Myth Happens

Quel fior anticho di vertuti et d'arme

2008-05-17T04:24:08Z

I love the internet.

"Of Nounes Adiectiues, and of the vſe of them."

Someday he's going to take stock of sleepwalking days

2008-05-15T18:04:21Z

I am not dead. I aten't dead, even. I have had a bit of a health crash, which is annoying me very much. The most exciting thing that happened to me this week? I had three poems rejected.

That is perhaps not fair: I also acquired unholy amounts of Peter Bellamy, loved Eric Jay Dolin's Leviathan (courtesy of fleurdelis28), watched three episodes of the new Doctor Who, and was dragged to see Iron Man (2008), which I liked all out of proportion to my expectations. Even celebrated ericmvan's birthday last week, which was quite awesome. But still, in the last five days I haven't been moving much. Who do I have to bribe for an immune system that works?

In honor of the lilac tree in our back yard, which I need to photograph, have some poetry that is not mine. I am going back to proofreading.

Lilacs in dooryards
Holding quiet conversations with an early moon;
Lilacs watching a deserted house
Settling sideways into the grass of an old road;
Lilacs, wind-beaten, staggering under a lopsided shock of bloom
Above a cellar dug into a hill.
You are everywhere.
You were everywhere.
You tapped the window when the preacher preached his sermon,
And ran along the road beside the boy going to school.
You stood by pasture-bars to give the cows good milking,
You persuaded the housewife that her dish-pan was of silver
And her husband an image of pure gold.
You flaunted the fragrance of your blossoms
Through the wide doors of Custom Houses—
You, and sandalwood, and tea,
Charging the noses of quill-driving clerks
When a ship was in from China.
You called to them: "Goose-quill men, goose-quill men,
May is a month for flitting."
Until they writhed on their high stools
And wrote poetry on their letter-sheets behind the propped-up ledgers.
Paradoxical New England clerks,
Writing inventories in ledgers, reading the "Song of Solomon" at night,
So many verses before bed-time,
Because it was the Bible.
The dead fed you
Amid the slant stones of graveyards.
Pale ghosts who planted you
Came in the night time
And let their thin hair blow through your clustered stems.
You are of the green sea,
And of the stone hills which reach a long distance.
You are of the elm-shaded streets with little shops where they sell kites and marbles,
You are of great parks where everyone walks and nobody is at home.
You cover the blind sides of greenhouses
And lean over the top to say a hurry-word through the glass
To your friends, the grapes, inside.
—Amy Lowell, "Lilacs" (1925)

How all at once my heart took flight

2008-05-07T05:55:22Z

I write this not sitting in the kitchen sink, but with band-aids on both hands. This is because I greatly overestimated my recovery this afternoon, walked into Arlington Heights to run some errands, and tripped over nothing on the sidewalk; I went down with angular momentum and completely skinned the heel of my right palm, nicked grit into the other, and scoured the corduroy off both knees. A woman in a passing car stopped to ask if I was all right. I must have looked spectacular from the street. (I was of course carrying my leather jacket over one arm, which meant it afforded no protection at all; hence the mysterious scrapes up my arm to the shoulder. I think I rolled.) Yes, I told her; I got up and walked into the bank, handed over my checks and deposit slip, and asked if I could use their bathroom. "Not unless it's an emergency," the teller said. "It's not an emergency, is it?"—"No, I just fell on the sidewalk and I need to wash the grit out of my hands," and I turned up my palms, one of which now looked like do-it-yourself stigmata. She blanched and hastily showed me downstairs to the restroom; then misplaced my checks, so I had to wait around while she located and deposited them. I had forgotten until I got home that two nights ago I fell over in the shower. Whatever I have, it's messed up my inner ear. But at the moment, I am more annoyed about the corduroys, of which these were my best pair, and my sundial ring, which is badly scratched up: it was on the hand I landed on. The only reason I'm not covered in mercurochrome is I think it's illegal. Neosporin, however, right now is my friend.

It seems that what I do when too wiped out to write productively is watch classic movies. Tonight's was Pygmalion—the 1938 version, Shaw's own adaptation, with Wendy Hiller and Leslie Howard. And I have to say, I grew up on Rex Harrison. He's definitive. Anyone who essays the role of Professor Henry Higgins from now until the end of time will have his shadow to contend with, and lines of My Fair Lady are regularly quoted in my family's house.* But for an obsessed phonetics geek with no people skills, I'll take Leslie Howard for a thousand, please. If there's a romance here, it's even more one of the intellect. And Wendy Hiller is luminous.

Lastly, hats off to an achievement of awe. Because they all married non-Jews, my mother and her two siblings were long ago disowned by our religious relatives in Florida, declared dead and pointedly said Kaddish for. This is the branch that descends from my great-grandfather's brother Pesachia, who was quite devout where Noah was a crazy freethinker who read Zola and liked Italian opera; I have never heard anything against Pesachia, but his children are idiots. One of them just called up my mother's brother, wondering if he would like to send them money. Because someone's life is on the line? Because of dire financial straits? Nah. They just want a donation to their synagogue in Miami.

Leo Rosten, eat your heart out.

* According to David Ehrenstein, in the essay included with the Criterion DVD: "There’s a saying that goes: a definition of an intellectual is someone who can listen to Rossini's 'William Tell Overture' without thinking of The Lone Ranger. Were that notion expanded to include anyone who can experience Shaw's Pygmalion without humming the melodies of 'I Could Have Danced All Night' or 'I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face', millions more would fail the test."

Even though she cost him all he had to lose

2008-05-06T05:55:55Z

Since I still feel like a train fell on me, I curled up on the couch downstairs and watched first David Lean's Brief Encounter (1945) and then John Ford's The Long Voyage Home (1940). The former I found lovely and classic; the latter I want to own. It was the perfect film for me to watch right now. It's an Odyssey with no νόστος: the only real home for its sailors is either the sea itself or their awaiting deaths; the land is more alien to them than the water, but they all dream of it. It is not out of key with Kipling, either. And there are small points that the drama crests toward, the four one-act plays by Eugene O'Neill out of which the script was adaptated, but really it's one seam out of a narrative that starts nowhere and never stops; sea-like. But for others the long voyage home never ends. The film was made in 1940 and the action has been updated from World War I to II, but wartime is an incidental condition. It's the sea that calls you and the sea that never lets you go; it cuts you off and it binds you together. I don't mean the stories are nihilistic. People matter—who you hold on to, who you keep faith with, who you don't leave behind. (To be discussed in comments, if anyone wants to. I am too tired to deal with cut-tags and synopses that don't run on.) But the sea doesn't care. It was here first. You can swear to love till the seas run dry, but you can't outlive the ocean. I don't find this an upsetting thought. I think we've established already I'm not normal.

And some are drowned in deep water,
And some in sight o' shore,
And word goes back to the weary wife
And ever she sends more.
—Rudyard Kipling, "The Sea-Wife" (1893)

And tide and tide and 'tween the tides her sons go out and in

2008-05-05T03:49:13Z

Berlioz's Les Troyens at the Boston Symphony Orchestra: monumental and shimmering, like the ancient cities that you dream. Coming down with a severe sore throat: probably created a slightly more hallucinatory impression than Berlioz intended. On the other hand, Yvonne Naef had a head cold for tonight's Cassandra, and I should sound that good on my healthy days.

Pursuant to my last post: a playlist of sea-yearning songs. Some will be familiar to readers of this journal—some I have gotten from readers of this journal—of this particular batch, a few are traditional, most are coined, and all, when I heard them, spoke to me in the right language of the sea. They may not for anyone else. (The sea has many voices, / Many gods and many voices.) There are thirty songs here; translations or transcriptions can be provided upon request, and there may be a sequel to this playlist at some point. Until then or otherwise, enjoy! I am going to drink a lot of tea and go to bed.

The Bills, "Bamfield's John Vanden"

So your questions of romance don't ask me
I'm the man who wed the Pacific sea

Brian Peters, "The Widow at Windsor"

Walk wide o' the Widow at Windsor,
For 'alf o' Creation she owns:
We 'ave bought 'er the same with the sword an' the flame,
An' we've salted it down with our bones.
(Poor beggars!—it's blue with our bones!)

Cliff Haslam, Jeff & Gerret Warner, Tony Saletan, "The Dreadnought"

Here's a health to the Dreadnought and the whole of her crew
To the bold Captain Samuels and his officers too
You can keep your flash packets, Swallowtail and Black Ball
Oh, the Dreadnought's the flyer that can lick them all

Cyril Tawney, "Roll Down (The Shantyman)"

Now the anchor's aweigh and the sails are unfurled
(Roll down)
We're bound for to take you halfway round the world
(Walk around, me brave boys, and roll down)

Dar Williams, "The Ocean"

It's where we came from, you know
And sometimes I just want to go back
After a day, we'll drink till we're drowning
Walk to the ocean, wade in with our work boots
Wade in our work boots, try to finish the job

The Decemberists, "The Island (Come and See, The Landlord's Daughter, You'll Not Feel The Drowning)"

I will dress your eyelids
With dimes upon your eyes
Lay you close to water
Green your grave will rise

Eliza Carthy & The Kings of Calicutt, "Fisher Boy"

Oh, the bonny fisher boy that brings the fishes from the sea
Oh, the bonny fisher boy, the fisher boy got hold of me

Gordon Bok, "Peter Kagan and the Wind"

Kagan, Kagan, Kagan
Bring the dory home
The wind and sea do follow thee
And all the ledges calling thee

John Roberts & Tony Barrand, "Anchor Song"

For the wind has come to say:
"You must take me while you may,
If you'd go to Mother Carey
(Walk her down to Mother Carey!),
Oh, we're bound to Mother Carey where she feeds her chicks at sea!"

John Roberts & Tony Barrand, "Drake's Drum"

Drake he's in his hammock and a thousand miles away
(Captain, art thou sleeping there below?)
Slung atween the round shot in Nombre Dios Bay
And dreaming all the time of Plymouth Hoe
Yonder looms the island, yonder lie the ships
With sailor lads a-dancing heel and toe
And the shore lights flashing and the night tide dashing
He sees it all so plainly as he saw it long ago

Kaizers Orchestra, "Dekk Bord"

Ro, ro heim til Transylvania
Gløm nå personalia og andre trivialia
Dekk bord, send et telegram
Til Victoria, for snart komme me fram

Row, row home to Transylvania
Forget the personal notes and other trivia
Get the table set, send a telegram
To Victoria, for we're soon coming home

Lal Waterson, "Bath Time"

What's all this fuss and commotion?
Two children in a tin bath on a clippy mat
We sailed a mighty ocean

Lal Waterson, "Midnight Feast"

And always in our ears was the sound of the ocean
Always in the distance was an indigo sky

Lal & Norma Waterson, "Jenny Storm"

But in Boggle Hole lay the lad she should wed
(The larks they sing so clearly-o)
The seaweed was tangled about his head
(As the tide came flowing in)

Martin Carthy & The UK Group, "The Mermaid"

For last night, last night the moon shone bright
And you know that she had sons five
Tonight she may look in the salt, salt waves
And find but one alive

My Favorite, "How I Saved My Life"

She shook a black tambourine in my shipwrecked dreams
A heart like an anchor that sank her down to me
At the bottom of the sea

Peter Bellamy, "We Have Fed Our Sea (The Song of the Dead)"

There's never an ebb goes seaward now
But drops our dead on the sand—

PJ Harvey, "Water"

Now the water to my ankles
Now the water to my knees
Think of him all waxy wings
Melted down into the sea

The Pogues, "Turkish Song of the Damned"

Did you keep a watch for the dead man's wind?
Did you see the woman with the comb in her hand
Wailing away on the wall of the strand?

Rasputina, "SweetWater Kill"

All along, it was the ocean's song
That called me down to listen to her
Swirling still in a sweetwater kill
A swiftly sifting riptide

Robyn Hitchcock, "The Ghost Ship"

The bubbles rising from the deep
Where dead men sing themselves to sleep
From oak and coral, they do seep to say
Okay, you read my future like a chart
See through my skin into my heart

Stan Rogers, "Barrett's Privateers"

God damn them all! I was told
We'd cruise the seas for American gold
We're fire no guns, shed no tears
Now I'm a broken man on a Halifax pier
The last of Barrett's privateers

Stan Rogers, "Three Fishers"

Three wives sat up in the lighthouse tower
And they trimmed the lamps as the sun went down
And they looked at the squall and they looked at the shower
And the night wrack came rolling in ragged and brown

The Starboard List, "The Banks of Newfoundland"

Wash the mud off the dead man's face and heave to beat the band
There blow some cold nor'westers on the banks of Newfoundland

Sting, "Blood Red Roses"

Oh, you pinks and posies
Go down, you blood red roses, go down

Sting, "Why Should I Cry For You?"

Under the Arctic fire
Over the seas of silence
Hauling on frozen ropes
For all my days remaining

Sting, "The Soul Cages"

If you lose a wager with the king of the sea
You'll spend the rest of forever in the cage with me

Vetiver, "Luna Sea"

The moon drives the seas insane
Soon the tide will take you in
Why do I bother to explain?

Waterson : Carthy, "Captain Kidd"

My parents taught me well
To shun the gates of hell
Against them I rebelled, as I sailed

The Young Tradition, "Shanties (Fire Maringo, Hanging Johnny, Bring 'Em Down, Haul On The Bowline)"

Lift him up and carry him along
(Fire Maringo, fire away)
Put him down where he belong
(Fire Maringo, fire away)

This is where all pathways lead me

2008-05-04T06:10:49Z

Thanks to n1jdu, a panel I was on at Arisia—"Non-Genre Films That Fans Love," with ericmvan, yendi, and Julia Tenney—is now online in RealPlayer, sound-only as mp3. The first ten minutes are also available on YouTube, which is the only format in which I have been able to view the footage. I am never used to my face or my voice at third-person remove. Boy, do I talk a lot about Powell and Pressburger.

I do not ordinarily post e-mail correspondences, but teenybuffalo wrote this to me last night about "The Salt House" (Sirenia Digest #22) and it may be the best thing anyone has said about a story of mine, ever:

I LOVED IT. I would have read it sooner, but home computer has been being wonky, and when I was on the school computer I didn't want to have someone glance over my shoulder and see the illustration of hot mutant girl-on-boy action from the first Sirenia Digest story.

Well, it was worth waiting for. It was soul-crushingly sad, for one thing [. . .] You hit the high points of just about every single sea-people story, song or archetype I've ever loved, so it set off a big emotional reaction for me.

And I don't mean "sad" just as in "tragic", though that's a big part of it. I mean that it hit me right in my yearning. It helped crystallize the feeling of desire that sneaks up on me whenever I see rivers or the sea. You may have had the same feeling as I did when I looked at Bill in Dead Man's Chest—part of me just felt bad for him but the other part wanted to go where he'd gone all those years and be like him, a part of the ocean. Even being overgrown with kelp and barnacles is appealing when seen in that light. I guess I talked about this when I posted those lines from "Death By Water". Oh, well, it makes sense inside my own head, but when I try to write about it...! So I'll just say it was a lovely, lovely story.

I do not know if I can adequately explain what this means to me. But that sense of yearning is what I never feel I can communicate, how much the sea makes me hungry, desiring and desolate at the same time, because the world fades off forever into the horizon and I cannot shrug into another skin and swim away, I cannot breathe salt water undrowned; I braided kelp into my hair as a child, but it never took root. That rich and strangeness in the songs of other singers, in other writers' words. I put so many things I loved into "The Salt House." To know that it touched someone else amazes me.

"I did not expect anyone to love my own private autumn," nineweaving says, "but there, the sea and the seasons are elemental: they possess us to be handed on."

I can think of worse honors than to be possessed by the sea.

We have fed our sea for a thousand years
And she calls us, still unfed,
Though there's never a wave of all her waves
But marks our English dead:
We have strawed our best to the weed's unrest,
To the shark and the sheering gull.
If blood be the price of admiralty,
Lord God, we ha' paid in full!
—Rudyard Kipling, "The Song of the Dead" (1896)

I've waited all year from midwinter through till May

2008-05-02T02:59:44Z

Happy May Day, all.

What is the sea for the man who has loved and left her? She is fire-water, whisky, rum, a roric flame. She is a green-eyed witch; she speaks in tongues. Her coral rings are forged of skeletons; her white shoulders glisten with the dust of powdered bones.

She is memory, the number of numbers, the eye of the world, the mirror of the sea. What is the ocean for the sailor who has loved and left her? The one lover who dissolves the night. A bottomless glass of moonshine.

And sailors? All sea-talkers. The sons of mermen.

—Rikki Ducornet, The Fountains of Neptune (1989)

Because where we are, we won't always be

2008-04-30T04:01:44Z

Why is no one making a film of Vonda McIntyre's The Moon and the Sun? It began life as a screenplay. It's not as though historical epic is an unpopular genre at the moment. And I cannot be the only person who thinks Peter Dinklage would make a beautiful Count Lucien.

This post brought to you by a complete frustration with calendars.

You give us a tantrum and a know-it-all grin

2008-04-26T06:52:10Z

Tonight I went to see Dreams with Sharp Teeth, Erik Nelson's documentary on Harlan Ellison, at the Brattle Theatre as part of the Independent Film Festival of Boston 2008. It was terrific.* Someone from the film festival came out beforehand to introduce it and explain that this was the documentary's New England premiere, unfortunately sans Harlan, so I was particularly glad I had talked my parents into it. What I cannot figure out is why the audience totaled at most twenty-five. Did the film already hit the con circuit, so no one in Boston fandom felt the need to attend? Has everyone simply heard enough of Harlan Ellison? Has no one heard of Harlan Ellison? How many documentaries can there be that interview Neil Gaiman, Robin Williams, and Ron Moore all on the same subject, anyway? I am genuinely puzzled. If nothing else, it was intensely quotable. And made me want to unpack and re-read several boxes of books.

Tomorrow, I hit up the BSO box office for tickets to Les Troyens. And get my pictures developed!

*Harlan Ellison was not one of my early, formative influences, like Peter S. Beagle or Jane Yolen or Patricia McKillip, but he is one of the most important to me. From about ninth grade until my first or second year of college, if asked to name my favorite writers, I would have started the list with Harlan Ellison, Ray Bradbury, and Theodore Sturgeon, whom I rediscovered more or less simultaneously and in pursuit of whom I scoured the used bookstores of Boston, New York, Gainesville, any English-speaking city I happened to find myself in, which is why I own near-complete collections of all three and some of the reason I need an apartment with library space. I did not have a writer's circle. In high school, I had one friend who wrote poems—many of which I still think are better than my own—and one friend who was writing up her loves and trials in the third person with all the names changed. No one was bouncing chapters of their novel off me. I read Ellison and Sturgeon and Bradbury (and later Cordwainer Smith, whose "The Ballad of Lost C'mell" would furnish my senior yearbook quote: like my last name, misspelled) and never worried that the short stories I was writing were some kind of lesser form, études for a novel. Yes, Fahrenheit 451; yes, Some of Your Blood; yes, Spider Kiss. But the substance of their work was short fiction. I had the shelvesful of collections to prove it. While I still hold Lloyd Alexander responsible for the fact that I sent my stories anywhere, it is not unfair to blame Ellison et al. for the thought that I might be able to make a living out of them.

Rappelle-toi qu'entre les doigts, lune fond en poussière

2008-04-23T19:51:41Z

I met lesser_celery for lunch in Harvard Square today. Given the sudden summer temperatures, it was perhaps not the best day to walk with a backpack to Central Square and back, but I am not really going to complain. I took pictures.

In honor of International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day, I offer "Drink Down," written in August 2005 and published that September in Not One of Us #34. It is the story I wrote because I was obsessed with PJ Harvey's "Yuri-G." Anne Briggs is also to blame, and the Dresden Dolls; 7300 words, for those who like the numbers up front. Enjoy!

Drink Down

I stuck them in real clean . . .
She's got me so mesmerized.
—PJ Harvey, "Yuri-G"

Down in the street, firecrackers were going off like flashbulbs, a staccato ghost of the echoes rolling back and forth between the skyscrapers as the sky exploded overhead. "Like that," Brace said, one hand raised to the gunfire spray of silver that ran above the skyline, electric tag art on the darkened air. Someone had propped the stairwell door open with a radio, static and cannons and triumphant brass spilt out over concrete flagstones still warm from the day's deep heat; her voice was slow, clear, in the spaces between fireworks, and Maddy hitched herself up onto her elbows to listen. "Bright. Sudden. I never felt what I'd held in my arms until it was gone. Yeah, I fucked the moon once. But he waxed and waned like all the rest."

Flares were sinking in green and smoky gold, drifting anemones of smoke. On her back like a stargazer, Brace folded her bare arms beneath her head: reflections glinted down the paneled windows of the offices across the street, angled dark into the skyline's stitchery of neon and steel; ran like the sheen on oil over the silver loops in her ears, the tarnished twist of bracelet around her wrist, the slender ring in her lip. Her hair was the color of heavy cream, pulled back hard from the dense and delicate lines of her face. Beside all that pale glitter, with her own face as speckled as a songbird's egg and her hair too light for cinnamon, too dull for red, Maddy felt absurdly earthbound: mortal counterpoised to myth. "At least," she said, lightly, grimly, "you still see him every night." Last year, she had watched the fireworks in Charles' arms, hers crossed on the cement wall that overlooked fourteen stories' drop down into the sodium-hazed street, his linked around her waist and she could lean her head back into the cradle of his collarbone. Last week, she could have tallied him on her fingers like the elements of a spell. His maple-sugar hair, fine as a small child's, that always looked as though he had just shuffled his hands through it, distracted and intense; his fingers stained from eating oranges, that he bit like apples from within peels half skinned back; his eyes were the color of lime leaves. The kiss he dropped, light as a dead leaf, something outworn, onto her parted hair as he headed out to the library. It's not like there aren't fireworks every year, and she had not answered him before the door closed. A hail of white and punk-pink rained down the sky and she muttered, "One off night a month isn't bad."

"Oh, the light moon and the dark are the same . . ." Then Brace's smile slid up as wide and sly as Maddy always forgot to expect from her, as transforming as possession. "No offense, but Charles is no moon."

Charles in neoclassical draperies, silver paint on his face and the moon's crescent tilted in his hayrick hair: a burlesque Artemis, the bass-voiced huntress of the night. The laugh startled out of her, fireworks in her blood like voltage. She had to put a hand over her mouth to stop the snickers; before she started to hurt. Charles, thinning as she held him tighter until he dwindled to a rind of shadow in her arms. No bright regeneration, though she could still look to dark of the moon and hope. He had liked fireworks.

"No," Maddy said, and rolled sideways to sit up. Concrete scraped under one denim knee; she put her hand down for balance, onto grit and old sun-warmth, and the sky deafened. Blue to gold to verdigris thunder, aurora borealis detonation: all the skyscrapers' mirrored panes epileptic with reflection and Brace had her fingers in her ears. She wondered if Charles was watching, from his library window. Unheard in all the clamor, as though the words would change anything, "No. He's not."

The last echo boomed away over the river. Smoke tangled in the syrup-slow air. Into the aftermath of car alarms and conversation and the rooftop crowd funneling toward the stairs, eyes closed as though she were holding the last brilliant blast safe inside, Brace said, "I like that. Even if it goes so fast. It reminds me what it felt like. I still have dreams, sometimes . . ."

With the same abstracted candor, she had remarked on her six months in the Danish Merchant Navy, how she had backpacked across Ireland for free, and broken her ankle climbing down Mount Fuji in the dark: as randomly and reliably far-fetched as an ancient geographer. You don't believe me, she had said to Maddy over afternoon coffee a week or two ago—small, cliché small world, when Maddy realized that the pale music-store clerk lived three floors up from her own apartment; she had bought Le Tigre and Electrelane from her the day before—unoffended, amused. I don't blame you. But I don't lie. Not a tall woman, and not more than thirty; her brows were almost as light as her hair, her skin as faintly flawed as a plate glazed to crack. The lip piercing was fresh, still flushed, and she had tongued it exploratorily between sentences. The moon was a new story.

Whether she would tell the truth now, or a fantasy, or neither, Maddy did not care. If she could fill her head with strangers' loves, perhaps Charles would not stick so insistently in her thoughts, a fishbone that scraped as she swallowed. Or maybe she could come home tonight and find him still awake, waiting up for her as he had done in their early days, a care that had charmed her all the more because he never thought he was doing anything special, so that she could tell him he was more to her than any mythical one-night stand. Perhaps. Maybe. The words tasted like the smoke unraveling downwind, gunpowder and dissolution. Still she said, "So tell me about your moon. Do you mind? I'd like to hear what you dream."

"You're better off with Charles." Brace laughed softly; opened one eye, dolphin-dark. A spray of firecrackers a few roofs away sounded like incendiary bubble wrap. "It's easy to fall in love with the moon. It's afterward that's hard. But"—a slight shift of her shoulder, a horizontal shrug—"there's nothing unique in that."

* * *

The coffee grinder had broken the day after the Fourth of July, in a coughing whine and stutter of black-brown grounds that they mopped off the countertop with damp paper towels, so she put two mugs of water in the microwave to nuke for tea. Charles was reading on her bed, a wasteland of dark-blue sheets and three or four pillows in a crazy-quilt mismatch of pillowcases; framed posters for Kill Bill and City of Lost Children on the walls, the Decemberists on the stereo, and if she walked into the other room she would see the dogwood tree outside her window still flowering like May. On the floor, where she had sat down to file some scattered manga, Maddy listened to the hum of the big fan in the window and did not reach to pick up Angel Sanctuary. Their silence congealed in her stomach, cold and unmoving.

Charles turned another page of Novalis, mid-afternoon sun in his hair like molasses. He never wore T-shirts with images or logos; this one was blue-black, a size too small, a muscle shirt if he had had muscle worth showing off. No beauty, for all that she could watch him for hours on end: creases and angles as awkward as a stepped-on rake, his face constructed from fine components and no symmetry, like a blind collage. He always looked sleepy when reading. No, she don't know why she got all dolled up for a suicide . . . Faintly through Colin Meloy and the fan's white noise, Maddy heard the microwave beep.

She still had one hand on the mattress when Charles closed Novalis, the nearest corner of the sheet like a bookmark between night-hymns, and said as conversationally as a glance at his watch or her name, "Abwärts wend ich mich zu der heiligen, unaussprechlichen, geheimnisvollen Nacht."

His head was still bent toward his book, the nearest pillow with an ink-brush print of a sleeping cat wrinkled over fawn-colored cloth. On their second date, he had recited Jacques Brel in French until the nearest tables at the little noodle shop were all looking at them, and she had only heard David Bowie's version before. "And for those of us who don't speak German?"

"Oh, like I could call a cab in Berlin . . ." Translation unfocused him, as though he were winnowing words out of the spaces between the air: molecule by molecule, from somewhere he could never see, only feel. "'Down I turn to the night, holy, unutterable, full of secrets.'"

The cold in Maddy's stomach touched her throat, so that her voice was very soft. "What brought that to mind?"

Sunlight fingered a dozen kinds of green from Charles' eyes, bright and momentary as an edge of bottle glass, as he turned his face toward her for as long as it took him to say, "I just liked it. Is that a problem?"

More puzzlement than edge in his voice, this time: easy enough to sharpen if she let herself reply. Those words he might have declaimed to the darkness as it blossomed in fireworks, their moment slid past in days that simmered like sun-sticky blacktop, nights that clung like melted velvet to the skin, and now she could not listen.

"Fine. Jesus," and he reached for the paperback, place lost as he pulled it free of the sheets. As snappish as though she had slapped him with it, "I thought you'd like the imagery. Your sort of thing, isn't it?" The microwave was plaintive in the kitchen and she left the room before he could open the book again; before she regretted how she would answer him, this temptation of another night. He leaned over and punched off the music as she passed. Is it too late to tell you—

* * *

Under the hood, the engine snarls and buzzes like a ripsaw, until Charles pulls the slate-blue Civic over in the breakdown lane. The night sky smolders with stars like sea-salt flares, cold sapphire rages in the pure dark, each the size of Maddy's palm that she raises to measure the unfamiliar constellations; the hills and trees rimmed in silver, all this back-country desolation where the road coils like dropped ribbon, though she sees no moon. Her shadow on the gravel and scrabbly weeds is faint with starlight, even her freckled skin turned pale as skimmed milk.

Behind her, Charles curses and she hears him drop the wrench back into the canvas bag of tools he keeps in the trunk, though she can change a tire far easier than he—his fingers are for turning pages and taking notes, spider-scrambling over his laptop's keys, and the one time he tried to fix her toilet they had to call a plumber for the entire floor. "Sweet," he says. "I knew it was running too sweet," and when she leans to see beneath the raised hood, the engine is all one mass of hornets' nest, head gaskets and valves mummified in sugar-brown paper and seething with yellow jackets. Honey drips through the transmission and pools like amber-clear oil on the asphalt. His fingers are smeared with it, reddened with stings, and he sucks on them absently as he closes the hood. "Luna de miel," the way he loves to scatter other languages like largesse into their conversations. "The moon will have to fix it."

"What moon?" Maddy starts to argue, before she sees the silver bubbling up through the trees, sliding in rivulets over the hills, as the blacktop turns to poured and precious metal. If the stars are fists, the moon is seven clasped hands, and it does not rise so much as it burns through the darkness like a coal through cheap cloth. Its highlands are white as new paper. All its seas shine wet as inkstone, calligraphy in the language of meteoric time. But the letters write themselves together, word on word like the features of a face, as Maddy blinks in the alien blaze and Charles turns away from his wasp-ridden car and the revelation of the moon together, and she recognizes its parchment smile in the second before Charles reaches to cover her eyes.

She was blinking away silver, her lips parted on a word she could not remember if she had spoken, awake or in dreams. In the darkness where no stars burned and the fan only stirred the heat back and forth, she lay against Charles' sweat-warm back and watched the pages of her Bosch calendar flutter palely on the wall, hells of music and heavens of sex, until she felt him stir against her woken stillness. Half into the pillow, he mumbled her name. "Go back to sleep," she murmured. One hand over his tousled hair like a magician's pass, "I'm all right," and she repeated the words as strongly as a charm, for both of them, no matter whether it was true.

* * *

A sultry wind was rising as she closed the stairwell door, and far out on the horizon thunder grumbled. The city spread out around them in lights and tumbled architecture, the crisscross canyons of streets and avenues: as though traffic wore down through brick and concrete like a river through sedimentary years, chiseling out skyscrapers from tenements and street-stalls, erosion into metropolis. Car horns and conversation drifted up, blew away on the hot night air. Sweat was already starting down the back of Maddy's neck, and she waited for lightning in the star-faded sky.

Drink down the moon, Brace had said, and so she was looking for all the candles and crystals of new-age ritual, ley lines and wine in a silver cup; not Brace in a black tank-top and loose jeans, perched peregrine-careless where the roof steepened into old slates and a dust-crazed skylight that looked down into someone's forgotten attic, arms folded over her drawn-up knees and a carton of Canadian beers beside her. White light fanned out from the fixture over the stairwell door, paper-cut her shadow across the concrete flags, so that she turned to Maddy a face momentarily without shadows: an unmarked moon. Only the heavy braid of her hair held darkness in its plait.

For a second, Maddy half expected honey to drip, like strands of clotted sun, from the hand Brace raised in greeting. But she said only, "Hey. The show's just getting started," and moved over to make room.

In the shadows of their bodies, the beer was the color of Brace's eyes and tasted dark as earth on Maddy's tongue: less like a fermentation of grain than leaves. Condensation beaded between her fingers like sweat, dripped down the heel of her hand. Even halfway through her second beer, she still flinched a little at Brace's question. "No," she answered, and pressed the bottle against her forehead: no real chill left in the opaque brown glass. "Charles said to thank you for the invitation, because he's like that, but he's probably asleep by now. He's the one in classes and he gets more sleep than I do," but she could not even put her mouth into a smile, and she tilted her beer back so quickly her teeth clinked on the bottle's rim.

One foot propped on a strip of copper sheathing that rain and corrosion had flaked milky green, Brace took a handful of her shirt and twisted the cap off another beer: her third, or fourth, or Maddy had stopped counting. If anything, she spoke a little more carefully, placing her words as steadily as stones. "If you want—"

"No." The word was a drystone clack; she shook her head. "I really don't. I just . . ." The blink of stars descending on as straight a line as a theater's god-from-the-machine was a plane coming in to the airport. A cat's-claw darkness past full, the moon looked only like itself: an ash-white coin Maddy could cover with her thumb. "It's just stupid. With him. I can remember what we did, but I can't remember what the fuck I was thinking."

"I didn't even think." Briefly flicked over to her, Brace's look was not unkind. "I wanted. I couldn't think. I dreamed of her all night, every night. I wasn't sleeping—lying there, looking up at the sky. Imagining how it would feel, all that clean white, that cold burn. Like she was in me already, and it was over, and all I had left was the memory." Her mouth pulled an expression too sardonic for a smile, too soft for a sneer. "I knew the stories. Afterward. Tithonos, Endymion—who wants that kind of immortality? I would have walked away. But she put her hand on my wrist, like that," as Brace laid her fingers against the slates, dryly grey as a sea-cliff, "and she said, Those aren't the only gifts we give. And I laughed at her. Christ, I laughed and I said what was she going to give me, then? An all-expenses paid trip to Florida? I'd been to Rome . . ."

Maddy swallowed another mouthful of beer, that might have been water for all she noticed. The story was a thin wash of tinsel on her thoughts, sense less important than sound; only that Brace keep speaking, telling the moon as they drank it down. "What did she give you?"

Brace's smile came and went like an eclipse. The backs of her eyes were luminous, moonstruck: or their sheen might have been tears. "The usual," she said; and lifted her bottle, drank without taking her eyes from the sky. "Change."

She set before the moon did, subsiding from story to silence: half-curled on her side, her cheek against the slates like a tired child. Passionless and certain as a catechism, she had recited, But if I look at the moon herself and remember any of her ancient names and meanings, I move among divine people, and things that have shaken off our mortality, the tower of ivory, the queen of waters, the shining stag among enchanted woods, the white hare sitting upon the hilltop, the fool of faery with his shining cup full of dream, so the same mouth could hold poetry-philosophy and lip piercings. No doubt Charles had a copy in Maddy's apartment or his, the pages all unbent at the corners and marked on the diagonal with his small, ink-slashed hand, neat as a script font. She did not wonder for how much longer; she listened to Brace, her murmured lyrics and confidences and lunacies, until there was no more to hear.

"Brace . . ." But she was asleep, without any of the little stirs and twitches of dream Maddy had been expecting, pale hair braided like fishbones down her back, the relaxed curve of her spine and all her skin turned to Italian marble in the late moonlight. Where her tank-top cut away from her shoulders, as grave with muscle as a swimmer's, the vertebrae showed fossil-fragile at the nape of her neck. A loose thread of hair had blown over her parted lips, and stirred faintly with her breath. Beneath her lids whose lashes were fairer than her hair, only her eyes flickered, and Maddy did not shake her awake after all.

There were no beers left, but their taste was still in her mouth, like rained-on earth. Only a few hours until the sun rose, and the moon still thumbtacked over the western sky; she settled down on one elbow to watch Brace in the haze of streetlight and reflection while the night gathered and faded toward the dawn, while Brace dreamed of her lover.

* * *

Far beneath their feet, the ocean booms like distant fireworks and mortar fire, but the cliff pushes back against her leaning palm rough and wet with spray. Shells coil within the stone, ammonites, trilobites, frozen in their silting seafloor that the earth has heaved up high and dry, that she fingers like a rosary as Brace tightens the cord, snaps one finger against the veins in the soft crook of Maddy's arm: a drum, or a watermelon that might be ripe. "She draws," Brace tells her. All enamel and filigree, her hair unfurled like phosphorescence by the salt-damp wind, "She pulls. The sea knows, you see. Our blood's no different."

Down through the darkness, silver slides and buckles on restive water, striations where the ocean floods one way and tide drags another. This moon has knotted itself into the sky, a netsuke puzzle of coral and bones; like black and disturbed mercury, the night bulges around its weight. All the filaments of its light are anchored in the waves, the cliff face, Brace's shoulders and hair and her hands now reaching for the syringe, all marionettes for the moon. The strings stretch and slant, and never slacken. When Maddy reaches for one, it breaks over her fingers as insubstantially as plain moonlight, fine as a laser's beam. "But it never hurts," Brace confesses, and folds Maddy's hand closed, holds it safe in her own as she sets the needle to Maddy's unmarred skin. "It only hurts when you pull the other way," and the moon flows into her like a spider line of light, hooking her up, plugging her in, brimful.

Her vision is turning to platinum and the slideshow blur of waking, the moment when dream becomes memory, but all she can feel now is the burn of silver in her veins and Brace's hand clenched on her own as the light hardens, as the strands form, and through them she drinks down the moon.

* * *

Charles came for his books in the morning, his knock at her door so unfamiliar that she almost forgot, listening for the clink and ratchet of keys, the doorknob thumped against the nearest shelf, to let him in.

Awake before noon, he looked as blurry as a bad photograph, stunned even by the bits and breaks of light slanted through the dogwood branches, speckled like dust motes over her rust-orange carpet, the stacks and slopes of books, the birch-framed couch still half a bed with a pillow at one end and a bundle of hospital-white sheets stuffed against the arm of the other. Night sharpened him, as though late hours were strong coffee, so that he wrote all his articles before sunrise; so that at four in the morning, as she had turned away from him under sweat-rumpled covers, from his flesh that pressed too close to hers, he could be articulately unkind. Don't bother. You don't even want me in your bed anymore, do you, and he had risen and pulled one pillow out from under her shoulder before she could answer. Through the fan's whine and whir and the hard beat of blood in her own ears, she had listened to Charles rummaging through the plastic bins of her dresser and known that kindness or unkindness came to all the same end; after all the silence and the shouting, she would have said yes either way. Now he said, flatly as teletype, "You said this was a good time," but she had to ask him twice before he would come in.

Heat filled the apartment, drowned their movements slow as undersea in summer. On his knees to gather up paperbacks, split-backed science fiction and Norton Critical Editions, he was too familiar not to touch and Maddy picked up last night's tea mug and filled it at the kitchen tap instead. Running water so she would not hear him, cool and sun-shot spill over her fingers when she held the mug under the faucet too long; when she drank, it tasted like the dregs of rose hips, metallic, a hangover ghost of homeopathy. Blue-glazed earthenware was impenetrable to the teeth, only a little harder than language as she walked back in to watch him.

"Charles." He did not raise his head at his name, though she saw it register in his shoulders, his back, the way his hand closed on a well-thumbed reprint of Sturgeon's Venus Plus X. Today's T-shirt was graphite-grey and so oversized that it hung off his shoulders as though still on the bargain rack, loose sleeves down past his elbows like a tunic. A scarecrow child, sticks and sanctuary. He had never looked his age. "You don't have to take everything. I really don't care."

"So? Maybe I do." He rested one arm across his knee, looked over at her. With his eyes narrowed against the light, all the fine lines in his face were creased as deep as cuts. Then he said, as though she had spoken in the brief, considering silence, "I'll sound like a real asshole if I ask, won't I?"

"Ask what?"

"If this is because I don't have tits."

Sunlight shifted on the carpet like a kaleidoscope; the wind-crooked branches, laden salmon and white with late blossom, drew and re-drew shadows on the dust-flecked panes. Maddy's voice was somewhere unmanageable, her stomach or her knuckles, and she retrieved it in more pieces than she had meant. "Yeah," and she sipped more tea-flavored water, so she could finish the sentence. "Yeah. You really will."

Charles sat back on his heels, the battered paperback still in one hand. Flakes of acid-browned paper had crumbled onto the knee of his cargo pants: pockets always empty, shirt always tucked in. "Does that mean it isn't true?"

Two and a half years, if she counted from September. The sun made highlights in his hair, flyaway and disordered as ever. His eyes were green enough to slice: and burn in the wound.

"Fuck you, Charles," she said, finally. The words might have been I love you, for all the difference they made.

Arms full of Spider Robinson and Goethe, Schiller and Le Guin, all the philosophies and speculations she would never read, he paused once in the doorway to brace the heavy white cardboard box against one narrow hip and reach for keys that were not there. Sweat darkened the collar of his T-shirt, the patch where it had stuck to his spine as he knelt in slow, restless sunlight. "I don't really care, you know," and she heard her own words inverted back at her, a mirror with a flaw. "If you want to fuck men, women, Shetland sheepdogs, more power to you. But don't—" He shook his head, dazed with the intricacies of explanation, with early waking and all the broken places between them; she had forgotten that he, too, might hurt from this. "You could at least have told me."

There might have been humor in his words, however unwieldy, but she felt only the barbed-wire snarl that every spoken exchange had become: the rips and scratches of common courtesy, until the only unambiguous language lay between their bodies; and not even that now.

"I don't want to fuck Brace Williams," Maddy said. As true as false and the other way round, and her voice shook only a little; she laid the words down between them and did not look away. "Okay?"

"Okay." The door had almost swung shut; Charles propped it open with his foot, his unbeautiful, intimate, foreigner's face blocked between the doorframe and metal painted brown as old wood. "But," he said, like a riddle, like the last line of a theorem, "you say her name in your sleep," and the lock clicked home behind him.

* * *

Cried raw, she fell asleep with the afternoon sunlight on her mouth, her arms wrapped around the feather pillow from the couch. The powder-blue pillowcase smelled like Charles' hair, and the CD in the system under her desk was a mix she had made for him, that he had never taken home: why bother, with every other night spent in her bed, in her arms? Tom Waits' voice heaved itself up like rusty anchor chains, pitched back down the other side of the verse, a red rose, red rose blooming on another man's vine, and the tears seeped between her eyelashes to mark the other, foam pillow beneath her cheek. "Damn you," Maddy whispered, to both of them, to either, but she was asleep before the next track started up. Somewhere in the dark that smells as cool and mineral-pored as a cavern where no sun ever reached, Johnette Napolitano's sweet hoarse voice tears open over itself, ache and anger like stone and soil, and Charles pulls another page from the book he holds open on his knee. Light diffuses up over his face, spectral as foxfire, the photophore glow of abyssal fish. On the torn paper, luminous ink in snailshell characters slowly blackens to illegibility—silver to tarnish, the scattershot shorthand of dream, and she cannot take the book from his hands.

* * *

Sky and skyline had reversed themselves, so that she looked out onto a nightscape inverted. Beyond the opened window, the geometric dazzle of signs and lit windows marked shops and apartment blocks like stars pinned to earth, butterfly-collected; only coal-dust darkness above. After the day's broil and simmer, the breeze that threaded in from the street might almost have felt cool. Salt still lay on her skin like a residue of tears. "Did you ever think," Maddy said, softly, "your moon would come back?"

"You had to ask. God. I don't know," Brace answered, her smile an implication at the edges of her mouth, and reached for the bottle of soda on the windowsill. With no beer in the refrigerator, she had fished out a raspberry lime rickey from behind the water filter, sugar-sour and transparently red as stage blood; Salome or Snow White. As softly, she said back, "Charles?"

This time last week, Maddy had been transcribing tapes while Charles read Wilde's De Profundis and played all the Enigma CDs they owned between them, Gregorian chant and backbeat every time she slipped off the headphones and neither of them spoke. Brace on the same couch, a book of Annie Dillard essays in her lap, might have been swapped in from some alternate universe: or some sea-depth of Charles' subconscious, cream-braided anima as decorated with silver as a talisman. The thought tweaked her mouth up a little, so that she could answer; only a little. "I don't know. I should miss him more. Or maybe if I never saw him again, the sky could stay dark for all I cared."

"It's dark of the moon." Brace shifted, zazen on canvas-colored cushions. "You could get your wish."

"Oh, yeah. For one night."

Brace said mildly, "Sometimes that's enough."

"For what." She stopped herself before the words became a question. "It doesn't matter. Like you said," so tightly that the words were cords jerked in her throat, "Charles is no moon. And I never—he thought—" Maddy's fingernails were picking at the back of the couch like a cat's impatient claws, hard enough to snap threads; head bent away from Brace, so that she saw only couch, carpet, books, and between them the partition of her own dying-leaf hair. Brace's gaze was as palpable on her flesh as the faint stir of air through the screen, less heated, as patient. She looked up at last in frustration: no lunar phase or fairy tale sufficient to this ache shoved hot through her heart. "There isn't anything enough for what I want."

"Should I ask what you want?"

Sweat on Brace's skin looked more like oil, thumb-stroked over the submerged line of her collarbone, the channel of her throat; or she was a fair-haired woman in black combats and a sleeveless grey shirt, broad-shouldered, clear-voiced, recognizable. No strings of moonlight and desire vanished upward from her elbows and knees into a sky as darkly restless as the sea beneath. Her face held no honey, no craters. Maddy twisted her fingers in the torn threads of couch; dry-mouthed, salt on her lips. Adrenaline stitched her chest like a scar.

"No," Maddy said. The sound was little more than the shape of her lips, a shake of her head. "You shouldn't." But she was moving as she spoke, had knelt up on the couch and her hand closed clumsily on the cloth at Brace's shoulder, as though she clung a moment for balance before her fingers opened, slid up to the alien smoothness that was Brace's unstubbled cheek.

Strands of pale hair slipped over her knuckles, loosened from Brace's customary braid; the shaded lamplight made fire-specks of the piercings in her ears, a gilded wink at her lip. Her skin was soft with sweat, and she held very still under Maddy's touch. So low her voice might have been a stranger's, she said, "You don't want me."

Each breath was transformation: possibilities breaking down into potentials, into present. This close, Brace's eyes were the next shade of brown up from black. Electricity barbed the underside of Maddy's skin. For answer, for argument, she dipped her head to meet Brace's mouth, and her lips were sweeter than soda, warm as afternoon.

Neither midnight nor silver: and the same mute cold spilled through Maddy so quickly, desire stripped from her bones and ice laid there instead, that she pulled back even before Brace could say, with no grace at all, "I told you."

Her face was feverish and her gut churned cold; she had known the minute their skins touched. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I thought—"

"I'm not the moon!" In that moment Brace looked more mortal than ever, caught wrong-footed for conversation. She wiped the back of one wrist over her forehead where sweat shone, damp-dark streaks in her hair where she had pushed it back; a split of anger in her voice that was always even as the wheel and rising of stars. "You thought I was the moon." Only flesh and blood, transformed and still vulnerable. The anger shook out of her voice, left it boneless and her face as stark as a tinsnip circle of light. "I'm not even the next best thing."

For this, Charles. For this, dreams. Like a dead echo, clean white and cold burn and ashes in her outstretched hand, Maddy whispered, "I didn't think."

"I know. I know. Nobody ever . . ." and when Brace shoved herself up from the couch, strong forearms and her swimmer's shoulders, feet bare on the iron-rust carpet and fewer books to step over than before, she was already as insubstantial as the distance of sunlight.

Still she knelt by the door, as wordless as her own reflected ghost, lacing her black and steel-toed work boots as blindly as though she were crying. Dry-eyed, dark-eyed, she looked finally back at Maddy. "And you wouldn't want me anyway. The light moon and the dark are the same." Speaking, she almost sounded as easily unhurried as ever, but silence hitched and caught between every word. "It's what she gave me. He. And you will always think I'm what I'm not."

Someone had broken all the bones of her chest; Maddy breathed in against the matchstrike rasp of tears and said helplessly, "Brace. I'm sorry."

"It's okay." Lying, Brace sounded even less like anyone Maddy had ever known. To the carpet beneath her knee and her hand on the doorframe, she said, "Be glad I'm not the moon," and rose to let herself out.

* * *

Silver smells like oysters and lit magnesium, as chill and incendiary as Sirius distantly alight in the depths of time. Silver feathers her skin like the moment when flakes of snow, falling, distinguish themselves from the whalebone sky, and silver pulls beneath her flesh like hunger and loss, tendons and ligaments of immaculate light. If she parts her lips, silver will drown her, moonstruck, moon-drunken, and cast her in its image from the inside out. Flesh shelled around metamorphosis; a husk of story to peel from a dream. She will never hold it all.

"Den Wein, den man mit Augen trinkt," says the man who was Brace, the woman whom Brace will become, or both in the same braid of light and dark, "Gießt Nachts der Mond in Wogen nieder." As recitative as Charles, bard of libraries and Romantic pages, "'The wine that one drinks with one's eyes, the moon pours down in waves at night.' But I drank down that white, white wine, and he waxed and waned. And me along with her. Kainis was Kaineus until they hammered him into the earth." Very little in the broad, solemn bones of her face has changed, the strength in his shoulders and the casual precision of her voice, but he has unbound his wealth of moonlit hair and it trails away into the dark and silver until Maddy cannot tell where Brace stops, where the moon's curve begins. They hang like iris and pupil, the night's unblinking regard; the celestial, inconstant lover and the androgyne who fucked the moon. "But I keep coming around," and there are centuries in Brace's wry smile.

To answer, she must open her mouth, inhale night that she will shape into language, and silver frosts on her tongue like alcohol's gaslight flame. Of course I love you and of course it's what inside that matters . . . With moonlight splintered between her teeth, molten in her throat, Maddy starts to ask, "Is it too late?" but Brace's finger presses silence to her lips, angel of the world before preserving secrets into the world to come, and his eyes are the only reminder of earth in all this star-skinned night.

"It's always too late."

Her scarred hands—as though he caressed fire, once, or bitter cold—comb through Maddy's hair that is the color of leftover autumn, gently touch her face as though to read freckles like Braille. The full moon gleams in her left ear, the new moon in his right; a crescent on her lips and he carries the moon's orbit at his wrist, like a thin-skinned planet. The anemone bloom of her hair rays as palely on the dark as the moon's puppetry, drifts close around them as Maddy cups his cheekbone in her palm, this memory more real than all the rest and it feels even more like a dream. This time, she will hold him no matter which face of the moon turns to her, no matter that she does not hold the moon. This time, no matter how many late nights, how many uneasy silences and conversations that could hurt, she will not let go.

"From the moment you look up," Brace tells her, unalterably, not unkindly, "it's too late."

Silver is streaming like acid through her, in her nails and capillaries, her lashes and her ribs, revelation and obliteration in the same phase. Fireworks that fade. Maddy answers, "I know," and what she knows, she will forget when she opens her eyes. But this moment, she twines her fingers deep in Brace's cream-colored hair and pulls her mouth, his mouth, close to her own, so that she can murmur, "This is not for the moon," before she kisses Brace as the moon never did, and its light is eclipsed between their mouths.

* * *

Over in the west, across the roofs as blackened in silhouette as something charred, the sun had fallen and the sky flamed up all the colors of firelight and tangerine peel. And it lies in blood, but she had no lovers to ask where they were and the eastern sky was still clear, ash-streak clouds and no moon. Distinct as pencil scratches on the warm-water air, a canted aerial and an empty clothesline stood like the remnants of an older decade. Even moonlight was eight minutes in the past.

Slate under the heel of one hand and concrete under the other, Maddy had her eyes closed against the honey-thickened light; memories skinned too close to the surface, but she would have been deaf before she missed the metallic scrape of the stairwell door pushed open, the scuffed and striding footsteps, and shadow dropped sideways across her feet like a greeting.

"I never," Brace said, each word like a weight dropped down, lead for the seafloor, sounding depth, "thought the moon would come back."

When Maddy twisted her head up to look at her, sunset burned across her vision and she blinked through a Rorschach smear of afterimages to find Brace with her hands in the pockets of her jeans, her black T-shirt for a band Maddy had never heard. She had cut her hair, thick as a sheaf of barley and styled back from her face; there was a stitch of silver across her right eyebrow, and the earrings were plain studs. Straight-faced, "I felt like a change," and for a moment Maddy would not even have sworn that her voice was the same. But Brace crouched down beside her, monochrome figurehead if residential roofs were clipper ships, washed to amber by the declining sun, and finished, "Never."

Trading in used CDs for store credit over the weekend, Maddy had looked for Brace among the racks of alternative and blues, showtunes along the wall and operas on their own shelf behind the counter, and seen no one familiarly straight-backed and braided. She had not even drawn breath to answer, now, as though some incautious movement might startle Brace back into her own moon-haunted dimension; but she would have bet that Brace was not the one dreaming of deep skies and silver, night after night. Her addiction was aftermath. Thirdhand sunlight; and some reflections never faded.

When she looked over at Brace, the woman's earth-dark gaze was fixed on the horizon: where the clouds caught fire, not where they cooled. Were the lines of her face less delicate, cut to a harder scale? She had never been voluptuous. Or had she never been what Maddy saw all along? The question would mean as little as the answer: they had lain all night beneath summer haze and landing lights, drunk on folklore and fantasias, wasted on the moon, and Brace in dream or daylight had not been wrong. Like a proverb up-ended, the beloved of my lover is mine. But no one made love to Brace and felt the moon like an echo in her flesh. You don't want me. It's always too late.

Maddy had nothing less mundane to say; still she offered the words. "At least you had her once. That's more than most people."

"Wax and wane," said Brace. Her smile was as sly and reminiscent as the last crescent of light on the old moon, the first sliver of dark for the new. Once she must have looked only human. Her piercings glittered like tears. "Wait and see."

Their shadows slipped east, and the skyline was putting out the sun.

So until your blood runs to meet the next full moon
Your madness fits in nicely with my own.
—Tears for Fears, "Sea Song"

Infandum, regina, iubes renouare dolorem

2008-04-21T03:23:01Z

Am I going to hear all five acts of Berlioz's Les Troyens on May 4th at Symphony Hall? Gods of the Styx, yeah.

Sing for the cameras, sing for the animals

2008-04-16T01:46:08Z

Partly this is an excuse to show off my new icon, which I thieved from chomiji. I am also unrelatedly pleased that I found my camera in a filing cabinet: it has been AWOL for years and last seems to have been used when I was in Italy, England, and Ireland in 2004. (It is not a digital camera. I got it in 1999, the first time I went to Europe; I am not a good photographer, but I am very fond of it. I wonder if I can still get it black-and-white film?) But mostly I am pointing to Not One of Us #39, which is finally available from The Genre Mall! Check it out for yourself. It is good stuff.

This is just a perpendicular line to the brain

2008-04-12T16:18:31Z

I have not written any novels, so I cannot participate in the meme that is making the rounds of my friendlist (see matociquala, stillsostrange). But this is as good a place as any to mention that my oldest real story, "Stone Song," has been accepted by norilana for her new anthology Sky Whales and Other Wonders, in which I know time_shark also has a piece. This actually happened while I was in Orlando at the ICFA; it was one of the many wonderful elements of the conference about which I have not yet posted in any substantive way. To make up for this oversight, have a picture of me in a hat.

The hint of fair hair and blue-shirted shoulder on the deck chair behind me is David Swanger. About the same level of identification is possible for Eric Van's knee. Taken by Greer Gilman.

Left to right, I can identify Lila Garrott, Patricia McKillip, Greer Gilman, and Eric Van. Also my hat. Taken by Cheryl Morgan.

This is not my hat. These are Lila's feet. That sounds like a surrealistic lyric. (The hands with the silver ring, however, do belong to me.) Taken by Greer Gilman.

Our third night at the conference, I went downstairs after dinner to look for people. The previous night, there had been roaming and music. But the outdoor pool was almost deserted; other than a cluster of smokers outside the door, all I saw were three raccoons and a possum, which looked up at me from three feet away in the rhododendrons, unimpressed. I don't think they were anyone I knew. But if any of my friends were to have transformed into raccoons or possums, the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts would have been a completely believable place to do it.

Meat pie time!

Ah, sir, times is hard, times is hard

2008-04-11T21:45:30Z

For his birthday tomorrow, my father requested meat pies. So I spent this morning and afternoon preparing the different kinds of filling, pulled pork with improvised barbecue sauce and curried beef with onions; rolling out the dough, crimping and brushing the pies with egg: I have just put the lot in the refrigerator to await the celebratory dinner. Yes, of course I listened to Sweeney Todd all the while. What do you take me for?

(Incidentally: edible anatomy lessons. I so need a copy of this book.)

And I love how the tale does not stop safely in the past. The last "Ballad of Sweneey Todd" is where melodrama turns into myth; the foolish barber and his wife are done with, but like a hungry ghost or a thoughtless promise, once called up, Sweeney will never disappear.

His needs are few, his room is bare
He hardly uses his fancy chair
The more he bleeds, the more he lives
He never forgets and he never forgives
Perhaps today you gave a nod
To Sweeney Todd
The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

Sweeney wishes the world away, Sweeney's weeping for yesterday
Hugging the blade, waiting the years
Hearing the music that nobody hears
Sweeney waits in the parlor hall, Sweeney leans on the office wall
No one can help, nothing can hide you
Isn't that Sweeney there beside you?

The elements that create him are quintessentially Victorian, but in the steam-whistle shriek that heralds his moments of manifestation and murder, the industrial design of the original production, the mechanized efficiency of his barber's chair, he's a creature of the modern age. Everywhere, anyone. He's out of time and he will never die. There is something vampiric in this characterization; which is famously balanced between the old and the new worlds as well.

(And I get T.S. Eliot overtones, but I doubt this is an intentional intertext.)

Leaves blown backward in a vanished book, untelling winter

2008-04-10T16:57:47Z

I did not sleep last night. This is due to headache, not inspiration, and is therefore unwelcome.

This is what is welcome: erzebet's newest Synthesis 2, which contains the text of my poem "The Gambler." Go; marvel. Sometimes I only dream my words look like that.

I like forms and forms like me

2008-04-10T07:16:27Z

I am not surprised that I had never heard of Pylon before tonight. I am also not surprised that I love them. They are spiky and spare and apophatic—the musical equivalent of Ceci n'est pas une pipe, only headbangingly danceable. Their catchiest songs are anti-anthems. This after I spent much of today plying asakiyume with mythic folk. Maybe it's the same angle of my brain that really likes Pierrot Lunaire.

The world flips when an animal gets its soul

2008-04-08T19:06:43Z

I have a headache like someone has decided to squeeze my skull into an orange, but my contributor's copy of Not One of Us #39 just landed on the step. In addition to my poem "Lupercal," it contains stories and poems by stillsostrange, watermelontail, madwriter, eredien, seajules, handful_ofdust, erzebet, and that's only half the TOC; in other words, it is packed with all kinds of awesome and strange. Copies will soon be available from The Genre Mall. You want one. We ought not to hesitate nor to be abashed, but boldly to enter upon our researches concerning animals of every sort and kind, knowing that in not one of them is Nature or Beauty lacking. You will look at neither dragons nor dolphins the same way again.

Did I come back for all of this? It seems absurd somehow

2008-04-03T05:53:43Z

Earlier tonight in Barnes and Noble, buying a birthday present for my father (Stephen Wilkes, Ellis Island: Ghosts of Freedom), I looked through the first few pages of Ron Hansen's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Somewhere there must be a historical figure in whom I took an interest strictly because of nonfiction, but right now I can't think of one. I had imprinted on William Daniels, so I picked up David McCullough; I read Suetonius because of Robert Graves.* Camille Desmoulins, Tanith Lee's The Gods Are Thirsty. Werner Heisenberg, Michael Frayne's Copenhagen. Whatever I know of their historical importance, even if I encountered them first in school, it's still the jolt of story that inspires research on my own time. I don't require that dramatic arc and historical record match up—Peter Shaffer, I'm looking at you.** Mary Renault's The Mask of Apollo may no longer represent an accurate knowledge of fourth-century Athenian theater, but it's still one of the first books I unpack. And every now and then, it goes the other way: I love Swinburne, so Elizabeth Hand won bonus points with me for Mortal Love. I don't know. It isn't that I don't run across enough odd historical figures in my daily life, many of them thanks to fleurdelis28. But when I read Cicero for the first time, I had rags of Steven Saylor in my head, and it's because of strange_selkie that I translated three songs by Hirsh Glik.

* And then because I had Derek Jacobi on my radar, I pulled a play called Breaking the Code off a shelf in the Book Rack and discovered more than the computational theories of Alan Turing. It's a self-perpetuating cycle.

** On the other hand, when Cecilia Bartoli released an album of arias by Salieri, did more musicologists buy it, or curious audience members? I can only hope his shade would have been amused.

Just as I copied this entry to post it, it struck me that there are historical figures whom I discovered as themselves and whom I keep an eye out for: actors, writers, usw. So is that another form of discovery through art? Or would I need to have seen Love is the Devil before I bought a print by Francis Bacon in order to count it as the same phenomenon?

Every raw material at hand

2008-04-01T14:07:22Z

My poem "Autopoiesis," dedicated to xterminal, is now online at Lone Star Stories. Check out out especially samhenderson's "Hungry: Some Ghost Stories," which is exactly the angle I wondered about after reading her recipe-story "Scones" several years ago.

Happy birthday, sharhaun!

Well, it is the little things, for instance

2008-04-01T01:06:04Z

(Not all of the ideas below are contiguous, or necessarily memorable. I simply wanted them collected somewhere. At least three of them, however, I would like to expand.)

What I do not forget when I tell people that I think Leslie Howard would have made a better Peter Wimsey (pace Edward Petherbridge) than any other actor currently alive or dead, but which I do often forget to mention, is that Howard's flawless upper-class Englishness was itself—like Wimsey's silly-ass piffling or Percy Blakeney's foppish inanity: the characters are on a direct continuum—a kind of impersonation. His parents were Jewish, at least one a Hungarian immigrant. His birth name was Steiner. He was a clerk before he enlisted in World War I; was badly shell-shocked and took up acting as therapy; became, after the outbreak of World War II, the on- and off-screen embodiment of all that was quintessentially English, slightly fey with unexpected reserves of passion and steel; and was shot down in 1943 while on a lecture tour of Spain and Portugal with intelligence-gathering on the side, not unlike his most famous character. I would want to write him into a secret history, if film criticism hadn't already beaten me to it: "This final scene [of Pimpernel Smith (1941)] achieves a near-supernatural quality, with Smith vanishing almost impossibly into the night, his whispering voice somehow remaining behind him. Coming to this extraordinary sequence today we cannot help but bring to it echoes of Howard's own death at the hands of just these enemies, making it not only every bit as stirring as Howard intended, but also genuinely poignant." And so I know that actors differ from their roles, but I still wonder if he gravitated toward those interplays of face and mask, person and persona; he lived one. And he seems to have made it real.

This is for schreibergasse: I imagine it will not come as a surprise to most people if I mention that in high school I sang with the chorus (and later the Madrigal Singers), that I took Latin and Spanish until my junior year when I dropped Spanish (in order to have room for Madrigal Singers), or that my first afterschool job was in the now-defunct science fiction and fantasy bookstore Enchantments in Lexington Center (which had nothing to do with the Madrigal Singers at all, except that friends of mine were involved in both), but I have no idea how many of my current acquaintances know that for two years in high school, I ran cross-country. I was not good at it. Unlike archery and singing, which I found both physically exhilarating and good for my emotional and mental health, I did not enjoy the experience of running for half an hour or whatever at a stretch; I can walk a mile in easily under fifteen minutes, but I clocked under seven minutes running exactly twice. I am long-legged, I have good lungs, it didn't matter. I was not a cheetah. I felt more like a jackal: in races at home, I would run alongside girls from the other team, occasionally at a conversational pace, and then sprint flat-out once the finish line was in sight, which meant that I almost always came in ahead of them. (They were also sprinting flat-out, because that's how races end, but it still always felt like a cheat.) I don't remember that I formed friendships on the team, either. All I liked was knowing that I had the ability to run for five miles straight, even if I hated how each step felt. And then in the spring of my sophomore year, I caught whooping cough and that put the kibosh on running whether I liked it or not—that fall, I auditioned successfully into the school musical. Occasionally I think that I should pick up that stamina again, on the possibility that someday I might have to run for more than the honor of Lexington High School. I can't tell if that's prudent or paranoid.

Perhaps this is my first objection to the classification of speculative poetry: that some of my earliest exposures to formal poetry contained as many gods and myths as fit in a handful of hendecasyllables, and no one speaks of Catullus or Ovid (or Kallimachos or Sappho) as speculative. I do not buy the argument that mimetic fiction is a weird secondary spinoff of the fantastic—among other reasons, because the taxonomy assumed by that statement is anachronistic—but I might argue about poetry. Which has similar issues of historical applicability, not to mention where does it leave politics and personal feelings, the whole epic/lyric binary that annoys me almost as much as the mimetic/mythic, but it is not profitable to argue that non-realist elements are something sui generis.

"In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him . . . They will not be imitators, any more than the scientist who uses the discoveries of an Einstein in pursuing his own, independent, further investigations. It it simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history . . . Instead of narrative method, we may now use the mythical method. It is, I seriously believe, a step toward making the modern world possible in art."
—T.S. Eliot, "Ulysses, Order and Myth" (1923)

There is a paper to be written on George Mackay Brown's "John Barleycorn" as a literary hymn.

Assez! Voilà donc ma vie brisée! . . .

2008-03-30T03:27:20Z

Greg Nagy's presentation included selections from Powell and Pressburger's The Tales of Hoffmann (1951).

(Did I mention that Simon Goldhill's was about John William Waterhouse?)

Best. Conference. Ever.

When two worlds collide, they stick together

2008-03-28T00:48:53Z

Having barely returned from one conference, I am getting up at four in the morning tomorrow to attend another. Yes, I am out of my mind. On the other hand, Odysseus, Gilgamesh, Seamus Heaney, Orpheus, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Jacques Offenbach. ὠς λόγος. Someday I will write up my stories before I forget them.

Now you can lay me down and love me

2008-03-24T05:22:44Z

I am returned from the ICFA. It was one of the more splendid weeks of my recent life. The reading went well; the singing went well; the talking with people, yes, truly. Details to follow when my brain has slept. I am very glad that I don't have anything else con-like from now until Readercon, but I would not have traded all the travel.

"Gold bands! Where in Time's name are my gold bands?"

2008-03-18T10:27:39Z

Actually, all of my bags have been packed since eight o'clock last night, including a packet of seaweed to snack on, copies of my books in triplicate, and a chapter of Calame to proofread. I seem to be reasonably awake, even. Probably because it's still dark out.

See you all in a week. ICFA ho!

In a real death waltz between what's flesh and what's fantasy

2008-03-17T17:23:17Z

Nota bene: this post was actually finished around five in the morning, but I was too fried to bother with putting it up until now. Have a slight anachronism. Also a happy Saint Patrick's Day, if there are serpents in your life that need disappearing. There may be more pertinent content later.

I am collapsibility tired. I realize this makes me sound like a relative of Capability Brown (or Bloody Stupid Johnson), but I have spent most of today looking after a five-year-old, who is of course my beautiful second cousin Tristen. We had an unexpected sending of relatives yesterday: I was making a North African recipe for dinner, literally up to my wrists in ground lamb, when the doorbell rang and kept ringing as though someone were leaning their weight on it. Most of my day up to that point had sucked considerably,* so it was not with enthusiasm that I opened the door. On the doorstep, more wild-haired and about six inches taller than the last time I had seen him, was Tristen. He grabbed me around the neck and started yelling my name; his grandparents were coming up the walk with my grandfather. They are staying through Tuesday, although I will leave before they do. So my cousin's presence has not lessened my stress levels, but certainly has improved my mood; this afternoon we walked around the reservoir and he explained how sometimes he was a mermaid, sometimes a dragon, sometimes a Siamese cat. At dinner, I found a pearl in my fried oyster. I'm not surprised.

Also last night I went with Bob and Anita to see Josef von Sternberg's Underworld (1927) at the Somerville Theatre, with a live score by the Alloy Orchestra** and now I have another film in my catalogue of strange loves. Because I could do so much else in the same amount of time, I try not to watch movies unless I think they're going to be worth it, but I'm still surprised by how good some of them are . . . I suppose there are people who feel this way about reading.

From the standpoint of film history, perhaps the most interesting aspect of Underworld is its license to take whatever twists it likes with the rules of its genre, because as yet there are none. It can be realist up to the point where it begins to bend gravitationally into expressionism, hurtling through cinematic strangeness until it has nowhere to go but back out into realism by way of mystery play; its cinematography can have the matter-of-fact detail of a dream, slanted between fear and desire; the story swing around from tragedy to late romance like a mad weathervane. More than the first gangster movie, it's a gorgeous piece of proto-noir, laying down the mythology that will fuel James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson and Robert de Niro and Al Pacino for generations—and it's also a prospect so unlikely that Paramount, predicting it would be a flop, allowed the film to open in only one theater in New York, after which it was such a smash that it even after national distribution, people were still queuing up to see it twice. In retrospect, it is at once instantly recognizable and off-kilter.

But this is a structural definition, and ignores elements like the wit of its intertitles and the surprising—I should not have been surprised; I know that not all silent films were played as broadly as stage melodramas—dimensions of its characters, who are simultaneously naturalistic and archetypal. The first thing that happens onscreen? A bank explodes. Out of the wreckage strides its robber, not so much fleeing the scene as strolling from it with a strongbox under his arm; a drunk in the street calls out, "The great Bull Weed, closing another bank account!" and is promptly collared and bundled into the getaway car. Is he important? This is a film without the markers of accumulated tradition to tell us who's a leading player and who's incidental detail; the mouthy witness might well be shot in a few seconds as a testament to Bull's toughness and the real story start only with the next scene. But what happens next turns out to be a characteristically sentimental, generous gesture from a top-of-the-heap gangster whose boisterous laugh doesn't need a soundtrack to fill the theater: he takes a liking to this bundle of dirty clothes who describes himself, with the swaying, satirical dignity of a man who has not yet pummeled his intellect into alcoholic submission, as a "Rolls-Royce for silence," and after observing him stand up to a rival hood's bullying in a speakeasy frequented by Bull Weed and his cool-eyed, inseparable moll, Feathers McCoy, slaps a thousand dollars into the newly-christened Rolls Royce's hand and sets him up as a sort of gangland consultant, with an apartment of his own and all the literature ("He's read every book in the case! He likes to read!") ill-gotten gains can buy. Meanwhile, the aforementioned rival, Buck Mulligan, whose tidy florist's business fronts for his more thuggish ambitions, is gunning both for Bull's position and Feathers' love, or at least her body, clothed always in her namesake; she drifts in a cloud of flapper frou-frou, both erotic and offputting, easy to spot, difficult to get close to. Not the climax, but the hinge of the story—remember what I said about leads and incidentals—will take place at the annual gangsters' ball, where champagne and confetti rain down on what the intertitles describe as "a devil's carnival," and because we are in full-blown German Expressionism by this point, it really is.

We are also in a sort of love story, although it's more about loyalties and senses of self and what happens to epic proportions when they hit the present day than it is about sex. Rolls Royce¹ (Clive Brook) is what might have become of Sydney Carton if he had never found Lucie Manette to die for. Fresh off the streets, with a derelict's stubble, a seam-split jacket and shaky hands, he has no self-respect when it comes to cadging drinks, but an air of forbearance that has him refuse to pick up the ten-spot Buck Mulligan has flicked into the spittoon at his feet.² Cleaned up, he's kindly, ironic, discreet, and not above urbane self-mockery, which suits the affection Bull Weed has for him, a little derisive of his erudition, his eloquence, his odd tastes—when he's not Rolls Royce, he's the Professor—but also the trust placed in him. He's a valued member of the gang now, the right-hand thinker. "A lawyer, sometimes," he replies, when asked what he used to be, "a drunkard, always . . . What does it matter?" The combination attracts Feathers (Evelyn Brent), whom Rolls Royce treats with the same faint courtesy as he might a woman of his own former class and education, and which she fears might be disdain. Asked in turn what she used to be, she does not answer. Her first moments onscreen find her adjusting her stockings in the doorway of the speakeasy, an unselfconscious gesture of seduction, but she is not the breathless bimbo her name implies; she may sigh over jewelry that even Bull dismisses as "too vulgar" (although he will gallantly shoot up the store to obtain some of it for her) and pick up a book the wrong way round, but she's easily the smarter of the lovers, both grateful and loyal to this man with the presence of a Mack truck and the impulses of a small child, still wistful for someone more her match. Maybe that's Rolls Royce, who is more guarded and more vulnerable than anyone she has known.³ He's not interested in women, he tells her, but we know that he keeps a feather from her collar in a cigarette case like the memoir of an affair that will never take place; her initial presence signaled by its leaf-fall downward, unnoticed, into his hand. In a later film, they might connive toward Bull's death. Here, he only believes they would.

And what we believe is critically dependent on Bull Weed (George Bancroft) himself, who early in the film sights a neon insurance sign on the skyline—The City Is Yours—and turns expansively to Feathers, offering her the plattered world with a wave of his arm. "The city is yours, kid. What'll you have?" With admiration and his usual irony, Rolls Royce subtitles the scene, "Attila the Hun at the gates of Rome," and when Bull demands to know who he's talking about ("Who's Attila? The leader of some wop gang?"), the ex-lawyer's answer might be the film in epitome: "You were born two thousand years too late. You can't get away with your stuff nowadays." So our antihero is an outsize character, jovial, brutal, lavish with his friends and unremitting with his enemies, who charges like a knight errant or his totem animal to protect his lady from violence, but lowers his head, beaten and blindly murderous, when he thinks he has been double-crossed in love. He pulls into his orbit not only the other characters, but the film; he's his own best mythographer, and the cinematography alters itself around him as he lurches through the grotesquerie of the gangsters' ball to find Feathers, or staggers down false-dawn streets in pursuit of revenge. But he's more than the handsome brute with a soft spot, despite his scene with the kitten.⁴ He's aware there are dimensions he's missing. Some of them he tries to get at through Feathers, others through Rolls Royce. And so he will, if not in the way he expects; his choice matters finally because it is made by himself, stripped down to humanity, not some street-hailed Jupiter of crime.⁵

I should save the cinematography for an entire post of its own. Or the soundtrack. I should sleep and get ready to spend all of tomorrow packing, since we leave so early on Tuesday that it might as well be Monday for all the last-minute time it will afford me. But this is another film I want to own, when that brick of money finally falls from the sky. And I'll be looking out for Clive Brook.

1. As with Feathers, we never learn his real name. But for stray mentions, their lives before Bull Weed might as well have ceased to exist.

2. For his fastidiousness, he is socked in the chin—we see the wind-up and then the camera jolts ceilingward, a right hook to the audience's viewpoint; it's a simple trick and it's wonderful. And it has to predate the handheld aesthetic by at least half a century.

3. He can also be something of a bastard, which is not in the archetype: when Feathers tries to persuade him not to start drinking again, he replies coldly, "Aren't you Bull Weed's girl?" So he points up not only his disinterest in her opinion, but its utter lack of relevance in the first place, and sets her squarely back in the role she has come to feel hopelessly trapped by—not a person with weight and consequence of her own, but an ornament to the boss, shut up and look sexy. It's the cruelest thing he could say to her, and he's too smart and too practiced an alcoholic for it to be a drunken slip of the tongue. These are the shadings of which film noir is made.

4. I'm curious to know if this is the first film appearance of the spring-loaded cat: a noise outside the door causes Bull to jerk it open, ready to fire, only to find a small, bedraggled kitten trying to get into a milk bottle. It's a classic bit of suspense, which von Sternberg turns into a character moment as the gangster quickly pulls kitten and bottle inside and feeds it, absently, while waiting for Rolls Royce to come home so he can kill him.

5. And in the middle of all this fine-tuned character work, we have the character played by Larry Semon, who has wandered in from some other surrealist world entirely. The laws of mime and silent comedy apply to him, not social realism or even physics; he is debonair, dandyish, as white-faced and permanently surprised as a classic pierrot; he handles visible, tangible objects with the precision and delicacy of empty air, and he might be something like the chorus, because of the many scenes in which he is an onlooker and the few instances in which he interacts on behalf of other characters, as though transmuting their desires into the plot, but he's not like any chorus I've ever seen. (And yet, as I type these words, I wonder: were Kander and Ebb familiar with Underworld? Wilkommen, bienvenue, welcome . . .) He is named "Slippy Lewis" in the cast list, but no one ever addresses him by name; his only spoken line is a stutter and a slur. He's extraordinary. And he is simply there, without explanation. Thank you, German Expressionism!

* What I had been hoping was a tenacious sunburn turned out to be a contact dermatitis that went systemic; I looked like a pox victim and was sent home from the doctor's with a steroid cream and instructions to buy, before departing for Florida, the strongest possible sunscreen and a hat. This I did not need. schreibergasse, you shall still have the post I owe you.

** One-third of the Alloy Orchestra is Roger Miller, as in Mission of Burma, which I had not known when I saw their card at the Brattle Theatre. Eric and Bob had to enlighten me.