Your mother arrives from the world of the dead

My poem "Wisdom" has been accepted by Mythic Delirium. It's a piece I conceived of while staying with strange_selkie and darthrami last July, though it turned out to want to be written at this year's Readercon; it has to do with the postwar fate of the fools of Chelm and is entirely unrelated to the fact that Tisha B'Av began tonight, except that I find the conjunction appropriate.

This afternoon yielded frozen yogurt from BerryLine with Eric (I correctly diagnosed the existence and location of the original store on Arrow Street from the presence of a passerby with a medium-sized cup of blueberry-banana, having been previously unaware of any locations other than the one on Mass. Ave.) and a successful pass through two used book stores: I am now in possession of Jane Campion's screenplay for The Piano (1993), David R. McCann's Early Korean Literature: Selections and Translations (2000), Nathaniel Deutsch's The Maiden of Ludmir: A Jewish Holy Woman and Her World (2003), and Théophile Gautier's My Fantoms (2008). The last is making me particularly happy; if Gautier was not one of Tanith Lee's formative influences, then evidently he should have been one of her muses, because the seven stories collected and translated by Richard Holmes are populated by diabolical actors and obsessed painters and beautiful vampires and priests and sexually predatory ghosts of Pompeii; I love the Symbolists. I may go back for the children's picture book about Paganini, if it's not gone by the next time I'm in Harvard Square. It had a terrifying angel.

I have got a dentist's appointment tomorrow.

I hear you polishing your teeth sometimes

The dentist observed that my front teeth were very sharply angled cutting surfaces, so she filled them in with with composite to a less wedgelike shape that should provide reinforcement against the pressure and torque of biting into things—although I have been cautioned against very hard breads—and prevent any further nectarine-esque disasters. I keep running my tongue over the new edges, which are much duller than I'm used to. I feel oddly defenseless against my natural predators.

I went back to the Harvard Book Store for Aaron Frisch and Gary Kelley's Dark Fiddler (2008), because for God's sake it's a children's picture book about Paganini. There has to be somebody I can warp at an early age with it. I returned home to the limited edition of Caitlín R. Kiernan's The Ammonite Violin & Others, with accompanying chapbook of "Sanderlings" and gorgeous jacket and endpapers by Richard Kirk. For obvious reasons, this is so much better than dentistry.

yhlee set me a music meme right before Readercon; I never posted the results. Have five songs that begin with the letter L. Tell me if you'd like a letter.

( Lying on the star-crossed lovers' map. )

I cannot understand why Peter Greenaway never filmed Angela Carter.

Rosa is winning. He is sending his music to Hollywood producers who believe the public will never tire of the Western. Who believe that guns and deserts, cow-boys, Indians and ranchers are the new and permanent mythology. Silenus is the whisky priest and Hercules is the rancher's saviour. Venus is the saloon vamp, Juno, the cow-boy's wife. Jupiter with a tin star is the good sheriff and Pluto, with the blood-stained whip, is the bad. All are settled on Mount Hollywood instead of Mount Olympus, where Crassus and Midas are Gods too, dealing the money, fingering the gold. Rosa is truly embarked on a lucrative career, writing music scores for assembly-line westerns. Does he think himself to be the Apollo or the Orpheus or the Marsyas of Mount Hollywood music?
—Peter Greenaway, Rosa (1993)