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?

[alankria.livejournal.com]

...I was never told at school, at my all-girls school, that women wrote WW1 poetry too.

[ashlyme.livejournal.com]

A good haul of books. I missed The Tractate Middoth too, which really annoyed me.

Thanks for the link to the Hardinge! It looks great. I'll read that later.

[ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com]

Tim Kendall's Poetry of the First World War: An Anthology (2013) is the first such I've seen that includes female poets...

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.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Maybe it's only when you're exhausted that your time isn't spoken for? And therefore your brain can do its free-ranging, inspiration-gathering thing?

I am approaching too-stupid right now, and--did you know that if you're very exhausted, apparently you stop seeing things in a continuous fashion and instead see them strobe-light style? And that's what happens when monks and warriors meditate on a waterfall, waiting to see it stop (or so I'm told by some source which, why am I sure it's authoritative??)--which is A Thing. They do see it stop, because in their exhaustion, they stop integrating the images, and they become strobelike. Stills of the waterfall.

Which I mention because that was how I got this post. Empty cup of chai. Oh, and before that, a cluster of female poets. And fish--but not with the poets or in the chai. Though the salmon was spicy, but perhaps not Lovecraftianly culinary?