In which I listen.

New pursuits: to reward myself for being a very good lad, I had the folks at Amazon send me two books and two CDs.

"The Yiddish Policeman's Union" by Michael Chabon. Very good. Hardboiled Jewish Speculative Fiction. I'm not sure how else to describe it. It starts with a speculative premise: In WWII, the war in Europe took an extra year to end (with an atomic bomb in Berlin). Therefore in 1948, Israel was not strong enough to hold off the onslaught and was wiped, bloodily, off the map. The United States offered up the west coast of Alaska as a temporary place of refuge. The Jewish "Sitka" settlement grows to two million people, with Yiddish as the common tongue. Sixty years later, the territory is about to revert back to the U.S. and the protagonist, a broken-down Sitka cop named Landesman, is trying to solve one last murder that nobody cares about.

I like it a lot.

"Atlantic Cousins: Benjamin Franklin and his Visionary Friends" has been out for a few years and somehow I was late in getting a copy. Jack Fruchtman writes gracefully clear, eminently readable biographies that are more about the thinking than the lives of his subjects. In fact it's not entirely accurate to call them biographies at all, in the traditional sense. They are sort of... intellectual histories. This book doesn't concern itself so much with the minutiae of Franklin's life as with exploring the influences on, and from, his long life as a public intellectual. It reminds me in many ways of another excellent intellectual history, "The Metaphysical Club," about the common threads and influences running through the work of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Charles Peirce, John Dewey, and William James. Hell, read them both. I am under no ethical obligations to make full disclosures in this blog, but I'll note that Jack Fruchtman was my poli-sci professor in college and later a personal friend.

While reading these books, I've been listening to "Evil Urges" by My Morning Jacket. Also excellent. And the superdeluxe re-issue of Whiskeytown's "Stranger's Almanac," which has been excellent for years and continues to be so in this re-issue with a second disk full of extra, also very cool, music.

Writing about music is sort of like dancing about architecture, which doesn't stop a lot of people from making a really good living killing trees in the name of describing music. My Morning Jacket is fun, smart, accessible pop. Whiskeytown didn't know it was helping define Americana and Alt-Country when they made Stranger's Almanac back in 1997, but they did. If you like that sound at all, Stranger's Almanac and Uncle Tupelo's "No Depression" are more or less mandatory listening.

As an aside: I really hate the term "alt-country." But I find myself using it (and also "alt-bluegrass" when it comes to the Avett Brothers and a couple of others) because if you just say "country," people think you mean the unlistenable bilge that is played on Clear Channel's country music stations. Instead of calling "real" country "alt-country," why don't we come up with a new name for the horrifying crap being churned out of Nashville these days? I'm looking at you, Rascal Flatts/Toby Keith/Kenny Chesney/etc. I am hoping to suggestions for the new name for this music -- I'm leaning toward "vapid, soul-killing flatulence," but that doesn't really roll off the tongue, so if anyone can think of something catchier...