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.

#MeToo brought this while George Floyd brought an explosion in black victims of homicides. And this result was easily predictable all along because of how the cause was defined.

You get so used to having all of your time outside of work claimed by a child that it becomes a way of life. And then all of a sudden, the child is 7 and tells you in a tolerant way, “I’m busy right now, Mommy, but I’ll play with you later.” Which, by the way, I never said to her in her life.

As a result of suddenly free morning, I invented a new breakfast recipe. I thought it would be absolute garbage but it turned out surprisingly delicious. I cracked two eggs into 1/3 cup of ryazhenka (US alternative is kefir), mixed it with a teaspoon of flour, added a handful of chopped up ginger, some shredded carrots, sunflower shoots and cumin seeds. Then I cooked it as an omelet. The carrots and the shoots only have time to cook a bit, so they remain firm and balance out the mushiness of everything else.

I don’t have a picture because ryazhenka is beige, and that makes the result look nothing special. But it tasted phenomenal.

NATO doesn’t exist. The Iraq war killed it.

There is absolutely no likelihood that American voters will support sending troops to any place that didn’t militarily attack the US. And if the US doesn’t honor NATO’s obligations, there’s no NATO.

Everything has consequences. The Iraq war was so colossally stupid and massively immoral that its impact will be felt for a long time. It showed that the US army is weak and incompetent. It changed the perception of the US as a military power abroad, but even more so at home.

American people now see the US as a loser in what concerns the military. It’s a foregone conclusion that the US army will lose. Nobody even fantasizes about a possible victory because that would be too daft. Before you deny it, please tell me why you are opposed (like I am, I’m completely opposed, too) to sending US troops into battle anywhere. Because you don’t want another Iraq and another Afghanistan, right? Because you expect the US to lose. I don’t blame you because I feel the same way.

Once again, I most whole-heartedly oppose sending US troops anywhere. I’m simply honest with myself about why I oppose it. And if the strongest army in the NATO will never engage with anybody militarily, there is no NATO.

The US government knows that the US army is never going to fight again. Hence the forced vaccination, hence the morale-sapping wokeness trainings, hence the sissification of the whole outfit. The army can’t serve its original purpose. So now it’s a pool of free subjects for large human experiments.

When Trump talked about abolishing the NATO, he simply proposed making an already existing fact official. It would be the honest thing to do. There are countries in Europe right now that sincerely believe US soldiers will come to defend them when Russia invades. I talked to a guy from Lithuania yesterday, and he believes this completely. But we all know it’s never going to happen. And I think it’s a good thing because I don’t want to feel humiliated by our loser army. Let’s let people know that we aren’t showing up, and it’s all good.

We don’t really need a standing army. Technology and geography make it unnecessary, so it’s not even a big deal.

The Russian journalist was nice. She said she emigrated from Russia to Ukraine in 2013 and learned the language, so I forgave her for being Russian. Unfortunately, she’s not a great public speaker and doesn’t know that unless you have a talent for public speaking, you need to train and prepare. A lot of stuff she wanted to talk about involved play on words (like the famous babovna), and you just can’t explain that well if your English isn’t fantastic and you haven’t thought it through beforehand.

But the star of the event was an American professor of International Relations who talked about what the world will look like in 2050. He’s a superb public speaker, better than I am. Brimming with energy and optimism. He explained why all the doom-and-gloom predictions about the war with China, climate apocalypse, or resource scarcity were stupid. I hear the arguments he made regularly on Ukrainian TV, and it was a strange experience to hear them in English. I was greatly tempted to ask him if he was a Ukrainian spy because both the content of his talk and the energetic, exultant delivery sounded very familiar.

Of course, the audience bristled because they love drama and imaginary catastrophes.

We need many more people like that professor. He was like a smart Tony Robbins.