Eclipse first, the rest nowhere! The moon was just beginning to dent sootily in as we left the house. Our headlights caught a fox with a coat like copper-flooded seas trotting across the road with a rabbit in its mouth, the least subtle of metaphors. Our star-watching hillside was silhouetted with other observers and occasionally their telescopes clambering out of the false dusk of the horizon like the saucer-legged Zeiss projector of my childhood. The one nearest us mysteriously packed up a few minutes from maximum, but we heard others whistling and shouting as we approached 96% and one small child in light-up sneakers flashed down the slope like fireflies. We never saw the full red moon in the rolling clouds, but we could see its smoked-glass tint creeping toward the tenacious bright rind that winked so sharply out at one point in the haze that a whole set of stargazers yelled. The ebbing shadow gave it a cat's-eye look above the rooftops as we came home. It was kind of the fox to lend us back the light.
Because it was closer on Route 2 than the Wachusett Reservoir and farther out than Concord, I spent the later afternoon wandering with ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch around downtown Maynard, where he had done contract work for DEC in the run-up to Y2K. By six o'clock we were sitting on a park bench across the rust-colored canal-thread of the Assabet River from the brown industrial bricks of the former woolen mill whose clock tower chimed the hours as we ate our mango and orange sherbets from the Fine Arts Theatre. The mill buildings themselves have been through multiple commercial cycles since their antebellum textile days and now seem to function as an unpredictably inhabited office park. Walking around the mill pond with its sculling mallards and reef-reflected clouds, we found a thread of bright sky between the steel girders of a garage and nineteenth-century granite sills, a derelict parking lot whose white-lined spaces had been redrawn by a conflagration of weeds, the black spidering iron of fire escapes over windows that held nothing but cracked shadows in one row and all the usual in-office paraphenalia another. We could see the beams and the interior brick. The chimney looked as though it should have had a steeplejack atop it providing color commentary. It was just the right angle before sunset for all the panes to turn to a contact sheet of mirrors. By the time we retrieved the car, a band was tuning up for an open-air performance in the park with the oversized chess set, with plenty of woodwinds and a tuba. We ate incredibly late, but satisfyingly, in that no second meal remains of my khao soi with salmon. Earlier in the afternoon I had called Rob from Porter Square Books because as I walked in to pick up my mother's order, I realized they were playing "9 to 5" (1980).
spatch around downtown Maynard, where he had done contract work for DEC in the run-up to Y2K. By six o'clock we were sitting on a park bench across the rust-colored canal-thread of the Assabet River from the brown industrial bricks of the former woolen mill whose clock tower chimed the hours as we ate our mango and orange sherbets from the Fine Arts Theatre. The mill buildings themselves have been through multiple commercial cycles since their antebellum textile days and now seem to function as an unpredictably inhabited office park. Walking around the mill pond with its sculling mallards and reef-reflected clouds, we found a thread of bright sky between the steel girders of a garage and nineteenth-century granite sills, a derelict parking lot whose white-lined spaces had been redrawn by a conflagration of weeds, the black spidering iron of fire escapes over windows that held nothing but cracked shadows in one row and all the usual in-office paraphenalia another. We could see the beams and the interior brick. The chimney looked as though it should have had a steeplejack atop it providing color commentary. It was just the right angle before sunset for all the panes to turn to a contact sheet of mirrors. By the time we retrieved the car, a band was tuning up for an open-air performance in the park with the oversized chess set, with plenty of woodwinds and a tuba. We ate incredibly late, but satisfyingly, in that no second meal remains of my khao soi with salmon. Earlier in the afternoon I had called Rob from Porter Square Books because as I walked in to pick up my mother's order, I realized they were playing "9 to 5" (1980).
Only last week my mother was expressing her considered opinion that no one would ever be as beautiful as Tim Curry as Dr. Frank-N-Furter. I am not sure she meant only within the context of The Rocky Horror Show. August 2026 is starting to feel like January 2016. The amount of unapologetic self-creation we are going to have to pour into this world.
Because I had a particularly painful mammogram this afternoon, spatch drove me afterward to Belle Isle Seafood for a restorative plate of smelts and a ginger beer mocktail with an open-air panorama of the harbor under an afterimage-blue sky of thick-stacked summer clouds. The water glass-sparkled dragon-green. Looking southwest across it seemed to collage the runways of Logan into the cranes of Conley Terminal, as if the planes taxied in to be unloaded like container ships. The gulls were out in full force, pattering a silhouette of webbed feet across the greenhouse vanes of the awning, screaming in triumph over an abandoned leftover of fries. Pigeons and sparrows were milling around the oyster-shell gravel under the tables, interwoven with the dart and skirt of a black-headed gull. A juvenile on the floating dock was trying to crack a mussel by dropping it with a hopeful singlestick thwack. I must have seen earlier, but had not remembered noticing the kinetic sculpture made out of anemometers just before the turn for Route 145. Threading the crowd of Revere Beach on the way home, we heard a man drumming on one of the pavilion's park benches. Unfortunately it was around Route 60 that I hurt too much to keep cloud-watching and as soon as we got home I fell asleep on the couch. I woke and saw the much less pleasing news of Dolly Parton. Her memory for so many kinds of blessing, as her life was.
spatch drove me afterward to Belle Isle Seafood for a restorative plate of smelts and a ginger beer mocktail with an open-air panorama of the harbor under an afterimage-blue sky of thick-stacked summer clouds. The water glass-sparkled dragon-green. Looking southwest across it seemed to collage the runways of Logan into the cranes of Conley Terminal, as if the planes taxied in to be unloaded like container ships. The gulls were out in full force, pattering a silhouette of webbed feet across the greenhouse vanes of the awning, screaming in triumph over an abandoned leftover of fries. Pigeons and sparrows were milling around the oyster-shell gravel under the tables, interwoven with the dart and skirt of a black-headed gull. A juvenile on the floating dock was trying to crack a mussel by dropping it with a hopeful singlestick thwack. I must have seen earlier, but had not remembered noticing the kinetic sculpture made out of anemometers just before the turn for Route 145. Threading the crowd of Revere Beach on the way home, we heard a man drumming on one of the pavilion's park benches. Unfortunately it was around Route 60 that I hurt too much to keep cloud-watching and as soon as we got home I fell asleep on the couch. I woke and saw the much less pleasing news of Dolly Parton. Her memory for so many kinds of blessing, as her life was.
Amid all the nonsense, I can honestly say that the week started with something nice: the arrival of cards from Yoon Ha Lee and theseatheseatheopensea, one decorated with a green-tailed mercat from New Orleans, the other actually two letters, three postcards, and a handful of heartening stickers all in the same envelope. I had to visit the post office to retrieve the latter, but it had made it to my local post office in the first place, a significant improvement on the last try.
spatch and I cooked dinner together for the first time in ages. It seems extremely credible that I had not eaten a steak all year. We seared it with black pepper and nutmeg and served it with grits and cheese and made rice krispie treats as a rewarding afterthought of dessert. Hestia inspected delicately from her perch on the cardboard box that used to contain peaches and has become her preferred dining room plinth. We used to ward her brother off from plates with the palisade of an arm over which he would crane with inexorable politeness.
Not only does Ugo Betti's The Burnt Flower-Bed (1952) seem never to have been filmed even in its original Italian, its English-language premiere at the Arts Theatre in 1955 didn't even get a photo call in Theatre World, which in the last twenty-four hours I had become spoiled for. Its political drama resolves at the last minute in one of those galvanizing symbols for which I may just not have been Christian enough, but I am still susceptible to stories which assert the importance of meeting the future to make a difference in it, whether it can be believed in or not.
theseatheseatheopensea, one decorated with a green-tailed mercat from New Orleans, the other actually two letters, three postcards, and a handful of heartening stickers all in the same envelope. I had to visit the post office to retrieve the latter, but it had made it to my local post office in the first place, a significant improvement on the last try.spatch and I cooked dinner together for the first time in ages. It seems extremely credible that I had not eaten a steak all year. We seared it with black pepper and nutmeg and served it with grits and cheese and made rice krispie treats as a rewarding afterthought of dessert. Hestia inspected delicately from her perch on the cardboard box that used to contain peaches and has become her preferred dining room plinth. We used to ward her brother off from plates with the palisade of an arm over which he would crane with inexorable politeness.Not only does Ugo Betti's The Burnt Flower-Bed (1952) seem never to have been filmed even in its original Italian, its English-language premiere at the Arts Theatre in 1955 didn't even get a photo call in Theatre World, which in the last twenty-four hours I had become spoiled for. Its political drama resolves at the last minute in one of those galvanizing symbols for which I may just not have been Christian enough, but I am still susceptible to stories which assert the importance of meeting the future to make a difference in it, whether it can be believed in or not.
I felt so awful last night that I went to bed before nine o'clock and effectively stayed that way until after noon. I still feel uncannily flattened, but a week past my day trip to NecronomiCon Providence, I seem not to have COVID-19. I dreamed of a dilapidated belt of the city where the old brown-brick buildings looked irregularly carved from carnelian while the people inside their jewelry richness went about their ordinary, gig-tired lives. When I was asleep, I read it as an infection. Awake, it might just have been a metaphor.
Aside from my amateur interest in representations of atomic science, it fascinates me to have found John Clements in Norman King's The Shadow of Doubt (1955) because I know so little of his stage work and the role fits so well into his screen persona: if he hadn't functionally bowed out of film after the '40's, nothing would have been more natural than to see him as a particularly mid-century take on one of the compromised men of his pre-war stardom, ironically and not imperviously brazening out the brand of their reputations. "Before I reformed I was a dangerous revolutionary. I've got my press-cuttings to prove it." As the struck-off scientist whose outing by anonymous letter shoves him suddenly back under the burning glass of public opinion, Arthur Ross may even be a harder sell than some of his predecessors, since he did very much breach the Official Secrets Act and offered no defense for it at his trial, maintaining only his ignorance that the former student to whom he abruptly unburdened himself of his classified research had been tapped by the Soviets to pass it on. He called science a goal without national boundaries. If he couldn't be proven a calculated traitor, at the very least he looked like a dangerous fool. "I talked when I shouldn't have talked. Nothing could alter that." He's in too well-made a play to leave the question of his loyalties and motives indefinitely open, but there's just as much and perhaps more successful drama in his exclusion from the field he still thinks in, a middle-aged menial clerk eating his heart out over the latest scientific journals at the public library, though you wouldn't know it from the cast-iron crust of his jokes about capitalism. Going sharply to pieces straight from the light comedy would have been another early Clements specialty, too. I find the ending a little facile, but not the payoff of the mystery about Ross, which is incredibly—a compliment, it's human—stupid. Poking at the rest of Clements' first season as actor-manager of the Saville Theatre, I found that he had an arrangement with ITV to stage and then film a repertory of classic plays, some of which even survive. Presumably as a new play, The Shadow of Doubt was left out of this scheme; it was televised three years later by the BBC with an almost entirely different cast and is missing from the archives into the bargain. I am not going to get closer than the production stills in the September 1955 Theatre World and the ease with which I can hear Clements saying dryly, "I'll let you into a secret—unofficial this time; they never did. Two and two can make precisely what you want them to make. I used to know a proof of that when I was at school. We forget all the valuable things."
From reading the same volume of collected plays, I discovered R. C. Sherriff's The Long Sunset (1955) which would impress me more as Roman Arthuriana if it didn't turn into such an imperial lament; from Audrey Williamson's Contemporary Theatre 1953–1956 (1956) I got a pointer to Charles Morgan's The Burning Glass (1954), which does nothing philosophically or sfnally new with weapons of mass destruction and then throws a take on forbidden knowledge into the last act that should have been the entire play. In conclusion I am in a rough patch for watching movies, but apparently not for reading things I'll never see.
Aside from my amateur interest in representations of atomic science, it fascinates me to have found John Clements in Norman King's The Shadow of Doubt (1955) because I know so little of his stage work and the role fits so well into his screen persona: if he hadn't functionally bowed out of film after the '40's, nothing would have been more natural than to see him as a particularly mid-century take on one of the compromised men of his pre-war stardom, ironically and not imperviously brazening out the brand of their reputations. "Before I reformed I was a dangerous revolutionary. I've got my press-cuttings to prove it." As the struck-off scientist whose outing by anonymous letter shoves him suddenly back under the burning glass of public opinion, Arthur Ross may even be a harder sell than some of his predecessors, since he did very much breach the Official Secrets Act and offered no defense for it at his trial, maintaining only his ignorance that the former student to whom he abruptly unburdened himself of his classified research had been tapped by the Soviets to pass it on. He called science a goal without national boundaries. If he couldn't be proven a calculated traitor, at the very least he looked like a dangerous fool. "I talked when I shouldn't have talked. Nothing could alter that." He's in too well-made a play to leave the question of his loyalties and motives indefinitely open, but there's just as much and perhaps more successful drama in his exclusion from the field he still thinks in, a middle-aged menial clerk eating his heart out over the latest scientific journals at the public library, though you wouldn't know it from the cast-iron crust of his jokes about capitalism. Going sharply to pieces straight from the light comedy would have been another early Clements specialty, too. I find the ending a little facile, but not the payoff of the mystery about Ross, which is incredibly—a compliment, it's human—stupid. Poking at the rest of Clements' first season as actor-manager of the Saville Theatre, I found that he had an arrangement with ITV to stage and then film a repertory of classic plays, some of which even survive. Presumably as a new play, The Shadow of Doubt was left out of this scheme; it was televised three years later by the BBC with an almost entirely different cast and is missing from the archives into the bargain. I am not going to get closer than the production stills in the September 1955 Theatre World and the ease with which I can hear Clements saying dryly, "I'll let you into a secret—unofficial this time; they never did. Two and two can make precisely what you want them to make. I used to know a proof of that when I was at school. We forget all the valuable things."
From reading the same volume of collected plays, I discovered R. C. Sherriff's The Long Sunset (1955) which would impress me more as Roman Arthuriana if it didn't turn into such an imperial lament; from Audrey Williamson's Contemporary Theatre 1953–1956 (1956) I got a pointer to Charles Morgan's The Burning Glass (1954), which does nothing philosophically or sfnally new with weapons of mass destruction and then throws a take on forbidden knowledge into the last act that should have been the entire play. In conclusion I am in a rough patch for watching movies, but apparently not for reading things I'll never see.
I dislike reading on the Internet Archive, but then I keep running across artifacts like Noel Streatfeild's Ballet Annual (1959) with its stories by Elizabeth Enright and Pamela Brown and an interview with Moira Shearer from which one may learn the unreasonable fact that technically her first acting job at the age of ten was portraying Posy Fossil in an advertising photograph for Ballet Shoes (1936). I had never heard either of Norman King's The Shadow of Doubt (1955), but Audrey Williamson convinced me that I would have wanted to see its original run at the Saville Theatre with John Clements as the famous and disgraced, not otherwise all that Oppenheimer-ish nuclear physicist. I was able to do nothing with my day that I had hoped for and spent most of my evening on the couch staring at TCM while intermittently pinned in place by Hestia in her rare and treasured mode as movie cat. Marie Windsor working an oil rig in the slim crime programmer Double Deal (1950) wears her jeans and T-shirt better than Brando did.
By sheerest chance in a total change of pace from reading about the history of Chelmsford Ginger Ale, I have just seen that the Harvard Film Archive has returned from their summer of renovations with the repertory series The Cold Heart is More Precious Than Diamonds: The Cinema of Graham Greene, kicking off tomorrow night with the powerhouse double feature of The Fallen Idol (1948) and Brighton Rock (1948). I love the former absurdly and have never seen it anywhere other than my television and have never seen the latter at all despite its long-shadowed significance to British noir. The Heart of the Matter (1953) has been on my radar for some time. I'd never heard of The Stranger's Hand (1954), but spatch recognized the story of the author coming second in a competition to write like themselves. The HFA is rather underselling the full bore bizarrerie of Went the Day Well? (1942). I am still functionally composed of wet tissue paper, but I have not seen a film in theaters all year and I have at least the intention of a plan. The second and third monarchs of the summer flew this afternoon between rainshowers.
spatch recognized the story of the author coming second in a competition to write like themselves. The HFA is rather underselling the full bore bizarrerie of Went the Day Well? (1942). I am still functionally composed of wet tissue paper, but I have not seen a film in theaters all year and I have at least the intention of a plan. The second and third monarchs of the summer flew this afternoon between rainshowers.The first of the currently fifteen monarchs residing in various states in my mother's house was launched this afternoon with the assistance of the twins past whom it shot like a special effect in marigold cellophane. I walked around the neighborhood with my camera and came back heat-stunned with pictures of bees. I have some kind of reaction on my hands that obliges me to leave my rings off and without the weight my fingers feel weird. Two of them are only thirteen years old, but I have worn the third for more than twenty-five years. It's left a callus.
R.I.P. Phyllida Law. I would have seen her acting on film with both of her daughters, but had encountered her most recently through her mid-century stories of the West of England Touring Company collected in Kate Dunn's Exit Through the Fireplace: The Great Days of Rep (1998): "Because it was a fit-up company and the stages were all of different dimensions, sometimes we had to leave bits of the set off . . . Sometimes we had to extend the stage with card tables. I think Joan Plowright once went through one."
The predictable thing happened when I started to rewatch the 1979 BBC Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy in memoriam John Irvin: since the last time I had seen any of the serial, I had properly discovered Alexander Knox. Control was how I saw him first, that dying man shot like Hamlet's ghost in the greenish, cadaverous desk-light of secrets, but I had learned his face so many decades younger, I recognized him through the second half of the twentieth century as if through a mask. The tilt of his bones, the draw of his brows. A cold desperate hawk of a performance, it might have been the closest thing to seeing him onstage at the time.
spatch told me about and then sent me the six-part interview that Kliph Nestoroff conducted with his next-door neighbor of recently blessed memory, radio legend Peggy Webber.
I don't know how far I agree with the results of this color-coded quiz on reading styles courtesy oftroisoiseaux, but I am entertained to be rated an Alchemist Purple. It was right that I read Le Guin and Butler and Vonnegut and Bulgakov.
R.I.P. Phyllida Law. I would have seen her acting on film with both of her daughters, but had encountered her most recently through her mid-century stories of the West of England Touring Company collected in Kate Dunn's Exit Through the Fireplace: The Great Days of Rep (1998): "Because it was a fit-up company and the stages were all of different dimensions, sometimes we had to leave bits of the set off . . . Sometimes we had to extend the stage with card tables. I think Joan Plowright once went through one."
The predictable thing happened when I started to rewatch the 1979 BBC Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy in memoriam John Irvin: since the last time I had seen any of the serial, I had properly discovered Alexander Knox. Control was how I saw him first, that dying man shot like Hamlet's ghost in the greenish, cadaverous desk-light of secrets, but I had learned his face so many decades younger, I recognized him through the second half of the twentieth century as if through a mask. The tilt of his bones, the draw of his brows. A cold desperate hawk of a performance, it might have been the closest thing to seeing him onstage at the time.
spatch told me about and then sent me the six-part interview that Kliph Nestoroff conducted with his next-door neighbor of recently blessed memory, radio legend Peggy Webber.I don't know how far I agree with the results of this color-coded quiz on reading styles courtesy of
troisoiseaux, but I am entertained to be rated an Alchemist Purple. It was right that I read Le Guin and Butler and Vonnegut and Bulgakov.As an index of my mental health and the general state of my life, I realized sometime in the afternoon of NecronomiCon that I was surprised for people to recognize me. After seven years out of circulation and more than a year off mass-market social media, I expected not to be remembered. I have been trying since 2012 to shift Tiny Wittgenstein off my shoulder and into his carefully enriched environment of a jam-jar that the mother of my godchild curates for me and I do not seem able to wrap my emotions around the idea of my own object permanence. I do not think the additional layer of isolation enforced by my illness of the last few years has helped.
I found my 2019 Elder Sign. It was pinned to the lanyard of my convention badge, which is where I thought I had left it. Along with similar paraphernalia from Readercon and the Ig Nobels, it was in a miscellaneous box on which Hestia has been sleeping. Our treasure-guarding temple cat.
The contractors arrived once again at a barely legal hour of the morning to buzz the sad greenery of our yard into sadder green yard waste, but I did manage a meaningful span of sleep beforehand and even a couple of hours after. The monarch count stands at four chrysalides, seven caterpillars, and as of this afternoon three more eggs on a stalk of milkweed I had hoped to provide to the smallest caterpillar, which requires the tenderest leaves. I had to run around more than I wanted for the day, but at least I was not obliged to see any doctors. I was unavoidably and not unpleasantly reminded by Sally Smith's A Case of Mice and Murder (2024) of Cyril Hare's Tragedy at Law (1942).
I found my 2019 Elder Sign. It was pinned to the lanyard of my convention badge, which is where I thought I had left it. Along with similar paraphernalia from Readercon and the Ig Nobels, it was in a miscellaneous box on which Hestia has been sleeping. Our treasure-guarding temple cat.
The contractors arrived once again at a barely legal hour of the morning to buzz the sad greenery of our yard into sadder green yard waste, but I did manage a meaningful span of sleep beforehand and even a couple of hours after. The monarch count stands at four chrysalides, seven caterpillars, and as of this afternoon three more eggs on a stalk of milkweed I had hoped to provide to the smallest caterpillar, which requires the tenderest leaves. I had to run around more than I wanted for the day, but at least I was not obliged to see any doctors. I was unavoidably and not unpleasantly reminded by Sally Smith's A Case of Mice and Murder (2024) of Cyril Hare's Tragedy at Law (1942).
I slept a couple of hours between headaches and caught a train at an hour usually reserved for my gochild and had an amazing last day of NecronomiCon Providence.
Of my back-to-back panels, the standout was "Weird Film from the Pre-Code Era." Matthew Cheney pitched for the two-strip Technicolor uncanny of Doctor X (1932) and Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933). Gillian Daniels broke down the mesmerism of Svengali (1931) and The Mad Genius (1931). I had come prepared to recommend the existential horror of The Lost Patrol (1934) and got sidetracked by a reference to Lovecraft's tastes in cinema into recalling the temporal smash-up of Berkeley Square (1933). Pulling double duty as moderator and projectionist, Gwen Callahan illustrated throughout with slides and clips on the fly. We ran longer than most of the movies we could have kept talking about. "The Sheer Mind-Bending Terror of Physics" was operating at the disadvantage of the last slot in a four-day convention, but it nonetheless obeyed the dictates of gravity and spun centripetally into a broader conversation on the history of science and science fiction and the perpetual revision which can feel like unraveling of the understood world and as Despina Durand finally synthesized, the limits of mortality. Their father trolled brilliantly from the audience with just a few thoughts for the panel. I believe my primary contributions were nuclear physics, radio astronomy, and the impossibility of bargaining with the speed of light in a vacuum.
I feel as though I have forgotten that I used to socialize with large groups of people at regular intervals. At one point in the early afternoon, I was seated at a chair-crowded table commandeered from the patio of a café none of us was officially patronizing, surrounded by Michael Cisco, Sean Moreland, Adam Bolivar, Larissa Glasser, Carrie-Edmund Laben, Fiona Geist, Daphne Gem, and Zin E. Rocklyn, almost none of whom I had seen since my last NecronomiCon in 2019. I ran into K. H. Vaughan in the dealer's room and s.j. bagley at Lovecraft Arts & Sciences and on both sides of my panels was asked to sign books. I got to hug in person someone I had been cut off from with the loss of FB. I was pleased to discover that even after seven years, I remembered the general drift of the walk from the station to the ex-Biltmore Hotel. Probably from running flat out, I did not manage to eat anything beyond a couple of Fig Newtons until taken by Adam and Merlin Cunniff to an outdoor table at Mokban, where I was so enthused by the bulgogi set before me that I completely blanked on the existence of the gochujang I could have added to it. The vague poetry thing that three or four people had told me about in the evening turned out to be a party for Prema Arasu's Vampire Squid (2026) which I was bound to buy from the second the author talked about the inaccuracy of the popular perception of the deep sea as a fearful and incomprehensible void. I could have taken a later train, but correctly forecast that I would have deliquesced into an insentient heap by the time it arrived. Returned to the Boston environs, I collected the car which had been having its headlight repaired, drove home carefully, and ate a lot of coconut-milk mango ice cream. Hestia affirmed that I smelled like hotels and commuter rail.
I could not have done more than one day at this pitch. I felt very ragged and a little like a ringer and people seemed happy to see me. I signed bookstore copies of things I had written. I want to find the Elder Sign from the year I was Poet Laureate—it was silver and seems to have vanished into a box in the packing-out of the last apartment—to put on my computer bag alongside this year's gold and leaf-like design. In addition to the Arasu, I have copies of Adam Bolivar's The Lovecraft Arms (2025), Anita Allen's Nothing Ever Happens Here (2026), and the next-to-latest issue of Spectral Realms (2026) courtesy of the publisher whom I last met voicing the Devil in a puppet-play. It feels nuts that pre-pandemic I never attended this convention more than twice: it feels almost as much home as Readercon. I am phenomenally tired. At the moment I regret nothing. Wish my immune system luck.
Of my back-to-back panels, the standout was "Weird Film from the Pre-Code Era." Matthew Cheney pitched for the two-strip Technicolor uncanny of Doctor X (1932) and Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933). Gillian Daniels broke down the mesmerism of Svengali (1931) and The Mad Genius (1931). I had come prepared to recommend the existential horror of The Lost Patrol (1934) and got sidetracked by a reference to Lovecraft's tastes in cinema into recalling the temporal smash-up of Berkeley Square (1933). Pulling double duty as moderator and projectionist, Gwen Callahan illustrated throughout with slides and clips on the fly. We ran longer than most of the movies we could have kept talking about. "The Sheer Mind-Bending Terror of Physics" was operating at the disadvantage of the last slot in a four-day convention, but it nonetheless obeyed the dictates of gravity and spun centripetally into a broader conversation on the history of science and science fiction and the perpetual revision which can feel like unraveling of the understood world and as Despina Durand finally synthesized, the limits of mortality. Their father trolled brilliantly from the audience with just a few thoughts for the panel. I believe my primary contributions were nuclear physics, radio astronomy, and the impossibility of bargaining with the speed of light in a vacuum.
I feel as though I have forgotten that I used to socialize with large groups of people at regular intervals. At one point in the early afternoon, I was seated at a chair-crowded table commandeered from the patio of a café none of us was officially patronizing, surrounded by Michael Cisco, Sean Moreland, Adam Bolivar, Larissa Glasser, Carrie-Edmund Laben, Fiona Geist, Daphne Gem, and Zin E. Rocklyn, almost none of whom I had seen since my last NecronomiCon in 2019. I ran into K. H. Vaughan in the dealer's room and s.j. bagley at Lovecraft Arts & Sciences and on both sides of my panels was asked to sign books. I got to hug in person someone I had been cut off from with the loss of FB. I was pleased to discover that even after seven years, I remembered the general drift of the walk from the station to the ex-Biltmore Hotel. Probably from running flat out, I did not manage to eat anything beyond a couple of Fig Newtons until taken by Adam and Merlin Cunniff to an outdoor table at Mokban, where I was so enthused by the bulgogi set before me that I completely blanked on the existence of the gochujang I could have added to it. The vague poetry thing that three or four people had told me about in the evening turned out to be a party for Prema Arasu's Vampire Squid (2026) which I was bound to buy from the second the author talked about the inaccuracy of the popular perception of the deep sea as a fearful and incomprehensible void. I could have taken a later train, but correctly forecast that I would have deliquesced into an insentient heap by the time it arrived. Returned to the Boston environs, I collected the car which had been having its headlight repaired, drove home carefully, and ate a lot of coconut-milk mango ice cream. Hestia affirmed that I smelled like hotels and commuter rail.
I could not have done more than one day at this pitch. I felt very ragged and a little like a ringer and people seemed happy to see me. I signed bookstore copies of things I had written. I want to find the Elder Sign from the year I was Poet Laureate—it was silver and seems to have vanished into a box in the packing-out of the last apartment—to put on my computer bag alongside this year's gold and leaf-like design. In addition to the Arasu, I have copies of Adam Bolivar's The Lovecraft Arms (2025), Anita Allen's Nothing Ever Happens Here (2026), and the next-to-latest issue of Spectral Realms (2026) courtesy of the publisher whom I last met voicing the Devil in a puppet-play. It feels nuts that pre-pandemic I never attended this convention more than twice: it feels almost as much home as Readercon. I am phenomenally tired. At the moment I regret nothing. Wish my immune system luck.
On the other hand, if I had spent the entire weekend in Providence, I would never have seen that a local band by the name of Mixed G was playing a show at Spy Pond approximately twenty minutes from when I discovered their flyer and since their keyboardist was an elementary school friend of mine whom I had not seen in nearly twenty years, gotten in the car and even managed to park it in the postage stamp of a lot on Pond Lane and enjoyed a solid hour of open-air rock before needing to head over to my mother's. Not having been to an outdoor show in ages, I had forgotten the probability of smokers, which meant that I spent most of the set drifting intermittently to avoid the nicotine which was doing the same, but there were stacks of late-limned cloud over the water and a mix of wood ducks and mallards sculling across it and the band turned out to be the kind where just about everyone could and did take a song. Their repertoire ranges from Jefferson Airplane through Gloria Gaynor to Counting Crows. The crowd had accreted up the lawn by the time I left and someone's kids were dancing at the front of the patio. The keyboardist was instantly recognizable as himself; I must have been too, since I didn't need to introduce myself. I continue to feel that even alluding to the last few years of my life sounds like a Victorian melodrama, but we have established our geographical relations and the fact that he has even less presence on social media than I do. It was a lovely surprise of a thing to do with an afternoon. I put in an official request for Talking Heads and left earwormed with Dire Straits. It requires me to leave Boston at an exhausting hour, but I intend to make the last of my panels at NecronomiCon.
Why in the name of Robert Moses are a pair of road-painting trucks idling outside of our house at three in the morning? Their air compressors sound like wind tunnels. The whole house is hammering with it. My ears were already hurting. What was wrong with blocking off the intersection for a couple of hours during the day like a normal municipal inconvenience? We were not even flyered for construction season this time.
Thanks once again to the magic of a pharmaceutically suppressed immune system, I have been diagnosed with my fourth ear infection of the year. It was not an option this time to avoid antibiotics. What a dumpster of a week. Have some links.
1.theseatheseatheopensea writes gorgeously about Desert Fury (1947) for the July issue of Edición Sunset. Pour a cold one out for Johnny Ryan.
2. I can understand the explosively invasive danger foreseen by this paper and still find the illustrating sea-colonization beautiful.
3. I have never seen any of the BBC adaptations of Neil Munro's Para Handy stories, partly because the one with the most attractive cast to me was burninated entirely and its next closest successor mostly doesn't survive, but in the process of running down a reference for a friend about fourteen years ago I discovered Highland Voyage (1964), a promotional film for the album of the same name which featured three-quarters of the cast of Para Handy – Master Mariner (1959–60) and a ringer from The Maggie (1954). The chain by which I was reminded of it began withspatch informing me about the phone box on Mull.
4. Bioarchaeology yields the first confirmed death by trebuchet, courtesy of the Siege of Stirling Castle. "What is large and moving very, very quickly in 1304?"
5. Viashewhomust: the Whiskered Auklet. It looks like a cartoon by B. Kliban, if B. Kliban drew birds.
My major achievement of last night was lying on a couch and watching three movies with Glenn Ford.
1.
theseatheseatheopensea writes gorgeously about Desert Fury (1947) for the July issue of Edición Sunset. Pour a cold one out for Johnny Ryan.2. I can understand the explosively invasive danger foreseen by this paper and still find the illustrating sea-colonization beautiful.
3. I have never seen any of the BBC adaptations of Neil Munro's Para Handy stories, partly because the one with the most attractive cast to me was burninated entirely and its next closest successor mostly doesn't survive, but in the process of running down a reference for a friend about fourteen years ago I discovered Highland Voyage (1964), a promotional film for the album of the same name which featured three-quarters of the cast of Para Handy – Master Mariner (1959–60) and a ringer from The Maggie (1954). The chain by which I was reminded of it began with
spatch informing me about the phone box on Mull.4. Bioarchaeology yields the first confirmed death by trebuchet, courtesy of the Siege of Stirling Castle. "What is large and moving very, very quickly in 1304?"
5. Via
shewhomust: the Whiskered Auklet. It looks like a cartoon by B. Kliban, if B. Kliban drew birds.My major achievement of last night was lying on a couch and watching three movies with Glenn Ford.
I got back in the car from dropping off spatch and WHRB came on with the Undertones' "Teenage Kicks" (1978). Of the nine monarchs on the sun porch, one is in nephrite-green chrysalis already, two are getting there, and the rest are busily milling their way through the milkweed. I almost fell asleep on a cast-iron bench by the Mystic Dam where a couple of birders with binoculars and telephoto lens were observing an osprey and the air was filled with the flick-winged swoops of swallows and swifts. Things around here have been otherwise more medical than not and environmentally depressed. Have a very few links.
1. The Globe makes the current exhibition at the Norman Rockwell Museum sound irresistible.
2. Viaselkie: a meditation on the bog body panel! I remember the author's comment, too.
3. I always like hearing about an ancient shipwreck.
4. First I discovered Gail Holst-Warhaft's Road to Rembetika (1975) and then I found its Anthony Quinn-narrated documentary. She writes a mean ghost poem, too.
5. R.I.P. John Crowley. I never tried to write like him and I loved his language. We met my very first year at Readercon. I love none of this loss.
We went out last night for the Perseids and saw heat-haze: I may have caught one bright streak through the film of cloud. Kids on electric bikes were reinventing polo with a basketball. The solar eclipse on this coast will be extremely partial, but I have hopes for the lunar.
spatch and WHRB came on with the Undertones' "Teenage Kicks" (1978). Of the nine monarchs on the sun porch, one is in nephrite-green chrysalis already, two are getting there, and the rest are busily milling their way through the milkweed. I almost fell asleep on a cast-iron bench by the Mystic Dam where a couple of birders with binoculars and telephoto lens were observing an osprey and the air was filled with the flick-winged swoops of swallows and swifts. Things around here have been otherwise more medical than not and environmentally depressed. Have a very few links.1. The Globe makes the current exhibition at the Norman Rockwell Museum sound irresistible.
2. Via
selkie: a meditation on the bog body panel! I remember the author's comment, too.3. I always like hearing about an ancient shipwreck.
4. First I discovered Gail Holst-Warhaft's Road to Rembetika (1975) and then I found its Anthony Quinn-narrated documentary. She writes a mean ghost poem, too.
5. R.I.P. John Crowley. I never tried to write like him and I loved his language. We met my very first year at Readercon. I love none of this loss.
We went out last night for the Perseids and saw heat-haze: I may have caught one bright streak through the film of cloud. Kids on electric bikes were reinventing polo with a basketball. The solar eclipse on this coast will be extremely partial, but I have hopes for the lunar.
Night before last, when given a break from the non-stop doctors I slept as much as eight hours and had to check when I woke that Tom Courtenay and Omar Sharif had not shared any projects in the British New Wave because I had dreamed a vivid conversation on the subway with someone who was studying the kitchen-sink difference from their epic use by David Lean. Last night I did not sleep more than a couple of hours and nothing inside my head feels worth recording. I suppose I was bullied by the driver of the black SUV who became so furious that I had stopped in front of them at a red light that they leaned on the horn for blocks where I wasn't sure if they were following their original route or me, gunned their engine to my bumper, gesticulated and shouted through their windshield, and finally roared past me on the wrong side of the road in a near-graze of mirrors after I had turned down the small side street necessary for my errand. It was exhaustingly superfluous of them. fleurdelis41 has been sending me incredible excerpts from Ian Collins' Blythe Spirit: The Remarkable Life of Ronald Blythe (2024). I meant weeks ago to link Valentine Ackland's "Teaching to Shoot" (1943). Because the analog technologies of my daily life do not extend to a record player, Arun Sood and Angeline Morrison's "A Rìbhinn a Bheil Cuimhn' Agad" (2026) really makes me wish the album came on CD.
fleurdelis41 has been sending me incredible excerpts from Ian Collins' Blythe Spirit: The Remarkable Life of Ronald Blythe (2024). I meant weeks ago to link Valentine Ackland's "Teaching to Shoot" (1943). Because the analog technologies of my daily life do not extend to a record player, Arun Sood and Angeline Morrison's "A Rìbhinn a Bheil Cuimhn' Agad" (2026) really makes me wish the album came on CD.When spatch and I drove out to Gloucester after dark, we found night fishers casting their lines into the low tide of the harbor and the green lawn of the esplanade flyered with an exhibit of participants in the Battle of Gloucester including Lydia Giddings Foster and HMS Falcon and wreaths of white flowers around the fisherman in his drowned green bronze which we shortly realized from the municipal signs and temporary bleachers were for the annual Gloucester Fishermen's Memorial Service. There are new names on the cenotaph for the first time since 2020. We couldn't tell the recencies of the stones inscribed around the foot of the Gloucester Fishermen's Wives Memorial. An easy fifteen degrees cooler than Somerville, the air was still sweat-hot, a charcoal towel; we were not the only restless walkers of the promenade so close to midnight. Ten Pound Light blinked red across the harbor and Eastern Point Light flashed a haze-white beam beyond it. The navigation lights made stop-sign reflections in the thin water of the Blynman Canal. At one point a seagull woke and screamed across the water as if someone in its line of sight had fish and chips. We drove home to a seamlessly beat-linked set of drum and bass on WZBC, a soundtrack for cruising a black space of lasers. I had not had to get up for any doctors that morning.
spatch and I drove out to Gloucester after dark, we found night fishers casting their lines into the low tide of the harbor and the green lawn of the esplanade flyered with an exhibit of participants in the Battle of Gloucester including Lydia Giddings Foster and HMS Falcon and wreaths of white flowers around the fisherman in his drowned green bronze which we shortly realized from the municipal signs and temporary bleachers were for the annual Gloucester Fishermen's Memorial Service. There are new names on the cenotaph for the first time since 2020. We couldn't tell the recencies of the stones inscribed around the foot of the Gloucester Fishermen's Wives Memorial. An easy fifteen degrees cooler than Somerville, the air was still sweat-hot, a charcoal towel; we were not the only restless walkers of the promenade so close to midnight. Ten Pound Light blinked red across the harbor and Eastern Point Light flashed a haze-white beam beyond it. The navigation lights made stop-sign reflections in the thin water of the Blynman Canal. At one point a seagull woke and screamed across the water as if someone in its line of sight had fish and chips. We drove home to a seamlessly beat-linked set of drum and bass on WZBC, a soundtrack for cruising a black space of lasers. I had not had to get up for any doctors that morning.
Today was my brother's birthday; I posted him a card with a killer whale magnet. I had a tin of smoked mussels and part of a baguette when I got back from the afternoon's groceries. My actual camera is on a slight blink, so all of my photographs recently have been on phones.
( I think they think I must be out of touch. )
For dinner I made an experimental corn carbonara from more or less the recipe which had attracted my mother's attention and the tl;dr is even more corn the next time, but it tasted intensely of the three sweet summer ears whose kernels were partly steamed until soft in bacon drippings and the sauce actually fluffed up with the boiling addition of pasta water from a slurry of egg yolks and corn milk and grated Parmesan and we are in agreement that the bacon should be incorporated rather than merely garnished in the same fashion as the torn fresh basil leaves, but I had not cooked anything new or even more complicated than a chili in months; it was worth its dishes. I was cautioned by a medical tech earlier this week to avoid excessive sweating, as if it weren't August in the Anthropocene. The humidity even after dark has been a Devonian swamp.
( I think they think I must be out of touch. )
For dinner I made an experimental corn carbonara from more or less the recipe which had attracted my mother's attention and the tl;dr is even more corn the next time, but it tasted intensely of the three sweet summer ears whose kernels were partly steamed until soft in bacon drippings and the sauce actually fluffed up with the boiling addition of pasta water from a slurry of egg yolks and corn milk and grated Parmesan and we are in agreement that the bacon should be incorporated rather than merely garnished in the same fashion as the torn fresh basil leaves, but I had not cooked anything new or even more complicated than a chili in months; it was worth its dishes. I was cautioned by a medical tech earlier this week to avoid excessive sweating, as if it weren't August in the Anthropocene. The humidity even after dark has been a Devonian swamp.
The radio telescope in the side yard of my parents' house has not been in use for at least fifteen years, but it makes a pleasing background to the morning glories which are currently sharing the raised bed with a miscellany of tomatoes, chives, basil, irises, and milkweed. Beyond the ever-popular petition, I am seriously thinking there must be a way for me to write to UKRI to protest the defunding of Jodrell Bank on the personally felt grounds that no one needs to hold the U.S.'s beer in putting themselves behind the entire pool table of science. Between 1949 when it was conceived and 1956 when it was completed, the deep-dished design of the Lovell Telescope was converted from reflecting mesh to solid steel in order to catch the newly detected 21-centimeter line of neutral hydrogen, on whose hyperfine galactic drift the observatory has done important work ever since. I read some of it in 1997 when I was embarking on my own small, latitudinally limited project. We shouldn't need another cold war to make radio astronomy valued. On top of the rudeness of pulling funding from a World Heritage Site, interfering with this observatory feels as though it would perturb Alan Garner, at which point there's no telling what might come up out of the unmapped gulfs of time.
I am not having at all the week I wanted, but I took a picture of myself this evening that my mother said looked like a slightly suspicious wild bird.
The Prisoner (1967–68) is much formally weirder than I could tell when I last saw it—on VHS—in high school. I am enjoying the number of actors I recognize, too.
The Prisoner (1967–68) is much formally weirder than I could tell when I last saw it—on VHS—in high school. I am enjoying the number of actors I recognize, too.
