This is what water, wind and time and toil reveal

The mail brought my contributor's copy of Not One of Us #84, containing my poem "The Burnt Layer." It's the one with the five-thousand-year-old sky axe and α Draconis; it is short and important to me. The flight issue is a powerhouse, showcasing the short fiction and poetry of Jeannelle M. Ferreira, Zary Fekete, Gretchen Tessmer, Francesca Forrest, and Patricia Russo among no-slouch others. I love the warping truss bridge and the birdflight of the covers courtesy of John and Flo Stanton. You can read a review, pick up a copy, submit work to the next issue and I recommend all three. This 'zine is a seasonal constant. It even feels autumnal at the right time of the year.

Are there some aces up your sleeve? Have you no idea that you're in deep?

Nothing enlivens an afternoon like hearing from your primary care physician that actually last week you almost died, especially since it didn't feel like it at the time. Continued proof of life offered from the stoplights of rush hour. Have some links.



1. Transfixed by a dapper portrait of Yuan Meiyun, I discovered it is likely a still from her star-making, genderbending soft film 化身姑娘 (1936), apparently translated as Girl in Disguise or Tomboy. In the same decade, it would fit right into a repertory series with Viktor und Viktoria (1933) or Sylvia Scarlett (1936). To my absolute shock, it is jankily on YouTube. Subtitled it is not, but I really expected to have to wait for the 16 mm archival rediscovery.

2. Because I had occasion to recommend it this afternoon, Forrest Reid's Uncle Stephen (1931) does not seem to rate in the lineage of time-slip fantasies, but for its era it is the queerest I have encountered, the awakening sense of difference of its fifteen-year-old protagonist erotically and magically mediated by Hermes in his aspect as conductor of souls and charmer of sleep, dreams figuring in this novel with the same slipperiness of time and identity that can accidentally bring a secret self like a stranger out of an unknowing stratum of the past. It's all on the slant of ancient Greek mysticism and the pollen-stain of a branch of lilac brushed across a sleeper's mouth and a lot of thinking about the different ways of liking and then there's a kiss. It was written out of a dream of the author's and it reads like one, elliptical, liminal, a spell that can be broken at a touch. I have no idea of its ideal audience—fans of Philippa Pearce's Tom's Midnight Garden (1958) and E. M. Forster's Maurice (1971)? I read it in the second year of the pandemic and kept forgetting to mention it. Whatever else, it is a novel about the queerness of time.

3. I am enjoying Phil Stong's State Fair (1932), but I really appreciated the letter from the author quoted mid-composition in the foreword: "I've finally got a novel coming in fine shape. I've done 10,000 words on it in three days and I get more enthusiastic every day . . . I hope I can hold up this time. I always write 10,000 swell words and then go to pieces."