Never thought I'd let a rumor ruin my moonlight

My poem "The Plague Hill" has been accepted by Mythic Delirium. It was originally written for asakiyume and Colmers Hill; to the best of my knowledge, there is not a piece of historical truth to it. All hail local legend.

From Penelope Fitzgerald's The Knox Brothers (1976), a passage of which nineweaving read me yesterday:

But the greatest influence upon Dilly was the best-loved and most eccentric of the Fellows, Walter Headlam. Headlam, one of the finest of all interpreters of Greek thought and language, was a purebred scholar, descended from scholars. In 1902 he was thirty-seven years old, and seemed to have only a frail contact with reality. Traveling was difficult because he could not take the right train, and even when on horseback he rode straight into the pond at Newham, saying doubtfully, "Do you think I ought to get off?" Letters were difficult, because Headlam chose his stamps only for the beauty of the colors. But his rooms in Gibbs Buildings were open to everyone who cared to come, and anyone who could make their way through the piles of manuscripts and bills was sure to be listened to and taught. The pupils' work was usually lost and rapidly disappeared under the mass of papers, but Headlam sat "balancing an ink-pot on one knee," as Shane Leslie described him, "and scribbling words into Greek texts, missing since the Renaissance, with the other. His famous emendations, in exquisite script, were allowed to float about the room until gathered for the Classical Review. A year later they became the prey of German editors."

Headlam taught both by night and day, for both were the same to him. His knowledge of Greek literature was enormous and consisted quite simply of knowing everything that had been written in ancient Greek, down to the obscurest Rhetoricians; he had no need for a dictionary. But Greece, to him, was not a dead civilization. He taught the Eleusinian mysteries with reference to ghost-raising and The Golden Bough, Greek obscenities were collated with Burton's Arabian Nights, he strummed on a hired piano to illustrate the music of the tragic chorus, and, draped in his own beautiful faded crimson curtains, demonstrated how they should enter. Enthusiasm, however, combined with meticulous exactness. Headlam's vast learning told him infallibly what an author could not have written, his artist's eye helped him to supply missing letters. And only here, in matters of textual criticism, a battlefield of giants in those days when reputations were lost and won and German and English scholars faced each other in mighty competition, did Headlam make enemies. Confronted with an inaccurate text, his charming, sunny temperament disappeared and was replaced by a concentration of scorn. Afterward he would be mildly surprised at the resentment of those he had called "idiotic pedants" and "illiterate amateurs"; a party had formed against him, even in King's itself. Meanwhile his own undertakings, and in particular his edition of Aeschylus, remained unfinished; his own sense of perfection made it impossible for him to finish anything.

"Does anyone here speak English? Or even ancient Greek?"

I can hardly wait

Outside, it's pouring straight down: at once raw and humid, spiraling with torn leaves. Inside, I have just received my contributor's copy of Not One of Us #40, whose table of contents is a lineup of rare and alien: greygirlbeast, stillsostrange, Karen R. Porter, dreamnnightmare, Patricia Russo, madwriter, handful_ofdust, watermelontail, and the other half still to go; my poem "Cold Spring Calling-On" also appears therein. Sirens and night-owls, exiles and exits, an aglæc-wif and a ghostwood banjo—as soon as there are copies available online, I'll post the link. Otherwise, archaically, subscribe.

A lovely little thinker, but a bugger when he's pissed

"If Iran acquires nuclear weapons, it is an existential threat to Israel."

Sartre v. Palestine! Film at 11!