I leave for Berlin and Amsterdam a week from today and meanwhile am slammed at work-work and with other work, so I keep not being able to post any of the things I intend to write here.

But for the first time since my college days, I’ve been keeping a journal. Actually, I’ve been keeping journals, as in many, on my iPad, using the Paper app, which I wrote about last month at The Chimerist and have been turning to more and more often since then. I still scrawl longhand drafts and quick notes in my hardbound composition notebook, and my penmanship on the iPad screen leaves something to be desired (see below), but I like the way Paper allows me to categorize my thoughts and musings, and to delete them when they’re no longer useful by pressing a button.

In mid-June I go back into hibernation on my novel, which I haven’t focused on in months. Here are some events I’m involved in before then. On May 30, at the invitation of the ever-inspiring Austin Kleon, I’ll be speaking with two of my Internet crushes, Maris Kreizman and Maria Popova, about creativity and curation in the digital age, at McNally Jackson.

On June 9-10 I’ll be participating with a lot of great writers in Urban Librarian Unite’s 24-Hour Read-In to protest proposed NYC library budget cuts. And on June 12 I’ll be talking with the amazing Kate Christensen about her latest novel, The Astral, which you know I love. Details for all of these events are here.

“My Son Went to Heaven, and All I Got Was a No. 1 Best Seller,” my essay about Heaven is For Real, my own fundamentalist background, and my lifelong doubt, appeared in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine, underneath this illustration by Tom Gauld.

“People ask me, was writing Fun Home therapeutic? And I feel like, yes it was, but that’s kind of like asking somebody if swimming the English Channel was a good workout for them. That’s not why they did it — of course it was a good workout.” The great Alison Bechdel and I spoke on the phone a couple weeks ago about her new book, Are You My Mother? An edited transcript of our interview is up at Barnes & Noble Review.

Tuesday night I’m reading with Alexander Chee at the KGB Bar for the True Story Nonfiction Series. Both of our essays are about family mysteries, conversations across generations, and I promise you, Alex’s is gorgeous and you want to hear him read it.

In his fiction and in his life, Harry Crews empathized most with the people who needed it most: the freaks, the fuck-ups, people who’d been broken by loss of one kind or another. Crews died yesterday, at age 76. As his son Byron told The Daily’s Claire Howorth, “[he] put more miles on the Chevy than most of us.”

Amended to say: Now that I’ve pulled myself together, I wrote about him for The Awl. And of course, there are the archives.

Image courtesy of the University of Georgia’s Hargrett Rare Book & Manuscript Library; you can also find a podcast of Crews teaching a creative writing seminar.

I’m finishing up some longer projects and running around for the next little while. Wednesday night, March 28, I’ll be speaking at Butler University, in Indianapolis.

On April 10, I read with the amazing Alexander Chee for KGB Bar’s nonfiction series. And I might as well be living at my favorite bookstore in April. On the 4th, I interview Madeline Miller (of the wonderful The Song of Achilles). On the 17th, I’ve got your daily double for FSG’s Nerd Jeopardy. On the 25th, I talk with the venerable Ron Rash (Serena, The Cove). Details for these events and others reside here.

I’d love to see you and talk for a second in the midst of the whirl.

Image Credit: Downtown Indianapolis from the Canal, by Matthew Rogers.

The last time I visited Oxford, Mississippi, at the end of a trip through ancestral haunts in the Delta, I stopped by Faulkner’s grave, Rowan Oak, and Square Books, and consumed my weight in sweet tea and fried catfish with my favorite aunt.

I aim to do some of the same things this weekend, when I’m in town for the Oxford Conference for the Book to talk online publishing with Jack Pendarvis, Anya Groner, and Michael Bible. Other speakers include Barbara Epler, Josh Weil, Steve Yarbrough, and Ken Auletta, to name just a few.

I found a new polka dotted dress for the occasion, and managed to rope my dearest Carrie Frye into meeting me there. I wish I had an extra day or two to get over to Eudora Welty’s house and my Great Aunt Maude’s official state archives (really!) in Jackson, but I fly back Sunday for a couple days before heading to speak at Butler University next week. Meanwhile, I’m looking forward to Gulf Coast oysters, mint juleps in their native habitat, and good company.

Last month I sent Darin Strauss a copy of Muriel Spark’s Memento Mori after he overpaid for his part of a cab ride home from a party. In return, he introduced me to the Essential Stories of V.S. Pritchett. And then, poking around online, he discovered that Pritchett (pictured) had once written an introduction to an edition of Memento Mori. We were excited as any two book nerds could be.

So far I’ve only found a few tiny excerpts, but they’re great. “Only one other novelist and playwright of consequence — Samuel Beckett — had looked at Mrs. Spark’s subject: the corruption of the flesh, the tedium of waiting to die,” Pritchett said, praising her for taking on “the great suppressed and censored subject of contemporary society, the one we do not care to face, which we regard as indecent: old age.”

Now if only someone will get permission to republish the full text online . . .

Fannie Farmer’s Food and Cookery for the Sick and Convalescent and Robin Bellinger’s “Feed a Fever, Starve a Cold” inspired my latest New York Times Magazine mini-column.

Sometimes (rarely, but sometimes) when you’re sick you need something other than a hot toddy.

Birkerts’ best personal essays are steeped in an anxious nostalgia that is, in intensity if not in focus, all too familiar to me.

“The Pump You Pump the Water From,” on his wistfulness for the writing processes of his younger days, is online at the Los Angeles Review of Books. If you like it, pick up The Other Walk, and read that, too.

My latest New York Times Magazine columnlet draws on a passage from H.L. Mencken’s The American Language (1921) about the word “bug.”

“An Englishman,” he says, restricts its use “very rigidly to the Cimex lectularius, or common bed-bug, and hence the word has highly impolite connotations. All other crawling things he calls insects. An American of my acquaintance once greatly offended an English friend by using bug for insect. The two were playing billiards one summer evening in the Englishman’s house, and various flying things came through the window and alighted on the cloth. The American, essaying a shot, remarked that he had killed a bug with his cue. To the Englishman this seemed a slanderous reflection upon the cleanliness of his house.”

In a footnote, Mencken elaborates: “Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Gold Bug’ is called ‘The Golden Beetle’ in England. Twenty-five years ago an Englishman named Buggey, laboring under the odium attached to the name, had it changed to Norfolk-Howard, a compound made up of the title and family name of the Duke of Norfolk. The wits of London at once doubled his misery by adopting Norfolk-Howard as a euphemism for bed-bug.”

Even today, slang guru Jonathon Green confirmed when I asked him on Twitter, the UK “does use ‘bedbug’ but otherwise, I would say UK still mainly [uses] ‘insect.’” A British friend of mine agrees. Nowadays, though, she says, “bug has no connotations of uncleanliness, it’s just not used. The only time an English person says bug to mean insect is ‘don’t let the bedbugs bite’ and no modern British person’s ever had bedbugs, so it’s just a saying, not an insult! We know that it’s a general American term for insect, but we tend to call insects by their species, generally — fly, beetle, ladybird, etc — or, if we need a catch-all euphemism, we’ll say ‘creepy-crawly’ or in Scotland ‘beastie’ (or ‘wee beastie’).”

As the plague spreads, visitors to the UK may wish to make linguistic adjustments.

Don’t miss Parul Sehgal’s admiring (and profound) review in the weekend’s New York Times Book Review.

I talk with Ullman on Thursday, March 1, at Book Court, at 7 p.m. She will also read, and we’ll celebrate the release of this wonderful book into the world. Join us if you’re free.