Sheltering with your ghosts in some leviathan's bones

It was so very too hot to sleep that at half past midnight spatch and I took a walk just to get out of our building where with air conditioner and two fans at full blast the temperature is hovering on the wrong side of 80 °F. We were out for about forty-five minutes, enough time to walk up Highland and down McGrath and then to lose ourselves in a transient maze of one-way streets and bathtub Marys and tawny lilies and red roses growing in strangers' front yards. It was cooler outside, although loweringly humid. Inevitably glimpsed over the skyline, the casino continues its one-corporation campaign of light pollution the exact same smudge-thumbed orange as sodium streetlight, reflecting off the low soot-banked clouds like an incipient hellmouth. As we turned past the corner of Jackson and Bradley, we heard steady, distinct human snoring—it was a tenant sleeping out on the second-floor porch in a time-honored attempt to deal with the suffocating heat. It is supposed to storm tomorrow and we're hoping it makes a difference. I'm hoping it makes enough of a difference for me to sleep. I feel stupid beyond expression. I would prefer to be writing, or at the very least unconscious. It's been days.

I understand it is considered rude to steal from museums, but I desperately covet this cowrie-shell compass charm.

Deep, deep down in the river's bed, he's looking for the ring

My mother just called to ask if she was remembering correctly that I used to sing a song about a black swan. I answered yes, absolutely: "The Black Swan" from Gian Carlo Menotti's The Medium (1946). I heard it for the first time in high school; it terrified and transfixed me; it became my standard audition aria for years. I sang it as a folk song sometimes, unaccompanied; it has the form of one, a drowned and sleepless murder ballad set like a jewel in an Aickmanesque opera of supernatural noir. Fragments of it worked out into my fiction for decades, even as recently as "The Face of the Waters." I have no recordings of myself performing it.

My mother just heard it performed by Rhiannon Giddens. She had the undercurrent of someone else's voice running through her memory throughout and it turned out she was hearing me. You should listen to Giddens' version: it is much closer to Nina Simone's than to the original Menotti, still full of that swirling river-darkness. The same album contains a similarly rewilded version of "The trees on the mountain" from Carlisle Floyd's Susannah (1955), also a song I performed because it was classical folk, in the same way that I brought "The Trees They Grow High" and the "Lyke-Wake Dirge" to my recitals when I had them. I know they are not and never were my songs in any possessive sense—opera as much as folk is a tradition of perpetual reperformance and reinterpretation and it is in any case another world I no longer have any rights to—but it is still a little strange to hear them in someone else's voice, in such different settings, especially when the Menotti lived so close to my nightmares and my yearning for so long. They must mean as much to Giddens or she wouldn't have selected them out of her wide repertoire to share. I am glad they will reach people who might otherwise not hear them. Now that she's hit two out of my three favorite twentieth-century English-language operas, I shall wait and see if she does anything with Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes (1945).

I finally got some sleep this morning, admittedly on either side of having to get up and stop the box fan from making a weird flanging sound that so exactly mimicked the vibration of my alarm that it woke me. Much of the afternoon was beautifully sunny and beachside baking hot and then in about the last fifteen minutes the clouds slammed together and the skies broke open; it looks darker out there than it's been at actual night. My errands for this evening may have to be postponed unless I want to swim them.

Anyway, speaking of lost children, drowned tongues, singing from rivers' beds: Nadia Misir, "manual for the tongue whose first language is a churile of my second."