One of the pleasurable little things in my life; playing soccer in an absolute driving downpour on a hot summer evening. How often have I done that? Not often enough; I think back now to a week of soccer camp in the summer after eighth grade; pouring rain as we scrimmaged in the afternoon and I let a cut on my elbow bleed, no doubt in order to show how extra tough I was. Rain, grass, blood and fourteen year old bravado (wasn't there a girl there, a pretty blonde?)

It's been raining off and on for the past forty-eight hours here (and disgustingly humid all through), but the skies saved up twenty minutes of monsoon-grade stuff for us this evening. Two hours later, a few of my bones are still soaked through, my hamper-bound clothes stink of rain mixed with sweat (so I've got to get them into the washer tonight), and my boots won't be dry for a week. Apart from the thunderclaps snapping down too near - this slight, silly anxiety about lightning, not least of all when I'm running around a flat, exposed field with big metal things nearby - and the way I must ease up on the choppy ground so I don't wreck my knee again over nothing, it's a joy.

I see Kiki writes so tenderly of her own physical joys now, the joy of her son waking her up in the morning with a hug and his fingers tracing her lips, and I love to read it. Her joys become mine; her opening up allows me to open up, and it can only do us both good. We all do better when we can make sense of things. To know what she feels and thinks, how happy they are there together, though they're far from me. We'll fix that last part soon.

Some things about me, worth knowing at the moment.

The academic year is starting again in a week or so. I don't know exactly which day, which is typical of me. I'm confident I'm not supposed to be anywhere tomorrow morning, in any event.

At the moment, I'm supposed to put together an abstract for a seminar in Texas in November. Due a week from tomorrow. I've got ideas, but nothing more.

The new school year I'm starting should be my dissertation year, but in fact I'm still quite a ways from that part. Meetings, exams, proposals, etc. I resigned myself to spending another year on this a while ago, but since Kiki has dedicated herself to pushing through this round of treatment so that we can get on with our lives together both happily and healthily, it's only right (and a very good idea) that I get on the stick and wrap my stuff up on time, instead of dragging out my time here.

I am in love with an amazing woman, this Kiki of mine. Crazily enough, she is in love with me too. I could not be luckier. Her reality is her son, her sensitivity, her generosity, her spirit, her beauty; for the moment, it is also this fight against a nasty disease that she will win. My reality, for the moment, is to watch from here, support her and bug her from here, to pray from here, and be amazed by her as she makes it happen. She is one stubborn burdie, and a damn sight tougher and stronger than any AML.

All this has had its effects on me.

In the meantime, I am trying to figure out what to do with this blog, which has been a little of everything and a lot of nothing up till now.

I think the answer is "write in it." Like so. But as with all things about me, it must be a little more complicated than that.

Some write their blogs to snark, some to pontificate, some to spread the news about this that or the other, some just to write whatever comes up. That's all good, but I think if I'm going to stick with this, I want to try and do something else with it, besides all of those; to make shape of things. Things like myself.

Let's say you're a type of conscious person. You must know when and where you are impressionable, when it comes to books, art, music, and the people that bring them into being. If you are thoughtful enough, you sense who and what shaped you. You have sympathies. Not all of these are equal though; some blows are glancing and you remember only a word or sensation, others leave permanent marks. You might arrange them in a hierarchy or a pyramid. There at the top are your few models or imagined mentors, below, this massive assortment of useful others, a little niche for almost everything you've taken in. It's a jarring hodgepodge when you start young, when you hardly know what you're reading and impressing upon yourself.

The vast, ancient Yucatan crater of my inner creative sensibility, the awesome reminder of something that hit a long time ago and deeply canalized my perceiving, writing mind, this I owe to the example of Nabokov's Speak, Memory. To this, at the start of Chapter 14;

"The spiral is a spiritualized circle. In the spiral form, the circle, uncoiled, unwound, has ceased to be vicious; it has been set free. I thought this up when I was a schoolboy, and I also discovered that Hegel's triadic series (so popular in old Russia) expressed merely the essential spirituality of all things in their relation to time, Twirl follows twirl, and every synthesis is the thesis of the next series. If we consider the simplest spiral, three stages may be distinguished in it, corresponding to those of the triad: We can call "thetic" the small curve or arc that initiates the convolution centrally; "antithetic" the larger arc that faces the first in the process of continuing it; and "synthetic" the still ampler arc that continues the second while following the first along the outer side. And so on."

Never mind how superficial and ham-fisted my reading of it was when I read it years ago, when I did not read with much attention (and do I read any better now? I'm just learning....)


"A colored spiral in a small ball of glass, this is how I see my own life."

I don't know whether to curse good old Vladdy or thank him for this, this...sense that there could be a conceptual pattern to one's life. Well of course he might see that; the man was a synaesthete. He fixated famously upon things like chess problems and butterflies (possessors of their own mysterious, ordered patterns) upon words, upon incidents and relics lost to time and chaos but articulated by his solicitious memory; some speculate he had Asperger's Syndrome on top of it all, but in any event, he was one of those geniuses. And you, M, are no genius. How arrogant, and quite stupid, for you to follow that approach.

It doesn't matter. It's just what I've done, or tried to do for years now. Sussing out the pattern of my life by combing over it again and again, restoring and linking the diffused bits of this memory or person to that, following a conviction that there must be some order to it all. What is the image to look for? The picture of an intrinsic, natural, deterministic order? An order created only by my willed selection? A perfect Hegelian-Nabokovian spiral, or something else? I don't know, and probably will never know; the figure may always lie just beyond the horizon, an irresolvable, tantalizing literary suggestion that goads me. Or I might crack the code. Whatever that means.

Some problem. And a continual project, here and everywhere else I write.

In between the heavy thoughts, it's been too hot to think this weekend.

Me: should I change my title to "Let's Bore Each Other"?
Kiki: yes
Kiki: sounds lovely
Me: does a blog like mine really NEED that title?
Kiki: you got a point there baby

I love my Kiki so much, so much....

Or, TPC Restart XIV: This time, I really, really, really mean it to stick.

I last managed to write anything here two and a half months ago, in the midst of a minor end-of the quarter whirl. That's an academic term for something normal people call "you think that's hectic?" before laughing heartily. Well, there's a reason I never seriously considered becoming an options trader or an emergency room surgeon, f'rinstance; I'd melt part way through the first 24 hour (or whatever it is) internship shift.
Also, I just can't take blood and that is an issue. My hands are kinda jittery, too.
But yeah, the point is that ninety hour weeks are no friend of mine.

Even forty hard 9-to-5 hours is pushing it. Give me the academic life, with its semester-long slow burn and irregular, knobbly, but still quite serious demands on energy and psyche instead; I'm fit for that, being pretty irregular and knobbly myself. But past a certain point in an academic term - the point where the deadlines start raining down and time really does compress - I shift into a survival mode. The solid refusal to write any more than necessary, the instinctive defense against a creeping case of cerebral overload. A willed lethargy. I don't write much in my journals, and I don't bother here at all. Unfortunately, it's not a very comfortable state to live in, especially when you see yourself as one of those people who write to think and to function. One of those people fixated upon discerning the shape and order of life by scribbling prose. When you can't or don't do so, it's like holding your breath. It's high time I broke out of that rut, started breathing normally again, and saw how long it can last.

To catch up with what's happened since, as briefly as possible.

I finished the quarter. My last round of classes ever, or so it should be, though there's still a few things to be put to bed.

I ran the Wendy's Triathlon for Team in Training. Blog here, minus the raceday recap I've been meaning to write for a while now. Whatever I put into it, I got back much, much more in terms of discipline, stamina (in more than one sense) accomplishment. Giving is good, and there's a hell of a lot that needs to be done. I hope you'll try TnT or something like it when you get the chance, too.

I spent a couple weeks in my beloved Europe: Hannover, Dresden, coastal Lithuania and Vilnius, London, Manchester. Then another couple weeks in my beloved Connecticut. August finds me back in my beloved (am I capable of saying that now?) Ohio. That is where you find me now, on the arduous to-bed-by-3, up-by-noon, read-on-the-sun-drenched-patio-all-afternoon schedule. Lord knows I'm grinding down.

Much to write about all this, and I'll get to that in coming days. For now I'll talk about my summer's books.

There's a sensible reason for this. Reading has been my primary occupation this summer. I'm not working for the first time since I came here, so I've got lots of free time, few distractions and very little cash; a better situation for reading is hard to imagine. There's a more personally ingrained reason, too. I'll lose interest and slack off here like I've slacked off before, unless I write a little more personally and deeply here; I want to correspond with the Great Collective You out there, but to do that, you've got to know me a little. I used to be one of those bookish young romantics who so dubiously believe that no one else could really know his soul without also having read all the books he's read. Did I say dubious? No, it's just ludicrous, I understand now; let's read each other's bookshelves up and down, it won't bring us all that much closer. But I still like to talk about books and talk through books and there's a chance that you do too. So here's most of my summer reading up till now:


A Fan's Notes - Frederick Exley
Flaubert's Parrot - Julian Barnes
The Bridge of San Luis Rey - Thornton Wilder
The Fourth Dimension (interviews with Christa Wolf)
Clueless in Academe - Gerald Graff
Striving Towards Being (Letters of Czeslaw Milosz and Thomas Merton)
How To Read a Book - Mortimer Adler

The rhyme and reason to this sampling is quite obvious, isn't it?

But of course it isn't. It was dumb luck, the pursuit of fancies, and good fortune. There's a sprawling, musty secondhand shop in the basement of a building uptown full of mannequins, chintzy jewelry and scratchy old polyester things; down the far wall, there's a nice eclectic stash of cheap secondhand books that I like to plumb through from time to time (later on I'll tell you what I got there today); I picked up the Exley, Barnes and Wilder for a dollar each and toted them to Europe and back; the Graff was an excellent gift from a friend, and the Wolf had been sitting unread in a pile for months, ever since I finished a biographical piece on Max Frisch. The Adler was the product of a whim, wikipedia, and being so close to a good library; I should have read it years ago.

I've had a lucky summer; just about every book I've read has came along at the right time, or filled a need somewhere; for entertainment, enlightenment, identification, information, provocation. I'll go into detail in coming days. More to be said about this, in the next installment...



Consume this:

Happy 90th birthday, Daniel Schorr. There's no sage veteran broadcaster I'd rather hear from in these wretched times.

The great Jarvis Cocker is coming out with a new solo album after a five-year post-Pulp break. On Myspace (of course) you can hear his new, totally apropo for these times single (note; it's heavy on a certain naughty word, the one that starts with a "c", so be forewarned). Perhaps even better, click on "jarvcast" and you can listen to his reading of a wonderful Icelandic folk tale.