This site is still a work in progress, so don’t be alarmed if things shift around over the coming weeks.  I’ve imported my old blog posts, but I haven’t gone back and reformatted them for this new site.  I imagine it will take me a few weeks to discover all the ins and outs of WordPress blogging.  Keep checking back for updates.

Not that this means anything, but you can contact the White House here. I stumbled on this because some bloggers are suggesting Haiti should be granted Temporary Protection Status.

What the hell, it’s the end of the decade. Time for a recap. The decade opened with Amazon reaching for the book business with online sales, and the decade closed with Amazon altering the book business once again with the Kindle. Other than that, here are 5 trends I’ve noticed about fiction this decade:

1. Chick lit. I don’t mean just your ordinary book about women or domesticity, but a particular breed of urban-chic-single chick lit (the novel’s response to Sex in the City – Shopaholic, The Devil Wears Prada, etc). I think the HBO series is what pushed this genre into existence, and I think the recession might have killed it.

2. Boy Wonders. Maybe Nick Hornby launched himself in the ’90s, but his ilk have taken over for the ’00s: Jonathan Franzen, Dave Eggers, Michael Chabon, Jonathan Saffron Foer, Jonathan Letham and Joshua Ferris. (Apparently it helps if your name is Jonathan.) I guess this literature is the urban-chic-male response to #1. This genre is still thriving, though I’m not sure it’ll carry us into the ’10s.

3. Multi-Cultural Lit. Ethnic was cool this decade, be it the heartrending The Kite Runner or the comic The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. We live in a global community now. (And America might be on the decline, so it seems fitting for us to go out the way we came in, by examining the immigrant experience.) This genre probably won’t do anything but get more popular for a while yet.

4. Memoirs. I know I titled this section “fiction,” and memoirs are supposed to be nonfiction, but the aughts really exploded that facade. Unless you consciously question the nature of truth and memory, I suspect your memoir is a load of horseshit. It might not be, but James Frey apologizing to Oprah and Nasdijj (white guy who quit writing gay porn and decided to write his “memoir” about growing up on the reservation) have undercut every memoirist’s efforts at revealing the truth. (Though, to be fair, humans have such a short memory that we’ll still fall for the “based on a true story” line anyway.) I’m sorry to sound bitter about memoirs, but too often in the ’00s they’ve seemed like an excuse for sloppy writing. Allegedly, Frey couldn’t sell his book as a novel, so they slapped “nonfiction” on the spine and it hit the bestseller lists. I blame readers as much as Frey himself. I hope this genre is dead, though I suspect it’s got plenty of life yet.

5. Children’s lit. Ok, so Harry Potter came out in the ’90s, but the ’00s really seem to be the decade of adults devouring children’s literature – Harry Potter, Twilight, Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia. Not that there’s anything wrong with any of those stories, exactly, though some are exponentially better written than others, but this childhood escapism seems dangerous to me. I’m all for book sales, I guess, but what does it say about our society when grown men will dress up like child wizards and stand in line at midnight to find out Hedwig dies and Harry lives? Could these same grown men find Yemen on a map before last Friday or define “Kurd”? Now that Harry’s saga has come to the end, I’m not sure this genre has that much life left – I’d be surprised if there was as much brouhaha over the final movies as there was for the final books, which is a true testament to the raw power of narrative (versus mere special effects). I also suspect most people won’t have much tolerance for cheap knockoffs of what has already been done, so if children’s literature is going to continue to dominate, it has to find new ground, beyond witches and such.

There were plenty of other trends in fiction this decade (a resurgence of the short story? The blurring of the line between genre and literary? Flash fiction?), but the above five are the most interesting to me, because they seem to affect both the MFA crowd and the mainstream (whereas the mainstream might not care so much about genre vs. literary, or what the difference is between flash fiction and prose poetry).

Elections are this week, and the big race in Virginia is between Republican Bob McDonnell and Democrat Creigh Deeds. McDonnell has been endorsed by the Richmond Times-Dispatch, and Deeds has been endorsed by the Washington Post.

I think Deeds ran a great primary, but he’s run a fairly disappointing race against McDonnell. The turning point came when the Washington Post ran an article on McDonnell’s 20-year-old master’s thesis, in which McDonnell apparently wrote a right-wing, moralism kind of argument that said working women and homosexuals were a detriment to the family. Scary, yes, but that 20-year-old thesis became the main thrust of Deeds’ campaign – “Boo on McDonnell because of that thesis” – which I don’t think has really spoken to voters. Voters don’t even remember one year ago when Bush was running up our deficit and inconsistently bailing out banks so he could pass the buck to the next guy. Deeds has come off looking grumpy and stubborn, whereas McDonnell has appeared in commercials with his working wife and daughters, thrown a football around with his son, and said, “I’m a good guy and I’ll do right by Virginia.”

You can see evidence of what I’m talking about in last week’s Style Weekly interview with each candidate. Here was their last question:

17. Can you name one good reason that someone should vote for your opponent?

DEEDS: [Long pause] You know, I can name you a thousand good reasons why they should vote for me. I’m the best-prepared person to be the next governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia. … Bob is a guy that I’ve always gotten along with, but I get along with most people. I work hard to get along with people. I don’t agree with Bob on a great deal.

McDONNELL: He’s a good family man. He’s worked hard to represent his district well for 18 years. To me, he’s a good story of somebody living and accessing the American dream. You know, he tells the story about … first guy in his family to go to college with four $20 [bills] in his pocket and now he’s competing for the job held by Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry. To me, that’s a great story. I think there’s a hundred reasons why I’d be a better governor than him, but for the way, and this is his own personal life story, the way he has told it — it obviously happened because of tremendous hard work, tremendous perseverance to be able to get to the level that he is at, and I think that’s very admirable.

I predict McDonnell has it, and I predict that next weekend the big news across the country will be how Virginia, who went for Obama, is now swinging Republican again. Pundits will be arguing Virginia is a litmus test for the country as a whole. They’ll be saying the Democrats are doomed in 2010, and they’ll use this race as evidence that Obama is a failure. Last week Obama did come to campaign with Deeds, so look for pundits to say, “Obama campaigned for the Chicago olympics and lost, and Obama campaigned for Deeds and lost. Obama’s a failure.” I do think the Democrats are probably doomed in 2010, but I don’t think that means Obama has failed, nor do I think it’s a bad thing. Even Milton Friedman, in Capitalism and Freedom, suggested a good political balance was to have a Democratic president and a Republican Congress because they would keep each other in check. Consider Clinton’s years from 1994 to 2000, not bad years for our country.

I don’t have anything to blog about to day.

1) Interest rates fell to about as low as they’ve been since WWII this week. If you have or can borrow $12,000 and have good credit, you can buy a house in the $170-180K range and have your mortgage payments be $1200 a month, including taxes and insurance. (Some FHA loans only require 3% down. That obviously is not for everybody.)
2) If you’re a first-time homebuyer, the government will give you $8,000 as a credit, which you can keep, provided you buy the house before the end of July and stay in it for at least three years. You can amend your 2008 tax returns to get the money now, rather than waiting until next winter.
3) There is enough real estate out there to get pretty close to exactly what you want, provided you shop around. Many houses show up on several realtors’ Web sites.
4) Google maps is the best thing ever, because you can get a street view and see how close a house actually is to a neighbor, or if the street is actually a four-lane highway in that area, or if everyone in the neighborhood has a lowrider truck or a mid-90s Astro van or if cars are floating around on blocks. (Not to be classist and pass judgments, but this is a big purchase, and why not do it right.)

Remember that old game? It was such fun, and much less gruesome than what’s on the market these days.