Always yawning, you with your eyes on the moon

My sleep schedule is really not a thing. Today I slept two hours through my alarm and in consequence have spent most of my time since then either working or on a bus (I am in Roslindale, with cats—Autolycus leaped onto my shoulder while carrying his balloon with him, an acrobatic feat for which derspatchel and I praised him) and then working some more, meaning that my original plan of making several posts today at decent intervals allowing for reader response is almost certainly doomed. Watch this space, anyway. I saw Crimson Peak (2015) last night.

1. Copies of The Humanity of Monsters, edited by Michael Matheson, have been glimpsed in the wild! It is only a matter of time until one finds its way to my door, bearing a reprint of "In Winter" as well as work by Gemma Files, Rose Lemberg, Maria Dahvana Headley, Sofia Samatar, and the rest of the ridiculously excellent table of contents. I am so looking forward to reading this anthology.

2. I am loving Alice Notley's Songs and Stories of the Ghouls (2011). Many of her concerns about the ancient and the contemporary world are close to mine: dead languages, lost voices, devastated cultures, the ghosts who speak in fragments and tell a different story from those who buried them. The presiding spirits of the collection are Dido and Medea. Cities are poems are bodies are the shattered statuary of museums. Carthage is the ultimate Other city, feminine, eastern, dark, whose child-murdering authority must be punished by the sacrificial suicide of its love-blinded queen. Around it, Notley builds a complex cosmology of death whose two worlds are Day and Dead, the first the masculine canonical world of the inevitability of empire and what everyone knows happened, the second the dreamlike realm of poetry where Dido stubbornly founds her city over and over again no matter how many times Rome destroys it and Medea fled with her children beyond the limits of myth; it is the world of the ghouls, the inconvenient survivors who are supposed to be tidily and tragically dead, not eating blood to stay—if not alive, then around and still talking. Their bodies are dissected like nineteenth-century ethnography for the texts written on their internal organs; they take on new forms and keep telling the story, keep on being not quite as dead as the Coroner who looks for the neat structures of history in their corpses says they should be. Basically, if you want an entire cycle of poems about being both the wronged and the monstrous feminine, Songs and Stories of the Ghouls is for you. Notley's language and her patterns of thought are mostly not mine at all, and that is the other thing I really like.

What were you doing when I thought you were dead, weren't you dead? The history of Carthage has been related by numerous ancient men but the Tyrian princess Dido founder of the city cannot be mentioned except in relation to her tragic passion for Aeneas; an important production of little masks characterizes the Punic world you are hellenized you worship Demeter and Kore. The young woman is dressed in a skirt of folded wings upon her sarcophagus our knowledge of the religion is lacunar but it is possible that one worshipped nothing except for untrue but powerful images and symbols perhaps 'worship' means 'use' as it should. Was there once again but this time I knew he was really dead there is a poem in the scars on my liver a written history or map which is beautiful but only covers me. I must be the child who isn't listening so I'll hear. Destroyed in 146 B.C. your poetry is dreadful, vacant and inept and ours will survive as long as our empire lasts; every present writer says. Towards changes hands of configuration each small mask is a word to cover your lack that is where language stands on no foundation but the wars it has always upheld for if your ways were destroyed and your poems broken and ploughed into the salted earth what would you be? The ghoulishness of this project is affirmed by any style and there is no 'way forward' but your empire's way.

3. I've been listening to this mix almost constantly since discovering it last night: it's autumnal and there are ghosts in it, but there are other things as well. My brain keeps slipping Bonnie Beecher's "Come Wander with Me" into the tracklist, with a guest appearance from Greanvine's decades-later "Prickle Holly Bush."

So far today I have eaten a peanut butter cup and some leftover naan bread from Rob's refrigerator. I think it is time for food.