I had a splendid time last night with rushthatspeaks returning our books to the Malden Public Library and checking out even more. Despite some rearrangements of the supporting cast, I was fascinated to see how faithfully Elleston Trevor's The Flight of the Phoenix (1964) had been translated into the 1965 film, except for the difference it made to cast its engineer-antihero with Hardy Krüger instead of the impenetrably schoolboyish Englishman described by the text. I will be reading The Big Pick-Up (1955) more or less next since it was one of the sources for the 1958 Dunkirk which I enjoyed so much last summer, although at the moment I am in the middle of Glendon Swarthout's They Came to Cordura (1958). I am looking forward to Rosemary Sutcliff's Sword at Sunset (1963); I have not read it since early high school, when I followed it straight from her Romano-British chronicles of the dolphin ring and perhaps unfairly found it much less imprinting than Mary Stewart or Parke Godwin. For my mother, I got a pile of the least familiar titles by Agatha Christie. Because I could carry only so many hardcovers under my own power, I dumped the intended autobiography of W. C. Fields in favor of the film criticism of Graham Greene.

As of this afternoon, Facebook has suspended my account, apparently under the technologically-detected impression that I am a commercial account which has violated their advertising standards. I have had this account since 2011 and I have never run ads on it unless one counts promoting my own work and the work of other writers, which I thought was standard practice for social media. Because I was never on Twitter or Bluesky, the platform is my primary point of connection with most of my professional acquaintances as well as a bunch of friends who were conversely never on LJ/DW. Most recently I had shared an appeal from Readercon for contributions in memory of the trailblazing sword-and-soul of Charles R. Saunders and left a comment about the pre-Code nakedidity of George Raft in Night After Night (1932). It is exactly the sort of algorithmic idiocy for which I would like to talk to a real person, but the only option with which I am currently presented involves handing over my three-dimensional biometrics to Meta. In the meantime, spatch reports that not only can he no longer see my posts or tag me in his own, the platform seems to have dissolved our marriage.

Otherwise I am so tired that I seem to have the semi-constant shakes and have now spent more than a week playing an escalatingly aggravating game of phone tag with a doctor's office. Heard on WERS, Haim's "The Wire" (2013) just sounded like an unapologetically grooving breakup song, but the video is incredible.