I've just had a banana with Lady Diana

I dreamed of horsemen riding out of a cold lake, so deep no one had sounded it until the twentieth century, so clear the folklore said that if you looked long enough into its waters, wind-whitened, reflecting the very raw blue of the sky, the movements far down in their depths would be strangers going back and forth on the earth's other side. The fact that the riders were Russian should have made the lake Baikal, but it wasn't. The woman at their head on her black-maned brown horse looked like an outtake from Johanna d'Arc of Mongolia. I knew, in the dream, that I did not know what or who they were.

I become even less communicative when recharging, so I owe quite a lot of e-mail to people. Promise I'm not dead.

(Norman Wisdom is. I have never seen any of his films, but I was describing him to my mother last night; I discovered him two years ago in a scratchy little wonderful clip from The Night They Raided Minsky's (1968) and Jason Robards made a perfectly fine vaudevillian, but Wisdom was the real deal. He was mentioned in David R. Sutton's A Chorus of Raspberries: British Film Comedy 1929—1939 (2000), which I read the night of last week's migraine. Anyone recommend him, or should I stick to George Formby, Jr.?)

I need either to prune the post I was attempting to write about Horror of Dracula (1958) and The Brides of Dracula (1960) or allow it to become an essay, but either way I think it's definitively too late at night. Except for the above-described few minutes of REM, I kind of failed my sleep roll last night. I am going to read John Maddox Roberts' Saturnalia (1999) until I pass out. That should at least produce dreams of something.