Full disclosure: I consider Rob a friend, though I by no means claim membership in the Circle, and Rob knows that I have enough respect for him to be unflinchingly honest in my assessment of this book—indeed, because I respect him, I could not behave otherwise. (Besides, he knows enough of my secrets to be dangerous...)

As I said recently in my post on Nick Tosches' Country, one of the great joys of good music writing is that you can enjoy it without necessarily being a fan of the subject matter. As Rob would be the first to tell you, if you were to draw a Venn diagram of our tastes, outside of the literary world there would be very little overlap. (The Grateful Dead, Rob? Really?) I can't claim to be a Tramp, or even a particular fan of Bruce Springsteen, though I don't dislike his music by any stretch. He just happens to fall at the intersection of a couple of musical styles and techniques I don't connect with easily (bar band rock, big band/ensemble rock, '80s pop, and rock 'n' roll featuring a saxophone), so at best I'm a casual listener. I'm at least ten years younger than Rob, so to me The Boss only figures in my consciousness as an '80s pop act who put out a few good songs around the time I was starting grade school. I think before reading Walk Like A Man, the only Springsteen songs in my whole collection were "Streets of Philadelphia," from the Philadelphia soundtrack, and a live cover of "Merry Christmas Baby," from 1987's A Very Special Christmas multi-artist anthology. To give you an idea of how significant that is, my mp3 collection currently contains 31,156 songs on 2,692 albums by 1,494 artists, for a total running time of 81 days, 15 hours, 18 minutes and 53 seconds. That does not include my physical CD collection, which runs in excess of 500 discs, last I checked. But: as I'm writing this, I'm listening to Rob's mix-tape from the book (including a high-quality, audio-only version of the performance of "Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)" from the Arizona Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix, recorded on July 8, 1978), and it's been on repeat all day.

Walk Like A Man is a strange beast. It's part Springsteen biography, part memoir, and part love-letter, both to Springsteen and to Rob's younger self. The strangest part is that it doesn't just work, it makes perfect sense. I'm actually a little pissed at Rob for thinking of the structure first. The book opens with a short, context-providing biography of Springsteen that I found incredibly useful, though I think it exaggerates his importance as an artist, albeit only by a tiny bit. It then goes into that beautiful mix-tape structure, explaining first the significance of the song (and the particular version of it Rob is referencing) in Springsteen's catalogue, and then how it figures in his own life. Rob is a pretty friendly, open, and candid guy when you hang out with him, and reading the memoir portions of these chapters has almost exactly the same feel as sitting across the table from him over a pint (or in my case, a whisky sour). He's not self-aggrandizing, and rather upfront about his failings, and often not the hero in his own stories. But he's not unnecessarily hard on himself either, and if I didn't know Rob already, I'd want to after reading Walk Like A Man.

Though clearly not as experienced a professional music writer as some others (at first I worried it may have been a bad idea to read this immediately after veteran Tosches' Country), his passion for Springsteen's music and for being a Tramp is evident on every page, and it's infectious, more than making up for his lack of experience in the genre. Walk Like A Man even convinced me to track down a copy of Nebraska (1982), an album that, based on Rob's descriptions, seems like something I might connect with a little better than his more well-known albums. True passion for art never excludes, it always allows for a way in, and that's a big part of what Rob offers here: a way in, to Springsteen's music, and to himself.

I've never really had the same kind of obsession with an artist that Rob has for Springsteen (and to a lesser extent, The Hold Steady), though I've come close, with Led Zeppelin and The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. My main obstacle seems to have been timing. John Bonham died just over a year after I was born, and JSBX rarely tours in Canada, and pretty much never at all-ages venues, meaning I didn't have a chance to see them live until I was in my early 20s, and by then they were just starting to enter a pretty serious artistic decline, which a decade later they still haven't climbed out of. (Plus I grew up in a town that, while slightly bigger than Agassiz, was considerably more isolated, and traveling to shows, especially in the US, could easily cost a month and a half of my salary as a teenaged kitchen supervisor at the local A&W.) The closest I've come to that kind of obsession that I was able to actually indulge, in fact, is with a TV series called Community, but that doesn't lend itself to the same kind of pilgrimage-type behaviour. However I could easily see myself putting together a similar set of memories and musical exegeses with songs from a variety of artists, and I think that's why this book really works, despite being hard to pin down conceptually in a traditional sense; because as Rob says in his introduction: "The term 'mix-tape' is a bit of an anachronism, but the spirit behind it isn't." It's hard to describe that spirit when it's been reshaped into something like a book, but it's something I think we all recognize and understand when we see it, regardless of the form.

Rob's tapped into something special here, whether you're a Springsteen fan or not, and I regret waiting so long to read it.

Here's the deal, kids. Nobody's been cancelled yet, except 30 Rock. Here's what went down:

There has been talk on Twitter and blogs and whatnot that 30 Rock was getting a 13 episode season for next year, which would be its last. That was confirmed today by TV By the Numbers, which in case you didn't know, is probably the most reliable venue for this kind of news. There was speculation (and I can't remember where I first saw it, but it may actually have been at TVBTN) that Community and some other sitcoms would be returning with similarly shortened orders. No announcement is planned on NBC's other sitcoms until Monday, though it doesn't look good for shows like Whitney (which is a guilty pleasure of mine).

The link-baiting idiots at something called Opposing Views, a site nobody had heard of until today, are reporting that rumour as fact for two sitcoms: Community, and Parks & Recreation. It's not a bad guess for Community, which—while being the best and most innovative comedy on TV in at least a decade—is a ratings underdog despite a recent post-hiatus uptick (even beating American Idol at least once). Besides, Dan Harmon would be Tweeting his ass off right now if that information had already been released. (And as of his most recent tweets he has no idea what these people are talking about.) As for Parks & Recreation: It's not a powerhouse, but is still one of NBC's few ratings winners right now, and nobody has suggested it's even potentially on the chopping block, making the rumour not only unlikely to be true, but bordering a little on the absurd. (I can't imagine they'd cancel it to bank on Matt Perry and Anne Heche.)

The lesson here? Cool your jets, and don't spread rumours. They might be true, but for right now your mourning is premature. Except for 30 Rock.

One of the things I like about good music writing is, somewhat surprisingly, something it has in common with good sports writing: you don't have to be a fan of the subject matter to enjoy it. For the most part, I don't care for country music. I like Johnny Cash, two or three bluegrass acts, and a handful of early country performers who would just as easily be classified as "roots" or even blues musicians (Tosches takes a few not-very-convincing steps towards explaining this in Country, but the truth is that for a long time the only significant difference between country and blues was the race of the performer), but for the most part it's not a genre I connect with. I did, however, get a lot of satisfaction out of reading Country.

Country covers, or claims to cover, the darker, stranger bits of country music's history, but given that it was first published in 1977 and social norms have shifted a fair bit since then, a lot of what would have been strange and shocking at the time of the book's release now seems rather tame. Tosches has a gift for presenting the personalities of early country music (some big, some obscure) without judgement—or without much judgment, anyway—looking at them mostly in terms of their role in the development of the music and the industry. That Emmett Miller (one of the most obscure, but also most important musicians in the genre, even if only for the profound influence he wound up having on Hank Williams) built his career around minstrelsy isn't used by Tosches to diminish the quality of his songs (some of which are quite good) or the impact he had, as might be done if the book were written today. Instead Tosches is straightforward about it; yes it was racist, yes that means it's morally objectionable and we can't condone it, but it was a real thing that real people did, and it can't be ignored, so let's take a serious look at its place in country music history that can acknowledge the moral difficulties without everything being about those difficulties. It's a fine line to walk, but Tosches manages it. In fact, there is an entire chapter about the history and development of minstrelsy in country music (an interesting fact, that Tosches backs up with an impressive run-through of artists and their work, is that it was more popular in the north than the south, and most of the performers were themselves northerners) that pulls no punches when it comes to some of the racism that was a part of the scene at the time. (Tosches doesn't get much into contemporary music, so there's no examination of race issues in late '70s country; he does, however, add in the preface that he initially didn't want to write that chapter, but in hindsight sees it as one of the strongest and most important parts of the book.)

A special bit of fun for people like me is when Tosches traces the origins of a song, or a playing style, right back to the Seventeenth or Eighteenth Century (or in one memorable case, right back to Ancient Greece). It turns out—and this surprised me, though it makes sense in retrospect—that the slide/steel guitar technique originated in 19^th Century Hawaii.

Tosches has a tremendous gift for metaphor, which is all that much better because he likes to keep them simple, and the level or research and scholarship that went into Country is astonishing (even just the work done on Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Sun Records). I would have a hard time tracking down most of that information in this day and age, with access to the Internet and my superior Google kung-fu; I can't imagine having to do it in a time before the widespread use of cassette tapes and FAX machines. (I did find myself struggling a couple of times to fight against the atemporal view of pop culture encouraged by my heavy Internet usage; Tosches shows a fair bit of disdain for Johnny Cash in the book, but I had to remind myself that it was written at a time when Cash had for years been producing the worst work of his career, and he had yet to begin the genre-defying American Recordings series that would reinvigorate his work and cement his reputation as one of popular music's most powerful and respected artists.) Even if I hadn't loved the book I would have walked away with an enormous list of roots musicians and recordings to investigate.

I stumbled across Country because of a Twitter conversation I had quite a few months ago with William Gibson. We were discussing blues, and the country-rock group Drive-By Truckers, and I mentioned how it didn't strike me as his kind of music. He told me that, growing up in the South as he did, it was hard not to have a certain kind of relationship to it, and recommended I track down a copy of Country. It took forever—the Toronto Public Library only has a single reference copy—but was well worth the wait. It's some of the best music writing I've ever read, and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in music of any kind, whether you're a country fan or not.

Appropriately titled, the common denominator across nearly all of the stories in Toronto-based author Derek Hayes' first collection is a character who is so wrapped up in themselves, has internalized their neuroses to such a degree, that they have become unable to see the reality of their position in the world and the truth of their relationships to others. Many are merely oblivious (see Steven W. Beattie's recent blog post on "Green Jerseys" for an excellent in-depth look at a particular example), while others have deeper issues. Anxiety is a constant companion to nearly all of Hayes' characters.

In "Maybe You Should Get Back There," Max lives with his girlfriend Nadia, and Chris, an old friend from school, and can't stop imagining that they are having, or want to have, an affair. He obsesses over the dynamics of their relationship, giving undue weight to casual conversations and comments, leading to circular reasoning and a trap of jealousy and paranoia that should look familiar to anyone with trust issues (whether their source is from a real betrayal, or something more internal). As the reader becomes more invested in Max's voice, he stops coming off as quite so unreasonable, and one starts to wonder—what if there really is something going on between Nadia and Chris? We're snapped out of it when Max takes significant action on little more than suspicion, but by then we've gone through a whole spectrum of emotions with him, and the story takes on extra shades of complexity. It's no longer just about Max's jealousy and selfishness, and the isolation they cause, but also about his inability to address his fears directly, and Chris and Nadia's complete unawareness of his deteriorating emotional state.

Some of the pieces in The Maladjusted are not so sophisticated; "Inertia" feels like something I've read a dozen times before, ripped straight from the CanLit Book of Themes for Urban Writers, while "A Feel For America," seems disjointed and unfinished.

I'm going to agree with Steven in his National Post review and say that the end of "That's Very Observant of You," one of my favourite stories in the collection, is unconvincing, but otherwise it's an astounding exploration of how anxiety can be crippling, not through big events and responsibilities, but rather the minutiae of daily life, and how liberating that can make small achievements feel. Despite the two stories being entirely different, I couldn't help but link it in my mind to Rebecca Rosenblum's wonderful "Route 99," from her debut collection, Once.

If I had one complaint about the book as a whole, it's that there were times I felt like I was reading the same story over and over again. Hayes is so invested in his core themes of alienation and disorder that there is often little room for anything else, and by the end of the sixteenth story, I was definitely ready to see something else from him.

Full disclosure: I was the copyeditor for the cover art of Soon This Will All Be Gone, but I had no involvement with the music; indeed, I haven't even met the band in person.

I went to see catl with a friend of mine a little over a year ago. I had just heard With the Lord For Cowards You Will Find No Place, and events had arranged themselves so that they were doing a show at the Horseshoe at a time when I actually had the money to go. We sat through a couple of warm-up acts, one band so forgettable I can't even remember what kind of music they played, and another a slightly better than average dad-rock band, the sort of unit you expect Jim Belushi to front on his off days. Our conversation was not interrupted.

And then it was catl's turn.

I've been to some pretty epic live shows, from big stadium acts like the Rolling Stones, to tiny indie bands that tore up the joint but never managed to put out an album. I once reckoned that the best show I'd ever been to, as hard as it might be to believe, was Econoline Crush on the B-stage at Edgefest '97 in Winnipeg. They were a mediocre studio band at best, but their live act was a thing unto itself, alive, and a little bit on fire. I got kicked in the face twice during their set, and was nearly concussed as crowd-surfing filmmaker (and old friend) Karl Richter slammed into the back of my head. It was a throbbing mass of flesh and blood and noise. It was glorious, and far and away the best thing I'd ever seen on stage. Until I saw catl.

I didn't know it was possible to fill a space with that much sound, especially not from such tiny amps on such a tiny stage. It was like a fluid, swirling up from below, getting not just in your ears, but in your eyes and mouth and nose and down into your lungs, getting at your soul through capillaries as yet undiscovered by science.

Jamie Fleming was sitting up there with his guitar, rocking back and forth and nodding along with the rhythm, as righteous a shouter as any Toronto has ever produced. When my friend saw Sarah K. shaking at the keys like some sexy rock 'n' roll faith healer, little smoky jets of light erupting like fireworks from her sequined dress, she turned to me and said, I want to BE her. Johnny LaRue was somewhere in the back, steady-rolling and inscrutable. It was raw and dangerous and beautiful.

So that's their live show. What about this new album, Soon This Will All Be Gone?

The intro and outro (oh, how I miss the word "coda") are scratchy, tinny covers of the great Furry Lewis and Lead Belly. They frame the album perfectly; they are irreverent and playful without being disrespectful, or worse, ironic.

The album opens properly with "Gold Tooth Shine," which is the clear choice for a first single—well, they've released a video for it anyway; I don't think they do traditional singles—because aside from being a crapload of fun, it has a strong connection to their last album, and also showcases a lot of what's great about their new direction, like the killer dynamic between Jamie and Sarah K. on vocals, and a more full studio sound.

Most of Side A is original tracks, and make for a pretty good set of party tunes. There isn't a weak one in the bunch, but "Gotta Thing For You" is the stand-out cut of the side, deep and growly and right smack in that sweet groove where all good jump blues lives, with the hard-driving "Cinderblocks" not too far behind.

Side B is all covers but one, and contains my three favourite cuts, including "He'll Make A Way," which is probably the best thing on the whole album. It captures the band's versatility, lets everybody do their thing and shake loose a bit, but still digs way down deep to the emotional core of country blues. It's risky including a Robert Johnson cover on an album, because you're pretty much guaranteeing it will be the best song, unless of course you also include a Skip James cover, in which case even the Devil's own guitarist would have to settle for number two. But catl nails it, and makes it their own, which is in itself no mean feat.

"5 Miles," the lone original track on Side B, is notable for being the most foot-tapping, head-nodding song on the album, and I think it will also eventually be recognized as the the most memorable and fun of the uptempo numbers.

"Get Outta My Car," a Hasil Adkins cover, is emerging as the obvious critical favourite, in no small part because they handle it like old hands, but also I think because it was an obvious direction for the band to go in, and doesn't offer the same remarkable surprises as a cut like "Cocaine," a slow-burning number that sees Sarah K. taking the lead on vocals. It was one of the best creative decisions the band could have made. She'll never win American Idol, but that sort of voice would work against her; it would be too polished, too sterile and insincere. Instead she's gentle and raw by turns, strong but never soft, belting out God's own motherfucking Truth like a blues singer should.

I really didn't think that catl could put out a record better than With the Lord For Cowards You Will Find No Place, which remains one of the finest blues-punk albums I've heard, and one of the best new blues albums since the Black Keys' Chulahoma (an album made up entirely of Junior Kimbrough covers), but Soon This Will All Be Gone has more than lived up to that challenge.

Here is where I post links, so you can follow the band on Twitter and buy the album.

I mentioned in an earlier post that this year I'm going to make an effort to reacquaint myself with my nerdy roots, and true to my word I've already begun in earnest. I've finished the first book from my three-volume H.P. Lovecraft collection, three more Ian Rankin novels (a different kind of nerdy) and this morning while waiting for my alarm to sound, I polished off The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers. "But wait," you say (don't argue, I heard you quite clearly), "the title of this post is Steampunk 101; that's pretty specifically nerdy." Well, yes it is. Allow me to explain.

Last year I reviewed two novels, Alex and the Ironic Gentleman, by Adrienne Kress, and Triptych, by J.M. Frey (both of which were excellent), and I have—sort of, in a very limited way—started to get to know both authors online and that, in turn, got me interested in a corner of the nerdy world that I haven't paid much attention to: steampunk. (Because they are clearly interested and involved in it, and one of the best parts of getting to know new people is getting exposed to new things.) I've read a few steampunk novels before, which I'll get to in a minute, so I put the call out for a list of books that might qualify as a kind of "Steampunk 101" reading program. I put together a list based on the recommendations I got (here's a post on Kress' blog that was particularly helpful), which I will be adding to as I discover what it is about the subgenre I do and do not like. I'll get to the list, but first, let's talk about how I'm coming into it.

The first steampunk novel I read was William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's 1990 collaboration, The Difference Engine, the title apparently responsible for bringing popular attention to the subgenre. It's the closest thing Gibson has to a "difficult" book, and to be honest I found it a struggle to get acclimatized both times that I read it (the last being a good seven years ago), and I remember almost nothing specific about it, except that it took a long time to get going, and then became quite good. I'll probably read it again soon, if for no other reason than because I find it a bit ridiculous that I remember so little.

The other two that I've read are Gordon Dahlquist's The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters and its first sequel, The Dark Volume. Dahlquist said (in an interview a few years ago with a Johnny Depp fansite, of all places) that he's working on a third book to round out the series, but given how enormous the advance was on the first two—two million dollars, according to Google—and how poorly they sold versus expectations, no third book appears to be forthcoming. The rumour mill seems to think that, essentially, because an acquisitions editor saw something good and went a little nuts with the advance, no one is going to touch book three. If that's true, and I want to emphasize the if, it's a crying shame, because Dahlquist's first two were fun as hell.

They follow a trio of protagonists, Miss Celeste Temple, Doctor Svenson, and Cardinal Chang, who on the surface could not be more different. Svenson is attached to a diplomatic mission, Miss Temple is a wealthy young woman (initially) in search of a respectably middle-class husband, and Cardinal Change (whose real name is never revealed; he's called Cardinal Chang because he wears red leather and has unusual scarring around his eyes), and unusually intelligent and skilled... well, I'm not sure what you'd call him; he's kind of a cross between a detective and an assassin. Imagine an even more violent, amoral Batman, but instead of living in a Twentieth Century mansion, he lives in one of Victorian London's rookeries.

Each chapter is from the (third person limited) point of view of one of the three protagonists, moves like a rocket, and then ends on a cliff-hanger, making them two of the most fast-paced books I've read in years, despite being 760 and 508 pages, respectively. Neither book pretends to be high art, but Dahlquist does an excellent job of not only giving each protagonist a unique voice, but an interesting and complex one—although as their interests converge and diverge, they do tend to work in unison a bit more than perhaps they should, becoming "the gang" a bit too easily.

But all that aside, there's a lot of interesting stuff going on with power relationships in the two books, and not just as a natural consequence of having three protagonists from different social classes. The plot is built on cascading layers (is that right? Maybe cascading through layers?) of control, or efforts to manipulate relationships in order to gain, maintain, or exert power, from the halls of government, to personal relationships (especially, in some really fucked up ways, power over women, although Miss Temple manages to turn that on its head—she starts out as a Damsel in Distress, but one with considerable pluck, and by the end is a force to be reckoned with). There's a kind of Eyes Wide Shut element to a lot of what goes on (although it gets considerably weirder, and there is some seriously hand-waving to explain some of the "science" as science), and while the books can be smutty in a fun way at times, it can also get kind of dark, which I'm told is not entirely usual for steampunk. Which is sort of odd to me, given how conflicted the Victorians were about sex. On the public face of things they were every bit as uptight as the stereotypes would suggest, but they were also obsessed with brothels to a pretty much unprecedented degree, and had a thriving child prostitution industry. It's not that the Victorians were "okay" with child abuse, it's more that so long as a) the child was of sufficiently low station, and b) somebody got paid for the child's, uh, services, it wouldn't have even occurred to most of them to think of it as abuse. That's splitting hairs, I know, but the Victorians were almost schizophrenic in their attitudes about children, and those attitudes were as much wrapped up in their ideas about class as they were in their ideas about morality. (If you want to read a novel that addresses this particular brand of Victorian hypocrisy directly, I suggest John MacLachlan Gray's excellent White Stone Day—and my fellow Downton Abbey fans should recognize that not only is this the world that Robert Crawley grew up in, it's also the social order the Lady Dowager wants so desperately to preserve.) Anyway, Dahlquist's two novel are almost fever-inducingly good.

So having read all of that (and then Peter Ackroyd's amazing psychogeography / psychohistory London: The Biography, which I think is a must-read for anyone who wants to write or read about London; it will profoundly enrich your other reading experiences, among other things), and having solicited my recommendations, I started my Steampunk 101 project with The Anubis Gates, by Tim Powers. It's considered not only one of the foundational texts of the subgenre, but also one of the best. It's one of those protagonist-travels-in-to-another-realm/time fantasy novels, which, I have to tell you normally really fucking suck, I mean, hard. Think of The Fionavar Tapestry. It's a fish-out-of-water thing for sure, and it gives the reader somebody to connect with without a whole lot of work for the author (in fact the author would have to work pretty hard to screw that up) but it can also be used to give a character expert-level status they wouldn't normally possess, and otherwise Mary Sue the hell out of them (once again, see The Fionavar Tapestry for the mother of all examples). Before we go any further, I'm going to say that The Anubis Gates is the exception to the sucking thing. Oh yes, and you would not believe my surprise to find out that it was a fantasy novel, and not science fiction, as it was my understanding that steampunk was explicitly a cyberpunk offshoot, so I was expecting closely observed cultural details with particular focus on how technology fits into that whole mess. There was all sorts of cultural grime in the corners of the novel, but instead of technology, there was magic. Magic! Blew my goddamn mind. And now, as I look over my list, I see things like zombies. Well, okay.

The Anubis Gates wound up being a great deal of fun once you get past the sluggish, overblown prose of the first fifty pages (it was intended to be a dark and exciting opening, but it didn't quite work), and Powers did a remarkably good job interweaving non-heroic (or non-mythmaking, if you prefer) versions of several Romantic poets into a time-traveling adventure with some genuine swash-buckling. Powers does an interesting thing with a fictional poet named William Ashbless (who is in reality the consciousness of Brendan Doyle, our protagonist from 1983, trapped in the body of a guy named Brennan, also from the future), a character who also appears in a novel by James P. Blaylock, and publishes poems that have no author. Ancient Egyptian magic, gypsies, psychotic clowns, time-traveling academics, magical clones and a body-jumping magician who sprouts an insane amount of hair; how could you possibly resist?

Anyway, as my first foray into a serious introduction to steampunk was pretty successful, here's my list, which I expect to get longer, in no particular order (most of it comes from J.M. Frey and Adrienne Kress, but I also did some independent research):

• Boneshaker, by Cherie Priest (Dreadnought was the original recommendation, but Boneshaker is apparently the first in a loosely-connected set of a novels, and I like to read things in order)
• Mainspring, by Jay Lake
• Leviathan, by Scott Westerfeld
• Soulless, by Gail Carriger
• The Drawing of the Dark, by Tim Powers

So last night's post about the blues was sort of accidental. I had intended to write about what I listen to when I read. For years I was the sort of person who could read anywhere, regardless of what was going on around me. In university, when reading suddenly became important to my future (in terms of my career, I mean; I'm a book critic—as in, reviewer—now, but I once wanted to teach university-level English Literature and work as an academic critic/theorist), I lost the ability to read in the same room as someone watching television. And then I couldn't read while listening to music with lyrics. And then I couldn't read while listening to any sort of music.

Most of that has passed, and I can once again listen to music while I read, although anything too heavy or uptempo, or with complicated lyrics I like to get lost in, is still a no-go. It's as though they occupy the same space in my brain as whatever it is I'm reading.

But anyway, I thought I'd give you a brief list of some albums I like to listen to when I read (my total "Reading" playlist is 1,983 songs, or approximately 6 days of continuous listening, so I won't be including it all), and if you like you can make suggestions for your own additions in the comments.

• Various Artists - In the Mood For Love Soundtrack
• Emily Haines & The Soft Skeleton - What Is Free to a Good Home?
• Alpha - Pepper
• Various Artists - Cinematic: Classic Film Music Remixed
• Cliff Martinez - Solaris Soundtrack
• Kronos Quartet - Pieces of Africa
• Robert Plant & Alison Krauss - Raising Sand
• Alexandre Desplat - Birth Soundtrack
• Andrew Bird - Armchair Apocrypha
• Matt Sweeney & Bonnie 'Prince' Billy - Superwolf
• Esthero - We R In Need Of A Musical Revolution
• Headless Heroes - The Silence of Love
• José González - In Our Nature
• Barbara Morgenstern - Nichts Muss
• Masha Qrella - Unsolved Remains
• Massive Attack - Mezzanine
• Shugo Tokumaru - Night Piece
• Sparklehorse - Dark Night of the Soul
• True Widow - True Widow
• Warpaint - Exquisite Corpse
• The London Haydn Quartet - Haydn: String Quartets, Op. 20
• Auryn Quartet - String Quartets Op. 76, nos. 1 - 6 (Haydn)
• Hesperion XXI cond. Jordi Savall - Luigi Boccherini (1743-1805): Fandango, Sinfonie & Musica Notturna di Madrid
• Various Artists - Master & Commander: The Far Side of the World Soundtrack
• Vangelis - Blade Runner Soundtrack (Extended Bootleg Version)

Again, I'd love to hear your recommendations in the comments.

It's no secret that I'm a huge blues fan. An argument could be made that the blues, as a genre, is at the core of all modern Western popular music, from jazz, rock 'n' roll, and country, right up to dubstep and digital hardcore. But that's not why I love it. There are so many things about it that appeal to me it's hard to know where to start. It's a music that has remained vital, emotionally and spiritually, for more than a century, maintaining both a strong connection to its roots and originating forms, and at the same time embracing new styles and techniques. Charlie Patton, who died in 1934 somewhere in his forties (nobody knows for sure how old he was), could rise from the dead and would be able to hear catl or The Black Keys and not only understand their music, but recognize it as his own.

The prevailing stereotype, which derives largely from '60s revivalist fans, is that it is a music of hardship and despair, sounding all too often like a cheap knockoff of Muddy Waters' spectacular "Mannish Boy" (a song full of raw sexual energy and the irony of a grown man gently mocking the näiveté of his younger, more cocksure self, and an answer song to Bo Diddley's "I'm a Man," itself written in response to Willie Dixon's "Hoochie Coochie Man"). These stereotypes certainly ring true in particular corners of the blues world, but only if one listens uncritically.

The blues is also a music of spiritual revelation, of race and class struggles, of love and sex and a whisky-throated howl from the back of a juke-joint on a hot Saturday night. It is also a music of honesty and reflection. Rock 'n' roll, the most famous of the blues' bastard-children (and really, originally just a name made up to trick white people into buying R&B records), is about ego. Rock 'n' roll cries out, look how great I am, and says I love you because you are beautiful, because you're perfect, and sometimes, I can't believe you would hurt me. The blues won't tell you these lies. The blues understands atonement. For every blues song saying you've done me wrong, there is one that says I know that I've done wrong. It asks for forgiveness, knowing it doesn't deserve any. The blues says you aren't that pretty, but neither am I; you can be spiteful and I can be cruel, but I love you anyway, and I'm asking you to love me too. The blues knows you aren't perfect, and it doesn't give a shit, as long as you tell the truth, even when it's hard. Maybe especially when it's hard. The blues is honest, and it's raw.

If you know the blues mostly from artists like B.B. King and Buddy Guy, then I'm about to blow your mind. They are great performers, well-liked and respected for good reason. But they are slick and polished in a way that I think doesn't reflect the core of the genre, or the power it can really have. Last year a friend of mine asked me to put together a small sampler of blues songs, to give her a sense of the genre. I wound up making a five-disc, one hundred song collection, mostly of country blues (but also some proto-blues, blues-punk, and even rock 'n' roll), that I think is a good introduction to what the blues can really be. That shows its raw side, its love of strong drink and causing trouble and licking sweat from its partner's neck. I called it Drinking, Fighting, and Fucking: Lessons in the Real Folk Blues. I can't distribute it here, because that would be illegal, but I'm going to give you the playlist, so you can assemble it yourself.

This is important music, and I hope you'll seek it out.

Disc One

1. Rosie - C.B. And Axe Gang
2. Hard Time Killin' Floor Blues - Skip James
3. Ain't Gonna Study War No More - Lead Belly
4. Evil Blues - Mance Lipscomb
5. Down The Dirt Road Blues - Charlie Patton
6. Dry Land Blues - Furry Lewis & Frank Stokes
7. Stop Breakin' Down Blues - Robert Johnson
8. Shake 'Em On Down - Bukka White
9. Three Women Blues - Blind Willie McTell
10. Catfish Blues - Jack Owens & Bud Spires
11. I Got Mine - Furry Lewis & Frank Stokes
12. The Panama Limited - Bukka White
13. When I Lay My Burden Down - Mississippi Fred McDowell
14. C & A Blues - Big Bill Broonzy
15. It Hurts Me Too - Tampa Red
16. Drop Down Mama - Sleepy John Estes
17. I'm A Steady Rollin' Man - Robert Johnson
18. When Can I Change My Clothes? - Bukka White
19. Motherless Children - Felix Dukes, Mississippi Fred McDowell
20. Furry's Blues - Furry Lewis & Frank Stokes
21. Cross Cut Saw Blues - Tony Hollins
22. Working Man Blues - Sleepy John Estes
23. You Can't Get Stuff No More - Blind Willie McTell
24. I Am In The Heavenly Way - Bukka White
25. Me And The Devil Blues - Robert Johson
26. Midnight Special - Lead Belly

Disc Two

1. Jesus on the Mainline - Jame Shorty, Viola James & church congregation
2. Baby, Please Don't Go - Mississippi Fred McDowell
3. A to Z Blues - Blind Willie McTell
4. The Atlanta Special - Bukka White
5. Sweet Blood Call - Louisiana Red
6. Suffer - Jimmy McCracklin
7. Catfish Blues - R.L. Burnside
8. I Love You (Solo) - Asie Payton
9. Motherless Children Have A Hard Time - Blind Willie McTell
10. Goin' Down to the River - Mississippi Fred McDowell, Fanny Davis & Miles Pratcher
11. Down in the Alley - Big Bill Broonzy
12. Sissy Man - Josh White (As Pinewood Tom)
13. Shake 'Em On Down - Mississippi Fred McDowell
14. Boogie Chillen - John Lee Hooker
15. Hoochie Coochie Man - Muddy Waters
16. Mama Talk To Your Daughter - J.B. Lenoir
17. Messin' With the Kid - Earl Hooker & Junior Wells
18. Big Boss Man - Jimmy Reed
19. Killing Floor - Howlin' Wolf
20. Dust My Broom - Elmore James
21. Bring It To Jerome - Bo Diddley
22. Prison Bars All Around Me - Earl Hooker & Junior Wells
23. Mannish Boy - Muddy Waters

Disc Three

1. Nobody's Fault But Mine - Mance Lipscomb
2. Black Mattie - Robert Belfour
3. Standing in My Doorway Crying - Jessie Mae Hemphill
4. Peaches - R.L. Burnside
5. It Must Have Been the Devil - Jack Owens and Bud Spires
6. You Got to Move - Mississippi Fred McDowell
7. Please Tell Me You Love Me - Asie Payton
8. If You Like Fat Women - CeDell Davis
9. You Better Run - Junior Kimbrough & The Soul Blues Boys
10. I Found Out - Nathaniel Mayer
11. Jumper Hangin' on the Line - R.L. Burnside
12. She Asked Me So I Told Her - T-Model Ford
13. Done Got Old - Heartless Bastards
14. Teardrop - Magic Slim
15. I Got My Eyes On You - Robert Belfour
16. Have Mercy on Me - The Black Keys
17. Burning Hell - Canned Heat & John Lee Hooker

Disc Four

1. Back to the Bridge - Asie Payton
2. Keep Your Hands Off Her - Junior Kimbrough
3. Bad Luck City - R.L. Burnside
4. When The Lights Go Out - The Black Keys
5. Breaking My Heart - Robert Belfour
6. Feel Good Babe - Frank Frost
7. Pucker Up Buttercup - Paul Jones
8. Sail On - T-Model Ford
9. Boogie Chillen No. 2 - Canned Heat & John Lee Hooker
10. Modern Times - The Black Keys
11. Ride Like Hell - Big Sugar
12. Grind It Down - catl
13. Chicken Dog - The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion
14. Devil is on His Way - Joe Buck Yourself
15. The Criminal Inside Me - R.L. Burnside
16. Workin' Man's Soul - catl

Disc Five

1. Travelling Riverside Blues - Led Zeppelin
2. Memo From Turner - The Rolling Stones
3. Shake It Baby - John Lee Hooker
4. Boom Boom - The Animals
5. Groundhog Day - Big Sugar
6. Ole Man Trouble - The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion
7. Happy Wanderer - Chad Parks and The Near Death Experience
8. I Got Mine - The Black Keys
9. Skull Ring - Big Sugar
10. The Girl I Love She Got Long Black Wavy Hair - Led Zeppelin
11. Oh Death - catl
12. Blues X Man - The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion
13. Over the Hill - R.L. Burnside
14. Norene - Robert Belfour
15. Why Don't You Give It To Me - Nathaniel Mayer
16. Empty Head - Big Sugar
17. My Mind Is Ramblin' - The Black Keys
18. Hard Time Killing Floor Blues - Chris Thomas King

I've been reading The Children's Book recently, and came across a passage that struck me as important. If you want to understand A.S. Byatt's work, not the whole of it, of course (post title notwithstanding), but the catalyst, the detonator, the idea that acts as the prime mover, you'd do well to think very hard about this passage.

All you need to know in advance is that the book takes place in early Edwardian England, and that Patty Dace, Arthur Dobbin, and Rev. Frank Mallett have decide to organize a lecture series, and are meeting to discuss the topic and potential lecturers.

She put on her spectacles, and said to Frank that they should perhaps find a title for a series. Dobbin said he thought they should find exciting speakers first, and then make up a title. Although Dobbin had been shy and ill-at-ease at Todefright he felt in retrospect that he had been privileged and delighted to meet the glittering folk in their fancy dress. He wanted to hear them again — Humphry and Olive, Toby Youlgreave and August Steyning, the anarchists and the London professor who worked with Professor Galton on human statistics and heredity. He said that he had heard some very interesting ideas about folklore and ancient customs whilst in Andreden. Maybe she could think of those.

Miss Dace said she was interested more in change. She wanted lectures on new things, the New Life, the New Woman, new forms of art and democracy. And religion, she said, looking bravely at Frank.

Frank sipped his tea and said thoughtfully that in fact there was only an apparent contradiction. For many of the new things looked back to very old things for their strength. The theosophists looked back to the wisdom of Tibetan masters, for instance. William Morris's socialism looked back to mediaeval guilds and communities. Edward Carpenter's ideas about shedding the stultifying respectability of Victorian family life looked back also, to human beings living in harmony with nature, as natural creatures. And the same was true of the vegetarians and anti-vivisectionists, they required a wholesome respect for natural animal life, as it was before technical civilisation. In the arts too, Benedict Fludd, for instance, wanted to return to the ancient craft of the single potter, and to find the lost red glazes, the Turkish Iznik, the Chinese sang-de-boeuf. The Society for Psychical Research had rediscovered an old spirit world, and lost primitive powers of human communication. Old superstitions might furnish new spiritual understanding. Even the New Woman, he said, venturing a half-joke, sought freedom from whalebone and laces in Rational Dress but also in free-flowing mediaeval gowns. Women's work in the world appeared to be new, but in the old times abbesses had wielded power and governed communities, as principals of colleges now did. Maybe all steps into the future drew strength from a searching gaze into the deep past. He would almost dare to propose himself as a lecturer on this theme.

I'm a newcomer to the CBS legal drama The Good Wife, now in its third season. I've spent the last day and a half watching the first season from my sick bed. It was a combination of things that made me finally give in, despite the fact that a new network legal drama wasn't particularly high up on my priorities. People whose opinions I respect say good things about the show, and then I saw some really great things said about it on PBS's excellent recent documentary, America in Prime Time, so here we are. The premise is simple: Alicia Florrick (Julianna Margulies) has to return to the law in order to support her family after her philandering husband, Peter (played by Law & Order veteran Chris Noth), an Illinois state's attorney, is disbarred and jailed for a sex/corruption scandal. Structurally, the show is divided into two slightly overlapping major elements. First, the main plot, which follows Alicia Florrick as she tries to balance the aftermath of a very public humiliation with the workload of being a junior associate and being a single mother of two, and second, the Case of the Week format common to nearly every courtroom drama ever to grace American television.

The cast is very strong. Julianna Margulies gives a surprisingly subtle performance that's more about cumulative effects than individual scenes. She's best with small expressions in scenes with a sense of stillness, but she also manages to go between genuinely tender and brutally cold without appearing inconsistent or in any way out of character. I haven't seen a lot of her work, but this is the best performance she's given of those I have seen.

Chris Noth doesn't have a lot to do, and Josh Charles (as Will Gardner, one of the named partners at Alicia's firm) plays a variation of the same character he's done in everything since Sports Night. It's not a bad character, but it would be nice to see something new from him. Christine Baranski's portrayal of Diane Lockhart (another of the named partners) is exceptional, in part because despite being cast as a rich, powerful woman (a common role for her), she easily sidesteps any potential accusations of typecasting by giving a really warm performance, one that's strikingly different from the borderline parodic ones she's given in comedic versions of that role in the past. Relative newcomer Archie Panjabi (who I know best as Maya from the original UK series Life on Mars) is also great as investigator Kalinda Sharma. She is particularly excellent at keeping a subplot about the question of her sexuality from overwhelming her character. The part is written very well, but an actress not on her game could easily wind up wielding that aspect of the character like a cudgel, which would be the absolute wrong way to play her. Alan Cumming is just Alan Cumming with the volume turned down a bit, and it works fine.

The show also uses an excellent array of quality character actors, people like David Paymer, Michael Boatman, Peter Riegert, Peter Gerety (who most will know from The Wire, but I liked him better in Homicide: Life on the Street), and personal favourites Joe Morton, Carrie Preston, Amy Acker, and Martha Plimpton (and of course Gillian Jacobs makes an appearance in the pilot).

The ongoing plot about Alicia, her career, and her husband that makes up half the structure of the show, is unique and exceptional, focusing not, as one might expect, on the political ups and downs of the prominent public figure Peter Florrick (you can catch Kelsey Grammar in the new series Boss if you want that), but on her balancing act. One could also argue that it's a show about balancing private and public spaces, but those spaces commingle significantly after Peter is released from prison, and we are offered glimpses of his life and career through cracks in the door and shots over the shoulder. The information accumulates over the course of the season, and what happened to Peter and how he's responding gradually becomes clear, but we still see it primarily through how people treat Alicia on the job. It almost seems like the early episodes can't seem to decide whether or not they're actually about Alicia, or if they're just about Peter as seen through Alicia's life, like drawing a figure by filling in the negative space. I say almost, because the writers use it as a way to push her towards establishing her own agency, and by the end of the season, The Good Wife is unquestionably about Alicia, almost as though it took twenty-three episodes for the writers to convince both the audience and Alicia herself that the show really should be about her.

If I were to have any complaints about the main plotline, it's with some of the children. Zach Florrick's unusual technical prowess is a little too much like "kids these days" hand-waving, while his girlfriend Becca's (not unrealistic) aggressive sexuality just seems like one plot point too many.

The Case of the Week element of the show is a bit more problematic. On the one hand it's the primary vehicle by which Alicia establishes her new sense of self (and how they sneak in all those great supporting actors), but there's nothing new there in terms of a network legal drama. I've seen these cases before, I've seen the legal trickery and the research and the late nights with empty pizza boxes and those cool folded cardboard cartons of Chinese food that you never see in the real world. I've seen the awkward opening statements and the love/hate relationships between opposing counsel. I have seen it all a million times before, and it's not even self-aware about it like Boston Legal (an unbelievably brilliant show, despite its problems). Eventually one case began to blur into another, and they started to lose their sense of urgency. I can't help but wonder if they were only included at the network's request.

Since my case of the plague (or rather this nasty head cold) doesn't show any signs of abating, I'll probably move on to the opening episodes of season two tomorrow. It is my hope that the main plotline will continue to be strong, and the kinks in the Case of the Week format will iron themselves out.