I’m going to France – so the long wind-up begins

I’m going for a long time, I mean, for ten months or so.  I’m going in a week.  What an adventure!  But it means this other adventure will have to adapt.  To end, in an important sense.  The tenth anniversary of Wuthering Expectations would be at the end of September, so I appreciate the pleasing, non-neurotic irregularity of changing now.

A decade ago when I embarked on this folly, I knew – oh, I knew so many things – I knew that I needed a strong structure to keep myself going.  Few things in life are easier than not writing a blog post.  Thus the idea of writing something every workday, something, something.  And I think I have done it, five days a week, excepting vacations and holidays and, to my memory, one day.

I won’t miss giving up that.

It is time to consider other kinds of writing: other lengths, venues, subjects, forms.  France will give me a chance to play around, perhaps even, who knows, to think.  Perhaps I will convert the website into an early film blog, or the glutton blog I have always dreamed of.  Whatever I do, I will put it here, somehow.  Why not?

I have no preconceptions.  No idea what I will write, or how much, or for that matter – more importantly, right? – what I will read, or how much.  The funny thing is that my reading will be more English-language than ever, since my French is too poor to read much – my hope is that I can convert my bad A2 French into decent A2 French – and the hardest books to find in France will be anything in English translation.  But I will have Conrad’s Under Western Eyes for the airplane, and I’ll have the internet, and France has libraries, good ones.  And bookstores, oh what bookstores, although the last thing I should do in France is buy books.

I do plan to be at the Frankfurt Book Fair in October, and the Quais du Polar in Lyon in April, not to buy books, but just to see them.  They should be interesting, yes?  I can file dispatches, pretending I am a bookish reporter.

Henry Adams wrote about himself in The Education (1907) “that what he valued most was Motion, and that what attracted his mind was Change” (Ch. XV).  Me too, mostly, and I will be getting plenty of that.

I had the idea, once, that I would wind up Wuthering Expectations with a series on Daniel Pennac’s The Rights of the Reader (1992) – please see Book around the Corner, off to the right somewhere, and down a bit, for all ten rights – which was appealing in part because #10 is “The right to be quiet.”  But I’m not going to be quiet, so that won’t work.

But this five posts a week nonsense has to go, except for this week, the last one.  Four to go.