Diary

On October 17, the leaves were at a peak here, and that night there was a freeze; since then the leaves have been turning brown and are falling. I can already see the mountains through the woods. The tomatoes were wiped out, though I still have a few inside. This is all occurring a little earlier than usual and allows extra preparation time before the snow starts.

I haven't been reading much but will soon start on Buddenbrooks, by Thomas Mann. This is part of my limited effort to read fiction written by authors from different countries. Mann represents the transition from nineteenth-century-style novels to twentieth-century-style novels. He seems to have been a closet gay man, like Henry James, but married and had six children. I enjoy reading authors who have connections with other authors I've read. In this respect, three of his children, Klaus, Erika and Golo were gay. Erika introduced Carson McCullers to Annemarie Schwarzenbach, with whom McCullers fell in love. Also, Mann himself became a German émigré and lived in California during World War II, along with friends and acquaintances such as Max Reinhardt and Carl Zuckmayer. In earlier times, there seem to have been fairly coherent literary communities compared to what we have now. But I think that most of these émigrés returned to Europe by the time of the McCarthy era. The emergence of people like Joseph McCarthy or Donald Trump is usually a death knell to the arts. There is also a new book by Nichola Raihani, one of my favorite science writers, coming out in February.

The next few months in the U.S. may be interesting politically. The Democrats are likely to win the House of Representatives. If they also win the Senate, it may lead to the death of the MAGA movement. There is the possibility of massive investigations into the Trump administration and the Trump family, and new legislation to prevent similar corruption and abuse of power in the future. You can now easily see that Trump is in the final phase of his pathology and is unlikely to recover. I couldn't believe that Steve Witkoff, the U.S. Special Envoy to the Middle East, publicly praised Vladimir Putin as a "humanitarian." A few hours later, Putin launched a missile and drone attack on Kiev and elsewhere in Ukraine, killing several people.