Work has been so peopley that I decided to go see a 3-hour horror movie. Sitting silently in the dark with nobody looking at me or expecting conversation sounds like a very attractive proposition.

However, the theater is so hellishly hot that I feel like the horror has started already.

It’s the end of the academic year, and I’m drowning in stuff but I want to make it known that the news story that Ukraine planned airstrikes on Moscow on the first anniversary of the war but the US forbade that is a complete fabrication. These lies were published in the WashPo, and I’m stunned that there are still people who believe this lying rag.

This is stupid Russian propaganda that idiots at WashPo keep falling for.

You become brave just by being a parent, he said. Or maybe it’s just you become disinhibited. He’d felt this last night, socializing with people in their twenties. He’d forgotten how physically shy they were.

Rachel Cusk, Outline

Polar lights in Ukraine tonight:

There’s still time to enjoy nature this weekend.

From the local newspaper:

Read the whole thing here because it’s priceless.

Books about Jeeves and Wooster have been censored and given trigger warnings.

Something else to boycott.

There was a German writer, W.G.Sebald who created his own style of writing, and it’s been very influential. There are writers in pretty much every European country who write Sebaldian prose. In Spain, it’s Javier Marías, Antonio Muñoz Molina, and to a lesser extent Kirmen Uribe. I heard that Olga Tokarczuk and Karl Ove Knausgaard write in that style, although I haven’t read them myself.

In these books, there isn’t much of a plot and very little happens. There’s a ghostly narrator who meets people, listens to their stories, and ponders the complexity of human relationships. It’s all about different shades of emotions. The writing is usually beautiful. The mood is calm and melancholy. Very often, the problem that the ghostly narrator half-heartedly struggles with is divorce. Sometimes, it’s a parent’s death.

This is how Rachel Cusk writes. I like her more than Javier Marías because she’s less pretentious. Plus, I never read a novel in this style by a female author. This is usually a very male kind of writing, so it was interesting to see how a woman would handle it.

What’s interesting is that Sebald’s shattered, directionless, plotless writing was a response to the horror of WWII. He belonged to a generation of Germans who had lost the plot, so to speak, and had no idea how to get over the devastation and the guilt. He wrote like a shell-shocked person because he was one.

So when Uribe, Muñoz Molina or Cusk apply this writing style to the descriptions of problem-free existences of people who hop around the world on transcontinental flights out of boredom, it’s hard to figure out why they decide to drown in all this minutiae. It’s cute, often delicious, beautifully described minutiae but there’s a limit on how many books of this kind one can ingest. If you never read any, I definitely recommend getting familiar with the genre through Cusk. If you read them before, I’m not sure what one more would do for you. These books are extremely interchangeable. One could have easily convinced me that a page from Cusk’s Outline was a translation of Javier Marías’s novel.

Why so many writers choose to write these identical books I wouldn’t be able to say. They are so similar, even down to small details. Enjoyable, though. They are definitely enjoyable.

At the trampoline park, Klara shows me her new moves. I laugh, clap, and encourage her to do more.

A boy comes up in hopes of getting some attention, too.

“Look, I can do something cool, too!” he exclaims.

“If he wanted attention, he should have brought his own Mommy,” Klara mutters.

I invite everyone to read the comments to see how utterly lacking in a sense of humor most people are.

A frost advisory has been issued for our region. Life suddenly feels a lot sweeter.

We are doing our first barbecue of the season today, so the drop in the temperature is doubly welcome.

I don’t know why I keep calling it a barbecue when it’s clearly a shashlik in every possible way but what’s funny is that the discussion N and I had today about what to drink with the shashlik revolved around Perrier and San Pellegrino. We’ve turned into those crazy healthy people we used to find very puzzling when we were younger.