If you swam to the edge of things where the earth meets the sky

1. My copy of the limited edition of Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan (Volume One) arrived in the mail right before I had to leave for Plymouth. It is a pretty, pretty book. I imagine the still-available trade paperback is also quite nice.

2. I dreamed of watching the livecast of a fictional play with some influence from The Camomile Lawn and mid-twentieth-century travel writers. It was being staged outdoors, at a kind of garden party. All I can remember is the line: "She asked for a knife, but they gave her paper and ink instead."

3. I have only two real complaints about A.S. Byatt's Ragnarok (2011). One is that more could have been made of the frame-story, the "thin child" who discovers Wägner's Asgard and the Gods while evacuated to the countryside during the Blitz and so understands the war through the lens of Norse myth, imagining her airman father in North Africa ("with his flaming hair in a flaming black plane") as part of Odin's Wild Hunt, puzzling over the relationship between the Germans who told these stories she loves and the Germans everyone is fighting and hates. She may be a version of Byatt's own childhood, but I believe her as a bright, mistrustful child, disappearing into books except when she finds it impossible to believe them (Sunday school is a no-go). I would have read a novel about her, not just through her eyes. The second is that I'm really not sure the author's extended afterword needed to be included in the book: it directs too much of the reader's attention away from the myth and toward the reasons for Byatt's treatment of it, which are interesting, but I'd rather have had the last words in my head be her last words of a fallen cosmos, "the bright black world . . . at the end of things." On the other hand, she cares about Loki and she writes him well, which is not true of most authors who work with this mythology; and she devotes an attention to his monstrous children that I haven't seen elsewhere, like an entire sequence of chapters from the perspective of Jörmungandr and one of the better evocations of Hel. The writing is some of Byatt's most graceful and scientific, which is not a contradiction. I found myself a little sorry she'd confined herself mostly to the creation and destruction of the Nine Worlds, because I would love to have seen how she handled some of the stories in between. But it is a novel of Norse myth (that isn't by Diana Wynne Jones) that I don't want to kill with fire, so I am pleased, and I feel a lot better about her now than I did after The Children's Book (2009).

(My third complaint is probably not fair. Byatt associates the trickster god with Ariel: "Odin was Power, was in power. Ungraspable Loki flamed amazement and pleased himself." Result: I resent never seeing Karl Johnson as Loki. I can't expect A.S. Byatt to fix that. But damn.)

4. lesser_celery and I have nearly finished the first season of Millennium (1996–1999). We have met the enemy and she is Lucy Butler.

5. Walking night roads in Plymouth with schreibergasse, I saw the Milky Way, and a shooting star.

I need to sleep. I have to see doctors in the morning.