But, when they should transform to newts, are naughty and erratic

[sovay]

Yesterday I felt optimistic enough about this cold to go out and meet ratatosk for lunch at Dave's Fresh Pasta and then hang out until the evening, trying not to cough on anyone too badly and mostly succeeding. (He has two books of Walter Garstang. I got to watch a puppet feed a cat. It was great.) Today I am back to drinking soup and sounding like a TB ward. Rabbit, rabbit. Other less festive noises. Links.

1. I didn't know anyone had written a revamp of Five Children and It. Can someone who isn't me read this first and tell me what on earth it's like?

2. I have tickets next week for Peter Maxwell Davies' The Lighthouse at the Boston Lyric Opera. I've never heard the opera, but it's based on the mystery of the Flannan Isles light (and I got a discount for being an ex-Opera Boston subscriber). I am looking forward.

3. I hope people do come to refer to this work, academically, as the Whoopensocker Dictionary.

4. cucumberseed: Cookiethulhu.

5. This documentary really sounds like porn for me.

Comments

[sovay]

Please do, if it's not a pain.

It's not a pain if I do it through music.

For years, my standard audition aria was a song called "The Black Swan." I heard it for the first time in high school; it gave me nightmares.

The sun has fallen and it lies in blood
The moon is weaving bandages of gold
O black swan, where, o where is my lover gone?
Torn and tattered is my bridal gown and my lamp is lost

With silver needles and with silver thread
The stars stitch a shroud for the dying sun
O black swan, where, o where has my lover gone?
I had given him a kiss of fire and a golden ring

Don't you hear your lover moan?
Eyes of glass and feet of stone
Shells for teeth and weeds for tongue
Deep, deep down in the river's bed, he's looking for the ring
Eyes wide open, never asleep, he's looking for the ring

The spools unravel and the needles break
The sun is buried and the stars weep
O black wave, o black wave, take me away with you
I will share with you my golden hair and my bridal crown

O take me down with you
Take me down to my wandering lover
With my child unborn

The title character of The Medium is a fraud. Her particular clientele are griefstricken parents, convinced that their dead children communicate with them through the vocal talents of Monica, Madame Flora's never-seen daughter, and the silent puppet-mastery of Toby, the mute, feral boy she took off the streets of Budapest one starving winter. The two of them are not much older than the ghosts they pretend to be; they play at love as if it is one more new trick and it is beginning to turn into the real thing—shy, capricious, cruel. Madame Flora drinks heavily, clutches her daughter like her rosary and beats Toby when the strange, wordless way he looks at her begins to trouble her conscience; they are used to her rages. What they are not used to her is her fear. At the seance, she felt something touch her: a cold, cold hand at her throat. Monica swears she saw nothing. Toby only stares, as uncanny a thing as one of his puppets. If she's lucky, she's only losing her mind to drink. She cannot shake the terror that for once in her false life, she called up something true—and it is not a plaintively singing daughter or a laughing infant boy. The first act closes as she shivers in her daughter's arms, praying while Monica sings a lullaby from her own not-so-long-ago childhood, to soothe her. Drowned lovers and dying suns. If the ghost in the opera is real, I don't think Madame Flora is the one who made it manifest.