Lit City Blues

 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...