Clarissa's Blog

A Princeton professor of mathematics begs all of us to come to our senses and recognize that there’s absolutely nothing racist in the idea that there are right and wrong answers in math.

That this needs to be said is in itself quite sad.

What Ishiguro forgets to add are the crucial words “in English.” This is a problem of people writing in English. Everybody else writes with complete freedom.

In the twentieth century, literature in Russian was destroyed in this way. Now literature in English is following suit. This is a very culture-specific phenomenon that should be analyzed as such.

This is what happens when children become fashion accessories:

It’s inexplicable why we all so easily consent to damage a baby to flatter the vanity of three grown men.

There are people who were offered refugee status in the US because they were receiving the same treatment in their country as Asian Americans are receiving in the US. Late Soviet and early post-Soviet Jews had to demonstrate that there were quotas limiting how many Jews could be accepted into a prestigious college program (and there were), and that was it. Back then, preventing a minority from college admission because its members were “too smart” was considered beyond the pale in the US (pun intended).

Every totalitarian regime has an internal enemy that consists of people who are “too smart” and have to be taken down a notch.

Your executive function is what helps you identify and achieve goals. Some people can organize a comfortable life for themselves while others exist in a constant state of discomfort. Their family life is never what they hoped. At work they are always doing what they don’t want to. They mope and complain but never actually do anything about it.

Stoner is a novel about a guy with a faulty executive function. He’s so helpless he can’t even organize a comfortable place for himself to read and grade papers. He’s neither stupid nor mean yet he spends his life in a state of bovine helplessness that turns out to be extremely destructive to people around him.

The novel’s great strength lies in the contrast between the placid tone of the narrative and the quiet horror into which the perennially helpless Stoner turns his, and what’s much worse his child’s life.

For those of us who have known a real-life Stoner this is a devastating novel. The harm such a person causes is too deep. People who haven’t been in close contact with a Stoner, however, might see him as a victim or a noble sufferer.

A great novel; highly recommended.

In John Williams’s novel Stoner, the main character spends years teaching primitive beginner courses that a hostile Chair assigns to him until he finally invents the method I came up with in my first semester of teaching.

I knew I was overqualified for the boring Intro courses. So I simply taught them as whatever research topic interested me at the time. Yes, the students were a little confused at first but they got over it.

Want to know what kind of crap I got assigned? Introduction to Learning Spanish. IN ENGLISH. For people in Engineering and Nursing. Not a word of Spanish was supposed to be used in that course. I have no idea what we were supposed to be doing. Chatting in English about how to learn Spanish?

Obviously, I wasn’t going to do that. The first semester, I taught it as “Spain: The History of Ideas.” Then I’d change it up because it bores me to do the same thing. Last Fall I taught it as “Democracy in Central America.” It still has the official title of “Intro to Learning Spanish” but not for long. As Chair I finally can put in the paperwork to change it.

I could have spent years here on the blog wailing about how I get assigned boring courses and how I’m a victim. Instead, I went and did what I needed to enjoy my teaching. And there’s a million things like that. That first semester, the department gave me a syllabus for the Beginner Spanish, said I had to follow it. I binned it immediately, didn’t even read it. Still have no idea what’s in it.

It’s funny to see this method described in a novel published a long time ago. I was so certain it was my know-how.

When Cuomo was murdering elderly people by the thousand and concealing the deaths to be able to continuing doing it, nobody batted an eyelash.

But now that he’s sinned against the puritanical mortality, he’s going to be persecuted.

Of course, it’s still a win for the good to remove this homicidal maniac from power but having to read about how adult women were “groomed” with some utterly inane comments is aggravating.

A new joke from Russia:

The descendants of Pushkin’s slaves are suing the BLM.

For those who don’t know, Pushkin, Russia’s greatest poet and the founder of the Russian literature was black. At least, according to the US standards that are based on the “drops of blood” theory. He was also a slave-owner known for sexual abuse of the women he owned.

It’s stupid to explain jokes, I know. But it’s a really good one. Russians and Ukrainians find the BLM hilarious because slavery existed there until 1861.

I love this piece by David Hockney:

It captures perfectly how I feel inside.

Just 15 years ago, the story about Big Pharma pushing a largely untested, completely new technology onto the entire population turning them into lifelong patients under manufactured pretenses and a left-wing journalist getting censored and prevented from sharing her report about this by companies that bankrolled the current presidency would raise every leftist hackle in existence.

But today the only person who will report it is Tucker Carlson.

I’m not the one who changed.