Gods, to their eternal chagrin, are comic.
my gloss on it, from yesterdays post:
a wonderful simple sentence holding two ideas at once: the gods are better than us, unable to experience tragedy as we do, but that in that greatness there’s a loss. there’s something to be said for feeling bad. it ain’t nothing to be laughed at
Anne Carson on the gods
In an intro to Euripides, in a parenthetical, Anne Carson says:
Gods, to their eternal chagrin, are comic.
In place of a full post today, I implore you to think on that. Maybe I will say a piece tomorrow.
submissions
i write novellas now. it’s all in attempt, i think, to write more novelistically, to pretend i’m maturing from short stories, though of course that’s not the case. but i write with such compression, in attempt to recreate alienation, getting word counts up is hard, not without getting fragmented and ballooning counts of characters
anyways: submitting novellas for publication feels difficult, begging people to look over things they don’t want. novellas don’t sell is the wisdom (then again: short stories is the same). it feels extra bothersome, or hopeless, or something similiar
still: sent one in today, Scott and Bianca. then i revise American Desert for what’s next. hobbyist writing means, i think, creating fantasies you think will die
Strange Overtones
been listening, all day, to David Byrne’s Strange Overtones. it’s beautiful. i, too, sometimes hear things through walls
but… BUT: i’ve known this song, for the longest time, for a cover or alternate version i can’t place for the life of me. it’s no longer upbeat but rather morose, sentimental, wistful, Ahnoni and the Johnson’s style. it has a sense of loss. and i cannot find it. i dont know who it’s by, i don’t know when it’s from, I can only hum and feel it, or listen to the original and imagine what I know exists there somewhere, or if doesn’t exist now should still somewhere
or maybe it was put-upon painful, a la xiu xiu
i am dreaming
of course the story means, the question’s what’s it mean specifically
this is about I Found Evidence Of My House Spinning | U&U Forums (LibreCrawl archive 2026-09-03)
the story’s of course spreading a bit (or so i hope or so i imagine), and the twists a pretty open secret also (if you don’t know it, don’t read on), so i just wanna look at how the twist functions, huh
recontextualization, yeah, we get it, but i love the way that’s already what the story is before the context gets put in. it’s a paranormal story from the start, and what’s a paranormal story if not a desperate search for context. it’s like detective stories, but more open-ended: not so much who-done-it what-is-it-that’s-done: the evidence is all there, what could it mean, what does it mean of the unknowable world?
anyways i’m incredibly charmed by the nature of the recontextualization: it’s emotional. why understand the world? for others
nice