Lit City Blues

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel comes to a close with its fifth season and while I'm sure that Amy Sherman-Palladino probably has a lot more left in her creative tank and is, as far as I know in good health and not in danger of shuffling off this mortal coil anytime soon, one hopes, I'm going to go ahead and shoot my shot: I think this might be her masterpiece. It might be her magnum opus. She might do something else to eclipse it, of course, but right now, this is her brass ring. I don't know if she's always wanted to do a period piece, but given the fact her production company is called Dorothy Parker Drank Here and her dialogue from Gilmore Girls to the lamentably short-lived Bunheads is chock full of pop culture references that go back decades- hell, pretty much all the way to Proust, if not before, you have to think that it was percolating somewhere for her and with The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel , she hit it out of the park. At the close of the previous season, Midge (Rac

Hey, remember the Sea Shanty craze that took the internet by storm during COVID? ' Wellerman' was everywhere and soon that lead me down the rabbit hole of ShantyTok and you found such classics as 'Bully In The Ally' and 'South Australia' . But the one that really stuck with me was 'Barrett's Privateers'. I stumbled across this performance on YouTube and was instantly hooked, so I had to take to the interwebs and find the original Stan Rogers version (embedded above.) First of all: I didn't realize the depth of love that people have for the original Master and Commander movie, but if you love that movie "OCEANS ARE NOW BATTLEFIELDS" etc, then, this is the song for you because it's like Master and Commander in song form with a Canadian flavor to it. And it's a complete story, too!  TL;DR: The young man in question signs up with Captain Barrett of the good ship Antelope (which is the scummiest vessel he'd ever seen) to crui

I honestly don't know how to feel about this. Also, I'm not entirely sure where we got this book from- but it's been sitting on one of our bookshelves for a while now and when I was in need of a fiction adventure, I decided to pick it up and give it a go and that's what I'm left with: I honestly don't know how to feel about this book. It's got the character details of Empire Falls , but the post-modernist surrealism of Gravity's Rainbow with a touch of Philip Roth's commentary on the state of American life and society in the spirit of American Pastoral . It manages to feel like all of these things and very much its own thing all at the same time, which is a strangely impressive feat for a single novel to accomplish, but somehow Franzen does it. The story of the Lambert Family opens with Enid and Alfred. They still live in the Midwestern town of St. Jude in their house that has seen better days. Enid wants to start having some fun in her retirement,