The strength of the vampire is that people will not believe in him

Sadly, last night was terrible and I did not fall asleep until after eight in the morning, with the result that I have no idea if anything I had planned for today will actually happen. In lieu of content this afternoon, please enjoy this pair of adorable publicity stills from Dracula (1931).





It's Dracula's not at all apologetic look in the second photo that really makes this narrative for me. Also, Renfield is quite right to worry about his plotline.

You offer a hundred dollars, he'll send you to Atlanta

Mostly through application of literature, my day got better.

About half an hour after my previous post, I left the house and walked across the freezing slush to Porter Square Books, where I spent the next hour and a half browsing without taking off my coat. I still have a sore throat and a slight cough and a faint sense of trains having fallen on me; I should have remembered last night that I am actually sick, not just stupid. One of the regular booksellers told me that the definition of a New Englander is a person who knows how to walk on black ice. I found that depressingly plausible. I was tempted by Kenneth Wishnia's Jewish Noir, mostly because it collects a previously untranslated story by Yente Serdatzsky; I ended up buying the 1940's volume of the Library of America's Women Crime Writers because I've never read either Vera Caspary's Laura (1943) or Dorothy B. Hughes' In a Lonely Place (1947) and I'd never even heard of Helen Eustis' The Horizontal Man (1947) before this series came out. They didn't have the '50's volume, so I will just have to go back. I should talk sometime about Hughes' The Expendable Man (1963), which I read in October, although it's not possible without spoilers. It's an astonishing novel, though. I go back and forth on whether I think it could be filmed.

I walked back with herbal chai in hand, meaning eventually it got on my corduroy coat. I washed it off with a handful of snow. This coat is going to have to put up with a lot worse than almond milk and spices if it's going to have anything like the eleven-year run of its predecessor. After months of fearing it had been accidentally put in storage or lost in the move, I finally found my heavy green winter scarf that I've had since high school. Not that I'm retiring the purple silk kerchief with the fish that I've been wearing since the weather turned cold, but still. It is amazing what a sense of at last, my arm is complete again a person can attach to clothes.

I returned home to find that fleurdelis28 had sent me a copy of Helen Scales' Spirals in Time: The Secret Life and Curious Afterlife of Seashells (2015), from which she had read me the excerpts I mentioned at Christmas, and that my contributor's copies of Mythic Delirium: Volume Two had also arrived. This is the collected second year of the digital magazine, reprinting my pieces "Poor Old Horse" and "Anonymity" along with fiction and poetry by Jane Yolen, Michele Bannister, Saira Ali, Rose Lemberg, Virginia M. Mohlere, Sheree Renée Thomas, Shveta Thakrar, Dominik Parisien, Gwynne Garfinkle, Jeannine Hall Gailey, Natalia Theodoridou, and other cool people.

derspatchel is coming over for dinner. I still have poems to write and a movie I want to watch off TCM. I feel a little less like everything has collapsed. If it just stays that way for another few hours, I'll be fine.