Clarissa's Blog

I read 36 pages of a book in a 2-hour in-person meeting of administrators where I was one of the most active participators throughout. I’m usually intensely crabby in meetings but I would be a lot crabbier and probably downright intolerable if I couldn’t read during them. I hope people realize that I’m doing them a huge favor this way. Even I find myself unbearable in how curmudgeonly I get in meetings.

I don’t read during the meetings that I hold myself because those are extremely compressed. I don’t believe in administrative meetings that are longer than 20 minutes (ideally, 15).

One the positive side, when the Russian faculty member arrives, I’ll finally have somebody refer to me with my name and the patronymic. I left Ukraine before I was old enough for anybody to use the patronymic. And in North America everybody calls me with my full first name (or Professor Last Name). The full first name makes no sense culturally. It’s either the diminutive form of the first name (Masha) or the full name with the patronymic (Maria Petrovna). Maria with nothing to follow it sounds weird.

I want to be addressed correctly at least once in my life, damn it. Let’s make Russians useful at least in this limited way.

The patronymic is based on the first name of one’s father, and it would mean a lot to hear it said aloud.

So we will get our Russian faculty member, after all. In a curious coincidence, this person has the same name and a very similar last name as myself.

This is only happening because of my efforts, which is deeply ironic. I will say honestly that I was sorely tempted to can the whole endeavor, and nobody would have judged me for it here on campus. To the contrary, I’ll be judged for proceeding with it but as we all know, I don’t care about these things.

I decided to proceed because it can be an important social experiment and a learning opportunity. If you place a brainwashed person who is under the age of 30 (so probably still not completely ossified) in a normal, friendly environment, can she recover? Can a whole year of new experiences, new people, new points of view and new information help a person change her mind at least a little bit?

This project will require from me inordinate feats of patience and kindness – the two qualities I have in very short supply – but what if it’s not in vain? Nothing ventured, nothing gained, right?

Everybody I know thinks I’m completely insane, and maybe I am. I will be posting regularly about my progress, so we can all observe how it goes.

Kamil Galeev’s best thread so far is here. I call it the best thread among his multitude of amazing, well-informed threads because I never wondered about the causes of the phenomenon that Galeev describes.

This is absolutely true. Post-Soviet people tend to fall massively in love with “THE theory that explains the world.” To a huge degree it’s caused by the complete absence of the Humanities that were eradicated under the Soviets and never recovered. The first taste of a system of ideas makes them fall in love with it so deeply that they become fanatical.

I know how this feels. When I first came to Canada and discovered Hispanic Studies I was so enamored that I’d walk down the street and feel deep compassion for passersby because they weren’t learning about Hispanic Studies. To counteract the dangers of this kind of ideological fanaticism, I became so eclectic that it confuses everybody. Religion, psychoanalysis, theory of neoliberalism, conservatism and neo-Marxism are now my frameworks, and who knows what I’ll find next.

For many post-Soviet people, though, their romance with the single theory of everything never ended.

One added indignity of the translation project I had to undertake to honor my late father’s request is that the novel I’m translating has a lot of poetry by the poets from the Silver Age of Russian poetry. These are great poets but most of them have not been translated. So I have to provide the translations. The very last thing I want to be doing is translating any poetry and especially the Russian kind. But duty calls. Here is my rendition of a poem by Vyacheslav Ivanov.

First, the original:

Может быть, это смутное время
Очищает распутное племя;
Может быть, эти лютые дни —
Человечней пред Богом они,
Чем былое с его благочинной
И нечестья, и злобы личиной.

And here is my translation:

It might be that this tragic time
Is cleansing our perverted tribe.
Maybe the cruel days we see
Will more humane and godly be
Than our past that was so fake
And lacking honor like a snake.

I’m substituting the “ch” alliteration in the Russian version with the “k” alliteration in English because it has a similar effect.

And here is my translation of a poem by Natalia Krandiyevskaya.

The original:

Свидание наедине

Назначил и мне командор.

Он в полночь стучится ко мне,

И входит, и смотрит в упор.

Но странный на сердце покой.

Три пальца сложила я в горсть.

Разжать их железной рукой

Попробуй, мой Каменный Гость.

And the translation:

To me, preserving the rhyme is more important than anything else. I’m a poetry philistine, and to me it’s not a poem if it doesn’t rhyme.

But Lord have mercy, what extraordinarily weird things does one find oneself doing our of grief.

Cathedrals is supposed to be the Argentinian novelist’s big anti-Catholic and pro-abortion novel. The Catholic characters in Cathedrals are so cartoonishly horrid that you don’t know whether to laugh or to cry. Who knew the Catholic Church was still so powerful that people needed to write novels arguing that religion turns people into perverted, sick sociopaths?

What I find interesting, though, is that the atheist characters who are supposed to be the good guys of the novel are quite disgusting, as well. They aren’t blood-thirsty maniacs like the Catholics whose sociopathy isn’t even believable because, without dropping any spoilers, it’s very hard to imagine such extraordinary dysfunction in a random bunch of Catholics. The atheists in the novel are scary in a much more convincing sense. They are incapable of sustaining a normal human relationship. They are self-referential and sterile in every sense of the word. These atheist characters aren’t howling at the moon and chain-sawing relatives’ corpses for fun (OK, one little spoiler) but who’s more likely to hurt us in our real lives, a raging narcissist or a religious fanatic with a chainsaw? And if your answer is ‘a religious fanatic,’ I sincerely congratulate you with having led a very sheltered life. I haven’t been similarly blessed and so I fear cold bastards who use people a lot more.

On the positive side, Piñeiro was trying so hard to show what disgusting bastards religious people are that she accidentally created a female character who isn’t a pathetic, wobbly victim. This woman is a very religious Catholic, which for Piñeiro is clearly the worst thing a person can be. Of course, in order to be as consistently evil as this character, one has to have an uncommon strength of personality and a fierce dedication to one’s goals. And that’s how the unexpected feat of putting a woman with a personality into a Latin American novel was finally achieved.

I don’t think this novel has been translated yet but it will be because Piñeiro always gets translated. She’s very popular. And deservedly so because in spite of the ridiculousness of the plot and the cheap, tacky efforts at lecturing the readers on the badness of religion and of abortion bans, the novel is imposible to put down.

When Cathedrals gets translated, I highly recommend reading it because it’s very good and because there is no better illustration of what I call the neoliberal mentality than what you is in its ‘good,’ atheist characters.

N and I are celebrating 15 years together. I want to reiterate that the people who say that the intensity of feeling necessarily fades over time and the excitement goes away are wrong. Everybody’s story is different but the transformation of passion into friendship is absolutely not a given.

I spent 15 years, terrified of marriage because everybody said that love runs its course in 3 to 6 months, and then you are stuck living with a roommate. And I’d rather live with a family of alligators than a roommate. Then it turned out that everybody was wrong and marriage is the best thing that could have happened to me.

There’s so much “common wisdom” surrounding these topics that’s completely stupid. I wish I had never listened to it.

It’s s great documentary, my friends. Please watch. Walsh travels around the country, asking people a simple question, “what is a woman?” The number of people who are incapable of answering because they are afraid of saying something politically incorrect is scary.

The documentary explores the trans delusion. Walsh talks to several gender therapists, physicians, and theorists, and soon discovers how extraordinarily weak and vapid their theories are. A woman is anybody who feels like a woman. But how does being a woman feel? Like being a woman, of course! And on and on we go. Nobody would care if there weren’t a whole cottage industry of child mutilation that brings increasingly delightful profits to a bunch of gender peddlers.

The most poignant part of the movie is an interview with a woman who underwent six surgeries to look like a man. She had terrible things done to herself, destroying her health and shortening her lifespan. She is trying to warn people that if she got caught up in this insanity as an adult, it’s so much worse for kids who get lured into the gender cult.

Another really important moment is when Jordan Peterson is interviewed and he says that it’s absolutely not a therapist’s job to “affirm” the patient’s beliefs. Many people don’t know this. Apparently, many therapists don’t either and they end up not doing anything of value for the patients. The only functioning form of therapy does the exact opposite. It frustrates and keeps the patient on a low simmer. What soothes doesn’t heal.

Excellent movie. I know Walsh is annoying but he worked hard to keep his annoying personality in check as much as possible for the movie.

At the farmer’s market, everybody sells garlic scapes in jumbled, messy piles except one smart woman. Here’s how she sells hers:

Of course, she sold out faster than anybody and at a higher price because she’s selling product + additional labor. There was one seller who charged 25 cents per shoot, and you are supposed to stand there, in the scorching heat while your kid’s exhausting her already thin stock of patience as you dig shoots out of a messy jumble one by one and count them. It’s worth a premium not to have to do that. I happily paid $3 a bunch, which comes to 30 cents a shoot.

I remember how hard it was for the post-Soviet people to learn this lesson in basic capitalism. We had been trained for generations to take every shortcut we could think of and expend the least amount of effort. If competition doesn’t exist, nobody learns to take an extra step and do a little bit better than strictly necessary.

And this, my friends, is a real goulash:

It’s steaming hot, which is why the picture looks a little blurry.

I had no bacon so I used kabanosy sliced very thinly instead. I’m the kind of person who always has some kabanosy on hand. The sweet bell pepper wasn’t authentic, of course, but you’ve got to make do.

The central part of the Hungarian goulash is paprika. Without paprika, it’s a simple meat and potatoes stew. Paprika needs to be fresh, European, and it’s very important not to let it burn, not even a little bit. It will become bitter, and the whole dish will be ruined.

Many people prefer a soupier goulash but I had a cheap cut of meat and had to dredge it in flour and sear it before cooking. Otherwise, it would have been hard as leather. The flour got absorbed into the liquid, creating a thick sauce and cutting down the soupiness.

It’s delicious, and I’m not counting on it lasting beyond the weekend.