An update, long overdue

Hello again to those patient readers and subscribers still around. I am coming back.

I have gone from barely able to read and unable to write, to mostly able to read and just about ready to start writing again. This is major progress. I am going to see what we can do today, although I don’t expect to actually relaunch until I have some material in the bag to go ahead with. Also, I am moving (not far) next week, so I definitely don’t plan to start publishing again until I’m settled into a new apartment and, to some extent, a new life.

So what have I been up to? Mostly reading Victorian novels like it’s my job. I’ve been knocking off a few things on the dehumiliations list, or maybe just the “you need to read the freaking canon more” list. Far from the Madding Crowd—excellent, and excellent news that I do not in fact hate Thomas Hardy (Tess notwithstanding). Adam Bede—also excellent, and much-needed, therapeutic. The Sympathy Project becomes suddenly and intensely real for me here, and not just because Eliot must have used the word a hundred times over. Then I skipped over The Mill on the Floss (because, you know, I like to do things in order, but a sibling-story didn’t sound super appealing) in favor of a re-read of Middlemarch. I am chugging along there, but, you know, long.

I did make a little break for some Conrad; Typhoon, unexpectedly short, was as excellent as it should be. I particularly liked the captain—not your usual Conradian protagonist, if he can even be called that. Also much picking up and putting down of other things. I’m not sure how much of any of this will get the real blogging treatment, though Eliot seems to beg for it. Which is why I’d like to start getting writing or at least drafting in advance, before it’s too far out of mind. Also because I have missed this dreadfully—the writing, the discussion, the dear readers.

More sympathy is still needed, not from any of you, but from me, and seems to be both a more frustrating and more rewarding help through existential crisis than my usual friends in such times, Agatha Christie and P.G. Wodehouse (or Schopenhauer, Wittgenstein, Szasz, Stirner, and Cioran), so I foresee more Eliot and her ilk. Recommendations on this point welcome; it is not, as they say, outside my wheelhouse, though seemingly outside my usual fare.

That’s just about all for now I think, but the real message is: don’t give up on me yet! It is far from enjoyable for me to have left off my most personally-precious productive activity. July needs to be a whole new ballgame, and the perfect time (as my blogiversary) for a rebirth.