Myth Happens

In the midst of everything, we still have birthdays, and for spatch's fifty-first I took him to Porter Square Books and on the roundabout way home we collected dinner from Il Casale. It started to snow on the way back, the light salting flakes of an all-day deep-freeze. I have my fingers crossed for an Arctic explosion this weekend.



I have written another fill (AO3) for threesentenceficathon. WERS played Dave Herlihy's "Good Trouble" (2025) and I had to get home to trace his voice to Boston's own post-punk O Positive. I wish I could call the hundred-year tides against the people who have no right to the streets of my grandparents' city. Failing that, it still matters to be alive.

My plans to sleep out a recovery from Arisia were somewhat complicated by the move-in of the new upstairs neighbors and the resonating chamber of feet and furniture our bedroom immediately downstairs of this process necessarily turned into, but the snow remains beautifully fallen and is not even supposed to rain back into immediate slush or, worse, spring.

I am re-reading Kathryn M. Drennan's To Dream in the City of Sorrows (1997) for the first time since it came out and had completely forgotten the introduction by J. Michael Straczynski in which he designates it the first fully canonical novel in the Babylon 5 tie-in line. Despite the volumes of Harlan Ellison I was tracking down in used book stores and reading at the time—his credit as creative consultant was a point in the show's favor—it was not until years later that I caught since how much of his nonfiction voice had been adopted by JMS. "How difficult a task was this? Job would've packed it in, Hercules would've retired, and Orpheus would've decided that his days spent in Hades weren't really that bad."

The Post-Meridian Radio Players have now opened auditions for their spring show: Jeeves & Wooster: Hijinks and Shenanigans. I am seriously considering throwing myself on a slot for the genderswapped adaptation. It would be something of an exercise if I went for it; most of my performance skills do not translate into straight acting and I am frankly missing the facility with accents specified in the sides or I'd be able to code-switch out of being asked all the time where mine's really from. There was an intrusion here from Tiny Wittgenstein which has since been deleted. But even if it's just the hangover from Arisia, I have not auditioned for anything since 2019 and so long as I could decouple the experience from actually landing a part, it suddenly looked as though it might be fun.

Indeed, I had never heard of hickory oil. I am not however thrilled by the prospect of trading off maple syrup.

I may feel like a dishrag, but if so it's a dishrag who had a wonderful time returning to Arisia after six years, even if the ziggurat on the Charles is still a dreadful place to hold a convention. For the Dramatic Readings from the Ig Nobel Prizes, I performed selections from W. C. Meecham and H. G. Smith's "Effects of Jet Aircraft on Mental Hospital Admissions" (British Journal of Audiology, 1977) with what I hope was an appropriately haggard channeling of my sleepless night and Leonie Cornips' "The semiotic repertoire of dairy cows" (Language in Society, 2024) with what I hope was an appropriately technical rendition of cow noises. I heard papers on the proper techniques of nose-blowing, whether snakes dress to the left or the right, the sexual correlations of apples. It feels impossible, but it must have been my first time onstage since onset of pandemic. Readers who overstayed their allotted two minutes were surrounded by a chorus of bananas.

I had forgotten how much socializing my attendance of conventions used to entail. I turned the corner for registration and immediately spotted a nineweaving, followed in close succession by a choco_frosh, a_reasonable_man, and a sorcyress. I was talking to the latter in the coat check when Gillian Daniels came in and now I have a zine-printed copy of the second edition of her chapbook Eat the Children (2019/2026). I had not lengthy enough catch-up conversations with awhyzip and rinue and am now in possession of a signed copy of Nothing in the Basement (2025). I brought water with me and kept forgetting to duck outside to drink it. Dean gave me a ride home afterward and commented on my tired look, which was fair: six, seven years ago I could sprint through programming even after a night of anaphylaxis or a subluxed jaw and these days there's a lot less tolerance in the system. It seemed to be a common refrain. If I have fun and don't take home any viral infections from this weekend, it'll be a win.

Tomorrow, panels.

Today was the yahrzeit of the molasses flood. I was last at Langone Park for the centenary, since which time the field has been renovated and a new marker erected in memory of the disaster and its dead. Seven years ago feels nearly a century itself.

Speaking of man-made needless awfulness, I have been made aware of the locally vetted aggregate of Stand with Minnesota, a directory of mutual aid, fundraisers, and on-the-ground support against the onslaught of ICE. All could use donations, since internet hugs are of limited efficacy against tear gas, batons, bullets to the face and legs. Twenty-three years ago feels like several worldlines back, but the Department of Homeland Security sounded absurdly, arrogantly dystopian then.

The fourth and last of this week's doctors' appointments concluded with an inhaler and instructions to sleep as much as possible. My ability to watch movies remains on some kind of mental fritz which upsets me, but I liked running across these poems.

Running this many days without sleep, I find it hard to tell whether I had an insight about creativity this weekend or just reinvented a 101-level objection to LLMs and so-called generative AI, but it ocurred to me that such technologies are not capable of allusions. Their algorithms are not freighted with the same three-dimensional architecture of associations which accrete around information stored in the human cold porridge, all the emotional colors and sensory overtones and contextual echoes which attend the classic example of a word like tree when you throw it out across the incommensurable void between one human mind and another to be plugged into their own idiosyncratically plastic linkage of bias and experience whose least incompatibility may be the difference between a bristlecone and a birch and Wittgenstein has to lie down with a headache, but all of these entanglements form as much of the texture of a writer's style—of any human communication—as the word cloud of their vocabulary or their most commonly diagrammed sentences. It has always interested me to be able to detect the half-rhymes or skeletons of familiarity in the work of other writers; I have always assumed I am reciprocally legible if not transparent from space. I've seen arguments against the creativity of LLMs based on intentionality, but the unintended encrustrations seem just as important to me. By way of illustration, this thought was partly sparked by this classic and glorious mashup.

I was delighted to find on checking the news this morning that a new Roman villa just dropped. Given the Iron Age hillforts, the twelfth-century abbey, the Georgian country house, and the CH station, Margam Country Park clearly needed a Roman find to complete the set. I have since been informed of the discovery of a similarly well-preserved and impressive carnyx. Goes shatteringly with a villa, the Iceni tell me.

I joke about this rock I spend most of my time under, but how can I never have heard of Marlow Moss? The Bryher vibes alone. The Constructivism. And a real short king, judging by that jaunty photo c. 1937 with Netty Nijhoff. Pursuing further details, I fell over Anton Prinner and have been demoralized about my comprehension of art history ever since.

Last night I read David Copperfield (1850) for the third time in my life. It has the terrible feel of a teachable moment. In high school I bounced almost completely off it. About ten years later, I enjoyed the dual-layered narration and was otherwise mostly engaged by the language. Now it appears I just like the novel, which I have to consider may be a factor of middle age. Or I had just read the necessary bunch more of Dickens in the interval, speaking of traceable reflections, recurring figures; my favorite character has not changed since eleventh grade, but I can see now the constellation he's part of. It seems improbable that I was always reading the novel while waiting for chorus to start, but I did get through Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) in the down time of a couple of rehearsals that year. I was not taking either of the standard literature classes, but I had friends who left their assigned reading lying around.

I have to be at three different doctors' offices tomorrow. I could be over this viral mishegos any second now.

While we seem to have skipped actual plague, all of my households have acquired the going lurgi and my head feels like a balloon which has been filled with concrete and may at any second fall off. I have not been ill with a pharmacologically suppressed immune system before. I hadn't been sure it would be capable of running even a low-grade fever.

I have him so totally identified with the role of Neroon on Babylon 5 (1994–98), I keep forgetting that John Vickery in common with many actors who could handle the hours of makeup made several appearances on Star Trek, although the time I actually seem to have seen him in that universe involved no enhancements beyond near-catatonic terror as the sole survivor of a creepily derelict death-ship in TNG's "Night Terrors" (1991). Perhaps it was just lost to the sands of fanzines, but I was genuinely surprised that no one on AO3 ever filled in some kind of comfort for a character who spends nearly his total screen time telepathically looping through cryptically traumatized echoes and crying. Just when you think you have a handle on other people's id.

It is not reasonable that for two years the earth has been bereft of a rust-black little cat with cut-lime eyes, my miracle, my salty boy, my sassafras, while it suffers the weight of human people who are not worth one of his twenty-six claws, snagged in my bathrobe as he clambered to my shoulder for his terrycloth time after a shower. I miss turning back the covers in this weather to find his sincere blink up from the bedclothes, the absolute trust in the soft curl of his back that no one would shift him from his burrowed comfort. I miss the notes in his purr, from the musical edge of wanting to the subterranean roar of contentment, the whole architecture of his body vibrating like throat singing with the little whiffle that went in and out of his voice, his signature trill. I miss the unretractable click of his claws that announced his progress and the calluses of his desert-rose pads with which he gripped fiercely for human touch. From childhood I was taught that cats turn into flowers and Autolycus lies with his grave goods at the roots of the forsythia I have twice watched bloom since his death; the candle lit for him after sunset burns and his sister did not spring immediately off the bed when I stumbled into it, nauseated and head-aching. I am not without cat in my life. But I am without this cat and he was of inestimable worth to the world.

Doubtful as it may be under present conditions to find encouragement in anything of military origin unless it's the USS Princeton in 1844, about twenty-seven seconds into the two minutes' patriotism of Warship Week Appeal (1942) I cracked up.

Two hundred feet exactly of no-credits 35 mm, the object in question is a trailer produced for the Ministry of Information, essentially the same concept as the film tags of WWI: a micro-dose of propaganda appended to a newsreel as part of a larger campaign, in this case a sort of public information skit in which it is supposed that Noël Coward on the Denham sets of In Which We Serve (1942) is approached by Leslie Howard, slouching characteristically on with his hands in his pockets and his scarf twisted carelessly label-out, anxious to discuss a problem of National Savings. "How do you think we can make an appeal so it won't quite seem like an appeal?" With limited screen time to realize their meta conceit, the two actor-directors get briskly down to explaining the mechanics of the scheme to the British public with the shot-reverse-shot patter of a double act on the halls, but the trailer has already dropped its most memorable moment ahead of all its instructions and slogans, even its brief mnemonic rhyme. Diffident as one end of his spectrum of nerd heroes, Howard apologizes for the interruption, excuses it with its relevance to naval business, and trails off with the usual form of words, "I'm sure you won't mind—" to which Coward responds smoothly, "I'm delighted to see you. And I know perfectly well—as we rehearsed it so carefully—that you've come to interview me about Warships Week." He doesn't even bother to hold for a laugh as Leslie snorts around his unlit cigarette. It really does not feel like a bit. The interjection may or may not have been scripted, but Coward's delivery is lethally demure and his scene partner's reaction looks genuine; for one, it's much less well-timed or dignified than the smile he uses to support a later, slightly obligatory joke about the income tax, which makes it that much more endearing. It's funny to me for a slant, secondhand reason, too, that has nothing to do with the long friendship between the two men or further proof of Noël's deadpan for the ages: a dancer with whom my mother once worked had been part of the company of Howard's 1936 Hamlet and like all the other small parts, whenever her back was to the audience and the Hollywood star was stuck facing the footlights, she tried to corpse him. One night she finally succeeded. Consequently and disproportionately, watching him need the length of a cigarette-lighting to get his face back, I thought of her story which I hadn't in years and may have laughed harder than Leslie Howard deserved. If it's any consolation to him, the way his eyes close right up like a cat's is beautiful, middle-aged and underslept. It promotes the illusion that a real person might say a phrase like "in these grim days when we've got our backs to the wall" outside of an address to the nation.

Not as much consolation to the MOI, Warship Week Appeal accomplishes its goal in that while it doesn't mention for posterity that a community would adopt the ship it funded, the general idea of the dearth of "ships—more ships and still more ships" and the communal need to pay down for them as efficiently as possible comes through emphatically. It's so much more straightforward, in fact, than I associate with either of its differently masked actors, I'd love to know who wrote it, but the only other information immediately available is that the "Ronnie" whom Coward is conferring with when Howard courteously butts in is Ronald Neame. Given the production dates of their respective pictures, it's not difficult to pretend that Howard just popped over from the next sound stage where he was still shooting The First of the Few (1942), although he is clearly in star rather than director mode because even if he's in working clothes, he is conspicuously minus his glasses. What can I tell you? I got it from the Imperial War Museum and for two minutes and thirteen seconds it cheered me up. Lots of things to look at these days could do much, much worse. This interview brought to you by my appealing backers at Patreon.

This administration has run so hard from the start on leaded fantasies, the presence of a fossil fuel in its latest scream for the headlines seems macabrely apropos. Oil is indeed a lucratively unrenewable resource, but aren't those equally heady fumes of the Banana Wars and Neptune Spear? In my own throwback to the twentieth century, I haven't been able to get Phil Ochs out of my head. It was in another of his songs that I first heard of United Fruit. I live in endless echoes, but I am tired of these threadbare loops of empire that were already sticky shed and vinegar when another fluffer of American exceptional stupidity hung out his banner of a mission very much not accomplished. Is it the Crusades this time or Manifest Destiny? War Plan Red hasn't panned out so far, but we can always rebrand the Monroe Doctrine. Colombia! Cuba! Greenland! Daddy's shadow and Deus vult. "Every generation of Centauri mourns for the golden days when their power was like unto the gods! It's counterproductive! I mean, why make history if you fail to learn by it?" I was thirteen when I heard that line and I understood the question. Who knew I was going to spend the rest of my life finding out just how many people were never even interested in trying?

The afternoon's mail brought my contributor's copy of Not One of Us #85, containing my poem "The Avalon Procedure." It is the Arthurian one, in debt to and argument with Bryher. It belongs to the outsider issue which kicks off the 'zine's fortieth year of alienation, characteristically incarnated by the short fiction and poetry of Steve Toase, Devan Barlow, Lauren Hruska, and Gwynne Garfinkle among others. The threshold shadow of the cover art by John and Flo Stanton is an excellent advertisement, or harbinger. Pick up a copy or contribute to the strangeness yourself. I remain so glad it sneaked into our reality.

"These clocks are like Time herself. Magnificent edifices, but secretly fragile. In need of constant attention . . . Forgive me. My pet subject, Time." I didn't realize until I opened the jewel case that Sigil (2023) was dedicated to the memory of Murray Melvin: it was his last recording for Big Finish, released posthumously. It starts like a classic M. R. James with a series of weird and hauntological misfortunes attending a three-thousand-year-old bronze bird ever since its ill-omened excavation in the Victorian era and then it twists much more cosmic, with a pure sting of Sapphire & Steel. I can't tell if it was designed as a farewell, but it makes a tantalizing final communiqué from Bilis Manger, a gorgeous, wickedly silken and knowing performance from Melvin whose voice caresses a stone circle because it's "an ancient timepiece" and can put a harvest-withering contempt into a statement like "I've never owned a scatter cushion in my life." There's a sort of promotional interview at the end of the CD, but it poignantly does not include Melvin. The last we hear of him is in definitive character, so much time echoing backward and forward in his voice that was then eighty-nine human years old and still made you think there could be younger barrows, meadows, stars. "What could murder a murder of crows?"

I had no idea about this historical reenactment at Prospect Hill, but I am happy to read of its turnout in the new snow. I have not gotten the sestercentennial onto my mental calendar. I am still not convinced of this decade at all.

That was the year that was no good. I kept up with my website and my presence on AO3 and slept terribly and spent six days in hospital.

I published one new piece of fiction, although a meaningful one to me:

"Hyperboloids of Wondrous Light" in Not One of Us #81, January 2025.

Very little new poetry:

"The Ghost Summer" in Weird Fiction Quarterly Winter 2025: Ghosts, April 2025.
"The Burnt Layer" in Not One of Us #84, September 2025.
"Below Surface" in Not One of Us #83, June 2025.

One reprint:

"Twice Every Day Returning" in Afterlives: The Year's Best Death Stories 2024 (ed. Sheree Renée Thomas), Psychopomp, December 2025.

Nearly as much fanfiction as all of the above, counting the fills I transferred to AO3 and the one I left in place:

"Fall from the Sky" (Repeat Performance), January 2025.
"Floriography" (M*A*S*H), January 2025.
"A Good Accountant, All Right" (I Walk Alone), January 2025.

Very much less than I had wanted for Patreon:

Cover Up (1949), January 2025.
Decoy (1946), January 2025.
Grand Jury Secrets (1939), February 2025.
Lost Boundaries (1949), February 2025.
A Bomb Was Stolen (S-a furat o bombă, 1962), February 2025.
Black Kitten Micro-Thon 2025 [Final Offer (2018), "Come Back Mrs Noah" (1977), "Contact" (1981), Other Other (2024), Once in a New Moon (1934)], February 2025.
"Poison" (Alfred Hitchcock Presents, 1958), March 2025.
No Publicity (1927), April 2025.
A Bell for Adano (1945), May 2025.
City of Fear (1959), June 2025.
Ladies (2024), June 2025.
The Sea Wolf (1941), July 2025.
None Shall Escape (1944), July 2025.
I Won't Play (1944), August 2025.
The Gaunt Stranger (1939), August 2025.
The Perfect Murder (1988), August 2025.
The Hot Rock (1972), September 2025.
The Innocents (1961), September 2025.
Heat and Dust (1983), September 2025.
The Immortal Story (1968), October 2025.
Marooned (1994), October 2025.
Girl Stroke Boy (1971), October 2025.
Fear in the Night (1972), November 2025.
Enys Men (2022), November 2025.
Blind Spot (1947), November 2025.
Defence of the Realm (1985), December 2025.
A View from a Hill (2005), December 2025.

My major achievement of the last twelve months looks like not dying. More than one member of my family could say the same. Happy New Year. A healthy year, a more than endured one. Mir zaynen af tselokhes.