Tangled Mind

Following a rather friably sleepless Easter, I slept nine or ten hours and resent dreaming of poetry without bringing it out with me this time. I was spending time in evocatively broken-down places by the sea.

March ran out so disastrously, I never got around to linking either of these novelettes: M.E. Bronstein's "Bitter as the Sea" (2026) and Michael Cisco's "Tatterdemalion" (2026).

After nearly twenty years of doing nothing with the extras on my Criterion DVD of A Canterbury Tale (1944), I watched the interview with Sheila Sim which was recorded in 2006. I had never seen her as herself with so much time between her memories and her own ghost of hillsides and reflected sunlight, the house in the country where Alison exclaimed, "What wouldn't I give to grow old in a place like that!" exactly as Sim realizes, as if she caught her character's dream, in the more than sixty years since she spoke that line she has done. It was her first film, straight out of drama school with the careful accent that sounds so artificial to her now; she had to learn to act for the camera, in the open air; she did not have to know that the part had been written originally for someone else, whom I have never been able to imagine in it without losing the earth wire of the character. She was right that it became its own kind of continuity through time, more so than even the regular haunting of film:

"I think I'm a little surprised that the film works for young people today—not necessarily young people, middle-aged people as well—but I'm very touched and very pleased in the best sense of the word that it does. Maybe we feel today, rightly or wrongly, that we are losing certain things that we had then. Maybe a kind of nostalgia that makes people love the film. The connection with history and the people who've gone before and the countryside that goes on, the countryside that we to some extent take for granted. We're realizing now in our present world that we are not entitled to take it for granted. It's not going to last."

Not even the film is going to, but on its own terms of folk anti-horror, I do not expect that hillside ever to be without the imprint of Alison Smith and Sheila Sim, even when it's under ocean again, even after the seas run dry.

I freely admit that I ground my way through the protracted heteronormative anxieties of Strange Lady in Town (1955) for the continued presence of twenty-three-year-old Lois Smith as Spurs O'Brien, one of those mixed-up motherless tomboys who just needs her gender trouble sorted out by her father's remarriage to a strong feminine role model if you believe the screenplay and looks such a late nineteenth century baby dyke in her ranch jacket and jingling boots that you feel she's just waiting for motorcycle clubs to be invented. Her crush on a cavalry lieutenant is narratively doomed and might in any case have been envy. Put her in a ball gown, she's right back in trousers and string ties the next scene, heedless and gallant as any young grandee. I mean when Dana Andrews drags his heels on the sub-screwball romance through which the picture manifests its stresses over the place of professional women, Spurs does her best to run off with Greer Garson herself, all the way back to Boston. "I don't know, Doc, except—well, except I can't figure out any sort of life without you." What did the film think it was doing with her? I don't even know what it thought it was doing with the slap-kiss of its textual couple, but I took an awful screencap just because of the lingering way Spurs sees herself out of a room with Garson's Dr. Julia Garth in it. Once she gets over the rebound, she'll make some Eastern belle ring. "But what a woman!"

The moon looks like a Constable watercolor in black and olive and cratered parchment. I have seen the latest pictures of Earth. I can't turn off the part of my brain that brings around you may leave here for four days in space, but I worried so much about that launch.

This morning was marked by the municipal pruning of trees on our street. When the racket moved far enough around the block to become merely obnoxious, I went back to listening to byways of Flanders and Swann. In the afternoon Hestia saw a cardinal in the yew and almost went through the glass.

I recognize that midlife m/m amid the mussel beds of North Wales is the single most stereotypical choice I could make out of this year's lineup for Wicked Queer, but I am still seriously considering On the Sea (2025). It would be a sure bet if I didn't have to think about parking at the MFA.

I would like the next week to involve much less talking to doctors. None would be an ideal.

My poem "The Cryptogamists" is now online at Strange Horizons.

I am honored to have it appear as part of the magazine's special issue on fungi in SFF, an entangled network of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and art by Mary Soon Lee, Ruthanna Emrys, Romie Stott, Yri Hansen, and branching more.

Given an invitation to write about mushrooms, mosses, lichens, my brain responded, "But what if Geoffrey Tandy had been posted to Bletchley Park because they really did need specialists in cryptogams?" It was written almost entirely to a combination of Kele Fleming's "Turing Test" (2024) and Rabbitology's "The Bog Bodies" (2026) plus the occasional "Five Minutes of Pink Oyster Mushroom Playing Modular Synthesizer" (2020). It is the first poem I have been able to write all year.

On top of being flat, I appear to be actually sick with some kind of non-flu, non-COVID crud which makes my entire body feel as though it has a fever and my thermometer disagree with me. I was doing fine with just the two eye infections and the unremitting headache. My major achievement of the day besides feeding the cat and bringing a bag of groceries inside has been reading, most pleasantly Donald Swann's The Space Between the Bars: A Book of Reflections (1968).

As a reading experience, it suggests a journal that got away from its keeper. Despite several autobiographical chapters, it is not a memoir; it interrupts itself to redirect the disappointed reader toward the available oral histories of Flanders and Swann and it ends with the author in a devil's advocate argument with himself about the entire project. "Green baize flags! Good idea." The style throughout is conversational and the structure consciously disorganized on the principle that some of the most insightful traffic of ideas occurs at odd hours by chance, like the radio conversation in Chicago in 1961 which he assumed would be a ten-minute promotional spot when he agreed to it and which ran instead from eleven-thirty at night until two in the morning when the station turned out the lights. After the fashion of letters, or a column, or a blog, he will mention periodically that he is writing from a coffee shop in New York where the Muzak annoys him or that he has just taken a break from his chapter about Christmas Eve to see Mai Zetterling's Night Games (1966). I had no idea he had attended the Easter 1967 Central Park be-in, where he looked like a total square and had a wonderful time: he found the hippie ethos congenial and if he wasn't personally into the psychedelic scene, he respected its mystical side. "To the English eye, there was a resemblance to a good humoured Bank Holiday crowd, only the clothes were weirder." It would have been near the end of the tour of At the Drop of Another Hat. I had known about his Anglo-Russian, half-Muslim parentage which accounted for the Ibrahim in the middle of his otherwise amiably English-sounding name, but it was never clear to me how far he thought of himself as a mixed person and the answer seems to have been thoroughly. He is amazingly anti-nationalist, in a way that differentiates itself carefully from the love of people and places which he falls into on a regular basis, sometimes naively, always sincerely, sometimes without any roses in his glasses at all. Greece knocked him sideways during his time with the Friends' Ambulance Unit, but territorially, specifically, Epirus, Thesprotia, Igoumenitsa. A week in Tonga and he is already recording some of his favorite vocabulary and the musical notation. "If you were to draw me out on aspects of Britain that I admire I could run on for ages, from underground trains, an impartial judiciary and kippers, to its new fashion flair and its sudden ability to make coffee." His Christianity is a constant lens and it is similarly anarchic. He likes ritual, not organization. Syncretism thrills him as much as sectarianism gets him down. He has a perfectly lucid analysis of his experience of revelation climbing down the Mount of Olives at the age of twenty-one, having been relegated by dysentery from his work in a refugee camp in—call the projectionist, the millennium's stuck again—Gaza. "We are all minus each other, there is no one who cannot be my saviour." I can't tell if he knows that at one point he is quoting Hillel, but I have to hope from his paean to the cracks in things that before the end of his life he managed to discover Leonard Cohen. For that matter, I hope he remained a socialist. He was not unaware that his optimism was working uphill: "I assure you that after World War Two people talked the way I am doing now; they really thought there would be human rights, and had meetings about them . . . I am trying to reset the stage for a one world consciousness, and every morning newspaper is stopping me." I respect his intention not to have written a funny book, but Michael Flanders was not the only chronically clever case in that partnership. Also it is very difficult to tell people with a straight face that you almost fell off the Great Pyramid of Giza. Anyway, aside from making me feel justified in my longstanding affection for Swann based on little more originally than his tongue-twister modern Greek and his chaotic laugh, this unwieldily absorbing set of meditations provided a piece of invaluable intelligence:

"They are all pacifists there," said a man at a party in Boston to me. He had just been on a businessman's trip to GHQ Omaha, where they push the button that sets off the H bombs. Fortunately Tom Lehrer was also listening and he said: "Why don't they invite some Chinese and Russian generals instead of businessmen?" That stopped that.

I had never been sure if they knew one another socially outside of the shelves of record collections. Now I know. I have so many questions. Look at what can happen when you realize you have spent an entire month singing "20 Tons of TNT."