As you can see, no posts today -- I picked up Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell this morning and the perfidious beast lured me away from the joys of the internet. (And what a massive beast too; I like to think I read fast, but the whole thing took upwards of eight hours, easily.) More on that later. In the meantime, I'm off to Berkeley for dinner and hoping to catch And You Will Us Them By The Trail Of The Dead downtown later... So farewell for now little blog!

Oh, and not much to report on the Iraqi election front. It's still worrisome. Still crossing my fingers. And I'm still baffled as to how anyone could possibly interpret tomorrow's events as a success or a failure. Let's face it, we could see 80 percent of Sunnis turn out to vote tomorrow, and Iraq will still be teetering on the edge of catastrophe. Alternatively, election day could be a bloody disaster, marred by bombings left and right, with miserable turnout, and Iraq could still conceivably glide along towards relative stability in the end. Or whatnot. So I don't really care about whether the elections are a "sham" or a "historic moment" or whatever other armchair narrative we decide to impose tomorrow. It only matters where they'll eventually lead Iraq -- and that seems deeply unknowable at this point, regardless of the outcome in the short term. Oy.


MORE: Nadezhda has some further thoughts.