I must have slept ten hours. Hestia appears to be watching the rain with almost as much interest as the birds sheltering from it. May it and the recent snowmelt amend the drought. Tomorrow, of course, it is forecast to snow again.

selkie was safely collected from the Penn Station-alike that South Station has done its best to inhume itself into since her last visit, provided with an appropriate quantity of local barbecue for an obligate carnivore, and even successfully checked in to her hotel despite the mishegos attending every stage of her conference even before it started. At no point in this process did we apparently remember to take any pictures of ourselves.

My dreams seem to be branching out in terms of media, since last night's featured a youngish Alec McCowen starring in the radio version of a Tey-like crime novel as the ambiguously poor relation of an upper-class family who is not actually Kind Hearts and Coronets-ing his way through them, but needs to figure out who is before he's so handily scapegoated for the accidents escalating to murder ever since his arrival; he is, naturally, keeping a secret from the family, the authorities, and even the inattentive reader, but it isn't that. I was very pleased to find that a recording had survived, because the original novel had just been reprinted by the British Library Crime Classics. There were images mixed up in it in the way of dreams, but it was definitely on the Internet Archive.

Outside my head, I have been recently listening to Wu Fei & Abigail Washburn (2020), Jake Blount and Mali Obomsawin's symbiont (2024), and Huw Marc Bennett's Heol Las (2026), which I found through its ghost-boxish "Cân Gwasael (Wassail Song)." I like that I do not have to dream their remixes of folk and futurism and time.

On the way back from the MRI, in accordance with the local observance of the hundred and twelfth birthday of Wendell Corey, I found and talked to a dry stone wall.

I can't believe I dreamed an entire opera whose closing performance by a small local outfit I was all set to attend before it was canceled at the last unavoidable minute. It was a Gian Carlo Menotti from 1948 and had never before received a Boston premiere. I had read its libretto for years because it was full of sand and sea-haunting: No body that presses its mouth to the shore closer than your mouth to mine. No eye that fades into the haze of the sun more fixed than your eye to mine. No ship of a letter that crosses the seas faster than my hand to yours, unless it has foundered, unless it has torn on the black rocks of the heart. It had one of his terse, enigmatic titles, The Visitor. The company that had put it up was called Marmalade and Gold, an allusion whose meaning did not escape the event horizon of waking, and specialized in bare-bones, slightly more than concert performances of oddities or undeserved obscurities of the twentieth-century opera world: I remember perusing the catalogue of previous seasons on their website and approving of their choices, all of which I suspect of not existing outside of the hour or so I was asleep. Erich Wolfgang Korngold did write a bunch of operas, mostly before—very popular choice—leaving Germany, but I do not believe a 1932 Der lahme König was among them. I am having a terrible week for which the external world offers nothing in the way of respite and even if I didn't get to hear any of its music, I appreciate the inside of my head attempting to furnish a break of art.

The wall-to-wall crowd of the memorial from which I have just returned testifies to the love poured out and returned by the guest of honor, but I would still rather have been in the worldline where they were present to be celebrated in more than memory.

It is the dozenth birthday of Hestia Hermia Linsky-Noyes, lhude sing meaw! We sang to her after midnight. She ate eagerly of her festive ham. She has spent the afternoon in the pursuit of Bird Theater. I remember her brother under that same light. Bast smiled when our cats were born.

Not only is 42 °N a lousy latitude for radio astronomy, it does jack most of the year for the photosynthesis of vitamin D, but I was inspired by the summerlike spike in temperatures to walk out for groceries in a T-shirt and whatever it may or may not have done for my metabolism, it was worth the pitching over onto the couch when I got home.



No introduction to an actor may be as misleading as discovering Peter Lorre with Arsenic and Old Lace (1944), but spending much of last night sacked out in front of my longtime comfort movie of Robert Aldrich's The Flight of the Phoenix (1965) reminded me that I should probably count Richard Attenborough in a similar vein, all those weak links and bad influences his panicking debut in In Which We Serve (1942) and his nihilistic breakout in Brighton Rock (1947) set him up for. Never mind that I saw him first as the briskly competent ringleader of The Great Escape (1963), he looks much more in his ambivalent element as Lew Moran, the middle-aged navigator who may have his moral compass screwed on straightest of the sun-blistered survivors of what will become the Phoenix but little authority between his uneasy position as peacemaker and his diffidence as a drying-out drunk, even if his stammer doesn't after all stop him from going off like a firecracker on some blatantly bullheaded display of stupidity on the part of one or more of his co-leads. It would have been the second way I saw him, after which the time-shock of Jurassic Park (1993), jovial and grandfatherly and scientifically short-sighted. I'd give a lot for a record of his Sergeant Trotter in the original run of The Mousetrap. The time machine bureau is going to cut me off.