Lit City Blues

Living where we live, there's always been a soundtrack to our house. Summer brings softballs, fouled out right over our fence and into our yard for the dogs to collect. Fall, there are Friday night lights, the cheers of the crowd. Spring there are the shout and the echo of starter pistols from track meets. Late July and early August you get the start of two-a-days for the football team, voices in unison, shouting out numbers of jumping jacks. August, the marching band begins and there's a week or two of trying to figure out what this year's theme is before it all actually clicks. This past week or so, the soundtrack has been different. Jackhammers, clanks and crashing, rubble shifting, things slamming so hard the windows shake. The sounds of destruction behind a screen of shrubs or trees that the school district planted as a privacy screen years before.  Hoover Elementary is slowly being torn down. What's going in its place hasn't been made super clear yet-- I'm

So, Star Wars . Yes, I've seen all the movies. Yes, I've seen The Mandalorian . I've seen bits of Clone Wars (but not all of it) and the other animated shows. And after catching up with The Book of Boba Fett and watching Obi-Wan Kenobi , I am convinced of two things: first, for the sake of the Star Wars franchise, they have got to discover other planets in this galaxy of theirs that are far, far away. I'm getting bored with always coming back to Tatooine. Secondly: I'm starting to wonder about the MCU and now I'm really starting to wonder about Star Wars: how much content is too much content? At a certain point, do people stop caring? Or do people wander in and out of the franchise and watch what they like? (Streaming, as a concept, is still fairly newish in the grand scheme of things, so it'll be interesting to see if set viewing patterns emerge or shift as we go forward into a multiplicity of streaming platforms.) But, Obi-Wan Kenobi : the overall idea w

I've been contemplating how to write this post for a while. I wanted to let the dust settle a bit and see how the media coverage plays out and see if there are any emerging trend lines out there in the zeitgeist/internet hive mind that might translate into something tangible come November and to be honest, I don't know if I can hang my hat on anything concrete.  It's entirely possible that inflation and gas prices plus the historical pattern of midterm elections all hold true come November. I feel like voters are frustrated at the turgidity of both Congress and the Biden Administration on any number of issues and if there's no serious relief of something , somewhere come the fall then, try as the media might, I expect pocketbook issues to take center stage once the serious campaigning starts. (Hopefully: Biden comes through on some kind of student loan forgiveness AND they fix the impending Obamacare Subsidies disaster at a minimum , but it would be very nice- and not

Guy Gavriel Kay is rapidly becoming one of my favorite authors. Under Heaven is only the second book of his I've ever read and I went into it knowing nothing at all about what I was going to read and I left honestly sad that it had ended. Kay is an author whose books will sit with you for a very long time, but in a good way- a very good way. Under Heaven is set in a fictionalized China that roughly corresponds to the Tang era. Right off the bat, I don't know that much about ancient Chinese history, so I can't tell you how well he captures that era of China's long history, but given the care that you can see Kay put into constructing the characters that inhabit this world, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that he probably did a good job. He doesn't seem like the type who is going to skimp on his research. Anyway: when the story opens, Shen Tai, the second son of a renowned general of Kitai (what we're calling the fictionalized China) has been living