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...