(no subject)

[jfb]

1. Wow, Middlesex was great. I'm not going to say anything else about the book itself. I'll confess something: I avoid long novels. It takes me a long time to read anything, and the longer the book, the more likely I am not to finish it at all. 530 pages is more than enough to ward me off, but I loved the author's previous, much shorter novel The Virgin Suicides, so I made the effort, and am very glad I did.
   
   The cover of my paperback edition was covered with a thin waxy film, glued on so at first I didn't realize it was there. But over the course of reading it--two or three months carried around in my backpack in the California sun--it started to peel away from the cover, at first just around the edges so it seemed like an extension of the smoke motif in the cover design. Today after I read the last page I pulled the rest of it off, and, with its skin shed, it looks bright and shiny and new. Which, as it happens, nicely matches the protagonist's experience: gradual, then sudden transformation into what you were all along.
   
   
2. I finally saw Fahrenheit 9/11, which left me a little sad, some angry, but mostly inarticulate. I will say that I hated his use of music cues, and I really, really liked that there were Kerry supporters outside the multiplex registering voters.
   
   
3. It looks like I'm in a new band, with Meredith Edgar and three of the DTs. With this one I'll be playing keyboards--the full-sized kind--along with, of course, some other instruments. (The usual suspects: mandolin, accordion, maybe a little lap steel.)
   
   Russell and I are still trying to name our duo, and the new band needs a name too. So far, we are in grave danger of being named the Dead Horse Beaters. Our friend Dan is taking a poll on the subject, so chime in if you have an opinion.