Myth Happens

I went right back to not sleeping. I haven't been this exhausted without respite in a very long time. I keep having to remind myself that it is not an emotional symbol, it's just the physical effects of too little sleep and a schedule that interacts badly with everything else about my life, but it is both not very pleasant and familiarly boring. It leaves me feeling I don't have much brain to do anything with. I did manage to attend the opening night of A Man for All Seasons, which was a good strong start, and then came back with my parents (who were celebrating their thirty-ninth anniversary) for the second night, which was even better. This afternoon is the matinée and derspatchel's on his own. Have some things.

1. As far as I can tell, From Hell (1999) is the first book by Alan Moore I have uncomplicatedly liked. It may be a book I had to wait for: I can remember looking through an early edition in the Million Year Picnic when I was in college, but it didn't grip me then; I remembered scattered frames and sentences, but nothing of the structure or the spiraling conspiracies, absolutely none of the psychogeography which I wouldn't have known the word for at the time anyway. This time I just admired. The footnotes aren't even the best part. I borrowed rushthatspeaks' copy; I need to find my own. I need to track down Iain Sinclair's early work.

2. Solmate Socks are just as good as everyone recommended. I bought two pairs from Firefly Moon on Tuesday (Equinox and Nebula) and ordered two more; they are why my feet weren't worse off the night Rush and I waited forever at Kendall Square. Rob and I are time-sharing a pair of Luna, since he can't really wear more than one sock at a time right now. They are warm and sturdy and handmade and weird; this covers most of my criteria for clothing.

3. I think Robert Aickman's "Ringing the Changes" is one of the most refusing stories I have ever read. It's not just that it doesn't explain anything. Any sufficiently elliptical narrative can do that. It's that at numerous points throughout this one, events present the opportunity for explanation (why Holihaven, why bells, how does the sea figure, what the fuck happened last night) and each time the story simply walks on by. I did what had to be done. I hope I was in time. The emotional effect produced by this technique is not quite like anything I've encountered in other authors. The first few times, it's almost too obvious: it feels coy, a textbook exercise in denying expectations—yes, Aickman, I see what you're not showing me there. By the end of the story, however, it seems only a natural consequence of the events described therein. It's not deliberate withholding; it's more like resignation, or fatalism, or just plain indifference. Explanations wouldn't help. The protagonists wouldn't be better off knowing and neither would you. Things happen; you live through them or you can't. You go on honeymoon and the dead rise. What can you do? (But then, one of the protagonists has not behaved from the start as we would expect her to—as her husband did, irritation giving way to dread as the bells rang on relentlessly in this crumbling little seaside town. We'd have been frightened, too, wouldn't we? What if the problem isn't with her, it's us?) In other news, it does not at all surprise me that the cover illustration of the edition of Cold Hand in Mine (1975) Rush lent me is by Edward Gorey.

I should go out. Too much of my life lately has been running around, which is different.