Just a brief note (with hopefully a lot more later): the commercial release of the Fiery Furnaces' Blueberry Boat seems to have some differences from the prerelease, although I suppose I could just be losing my mind. At any rate, the booklet has lyrics, so you should buy it for that reason alone, aside from the whole supporting-the-band thing.

I'm hopefully going to write a lot more about it later, but for now, let me just note that I think it's akin to a modern literary novel[1] in many ways: the narrative is both historical and personal, and it's delivered with the kind of difficulty and stylistic experimentation we might expect from a novelist, where you sort of have to fight things and pay attention to figure out what's going on. At the same time, of course, there are more incentives to re-examine the work than most novels give you, I feel (like catchy singles), but you do have to sort of consciously construct this story to explain everything there. But it can be done, which is impressive. It makes you work but rewards you. Good stuff.

In other news, I notice my traffic spiked lately and has sustained itself at the new level for about a week. Is this runoff from the Fluxblog bump resulting from the media coverage, or are y'all just here on your own volition? Stick around, regardless--lots of new content coming soon.

[1] I'm avoiding naming a school here because I can't tell whether to put 0, 1, or 2 "post-"s in front of "modernist."
posted by Mike B. at 10:47 AM 0 comments