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.