Clarissa's Blog

Happy birthday to reader Dreidel!

This blog wouldn’t be the same without this curmudgeonly yet sweet gentleman.

Thank you, dear friends, for the birthday wishes, the kind words, and the gifts! You are wonderful people.

Now that I have a makeup refrigerator, I’m fully ready to enter middle age. And in that spirit, I will be starting my very first regular 9 to 5 job on July 1. If everything reopens, that is. I truly hope my first ever regular office job won’t be thwarted by a quarantine.

The regular office job means I will be reading much more because there’s not much to do at the office. So more book reviews and more fun for everybody.

Klara says, “Mommy, I like nature. Because when I see flowers in bloom and everything growing and the sun shining, that makes me feel loved.”

My birthday program consisted of me lying in bed a d staring placidly out of the window.

But then my sister gave me a makeup refrigerator as a birthday gift. When I plugged it in, I realized that my room wasn’t clean and pretty enough to house the makeup refrigerator. So I started cleaning up like a maniac.

I need to get this party back on track.

The difference between the US welfare and the Canadian welfare is obvious once you look at Trumpbucks vs Trudeaubucks.

Trumpbucks dropped into people’s accounts. Even those who, like N and I, are working and getting a good income got their Trumpbucks.

In Canada, people got the same amount (factoring in the currency difference).

But.

Not all people got Trudeaubucks. Only those who lost jobs because of COVID (and can prove that it’s because of COVID and not, say, 3 days before and are now stranded because nobody is hiring, true story) will get the payment.

As a result, industries that are booming (like food packaging) can’t hire, true story. Because people don’t want to lose their Trudeaubucks.

This is extremely typical of Canadian welfare. Which is why I hate Canadian welfare. (Still love Canada, though). Canadian welfare is ferociously cruel towards people who like working. A hard-working person will be stripped raw to pass the money to lazy layabouts. And if a hard-working person falls on hard times, the welfare system will laugh in the poor bugger’s face and say, “hey, but don’t you still have that little piece of property? We won’t rest until we take it away.” (True story).

Yes, it’s extremely rare that you get the US government to drop cash into your account. But they don’t hunt you to the ground and strip you bare like the Canadian government does. The US system is flaccid and too convoluted but it’s not driven by an intense hatred of people who work. I mean, we are in the middle of a global pandemic, and the Trudeau government is obsessing over the remote chance that somebody who was fired the day before the quarantine and not the day after would get help.

P.S. For those who don’t know, I’m a Canadian citizen and my whole family lives in Canada (Quebec and Nova Scotia). I love Canada. It’s the Canadian welfare system that I dislike. I don’t vote in the Canadian elections, though, because I think it would be immoral given that I don’t live there.

COVID has offered a clear conclusion to our discussion of Caldwell’s book The Age of Entitlement.

Caldwell’s argument was that the moment you decide that it’s ok to disregard the Constitution just this once for a very good reason…

… and one more time for a really great reason…

… and a couple more times to make people feel good…

… and a bunch more times to make somebody feel safe …

… you can just forget the whole thing altogether.

And now we have people arrested for protesting against the government, people fined for assembling or practicing their religion, etc. It looks likely that this will go on for as long as at least some folks feel “unsafe.” And since somebody always feels unsafe, we are stuck without our constitutional rights. And nobody seems to mind because we have long accepted that these rights were conditional.

Before Hollywood buys rights to this novel and craps all over it, everybody who reads in Spanish (and can survive 700 pages of hardcore Mexican slang) should read Salvar el fuego.

And here’s why.

The protagonist of this novel is Marina, a very typical representative of the cosmopolitan elite. Marina inherited a fortune and then married a hedge fund manager. But that’s not the worst part. She also considers herself an artist. In a dance school she buys with her inheritance, Marina puts on modern dance performances where dancers pretend to be tampons soaked in menstrual blood. That kind of thing. Obviously, these performances bring Marina nothing but ridicule, and she is casting about for a way to strengthen her brand.

The way Arriaga mocks the pretentious “creative” types of Marina’s ilk is absolutely delicious. Half of the novel is narrated in the first person by Marina, and Arriaga manages to make her completely real and not just a facile parody.

In search of new experiences that would make her “art” pop more, Marina starts an affair with a convict serving a sentence for two premeditated homicides. She goes out of her way to conduct the affair in settings as grimy as possible because she hopes this manufactured suffering will make her a better artist. It’s all absolutely hilarious and an incredible fun to read.

Marina’s story is just one part of this extraordinarily entertaining novel. There’s also an explanation of Mexican machismo and violence that’s unmatched by anything since Octavio Paz. There are cartels, violence, corruption in the Mexican government at every level, the atrocious conditions in Mexico’s prisons, sex, jealousy, the idiocy of the Mexican rich, and the dark side of the indigenous legacy. It’s the most Mexican novel I’ve read in forever.

Arriaga is a screenwriter, and that’s both bad and good. The architecture of the novel is impeccable. It’s rare that you see such a massive novel that’s so meticulously planned. But the ending unfortunately shows the negative side of Arriaga’s career in the movies. I won’t say more but I’m sure everybody understands what I mean.

I couldn’t tear myself from this novel for days. It’s definitely going to be one of the biggest reading experiences of the year for me.

On the positive side, this quarantine has put Klara off social media for a long time to come. She’d never experienced social media before but in the quarantine many of her friends tried to connect with her through FB Messenger, WhatsApp, Zoom, etc. She hated all of it. After a couple of tries, she informed me she never wanted to do “this boring activity” again.

Instead, she asks me to take her to “look at friends.” This means we go for a walk and she gazes at other kids sitting in their front yards from a distance. It’s really sad.

IHME has updated its model again, for the second time in 3 days.

The peak in the US is projected for April 11.

I’m very glad scholars at IHME (whose initial model sent us all into this lockdown) are recognizing their mistakes and are revising the model.

The governors are now trying to get rid of the unused ventilators that they hoarded in expectations of millions of moribund people. I’m glad they took it seriously but it’s time to take other things seriously, too.

And why exactly can’t university library workers be at work and send us books? If there is a workplace with mountains of space between workers it’s a library. Libraries are extremely understaffed. A worker wouldn’t meet a soul in the stacks for years. You want social distancing? These workers will be better isolated at work than at home.

It’s very very hard to do my research without interlibrary loan for books. And I really don’t want to start suspecting that we are being schooled into accepting life without libraries.