Lit City Blues

This might wind up aging like milk, but I think I'm going to say it anyway: Calm down about the gerrymandering thing . Look, I'm not going to say that it's not bad, okay. It's bad. It's a parade of bad. It's another shower of shit in a rain showerhead of shit we've all been dealing with in this country for decades-- but... (and this is a big-ass but) we can't possibly predict what the ramifications are ultimately going to be. The problem with gerrymandering is that you can only do so much of it before it has the very real potential to backfire on you. Texas is going to be fascinating to watch this year, because its gerrymander is based on the 2024 election results and assumes that every electoral result after that would mirror those. Given, you know, all of this (gestures broadly to the world at large), that's not a bet I would have made, but I'm not the Texas GOP. Also, I do expect you're going to see more state GOPs taking a pass on furthe...

I accidentally stumbled onto this album again, and honestly, this wasn't even on my radar. I think a few TikToks of Sting's awesomely 90s music video for 'If You Love Somebody Set Them Free' floated by me, and then I just kept tugging on the thread again and again, and soon I was sitting down to listen to this entire album. Seriously: look at this music video and tell me it's not awesome: The strange part is that when I went back to the Archives , I found that this one didn't even make the original run of Albums2010, which is bizarre. This was one of the albums I clearly remember listening to growing up-- back when my parents had the full late 80s stereo setup in the living room of our house. (Everyone my age probably has some version of this in their memories: it occupied a full cabinet, had CD, tape, record, surround sound, and those sound bars that moved in time to the music?) This was one of those albums-- (along with his third studio album, Not...

  Here's the 2026 Edition, Quarter One Update:  1. A completed, working draft of Book 4 by the end of the year. I've got 40K words and it's time to figure out what to do with them. It needs a restructure. I know how it ends. I sort of thought I knew how it begins, but that might be changing, and I need to figure out the rest in between.  This begins now! I hope to have a more concrete update next quarter. 2. Built-in bookshelves! (Also: fix the gutter, fix the window, privacy strips for the fence, get new doors hung in the back hallway, fix the van bumper.) Gutter is fixed, window is fixed-- need to get more doors hung and privacy strips for the fence. The van needs new brakes and an oil change, but parts of it are-- at least for now, not dragging on the ground any longer.  Built-in bookshelves are still on the menu! 3. Being Present: I know that's a buzzword these days, but I want to unpack it a little bit. I want to get into the habit of putting my phone down rathe...

Honestly, I'm not quite sure why I picked this book up. I think I was in the bookstore with one of the kiddos and just felt an unshakable urge to buy a book and saw this one and thought, 'hell, I'd love to learn more about The Templars' and snagged it. It didn't hurt that it was by Dan Jones, who is one of the best narrative historians out there. The Plantagenets and The Wars of the Roses were both phenomenal books, so I figured it would be more of the same here, and as it turns out, I was entirely correct. The crusades have always fascinated me. Somewhere, lurking on our very crowded bookshelves, I've got a very nice three-volume history of the crusades from The Folio Society that somehow wound up in my possession after the parents did a book purge some years back. I have yet to crack those, but what I was left with after this book was that the idea of some kind of 'Clash of Civilizations' is really more ridiculous than it seems. I'm going to go o...

The Mars Volta never made it to the original run of Albums2010, but they should have, because they were a band that I flirted with time and time again back when I was in college. I have this weird nostalgia for the print magazines of old. Newsweek was a staple of my childhood. One of my favorite things to do in college was to go downtown to Prairie Lights and get a copy of The Economist and then go next door and get a good bowl of Krith-A-Raki from Z'Mariks and sit in the window seat and read it and eat my lunch. But weirdly, the more I think of my college years, the magazine that I remember is Entertainment Weekly. EW used to be my main source of television, movie, and music news-- I'd get previews of upcoming fall shows (back when the TV season was more of a concrete feature of the calendar than it is now), and I'd also get music news there. And I remember reading reviews of this album when it first came out and thinking that it sounded interesting. A blend of musical gen...

Another year, another list. I know it seems passe to care about New Year's Resolutions and the like these days, as no one keeps them, but I like this format. I get romantic about the possibility of 365 more days to do something different. To try and be better. To move the needle forward on whatever it is that is important to you. Here's the 2026 Edition:  1. A completed, working draft of Book 4 by the end of the year. I've got 40K words and it's time to figure out what to do with them. It needs a restructure. I know how it ends. I sort of thought I knew how it begins, but that might be changing, and I need to figure out the rest in between.  2. Built-in bookshelves! (Also: fix the gutter, fix the window, privacy strips for the fence, get new doors hung in the back hallway, fix the van bumper.) 3. Being Present: I know that's a buzzword these days, but I want to unpack it a little bit. I want to get into the habit of putting my phone down rather than having it with m...