Clarissa's Blog

I’m no stranger to making people mad on social media, but it’s very sad that one of the biggest bouts of anger that I ever managed to provoke was when I described how much we were assigned to read in my undergraduate program back in the early 2000s.

People go nuts and accuse me of inventing it, and I never even mentioned that all the reading we were expected to do was in a foreign language. And it was fine. I don’t remember anybody complaining or offering it as a topic of conversation that there was too much reading.

Apparently, there’s some new course at Harvard which requires students to read one book per week, and everybody is extremely impressed by how rigorous that is. It’s like that world of dusty, warm mom-and-pop shops. It was normal, it was real, and now it’s gone. People get angry and emotional when you tell them about this actually quite recent past because they know deep down that they have been robbed. But they don’t want to accept it.

There is a publishing house in Spain that publishes books for pretentious woke people. For example, it’s considered very chic in a progressive, Portlandia kind of way to leave a book by this publisher lying on your coffee table or on your corporate desk at work. It’s this really hilarious idea of signaling that you are on the side of the downtrodden by buying overpriced books, many of which transmit boutique, far-left ideas that are of interest only to the very privileged.

Of course I am in academia so I am a lot more pretentious than the aspiring middle-management girlbosses and the fading hipsters who love these books. The books increase their status but decrease mine. But in any case, this is not the funny part. The reason I’m writing the post is that the name of this publishing house is Blackie Books.

That Spanish neoliberal strivers who are desperate to be Anglo love this publisher is never going to quit being funny.

Poor saps.

Why did people dislike my post about the parent-teacher meeting? Is it because of the joke about my mother’s death? We’re Ukrainians. We use a lot of dark humor to deal with trauma. If you heard the massively popular comedy routines about the war that are done by stand-up comedians in Ukraine today, you would probably keel over.

I thought ever since Camus mocked the idea that there was one correct way to mourn the death of your mother, people got over it. But apparently not. For people who want to be judgmental, I talked to my mother (and I don’t mean briefly, I mean very long conversations) at least once but often twice a day, every single day since my father died in 2022. Every single bloody day, I listened to her weep for up to an hour and tell me how her life has no meaning and everything, including me, is horrible. What have you done for yours, Mr. and Mrs. Judgmental?