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,...

During the back half of our week in the UK we rented a cottage down in Somerset and used it as a base to go visit various relatives and enjoy the countryside-- but we also wanted to enjoy our cottage a little bit as well, so we checked out the Netflix one evening, found The Diplomat and decided to give it a go. We ended up wrapping up the first season when we got back to the States because it was one of those shows that you just couldn't stop watching. I had no idea what to expect going in-- the previews made it seem like a sexy thriller type of a situation which I guess it kind of is, but it falls closer to the spiky/dramedy/political thriller end of the spectrum with a nice scoop of 'my, every main character is an attractive, sexy person'  than a straight up spiky/sexy thriller. The show begins with tensions high between the US and Iran and a British aircraft carrier is attacked in the Persian Gulf, resulting in the death of 41 sailors. Expecting to be assigned to Afghani...

Anyone who knows me knows that I am a Star Trek fan. I don't own a uniform and have yet to attend any conventions, but of the big science fiction franchises that have stood the test of time, Trek is probably the nearest and dearest to my heart. I've written about it before and I'll write about it again: I do believe that the current moment of Trek is probably the best the franchise has seen in decades. There is an embarrassment of riches for Trek fans these days and it's awesome, I'm soaking it all up and loving every single minute of it.  I have no time for fan gatekeeping or toxic fan culture, my criteria is simple: is it entertaining? For the 50th Anniversary of Star Trek starting in 2016 and lasting well into 2017, I watched every episode of Star Trek ever made. (I modeled my post titles after Wagner's The Ring Cycle, because well, it felt that epic- so here , here , here , and here you go if you want my full thoughts on the franchise.)  Although many peop...

So, I'm a bit late to this particular party- since the Reddit Post in question is about a month old now, but I read it again and I decided that it was worth reacting to, because, despite the deep doomerism that infuses the entire post, there is a kernel of truth to be considered there: what is the future of the University? First of all, go read the Reddit post and come back. I'll give you a minute or two to do that. Got that done? Okay, let's talk. We've got to pull back our view and focus on higher education in general. In the nearly fifteen years I've been perched in my little corner of higher education, I've been hearing about the great coming educational apocalypse and it has yet to materialize. This doesn't mean that there aren't very legitimate reasons for concern in the years ahead. I think it's important right out of the gate that we harsh the narrative about higher education a bit- college costs have, in fact, been dropping for the past dec...

I was going to read something else and then circle back around to this series at a later date, but I was at the library randomly and decided I just couldn't stomach the size of Sanderson's Oathbringer in person (I've read the other two volumes on Kindle, so I just... didn't know- though really, I should have) so I went with The Obelisk Gate instead and I'm glad I did. A worthy sequel to the first volume of N.K. Jemisin's The Broken Earth Trilogy, The Obelisk Gate picks up where the events of the first book left off-- but with Schaffa, Essun's former Guardian who awakens underwater in the immediate aftermath of Essun's devastating attack during the end of the first book. He's about to die when the mysterious entity that gives him and the other Guardians their powers are allowed to take over his body for a brief period. He survives, though suffers brain damage and profound memory loss, leaving him unable to remember his past as a Guardian. He's r...