sovay | Myth Happens

My thirty-year-old sound system has not after all survived having its speakers ripped out of its subwoofer and its subwoofer pulled plug-wrenchingly from its power bar prior to being dropped on the dining room floor with its cord trailing mystifyingly into the kitchen. It was a treasured and redoubtable part of my office. It came from Cambridge SoundWorks of blessed memory in 1996 and lived with me through four different dorm rooms and eight or nine apartments and the most maintenance it ever required was an occasional stripping and recutting of wires and I have no idea what in the hell I can replace it with. It was stored in a box for a year once and was just fine on the other side. I have to estimate something for the insurance and beyond rubies is obviously not going to cut it.

On the other insurance front, after an unreasonable number of hours on the phone I have managed to file an appeal for the denial of coverage for my antibiotics last month. I spoke to some very sympathetic representatives along the way. Unfortunately it seems the clinician who could just have signed off on the prescription as written by my actual doctor was not of their mind. I should have a decision within the month. I feel like punching Kafka.

In other complaints, the Orionids have been clouded out.

Music: Blondshell, "Reinstall"

To the very small number whom it may concern—although statistically likelier to occur on my friendlist than many places on the internet—I am flabbergasted to report that Leo Marks' The Girl Who Couldn't Quite (1950) has been uploaded to the Internet Archive. The acting edition by which I could compare the screenplay to the playscript continues to elude me, but I am thrilled by a decent transfer from a dead-out-of-print DVD—when I watched it off the crackly free Roku, it looked like it had gone through a boot. Cloudburst (1951) is sketchier in quality, but still available for an early Marks double feature should anyone other than me want one. Both come courtesy of the alphabetically idiosyncratic collection of Paul's British Films, which so far only goes up to J, but still encompasses nice copies of The Ghost Camera (1933) and The Gaunt Stranger (1938) and Cage of Gold (1950), to name some films I watched originally under fuzzier circumstances. Nice copies of some films I have been wanting to watch, too. I hope Paul makes it to the end of the alphabet. In the meantime, good grief.

Music: Dry Cleaning, "A.L.C."

I have not felt especially plugged in to my emotions for a while now, but I seem to be more than abstractly angry about the break-in. It could have been very much worse, but every good thing this year has felt acutely like fragments shored against ruin and the invasive loss of one we had worked for feels superfluously mean. I won't see my brother or my niece again until Thanksgiving. I am under no illusions that I can insulate myself from the state of the world, but I should be able to trust that I can leave the house without someone wrecking it. Partway through the pan-frying of steak tips tonight we remembered that we couldn't open the back door for ventilation on account of still not having one.

I meant to put some of the Craneberry left in our liquor cabinet into the cider we mulled after dinner, but it came out so well on its own—the normal fall spices plus star anise, simmered an inch down—that I just drank two mugs instead. I have not eaten enough apples this fall. I have been belatedly rabbit-holed by the article sections of Kaldor City. I managed to watch my third film all month this weekend and in the meantime of waiting for my mind to come back online, the time-shock and meta-layering made the first episode of Adam Adamant Lives! (1966–67) a hit. I am hoping the forecast nor'easter won't interfere with the Orionids.

I am still sleeping worse than usual. Sometime after I had listened to the upstairs neighbors all morning I dreamed of an image like an record sleeve, a plover-freckled profile blindfolded with windflowers like blinkless eyes. Their straight dark hood of hair looked as 1970's as the grain of the vague sunlit field behind them. It might have been a frame of film. I can think of several writer-directors working who would have done it.

spatch took a different picture of me this evening when I was delighted by some weathered ornamental cherries.

Music: Dry Cleaning, "Scratchcard Lanyard"

Prior to the interruption of the merlin, I had been trying to assemble some links. I leave them here before leaving the house properly for the first time in in five days. There was frost on all the sidewalks and windshields last night.

1. On closer research, Harcourt Williams was not part of the first English-language radio version of Karel Čapek's R.U.R.; that was broadcast by 2LO in May 1927 and Williams played Alquist in the November repeat. If the James Whale among the robots of the original cast is the same as the director who was more of an actor until the smash success of Journey's End, however, it's a wonderful through-line to his future world of gods and monsters.

2. Since Spotify isn't region-locked, I was able to listen to Shelagh Delaney's Catch Me Who Can (1978/2026), the rediscovered one-act adapted for radio by her daughter Charlotte after her death in 2011. It's a two-hander that widens into a quartet, counterpointing a fourteen-year-old runaway to the middle-aged maths teacher who almost literally runs across her in a park and then chipping in to their argument—immediately over her truancy, generally over the shapeless unanswerable questions of life—with an elderly bag lady and a young despatch rider who contribute everything from a spare lid to intimations of anarchy. It stars Ivy Sheehan, Toby Jones, Xavier Moras Spencer, and the iconic hat-tip of Rita Tushingham and runs half an hour with incidental music and ducks. I would say that I am accommodating to audio drama except that I still can't even read e-mail while listening.

3. Fingers crossed that Theo Rollason's Queer Edward II (2026) shows up anywhere I can see it. Jarman's screenplay-diary of the same name is one of my treasures from long-missed McIntyre and Moore's. Edward II (1991) was in fact the second film of Jarman's I ever saw, immediately on the heels of Caravaggio (1986) with

rushthatspeaks in the first year of our relationship when he still lived half a country away and we saw one another at three- to six-month intervals and otherwise I would walk as far as Belmont on long nightly calls with him. This documentary is the first I am hearing of the filmmaker, but I wish I had known about them in time for Readercon; their debut short co-directed with Tabitha Carless-Frost was Out of the Peat (2025).

4. It took me a year to get back to watching the second series of Poldark (1975–77), but even at potato quality, my attention span buckled instantly at the appearance of the not yet twenty-one-year-old Kevin McNally. No rewind on an actor is ever going to be weirder than the time I accidentally chased The Legend of Hell House (1973) with Lassie Come Home (1943), but the distance from the midlife roles I learned him in is still a striking ghost-trick. His voice was so much lighter, even with the assist of the West Country accent I wouldn't have placed him by it. His face had its eyebrows to grow into, like a puppy with its paws. In movement he was instantly recognizable, the swing of his wrist in the cuff of an eighteenth-century shirt; it's a good era for him. I didn't expect him to make me think of Fuchsia Groan: but with how small a twist might she not suddenly have become beautiful.

5. While I cannot volunteer to write for it, I found their letter through friends-of-friendlist and I dearly hope that

thefourthvine gets their Leo Marks for Yuletide.

Music: Dry Cleaning, "Strong Feelings"

A week out from reading in Providence and five days after a crush of strangers in the house, I seem not to have COVID-19, which is the nicest thing I can say about this week. I may have some kind of ordinary cold. We have duly reported the further possessions we found missing and heard nothing from the property manager about the plywood sandwich that used to be our back door. Hestia has been checking in with me before bed, often trampling herself a nest on my ankles while I read. I stopped sleeping for three nights.

Halloween has sprung on our street. Our facing neighbors in particular have pulled out all the spooky stops with a fringe of cheesecloth ghosts and plastic skeletons hanging from the top of their porch and woolly-bear-like garlands and spiderwebs all through the railings and an array of mostly albino pumpkins and autumnally colored flowers on the steps. Since I have had an unobstructed view of their house from my office ever since the Bradford pear on our sidewalk was cut down in the spring, I appreciate it. I had such a dichotomous relationship with this holiday as a child. I loved the costumes which could be planned for half a year, the door-to-door of the trick-or-treating, the leaf-weather, the dark. It was full of bones and masks, the skull beneath the skin. Everything I read told me the world swung open and the in-between came through.

I was distracted from continuing this post by the sudden arrival of a small falcon in the yew tree outside my window. It was after the sparrows who scattered with a frantic twitter. Its slate-brown back and its buff-brindled breast and its black-banded tail were so distinct that the internet tells me it was a merlin. I had never seen one with my own eyes. It thrashed around in the red-berried needles and took wing again. I want to take it as a good sign. It perched briefly on the edge of our porch. It gave a small sharp cry.

Music: Dry Cleaning, "Icebergs"

Before my week derailed like thirty thousand pounds of bananas, I blew my mind reading Harcourt Williams' Four Years at the Old Vic (1935).

As an actor, he's one of my elliptical favorites. He didn't get into film until his sixties and then mostly in small parts, but I have rejoiced for years every time I have caught him onscreen; he originated the role of Hebble Tyson in the original 1948 West End run of Christopher Fry's The Lady's Not for Burning and from the first time I saw him as one or another of his ineffectual or eccentric authority figures, he was no trouble to picture wishing to be alone with his own convictions. In his capacity as producer for four seasons at the Old Vic, however, he was off my radar almost completely until I looked into the claim that he effected a sea-change in the performance of Shakespeare on the British stage and the thing is that it seems to be true. His memoir is a delightful and mild-mannered grenade of ideas about theater that by virtue of history bending to follow him now look like common sense. By his own admission, when he was offered the job by Lilian Baylis in the spring of 1929, he was a peculiar choice: a forty-nine-year-old character actor with almost no professional experience directing for the stage, but the intensity and intelligence of his affection for Shakespeare made up for any shortfalls in his learning curve. He cared about the texts. He cared about communicating them to an audience. Until he turned the company over to Tyrone Guthrie in 1933, he got regularly shocked notices for stripping away as much of the received costume and business as he could afford on a perpetually straitened budget in order to engage with the plays themselves and not their pop-cultural accretion. He could do a straight, striking production of Julius Caesar or Macbeth, but he leaned more toward experiments in recontextualization that went beyond modern dress: a commedia dell'arte Taming of the Shrew, a Renaissance Antony and Cleopatra, an English masque of a Midsummer Night's Dream with incidental folk music by Cecil Sharp. He directed the five-hour coup of a then-uncommon full-text Hamlet. Inflexible on the subject of treating the verse as speech rather than affectation, he picked up the pace so much from the typically mannered style that his calling card of Romeo and Juliet was savaged by the critics as an Italianate gabble, but he never backed down on his philosophy, although he did panic about his notices to the point of trying to resign after the opening night of The Merchant of Venice, after which he began the sensible habit of saving them to read later and then just never getting around to it. He listened to his actors. Characteristically modest about his own achievements, he gives a refreshing amount of credit to all sorts of people in his memoir, from mentors and colleagues to members of the company and crew with whom he worked open-mindedly. He attributes most of his inspirations to Harley Granville-Barker, but at least manages to own the bridge-conceit of the spectacular Tempest that immortalized Leslie French. Actually the list of actors launched during his tenure reads like one of those supergroups in reverse; John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson may have been the most legendary of the men, but Martita Hunt was the darling of his leading ladies and he had the sense to poach Peggy Ashcroft after seeing her with Paul Robeson. Later additions to the company included Marius Goring, Valentine Dyall, Judith Furse, plus the return of Edith Evans and John Laurie. The Old Vic was where Michael Powell first saw and set his sights on Roger Livesey. When Richardson got a brutal sore throat during the run of Othello, Alastair Sim stepped in. Williams himself took the occasional part, like the distrait Charles VI in Henry V which he would reprise on film for Olivier; offstage he was a memorable character in his own right, a permanently disheveled vegetarian who as far as anyone could tell lived off wheat germ and cheese sandwiches and his nerves, cf. Eric Phillips:

In the late summer of 1929 a new producer strode into the rehearsal room of the Old Vic where the company were assembled for the first rehearsal of 'Romeo and Juliet'. Under one arm he carried a script of the play, under the other a wholesale-size tin of a well-known tonic beverage. He was wearing a white shirt, open at the neck, with sleeves rolled back above the elbows, and a pair of old flannel trousers. His untidy hair literally stood on end and his eyes shone with fanatical enthusiasm [. . .] I looked at the tin of tonic food which Harcourt Williams had presumably brought with him to soothe his nerves, and I wondered at the moment whether it was his nerves or ours which needed soothing.

or Ralph Richardson:

Harcourt Williams was our director and our mentor; everybody who worked with Harcourt Williams remembers him with great affection. Somehow he had the faculty for getting the best out of everybody. How he did it, I don't know. It was a kind of secret magnetism. He never bullied, he never worried you, he found out what you could do best and brought the two bests together. He himself was a terrible bundle of nerves. He was always eating Bemax in the stalls and rushing up and down and pulling his hair; but he made us calm, he took all the calmness out of himself. A very unselfish and delightful fellow.

or Harcourt Williams:

In spite of all difficulties the first performance on Saturday, September 14th, went without a hitch. At least so it was reported to me, for I saw nothing of it. Remembering a dictum of Granville-Barker's that a producer can do nothing on the first night and had much better stop away, I spent the evening turning out a cupboard in my office. It was a dirty job, but it kept me busy until I had to turn out for the critic of a Sunday paper who had to write his notice in the interval in order to get it in to his paper in time. If I recollect it was not a particularly flattering review, and I felt that as he had used my very pen he might have been more merciful, but no doubt the distracted individual with grubby hands meant nothing to him!

He had been a conscientious objector during World War I, although he mentions it only in the passing of a reproach from Lilian Baylis over his attempted resignation; he may have been as self-deprecating as the next memoirist, but he wouldn't have done the theater he did without a seriously stubborn core. He introduced Shaw into the repertoire of the Old Vic by writing directly to the author, much as he got advice once from John Masefield on the technical business of a shipwreck for The Tempest. He introduced Sheridan and Goldsmith and Molière. He staged a Knight of the Burning Pestle that I would like to borrow the time machine for, now that you ask. He wrote skits for the annual Birthday Night and was thrilled by the reactions of London council school students to the special matinées. His request that the audience not strike matches during the performance suggests that he would have thrown a rod over cellphones. For the very last production of his last season, he yielded to the temptation of playing—successfully—Prospero. I can't find that he directed further. He didn't break his actor's staff; he did stage work until close to the end of his life and left the late, weird record on film by which I worked my way back to him, inspired by his overproof quotations in Brighton Rock (1947); and I had read so much about the Old Vic under Guthrie, but the groundwork for all that iconoclasm does look like Williams who tilted at every tradition he could find except the one where Shakespeare mattered. I might love him just for the fact that he made Ralph Richardson who shied from romantic, heroic roles as badly as Julian Fleming play Prince Hal and Henry and live with having been a hit. He encloses samples of his wife's rehearsal notes in his book and a candid snap of himself being walked off his feet in the Malverns by George Bernard Shaw. I still wish I'd seen him in Christopher Fry.

Music: Blondshell, "New Shape"

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.

Music: Dry Cleaning, "No Decent Shoes for Rain"

I had been having a lovely birthday observed with my parents and my brother and my niece and my husbands when

spatch and I received a text from the upstairs neighbor about mysterious crashing noises that she had heard downstairs and we leapt in the car and the long and short is that we have been broken into and our apartment trashed and most of our electronics stolen. Our professional lives. Our art. The back door was smashed down with a brick which was then left on our bed. Our dressers were rifled. My thirty-year-old speaker system was dismantled and strewn across the floor. Rob's camera with fifteen years of photos on it was taken. My desk's drawers were jerked open and my financial information disemboweled. The whole house reeks of cigarette smoke and ash left lying everywhere. Hestia is safe. We found her hiding in the bedroom. We have been with the Somerville police since we got home. I hadn't even finished opening my presents. Our kitchen floor is all over broken glass.

Music: Blondshell, "Heart Has to Work So Hard"

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.

Music: Dry Cleaning, "I Have the Key"

Anyway, I will be reading tonight at Weird Providence in support of K. H. Vaughan's This Is the Table Where We Wash Our Dead (2026). After which I expect to come home and not move for a day.

Not to wade into the Torment Nexus, but the capacity of this federal government to lunge gleefully for concepts that were first presented to me as sfnal horrors is displeasing. Varos at least bundled its federal snuff films with a free Martin Jarvis.

Music: Cracker, "Teen Angst (What the World Needs Now)"

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.

Music: Dry Cleaning, "Grass"

It is my birthday. I am forty-five years old. It must be any number of fictional people's age. Last night I lay flat on a granite block at the top of a hill and looked up into the sky-scratching glitter of the Draconids. We saw few but clear of them in the mild haze. One shot in a flash between Thuban and Aldhibah as if falling out of Polaris.

spatch sang to me at midnight. I woke to a book from my parents on queer and trans Olympians. I feel I have done too much work to reach this year, but the air is autumnally sheeting with sun.

Music: Scout Niblett, "Kidnapped by Neptune"

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.

Music: Free Electric State, "Darkest Hour"

Two days from my forty-fifth birthday, I have been informed that I have teenage hearing, meaning the last three weeks' sensation that someone has stuffed a sock in my left ear should fade once the inside of my head sorts its plumbing out. I appreciate the reassurance and can't wait for a normal internal pressure front.

R.I.P. Eva Marie Saint, iconic and unapologetic.

Courtesy of

movingfinger: "long live the lesbian shrimps," a story of Yiddish idiom.

I am not sleeping any better, but it does seem that once the weather cools, I walk around more.

Music: Lloyd Cole, "Rattlesnakes"

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.

Music: Blondshell, "Sea Legs"

Paranoiacally I set my alarm early for this morning's telehealth and was thus awake and feeding the cat when the doctor called also early, leaving me feeling prudent but confused. I had not so much slept due to a winning combination of crushing headache and construction starting on the house next door, so I made a bunch of phone calls and left the house to run some errands and came back in time to collect

spatch who had a bus to catch and would walk with me in a roundabout curve to the Mystic River in the clear autumn pour of sun. I returned to eat a tin of anchovies with olives and lemon in which Hestia professed interest until she registered the olive oil which she dislikes on her fish. I feel that I have done a lot of practical things at the start of the week, but not very much with my mind. I am having a lot of trouble feeling that I can get room for my mind in between everything that happens. I may have figured out how to get my pictures reliably off my camera again, however, and I walked underneath a pretty delightful plane tree.

Music: Blondshell, "New Age Trojan Horse"

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.

Music: Dry Cleaning, "Hot Penny Day"

I had just gotten used to the raw autumnal bluster of the last week when temperatures this afternoon boinged close to 90 °F and everything became summer-sticky again. I recognize this phenomenon and every year I am unimpressed by it. The leaves have not fully flashed over, but I saw a classically orange maple while out on errands, bright as crepe paper.

On something of the same theme,

spatch had warned me that Turlough would be leaving in Planet of Fire (1984), but not that Mark Strickson would be going up against David Farrar in Black Narcissus (1947) for Great Moments in Booty Shorts. At the point where he dropped to his speedos he probably won. That's for those of you who have absolutely no interest in pirates.

Music: Bipolar Angels, "I'm Bad"

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.

Music: Blondshell, "Stone Fruit"

Five days out from a late train home from D.C., I seem not to have contracted COVID-19 and since my immune system is still a pile of wet tissue paper and my government still invested in the die-off of just about every demographic I belong to, I will continue with my masking and keep visiting the mother of my godchild until we sort this continental divide problem out.

I find it very demoralizing that for various reasons I have barely slept since coming home. Part of the efficacy of the windowless pit is simply that in a house with normal insulation I cannot hear every footfall on the floor above as if it's in the room with me starting at the dark-thirty hours necessary to scramble for work or assemble a teenager for school. Part of the rest is this apartment possessing genuinely the worst-converted bedroom I have slept in, at least in terms of its orientation to light and the accommodation of the windows to blocking it. Dawn didn't go off like twenty tons of alarm clock everywhere I've lived.

Having watched almost no movies since the start of this month, I was dismayed to discover last night that the Criterion Channel has overhauled its formerly minimalist, straightforward interface into something much more pushily autoplayish and also geoblocked itself outside of North America. The former annoys me, but the latter seems counterproductive to the point of cancellation considering its catalogue and subscriber base, not to mention the existence of international travel; I can't even see it as a logical extension of Criterion discs being traditionally locked to Region 1/A. I have to wish a whole lot of film fans a very happy VPN.

I may have been even more shocked to walk into my local branch of When Pigs Fly this afternoon and be informed that they no longer sell pumpernickel. I have been buying it for two decades at least. It is mostly what I patronize the bakery for, although I like their cinnamon raisin and some of their fancier fruit breads in season, like apple cinnamon and the mango pineapple ginger that is basically candy. "No one bought it," said the person behind the counter, cheerfully. "I bought a lot of it!" I protested. I could use it for sandwiches from grilled cheese to peanut butter to lox and cream cheese. It had figured centrally in my plans for dinner. Since their contact information includes a phone number, I figure I can call tomorrow and register my disappointment. Without pumpernickel, the chances that I will purchase anything from them have considerably dropped. I think of it as an absolutely staple bread.

Just because I discovered Kate Bush's "Coffee Homeground" (1978) twenty-one years ago in October, it has been in my head walking around the cold leaf-scattered rain of my neighborhood over the last few days. Yesterday I was stopped and asked for directions on the Tufts campus which I could not provide.

spatch reassured me that I might have been mistaken for faculty or staff. This afternoon the sun came out through the overcast in the waterily monochrome fashion that suggests an overexposed silver gelatin print. I do not understand how leafblowers were allowed to become legal in residential areas.

selkie sent me another packet of Violet Crumble in the mail.