Seaweed, kelp, and brine

It's an assorted notes kind of day. I have spent most of it working while it rained on and off outside. This February feels like April. I don't miss last year's train-clogging Fimbulvetr, but I would have liked real snow.

1. Suvaai is a lifesaver. They are first and foremost a very good Sri Lankan restaurant; I discovered them recently with derspatchel. The first time we ate there, I got coconut roti with goat curry and three accompanying vegetable sambals of the day—one of them was cabbage-based, one of them contained beets, and I really think the third had jackfruit in it, but the point is that there were no survivors. I am actively invested in learning to make wattalappam, because a flan-like custard made with coconut milk and palm sugar is one of my Platonic ideals of dessert. Also, they serve attukal soup. The internet tells me it can be made with lamb or mutton, but Suvaai makes theirs with goat. It is bone-in and the broth is dense and protein-rich and spicy and it is a great thing for a person to eat who has just had their braces adjusted and in consequence is finding even mushrooms hard to chew. A bowl of goat soup goes a long way toward me not feeling like I'm going to starve before my teeth get better. I insulted Lucien recently by saying in his presence that goat was a miracle animal, when plainly he knew that cat was a miracle animal, but since I meant it in the sense of widely applicable deliciousness, I figure in the long run he'll get over it if I don't consider him manna.

2. Simon Sylvester's The Visitors (2014) is not quite the queer selkie novel I am always waiting for, but it is a very good novel of the sea and storytelling and liminal spaces and times (a small Scottish island, late adolescence, attraction and danger) with a mystery plot that plays well against the kinds of disappearance associated with myths of the sea: drowning or return. At the start of the story, the seventeen-year-old narrator's boyfriend has just left for university in Bristol; she doesn't miss him so much, because their relationship was one of familiarity and convenience rather than active desire, but she envies him desperately for his escape, since the island of Bancree has all the sea-scudded Gaelic beauty of a folktale and all the economic depression of a former fishing industry gone badly bust. "Only the whisky survived . . . Without the distillery, Bancree would be deserted." When a pair of strangers—a father and a daughter—move into the abandoned cottage across the inlet from the narrator's house, they're the first new arrivals to Bancree in years. Everyone else has been moving away. The narrator falls into unexpectedly instant friendship with the daughter, a dark-eyed night-swimmer who seems to attract schoolyard abuse even worse than the self-consciously isolated narrator herself; she isn't sure what she feels for the father, who is solitary, sinewy, and beautiful in ways that belong in films or fantasies. Her school project on selkies comes to obsess her; she can't help linking the overwhelming love and bereavement of the stories (from her own family, from the itinerant storyteller who lives on the beach, from a disturbing book she finds in a library sale, where all the selkies are vicious seducers and all the humans are devastated victims) to the perilous, confusing pull she feels toward both strangers. She learns some of their secrets, why they move so frequently, what the pin-marked map in the father's room represents, but nothing that seems to explain them. And all the while the disappearances are coming closer together and closer to home: Bancree is tiny, close-knit and confined, and there are only so many people who can go missing before it becomes clear that something is inescapably wrong. Where the story goes astray for me is in the climax, frustratingly—I'm fine with the crime-thriller reveal, but then the author makes a choice that I cannot agree with either narratively or mythologically, even when I understand the in-story decisions it's meant to drive, and I was left colder than I would have liked by what is otherwise a resonant and evocative epilogue, pulling together all the novel's free-floating themes of ways of seeing and telling and remembering the world. Other readers' mileage may vary, however, and I am definitely not anti-recommending The Visitors. It is closer to Mollie Hunter's A Stranger Came Ashore (1975) and Elizabeth Hand's Generation Loss (2007) or Available Dark (2012) than any single novel I have encountered previously, which is an unusual combination. It would pair well with Neil Jordan's Ondine (2009), another sea-spell that doesn't quite stick the workaday landing. I am not at all sorry that I took it home from Porter Square Books on Monday night. Its prose is very good, graceful and gritty, and I believe its selkies. I believe its teenage protagonist, too, and that might be even more of a feat.

3. Jason deCaires Taylor is building a museum under the sea. I've been following his work for years, for reasons that shouldn't surprise anyone: "We swim to one statue. A blood-red sponge has spread like scar tissue across her features, softening her expression, outlining her nose, lips and eyes. She is vibrant with colour, her cheeks pulsing with life. Algae trace her hairline, purple acropora coral protrudes from below her chin. Taylor points to lobsters peering out from beneath and nods. All good signs of a healthy, thriving reef . . . faces melting, chests pitted with tiny holes drilled by clams, sea urchins crawling across human necks, feeding at night." The political dimension is striking and welcome.

4. I like everything about this array of mermaids, but the deep-sea angler-mermaid and the Arctic mermaid with the pack of walruses are my favorites. The fact that both of them are available as prints is now giving me trouble.

(I remind my brain that I just got a mermaid print—yhlee just sent me Heatherlee Chan's mermaid reading in a bathtub. It was unexpected and gorgeous and I need to get a frame for it stat. Someday, I will have all my art out of storage and hanging on walls I won't need to leave any time soon and it will be awesome.)

5. My family has been quoting this cartoon for as long as I can remember. I cannot give either of my parents chocolate mice from Burdick's without provoking a chorus. I don't live well with them, but I do like my family.