The internet informed us while I was driving spatch to work that the joke "We put the AI in dystopiai" does not work because the proper English plural is dystopias or dystopiae. "Well, it works in Greek!" I protested, which the second it was out of my mouth sounded exactly like Donald Swann at the end of a 1957 recording of "Τὸ κοκοράκι" which I can't link neatly because it's blocked in my country, but it's the heroic indignation with which he defends the tongue-twister sound effect of τσιοῦ-τσιοῦ.

I was driving spatch to work partly because I was picking up one of my library requests, Bryher's The Coin of Carthage (1963), which I had to remind myself not to read at the stoplights on the way home. You can tell at once on which side of the Punic Wars her sympathies lay from her description in the foreword of the archaeological understanding of Carthage: "It is as if England had been defeated in 1940 and we were trying to describe the last hours of London only from enemy accounts." It is the only novel I can remember seeing published with a numismatic note on the inner flap of its jacket, identifying the cover illustration with a citation from Carson and Sutherland's Essays in Roman Coinage (1956).

I was talking about dystopian literature because I had just finished reading Rose Macaulay's What Not (1918), otherwise known as the only near-future satire on eugenics I have ever loved as opposed to experienced a violent allergic reaction to. Its personal-political comedy of bureaucracy-crossed lovers is funny enough to draw blood, all the more so now that marriage equality and reproductive rights are back on so many tables, albeit in less nationally compulsory form than Macaulay's thought experiment of a post-war future which diverges mainly from the present day of the novel's publication in the occasional street aero and the all-pervading influence of the Ministry of Brains, an idealistically authoritarian endeavor with a fatal irony at its heart of which its Minister is all too cynically aware, being no fool himself, except in the inevitable human way which is so much of the novel's tragicomedy; it has been correctly read since its rediscovery in the lineage of Huxley and Orwell, but I had sharp flashforwards to Alexander Mackendrick in the way it pulls none of its punch lines, laughter explodes the loftiest of principles and the commonest of hypocrisies and can be the only reasonable reaction left. It's more ambivalent than its successors, too, especially when it comes to the future of its future. Apparently the 2019 Handheld Press edition restores a significant passage censored from all further printings which I am curious about, since the 2022 MIT Press version seems to use the revised, public domain text. I am entertained by the choices made in cover art between the reprints.

I'd like to think it wouldn't have happened if I'd been singing with lyrics, but I missed a step in the opening phrase of "The Lincolnshire Poacher" and got stuck in "The Whirly Whorl." I had to get out via Peter Pears. I heard him before the numbers station.