Updates September 23rd 2026
My life
Suzanne takes you down To her place near the river You can hear the boats go by You can spend the night beside her
Bonjour mes amis, I have two announcements this week.
First, I finally migrated the book clubs from my old site. I know this has taken a while, and I don’t expect anyone to immediately come back to their club given the abrupt outage during migration. I’m going to be starting these over from scratch, so if you’re interested, head on over and subscribe to the upcoming clubs!
We’re going to start with three tracks. The first track is going to be Eastern European classics, à la Dostoevsky and Pushkin, with some lesser-known favorites of mine like Bruno Schulz thrown in here and there. The second track is going to be Southern Gothic, where we’ll start with McCarthy and Faulkner and travel downward into more obscure literature centered around Black authors and poets. The last track is going to be poetry, and this will likely end up being the most diverse category. We’ll start with really well-known modern poets like Billy Collins and try to travel backward in time, where we’ll pick out pieces of work reflective of the philosophy of the period. I can’t wait until we get to Byron and can experience Don Juan again!
These groups generally follow a pattern where I’ll post a chapter or set of poems for the week in the group. We’ll give everyone a few days to read them, usually Monday to Sunday. On Sundays, I’ll post a short synopsis of the most important points and my own analysis. You can then comment on my analysis or post your own alongside mine and accept comments and feedback from others.
I try to keep the number of people in each track to five or six—not many people are interested anyway, coincidentally—so each person gets a chance to share and comment. I stagger the tracks so I have enough time to do my own reading, give feedback where I think it’s valid, and somewhat moderate the groups. We’ll then proceed through the entire body of the current work, and at the end, as a group, we’ll select the next piece from my suggestions that keeps us on the general theme.
Please come join if you’re interested! I keep these groups open and make sure you can drop in and out anytime it’s convenient for you. If these ever get really popular, I might have to start recruiting some of my friends to lead discussions, but that’s for another time.
Second announcement: tomorrow is eye surgery day, and then next week is moving week. I’m understandably going to take a short hiatus, but I have some pieces I’ve already written to keep the site somewhat alive.
This should be the last eye surgery I have to have. The ducts in my eyes are now properly working, but I got ptosis from the last surgery, which is actually pretty normal, and that now has to be corrected. I’ve essentially lost all the pigment in the outer part of my iris but kept my inner heterochromia. I’ve now got grey-brown heterochromia, which my ex-wife said looks pretty cool up close, but I have, womp womp womp, officially lost most of my green to a pale green-grey. Hey, at least I can see.
Moving day is fun, though. I’m finally selling my house in Portland, Oregon, and I’m going to be in New York essentially full-time until January, when I’ll go back to London for six months. I’m not the biggest fan of New York, to be honest, but that’s where my day job is—finance, eww—so I make do and go to lots of museums and take weekend trips all around.
I think I’m going to go to New Hampshire the first weekend I’m back, which will be the first weekend of October. I’ll make sure to create an album and share some pictures. I got a new lens for my Canon camera for wide-angle shots that I’m excited to use. I really hope there’s fog on the water!
Last thing: I want this girl to give me one more chance, but I took away my only means of contacting her so I wouldn’t have the temptation to bother her. I think that’s for the best, but I’m really struggling, and I’m having to be even more manic than usual not to dwell. I’m really struggling, guys. I think I might have loved her and found someone who could see me.
Off to the gym and then to my last hockey game of the year tonight. I can’t play for four months with the eye surgery. Have one of my last images of Portland for your time.
À bientôt, mes amours!