Don't Make Me Release The Flying Monkeys

The mail brought my contributor's copy of Weird Fiction Quarterly Winter 2025: Ghosts. It leads off with my poem "The Ghost Summer," inspired by the season I wrote it at the end of and given a gorgeously night-eyed illustration by Sarah Walker. Other contributors to its store of specters include Natasha Liora, Andy Joynes, Brandon Barrows, David Barker, Rebecca Buchanan, Maxwell I. Gold, Christopher Ropes, John Claude Smith, Lisa Morton, Jayaprakash Satyamurthy, Daniel Braum, Can Wiggins, Mark McLaughlin, Duane Pesice, Ngo Binh Anh Khoa, Peter Rawlik, M Ennenbach, Robert Jeschonek, Michael Thomas Ford, Adam Bolivar, and Russ Parkhurst, and dozens more. Check it out! Feeling like an apparition yourself is not compulsory.

I did not get out of bed until after noon. Hestia was curled at the foot of it to make sure. It was the first real sleep I'd gotten all week. Outside in breezy contrast to the last couple of days of November for May, we seem to be having a kind of spring-rinsed, sunshowery day. I have eaten a peanut butter granola bar. Hestia has wrapped her tail possessively, temple-cat-fashion, around my mug.

Because the internet is hazardous to the human condition, within the same five minutes I read some evolutionary psychology on atheism and ran into a reminder of the persistence of ace discourse and experienced a similar resurgence of antipathy. Any discussion of atheism predicated on a framework of faith would always fail to find purchase on me, but even when expounded by a self-identified atheist it grinds my gears to find the state explained only in terms of lack: an inability to imagine, a disaffection with religion, a failure to be socialized to it, a decision against it, all negative paths of arrival, no neutrally variant initial condition. Basically just replicate most of that complaint for discussions of sexuality, since if there is one thing the human species does seem to be majority-wired for, it's sloppy othering. It has occurred to me before that I was shielded from a lot of damage by coming at so-called normality from such an angle that not only did it make too little sense to me to feel aspirational, I didn't recognize for years what much of it was supposed to look like. But I'm also just kind of starting to have it in for the alpha privative. Defining by not still lets the thing it isn't set the terms.

WERS has been playing Jesse Welles' "Horses" (2025) on a near-daily basis for weeks now and because I too belong to this conflicting species, I feel that generally I agree with its message of letting go of self-defeating hatreds and divisions in the bigger picture of stellar time and at the same time the government of my country is pursuing policies of active harm to just about everything which seems to limit the degree to which I should be reasonably expected to let down my guard. Now I suppose I get to worry that finding a popular folk song naive means I have just flipped into the last verse of "Love Me, I'm a Liberal."

I seem to have spent much of this day driving in a nor'easter, when all the potholes overflowed and every other driver in between the streaming gutters drove like a hydroplaning yak. I got to see rushthatspeaks and secured a new inhaler and an appointment with a pulmonologist. Foods of the hour look like pastrami, scones, and a Zagnut.

Last night's shooting at the Capital Jewish Museum is still going around in my head, even if I didn't have people in the Jewish professional community of D.C. I don't want to entertain a referendum on the politics of the victims any more than I want to hear it about detained students or deportees, but it feels too cheap for irony that the shooter targeted an event with a focus on humanitarian aid in Gaza: all that mattered was that it aggregated Jews. The word antisemitism should be like hot iron in the mouth of the man in the White House. What he has to offer, none of us need.

In stark contrast to the mishegos with FB, when Criterion's website refused to honor a gift certificate I had received from them in the last month, I was able to get a real live person on their customer support staff who solved the problem for me so that I could ship a DVD of Arsenic and Old Lace (1944) to a relative who really needed it. Maybe I should try to bribe them for editions of my favorite films.

While it seemed the most natural thing while dreaming to collect moon_custafer and thisbluespirit for the second such road trip we had taken together, when awake my brain's notions of geography seem positively Paleozoic.

I am spending much of my time very flat, mostly reading, sleeping enough to dream, not necessarily enough to think, but in the usual fashion managed to take a walk around my neighborhood late in the afternoon.

( When one world ends, the other worlds keep spinning. )

I was so entertained by the avowedly partisan entry on Kay in Phyllis Ann Karr's The Arthurian Companion (1983/97) that it finally occurred to me to try to track down some of her Arthurian short stories and thus encountered a canonical description of her favorite churlish knight in "The Coming of the Light" (1992): "a sharpfaced dark man, also with hair more silver than black, who sat far to one side but spoke with more authority than his distance from the king would have suggested." Yes, look, I've loved his terrible personality for ages, I didn't need confirmation he has an interesting face, too.

After several years of not getting around to it, I really enjoyed C. M. Waggoner's The Ruthless Lady's Guide to Wizardry (2021) just in time to hear Lucy Dacus' "Best Guess" (2025) on WERS and get the song fixed in my head to its plot: If I were a gambling man, and I am, you'd be my best bet.

selkie sent me waves in the Drake Passage.

I have been so spoiled in recent months by the accessible obscurities of my local library systems that I took it personally when both internet archives and interlibrary loan wiped out on the 1954 source novel for "Dishonoured Bones" (1964), which I watched last night while falling down a rabbit hole of surviving episodes of the BBC's Detective (1964–69) thanks to thisbluespirit. At least in fifty-minute anthology format, the mystery itself is a shoal of red herrings, but I was instantly taken with Alan Dobie as Martin Cotterell, an archaeologist-hero as pipe-smoking and untidy as any weirdo by Leslie Howard, especially with his awful walking hat knocked down over his eyes, characteristically rolling off one of his socks in the middle of a discussion of suspects with his old friend who has turned up as the sergeant on the case. (He's right to have suddenly noticed it was inside out and his friend is right that no one else would have noticed because his socks aren't matched to begin with.) He has an artificial hand. It's treated so matter-of-factly, it's never even addressed as such until the rock-fall of the climax, which would have smashed a hand of flesh and bone and just leaves Martin wryly straightening his flattened tin fingers; otherwise the viewer notices eventually that he does most tasks one-handed, the other always gloved, impossible to tell which was originally his dominant hand. Its relevance to the plot is realistically zero. Trying to find any information on this elusive series, I am delighted to learn from its author's obituary that not only was John Trench more than literarily into archaeology, he was employed long-term, about a generation later, by the same advertising firm as Dorothy L. Sayers. They both worked on the Guinness account. I have a line on the novel and in the meantime am stuck with an interest in Alan Dobie, with his thin dented-in face that looks so much younger with his hat off, except when he's got a bandage around his head. Even if she doesn't have that much to do, you get early Judi Dench with this episode, too.

It upsets me for many reasons that science in this country is about to crash for a generation if we're lucky, but one more is the news which spatch just sent me that it is now possible to synchrotronically transmute lead into gold so long as you don't mind the gold being a transient and unstable radioisotope. Is there a productive application for this discovery? Do I care? I'd rather it take my tax money than anything advanced by RFK Jr. I like libraries and habeas corpus, too.

To every nimrod who still wants to claim that the women of noir are misogynistically divided between the milksop and the fatale, I commend the enchantingly left-field battle royale climax of Riffraff (1947) in which Anne Jeffreys launches herself like a pro wrestler onto Walter Slezak while Pat O'Brien is still fighting off his goons and then squashes him under a bookcase from which he has to disencumber himself like the victim of a Murphy bed. It's even goofier and braver because Slezak in this film has real menace, a summer-suited stone cold sketch artist who finishes up his latest street scene while his hired muscle is slugging the bejeezus out of O'Brien, whose amiable chiseler of a private eye has a nicely careless chemistry with Jeffreys' canary, herself the kind of platinum-tressed pulp ideal who can pick herself up from getting cold-cocked in someone else's tossed office with breezily tart sang-froid. The opening murder at 30,000 feet is breathtaking in its sharp-shot night rain and silence, but I may still consider the film stolen by Percy Kilbride as the sarcastically milk-tippling cabbie whose jalopy fires up like the 1812 Overture and whose gag of mending O'Brien's shirts runs all the way through a proposal into breach of promise. He's the cherry on this modest but satisfying sundae of RKO B-noir which balances its shortfalls in budget with buckets of style, incidentally the first non-short film I have managed to watch this month. "You got the piano player?"

Speaking of women in noir, the Brattle has announced this year's Noir City Boston and despite the presence of Foster Hirsch, I am not missing Caged (1950) on 35 mm, not to mention I have never seen the directorial debut of Mickey Rooney, My True Story (1951). I reserve the right to throw popcorn if he mischaracterizes any of the dark city dames I know anything about.