I haven't heard from the organization that I know wants to fund my research trip to Prague this fall, which makes me worried. Perhaps FedEx failed on the whole next-day thing.

I like Wilco, but I've always felt like a dork singing along to them because, whereas with R.E.M. the lyrics are unintelligible so any idiocy you wail aloud is of your own making, Wilco lyrics are intelligible and on the asinine side (except for "Heavy Metal Drummer," which features a linear narrative and the difficult task of unironically waxing lyric about butt rock), so you've chosen to warble dumb lyrics of someone else's doing. In other words, R.E.M.'s co-created (how Modernist!), sing-a-long lyrics express the deepest depths of your tortured soul and that's cool, while Wilco's wholly-belonging-to-Jeff-Tweedy lyrics say nothing about you except that you're attempting pathetically to be hip, even though no hipster would be caught dead singing along to Wilco. They tend to sing "Billie Jean" and early Lionel Ritchie. All of this to say, that Jeff Tweedy is releasing a book of poetry. Didn't he learn from Jewel? -Zh.