ThomasLitchford

We’ve been making jam like pioneers laying in stores for a frontier winter. We made strawberry jam in June, raspberry and blueberry jam in July, and, yesterday, we made blackberry jam. Once the local apple season arrives, we’ll do apple butter. Maybe pumpkin butter in October. We’re crazy, I know.
The trouble is, once you’ve figured [...]

[Read more →]

I stumbled on this really excellent article in Travel and Leisure about Newport, the city in which I live. It’s a few years old, but still rings true in its assessment of the place:
Now downtown works as a model of New Urbanism, obeying all the pedestrian-friendly, mixed-use laws of that development movement without the unsettling [...]

[Read more →]

Sunday’s New York Times ran a great Frank Rich Op-Ed about the presidential race.
It’s finally looking like there will be some intelligent analysis of the two candidates. For the first time in my life I am seriously reconsidering my political stance. I’ve always voted Republican. Danielle has always voted Republican. Our parents vote Republican. Siblings, [...]

[Read more →]

What is it about August? Is it the heat, the humidity, that just saps away motivation and ambition?
Newport is incredibly full of end-of-summer vacationers trying frantically to relax before the kids are back in school. I can see it in their faces: an urgent need to maintain the schedule of fun, to Fit It All [...]

[Read more →]

I mentioned in an earlier post that I would be ordering James Wood’s new book, How Fiction Works, immediately. Thanks to our Amazon Prime membership, I had the book in my self-consciously sweaty hands a mere two days later, and I have now finished reading it.
The title of this book should perhaps be amended, thusly: [...]

[Read more →]

I finished reading Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco a while back, but I’m torn about my review.
The book is basically a thinking man’s The Da Vinci Code, but it came out in the 1980s. It follows a group of three editors (well, two editors and one philologist who fancies himself ‘a kind of private eye [...]

[Read more →]

My latest Milspouse blog post is up.
I’ve known for a long time that I needed to have a will drawn up, but, as usual, I put it off. Beyond needing a lawyer, I had no idea what was involved, and, hey, lawyers are expensive, aren’t they? After Sean was born, though, I couldn’t keep putting [...]

[Read more →]

The kind folks over at The Orwell Prize have begun a remarkable project: a daily blog post corresponding to George Orwell’s diary entries of 70 years ago. Here’s today’s entry:
This morning all surfaces, even indoors, damp as a result of mist. A curious deposit all over my snuff-box, evidently residue of moisture acting on lacquer.
Very [...]

[Read more →]

OK, if that sounds like the petulant outcry of a scolded fiction writer, that’s because it is. I was innocently leafing through last week’s issue of Newsweek when I came across a review of James Wood’s new book How Fiction Works. The first paragraph of the review reads thusly:
James Wood’s new book, “How Fiction Works,” [...]

[Read more →]

Adbusters thinks so. Their argument is that the current generation of hipster trash is trying to be rebellious without really rebelling against anything: not against war or capitalism or government or anything else. The sole motivation seems to be whether something is Cool or not.
But Alex Payne sees things differently. His thesis is basically that [...]

[Read more →]