You know, when I was young, you had to wait years for a new Lucinda Williams record. These days it seems like she’s releasing an album every other week. The new one is supposed to be pretty good, though, so we’ll cut her some slack. You kids don’t know how easy you have it.

Just a little programming note: a certain very ill and somewhat frightening monster has captivated the television stations and radios and many of the papers. If you’re feeling a bit too heartily pursued by this particular monster, feeling a bit too caught in the crossfires of the media streams, we have a solution for you! Join us in turning your very important gaze elsewhere. It’s your mind, after all — literally your only resource. Free it and your ass will follow, and there’ll be no monsters on your tail.

It’s March! Spring is coming! And no one knows what to do.

It’s very difficult to make up one’s mind about anything this time of year. It’s very hard to commit. I’ve noticed it in the flock of pigeons that fly around outside my apartment all day. First of all, they seem to have doubled in number over the winter.

There must be two hundred of them now, and they are extremely active of late — swooping between my building and the next in a thick, shape-shifting paisley of purple white and gray. It’s quite beautiful, actually, the way they rise and dive as one, simultaneously changing direction, some sort of primordial communication at play in mid-air. Except that they just fly around and around in circles for hours, tiny brains abuzz and aflutter — all messed up with early mating season hormones, probably. Even when they do alight on a ledge or a rooftop, it’s only for a second. A moment later, they get spooked and they’re off again without a plan or destination. Also, I fucking hate pigeons.

Distracted by the disgusting flapping of four hundred dirty wings and that cooing sound that makes my skin crawl, I spent a full hour yesterday writing the first paragraph of a piece that’s probably not worth that amount of work in its entirety. I could never quite fit all the caveats it seemed I needed — a “but” or a “though” or an over-worded rationalizing clause after every sentence, betraying what was obviously confused thinking from the outset.

The weather, too, is never more frustratingly fickle. 60 degrees one day, 30 the next. Rain? Snow? Sun? How is anyone supposed to know what to wear? You’ll be sweating in the coat, freezing in just the sweater. As was pointed out yesterday, we’ll all surely get sick.

Ash Wednesday will happen this month. Always very confusing. And Saint Patrick’s Day, too. Also confusing, as drunk as everybody tries to get. And with the wrong color beer. The college basketball players will try very hard at their big tournament. And one team will win. And some people will win their office pools. But most of us will lose. Because, again, no one really knows what teams to pick. I mean, good luck, right? Oh, and the ides, on the 15th, beware them, of course.

But there are good things to look forward to! By the end of the month, this miserable winter will finally, finally be officially over. Sure, it will probably snow at least once more. (It does that sometimes, you know. And people die of cancer. Young people, far too young.) But it will be consistently warmer. It will be spring. Maybe you will clean your apartment. Maybe you’ll start your days with a sniff of a bar of Irish Spring soap in the shower and step out wet and whistling and ready for a fresh new beginning. Hey, who knows, maybe you’ll get around to starting on that New Year’s resolution? Maybe you’ll start eating healthier and maybe actually try to get some exercise for the first time since 2009. (Was this your resolution? It was mine. I pretty much keep a standing resolution, the same one every year. All too predictable, I know. But, hey, I’m no one special. Why do I need some sort of extraordinary New Year’s resolution every year? Especially considering the very slim chances I’ll actually act on it even a little bit.)

I think it’s fair to say that we could all stand to get ourselves into better shape. Or just generally improve ourselves, right? Maybe this spring will be the time. Maybe we’ll really do it. It’s hard to say, though, isn’t it? I mean, it’s not really up to us. If it’s God’s will, it will happen. There’s not much we can do to control these things. It’s like the weather. We can hope for the best. But really, we’ll just have to wait and see.

by Rudolph Delson

This essay is from the new collection The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books, co-edited by Jeff Martin and C. Max Magee, of The Millions. In the book, Jonathan Lethem, Rivka Galchen, Nancy Jo Sales and many others consider the landscape as the literary world faces a sudden change in the way we buy, produce and read books.

Say it was 1910, and say on a breezy day you stopped me on Broadway, and say you asked me: “Sir, whither American letters?”

And say that the answer I gave you was fantastically correct. Say I predicted all about Modernism. Say I advised you to have your transatlantic agents ship you first editions of Dubliners (1914) and The Voyage Out (1915). Say I explained the plots and the modes of The Great Gatsby (1925) and The Sun Also Rises (1926) and The Sound and the Fury (1929), and say I did it incisively, with historical cross-references. Say I told you about, oh, Pearl Buck. And Saul Bellow and Toni Morrison. Say I even noted the late-century curios, the Room Temperatures (1990) and the Autobiographies of Red (1998). And say you were able to comprehend it all, not just the authors and the publication dates, but the meaning of all the millions: the mass migrations and the mass deaths and mass social movements, all the hours between Now and Then. How could you possibly have responded?

“Hum! Portnoy’s Complaint sounds worth the while. You say it will be published in 1969? I do hope I survive to read it. I trust you when you say that there will be an influenza and that there will be horrid world-wide wars, and even so — even in peace and health — it is hard to imagine I shall live another fifty-nine years. And what a shame, too, because Portnoy’s Complaint does sound ever so much better than House of Mirth. Or The Golden Bowl. To think, not only will there be a revolution, but it will be sexual.”

“Sir,” I would have said, “You can bide your time with Moby-Dick.”

“I have never heard of any such thing.”

“Moby-Dick! It was first published in 1851!”

“No, no, no. I have heard of no such thing.”

We would have tipped hats, dodged the horse carriages, gone our ways — and although everything I told you would have been true, none of it would have improved your breezy day.

But it is not 1910.

It is 2010.

And here we are on Broadway, and the day is balmy. And here I am in my timesuit, a chrononaut from the unhappy year 2110, speaking to you through the electrical mouthpiece of my helmet, trying to keep my alien accent in check:

“Pay attention in 2014; that year will witness the publication of the first non-linear e-novel. It will appear on the internet, and it will advance the technique of Edward Packard in the rarest way imaginable. I said: Edward Packard. You have not read Edward Packard? But he invented Choose Your Own Adventures! What do you mean, you haven’t read them? You have not ready any at all? But they were first published in 1979! Oh, it’s a disgrace worse than Melville. In 2014, these non-linear e-novels, these online Choose Your Own Adventures, they will put an end to sequentially fixed narratives, and to sequentially bound print-publishing. It will be quite the biggest literary event since Aeschylus, or anyway since Cervantes. Imagine if Proust had not had to fix his memories into any particular order: this is what will happen in 2014. Blossoms will bloom. And make certain to learn Spanish before 2021, because if you want to know anything about the American novel, you must read the works of Vilma Marielos Gonzalez Alvarado in the original. She will die young, of course — too young — when the tsunami from the first collapse of the Antarctic ice shelf scrubs out coastal California.”

Or whatever.

You have gathered my point: There is no pleasure in knowing about novels; the pleasure is in reading them, and for that you must wait. And my other point: That as racy and as witty as it is to lay bets about the future of literary schools, and the future of publishing economics, and the future of authorial demographics, there is no glory in such guesswork, there is no glory in parlor games; the glory is all in the elucidation of human fate in elevated speech, the glory is all in literature itself. And my final point: That to the extent they were not written before we were born, most of the best books will be written only after you and I are both dead.

Rudolph Delson lives in Brooklyn. He has won no prizes. The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books

is available now at your favorite purveyor of books.

#wiunion capitol staffers confirm that lobbyists were let into building and firefighters and public denied access.less than a minute ago via Twitter for iPhone

The Way Forward WI
TheWayForwardWI

It’s been a long day in Wisconsin. People say they’re blocking some windows at the Madison Capitol building to keep food and people (presumably) from being brought in and out. And here are the crowd control barriers being installed. More of this will make some sense when, you know, someone starts reporting on it, I guess? (via)

Say a warm welcome to “One Minute News, a video-based online start-up conceived by former MTV advertising executive Doug Greenlaw — and his son, Mack, whose resume also includes a stint at the ostensible music network.” Haha, ostensible. Haha, working with your dad. Anyway! Mack said that “we love Gawker, we love the Huffington Post,” but they “don’t seek to overshadow or muscle out any pre-existing entities.” Well they might! Big words, launch boy. True, they are proactive and in your face with their snackifying media programming! Presumably this is on the Internet somewhere, if you have the attention span to find it. I couldn’t, just the BBC’s own “One Minute News” program and some other stuff, and I couldn’t Google up Mack Greenlaw either, unless he’s the voice of Garris Cain in the Battlestar Galactica videogame. I hope he’s cute though, that’s such a great name! Right? Maybe I’ll look him up on Facebook later. Or maybe there’s something in the fridge? HEY MOM. MOM, IS THERE ANYTHING IN THE FRIDGE THAT ISN’T GROSS? No don’t come in here, THIS IS STILL MY ROOM, MOM. Anyway, I’m sure they’ll totally house the Internet.

Here you will find a picture of a giant egg laid by a chicken in Iowa. Before you panic, please take note: “An egg approaching that size is unusual, but not unheard of, egg experts said.” [Via]

What sinister cabal is behind the massive conspiracy to keep the world from knowing why Natalie Portman wore “Rodante” [sic] rather than Dior at last night’s Oscars? I’m guessing it had something to do with the Jews. I mean, it usually does.

She made herself ill eating cat shit then “pressure washed” the inside of my truck with spray poo. The “turducken” of shit! #ZERORESALEVALUESun Feb 27 03:37:29 via Twitter for iPhone

Neko Case
NekoCase

To wrap up our bizarre choice to highlight a person on Twitter each day this month, let us end with the x-number of people you really should follow on Twitter for a well-rounded life. For starters, Neko Case! The ongoing stories of Liza the dog are worth it alone.

Liza said tonights songwriting efforts were “flaccid”and “uninspired”.She told me I was a hack and that she wanted a chicken treat.Mon Feb 28 06:25:17 via Twitter for iPhone

Neko Case
NekoCase

Liza wants to see some growth. Something daring and with cat’s buttholes in it. I need to “become the woman a was whelped to be”.(her words)Sun Feb 27 03:19:38 via Twitter for iPhone

Neko Case
NekoCase

I mean: wildly exceeds expectations, right???

In more serious news, Blake Hounshell is overwhelming but if you want to intently follow on along on issues from Libya to Oman, he is your man.

Check @iyad_elbaghdadi’s stream for the latest inside dope from Libya. He seems to be tapping the Qaddafis’ phones.less than a minute ago via Twitter for Mac

Blake Hounshell
blakehounshell

For issues in artistry and the expurgation of anxiety, it’s Colson Whitehead, natch.

If you wrote your thesis on Blade Runner, you were pretty much jerking off.less than a minute ago via TweetDeck

colson whitehead
colsonwhitehead

For the politics more local and transactional, obviously Ben Smith.

If you’re in NYC, I’ll be participating in convo on “the role of money in our lives” at the Public Theater tonight http://is.gd/umK0C6less than a minute ago via Tweetie for Mac

Ben Smith
benpolitico

And for the local more financial, it’s Heidi Moore.

Warren Buffett is looking for cos to buy. He didn’t even use a porny metaphor this time, so you know he’s serious. http://bloom.bg/ghpe9HMon Feb 28 13:40:20 via web

Heidi N. Moore
moorehn

And I honestly don’t know who Ahmad Bilal is but he cracks me up.

Yeah, that’s what all the hot guys are doing at 3am on Wednesdays. Eating cottage cheese in pajamas, explaining “swag” to their friends.less than a minute ago via Mobile Web

Ahmad Bilal
FlatbushCtyLmts

And for all your breaking celebrity non-news?

I, for one, am now willing to follow Charlie Sheen onto whatever comet he says will take us to Planet Winning. Missheen accomplished.less than a minute ago via web

marklisanti
marklisanti

At long last, yes, there is our in-development Twitter list of Awlers. Merry Christmas. Now delete your Twitter account and get off the Internet.

I spent the spring before I moved to Brooklyn diligently flattening out what was already a pretty mild Southern accent. The way I looked at it, I was moving up Nawth with no particular intention of returning to Kentucky.

What I didn’t know, being naïve and geographically provincial, was that in diluting my accent I was inadvertently losing something of myself. Sure, now I didn’t sound different than my colleagues from Connecticut, Boston, Pennsylvania or even Des Moines. But that turned out to be a shame. Nearly everyone I met those first few years would, upon learning where I was from, immediately ask me, “What happened to your accent?” Pride in my My Fair Lady fix turned to remorse at my Gone With the Wind loss.

It was only years later, after I’d collected a few fellow Southern friends in New York, that I began to appreciate my Southern roots. A taste for bourbon became a badge of honor; finding a good cornbread was a genuine victory. In fact, a background I’d once considered provincial actually made me much more conscious of just how unworldly many Northeasterners are. Here I was living among and teaching the Russians and Yeshiva kids while all these Long Islanders thought going to Philadelphia was akin to a trip to Outer Mongolia. What I came to know was that I wasn’t better for losing my Southern-ness, I was better for ever having had it at all.

Similarly, a fondness for Kentucky basketball — an affection I had taken for granted, even avoided, living in Lexington all those years — blossomed into true fanaticism. As with the bourbon and the cornbread, the longer I lived away, the more latching onto home took on new importance. Learning to let go and love something I’d once dismissed as a redneck obsession brought me closer to who I really was down there under all that pretension, manufactured worldliness and uninflected Brokaw diction.

Now I will readily acknowledge my own Big Blue bias when it comes to evaluating college basketball, but that doesn’t mean I don’t know what I’m talking about. Understanding sports on a deeper level mostly involves watching a shit-ton of it and paying attention to more than the score when you do. And as I fell back in love with the Wildcats, that’s what I did: watch game after game after game. While there were some fantastic games over the decade-plus I was in New York — Tayshaun Prince’s five threes vs. UNC, the stomping of Florida at Rupp in February of 2003, many battles with Duke and UNC and Kansas and the like — there were also plenty of Ole Miss games, Dennis Felton-coached Georgia slugfests and November out of conference tilts with directional schools.

Still, as I grew from fan to aficionado to self-proclaimed expert, I learned to be judicious, observant and to appreciate the full spectrum of players, coaches, styles and traditions. Anyone who loves college basketball can’t help but marvel at “Rock Chalk, Jayhawk” or at the brilliance of a Jay Williams at Duke, Kevin Durant at Texas or Mike Beasley at Kansas State. Hell, I even came to appreciate Joakim Noah. Who wouldn’t want that guy on your team? Dude just killed Kentucky over and over again.

But as I’ve learned to appreciate my Southern roots in absentia, I’ve also come to appreciate how regionalism affects college basketball, too. By this I mean not only the ways in which the media can group-think on a particular team or group of teams, but also the real and organic ways in which — despite the globalization of the game and the freer distribution of high school players across the country — player skills, programs, conferences, rivalries and styles have developed and matured over the years in well-defined pockets.

Historically, college basketball was fairly localized. There were a few national programs that could recruit from all over and teams did compete outside their area a few times a year, but generally the western teams stayed out West and the southern teams in the South and so on. And out of these localized zones of competition came the conferences that we know today: the Southeastern, the Atlantic Coast, the Big East, the Pacific-10 et al. Expansion and attrition have changed the dynamics somewhat, so that Louisville, and next year TCU (!), can be considered “East.” But the basic framework of the conference structure harkens back to when teams traveled by bus and not charter jet, to when a program’s players mostly reflected the particular stylistic tastes of its fan base and when its recruits almost entirely came from a hundred-or-so-mile radius around the school.

It wasn’t that long ago that the NCAA tournament’s directionally named regions were actually reflective of the areas of the country in which those teams played. This is still true, though to an ever-lessening degree. Usually the top four seeds are slotted roughly by region, but not always. And now there is of course the so-called ‘pod system’ to dictate where the games are played in the earlier rounds, which means the region a team is from factors in mostly since proximity issues are in play, too.

But more than the naming of a bracket or the placement of teams in the tournament, what I’m talking about is regionalism as it plays out on the floor and among fans. While recruiting at the highest levels of NCAA hoops is now a national endeavor, most schools outside the twenty or so truly national programs still populate their roster primarily with regionally grown prospects. This is especially true the further down the food chain you go. Northern Iowa, out of the Missouri Valley Conference, for example, has eight kids from Iowa on the roster and each of the others is from a Midwest state. It’s not that the national programs don’t want local kids — you’ll still find Kentucky kids on the Kentucky roster, or Carolina kids on the Tar Heels roster — but by and large those are either kids who would have been recruited by those schools anyway or they’re there as token payback to a program’s loyal local fans.

Regionalism also reveals itself in ways that are less obvious and harder to quantify than in recruiting. Even among the big-time programs, there is a maturation over time to the ways the teams play and the skills and styles of the players. Watch SEC games regularly enough and you’ll see how recruiting athletic but fundamentally untamed kids from hamlets in Alabama, Florida and Georgia has affected the style of play, creating an above-the-rim game that can often devolve when a team needs a bucket off a set play. Watch the Brooklyn-bred point guards that populate Big East rosters drive and drive because when you play on bent metal rims in Bed Stuy, you better not be more than a foot from the goal. In the Midwest, where basketball is played mostly indoors in leagues or on park courts with nets and decent backboards, learning to shoot is just how you develop as a player. Thus you get Big Ten and Big XII teams like Wisconsin or Nebraska whose offense often involves set plays for jump shots, not just lobs at the rim. Likewise, West Coast players tend to grow up learning to play up-tempo, less physical basketball at the lower levels, and it translates to a freewheeling but hands-off PAC-10 style at your Washingtons and Arizonas.

These are, of course, oversimplifications. There are plenty of dunks in the Big Ten and plenty of deep threes in the SEC; Ben Howland brought muscle ball to UCLA and don’t try to tell anyone that Pitt’s Travon Woodall can’t shoot. But there are some truths here, too. Regional trends do exist, and how those trends match up when the different regions meet in the NCAA tournament is a big reason the event is such a fascinating one. After a season of watching Pitt and Syracuse punch each other in the nuts, it’s great to see whether those teams can still dominate a more fluid offensive team like Florida or Missouri. Or will those Big East brawlers get smoked by finesse teams from other conferences that feature deadeye shooters you can’t shove into the stanchion? While at Kentucky or Duke or Kansas they may have flattened their regional accents with their national recruiting, most of the programs in the postseason will display elements of these regionally infused dynamics.

That said, the difference between winning and losing in the postseason is still remarkably simple: The team that has better players usually wins in the end. This holds most true in the later rounds. Upsets are what make the NCAAs so popular, but what’s rarely acknowledged is the generally unremarkable makeup of each season’s Final Four. Viewing Butler (2010) and George Mason (2006) as exceptions to the rule, you can bank on the fact that the likelihood is that a team that finished among the top three from the five or six “major” conferences will emerge from each region. This means you can expect the last four teams to be primarily from the ACC, SEC, Big East, Big Ten, Big XII and PAC-10. This isn’t to say there won’t be a surprise (see also: Butler and Mason, George). But looking back at the participants from the last decade of Final Fours isn’t much different than looking at the teams playing on Monday, Tuesday and Saturday nights during the regular season on ESPN.

In the late ’60s, Richard Nixon figured that his only chance to wrest the presidency from the dominant but fractured Democratic party was to capitalize on what he saw as the only pilferable voters: disenfranchised white Southerners. By cleaving traditionally conservative and “farm” voters from the Democratic Party, and by colluding with Southern Dixiecrats, Nixon solidified his chances of capturing first the GOP nomination and then the presidency over Hubert H. Humphrey, albeit by the slimmest of margins. This tactic became forever known as the Southern Strategy. Much reviled today as the exploitation of voters’ racial fears and of Southerners’ perception of themselves as victims, it’s also undeniable that the Southern Strategy worked. It worked again for Reagan in 1980, when he successfully appealed to “states’ rights” voters in the South, dog-whistle political code for white working class voters feeling left out by what they saw as the minority politics of the prevailing Democratic Party.

What do college basketball and Nixonian politics have in common? In addition to the sad fact of cheating, the Southern Strategy in hoops isn’t a bad one to utilize, either. Like me, you probably didn’t realize that teams from below the Mason-Dixon line have won thirteen of the last twenty titles, and seven of the last ten. In addition, only one time in the last twenty years has a national title game not included a program from the traditional South, when Syracuse stopped Kansas in 2003. Remarkable.

This isn’t to say that a team from another region won’t win this year’s title. The two major southern conferences — the ACC and the SEC — are both considered to be having down years this season. But despite the top-heavy nature of each conference, strong teams capable of deep runs will come out of both leagues. From the ACC, Duke and UNC are both talented and well coached, if flawed, and each could get on a roll in March and April. There is a strong chance that the SEC will still get five or even six teams into the NCAA tournament. Kentucky and Florida are both loaded with talent, and Vanderbilt, Tennessee and Georgia are all capable of beating some of the nation’s best teams. Though any of those five is also capable of losing to a lower seed, too, that could almost always be said to be the case. Rarely are there prohibitive favorites anymore, and even more rarely do those favorites actually win the whole thing. This year, Duke is the only “southern school” being tabbed a top contender for the championship at this point. But there is no real favorite this time around. And with the NCAAs, there is always the potential for a surprise, albeit probably only one from a major conference.

I was surprised that I came to embrace my own regionalism. In my case, it took a long time to appreciate the many good things the South has to offer. When it comes to college basketball, maybe it’s been right there under our noses the whole time.

Originally from Kentucky, JL Weill now writes from Washington, DC. His take on politics, culture and sports can be found at The New Deterrence and on Twitter.

Photo from Flickr by Sonnett.