I must be under something else's spell

I am returned from NecronomiCon. I am exhausted. It was great.

It was not entirely felicitous that the end-of-schedule poetry workshop for which I hauled myself out of bed on sputtering nerve-ends and negative sleep was not really any such thing, but it seemed to work for its attendees; it gave me the chance to evangelize for the poetry of Le Guin and say a proper goodbye to Donald Sidney-Fryer. On my way into the dealer's room, I caught Michael Cisco and Farah Rose Smith right before they decamped for New York City, and in the dealer's room I finally picked up a copy of Ashes & Entropy (2018), an anthology of cosmic horror neo-noir edited by Robert S. Wilson that I have wanted for obvious reasons for months now. The dealer's room also contained ashnistrike and handful_ofdust and Steve and we all ended up having lunch once again at the second-floor restaurant of the Omni, which turns out to make shockingly good hot chocolate. Gemma recommending Everil Worrell's "The Canal" (1927) led to the discovery of Marie Nizet's Captain Vampire (1879); me recommending Tanith Lee's Kill the Dead (1980) mostly led to me wishing both my copies were not in a box. And then I tried to attend a panel and it was just not happening; there were small lights crawling around the edges of my vision; I went promptly to my room and to bed, which is how I missed both the end-of-convention wrap-up panel and an impromptu party in a cemetery. I feel a little bad about it, I understand that hallucinating in a graveyard is probably the height of Romantic poetry, but I mostly think I made the right choice. In any case, I intended to nap for half an hour and I woke up two and a half hours later, so I'm not sure how much choice was involved. In the evening spatch and I returned to Mokban for dinner and caught the last commuter train to Boston. In flagrant defiance of the recent MBTA, it was neither late nor on fire; we got home before midnight, the cats performed their rituals of household reintegration, and I fell over.

I cannot just sleep for the next week and I resent it. But this convention was worth the outlay of stamina, absolutely worth it. As I wrote to the organizers, it was an honor and a blast. The people, the programming, the conversations, the books. A weird fiction festival is a good thing to have in a person's life. And I am so very happy to have been part of it.

Gold light feels right

Well, I am dead on my feet after NecronomiCon. I slept into the afternoon and dreamed that Ben Mendelsohn was starring in a film adaptation of a Dick Francis novel that I deeply resent not existing, because Ben Mendelsohn as a professional gambler who does not actually care about horse racing per se until someone starts crooking his main source of income is a premise that should have been shot yesterday.

Assorted details from the aftermath.

1. I suspect I forgot to mention that Fiona Maeve Geist wrote an appreciation of me in the souvenir book that still astonishes me. I want it on the covers of all my future books.

Sonya Taaffe's work is a numinous reenchantment of the real, where myths and history cohabit closely amidst the mundane—a territory often dismissed by the fantastical that she imbues with a deep weight of importance. Her work is often deeply intimate pictures of individuals grappling with the past or the supernatural (often entwined), which serves to highlight her many and varied interests: Judaism, queerness, her education as a classicist, noir (and film in general), and music. Forgotten, neglected or discarded things matter in the present of her work in powerful ways . . . The surface of her work shimmers brightly, drawing readers into fabulous and rich depths of history, longing, language, loss, and searching. I invite anyone to drown in it with me.

2. Until the night of Saturday's room party, I had not been inside another hotel room of the Graduate. I had no idea the still life of donuts and the clam lamp were standard decor. Or the armchair patterned in violent zigzags of white and blue. Or the carpet in lozenges of blue and taupe that clashed with it. Or the grape-cluster curtains that clashed with both of them. Or the bookshelf wallpaper. Or the empty brackets on the same portion of wall. That last is the item that really blows my mind—did they remove the same piece of art from all the rooms? Is it a deliberate effect of slight dorm-room derelictness? Do they just assume that everyone who stays at the ex-Biltmore wants to hang their marionettes between the windows? I got nothing but nothing. But that was the same evening I realized that the paisley pattern of the hallway carpets was actually composed of donuts, coffee cups, and coffee spoons, and I got such a case of Prufrock from that, all else was garnish.

3. Why is the H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival held on the other side of the country from me? The weekend before my birthday? I missed their entire film track at NecronomiCon and I cannot afford to travel to Portland, Oregon in October. Teleporter, teleporter.

(Meanwhile, in news of linear transit, the MBTA closes our bus stops.)

I feel like this weekend crystallized the traditional New England August conversion from sweat-melting summer to cool bright autumn, which would incline me to walk around my neighborhood if I thought I could leave this couch.