When you spoke of the seven wonders and you reached in your coat for your telescope

[sovay]

This was not a bad week. There was the wiped-flat exhaustion from Readercon that I failed to notice until Tuesday or so, but there was also my brother's birthday and Legend of Korra with gaudior and The Blues Brothers (1980) with derspatchel at midnight, which I may now consider the ideal time to start watching that movie. I have been listening to Anaïs Mitchell's Young Man in America (2012), which is a kind of epic cycle of American myth; it's not so much that it pulls back from the archetypal scope of Hadestown (2010) as it is a different way of focusing the same body of music and stories, the stretching shadow of the Depression. Yesterday, however, was a bad day. I got a poem out of it, but it was still a very bad day.

Today, the mail arrived. I am looking at:

1. A certificate for my poem "Tapping the Vine" placing second in the 2011 Dwarf Stars Award.

2. Copies of Gil Adamson's The Outlander (2007) and M.R. James' Casting the Runes and Other Ghost Stories, sent me by handful_ofdust.

3. The Alan Turing T-shirt ajodasso sent me a link to on Tuesday and which I ordered promptly, because I know a necessary item of clothing when I see it.

Okay, universe, I'm sure there's a point in here somewhere.

Have some panoramic views of Mars.

Comments

[three-magpies.livejournal.com]

Best wishes for a better day and thank you for a sharing of Mars.

I was going to tell a story about Turing, but the words are coming slant-wise.. Another day, then.

[ashlyme.livejournal.com]

Thankee for the Martian vistas! I'm glad you had postal goodness. I hope you feel better now.

The Turing tee looks nice. I zipped through my first reading of this entry and saw "M. R. James T-shirt"; I have a facetious eye.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

That Mars panorama is fabulous. So hard to wrap my mind around the thought that that's a whole nother planet. I can't get there from here. But it's there. Looking like a place I could walk to, given enough time.

[ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry for the dies horribilis, and I hope today will be a better. I'm glad there at least wasn't a bad week before it.

Congratulations on the certificate! I'm happy for the books and t-shirt.

Thanks for the views of Mars! (I know, intellectually, that I'll not, but on some level every time I see something like this I hope I'll suddenly see thoats and flyers and red and green people, or at least a wooden landship under sail, with a snarling-beast figurehead and wheels spun of crystalline wire.)

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

Nice haul! For some reason, when I look at Mars I get the Wallace & Gromit theme tune runningmthrough my head...

Nine

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

Whoo-hoo! How excellent they got there that quickly; I hope you enjoy them both.

Yeah, it's been a weird week over here--constant rain, which was fun for a while in that it finally broke the heat, but then became wearing. Still, today I netted a truly outrageous haul of stuff from various DVD stores, including a Civil War zombie film, a cult movie about LSD that makes all your hair fall out, a copy of Jose Ramon Larraz's Vampyres, a 1980s adaptation of Stoker's The Jewel of Seven Stars in which Charlton Heston falls in love with his own daughter, The Big Easy, the Criterion copy of Roeg's Walkabout, MIchael Winterbottom's Code 46, Nina Paley's Sita Sings the Blues, Ken Russell's Altered States and the legendary Queen of Black Magic, an Indonesian film featuring a pennanggalan.

[strange-selkie.livejournal.com]

You aten't dead. There is that. And I'm tossing things around for the magazine of That Nice Mr. Benson.

[clarionj.livejournal.com]

I'm coming here late and hope the days have improved! Congratulations on the poem award. You continue to fill the world with tactile beauty in your words.

(So strange how your poetry, and no one else's I can think of, always makes me imagine eating the images. Okay, that sounds weird, but it's like trees in fall. There is something so striking in that color that...it's not that I taste flavor, but ...what? Maybe it's a return to infancy and the suckling, the need to experience the new by putting it in our mouths? Or maybe it's that I feel I've consumed something? Your words, phrasings, images ...well, I didn't make this any less weird, did I.)