The Shepherd’s Crown: Saying Goodbye With Terry Pratchett's Last Discworld Novel

This was a very hard book to read.

Not that it was bad, mind you. It may have been a bit incomplete. It did feel short - not even 300 pages. If you’re reading this, you might know. The author died.

He died, and the day I heard, I sat at my desk and cried. I’m a grown man, right? So I closed the door and made a coworker who looked in on me feel bad, If you’re like me, you’ve spent hours and hours with Terry. He’s a friend you lost, and this is the last letter he wrote before you lost him.

It is hard because in the beginning of the book, a beloved character dies too. It was impossible for me to read it without thinking that Terry was a stand-in for the character. There’s a conflation that I cannot escape. The character who passed was a witch, and a special thing about the witches is that they know when they will die, so their rendezvous with Death can be orderly and planned, unlike most of us. Terry knew too. He’d been facing the reality of his impending mortality since 2007. I guess that gives you more focus, and more urgency.

In here, Terry writes: “No long faces, [...] please. She’s had a good death at home, just as anyone might wish for. Witches know that people die: and if they manages to die after a long time leavin’ the world better than they went an’ found it, well then that’s surely a reason to be happy” (61). The world is a better place that Terry was in it.  

As for the book, it is all you could want for a final coda from a friend. We learn more about the Chalk, and we see Tiffany come into her own. What more could you ask?

Remembering Everything: The New book by Derek Zanetti

I don’t know if Zanetti (better known, perhaps, as the one-man-band “The Homeless Gospel Choir”) considers himself a poet.

I think that he calls the things he writes his “stories”. And that’s fine. But what he turns out in both this and his previous work are exquisite little poems on that ring on the same note that Burroughs did for his little routines in “Queer,” or “Junky.” He is a poignant observer of the slice of life, and he lives it out on the page and on the stage.

There are a number of stand out works here, but my favorite was “Some People”, in which Zanetti uses repetition and the meter to drive the point home in the closing line that is like a punch in the gut.

I have to give one caveat. I don’t know the man, but I shook his hand. I told him “Thank you for the art” and I have been a fan since. He has a good bit of my money for merch and art. He should get a bit of yours too.

Et in Arcadia Ego?

With potential presidents interviewing in front of whole country, you can hear them lament a falsely-remembered 50's where the manufacturing job was the root of the blue-collar america, what was America in all its greatness. The truth is that the country has manufactured more and more, just with lower labor input through various capital deepening forms like robots.

In fact, the country went through a much more drastic labor shift. At the end of the nineteenth century, fully half of people working were working on farms. Now it's less than two percent of all jobs. Where are the candidates calling for a return to arcadia, where we will once again become a nation of farmers? I want to vote for her.