I got my line in the water and I'm waiting for a bite

An announcement—

Welcome to Strange Horizons' two new poetry editors, Li Chua and M.J. Cunniff!

(I am still reading for the remainder of March. Send me your poems! After that, it looks like I won't be editor on duty until 2016. We have four editors now. We can do that.)

The next day, we drove back to the City in Parmenides' cart, and we quarrelled all the way

Latest earworm: Jake Xerxes Fussell, "Raggy Levy." I listened to the first few bars and thought instantly of John Fahey. I looked around on the internet and sure enough, Fussell plays a lap steel guitar fingerstyle, as Fahey did. I am feeling disproportionately proud of my ears despite this migraine-grade headache I've had for two days straight now. Anyway, it's a nice song. It was first collected in 1942.

Latest reading: Goatsong (1989), by Tom Holt. schreibergasse gave it to me for the holidays. I bounced completely off Holt's Expecting Someone Taller (1987) when I was much younger, but I really enjoyed this one. It's a fictional autobiography of the fifth-century comic playwright Eupolis, who is a godsend to novelists since absolutely nothing is known of his personal life. We have a record of his prizes at the Dionysia, titles and fragments of fifteen to nineteen comedies attributed to him, and four different traditions about his death; he is numbered among the preeminent writers of Athenian Old Comedy along with Aristophanes and Kratinos, he's supposed to have had a feud on with Aristophanes, the Suda claims he was seventeen when his first play was produced and that's about it. So Holt has a lot of latitude within which to create his protagonist and I think I like the results. There's almost no attempt to recreate a classical Athenian voice, as with Mary Renault or Jill Paton Walsh, but in its own casual way the narrative gives a very good sense of the alienness of the past, because Eupolis will go along sounding like any British-born raconteur you might sit down next to in a pub and then all of a sudden he'll say something about women or slaves or barbarians or love or war or the soul which is not a contemporary prejudice or philosophy and it's correctly jarring. Its closest relative in terms of tone is probably John Maddox Roberts SPQR series (1990—), otherwise known as the Roman detective novels that are not by Steven Saylor or Lindsay Davis; their protagonist is Decius Caecilius Metellus the Younger, a historically accurate upper-class ne'er-do-well of the late Roman Republic, who's much cleverer than his reputation but just about as much of a self-centered asshole. (I'm very fond of him.) Goatsong is often reflexively funny, because it's being told by a professional comedian whose stock-in-trade is the satirical, absurd, and politically insulting, but it's also possible to discern something much closer to tragicomedy underneath the tart-tongued narrative, because there are ways in which Eupolis' life is a badly hurt one, both personally and societally. He's a few years older than Alexias of Renault's The Last of the Wine (1956), if that helps you get a fix on the period; he was a child when he lost his entire family in the plague of Athens and he'll watch his city broken by the Peloponnesian War before the end of his life. In a calmer time, he would still be an ugly man in a culture where goodness and beauty are synonymous, learning to make capital of his shlimazl's brand of anti-luck and live with a complicated marriage, a self-protectively cynical outlook, and his own flammable mix of god-given confidence and human-driven self-despair. None of it is sentimentally presented, though, thus keeping the reader out of the trap of pitying the protagonist, who cold-shoulders or jokes off most attempts at sympathy within his own story anyway—his most comfortable relationships are the ones where the emotions exist in lacuna, both of them saying one thing and meaning another. Incidences of violence also come across much more brutally than in many historical novels I've read, partly just from the difference in attitude. Disarmingly light, may be what I'm trying to get at. I intended to close down my computer and go straight to bed last night and instead I stayed up and finished the novel. There is a sequel, The Walled Orchard (1990), which Schreiber' also sent me. I'm really looking forward to it. It’s been a wonderful gift.

Latest decision: it is sunny, soft-skied, and not freezing outside. I'm going for a walk.