Myth Happens

With the disclosure that I have not myself seen Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey (2026) despite it doing numbers at the Somerville Theatre in 70 mm, I read the kind of glowing profile of the film and its maker that leaves me wondering what he valued in it at all beyond its ability to be retold to his specifications:

"We broke the fragile bonds between men," he says after the massacre, essentially repeating the words he uttered about his earlier shame. "And for centuries of darkness to follow, the stories of Troy will only be sung." [. . .] And in case we haven't gotten the message, Odysseus delivers one final prophecy. When Penelope asks him why the stories of Troy will only be sung, he says, "Because songs will be all they have to remember those of us who could write." (At the collapse of the Bronze Age, written language was lost for centuries; we have no evidence of writing from this period. Surely nothing like that could ever happen again.) "A new dawn will break over the darkened world," Odysseus says. But his prediction isn't a happy one. He adds, "And all our mistakes will once again be forgotten." In other words, history will repeat itself. Again, he's talking to us.

There is indeed a lacuna of known literacy in the Greek language. By the eleventh century BCE, the syllabary of Linear B had ceased to be used to write Mycenaean Greek and it would take until the eighth century for inscriptions in the contemporarily recognizable Greek alphabet to start to show. (Elsewhere in the Mediterranean we find no comparable rupture in the record. Hittite cuneiform does conk out after the Late Bronze Age Collapse, but Luwian trucks right on through the Greek Dark Ages and Akkadian which got its start in the third millennium will persist in the written record as late as the first century CE. The Phoenician alphabet which provided the Greek template will run down through the destruction of Carthage into the Christian fourth century of Sirte. Sumerian may be too far east and inland to count for purposes of this parenthesis, but Egyptian hieroglyphs are close to four thousand energizer bunny years. There was not some kind of global, apocalyptic forgetting of the concept of writing. The Cypriot syllabary, in use into the Classical period, derives from Minoan Linear A.) It still feels breathtakingly culture-bound to conclude the retelling of an oral tradition by lamenting it as a means of transmission—the post-technological leftovers, second best of a fallen world, no real substitute for the hard historical fact of fixed and impartial, implicitly more civilized text. Those of us who could write. The ones who mattered? Who should have been telling the story? As if the Odyssey were not full of singers of tales from Demodokos to the Sirens to Odysseus himself and so much of it concerned with the shaping of stories, of histories, of memory beyond a punch line. As if the improvisation and reperformance of an epic tradition were inherently naïve and mendacious, larding rosy-fingered glasses of gods over the brutal truths of burnt walls. As if we're all still stuck at Hisarlık with Schliemann and its archaeological accuracy is the most important thing about an epic poem. Of course, what was lost when the lights went out over Hellas was exactly what we would have mourned most. What you should grieve is the impossibility of never hearing a passage from the Iliad or the Odyssey or any of the rest of the Epic Cycle as it would have been sung in those so-called Dark Ages, never twice the same around the formulae, a living story instead of its papyrus-fossilized bones. I am a text-oriented person, terrified by the current popular indifference to reality, and I was primed from early childhood to respond favorably to stories that disappear into their own meta: and, in time, only the bards knew the truth of it. Assuming an accurate report of this one, hell, no. How can you spend so many years with a story and still miss how it worked in its world? It makes a good mic drop. It's just a silly thing to say. Anyway, they'll remember you through the vase paintings, too.

I saw earlier this evening that the man in the White House is threatening to increase tariffs on Canada for the wildfire smoke, reminiscent of Leo Rosten's celebrated definition of chutzpah except specifically with arson. I can wish him the same luck with his lungs as with his reflecting pool. In any case, it is how I saw that Namaygoosisagagun First Nation has been entirely burned out by said wildfires and all donations toward emergency response and community recovery should be vectored through the Anishinabek Nation 7th Generation Charity. I hope my state is sending firefighters, as we have done in the previous fire seasons that start to char into one long combustible drought. I am not even sure we are getting to the healing of the world at this point, but it's better than further burning it down.

Acting on a suggestion from phi, I have successfully regained access to my files within Microsoft Word. It is less of a solution and more of a deferral than I would have liked, but since it enabled me to resume control of my own work without forking over any further monies to a corporation that just kicked the goalposts over onto the cross-country track, I am counting it as a species of victory and dreaming of arson. That the process was complicated by a glitch within one of Microsoft's own tools feels like one of those choices between malice and incompetence that there's no point in trying to make.

Yesterday I had to dash out into the sulfuric sunset to collect my interlibraried copy of Randolph Stow's The Girl Green as Elderflower (1980) from the Malden Public Library before it was shipped back out of reach again, but then I left with the predictable armful of books I had known nothing about prior to venturing into their multifarious stacks. Winston Graham's Woman in the Mirror (1975) trips over the rake of its own twist in the last two pages, but learning that it was revised from his earlier novel The Giant's Chair (1938) has made me curious whether the original more successfully stuck the Gothic landing. I have already lent my mother the Ghost Box-styled The Magic Valley Travellers: Welsh Stories of Fantasy and Horror (1974) for its unexpectedly sweet inclusion, under an alternate title, of John Wyndham's "Chinese Puzzle" (1953). The hallucinogenically mediated time travel of Daphne du Maurier's The House on the Strand (1969) looked in line with the strangeness of her short fiction. Joseph Conrad's Almayer's Folly (1895) may be in the public domain, but I hate reading novels off screens. For spatch I obtained histories of Penn Station and Sesame Street and we coughed our way back out into the 16 mm evening. The strip-mall hole-in-the-wall of Fresco's may have served me the largest and one of the most delicious roast beef sandwiches I have ever ordered in my life.

I checked out early on the fifth column shenanigans that make up the action of J. E. Harold Terry and Lechmere Worrall's The Man Who Stayed at Home (1914), but emotionally it is another radiation of the Scarlet Pimpernel, this time on the home front of World War I, and as such fascinates me with its fidelity to the drawl and the eye-glass, among other conventions of the silly-ass mask: "Hello, everybody! By Jove, I say, isn't it a jolly mornin' for the war, what?" Tonight's adventures in college car radio have included Sam & Dave's "Hold On, I'm Comin'" (1966), Frog Eyes' "The Akhian Press" (2004), and James Chance's "The Devil Made Me Do It" (1983). If I do not get some kind of time to myself before this month ends I may explode.

All day the light through the wildfire smoke has looked like a pair of Ray-Bans. It tints sulfurously through the windows like Eliot's fog or Gilman's wallpaper. Our house is not airtight and everything smells rasping and bitter. I have a wheeze and a nosebleed and we are nowhere near the epicenter. It is not even the metaphor of the trash fire; it is just the burning world.

Hestia did her winsome and inexorable best to collect six days' worth of back petting when I finally got home last night. She planted herself on the hall runner with her small paws foursquare and then disposed herself upon her side like an impatient odalisque. She interposed herself in every doorway so that I could not pass without ostentatious rudeness to cat. She ran under my hands as I unpacked and coiled her tail over my wrist and swatted peremptorily in the same spot so that I carry yet another red-scratched mark of the loving claws of kitten. She purred like a two-stroke engine. Just now she yawned her pink and particolored mouth and I petted her between her soft alert ears which smell so much sweeter than the surrounding air. It is a good thing to be in the same house as a small predator. She blinks slow gold.

I dreamed of Tarot cards and a stage show by a queer contemporary artist whose music did not exit the dream with me: electrochemical, the aesthetics of vintage video games. At the moment the balance of Readercon is still holding at worth it.

And then this morning the light snapped over like the shutter of a camera and the summer looks later than it is. I am sure the clouds of green weed coiled beneath the silt-gilded surface of the reservoir are some climatically invasive bloom, but they create the mermaid's hair illusion of a tidepool in fresh water. I saw a flotilla of three cygnets proceeding in a line between their protective parents, the retinal flickers of red-winged blackbirds, a mallard basking with the royal blue flash of her speculum feathers out. It was very hot and I came back feeling like a noodle, or possibly the Flat from Manly Wade Wellman's Silver John. Post-Readercon, have some links.

1. I have realized it is rare for me to write about actors from my childhood and Sam Neill was no exception, since I would inevitably have seen him first in Jurassic Park (1993). "The lovely paleontologist," my mother called him, even when we were watching Reilly, Ace of Spies (1983). I seem to have missed most of the big tickets of his CV beyond The Hunt for Red October (1990), The Piano (1993), In the Mouth of Madness (1994), which means I have plenty to choose from for his memory, although I would rather I had just been reminded of his character actor's commitment to being whatever a film needed; he never phoned himself in. spatch's film-streaming group dropped everything this morning and rewatched Event Horizon (1997), flag of the future Australia and all.

2. Strange Horizons has made its base goal for this year's Annual Fund Drive, which means there are four days left to fund it sufficiently further to pay its authors at their current rates rather than dropping back to the mere industry standard. It's worth chipping in for. Past $30,000, the regional special issues—a treasure of the magazine—return.

3. a_reasonable_man has used his Substack to trace the moral arc of the universe, especially as bent through the rhetoric of MLK and Obama and the life of Thomas Sims. Come for the cool professional anecdote, stay for the spiral of piercingly relevant time. I do await his further work on Theodore Parker.

4. Since I can't see Oliver Chris in Arcadia, I can at least read an interview with him about it. "Chris contends that since Bernard only knows about Byron, that's all he needs to know about too." I am delighted he's never changed his last name.

5. selkie imparted to me the news about Lindsey Graham yesterday morning. We will keep on outliving them, too. Did I mention that dave ring compiled a trans bog body unsyllabus?

I rely on the car radio experience of WHRB because for its evening concert it can reprise Gian Carlo Menotti's The Unicorn, the Gorgon and the Manticore (1957) and then after ten o'clock come out with Mecannique Rythmique's "Extase" (1981), the Terrorways' "Never Been to Borstal" (1979), and Pere Ubu's "Blue Velvet" (2006). Everil Worrell's "The Canal" (1927) is really very proto-Aickman right up until it explodes into bats.

For my second day of Readercon I had a blast.

Both panels were bangers. I was not joking when I said early in "The Bog Body Motif in Trans SFF" that we should edit an anthology on the topic: we had audience members with bog body stories, not to mention at least one non-me panelist. The conversation started with readings from Izzy Wasserstein and Seamus Heaney and ranged through questions of transformation, ecosystems, illegibility, persistence, continuity, fragility, and protection. I may have given instructions on how to sink someone in the Great Meadows. "SFF and Queer Cultural Memory" was anchored by an intergenerational span of forty years across five panelists and a vivid embodiment of pre-Stonewall and gay liberation memories in the person of David Gerrold, who taught me something I hadn't known about how custody and adoption laws shifted for queer people in America. (It was lesbians.) I feel I ran true to form by leaping straight from a formative encounter with Theodore Sturgeon's Venus Plus X (1960) to a recommendation for Irene Clyde's Beatrice the Sixteenth (1909). The audiences always ask moderator-grade questions.

I saw April Grant and Anke Kriske in flyby. I still spent most of my time in the dealer's room talking to Mike and Anita, but I walked out with Owen Hill's The Incredible Double (2009) and was handed copies of Antisocieties (2021), Ethics (2022), and Black Brane (2025) by Michael Cisco, each with their crimson seal-stamp of a hand of glory. I bailed on the Shirley Jackson Awards, but Ellen Datlow complimented the sea-blue waistcoat I was wearing for the first time, newly gifted by Merav.

And I can't remember the last time I ate at two restaurants in a week, but I had dinner with Michael and choco_frosh at the superlative Treasury, which we found via its advertisement of outdoor seating. It is slotted a little counterintuitively into a bland box of stores where I have purchased jeans from the L.L. Bean and seated us without a reservation and furnished us with tall thick petal-pink rose lassi and a smoke-deep dal makhani and a velvety stunner of an awadhi korma which won out over the mutton ghee roast because of the bone-in goat. The jeera rice was delicately savory enough to eat by itself. The butter naan flavored all our fingers. I could not think about tasting the masala chai negroni because of the chai, but it smelled like an intricate mechanism of spice and mahogany and reduced my dining companions to silence and poetry. When the server discovered that I couldn't eat the rasmalai tiramisu because of the coffee—it was on the house—she brought me a plate of rasmalai by itself, soaked in a minor kingdom's ransom of saffron and pistachio. It was nuts. I have leftovers for a week. It had been years.

Naturally my last panels are the earliest. This time, Homeric epic.

Afterward I felt that I should have recognized Brian Fairbairn and Karl Eccleston's Tommies (2022) at once as the work of the same filmmakers who introduced half the internet to Polari with Putting on the Dish (2015), not least because the two short films make such a nice double feature for the viewer who shares their abiding interest in historical diction, coded communications, and the infectious paranoia of the pre-decriminalization queer male UK. Dense for their snapshot runtimes, they require a similar willingness from their audience to entertain the past on its own terms and learn how to listen to it, whether it's a bombshell of intricate argot or an event horizon of the politely unspeakable.

Six pyrotechnic minutes on Hampstead Heath in 1962, Putting on the Dish is the wittier, higher-wire of the two, sustaining even through its hard zag of an ending a rapid-fire exposition of Polari to scream for. On top of a crash course in the range and variety of marginalized influences that cascaded into one voraciously colorful anti-language, it concisely demonstrates how two strangers side by side on a public park bench could have anatomized the exuberantly unexpurgated adventures of acquaintances or exchanged their own appraisals of well-packaged passers-by, openly under the radar of Lily Law. "Real fantabulosa bit of hard." Its barbed ciphers form a fragile safe space, advanced as casually as a noncommittal naff or bona and then more colloquially relaxed into with talk of floweries and dinarly and disappointingly dolly HPs. "Nada to vada in the larder?" – "Bijou." Nothing else automatically links the bolder and cagier persons of Steve Wickenden and Neil Chinneck—the invaluable screenplay gives their camp names as Maureen and Roberta—but in their shared appreciation of a zinger of defiant backchat, the hillside seems tranquil with possibility, at least until recalled to the realities that oblige a furtive countercultural jargon in the first place. Polari defaults so naturally to irony, getting a heart-punch out of it is an achievement, one of the few direct gestures in a vignette that rewards cryptography. Even the book in its pink jacket encodes its own implications. What English signals is nothing to say.

Down to the riddle of its title, Tommies is the more somberly ambitious slow burn, circling its fifteen minutes in the wings of the haut ton in 1814 around an invented yet all too imaginable coda to the infamous treatment of the Vere Street Coterie. An exercise in negative space, it never looks inside the molly house itself, shows nothing of the men who patronized it except through their social radioactivity, the cishet fascination with their queer customs. "When the police raided their den, they found a dozen men in a bed in one room and in the other a midwife helping a female grenadier give birth to a Wiltshire loaf!" Its Mayfair house is a curdled chocolate box, thick with the stifling half-light of a summer's evening and frantic with the trills and flutters of canaries like the tight catch in a throat or the snap of an expertly wielded fan. Sarah Winter as Georgina Ashton has a look of Psyche not only because of the white fillet her bronze-dark hair is caught up with, but because she stands on the black-and-white chequers of the stair hall as if facing into hell. How she fits into the loose, allusive swirl of gossip that gradually overtakes the women's conversation may be clocked first by students of the queer Regency, but it still has to be deciphered from the ellipses left between the more overt shocks as the cross-currents of schadenfreude, sympathy, and self-preservation gather to a point of no return. As with so much paranoid cinema, even at pocket-size, the question of who knows what is really asking the use of which the knowledge will be made. "When a man holds fire to his chest, it is not only his own clothes he burns." It's a tense, trickily layered tour-de-force for its all-female ensemble—the rest of its cameos are precisely razored in by Marion Bailey, Claudia Jolly, Elizabeth Roberts, and Susie Trayling—and it doesn't not land the wraparound of its final scenes to the unsettled Gainsborough of its cold open, but it feels like more of a fragment than its predecessor despite or because of its greater craft. Its apophatic technique might have to let up for a feature. As a chip of history, it can still haunt.

Beyond their adroit ear and eye for period detail, both films are attractive little objects. Shot on open-air digital by Benjamin Barber, Putting on the Dish has a sort of Eastmancolor overcast that suits both the year and the season; its men look unglamorous and attainable, the imperfections of their faces as expressive as the artifice of their language. Tommies looks like a heritage ghost on slightly powdery 16 mm, a gallery of revealingly shadowed portraits hung by DP Brian Fawcett; its women emerge from their era with all the mixed and inconvenient reality of facts escaping the historical record. I can best compliment the characterfully inhabited costume design by Oliver Cronk by invoking Alexandra Byrne. Impressively, neither feels like just another whack of gay tragedy even when they focus so intimately on the never-beneficial ramifications of a criminalized life; they are too vivid and compassionate, interested in all of their players regardless of their effects. I watched them courtesy of their writer-director-editors' YouTube and would be intrigued by any further foreign countries—how differently and how recognizably things are done there—they choose to add to their many-voiced queer mosaic. This English brought to you by my bona backers at Patreon.

I had no idea until last night that the runaway success of Lock Up Your Daughters at the Mermaid Theatre in 1959 had produced a small boom in Restoration musicals upon the London stage, or at least for two months in 1963 it produced Paul Dehn and James Bernard's Virtue in Danger, a musical translation of John Vanbrugh's 1696 The Relapse which despite a comedically impressive cast including Barrie Ingham, Patricia Routledge, John Moffatt, Patsy Byrne, and Alan Howard fizzled out as a curiosity with an original cast LP. As a musical, it does feel thin on the ground in that most of its songs are glosses on the Vanbrugh, but every now and then it comes up with a minor gem like the devastatingly sincere "I'm in Love with My Husband," the conditional yearning of "Let's Fall Together," or the sweetly clueless "Why Do I Feel What I Feel?" which last is stuck disastrously in my head. It's the catchiest tune in the show and the likeliest to have escaped containment—nothing else in the score rang any bells with me, but this one may have made it as far as Standing Room Only—and its debt to Rodgers and Hart is honorably discharged, but I still couldn't stop thinking of Tom Lehrer.

I will be at Readercon! Observe my schedule.

Reading: Sonya Taaffe
Friday 12 pm
Sonya Taaffe

Current forecast: new and uncollected poetry.

100 Years of Lud-in-the-Mist
Friday 2 pm
Casella Brookins, Graham Sleight, Greer Gilman, Lila Garrott (m), Sonya Taaffe, The joey Zone

Lud-in-the-Mist was published 100 years ago, the last of three novels Hope Mirrlees would write. Reprinted without authorization in 1970 in the Ballantine fantasy series, Lud-in-the-Mist influenced many contemporary writers, such as Michael Swanwick and Elizabeth Hand. What power does this novel still hold today, and how did a once-forgotten work come to be so well-remembered?

Classical Reception in Contemporary SFF
Friday 4 pm
Alexander Jablokov, Lila Garrott, Sonja Ryst (m), Sonya Taaffe, Tom Doyle

Greco-Roman and especially classical Roman culture are alive and well in recent and current SFF, from the seemingly ubiquitous Imperium to the pastiche of Pliny the Younger that opens Kai Ashante Wilson's The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps. Why do we keep reaching not only for the classics but for the classical? And why does it all feel so current?

Why "Morally Gray" Characters Get All the Love
Friday 7 pm
Elizabeth Bear, Melissa Caruso (m), P. Djèlí Clark, Sonya Taaffe, Sunny Moraine

Why is everyone so in love with "morally gray" characters now? Are we seeking to understand the complexity of the human soul, escape hero/villain stereotyping, or is it something else? Are morally gray characters really more interesting to write and read, or has moral clarity simply gone out of vogue? Is a morally gray character just a villain with a redemption arc?

The Bog Body Motif in Trans SFF
Saturday 1 pm
Ann LeBlanc, dave ring (m), Sonya Taaffe

Izzy Wasserstein's poem, "Come Back Wrong" (Strange Horizons, May 5, 2025), examines medical transition, drawing parallels with the transformation of sacrificial bodies tossed into acidic bog soils and left there for centuries to tan to leather. The bog body motif seems to pop up again and again in queer and especially trans SFF stories, songs, and games. Why? What is so appealing about the bog body as a metaphor, and what does the repeated use of this imagery indicate about the times we live in?

SFF and Queer Cultural Memory
Saturday 6 pm
David Gerrold, Ian Muneshwar (m), Sonya Taaffe, Susan Stinson, Victor Manibo

Much has been written about the losses to queer cultural memory wrought by both repression and AIDS. From Nazi burnings of research to yesteryear's censorship and today's book and social media bans, repressive movements have long tried to prevent queer narratives from emerging. What role has SFF played in preserving queer cultural knowledge? How have queer writers and readers changed SFF, and how has SFF changed us in return?

The Odyssey in 2026
Sunday 11 am
Charles Allison (m), Kate Nepveu, Kenneth Schneyer, Sonya Taaffe

Homer's Odyssey is having a moment: a new major translation by Daniel Mendelsohn (following other major ones by Emily Wilson and Peter Green), a recent movie starring Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche (The Return), a musical adaptation that is a social media sensation (Epic), and a forthcoming blockbuster movie written and directed by Christopher Nolan. What aspects are these translations and adaptations highlighting compared to past versions, and what elements are ripe for more attention?

Reckoning at 10
Sunday 12 pm
Corey Farrenkopf, Marissa Lingen, Michael J. DeLuca (m), Sonya Taaffe

Reckoning launched its first issue at Readercon 27, back in 2016. Join Reckoning contributors and staff in celebrating ten years of creative writing on environmental justice with readings of work from the new issue and highlights from the past.

After an unbroken run from 2004–19, I have been out of the Readercon loop since its virtual edition in 2021 thanks to a combination of pandemic and personal medical disaster. Am I returning in good health? Hell, no, but I am returning. Who may I expect to see there?

Anyway, two hundred and fifty years later I oversaw the making of the strawberry ice cream and after dinner a terrific crack of rain fell out of the sky. Earlier in the afternoon and the heat, my niece and the twins came in from swimming for the second day in a row. a_reasonable_man showed up with a box of peaches. spatch took a picture of me dressed for the occasion, i.e. the future.