Myth Happens

Out of intolerable exhaustion, I may have slept close to twelve hours last night. The dreams I can remember were banally about a T station that does not exist in the middle of a salt marsh, much less have a sort of ferry situation for cars. Less fortuitously, our kitchen was abruptly deprived of water this weekend and the property manager has not yet sent a plumber to take a look at it. We have kept the taps faithfully dripping through the well below freezing temperatures, but as we have no control over the state of the pipes in the still uninhabited upstairs apartment, we are concerned. The last time something went wrong with the kitchen sink, half our pantry got ripped out. Have some links.

1. Following that meme about random geographic coordinates which assumes instantaneous transportation to the location with nothing but the objects currently on one's person, I rolled 28.36967, 80.57272 and seem to have been dropped in the middle of the Sharda River closest to the village of Majhaura in Uttar Pradesh. The good news is that it's south of the whitewater rapids and the rumors of man-eating goonch and when it's not monsoon season, it seems to have a relatively placid flow, albeit to the detriment of the surrounding communities it's been changing its course onto for decades. It's overcast, in the Fahrenheit forties, a little past seven in the morning. I am going to vote that I will be cold, exhausted, annoyed, and lose my shoes, but probably not drowned. As I know an extremely small number of words in Hindi and none whatsoever in Bhojpuri, it may take me a little while to explain the situation.

2. I had never heard of the Television Village:

This lack of formal training came back to bite the presenters multiple times. Hornby remembers being chastised by a producer for ruining "continuity" after getting a perm; Terry Jones of Monty Python fame tried to eat the studio's pet goldfish during an interview; and the whole production was put at risk when a Weetabix box that was being used as a prop to hold up scripts out of sight of the camera was accidentally broadcast, potentially breaching advertising rules. Numerous people involved with the station recall the broadcast being interrupted, only for it to turn out that a sheep had chewed through cable wires.

spatch who did public-access television and college radio in the Pioneer Valley around the same time nodded in enthusiastic recognition as I read selections out to him. I am hoping that my keyboard survives the spit-take of the Weetabix box.

3. I had no idea that steak tips were specific to New England. I wonder if that means my parents only started making them after moving to the Boston area. They always seemed to occupy an intermediate niche between kebabs and London broil.

4. Intrigued by a photo of Neal Ascherson, I vectored through his aunt Renée and discovered that a film I have wanted to see since grad school was rediscovered this summer. I had not been aware that The Cure for Love (1949) had actually ever been lost: I just knew it as the sole film directed by co-star and producer Robert Donat which never did me the courtesy of turning up on any of my streaming services or the free internet. If it made it to TPTV, fingers crossed for TCM.

5. How did I miss the existence of The Vatican Stole the Menorah and We're Going to Steal It Back (2025), a one-shot, dreidel-powered TTRPG complete with a Player's Guide for the Perplexed? Obstacles include some schmuck and the Popemobile, allies include space lasers and the Golem of Prague. I hope they make their end-of-year goal for the print edition.

P.S. I have just been informed of the existence of a bilingual Sanskrit–Greek stele from the third century CE. This is such a neat planet. I wish people would not make it so difficult to inhabit.

In the afternoon there was eggnog, in the evening there was roast beef, and after dinner with my parents and my husbands and nineweaving, there was plum pudding with an extremely suitable amount of brandy on fire.



At the end of a battering year, it was a small and a nice Christmas. There was thin frozen snow on the ground. In addition to the traditional and necessary socks and a joint gift with spatch of wooden kitchen utensils to replace our archaically cracked spoons, I seem to have ended up with a considerable stack of books including Robert Macfarlane's Ghostways: Two Journeys in Unquiet Places (2020), Monique Roffey's The Mermaid of Black Conch (2020), and the third edition of Oakes Plimpton's Robbins Farm Park, Arlington, Massachusetts: A Local History from the Revolutionary War to the Present (1995/2007) with addenda as late as 2014 pasted into the endpapers by hand, a partly oral history I'd had no idea anyone had ever conducted of a place I have known for sledding and star-watching and the setting off of model rockets since childhood. The moon was a ice-white crescent at 18 °F. After everything, as we were driving home, I saw the unmistakable flare of a shooting star to the northwest, a stray shot of the Ursids perhaps after all.

It is still sleeting more than snowing here, but it sticks in the occasional patch of shadow. Farther from the water, it's frosting up like winter. The Ursids were washed out by this year's weather, but somewhere beyond the clouds they are still streaking light.

I spent a remarkable portion of this day having conversations related to employment, but one of them was a thorough delight. I hadn't known about the practical, ritual links of the Jewish Association for Death Education.

We lit the candle for my grandfather's yahrzeit, our ghost story for Christmas Eve.

The most disturbing part of A View from a Hill (2005) is the beauty of Fulnaker Abbey. From a dry slump of stones in a frost-crunched field, it soars in a flamboyance of turrets and spires, a dust-gilded nave whose frescoes have not glowed in the wan autumn sun, whose biscuit-colored fluting has not been touched since the dissolution of the monasteries. His customarily tight face equally transfigured, Dr. Fanshawe (Mark Letheren) turns in wonder through the rose windows of this archaeological resurrection, a ruin to the naked, post-war eye, through the antique field glasses which first showed him the distant, fogged, impossible prospect of its tower in a chill of hedgerows and mist, medievally alive. In a teleplay of sinister twig-snaps and the carrion-wheel of kites, it's a moment of golden, murmuring awe, centuries blown like dandelion clocks in a numinous blaze. It is a product of black magic only a little more grimily direct than most reconstructions of the past through a lens of bone and it would be far more comforting as a lie.

Visible in appropriate hindsight as the first in the irregular revival of A Ghost Story for Christmas (1971–78), A View from a Hill was adapted for the small screen by Peter Harness and faithfully preserves the antiquarian creep of its source M. R. James while remixing much of the detail around its central conceit, its adjustments of period and tweaks of class taking the story from an eerie sketch of the skull beneath English pastoral skin to an explicit meditation on the double edges of disinterring the past, specifically who decides what the transcendence of time is worth and who foots the bill. It can be mistaken for a purely material question. Aristocratically cash-strapped and as tone-deaf to transcendence as to manners, Squire Richards (Pip Torrens) would be the first to admit he's only called in an old school favor from the Fitzwilliam because his inheritance of antiquities might have something in it to bail out the stately crumbling home. "Never really my thing, standing in a field, grubbing about in the past. One wants to get oneself out there, don't you think? Get a bit of life." Fortunately for that piece of breathtaking tactlessness, Fanshawe came prepared to be condescended to, his archaeological credentials carefully organized to offset his grammar-school accents and implicitly junior standing, packed off to the countryside to investigate a miscellany of Crimean souvenirs and unremarkable Roman ware. He was not braced to discover a double of sorts in the amateur figure of F. D. Baxter (Simon Linnell), the village antiquary still remembered suspiciously for the macabre chime of his death with the obsessions which preceded it. "Fancied himself an archaeologist, like yourself . . . Used to be very bothered with ransacking and rummaging all the history of the place." To be classed with a half-educated watchmaker predictably flicks his defenses, but Fanshawe seems nevertheless to feel some sympathy for this ill-reputed character whose notes led unerringly to worthwhile finds—the kind of professional half-life he might have had to settle for himself, a pre-war stratified generation or two ago. Besides, Baxter was just as transfixed by that mysterious apparition of an abbey, judging from the beautiful, precisely drawn elevation that Fanshawe finds among his papers, complete in every corbel and tracery and dated to 1926 when the squire and the less eccentric evidence of his senses assure him that nothing remains but the cold little scatter of stones that he cycles out to inspect by the rime-glint of afternoon, looking as he paces the dimensions of its absence in his fallow windbreaker and the overcast of his own breath at once tougher and more contemplative, on his own ground for once instead of the back foot of his diligent, tiresome job. His fingers move over a half-buried, moss-crisped stone as if its lost architecture were held like amber within it. Even an inexplicable wave of panic after a puncture at the wooded top of the locally named Gallows Hill can't dim his fascination with the site and the brass-bound binoculars which seem to pierce time to show him more than any survey or excavation or illustration ever could, the past itself, not its denuded, disarticulated remains. Reflections from the Dead: An Archaeological Journey into the Dark Ages, reads the title of the manuscript he brought to edit in his spare time. He looked, too, through the eyes of that curious, earth-browned skull-mask that came, like the binoculars, out of Baxter's collection: "Some of it is pretty bizarre." Of course, there all his troubles began.

James reserves this fact for the punch line of "A View from a Hill" (1925), the ickily logical explanation for the optical disillusion by which placid scenery may become a deep-soaked site of violence. The teleplay drops it square in the middle of its 40 minutes, a night-flashed miniature of folk horror narrated by the aged, watchful manservant Patten (David Burke) with masterful suggestion. "My father served on the inquest. They returned a verdict of unsound mind." Frustrated with the human limits of fieldwork and too much alone with the tools of his trade, Baxter is locally averred to have taught himself as much necromancy as archaeology when he rendered the bones of the dead of Gallows Hill in order to paint the lenses of his field glasses into ghost-sight, an optical coating of the unlaid past. His rain-caped figure sketching on an autumnal hillside would be a study in the picturesque except for the feverish avidity of drawing a dead building from life, the success of his spectral optics which merely conceal the grisliness of their cruder predecessor, the freshly unearthed front of a skull. Harness does not have him cry as in the original story, "Do you want to look through a dead man's eyes?" but visualizes the line until we wonder even whether it accounts for the accuracy of the unexcavated sites left behind in his notes, a sort of ground-penetrating radar of the dead. Or he had a real feel for the tracks of time in the land, for all the good it eventually did him: "What," the squire greets the payoff with meta-modern skepticism, obviously not the target audience for antiquarian ghost stories, "the hanged men came for Baxter because they didn't like their bones being boiled?" Fanshawe for whose benefit this ghoulish moral was actually exhumed doesn't commit himself that far. "It's an interesting story." Relocating it complicates him as a protagonist, but not beyond what either Jamesian canon or extra-diegetic relevance will bear. By the time he brings the binoculars back to the sun-whitened field where the abbey waits under its accretion of centuries, he knows too much to be doing it. Not only has he heard the story of their ill-fated creation, he's seen the drawings that support it, even experienced a dreamlike encounter in the bathroom of all places where the water swirled as cloudily as leached bone and the face flickering like a bad film behind its skull's visor belonged to a pale and crow-picked Baxter. As if their stolen second sight were as much of a beacon as the torch he flashed wildly around in the restless dusk, Patten attributed his terrifying sense of woodland surveillance to his possession of "those glasses." It makes any idea of using them feel intolerably foolhardy of Fanshawe, but more importantly it makes him complicit. Despite its cadaverous viewing conditions, Fulnaker Abbey is not an inherently cursed or haunted space: its eeriness lies in its parallax of time, the reality of its stalls and tapers in the twelfth century as much as its weather-gnawed foundations in the twentieth in one of those simultaneities that so trouble the tranquil illusion of a present. To anyone with a care for the fragility of history, especially a keen and vulnerable medievalist like Fanshawe, its opening into the same three mundane dimensions as a contemporary church is a miracle. For the first time as it assembles itself through the resolving blur of the binoculars, we hear him laugh in unguarded delight. None of its consecrated grandeur is accessible without the desecration of much less sanctified bodies, the poachers and other criminals who fed the vanished gibbet of Gallows Hill and were planted thick around it as the trees that hid their graves over the years until a clever watchmaker decided that their peaceful rest mattered less than the knowledge that could be extracted from their decayed state. It happened to generate a haunting—a pocket timeslip constructed without the consent of the dead who would power it, everyone's just lucky they stayed quiescent until attracted by the use of the device again—but it would not have been less exploitative had Baxter done his grave-robbing and corpse-boiling with supernatural impunity. No matter how gorgeous the temporally split vision from which Fanshawe begins to draft his own interior views, it's a validation of that gruesome disrespect and it's no wonder the dead lose no time doing him the same honors as the man who bound them to enable it.

Directed by Luke Watson for BBC Four, A View from a Hill is inevitably its own artifact of past time. The crucial, permeable landscape—Herefordshire in the original, the BBC could afford the Thames Valley—is capably photographed at a time of year that does most of its own desaturation and DP Chris Goodger takes visible care to work with the uncanniness of absence and daylight, but the prevalence of handheld fast cutting risks the conscious homage of the mood and the digital texture is slicker than 16 mm even without the stuttering crash zoom that ends in a superfluous jump scare; it does better with small reminders of disquiet like a red kite hovering for something to scavenge or the sketch of a burial that looks like a dance macabre. The score by Andy Price and Harry Escott comes out at moments of thinned time and otherwise leaves the soundscape to the cries and rustles of the natural world and the dry hollow of breath that denotes the presence of the dead. Fulnaker Abbey was confected from select views of the neo-Gothic St Michael's in Farnborough and Fanshawe's doctoral thesis sampled ironically from a passage of Philip Rahtz: The gravestones are indeed documents in stone, and we do not need to excavate them, except perhaps to uncover parts of the inscription that have become overgrown or buried . . . As a three-and-a-half-hander, the teleplay shines. Letheren's mix of prickliness and earnestness makes him an effective and unusual anchor for its warning to the heedless; even if that final explosion of wings in the brush is as natural as it sounds, Fanshawe will never again take for granted a truly dead past, nor his own right to pick through it as though it had no say in the matter. Taciturn except when essentially summarizing the original James, Burke avoids infodump through little more than the implication that Patten keeps as much to himself as he relates, while Torrens in tweed plus-fours and a total indifference to intellectual pursuits more than occasionally suggests a sort of rusticated Bertie Wooster, making his odd expression of insight or concern worth taking note of. Linnell as the fatally inventive Baxter is a shadowy cameo with a spectral chaser, but his absorbed, owlish face gives him a weird sympathy, as if it never did occur to him how far out of reason he had reached into history. "Always had some project on the go or something. And pretty much the last job he did was finishing off those glasses you took." It is characteristic of James as an unsettler of landscapes and smart of the teleplay not to tamper with his decision to make the danger of their use entirely homegrown. Who needs the exoticism of a mummy's curse when the hard times of old England are still buried so shallowly?

I seem to have blown the timing by watching this ghost story for the solstice rather than Christmas, but it's readily available including on the Internet Archive and it suited a longest night as well as somewhat unexpectedly my own interests. I might have trimmed a few seconds of its woodland, but not its attention to the unobjectified dead. With all his acknowledged influence from James, I can't believe John Bellairs never inflicted a pair of haunted binoculars on one of his series protagonists—a dead man's likeness transferred through his stolen eyes is close but no necromantic banana. This project brought to you by my last backers at Patreon.

Last night on a snow-salted suburban road I saw a deer bound suddenly through the splash of the headlights, followed a moment later by what must have been a pair of coyotes because it's been centuries since there were wolves in this part of the world. It was so folkloric, I expected to see riders the next moment, or the moon. After days of sleepless free-fall and headache it hurt to breathe through, I spent much of this afternoon unconscious, which was terrible for my exposure to daylight but produced vivid dreams only occasionally suggesting a surrealist facsimile of same, such as the second-story view onto a green quadrangle where a policeman was bleeding out milk. Hestia is trying to climb through my arms as I type in her best doctorly fashion. In nearly half a lifetime of chronic illness, I don't think I have ever felt this daily-basis bad.

For the first night of Hanukkah, my mother accompanied me to None Shall Escape (1944) at the Harvard Film Archive. It snowed into the late afternoon, silver-dusting the unsanded streets. The wind chill feels like zero Fahrenheit. spatch and I lit the first night's candle for strength.

At this point if I have a circadian rhythm it seems to be measured in days, but last night after two doctor's appointments and an evening of virtual seminars through the euphemistically designated career center, I fell over for something like a cumulative thirteen hours and still got through this afternoon's calendar of calling more doctors and the next stage of the career center in time to run out into a cold pastel sunset out of which the occasional flake of snow drifted with insulting singularity. I am delighted by the rediscovery of silent Holmes and also by my camera's cooperation when trying again for the beautiful fungi I had spotted on an earlier walk, clustered on the stump of what used to be a sidewalk tree and has now pivoted to Richard Dadd. I dreamed intensely and have no idea what Alex Horne was doing in there.

It feels like cheating for the air to taste so much like the sharp tin tacks of snow when the sky is so clear that even through the white noise of the streetlights Cassiopeia comes in like pointillism and Polaris as bright as a planet. I saw none of the phi Cassiopeids, but the Geminids peak at the end of the week, with any luck on a night that cloudlessly doesn't make my teeth feel about to explode in my mouth. On that front, may I commend the attention of people in frozen boat fandom to this early twentieth century hand-painted stained glass window depicting Shackleton's Endurance? I spent my afternoon on the phone making sure of our health insurance in the bankrupt year to come: the customer service representative was a very nice science fiction person who agreed that it was time to reset this worldline on account of stupidity and for whom I apparently made a pleasant change from all the screaming and breaking down in tears, even more so than usual this year that never need have happened. I've been sent photographs of some really neat letters. Two cards arrived in the mail. My digital camera is showing further signs of deterioration, but a few evenings ago I caught one of those scratch-fired sunsets it's hard to wreck. I am aware of the collapses in the world, but I don't know what else to love.

Crossing recent streams, tonight I participated with rushthatspeaks in a reading of The Invention of Love (1997) in memoriam Tom Stoppard with a Discord group that does a different play every week. I was assigned Moses Jackson, the straightest himbo ever to play a sport. I consider it a triumph for the profession that I did not catch on fire enthusing about field athletics.

When I read in passing that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966) had begun life as a one-act comedy entitled Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Meet King Lear, I went to fact-check this assertion immediately because it sounded like a joke, you know, like one of the great tragedies of the English stage starting out as the farcical Romeo and Ethel the Pirate's Daughter and then a ringing sound in my ears indicated that the penny had dropped.

Speaking of, I have seen going around the quotation from Arcadia (1993) on the destruction and endurance of history:

We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?

Stoppard was not supposed to have known the full extent of his Jewishness until midlife, but it is such a diasporic way of thinking, the convergent echo of Emeric Pressburger is difficult for me not to hear. I keep writing of the coins in the field, everything that time gives back, if not always to those who lost it.

spatch and I have been married for twelve years. A round dozen of anniversary gifts looks as though it adds up to the woven road of silk. Here we are still, intertwined and traveling.