You shine so different on another

Despite skepticism from the weather forecast, we observed the beginnings of the lunar eclipse through rolling cloud-wrack and made the decision to run for the high ground of Prospect Hill, where we were rewarded with the smoked-glass copper of totality in clear patches of sky, not that my camera was faintly decent at capturing the effect.



Not being a fifteen-year-old digital camera, we had a wonderful time spotting for the increasingly covert moon as we walked up to the park and then back across the Easter bridge, sometimes losing it in the clouds or the skyline, always catching it again by its low stained smolder. There were more people than we had expected at the park, but we settled ourselves downslope and watched some remarkably fearless rabbits lollop past us, awaiting the return of their lunar representative. The gesture of stuffing my rain hat into spatch's pocket on the way out the door was either successfully apotropaic or totally superfluous. It was a beautifully shadowed moon.

You asked if I had read Apollinaire

I was supposed to have a relatively important doctor's appointment this afternoon, but right before the weekend it was suddenly canceled and rescheduled almost a month out and so now my medical plan for the rest of this month is . . . crickets? Stubbornness? I am in objectively better shape than I was two weeks ago—rushthatspeaks observes that while I am still coughing, I no longer sound like I need to be shipped out to a sanatorium in the Rocky Mountains—but I wouldn't call it good when I take a day out walking and then I spend two days lying around like a noodle. By my serious estimation, it has been at least nine months since I did not have to spend the majority of my time lying around like a noodle. It's boring and does nothing to release me from my obligations to capitalism. Have some links.

1. Catherine Rockwood, "Goliath by Tochi Onyebuchi." I served as a linguistic consultant for this review, but also having lived in New Haven, specifically in a building and a neighborhood that have since been surreally gentrified, the novel's portrayal of future Yale sounds about right to me.

(In the same issue of Strange Horizons, please check out R.B. Lemberg's "The broken hill and the breath." The poem is dear to me.)

2. Matthew Cheney, "The Rats in Our Walls: An Essay." On Lovecraft and irrationality, the reality of narratives and the realities of the people who make and encounter them, William Faulkner and Madison Grant and Franz Boas, eugenics and ancestor trouble, and imagination. It's great.

3. The context is, depressingly, the death of microclimates, but I was still delighted to see this headline turn up in the sidebar of another article I was reading: "Caesar's favourite herb was the Viagra of ancient Rome. Until climate change killed it off." I acquired this sort of secondhand fondness for silphium via Catullus more than twenty years ago and it's just never going away.

4. Courtesy of a friend who is not on DW: a really operatic waistcoat.

5. Courtesy of selkie: a good loophole.

I just want to be out in sunlight: I feel starved for it. A line of mine got used as a tag for a post quoting H.D., which does make me feel like I have arrived.