Baby, how I ponder your shadow

Have a traditional year-end summary; I meant to post it last night, but got distracted by a poem. This really was a terrible year for publication. It started off all right; after July, it unraveled. At least I think a few of these poems are among the better things I've written. And I have written three different things in the last month.

"September Song" in Goblin Fruit #15, January 2010.
"Silk Sleeve Song" in Mythic Delirium #21, January 2010.
"Anakatabasis" in Hidden ed. John Benson, January 2010.
"By the Dog" in The Pedestal #56, February 2010.
"Idle Thoughts While Watching a Faun" in Strange Horizons 3/29/10, March 2010.
"Phersipnai" in ChiZine #44, April 2010.
"The Fool Where Angels Fear" in Not One of Us #43, April 2010.
"Tapping the Vine" in Goblin Fruit #16, April 2010.
"Telegony" in Scheherezade's Bequest #10, May 2010.
"Heaven and Sea, Horatio" in Mythic Delirium #22, June 2010.
"Radio Banquo" in Strange Horizons 6/21/10, June 2010.
"Leukothea's Odyssey 6" in Goblin Fruit #17, July 2010.
"Candle for the Tetragrammaton" in Sybil's Garage #7, July 2010.
"Domovoi, I Came Back!" in Stone Telling #1, September 2010.
"In the Earth in Those Days" in Not One of Us #44, October 2010.
"Ovid's Two Nightmares" in Mythic Delirium #23, December 2010.

There were reprints; I should not forget to mention them.

"The Coast Guard" in Chanteys for the Fisherangels, April 2010.
"The Dybbuk in Love" in People of the Book: A Decade of Jewish Science Fiction & Fantasy ed. Rachel Swirsky and Sean Wallace, December 2010.

Next year in wherever.

God, sometimes you just don't come through

By an unretrievable chain of internet meandering last night, I ran into Peter Iver Kaufman's "Augustine, Martyrs, and Misery" (Church History, 1994), not ordinarily a set of topics I would choose to spend much time with. But the article opens with the following speculation:

Augustine said that Rome fell frequently, all too often into "utter moral depravity," occasionally into the hands of the city's enemies. Maybe Aeneas was to blame. He had shown poor judgment, hauling to Italy the gods that failed to save Troy. Subsequently, when the Gauls came to Rome's gates, those divine and purportedly vigilant protectors did remarkably little protecting. They later offered no resistance when Nero reduced Rome to rubble. Augustine held Aeneas's eulogist responsible for the terribly inflated expectations that made the city's humiliations all the more demoralizing; Virgil misled citizens, suggesting that Rome would stand forever. Christians should have known better. They had it on higher authority that heaven and earth would pass away.

That last bit about Christian realism vs. Roman arrogance, whatever. It's the line about the failed gods of Troy. That got my attention.

( Will you even tell her if you decide to make the sky fall? )

So it sticks with me, this idea of seeding a city's future doom with the wrong gods. Maybe this is why Rome becomes the epitome of falling empire, rather than being remembered at the height of its imperium: somewhere its temples are always in flames. I cannot quite say that I agree with Augustine, because he's got his argument stacked in favor of the efficacy of Christ—and I would think the gods of the Gauls who sacked Rome were fully as pagan as the once-victi, long-victores Penates, thank you very much—but as a secret history, it does have something to it. Or at least it should make someone a very good story.

Apparently this is what I do for New Year's . . .