Clarissa's Blog

Let’s share our go-to dinner ideas, the ones we use when we have no time and energy to cook. Mine used to be boiled hot dogs with mashed potatoes but hot dogs cause diabetes, so I gave them up.

The current go-to is the one I came up with the help of my sister who is not into cooking as much as I am into it.

I dump a bunch of vegetables – asparagus, broccoli, baby carrots, Brussels sprouts – into a baking sheet and place them in the oven. Fifteen minutes before they are ready, I put in another baking sheet with one of those slabs of salmon they sell at Sam’s for $16. The salmon doesn’t even need to be salted, so there’s zero prep.

It’s dinner and lunch for two days.

All I can say at the end of this long day is that it must suck beyond words to be a single mother.

One thing that does bug me about the contemporary feminist theory is the obsessive need to compare Sex & the City and Girls because these shows supposedly represent my generation and the one 10 years younger than me respectively. You have no idea how many sources in all kinds of languages I discovered that compare these stupid shows.

I liked Sex & the City a lot but the idea that women in the show represent me or any women I know is insane. The show and its characters always looked extremely outdated to me, and it was fun to watch such antiquated ideas and behaviors on the screen. I always thought that the show was a collection of stereotypes more at home in early 1980s.

I also think that there is a big difference between “feminist” and “about women.” And people often seem to lose that distinction.

Hey, folks, good news for feminist scholars. Turns out that the global economic crisis of 2008-9 had a wonderful effect on the field of feminist studies. They have finally – FINALLY! – moved away from the navel-gazing calls for inclusion and intersectionality and are now in a completely new and very promising territory of engaging with the reality of global capitalism and fluidity. I missed this development completely because I had given up on feminist theory precisely when the crisis was beginning. And now I was forced to go back to the field and was pleasantly surprised.

For those who are interested in exploring this new strand of feminist theory, I recommend you begin with the second edition of Postfeminism: Cultural Texts and Theories by Stéphanie Genz and Benjamin Brabon. It has to be the second edition, though, because the first was published in 2009 and was still all about intersectionality and all that.

I will post more sources as I go along.

This is very heartening because I was so not looking forward to writing this feminist article because all I care about is global capitalism and the nationalist response to it. And now it turns out that feminism has gone in this direction, too. This is my first day of writing the article (I don’t consult any sources until I create my own thesis) and I’m already feeling encouraged.

A debate is raging over if the US translator who was at the one-on-one meeting between Putin and Trump should testify. People are resorting to pretty insane arguments as to why she shouldn’t:

And if she were to say what, exactly, transpired, she would violate an ethics code of confidentiality similar to lawyer-client privilege or the silence of a priest during confession.

This is utter bonk. There is no such ethics code, and the analogy us ridiculous. Of course, she should testify.

Priest confidentiality and lawyer confidentiality exist to protect people from being rolled over by the government. But the president is part of the government. In the meeting with Putin, he was the entirety of the US government.

P.S. NYTimes has made it extremely hard to link to them because I’m a subscriber. So if you see a source with no link, it is probably the NYTimes. You can find the entire text by googling the quote.

I don’t know if anybody else here is following the Uncle Ted story which is the most recent sex scandal in the Catholic Church. Thankfully, no child abuse is involved this time but the whole thing still stinks. All I have to say is that priests need a labor union. Everybody needs to unionize, and so do priests because it’s a profession that generates complete dependency, and this can’t but lead to abuse, including of the sexual kind.

A hilarious story about a progressive bakery in Portland. Why it is always a bakery, I have no idea. It must be something very Freudian.

And of course the plot wouldn’t be complete without a sexy Russian spy. So some two-bit whore was found to spice up the deathly boring story of Mueller’s interminable “investigation.”

The NYTimes articles on the prostitute read like standup comedy. It beggars belief that people would actually believe this sorry crap.

Some people are just not well-read. They observe a phenomenon in 18-century literature and immediately attribute it to the Enlightenment philosophy. They think that if it happened in the era of the Enlightenment it must have happened because of the Enlightenment. And that’s a logical leap nobody should take.

If this person had done her reading, she would have known that said phenomenon existed since at least the 16th century and up until the early twentieth.

I specialize in the most contemporary Spanish literature possible. Stuff that was published five minutes ago is what interests me. But I’m constantly reading up on medieval, on Golden Age, on the Enlightenment, etc because you have to keep your scholarly base fresh. You need to know what led to what. Everything is connected and nothing exists in isolation.

You can’t just “know one thing but know it well” if you are a research scholar. You need to read widely and assiduously. And never assume you know all there is.

Why are some journals offering letters confirming that an article has been accepted for publication? Even at my school, acceptances don’t count, only actual publications.

When I was a first-year tenure-track person, I had a big argument with tenured profs over whether it’s easier to publish after tenure. I thought it was but they laughed me out of the room. And I couldn’t say anything because I didn’t have the experience. Now I do and I can say with authority that it’s definitely easier. Right now, I have publications lined up until 2021. I know for sure that things are coming out every year for the next three years, I know where they are coming out, and it’s all part of a planned-out publication strategy. The unpredictability and stress have gone out of the experience because I now know enough to plan and control the process.