Binoah, that's very nice of you to remember my anniversary and to write inquiring about my novel not once but twice.

I apologize about being shy about writing here, but when I heard there were questions about my new novel I wanted to clear it up. I have said somewhere that I finished writing it. Well I finished the first draft and, the way I write (always going back and revising as I write), that's close to meaning completely done, but not quite. I'm now putting on the finishing touches and expect to turn it over to my agent by the beginning of November. I'm turned on about it.

Hey did anyone watch Wim Wenders's movie for the Scorsese PBS Blues series last night? I think anybody interested in music (and who ain't?) should watch this series. It's got to be uneven--Scorsese's segment was (the first one of the seven segments, it was run day before yesterday), but for the archival footage alone it's worth it. There was a lot of advance gossip about the Wenders, since he did suspicious-sounding things like make faux-documentary type footage of people (Blind Willie Johnson and Skip James), but I swear it worked. The way he mixed approaches, many of which sounded like they'd have to be too tacky to believe, such as playing Willie Johnson's "The Soul of a Man" while running pictures of the cosmos (the song's one of the recordings sent up in the Voyager spacecraft) was actually powerful and moving. And there was amazing actual footage of J.B. Lenoir. Check your listings and watch as many of the series as you can. You won't be sorry.