Projects, v. and n.

Built into the word: a hurling forward. These have taken roughly a year and have little enough to show for themselves:

Plutarch's Lives

Pratchett's Discworld

I was intending at first to do something alongside the reading, made some brief notes for a podcast or lecture series, but that has not materialized...Vi Hart talks about how long it takes to actually make one of those videos, and how her Patreon allows her to work on them full-time, and I despair. Like being friends, it must be one of those things you have to somehow put yourself into before knowing if it will be any good, just for it to be anything at all. And I take heart.

As with the monthly writing projects, so these year-long reading ones: I dabble, I do them all at once, poorly, and pat myself on the back that I do any of them at all. Swing between that and being too hard on myself for not doing any better. Though I'll say it could be otherwise; it occurred to me just now, for the first time really got my attention, that I could stay home and write full time, at least for a year or so. See what comes of it. But I do like teaching, too. I would miss it if I stopped, like soccer, and get worse at it.

Then this coming year, Kierkegaard and Plato at the top of the stack.

Of course, we might suggest something smaller to begin with for those like me, bewildered again in the expanse of possibilities, looking out for something to do: perhaps watching Civilisation, Twin Peaks, comparing them to Infinite Jest?

Steph and I have been reading Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus, off and on, Sunday mornings all year, making our note cards of new German words. On my phone in place of King James I've been working through part of Luther's Genesis. And poorly, poorly, I did read practically every word in Klaeber's Beowulf...

In trying to catch up now with Mythgard's new course on the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, I see that Gaiman says in his foreword to this copy that he'd started as a writer with a book on Adams -- talk about learning what you love! And that's the motto of the online courses, but perhaps it's also a good guide to the book I should be writing, a better one than the one I found at the used book store about Pullman. If there's going to be another go at adaptation to the screen, what better time to try releasing a short book of idyllic essays? In the wake of his own, no less.

Now Beowulf's done, I try getting up early at least as often to translate Figari, Art, Esthetic, Ideal. I think about psychology more than usual, since Alex put me on Peterson, another Patreonized entrepreneur. What about a short course on Wm James' Talks to Teachers and to Students? Something for all the English teachers who're told to teach something they're calling the Hero's Journey? My word. There is so much to work towards.

The kids asked me the other day who my favorite artist is, music-wise. I'll have to play them this or this before I go, good as the Charlie Brown Christmas album is.