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

[sovay]

I'd never encountered poetry by women on that war before, and now I feel slightly ashamed for never having noticed that lack, because of course women would have written about it, and some of them would have been poets.

It's a very strange absence. I think some of it must come from the assumption that "war poet" is synonymous with "poet who was a soldier," like so many of the generation of World War I, but that automatically writes out all experiences of combat that were not directly, officially military (tell that to all the ambulance drivers) and the effects of living through a war as a civilian, which is not the same thing as being unaffected by a war. And then you cut that with straightforward sexism—it's not a woman's place to write about war—and I'm not surprised that I'd never seen any female war poets anthologized before, I'm just sorry. It would have been useful.