If anything derails my best attempts at regular blogging, it’s time on the road. Away from home, my life is usually too chaotic to regularly fit a significant stretch of daily drafting time – an unfortunate necessity for a writer as painfully slow as I. Then, even once I return, the work piled up in my absence still keeps me away from the keyboard.

Which, in short, is an oblique apology for the late lack of content. But if I don’t want this already desiccating site to shrivel up and die completely, blogging-while-traveling is a skill I’d best pick up, fast. I head out of town, yet again, to Sweden and Denmark this Friday evening, then return to New York just long enough to unpack and repack for the Toronto Film Festival, which will take me away from home until mid-September.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m thrilled to head out into the world. As Seneca observed several millennia back, “travel and change of place impart new vigor to the mind.” It’s just that, these days, I never seem to have quite enough time to fully consider one completed adventure before being flung into the next. Perhaps, then, it’s William Hazlitt’s more recent (just centuries old) quote that’s more apropos: “I should like to spend the whole of my in life traveling abroad, if I could anywhere borrow another life to spend afterwards at home.”