one of the bands i find most alluring, but haven’t been listening to much of lately, is the white stripes. i found an excellent bbc radio interview of the jack and meg white where they discuss (among other things) the apparently overdone mtv movie award performance of “fell in love with a girl” and the upcoming movie Cold Mountain (based on the book by Charles Frazier) in which jack plays a folk singer and the husband of renee zellweger’s character.

i recently finished (actually devoured) a book that i picked up a few weeks ago at the sils booksale. a few years ago i took a creative writing poetry class and our teacher-poet, michael chitwood recommended we read this book, gap creek by robert morgan, a north carolina author. so i picked it up. and read it at night when i should have been sleeping.

the language was intoxicating–so apparently authentic to the appalachia region of north carolina and so different from what i’m used to that it was almost unbelievable. the story was very plot driven, picking up from the first chapter with an almost mythic event and proceeding at the same pace throughout. if anything, the only disappointment was the familiarity of the story–which follows the first year of a young and impossibly hard marriage in rural south carolina during the early part of the 20th century.