Appalling

Next week is going to be very hard for me. It's the last week of the semester, so there will be a lot of stuff to do to wrap up the academic year. Since I'm the person responsible for cooking in our house, my plan was to dedicate today to preparing food in advance for the week to come. I was going to make these delicious Russian meatballs that I love and post the recipe on my blog.

So we got up this morning and headed to the grocery store only to discover that all the grocery stores in town are closed today. The reason why we were frustrated in our search of food is that today is Easter Sunday.

I find this completely appalling, people. I thought that, in spite of everything, this was still a secular country. I thought that the very purpose of its creation was to make sure that people could do whatever they wanted to in terms of religion. That everybody should sit hungry because some people think that something that matters to them took place two thousand years ago, makes absolutely no sense. Closing everything down for religious holidays of just one denomination is simply barbaric.

And please don't tell me that everything is closed down because all customers are in church and nobody would come anyways. We are now at Denny's, which is one of the very few places that's open, and I've never seen it so full. Walmart also looks open (you can say what you want about Walmart but it's very inspiring to see a company that puts business above somebody's fanaticism), and the parking lot in front of it is filled with cars. We are a university town, and the number of people for whom the word "Easter" means nothing is high.

If anybody is aware of any other religious occasions of the ruling religious group (besides Christmas) where everything is likely to close down, please tell me. I want to be prepared for those days when the religious folks celebrate by inconveniencing everybody else.

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Zygmunt Bauman's Liquid Modernity: A Review, Part I

Liquid Modernity (2000) is probably Zygmunt Bauman's most important work. This is where the philosopher introduces concepts that will inform his Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds (2003), Liquid Life (2005), Liquid Fear (2006), Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty (2006), etc. Since Bauman is one of my favorite contemporary philosophers (probably the second favorite after Žižek), I hope eventually to post reviews of all these books on my blog. As usual, I will dedicate the first part of my review to going over some of the ideas from Liquid Modernity that I found to be useful. Later, I will publish the second part of the review that will discuss what I consider to be flawed parts of Bauman's argument.

The main idea that Bauman advances in this book is that it is a mistake to see modernity as a monolithic period that stretches more or less unchanged from the late XIXth century until today. Bauman distinguishes between two stages of modernity:

1. The first stage of modernity, according to Bauman, is the "solid" stage. This is the moment in history of our Western civilization where solid certainties of pre-modern times had disintegrated to such an extent that the only thing to do was to sweep these rotten underpinnings of pre-modern societies out of the way completely. The goal of this first stage of modernity was to erect its own solid certainties in the place of the ones that were going to be swept away by change. If we think about the trajectory of the Soviet approach to modernity, we will see that it fits Bauman's argument perfectly. The transformative push of the first few years of the revolution led to an impenetrable fortress of a repressive Communist regime.

Bauman points out that the main fear of this first stage of modernity was that totalitarianism would emerge from its push to create a new set of certainties on the wasteland of the old society that had been destroyed by the advent of modernity. Orwell's 1984, says Bauman, is a perfect example of what this solid stage of modernity saw as its worst-case scenario. As we know all too well today, totalitarian regimes did, in fact, flourish during this first stage of modernity.

2. Bauman refers to the second stage of modernity as "liquid." At this stage, there is no more effort to replace a set of old rules, certainties and identities with a new one. The freedom to switch identities as often as we want, move around, transform ourselves is now seen as an end in itself and the most prized characteristic of our existence. Bauman's goal in Liquid Modernity is to analyze the main concepts that inform this liquid stage of modernity and to point out the limitations of this freedom.

One of the main struggles of individuals in pre-modern societies consisted of defending their private sphere from the encroachment of the public sphere. People belonged to their families, their clans, guilds, social classes. Their identities that were assigned to them at birth were inexorable and inescapable. If you were born a woman, for example, this very fact implied a set of roles, behaviors and life strategies that was pre-ordained and that you could try to escape at your own peril. If you look at the history of art, you will see that it isn't until the birth of the Romantic movement in late XVIII century that individual emotions and minute shades of personal feelings start being discussed as something valuable. It is only at the end of the XIXth century that we begin to see a slow process of liberation from identities one is assigned at birth.

Today, however, Bauman maintains, it is the public sphere that needs to be salvaged from the constant encroachment of the private sphere. According to the philosopher, our public sphere has been eroded by a constant parade of exhibitionist private issues that there isn't any public sphere left to speak of. Think about the following statement by Bauman in terms of what we are witnessing in today's politics:

What are commonly and ever more often perceived as 'public issues' are private problems of public figures. . . Not one among the 'great and mighty', let alone the offended 'public opinion', proposed the impeachment of Bill Clinton for abolishing welfare as a 'federal issue'. (70-1)

We can see that this tendency has become even more pronounced today, 11 years after the publication of Bauman's Liquid Modernity. To give just one example, there is a huge group of people whose political activism is limited to a painstaking investigation of whether Sarah Palin's child is truly hers (I blogged about these folks here), as if her motherhood had anything whatsoever to do with whether she will make a good presidential candidate. We get regaled with endless stories about Michelle Obama's personality, President Obama's shoes, George W. Bush's daughters, Donald Trump's ex-wives. In the meanwhile, a discussion of what it is they are doing as politicians gets relegated to the realm of the inconsequential. 

While we are concentrated on discussing the private issues of others and exhibiting our own private sphere to the world (blogging and Facebook are a perfect example of this), we fail to notice that the very nature of power has changed. Formerly, those who possessed the greatest masses of land were the most powerful. Power was bogged down by the enormous apparatus of hardware and people needed to maintain it. Today, says Bauman, power has become liquid:

We are witnessing the revenge of nomadism over the principle of territoriality and settlement. In the fluid stage of modernity, the settled majority is ruled by the nomadic and exterritorial elite. Keeping the roads free for nomadic traffic and phasing out the remaining check-points has now become the meta-purpose of politics. (13)

The power today is hard to pinpoint in every sense of the word. As everything else, it has become mobile and uprooted.

(To be continued. . .)

So Has the Movie Atlas Shrugged Already Been Released?

And if so, then why isn't it showing at our local movie theater? I haven't been able to find it anywhere in St. Louis either. I absolutely need to watch this movie, people. Even if I have to schlep all the way to Springfield. And yes, I'm sure that the book must have been mangled horribly in the course of making the movie, but still I have to see it for myself.

Has anybody seen it? Any impressions to share?

My Baby

I don't know why I suddenly started posting so many little stories about my life, but here you have it.

My younger sister was born when I was six. Our parents worked a lot, so I was entrusted with taking care of her. I would come from school, get her home from daycare, feed her, play with her, take her for walks, etc. We both loved that. Once, when I was about 12, I left her at home (which in our country is not a big deal at all, so let's have no drama about that) and went to the store to sell back empty bottles. In the Soviet Union, a school teacher and a philologist who worked full time had trouble making ends meet, so it was important to sell back all the bottles because every coin mattered.

The line at the store turned out to be much longer than I'd expected. After 40 minutes or so, I got tired of waiting and told people in line, "I think I'm not going to keep waiting because I have a kid at home and she must be getting hungry." People looked at me with mute horror. I was a very small and skinny 12-year-old with an angelic look. "Let the poor child go to the front of the line, comrades," a kind lady said. "She has a baby to feed." 

When I moved to Montreal at the age of 22, my sister came to live with me full-time. After a few years of living together with her, I would often say to my colleagues, "OK, guys, I have to run because I have a kid waiting for me at home and I need to feed her." 

"Oh, we didn't know you had a baby," people would respond. "How old is she?" 

"My baby is nineteen years old," I would say proudly and everybody would look at me like I was insane.

My baby had a baby 17 months ago, so I guess I'm a grandma now.

"My Blonde"

In Quebecois French, the word "blonde" can mean "a girlfriend", irrespective of the woman's hair color. Once, when my sister had first started dating her boyfriend and her colloquial French of Quebec was still not good, she heard him talking on the phone. He was telling his friend about this blonde that he was dating and how amazing she was. My sister, whose hair is black, is no shrinking violet. As she listened to the conversation, she started getting enraged and began to imagine all kinds of horrors she was going to visit on the guy. It's a good thing he managed to explain this curious linguistic reality to her fast enough.

Girls and Boys in Spain

Once, my friend and I were walking down a busy street in Madrid on a Sunday afternoon. Suddenly, we heard somebody who was walking behind us call out, "Girls! Hey, girls! Wait up for us! Don't run away." We turned around and saw two gentlemen in their 80ies wave at us in a flirty way. With a sense of righteous indignation at these much older men who dressed in their Sunday best and went out to chase young women (we were in our twenties then), we turned around and saw two very old ladies who were waving back at their "boys" and giggling.

My friend and I felt very ashamed of our presumptuousness.

Do They Know?

During a class on Thursday, I mentioned blogging as an example of a creative activity that is accessible to anybody. As soon as I uttered the word blog, two of my students exchanged knowing stares, smiled and nodded at each other. And then looked at me in a sly manner.

So I started to wonder if they have discovered my blog. The reason that I mind is that I really don't want the students to be exposed to my strong political beliefs. I try to keep my politics as far away from the classroom as possible in order to allow the students to feel comfortable expressing their own convictions.

Hopefully, I'm just being paranoid.

Girls and Boys

During our recent New York trip, my sister (a very successful business woman), a friend (a scholar in Germanic Studies) and I (a university professor) went into a bank. An older gentleman came up to us and asked in a playful tone, "So what do you, girls, need?"

All three of us absolutely hated it. Only a misunderstood sense of politeness prevented us from telling him, "Go get us some change, boy."

Rich People

For some mysterious reason, I always end up surrounded by rich people. I went to a high school for rich kids and hated it. Then I ended up in a graduate program at a university for rich folks and hated it even more. My first professorial job was yet again at a place for rich students. I always was the envy of my friends because of constantly attracting very rich admirers. They were all nice people, those admirers, but they were rich, which made any relationship between us hopeless. Don't get me wrong, I have absolutely nothing whatsoever against rich people. I want them to keep being rich and become even richer. I'd just like them to do it far away from me.

My great-grandmother whose personality I have and whose life journey I'm repeating down to minor details was a passionate Communist. She benefited greatly from the October Revolution and the Communist regime. I guess I'm now repaying some karmic debt for her Communist beliefs by constantly having to suffer through the company of rich people whose way of being, while completely worthy of respect, is extremely alien to me. 

Over It

After I separated from my first husband, people kept asking me, "Why did you guys break up? Whose fault was it?" For years, I would respond with a long detailed story about how he was a horrible person who treated me badly, betrayed me and forced me to leave him because of how nasty he was.

Then once, when somebody asked me this question, I just said, "I think we were both to blame but probably I was a little more to blame." And I felt like adding no extra details because the story had become boring. That's when I knew that I was finally over it.

So today I was answering a personal email from a colleague who mentioned my second graduate program*. And I immediately went on a long and detailed rant about how vile the experience was for me and how much I suffered there. Which means that I'm still far from being over it. I just hope that one day I will be able to say calmly, "It was not a good place for me" and stop right after that.

* My first graduate program was absolutely 100% fantastic.

Unbending

After several recent online discussions about the correct usage of the English language, people keep asking me why my vision of the language is so unbending. "Why can't you accept split infinitives, double and triple negations and words like "birthed" as linguistic experimentation and a sign of a person's own unique language style?" they ask. Well, let me tell you why.

I will be teaching two courses next semester, and both of them will be in English. The written component in these courses will be intense. I am already bracing myself for a new round of sentences like "A think that these text kinda sucks" and "Sarmiento and Rodo are Latin America writer's and there affect is huge." Given that I will grade at least 250 such essays over the course of the semester, you can imagine how much I'm looking forward to that. If somebody had taken the trouble to educate my students about the basics of the English grammar and spelling, I wouldn't have to waste so much time on correcting such silly mistakes and could finally try to engage with the content of what they are saying.

There is creativity and there is simple ignorance. The right to creativity, in my opinion, needs to be deserved. A student asked me yesterday, "Can I write my essay in sentences that are 30 lines long? This is what Goytisolo does, so why can't I?" So I explained that Goytisolo wrote several very popular novels and many essays and articles before he created his own unique personal style. First, you learn to write correctly and then, if there are still people who want to read your stuff, you can proceed to work on your distinctive style of writing. When, however, people try to sell sheer laziness as originality and creativity, that's just annoying.

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The New Work Space Rules!

I'm loving my new work space, people. I have managed to accomplish so much today that it's even hard for me to believe. Here is what I did after getting home from a departmental meeting (which was only 5 hours ago):

1) Created an oral exam for the language course;

2) Prepared a review session and a study guide for the final exam in the language course;

3) Created the final exam for this course;

4) Made a PowerPoint for a review session in the Survey of literature course;

5) Created the final exam for this course;

6) Made a list of draconian rules for the oral exam to be handed out to the students while smiling gleefully.

All of the above-mentioned accomplishments mean that, apart from grading, I have absolutely no other teaching-related stuff to do until August. 

I think I just invented the proverbial wheel which, for me, is the realization that you work much better when you are comfortable and well-organized. Eureka!

Are the Rich Really That Different?

What is it with these rich and famous people of both genders who at the age of 60, 70, 80 or 90 marry twenty-year-olds? Do they not realize that the younger person is just selling him or herself for money, comfort and a hope of a good inheritance? Do they never ask themselves if their spouse would have given them a second look if they were retired teachers, miners or janitors?

Or are they so cynical that they don't care and the realization that their young spouse cringes with disgust when forced to get into bed with them causes them no unpleasant feelings? 

Vengeance Is Mine, I Will Repay

I just finished creating the final oral exam for my refuseniks, which is how I now refer to the students in my Spanish language class who consistently refuse to speak Spanish. Oh, it is going to be one painful exam, people. Of course, for the students who actually did the activities I brought to each class session, this exam will be nothing but total, unadulterated fun. However, it will imply a lot of pain and suffering for those who used class time to discuss (in English) the comparative merits of their manicurists. (I'm not kidding, my friends. It got so bad that I even taught them how to say manicure, nail polish, nail file, etc. hoping that they will at least get something out of the course.) I have a lot of manicure lovers in that group.

I can't wait for that exam.

Stating the Obvious

It is very difficult to get students to stop peppering their essays with all kinds of trivial observations. No matter how many times I ask them to stop stating the obvious, I still get essays that start with "In this course, we have read many different works of literature." Since I taught the course, it is self-evident that I'm very aware of this Earth-shattering piece of news.

"Cervantes is a writer from Spain" is an equally obnoxious piece of wisdom that students try to share with me on a regular basis. Really? No shit. And here I was, thinking he is a German painter. Thanks a lot for clearing that up.

Another annoying kind of statement (and the one that students absolutely love to regale me with) is "Don Quijote and "Vino, primero, pura" have many differences." Given that one is a novel from the XVIIth century and another one a poem from the XXth, I'd say it's a safe bet they have differences.

There are also platitudes that make me cringe because of their sheer inanity. "Everybody wants to be happy" and "People often make mistakes" are good examples of such vapid generalizations. I asked the students specifically to go over the essay and delete all sentences that mention everybody, people, and humanity at large.

And then there are offensive commonplaces of the "Spanish culture is very romantic" variety which make me question if students have heard anything I've been saying in class.

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How to Talk to Students Without Getting in Trouble, Part I

From Spanish prof's great blog (that isn't written in Spanish, so everybody can head over there and enjoy it), I discovered that Dr. Calvo might have made some remarks that are perfectly acceptable in a Spanish-speaking country but that might have been used against him in a culture of prissiness that has engulfed the American academia. I also come from a different culture, one that enjoys a much greater freedom with words, has a dark sense of humor and is the opposite of prissy. With my colleagues and administrators, I'm always as outspoken and outrageous as I am at home (or on this blog). The students, however, are a completely different matter.

I cultivate a huge distance from my students. You wouldn't think that if you observed my teaching because my teaching style is very laid-back, I make a lot of jokes, and tell funny stories all the time. The distance is always there, however. For one, the jokes and the funny stories I tell are only and exclusively about me. Yesterday, for example, I alleviated the tension during a very difficult lecture on post-modernism by telling the story of my 4-year-long hunt for a bathroom cabinet in my own apartment.

Another rule is never ever to discuss other students when they are absent or ask any questions about them. Even the most innocuous comment of the "I see that John isn't here again" variety can get interpreted badly. As for other professors, the administrators, other courses, the university at large, the staff members, the lab workers, etc., I only refer to them in extremely positive terms. "Professor X is really fantastic and the Dean Y is the best ever" are the only comments students will ever hear from me, even if I dislike both the professor and the dean immensely.

As everybody must have noticed by now, I have very strong political beliefs. My convictions, however, never get into the classroom. Whenever students express their opinions on political issues, my only response is, "This is very interesting. Does anybody want to respond to this?" A passionate feminist who writes an essay condemning machismo has just as much of a chance to get an A for her paper as a Conservative student who writes an anti-immigration piece. As long as the essay is structured the way it should be, is well-written, coherent, and well-argued, I couldn't care less what political beliefs it supports. 

I had a student once who kept trying to bait me by saying things like "Feminism is just stupid" or "I'm sick and tired of feminism." I always responded to such comments by asking the students to return to the reading and discuss some very technical aspect of the text. It is not my place to educate students on feminism or politics. I teach Spanish language and literature. Everything else is left outside of the classroom. 

Sophisticated

My new work space makes me feel so sophisticated and grown up that I even got myself a glass of wine (which I never do on weeknights) and now I'm sipping it feeling like a real professor. Maybe I'm going to read some Baudrillard before going to bed.

Back in grad school, our department of Spanish was a party-till-you-drop place. We had the greatest parties ever. We drank, talked, argued, danced, sang, and generally had a really crazy good time. So once, at about 2 am, we decided to drop by a party of our colleagues at the Department of French. When we got there, we realized that cultural differences run deep. The lights were dimmed, there was quiet classical music playing in the background, some candles. Our colleagues, all dressed in black, sat around with small glasses of wine and quitely discussed Guattari and Baudrillard.

I never went back to one of their parties.

The First Post From the New Work Space

And now, as promised, pictures of my workspace before I got my first desk in 8 years and now that I finally have one.

Here is the work space before the change. And yes, I'm messy, it's the end of the semester, no need to make me feel even worse about it than I already do. 

And here is the new work space. Now I can have all my reference books right where I work. There is no need to run upstairs to get them every five minutes or leave them strewn around on the floor.

And this is how the living room looks now that I have removed all the work-related mess:

I'm absolutely loving this new arrangement.

On Deportations

Almost immediate deportations of people who are in the country on work visas and lose their jobs don't just hurt these people and their families. I mean, if it were just them, who cares, right? They are immigrants which means that they are not fully human anyways. To hell with those losers.

However, actual real American citizens get hurt by these deportations, too. Even worse than that, businesses get hurt, which is the real tragedy. Let's say a person has lived in the country for several years. Dr. Calvo, for example, has been in the US for ten years. Within that period of time, people put down roots, which is kind of unavoidable. A person gets to have either a mortgage or a rental agreement. It is highly probably that s/he leases a car and has a credit card, which probably carries a balance. There are people (once again, actual citizens) who depend on that person for professional or any other kind of services, favors, support, etc. Maybe this person volunteers, is active in a church, participates in a book club, has a timeshare, has been asked to be a best man or a bridesmaid at a wedding, is in the midst of directing an Honors thesis or a Senior Essay, promised to review a book for somebody, is scheduled to speak at a conference or is even organizing that conference, is collaborating on a project, co-authoring an article - I could obviously continue this list to the point where this would be my longest post ever. So if such a person has to pack up and leave within a month, all of these individuals, companies and institutions that depend on him or her will be screwed. 

If a person were given a reasonable amount of time (let's say, six months at a minimum), they could try to find another job or at least get their affairs in order, pack without a hurry, make sure that things are taken care of. So whose interests do these immediate deportations serve? If a person has been in the country for years, what will an extra year change?

P.S. I want to warn everybody in advance that this is a touchy subject with me. So unless you are an immigrant who lost your work visa in the past 2-3 years, don't come here telling me that such things don't happen. You'll just make a fool out of yourself.

I Ain't That Smart

So what kind of a genius depresses students with a heart-breaking movie based on Garcia Marquez's Nobody Writes to the Colonel right before they have to write her evaluations?

That would be me, my friends.

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