We all do what we can not to think about life

schreibergasse, Grace, and Peter are asleep downstairs; they arrived in Boston impromptu after the blizzard canceled their plans for New Year's, but I consider this my gain. We seem to have spent most of the evening watching The Supersizers . . . on my laptop, which only gains in entertainment from being watched with an early modern historian.

With slightly more planning, B. is also in town. We met for lunch at Sapporo Ramen in the Porter Exchange, where I had a bowl of tantan-men (with extra seaweed) bigger than my head; he brought me a loan of Walter Jon Williams' Aristoi (1992) and a gift of The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T (1953), which solidifies this holiday season as awesome. He also showed me Cemetery Man (Dellamorte Dellamore, 1994), about which I had mostly been told that it contained Rupert Everett and an ossuary and was indescribable; all of these things are true and I liked it immensely.¹ Dinner was at Yenching in Harvard Square, with the Schreibergasse contingent. No idea how tomorrow is working, but it will involve somebody.

My flash "To the Mistress of the Labyrinth, Honey" will appear in Sirenia Digest #61. This last week of 2010 started off at a serious loss despite the blizzard, but it's looking up as we leave it.

1. The back of the DVD box calls it a "brilliantly bloody black comedy," although I'd classify it more as a piece of existential surrealism with zombies. There is a plot, but summarizing it will not help. The story starts with the zombie apocalypse; things only derange from there. And yet it's not an incoherent movie, inexplicable as its moment-to-moment may be; it is all the same story, in an appropriately stitched-up, reanimated, uncanny-valley kind of way. But I also just respect a film that knows exactly what it wants and gives us a half-naked Rupert Everett world-wearily blowing a zombie's head off even before the title card comes up.

A story completed remains static

So. Yuletide. Why I started browsing through the archives this year as opposed to reading the usual one or three stories by people I know who send them to me, I couldn't tell you, but I am impressed. There are all the usual books and shows and games I have little to do with, but there's also a fictional visit between Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears, and Guy Burgess in Moscow. There is a British Raj retelling of Othello. There's non-classical, non-Charioteer Mary Renault. There are three fics for Shakespeare's Coriolanus, including a sex scene in blank verse; there are three for Hark! A Vagrant; there are something like nine for Alan Bennett's The History Boys. There are two for the sculpture of the Dying Gaul. Édouard Manet's Olympia is a truly unexpected fandom. Possibly this is all par for the course. Nonetheless, my idea of recommendations:

"Inscribed on Glass Plaques." If you have not seen both seasons of Princess Tutu (2002), this catalogue of objects in a museum may be entirely incomprehensible to you. If you have (seriously, why haven't you? Go and fix this gap in your narratological education at once), you will understand why it is not only the inevitable next step from the constant reframing of story so central to the original anime, but how marvelous it is that this final layer of meta actually furthers, rather than muting or undoing, the series' "gentle, bittersweet resolution." Or, as my cousin rather more efficiently said, "That, right there, would be Doing It Right."

"A Piece of the Continent." A coda to Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), comprised of Genly Ai's notes, reports, and journals from his next posting after Gethen; it should be canonical. The voice, the clarity and subtlety (and misapprehension) are pitch-perfect and so are the pronouns and the linguistics. I didn't know it was what the novel needed. Now I want Le Guin to edit a shared-world anthology of the Ekumen, so that "A Piece of the Continent" can be the closing story. Whoever wrote it, if they're not professionally published already, they should be.

"Those voices that will not be drowned." Ordinarily, aside from the writers on my friendlist, I do not think I would care much about the authorship reveal in January. Somewhere in this world is a person who thought to write a follow-up to Mary Renault's The Charioteer (1953) with walk-ons from Quentin Crisp and Bletchley Park and the emotional turn of the story resting on the sea and Britten's Peter Grimes. I need to know who they are.

"The Knight of Infinite Resignation." KIERKE-GAARD. A brief, complex, nonfantastic contemplation of the relationship between Søren Kierkegaard and Regine Olsen, split five ways through the prism of his writings. Has anyone ever succeeded in publishing work which originally appeared on Yuletide, or is that considered futile and/or tacky? I could imagine discovering this piece in any number of magazines, most of them mainstream.

"I Will Constitute the Field." I wouldn't mind knowing who requested Coriolanus this year, because I don't count it among Shakespeare's more popular tragedies; I just happen to be fond of it because it's so stripped-down, classical, and strange. This fic is a kind of posthumous triangle between two beloved enemies and war. Mars is not Ares. The iconography is all in the right place. I could see this story—by now, Shakespeare is as acceptable for retelling as myths, fairy tales, and historical figures—in professional print, too.

"Dream Stuff." Honestly, I still don't think it's as perverse as the source material, but the fact that someone wrote any kind of fic at all for The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T (1953) helps my faith in humanity.

"One of Many Circles." This is original fiction. Its sole nod toward fan-ness is the presence of a television show invented by Kelly Link. It is a fictional city and the fictionality of the city, on a par with M. John Harrison; it also maps beautifully to Wallace Stevens. Who do I convince to reprint it and how?

Fascinatingly, I could go on like this for quite some time.