Myth Happens

A mycelial vixen trailing autumn as she roams

2026-07-20T18:57:45Z

This week is starting off terribly, but a neatly overstuffed envelope of tiny, brightly jacketed chapbooks of poetry by Romie Stott—Love, Witness, Today, Going Under, Prompt, Offline, Political, Splinter, in shades of cone-orange and map-blue and mint-green—arrived in the mail and even without being absolutely the best thing in the last couple of days would be pretty great.

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No bones stacked by the hearth, no ghosts on the heath

2026-07-19T11:07:37Z

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.

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I arrive as if a ghost, sphagnum flesh tinder-dry

2026-07-18T20:10:39Z

This afternoon the sky has lost its pest-fire sickliness in the intermittent washout of rain, but we are into the red blobs on the map and I am using my inhaler. I dreamed of a supporting character from Winterset (1936) as if during the prologue to the plot. I feel brainless and abraded.

Because I had Felled's "Fire Season on the Outer Rim" (2017) on my mind after this ash-fall week, I was reminded that I had never gotten hold of their sophomore LP The Intimate Earth (2021) and behold, there's another bog body in "Sphagnum in the Hinterlands."

I put another pin in the awfulness of the last two years by the fact that I missed the existence of Emmett Nahil's From the Belly (2024), which looks rather barnacle-crusted to my interests. I am not sure I even agree with the author's assertions about the foundations of nautical horror, but I like his passionate championing of Melville over Lovecraft. I never recomended Avi Burton's "We Are All in the Same Boat" (2026).

I meant to grab a copy of M.A. Knight's Feverchain (2026) while I was still at Readercon, but after a lovely and too-brief interaction with the author and the designer in between panels I never made it back into the dealer's room. If we shared the same social media, I could ask if they would be at NecronomiCon.

I would cheerfully read further adventures of this psychogeographer in Albuquerque, but this one stands as an excellent one-shot for anyone who cares about land, water, and the Situationist International: Rath Mercury, "Herkimer Inquiries" (2026).

Yesterday the most complicated thing I did was take a walk, read two novels, and reconstruct my long-lost favorite burger from Christopher's with pepper jack, avocado, and homemade chipotle mayo on an English muffin. I watched a movie for the first time in ages, even if I do not seem possessed of the intellect to do anything about it. It was nice. I am tired of the most boring people in the world doing so much to harm it.

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So I took a vacation to another station and I took pictures of the ground

2026-07-18T03:32:14Z

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.

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O Moon, thou pluckest me out, O Moon

2026-07-17T18:08:19Z

Five days from the end of Readercon and seven days after a confirmed contact for COVID-19, I have tested multiply negative for pandemic and may even have dodged regular old con crud, seeing as my sore-throated wheezing of the last few days is equally consistent with wildfires blowing into town. Today we are in a clearer patch and there is birdsong in the yew trees. Huzzah for paranoia and the N95.

Meanwhile, spatch has shingles.

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I wish I was the mother of an engineer to be

2026-07-17T08:45:51Z

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.

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Whole team full of Roman accountants at their desks the day Hannibal crossed

2026-07-15T21:00:25Z

I can't participate in the poll itself, but I spun the wheel of Greek mythological figures as dictated by this meme and got Achilles trying to kill me and Odysseus trying to protect me and considering their respective hit rates on those fronts I think I'm just going to hang out in lyric poetry for a while.

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The cause and effect never met

2026-07-15T19:08:54Z

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.

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Soul slumber party with my deepfake friends

2026-07-14T17:21:11Z

And then I got up this morning to discover that despite my vigilant disabling of every attempted auto-connection within my copy of Microsoft Word following last year's deeply unwanted incursion of Copilot, Microsoft itself has nonetheless reached into my computer and bricked my license so that more than a quarter-century of my files are rendered read-only and incidentally look weird. I am locked out of my own intellectual property. On my own computer. Which I purchased for myself. Within a program that I purchased for myself. Not even on the subscription model since I did not wish to be any further beholden to a corporation than I already was shoved forward from the blessed CD-install days of Bertie Owen. Aside from instantaneously wanting to chop off the hands of every single meaningless executive and politician who salivated for the globalization of the company store, I do not even understand why it happened since I am running well above the operating system specified by the no doubt chatbot-vomited instructions on their website. My memories of trying to get hold of human assistance the last time Microsoft did something obscene to an important component of my creative life are not encouraging. I am not sure I can fix this problem with a reinstall and I don't have the immediate time in my afternoon to troubleshoot it, which feels like leaving the house with a head wound hanging open. I do not wish at this time to litigate all the alternative softwares I should be using instead. It remains grotesque that my personal computer is not personal at all. I thought after Readercon that I might be able to think like myself again. I am reminded once again that the ways in which I think are not supposed to exist in the world.

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Pack up the stereo, meet at the burial ground

2026-07-14T04:20:15Z

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.

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What's in your heart? What's in your way?

2026-07-13T04:38:08Z

I had such a nice Readercon!

I went into my last round of programming on just as little sleep as my first because of the fox that screamed in the yard for what felt like all night, but the epically freewheeling breadth of "The Odyssey in 2026" can be gauged by the fact that one of my co-panelists talked about the anarchic receptions of Katerina Gogou and another the diametric adaptational differences between Armand Assante and Ralph Fiennes and a third the modern moralities of Epic: The Musical (2024) while I had the chance for the first time in several decades to mention my master's thesis on the archaic lyric transformation of Homeric motifs. The audience was full of brilliant questions about the oral tradition and the epic cycle and we barely even got into the polyphony of translations. We could have gone another thousand hexameters easy. "Reckoning at 10" came out about half reading and half craft beer-and-cider tasting courtesy of Michael J. DeLuca and his harvesting of post-industrial orchards and spruce tips. I enjoyed the technical discussion and the notes from the drinking audience. The room sang happy birthday to the magazine.

Beyond this point I was already beginning to slump into a pumpkin, but I managed to collapse on a portion of outdoor sofa adjacent to Kate Nepveu and Marissa Lingen and Gwynne Garfinkle and Greer Gilman with interludes of Catherine Rockwood and Michael McAfee and ckd and Romie Stott. Dean offered me peaches. choco_frosh had to run off to dismantle the con. I caught Mike and Anita as they were loading out and now I have copies of the phantasmagorically endpapered Trail of Shadows (2025) and the brand-new edition of Strange Wisdoms of the Dead (2006/18). The sole reading I made it to was Michael Cisco's. Briefly there was a Cameron Roberson. I hugged a lot of people.

Then I was a pumpkin that had to run a lot of errands, but so long as the monkey's paw does not curl slowly shut, I have not had a nicer weekend this year and I have not had such a professional one in seven. I will feel fragile about my immune system until some days have passed. I will need to sleep a lot. I didn't remember to bring my four-year-old collection which would have been convention-new. I was asked for my website and my social media and the spelling of my name. I have not felt for a long time that I could rely on either my intellect or my stamina and I am still not sure if I can start again, but I made it through all three days of my panels and loved them. It was like being alive to talk with people. At the moment I am looking forward to NecronomiCon.

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Honey, just put your sweet lips on my lips

2026-07-12T07:08:54Z

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.

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Haunted is an easy word for all these moons

2026-07-11T05:49:58Z

Readercon! I had not thought that my body was capable any longer of a reading and three panels on two hours of sleep and as far as I can tell, I had a great time. I talked about the Bacchae for Mirrlees and Rika Lesser for classical reception and film noir for moral ambiguity, news at eleven. I heard other panelists talk about the boundary conditions of fantasy and the topical relevance of the Sicilian Expedition and Walter Mosley's Mouse, especially as played by Don Cheadle in Carl Franklin's Devil in a Blue Dress (1995). All could have gone on cheerfully past the five-minute card and then the vaudeville-hook STOP. The auto-transcription had not existed the last time I was part of this convention and it was particularly inventive in its mondegreens for Lud-in-the-Mist (1926). I was complimented more than once on my cat-Neptune T-shirt from the Coney Island Mermaid Parade. I may have socialized more in eight hours than in the total last two or three years. Incompletely, I have seen and even spent meaningful time with Dean Grodzins, Greer Gilman, Merav Hoffman, Michael Cisco, Gwynne Garfinkle, Rachel Gutin, Rebecca Fraimow and Elizabeth Birdsall, Mike and Anita Allen, Jim Freund and Barbara Krasnoff, Romie Stott, and choco_frosh. I did not stay for Meet the Pros(e) because I was flat by the last of my panels and needed to check on my mother, but I have still managed to have conversations about Shirley Jackson and Walter de la Mare and family histories and chapbooks and what everyone has been doing with themselves in the up to seven years since last I saw them. I barely managed to look into the dealer's room, but I am still in possession of a field guide to urban lichens which Greer had foreseen had my name on it and two beautiful, familially inherited waistcoats from Merav which I am determined to wear with at least one of the other T-shirts I packed for this layer-less weekend. They made me a dinner of rainbow trout and glass noodles in their air-filtered room; otherwise I spent a lot of time on the patio where the cast-iron tables were just tolerably shaded enough for hanging out in the open air. I am appreciating the adherence to masking in all the con spaces, without which I could not hope to spend this much immunosuppressed time around other, indoor people. Fingers crossed against even con crud. Tomorrow, bog bodies.

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In your actual English

2026-07-09T21:11:26Z

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.

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We tried another way we never came back from

2026-07-09T04:25:03Z

Following the successful conclusion of one of spatch's appointments for a change, we returned to Belle Isle Seafood and this time it was a beautiful gold-tilting evening and we could seat ourselves at one of the weather-polished open-air tables and a server came by with her pad of guest checks and for what we estimate to have been the first time in six and a quarter years we ate at a restaurant together. I got a plate of smelts piled just as high and sweetly sanded and ate them down to the fried tips of their tails and the delicate bones. Rob assures me that his baked haddock was as flakily rich as it looked under its crumbs and juiced lemon. We had duly observed the warning sign about the seagulls, but mostly we saw sparrows leaning like acrobats through the diamonds of the chain-link and a common tern that made an air-slicing swoop into the water after a small silver struggle of fish. I twisted corners of napkins into earplugs because of the planes roaring out of the peach-haze over Logan. The serpentine water was full of the shivered reflections of boats and the piers built green shadows under their Plimsoll lines. When we came home by way of Revere Beach where the glass-backed combers were still curling in high, the sun doubled itself fierily in the salt marsh off North Shore Road. Even more so now, the sea feels like a lifeline. Everything feels like choking and it is so important to have reasons to breathe.

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I cannot give a laurel for beauty to my girl

2026-07-07T21:12:53Z

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.

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There where the sun flies, there where the sky is bluer still

2026-07-07T08:27:30Z

Rewatching John Carpenter's Starman (1984) in full for the first time in decades reminded me of the odd, small cycle in American science fiction of its decade with their almost folkloric exploration of passing for human—learning what it is to be human, which is never required to mean replicating it perfectly. Jeff Bridges as the Starman retains his slight, birdlike glitches of movement and artifically accurate cadences to the last. His eidetic mimicry of television fills in for the cultural tics and expectations he has not yet worked out the rules of, but whose pattern he can reproduce well enough for normal social weirdness. It took me well into adulthood to understand the humor of the scene in Splash (1984) in which Madison is initially upset by a shootout in an episode of Bonanza because that extra-diegetic awareness of acting which a slightly nonplussed Allen explains to her was exactly how I learned to separate my own emotional reactions from fictional images that similarly disturbed me. The Brother from Another Planet (1984) and The Hidden (1987) would be the other titles that come to mind; I may be overlooking others, but the superficial appearance of Earth-humanity is a necessary criterion. Of course they are immigration stories, too, or so many of our heroes wouldn't have an inimical government on their tails. Madison and the Brother even make their respective landfalls at Ellis Island. I would love to be able to interpret this strain as a rebuttal to the paranoia of so much of the previous generation's science fiction where the federal government, fueled by the Cold War and the Red and Lavender Scares, was fully justified in blowing the aliens away, but I might need a larger sample set. I can at least track that the nonhuman characters under discussion are just trying to get on with their own lives, whose cosmically personal stakes are love or freedom or knowledge. "I make maps," the Starman explains himself. They feel more like Zenna Henderson's People stories than even something like The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976). I saw three of them as a small child. It was a useful additional reinforcement of the different ways to be a person.

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What ship, brother sailor, she said unto me

2026-07-06T18:56:57Z

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?

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The notes that she sang were the nightingale notes

2026-07-05T21:59:28Z

The rain actually washed a solid twenty degrees off the heat, leaving an unobjectionably haze-whitened summer through which one may walk without courting a flashover event. The bush of lavender that overhangs the sidewalk up the block was thick with honeybees and bumblebees. They hummed around my shoulders and hands as I moved with the camera. I thanked them for their time and close-ups. No one stung me.

Thanks to a pre-Fourth article on shape note, I have discovered Tim Eriksen and Peter Irvine's Absence and her sister (2026), whose release I had missed earlier this spring. It is the haunted banger one would expect from two-thirds of a band who cautioned a folk-punk generation not to stick knives in babies' heads.

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In the light that shows the distance, a new space for us to grow

2026-07-05T02:59:12Z

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.

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And I'm the reason there's salt in your tears

2026-07-03T20:03:06Z

Yesterday's heat dome cracked 102 °F and felt like 109 °F. This afternoon hovers modestly around a mere 100 °F. I would have thought the last comparably soaring scorcher had been the previous summer with all its melted daily records, but apparently for sustained triple digits it was 1944.

At this point my life is such that even were anything sestercentennially awesome happening I would almost certainly be obliged to miss out on it, but it remains exhausting to watch a reality of history ground into Christofascist clickbait so malignly uninteresting it seems slopped out entire by that insult to mediocrity, the plagiarism engine: it has the thin, unreal, nauseous feel of it, including that at any mindless second it could be prompted to bomb the Middle East. My father has been mourning the bicentennial. I still have the commemorative quarters my grandmother kept for years on the windowsill of the anchor-papered guest room with the dollars and half-dollars in the metal piggy bank.

The aetiological little murder ballad that I heard last night on my way to collect spatch turned out to be Mugison's "Salt" (2004). I am enjoying the photo slider of local psychogeography from the Boston Globe.

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Peering at the Perseids from your bedroom

2026-07-01T16:32:53Z

Rabbit, rabbit! Shortly after dawn I saw two foxes chasing one another in a figure-eight around the lilac and the pussy willow like a fulvous double star.

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What is an island but a break in the ocean?

2026-06-29T18:47:09Z

Once again my week begins with phone calls, phone calls, and more phone calls, but I am disproportionately entertained by this recent interview with Matthew Rhys:

To me, when I read "Widow's Bay," I was, like, This is Wales. Like, sixty-five per cent of the country is coastline. An enormous amount of the population live in small coastal towns. My mother was from there—we lived in one for a while. She's from a seafaring family, where you throw a stone and there's a myth or a legend [. . .] Oh, God, well, as kids we were raised with these ancient tales called the Mabinogion. And there's four branches of the Mabinogi, and they're wildly dense myths about different parts of Wales. There was a princess who turned into flowers, and you know, the only way her husband could be killed was if he had one foot on a trough and the other on a goat, and he was killed by a special silver spear.

I understood that reference.

It is also funny to me because I have been recommending the show on the strength of its regional specificity about which I had not thought I had particular feelings, except that the familiarity of the geography, the material culture, the accents, and the attitudes whose reality encloses the shadow-stretches of the comedy-horror startled me past its engagement with a history of New England weird fiction and horror that scratches deeper than Stephen King. I am much more used to finding my formative coasts by analogy in other stories, not for the process to run the other way. On sort of the same level, I remain amazed that what feels like an idiosyncratically local show despite its backing by Apple seems to have taken the American TV-streaming public by storm. Yesterday I sent spatch an article on the revival of fishing in Boston Harbor:

"Mike Delzingo, a well-known guide who has been fishing in the harbor for 34 years, said people are surprised when he gives a talk and refers to Boston Harbor as a world-class fishing destination. 'People think about Block Island and Cape Cod and Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard, but the fishing in the harbor is phenomenal.'"

and was thus obliged to append, "Fuck Cape Cod!"

Otherwise I feel my priorities may be gauged by the fact that I dreamed that I was eligible for the shingles vaccine.

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Don't hurt your faces, folks, just a simple little clapping will suffice

2026-06-28T18:48:47Z

I think it's wonderful that Mel Brooks is a hundred years old. I watched a 1967 clip of the 2000-Year-Old Man for the occasion, but the majority of his currency in my household's dialect is realistically more like "Did you try to bullshit last week?" "Everything below the waist is kaput!" "That's our Hitler!" "And I'm still hysterical!" Long may his work rise below vulgarity.

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When you're in as deep as we are, honey, it's so easy to get washed out to sea

2026-06-27T03:27:37Z

I began my day by cleaning the bedroom, the bathroom, and the kitchen and dispatching the contents of the recycling and the trash because there was a distressing smell of cold rot in the air when I woke up and I am dearly hoping it is not an inhabitant of either the walls or the central air. My mother has been medically recommended to eat more sardines, so I walked to Berman's in the afternoon and collected her three tins of the lightly fancy kind with preserved lemon from Fishwife. I had missed the news of the identification of John Pumphrey as part of the Camden Burials Project, but then I just heard about the monument for Absalom and Hannah Cook Boston. The splinteringly angular, female-led post-punk that WHRS played as I was driving home turns out to have been Duchess Says' "Melon" (2008). Phoebe Bridgers' "Lost Boys" (2026) has also crossed my radar. I just saw that Cape Verde is going to the knockout stage to face Argentina. Hestia drank goat's milk from my cupped hands and followed me throughout the apartment afterward, emotionally blackmailing me with huge golden eyes for the contents of my mug.

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