Are you working on Pushkin? How is the sea?

I left the house this evening to find postcards from rushthatspeaks and B. in my mailbox: one of Neuschwanstein, the other from the Acropolis Museum, both mailed from Santorini. I have archaic statuary and more turrets than any castle in its right mind really needs. And stamps from Greece.

derspatchel and I finally met Alison, her Rob, and their daughter Audrey for dinner at Muqueca in Inman Square. I think the next time we go back, we're sharing the feijoada rather than ordering dishes of our own (an excellent steak with fried egg, mariscada with tiny shrimp, mussels, squid in coconut milk), especially if we're even considering appetizers, but the food was astonishing as well as lots of. Salt cod croquettes. Fried yucca with linguiça. Serious, serious flan. The caipirinhas were made with sake, because apparently cachaça is too high-test to be sold in restaurants rather than bars; it worked. We walked home.

I still can't afford the anthology of poems edited by Iain Sinclair that sits on the rarities shelf at Lorem Ipsum (I keep telling it to hide, wait for me, I promise to come back when I have the money), but I am now in possession of J.A.E. Curtis' Manuscripts Don't Burn: Mikhail Bulgakov, a Life in Letters and Diaries (1992), apparently the first Western publication of any of his private papers. I'm sure it's selective, and it's had twenty-one years to be supplanted, but I'm still looking forward to it—I paged through the early sections in the store and wondered if Tiny Bulgakov is possibly a thing. Until I have my own apartment I will not be a human being, but half of one . . . In moments of ill-health and loneliness I succumb to melancholy and envious thoughts. I bitterly regret that I abandoned medicine and condemned myself to an uncertain existence. But God is my witness that my love of literature was the only reason for doing it . . . I am frightened by the fact that I am thirty-two, by the years I have squandered on medicine, by my illness and weakness . . . I am writing at night because almost every night my wife and I don't get to sleep until three or four in the morning. The sixteen black-and-white photographs include my all-time favorite picture of him.

I have an apartment and it is cool. The back stairs are still a steambath, but I only have to cross them on the way to and from my room. I'm sitting at the kitchen table and I'm still wearing my shirt. These last couple of weeks? That's new.

O leave the dead be'ind us, for they cannot come away

This afternoon I finished my first full-length story since 2008.