I just took a hot shower. This is news only because there has been no hot water in the house for two nights; my mother and I spent most of yesterday bleeding air out of the pipes and I still wound up half showering in absolutely cold water and half sponge-bathing with water heated in a teakettle on the stove. It was giving me flashbacks to New Haven. (My apartment had many virtues, chiefly that it was mine, but heat and hot water in winter were occasionally not among them.) The bright side was that in between ministering to the plumbing, I caught about forty-five minutes of Doctor Zhivago (1965) and was reminded again that pace Omar Sharif, Alec Guinness as his half-brother completely steals the film for me. Yevgraf is a wholly cynical narrator, an officer of the secret police who can introduce himself quite honestly as "nobody's idea of an uncle" and clarify his feelings toward Yuri Zhivago with the admission, "Besides, I've executed better men than me with a small pistol," and the audience knows the words are neither apology nor boast. And yet he puts considerable effort into looking after the threads of his poetic, vulnerable half-brother's life, whether helping to clear the family out of Moscow in advance of a purge or searching years later for the lost child of Yuri and Lara, and the slight, ironic awareness with which Guinness tells his story—its own kind of deadpan—suits these complexities. I wouldn't mind seeing the film again just for the rest of his scenes.
In any case, my hair no longer smells like cigarette smoke. This afternoon, Mission of Burma gave a free show at MIT to celebrate the Tuesday release of The Sound The Speed The Light (and the first annual Mission of Burma Day); I went with Eric and I forgot that open-air concerts, in paradoxical contrast to clubs, now involve smoke. About eighteen different people's nicotine-flavored deathwishes found their way into my lungs, not to mention my jacket. Thank God I forgot my hat. But the music was wonderful—they opened with some neck-snappers from The Obliterati and then played the entire new album backward, with some of their oldest songs for encore. Five of the songs were new to me. Two are my favorites off this album already. It being my birthday season, the CD I acquired at the show has been squirreled away in the house somewhere, so I will not get the chance to listen to "Feed" or "SSL 83" before Friday, but I do not imagine the studio versions will disappoint. And in counterweight to all the secondhand smoke, for a while the person standing in front of me was a father who had brought his four- or five-year-old daughter to the concert, hoisted up on his shoulders so she could get a view of the musicians. She had on the kind of industrial-strength earmuffs usually seen on airport runways, albeit not usually in hot pink, and she was smiling. Really, I am sorry only that I forgot my camera. Walking to and from the car to the courtyard, the light was clear and fading, dissolving papyrus-gold at the horizon as if it had forgotten it belonged to autumn. On some plywood at the head of a chain-linked lot, someone had spray-painted or markered, "BEAUTY."
My poems "Lupercal" (Not One of Us #39), "Painted Gods and the Eye of Childhood" (Space & Time #104), "The Devourer" (Mythic Delirium #19), "The Plague Hill" (Mythic Delirium #19), and "The Second Ghost" (Home and Away) have been given honorable mentions by Ellen Datlow in Best Horror of the Year #1.
I am going to attempt sleep. Or at least not staying up with a new Heyer until dawn. It might work.
In any case, my hair no longer smells like cigarette smoke. This afternoon, Mission of Burma gave a free show at MIT to celebrate the Tuesday release of The Sound The Speed The Light (and the first annual Mission of Burma Day); I went with Eric and I forgot that open-air concerts, in paradoxical contrast to clubs, now involve smoke. About eighteen different people's nicotine-flavored deathwishes found their way into my lungs, not to mention my jacket. Thank God I forgot my hat. But the music was wonderful—they opened with some neck-snappers from The Obliterati and then played the entire new album backward, with some of their oldest songs for encore. Five of the songs were new to me. Two are my favorites off this album already. It being my birthday season, the CD I acquired at the show has been squirreled away in the house somewhere, so I will not get the chance to listen to "Feed" or "SSL 83" before Friday, but I do not imagine the studio versions will disappoint. And in counterweight to all the secondhand smoke, for a while the person standing in front of me was a father who had brought his four- or five-year-old daughter to the concert, hoisted up on his shoulders so she could get a view of the musicians. She had on the kind of industrial-strength earmuffs usually seen on airport runways, albeit not usually in hot pink, and she was smiling. Really, I am sorry only that I forgot my camera. Walking to and from the car to the courtyard, the light was clear and fading, dissolving papyrus-gold at the horizon as if it had forgotten it belonged to autumn. On some plywood at the head of a chain-linked lot, someone had spray-painted or markered, "BEAUTY."
My poems "Lupercal" (Not One of Us #39), "Painted Gods and the Eye of Childhood" (Space & Time #104), "The Devourer" (Mythic Delirium #19), "The Plague Hill" (Mythic Delirium #19), and "The Second Ghost" (Home and Away) have been given honorable mentions by Ellen Datlow in Best Horror of the Year #1.
I am going to attempt sleep. Or at least not staying up with a new Heyer until dawn. It might work.
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