At a lid-flipping price!

The First Four Notes, my long-awaited (by me, that's for sure) book exploring the cultural history and misadventures of the opening gambit of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, is ever closer to being an actual thing. Proofs have been proofed, hilariously serious author photos have been taken, bound galleys are fanning out across the land in search of blurbs, all in anticipation of November 13, when the book drops. (Can a book drop like a record does when it's released? I will drop a copy on the floor myself, if necessary.)

One thing left to do is to get a website up to promote the book, but until that happens, this space will have to suffice, which is why you can now find, over on the right, some pertinent links and information. This includes a now-tiny-but-hopefully-at-least-slightly-longer-eventually list of author appearances. That's right, I might be coming to your town! (Unless your town is Brigadoon. No way I'm falling for that again.) As things are confirmed, I will continue to post more and more detail until the density of information reaches the Bekenstein bound and I find myself giving a reading inside a black hole. Where I bet the refreshment table is superb.

The image at the head of this post, incidentally, comes courtesy of my Boston Globe colleague Jeremy Eichler, who generously rescued it from an old Boston Symphony program book. If anybody out there actually still has one of these t-shirts, send me a photo, and you will be rewarded with all the fame that an intermittently-updated blog can provide.