Tesla Model 3 Breaks Out From The Pack -- August 3, 2018

Pardon the interruption: this has nothing to do with Trump's tariffs as far as I know but it's being reported that lithium prices are tanking as Chinese EV production slows. Even in China, EVs won't make it without government subsidies or mandates. Wow. Who wudda thought?

Changes to Chinese subsidies for hybrid and battery-powered vehicles – or new energy vehicles in local parlance – that came into effect mid-June are already having a dramatic impact.
According to data from China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, some 64,000 battery-electric vehicles (BEV) rolled off production lines in June 2018, a drop of 16% compared to May. June sales fell by 23% to 63,000 units. Plug-in hybrid sales increased 5% to 22,000.

Chinese BEV production peaked at more than 150,000 units in December last year. Global EV sales topped 1.2m in 2017 with BEVs making up two-thirds of the total and China accounting for more than half the market.

The new subsidy regime has impacted several leading battery producers in China according to the latest lithium research report from industry tracker Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. The country’s Optimum Nano last month announced that it would cease operations for at least the rest of the year while Yinlong New Energy has suspended production at many facilities due to slower sales.

Should be good news for Elon Musk. Batteries should be getting less expensive.

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July EV Sales

July EV sales are beginning to be posted.

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The Book Page

A quick look at two biographies of Franz Kafka today:

• Kafka: The Decisive Years, Reiner Stach, c. 2002, translation by Shelley Frisch, 2005
• Kafka: The Years of Insight, Reiner Stach, c. Shelley Frisch

Neither book seems to have been read or checked out by anyone; they seem to be in pristine condition. If I had shelf space, I would add them to my personal library. Exquisite feeling books, especially the first one.

The introduction of the first book begins:

The life of Dr Franz Kafka, a Jewish insurance official and writer in Prague, lasted forty years and eleven months. He spent sixteen years and six and a half months in school and at university, and nearly fifteen years in professional life. Kafka retired at the age of thirty-nine. He died of laryngeal tuberculosis in a sanatorium outside Vienna two years later.

Apart from stays in the German Empire -- primarily weekend excursions -- Kafka spent about forty-five days aboard. He visited Berlin, Munich, Zurich, Paris, Milan, Venice, Verona, Vienna, and Budapest. He saw three seas, each one: the North Sea, the Baltic Sea, and the Italian Adriatic. And he witnessed a World War.

He never married. He was engaged three times: twice to Felice Bauer, a career woman in Berlin, and once to Julie Wohryzek, a secretary in Prague.

He appears to have had romantic relationships with four other women as well as sexual encounters with prostitutes. He shared an apartment with a women for about six months of his life. He left no descendants.

And that's why I came to the library today, looking for biographies of Franz Kafka. I came across the name of one of his female acquaintances while reading about the German (Nazi) female concentration camp at Ravensbrueck, and then remembered a book I have in my library: Kafka's Last Love, The Mystery of Dora Diamant, Kathi Diamant, c. 2003.

It was also timely since our oldest granddaughter is now reading Kafka.

So, instead of reading the books like I normally would, let's cut to the chase. Is Milena Jesenska or Dora Dimant mentioned in either book?

First, Milena Jesenska. If not, I will be disappointed.

Yes, in the first book, Jesenska is mentioned on pages 53, 109-110, 134, 137 -138, and 423.

Page 53: Jesenska mentioned in passing; mentions that Kafka sent a letter to her describing one of his male friends.

Pages 109 - 110:

... although it was Freud who discovered that the choice of a sexual partner is invariably connected to the most concealed elements of our lives. For this reason a choice of partner often seems preposterous to everyone but the couple involved. The famous engagement photograph that displays Kafka standing behind his fiancee [Felice Bauer] and smiling with only half his face is a perfect illustration of this kind of couple. These two obviously do not fit together. But the lack of fit means that the common ground anchoring them is hidden from view. Hidden from us, definitely, and perhaps from themselves as well.

... He desired not a "partner" but a woman who would enfold him, as he later mustered up the courage to declare to Milena Jesenska much more openly.

Page 134:

... Fifteen years later, long after he separated from Felice, he had grown cynical ... but ultimately self-destructive five-year attempt to wring the intimacy of a flesh-and-blood relationship out of the medium of letters to Milena Jesenska in March 1922.

Pages 137 - 138:

...  five-year relationship, Kafka and Felice ... readers today know next to nothing about her. It is odd how few attempts have been made to fill in at least part of this gap.... compare this lack with the intense efforts beginning in the late 1980s to form a realistic portrait of Milena Jesenska.

Milena is considered the more interesting figure: she was articulate and, more important, spent her life distancing herself from all bourgeois norms. She is the only person in Kafka's biographical sphere who escaped his enormous shadow, and after several decades during which she was known only as Kafka's lover, she regained a life of her own in the cultural memory.

And then nothing more of Milena, until page 423, and there again, only in passing. The most interesting thing we learn late in the book is how close Kafka came to losing his mind. It took everything he had to hold himself together.

Let's see if there is more Jesenska in the second book.

Oh, yes, the book is filled with Jesenska. Way too much to summarize now.

And, yes, in the second book, a full chapter, chapter 26, devoted to Dora Diamont.

Perhaps next week, I will check out the books from the library. We'll see.