Lit City Blues

Hey, remember when I wrote my elected officials about the potential cuts to NOAA and the National Weather Service? Remember when the cuts went ahead anyway, and there are now delightful tweets like this one floating around? I want to say again: I'm not against cuts. I'm not against shrinking the size of the government, but what I am against is cutting off your own nose to spite your face. I am against this delusional idea that absolutely everything of value must go regardless of its good or not. This is not good. Don't believe me? Go talk to any meteorologist, and they will tell you that these cuts are a terrible, terrible idea.  (The interesting thing-- if such things could be called interesting-- is going to be how people react to this when the cuts are felt in a real way. I do not think we will be frogs in boiling water that's turned up slowly-- I think we're going to be frogs in suddenly boiling water and we're going to be pissed off. At least I hope so.) A...

The Missus read this book a while back and really liked it, so after hearing her talk about it for months , I finally got around to picking it up and seeing for myself what the fuss was about. In essence, Michael Easter is arguing something pretty unusual that grabs your attention right away: we're too damn comfortable. "Embrace discomfort to reclaim your wild, happy, healthy self." That's the tagline on the front of the book, and quite honestly, going into it, I was a little bit dubious. I don't know why: I got really into the whole mushroom thing that went around a few years back, and I will happily take Lion's Mane until the end of my days because I found all the mushroom science I read to be somewhat convincing. (I am, I will admit, also the type of person to say, "hey, that supplement sounds interesting, maybe I'll try that," so there's a little bit of that there I've got to be honest about as well.) I've heard all the Joe Rogan ...

 1. Look, I've been saying it for years now, but this has to be the year of Book 4. It's grinding away, little by little but at minimum, I'm going to get this damn thing into a workable draft format this year. If I'm very lucky and write very well, I might be into revisions by the end of the year and beating into shape for a final draft and a release. I have no idea why this is taking so long. I have no excuses to offer. I just really, really want to get this- at a minimum- closer to the finish line this year.  Quarter One revealed to me that Book 4 had a structural problem. I'm working on re-tooling it a bit now and I want to get back into it sometime this month and have palpable progress to report on by the end of this quarter. (For more details, you can see my Substack update.) Do I think I'm still on track to get this thing closer to the finish line by the end of the year? I do. But when I started writing books and putting them out into the world, I mad...

I can't remember when I got this album, but I know I haven't listened to it all that much since the first time I got it. Which is a shame because if two Santana albums were growing up that I was very familiar with, it would probably be Abraxas and Supernatural ( which featured as #25 and #26 on the original Albums2010 run ) so I'm still not quite sure why Blessings & Miracles hasn't been spun up more often, but for whatever reason, it hadn't, so I gave it a whirl and then I realized why it probably hasn't been spun up all that often. Don't get me wrong: it's very much a Santana album, and my opinions are probably hampered by the fact that I haven't done a complete dive on his very extensive discography (this album is #26 for Santana and produced by the man himself) so I say this not knowing for sure if it's par for the course or not, but it feels like this albums is trying to recapture the formula of guest stars/musical acts that made Super...

Friends, nerd out with me here for this post. I want to make clear that I am not interested in sane-washing the current administration's policies or their methods. I am deeply, deeply skeptical of the tiresome arguments of "oh, he's playing three-dimensional chess and y'all are just playing checkers"- and I will be honest with you: I straight up do not believe those arguments. However...  we gotta talk about their foreign policy a little bit. An underdiscussed aspect of what drives the Trumpian/New Right (whatever you want to call it) foreign policy is how much of it is a backlash to the neoconservative disasters of the early 2000s. As much as it pains me to admit it, Trump was very open about wanting to end our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and (again, to his credit) didn't start any new wars in his first term. (Granted, he didn't get us out of Afghanistan in Term One either-- Biden did that and caught the flack/fallout for it instead of Trump, which worke...

Man, I don't know what to think about this book. I want to grade on ever-so-slight of a curve because it was translated from Spanish, but I'm just not that convinced that it would lose that much in translation. We're not talking about ancient Greek or Latin here. It's Spanish. But this book appeared on more than a few 'Best of 2024' lists and for the life of me, I can't understand why. I'm not opposed to messing around with structure or getting a little weird (see: Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar) but this book was really fucking frustrating to read and there was little to no payoff for the reader who managed to slog through all that frustration.  We opened in Tenochtitlan, the island capital of the Aztec Empire in 1519. Conquistador Hernan Cortes and his soldiers have arrived in the city, lured on from the coasts by the promise of unimaginable wealth and power ahead of them. They badly bungle the entrance (Cortes goes to hug Emperor Moctezuma and is nearly kille...

There is nothing I resent more about the current time of nonsense that we live in than getting so annoyed about any given issue that I am forced to poke my Congresscritters about it. Do I think my little email is going to make a difference in the grand scheme of things? Probably not. But I do know that ALL of them get read by SOMEBODY in their respective offices and honestly, I refuse to be beaten down by the time of nonsense. The nonsense will not win. So occasionally, like Don Quixote, I will saddle up and tilt at a windmill or two in attempt to get my elected representatives to listen to me. (Or at least force one of their underlings to read my email.) So, Senators Grassley, Ernst and Congresswoman Miller-Meeks received the following from me this afternoon: Dear Senator, I am one of your constituents, writing to you from Johnson County, IA. At this hour, it appears that mass layoffs are underway at the NOAA and NWS, and as we are about to head into tornado season, I, understandably,...

I woke up the day after Election Day last November and realized that I was in a country that I no longer understood. I mean, I did understand it-- I had a sinking feeling that whatever they did with Biden, the price of gas and groceries would be the undoing of whoever was in office and ultimately, that turned out to be right. I said then that I honestly didn't want to write about politics for a while, maybe ever again, and I stuck to that for as long as I could but then I woke up and found out that the Legislature in Des Moines was at it again. What is this new devilry you ask? Well, it's delightful let me tell you. The Legislature, in its wisdom, in a state that is grappling (as it always does) with brain drain and a workforce crisis, decided that it wanted to make it easier for people to discriminate against transgender individuals. As if transfolks don't have enough on their plate to begin, the state, in its wisdom, wants to make it easier for people to be shitty to them...

The real question that I am afraid to ask is this: does Garden State still hold up after all these years? Natalie Portman puts the headphones on Zach Braff and says "This song will change your life" and honestly, it does and you can't listen to this album and not think about Garden State . But at the same time, it's more than just Garden State . The Shins to me are like a time machine, an instant slice of life that was college.  Technically, this album is a new entry in the Albums2010 canon.  I went back and checked the archives - it turns out that while the Garden State Soundtrack did make the cut , I didn't go back and find this album at all. (There's a chance it made the cut of the lost entries between #68-#80. but those are lost forever in the wilds of cyberspace thanks to the Unfortunate Wordpress Experiment.) I think this is a great album, but what I found myself struggling with is how to describe this band. It sort of fits into a variety of genres and ...

I heard good things about Slow Horses on Apple TV, so started it was hooked by the end of the first episode and promptly devoured it. (I even finished up the latest season thanks to Apple TV's free weekend over New Year's.) The show is incredible. Gary Oldman will, at some point, add to his already large collection of awards for his portrayal of Jackson Lamb and if she hasn't been nominated for anything for her role as Diana Tavener, Kristin Scott Thomas is overdue and will get there eventually. All of that being said: I had never read any of the books, so I decided to change that. I picked up the latest in the series, not because I am opposed to starting at the beginning, but because I figured Apple TV was going to do an excellent job of adapting these things and I wanted to see what a book in the series that had yet to be adapted was like and Slough House fit the bill. (So far the show has adapted Slow Horses , Dead Lions , Real Tigers , and Spook Street .) Slough House ...

A long time ago, in a blog that's far, far away now, I decided I was going to listen to 100 Albums. It occurred to me at the time that with music becoming so digital then (and even more so now) we were drifting further and further away from the concept of the album. People weren't listening to music that way anymore and I wanted to explore and in some weird way, fight the power that was sweeping us all into digital subscription-based services and away from physical media. That was fifteen years ago and here is the post that started it all. (And here is the complete list of the original run -- which took me far longer than my original plan of one year.) What's changed since then?  In fifteen more years, this might seem like a delightfully quaint notion, but I am starting to wonder if physical media might be making a comeback? Vinyl never quite went away but now seems to be making a comeback. There are people who steadfastly refuse to read anything on a Kindle (I can go eith...

The Missus' book club read this months ago- possibly even last year at this point and it's been sitting on my bedside table this entire time until I finally picked it up and read it. When The Apricots Bloom is set in the waning years of Saddam Hussein's rule in Iraq, when the country was virtually sealed off from the outside world. The lives of three very different women intersect as they try and protect their secrets and navigate the parlous and perilous world of Baghdad under Saddam's rule. Huda is a secretary at the Australian Embassy-- one of the rare, well-paying jobs that are available, her salary causes tension with her husband at home, who has also been laid off from her job, but when the new Deputy Ambassador arrives with a wife, Ally, she is visited by the secret police, the mukhabarat who order her to watch and listen for any scrap of useful information that can benefit the regime. Ally, for her part, is somewhat unusual. Not many wives accompany their husba...

1. Look, I've been saying it for years now, but this has to be the year of Book 4. It's grinding away, little by little but at minimum , I'm going to get this damn thing into a workable draft format this year. If I'm very lucky and write very well, I might be into revisions by the end of the year and beating into shape for a final draft and a release. I have no idea why this is taking so long. I have no excuses to offer. I just really, really want to get this- at a minimum - closer to the finish line this year.  2. Let's Get Some Vinyl: I finally got another tattoo and will probably get another at some point this year, but I really want this year to be the year I expand and actually use/listen to our vinyl collection more. We need more storage for it and I'd like to make purchases from our local store and find some place other than Amazon to snag more records for our collection. 3. Social Connection: I want to work on being more present when I'm not at work...