Just a quick check-in this week. My self-imposed deadline for the next lecture is a week from today, and I have plenty left to do. Usually by now I’m putting the finishing touches on the editing, but this month I still have video left to shoot, a quote to record, some images to decide on, and all of it left to put together.

I had a dream recently that’s been sticking with me, but I didn’t record it when it happened, which means it won’t make it’s way into the lectures so I can use it here. In the dream, I was at a party with a bunch of artist and writer friends—the ones I can picture who are real people from my life happen to be poets. I think we were celebrating someone’s something—a publication or a prize or something like that. At a certain point, I shyly slipped into the conversation that I’ve been working on these lectures, which I didn’t know if they knew about. A few people said they did, and that they liked them, which pleased me. Then they asked me to tell me more about them, and I spouted out a few pointless words before saying I didn’t know how to talk about them. And then everyone started booing me. That’s about all I remember.

This is a photo from the Sedlec Ossuary, a chapel beneath a church located in a cemetery in Sedlec, a suburb of Kutna Hora in the Czech Republic. According to Wikipedia, the ossuary contains—in many ways, is built from—the bones of between 40,000 and 70,000 people. At the risk of imprecision, the bulk of those skeletons are from people who died in the Black Death in the mid-fourteenth century.

Cycles within cycles within cycles. The pandemic cycle. The seasons. The political cycle. The academic calendar. A week. A day. And then, the personal: the ups and downs of my mood, hunger, tiredness, energy, inspiration. The hope of progress battles with, succumbs to, the cyclical reality. Within all these gears of various sizes, I’ve inserted the Corona Lectures: writing, revising, requesting quotations, recording, finding images, editing the video, releasing it, starting over. And with this I’ve noticed a cycle of my own attention, sometimes lagging behind the phase I’m in—regretting not reshooting after a flubbed word or line, excited to see a response to a just-posted lecture, realizing I could’ve lit something better—other times surging ahead—anticipating the next lecture, the possibility of finally nailing one, imagining new iterations, making promises to myself I’ll break in three week’s time. Even every once in a while finding my attention focused right where it belongs, on what I’m doing now.

It’s about the middle of the gestation period of the lecture I’m working on, and it’s the middle of the month. I’m behind on some aspects, ahead on others, and figure it all averages out to being just about on schedule. I had thought that this one would go long and turn into a third “Simple Machine Underwater” lecture, but that didn’t turn out to happen. And so my thoughts naturally turn toward the next lecture.