A year ago today I was in Istanbul.
A year ago my day was spent listening to presentations on globalization and pop culture and drinking many little cups of bad Nescafe there in the basement auditorium of the Goethe Center (how the Germans and that organization of theirs crops up in my life every decade or so!), engaging in that prolonged, yet agreeable ritual known as the Academic Conference; just as agreeable were the nights spent drinking Efes in the bars along Istiklal Caddesi with old and new friends until the wee hours, absolutely delighted to be back in a city proper, to be back in Europe, to be back in a European city (I suppose you can argue that definition, but I'm not going to now), most of all one I'd never seen before.
For a few lively, fascinating days I was planted a world (literally and figuratively) away from Appalachia, consciously on the cusp of certain things (like giving my presentation, which I would do...a year ago tomorrow) and unknowingly on the cusp of others - like getting raked back into academia almost as soon as I got back, thanks largely to the trip. All of it, the trip and its aftermath, happened very quickly. It's worked out pretty well.
But that memory is a little more piquant in light of the torpor and stagnancy I'm feeling right at this moment. It's not the work - of which I have a lot - which gets to me. In fact, work right now is a saving grace. Not that I'm getting down to doing it any faster. I've got a ton of books to read and papers to write and there's little else I want to do, really, but read and do them. Wearing me down is this gnawing realization that I haven't spent a day outside this small, charming, small, lovely, small, placid, small, boozy, small town since early January. I like it here all right - but I've just about had my fill, at least without a break. Ahead is the prospect of a single weekend away for a wedding, and then back here, and then the long, somewhat rote slog of summer work right here. That work will (hopefully) earn me just enough to pay bills and rent - a vacation, even a short trip anywhere else this summer seems a pipe dream right now. The walls are not so much closing in on me, but the walls and the buildings and the streets and the people are looking all the same, all the same, all the same, everyday. Needing a change of places and faces in the worst way, if only briefly, and no such change is in the offing. I'm not going to cry grinding poverty...only drudging poverty. Drinking - the primary, if not single social activity here - has grown mind-numbingly tedious, and physically it is almost revolting now. Utterly frightening is the thought that I may not get out of this place for any meaningful amount of time between now and December.
Thanks to this I've become very very hard to deal with in the last few days.

With so few outward-leading roads open, I find myself detouring onto ones pointing towards the interior. That's led me to think about the title of this thing, which I've meant to write about since at least the second day of its existence, least of all for Zoran, who has not read Musil but whom I implore to. I think he'll appreciate Monsieur Le Vivisecteur greatly.

Why "The Parallel Campaign"? I didn't establish that at the start because I didn't have a clear idea, myself. The allusion, significant and not as obscure as it may have been even ten years ago to most (beyond German literature buffs), is to one of the most important and most thought provoking books I've ever read - Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities. I'm not going to summarize (ha! as if) or laud it any more here - read all about it somewhere else. Suffice it to say that reading this book - enormous effort that it was - was a life-changer for me, changing my idea of what writing (is Musil writing "fiction"? some think of him as a thinker using the novel as a medium, not a novelist) could be and should be and has to be (to the extent that I believe that, it may be impossible for me to ever actually write novels myself, which was once all I thought I'd ever do...though I'd like not to believe that).
It simply changed the way I go about trying to live and understand living, "essayisticly", densely and deeply.

Seems like I am not the only one among the blogerati with some such Musilian interest; taking great big wallops at philosophy where I timidly and amateurishly whiff is this Parallel Campaign, while "Robert Musil" (don't know if that's his real name) proffers political opinion at The Man Without Qualities.

If taking this title was partly spur of the moment, and partly pretentious display, then it was something else, as well. Something precisely right.
Roger Kimball describes the book's Parallel Campaign as "one of those phony endeavors whose aim is everything and nothing", and "the perfect repository for all manner of frustrated idealism, misguided beneficience, and outright charlatanry."

There should be no more question of why I picked that as the title, then. Phony endeavor, repository for idealism and charlantry...without qualities...all descriptions that spring to mind every time I start writing here. It is indeed a parallel campaign of my own, a flimsy, ersatz rival to the many, many more established, more focused, more substantial efforts out there. What the hell am I writing about, anyway?

Looking back over nearly a year of posting here, it seems I've run the gamut from extracted oddities of the web and found sound off the airwaves, through erratic political rants and literary bricolage, to the latest spate of ruminations and ill-starred personal catharsis. Everything and nothing.
Don't ask me where it's going next. I wish it were somewhere cool and hip, or groundbreaking, or influential, but who really knows?

The Blog Without Qualities would be in many ways more precise a title, but it is probably a little too late, and pointless, to change it now.