It’s been a low-key past few days. Things are strange right now.

We leave our current flat on April 6th, but can not move into our new one until April 15th. For complicated reasons, the people with whom we had planned to stay with in that interim period fell through, and the readily available solutions were kind of crappy- essentially, we could pay £50 a night to stay in a hotel for nine days ($900, roughly) until we could move in, or we could ask our current landlord to let us stay on for the additional time (without a flatmate, who had been splitting the bills with us)- roughly £45 a night, plus the possibility of the place not being available. I’m loathe to spend more than twice what we’ve been paying to rent the cheapest hotel room we could find in London for nine days, so we went with a not-readily-available solution- moving to Switzerland.

That’s a bit of an exaggeration, but only a bit. In lieu of renting a room we can’t afford for ten days, we’ve booked a place in Switzerland which, along with discount EasyJet fare, makes getting the hell out of the country cheaper than staying within.

So, Switzerland. I have no idea where. Well, I do- it’s a place called Gryon, but googling it will only give you the website for the place we’re staying, a hostel/ski resort/chalet in the Alps. There appears to be very little else there, which sounds pretty amazing, really, after the congestion of London. It should be a nice break, and I look forward to it. I will be engaged in the process of re-writing the novel at that point (as I’ve asked, and will now gently remind, the people who are reading it for me to please get back to me by April 1st) and could use some quiet.

A trick, if trying to cut through Europe, is that ski resorts are often very cheap places to stay, if one plans not to ski. That is how they get you, but we have outsmarted them and will merely be using them for their bed and kitchen. We will be about fifty miles outside of Geneva, which is far enough away that there ought to be very little pressure from the outside world. We get back on the 15th and promptly move into our new place. It should be a good time, better than most alternatives.

Anyway. I’ve been reading again lately, even though my attention span is like a four year old right now. I finished freakonomics the other day, which is a book that has done nothing to further my understanding of economics, but which did explain to me that, before reading it, I had no idea what economics even meant. Clever book, that- it’s also really short, so if you want to feel smart, and like you’re educating yourself on important subjects, I recommend reading it. It’ll take you three hours, even if you move your lips and only read on the toilet, and is full of interesting ideas, clever ways of looking at the world.

I picked up freakonomics because it came up a few times when I was researching Austan Goolsbee, Barack Obama’s main economics advisor. The book’s main author, Steven Levitt, teaches alongside Goolsbee at the University of Chicago School of Economics. Which is interesting, because it’s that school that gave the world Milton Friedman and, by extension, Augusto Pinochet and much of the direction that the Latin American turmoil of the 70’s-onward took. Given the famous nature of that particular school, and the specifics of what it’s famous for, it’s interesting to see the sort of economic theory being considered by its current celebrity professors.

And if that doesn’t get the kids’ attention, I don’t know what will. Economic theory, especially commentary on it from soneone who doesn’t know what he’s talking about? Why, it’s what the Internet is based on!

With that in mind, I’ll spare you the discussion of the first four chapters of falling man by Delillo, just to see if there’s any way to keep people paying attention.

That’s enough of that. In a few days, there’ll be a new website up at dansolomon.com, complete with a goodly amount of previously-unseen/unread material, as well as all of the old shit in a new format. One thing that won’t be on the site, however, is poplife. It’s been a good four years of the book in its incarnation as a 75,000 word Creative Commons digital release, and I’m proud of the reception its received and the fact that I put out a novel for free on the Internet, but right now is not the time for that. I’m reconsidering a lot of aspects of that book, and I’m convinced right now that the failure to find a traditional publisher for it has to do with the fact that, as it appeared online, it was not as good as it needed to be. So, with weathered completed, April seems like a good month to re-write both novels, and to pursue the publishing avenues available to me for both of them in the future. I still have every intention of releasing everything I do online as a free download via a Creative Commons license, but right now the book needs to be re-written before I’m ready to distribute it. Which is not a knock against you, if you liked it- but a tighter version of it with some of the logic holes that I was too immature, at 23, to feel really needed fixing is on the horizon, and I do not want to distribute it until I’ve done the things with the manuscript that I should have done years ago. Mostly it’s just some pacing concerns, and a scene near the end, but these things grow in importance when it’s your own thing, and I’m excited at the idea of having the book back online before long.

In the meantime, there’ll be some new stuff to make it worth clicking over to the site at least once- video from the sometimes you gotta fight the bear tour, with live material never before released, and the full text of greeted as liberators, the novella-length fold-and-staple book I’m putting out about DIY touring and the re-election of George W Bush. greeted as liberators will hit the Internet right before it hits London, as it’s set to debut at the London Zine Symposium in late April. All of which makes this a hectic time, but also a good one. Now all that’s needed is a chance to get as much of this done as possible, all while living on a mountain in Switzerland.