Midsummer has arrived, and I have written little about baseball yet this season. But even more, I have written little of anything at all, period.

This writing dry spell is the longest of my adult life. For those counting, that is 45 years of “adulthood.” But I am beginning to see a light at the end of this long tunnel.

As I have mentioned here in my few posts of late, a few months ago I began listening to jazz seriously again. What began as a vague notion to “mix things up a bit” has now turned into something I have come to call “My Jazz Project”: a record of my multiple, focused listening sessions with various jazz albums, along with notes about what I am learning and what I prefer.

Also—and more importantly—I have recently begun rereading Yeats in earnest. Here is a list of the writers with whom I have spent the most time over the years. By “most time,” I mean both the number of works I have read and the number of times I have reread and studied them.

• W.B. Yeats
• Ernest Hemingway
• John Steinbeck
• Robert Louis Stevenson
• Seamus Heaney
• Arthur Conan Doyle

Of that list, no one comes close to Yeats. I have lost count of the number of times I have reread his complete poems cover to cover over the years. I have read every essay, play, and prose work that I have been able to get my hands on. I have also read letters and articles about Yeats, and I am now working through Richard Ellmann’s Yeats: The Man and the Masks.

I am hoping that, between Yeats, jazz, the Grateful Dead, and baseball, I will find my way back into a regular rhythm of writing again.