And as if the phantom ship had swept away with it all sign of life, the crowd vanished too

[sovay]

It is nauseatingly hot outside. I mean that literally. Running a half-hour errand on foot has made me feel physically sick. I have drunk water, eaten salt, and am sitting in front of a fan. This is not the weather I operate best in.

1. I really wish I were at Bard College right now. I had heard of Ethel Smyth's The Wreckers (1906), because the subject matter is germane to my interests and because it kept coming up in discussion of Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes (1945), sort of simultaneously as a forerunner of Britten's work and a point against the notion that English opera sat around looking at its fingernails for the couple of centuries between Purcell and Britten; I had heard of Smyth herself because she was a mostly lesbian suffragist as well as a composer and one of the models for Hilda Tablet. I cannot make either of the remaining performances. Anyone who lives in upstate New York and wants to tell me how it worked out, please go!

2. If these poems are representative, I need to read a lot more by Niall Campbell: "The House by the Sea, Eriskay" and "The Letter Always Arrives at its Destination."

3. Courtesy of rose_lemberg: all available evidence indicates Alyssa's father has been fishing in a hell dimension.

Even more than watching an opera about wrecking, I wish I were by the sea. I've been meaning to post this picture for months: it always looks like a summoning to me. I wish I had an offering that worked as well.

While I'm here at this address, however, I just opened a large package from yhlee and not only does it contain two year's best anthologies, a complete paperback set of Geraldine Harris' Seven Citadels (1982–83), and a splendidly cracky-looking manga by the name of MYth: A Promise (2007–2013), but there is also an assortment of Magic and Legend of the Five Rings cards tailored to my interests. I now have an Ancient Carp! (It's iridescent.) The flavor text makes me associate it unfairly with Leviathan. Thank you.

Comments

[kore]

Yeah, it was 90F here today and people in CA keep telling me "Well it's hot here too!" and I'm just like, but you are in a place where it is supposed to do that. Excess heat just also makes me physically sick. Ugh.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

That fish that Alyssa's father caught looks bigger on the inside than the outside. Hell fish are tardis fish?

Have you shown me "The Letter Always Arrives at Its Destination" before? Someone has. I love it.

ETA: Yes, you have. You shared it with me around May 13, 2014, and I then shared it here.

[gwynnega]

I've always been fascinated by Ethel Smyth, though the main work of hers I knew was The March of the Women. I really should look into more of her music. (Spotify has quite a bit of it, I see.)

Hooray for large packages of books, manga, etc.!

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

Have you read Seven Citadels? Alas, I haven't seen Geraldine in years, but she was one of my first first readers at Cambridge, one of the Jomsborg circle.

Nine

[oddmonster.livejournal.com]

This has nothing to do with your entry, but it is germane to your interests: Last night I played "Who Warbled Better?" on my late-night college radio show, putting Nina Simone's live 1964 version of "Pirate Jenny" up against Lotte Lenya's original Threepenny Opera recording of "Seeäuberung Jenny", and based on the popular vote, it was Lenya by a landslide.

I did not know of Lotte Lenya until you mentioned her on your journal and linked to the amazing Threepenny Opera recording. I just wanted to say thank you.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

I think the first I heard of Smyth was in relation to Juliana Horatia Ewing (one of those surprising chronological overlaps, as one thinks of them being in different eras, at least I do). Ewing's husband gave her harmony lessons. See https://books.google.com/books?id=ZmIJAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA110