A Rush of Media to the Head

During my two weeks of vacation this summer and the two weeks that Dinka and Veronika stayed on after I came home, I consumed an enormous amount of media by my standards. Some people might think that doing anything so ordinary as seeing a movie or reading a book on vacation is a waste, but vacation is for doing the things you love but don't have time to do during the rest of the year, right? Well, my reading, movie-watching and music-listening time is the first to go when things get busy so I made sure not to neglect it on vacation.

I realize now that, without meaning to, I chose some of the more popular items on my queue to consume and they were received with mixed results. I was: disappointed (Fahrenheit 9/11, Monster), befuddled except for the excellent Jack Nicholson part (Easy Rider), pleasantly surprised (Batman Begins, Jack Johnson's In Between Dreams), saddened (deeply: Million Dollar Baby, moderately: Josip Novakovich's Plum Brandy), encouraged (Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning), impressed (Donnie Darko, Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point), all econned out (Freakonomics), tickled (Hitch, Melinda and Melinda), and delighted (Wedding Crashers).

While this kind of frivolous entertainment is certainly acceptable in summer, my dear friend Fall is fast approaching and that means it's time to get serious for a moment, gentlemen. Autumn is the time for pondering life's larger questions, having that extra glass of scotch, feeling the nip of the air on your rosy cheeks, breaking out the wool and tweed, and taking in as much of the glorious nature surrounding us that you possibly can.

On that note, I will embark on two projects this fall to maintain the proper state of mind (that is, two projects not involving scotch or autumn leaves). The first? Listen to every available Bob Dylan album in chronological order. I have called myself a Dylan fan for a while now but there's simply too much of his catalog that I'm not familiar with. I know I won't be able to listen to everything but I'll do my best by buying, borrowing, checking out from the library and pulling from my existing collection whatever I can. This project happens to coincide nicely with the release of Martin Scorcese's documentary on Mr. Dylan, No Direction Home, airing next week on PBS and already out on DVD. The second project? Reading a substantial and terribly important work of fiction, whose title is as yet undecided. I've been reading a lot of existentialism and now it's time to feel it expressed in the art of the time. I'm reading Irrational Man, William Barrett's history of existential thought as a primer (which is enthralling, despite how it may sound). I'm open to suggestions here, anything from Dostoevsky (Karamazov was last summer's work, Crime and Punishment is on the shelf) to Tolstoy, Goethe to Faulkner, and beyond. As long as it's heavy enough to make my shoulder hurt from carrying it around and keep my brain chugging, I'll consider it.

Happy beginning of fall to all of you, and may you undertake equally ambitious projects. If you fall short, as I inevitably will, the season will be there to console you.