I drew a dick on all your sweatshirts

I was woken early by a medical phone call and overslept in consequence when I fell back asleep; I dreamed that I overslept and when I got out of bed in the mid-afternoon the sky was dead black and the block was lightless and there was the faintest dull bronze edge like a sunset against the buildings and it went out as I watched, leaving dry stars and no light anywhere, including in our apartment. "Did we miss an eclipse?" we asked one another, knowing it wasn't an eclipse; there was neither moon nor sun in the sky. I turned on Bertie and he was flickering and dying and full of sexual spam, which seemed like an especially insulting touch to the apparent end of the world. None of the phones worked. I woke before anything else happened, which in a dream like that it might never have at all.

Signal-boosting a Kickstarter of the dead makes me feel a little like one of those reminders of mortality in a Roman triumph, but as of this posting we are just under two thousand dollars from the first issue being free to read for everyone the second it drops, so please remember that you are mortal and there's art in it.

(If you are no longer mortal, please support our art all the same. Obols are an acceptable form of pledge, as are pomegranate seeds, salt and violets, black beans, incense, water, and beer. Copper ingots will be returned with extreme prejudice to Ea-nasir.)

I find this cartoon charming in its own right, but the description really makes it.

It's not the mutiny that gets written down in the diary, it's the manifest

I am still vibrating slightly with adrenaline from Zoom-speaking to Leigh Grossman's class at the University of Connecticut, which I was doing because my short story "ζῆ καὶ βασιλεύει" was included on the syllabus of "Popular Literature: Alternate Histories" and I was invited to come and talk about it. I was warned that the discussion might peter out early because the students were not necessarily chatty over Zoom. They asked questions and we ran right up until the last minute of class. I remember talking about my master's thesis and the Epic Cycle and my arguments with Mary Renault's Funeral Games (1981); I talked about Penelope and Odyssey 13.291–303 and the reasons it matters that μῆτις is not wisdom; I talked a lot about what you don't have to invent in the past, you just have to know where to look for it, like Kynnane and Adeia and pre-Code Hollywood and Axiothea of Phlios. I got asked about fanfiction and while not having a good solution to the shitshow that is American copyright law did manage to mention that I was delighted when it happened to me. I got asked about Catullus and talked about Roman sexual vocabulary. I talked about Carthage. I talked about film noir. I talked about Aṣûšunamir. I talked about Andromache. I explained the meaning of the title and the legend of Thessalonike; I talked about the complex of goddesses associated with the planet Venus and the importance of names. I recommended Elizabeth Donnelly Carney's Women and Monarchy in Macedonia (2000) and Glenn Markoe's Phoenicians (2002) and Craig A. Williams' Roman Homosexuality (2010) and Dorothy J. Heydt's The Witch of Syracuse (2017) and Ursula K. Le Guin's Lavinia (2008) and an assortment of Tanith Lee. I had not spoken to a class since 2011. I worried about boring them, but I think the fact that they kept asking questions argues against Tiny Wittgenstein. One of them had actually written a paper on my story. I don't know that anyone has ever written a paper on my fiction before. spatch ordered from Desfina to celebrate. I have had salt cod with skordalia and dandelion greens and eggplant and loukaniko and goat's milk custard and a fractional amount of mead. I think I have to reconcile myself to the fact that I lecture reasonably well so long as I just think I'm enthusing about something.