1. We had an unexpectedly amazing eclipse experience this morning. We’re not in the path of complete annular totality, but the maximum sun coverage was about 90%, so we saw the heavens darken a bit, and the birds in the yard all went crazy with confusion, so it was definitely noticeable. We didn’t have any approved viewing tools, so were just sort of planning to note the changing skies and that would be that. But, the sun’s position at maximum coverage was right behind a pair of trees in our back yard, the leaves of which made themselves into multiple natural pin-hole projectors, so our whole house was covered with eclipse images, without us having to project through a sheet of paper, or put a box over our heads. Oh nature, you’re magnificent!

2. It was way cool and I shared the photos with family abroad, after which my sister reminded me that this was not, in fact, the best eclipse we had experienced. That would be this one, Cackalacky Trash Food Style. (Sound required for the full effect).

3. I’ve had two books published this year and signed a contract for a third, but I’m greedy, so I’ve still got two other manuscripts (one poetry, one essays) out for review in various places. I didn’t get another contract, but it was nice to be notified last night that Jefferson Water and Other Poems was one of five finalists for the 2024 Press 53 Award for Poetry. They received over 400 submissions, so it’s nice to know that these 64 pieces are at least highly competitive with a Top ~1.25% finish in Press 53’s estimation. I continue to keep my eyes out for other locations and venues to submit, hopeful that I can build on this year’s publishing success. On the contracted book, Crucibles: History’s Most Formidable Rites of Passage (forthcoming in early 2025 on Agate Books, with representation from Trident Media Group), my writing partner (RADM Jim McNeal) and I just passed the 60% mark on our manuscript, which is due April 1, 2024. It’s coming together really nicely, good to have another research- and interview-intensive nonfiction project in the pipeline.

4. I’d mentioned this before, but since they’re approaching, I have three readings/signings coming up for Side By Side in Eternity: The Lives Behind Adjacent American Military Graves, my prior book with Jim McNeal. Here’s the information, if you happen to be in the are and are interested in hearing and learning more about the book, up close and personal like:

October 17: Village of Oak Creek Branch, Sedona Public Library (1 PM to 2 PM)

October 20: Naval Academy Midshipman’s Store (10 AM to 4 PM)

November 8: Downtown Branch, Flagstaff City Library (6 PM to 7 PM)

With autumn almost upon us, I’d also be remiss in not pointing out what excellent holiday gifts any and all of my books might make, should you have read them all yourselves already. You can find ordering and additional information about them all here. Thanks as always for supporting my writing endeavors, one way or the other.

5. As I’ve done in recent omnibus posts like this one, I’m sharing one of our family playlists with you today, if you’re looking for something new to soundtrack your own spaces, and since there’s got to be some good reason and outcome from my caving to streaming. This month’s selection is my Jazz Playlist, which gets played a lot around here, especially when we are both writing/working. My jazz tastes tend to be a bit arcane, in large part because I find myself always interested in artists who deploy atypical instruments within the idiom, so you’ll hear harp and oboe and bassoon and sitar and even bagpipes in the mix. It’s 100 songs long, eight and half hours worth of music, so as always, I recommend shuffle, play, and dig.

1. Today is my father’s 84th birthday. I wish I could I celebrate it with him, but he was taken from us some 21 years ago by an elderly and infirm driver who should not have been behind the wheel of his massive land yacht, for which my dad’s VW Bug was no competition in cruelly demonstrating that F=ma, always. As I often do on the occasion of my father’s birth or death dates, I offer a heartfelt public service request that everyone seriously work with your loved ones to get them off the road when and if they are no longer able to drive safely. Yes, that is a hard process, I know. But it’s much harder to have them kill somebody, for all parties involved, I can assure you, most emphatically.

2. Sedona Red Rock News did a nice interview/feature piece last week about Side by Side in Eternity: The Lives Behind Adjacent American Military Graves, which I co-wrote with Rear Admiral Jim McNeal. Here’s the piece. I am scheduled to do readings from it at the Sedona and Flagstaff public libraries in October and November, and will be at the Naval Academy in October for a book signing with Jim. We remain pleased by the responses we’ve received about the work thus far, and I am equally pleased by the reactions to Ubulembu and Other Stories, my short-story collection published earlier this month. Have you read either or both of them? Or my old warhorse novel, Eponymous, from 2001? Did you like them? If so, I would be most grateful if you could take a minute or three to leave a rating or a review at the retail outlet or website of your choosing, as such audience reactions and responses are crucial to marketing these and future works. I’ve set up a page on my website, here, with convenient links to purchase (if you haven’t done so yet, and would like to) or rate/review any or all of the books. I am always appreciative of all of the many direct responses I’ve received to these projects over the past few months, but it would mean a great deal to me if you’d also be willing to share those responses with others. Thanks in advance for your consideration, as always.

3. It has been almost a year since I reluctantly caved to streaming my music. While I appreciate the fact that this approach to listening allows us to have our home jukebox playing through a higher quality sound system than we had before, I will note that the “new normal” linking computers, phones, speakers, and an Alexa account remains annoyingly unpredictable and wonky, requiring regular unplugging and re-synching of various bits of software and hardware, a situation which we all, collectively, seem to have decided is okey-dokey for us. While it’s not quite as crap a standard as, say, the horrible plastic jewel-boxes were in CD times, it’s still a pretty sub-optimal situation, methinks. Trying to get what I want played when and how I want it played often goes something like this, even before sound glitches and wifi dropouts start causing annoyances:

On the upside: I do like the ability to create playlists quickly, and there seems to be more of the musical arcana that I like available on Spotify than there was/is on iTunes, which I’d used exclusively for the prior 12 years. We’ve sort of defaulted to themed playlists around the house, ranging from 50 to 100 to 150 songs. (I’m obsessive about tidiness on such matters, and couldn’t stand to have a 52-song or 147-song list, no sir, that would not do, not at all).

Another nice factor of the streaming era is that it’s easy to share things. Not quite as personal and meaningful as a classic mix-tape would have been once upon a time, but at least there’s easy social connection possible on the platform. So it occurs to me that I should share my playlists for those who might be interested in such things, one per omnibus post, for as long as that takes to work through the list. I’ll handle them in alphabetical order by title, which means we will begin with “Africa.”

In my memorial to the late, great Johnny Clegg, I explained the roots of my love for African music, and how the Scatterlings album by his first group, Juluka, factored into that equation:

While at the Naval Academy in the early ’80s, I made a decision to focus my political science major on African politics. My motivations were not entirely altruistic: I found that it was easier to wait until the last minute to work on papers and projects because so few books about Africa ever got checked out of the Academy’s library, while the Soviet or European or Chinese shelves would be picked clean most of the time. Score one for the lazy man with a keen eye for an angle.

Initial motivations notwithstanding, I actually really got into my African studies, and in parallel, I got deeply interested in African music, and spent much of my paper-writing, reading and studying time listening to it. In those pre-Internet and pre-“World Music” CDs at the Starbucks check-out counter (bleh) days, records and tapes from Africa were still relatively hard to find, and information about all but the most high-profile artists (e.g. Fela Kuti, Manu Dibango, Miriam Makeba, King Sunny Ade, etc.) was scarce. I had an odd hodge-podge of tapes and albums from all over the continent that I played to death for a couple of years, but the global popularity of Scatterlings (which was even reviewed by the likes of Rolling Stone and Spin) opened up new interest in African music, politics and culture that made it easier to access some true gems of the era and beyond, on and on for me up to this day.

My dig at “World Music” in that quote is indicative of my long-standing distaste for that term as a single proper noun, emerging as it did around the time that Paul Simon’s Graceland became a huge hit through its equally huge appropriation of South African popular music. That phrase, when used in the United States, presumes two things that I find objectionable: (1) That the United States is somehow not quite part of the world, and (2) That the world’s music can be meaningfully blocked as a single genre. Even clustering “African Music” (note the capital letters) as a single genre fails on this front, given the immense ranges of styles, languages and instruments deployed in both traditional and modern fare. “African music” is more correct, an adjective-noun combination that leaves open the breadth and depth of experiences to be found therein. It’s simply music from Africa, not a genre into and of itself. Similarly, I use “international music” in lieu of “World Music,” when viewing my song catalog from my perch as an American listener. Yeah, I know that’s subtle, but words matter.

And, with that as perhaps overly long preamble, here’s my “Africa” playlist, 100 of my favorite songs from that continent’s myriad of musical cultures. Yeah, that’s a whole day’s worth of listening, but whenever I put this or any other playlists on, I just set it up for “shuffle play,” and get whatever I get for as long as I care to listen. If I chose the same playlist the next day(s), there’s still plenty left to hear and experience. (Another beef about Spotify: I sort my playlists by artists’ names, but whenever I share the playlists, the embedded player defaults back to sorting in the order that I added songs to the list, hence the need to shuffle play. Grumble). Here’s hoping this and future playlists might provide some interesting soundtracks to your day(s), as you see fit!