Ei mihi, quod domino non licet ire tuo

Arriving very late in the day, the mail has brought me my contributor's copy of Mythic Delirium #23, in which my poem "Ovid's Two Nightmares" appears alongside what looks like stunning work from Jane Yolen, Shweta Narayan, Rachel Manija Brown, Theodora Goss, and other poets of no little note. I cannot remember how I first read Ovid. I know it was in high school, the same semester as Catullus (and I loved them both); probably we started with the Amores, but it might well have been the Metamorphoses. Past the famous line about carmen et error, I didn't really pick up the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto until graduate school, and I didn't read them all until the last couple of years. This poem was one of the results. To be honest, I don't think it's speculative at all, but I'm not going to tell time_shark that now.

I am off to see The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) at the Coolidge Corner Theatre, where it will be introduced by a roboticist. If someday they show a film with aliens and an extraterrestrial does the prefatory lecture, they will win science fiction forever.