We're dying on another day

My poem "The Trouble Over" is now online at Uncanny Magazine.

I wrote it last Armistice Day; it's a ghost poem for Isaac Rosenberg. He is one of my very favorite poets of the First World War, even though like almost everyone else I discovered him well after Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, or even David Jones. Most of the things about him that are important to me are in the poem, but I recommend Jean Moorcroft Wilson's Isaac Rosenberg: The Making of a Great War Poet (2008) and Vivian Noakes' 21st-Century Oxford Authors: Isaac Rosenberg (2008) if you are curious about more. The title comes from a letter he wrote to Edward Marsh in December 1915: "I never joined the army for patriotic reasons. Nothing can justify war. I suppose we must all fight to get the trouble over." Given the generally shoddy state of Rosenberg's health even before the war, I have also always had a certain amount of sympathy for the sentiment expressed in another letter to Marsh, this one from February 1917: "This winter is a teaser for me; and being so long without a proper rest I feel as if I need one to recuperate and be put to rights again. However, I suppose we'll stick it, if we don't there are still some good poets left who might write me a decent epitaph."

Who cares how rich you are, love, when you look like Boris Karloff?

We have not yet been hit by a hurricane, although earlier this evening I watched a beautiful fast-sliding sunset of graphite-brushed and salmon-rose clouds like layers of moving glass. Have some links.

1. The folksinger Michael Smith has died. He wrote any number of beautiful, wry, thoughtful songs that became part of the folk tradition, such that I first heard several of them in the voices of other singers, but I knew him first and best for "Dead Egyptian Blues," which means I hope he was buried with at least a few grave goods.

2. I am delighted to see Scout Tafoya raising awareness for The Eternal (1998), otherwise known as my favorite bog body movie, but what do you mean Michael Almereyda made a movie about Nikola Tesla and I'm just hearing about it now? I can only hope it's as weird as Experimenter (2015).

3. Courtesy of kaffy_r: I had not previously heard of Stuart Stevens, but the interviews with him at Mother Jones and The New Yorker are both worth reading. tl;dr veteran Republican strategist turned out to be too honest not to recognize that the man in the White House was not a deviation from the values of his party but a culmination of them and then he had to figure out what to do about it.

4. As a result of recommending David Jones' In Parenthesis (1937), I discovered two books of his that I hadn't known about: The Sleeping Lord (1974) and Dai Greatcoat: a self-portrait of David Jones in his letters (1980). So now I have to figure out how to get hold of those.

5. Courtesy of moon_custafer: I am hoping I have not scared off a total stranger on AO3, but a person who writes fic for Night Nurse (1931), The Petrified Forest (1936), Act of Violence (1948), Johnny Eager (1942), and Three Strangers (1946) is a person I am incredibly glad to discover exists. I shouted somewhat to that effect in their comments and am now d'escaliering about appropriate levels of enthusiasm. I was just so happily surprised. [edit] HOORAY I HAVE NOT HORRIFIED THEM.

I rewatched A Night to Remember (1958) for the first time in ten or twelve years and this time around, in addition to noting with pleasure the presence of Michael Bryant in a small role (because once you notice a character actor, they can and probably will turn up anywhere), what struck me most was the lines invented for Kenneth More's Lightoller as he sits with James Dyrenforth's Gracie and thirty other freezing men on the overturned hull of Collapsible B, frost on their hair and the black sea broken only by the other lifeboats and terrible debris and the lights of the Carpathia steaming for them against all odds: "I've been at sea since I was a boy. I've been in sail. I've even been shipwrecked before. I know what the sea can do. But this is different . . . Because we were so sure. Because even though it's happened, it's still unbelievable. I don't think I'll ever feel sure again—about anything." It's the one scene of the film that feels contemporary rather than intensely of the moment, since for all its composites, elisions, and occasional errors the script is otherwise scrupulous about knowing only what history knew—more like post-WWII 1953 than pre-WWI 1912—and it also feels to me like weird fiction, like cosmic horror. The world can be smashed so badly out from underneath you, nothing can be trusted anymore. Which may explain why it occurred to me to rewatch the movie now, aside from the fact that I remembered liking it.