All you can do is do what you must

I slept about two hours last night. I've been awake for four. Highlights of the last few days include discovering a useful bus and finally getting the cats' claws clipped by a very competent groomer at Petco. On Monday night, I fell asleep for an hour with Autolycus curled on top of me. Otherwise, things aren't so great.

1. Courtesy of strange_selkie: I am delighted that there is now a play about Sholem Asch's God of Vengeance (גאָט פֿון נקמה), otherwise known as the 1907 Yiddish drama with the lesbians. Its first Broadway production in 1923—even with the most inflammatory aspects somewhat amended in translation—was successfully prosecuted for obscenity. The queer relationship is the sole healthy one onstage. It makes sensual same-sex use of the Song of Songs. It's great. I saw a terrific off-Broadway staged reading in 2011 and still regret being unable to make it to the full production in 2012. At the moment I'm not sure how I feel about the levels of deconstruction as described in this review, but if Indecent gets more people to notice Got fun nekome, I'm all for it (and somewhat sorry I found out too late to see it during its original run. I really have been living under a rock). I remain vaguely surprised that the one Yiddish play most people have read in their lives isn't An-sky's The Dybbuk.

2. Generally I do not expect lists compiled by the Toast to reflect any kind of historical veracity, but it appears that titles of eighteenth-century novels are the exception. I can't pick a favorite. I'll Consider It! sounds like a theatrical revue from the days of Noël Coward. Any Thing But What You Expect sets up perfectly for a truth-in-advertising punch line. I hope more than I can say that Papa Brick; Or, What Is Death? was an early gesture toward Surrealism.

3. Is there a technical term for the kind of metafiction that occurs when an author writes a previously fictional book of their own creation? I encountered this phenomenon first in high school with Dorothy Gilman's The Tightrope Walker (1979) and The Maze in the Heart of the Castle (1983): the latter features prominently in the former as the touchstone fantasy novel of the protagonist's childhood and then Gilman just wrote it. Years after reading Daniel Pinkwater's Lizard Music (1976), I realized that the late-night sci-fi B-movie watched by the narrator while his parents are out of town is obviously the film version of Pinkwater's own Fat Men from Space (1977).* I know there must be other examples, but I can't remember any right now. This subject brought to mind by Amal El-Mohtar's review of Rainbow Rowell's Carry On (2015).

* The other late-night sci-fi B-movie watched by the narrator while his parents are out of town is Island of Lost Souls (1932), because Pinkwater is like that. In other news, it took me until my most recent re-read to appreciate that the proprietor of the protagonist's favorite candy store is named after a famous Ellis Island name-change joke.

4. Elizabeth Donnelly Carney's Women and Monarchy in Macedonia (2000) is exactly the nonfiction resource I wanted while writing "ζῆ καὶ βασιλεύει." I have some arguments with the organization, but the information density is very good. I appreciate a scholar who can point out both what we don't know and why we shouldn't draw too many conclusions from it.

5. "Not in Scamander's river."