women who call themselves “rejected” very sad. I know a couple of women like that, and it’s heartbreaking how they try to fill their lives and grab on to tiny, insignificant events to pretend like something is happening.

These days such women tend to be cognitively challenged. And men. I also know a man like that. They lead very orderly, routine-driven existences. In Barbara Pym’s novel, the rejected women fill their lives with church affairs. Today people don’t have that, so it’s harder.

It’s a good novel, if somewhat too deliberate and a bit forced at times. It’s just so hopeless, and I guess it wasn’t a good moment for me to read it.

Speaking of college acceptance, my Ukrainian instructor was almost refused admittance to our grad program because she scored poorly on some stupid online test. Grad school admission is a formality for our language instructors who don’t get diplomas or degrees. But I almost was refused an opportunity to bring her over because of this test score.

I tried explaining that, as she was taking the test, she had to interrupt it twice to go to the bomb shelter. And yet she still came back and finished the test. Yes, she scored a little below the cutoff. It was probably a little hard to concentrate. But this is clearly a person who won’t find whatever we do at our university to be too challenging.

I think I found a way around the stupid requirement but I’m still annoyed. I wouldn’t say anything if this was a person seeking an actual degree. But this is somebody who is coming to teach at my department. If I’m willing to be understanding, why should anybody stand in my way?

Juan Manuel de Prada traces how worker rights were dismantled in Spain and how sex freedoms were used to make the impoverishment more palatable:

Divorce was legalized at the same time that at-will firing became law; abortion became legal at the exact same time that the dismantling of our industry was undertaken; gay marriage became legal at the same time that “labour reforms” were introduced, turning workers into disposable rags; and, finally, transgender postulates are being imposed at the same time that the mockingly called “sharing economy” and the cynically called “entrepreneurship” are being established, turning the worker into a scatterbrain who has to make a living in the most unseemly ways and beggarly ways.

La enmienda a la totalidad

Yesterday, I saw photos from a manifestation of asexuals, demanding their “rights”. Obviously, none of them could remotely define which rights they were lacking in the sexual sphere. Then, I’m sure they all went to their crappy rented apartments and their miserable, half-indigent lives. Yet they are sure that it’s in the realm of sex where they are most aggrieved. This is the real mass delusion of our times. We believe that main transgressions against us and main freedoms we should seek lie in the genital area.

Since I started the day with quoting Arestovych, here are his July 4th well-wishes:

I agree that America will be fine and will emerge from this somewhat pathetic moment eventually. There aren’t big, unsolvable issues, there is mewling uncertainty but that’s not a big deal. All we need to do is lose the crippling tendency to catastrophize everything which is rampant both on the left and on the right.

Life is good, let’s go enjoy our barbecues or roast turkeys, as the case may be.