Fleet Sparrow

My poem "ἀγκυλοθάλασσος" is now online at Strange Horizons. I am indebted to radiantfracture for his Twine prompt generator designed to produce scientific-sounding compound adjectives and nouns, in this case the irresistible "ankylothalassic" from ἀγκύλος "crooked, bent" and θάλασσα "the sea." In the process of rendering it back into classical Greek, it acquired Twelfth Night and José Esteban Muñoz. It was written on New Year's Eve and I am very pleased to have it published in the middle of Pride.

Speaking of Strange Horizons, their Annual Fund Drive is underway! This year running on BackerKit instead of Kickstarter, thanks to AI. Please donate! The fund drive issue has already earned one poem, one short story, one essay, and two reviews, and more await. Not to mention the magazine continuing to pay its authors their well-deserved rates.

My week began with the wrestling of bureaucracy, but troisoiseaux has sent me a beautiful slim paperback of Duff Cooper's Operation Heartbreak (1950), about which I have been desperately curious since learning of it. The fact that Operation Mincemeat escaped containment into a novel directly precipitating the publication of Ewen Montagu's The Man Who Never Was (1953) is one of those points of history where the suspension of disbelief gives up.

At intervals accommodating my current ability to process film and TV, spatch has continued to show me selected episodes of visually potato, dramatically satisfying Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993–99), lately focusing on Jadzia Dax because we started with a couple of Sisko-centric episodes and then a couple of Quark and a couple of Bashir, and I am fascinated by the degree to which a show that couldn't commit to Garashir despite the best efforts of Andrew Robinson and Siddig el-Fadil just forgets to be anxious about queer and trans concepts around the Trill. Obviously I too am thrilled three decades on by "Blood Oath"'s iconically matter-of-fact "Jadzia, my beloved old friend!" but I was just as struck by Yedrin Dax in the grandfather paradox of "Children of Time" unselfconsciously recalling his wedding to Worf, slipping so naturally from the third person of a former life to the first person of memory that it leaves little room for rules-lawyering the gay away. The character himself was a predictable one-off favorite of mine from the first time around—his episode was one of a very small handful of DS9 I caught first-run, at which time it had no long-term chance in the intensity of my attention to Babylon 5 (1994–98)—but the constancy of affection asserted across the fluidity of bodies made so much sense to fifteen-year-old me that as with similar expressions by Tanith Lee, I took it as read and got to be surprised by its historical presence all over again in 2026.

Yesterday I got into the car to find WHRB playing the madrigal fable of Gian Carlo Menotti's The Unicorn, the Gorgon and the Manticore (1957), which I had known about but never heard. Later that night through more twenty-first century channels I heard Riah's "Other Side" (2025) and Thao's "Fossils" (2026).