What is it about being at home that makes me stop blogging? I posted ever so regularly during the Paris sojourn, and even managed the occasional post during the three frenetic weeks of travel that followed. But now I’ve been home for over a week, and I’ve managed one lousy little post in that time. And even managed to fail to link to the key item in that post.

But it’s not just my own blog I’ve been ignoring; I’ve got an alarming number of unread posts in my news reader. Something’s keeping me out of my usual mode of web activity. Maybe it’s my panic at the impending semester, and how much I’ve still got to do before I’m ready to roll. Maybe it’s my painful awareness of the number of my summer tasks that are still unfinished, and that need to be wrapped up ASAP. But maybe, too, it’s just the joy that I’ve taken in being offline these last few days, puttering around the condo and making the physical space in which I live feel like home again.

Whatever the cause, I’m hoping the silence doesn’t last long. In fact, here’s this, partially designed to keep me from feeling too comfortable in the long pause.

A while back, I mentioned the release of the Ithaka report on University Publishing in a Digital Age. Ithaka has now partnered with the Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library and with the Institute for the Future of the Book to post the report online in CommentPress (which I also wrote about a while back), making the text open to fine-grained commenting and discussion. Ithaka and the SPO are serious about seeking comment on the report; reactions and responses to this document may have a profound effect on shaping the future of academic discourse. Please stop by, read, and leave your thoughts and concerns for discussion.

(I’ll also take this opportunity to re-plug my paper on role of the social network in digital publishing, which focuses in part of CommentPress, which is also available for commenting in CommentPress. I’m beginning revisions on the piece, so your thoughts would be much appreciated.)

[Edited to add: Somehow I managed to let this post sit there for days without realizing that I hadn't actually linked to the CommentPress version of the report. Sheesh.]

I just got an email message from MoveOn.org, with the subject line “Vigil to End the War in Claremont,” and for a few seconds longer than I’d like to admit, I was mightily confused. We have a movie theater now, and several new restaurants, but those were all the developments of which I was aware.

A nine-hour time zone change in one direction, followed two days later by a three-hour change back the other direction.

One apparently lost, and then merely destroyed suitcase. One two-and-a-half-hour airport delay.

Two days, fourteen interviews. Nine more tomorrow.

Ass? Kicked, thanks.

We left the flat this morning at 9, headed into the various queues that make up pretty much the entirety of the CDG experience. The taxi was fine, the airport was fine, the boarding was fine. And the first flight was fine: 10 hours, CDG to IAH, during which I ate some and read some and dozed some and generally pouted a lot.

The flight, it turns out, was our pilot’s last; upon his arrival at IAH, he was officially retired, after 29 years of flying for Continental (and some unspecified number of years in the USAF before that). It was really quite sweet — there were “a salute to your pilot!” flyers on each seat as we boarded, detailing his career, the flight service manager made an announcement early on congratulating the pilot on beginning his last flight (producing round of applause number one), and the pilot himself, as we began our descent, in addition to the usual weather and time of arrival announcements, thanked the Continental customers, the crew and the rest of his colleagues, and his family, several members of whom were on the flight (prompting round of applause number two). Just before touchdown, the flight service manager fired up the P.A. again to say, “okay, folks, here comes the captain’s final landing as the pilot of a commercial airliner,” which was followed by the absolute gentlest touch-down I think I’ve experienced (followed by round of applause number three). And then there was the end: it’s apparently an IAH tradition that, when a pilot retires, the plane is flanked and hosed down by two Houston firetrucks as it pulls into the gate. This, of course, produced the last round of applause, which rolled gradually down the length of the plane. It was pretty cool, and quite dramatic, and I did my best to squelch my kneejerk SoCal “my god, the water!” response.

We’ve got three more hours to kill in IAH, alas, and by the time we get to ONT, it’ll be after eight in the morning in Paris, almost a full 24 hours since heading out. The worst of it, though, is that just now, sitting here, I got the “TripNotes” email from Continental about the flight that I’m taking on Friday, the very thought of which just makes me want to curl up in a small ball and exercise every ounce of my earthly rights as a being protected by the law of gravity.

I am completely up to my eyeballs in theories of subjection right now, and am thoroughly enjoying the connections that the reading that I’m doing is helping me to make, but I just want to note, for the record, that I long to be able to read (and, I guess more to the point, comprehend) at a rate such that my to-be-read list grows more slowly than my have-read list. I’m not holding out much hope for such an eventuality, alas, but it would certainly make things better, where “better” is defined as me feeling like less of an ignoramus.

Have not posted in part because I don’t want my very own blog to confront me with the knowledge that it’s no longer July. But must suck it up: August is both going to blow, and to blow by…