Oh, what delight is ensnared in this wild affection
I'd never had a book launch before. More people should have book launches. They're great.
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rushthatspeaks picked up me and spatch at three in the afternoon and it is a sign of the comparative mildness of the weekend traffic that it only took us until five o'clock to get to the Providence Arcade. I checked in with the Lovecraft Arts & Sciences Council; we did not get out of the bookstore without a couple of initial purchases; we drank lemonade at New Harvest Coffee & Spirits. nineweaving showed up, and teenybuffalo, and a_reasonable_man, and rax, and a number of people who are not on Dreamwidth and I was delighted to see. I was informed afterward that the bookstore sold out of Forget the Sleepless Shores even before the reading. That was neat.
The reading itself was both a lovely experience and really fun. s.j. bagley introduced me; I had planned to read one longer story for the first half of the event, but instead I read my still unpublished ghost poem for Hirsh Glik (and sang the relevant verse of "Zog nit keyn mol"—vi a parol zol geyn dos lid fun dor tsu dor) and followed it with a chain of shorter pieces, "Exorcisms," "Notes Toward the Classification of the Lesser Moly," "Imperator Noster," and "The Depth Oracle." After a brief break during which Rob bought me a glass of the Ardbeg Corryvreckan, which is named after a whirlpool and tastes like a fire in a peat bog, there were questions from s.j. and the audience, which is how I ended up talking about the sea-roads of the Phoenicians, research K-holes, the myth of Alexander's sister who became a siren, nostalgia and nationalism, A Canterbury Tale (1944), non-linear time, the three-dimensional structures of words and music and narrative, film noir and the recorded world obscured by its received image, pre-Code movies and the world that was always there, punching Nazis. We relocated into the bookstore afteward; I signed books for people, the new collection and two surprising copies of The Dybbuk in Love. Greer bought me a copy of Mark Fisher's The Weird and the Eerie (2016). I bought a DVD of the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society's The Call of Cthulhu (2005), since I remembered loving it. I may be bound to write about Nemesis for Fiona Maeve Geist.
And then since some of us had not eaten for eight hours or kind of all day, we went out with Rax and *iae to Pizza J, where the quarter-pound meatball is very impressive and so are the whiskey-cola BBQ seitan wings, but more impressive is the fact that a pizza called Hulk Out and chiefly characterized by hot sauce, blue cheese aioli, and candied jalapeño slices is not a stunt pizza; it's a real pizza and it's delicious. Would order again. Would even consider ordering the King Tidal Wave even though I don't like Hawaiian pizza because Julian's has now conclusively proven that they do weird pizza well. I forgot that it's not possible for one person or even two people who have eaten anything else to finish one of their ice cream sandwiches, but since they make them with coconut-milk ice cream it was still worth ordering. I watched Rob and Rush-That-Speaks play pinball. We drove back to Boston through thickening fog that made tentpoles out of the highway lights and faded the skyline off into the soft dark; night-lit as the Zakim Bridge always is, we could see no higher than the forks of the pylons. When we got out of the car, it smelled like the sea.
I like both of the pictures Gillian Daniels took of me. I am wearing the necklace I got fromhandful_ofdust at Readercon, the one called the Nereid's Lavender. Rob's phone got blurry in the low light, but I really like this one of his. I was interested in whatever I was saying.
This was a really good day.
rushthatspeaks picked up me and spatch at three in the afternoon and it is a sign of the comparative mildness of the weekend traffic that it only took us until five o'clock to get to the Providence Arcade. I checked in with the Lovecraft Arts & Sciences Council; we did not get out of the bookstore without a couple of initial purchases; we drank lemonade at New Harvest Coffee & Spirits. nineweaving showed up, and teenybuffalo, and a_reasonable_man, and rax, and a number of people who are not on Dreamwidth and I was delighted to see. I was informed afterward that the bookstore sold out of Forget the Sleepless Shores even before the reading. That was neat.The reading itself was both a lovely experience and really fun. s.j. bagley introduced me; I had planned to read one longer story for the first half of the event, but instead I read my still unpublished ghost poem for Hirsh Glik (and sang the relevant verse of "Zog nit keyn mol"—vi a parol zol geyn dos lid fun dor tsu dor) and followed it with a chain of shorter pieces, "Exorcisms," "Notes Toward the Classification of the Lesser Moly," "Imperator Noster," and "The Depth Oracle." After a brief break during which Rob bought me a glass of the Ardbeg Corryvreckan, which is named after a whirlpool and tastes like a fire in a peat bog, there were questions from s.j. and the audience, which is how I ended up talking about the sea-roads of the Phoenicians, research K-holes, the myth of Alexander's sister who became a siren, nostalgia and nationalism, A Canterbury Tale (1944), non-linear time, the three-dimensional structures of words and music and narrative, film noir and the recorded world obscured by its received image, pre-Code movies and the world that was always there, punching Nazis. We relocated into the bookstore afteward; I signed books for people, the new collection and two surprising copies of The Dybbuk in Love. Greer bought me a copy of Mark Fisher's The Weird and the Eerie (2016). I bought a DVD of the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society's The Call of Cthulhu (2005), since I remembered loving it. I may be bound to write about Nemesis for Fiona Maeve Geist.
And then since some of us had not eaten for eight hours or kind of all day, we went out with Rax and *iae to Pizza J, where the quarter-pound meatball is very impressive and so are the whiskey-cola BBQ seitan wings, but more impressive is the fact that a pizza called Hulk Out and chiefly characterized by hot sauce, blue cheese aioli, and candied jalapeño slices is not a stunt pizza; it's a real pizza and it's delicious. Would order again. Would even consider ordering the King Tidal Wave even though I don't like Hawaiian pizza because Julian's has now conclusively proven that they do weird pizza well. I forgot that it's not possible for one person or even two people who have eaten anything else to finish one of their ice cream sandwiches, but since they make them with coconut-milk ice cream it was still worth ordering. I watched Rob and Rush-That-Speaks play pinball. We drove back to Boston through thickening fog that made tentpoles out of the highway lights and faded the skyline off into the soft dark; night-lit as the Zakim Bridge always is, we could see no higher than the forks of the pylons. When we got out of the car, it smelled like the sea.
I like both of the pictures Gillian Daniels took of me. I am wearing the necklace I got from
handful_ofdust at Readercon, the one called the Nereid's Lavender. Rob's phone got blurry in the low light, but I really like this one of his. I was interested in whatever I was saying.
This was a really good day.
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Thank you! I had such a good time.