Lit City Blues

If you want to look for it, there's discourse aplenty online either mourning Iowa's election results or trying to figure out where it all went quite so wrong. I have no knowledge of the inner workings of the State Democratic Party. They could be doing quite a few of these things already-- and if they are, great. But while I'm technically registered as a Democrat, I am not. I hate the two party system and while we still don't have final results on who's controlling what quite yet, I am more convinced than ever than political parties are stupid. So: Iowa's results are entirely the fault of the State Democratic Party. Trendlines have been creeping against them for a few cycles now. The Caucus Clusterfuck didn't help matters. You get the sense that candidate recruitment  has been lackluster and the State Party just isn't willing to spend the resources where it should be to claw anything back. They don't have solid social media messaging either.  National

It took me way too long to get around to reading one Ursula K. Le Guin book and I didn't want it to be that long before I tackled another. I had heard a lot about Earthsea, but I had never actually read any of the books- which given the fascination of my youth with all things fantasy-related (Lord of the Rings, The Belgariad, Shannara, etc.) Earthsea was a surprising omission. So, I grabbed the first book on Audible and gave it a listen. Shout out to Rob Inglis who does a fantastic job with the narration for Audible. A little digging around on the interwebs reveals that this is definitely not his first rodeo with voiceover narration and, in fact, until Andy Serkis did it in 2020, his reading of The Hobbit was the only unabridged edition of the book ever made. He did one-man stage productions of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings back in the 70s and 80s which must have been amazing to see. In short, Mr. Inglis is, as the kids these days like to say: thoroughly legit. His voice I