2009-12-10

sovay: (PJ Harvey: crow)
I should probably mention I'm no longer in Providence. Of course the snow had turned to slush and freezing rain by yesterday morning, so there was no time spent by the sea; I came home on the trains and collapsed instead, which in this case meant cooking a quantity of Swiss chard which violated the Kliban rule and watching a couple episodes of Agatha Christie's Poirot. It was a pretty terrific visit nonetheless. Dinner at the Trinity Brewhouse was involved, as was my introduction to Myopic Books—where I failed to leave without purchase of Conrad Aiken's Mr. Arcularis, discovered on the same shelf as a Christopher Fry translation of Jean Anouilh—but mostly it was the aforementioned conversation, in re [livejournal.com profile] greygirlbeast's next novel. It will be called The Wolf Who Cried Girl, and I think it is going to be amazing.

(I know I had dreams last night, but I cannot remember any of them. The night I spent at Caitlín and Spooky's, I dreamed about a man who fathered a child on a girl who had been something else—I remember the two slender, dark-eyed men had been raccoons, but her hair was a sleek bright undyed red and I am sure she was not a fox, so I wish I could put it back together. He didn't know she was not human. He was violent when he found out. Years later, everyone else could be reunited, but no one knew where she or the child was. They still hadn't located her by the time I woke up. I wish these things were simple to turn into stories.)

Tomorrow I leave for Washington, D.C., for [livejournal.com profile] strange_selkie and [livejournal.com profile] darthrami's baby shower. I can't remember the last time I ricocheted around states like this in the same week. I'm inclined to view it as a good thing, although anyone who expects brisk and elaborate conversation out of me on Monday may be in for a shock.

Incidentally, it was a special snowflake.

Yes! The voices of the drowned are turned into seagulls—the voices of the wave and the seagull, of death and the seagull! You have only to shut your eyes and they come up from the drowned horrors of your own sea, your own past. I'd know those voices anywhere—I'd know those voices after a million years. The crying of the poor damned seagulls—the crying of the seagull dead!
—Conrad Aiken, Mr. Arcularis (1957)
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