But the ocean remembers, so we never did boast

Forget the Sleepless Shores has been reviewed by Publishers Weekly:

The magical realism of poet and fantasist Taaffe's luscious, melancholy, and literary second collection of stories (after 2005's Singing Innocence and Experience) drowns the reader in watery imagery and complex sensory landscapes while exploring the theme of mundane relationships transformed by the intrusion of the mystical and uncanny. In the heartbreaking "Chez Vous Soon," a woman devastated by her failure to keep her lover from fatally succumbing to insanity and artistic obsession encounters his embodied muse. "The Dybbuk in Love" leans heavily into nostalgia and Jewish heritage as a century-old ghost disturbingly inhabits the minds of a suburban woman's partners to entreat her to accept him as her beloved. "All Our Salt-Bottled Hearts" gracefully takes on the logical legacy of the Lovecraftian mythos with a deep empathy for those called to the sea but still connected to the human world. Though most of Taaffe's stories hit their unsettling emotional mark when encountered individually, her style falls into common patterns and her prose into lulling rhythms, so that readers who indulge in the entire collection at once may lose subtle distinctions and find themselves overwhelmed by a uniform sad strangeness.

I have warned spatch that uniform sad strangeness may be the title of my sex tape from now on.

So be easy and free when you're drinking with me

I woke this morning and the light looked like autumn for the first time all summer. selkie has reminded me that it is nearly Storrow Drive truck season. The air conditioner is off for the first time in weeks.

I dreamed of watching a movie or miniseries starring Alex Jennings as a nineteenth-century schoolteacher or clergyman who accidentally involves himself in a feud with the local fairies and gets the worst of it until it becomes first creepingly and then unavoidably clear that he is himself a changeling and as terrifyingly inhuman as any of his tormentors under the right conditions, about which he is fairly certain he should feel worse. In the meantime he goes on looking like a tallish, vague-ish middle-aged man with one of those awkward, slightly too open faces, so that every social bobble or personal remark comes up like a slap; he is easy to like and hard to take seriously and he turned one of his opponents' bones to oak-wood without thinking twice. On waking I feel my brain just ripped off Susanna Clarke and/or Gemma Files, but in the dream I was incredibly impressed with the production design for Fairy and its denizens because it was right out of Sylvia Townsend Warner or Richard Dadd, everything matter-of-fact and just a half-tone off from ordinary human strangeness. You could never tell that people were doing magic from the color of the air or music that wasn't part of the score, you could just see what it was when it was done.

poliphilo has done some great song-sleuthing. Make sure to check out the footnote.