I haven't posted with much regularity lately, although at least I didn't take my blog off the net like Billmon. That was a downer, but I see that Moon of Alabama will soon be presenting an archive of Billmon's posts. I started reading him when Katrina hit, and he's been my first stop almost ever since. A bit bloodthirsty for my taste, but he comes from a place on the left I recognize, which helps make him much sharper than anyone who might fancy themself something of a liberal. . . .

Like Molly Ivins. Her saving grace, aside from good humor and dependable scruples, was that as a Texas liberal she was self-consciously some sort of deviant. For a while I fancied trying to do something like her column from a Kansas vantage point, but I never had the fondness for politics or the general good will to make it work. I've read four or five or her books, but didn't get any traction from the last one I picked up, a compilation called Who Let the Dogs In? She reminds me of an acquaintance who back in 2001 or maybe even 2002 bravely offered that we had survived one George Bush, so we can survive another. Ivins didn't, and she's not alone. In retrospect, her Shrub was far too kind. Hell, even Bushwhacked went down too easy. For quite a while now, Bush has raised questions in my mind like: when did it finally dawn on average Germans that the Nazis had gone off the deep end? I don't know the answer to that, but I'm afraid it something like 1947.

Anyhow, the reason I haven't been posting -- well, one of them anyway -- is that I've been thinking about reprioritizing. I thought I'd start January off with a list of resolutions, but a week into February I still don't have them. I failed utterly in my main resolution last year, which was to write the book. A year ago I swore that if I couldn't get it done I'd give it up. Still, I can't think of anything more important or worth my efforts, so the first resolution is to give it another year, and the second is to cut back on everything else as needed to make it happen.

For now, the cuts will be moderate, but I need to get more serious about them as we go along. My main time sink is writing about music. Thus far I've cut that back to Jazz CG and Recycled Goods. I need to focus on jazz for the next 2-3 weeks, then that will let up for a bit. I'm far enough ahead on Recycled that it shouldn't be much of an imposition for the next two months. The other big music project is to relaunch Terminal Zone, and that I may have to give up. (Indeed, I may already have done so, and just don't realize it yet.)

The other big time sink is website work, and there I have some things that are fairly urgent, like getting news working on Robert Christgau's website, and getting some of Carola Dibbell's fiction up. The Village Voice just published their Pazz & Jop Poll. We've been planning on publishing Christgau's Dean's List after the Voice comes out, but that's just moved from future to now and I'm not prepared for it. But that, again, needs to happen in the next 2-3 weeks, and the combination means I won't have anything to show for my book resolution until March at the earliest. Ugh!

What's likely to happen with the blog in the meantime is this: continue jazz prospecting on Mondays, and whatever publication notices I can muster; do more reference notes, like the book quote posts, since those books are mostly book research for me; and start posting small snippets of book writing when I get something done. That means for the most part I won't bother with tracking current events, unless something truly disruptive come along. And I'll try not to get obsessed about posting daily, like I did for a few months last year.

More on this later. But that's enough resolutions for now.