So sing all your questions to sleep

I may finally, as they say, have recovered from my vacation. The first day after we came back, I slept until noon and then sat on the front steps for about an hour in the bright, windy, summer-autumnal weather, just soaking up the fact that it wasn't murderously hot and humid: this is more how I remember August in New England. In the evening, we watched The Constant Gardener (2005) and then The Hunt for Red October (1990), which made for a bizarre double feature—if Tom Clancy and John le Carré were put in a room together, I'm not sure that one of them might not combust—but at least I got to point out to my family what Bill Nighy and Stellan Skarsgård look like without tentacles and sea-change. Yesterday, mostly I transcribed lyrics and read some Vergil, worked on a new story that I started while in D.C., and my mother and I watched the first episode of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1979), which promises to be excellent. And so far today, not much has happened. Housecleaning. Gardening. I think this is all right.

In writing news, contributor's copies of Full Unit Hookup #8 landed in my mailbox this afternoon, containing my poems "The Meteors I Remember" (for strange_selkie) and "Because the Mermaid Has No Tongue." And my story "Nights with Belilah," which could previously be found only in Singing Innocence and Experience, will be reprinted this fall as feature fiction in City Slab #9; so if you need some Lilim in your life, that's where to look.

And finally, photographs. I took about a hundred pictures on this trip, a full of third of which didn't come out for some technical reason or other; mostly from the Museum of Natural History and the Air and Space Museum, which irritates me. I must not have made the proper sacrifices to the gods of the digital camera. Nonetheless, my favorites of the remainder are posted below. Thanks to time_shark for hosting them, sucker . . . er, I mean, magnificent friend that he is . . .

(Cut for lots of photographs.)
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