maiden hurrah; Middlesex
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Artist:
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Album:Lady In Autumn: Best Of The Verve Years
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rant of the moment: i heard on the news last night that the mega-turtlesque Internet connectivity due to the Taiwan tsunami will not be fixed until the last week of February (which i am taking to mean as mid-March or so). i promised to be level-headed about it but ...aaarrrggghhhhhh. 70% of my job relies upon the Internet. boooooo.i am on page 144 of Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, which so far appears to be the well-told* story of a hermaphrodite borne out of an inbred Greek family. *it is well-told as opposed to well-written; and here i make a distinction between good writers and good storytellers, and thirdly but not basically, good narrators. i picked the paperback up last year but waited until my love of Sofia Coppola's The Virgin Suicides (as opposed to my loathing of her Marie Antoinette) wore off before reading it.so, i tend to judge the book by its first sentence (similarly, a movie by its first scene) and here's how Middlesex's turned out:
I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.also, here is a nice little excerpt from page 109:
Historical fact: people stopped being human in 1913. That was the year Henry Ford put his cars on rollers and made his workers adopt the speed of the assembly line. At first, workers rebelled. They quit in droves, unable to accustom their bodies to the new pace of the age. Since then, however, the adaptation has been passed down: we've all inherited it to some degree, so that we plug right into joysticks and remotes, to repetitive motions of a hundred kinds.
But in 1922 it was still a new thing to be a machine.
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