Myth Happens

Thank you to everyone who has reached out about the break-in. It is very weird to be part of a crime scene. I have stopped a whole lot of checks and some credit cards and discovered around one in the morning that our emergency bug-out cash was missing. Hestia alternated between prowling the rearranged apartment and planting herself against her people, a small soft round of safe purr. Never having heard back from the property manager, we cleaned the broken glass out of the kitchen and blocked the no longer functional back door with plywood and early this morning some contractors came without notification and additionally boarded over the door from their side, which we have to hope is the precursor to the installation of a new door for many reasons including the legally mandated ones. We have laundered all of the clothes and all of the bedclothes in the house, but the pervasive smell of stale cigarette smoke clings in the bed itself and the pillows and the couch and the walls and I am trying not to feel that all of my books will make me sick for the rest of my life. If anything I always envisioned needing my renters' insurance for a flood.

Neighbors on our street were volunteering the data from their ring cameras. I have some kind of mangled feeling against the surveillance state and in favor of strangers being concerned for one another. I spoke to more people on our block in one evening than I had since we moved in four years ago.

People really had given me a lovely birthday, Mrs. Lincoln. My mother made an almond cake with raspberry jam and marzipan icing. My father exercised his favorite recipe for roast beef which involves an entire stick of butter. My brother had gotten me Matt Dinniman's Dungeon Crawler Carl (2020) and presented it to me with the welcome: "Congratulations, you're joining a cult." rushthatspeaks passed on from nineweaving the prize of Benjamin Harshav's The Moscow Yiddish Theater: Art on Stage in the Time of Revolution (2008). I was all ways delighted by the intricate maritime weirdness of Manuel Marsol's Ahab and the White Whale (Ahab y la ballena blanca, 2014/2026). My niece is growing tall and blue-haired. There was just a rather loud record scratch across the afternoon.

Last night my mother sent over one of the unopened presents so that I could still celebrate what she is describing as an extended birthday. It was the slipcased, Vortex-wrapped CDs of Doctor Who: The Sixth Doctor Adventures: Reunion (2026) which was amazing timing for having just finished The Caves of Androzani (1984) night before last. spatch and I have since snapped back to the Seventh Doctor and spent a couple of rounds of laundry with the panto-Ballardian trash-punk of Paradise Towers (1987). I do not know when things will stop feeling strange.

Actually Providence was a blast. The trains both ways were somewhat catch-as-catch-can, but I caught them and spent the forty minutes of the trip down staring out the window at trees that had been summer-green three weeks ago turned pumpkin-orange and flint-corn-red. I made it to Weird Providence with an hour to kill and passed it mostly in conversation with an employee of the bookstore whom I had met this summer at NecronomiCon and particularly complimented on their tattoo of מיר וועלן מוזן זיי איבערלעבן. I was one of five readers, the others being Curtis M. Lawson, Mary Robles, and the book-launch honorees of K. H. Vaughan and Joshua Rex. Fiona Maeve Geist emceed and ran the Q&A interludes between the readings, in the course of which I was asked about bog bodies, fatalism, nuclear physics; the usual. Outside of Readercon, I don't think I had participated in a reading in person since the earliest months of 2020 and it was wonderful hearing other people perform their own work and talk about it. Topics included Devil's Night in Detroit, the form of the lyric essay, clinical psychology and absurdism, Victorian performance traditions. I had occasion to recommend Carolyn Dinshaw and the queerness of time. I connected with a writer friend I had never met outside of FB and their partner I had never met at all and their small dog in a backpack who only yipped interruption once. Fiona walked me back to the station so that we could continue our conversation about alternate histories and I walked straight onto a delayed train that was right on time for me. spatch collected me at Route 128 and drove us to late-night roast beef which at half past eleven was the busiest we had ever seen it. I am very tired, currently happy, smell a lot like the commuter rail. I have a signed copy of Ken's collection and a Carcosa-colored enamel pin of the Elder Sign of NecronomiCon Providence 2019 which differs from the silver-branch version I was given as Poet Laureate. It was very gratifying that my sole spare copy of As the Tide Came Flowing In (2022) was immediately snapped up and sold.

My birthday will be celebrated familially when my brother and niece can make it into town, but for the day itself I walked around the granite shoulders and pine-drift of the Fells and breathed air that smelled like winters of leaves and a cold front of groundwater washing suddenly across the trail. Fallen trees had reared ragged cascades of roots out of the earth. The reed-islanded straggle of Long Pond reflected as exactly as glass. A great blue heron was perching in the maple-tinged brush at its margin; later a flight of wood ducks clattered off across the sunset glowing through the lily pads. My camera faded on me less than ten minutes in. Home, we ordered for the first time in ages from the extravagance of Muqueca, whose bacalhau à capixaba turns out to be an intricately sweet and robust stew of thick salt cod and plantains and tomatoes in coconut milk, garnished with half-slices of hard-boiled eggs and the pungent flecks of green olives. We watched the two episodes of Small Prophets (2026) currently available in this country and then the first half of The Caves of Androzani (1984). It was not a complicated time; it was nice. There was water and trees.

Not until the last half-hour of Brighton Rock (1947) does anyone get around to quoting Marlowe's Mephistopheles, but it's as apt as a title drop for a film in which murder is committed in the ghost-train shriek and rattle of the Inferno and damnation is taken as a surer fact than love. Nor am I out of it covers the holiday crowds in their threepenny deck chairs and the drizzle of coal-smoke on a terraced street, the windmill of racecourse tic-tac and the pier-end suck of the tide, the straight-razor seediness under the strenuous gaiety of a Whitsun weekend in the pre-war Brighton that is the human condition of Pinkie Brown. His telephone number starts with three sixes. He urges the girl who loves him to the despair of suicide. "Of course it's true," he asserts his personal credo of "flames, damnations, torments," looking every inch the demonic altar boy with his dead-eyed baby face contemplating a rosary. His real, impoverished age flickers in it for a second as he puts the beads from him, dismissing without even a shrug the earnest suggestion of heaven: "Maybe."

What a breakout for Richard Attenborough, twenty-three years old and playing a convincing seventeen as the seaside Caesar of a small-time razor gang whose territorial warning, "You think I'm finished," only underlines his adolescent obliviousness to the truth that he never got started. Too slender for his dapper cheap suits, he looks callow, unwholesome, a riveting dead end of the energies that knot a restless cat's cradle between his fingers like the traps he sets for himself as the loyal, needless killing of an indiscreet journalist unravels a hydra's worth of loose ends. The viciousness that snaps out of him in broken dolls and slashed faces still shocks despite the amendments of the BBFC, but so does the extremity of his youth, the dedicated perversity of pursuing his own doom in the guise of "security." The souvenir record he cuts in a moment of corrosive, confessional spite could undo him with the hiss of a gramophone and he gives it into the trusting hands of the last person who should play it as if he's planting his own dynamite. Rigidly repulsed by the pleasures of the flesh, Pinkie pacing the registrar's office where he waits to perjure himself into an alibi marriage mutters like a condemned man of his childhood intention to be a priest, characteristically negative as anything else in his tunnel vision of a life: "Why not? They keep away from all this." He's a war too early for even a Teddy Boy, but his unswerving nihilism gives him something of the sickly, proto-punk fury of the teenage wreckers of Violent Playground (1958) who expect nothing for their generation but the H-bomb—even a viewer who responds to the childishness cracked through his reckless cruelty may have trouble imagining what sociological salvation this puritanical little murderer could be offered that would compete with the terror and the glamour and the comfort of going to hell. Affecting a seduction in the rain-deserted shadows of the Palace Pier, he rolls a bottle of vitriol around his pocket as another man might jingle his money. He pronounces it slyly, but there's scarcely a joke in the Freudian Latin of his "suicide pax."

No character this bleakly bound needs an evil angel and the story has the sense to triangulate him instead with two diametrically different forces of fatal goodness, respectively incarnated by the veteran Hermione Baddeley and newcomer Carol Marsh. "Won't anybody shut that brass's mouth?" Pinkie demands in his volcanic first line, but it takes more than a few smashed glasses to silence Ida Arnold. Her broad-beamed bottle-blonde blowsiness sets her up as the natural enemy of his tightly wound repression, but her practical, inexorable sense of right and wrong which have nothing to do with virtue or sin makes an electrifying avenger out of her seaside artiste who takes her cues from automatic writing and bottled beer, Pierrette as Erinys. A frightened man disappeared on her in the plain air of an amusement arcade and the coroner's verdict didn't wash. The title is her metaphor, people like sticks of rock with their natures stamped immutably through them. "I'm like everyone else, my dear. I want to see justice done, that's all." Rose could do it with a word, but she'll keep shtum till Doomsday. Thin-shouldered and devout, clearing tables at the café as if frightened of the clatter, she could have been named out of Blake, her frail weed of beauty blighted by the radiant worm of her love for Pinkie; her deer-brows give her the look of a trapped wild thing in the warren of their bridal bedsit, but her teeth show in defense of her daemon lover. It's more than mistaken innocence. She shares his instinct for annihilation. It is a scalding and unconditional, implacable acceptance, embracing him at the triumphant cost of her sixteen-year-old immortal soul: "I wouldn't want to be saved if he was lost." Between justice and love, what chance does mere wickedness stand? The answer doesn't feel mechanistically moralizing, careening to its improvised irony of an epilogue through an ecosystem as wittily and grottily etched as Dickens. William Hartnell, Wylie Watson, and Nigel Stock make an authentically charmless mob, ever uneasier in their hand-me-down loyalties as their hellbent boy-leader drags them all toward his own reckoning, while Harcourt Williams with his face like a spooked concertina mixes Shakespeare with Burgundy as the ruined solicitor Prewitt. Alan Wheatley runs through a day-drowned nightmare as the marked, stalked Fred Hale, the one rider in real terror of what waits in the phosphorescently screaming dark. From his imperial salon of a suite at the Cosmopolitan, Charles Goldner as the godfatherly racketeer Colleoni casts a quizzical eye over the disruptions to his businesslike turf. "Now you do understand, don't you? Brewer's been complaining, so don't do it again." Even the small parts rounded out by Virginia Winter, George Carney, Joan Sterndale-Bennett, or Harry Ross all chip in to the breeze and scurry of their town, the glitter of the ocean, the advertisements on the buses, the strings of bunting in the misting rain.

Turning an underworld out of a seaside resort had been an easier descent than its original author envisioned. Pretty much since the novel's publication in 1938, Graham Greene had been obliged to deprecate his hectic, criminous, down-at-heel Brighton as the product of his imagination and in order to pacify the borough council enough for a permit, the film co-adapted by Greene and Terence Rattigan and directed and produced by John and Roy Boulting had to follow suit. The walking tours attest to their success. The title crawl explicitly sets the action in a safely stamped-out past—a newspaper pins it as 1935—but the semi-stolen location shooting makes it an equal document of the summer of 1947, its noir fictions embedded in a psychogeography of record temperatures and candid citizenry. The stations of its plot can be followed from the railway to the promenade, ghost-printed onto addresses since redeveloped into memory. Its purgatorial funhouse is filled with glancing mirrors and warped postcards and macabre little nods tucked into the mise-en-scène, like a holidaymaker dozing underneath a violent headline in much the same attitude as the described corpse. Peter Graham Scott and Gilbert Taylor pitched in with Harry Waxman on the forceful cinematography that makes even the studio-shot scenes feel far from stage-bound. The municipal and the criminal, the fanciful and the historic fused permanently in a stall-smashing rumble at the races which got the Boultings thrown off the course. "Bite all the way down and you still read Brighton." I had wanted to see this movie for decades; I got my chance on slightly dusty, gorgeous 35 mm at the Harvard Film Archive, my first film in a theater all year, but for purposes of home viewing it is readily available on BFI Player or Kanopy or even Blu-Ray. The punch line of Pinkie Brown who would barely rather marry than hang is his sexual presence, for once in his actor's career: baleful and contemptuously magnetic, a serpent-shine of a bad inspiration in a snap-brim hat and tartan tie. What an extra circle of perdition he would have found his fandom. This justice brought to you by my lost backers at Patreon.

Good afternoon! May I invite you to the book birthday of Jeannelle M. Ferreira's Ochre, Quartz, or Ivy, now electronically available wherever books are sold? Queer Arthuriana, futures of the Iron Age, co-parenting in a time of dragons. I happen to think it's the best long-form thing its author has yet written. There's so much time in it and fierce love and mountains. My godson did the fossil-coiled cover design.

Because I slept a normal human minimum last night, I was able to drive spatch to work on the short notice of his alarm sleeping through itself and then to walk down to the park in the later afternoon where I had a secondhand encounter with mortality. I was slightly buried in a yew tree at the time. I did get a bunch of pictures first.

( Are these exposed wires all good? )

I have spent most of the rest of the day engaged in very little except reading on the couch and making myself a pumpernickel bagel with chopped liver courtesy of Mamaleh's. I think it is great that butterflies prove the efficacy of dazzle camouflage. Sunkist Fruit Gems have been saved and it appears we are reinventing the flying boat. I had also not realized that Inspirobot was still around.

Rabbit, rabbit! I am entering October in a state of leftover illness and crushing sleep debt, but in the same way that one year in college it finally clicked with me how much Robert Graves Susan Cooper had woven through The Dark Is Rising Sequence, after close to forty years it occurred to me to check a key piece of verse in Elizabeth Goudge's The Valley of Song (1951) and it turns out to have started life as Euripides.

Much of it is Gilbert Murray's 1910 translation of a choral strophe from Iphigenia in Tauris:

Give me the little hill above the sea.
The palm of Delos fringed delicately,
The young sweet laurel and the olive-tree
Grey-leaved and glimmering . . .

O Isle of Leto, Isle of pain and love;
The Orbèd Water and the spell thereof;
Where still the Swan, minstrel of things to be,
Doth serve the Muse and sing!

The original Greek is less of a paean and more of a plaint on the part of the enslaved women of the Chorus, captured in the sack of Greek cities and sold eastward to serve Iphigeneia in her man-killing role as priestess of Artemis on the shores of the Black Sea. Like the halcyon who laments her husband, they long for home, for the familiar rites of Hellas, for Artemis as she is celebrated on Delos where she assisted at the birth of her own twin Apollo:

ἃ παρὰ Κύνθιον ὄχθον οἰ-
κεῖ φοίνικά θʼ ἁβροκόμαν
δάφναν τʼ εὐερνέα καὶ
γλαυκᾶς θαλλὸν ἱερὸν ἐλαί-
ας, Λατοῦς ὠδῖνα φίλαν,
λίμναν θʼ εἱλίσσουσαν ὕδωρ
κύκλιον, ἔνθα κύκνος μελῳ-
δὸς Μούσας θεραπεύει.

who beside the Cynthian hill makes
her home, and for the date palm's delicate
locks and the beautifully sprung laurel
and the gleam-grey olive's sacred
shoot, the dear travail of Leto,
and the lake spiraling its waters
round where the melody-making
swan serves the Muses.

Murray would be an anachronism in the early nineteenth century of the novel except that Goudge weaves his language so much into the numinous fusion of Fairy and the margins of Paradise that is her Valley of Song that it's like the substrate of Lal Waterson in Greer Gilman's Cloud. The Swan becomes her reinterpretation of the constellation of Libra, the singer of the wild autumn air who fills the gap of birds in the zodiac. The Valley itself appears differently to each person who enters it and one of its aspects resembles the Greek islands with a Delos of its own at its heart, the Swan's domain. It can be found in company of the character who introduces the quotation, the puzzling, disreputable stranger to the shipbuilding town of the Hard whom ten-year-old Tabitha Silver has thought of as "the ogre" ever since his reflection frightened her in a well: he wears the rags of a gentleman's clothes like the wrack of a classical education and shies off bitterly from any mention of the sea or second chances or the lovely East Indiaman that has been abandoned with her keel barely laid now that the captain who commissioned her is reported to have died a bankrupt, having lost all his fortune at cards. No prizes for guessing. His proper name turns out to be Andrew, although Tabitha reserves it for the eleven-year-old child-self he seems at the door to the Valley, unrecognizably beautiful with his slim brown grace and Athene-eyes; he was born in Greece and sees the Valley of Song as Elysium. "And then I was exiled from it."

It's easier to see in the homesick context of Euripides, but it shouldn't have taken reading the actual Greek for me to make the connection between the refuge that Andrew finds in the Valley which lies between this world and the next and the island of Delos whose floating, liminal nature made it accessible to Leto when Hera's wrath had closed all the conventional earth to her and her Zeus-fathered children—Andrew is running even more unforgivingly from himself, his responsibilities and his mistakes, his failures that he feels like ropes of iron, and it is only on the shore of his own island of pain and love, his unexpected homecoming that he was willing to forfeit when it looked for a moment as though he would only be trading off his own exile for Tabitha's, that he can gather the courage to face them out in the world. The orbèd water that idles so stilly about the Swan pours endlessly away down the stair to the great waters, the furthest depth of the sea. There Andrew will have to make his sailor's katabasis under the zodiacal guidance of Capricorn, the goat-fish older than his Greek name, the suḫurmāšu of Enki, craftsman, magician, lord of the life-giving waters of the Abzû:

"If I go down into the depths I shall die there in the rush of the great waters."
"Yes, you will die, and be born again."
"I cannot go down into the depths."
"Then you will make no beauty."
"I am afraid."
"So are all who give themselves to the great waters."

Murray in his notes glosses Λατοῦς ὠδῖνα φίλαν, which he rendered poetically with "pain and love," literally as "Beloved birth-pang of Leto." The Chorus of Iphigenia in Tauris are remembering Artemis not as an alien goddess who demands the blood of strangers, but as Artemis Lochia, Birthing Artemis, midwife to herself. Goudge's Swan does not sing its own dying like the myth of an earthly swan, but "lament and triumph in one . . . a wild desire to be gone and the sorrow of parting . . . weeping and laughter. . . . darkness and light and being born." The reader, like Tabitha, will have to wait several chapters to see whether Andrew succeeded in his rebirth and even if so, what will become of him once he surfaces beyond the Valley. He's not the only thread in the novel, but he pulled on me from childhood and it makes me happy to see finally some more of the resonances in which Goudge framed him. It is the novel of hers in which I have the least trouble with her Christianity, braided as it is with so many other deeply vivid mythologies. The motif of the Swan carries through to the very last page.

While on the classically-adjacent subject, I meant to mention it weeks ago when I learned that from 1924 until his death in 1979, the dancer-choreographer Léonide Massine lived on Il Gallo Lungo, the largest of the caldera-scratch of islands off the coast of Amalfi known as the Sirenuse after the Homeric Sirens who were said to inhabit them, or perhaps to have turned into them after Odysseus sailed on past their singing of tales. I love this fact for its own sake and because Massine is most famous outside the ballet world for his appearance in Powell and Pressburger's The Red Shoes (1948), where he originated the onscreen role of the irresistible, diabolical shoemaker in The Ballet of the Red Shoes, who ends the dance by offering the bright fatal shoes to the audience. It made perfect sense to me that he knew from siren song.

The nor'easter not only smells like autumn, it seems to have kicked the season over, all the leaves plastered in the street in slick green and early gold, barn-red and vein-brown. I remembered to take my camera and afterward to wrestle the pictures off it, a process which has begun to make a darkroom and a shelf of developers and fixers feel like the easy way out. The storm had reduced to more or less misting in which a quantity of students were out and about with hoodies, umbrellas, and rain in their hair.

( Think awhile, walk away. )

spatch and I made noodles and cheese with tarragon-and-shallot-fried ham for dinner, making sure not to leave Hestia out of the quality control. There was a horrifying moment when we thought the oven had died, but it was just the circuit breaker. I never had any rituals in my life where anyone threw them at me, but I am still sorry to hear about the demise of Sunkist Fruit Gems. My night was very much improved by discovering Kym Deyn's "Sir Gawain Fucks the Green Knight" (2023).

While I was away, the mail brought my contributor's copy of Not One of Us #88, containing my poem "The Walls." It's the one I wrote earlier this month, suggested by a marsh fort and a bog mummy, and it closes the new world order issue which opens with a call to resist authoritarianism. It's the fortieth anniversary issue, featuring the fiction and poetry of Patricia Russo, Jennifer Crow, Larina Warnock, Christiaan Sabatelli, Devan Barlow, and more. Check it out! I am honored to be in its pages. I slept almost eight hours with Hestia curled against me in the warmth of the bed, as I have not slept with a cat since her brother died. Outside has been a chill, grey, rattling day. The wind is rising for the forecast nor'easter.

Once again my rear-facing seat makes me wonder if I will ever take a train in the traditional direction again, but the overhead lines are the same copper-green as the gutters of the two-tiered brown-brick building we just slid past that made me think of the long-disused Signal Tower 'A' of the Boston & Maine at North Station. I am less used to the slope of afternoon sun on the crumbled umber and rust-pink of the ties. The shirr of white cloud drifting in two directions at once makes an optical illusion of even greater speed above the treeline. I hadn't been aboveground at Union Station in so long, I had forgotten it had quite so much Vittorio Emanuele wedding cake going on.

We discuss over and over again how much easier it would be without five hundred miles between our households, but in this immensely imperfect world I take these trains. Jorts leapt onto my black travel bag to shed pale fur all over it in a parting gift. My godson came down twice before bed to talk. N. showed me Project Hail Mary (2026). selkie wore the elisem necklace I gave her through the High Holidays. Everything feels so precarious, which makes the time matter more. It does not feel like nearly a week.