Clarissa's Blog

Today N and I are celebrating our 12th wedding anniversary. The quality of our relationship improved dramatically as a result of getting married.

We celebrated by going to a trampoline park for Klara, axe-throwing place for N, and a bookstore for me.

On the border between Belarus and Poland, masked, heavily armed men are holding a crowd of people hostage, trying to push them to cross the border illegally. The armed men have dragged these people to the border in order to make them act as migrants, render the Polish border insignificant, and destabilize Poland. The goal is to have the fake migrants occupy parts of the Polish territory and then bring in troops to control the territory militarily under the pretext of defending their rights.

This is called hybrid war. It exists to advance a model of statehood that is an alternative to the rapidly collapsing nation-state. This model isn’t tied to the territory, like the nation-state is, but to the people. “Our country” isn’t the territory within these clearly demarcated borders any longer. Instead, “our country” is wherever “our people” are. People are a lot more portable than land. You can bring them anywhere and start refashioning the society where you now have “your people” in any way you want, including militarily. This has already been done to several countries.

While Americans have been gazing intently at their navels and debating the racistest racism of the racistest racisms, other people have come up with an alternative to the nation-state – a pretty terrifying alternative – and are putting it in practice.

Currently, there are several models of state governance that are being tried out around the world to substitute the nation-state. The one I described is Russian. China is trying out its own thing. Maybe they’ll soon combine their models. In the US, though, we are still stuck on who’s what color. Important things are happening around the world but we can’t be assed to notice.

P.S. That’s exactly how it started in Ukraine in 2014:

Who was it that said Putin will start invading again the monent Trump is gone and a weak president is installed in the US? Yes, I believe it was me.

I’m kind of stunned by people who are declaring they are shocked to find out that the men shot by Kyle Rittenhouse were white. Why, in the name of everything holy, would anybody care? What kind of a weirdo even thinks about anybody’s race in this situation?

Yes, the coverage of the shooting and the trial has been abysmal. But we all let it happen when we allow this disgusting way of thinking to conquer our brains.

It never registered with me what race anybody in this situation was. The shooting was clear self-defense, and I don’t care if the participants are white, black, or orange with green spots. It’s either self-defense or it isn’t.

Refusing to get hopelessly stuck on Bykov, I decided to read a novel by another important Russian writer, Shamil Idiatullin. He usually writes in the genre of “ethnopolitical biopunk fan thriller with elements of fantasy and young adult fiction.” I have no idea what that is and no desire to find out.

But The City of Brezhnev (2017) is hardcore realism, which is exactly what I like. It’s set in the USSR of the early 1980s and shows the hopelessness, the violence, and the misery of those late Soviet times very well. This is important because young people in Russia idealize the USSR. The propaganda tells them it was great. Stupid TV shows cutesify it. How are they supposed to know? How is anybody supposed to know what we experienced if we won’t talk about it? Idiatullin decided to talk about it, and did it with heartbreaking honesty.

The novel reads breathlessly, and the ending is devastating. Even Bykov’s novels about Stalinism don’t have such bleak endings. If we were to compare Bykov and Idiatullin, I’d say that Bykov is more talented but Idiatullin is less of a highbrow author and more accessible to readers. As a result, he’s less aseptic and delivers his hits more into the feels than into the brain.

It’s an excellent novel. A male Bildungsroman that follows the Buckley formula – because they all do – but even the genre I detest didn’t spoil the novel for me. Idiatullin is older than I am and he remembers the USSR better than I do, and by God, he hates that bastard. The novel’s 700 pages (it looks like the standard book length in Russia these days but I’m not complaining) flew by in no time.

I’m very glad that Bykov wasn’t a fluke. Idiatullin is the second Russian writer I’ve attempted, and both are great. Obviously, I research books in detail before starting to read and discard duds. But the greatness of a national literature isn’t defined by an absence of duds. They are always more numerous than the good books. The problem is when there are no gems in a rubbish heap, and that’s exactly what the literature in Russian was since the 1930s. The 1980s and 1990s were particularly bad.

In 2020 Idiatullin published another realist novel, and Bykov hated it. I’m curious but it will have to wait until I get to the end of my lineup of Russian books I need to read. Then, I’ll do today’s Ukrainian literature.

P.S. By the way, the novel features a teenage boy who kills an adult attacker in self-defense, and it’s clear from the novel that only total Soviet bastards would judge the boy for it. Just saying.

The harassment training at work has been amended to include “OK, Boomer” as an example of harassment. I’m waiting for Karen and Brandon to make an appearance.

To clarify, I think “OK, Boomer” is stupid. So is Karen. (Brandon is still new and fun). But harassment? Words need to have meaning. If this is harassment, then nothing is.

I continue rescuing condemned books from the library, and today I liberated this gem:

It explains why Iberian America isn’t obsessed with race like Anglo America.

I’m running out of space in the office but at least I’ve rescued some great books. You should see the recently published crap that was preserved instead of these wonderful older volumes.

The reason why the now fashionable “thank you, Pfizer!” is so jarring is that we’ve all been sick, some of us quite seriously. We’ve recovered, often thanks to medication of some sort. People have had surgeries, requiring an anaesthetic. But have you ever seen people express thanks to pharmaceutical companies?

Moreover, we all eat. Does anybody thank the companies producing food? Surely, food is more crucial than the COVID vaccine.

A famous Russian writer Edward Radzinsky says that there’s no such discipline as history. History, he says, is today’s politics projected onto the past.

It’s true that no discipline is as blatantly ideological as history.

I’m once again trapped in reading Bildungsromane, and I started thinking about what peer groups value based on gender. When I was a girl, the only thing that was valued was whether you had a boy who brought you presents. And when I was a young woman, the only thing that was valued was if there was a guy willing to offer marriage.

In the male Bildungsromane I’m reading, it looks like what boys value is physical strength and if you can beat somebody up. I asked N and he says it’s exactly how he remembers it. Apparently, he spent his teenage years beating guys up and getting beaten up.

I’m very glad to be the age I am because I no longer even bother to think about what my peer group values.