I've come to fix the sink

And this morning I had a set of complex anxiety dreams about construction, but that is because the plumbers arrived at derspatchel and ratatosk's around nine o'clock and by nine-thirty had flooded the kitchen. (No, the washer hose was not supposed to do that.) Deadpanned the older of the two on his way to the downstairs half-bath: "No charge for washing the floor." I just can't believe none of us had the presence of mind to imitate a parrot.

1. I took a silly quiz! For the first time in years! Courtesy of rinue on Facebook, WETA's Sherlock Personality Quiz. Apparently I'm Mycroft:

You are Mycroft Holmes. It's possible you hold a minor position in the government. By which we mean, you probably run it. Organized, mysterious and well-connected, you're a master of manipulation and surprisingly adept at kidnapping people. You're actually the smartest person in your family, despite the fact that most people tend to pay more attention to your more dramatic sibling. You are the person in your social circle most likely to have a minion. (Or two.) And your diet is going just fine, thank you.

I don't have any minions! Where do I file an application?

2. houseboatonstyx has alerted to me to the existence of the complete online text of Vachel Lindsay's The Art of the Moving Picture (1915, although this appears to be the revised edition of 1922). It's certainly about movies; the book has a claim to being the first significant work of film criticism. It is also at least half manifesto, verging on revelation. He is reminded of Poe every time he looks at Chaplin and wishes the makers of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari had applied German Expressionism to the myth of Isis and Osiris. (I don't actually disagree with him on that point. Especially considering Conrad Veidt.) Later on, he rhapsodizes about the Book of the Dead ("Man is an Egyptian first, before he is any other type of civilized being. The Nile flows through his heart") and the shadowy, dream-flickery likeness of a movie theater to a spell-pictured tomb, the class of scientific and artistic visionaries he refers to as prophet-wizards and inventor-seers whose necessary union he views as a kind of alchemical process ("We shall have a tin heaven and a tin earth, if the scientists are allowed exclusive command of our highest hours"), and it all goes fascinatingly transcendent in the last chapter, America as the New Jerusalem as a perpetual World's Fair:

Why should we not consider ourselves a deathless Panama-Pacific Exposition on a coast-to-coast scale? . . . If it is not possible to bring in the New Jerusalem to-day, by public act, with every citizen eating bread and honey under his vine and fig-tree, owning forty acres and a mule, singing hymns and saying prayers all his leisure hours, it is still reasonable to think out tremendous things the American people can do, in the light of what they have done, without sacrificing any of their native cussedness or kick. It was sprawling Chicago that in 1893 achieved the White City. The automobile routes bind the states together closer than muddy counties were held in 1893. A "Permanent World's Fair" may be a phrase distressing to the literal mind. Perhaps it would be better to say "An Architect's America."

Take that, John Winthrop. You only thought everyone was watching Boston?

3. Have a new photo of Emily Dickinson.

Otherwise Rob and I went to M3 for the third time in two weeks (the pan-fried catfish with harissa is much more delicately spiced than it sounds, the duck fat burger is pure savory on a bun) and Backbar for our absinthe on fire and nobody gave anyone pomegranates; no one is bound. I voted. I am making my mother's coconut-and-chicken curry. Tomorrow I see rushthatspeaks.