We are just under two weeks from our wedding. It feels nice to be excited about the festivities and planned events, amid all that has gone wrong in the larger world. As I’ve mentioned, the ceremony will be during a weekend at my partner’s family farm in Central PA with our families and some of our dearest friends. Having everyone in one place for a couple of days is going to be lovely, particularly getting together with two of my oldest friends for the first time since we’ve all had kids. One lives in DC and I see them all the time, but the other lives elsewhere and it’s been way too long since I’ve seen them and even longer since we’ve been all together. Seeing our kids altogether is going to be a lot of fun. We’ve come a long way from my many weekends crashing on their couch in Brooklyn in our 20s.

We will have a bigger party in DC a few weeks later with a wider group of people. And, once again, there will be a lot of kids running around. I’ve never understood why people don’t invite kids to weddings. Kids are hilarious and fun, particularly on wedding party dancefloors and, more importantly, they are part of the circle of celebration. But I’m 40, not 25.

One week after that, we are off to France for ten days—5 days in Paris, 4 in the Loire Valley in the village of Amboise, about an hour outside of Tours. As is probably obvious from this newsletter, I’m a long-term Francophile, and had I been good at languages, there’s a world in which I could have gotten a Ph.D. in French literature. As it is, my French is at a mediocre conversational level, at best, despite a study abroad in Paris 20 years ago, when I got to a barely mediocre reading level. I’ve been working on getting some of it back in preparation for the trip and have an impulse to keep learning after. Being a much better English grammarian at 40, I find French easier than I used to and feel optimistic that I could achieve some fluency if my ADHD-adjacent capricious tunnel vision for learning projects lets me stick with it long enough. Regardless, I carry a cultural map of Paris in my head. I’ll be excited to go back to all the art museums with my partner, a visual artist who has never been. Musee D’Orsay is probably the place I’m most excited to show her. But we will also be in Paris for La Fête Nationale (Bastille Day, as we call it in the U.S.), which is sure to be an experience.

We’ve both been reading a lot of French stuff, too. I’m deep in a Balzac kick, which gives me another imaginative map of Paris. Our hotel is right around the corner from the described location of Rastignac and Goriot’s boarding house in the shadow of the Pantheon. And of course, I’ll be running around all the New Wave haunts, like Varda’s Rue Mouffetard, and Le Deux Magots (Sartre and de Beauvoir’s cafe, but also visited by Varda’s Chloe and a grumpy Jean-Pierre Leaud in Jean Eustache’s The Mother and Whore.) My partner just finished reading Alexander Chee’s wonderful Queen of the Night on my recommendation, a historical novel about a Second Empire Opera singer, so we will be sure to visit Le Palais Garnier.

I’ve not travelled around the rest of France, much. I remember a day trip to Rouen to see the cathedral and a weekend in Avignon in the south (but not quite the coast) during my study abroad. The trip to Avignon was for their famous theater festival, so mostly that’s what I saw there. At 20, I found most of it incomprehensible. It was extremely experimental and in traditions (Artuad, Grotowski) that I had no exposure to at the time, although now I appreciate and wish I could have that experience again. I do remember an epic closing night production in the courtyard of the medieval schismatic Pope’s papal palace that seemed to be staging images from a Bosch painting, but I did not follow the French narration at all.

I am excited to get out of Paris a bit, see the Loire, its Chateau, have a different experience of French history, and let my imagination run around its various cultural associations from Chretien de Troyes romances to Balzac’s hometown and provincial settings. I know my partner is thrilled to explore the many gardens of the old castles, and I’m looking forward to that as well.

My son will be involved in a lot of this, and I’m so happy he will be there. He will be away with his mom on their summer beach vacation during our trip to France, which will be easier without a 5-year-old. But next time I get to Europe, I’ve promised to bring him.

He has some big changes this summer too. He’s finishing the Pre-K program at his DCPS school next week and starting Kindergarten next year. He’s going to a new school in the fall, a Spanish immersion charter. I have all the ambivalences of any educator about the charter school movement, but I like this school and the immersion model. It will be a challenge for him and all of us, but he did have Spanish language daycare, so it won’t be entirely new to him. I think the benefits of early language are powerful, and even though I do not speak Spanish, I have this sense that we all really should be learning it, and that such early bilingual education should be universal.

Those are the major updates. It’s a busy summer, so I may be posting a bit less in the coming months, although I have some drafts going to my French New Wave series and hopefully will be able to write something up about France. I’ve been trying to work this summer to raise a little extra funds, but I’m not getting much work from the AI training platform I worked for last summer, so I’m on the lookout for other part-time opportunities and exploring tutoring.

As the possibility of leaving academia seems narrower these days after the collapse of the local job market thanks to Trump, I’m trying to make some peace with it and figure out how to supplement my income with more consistent side-gigs. I need to be able to meet the local cost of living more easily and start rebuilding savings after a few years of eating away at them. I don’t think my main academic job is ever going to be enough to sustain a family in DC, since inflation and costs are always outpacing whatever minimal raises we win through union organizing. I’d be happy to adjunct for good pay, but that work is too often scraping the bottom of an anti-worker job market, and the good-paying institutions have too large piles of CVs to ever break in. I’ve been trying for years to get a course at Georgetown, for instance, where I have connections, but to no avail so far. Other part-time stuff seems to be the best option available to me. I have some ideas and some applications out. I wish it were easier to make a living as an educator, but I have to find a way to make it work.

In my own life otherwise, things are good. The new Stereolab and Pulp albums are great—both bands are coming back from a very long time without making new music. And I’m excited to see both later this year. I’ll be teaching my American Literature Survey course in the Fall as well as a graduate student seminar on American Literature to 1865. I’m glad I’m getting more opportunities to work with graduate students, even though I’m at a loss at how graduate programs should adjust to the collapse of our job markets. It would be terrible if our research fields just disappeared, but we also have to do right by the young people trying to build a future for themselves.

I’m also getting an itch to get back into some philosophy stuff I explored a long time ago, even before graduate school. People who know me know part of the aforesaid Francophile history is also very much in French Theory. But I’ve also got a history of studying (continental) philosophy in general pretty seriously, from classes on Phenomenology and Existentialism before grad school to deeper readings in Kant, Hegel, and Aesthetics during graduate school, since I gave myself an aesthetic theory reading list for my one of my minor subject area qualifying exams. I don’t know how I used to focus on stuff like Being and Time, Kant’s Critiques (I’ve read two of the three), Hegel, and the big Adorno texts like his Aesthetic Theory (Minima Moralia is more my speed these days) but I used to eat that stuff up. Maybe I’ll write about it more here. Existentialism is particularly appealing right now, as so much of it was created from the experience of the Nazi occupation of France, and a lot resonates for me in terms of thinking about how to deal with this dark moment in history, ICE raids, the anxiety of what freedom you have in a situation of repression, and the need for good faith action and engagement regardless of outcomes.

Hopefully, I will have updates as the summer goes on. I look forward to seeing anyone reading this who will be at any of our festivities!