There was an opera performance for kids at the public library today. I came across it by accident and realized I knew half of the people in the audience. And that’s in spite of doing everything I can to avoid meeting anybody.

It’s really nice.

I’m listening to a Polish expert who’s saying that in the past year, the US has pushed Russia out of the European energy markets to the tune of up to 30 trillion dollars. That’s getting close to our entire external debt.

I know people aren’t capable of perceiving good news, so I’ll put it more bluntly: this is 30 trillion dollars going to us. And we are taking them away from really nasty dudes. This is great all around.

An aside for the particularly gifted: no, this doesn’t mean the US “provoked the war”. Russia and nobody else “provoked” it by starting it.

That’s a good way to put it. You can have either the weirdos or the normies. It’s impossible to cater simultaneously to both.

DeSantis had a great opportunity but he pissed it away. He tried to be everything to everybody and that always has the opposite effect.

At this very early point, I like Mike Pence. Obviously, a lot can still happen but for now he sounds sane and strong.

Of course, it’s important to remember that national governments no longer can solve the most pressing problems we experience because those problems don’t appear and develop on a national level. This process of the erasure of national subjecthood is far more advanced in Europe than in the US but it’s occurring here, too. So please don’t hate your neighbor over an election that means less and less for you in practical terms.

The kids wander around the house, perennially hungry. “When is lunch? Is this lunch? After we finish it, when’s the next meal? Is there more food in the house? Is anybody planning to feed us? What are you holding? Is it food? Are you sure it isn’t food? Where can I find a piece of food?”

The adults are pale and cornered, feverishly trying to decide what else to stuff into the hungry little beaks.

I don’t know why but it was uncommonly difficult for me to write today. I have ideas, I’m working on a very good section where I know exactly what to say, but the language was tripping me up majorly. I had to use the dictionary all the time.

Maybe it’s because I’m reading Elizabeth von Arnim whose style I admire, and it’s making me conscious of the poverty of my own writing compared to hers. I still did my 1,200 words but it took forever and madd my brain boil.

Here’s another delightful quote from Elizabeth von Arnim. A habitually sickly woman is entertaining the 60-year-old fiancé of her very young daughter called Judith. The fiancé is a Master of an Oxford college, which explains why the parents consented to the marriage with this age difference:

The Master had been very exuberant; and his vitality, delightful of course but just a little overwhelming at his age, had reminded her that she needed care. How difficult it had been to get him out into the garden, to somewhere where she wasn’t. She hadn’t got him there till half-past two, by which time he had been vital without stopping since twelve, and even then she had had to invent a pear-tree in full blossom that she wasn’t at all sure about, and tell him she had heard it was a wonderful sight and ought not to be missed. But how difficult it had been. Judith had not seemed to want to show him the pear-tree, and he would not go and look at it unless she went, too. Judith had gone at last, but with an expression on her face as though she thought she was going to have to bear things, and no girl should show a thought like that before marriage

The Pastor’s Wife

I will never forget this “expression as though she thought she was going to have to bear things”. Don’t we all have such an expression sometimes, and isn’t this beautifully said?

Putin said the grain deal is off. The next day he said it was never off. He said that 100% of the funding for the mercenary group Wagner came from the federal government of Russia. A week later he said Wagner never existed. These are only two of the dozens of examples of how he has no idea what’s happening any more.

This doddering, senile loser is who we are all so terrified of. People complain about Biden’s mental acuity but Biden is fresh like a spring daffodil compared to Putin’s bumbling and fumbling.

My 13-year-old niece: So, what should we do? We could listen to the radio.

My 7-year-old nephew: Radio?? What are we, forty?

A corpulent colleague and I get into an elevator, panting from the insane heat outside.

“It’s OK, it’s OK,” the colleague says encouragingly, wiping off copious amounts of sweat from his face, “by November it will be cooler for sure.”

Since we are talking about early twentieth-century British fiction, I want to recommend a novel that I mentioned before but a long time passed and people might have forgotten.

It is titled Vivien, published in 1905. It’s deeply Victorian, so beautiful. You get so many details of life in Victorian England, it’s a treasure.

The author, WB Maxwell, was a son of the very talented bestselling author Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Braddon lived with a married man and had a large number of children with him. In the 1860s. You can imagine what that felt like at the time.

WB Maxwell was 8 when Braddon and his dad finally got officially married. He clearly never got over their irregular living situation, which one can see in Vivien. I tried reading other novels by him but they were horrid. But Vivien is amazing. It has this blend of gritty realism and almost farcical snobbishness that one rarely finds anywhere.