There is no redeeming value to this post. Be warned.

I get my teeth from my father rather than my mother, meaning I've still never had a cavity as opposed to fillings in every tooth with occasional crowns by the time I was twenty, but I grind them badly enough that a few years ago I bit into a nectarine and cracked a half-circle out of one of my front teeth. It was traumatizing; I believe I responded by making a playlist about monsters and going to bed with the complete works of an obscure Polish playwright. So I wear a nightguard, which I dislike, but it keeps me from needing more of my bite filled in with composite; that was an even more demoralizing experience. My teeth are a lot blunter now than they used to be.

I dropped the nightguard down the toilet this morning. I didn't even fumble it: it popped out of my mouth with more than the expected force and made a straight shot down the porcelain, one of those nightmare bits of comedy you couldn't restage if you were trying. I don't think of myself as the sort of person who exclaims in moments of crisis, but somebody was certainly wailing, "Oh, God, I don't even know how that happened!" I had been awake for maybe five minutes, if by awake you mean I was on my feet and at least one of my eyes was open. It was not a good introduction to the day.

And there are worse problems to have, okay, I can name you half a dozen without even starting in on terminal illness, but I am already feeling financially fragile—my gift to the friend whose wedding I'm attending this upcoming weekend in Maryland is that I'll be there at all—and not at my best and I don't like breaking things. And all of my dreams last night were nightmares. Usually, the one bright side to that state is that when you finally wake up, things haven't gotten worse.

So tonight I am supposed to see Alex Cox's Revengers Tragedy (2002) at the Harvard Film Archive with rushthatspeaks and some other people, and if it's raining too heavily for a group outing, I'm still going to the movie, because it's either that or kill something myself. But I'd rather just be going because I like post-apocalyptic blood all over the stage. And Christopher Eccleston.

This is a found post. As in, I found it on my desktop; it's at least three years old and I don't know why I never put it up, except that it didn't have a title and it didn't have music and I can't tell if I forgot about it or just decided nobody would care. There are half-finished, half-started livejournal fragments all over this machine. They weren't a good sign. Anyway. This is a form of clean-up. Here.

There are several reasons A Wind in the Door (1973) is my favorite of Madeleine L'Engle's original Murry books, a few being the singular cherubim, the idea of kything, the deep-eddying undersea of Yadah, and the statement that "Love isn't feeling," which I associated then and still with Le Guin's concept of ontá.¹ But a significant contributor to its imprint on me as a child, and one which only came into focus for me a few years ago, is the character of Mr. Jenkins. Everyone be surprised.

( Now, see here, I don't know who you are and I don't care, but I demand an explanation. )

And for a further L'Engle connection: happy birthday, gaudior! Rabbit, rabbit, my best cousin. More joy.

Today contained far more public transit frustration than it really needed to, but in the evening lesser_celery came over and I showed him The Legend of Hell House (1973), which I love and he hadn't seen. It went over well. The obvious direction for next week is some other title containing the word "house," because he was joking that he couldn't remember if he'd seen The Haunting of Hill House or The House on Haunted Hill, but I am afraid that way eventually lies Obayashi.

I feel as though I'm writing more about my daily life than I have in a long time, but less about my thoughts. I find myself wanting to do something literary and unethical, like write in detail about the people I love: I don't know what point that would prove. I admire memoir as I do most genres I can't (have no idea whether I could) write, but I don't know if I want that much of myself in print for others. Then I don't know why I write that sentence, because it's not as though my recurring motifs are especially hard to decode. I think of myself as relatively transparent. It surprised me in January to find out how little I had let some people know.

(I looked to see what I was doing this time last year, in case it was diagnostic; looks like writing about British noir. Draw your own conclusions.)

That five-questions meme has come around again, this time set by rose_lemberg:

( I am so glad you stayed true to your obsessions. )

Comment if you want five questions of your own. On the interminable bus this afternoon, I thought of a title for a chapbook of ghost poems. There would still need to be more history.

And tonight I brought derspatchel to Viking Zen's for Movie Night and they showed me Xanadu (1980). Fortunately there were caipirinhas, although I still have this memory of catatonically hugging the bottle of cachaça during the Don Bluth-designed sequence nobody warned me about. But there was also Gene Kelly, who was a lovely, lovely man even on rollerskates and dripping with cowboy fringe: I watched his dance-duet with the memory of his muse and I was just smiling. It might have been his last screen role, but I don't think he was capable of being without grace. And the big-band prog-rock fusion number was genuinely quite good. There are tentative plans next week to watch Big Night (1996), but only if (Alison's) Rob makes his family lasagna.

And then I came home and found the mail had brought me contributor's copies of Rose Lemberg's Here, We Cross: A Collection of Queer & Genderfluid Poetry from Stone Telling 1–7, in which my poems "Persephone in Hel" and "The Clock House" are reprinted. The table of contents includes some of my favorite poets working in the field. I am very pleased to be in their company.

And this is the world's greatest commercial.

I am going to bed before I write anything about muses.

My poem "Spirit Photography" has been accepted by Through the Gate. The magazine is a new market; the poem is the direct result of one of those dreams that hybridize figures from waking life with history and random brainstem spatters, in this case a theater tour of Faerie and the never-recovered camera carried up Everest by George Mallory in 1924. There is an entire genre of dreams I can never figure out what to do with, so I'm glad this one turned into something.

(I feel as if I am developing a subgenre of ghost poems: Lucan, Christopher Morcom/Alan Turing, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Thomas Andrews, George Mallory; the eponym of "Ovid's Two Nightmares" is not a ghost in the poem, but he certainly isn't alive now. It must have started in 2003 when I wrote about Young Vilna for strange_selkie, but it seems to be accelerating in recent months. There are ways in which I suppose it's not all that different from writing about myths and gods. It feels like something else: it requires more research, but it also requires more responsibility. Everybody and their cousin has a Persephone poem and I accept that not all of them are going to fall within my ideas of reasonable interpretation. (I reserve the right to be cranky as death about it, though. There are maybe four authors who don't annoy me on Norse myth and two of them are on this friendlist?) Stories throw out variants like many-worlds quantum mechanics: it's what they do. A god has a different face for everyone from the moment it's described. There are parameters on lives, on history. I don't want to get them wrong. The dead have enough troubles; they don't need me misrepresenting them. What I should really pay attention to is: why these ghosts. There are others I would have expected. Maybe they'll come along.)

I don't think there's been anything particularly memorial about it, but it's been a good weekend so far. Friday was marked by a visit to the home of two of derspatchel's friends: it is a former boarding house once occupied by the composer of "Jingle Bells" and deserves its name, being full of odd little corners of rooms and roof-slants and second kitchens where you don't expect them. We were taught the correct way to do vodka shots. (It turns out to involve black bread, pickled olives, and smoked whitefish. You don't get a hangover and you're all set for visiting a deli for the next few days.) We did not play, but were duly impressed by the antique board game—discovered in the barn—where the various trading countries are things like "Servia" and "Sarawak" and on the other side a race between electric and gas-powered cars includes penalty squares like "Shot by Man You Ran Over, -10 Points." There were hours of conversation. I have a new translation of The Master and Margarita to look for. Saturday, I crashed early in the evening: listened to an episode of The Mask of Inanna, watched some YouTube fragments of a BBC Play of the Week, read a book of poems by Medbh McGuckian, and managed to stay asleep for nearly ten hours. Today, Rob and I tried Café Algiers (where I'd had mint iced chocolate with Dean on Friday) for dinner and were rewarded by really good hummus, falafel and merguez respectively, and tamarind soda where you pour the seltzer into the syrup yourself; we saw A Day at the Races (1937) at the Brattle Theatre and I have no plans for tomorrow.

The Economist gave its obituary to Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau.

1. cucumberseed, this afternoon on the bus I sat behind a woman with dead bees in her hair. I don't know how, but this is your fault.

2. Not only does the absinthe-minded bartender at Backbar still recognize me and derspatchel, he supplied the missing ingredient for the Seeräuber-Jenny, which I'd realized had to contain ginger liqueur (mule) and spiced black rum (pirates). Citrus, he said, and then after a moment's thought: bergamot. He didn't have any behind the bar, but if I can bring him some, he'll mix me the drink. Challenge accepted. —Where do I find bergamot?

3. Lorem Ipsum is one of those vortex bookstores where you look in to see what's on the shelves and leave something like an hour later regretting only that you didn't have the cash in hand for Rube Goldberg's Guide to Europe (1954). We stopped in briefly on the way to dinner at Tupelo and came back afterward for our couple of books which were half a dozen by the time we fled. The bookseller threw in a local 'zine for free. Also some bookmarks, which reminds me that I should probably not use the envelope with the tickets for Gojira (1954) for the purpose in George Dyson's Project Orion: The True Story of the Atomic Spaceship (2002). I cannot afford Turing's Cathedral (2012) until it's out in trade paper, so I'm consoling myself with backlog.

4. Three episodes further with Viking Zen, The Legend of Korra is still impressing the hell out of me. The technology is complex and changing, the political situation in Republic City is as murky as in any metropolis, and the character work continues to avoid the obvious, sometimes in ways I don't even notice immediately. (I was walking home when it registered that the character gushing at Korra in a crush-struck way calls her the "smartest, funniest, toughest, buffest, talentedest, incrediblest girl in the world"—she's flattered to blushing and there is absolutely no attention drawn to the fact by either the script or the characters that this litany of compliments has zip-all to do with her physical appearance past the fact that "buff" is a definite attractor.) Someone is also having fun with fictional advertisements: Cabbage-Corp is a punch line waiting to happen (I'll be disappointed if it doesn't), but the timing on "Flameo Instant Noodles, noodliest noodles in the United Republic" was beautiful. And I continue to feel there are historical references I'm not getting, which means they're doing worldbuilding right.

5. I am still feeling a little thin-skinned and selectively interactive, but the last couple of days have involved something more like sleep than not and that's a leg up on the way I headed into last weekend. I will not be at Wiscon, if anyone's curious; I have no particular plans for Memorial Day. I think it will work out.

I walked home tonight in a glow-in-the-dark T-shirt for the first time in years. It reminded me that as a child I had glow-in-the-dark stars on my ceiling—I marked out the major constellations, as I suspect many people I know nowadays did. I don't think I'd want them again; I am the sort of person who props books in front of or drapes clothes over the computer lights while I sleep. But I miss that sort of casual astronomy in my life. This comment also brought to you by reading Project Orion and about four children's books from the 1950's in the same three-day span. I thought I had a decent chance at being an astronaut when I was eleven.

My poem "The Green Man Answers the Classifieds" has been accepted by inkscrawl. It was written for ashlyme. He attracts green things.

I have nothing else to report about today, but that's all right.

(Strange Horizons is still looking for volunteers.)

I aten't dead. I am not, however, sleeping very much, which makes me about as communicative. Possibly less so, depending on the haunting.

That said: announcement!

Strange Horizons is looking for proofreaders, webmasters, and editors.

That last includes poetry. Deadline is June 10th. Spread the word.

And I expect to recognize some of the names on those applications . . .

1. The mojito cupcake at Kickass is not kidding. It is not quite truthful to say that we went promptly for lunch at Blue Shirt Café because I needed something in my system that wasn't rum and sugar, but it is not quite a stretch, either.

2. Following an interlude at Dave's Fresh Pasta in which some fresh pasta was purchased and some foodstuffs not commonly available in this country were stared at with respect (preserved lemons, lardo, condiments I didn't recognize), rushthatspeaks showed me True Stories (1986). I cannot overstate how much I love this film. Attempts to describe it will descend into incoherent flailing about John Goodman and Papa Legba and the Lawnmower Brigade. (The conspiracy theory revival meeting. The dueling auctioneers. The roaming tribe of children in their 4-H shirts, singing.) I may try anyway when I am less tired, but for the moment suffice to say that I would cheerfully rewatch it anytime, anywhere, and that may include right after watching it the first time. The one shortcoming: I have been informed there is no such thing as a good non-bootleg version of the soundtrack.

. . . I'm taking suggestions, internet.

3. After weeks of hiatus, Viking Zen and I finally managed to meet for Movie Night. The Legend of Korra is currently streaming for free on Nickelodeon's website. We watched the first three episodes. I am just going to geek out here, all right? There is all the development I wanted from the worldbuilding and more—the explosive cross-pollination of technologies and cultures (and genetics) that was inevitable from the finale of Avatar: The Last Airbender (2005–2008) means that the seventy years between series have taken the world from steampunk to a beautiful fusion of the 1920's and '30's with varying points of real-world origin, most visibly to me Shanghai, New York, and Hong Kong, but I'm sure there are allusions all over the place I simply don't have the knowledge to pick up on. There are characters wearing what trenchcoats would look like if they had evolved from hanbok. (Plausible extrapolation of clothing! Who does that?) I want the soundtrack—the music is a similarly alt-world version of big-band jazz. There are airships. There are elevated trains. There are slums and street food and media blitzes. The introductions to each episode of Avatar were spoken by a character who came from a culture that was not illiterate, but heavily invested in oral tradition; the recaps in Korra are newsreels. And it is an older show, more immediately violent than Avatar, more politically and emotionally complex. An obvious villain is spearheading a movement with an entirely legitimate and unaddressed grievance; the latter cannot be dismissed no matter how disturbing the actions of the former. Korra on her first day in Republic City takes down a trio of racketeers collecting their weekly protection money from a hard-up merchant and finds herself under arrest because, in the process, she completely trashed the street. She's not a diffident or an accommodating protagonist. She's aggressive, impatient, used to a prodigy's quickness and an Avatar's privilege; she tends to kick ass first and remember later that she should have been taking names. I find her a delight to watch, especially since the show is aware that her two-fisted naïveté is both problematic and endearing. There are odd resonances with Baccano (2007), probably because of the jazz and the frequent fight scenes; I found myself thinking that I wouldn't be at all surprised if Jacuzzi wandered into a crowd scene while Nice blew something up (and if someone vidded this, I would be so entertained). There is also a major character who was a gangland accountant when he was younger and I liked him even before that was revealed. I don't know most of the voice actors in this cast, but one of the secondary characters is voiced by Lance Henriksen. (I recognized him instantly. I am always glad he's working.) It is very clearly the same world as Avatar, the same creative team and the same attention even to written language—I can't read the newspaper headlines, but I'm sure someone else can and will; it is not the same show. So far, I really like the one it is.

Bed.

I am so tired, I spent all night dreaming about being unable to sleep.

I got out of bed and found my poems "Blueshift" (for time_shark) and "Natural Phenomena" (about sirens and their listeners) have been accepted by, respectively, Goblin Fruit and Not One of Us. I am meeting rushthatspeaks at Kickass Cupcakes in a couple of hours.

I'm okay with being awake.

1. It's spring and the anthologies are starting to bloom. Here, We Cross—a chapbook of queer and genderfluid poems collected from the first seven issues of Stone Telling—is now available from Stone Bird Press. The table of contents includes work by Michele Bannister, Jack H. Marr, Dominik Parisien, Amal El-Mohtar, Jeannelle Ferreira, Lisa Bradley, Adrienne J. Odasso, and I'm not even naming all the ones that impressed me. Also in that lineup are my poems "Persephone in Hel" and "The Clock House," the former written for rushthatspeaks, the latter for Christopher Morcom and Alan Turing. Yes, you could read them off the website, but you could also have them in beautiful print and support a small press besides. ( Even if the bridge falls down, the memory of that bridge remains. )

2. I must confess that my first reaction to this article about the creation and debunking of two recent historical hoaxes was: next time, put more research into your marks. (And remember that there is more to the internet than Wikipedia.) I look forward to seeing what happens next year.

3. I didn't realize there was a Canonical List of Weird Band Names. It doesn't seem to have been updated in some time, but it confirms my belief that any time the phrase "That would make a great band name" is uttered, somewhere, someone does. Also, I listen to some of these bands.

4. I will probably not hear any of them on WFNX, because the station has been sold to Clear Channel. That is not good. I have no idea what my brother is going to listen to when we drive anywhere in Boston now.

5. This article reminded me that I have been meaning to rewatch The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964) for years. It is not a great film. I find myself saying that by way of disclaimer whenever I bring it up. It is a three-hour spectacle within which exists about an hour of good movie, mostly to be found in the interactions of the supporting cast—Alec Guinness, James Mason, Christopher Plummer, Sophia Loren; unfortunately, the lead is Stephen Boyd and despite his strong work along similar lines in Ben-Hur (1959), he has here the charisma of a grocery bag and doesn't seem able to act his way out of one. He has so little chemistry with Loren, I don't even feel like making the effort of an amusing simile. Sometimes the script wants to be contemporary political commentary in the guise of costume drama and more often it's just swords and sandals. There is an attack of German tribesmen which I would swear was organized by rounding up whoever was loose on the lot at the time, handing them all blond wigs and different pieces of fur, and telling them to scream and run that way. And yet it furnished me with at least two performances I remember very fondly and I found myself writing once to teenybuffalo that the funeral of Marcus Aurelius is genuinely something from another world. ( Well, in order to answer that question, one must consider three aspects of the situation. ) Just for those scraps of another time, I'd sit through scenes like the one where Sophia Loren is supposed to prefer Stephen Boyd to Omar Sharif.

This weekend. Right. I really liked most of it!

Honestly, I was not intending to see all three performances of the Spring Sci-Fi Spectacular, but I had already promised taiganwolf that I would hear him in the matinée and then I had my stuff stashed in the balcony of Urban Promise and then I was invited for dinner between shows with derspatchel and some of the Spetacosians ("a race of acid-spitting backbiters . . . known far and wide for hating that which they love," although off-mike they also do a nice line in WWII dick jokes) and therefore with one thing and another, there was a lot of radio theater on Saturday. What I didn't realize this would give me was the chance to watch the show evolve in performance as the actors tried out different line-readings or bits of business on their varying audiences, culminating in the case of Havoc Over Holowood! in Rob taking a rather nice pratfall for a bit of blocking that had previously been indicated only by some toppling tin-can noises on the foley. (Dr. Alberts is standing in for the robot sidekick of Jetpack Jones, the hero of the wildly popular holo-serial whose latest episode the regular cast are feverishly working to reframe and retcon in a sort of Be Kind Rewind attempt to satisfy a legion jihad junta mob of angry, magna-pitchfork-and-laser-torch-wielding fans. Doc is many things, but one of Nature's thespians is not among them.) Aside from the cast changes between matinée and evenings, I saw less variation in The Day the Earth Stood Still, but I did think their Klaatu improved with performance. My parents loved him on the first night; I found him occasionally, jarringly close to superior in his delivery, which made his closing ultimatum more of an interstellar rap on the knuckles than a cool choice of evolutionary consequences. By the last night, even if he never achieved for me that slight, intrinsic otherness that I want out of my alien characters (and which Michael Rennie conveys, which surprised me when I rewatched the film), I did not have that problem. It didn't hurt that the actor himself looked straight out of the '50's—silvery hair in a neat businessman's cut, brow-line glasses, wearing a grey pinstripe suit and suspenders like he put them on every morning; the accent of the time, too, which seems to be more or less his own. Oh, yes, and he turned out to be a friend of one of my mother's two closest friends in Boston. Playing opposite agoodshinkickin, the aforementioned last-seen at darthrami and strange_selkie's baby shower. This is just getting silly.

There was an enthusiastic afterparty. I almost did not go to it, for reasons that were partly Tiny Wittgenstein and partly finding out there are places in my head that have not yet healed as much as I hoped they had; I walked to Orchard Street out of a teeth-gritted fuck-you-brain and a deep conviction that I would have nothing to do except stand around reading the spines of my host's library and then I got to the driveway and the actor who had played Professor Barnhardt in The Day the Earth Stood Still (who does a hell of a German accent, although what we traced in conversation Friday night at Saloon were our respective origins in the Pale) spotted me, sang out my name, and tried to give me his margarita. So I went in. I sat on the stairs with ladymondegreen and talked about souls and significant others and music we needed to exchange. I discovered further interconnections between various spheres of my life. I seem to have wound up with invitations to two different people's houses. I am hoping my brain takes the point.

And then on Sunday I woke up with something that was either a transient bug or a touch of norovirus or food poisoning—I would really prefer it not to be the latter, because the only culprit would be the conch burger from Boston Burger and it had mango salsa and jerk mayonnaise, but either way I did not meet my family for a matinée of The Avengers (2012), which my mother has been wanting to see ever since Thor (2011); I spent most of the daylight hours curled up in bed trying to convince myself that even drinking water was a good idea. Dinner was a bowl of macaroni and a lot of tea. I counted it a success. And eventually I felt well enough to return home and watch "The Hounds of Baskerville" on Mystery! with my mother for Mother's Day (I seem to be averaging about two episodes per season of Sherlock, but I've enjoyed all the ones I've seen), but it was not exactly how I'd planned to wind up the weekend.

(The title of this post comes from one of the things Rob showed me to distract me in the meantime: Noel Harrison and the Smothers Brothers, "The One on the Left Is the One on the Right." It did its job. Also, it's catchy.)

Yesterday made up for it. Rob and I went to see Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986) at the Coolidge Corner Theatre. My parents were also in the audience, which caused some drama around picking up the tickets, but also made my mother feel a lot better about missing The Avengers. Despite silliness with rain and buses, we made it in time for the introductory lecture by an extremely entertaining marine biologist who showed both footage of data-tagging whales with suction cups and really neat models of the data obtained thereby. The crowd was probably some combination of Trekkies and hipsters—the applause was always appreciative, but I think it was sometimes appreciating different things—and the print quality was awful, which was rather distressing on a film-preservation level, but it remains a delightful movie and I was strangely pleased I was not the only person who very nearly lip-synched, "Well, double dumbass on you!" And then there was dinner, which kind of turned into the Anabasis. In a sensible universe, we would probably have just walked into the likeliest-looking restaurant in Coolidge Corner, since one of us hadn't eaten all day and the other had cautiously essayed some rice cakes around eleven in the morning. Instead, Rob knew a barbecue place in Brookline, so we walked up to the Village Smokehouse only to discover it had closed just as we got there. Catching the D line from Brookline Village became an instantly less appealing prospect as soon as we realized that it was a Fenway night: a game had just gotten out and the subways were going to be chaos. We kept walking. And in one of those disorienting clicks where the streets look like déjà vu until you get them from the right angle, we came up past a garage and I realized I knew exactly where we were, just facing the other direction. It was the route I take with lesser_celery whenever we walk back from lunch to his car, sometimes from the Back Bay. And so we walked up Huntington, keeping an eye out for plausible restaurants, avoiding Penguin Pizza because it was full of students, and just at the point where our blood sugar was about to desert us entirely, we reached The Squealing Pig (which is not to be confused with The Salty Pig, even though I ate for the first time at both places with lesser_celery) and not only were they still open and serving food, they weren't even very crowded. Rob had the fish and chips and curry fries; I had the lobster toastie and the Tuscan fries. He ordered a lot of imaginatively named beers, one of which I would have totally mooched from him if it hadn't contained coffee. For dessert, we decided we didn't need our arteries and got the toasted sandwich made out of Belgian waffles, bananas, and Irish Mars Bar. The stereo played Division of Laura Lee's "Dirty Love," which is one of the songs I wrote "Little Fix of Friction" to. We may have closed them out and I still caught the last bus from Somerville, which I consider another victory of timing over planning.

And today I have no plans at all except a lot of work and recharge. TCM claims to be showing something called Remember the Night (1940) later this evening, starring Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray and written by Preston Sturges, which I suspect I will collapse in front of. That is fine.

This is not the post about my weekend, because my weekend contained enough things that I should write them up properly. (Upshot: I saw a lot of sci-fi radio theater. It was good. Sunday could have stood some improvement, but it turned out all right.)

This is the post about The Moment of Change: An Anthology of Feminist Speculative Poetry, edited by Rose Lemberg, which is now available from Aqueduct Press. Contributors include Ursula K. Le Guin, Shweta Narayan, Theodora Goss, Amal El-Mohtar, J.C. Runolfson, Lawrence Schimel, Cassandra Phillips-Sears, Catherynne M. Valente, Rachel Manija Brown, JoSelle Vanderhooft, Athena Andreadis, Adrienne J. Odasso, Phyllis Gotlieb, Greer Gilman, Jo Walton, Samantha Henderson, Jeannelle Ferreira, Yoon Ha Lee, Sofia Samatar, April Grant, Nisi Shawl, and a great many other poets speaking in all their own (and sometimes multiple) voices. Two of my poems are among them, "Matlacihuatl's Gift" and "Madonna of the Cave." I won't be at Wiscon for the reading, but I am honored to have been part of this project and very pleased it is out in the world.

Go and see; read and change.

Briefly, because it has been the kind of day mostly occupied by errands and work—

1. My poems "Aristeia" and "Godfather Drosselmeyer" have been accepted by Fantastique Unfettered. The first is the poem I wrote with a migraine in December; the second was written for Shaun O'Brien of the New York City Ballet. They are a new market for me. I am rather pleased.

2. I had dinner in Providence last night. My brother informs me that he once drove to Portland for a lobster roll, so apparently I still have some ways to go in the food-related road trip stakes, but it was a very pleasant way to wind up a day that had involved rather more waiting for buses in sudden tropical showers than I had expected from waking up in New England: I piled into a small red car named Ohtori with rushthatspeaks, gaudior, and a visiting rax and we all drove to Julian's. Rush and I last ate there one eventful weekend in 2010; we count it as our first date. They had astonishing food and the most entertaining bathroom either of us had ever seen. Neither disappointed on return. They had just changed their menu that night, so I think we got some experimenter's attentiveness from our waitstaff, but the people around me were ordering things like corned seitan and saffron-olive bulgur and buckwheat pancakes with duck confit and piñon ice cream and all indications were favorable. I had a chimichurri steak pizza with queso fresco on naan, which should not have worked at all. It did not surprise me that the jalapeño goat cheese grits were delicious, but I was still really glad to have ordered them. Gaudior can vouch for their lemongrass basil sorbet; Rush ordered something that was indeed not a Boston cream pie, but it was glazed with Nutella, so I really didn't care. It is now a definite thing that I like Becherovka. We had to drive back to Boston immediately afterward, because Rax had a poker date and Gaudior has a job, but they dropped me in Davis Square and I met derspatchel and a table of Post-Meridianers at The Painted Burro, which is how I found out that someone whom I last saw at the baby shower for my god-daughter (who at that time was going by the name of Figment and is now two and a half years old and tall) is playing the female lead in The Day the Earth Stood Still. The interconnectedness of my world is just getting silly.

3. The Day the Earth Stood Still is the second half of the Post-Meridian Radio Players' Spring Sci-Fi Spectacular, which I am going to hear tonight. Come if you're in the area (on the right planet, in the correct dimension)! The first half is an episode of derspatchel's Red Shift: Interplanetary Do-Gooder, in which he also performs as Dr. Albert Alberts. teenybuffalo, I know I still owe you a mad scientist poem. It's going to be sap, I'm just warning you.

My brother got a full-time job and was so happy about it, he talked to me for half an hour before going back to the garage to finish the knife he was making. I return to my much less interesting work.

1. This post somewhat delayed by the fact that lesser_celery showed me Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989), which is probably going to need its own writeup. [edit: see remarks to asakiyume in comments.] It feels like it explains a lot of Simon Logan's industrial fiction, though.

2. I dreamed last night of trains and apocalyptic landscapes. One of them was New Haven, which surprised me only insofar as it looked like Hartford.

3. Shamelessly reposted from comments in handful_ofdust's recent post, because they came out rather well: my years-belated thoughts on FairyTale: A True Story (1997), which nineweaving screened for me in 2009.

( Together, they create an etheric field which allows the fairies to materialize subtle amounts of ectoplasm into their bodies. That's how they’re able to capture them on film. Do you see? )

4. When Craig Arnold disappeared three years ago on Kuchinoerabujima, I hoped that someone who knew and loved him would write him a poem. His lover has written him a book.

5. I really like this Wondermark.

I am out of five things, but this interview with Lindsay Kemp is still pretty awesome. I discovered him with The Wicker Man (1973); I should have known all the best people had something to do with Derek Jarman.

Maurice Sendak.

His memory for a wild blessing.

My weekend was in many ways comprised of parties and it was delightful. The one on Saturday night was for Cinco de Mayo: at first I didn't have much to do except stand around the kitchen and not know anyone besides derspatchel and a pair of actors I'd seen in two productions and then all of a sudden one of the host's housemates needed someone to keep a pan of olive oil and chicken from burning while he chopped some peppers and the next thing I knew we were making two batches of extremely spicy stir-fried chicken with jalapeño and habanero and curry spices when we ran out of Mexican ones (and the inevitable moment of facepalm when we were told the first batch was too hot for most people who weren't us, so at the last moment with the second we diced in some fresh tomatoes to tone it down and then received disappointed comments about how it wasn't even hotter) and that is a terrific way to spend a party by me. My co-chef made me a drink with rum, honey, and lime. I have this memory of singing musical theater with Rob and no one caring or noticing except insofar as we were between them and the refrigerator, which was rather charming. After midnight, we moved on to a coming-home party for one of his friends who had been serving in Afghanistan; his girlfriend turned out to be interested in weird cocktails and he talked to me animatedly about Greek epic until Rob and I were the only people left, so I think it went well. We went home and slept. Abbie the Cat has decided he likes me well enough that he can be inconvenient about choosing me as a nap site. Yay?

And Sunday was Somerville Open Studios, so we actually got inside the former Masonic temple on College Ave., the Museum of Modern Renaissance. It's as astonishing as it looks from the photographs: densely iconographic, full of myths from a dozen different traditions all kaleidoscoped together; it could be hodgepodge and it's awe-inspiring. Fortune spins the threads of fate from her wheel with the signs of the zodiac between the spokes. There is a figure that looks for all the world like Paul Bunyan if he were a bogatyr. I saw a mermaid I want on my wall, darkly green-armored, her hair rising in spines. rose_lemberg, there are several different kinds of firebird. When we left for Blues Jam, we passed some members of Emperor Norton's Stationary Marching Band playing klezmer ("Fun Tashlikh"!) in Davis Square. And I finished up the evening at Tea at sen_no_ongaku and sigerson's, where I saw two of the people from last night's second party and a very welcome schreibergasse, who has been only a ghost-presence in my life for months. He had made Moustachio's man-portable fusion pie. Someone else had brought homebrewed mulberry port. I made very enthusiastic recommendations for Lackdaisy. I have a copy of Mike's incidental music for The Winter's Tale and so should you.

(My post title is from none of these events; it is from an awful humorous story in the October 1917 issue of Popular Mechanics, which is a lot like reading World War I-era MetaFilter. I was just looking for information about the Gotha G.V, but Rob and I lost hours off our lives. Just the advertisements are entertaining. Don't say I didn't warn you.)

And now I am about to be late for my afternoon, so I am leaving this computer. Have some links.

1. Courtesy of shirei_shibolim: Every Major's Terrible. It is a thing of beauty. Also, it scans better in places than the original.

2. Courtesy of asakiyume: Kickstarter a documentary about Lloyd Alexander. I have written before about how much he mattered to me. I am glad someone's doing this.

3. Tom Edden impressed the hell out of me as Alfie in One Man, Two Guvnors. Pleasingly, the New York Times seems to feel the same way. (Marty Feldman! I said so!)

4. Norman Bel Geddes took tabletop gaming seriously.

5. When we go back to New York.

I did not have very high hopes for today when I woke up. Sleep was what they call around here an epic fail. I stared at Robert Holdstock's Lavondyss (1988) on the bus and generally felt like one of the brain-dead.

And I spent the afternoon with rushthatspeaks learning how to make samosas out of their amazing dumpling book. With the exception of the last batch where the unavoidable substitution of olive for canola oil caused the wrappers to soften and fall apart in the frying, they came out looking remarkably like actual street food and tasting as samosa-like as the addition of hard-boiled egg and seitan to the potato, pea, ginger, and shallot filling allowed, which was considerable. Nobody burnt themselves with hot oil. (I didn't really expect anyone would, but after the ginger tea incident, I wasn't going to bet against it.) Andrea Nguyen's recipe for simple flaky pastry is going to become a staple around the kitchen. We needed something sweet to send along with the savory, so we invented chocolate lemon brulée bars. Quite gratifyingly, I have since heard that both were well-received by their intended consumers.

And after their particular contingent of Sassafrass got on the road, I had dinner with derspatchel and audioboy and his wife whose livejournal handle I don't know (if she has one) at Magoun's Saloon, where if Rob didn't accidentally order a cider, I have discovered an actual beer I like. Flemish red ale. I'm as surprised as anybody. I'm guessing from the taste it's some relative of lambic, but I know nothing from Belgian. I honestly think the Reuben I ordered to go with it might have been bigger than my head if I had not dissected it in self-defense, which my tablemates kindly did not comment on. The fried triangles of mac and cheese were ridiculous.

And after dinner, I took Rob to Backbar, where the absinthe-specializing bartender remembered me from Sunday and made me the best Corpse Reviver #2 I have ever tasted. It got the woman next to me at the bar to order one. For Rob, he did a Bunny Hug and after we described the problem with the Moxie Mule, an astonishing change-ring that was so good we didn't even fight over it, substituting Amaro Nonino for the Fernet Branca and thereby fixing the entire drink. (It needs a name. We haven't got one yet. Ideally it should be riffing on "moxie," but "attitude" isn't going to cut it.strange_selkie, inventor of the Very Pleasant Pineapple—help?) I seem to have been the test case for a variant on my erstwhile favorite cocktail which he called a Dark & Moody, with ginger liqueur and clove bitters ("like sniffing a pack of Djarums"). I'd like to see it on the drinks board one of these weeks, so I'd call it a success. And he set absinthe on fire for us.

Apparently the reason I wasn't very interested in alcohol for years was simply the lack of speakeasies in my life?

And now I am home, I am going to curl up with Willie Sutton's Where the Money Was: The Memoirs of a Bank Robber (1976), and I am not getting up tomorrow until I actually wake up. Any telemarketers will be redirected to the newly created circle of hell.

I appear to be rather tired. Possibly this is because I spent the afternoon walking around the Middlesex Fells with ratatosk—I'm not sure our level of activity was strenuous enough to qualify as hiking, but we did climb over some wonderful granite outcroppings, shining as sea-pebbles under that slightly luminous overcast you get on certain days that are almost rain. The lichens were wet and very bright. There was a waterfall. I talked a lot about Mythago Wood. We are definitely going back.

Possibly I am also tired because this week has been so far—and likely to continue—much more social than I was planning when we got back from New York. Monday, I met Dean at Tealuxe after my voice lesson and discovered they serve decaf chai that does not give me a migraine, which was a pleasing surprise. Tuesday was mostly yardwork in the rain and reading slush for Strange Horizons until I had to run an errand in Davis Square in the late afternoon, as a result of which I had dinner with derspatchel at Pizzeria Posto. (Goat ragout. Oh, my God.) I can't remember the last time I had a sundae before Wednesday, but I got one from J.P. Licks with Matthew that was coconut yogurt with hot fudge and mango and we talked a lot of Mel Brooks movies; stopping by the Diesel netted me an unexpected five minutes of audioboy and in the evening lesser_celery showed me a Pixies concert from 1988 and the first episode of Six Feet Under (2001), both of which I quite liked. Today, Fells and brief sightings of Rob and Abbie the Cat. Tomorrow I am making a gazillion samosas with rushthatspeaks because Sassafrass will need to eat them on their road trip to a wedding in Virginia.

So I should probably not be surprised that I passed out on the bus back from Somerville and had half-dozing, disconnected dreams: a man pulling yards and yards of red silk from his slit unbleeding wrist, a woman's voice singing in the winter war for his country, always a soldier against a drum-machine backbeat, something about angels and orange trees. The line a ghost from the sticks, which I couldn't decide if it meant also the underworld river. I haven't been able to get my brain to shut off before four or five in the morning the last few nights—although staying up for The More the Merrier (1943) was totally worth it—and it would be nice if tonight's the night that alters. I still think I'm doing all right. I've been happy. I'd just like to be able to say the same by Monday.

This post is both signal-boost and shameless self-promotion, which will be a neat trick if I can pull it off.

Ottawa Storytellers are fundraising for the Odyssey Project: a twelve-hour telling of the epic from Olympos to Ithaka with eighteen storytellers and all the gods, tricks, and tales that can be conjured from words and voices and listening ears.

I can't think of a better choice for an all-day affair. The Odyssey is a storyteller's epic: it is what Athene says she loves most about Odysseus.

εἰδότες ἄμφω
κέρδε᾽, ἐπεὶ σὺ μέν ἐσσι βροτῶν ὄχ᾽ ἄριστος ἁπάντων
βουλῇ καὶ μύθοισιν, ἐγὼ δ᾽ ἐν πᾶσι θεοῖσι
μήτι τε κλέομαι καὶ κέρδεσιν

we two who know
guile, since you are by far the best of all mortals
at plans and stories, while among all the gods
I am famous for craft and clever ways

(Odyssey 13.296–299)

All that first night together in their olive-tree bed of twenty years, what Odysseus and Penelope do is tell one another the stories of the different kinds of hero they have been.

τὼ δ᾽ ἐπεὶ οὖν φιλότητος ἐταρπήτην ἐρατεινῆς,
τερπέσθην μύθοισι, πρὸς ἀλλήλους ἐνέποντε,
ἡ μὲν ὅσ᾽ ἐν μεγάροισιν ἀνέσχετο δῖα γυναικῶν,
ἀνδρῶν μνηστήρων ἐσορῶσ᾽ ἀΐδηλον ὅμιλον,
οἳ ἕθεν εἵνεκα πολλά, βόας καὶ ἴφια μῆλα,
ἔσφαζον, πολλὸς δὲ πίθων ἠφύσσετο οἶνος:
αὐτὰρ ὁ διογενὴς Ὀδυσεὺς ὅσα κήδε᾽ ἔθηκεν
ἀνθρώποις ὅσα τ᾽ αὐτὸς ὀϊζύσας ἐμόγησε,
πάντ᾽ ἔλεγ᾽: ἡ δ᾽ ἄρ᾽ ἐτέρπετ᾽ ἀκούουσ᾽, οὐδέ οἱ ὕπνος
πῖπτεν ἐπὶ βλεφάροισι πάρος καταλέξαι ἅπαντα.

and when they had had their sweet fill of lovemaking,
they took their pleasure in stories, telling one another,
she of all she had endured in her halls, bright among women,
watching the wrecking-crew of suitors
who made her the excuse for much slaughter of cattle
and fine sheep and emptying many jars of wine,
while Zeus-born Odysseus told of all the trouble he had made
for people and all he he had sorrowed and suffered himself,
and she was glad to listen, and neither did sleep
fall on her eyelids until he had finished it all.

(Odyssey 23.300–309)

The performance is on June 16th. One of the incentives is an illustrated print of my poem "Leukothea's Odyssey 6," originally published in Goblin Fruit. That's the shameless self-promotion, but it's a lovely thing. The artist is Elizabeth Paxson.

Help them bring Odysseus home.