Don't Make Me Release The Flying Monkeys

My plans to sleep out a recovery from Arisia were somewhat complicated by the move-in of the new upstairs neighbors and the resonating chamber of feet and furniture our bedroom immediately downstairs of this process necessarily turned into, but the snow remains beautifully fallen and is not even supposed to rain back into immediate slush or, worse, spring.

I am re-reading Kathryn M. Drennan's To Dream in the City of Sorrows (1997) for the first time since it came out and had completely forgotten the introduction by J. Michael Straczynski in which he designates it the first fully canonical novel in the Babylon 5 tie-in line. Despite the volumes of Harlan Ellison I was tracking down in used book stores and reading at the time—his credit as creative consultant was a point in the show's favor—it was not until years later that I caught since how much of his nonfiction voice had been adopted by JMS. "How difficult a task was this? Job would've packed it in, Hercules would've retired, and Orpheus would've decided that his days spent in Hades weren't really that bad."

The Post-Meridian Radio Players have now opened auditions for their spring show: Jeeves & Wooster: Hijinks and Shenanigans. I am seriously considering throwing myself on a slot for the genderswapped adaptation. It would be something of an exercise if I went for it; most of my performance skills do not translate into straight acting and I am frankly missing the facility with accents specified in the sides or I'd be able to code-switch out of being asked all the time where mine's really from. There was an intrusion here from Tiny Wittgenstein which has since been deleted. But even if it's just the hangover from Arisia, I have not auditioned for anything since 2019 and so long as I could decouple the experience from actually landing a part, it suddenly looked as though it might be fun.

Indeed, I had never heard of hickory oil. I am not however thrilled by the prospect of trading off maple syrup.

I may feel like a dishrag, but if so it's a dishrag who had a wonderful time returning to Arisia after six years, even if the ziggurat on the Charles is still a dreadful place to hold a convention. For the Dramatic Readings from the Ig Nobel Prizes, I performed selections from W. C. Meecham and H. G. Smith's "Effects of Jet Aircraft on Mental Hospital Admissions" (British Journal of Audiology, 1977) with what I hope was an appropriately haggard channeling of my sleepless night and Leonie Cornips' "The semiotic repertoire of dairy cows" (Language in Society, 2024) with what I hope was an appropriately technical rendition of cow noises. I heard papers on the proper techniques of nose-blowing, whether snakes dress to the left or the right, the sexual correlations of apples. It feels impossible, but it must have been my first time onstage since onset of pandemic. Readers who overstayed their allotted two minutes were surrounded by a chorus of bananas.

I had forgotten how much socializing my attendance of conventions used to entail. I turned the corner for registration and immediately spotted a nineweaving, followed in close succession by a choco_frosh, a_reasonable_man, and a sorcyress. I was talking to the latter in the coat check when Gillian Daniels came in and now I have a zine-printed copy of the second edition of her chapbook Eat the Children (2019/2026). I had not lengthy enough catch-up conversations with awhyzip and rinue and am now in possession of a signed copy of Nothing in the Basement (2025). I brought water with me and kept forgetting to duck outside to drink it. Dean gave me a ride home afterward and commented on my tired look, which was fair: six, seven years ago I could sprint through programming even after a night of anaphylaxis or a subluxed jaw and these days there's a lot less tolerance in the system. It seemed to be a common refrain. If I have fun and don't take home any viral infections from this weekend, it'll be a win.

Tomorrow, panels.

Today was the yahrzeit of the molasses flood. I was last at Langone Park for the centenary, since which time the field has been renovated and a new marker erected in memory of the disaster and its dead. Seven years ago feels nearly a century itself.

Speaking of man-made needless awfulness, I have been made aware of the locally vetted aggregate of Stand with Minnesota, a directory of mutual aid, fundraisers, and on-the-ground support against the onslaught of ICE. All could use donations, since internet hugs are of limited efficacy against tear gas, batons, bullets to the face and legs. Twenty-three years ago feels like several worldlines back, but the Department of Homeland Security sounded absurdly, arrogantly dystopian then.

The fourth and last of this week's doctors' appointments concluded with an inhaler and instructions to sleep as much as possible. My ability to watch movies remains on some kind of mental fritz which upsets me, but I liked running across these poems.

Running this many days without sleep, I find it hard to tell whether I had an insight about creativity this weekend or just reinvented a 101-level objection to LLMs and so-called generative AI, but it ocurred to me that such technologies are not capable of allusions. Their algorithms are not freighted with the same three-dimensional architecture of associations which accrete around information stored in the human cold porridge, all the emotional colors and sensory overtones and contextual echoes which attend the classic example of a word like tree when you throw it out across the incommensurable void between one human mind and another to be plugged into their own idiosyncratically plastic linkage of bias and experience whose least incompatibility may be the difference between a bristlecone and a birch and Wittgenstein has to lie down with a headache, but all of these entanglements form as much of the texture of a writer's style—of any human communication—as the word cloud of their vocabulary or their most commonly diagrammed sentences. It has always interested me to be able to detect the half-rhymes or skeletons of familiarity in the work of other writers; I have always assumed I am reciprocally legible if not transparent from space. I've seen arguments against the creativity of LLMs based on intentionality, but the unintended encrustrations seem just as important to me. By way of illustration, this thought was partly sparked by this classic and glorious mashup.

I was delighted to find on checking the news this morning that a new Roman villa just dropped. Given the Iron Age hillforts, the twelfth-century abbey, the Georgian country house, and the CH station, Margam Country Park clearly needed a Roman find to complete the set. I have since been informed of the discovery of a similarly well-preserved and impressive carnyx. Goes shatteringly with a villa, the Iceni tell me.

I joke about this rock I spend most of my time under, but how can I never have heard of Marlow Moss? The Bryher vibes alone. The Constructivism. And a real short king, judging by that jaunty photo c. 1937 with Netty Nijhoff. Pursuing further details, I fell over Anton Prinner and have been demoralized about my comprehension of art history ever since.

Last night I read David Copperfield (1850) for the third time in my life. It has the terrible feel of a teachable moment. In high school I bounced almost completely off it. About ten years later, I enjoyed the dual-layered narration and was otherwise mostly engaged by the language. Now it appears I just like the novel, which I have to consider may be a factor of middle age. Or I had just read the necessary bunch more of Dickens in the interval, speaking of traceable reflections, recurring figures; my favorite character has not changed since eleventh grade, but I can see now the constellation he's part of. It seems improbable that I was always reading the novel while waiting for chorus to start, but I did get through Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) in the down time of a couple of rehearsals that year. I was not taking either of the standard literature classes, but I had friends who left their assigned reading lying around.

I have to be at three different doctors' offices tomorrow. I could be over this viral mishegos any second now.

While we seem to have skipped actual plague, all of my households have acquired the going lurgi and my head feels like a balloon which has been filled with concrete and may at any second fall off. I have not been ill with a pharmacologically suppressed immune system before. I hadn't been sure it would be capable of running even a low-grade fever.

I have him so totally identified with the role of Neroon on Babylon 5 (1994–98), I keep forgetting that John Vickery in common with many actors who could handle the hours of makeup made several appearances on Star Trek, although the time I actually seem to have seen him in that universe involved no enhancements beyond near-catatonic terror as the sole survivor of a creepily derelict death-ship in TNG's "Night Terrors" (1991). Perhaps it was just lost to the sands of fanzines, but I was genuinely surprised that no one on AO3 ever filled in some kind of /comfort for a character who spends nearly his total screen time telepathically looping through cryptically traumatized echoes and crying. Just when you think you have a handle on other people's id.

It is not reasonable that for two years the earth has been bereft of a rust-black little cat with cut-lime eyes, my miracle, my salty boy, my sassafras, while it suffers the weight of human people who are not worth one of his twenty-six claws, snagged in my bathrobe as he clambered to my shoulder for his terrycloth time after a shower. I miss turning back the covers in this weather to find his sincere blink up from the bedclothes, the absolute trust in the soft curl of his back that no one would shift him from his burrowed comfort. I miss the notes in his purr, from the musical edge of wanting to the subterranean roar of contentment, the whole architecture of his body vibrating like throat singing with the little whiffle that went in and out of his voice, his signature trill. I miss the unretractable click of his claws that announced his progress and the calluses of his desert-rose pads with which he gripped fiercely for human touch. From childhood I was taught that cats turn into flowers and Autolycus lies with his grave goods at the roots of the forsythia I have twice watched bloom since his death; the candle lit for him after sunset burns and his sister did not spring immediately off the bed when I stumbled into it, nauseated and head-aching. I am not without cat in my life. But I am without this cat and he was of inestimable worth to the world.

Now that we are back in the swing of the year, my days are marked by doctors' appointments. I preferred being outside the calendar. I did dream briefly and unexpectedly of Alexander Knox, playing one of those harrowed, abrasive, obdurate figures on the other side of some internment or imprisonment that made me think he would have been anachronistically great as E. T. C. Werner. Have some link-like things.

1. John Heffernan falls into the category of actors of whom I have somehow become very fond without actually seeing all that much of them, which normally happens with character faces in the '40's. I am unlikely even to see his latest project, the freshly announced Amazon TV version of Tomb Raider, but since his character is described in the promotional dramatis personae as "an exhausted government official who finds himself tangled up in Lara's unusual world," it's nice to know I would almost certainly develop a disproportionate attachment to him if I had the chance. You can tell I am otherwise a solid generation of actors behind the times since I was impressed by the casting all in the same place of Jason Isaacs, Bill Paterson, Celia Imrie, Paterson Joseph, and Sigourney Weaver.

2. This song transfixed me a few nights ago on WHRB: Barbez, "Strange" (2005).

3. I meant once again to praise the Malden Public Library for ordering me a sun-bleached, peach-orange, jacketless first edition of Leslie Howard's Trivial Fond Records (ed. Ronald Howard, 1982), about whose selected nonfiction I have been intensely curious since discovering its existence in 2008, but the problem with reading some of the broadcasts he made for J. B. Priestley's Britain Speaks in 1940 is that one runs into passages like:

Democracy today, to survive at all, must be as militant as autocracy, and what the world is desperately in need of now is not the gentle, philosophic democracy of Jefferson, but the outspoken, militant and ringing democracy of Roosevelt, representing the righteous anger of the free people of the world aroused against the cynical arrogance of the totalitarian feudalists.