It's a belligerent style of play and you're resisting the change

We have new internet! It's not entirely clear that we actually needed new internet, but RCN certainly wasn't going to let us continue to use our previous internet, so the tech came and now we have a new router and all the same names on our networks because seriously. Autolycus bravely stayed on the couch through two rounds of doorbell while Hestia defended the bedroom door against all comers. I may finally have gotten over this nosebleed in time to leave the house.

spatch has written about Tuesday's Burns Supper birthday; I will add that the version I sang of "John Barleycorn" was George Mackay Brown's and that Rob left out the part where he was illustrated by buttresses in the persons of Lynn Feingold and Lynn Noel. We came home and watched Ken Russell's The Boy Friend (1971), a gloriously meta-theatrical love letter to shabby British theater and glamorous Hollywood musicals, with Twiggy, Max Adrian, Murray Melvin, and Vladek Sheybal.

Yesterday I did very little except work, which was boring but undoubtedly better for me than running around. Today I run around. Have some links.

1. The entire story of what Alan Turing's OBE and other memorabilia were doing in Colorado is nuts, but I'm glad they have been recovered; I hope Sherborne gets them back.

2. I am also in favor of not losing Prospect Cottage. To help crowdfund the preservation of Derek Jarman's garden, because apparently this is the world we live in, go here.

3. Via thanate: Kali Wallace, "your heart is a moving target." "I think a lot about what is being lost in those gulfs. I wonder what people would be writing if they weren't being reminded every single day that books live or die by what elements will have people squealing with joy on social media. I wonder what happens to a body of literature if the only people who can take time to create daring and unusual things are those people who already have the support and privilege to make such a choice possible. I wonder what it does to individuals and communities when writers internalize the idea that what they write might matter for a month or two, or maybe a year or two if it's extraordinarily lucky, but after that they have to find a way to matter all over again. What they aren't saying, because they don’t think anybody will hear it."

4. Via handful_ofdust: things Sherlock Holmes has canonically done. I only wish it came with the stories identified, since the one about the jellyfish is right there in the title, but I can't at all remember where the diagram of breadcrumbs goes.

5. I am actually very impressed by the science of the Vesuvius-vitrified brain.

Un shpilt zhe mir, klezmorimlekh, dos zelbike, nor sheyner

My short story "Where the Sky Is Silver and the Earth Is Brass," written for selkie and originally published in Machinations and Mesmerism: Tales Inspired by E.T.A. Hoffmann (ed. Farah Rose Smith, Ulthar Press 2019), has been accepted for reprint by Uncanny Magazine. This is the one with the Jewish demon and the ex-partisan in the West End of Boston in 1949; especially since its original release was confounded by the sudden death of its publisher, I am so glad that it will be available to a wider audience.

spatch and I did not see Knives Out (2019) at the Somerville tonight because the Red Line decided it would prefer not to, but we did at least have dinner beforehand at the Smoke Shop in Kendall Square, which furnished us with blackstrap collards and sea-salt-buttered cornbread and sweet ribs and soft brisket and some kind of ridiculously caramelized pork belly that may or may not have been the pulled pork we originally ordered and if it was, good grief. Earlier in the afternoon I continued my investigations of Broad Canal, which since last week has hardened into an opaque pane of cormorant-black ice chipped and splintered like tesserae with refreezing; along the edges of the channel it was cloudy green as a pond, with the remains of older piers standing up like snags. Apparently the proper name of the power plant which was built in 1949 as the Cambridge Electric Company's Kendall Station is now the Kendall Cogeneration Station. I don't know how much traffic it receives by water these days, but there are still two small loading docks at canal-level with signs and handrails and a garbage can on the rust-brown catwalk and one of them had a sodium light burning over its doorway which got Kipling's "Poor Honest Men" (But a light on each quarter / Low down on the water) stuck in my head for the rest of the walk. The other light had a greenish, Basidiumite glow under its metal shade, so I suspect mercury vapor. The canal itself dates to 1806, according to the local history plaque of which I forgot to take a picture; until the 1960's, remnants of the system to which it belonged still ran as far as Sixth Street. What a city of water we still live in, imperfectly filled. The neighborhood at the other end of Broad Canal is so new and glassy and glossy, it doesn't even look like it's on speaking terms with the bricks and black iron girders and long industrial grids of the windows of the power station. I took some pictures, once again on my phone because I have not internalized that I should just leave the camera in my computer bag. I am most pleased with this one: I think I may have accidentally achieved Charles Sheeler.



The afternoon was so overcast that I saw the fogged smudge of the sun over my shoulder as I crossed the Longfellow Bridge and couldn't stop thinking of Casting the Runes (1979). Later, on my way back across the bridge to meet Rob, I took a picture of the night river and all the lights of Lechmere and Storrow Drive doing their best Whistler.



I'm going back to collapsing now.