With hope in your hands and air to breathe

I am returned to Boston. I had meant to post about Les contes d'Hoffmann and my last night's dreams on Tuesday before I decamped for Providence and New York City, but of course Livejournal was temporarily defunct and my computer cannot travel right now, and at the moment I am not sentient enough to do justice to the miniature odyssey of the last few days—it was, however, awesome. As greygirlbeast has documented, she invited me to accompany her and humglum to her reading at KGB Bar, which was as Soviet and literary as the last time I was there. Also, crowded. I had brought earplugs, but I kept having to take them out because people were talking to me. Benjamin Parzybok read an unpublished story, "Birds," which I am hoping soon to see in print; Caitlín opened with "Still Life" and burned on to "Untitled 17" like a true demon lover: I want a recording. There was a proliferation of dinner at Grand Sichuan on St. Mark's Place, the same block where my father lived thirty-five years ago, and pomegranate macaroons from a dessert truck in the cold like a cutting torch. In and around which we stayed up way too late and got to bed at ridiculous hours and talked about everything from Harry Potter to Tam Lin, Norse myths to mosasaurs, the zodiac over Grand Central Station and the winter stars burning in the clear dark as we (i.e., Spooky, who deserves mad wakefulness props) drove back from New Haven. I brought and wore the T-shirts I had gotten from the Boston Lyric Opera on Sunday, Rusalka and Hoffmann; last night a Siamese cat slept on my feet. I have Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves (2000) on loan. We did not watch Firefly; we have to go back to New York for the museums. A goat did not fall from the sky and shatter the windshield. In place of more coherent description, please accept a photograph.


Taken by ellen_datlow: me, Spooky, and some spirit photography at KGB.

Huzzah, this week. Goodnight.