I had hoped, almost a month after going off Naproxen, that my crotchular woes were over. This turns out not to be true: The dryness is back, so bad that at least one crack seems to have opened (in the same place as last time, not-so-strangely). Everything burns. It doesn't help that I overslept due to post-Polaris exhaustion, but...wow, painful as hell. So I guess I know what I'll be doing tomorrow, instead of all the things I wanted to be doing.

General observation, without specifics (because specifics draw dicks, like shit draws flies): I step away for a minute or two, and do things improve? Do they, hell. All over the 'Net, people continue to act like dicks to each other, get called on it, call other people out for calling them on it and act like dicks while doing so, ad infinitum. Sometimes I wonder why any of us bother to talk to each other at all.

Ah, fandom. I'd say "never fucking change", except--well; I guess you already have. Thank God almighty, however, I no longer much care.

Anyhoo. Polaris was fun, if exhausting. We parked Cal at my sister-in-law's, where he apparently had a tonne of fun, and Steve and I did Saturday in style, moving pretty constantly from panel to panel. Things I liked included the crazy surprise of seeing my own face blown up twice life-size on an official guest poster, parked somewhere between genuine stars like Matt Frewer and Michael Hogan in an endless rogues' gallery wall-spread. I was moderator more often than I might have asked to be, but almost every audience I dealt with was large, vocal, enthusiastic and intelligent, while my fellow panelists were universally fun rather than jaded. The hotel was beautiful and fairly easily navigable, with an attached mall full of cheap, plentiful food alternatives, and free parking. Not to mention that the signing table was run by Chapters, who had actually ordered copies of both my books! Heaven.

Stuff I didn't like quite as much included having to do my reading while parked next door to the Vid Suite, with some anime blasting at full volume through the wall--but overall, whatever other annoyances cropped up were both small and forgettable. I'd gladly do it again next year.

Best of all, of course, was seeing old friends/meeting new ones. And my most useful conversation was with David Nickle, who wanted to know how Book of Tongues was doing. When I told him I'd just cracked 80,000 words yet was (maybe) only halfway through the book, he gently suggested I should probably tell my publisher, and start thinking about ways to compact the rest of the action. "It's a lot harder to cut 40,000 words out of something later on than it is to cut 10,000 words out of it now," he said, which I heartily agree with.

So...yeah. That's thing next. But for now: Sleep. I feel like my eyes are trying to vacate my head by force.

Some time back, I told sovay that my primary song for "The Emperor's Old Bones"—the ultimate Tim/Ellis OTP ship song, so's to speak—was Single Gun Theory's "Motherland", off their album Flow, River of my Soul. So...here it is, for them that wants it (http://www.box.net/shared/elmn28krc5).

The lyrics—

A long long time ago, I
picked flowers and sang on a hillside far away
I'm still singing
A long long time ago, I
felt love for the first time
it's still with me now
Through the years, through the years
Carried pain and loss with my love
Through the years, through the years
I carried the pain and loss with my love
A long long time ago, you and I swam
in the river of our souls
united
A long long time ago, you and I
kissed goodbye the love of our lives
it's still with me now
Through the years, through the years
Carried pain and loss with my love
Through the years, through the years
I carried the pain and loss with my love
Take a piece of beauty
and multiply it
(like fishes)
take some pain
and overwhelm it till it dies
ride a restless soul to peace and sanctuary
and multiply the love
I multiply my love
Through the years...

Is Tim fooling himself here? Oh, most definitely—particularly so if/when he includes her potential "feelings" in the mix, because I'm almost sure she doesn't really have any. And yet.

902 words added. I think this thing is finally shaking awake--though, grantedly, I've said that before. But as long as I'm moving forward, I'm happy.

As Harry Knowles points out, the newest re-release of Kathryn Bigelow's Near Dark (on Blu-ray)--timed, one assumes, to coincide with her apparent return to form in The Hurt Locker, which I totally want to see--has been retrofitted with a blatantly Twilight-ized cover that casts Adrian Pasdar as Edward and Jenny Wright as Bella...holy God! Lame on so many different levels at once, it's almost brilliant. Not to mention SO inaccurate, since Caleb's definitely the Bella, in that relationship...

One of the things I continue to love most about Steve is that Near Dark has somehow replaced even Lord of the Rings as his primary comfort movie--probably because it's far shorter, amongst other criteria. But yeah, it's always hilarious to come home to find him watching it, even though it bodes ill in terms of how he's probably feeling; he's probably watched it more times than I have, sadly. (My own primary comfort movie? Might be The Thing--that's often the default. Though I did watch 3:10 to Yuma a HELL of a lot of times in quick succession, here and there.;))

Otherwise: Still bashing away at Chapter Eleven. Added roughly 1,000 words, but again, few of them are in sequence--I paraphrased a Dine creation myth, with added commentary, and tried to work out some more of the conversation between "Grandma" and Rook. (Favorite exchange thus far: Rook wants to know her real name, but she won't come across. Rook: You know MY name. Grandma: Yes. The more fool you, for telling me.)

I also chased down Horehound, by the Dead Weather (Jack White's latest superband). It's rockin'--swampy, nasty psychobilly. Should tide me over for some small length of time, before I go on to the next thing. Other than that...not much. Payin' bills, feelin' tired. All that.

Okay, back to it. Let's make 1,000 into 1,500, before I have to run Cal over to Mom's again.

Amended to add: 1,551, and I am out of here. Maybe I won't even have to take a cab, this time.

For those who are interested--I'm going to be there, with Steve, on all three days (July 10, 11 and 12). I'm contractually obligated to be at the Blastoff Party (Fri, 8:30 PM), followed by a 10:00 PM panel on Female Superheroes. My reading is 1:00 PM on Saturday, in the Unionville suite or room. The rest of Saturday goes like this:

3:00 PM--On the Fringe (about Fringe, strangely), Aurora
4:00 PM--Heroes (the show), Presidential Boardroom
6:00 PM--This is an Ex-Show! (I'll be talking about Kings), Aurora
10:00 PM--That Scared the Sh** Out of Me!, Kingcity
11:00 PM--Superman is Gay?, Kingcity
12:00 Midnight--Romance vs. Erotica vs. Porn (hoping to create Big Gay Black Magic Outlaw novel buzz, obviously;)), Oakridges

Sunday starts at 10:00 AM, with a panel on the intense difficulty of raising genre movie/anything else funds in Canada, followed by a noon panel called You Know What Would Make a Good Movie? Then we have a signing--me and Derwin Mak, 1:00 PM, Richmond--and I'm done.

I'll be bringing sale copies of Imaginary Beauties ($2.00 each), Words Written Backwards ($8.00 each), and at least ten dubs of the poetry-reading collection CD ($5.00 each). I'll also probably be reading from A Book of Tongues, doing "Mrs Margery Lovett, Her Book" (to distract myself from Readercon envy), and maybe reading a section of "Signal to Noise", which still teases me with its potential finishability. Look forward to seeing people there, if they're coming.

As we all know, I’ve been forced to watch a whole lot of Mary Poppins recently. Like most Cal obsessions, this started out as just a bunch of disconnected bits—Mom introduced him to the patented Disney “play all songs” function, then started letting him choose from the menu, and then eventually I began going to the actual scene rather than the song itself, thus forcing him to watch what came immediately before and after (unless he lodged [verbal] protest).

What I’ve found increasingly interesting about this process, however, is just how weird a movie Mary Poppins has turned out to be. Oh, sure, the songs are catchy, and all—and I know it probably isn’t very faithful to the books, since the woman who wrote them reportedly walked out of the premiere in tears—but much like in the YouTube trailer which remixes MP as a horror movie called Scary Mary, the world it creates is less charmingly eccentric than baseline disturbing: A creepy fantasia cobbled together from prototype animatronics, bad greenscreen animation, Edwardian steampunkery, dancing bankers, literal iconogaphy (in the middle of one song, “Feed the Birds”, we get a lovingly spectral close-up of Julie Andrews superimposed overtop St. Paul’s Cathedral, surrounded by fluttering wings, the whites of her upcast eyes radiating from within like a glow-in-the-dark Jesus’), featuring two incredibly ugly child protagonists and a general cast of freaks, including the constantly-distracted Glynis Johns as their mother, the world’s least effective amateur suffragette. (Not to mention Dick van Dyke’s fourth wall-shattering narrator, Bert, who—as people from Neil Gaiman on down have noted—sports a “Cockney” accent so excruciatingly bad that it sometimes seems more like a hideous speech defect, or maybe some in-and-out form of palsy, given the cartoonishly grotesque way it causes him to contort his face while saying things like “Oi’d naow thet sil-hoo-cha-whette anywheres!”, etc.).

Right near the beginning, when the kids first see Mary Poppins come drifting down out of the sky to assume her position as their new nanny, using her umbrella as a combination glider/parachute, the little boy asks: “Is she a witch?” To which his sister replies, dismissively: “Of course not—witches have brooms”…but here’s the thing, guys: According to later evidence, I’d say Mary Poppins can’t possibly be a witch—because in order to be a witch, she’d have to have at least been something approaching halfway human, at one point. And given she seems to spend most of her time sitting on a frickin’ cloudbank looking down on London like some vain, capricious and hideously powerful local trickster-goddess of Politeness Or Death, just waiting for foolish children to invite her into their lives by throwing their ill-considered prayers up the chimney, I think that’s somewhat unlikely.

The solid world reshapes itself around Mary Poppins, obedient to her every whimsical command, but mere tribute is never enough, for her—what she most craves, apparently, is outright worship. We see it in Bert’s chalk-drawing world, where the penguins who staff the café (poor bastards! How long have they been stuck there, sweating themselves to death in English weather, no doubt having been plucked from their original habitat just because she thought they were “cute”?) are forced to give her a complimentary tea she doesn’t even eat, yet call her “our favorite person”; they only exist to do her bidding and sing her praises, much like the Pearly Kings and Queens at the racetrack, the sweeps on the rooftops, the turtles who almost drown themselves getting her and Bert across a small pond, or the children themselves. It’s like she’s Anthony, and this is “A Good Life”—at least until the wind changes and everyone’s finally released from their hypnotic spell, free to go about their normal business, albeit with all their little defects sternly and efficiently corrected. They probably feel better overall, but at what price?

And what are we to make of Bert, who seems to come from a whole family of low-level magicians—people like uncle Albert, who levitates when he laughs, or the other sweeps of London, who can teleport in and out of any house through the fireplaces? (Paging J.K. Rowling…) He seems to have sworn himself to Mary Poppins’ service, an eternally chaste, platonic consort (You never think of pressing your advantage, she sings, of him, in “Jolly Holiday”; forebearance is the hallmark of your creed… “Yeah,” I muttered to Mom, “I guess that’s kinda easy to do, when you know if you DID ever put the moves on her, she might blow you up into the sky and let you suffocate.”), and works three or four equally menial jobs—scrivener, one man band, sweep, kite-seller—in order to stay in her general vicinity, staring longingly at the horizon and waiting for her to re-appear, in all her brisk, rosy-cheeked British dominatrix glory. Then again, I’m sure whole generations of little boys, Cal very definitely included, can probably sympathize.

So, yeah: My musings about Mary Poppins, let me show you them, especially as they relate to helping me not go insane after roughly a million and a half successive partial viewings. And now, here’s another crazy thing I ran across on YouTube (a veritable font of MP minutiae): A three-minute or so remix of the entire film, called “Expialidocious”. Enjoy.

After a week of fairly good attendance at Surrey Place, Cal woke up this morning whey-faced and slack, then puked in the car. We took him home and laid him down on the couch, where he puked again (copiously, but mainly water), so I gave him a bath and put him to bed. Steve went to work, and I fell over. A couple of hours later we both woke up, Cal chirpy and hungry--no further accidents, as yet--while I continue exhausted and sweaty. I'm trying to make up for lost time while he watches The Jungle Book; it's going okay, I guess. But I'm certainly not where I hoped I'd be, by now.

Otherwise: Freakangels is on hiatus once more, which sucks. Everybody seems to have their panties in a bunch over Michael Mann daring to shoot a historical film on digital video. Last night's Harper's Island was a repeat of the pilot episode, probably as a vain attempt to jack interest in next week's two-hour finale. I wasted time by going through our ridiculously large collection of VHS tapes, separated out the ones I thought/knew I could replace on DVD, then organized the rest into vaguely thematically linked groups of ten or twelve for easy conversion; I now need to find out if that guy who did my first load takes dubs, because if he doesn't, that bodes ill for things like Daniel Yoon's Post Concussion, John Paiszs' [The Big] Crimewave, or The Sticky Fingers of Time. (Or, indeed, those two episodes of The Hunger I wrote the actual scripts for, which I still only have on video.)

Okay, so: Back on the horse. This morning's Supernatural newsletter brought a fresh new load of what one person considers Ruby-related songs, including Bjork's "Bachelorette", in which she claims to be "a fountain of blood in the shape of a girl"...that should be good for something.;)

Words added: Roughly 1,000, though at least some of that was me modifying boilerplate from yesterday. I'm hovering on the lip of a new section, which is good; getting through it will mean that I have to paraphrase some Dine legends without fucking them up too badly, though, which will probably be a bit dicey: Let me show you how the world works, grandson. In other true tales of dubious research methodology, I spent some time...the day before yesterday?...rewatching relevant sections of Apocalypto, in order to get myself into Ixchel's mindset, since she and "Grandma" are compare/contrast incarnate.

Like a machine, Rook thinks, looking through her eyes; men as parts, blood as oil. Cogs and wheels. To which she replies: Show me this...machine. Then adds, after a moment--

Ah. Yes.

Very like that, yes.

And that's the world she wants to rebuild--the Mayan-Aztec Death Factory. Because that's the way it's supposed to go. And he's going to help her get it, because then he doesn't so much get what HE wants as--not lose what he already has. Not for a while, anyways.

Yeah. Pretty good; better than I thought I was doing, at least. And now, I need food.;)

(Wordcount overall, just for reference: 78,392. Which means that by the end of Chapter Eleven, we'll probably be up over 80,000.)

After yesterday, Chapter Eleven resolutely refuses to kick-start again, and the new Blood from the Air outline is kicking my ass...though I think I've just now figured out how to make a particular plot twist work FOR me rather than against me, at least. Of course, I also don't feel that good, which doesn't help--Cal is definitely sickening for something, which means I'll probably get it too. And that's all I need.

So: Roughly 1,000 words on the outline, but I think I need to spread it out on a table-top somewhere and start making bullet-point lists of necessary scenes/cross-referencing who knows what when, and connecting stuff up with little squiggly arrows. I'm going to fold some laundry, then go pick up Cal.

The 2009 Rhysling Anthology (Year's Best Fantasy, Sci Fi and Horror Poetry) appeared in my mailbox today, along with the long-bruited final respite services reimbursal check. With the latter, I bought a new hair dryer; the former was full of truly startling pieces, many of which made me both jealous and ambitious. Great stuff, especially the ones which came with old/new friends' names attached.

Final word-count for today, meanwhile, = 780, which I suppose isn't bad. I also managed to get Cal home by subway and shank's mare, which exhausted him so much he literally fell over while watching Mary Poppins, then stayed dead to the world for an hour at least. He woke up pissy, and went to bed early. I see a pattern forming.

Now I'm exhausted, so...'night, all. Hopefully tomorrow will be more productive, not to mention less rainy.

Sloooow like treacle. Having the place to myself is great in many ways, but it hasn't exactly jump-started me the way I hoped it would. Then again, I often find that when you're under less pressure, things simply slack off--the steam-heat gives out, and the kettle won't boil. At which point, the only relevant "trick" is to keep on slogging.

In other news, I've managed to find and download two albums by Jeffrey Foucault--the wonderfully-named Ghost Repeater and Shoot the Moon Right Out of the Sky, both of which have a lot of tracks which remind me of Chess--as well as Tom Waits' Alice and Blood Money, which are just as odd as I'd always suspected they might be: Hell above and Heaven below/All the trees are gone/Rain makes such a lovely sound/To those who're six feet underground... I remember hearing that Blood Money was sort of based on Woyzeck, and it certainly does have that sort of Brechtian punch to it (much like The Black Rider)--but then again, both of them are just amazingly Grimm, routinely juxtaposing Sorrows of Young Werther swoon with decadent Weimar cabaret stomp. You could use them to score a Peter Kurten biopic with built-in Brothers Quay stop-motion dream sequences, maybe based on Dadaist collage imagery; God knows, there's a million other weirdnesses to steal from, given the era. Reveal the substance of which M is only the shadow, while simultaneously taking care not to slip directly into pure exploitation territory, the way those first films to make the leap from Norman Bates back to Ed Gein did...

Anyways: Almost at 500 words. Then I'll do the chores, have a bath, and get myself over to Surrey place at a leisurely walk, as an alternative to having not gone to the gym. Mom wants us over there at 4:30 so she can get her Cal fix; I'm amenable, as ever. It'd be stupid not to be.

It's been whacky. Cal is pushing hard to not be forced into diapers or the stroller anymore, but he isn't quite getting the whole toilet-training thing (we had him in training pants four times today, changing him completely after four separate accidents...though interestingly, he at least apparently knew not to pee on Mommy and Daddy's bed. Instead, he'd go into the living room and pee), and he also doesn't really like walking on his own for very long. The good part is that Steve has his Dad's car until Thursday, and has promised to drive us up to Surrey Place tomorrow morning. The bad part is that I'll still have to get him back down under my own speed, which probably won't be very speedy.

Otherwise: Still blocked, though I have a much better idea of what comes next. I spent today doing research and working distractedly on the sub-project of rewriting Blood from the Air's outline. My hope is that if I can do it well enough, it'll net me both an agent and Something to Do Next, but again, I really need to buckle down and make sure I don't get thrown off-track with Book of Tongues. Wordage must be produced, the distance from here to there crossed--all that. I owe it as much to Chess, Rook, Morrow and Ixchel as I do to myself.

Meanwhile, fandom continues to crumble, and I continue to try not to care. I've got enough shit on my plate without ordering up some more of it to eat, thank you.

Thursday morning, and no money whatsoever; I had to call Mom bright and early, and beg her to spot me $200.00 'til Tuesday. Steve actually tried to persuade me to get a refund on my pre-paid haircut, up until I pointed out to him that that would net us the grand sum of maybe $40.00. He also doesn't want to ask his Dad for a loan, because it's embarrassing--like A) it isn't for me and B) his Dad doesn't know he hasn't been paid for the last three weeks; whatever, dude. Whatever.

One way or the other, we're obviously going to have to manage this just a tad better, in the weeks and months to come. But it can be done, no doubt. (And now that I think about it, the government still owes us respite services money, which I can only hope is on its way even as we speak. So--maybe we'll get a nice surprise.)

In other news, I made a cover for my poetry CD, and am seriously thinking of trying to sell copies at Polaris (July 10, 11 and 12), which is coming up far sooner than I'd anticipated. Its background is Maurice Sendak's illustration for the Brothers Grimm version of "Fitcher's Bird", my favorite Bluebeard variant, which contains the following wonderful refrain/exchange:

You Fitcher's feathered bird, where are you from?
From feathered Fitze Fitcher's house I come.
And Fitze Fitcher's bride, what does she do?
From roof to floor, she sweeps the house like new,
and through the attic window she is watching you.

Okay, well: At least I'm taken up both my pant-legs, at this point.

Added: 720 words. Not a lot of them are consecutive--but some are! And yes, Chapter Eleven does finally seem to be organizing itself the way it should. Horrible stuff on the way, as it should be.;)

In other news, I vaccumed part of the apartment, and took up half a pair of pants. This latter was necessary because the other day, I was just about to go pick Cal up from Surrey Place after having done yoga on my lunch hour, when I stopped into the bathroom and realized that the crotch of my workout pants had actually exploded. Seriously: Massive holes on both sides, completely worn through, unfixable. I was forced to speed-walk to the nearest Addition-elle and buy a new pair of pants, in order to just do what had to be done without flashing everybody within a ten-foot radius. Considering the first mend-job took almost half an hour, however, I'll have to do the other half when I get home, I guess...

One day, I dream, I'll have somebody else to do this sort of stuff for me. Until then, it's fun fun fun.

Some time back, we figured out that one (reasonably) effective way to get Cal to do something was to present the command in question in the form of a song. This led to the creation of such musical opera—still in use today—as this one (sung to the tune of the “Toreador song”, from Bizet’s opera Carmen):

Pull up your pants! Use both hands!
Tuck in your penis, then do a little dance!
We’re happy now, because—you changed your pants—
those droopy, poopy pants!

Or this one (sung to the tune of “Turn That Beat Around”, by Miami Sound Machine):

Turn your bum around! Stick it in the stroller!
Lay your buttocks down, before we get much older!...

(Repeat, since this is all I know of said song, ad infinitum/ad inferno.)

In both cases, people who regularly overhear me serenading Cal with these things start out laughing and saying "how cute!", but quickly end up getting as immured to them as I am. Sort of sad, I guess. I just hope I won't still be singing them when I'm fifty, since then he'll be...fourteen?

Math skills: Minus eleventy-hundred. Jingle-writing on command skills: Okay, I guess. I mean, I'm no Don Draper.

Quote above because I've been listening to L7's "Fast and Frightening" quite a bit--more than I should, probably, because it does put me primarily in a Cornish sisters-writin' mood, and Chapter Eleven is thus far resolutely refusing to catch fire. Of course, it doesn't help that I'm in the PMS/change of seasons phase where my feet swell up like horrible pig's trotters, either...but come on! Barely 500 consecutive words over the last three days is pathetic. "Working writer", my fat and spotty ass.

(OTOH, I did finally finish Cool & Dark #9, my John Connolly retrospective piece, for FearZone; that came in at 1,124, and is off to glamberson as we speak. So now I get to think about Thing Next in that regard, too, since I'm at least a month behind.)

So: Now I've got maybe half an hour before I have to go pick Cal up/run him over to Surrey Place, which means I damn well better do more than just squish, clip and move things around. I have some notes I can input--maybe that'll make me feel better.

Amended to add: Okay! 723 words of notes, taking us almost to 72,000 overall. And I...am...out of here.;)

The summer's arrived, with a vengeance. Toronto is extremely bright, yet roiling with air-pressure I can feel in my sinuses, my eye-socket, my joints. This morning I woke up from a dreaming in which I was trying (and failing) to write a science exam involving taxonomically defining bears, and discovered that I must have been grinding my teeth all night, because I had a pain in my jaw that felt like I was recovering from a punch. That was when the intestinal distress set in, and stayed--possibly because I ate one of my sister-in-law's burgers yesterday, possibly because I'm still detoxing from Naprocen. One way or another, it doesn't exactly make me want to write.

In case you wondered what's been going on over the weekend, meanwhile, I've made an executive decision, and the "f" and "l" icon is being retired. I suppose I thought it would be "smart", somehow, to keep my finger on the pulse of what's riling the fannish community at any given point. However, since I don't really define myself primarily as a fan anymore, what's it really matter? I've already been labeled, however inaccurately; I'm also on deadline, and have increasingly little time to get enraged over stuff, then waste much-needed wordage analyzing my own reaction to it. So...there ya go. It's random pop-snark vs. stuff I like and "where am I now?" only, from now on.;)

In honor of that, therefore:

Last night Steve watched the entire two-hour pilot of Merlin, which I mainly eavesdropped on from the other room, while making my Dad a Father's Day playlist; occasionally I'd wander in and take a more direct look for a couple of minutes, but absolutely nothing I saw gave me the impression this was something I wanted to devote much of my time to: The guy playing Merlin's more dorky than cute, the character of Arthur's a complete jerk, Anthony Stewart Head's slumming; yes, I saw the slash, but if that alone wasn't enough to make me watch The Sentinel, it ain't exactly gonna change my mind here. "Gwen" as Morgana's servant? Um...odd. Though Morgana is indeed hot, and the music was occasionally intriguing, their world-building is inconsistent to say the least--so this is, thankfully, an hour I can definitely spend writing, instead.

Compare and contrast my reaction to this latest BBC export to my continuing devotion to Kings, that increasingly brilliant Dead Show Walking. From the start, this was a dicey proposition at best: A high-budget national network show cast out of HBO, which purports to retell the Biblical story of David and Saul set in a sort-of-current-day fantasy country (Gilboa, a martially-inclined, theocratic monarchy by popular acclaim, whose warlord rulers tend to be literally chosen by God), using Mamet-ishly artificial pseudo-Shakespearian language. It owes an equal debt to various British revisionings (McKellan's Richard III comes to mind) and the BSG reboot, in that it puts religion centre-stage, and makes no bones about it. Most people seem to have hated it on sight.

In this Saturday's episode, King Silas (Ian McShane) neglects to invite his disgraced nephew-in-law to his birthday party, causing the kid's father--Dylan Baker, CEO of CrossGen, the corporation which A) leant Silas most of his treasury and B) has been getting increasing annoyed at his attempts to make peace with Gilboa's ancient enemies, the Republic of Gath (ie, the Philistines)--to shut down Gilboa's capital city, Shiloh. In the ensuing blackout, people wander away to take advantage of their sudden anonymity; Prince Jack (Jonathan) reunites with the male lover his ambition spurred him to repudiate; Princess Michelle (Michal) and lucky young soldier David Sheppard (well, I wonder) are able to finally consummate their slow-burning romance; and we learn--through flashbacks--that Silas once bargained with the tall, cold, ineffably lovely Angel of Death herself (Saffron Burrows) for Michelle's life, on condition that when "the better man" appeared at last, he would step aside and give his throne over without complaint. Thus leading me to speculate that Kings first and only season may end with Burrows murmuring in McShane's ear, as David goes down the aisle to marry Michelle: "And there he is."

Add into the mix a thousand wonderful touches, including Michelle showing David a Renaissance-era painting she's "always been afraid of"--a close-up reveals the Angel's face hanging like a mirage in the background, almost obscured by chiaroscuro shadows--and the L. Frank Baum-esque Gilboan children's classic Silas obsessively reads Michelle in her fatal fever, called Harlow, Some Dumplings, and the Sabbath Queen (the Sabbath Queen also seems to be inspired by the Angel, perhaps a by-word for her, the way calling the Erinyes "Kindly" was supposed to ward them off), and...I'm sold. I'm there for the duration. Yeah, sometimes it's a bit bok-bok-y, but at least it has weight. True gravitas. And no, for once, I don't find the "good" people boring. Being good's a Goddamn hard proposition, in this world; David will fuck it up soon enough, I'm sure. Bathsheba's got to be lurking around here somewhere.

Okay, so--half an hour is long enough. Back to da grind/Chapter Eleven.

Gakked from breathe_poetry via that place where I usually find things which make me mad enough to spit, someone else's poem about someone else's poetry:

Nerve Speech and Song Lines
Brian Henderson

(for Gwendolyn MacEwen)

Along this river, shore birds cut
hieroglyphs in failing light

Dusk moves with the sweep of a hand

From the mouth of the moon
your shadow glides out,

Egyptian
among discarded languages,
broken tongues, ruins,
robbed tombs, codes of stars,
a shiver over the landscape
that once thought itself green
or perhaps human

Nerve speech spilt out of you
its pleasure sparked along
your limbs, hot tongues, burned
you up like furniture
calls you back to itself
crackling through the night unnoticed
forking out in new directions

and along your body strips of gold unfold

Considering where I found it, stuff like this makes up for a lot.;)

368 words, a bare beginning on Chapter Eleven--but that's the first section done, at least, which gives me more to work on later. So now I'm going to print out, have a shower, run Cal up to Surrey Place; it's possible I might be able to improve on this later on, but I'm not going to make any promises. There are many events in the womb of time, after all--and I do still need to finish that FearZone column, which is already up over 900 words, and counting.

Mom wants Cal tonight, to which I'm certainly amenable. This may or may not lead to movie-seeing. Or, y'know--other stuff.;)

Meanwhile, I've ripped a whole new bunch of forgotten music, from Gravediggaz and L7 to Jean-Michel Jarre. And now it's out into the day.