Clarissa's Blog

Do you buy herbs and spices online? What’s the best place?

The best Mexican oregano and oreja de ratón (oregano indio) are on Rancho Gordo. But they have no other herbs.

Why are kids so sociable? She spent all day at school playing with other kids. But every day after I pick her up, we need to drive to a playground or a park in search of more kids to play with. And as soon as we finally get home, she’ll start asking to go over to a friend’s house.

And the kids on the playground are all masked. What is it, a posh playground, or something?

Very annoying.

I didn’t get enough sleep because Klara urgently needed to borrow a book from my bedroom at 7 am. Everything at work that could go wrong went wrong. Adobe changed salary numbers in faculty contracts in weird ways. It was all crap.

My eyes are bleary, I’m hungry and miserable. I’m pacing around the playground, dreaming of steak. A juicy, bloody, very rare steak.

One thing about me is that I have no impulse control. None. Delayed gratification is not a concept I can comprehend. When a whim possesses me, I get up and run wherever it takes me.

Today, for instance, I was sitting at the meeting with the Dean’s Office, and experienced an overwhelming desire – which is the only kind I get – to read true crime novels.

OK, this didn’t sound the way it should. I have no bad feelings towards the Dean’s Office. We have a new Dean, and he’s great. Really great.

But the desire struck, so I dropped everything, ran to the public library, and dragged out two doorstoppers by Ann Rule. Then I read one of them. Yes, the whole 400-page thing. It was very enjoyable.

It’s all like that. The other day I left the office to pop down to the library on campus. Halfway there a desire possessed me to cook lentils. So I turned around, went to the car – never even bothered to go get my things from the office or lock up – and drove home to cook lentils.

Why lentils? Why true crime? Who knows?

A new edition of Reflection is on Kindle! It has photos and it’s cheaper than those Ukrainian publishers were charging.

It has my name on the cover but I’m the literary translator, not the actual author.

For those who don’t know, it’s a novel about the Jewish part of my family during Stalinism and after. It’s all true. The names and the photos are real. The stories are all real, too. The main character is the same person who this blog (and my kid) is named after.

There aren’t any horrors or anything like that. It’s a funny, cute, endearing book. My father, who is a noted Ukrainian writer, wrote the book and I translated.

My name is on the cover because that’s the only way to publish it on Kindle in the US.

On the subject of the so-called protests in Russia.

We all know I hate Putin with the intensity of a hundred vicious suns.

But I’d much rather he stayed as president if the alternative is Navalny. Putin is horrible. He’s debauched, he’s corrupt, he’s disgusting. He’s a globalist.

Navalny is a clean-living family guy. But he’s a neo-Nazi. I know the word had been overused and emptied of all content. But I’m not using it in an American way. I’m using it in a normal way. Once you’ve thrown a few sieg heils, you shouldn’t be an interesting topic of conversation in polite society.

I’m tired of seeing people on Twitter gush over how brave he is. I’m sure that Luftwaffe guys were plenty brave. Let’s pee ourselves with delight over them, too? Francisco Franco was known for his extraordinary bravery. But he was still a vicious dictator and Hitler’s toadie. Bravery in itself isn’t a virtue.

Real life is more complicated than cowboys vs robbers. Sometimes, the guy who opposes an evildoer is evil himself.

What happened to reader GSW? Where did he go? I have crowds of readers here clamoring for him to come back.

I’ve had quite a few readers tell me over the years that they aren’t here for me but for specific commenters. Every regular commenter has his or her own fans.

I take it as a huge compliment because attracting and retaining great readers is a lot harder than writing good content. There are tons of blogs or social media channels where the writing is good but the comment section is a cesspool of boring toadies with nothing to say for themselves. And on my blog, the discussion is often a lot more interesting than the post that gives rise to it.

Professors have weird obsessions that make everybody’s life harder and turn them into a whiny, slobbering mess. I sporadically browse professor FB groups, and the whining is insane.

Like due dates. The obsession with due dates is quite ridiculous, especially since most academics never hand in their articles on time and do everything 5 weeks late.

I’m completely relaxed about due dates. Can’t hand it in on the due date? Then bring it next week. Or next month. As long as I get it before the end of the semester, I’m good. As a result of this laid back approach, I almost never get situations when people hand in anything late. I respect students, and students respect me.

During exams, I approach every student and point out mistakes en cours. If I see that somebody is completely lost, I say, “hey, take it home, finish it in peace. Take as long as you need. Ask the tutor to help. Come to my office and we’ll do it together.” (We provide free tutors.) Why not? The goal is to learn, not get punished. In all the years I’ve been teaching, nobody abused my trust.

I don’t mind getting emails at night or over the weekend either. What’s the big deal, seriously? If people need help, I’m there to provide it. It’s worse when they don’t reach out.

And what’s with the stupid obsession with not putting your PowerPoints online? I put all of mine online. They are incomprehensible without my lecture anyway because I mostly use images to supplement the narrative. I even give tests where all students have to do is identify images and explain what they mean.

I also don’t ban cellphones in the classroom. If my lecture is so boring that people want to browse Instagram instead, it’s only fair that they should do so. In any case, I’m not their mommy. They are adults and can decide what’s in their best interest.

I ask students what format they want the test to be. Short questions? Long questions? Chronological exercise? Fill-in-the-blanks? I ask, “should we practice writing or speaking? An essay or an oral exam?” They tend to make the best choices, too.

I have so much going on in research and administration that I have zero interest in policing students or being their mommy. And it works out great because when you remove this unnecessary antagonism and bickering over cell phones or due dates, everybody has more energy to dedicate to the actual work.

I hate the philosophy of “in loco parentis.” I’m only acting as parent to my kid. Everybody else should go find their own parente.

“We should teach them values!” Oh, unclench. These are adults. Their raising has already been done.

OK, I promise to lay off the movies for a while after this one. I discovered the pastime of movie-watching rather late in life and now I’m finding it hard to tamper down my enthusiasm.

The African Queen was directed by John Huston. It stars Katharine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart.

I had heard of Hepburn and Bogart before but never seen them. I thought they were both supposed to be beautiful, like true Hollywood stars. However, they are actually quite ugly, especially Bogart. And old. Hepburn undergoes a Betty-la-fea transformation in the movie and becomes beautiful by the end. Unlike today’s makeovers, hers isn’t achieved with makeup and clothes. The movie is set in Central Africa during WWI, and both stars look sweaty and grimy the whole time. It’s only through acting that Hepburn transmits the transformation of going from being a dried-up spinster to a happy woman who has reclaimed her sexuality.

Hepburn and Bogart are both excellent actors. Unfortunately, Bogart couldn’t do a Cockney accent, so from a Cockney boatman – which would have made so much sense in the movie – he was turned into a Canadian.

I’ve been thinking about why I like these old movies so much and now I realize it’s because they aren’t hectoring me. Today’s movies remind me of what Hepburn’s character is at the beginning of the film: preachy, humorless, ridiculous, and barren. Even Frozen 2, whose biggest audience is aged 3, reads like a syllabus in a course titled “The Evils of Whiteness and Colonialism” at some rich-kid college.

In The African Queen there are some cartoonishly evil Germans but that’s the extent of the movie’s political message. Very good movie. I’m glad I found it.