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Because it is lashing rain against our windows even as we speak, the contractors have not been drilling and hammering our porch since daybreak and in consequence I slept and dreamed of the late discovery of an extra novel in Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain, newly published and illustrated in the style of Evaline Ness. (I had no idea she had taken her surname from her second marriage, to Eliot Ness.) In the way of dreams, it melted into a kind of AU remix by the time I was a few chapters in. The WWII echoes are always easier to see in Westmark, but they're all throughout Prydain far beyond the inspiring geography of Wales where Alexander was briefly stationed on his way to France; I assume someone has mapped them like the ghosts of the Western Front through Middle-Earth. There is presumably a larger project here about fantasy and war literature, crystallizing and changing shape throughout the twentieth century. Query: Susan Cooper and the childhood imprint of WWII, but also the cold white flame of the Light whose calculations and sacrifices would not turn a hair in John le Carré? "It is a cold world you live in, bachgen . . . I would take the one human being over the principle, all the time."

I feel as though I have stopped writing about almost anything that matters: I know that part of it is that the move and then injury and illness ate the month and concomitantly my concentration and my physical health is ground down beyond the question of reserves and has been since well before this time last year, but some of it is also feeling that there is nothing I should be talking about. I had a terrible time walking around Davis Square last night and feeling that I was surrounded by people playacting at 2019. As far as I know, I will never eat inside a restaurant again. I can't hang out all night in movie theaters or all afternoon in museums and I interact with bookstores in quick careful dives and it's no one's problem but mine, why can't I get with the program and pretend I have no medical factors that did not just evaporate when the economy needed to get back on track and ignore how much of the infrastructure around me has disintegrated in the last three years and everyone I know has been scraped past the bone. I don't think this country I live in understands grief.

On the other hand, I just fixed my twenty-six-year-old sound system by stripping and re-cutting the wires of the leads so that the speakers plug in more cleanly than their previous frazzled state and now it makes noise again and I feel a lot more competent than I did an hour ago when I had unscrewed everything and dust was obviously not the issue.