And there's nothing I can't spin them into

So yesterday was a Readercon meeting (where I met roozle), and Tea at sigerson and sen_no_ongaku's (where stealthmuffin introduced me to Lovelace and Babbage, the street-music-and-poetry-fighting alternate history I didn't know I needed), and schreibergasse came down from Manchester and stayed the night, which is how we started the day planning to visit the Arboretum and were instead distracted by tart frozen yogurt, used book stores, and very large arthropods. There was a lot of conversation, some of which was Latin scansion. I took home Roger Grenier's Piano Music for Four Hands (trans. Alice Kaplan, 2001) and Penelope Fitzgerald's The Knox Brothers (1977). I would like to have been able to afford the 1930's field-collection of ballads and sea-songs from Newfoundland, which opened to the most awesome version of "Willie Taylor" I have ever run into; I settled for borrowing pencil and paper from the bookseller and taking it down.

( Of the later ballads, 'Willy Taylor' is one of the most popular. )

If anyone has a recording of this version, please let me know; I have only Déanta's and June Tabor's, both of which have substantially less badass endings. It would make a great double-feature with "Sovay." In conclusion, I need to sleep, and Newfoundland rocks.

The bones that drift endlessly as far as the eye can see

I have been having peculiar nightmares (the one about being in New York with giant ex-zombie animal carcasses rotting on all the buildings was memorably lurid. Because nothing says Waldorf-Astoria like a decapitated snake half the size of a city block draped across the roof) for the last several weeks solid. Last night I dreamed I was cast by a Japanese director in a retelling of a folktale about a drowned girl. I think it was some kind of subconscious-bastardized version of Urashima Taro; in the first scene, the man who was probably the other protagonist was to find me washed up on the beach, rolled over in nets of kelp and Hel-faced with white sand. The makeup was fantastic. Then I drowned for real halfway through the shoot and spent the rest of the dream as a corpse with a sharkskin crust of barnacles growing on my skin. You come through, brain.