Go down to the netherworld, plant grapes

Somehow this post wound up huge. Thank God for lj-cuts.

1. Today was a rather bad day, but then csecooney found this card of Mary Magdalene. She had never before realized, she said, that the saint was a lycanthrope. So I wrote the litany.

( Our mother has been absent ever since we founded Rome. )

I feel slightly better now.

2. I dreamed last night of secret agents and the same fifteen minutes playing and replaying and almost no one noticing it was not the same universe each time, though the changes were not small: the zither on the wall is now a classical guitar, a stack of books on the dining room table instead of flowers. This feels like the premise of a film I haven't seen yet.

3. Jill Paton Walsh's Farewell, Great King (1972) is one of the more impressive novels I have read lately in terms of slow-dawning character work and evocation of the ancient world. For about a chapter, it is confusing that it's not by Mary Renault.

( May he see at last that, though I was not always honest, I was always right, and acknowledge that I loved Athens as truly as he. )

4. shweta_narayan has done a link roundup of the thing with the poem and the SFPA. It is not a good poem. In some ways, that's the least of its problems; and in others, everything else is just noise. Both are true. Intersections exist. Hello.

No fifth thing, because I'm going to bed. Tomorrow, Providence.