thoughts & questions: mostly thoughts, seem to be low on questions lately

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.