Clarissa's Blog

Why is nobody commenting on my passworded posts? Have people lost the password?

The most recent one is pretty funny.

I love every aspect of being department chair. The only thing that makes me unwilling to continue doing it for another term is that the Dean obligates us to engage in discussions of “what do you do to be anti-racist?” We have yet another one of those scheduled for later today. Obviously, this is done to distract us from more budget cuts but that’s not even the point. I resent having to participate in this Sovietization. If Americans are stupid enough to take this garbage seriously, it’s their problem. Why should I participate? Watching people make absolute asses out of themselves because they are either subservient or dumb isn’t enjoyable.

For some reason, periodontists now ask if you’ve had “recent heart trouble” during routine cleanings.

It turns out there was going to be a campaign of billboards all around the EU promoting the use of hijab because it brings “freedom and joy.” The French opposed it (and apparently nobody else did), so it was temporarily canned. What I find particularly sad in this story is that people in the EU still remember the word “freedom.” They have no idea what it means anymore but they do have a vague memory that it was something good. Maybe even almost as good as hijabs.

The way I knew I had COVID before getting tested was that I dropped a plastic lid on a hot stove, it started melting, but there was no smell.

Since then my sense of smell came back but every once in a while I can smell that melting plastic lid. It’s as if the smell I missed then got stuck in some part of my brain and now I can’t get rid of it.

I always cook a traditional Soviet menu for New Year’s. We get some Soviet champagne to go with it, and unleash the childhood memories.

For Thanksgiving, I do the traditional American thing. Brined and roasted turkey, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, Brussels sprouts, etc.

But what to serve for Christmas? What do you, folks, do? Also a turkey? It feels weird to do two turkeys so close to each other. Does anybody have any suggestions on how to distinguish between the Thanksgiving and Christmas family meals? I want it to be still American but different from the Thanksgiving shebang.

Richard Russo is, in my opinion, the most talented living American novelist. That Old Cape Magic, however, is one of his least popular novels. Russo is unique in the twenty-first-century American literature in that he writes about the working class. Readers love him for it because nobody else is doing it. That Old Cape Magic is different, though, and I think many readers felt cheated that he’d suddenly publish a book about stuffy college professors who pay for luxury weddings at Cape Cod while bickering about their boring personal lives.

In spite of this change in focus, though, the novel is priceless. The professors are deliciously dysfunctional and their contempt for a lot less dysfunctional Republicans and / or people without graduate degrees is hilarious. I’d also say that this is the deepest of Russo’s novels. It’s about permanence versus fluidity, and what both really mean. It’s about how impossible it is to escape from what our childhood made us be. Funny, sad, and completely absorbing, this is the kind of book that makes me pretend I have something urgent to do and instead sit in the car and read myself into oblivion.

This is true talent, my friends. Russo takes a topic as overdone as a college professor’s belated midlife crisis, and turns it into a gem. A wonderful, wonderful writer.

Everything by Russo is good except for Chances Are… That one was quite disappointing. I highly recommend his memoir Elsewhere because it’s eye-opening.

Today we went to see Clifford The Big Red Dog, a movie based on books for little kids. I detest the books because they are very primitive. But the movie was great. In it, a group of immigrants gets together to defend the right of a child in New York to have a normal childhood at a time when the state apparatus in alliance with an evil biomedical corporation conducts scary experiments under the guise of caring about safety and climate but in reality motivated solely by profit. The lesson the movie teaches children: ‘safety’ isn’t the most important thing in the world, and don’t be afraid to break rules because they are likely to be stupid anyway.