/
The miserable news for readers and writers alike keeps coming in the first month of 2009. First, the news that Fantasy & Science Fiction is going from a monthly publication to bi-monthly; then the news that there will be no 2008 edition of The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror; and then, on a more local level, the news that Harry Schwartz Bookstores, the oldest chain of locally-owned bookstores in Milwaukee, will be closing their doors in March.

Magazines, anthologies, and bookstores come and go all the time, but these are the biggies. From a purely selfish writer’s perspective, those first two are hard blows since they’re the gold standard in speculative fiction circles; from a reader’s perspective, the news flat out sucks.

School starts again tomorrow and I’m spending my Sunday finalizing what I’ll be doing in my English 101 class this week. The first couple sessions are pretty standard but I’ll be trying some new stuff this semester to use D2L, our online course management software, to try and generate online discussions. More on that as the situation develops.

Also, good news: while reading Todorov’s The Fantastic: A Structural Approach, I realized that I’m slowly but surely coming to grips with the critical questions swirling around the various definitions of postmodernism, magical realism, and the fantastic, and I’m also occasionally able to link these various takes within the larger literary theories of archetypal criticism, structuralism, and post-structuralism.

The bad news? Very, very few people will ever know what the hell I’m talking about and fewer still will ever care.

As 2008 turned into 2009, the Premier League suddenly got a whole lot less interesting. Chelski are diabolical, Rafa Benitez has shown his true colors by fielding conservative teams that can only muster draws, and Man Ure has taken over top spot. Even with their injury crisis, it’s very, very hard to see Man Ure slipping up and having either Liverpool or Chelski making up ground. The race for fourth should still be interesting, and the bottom half of the table is crazy.

I suspect that early season relegation favorites West Brom and Stoke will indeed go down but more due to their limited squad size rather than their teams’ respective abilities. That leaves, oh, about ten or eleven teams (!) threatened with the drop. At this stage it’s almost impossible to say who that odd team out will be, since so many squads are capable of Jekyll and Hyde performances. If I had to bet, I’d say Sunderland—especially if Kenwyn Jones moves to Spurs, or anywhere else for that matter.

I’ve had the (mis)fortune of watching Spurs a few times this season, most recently yesterday’s FA Cup match against Man Ure. They’re actually not that dire of a team but, above all, they seem flighty. What they need, above and beyond all else, is a rock to anchor the midfield. If they had that, I think 80% of their problems would be solved. Palacios was a good buy since he’s the kind of burly player Spurs need, and Defoe is handy too. The defense is shockingly poor, and Modric can’t do what he does best without an enforcer right behind him ready to break some legs. I think they’ll stay up, but only just.

My co-ed indoor team lost again on Friday but there are signs of improvement. In my first two games we lost 11-2 and 11-5, and then I missed the next three due to a last-minute injury I picked up and then vacation. Last week I heard we lost 6-4 (1) and then this past Friday, we lost 8-4 (although it should have been 8-5 as we had a goal cheaply disallowed).

When all is said and done, I feel our team’s biggest problem is the lack of one-touch passing. This is actually a two-fold problem of people not moving to get open, and people not hitting quick passes for the brief instant they are open. Whether this is lack of vision or lack of ability, I can’t say. We had more composure than any previous game, but we conceded most of our goals after bad turnovers. Sometimes it was because no one was open, and sometimes it was because the player on the ball dawdled and got closed down. Bad turnovers make you run more, get more tired, and therefore play worse; conversely, accurate one-touch passing makes the ball do the work and your running is limited to short bursts to get open.

While I honestly think this is crux of the problem, pointing it out doesn’t solve anything. It’s like saying the solution to scoring is to shoot hard, low, and in the corners. It’s not something you learn overnight. And despite the obligatory chippy play and tough guys getting in each others’ faces (some of my teammates take losing personally), I’m still having fun and getting exercise. Which is kinda the point, for me at least.

And in the personal victory column, I am also completely done with getting my digital music collection in order. Just about every CD we own has been ripped at 192kb quality and the best of it has been transferred to my iPod via Media Monkey, as I have officially abandoned iTunes.

I’m still generally dissatisfied with my 80 GB iPod classic though. Albums from Mississippi Fred McDowell and Robert Johnson that play fine on my computer still skip on the iPod, which is highly annoying since I downloaded both of them from legit online sources and have no CD to re-rip them from. An MP3 repair utility fixed some of the Fred but none of the Rob. This is some of my favorite reading/writing music and is therefore doubly lamentable.

Current Mood: Okay |