You're not the only member of the walking wounded in this house

1. Arisia. I am very, very tired, but I am counting it a success. Panels, readings, chantey sing, objective evidence indicates they all went well: and all of them were fun. Plus the usual attractions of a convention, people and books. Discussion at the Shakespeare panel reminded me of Lev AC Rosen's All Men of Genius (2011), which I found in the dealer's room immediately afterward; when it turned out I needed a slightly larger purchase (note to self: remember checks), there was handily a small paperback of Jim Butcher's Dead Beat (2005) at the same bookseller's stall. The next afternoon, I found the hardcover of Phyllis Gotlieb's O Master Caliban! (1976), which I hadn't actually realized existed. I got my mother an Edward Gorey T-shirt. I did not spend nearly enough time with cucumberseed. Saturday night, I had dinner with assorted Kesslers and no luck ordering a Bunny Hug (note to self: remember absinthe); Sunday night I bailed on parties and rather too late at night made dinner from a recipe off the Guardian. I met marlowe1 on panels and ajodasso for the first time in person; I got a sticker for the London Calling party and had goat curry with a slightly different assortment of Kesslers tonight in Teele Square. I sang Skin Horse filk with awhyzip. I expect to feel like trains fell on me tomorrow. Tonight, just moderately sized trucks. It was a good con.

2. Downton Abbey. I am enjoying the series, but the pacing is already troubling me—I understand the show isn't interested in being the Foyle's War of World War I, but it's the second episode and we're already in 1917. Given how much I'm told the war was the shadow on the horizon of the first season, it shouldn't be slingshot through in seven episodes. It's producing a weirdly compressed effect; there are several clear storylines moving forward, but we've had three instances now of subplots introduced and resolved within the same episode which I expected to become, if not long-running, then at least more than blinks in the thread of the show. (All three were fleshing out character and setting, not romantic suspense. I can't be the only viewer who prefers history to soap.) And it's been indicated that the PBS broadcasts are being trimmed slightly from their ITV originals, which is completely useless to me. I really don't want to have to wait for the DVDs. You can do that with anything. I will still (as one does) tune in next week and hope the season pulls itself out of second-novel syndrome, but it is reminding me why I do not watch as much television as I read books.

3. Hats. I promised these to strange_selkie, so blame her for any diminished opinion you may have of me. What my grandfather formally left me was the original Cibachrome print reproduced by Erzebet on the cover of A Mayse-Bikhl. Possibly because no one else wanted them, I have also inherited some of his hats: most notably a black lamb astrakhan and a wolf hat. They are vintage. The wolf hat—by which I do not mean the hat a wolf would wear, or a wolf-resembling hat, but a hat made out of actual wolfskin—almost certainly dates from the fifties, but my mother believes the astrakhan originally belonged to her grandfather, my great-grandfather Noah. All photographs were taken around one in the morning on Sunday, after my longest day of programming, hence the thousand-yard-stare. The wolf hat sheds on everything. ( I had a hat when I came in. )

Bed.

It was never this cold in my dreams and I think I might have fought for the wrong side

I have finally found a story by Bulgakov that scares me: "The Red Crown" (1922), whose guilt-maddened narrator sees every night—awake, not dreaming—the brother he failed to save from the war.

I have gotten used to everything. To this white building of ours, to the twilight, to the ginger cat who purrs at the door, but I cannot get used to his visits. The first time it happened, when I was still living downstairs in No. 63, he came out of the wall. He was wearing the red crown. There was nothing terrifying in that. I had seen him like that in dreams. But of course I knew that since he was wearing the crown he was dead. Then he spoke, moving his lips, which were caked with blood. He eased them apart, clicked his heels, put his hand to the crown in a salute, and said: "Brother, I can't leave the troop."

That's not the image that scares me. It's not even the narrator's awful last sight of his brother, swaying slightly in the saddle, shrapnel-blinded and so disfigured that at first the narrator cannot parse his death-wound and sees only "a red crown with yellow spikes in clumps." It's the single dream the narrator has where his brother looks like himself, alive, at home, with a smudge of chalk on his jacket and some sheet music from Faust on the piano, with his hair falling over his forehead and his eyes in his face again, and a heartbreaking relief overwhelms the narrator: "He had never gone away and had never been a horseman." The apparition that haunts him is never his brother. His brother is Kolya, the lively, musical boy whom he let go away to war, whom he tried to persuade to desert—finally following his mother's wish to save her youngest child—just an hour before he died. ("I can't leave the troop.") What haunts him is the horseman (всадник), the thing that rides slowly toward him out of the sunset, dead and still speaking, crowned with blood, "my brother, the horseman, wearing a ragged red crown." He is never referred to by name or relation again. "The horseman sat proud in the saddle, but he was blind and mute . . . the horseman in full military regalia . . . the familiar horseman with the sightless eyes." The word itself starts to sound wrong. And so he had never gone away and had never been a horseman. As if even when he was alive and riding with the White Guard, he was that death-haloed thing already. Was from the moment he went to war. That scared me. I can't believe I'd never read any of Bulgakov's early stories before. They may be slight, strange semi-autobiographies, but they're terrific. Sometimes in the archaic sense.

It was raining again when I came home, but there were two packages on the slush-lined doorstep: Dean Grodzins' American Heretic: Theodore Parker and Transcendentalism (2002) and John Benedict Buescher's The Remarkable Life of John Murray Spear: Agitator for the Spirit Land (2006). Here's to my knowledge of the American nineteenth century being less boring.

[edit] Also a copy of Jamie Mason's Echo (2011)! Which looks to have nothing to do with the nineteenth century at all.

Best. Economist. Obituary. Ever. Ronald Searle. "Not to mention Me n. molesworth brave and feerless wot a noble BOY in his yellow blazer and his cap at a rakkish angle, a gift to Art with the lite of geenius gleeming from his glasses and an expreshun that strike fear into every teacher in the skool."