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February 11, 2008

Wasp Stings

It's odd, but sometimes it's the unexpected, out-of-left-field things that make me feel the greatest validation as a writer. For instance, I went through all of 2005 experiencing lots of joys & giddinesses & highs because of the release of the movie and everything related; however, even after the film festivals and reviews, the one tiny, strange, surprising instance that made me realize "Wow--the movie has sort of cracked the general consciousness" was when I saw the title of this New Yorker article about a sports stadium in Munich.

Now something equally unplanned and odd has happened: a band has named an album after something I wrote. Cursillistas, the brainchild of Portland, ME's Matt Lajoie, makes layered, hypnotic, ghostly music that I really love, and the new album, Wasp Stings the Last Bitter Flavor, takes its title from a line in the second chapter of my second novel In Awe.

(Pictured above: Matt Lajoie.) When In Awe came out in 1997, some of the initial reviews were less than enthusiastic about the description-overload sentences like the "Wasp" one, so now, a decade later, seeing the words used as this album's title is hugely flattering. I'm elated. And it's especially cool because I like the music so much.