Which way the wind blows.

I've been thinking a lot about wind and weather lately. Here's why:

In a recent discussion in my Studies in the American Novel course, a student (Joey Brokaw) pointed out how birds drop out of the sky a lot in contemporary fiction. He was right, and that fact kind of floored me. It made part of me want to pursue these wayward feathered friends. I dreamed of writing a cultural history of birds from Hitchcock to Henson: 

But I'll leave that work to Joey B. 

What I think I'll do is look into meteorological metaphors in American fiction written in and about the 1970s. I've been obsessed with the 70s for a while now, even though Mike Watt and Eddie Vedder once warned me to defend myself against such an obsession. 

Which is why I found myself doing something pretty great the other day: Listening to this 1975 Tom Waits's song

while looking at this absolutely sublime wind map of the lower 48 states. 

The effect is oddly patriotic.