brief hiatus

It is my plan to start writing on this site again shortly. I have done hardly any reading in the past couple of weeks due to travel, a death in the family and minor upheaval in my work and personal lives. There's a lot going on. Plus I need to accept that I'm not going to finish some of the books I started, put them away, and start something else. Dreams From My Father is okay but ... sort of boring, honestly. Hooray for living in a free country where I can say that about a book by the president. Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, an account of traveling with David Foster Wallace, is also sort of boring, though I covered that already.

Last night I finished The Wire. I'm not ready to talk about it yet, but I agree with those who say it's the best show ever made. The best show I have ever seen, anyway. There's a montage at the end of the second season, which is about the decline of blue-collar work in Rust Belt cities, that encapsulates all the forces that brought me away from where I came from and to New York in search of stability and success.

Sometimes I think about starting another blog and calling it Rust Belt Exile. But what would I write? Maybe I could interview the people I've met in New York who come from Detroit, Grand Rapids, St. Louis, Syracuse ... there are no shortage of them.