Isorhythm

It feels so satisfying to select a volume from one of our four bookcases without having to consider syllabi or thesis research. My selections so far this year demonstrate the thrill of this freedom to wander: Crime and Punishment , Fyodor Dostoyevsky The Magic Mountain , Thomas Mann Kafka on the Shore , Haruki Murakami Ender's Game , Orson Scott Card A Confederacy of Dunces , John Kennedy Toole The Call of the Wild , Jack London Travels in Siberia , Ian Frazier We Were the Mulvaneys , Joyce Carol Oates Kettle Bottom , Diane Gilliam Fisher Into Thin Air , Jon Krakauer The Scarlet Letter , Nathaniel Hawthorne One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich , Alexander Solzhenitsyn Bluefield Breakdown , Rick Mulkey Dubliners , James Joyce Les Misérables , Victor Hugo Musicophilia , Oliver Sacks

Now that I've entered the working world, "summer vacation" no longer means two-point-five months of leisure and adventure the way it did when I was in school. Even when I attended summer classes or worked part-time, choice was still very much a part of my decisions. I could pile English class on top of English class, fill the empty space with library work, and still feel like summer was mine to design and control. And even now that I'm securely settled into full-time work -- albeit, still a temp -- I feel the need to section off my summer from sun-warmed June to humid August and fill it with summer things. I crave travel writing and novels set in faraway places, bossa nova on my living-room stereo, and meals crafted from farmers' market finds. And, like Vachel Lindsay one hundred years before me, I feel the need to go west. Outside Atchison, Kansas; Birthplace of Amelia Earhart; May 2010

With the aurora borealis flaming coldly overhead, or the stars leaping in the frost dance, and the land numb and frozen under its pall of snow, this song of the huskies might have been the defiance of life, only it was pitched in minor key, with long-drawn wailings and half-sobs, and was more the pleading of life, the articulate travail of existence. It was an old song, old as the breed itself -- one of the first songs of the younger world in a day when songs were sad. It was invested with the woe of unnumbered generations, this plaint by which Buck was so strangely stirred. When he moaned and sobbed, it was with the pain of living that was of old the pain of his wild fathers, and the fear and mystery of the cold and dark that was to them fear and mystery. And that he should be stirred by it marked the completeness with which he harked back through the ages of fire and roof to the raw beginnings of life in the howling ages. The Call of the Wild . Jack London.

I suppose an introduction would be a good way to start. I don't know yet what this blog will become or how I will fill it. My name is Lindsay. I am twenty-five, have been out of school for a year now, and, having realized that little ever goes according to plan, am contemplating my next major life decision. I am working as a receptionist at a cancer center in the meantime. It is not the most riveting or fulfilling work, but it allows me to buy food, pay my student loans, and purchase the occasional book or wardrobe item. I am a bit of a higher education junkie, and I hate myself for it a little bit. By the time I decided I needed a break I had three degrees, two senior projects, two theses, and four semesters of summer school under my belt. I still feel like I haven't learned all the things I'd like to learn. I earned my Bachelor of Music in Music History and my Bachelor of Fine Arts in Creative and Professional Writing, Poetry Emphasis, at  Converse College  in Spart...

I love the nowhere places, the long limbs of state highways stretched through wild pine, the whitewashed skins of farm houses peeling away, and tall grass that would feel so good against my bare knees. I love the deer that breakfast in my backyard and the wrenlings that thud into my bedroom window as they learn to fly. I am becoming unenchanted by the suburban sprawl, cookie-cutter communities in the woods, six-lane main roads unfriendly to bikes and foot traffic. I feel too young and too old for this place. Change would be welcome.