Hope is something the living do. It's too silly an occupation for the dead

I am afraid this post is not about Readercon, either. Except for a brain-saving walk to the Cambridge Public Library this afternoon, I have spent the day basically glued to my computer, catching up on work. It has been immensely unexciting. There were some highlights.

1. On my way back from the library, I met a traveling rabbit. She was nosing around a portable pen on the lawn in front of the library in company of a young black woman with glasses who was reading Lawrence Ferlinghetti's A Coney Island of the Mind (1958) under a tree; her fur was white, her eyes were red, and her name was Grace Hopper. She left the pen to investigate the tree, she sniffed at the library books and left them, she inspected the hand I held out to her as I would with a strange cat and promptly took refuge in the modified snugli in which it turned out she often left the house, carried by the young woman with the glasses. She emerged again a moment later and returned to nosing around the pen. I had never met an adventurous rabbit before, much less one who regularly made excursions to library lawns. The young woman explained that she used to harness Grace and walk her on a leash, but that limited the distance they could get from the house; with Grace in the snugli, they could range much farther and visit a wider array of interesting places. They were planning on Iceland later this summer. I think they'll do fine.

2. I just discovered that a fiddle tune I'd known for more than ten years as "Johnny the Blacksmith" is actually "Charlie the Prayermaster." Possibly because I have spent most of my day staring at repetitive tasks on a screen, I find this change of name and profession hilarious. It was one of the few tunes I knew by name, too—for some reason which I suspect has to do with the absence of lyrics, I learn instrumental melodies easily enough, but almost never remember what they're called. (This drove me up a wall while watching Green Dolphin Street (1947), because a tune I recognized was played diegetically in the background of a shipboard wedding and I had no idea of its name, I just knew I had to own a copy because otherwise I wouldn't have memorized it. I spent a lot of iTunes time afterward with Dave Swarbrick and Bill Spence. Appropriately enough, it turned out to be "Haste to the Wedding.") I had learned what I thought was "Johnny the Blacksmith" from the playing of Bill Spence with Fennig's All-Star String Band, but the file came from Audiography and it was mislabeled. I just didn't realize until tonight when I had it stuck in my head, wondered about other versions, and threw the name into YouTube to see what I could find. What I found was that "Johnny the Blacksmith" was invented by the legendary bluegrass fiddler Kenny Baker in 1957 and I'd never heard it before in my life. So I played my way through a truckload of jigs and reels and presently discovered that "Charlie the Prayermaster" dates back at least to the early twentieth century—it was collected by Francis O'Neill in The Dance Music of Ireland (1907)—and also goes by the names "The Girls of the Town" and the "Cowboy Jig." When I explained this situation to rushthatspeaks, they replied, "And any second now you'll find out he's also Robert the Politician."

3. I have now finished Barbara Hambly's Graveyard Dust (1999) and read my way forward through Wet Grave (2002), meaning that I am caught up chronologically on Benjamin January to Days of the Dead (2003), the object of my library walk this afternoon. (Also I had to return a recalled book before I was fined for it.) I may even have gotten gaudior hooked on the series. Possibly also my mother. It still surprises me somehow that I didn't encounter these books earlier: they are full of so many of the things that interest me, like intersectionality and characters who know their Catullus. Is this a case of a cult favorite or did I just manage with my usual fine attention to pop culture to miss something that everyone else on the planet has been reading for the last twenty years? I'm burning through them now and it's wonderful.

מפּני מה מפּני מה ירדה הנשׁמה

The mail just brought my contributor's copy of An Alphabet of Embers (2016), edited by Rose Lemberg. It's a beautiful book. The cover by Galen Dara is full of fish and flame and dancing; the interior illustrations by M Sereno are swirling pen-and-ink, shape-changing as the stories they accompany. I feel fortunate to have one for my short story "Exorcisms," reprinted from Mike Allen's Mythic #1—a woman's face with eyes closed, her hair a spilling darkness and another woman's figure rising from it, the pitched roofs of a village, the crowded windows of a city, all spattered across with ink or blood or rain or weeping, the smoke of a blown-out candle, the billows of the sea. You don't care about my story, pick up a copy for the artwork. If it came in prints, I'd hang it on my wall.

"Exorcisms" was originally published in 2006, but the first version of the story was written in 2001, the fall of my junior year at Brandeis. It was one of my very first explicitly Jewish pieces; it was the first time I wrote about dybbuks. I put some of my own family history into it, specifically the story of my great-grandmother and her lost friend. I have written about him before: he is one of the two ghosts of my mother's family. He isn't the dybbuk, but he passes through her story:

She came over the sea in the skull of the student she loved . . . took up residence below the memories of his sister, who had come ahead with her lover until they turned him away at the gates—his health, he was never strong; strong enough to cross wheat fields and mountains and an ocean that almost heaved out his stomach but not to step through a doorway?—and swam in the woman's dreams of her dead brother already transformed into a saint, one of the thirty-six on whose back the world rests, sweet and sanctified and studying now in the company of the great sages of the past. Together, they shed tears.

I did not know, in 2001 or even in 2006, that my great-grandmother Ida Friedman had really had a younger brother. I never heard about him as a child. I thought I had made him up. But in 2010, sorting through a box of old papers, my mother and I found a letter from his son who had corresponded with my grandfather about family stories and genealogies. He told the same story about his half-aunt Ida and her boyfriend who could not pass the physical exams and was turned back at America's golden door. He didn't mention his father's name. I don't know when he came to this country or what became of him, whether he was scholarly or loved anyone in their shtetl or died young or whether he resembled no one I've ever written about. But he existed. And so, while I always believed that I invented the dybbuk as well, perhaps I should not be so sure.

Anyway, she is in this collection, along with fantastic work by JY Yang, Sara Norja, Nin Harris, Greer Gilman, Zen Cho, Yoon Ha Lee, M. David Blake, Celeste Rita Baker, Shweta Narayan, Sheree Renée Thomas, Tlotlo Tsamaase, Emily Jiang, Ching-In Chen, Amal El-Mohtar, and many more. In the meantime, the bonus poetry chapbook Spelling the Hours is coming together, if you have any interest in marginalized figures in the history of science, and my out-of-print poetry collection A Mayse-Bikhl (2011) will soon follow in a new edition from Stone Bird Press. I wrote this post sitting outside in the sun, which is the only thing to do when someone sends you a handful of fire. If you want to take it, here it is.