Myth Happens

I dreamed of taking a transcontinental train with as little difficulty as traveling to D.C., which I am not convinced has been the state of American rail for decades. Otherwise since my sleep has gone principally to hell again, I feel burnt and friable and past my last fingernail of whatever I am supposed to be doing. On the one hand we are a communal species; on the other I would like to feel I had any right to exist beyond what other people require of me.

I am relieved to see that the enraging article I read last night about the deep-sixing of Yiddish at Brandeis has since been amended to a reduced but not eradicated schedule, but it would have been best to leave the program undisturbed to begin with. The golem reference is apropos.

My formative Joan D. Vinge was Psion (1982/2007), which even in its bowdlerized YA version may have been my introductory super-corporatized dystopia, but I had recent occasion to recommend her Heaven Chronicles (1991), which I got off my parents' shelves in high school and whose first novella especially has retained its importance over the years, of holding on to the true things—like one another—even in the face of an apparently guaranteed dead-end future, the immutably cold equations of its chamber space opera which differ not all that much from the hot ones of our planetside reality show. Not Pyrrhically or ironically, it chimed with other stories I had grown up hearing.

Jamaica Run (1953) is an inexplicably lackadaisical film for such sensational components as sunken treasure, inheritance murder, and a deteriorated sugar plantation climactically burning down on Caribbean Gothic schedule, but it did cheer me that it unerringly cast Wendell Corey as my obvious favorite character, the heroine's ne'er-do-well brother whose landed airs don't cover his bar tab and whose intentions toward the ingenue of a newly discovered heir may be self-surprised sincere romance or just hunting his own former fortune, swanning around afternoons in a dressing gown and getting away with most of the screenplay's sarcasm: "What is this, open house for disagreeable people?"

I cannot yet produce photographic evidence, but the robin's eggs in the rhododendron beside the summer kitchen have hatched into open-mouthed nestlings. A dozen infant caterpillars are tunneling busily through the milkweed.

Last night's eight hours of sleep were more disrupted and fragmentary than the previous, but my brain wasn't wrong that in life Kenneth Colley was only a little taller than me and a year or so younger when he first sparked a fandom for Admiral Piett.

I read later into the night than planned because I had just discovered Irene Clyde's Beatrice the Sixteenth (1909), which would fall unobjectionably toward the easterly end of the Ruritanian romance were it not that the proud and ancient society into which Dr. Mary Hatherley awakens after a kick in the head from her camel while crossing the Arabian Desert has zero distinction of gender in either language or social roles to the point that the longer the narrator spends among the elegantly civilized yet decidedly un-English environment of Armeria, the more she adopts the female pronoun as the default for all of its inhabitants regardless of how she read them to begin with. Plotwise, the novel is concerned primarily with the court intrigue building eventually to war between the the preferentially peaceful Armeria and the most patriarchally aggressive of its neighbors, but the narrator's acculturation to an agendered life whose equivalent of marriage is contracted regardless of biological sex and whose children are all adopted rather than reproduced puts it more in the lineage of Theodore Sturgeon's Venus Plus X (1960) or Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) even without the sfnal reveal that Mêrê, as she comes to accept the local translation of her name, has not merely stumbled upon some Haggard-esque lost world but actually been jolted onto an alternate plane of history, explaining the classical substrate of Armerian that allows her to communicate even if it bewilders her to hear that the words kyné and anra are used as interchangeably as persona and the universal term for a spouse is the equally gender-free conjux. If it is a utopia, it is an ambiguous one: it may shock the reader as much as Mêrê that the otherwise egalitarian Armeria has never abolished the institution of slavery as practiced since their classical antiquity. Then again, her Victorian sensibilities may be even more offended by the Armerian indifference to heredity, especially when it forces her to accept that her dashing, principled, irresistibly attractive Ilex is genetically what her colonial instincts would disdain as a barbarian. Children are not even named after their parents, but after the week of their adoption—Star, Eagle, Fuchsia, Stag. For the record, despite Mêrê's observation that the Armerian language contains no grammatical indications of the masculine, it is far from textually clear that its citizens should therefore all be assumed to be AFAB. "Sex is an accident" was one of the mottoes of Urania (1916–40), the privately circulated, assertively non-binary, super-queer journal of gender studies co-founded and co-edited by the author of Beatrice the Sixteenth, who was born and conducted an entire career in international law under the name of Thomas Baty. I knew nothing about this rabbit hole of queer literature and history and am delighted to see it will get a boost from MIT Press' Radium Age. In the meantime, it makes another useful reminder that everything is older than I think.

As a person with a demonstrable inclination toward movies featuring science, aviation, and Michael Redgrave, while finally watching The Dam Busters (1955) I kept exclaiming things like "If you want the most beautiful black-and-white clouds, call Erwin Hillier!" We appreciated the content warning for historically accurate language. I was right that the real-life footage had been obscured for official secrets reasons. The skies did look phenomenal.

In the appendices of Alzina Stone Dale's 1984 edition of Dorothy L. Sayers and Muriel St. Clare Byrne's Busman's Honeymoon (1936), reproduced for the first time from a handwritten sheet by Sayers with an additional scribble from Byrne, I have found perhaps the greatest production note I have read in a playscript in my life:

Warning

The murder contrivance in Act III Scene 2 will not work properly unless it is sufficiently weighted. It is therefore GENUINELY DEADLY.

Producers are earnestly requested to see that the beam, chain & attachments & the clearance above the head of the actor playing CRUTCHLEY are thoroughly tested at every performance immediately before the beginning of the Scene, in order to avoid a POSSIBLY FATAL ACCIDENT.

How is it that in this our era of infinite meta when See How They Run (2022) was a real film that came out in theaters and not someone's especially clever Yuletide treat no Sayers fan has ever worked this note into a fictional production of Busman's Honeymoon where the blasphemed aspidistra exacted a worse revenge than corroded soot? I don't want to write it, I'm just amazed no one's taken advantage of it. I wouldn't mind knowing either if the 1988 revival with Edward Petherbridge and Emily Richards found a way of reproducing the effect without risking their Crutchley, since Byrne's "Note to Producers" describes the stage trick in technical detail down to the supplier of the globes for the lamp and she still agreed with Sayers—she wanted the warning inserted before the relevant scene in the acting edition—that it could wreck an actor if not set up with belt-and-braces care. Otherwise I am most entertained so far that according to Dale, while the collaboration between the two women was much more mutual than an author and her beta-reader, Byrne characteristically put in the stage business and directions which it seems Sayers was less inclined to write than dialogue. This same edition includes Sayers' solo-penned and previously unpublished Love All (1941) and testifies to the further treasury of the Malden Public Library, whose poetry section when we were directed to it turned out to be a miscellany of anthologies, plays, and biographies shading into what used to be shelved as world literature. I have three more Christies for my mother, another unfamiliar Elizabeth Goudge, another unfamiliar Elleston Trevor, some nonfiction on an angle of women's war work and the Battle of the Atlantic that I actually know nothing about, and the summer play of Christopher Fry's seasonal quartet. I am running on about a fifth of a neuron at this point, but rushthatspeaks bought me ice cream.

I screamed in dismay in the middle of the night because I had just seen the news that Kenneth Colley died.

I saw him in roles beyond the megafamous one, of course, and he was everything from inevitable to excellent in them, but it happens that last week spatch and I took the excuse of a genuinely fun fact to rewatch Return of the Jedi (1983) and at home on my own couch I cheered his typically controlled and almost imperceptibly nervy appearance aboard the Executor, which by the actor's own account was exactly how he had gotten this assignment stationed off the sanctuary moon of Endor in the first place, the only Imperial officer to reprise his role by popular demand. In hindsight of more ground-level explorations of the Empire like Rogue One (2016) and Andor (2022–25), Admiral Piett looks like the parent and original of their careerists and idealists, all too human in their sunk cost loyalties to a regime to which they are interchangeably disposable, but just the slight shock-stillness of his face as he swallows his promotion from frying pan to fire would have kept an audience rooting for him against their own moral alignment so long as they had ever once held a job. It didn't hurt that he never looked like he'd gotten a good night's sleep in his life, not even when he was younger and turning up as randomly as an ill-fated Teddy-boy trickster on The Avengers (1961–69) or one of the lights of the impeccably awful am-dram Hammer send-up that is the best scene in The Blood Beast Terror (1968). Years before I saw the film it came from, a still of him and his haunted face in I Hired a Contract Killer (1990)—smoking in bed, stretched out all in black on the white sheets like a catafalque—crossbred with a nightmare of mine into a poem. Out of sincere curiosity, I'll take a time machine ticket for his 1979 Benedick for the RSC.

He played Hitler for Ken Russell and Jesus for the Pythons: I am not in danger of having nothing to watch for his memory, as ever it's just the memory that's the kicker. No actor or artist or writer of importance to me has yet turned out to be immortal, but I resent the interference of COVID-19 in this one. In the haphazard way that I collected character actors, he would have been one of the earlier, almost certainly tapping in his glass-darkly fashion into my longstanding soft spot for harried functionaries of all flavors even when actual bureaucracy has done its best for most of my life to kill me. I am glad he was still in the world the last time I saw him. A friend no longer on LJ/DW already wrote him the best eulogy.

Because Hanscom hasn't held an air show in years, I have no idea what the hell passed over my parents' yard behind the unrelieved overcast except that it sounded like a heavy bomber, but not a modern one: an air-shaking piston-engined roar like who ordered the Flying Fortress, which were not to my knowledge even tested at the base. It suggested lost psychogeography and worried me.

Japanese Breakfast's "Picture Window" (2025) came around again on WERS as I was driving this afternoon. The line about ghosts and home keeps resonating beyond the pedal steel guitar.

I see we will be celebrating the Fourth of July out of spite this year. So go other holidays. Af tselokhes, John.

Rabbit, rabbit! I had to go for my annual physical this afternoon, but I stopped by Porter Square Books afterward to collect a book for my mother and look what was part of their summer sea-display:



I had wanted to write about so many queer films for June, but the month disappeared. Fortunately before we ran out of the formal observance of Pride, rushthatspeaks and I made it to Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Querelle (1982) at the Coolidge. It was adapted from the 1947 novel by Jean Genet, but I have never seen anything onscreen that more resembled the novels of Chip Delany. Meant in sincere compliment, it is one of the sweatiest films I have ever seen. It looks like it smells like a porno theater. Its antihero is straight out of Tom of Finland with his sailor's tight, tight white trousers and muscular cleavage revealed by the barest excuse for an A-shirt, his boyish, chiseled, louche face under his insolently cocked bachi in the sullen, enticing haze that never varies from the sodium-smoke of just after sunset or just before dawn, a perpetual cruising hour. The sea-wall of its fantasized Brest is studded with stone phalli, anatomically complete with slit and balls. All graffiti in town is dicks. The chanteuse of the dive bar sings Wilde like Dietrich, but some of the construction workers with their buff hard hats are playing video games while the naval lieutenant who pines for Querelle records his poetically criminal obsessions into a portable tape recorder. The bare-chested, leather-vested cop at the bar actually is a cop outside of it, where he looks just as fetishistic in his fedora and black leather trenchcoat. Every interaction between men looks like a negotiation or a seduction whether it is one or not, although on some level it always is, regardless of the no-homo excuses manufactured to allow their bodies to meet. Constantly, metaphysically, literally, this movie fucks. Its hothouse, bathhouse sexuality must have come in just under the cutting wire of AIDS. I have no idea what it would offer a viewer with no sexual or aesthetic interest in men except its philosophy, although as my husband notes the philosophy is actually quite good, deconstructing its hard masc signifiers as much as it gets off on them, dissolving in and out of the words and ultimately the life of Genet; the theatricality of its interlocked sets and swelteringly flamboyant lighting would look entirely natural on the stage. It quotes Plutarch and stages a hand job that without a glimpse of cock would have caused mass apoplexies in the Breen office. (Send it back in time, please.) It was my introduction to Fassbinder and if I had seen it as an adolescent, I imagine it would have had much the same effect as Tanith Lee. It was introduced by the series programmer wearing leather in its honor and a T-shirt for Kenneth Anger's Scorpio Rising (1963). It made a superb date movie.

After many travails and an extra plague year in transit, the latest of the Paleozoic Pals has made landfall from the Carboniferous.





My father adores his Diplocaulus salamandroides. My niece has been sent a picture of hers with its accompanying book, to be held in trust until her next visit. My mother has been presented with its enamel pin form, which is done in bands of lighter and darker purple instead of newt-like red and black. I had forgotten entirely about the stretch bonus of Bandringa rayi, whose spoonbill suggests the Amazon river dolphin of the Pennsylvanian period. I really am invested in the continued existence of the Paleontological Research Institution, which is one of the reasons I have gladly thrown in to its Kickstarters for almost ten years. The present being so very full of horror and stupidity, it is important that it can also produce such snuggable plush of the past.

Returned from the optometrist's, I have nocturnal eyes and mirrorshades. When spatch informed me that Zohran Mamdani is Mira Nair's kid, I remarked that it was a little like discovering that Madhur Jaffrey the author of cookbooks and children's books is the actor who introduced Ismail Merchant to James Ivory. I feel I really should have seen this video coming.

For the hundred and thirteenth birthday of Alan Turing, spatch and I drove to Gloucester to watch the sunset on the water, so, queer joy?





I have worn this T-shirt since his centenary in 2012: it is a word cloud derived from "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" (1950). The tide filled in around the barnacle-colored, seal-colored boulders we had climbed out onto, swirling the olivine shag of the rockweed in the late mirror of the sea. I had not been to Gloucester since before the last glaciation, in a warm autumn that was still cooler than this heat dome settled over Massachusetts like a fitted block of Death Valley. We saw the red-and-white blinks of buoys, the oil-slick necks of cormorants. We checked in on the ghost sign for Moxie at the top of Tablet Rock in Stage Fort Park. From our vantage point of one of the granite horns of Half Moon Beach, we saw three crewed boats practicing for what we realized later would be the races for St. Peter's Fiesta, the blessing of the fleet which had hung the streets with tricolor bunting and Italian flags and set up the Ferris wheel and concessions of a carnival as well as an open-air altar brilliantly painted with a seascape of Ten Pound Light, its foreground wheeling with gulls with their own successful fisher's catch in their beaks. The fisherman in his sunken-green bronze oilskins still holds the wheel against more than four centuries of the remembered drowned. Our designated clam shack had closed an hour before we expected it, so we drove down Route 1 in a sailor's delight of clouds like an electric fire and came to a bewildered halt in a retina-searing splatter of blue lights, because it turned out that half of Revere Beach was closed to traffic thanks to a hit-and-run on a state trooper. We managed nonetheless to salvage roast beef and fried clams from Kelly's at the cost of several miles' walk in the gelatinous night, which compensated at least with the white noise of waves at high tide. The cable-stays of the Christina and John Markey Memorial Pedestrian Bridge were lit up in rainbow neon. I admire Aimee Ogden's "Because I Held His Name Like a Key" (2025) for not being any of the things expected of a Turing fairy story. I look forward to whatever comes of these unshredded papers. We drove home covered in sea-salt and sweat-salt and an unavoidable admixture of strangers' weed smoke and I had a really nice time.

If telepathy is admitted it will be necessary to tighten our test up.
—Alan Turing, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" (1950)

Thanks to the effects of prolonged illness on my body, I have even more difficulty with it these days than in previous difficult years, but spatch took a picture of me on the way down the hill of Powder House Park that looked like I could still be the prow of a ship.



Listening to the radio in the car and tracking down songs at home, I seem to have amassed a small collection of music videos, more recent than not. I had never seen the studly single entrendres that accompany the blues-rock boasts of Elle King's "Ex's and Oh's" (2015). Rob identified the scratchy guitar chug in Sarah Barrios' "Thank God You Introduced Me to Your Sister" (2021) as a callback to Fountains of Wayne and thence the Cars, but it is a sapphic banger in its own right. It is generationally lovely to have the London Gay Men's Chorus backing up the acoustic version of Isaac Dunbar's "American High" (2024). Jean Dawson's "Pirate Radio" (2022) rocks like an Afrofuturist anthem and an autobiographical chantey at the same time. If it ever crossed your mind to wonder about a cross between the Preacher in True Stories (1986) and the High Voltage Messiah of The Ruling Class (1972), there's John C. Reilly in Jack White's "Archbishop Harold Holmes" (2025). The vintage riot grrrl of Halsey's "Safeword" (2025) is enthusiastically not safe for work. Patrick Wolf's "The Last of England" (2025) has so much Jarman in its DNA, it is almost gilding the lily to have filmed at Dungeness except that it feels like the correct acknowledgement. I just like the oneiric stop-motion of Witch Prophet's "Memory (feat. Begonia)" (2023).