Clarissa's Blog

For some unfathomable reason, the most engrossing books are the ones bought in airport bookstores.

After my father’s death I have done what I’d sworn I was never going to do and returned to paid translation work. And now I’m thinking, why did I ever leave translation to be a scholar? It’s so much easier for me to translate than to write. Writing is bloody torture.

Every day is Father’s Day if you are close with your Dad. Because you live out what he taught you in everything you do.

One of the important things my father taught me that when you experience a tragedy (which everybody does because that’s life), it’s crucial not to turn other people’s lives into hell because you are suffering. It’s a really important lesson.

He also taught me to yell “speedo!” whenever a yellow car passes by on a road. It brightens up any trip, guaranteed.

Happy Father’s Day!

Klara says, “Today was the best day of the trip, Mommy.”

“What did you like about it?”

“I had an important conversation with my uncle.”

“What did you talk about?”

“Family. Food. How I got my toy camel.”

“How did you get your toy camel?”

“Uncle gave it to me.”

The camel has “I ❤️ Qatar” written on its side. It’s really weird to think that the Peruvian uncle gave my American child a toy camel from Qatar while I was at an Indian restaurant with my Ukrainian sister.

A university is a big operation. Sometimes things don’t work as they should. Take toilets. They are crucial. But sometimes plumbing breaks. Our university-wide email notification system informs us if in one of the buildings toilets have to be closed for repairs. Then we know that it’s best to try our luck in other buildings and can plan accordingly.

The new top administrator was scandalized that there are messages about toilets coming through the email notification system. Eeew, nasty. So without warning anybody, he banned tasteless toilet talk from the messaging system.

And then, of course, plumbing broke down in my building. Since nobody received any notice, people were running around the building like scared rabbits, hoping to find a functioning toilet. If you know you’ll have to schlep across campus to do your business, you plan accordingly. But with no warning, it gets icky.

After repeated requests to give us our toilet news back, the new administrator relented. It’s kind of funny, though, that an adult person would have this intense reaction to such a normal, everyday subject.

It rained yesterday in Montreal. Some lightning and thunder, nothing special. It was a rain like a million others. But at the beginning of the rain, everybody got an amber alert-type warning on their phones about the upcoming precipitation. I’m not talking about a text message from a weather service. I’m talking about an alert that one usually gets only in extraordinary situations. The kind that covers your whole screen and you don’t choose whether you want to see it or not.

It turns out that this started with COVID. All of a sudden, the intrusive alert became something that appeared regularly on trivial pretexts.

This is one of the many ways we are trained to exist in a constant state of exception. There’s always a crisis going on. And a crisis justifies extraordinary measures.

People will say this is a little thing, and who cares? But these things always creep up on us in little steps. And then we accept endless intrusions into our phones, homes and bodies in the name of safety. “Oh, it’s just crazy stuff that happens on campuses. It has nothing to do with us.” “Ah, it’s just a phone notification, who cares?” But none of this is accidental. Little by little, it sneaks into every area of life. And then it’s too late to do anything.

I know a soccer fan who travelled to Qatar for the World Cup qualifying games. He says it’s not great at all. Doha is mostly dead. No alcohol is allowed at the stadium, which makes the games boring. I asked what the food is like (because what else do we expect me to ask?), and he said, “Chinese.”

Well, at least it’s an improvement over when the World Cup was held in Russia while Russia was waging a war on a neighboring country and sending mercenaries to Africa and Venezuela. Qatar is downright cute in comparison.

In the meantime, my university is on the news because it’s getting sued for free speech violations. A program director bullied a graduate student because she didn’t like her political beliefs. The student was banned from communicating with several other graduate students, which in a tiny program creates an impossible burden for a student. Emails were sent to potential employers, maligning this young woman as “oppressive” and “harmful.” Professors and administrators joined in on the bullying.

I hope that the student wins her lawsuit. Maybe somebody will learn something, although I’m not too hopeful. It’s an absolute disgrace that people have let themselves go to the point where they gang up on students and don’t see a problem with such behavior. This isn’t even about the freedom of speech. It’s a complete vacuum of professionalism.

The understanding of world affairs that is dominant in the US is very Marxist. I don’t use this word as a term of abuse but strictly in its scholarly sense. Marxism sees the economy as the basis for everything. “At the root of everything that happens lie economic reasons,” say classical Marxists. This is imposible to prove because it’s untrue, so neo-Marxists have modified this rigid adherence to the economic causes of everything.

But the US government is a lot less flexible than even the Marxists who aren’t exactly famous for their openness to new ideas. Every administration since Reagan has conducted its foreign policy in rigidly Marxist terms. Time and again, the US government tries to solve political, military, and cultural problems through economic means. And every single time it fails. Because the economy is important. But it’s not everything.

China didn’t become democratic once it was included in the global economy. Russia didn’t develop anything resembling democratic institutions once its economy was fully neoliberalized. Four decades of economic sanctions didn’t make Iran’s military industry any less of a threat. “Markets” don’t create political institutions. They don’t change totalitarian mentality. They don’t win on the battlefield. They are powerful in many ways but not in every way.

I fell behind in the writing I had planned for the academic year, and as a result, will have to spend the summer stressing out about it and trying to catch up.

This was, above all, an error of arithmetic. I always calculate how much I will be able to write based on past performance. But I forgot to take into account that this year I’m writing mostly in Spanish which takes me about 1,5 times longer than writing in English.

I also put in no time allowance for emergencies. And this is precisely the year when every emergency happened. I was counting on the months of March and May, which are usually my heavy writing months, but for obvious reasons I couldn’t work in those months. Plus, I suddenly found myself saddled with a large translation project.

When it’s all done, it will be great. Five publications in very serious places created within a single year. But the process will be stressful and unpleasant when it didn’t need to be.