I heard the wings beat on the streets tonight

[sovay]

I went to Porter Square Books and bought the recent Penguin collection of Arthur Machen, The White People and Other Weird Stories. I drank herbal chai and read two stories out of S.T. Joshi's American Supernatural Tales (2013), which is for the record a beautifully designed hardcover. Tim Kendall's Poetry of the First World War: An Anthology (2013) is the first such I've seen that includes female poets: Charlotte Mew, Mary Borden, Margaret Postgate Cole, May Wedderburn Cannan. I had heard of none of them beyond Mew and I wonder how many more I don't know about.

I walked home with my book when I ran out of chai. I met derspatchel for dinner at Hana Sushi and ate slightly more fish than I was expecting. (No regrets. More sushi should include both spicy salmon and chopped apple.) I want to watch Mark Gatiss' The Tractate Middoth (2013), but I can't find it anywhere online.

Frances Hardinge writes what she calls "Lovecraftian culinary fiction" (I thought it was more like ecology by Mervyn Peake). Daniel José Older writes about Lovecraft.

I want to know why I become ambitious only when I am too stupid to get anything done.

Comments

[rosefox]

I want to know why I become ambitious only when I am too stupid to get anything done.

Fear of success?

[sovay]

Fear of success?

I don't think so; I would like very much to be successful. I am tired of existing in a very small circle. It's more that it seems profoundly useless for me to think of complex writing projects when I'm not even getting enough sleep to feel that I'm doing my actual, paying job effectively. (I need a better actual, paying job while we're at it, but that's another conversation.)

[rosefox]

Wanting to be successful and fearing success aren't incompatible. I'm just wondering how much of that sense of uselessness comes from Tiny Wittgenstein, who risks getting tinier every time you accomplish something and may be fighting back against that.

Of course, I might just be projecting!