Wednesday 11/3/21
I had a dream last night about my late sister Kerrin. I was helping her with a paper and it was a version of an assignment with which she had struggled the year before. She was nervous, but we were doing a good job, and when it was nearly done one of her teachers had seen it and they said some words that put her mind at ease. We were in some Cape Cod like setting, I think. But later we were out together in Beacon Hill, on the highest point of the hill, which was higher than the hill actually is in real life. It was night and she went into this store, and I kept strolling down the street as I waited. A gas lamp marked the end of the street, and I stopped by it, looking out over the evening sky. There was a factory billowing smoke with a strip of water to its side--either a river or a part of the harbor--and beyond the factory and the smoke, with fog passing before it, was the Tobin Bridge, which wouldn't be in that actual direction. As I waited, I called someone I've known for a long time, to tell them what I was seeing, because they used to live here, and I thought they'd like the scene, and I took a photo with my phone, too, but the smoke and the fog didn't come through in the photo. As I was talking, though, all of the darkness lifted, as if it had never been night at all, was daytime all along. I felt like I had been untruthful and misleading, though I had not been either. My sister didn't come out again in the dream.
I have gone through "Bivouacked" and made sure it is completely done. An amazing story.
Been lax in getting some things up in this record (though not in the News section, at least). Here are the last two "author takeover" entries I did on the 33 1/3 blog, of which there were five total. I think one can learn much about writing, music, art, and life from them.
I should round up a spate of recent radio interviews as well. I posted the one from last night last night, but let's do some others.
This entire half hour conversation is about the Sam Cooke book. This one is about Saki's "The Open Window," episodes of The Mysterious Traveler and Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar, a Halloween safety film from 1985, plus baseball, stairs, and the sun. Here we have an interview about a Cape Cod radio drama, Saki's "Sredni Vashtar," the 1986 ALCS, my dad, Christopher Lee reading Dracula, a fantastic performance of the Grateful Dead in Europe in 1972, and a TV adaptation of an M.R. James ghost story from fifty years ago.
I've been lax in incorporating links here, so I'm not sure if this went up either, but it's a personal essay in The Smart Set about nightmares. This is the kind of thing that is only to be found, right now, in the News section of the site, because various sections like those for Short fiction, Film writings, Music writings, and Literature writings are incredibly out of date and fragmentary. That will be fixed. It's just going to be a bit of a project I have to budget time for. Someone reached out about translating this essay into Arabic for their magazine.
There's a loud crow outside. I don't see or hear many crows in the city.
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