My poem "Spirit Photography" has been accepted by Through the Gate. The magazine is a new market; the poem is the direct result of one of those dreams that hybridize figures from waking life with history and random brainstem spatters, in this case a theater tour of Faerie and the never-recovered camera carried up Everest by George Mallory in 1924. There is an entire genre of dreams I can never figure out what to do with, so I'm glad this one turned into something.
(I feel as if I am developing a subgenre of ghost poems: Lucan, Christopher Morcom/Alan Turing, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Thomas Andrews, George Mallory; the eponym of "Ovid's Two Nightmares" is not a ghost in the poem, but he certainly isn't alive now. It must have started in 2003 when I wrote about Young Vilna for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
strange_selkie, but it seems to be accelerating in recent months. There are ways in which I suppose it's not all that different from writing about myths and gods. It feels like something else: it requires more research, but it also requires more responsibility. Everybody and their cousin has a Persephone poem and I accept that not all of them are going to fall within my ideas of reasonable interpretation. (I reserve the right to be cranky as death about it, though. There are maybe four authors who don't annoy me on Norse myth and two of them are on this friendlist?) Stories throw out variants like many-worlds quantum mechanics: it's what they do. A god has a different face for everyone from the moment it's described. There are parameters on lives, on history. I don't want to get them wrong. The dead have enough troubles; they don't need me misrepresenting them. What I should really pay attention to is: why these ghosts. There are others I would have expected. Maybe they'll come along.)
I don't think there's been anything particularly memorial about it, but it's been a good weekend so far. Friday was marked by a visit to the home of two ofderspatchel's friends: it is a former boarding house once occupied by the composer of "Jingle Bells" and deserves its name, being full of odd little corners of rooms and roof-slants and second kitchens where you don't expect them. We were taught the correct way to do vodka shots. (It turns out to involve black bread, pickled olives, and smoked whitefish. You don't get a hangover and you're all set for visiting a deli for the next few days.) We did not play, but were duly impressed by the antique board game—discovered in the barn—where the various trading countries are things like "Servia" and "Sarawak" and on the other side a race between electric and gas-powered cars includes penalty squares like "Shot by Man You Ran Over, -10 Points." There were hours of conversation. I have a new translation of The Master and Margarita to look for. Saturday, I crashed early in the evening: listened to an episode of The Mask of Inanna, watched some YouTube fragments of a BBC Play of the Week, read a book of poems by Medbh McGuckian, and managed to stay asleep for nearly ten hours. Today, Rob and I tried Café Algiers (where I'd had mint iced chocolate with Dean on Friday) for dinner and were rewarded by really good hummus, falafel and merguez respectively, and tamarind soda where you pour the seltzer into the syrup yourself; we saw A Day at the Races (1937) at the Brattle Theatre and I have no plans for tomorrow.
The Economist gave its obituary to Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau.
(I feel as if I am developing a subgenre of ghost poems: Lucan, Christopher Morcom/Alan Turing, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Thomas Andrews, George Mallory; the eponym of "Ovid's Two Nightmares" is not a ghost in the poem, but he certainly isn't alive now. It must have started in 2003 when I wrote about Young Vilna for
strange_selkie, but it seems to be accelerating in recent months. There are ways in which I suppose it's not all that different from writing about myths and gods. It feels like something else: it requires more research, but it also requires more responsibility. Everybody and their cousin has a Persephone poem and I accept that not all of them are going to fall within my ideas of reasonable interpretation. (I reserve the right to be cranky as death about it, though. There are maybe four authors who don't annoy me on Norse myth and two of them are on this friendlist?) Stories throw out variants like many-worlds quantum mechanics: it's what they do. A god has a different face for everyone from the moment it's described. There are parameters on lives, on history. I don't want to get them wrong. The dead have enough troubles; they don't need me misrepresenting them. What I should really pay attention to is: why these ghosts. There are others I would have expected. Maybe they'll come along.)I don't think there's been anything particularly memorial about it, but it's been a good weekend so far. Friday was marked by a visit to the home of two of
derspatchel's friends: it is a former boarding house once occupied by the composer of "Jingle Bells" and deserves its name, being full of odd little corners of rooms and roof-slants and second kitchens where you don't expect them. We were taught the correct way to do vodka shots. (It turns out to involve black bread, pickled olives, and smoked whitefish. You don't get a hangover and you're all set for visiting a deli for the next few days.) We did not play, but were duly impressed by the antique board game—discovered in the barn—where the various trading countries are things like "Servia" and "Sarawak" and on the other side a race between electric and gas-powered cars includes penalty squares like "Shot by Man You Ran Over, -10 Points." There were hours of conversation. I have a new translation of The Master and Margarita to look for. Saturday, I crashed early in the evening: listened to an episode of The Mask of Inanna, watched some YouTube fragments of a BBC Play of the Week, read a book of poems by Medbh McGuckian, and managed to stay asleep for nearly ten hours. Today, Rob and I tried Café Algiers (where I'd had mint iced chocolate with Dean on Friday) for dinner and were rewarded by really good hummus, falafel and merguez respectively, and tamarind soda where you pour the seltzer into the syrup yourself; we saw A Day at the Races (1937) at the Brattle Theatre and I have no plans for tomorrow.The Economist gave its obituary to Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau.
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