Lit City Blues

I've always had a fascination with maps, dating back to childhood- but that, combined with now obscure 80s cartoons like The Mysterious Cities of Gold has always left me fascinated by the Tierra Del Fuego (because it's literally, 'The Land of Fire') and the Straits of Magellan. So, when I found a book that detailed the voyage that first circumnavigated the globe, it was an easy sell for me. Over the Edge of the World , by Laurence Bergreen tells the story of Magellan's voyage in 1520. It's tempting to credit Bergreen's writing for how quickly he keeps the narrative moving and the pages turning, but in reality, the subject matter does it for him. (That's not to say that the book is badly written, quite the opposite- it's just that sometimes authors need to paint a picture and jazz things up a bit to get the pages turning. Bergreen has absolutely no need to do that with this subject matter.) The politics of setting up such a voyage are interesting en...

2024 is going to be the most fascinating election of my lifetime and my political science nerd brain has been running at *Red Alert* for the past couple of weeks now trying to sort all of my initial thoughts and reactions into something coherent and readable and this is my first crack at unpacking it all.  (If you have been living on another planet and/or under some kind of rock: President Joe Biden shortly after the end of the Republican National Convention, announced he was dropping out of the Presidential race and threw his support to Vice President Kamala Harris.) Hopium & Copium: Before The Convention Edition If you, like me, are a voter who's getting tired of feeling like you're trapped in some kind of insane asylum, voting for Kamala Harris is a no-brainer. If she can do a 100-day sprint of an election cycle and manage to win-- and do so convincingly-- it's a hammer blow to the primary system. This is something that has not gotten enough play in my opinion, The p...

So, I'm going to try something new this year and post quarterly updates on how I'm doing with my goals for the year. I don't know if this is going to provide me more motivation to keep on top of them throughout the year or give me the chance to do an occasional reset on my goals as I work my way through the year, but I guess we'll see how it goes. Without further ado, here's the Second Quarter Update: 10 For 2024 1. Book 4: Get this book into draft form (close to, if not ready to launch-- fingers crossed!) by the end of the year. I have some other writing goals as well, but this is going to be my big, main focus for the year. Okay, I will be honest--  Book 4 is moving, but slowly- slower than I'd like. I haven't written anything like this before, I went back and revised the first four chapters, got through chapter five and have made a hefty indent on Chapter Six (which I'm hoping to get done this month-- at least that's the plan.) As of this writing,...

Another book that's been on my shelf far too long, Five Past Midnight In Bhopal is a harrowing story of the world's worst industrial accident. Before reading this book, I knew the basic outlines of what happened. An industrial plant in Bhopal, run by Union Carbide had some kind of a gas explosion, that killed a ton of people, and then Carbide refused to take responsibility for it. (There were some court cases/decisions in the early 2000s that put this in the news back in the day, so I was vaguely aware of it.)  This book, however, lifted the veil on the horrible details you don't get from reading random news articles about court cases. I don't want to say something trite like "Man, this was way worse than I realized" but that's more or less what I was left with. Honestly, comparing this to Chornobyl in scale and long-term after-effects probably wouldn't be too far from the mark and I don't want to say it's a 'searing indictment of corpora...

I had to close the internet last week a few times because it just got to be way too much. I get that the algorithms are designed to feed into rage and hysteria. It's just a general byproduct of social media these days, but sometimes, it gets to be a little much. Especially lately, so let's look at the HYSTERIA METER of late June and early July: 1. The Biden Thing:  I was torn when I first heard about the debate schedule. On the one hand, I've always thought that the Commission on Presidental Debates was a festering pile of horseshit designed to shut out and an all third party candidates to preserve the duopoly as much as possible. (If you can get to 270 electoral votes on paper, you get an invite to the first debate. 15% in the polls get you to the second debate should be the rule.) On the other hand, I didn't know why they were scheduling debates before the convention until it actually happened. You have a debate in June because if you're 81 and people are concern...

So far, the pattern of the Stormlight Archive has been more or less this: lots of book interspersed with interesting moments until you get to about the 75% mark, and then things trip into fast forward in the usual Sanderlanche and you wind up with a big, awesome payoff that makes the lots of book you just went through more or less worth it. Three books in and you kind of know what to expect when you're getting into a Sanderson book so, I picked up Rhythm of War (Book 4 of The Stormlight Archive) thinking I was going to get much the same formula and only this time, I didn't. Going into this one, I had seen a lot of chatter online that indicated people either liked it or hated it and I was curious about that, because about 25% of the way in, I was actually enjoying this one. Things were happening. There wasn't as much 'lots of book' in between key moments in the plot. It felt like it was moving a long as a pretty brisk clip. Yes, there were the flashbacks to build out...

This movie finally made it to Prime Video. On a long, difficult afternoon, I decided that I was going to sit downstairs in the cool of my basement and watch it because I hadn't actually done that for a while and I'm so glad I did. American Fiction stars Jeffrey Wright as Thelonious 'Monk' Ellison, whom everyone calls Monk who is a highly-intelligent upper-class African American Professor and writer who lives in Los Angeles. His novels receive a ton of academic and critical praise but don't sell well and publishers have rejected his latest manuscript as not being 'black enough'. He gets placed on temporary leave after making one of his students cry over objecting to having to discuss a short story by Flannery O'Connor containing the 'n-word' in the title (the second weird intersection of what I am currently reading in real life and what I'm watching. Flannery is everywhere, apparently) and he is encouraged to go home to Boston and spend time...