Now the future is calling and I need one more chance

I have a new phone. It is a temporary phone. It is not in fact new and it has a habit of turning itself off when I don't want it to, but it's not in two pieces on my bedroom floor and that's the thing that counts.

On the whole, the reading went well. I read "The Trinitite Golem," originally published in Clockwork Phoenix 5 (2016) and soon to be reprinted in Forget the Sleepless Shores (2018); Caitlín read two of the new chapters from Black Helicopters (2018). Afterward we had plans to eat dinner at Friskie Fries, but thanks to a taco festival and some kind of show across the street we were unable to find even takeout double parking and ended up at Bucktown instead, which was (fried oysters, collards) delicious.

Criterion has brought out a Blu-Ray/DVD of Frank Borzage's Moonrise (1948)! That almost makes up for the way they have revamped their site so that I have no idea how to find anything.

This Twitter thread is like a lost episode of Withnail & I (1987). The topic was work-related fuck-ups. The winner by miles involved (1) meeting the President of Ireland (2) while on ketamine. I would pay money to hear Paul McGann record this story. "I am sweating like microwaved bread, eyes on hinges, convinced my fingernails owe me money."

And only the dead will be dancing with me

I am home from Providence. Autolycus himself supervised the decontamination process, painstakingly ensuring that I smell like him and his sister, not like other cats. The other cats include the Tattooed Lydia, who is longer and more muscular even than the last time I saw her two months ago. She wrestles with Selwyn, who is the size of a small couch; she is having a heroic childhood, like Paul Bunyan or Achilles.

I got back to Boston just in time to meet my mother for Michał Waszyński's The Dybbuk (דער דיבוק‎, 1937), newly restored by the National Center for Jewish Film and showing as part of their annual film festival. Today would have been my grandmother's ninety-fifth birthday. My first intimation of The Dybbuk was a poster that hung in one of the basements where Congregation Bet Ha'am used to meet, when I went to Friday night services with her; I remember that she or my grandfather or both of them told me the story first. I did not see the movie itself until Brandeis; I hadn't seen it since. I will write about it. Watching that movie hurts like looking at the sea.

Dear Hollywood, please make a movie of the California Clipper and its first commercial circumnavigation of the globe in December 1941 and January 1942, under truly ridiculous circumstances. The story is brimful of heroic engineering, it comes with white-knuckle suspense built in, and while the flight was made during wartime, the enemy was geography and mathematics, so we can skip the stereotyping. There's a home front angle. There's human interest all over the place. I regret only that it couldn't be filmed with a real plane, because the last Boeing 314 Clipper was scrapped in 1951. Otherwise, you would need to invent nothing.