Wait for history to count to ten, then you can come and get us, come and get me

My poem "Shadow-Song" is now online at Uncanny Magazine. I wrote it in October on a train to New York. It started off as a ghost poem for Bertolt Brecht, but it changed.

Elisabeth Hauptmann not only performed the initial translation of John Gay's The Beggar's Opera (1728) that evolved into Brecht and Weill's Die Dreigroschenoper (1928), she wrote much of the finished play's text, although she was not credited for it at the time. It is not completely a case of Brecht taking the labor of others for granted; Hauptmann seems to have published even her solo work under pseudonyms and anonymity by preference. She took credit for the book of the musical Happy End (1929) only under pretext of adapting it from an English-language original à la Threepenny when in fact she had written the story from scratch with lyrics by Brecht and music by Weill. I think it was complicated. Anyway, I knew who Kurt Weill was from childhood and certainly Brecht by the time I saw him haunting Marc Blitzstein in Tim Robbins' Cradle Will Rock (1999), but I must have been in college before I'd heard of Hauptmann. In life she was nicknamed Brecht's "devoted shadow," whence the title.

So that's my coincidental but heartfelt rebuttal to that article by Zoe Williams that's popped back up on my friendlist, about the value of art in times of apocalypse. Outside my office window, it appears to be lightly and dryly and sunnily snowing.

And we're only six months deep, my dear, so just try to hold on

I like roller coasters as amusement park rides, not as metaphors. This weekend was jagged as an EKG. Today started really well and then hit a land mine in the afternoon and I have not been fine since. I would like a couple of days when no external factors claw as deeply at the inside of my head as the last couple of days have been doing.

I don't believe Katerina Iacovides and Siki Red Fins' "Ocean Decay" was intended as fanart for Patricia A. McKillip's Something Rich and Strange (1994), but it works by me:



She thought of Adam, lying in the surf, watching her pull garbage out of her pockets, the look on his face as if he were the one dying . . .