Airplanes are leaving from the airport

I am back from the ICFA in Orlando. On the whole, I had a very good time—the reading went well, I met some wonderful people, and I have copies of Guy Gavriel Kay's Beyond This Dark House (2003) and Peter S. Beagle's We Never Talk About My Brother (2009), among other books. I heard papers on the science fiction poetry of Phyllis Gotlieb, the Paris Morgue, present-day Elizabethan theater; I should have written papers on The Last Unicorn and A Tale of Time City. After dark one night, Eric and I played basketball on the hotel's court, lit up arc-white. I forgot to bring my bathing suit again.

I love flying in and out of Boston. The plane wheels in over the water, last night as dark as fishskin and pleated in swells beneath a pure red after-sunset, the whole bar of the horizon cinnabar under ink-spreads of cloud; the channel buoys held on and off like fireflies, green, red, flickering sea-paths back and forth between the islands, whitewater flecks out of the dusk. There were thunderheads building when we took off from Orlando. I think we confuse in-flight snacks and seatbelt signs with domestication of sky and sea, so that clouds become less relevant than however many channels you can watch from the screens on the back of each seat, the sun in the stratosphere is an interference. Nothing is really tame. We just like to think so; and are surprised when people drown.

And you may have my precious bones on my return

I don't know if the Decemberists' The Hazards of Love (2009) is a folk opera, a song cycle, an indie-rock concept album, or a universal truth, but it is a thicket of ballads and I delight in its existence. Essentially, the plot is an expansion of "The Drowned Lovers" (Child 216) to allow for the interweaving of "Tam Lin" and "Reynardine"—an enchanted lover, a murderous rake, a possessive queen, pregnancy, shape-shifting, child ghosts, the river's marriage bed; it may be possible to follow the narrative while unfamiliar with the tradition it was created from, but one of the album's chief pleasures lies in how these stories are braided to interact with one another, mother's malison and all. None of it sounds like Anne Briggs, of course. She's not so much with the prog and acid. But the lyrics can be formal and archaic enough to pass for Trad.; there may be some of the mad storm and skirling of Steeleye Span's "Twa Corbies" in songs like "The Queen's Rebuke / Crossing" and "The Hazards of Love 3 (Revenge!)" and neither Fairport Convention nor Archie Fisher would look totally askance at the tongue-twisting "The Hazards of Love 1 (The Prettiest Whistles Won't Wrestle the Thistles Undone)." The title track of this post, "Annan Water," is straight out of Nic Jones.* In short, I love that The Hazards of Love is a mainstream release, when in fact it's as obscure as an Alexandrian epyllion. Maybe it's the zeitgeist (in which case nineweaving's intrinsicate, folkloric, PW-praised Cloud & Ashes: Three Winter's Tales should sell a million copies and we'll all be happy). But even if not, I'm glad someone is writing Child-inflected strangeness with fawns and forests and missel thrushes and taiga; daemon lovers, promises. They're hazards worth hearing about.

* You know, the more I think about this album, the more I wonder if its closest taxonomical relative isn't Peter Bellamy's The Transports: A Ballad Opera (1977). The styles are not comparable, but the spirit is rather like; and if you think Colin Meloy sings wiry and nasal, check out Bellamy sometime.