Sarah Arvio, "Wood":

I'll stake my life on this old stick I'll stick
and we talked into the morning and night
and laughed green leaves and sometimes a flower

I had never heard of this poet before; I am going to be thinking about this poem.

Well, this is Greek, but of another kind. My poem "ὡς πολλοῖς ὄμμασιν εἰς σὲ βλέπω" is now online at Strange Horizons. It was written in April for faithhopetricks, who was feeling less than kindly toward the Allegory of the Cave. The title is taken from an epigram attributed to Plato by Diogenes Laertius:

ἀστέρας εἰσαθρεῖς Ἀστὴρ ἐμός‧ εἴθε γενοίμην
οὐρανός, ὡς πολλοῖς ὄμμασιν εἰς σὲ βλέπω.

At the stars you gaze, Star of mine: if only I were
the sky, that with many eyes I might gaze you.

For the same Aster, he is also supposed to have written an epitaph:

ἀστὴρ πρὶν μὲν ἔλαμπες ἐνὶ ζῳοῖσιν Ἑῷος,
νῦν δὲ θανὼν λάμπεις Ἕσπερος ἐν φθιμένοις.

Star of the morning you shone once among the living,
dead now you shine as Hesperos among the lost.

I think my next collection of poems is going to need endnotes.

There were coyotes yipping and howling somewhere outside the house last night. Not dogs; or at least I have never heard a dog make that thin, almost whinnying keen before. I will be curious to hear if they return tonight. I expect I will still be awake.

From the sublime to the sugar-laden: for Thanksgiving, Burdick's is selling little chocolate turkeys with sliced almond tails. The dark ones are filled with clementine ganache, the milk with pecan, bourbon, and chestnut. I framed this one in its natural habitat, which was apparently on top of Georgette Heyer's The Toll-Gate (1954). It did not survive long. Fortunately, I memorialized it first.

gaudior

rushthatspeaks

tamnonlinear

My father has become interested in Cycladic art, so yesterday he handed me half a dozen books out of the Winchester library and asked if I would vet them for massive idiocy. The first book in the stack was J. Theodore Bent's The Cyclades, or Life Among the Insular Greeks, and in fact I handed back to him. It was published originally in 1885—the edition I was looking at is the reprint from 1965, foreword by Al. N. Oikonomides—and while it's a nice read if you like late Victorian scholar-tourism, I had trouble getting past that particular aspect of late Victorian scholar-tourism which rhapsodizes about the classical Greeks and regards their present-day descendants rather less warmly:

Furthermore, the pleasure felt by the people of Mykonos in possessing the valuable remains of Delos is only that of a satiated dog with a bone; they do not want them or understand them themselves, so they try to prevent anyone else from reaping the good that would ensue from their being properly looked after and opportunity given for a more thorough study of them.

Right, because that argument works so well on the Elgin Marbles. Bent has come to Mykonos specifically to hear the μοιρολόγιαι, the ritual laments performed by mourners over the dead, and yet even in his description of the funeral he is fortunate enough to attend on his third day on the island, he cannot refrain from remarks like "that harsh and grating voice which the Greeks love, but which is so distasteful to Western ears" or the comment that two grieving relatives "reminded one forcibly of the Carian women of antiquity who were hired for the same purpose; and one's mind wandered back to a Greek chorus—that of Æschylus especially—where the virgins at the gate of Agamemnon indulge in all the most poignant manifestations of grief, beating their breasts, lacerating their cheeks, and rending their garments; and I could not but admire the prudence of Solon, who forbade the excessive lamentations of women . . . and great was my relief when the priests arrived with their acolytes bearing the cross and lanterns to convey the corpse to the grave." Also he translates all the μοιρολόγιαι he recorded into rhyming couplets, so there goes any real sense of the language involved. If I ever meet his shade by noonday, I will say really insulting things to it from Aristophanes. After which I will be gracious, and thank it for collecting pieces of folklore I hadn't heard, as from the same chapter:

The archangel Michael is the modern Hermes, the angel of death, and in the representations of him, usually to be seen over the door entering into the part of the church consecrated to the sacred mysteries, he is depicted as a warrior having in his right hand a naked sword, balances in his left, and trampling a sinner under his feet. Again the idea is prevalent that at a man's birth the Fates fix the day of his death; consequently the pious believe that on November 8, the archangel's day, he looks through the list and writes down on a tablet the names of those who during the ensuing year must fall victims to his two-edged sword.

From the lamentations (μοιρολόγιαι) which are sung in Greece to-day we can learn much about the popular beliefs concerning the condition of the lower world . . . Charon, or Charos, to-day is a synonym for death. 'Charon seized him' is a common expression, and a clever popular enigma likens the world to a reservoir full of water at which Charon, as a wild beast, drinks; but the beast is never satisfied and the reservoir never exhausted. Imagination is the soul of these modern Greek death ballads; the ideas are beautifully poetical in many cases, though the language is crude and often difficult to follow from the complexity of patois expressions. They sing to you of feasts and banquets in Hades, where the dead are eaten for food; they tell you of the gardens of Hades, where the souls of the departed are planted and come up as weird plants.

King Charon is not the Death of the middle ages, the skeleton with a scythe in his hand; he is the Homeric ferryman; he rows souls across to Hades in his caïque, and he is a hero of huge stature and flaming eyes of a color like fire (Cf. πορφύρεος, 'Il.' v. 83); he goes round to collect the dead on horseback: so in olden days a horse was the symbol of death, as we see on so many tombstones. Charon, too, can lurk in ambush to surprise his victims, and can change himself into a swallow, like Athene, who perched on Ulysses' house on the day of the murder of Penelope's suitors. Charon's palace in Hades is decorated with the dead, and the bones of the departed are used for every purpose of domestic use. The dead who haunt it are for ever planning to return to the upper air, and form schemes for so doing, which Charon always discovers; sometimes they even manage to steal his keys, but in vain.

The dead growing in gardens, the horse, the swallow and the keys to hell: I love that.

And then I will tell it to λαικαζέσθω back to Hades, because really, in the chapter with the Nereids, the crack about bagpipes was unnecessary.

Things that were good about the last forty-eight hours:

Dinner with sigerson and sen_no_ongaku, who had made a lamb and lentil stew according to a recipe recovered from Phrygian grave offerings. I brought pear cake. I think they won.

An afternoon with rushthatspeaks at the Sweet Thyme Bakery in Lexington Center, where we walked and back. I have no idea why this place chose Lexington of all towns to manifest, but since they sell things like green-tea-and-pumpkin and rose-walnut cookies, roulades made with sesame and cranberry, yogurt-cheese bars with mango, pumpkin, or red bean, and in the right season they make moon cakes, I am profoundly grateful for their existence. I make a point of purchasing something from them at least once every week, in hopes of staving off the inevitable—I have become amazingly pessimistic about the future of Lexington Center ever since it lost its last non-chain bookstore and then the Waldenbooks went out of business. But in the grand old days of the Republic, hundreds of servants would change thousands of lightbulbs . . .

Catching up on the latest episodes of Dexter with Eric. Having been introduced to John Lithgow at an impressionable age—the eighth dimension was involved—I am delighted to see him here in a starring role, if only for a season.

Wednesday night's migraine was completely gratuitous.

Yesterday worked. Having made the decision to go for our crazy day-trip at nine in the morning, Eric picked me up about an hour later and we made it to New York City with forty-five minutes to spare, successfully surmounting an unexpected detour for automotive repair in Connecticut—the heat shield came most of the way off the exhaust pipe on Eric's Civic at just about the one-hour mark; the mechanic at the Midas in Vernon fixed it for free and told us not to miss our movie—a complete traffic jam while waiting to get on the George Washington Bridge, and the fact that I had slept barely three hours the previous night. (I dozed through most of the rest of Connecticut, in the kind of weird shallow sleep where your dreams are more like hallucinations of things heard and seen through your closed eyes. The bit of rubber that flew off the truck in front of us and bounced off our windshield turned out to be real.) We had first complete parking fail and then a stroke of parking luck, in front of an old record store on Carmine Street; and at 3:45 PM, in a very nicely crowded theater at the Film Forum, we saw the restored print of Powell and Pressburger's The Red Shoes (1948) for Eric's first time and my first on a big screen. It was gorgeous. ( Well, I don't know exactly why, but I must. ) Afterward we walked to Rivington Street for dinner at 'inoteca, which included pumpkin-and-thyme supplì and a ridiculously delicious salad of calamari with apple and celery root, and we drove back under what turned out to be the last of the Leonid shower, which I mistook for my own tiredness making stars glitter and blur. Even if this print comes to Boston, which I am hoping it does, I will not be sorry we drove to New York for it. I needed a day like this. It was definitely a good thing.

Ave atque vale, Edward Woodward. I have no idea what he was like in private life, but I will remember him always as a year-king or a soldier-poet, a sacrifice, and singing.

Eric and I are off to New York City in pursuit of The Red Shoes (1948). I think this will be a good thing.

My poem "Anakatabasis" has been accepted by Not One of Us.

I am slightly disappointed that the only difference between a Sachertorte and a Sacher-Masoch-Torte is the presence of redcurrant jam and marzipan in the latter, but that doesn't stop me from approving of its existence.

This message brought to you by Eric's brother's birthday request for a chocolate cake with chocolate frosting, which is so much more straightforward than anything I would have made if left to myself—I would have thrown some cardamom into the batter or kirsch into the icing or messed around with raspberries just to see what happened, but I have kept it so to speak vanilla and with any luck it will be well-received. Essentially, tonight has been a demonstration that I am easily bored and correspondingly obsessive about cooking; I went to put up an apple or two to bake after dinner, as a dessert or a snack, and now I have a glass dish full of apple slices rendered with maple syrup, honey, two kinds of cinnamon and other spices, and some cranberries that couldn't get out of the way fast enough. It tastes fantastic, but I think it stopped being a baked apple somewhere around the time I decided to do the bottom layer with clove and the top layer with ginger and see if they remained distinguishable to the taste after half an hour under foil at four hundred degrees. (Surprisingly, yes.) Also I am unsatisfied with my icing skills, meaning that the cake-wide distribution is not mathematically exact and I had to polish a paper towel around the rim of the plate afterward so as not to present Ron with a theobromine-flavored crime scene. I was adapting the recipe my family uses for holiday fudge. It came out rather more architectural than I had imagined. So long as no one goes into shock, I'll be happy.

I really think I want to reverse-engineer a Sacher-Masoch-Torte now.

All night I dreamed about dying. Every time—I was shot once, bleeding out; another time, I had some kind of wasting illness—I woke up instead of never opening my eyes again, but whenever I fell back into the dream, there was a different death to go through. Some of the circumstances, waterspouts, unmoored islands, shell-like crusts of uninhabited buildings in the middle of cities where I've lived, might have made intriguing story material if I hadn't been distracted by the endless iterations of mortality, none of them opera-clean. Today fails auspices.

However, I suppose we'll stick it, if we don't there are still some good poets left who might write me a decent epitaph.
—Isaac Rosenberg (1917)

Claude Lévi-Strauss died!

Claude Lévi-Strauss was still alive!

I fail current events.

(In other news, I am returned from Providence, where there was pizza and much late-night conversation with readingthedark, and last night Viking Zen and I watched Volver (2006), my first film by Almodóvar. I liked it. Today I am back to raking the lawn.)

My flash "The Fool Where Angels Fear" has been accepted by Not One of Us.

Copies of Not One of Us #42, meanwhile, are now available. My poem "Phersu" can be found in its pages, along with work by Patricia Russo, J.C. Runolfson, Eugene Mirabelli, and other artists of this issue's theme, communication—or not. Strange is your language and I have no decoder. I feel like that most days.

I must throw some books into a backpack. I am off to Providence this afternoon. Till then: man, I need more Hans Conried in my life.

People throw terms like "dreamlike" around very lightly. Generally, in comparing an experience or a set of events to a dream, they mean it was like a fantasy of theirs, or it worked effortlessly, or it was so perfectly successful, it was practically unreal. When they speak of art, usually they mean it was nonsensical, full of disjoints and undercurrents, surreal. Occasionally their comparisons make it clear that not all dreams are pleasant ones, and then you know they've read C.S. Lewis.

More than any movie I can remember seeing, Dr. Seuss' The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T (1953) is like a dream. Especially the part afterward where you attempt to describe it to someone else, and there is just no fucking way.

( Get me the physics laboratory! )

Notes toward posts that never coalesced. I got sick of having them strewn around my desktop—

Whoever and whatever the statue may be (and I note that just at the point where I had accepted him as something like extra-diegetic music, one of the other characters interacted quite brusquely with him), he, too, is part of the myth of Persephone. He is identified when Neville sets the conditions for the sixth drawing—"the lower lawn of the garden by the statue of Hermes"—the messenger between worlds, the one who brokers the terms of descent and return. I cannot tell precisely how this information is meant to be interpreted within the brutal formalities of The Draughtsman's Contract (1982), but it cannot be throwaway; this did not strike me as a profligate film. By the same token, I wonder whether Mrs. Herbert is past the age to conceive. Say that Mrs. Talmann is a little younger than I am; her mother could be in her early forties. It would make a nice symmetry, sowing both Demeter and Persephone: except it is the draughtsman who ends up in the underworld, like Mr. Herbert before him. There is hungry earth under all the mathematically clipped lawns.

I do not know why Anthony Lane considers David Lean's films to be without desire. If the wanting in Lawrence of Arabia were directed toward a lover, it wouldn't have been screened in 1962 without an X certificate. It just happens that what Lawrence is in love with is the sun, the desert, a myth of himself—Sherif Ali, his Horus-shadow. The real love story in Doctor Zhivago is probably between two people and a cycle of poems. I do not mean that Lara's only importance is to inspire Zhivago's work; I mean that Zhivago himself is less important than what he writes. His name means life. The balalaika motif called "Lara's Theme" is first heard at his mother's graveside, as he watches birch leaves blow yellow across the paling steppe sky—he connects it to the woman he loves, but it is the chord that catches in his poet's heart, the world that he turns into words for love of them. That is not repression, sublimation, disinterest. That's passion for more than people alone. There's a difference.

One unanticipated side effect of watching Ang Lee's Sense and Sensibility (1995) while Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters is in stores: now I keep seeing Colonel Brandon as a peculiar amalgam of Alan Rickman, Bill Nighy, and a squid. This is not as offputting as you might think.

—I don't know why most of these are about films. Possibly because if I posted about everything I read, I'd be typing nonstop.

"But there may be an answer: prove that the lionfish is not in fact a top predator after all, by getting people to eat it."

I have not yet collated or uploaded any of the photographs from last Saturday's Halloween party. Nonetheless, I took a few tonight.

The Post-Meridian Radio Players' Big Broadcast of October 30th, 1938? Awesome. With cigarette girls and a theremin on top. It made me want to buy Byfar Coffee Syrup, and I can't even metabolize coffee. sen_no_ongaku, please tell me there will be recordings. I am not sure it's healthy for Martian music to be stuck in my head.

There was no Babylon 5 last night, as two of the regulars were in New Hampshire, quite reasonably celebrating their kid's birthday, so in honor of the impending holiday, Eric showed me "Halloween" from the second season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It was very fun. hans_the_bold had screened a handful of episodes for me in New Haven and I remembered a fondness for Ethan Rayne, but I do not think I had seen this particular bit of diablerie. Masks, faces; the fusion or exchange of the two. Joss Whedon wins no points with me for referring to Janus as "a Roman mythical god" (as opposed to the other kinds of Roman god?) and the Latin in Ethan's invocation is more than a little hinky, but I do give Robin Sachs credit for pronouncing it like Cicero, not like the Church.

—That's as far as I got with this post before I decided to track down the episode online and transcribe the invocation, just to see whether I was being unfair to Buffy's mad classics skills. Thank God, I think, for the WBTV website; the answer is, not really, no.

Janus, evoco vester animum. Exaudi meam causam. Carpe noctem pro consilium vestrem. Vene! Appare! Et nobis monstra quod est infinita potestas. Persona intra corpem et sanguem commutandum est. Vestra sancta praesentia concrescit visceram. Janus! Sume noctem!

(Seriously, Whedon, had you no Latinists on-site? They aren't very hard to find. Or a textbook.) Going strictly on vocabulary, this means:

Janus, I call forth your spirit. Hear my suit. Seize the night for your purposes. Come! Appear! And show us what infinite power is. The mask must be changed for the flesh and blood within. Your sacred presence curdles the insides. Janus! Take up the night!

It is, however, terrible grammar. And while I am willing to accept the possessive adjective in the second person plural, because Janus is after all the double-faced god, bifrons, biceps, then the imperatives should not be in the singular—and either way, that's the vocative case you want for the god's name. Also, corpem is not a word. Neither is sanguem. And if persona is the subject of the passive periphrastic, someone should please have remembered it's a first-declension noun. Viscera is not. Oh, damn—

Animam tuam, Iane, evoco. Exaudi causam meam. Pro consilio tuo carpe noctem. Veni! Appare! Et quod est potestas infinita nobis monstra. Persona intra corpore et sanguine commutanda est. Concrescit viscera praesentia sacra tua. Iane! Sume noctem!

It's not well, but it's better. I return to restocking the kitchen.

I have finally seen a film that made me care about football.

Unfortunately, Eric, it was The Damned United (2009), so I still don't care about the Patriots.

Ulrike Ottinger's Johanna d'Arc of Mongolia (1989) is one of the best things I have ever seen in my life. I was going to write that it is a crime against humanity that this movie is not available on DVD from Criterion, but it looks as though copies can be ordered through the director's website, so I am going to hold off on calling down the wrath of Tengri and Angela Carter just yet. It's hilarious and otherworldly, stylized and documentary, full of old ritual and Yiddish theater standards, and while I have read stories and poems like it, I've never seen anything comparable on a screen. I loved it very much.

Ottinger's current project is Die Blutgräfin—The Blood Countess—from whose title you may correctly guess the subject is Erszébet Báthory. She will be portrayed by Tilda Swinton. With vampires, in Vienna. It is possible there will not be enough awesome in the world to describe this film.

These discoveries have seriously improved my day.

I did not sleep very much last night. Nonetheless, sometime after seven o'clock, I managed to dream that I was the owner of an old three-story house in a student neighborhood. It had been mine for years, inherited from someone who should have been closely related to me, although real-life candidates are few (my parents were mysteriously absent). There were two lodgers on the second floor. Their names were Kit and Anny; for the first few months I thought they were male, in their early twenties, until one afternoon I ran into them on the stairs and realized they were both women and closer to my age. I saw them occasionally on the landing, but otherwise not much outside their rooms. They dressed like Russian futurists who had just discovered punk rock—sort of DIY wing collars and waistcoats, Doc Martens and dark suit jackets with individual words stitched into the sleeve, although I could never read them. Kit was spikily chestnut-haired, Anny much darker. They had audible, enthusiastic sex at constantly unpredictable hours. And I cannot remember why one of them invited me in, but their sitting room had small, time-thickened diamond panes and the daybed, the desk, the floor were swamped in drifts of paper, all of them written on, even if only a crossed-out line or two, as though they never threw a draft away. I picked up some of the pages to read through while Kit was unearthing a three-ring binder of CDs or DVDs—I can't remember where Anny was; in the next room, out of shot—which is the point at which it became plain, without any kind of shock or revelation, that my downstairs neighbors were Anakreon and Christopher Marlowe.

If I could draw, this would be the best manga ever.