The disappearance of August by Alex Beam (from Boston Globe through ITH)

I remember August. What a great month it was for doing nothing! Maybe during the final week my mom would buy me a pair of shoes for school, or ask me how I did on that summer reading list. (Uh, not so well.) They didn’t have Trapper Keepers back then, but we would score a few notebooks at the Peoples drugstore - I grew up in Washington, D.C. - and then brace for the start of school in September. August is different now. It’s horrible, busy, laden, as fraught with to-ing and fro-ing as September used to be. Forty percent of the state’s 300-plus school districts will be starting school this month, a percentage that has risen from zero since I was a kid. The back-to-school sales started a month ago, and the National Football League played its first game two days ago. Wasn’t that a fall sport, once? Someone sped up the clock on me. Universities used to be reliable sumps of late summer torpor. “Colleges are increasingly reconvening before Labor Day,’’ Barmak Nassirian of the American Association of College Registrars and Admissions Officers told me. Why? Partly because there are more federal holidays but mainly because academe simply gave up working on Fridays and Mondays. “The students are the consumers, and consumer preferences have started to weigh heavily on how the schedule is arranged,’’ Nassirian said. See you in September? Not if you are attending the University of Maryland, Hunter College, William & Mary, or Bucknell. It’s more like see you real soon. Even President Obama - or should I say, especially President Obama - isn’t giving us an August recess. As part of his administration’s plan to make our leisure hours a living hell, he will be in Portsmouth, N.H., today shilling his incredible, shrinking health care overhaul. Please, Mr. President, can’t we have August off? No, we can’t. Notice that even the French, who, like psychiatrists, are notorious for doing nothing in August, seem quite busy these days. Employees at an American-owned electronics company in Villemur-sur-Tarn beat up their boss last week. Bankers at BNP Paribas paid themselves $1.4 billion in bonuses after taking several billion dollars of public-sector loans. They’re spending their August à l’américaine! Speaking of shrinks, “In days of yore, the beaches of Cape Cod often had more psychiatrists per square foot of sand than many Western states,’’ Dr. Ron Pies remembers. The late Judith Rossner once spun out a whole novel, “August,’’ about the emotional fallout among Manhattanites when their therapists bolted for the Hamptons on July 31. August off? “I never hear of it anymore,’’ Dr. Michael Kahn e-mailed me. “My father is a psychiatrist as well, and we always took August off in the ’60s to go up to New Hampshire. Now more than two weeks seems rare, and Wellfleet is no longer de rigueur.’’ Books? August used to be the month to publish and perish. Now literary bigfeet like Richard Russo, E.L Doctorow, Tracy Kidder, Thomas Pynchon, and Pat Conroy are flocking to the shelves. “The fall is so crowded and intimidating,’’ explains literary agent Esmond Harmsworth. “Many authors still want to come out in September, October, or November, but unless you have a very big book, you risk going unnoticed.’’ Like psychiatry, book publishing no longer naps through August. “Now we have auctions, and there is plenty of business going on,’’ Harmsworth says. Over at Slate magazine, David Plotz has been lobbying since 2001 to “get rid’’ of August, which he calls “the vast sandy wasteland of American culture. Publishers stop releasing books,’’ he writes in an article republished each year, and “television is all reruns (or worse, new episodes of ‘Sex and the City’).’’ So in part, his dream has been fulfilled. Quality TV, i.e., “Mad Men’’ and “Monk,’’ now starts up in late summer and publishers are ensuring that August is, well, like every other month. But I want my wish to come true. Wait until September to unleash your earnest literary pap, your lowest-common-denominator brainwashing campaigns for questionable public policies, and your thinly disguised gladiatorial bloodfests underwritten by alcohol conglomerates. School’s out for the summer. Let’s keep it that way. Let August be August. Relax.