Your mother arrives from the world of the dead

[sovay]

My poem "Wisdom" has been accepted by Mythic Delirium. It's a piece I conceived of while staying with strange_selkie and darthrami last July, though it turned out to want to be written at this year's Readercon; it has to do with the postwar fate of the fools of Chelm and is entirely unrelated to the fact that Tisha B'Av began tonight, except that I find the conjunction appropriate.

This afternoon yielded frozen yogurt from BerryLine with Eric (I correctly diagnosed the existence and location of the original store on Arrow Street from the presence of a passerby with a medium-sized cup of blueberry-banana, having been previously unaware of any locations other than the one on Mass. Ave.) and a successful pass through two used book stores: I am now in possession of Jane Campion's screenplay for The Piano (1993), David R. McCann's Early Korean Literature: Selections and Translations (2000), Nathaniel Deutsch's The Maiden of Ludmir: A Jewish Holy Woman and Her World (2003), and Théophile Gautier's My Fantoms (2008). The last is making me particularly happy; if Gautier was not one of Tanith Lee's formative influences, then evidently he should have been one of her muses, because the seven stories collected and translated by Richard Holmes are populated by diabolical actors and obsessed painters and beautiful vampires and priests and sexually predatory ghosts of Pompeii; I love the Symbolists. I may go back for the children's picture book about Paganini, if it's not gone by the next time I'm in Harvard Square. It had a terrifying angel.

I have got a dentist's appointment tomorrow.

Comments

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Some shops seem to change their location at whim, and the streets of Cambridge also seem given to strange and capricious shifts, so you are very lucky to have found that yoghurt shop. Your book finds are great; if I recall correctly, David McCann did some great translations of Korean poetry (well, I don't read Korean, so actually I can't say if they're great, but the poems in English are wistful and angry and beautiful).

Congratulations on the poem, and that's good news about the dentist, too.

[sovay]

and the streets of Cambridge also seem given to strange and capricious shifts

I believe that; I hadn't even known Arrow Street existed until I started walking in its probable direction. (The passerby was carrying a very new cup of blueberry-banana, which is how I knew there had to be another location; with the heat yesterday, she couldn't have walked up from Porter Square without arriving at Harvard with a cup of yogurt milkshake. I just retraced the corner she'd come around and down the most likely angle of small hitherto unnoticed street. Sherlock Holmes wouldn't have awarded me any prizes, but since it resulted in frozen yogurt, I was quite pleased.)

Your book finds are great; if I recall correctly, David McCann did some great translations of Korean poetry (well, I don't read Korean, so actually I can't say if they're great, but the poems in English are wistful and angry and beautiful).

I have been cautioned about his introductions, but I am looking forward to the poems themselves.

Congratulations on the poem, and that's good news about the dentist, too.

Thank you!