I was blindsided by your steady arms held out

I am not interested in tempting fate, I just wish to note that I had a really nice day with my husbands. rushthatspeaks came over in the afternoon; he brought my long-deferred Christmas present from nineweaving, Christopher A. Faraone's spectacular-looking The Transformation of Greek Amulets in Roman Imperial Times (2015), which includes recipes and rituals in its appendices. Mamaleh's was closing early when I called, but agreed to deliver to us nonetheless so that we got our 50/50s and whitefish salad and duck pastrami. We set the table, which was amazingly domestic. Autolycus was preemptively sequestered. After dinner, while spatch transcribed notes for a project, Rush-That-Speaks and I repaired to the couch and watched the Wachowskis' Speed Racer (2008), which looked like an '80's video game filtered through '50's Technicolor and was completely delightful. "Terrible what passes for a ninja these days." Hestia slept on the heating grate under the bed; Autolycus emerged from his sequestration and gently tested gravity. My brother drove by and dropped off homemade chicken soup and rolls. It was pretty cool. My new book made me think instantly of the copper-wire fascinus that lives in the glass-fronted cabinet, which ladymondegreen sent us all those years ago.

Dreaming, you fall into being

Tonight we made baked beans with cornbread for dinner. I really love this skillet.

I have never done anything with it myself and nothing ever occurs to me to, but the old association of fairies with the dead is an important piece of the folklore to me. It's the crux of Hope Mirrlees' Lud-in-the-Mist (1926); it never fell entirely out of the literature, but I think of it as having fallen out of fashion over the twentieth century until Susanna Clarke re-popularized it with Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004); I realized while describing a scene to spatch that it's present in Elizabeth Goudge's The Valley of Song (1951). The ships of cloud sailing into the Valley carry the dead for whom the door of crystal at the highest, coldest peak of the world opens in a blaze like the sun and moon and trumpets as it never does for anything still of the mortal world and when the door is closed again, its light drains away like sunset among the precipices of ice. When some of the human characters descend in turn into the sea in search of another who has gone down to the other crystal door, the one at the bottom of the great waters that pour forever from the stars into the abyss, they do so in a shell of mother-of-pearl which was once a sail fallen like a petal from the last of the cloud-ships as it drifts past into the stars. I should be allergic to this book beyond the beauty of its imagination, but I have never hurt myself on its Christianity, which I can't say of C.S. Lewis. rushthatspeaks once accurately summarized the Valley as "theologically located on the outskirts of Heaven, but . . . metaphysically in the land of Faerie." Of course the dead pass through it. I had just forgotten that they do until I was telling someone else about it.

We watched Fred Zinnemann's The Sundowners (1960) after dinner, with milkshakes and a movie cat. I am starting to dislike the summaries on Criterion as much as the ones on TCM. Whatever the original novel was like, it is a movie about different ideas of home, including other people. In any case, it went with the mysteriously Australian ginger beer we found in the refrigerator.

I am still crushingly tired and would be fine with not being so, thanks, any time now. selkie sent me a good article about the delivery of a letter.