sovay | Myth Happens

My poem "Reap the Rules" is now online at Reckoning.

It is my first publication with the magazine; it appears as part of the special issue on war, conflict, and environmental justice. I was honored to have it chosen when I had submitted it for another call and it should not have become more relevant than when I wrote it last summer, after the first U.S. strikes on Iran. The Elamite cuneiform means a prayer to Pinikir, the oldest goddess I know in that region. The English title is a mondegreen from Johnny Flynn and Robert Macfarlane's "Coins for the Eyes" (2022). I wanted it so much to be an artifact of that moment's anger. The need for curse tablets appears inexhaustible.

Music: Johnny Flynn & Robert Macfarlane, "Coins for the Eyes"

I made no sea creatures in marzipan for my father's birthday observed, but he still liked his strawberry-variant marmalade cake. My brother told stories about driving the Nürburgring with a minivan. I curled up with my husbands.

Music: Alice Merton, "No Roots"

I am frantically cleaning in expectation of niece, but my mother just called to let me know of the fossil discovery of octopods larger than a school bus. It feels apropros that my niece requested sushi for dinner. It makes me almost as happy as the news itself that everyone involved seems to have thought instantly of kraken.

Music: Hen Ogledd, "Nell's prologue"

Actually it appears that when younger I read several books by Leon Garfield without at any point committing his name to memory, which seems rude. I fell down a rabbit hole of recognition on the Internet Archive. I hadn't clicked with Black Jack (1968) because I expected more piracy from it, but the crash of affectionate recall prompted by The Stolen Watch (1988) should have translated into a copy of my own even before it could read like a direct ancestor of Frances Hardinge. I remembered the ending of Devil-in-the-Fog (1966) without any of the twists the story took to get to it. I must not have had access to The God Beneath the Sea (1970) or I would have tried it on the strength of the title and almost certainly bounced. I had not read either the comedy of misapprehensions that comprises The Strange Affair of Adelaide Harris (1971) or the sweetly macabre triangle of The Valentine (1977), but highly enjoyed both. At this point my ability to read novels off a screen conked out, leaving dozens yet of historical titles for me to explore at some more library-convenient date—Garfield seems to have been fully as prolific as Dickens who left an imprint on him that can be seen from Carroll crater. His closest contemporary in Georgian-Victorian picaresque-grotesque looks like Joan Aiken, whom I discovered around the same time and have never lost track of. I was reminded also of Sid Fleischman and Ellen Raskin. I would feel worse about mislaying him if I had not famously had to re-find Vivien Alcock's The Haunting of Cassie Palmer (1980) from a single scene that terrified me as a child sans author, title, or any hint of the wider plot; the late eighteenth century origins of that novel's ghost now look like plausible bleedthrough from one writer in the household to the other, especially since it was her first, although marked already with her own concerns of children and ambiguous adults. For people who like morally messy mentors, Garfield is a must. Most of his novels seem not to be supernatural, but the kind that wouldn't surprise if they suddenly turned into it. I hope he still fetches up in used book stores.

Music: Atomic Fruit, "Medicine"

My life remains much too medical, but with neat things to read.

1. Via

selkie: "Undzer Mishpokhe: A Queer Yiddish Curriculum Supplement." Let's hear it nokh a mol for In geveb.

2. Via

a_reasonable_man: the Catalogue of Ships incorporated into a Roman-era mummy. It makes sense as a magical text to me. Who wouldn't want so many heroes and ships on their side with all that underworld to cross?

3. I was not confident until I saw the illustrations as well as the title that I had really read, in the same elementary school library that introduced me to Alan Garner and Peter Dickinson and Madhur Jaffrey, Leon Garfield's Mister Corbett's Ghost (1968). I am intrigued by the starrily cast television film which may not have existed my first time around with it.

P.S. Via

sholio: I had no idea the musk ox was a megagoat. I am delighted.

Music: Hen Ogledd, "Clara"

It was cold enough in the intermittent late sun that I should have worn gloves, but I walked out and photographed the flowering things of my neighborhood.

( I'll salt circle your brain if I have to. )

It was a delight to run into Elana Lev Friedland on North Street. We talked cosmic horror and capitalism until my hands stiffened up. I dove for the bag of bagels as soon as I got home and made myself one with cream cheese and lox, the latter eagerly shared by Hestia. She has taken to leaping onto the top of the washing machine at the slightest rustle that might suggest deli meats. I fell asleep in the evening, but

spatch cooked me scrambled eggs and afterward

rushthatspeaks and I talked over our days. I am fascinated by the blue-based earthtongue.

Music: Eliza McLamb, "Salt Circle"

It was very nice to be told by the ophthalmologist this afternoon that I do not need surgery on my eye. I had been given some reason for concern. It was aggravating to be told that I should persist in spending hours of my time with a warm sheep, i.e. the cereal-filled microwaveable hot pack that lives in our freezer applied to my face, but at least it's working.

I read like a medical diary. Yesterday had social interludes in the form of

rushthatspeaks and

selkie and

genarti who dropped unexpectedly by with a lifetime supply of bagels and other heymishe staples from Mamaleh's. I paused Samurai III: Duel at Ganryu Island (宮本武蔵完結篇決闘巌流島, 1956) in order to show

spatch that Kōji Tsuruta lived up to his character's billing of looking more like an actor than a swordsman, which had sounded self-referential until he stepped onscreen as if exactly out of an ukiyo-e print. This evening I felt so set on fire that I curled up in bed for an hour and Hestia snuggled herself under the covers and pushed her head kitten-fashion against my knee. I made myself a sesame bagel with chopped liver and watched another of the Warners B-pictures written by Raymond L. Schrock that TCM has been running to more than fast-cheap effect so long as they do not contain Ronald Reagan. I feel as though I measure my time by what I can do in between managing my health.

I cannot manage the state of the world and it remains exhausting. Nearly a decade of my life seems to have folded itself like a tesseract of the Echthroi and it is hard at the moment not to feel that all that happened in the interval is that people died.

Music: Snail Mail, "Dead End"

Long story tired, within a week of recovering from last month's double ear infection I was exposed to some other viral crud and now I have a double ear infection all over again. Next I return to the ophthalmologist. I am rethinking the entire concept of having a head. In the meantime I lay on the couch and watched Hiroshi Inagaki's Musashi Miyamoto (宮本武蔵, 1954) while Hestia basked in the cat tree. WHRB introduced me to Pansy's "Woman of Ur Dreams" (2021) and Nia Nadurata's "i think i like your girlfriend" (2023). I like this color study which feels a levitation away from being a surrealist painting. If it played vaguely near me, I would watch a film about Mark Fisher.

Music: Mazzy Star, "Fade Into Me"

Under very few circumstances while watching Ishirō Honda's Atragon (海底軍艦, 1963) does one have to hand it to Agent No. 23 of the Empire of Mu, the shoregoing operative of a barbarically advanced civilization gathering itself from the bed of the Pacific to reclaim its former colonies which in the millennia since its Atlantean sinking had the temerity to strike out on their own as the nations of Earth, but he is played by Akihiko Hirata in a gold-glint of dark glasses and an out-of-season scarf tucked against the chill of the surface world and when he is held at gunpoint with his back to the tide-line, he only smiles in the slightest of farewells before leaping into the day-for-night-blue surf without even taking off his shoes. "He escaped into the sea?" His introductory getaway was more technically audacious when he drove a stolen taxi straight off a quay, but if he were human he would look like a suicide and once he's in the water instead he rejoins his phosphorescently submerged comrades without so much as catching a bullet. In a high-concept blend of lost-world pulp and post-war politics, he's a wonderfully uncanny touch without special effects, which is not to deprecate the film's ingenious panoply of images from hydronauts in a looseleaf of silver scales to a dragon coiling like a moray from the side of an oceanic trench to the crimson-clouded detonation of a geothermal sun. The people of Mu run hotter than seals: the sea smokes like a geyser around them, a wrench turns red-hot in the agent's contemptuous grasp; one of his colleagues appears capable of generating an eellike stunning charge. "We have special energy. It's useless." Elsewhere their civilization resembles a sort of Egypto-Minoan fusion by way of Verne and Haggard, its laser cannons sheathed in the coils of bronze ceti and the blinkenlights of its enormous computer banks carved around in cyclopean bas-relief. The empress of Mu looks like a nascent anime design with her hood of clementine-colored hair and new wave eyes, a casual ransom of pearls collared over her brilliant draperies and finely ringed mail. Humanity's last, best hope if it can be repurposed from a dream of militaristic nationalism to the defense of global ideals, the Atragon-class submarine of the title suggests a garfish down to its countershading, a sleek leviathan of spy-fi industry artfully equipped with a few indistinguishably magical tricks of its own. When Mu calls in its marker on the land, the inevitable destruction of Tokyo is a one-two doozy of practical and animated effects—business districts jolted to flinders by a precisely triggered earthquake, container ships set ablaze by an enemy sub's lancing ray—but the eye candy doesn't crowd out the food for thought when the sunken empire makes such a successfully fantastical double for the imperial past that Japan must explicitly repudiate in order to inhabit its international future. I wouldn't kick any of it out of bed for eating seaweed crackers, especially not the first glimpse of the sea-dragon Manda, a thick shield-wall of scales, seemingly endless, breathing. I just remain enchanted with the liminal simplicity of Agent No. 23 in his anonymous dark suit, a Magritte figure whose very ordinariness makes him surreal. His voice will narrate a history of his empire from a spool of 8 mm and deliver its modern ultimatum on reel-to-reel. "Admiral, this earthquake isn't a coincidence. Remember me?" He'd be namelessly memorable even if I hadn't loved his actor since Dr. Serizawa. This sea brought to you by my special backers at Patreon.

Music: Arca, "Urchin"

Today I have slept less than three hours for the second day in a row and the afternoon just clouded over. Have a couple of links.

1. I can't tell if the BLO's Daughter of the Regiment will be queer enough for its invocation of Deborah Sampson, but then I was distracted by discovering Alex Myers. I blame it on plague that I missed the queer Arthuriana of The Story of Silence (2020).

2. I had an excuse to link Bradley Kincaid's "The Two Sisters" (1928), the oldest version of the ballad I have heard recorded as opposed to seen written down. I used to sing its bleaker descendant by Roger Wilson. Tom Waits does a pretty straight one.

3. Hen Ogledd's "The Loch Ness Monster's Song" (2020) is a setting of Edwin Morgan. It may be the most zaum thing I have encountered since Victory Over the Sun (1913).

For the first time in this apartment, there was an Interloper Cat. Collared and silver-tagged, on the doorless back porch, a substantial ginger and white presence had seated itself in one of the windows with its evident object of a robin in the other. It stared directly through the back door. Hestia was wild. The bird was motionless. I did not let her out and the next time I looked, both bird and interloper had gone.

Music: The Grownup Noise, "See You in the Hall"

My father's birthday will be formally observed the next time my niece is in town, but for the day itself my mother and I baked him the chicken and leek pie which we had adapted from its recipe the two days prior that the filling can be stored in the refrigerator to deepen in flavor like a stew and a strawberry shortcake which I am currently proud of decorating with a painted marzipan man o' war after the mosaic in Leonardo Morales y Pedroso's 1930 Casa de Mark A. Pollack y Carmen Casuso. Even after I chilled the marzipan, the heat and humidity tangled the tentacles authentically.

I did not expect to receive an unbirthday present of Hen Ogledd's Discombobulated (2026), which I have been listening to since I got home and discovered the equally unexpected postcard awaiting me from

mrissa. The inner CD sleeve includes among its notes, "The painting on the front cover is called 'It's not darkness that falls, it's light', and now lies scattered in pieces across the globe. It was chopped into 34 segments and distributed as gifts to friends and family." I flashed inevitably on Wittgenstein's Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough (1931/1948).

Think how after Schubert's death his brother cut certain of Schubert's scores into small pieces and gave to his favorite pupils these pieces of a few bars each. As a sign of piety this action is just as comprehensible to us as the other one of keeping the scores undisturbed and accessible to no-one. And if Schubert's brother had burned the scores we could still understand this as a sign of piety.

Music: Hen Ogledd, "End of the rhythm"

Because I had a doctor's appointment downtown, from Storrow Drive I saw the cherry trees on the Esplanade blooming like soft fireworks in white and sugar-pink. The weather has catapulted itself into summer: asphalt-simmered air, huge tufts of cloud stacked over a haze-blue sky, lines around the literal block for Ben & Jerry's Free Cone Day. Sails all over the Charles. Afterward

spatch and I ate Greek takeout on a picnic bench by Spy Pond, watching a solitary Canada goose glide across the water as our summer in accelerated miniature looked like building toward thunderstorm. It is my father's seventy-fourth birthday.

Music: Momma, "Cross My Heart"

Things in my neighborhood are starting to bloom, so I got out of the house in the on-and-off overcast and photographed some.

( When it's just me against the sky. )

I agree with this post that the human body was not designed to know what the worst person in the world is doing every fifteen minutes, but it was not possible for me to avoid hearing that the man in the White House shared AI slop of himself as Jesus healing the sick for Pascha. It was much nicer to discover that Aimee Mann circa 'Til Tuesday belonged so clearly to the elusive Bowie–Swinton species. She could have starred in Liquid Sky (1982).

Music: The Mountain Goats, "Training Montage"

I had to quit out of this afternoon's virtual memorial for

minoanmiss right after the singing of "Lift Ev'ry Voice" in order to meet my mother for advance birthday baking, but I got to hear remembrances in the form of stories, poems, an illuminated manuscript of a slide show, a painfully pertinent lesson in public health, songs both folk and filk, and people just talking with love and grief and anger that she need not have died; she did not consent to the sacrifice. She had formed an incredible constellation of interests and affections that her mourners flared to life. It is just that one wants the person herself and not only the space left between her stars.

In memoriam: the braided liberation of Anthony Russell and Veretski Pass' "Lift" (2018). The queer shift of Jake Blount's "Where Did You Sleep Last Night" (2020). Kadra Ahmed-Omar in late-nineties Goth haute couture. A Graeco-Armenian papyrus from late Roman Egypt. Apparently people need reminding that Carthage was bad-ass. The election news from Hungary. The full-body college flashback I experienced on hearing Aimee Mann's "Say Anything" (1993) on WERS. Earth.

I cried when I got off the Zoom and then I made myself a bowl of angel hair pasta with lemon and pepper and sardines and thinking of food among her love languages went off to turn a recipe into a savory pie. I am glad she was remembered so well and so fully. I will always want to have seen her art for Artemis II.

Music: Cornershop, "Brimful of Asha"

I no longer owe my soul to the Malden Public Library, having returned the books that had become dramatically overdue in the midst of the latest nonsense. The loop of errands I was running allowed for the purchase of a Zagnut, which I continue to love in despite of Stan Freberg. It was gorgeous out and almost warm and I took a couple of pictures. I am trying to do more than just exist through my days.

( Happiness is just a street away. )

It would never occur to me to rescue and restore vintage Coach bags and purses, but I like knowing someone else has chosen it as their art. Speaking of art, I just heard about the Peabody Essex Museum's Edmonia Lewis: Said in Stone. Speaking of things I like knowing about, Jin Shengtan's "Thirty-Three Nice Things" is in fact pretty nice itself.

Music: Brigitte Calls Me Baby, "Slumber Party"

The better part of my afternoon was spent sitting on a park bench with

rushthatspeaks in the classically balmy sunshine, watching a classful of kindergarteners shriek and clamber all over the climbing structures, the fountain, and the swings. One edged his way over to us with his school tablet on which he showed us the groups of things he was learning. I saw another with a pinwheel, another with a fanny pack, another with a baseball cap made of duct tape, crouching with a friend to pry open a maintenance hatch in the fountain with a stick. We agreed that we miss tire swings and feel nostalgically toward metal slides which had to be insulated from thigh-scalding summer with pieces of cardboard or brown paper bags. FiDO Pizza turns out to deliver all the way from Allston and while I recognize the garlic honey and chili zing of the richly soppressata-studded Doc, the anchovy-forward collards and kale of the Braised Greens over Parmesan cream tasted like an entire kelp forest and I ate it like one. We had cookies left over from Pesach for dessert. Especially at the end of a scrambled week, it was a low-key, springlike, lovely time. We have made plans in the newly discovered directions of All She Wrote Books and Dani's Queer Bar. In the evening we saw that Artemis II had safely splashed down.

Music: Holly Humberstone, "To Love Somebody"

Entirely apart from it now apparently being business as usual for my killing joke of a government to start wars in whatever sovereign nations it feels like and threaten the annihilation of entire civilizations on capricious deadline, I have had a weird and fairly scrambled week in which I was not able to avoid talking to doctors after all. I can feel suitably noir-poisoned for recognizing some location shooting in The Rockford Files (1974–80) from Desert Fury (1947). The sky this afternoon suggested that it was trying to be autumn.

rushthatspeaks sent me an improbable mammal.

Music: Lake Street Dive, "Bad Self Portraits"

We just had a blackout! For what looked like blocks around! It lasted exactly as long as it took

spatch to light a candle in a yahrzeit glass and me to find a utility bill to call and report the outage. Briefly, stars were visible.

(Today was concerned primarily with taking Hestia to the vet, falling over afterward, and thinking unavoidably about geopolitics.)

Music: Metric, "Victim of Luck"

It took a month to wing its way from Münster in a small international envelope stickered with a great tit, but a bisexual oystercatcher just arrived in the mail courtesy of

spatch. It is currently in situ on my shelf between the axolotl and the white quartz, backed by A. E. Housman, A. C. Jacobs, and Robinson Jeffers. I saw some ordinary and really nice ivy while out walking.

Music: Mike Doughty, "27 Jennifers"

Following a rather friably sleepless Easter, I slept nine or ten hours and resent dreaming of poetry without bringing it out with me this time. I was spending time in evocatively broken-down places by the sea.

March ran out so disastrously, I never got around to linking either of these novelettes: M.E. Bronstein's "Bitter as the Sea" (2026) and Michael Cisco's "Tatterdemalion" (2026).

After nearly twenty years of doing nothing with the extras on my Criterion DVD of A Canterbury Tale (1944), I watched the interview with Sheila Sim which was recorded in 2006. I had never seen her as herself with so much time between her memories and her own ghost of hillsides and reflected sunlight, the house in the country where Alison exclaimed, "What wouldn't I give to grow old in a place like that!" exactly as Sim realizes, as if she caught her character's dream, in the more than sixty years since she spoke that line she has done. It was her first film, straight out of drama school with the careful accent that sounds so artificial to her now; she had to learn to act for the camera, in the open air; she did not have to know that the part had been written originally for someone else, whom I have never been able to imagine in it without losing the earth wire of the character. She was right that it became its own kind of continuity through time, more so than even the regular haunting of film:

"I think I'm a little surprised that the film works for young people today—not necessarily young people, middle-aged people as well—but I'm very touched and very pleased in the best sense of the word that it does. Maybe we feel today, rightly or wrongly, that we are losing certain things that we had then. Maybe a kind of nostalgia that makes people love the film. The connection with history and the people who've gone before and the countryside that goes on, the countryside that we to some extent take for granted. We're realizing now in our present world that we are not entitled to take it for granted. It's not going to last."

Not even the film is going to, but on its own terms of folk anti-horror, I do not expect that hillside ever to be without the imprint of Alison Smith and Sheila Sim, even when it's under ocean again, even after the seas run dry.