ἴδμεν δ᾽, ὅσσα γένηται ἐπὶ χθονὶ πουλυβοτείρῃ

My poem "Σειρήνοιϊν" has been accepted by Uncanny Magazine. It was written in March for elisem; the title is Homeric Greek for "of the two Sirens." I may reproduce a great many notes and illustrations when it is published. I am very, very glad it will have a home.

We come to life when we kill the lights

The mail has brought my contributor's copy of Not One of Us #53. It's the broken issue, featuring fiction and poetry by Patricia Russo, Alexandra Seidel, and J.C. Runolfson among others, and extraordinarily fine work in both categories by Mat Joiner. My contributions are the poem "Day, Sun, Night" and short story "When Can a Broken Glass Mend?" Both owe their existence in some way to rose_lemberg. asakiyume has written kindly about the former; I will add that it owes a debt as well to Frank O'Hara's "A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island," which I read for the first time around age four when I thought the petulant sun was funny and missed the shout-out to Mayakovsky for years. The latter is a queer kinky Jewish love story with demons; it's very short and the title is a Kabbalistic reference taken from "The Ten Faces of G-d" in Frank London's A Night in the Old Marketplace (2007). Check it out! This issue comes with interior illustrations.

I've learned from kore that Nigel Terry has died. I cannot remember seeing him outside the films of Derek Jarman, although the internet tells me I should remember him from The Lion in Winter (1968) and my memory tells me it doesn't want to think about Troy (2004) any more than it has to. Because it was the first role I saw him in, I suspect he will always look to me like black-browed reflecting Caravaggio, where he is not the violently hottest thing onscreen only because the other two points of his triangle are Tilda Swinton and Sean Bean. I envied his slouch hat then and probably still do. "Deeply attractive and private to the last."

I just got home from seeing Murnau's The Last Laugh (Der letzte Mann, 1924) at the Coolidge Corner Theatre with my mother. I don't think we see camera work like that again until the New Wave. While I'm talking about film: my Patreon has dropped back below $200 a month, which means no end-of-the-year chapbook of collected reviews; the milestone goal is showing itself unmet again. Anyone who is not already a patron (and if you are, thank you, cat pictures and poetry are forthcoming) want to chip in? Anyone have a friend who wants to be a patron and doesn't know it yet? I want that chapbook to exist.