I want to stare at the seaside and do nothing at all

I am if anything even more exhausted at the end of my second day proper of being a Poet Laureate, but I am still really enjoying it.

I had to get up for the lunch I accidentally networked myself into, but it was at Los Andes with Victor LaValle and an assortment of editor types from Tor, so I had empanadas and ceviche and Bolivian clam fritters and chowder with tiny shrimp and talked mostly about horror movies with people who had seen different horror movies than I had; it was great. I really wish this convention's film track had not scheduled its sole screening of Antti-Jussi Annila's Sauna (2008) at a time when I could not take advantage of it. I double-recommended Annila's Jade Warrior (2006) to make up for it.

I finally made it into the dealer's room! I acquired a tiny, sincere-eyed monstrosity from Feeping Creatures for my brother and his wife; the way it meered with its front paws reminded me of Autolycus. rushthatspeaks discovered an astonishing pelican by Liv Rainey-Smith. I was gifted a copy of Donald Sidney-Fryer's West of Wherevermore and Other Essays (2019) and contemplated some jewelry.

The panel on weird verse went . . . disorganizedly. Our moderator turned out not to be at the convention. There had been no replacement moderator assigned. One of the panelists threw themselves on the grenade and the end result was we all got splattered. I talked as best I could about what distinguishes weird poetry from any other kind for me (the same dislocation, the same uncanniness as weird fiction, less form or material than mood), about what I hope the future of the field will look like (continuingly hella diverse), and about Rika Lesser's Etruscan Things (1983), one of the best sustained examples of ghost-work in poetry that I know.

The panel on alchemy and magic in Lovecraft was a blast. Once again, we could have gone for twice the time as the conversation spun rapidly away from Lovecraft's fiction and into occultism in general without losing sight of the question of what Lovecraft believed vs. what he researched or invented vs. what he depicted vs. what has been practiced seriously or playfully in the tradition he accidentally founded since; Anthony Teth moderated brilliantly and Scott R. Jones, Robert Levy, and Douglas Wynne contributed everything from dreams to definitions of magic to histories of angelic script to personal and erudite discussions of the internal and external values of ritual. Not being a practicing occultist, I talked a lot about Greco-Roman magic and a little about Egyptian magic and ended up performing a description of the practice of defixio that people were still complimenting me on hours after the fact. I do not get asked about my religious beliefs after most panels, but did not mind after this one. Then I got asked about classical Greek, which is more normal. I talked about Wittgenstein on Frazer, too.

spatch had come down on the train just in time to hear me talk about ancient magic; my schedule did not work out for us to meet gaudior, rax, Rush-That-Speaks, ashnistrike, and Vari at Pizza J, so we walked down Westminster Street until we found a Greek restaurant called Kleos and walked inside. I got the psari meze which turned out to be a pile of crisp fried smelts, bright sweet anchovies, and intensely tangy taramasalata, and Rob got the pastitsio which turned out to be two meals even before the addition of the keftedes, and we split a plate of honey-dripping, cinnamon-dusted, fresh-fried loukoumades and we didn't even miss having forgotten to order drinks. One of our neighbors was just finishing a whole fish as we arrived. I believe we have a restaurant we will return to.

The room party held by Hippocampus Press became formally too loud about fifteen minutes after we had arrived, but it contained handful_ofdust and Steve, Michael Cisco and Farah Rose Smith, and Adam Bolivar who had promised me marionette theater when we were talking at the reception last night. He works with Appalachian ballads and Jack tales; the performance was a short play in rhyme concerning the dealings of Jack Straw (Bolivar) and Solomon Scratch (Derrick Hussey), the former being a naive scarecrow and the latter being a most dapper Devil with an ace of spades in his hatband and a rabbit's skull for a face. It ended in fire. I left with a little broadside chapbook of Bolivar's Ye Historie of Jack o' Lanthorne, or The Devil's Spark, an especially delightful windfall since it is a verse-drama version of a folktale I used to tell at Lilly's on the Pond. Pay for a drink with a coin that used to be the Devil, ask him for an apple and then cut a cross into the tree, at the end of your life you'll find yourself nowhere, with only an infernal coal to light your way as you wander the world, barred from Heaven's gates and Hell's fires alike. After that point the party exceeded its previous limits of loudness and became totally unlistenable and we fled in company of Ashnistrike back to our room, where Gemma made an impressively plausible case for Sodom the Killer (2004) as "shitmazing." We threw everyone out later than we should have and I still haven't fallen asleep.

Tomorrow I have to co-teach a poetry workshop, a thing I have not before done in my life, on adrenaline fumes and escalatingly little sleep. I can see through space and time, Tiny Wittgenstein. Let's do it.