Lit City Blues

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...