The leatherbound Life of Attila the Hun

So. This has been a good last couple of days. On Wednesday, I went into New York City for an afternoon with my dear friend who does not have a livejournal. In the evening, we attended the Salon Fantastique reading at KGB, which looked exactly as the name implied: up a vertiginous flight of stairs, lamplit in red reflection from all the Communist posters and flags on the walls, old photographs from the USSR and Emma Goldman staring at herself in the mirror over the bar. And hot as a sauna with all the people already packed inside for the reading, which is why at the intermission I settled myself in the open window that let out onto the fire escape and stayed there until the event was done. The doorway had been like a furnace-mouth. But I got to hear nineweaving and yuki_onna read, along with other excellent people whose livejournal names I did not know, and said hello to ellen_kushner and Ellen Datlow, and afterward went out to a stunningly good Chinese restaurant for the kind of meal where nine different dishes get ordered by table osmosis and no one quite knows what all of them are, but it doesn't matter, they're so delicious. And good conversation as well.


I can't tell if it would have been better or worse if I'd been looking at the camera. The subject's fault, not the photographer's.

Because the next train to Boston from Penn Station left from at three in the morning, nineweaving came back to New Haven to stay with me for the night, which gave us the opportunity the next day to visit the crazy sushi of Miya's. For the first time I can remember, its owner-chef Bun Lai was visible behind the counter, and he did not wear a mad scientist's labcoat: nonetheless, he swapped the asparagus in the Wabisabi Salmon for spicy flying fish roe and put apricots in the Mishima Sonata—whose contents already included krill, honey, almond butter, and tempura deep-frying—and on his recommendation I may have a new favorite, the Squiggly Giggly Roll, which involves raw squid, pickled plum, and Japanese basil, and tastes like deep-sea and ultraviolet. The man is insane in the best of ways. Then we hit the Book Trader Café, which seems to have reorganized its shelves to include sections like "Cult," and had a magnificent book haul. Mine were Matthew Sturgis' Aubrey Beardsley: A Life (1999), whose author bears an uncanny resemblance in his dust-jacket photo to one of Beardsley's own creations, and Anthony Minghella's Jim Henson's The Storyteller (1997), whose painted illustrations are drawn from the series right down to John Hurt in his cloak of patches. And she went home, and I went to the library, and in the evening I watched Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971) with some friends, one of whom I had gotten the movie for as a birthday gift. And that's what the rest of this entry is about, so run now if that's not your cup of substitutiary locomotion . . .

(Cut for far too much thought on character dynamics. With spoilers, if that matters to you.)
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