So give me the ghost, give me the crumbs, and something to help me sleep at night

I do not understand the phenomenon whereby actually sleeping makes me even more exhausted, but I don't like it: I would prefer to be writing things and I need to work. Have some links.

1. I am fascinated by the existence of Terence Davies' Benediction (2021), both because it's a biopic of Siegfried Sassoon and I hadn't even heard it was in the works. It has a hell of a cast, even if I will inevitably complain that it's not that hard to cast a Jewish actor for a Jewish part—he didn't start Roman Catholic. Seeing Peter Capaldi credited as the older version of Sassoon suddenly made me want to see him in Stoppard's The Invention of Love.

2. In case your life contains an insufficiency of lesbians, please enjoy Beatrice Fenton and Marjorie Martinet. Also this on-set photo from Bound (1996) and its magnificent tag.

3. Courtesy of sholio: Torchwood Three TikTok headcanon accepted.

4. Courtesy of moon_custafer: a great face on a tailoring student from 1955.

5. I had never heard of seasteading before this article: "The disastrous voyage of Satoshi, the world's first cryptocurrency cruise ship." I have to say that offshore pirate radio stations, thalassocracies, and the Principality of Sealand all sound cooler to me, but don't double-feature as well with libertarians walking into bears.

I finally have a lap desk for Bertie as opposed to a succession of large flat books and Autolycus wants to sleep on it instead, of course.

Dragged and washed with eager hands

When I returned from my appointment this morning, the mail had brought my contributor's copy of Not One of Us #68, containing my poem "Fascination." It was directly inspired by the discovery of the so-called sorceress' toolkit at Pompeii in 2019; the title comes from the Latin for charm, enchant, bewitch. It's a ghost poem, like most of my poems of the ancient world. The issue's conjoined theme of birth and death is taken up even more directly by stories and poems by Isa Arsén, Alexandra Seidel, Andrin Albrecht, Sarah McGill, and more. Submit, support, keep making strange: the traditional exhortations, but this 'zine is worth them. It is still small, saddle-stapled, black-and-white, with the occasional interior illustration and more often eerily photographic covers. This is the twentieth September. I am so glad to be published in its pages still.