Delia Sherman's Blog, page 11

Come All Ye

Trad English Folk Music enthusiasts, who love the Watersons, Ewan MacColl, Dick Gaughan, Jean Redpath et al. and list to this tale, of a young pinball wizard who just couldn't fail.  You won't be sorry.



From Gardner Dozois by way of Greg Frost.

Hear Ye, Hear Ye!

Stone Telling 4 is now accepting submissions!

Guest editors are our very own shweta_narayan  and seajules  .  Guidelines are here.  Submit!  You know you have something to fit the bill.  They're looking for something "inter- -- intersectional, international, interstitial. Genre-bending makes us happy. So do perspectives we haven't seen before, and lines we're still thinking about -- and emotions we're still aching from - three days later."

And if you don't have such a thing, go write one.  I'm going to.  And I'm not even a poet.  But come on--Stone Telling!

More Precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world

I've lost a lot of friends in my life, many of them in the 80's, when AIDS swept through the gay communities of Provincetown (where I was spending summers) and Boston like a tsunami.  I've gone to funerals and heard elegies, and the thing that I remember about many of them is the number of times I heard some variation on the words "I loved him/her.  S/he was there for me/made me laugh/drove me nuts in wonderful ways.  I wish I'd told him/her before it was too late."

Well, I did it again.  Diana died without my having told her how profound an influence she has had on my life and my fiction, how well I remember our meetings, how grateful I am to her for the gifts she has given me, both consciously and unconsciously.  And I wish it were not so.

My reaction to hearing that someone whose life touched mine has died is an overwhelming rush of affection for all my friends who are still alive.  Being a lot more reticent by nature than you'd probably believe, I don't immediately write or call them to tell them how much I appreciate their presence in my life.  But I should.  And I intend to.

I'll begin with you, my lj friends.

You have read my reviews, my trip reports, and my general effusions, and you've commented on them.  You have answered questions technical, historical, and bibliographical.  You have replied to my comments on your journals.  You have posted about your lives and your opinions so that I can understand and come to know you better.  In short, you have welcomed me into your community, made it my community as well.  For that I thank and honor you, the friends I haven't met in person as well as the ones I have.  I'm fond of you all, and love many of you well and truly.  And will tell you so in person, next time we meet.  It's a promise.

Diana Wynne Jones RIP

Diana Wynne Jones is gone.

I met her a couple of times (most memorably in Minneapolis, at an early Fourth Street, where she was very kind to me), but mostly I knew her through her books.  Her imagination was unconfined, her characters particular and living, her voice unmistakable.  Archer's Goon has given his name (and his purpose) to a loose network of writers who send one another pages once a week (in writing season) mostly to keep each other moving on first drafts of novels.  In my world, a Goon is a chapter or a portion of a chapter from a friend, and I think of Diana whenever I send or read one (it has to be turned around fast, and "I WANT MORE" is the only allowable response).

All unknowing, through writing books I've read and re-read until their rhythms have become part of my brain, she has taught me how to put a book together, how to reveal what must be revealed and not a detail more, how to take chances, how to hang in there, writing the books she wanted to write, until the wider world caught up with her.  She was a remarkable woman and a remarkable writer, and she'll be much missed.

And now I think I'll go and read Charmed Life again.  Or maybe Witch Week.  Or The Pinhoe Egg.  Something, anyway.

Double Falsehood

On a whim (and because we were both going to be out all day anyway and Ellen saw they had cheap tickets), we braved the sleet, rain, thunder, and snow last night to see Classic Theatre Company's production of Fletcher, Theobald and (possibly) Shakespeare's Double Falsehood.

Shakespeare wrote 37 plays.  That's more than a play a year for the 24 years he was active.  That's a helluva lot of plays.  It would be no shame if some of them weren't good--and some of them are indeed better than others (I'm looking at you, Timon of Athens).  When you add Fletcher into the mix--a workmanlike playwright at best--you get Two Noble Kinsmen and Henry VIII, which are read only because Shakespeare had a hand in some of their scenes and virtually never produced.  And maybe Double Falsehood as well, which could be the long-lost Shakespeare/Fletcher play Cardenio, if we believe Lewis Theobald, who discovered it in a 1660 prompt book in the early 18th Century and sprang it on the public in 1727 at Drury Lane Theater as a lost Shakespeare play.  Which inspired Alexander Pope (who Theobald had hammered in a scathing review of Pope's edition 1725 of Shakespeare) to write The Dunciad, with Theobald in a starring role as King of the Dunces.

Oh, and the textual scholars, who have run their stylometric analysis programs over the text and discovered the ghost of Shakespeare lurking in its verbal DNA.

I'm not sure what inspired the Classic Theatre Company to mount this production, and I'm certainly not convinced that Shakespeare contributed so much as a word to the text (except, possibly, "hath").  But on the whole, I'm glad they did it.  I love loopy, deriviative late Renaissance drama, and this is right on up there, with a girl dressed as a shepherd boy, another girl smuggled out of a cloister in a coffin, two heavy fathers, a virtuous young man driven raving into the wilderness, a pair of noble brothers, one virtuous, one gleefully vicious, two heavy fathers, some unfunny shepherds, and a denouement that is almost as unromantic as the end of All's Well.

Briefly, the argument is this:  Leonora and Julio (pronounced, in this production as Hulio, as in the happy (or unhappy) Hulio) are in love and waiting only for Julio's father's consent to marry.  Julio, called to attend upon the duke at court, asks his friend, the duke's son Henriquez, to watch over Leonora for him while he's gone.  Henriquez, in the meantime, is courting the beautiful but low-born Violante, who scorns him.  He rapes her (she's low-born, after all) and, in the space of one medium-length soliliquy, feels guilty, decides it wasn't his fault after all, decides he's actually in love with the Virtuous Leonora, feels guilty over stealing his best friend's intended, rationalizes that (I remember that taking less time that rationalizing the rape, but I could be wrong), and runs to Leonora's father, waving his pedigree and his bank account.  Leonora's father welcomes him with open arms, informs Julio's father Leonora has changed her mind, and goes off whistling to figure ways and means of getting the bride to show up for the new wedding he has planned for her.  Meanwhile, the Violated Violante considers suicide, decides (as one does) to dress as a boy instead and go watch sheep in the hills.  Julio, alerted to the situation by a letter Leonora has managed to smuggle out of the house, rides to her rescue.  Leonora, unwilling (because she's Virtuous, remember) to run away with him or to kill herself, tucks him behind the arras and proceeds to go through with the wedding until, just before she says "I do," Julio jumps out, hits Henriquez with a volley of lamentations, and rushes off into the night. Leonora decides he is dead and runs off to a convent.

Intermission, during which sleet pattered on the theater roof and thunder rolled commandingly.  The storm continued, at intervals, during the first part of the second half, but never when it would have been dramatically apt so we knew it wasn't part of the show.  Or maybe it was.  By this time, I was ready to believe anything.

The second half opens on the mountain, in a sheep field, with two shepherds and the V.V., en travestie.  Enter to them Julio, in his skivvies and smeared with ashes and, in a sharp break with his roots, not in the least bit a-cold.  He raves a bit, tries to kill one of the shepherds, gropes Violante, hails her as a girl, and scurries off, still raving.  The other shepherd then independently guesses Violante's femaleness and proceeds to try and rape her, but is prevented by Julio (still raving).  When he runs off, the betrayed pair tell each other their woes and exit, contemplating suicide and laughing madly.  The Horrible Henriquez, still stuck on Leonora, cons his virtuous older brother Roderick into smuggling her out of the convent in an empty coffin.  When she wakes up, she not unnaturally freaks out and spills the beans, which eventually leads to the cascade of bean-spilling that takes up the rest of the play.  At the end, Julio and Leonora are reunited, Horrible Henriquez is to marry to Violante, and all three fathers are satisfied that duty, justice, and their family honors have been duly served.

The actors did their best with this hodge-podge of borrowed bits and bobs.  I was particularly impressed by Slate Holmgren, whose Henriquez managed to be both a creep and an asshole (ninja and barbarian?).  The last scene, where he pretended to be delighted to be marrying Violante, was downright chilling.  Mackenzie Meehan as Violante frankly made a better Florio the Shepherd Boy than violated maiden.  I loved how she made it very clear in the last scene that she was only marrying Henriquez for his name and his money, and that she had every intention of making his life a living hell from that day forward.  The rest of the cast ranged from competent to excellent, with special props to Philip Goodwin, who played Julio's father and Henriquez's father in the same tux and managed to differentiate them even though the text did not.

Which brings me to why I'm not impressed by the scholarship that purports to establish that Shakespeare hand is detectable in Acts 1-3 of this play.  Even if you accept that the prompter had simplified Shakespeare's poetry so that stupid 17th C. groundlings could follow it, and that Thobald, in adapting the play for an 18th C. audience, mangled it further, I find it hard to believe that it wouldn't have retained a lyric flight or two, a line or a moment of true beauty or meaning.  The verse in Double Falsehood is sing-song, prosaic, utterly pedestrian.  What's more, the characters are purest plywood and cheap paint, their sentiments ditto.  They can't be said to be characters at all, just collections of convenient reactions.  Leonora loves Julio, and announces (over and over) that she will never marry another, than bowing a dutiful head to her father's wishes and putting her hand in Henriquez's without so much as an aside to explain her change of heart.  Violante spurns suicide in one breath and prepares to kill herself with the next.  I really should read the text to see if their moments of decision hit the cutting room floor, but still, I gotta wonder.  Furthermore, I got no sense of theme or weight or meaning in the play, other than "children should obey their fathers even when their fathers are self-satisfied idiots because it will all come out in the end somehow."

I read the Newsletter interview with the Arden editor of the play, Brean Hammond, and basically, it comes down to this:  His gut tells him it's Shakespeare's and he has a computer print-out and a bunch of other scholars backing him up, all of whom, like him, want a new Shakespeare play to pet and write about even more than they want tenure and a knighthood.  My gut tells me it isn't, and I bet mine isn't the only one.  Those other scholars probably have their pseudo-scientific reasons, too.  But what it boils down to is that we don't want Shakespeare to have had anything to do with the thing, which is jolly good fun, but ultimately even sillier than Cymbeline, and not nearly as well-written.

Teeth!

Guess what arrived in the mail today!  Our authors' copies of Teeth !  Isn't it beautiful? (she asked fondly)



The TOC is a wonder to behold:  Tanith Lee, Kathe Koja, Neil Gaiman and Lucius Shepard and Melissa Marr, for crying out loud.  And lots and lots of fellow LJ'ers, including glvalentine  , yuki_onna  , blackholly , cassandraclare  , castellucci  , and Chris Barzac and Steve Berman--oh, and ellen_kushner  , whose story is both very romantic and very sad, as many of her stories are.  My story's got a circus in it, with a cat act

Come on.  You know you love cat acts.

It's out April 5.  I'm very excited.

Arcadia

We counted up and realized that we'd seen Arcadia four times.  London, 1993, when it was new (In my diary, I wrote, "It made me cry for the beauty of it and the truth of it--and for jealousy that I didn't write it").  Boston, 1996, at the Huntington Theater.  ("The acting wasn't as good as London, but the play will stand up to an incredible amount of abuse.  We cried buckets at the end again.  Alexandria, entropy, loss, misunderstanding, beauty.  I hope I can someday write something half so lovely.") Boston again, in 2003, at Boston College, directed by Ellen's old school friend, who is the head of their theater department. (I can't find the entry for it, I'm afraid.  Perhaps I was just too overcome to write.  Or got home too late.)  And New York, 2011, in the new production at the Barrymore Theater, Monday night.

It was wonderful.  Arcadia is always wonderful.  The play itself is so close to perfect that even a problematical interpretation can only give you another way of thinking about it.  The way Stoppard orchestrates the dance of past and present, literature and science, romantic passion and scholarly passion, solipsism and generosity, middle age and youth, is a neverending delight to me.  Unlike some of his other plays (Travesties comes to mind), it never descends into pure speechifying, and you can always (if you pay attention) tell what's going on.  The text is fluid and complex enough to sustain more than one interpretation.  Septimus can be played romantic or caddish; Bernard can be played as a lit-geek or as a self-satisfied snark-monster.  Hannah can be a ball-busting Female Academic or a Priestess of Scholarship, and the text is still served, the play still works.

Our first Septimus Hodge, in London, was Rufus Sewall, and he made it his play.  The way he delivered the line about Mrs. Chater's drawers being in such a constant state of humidity as to grow orchids in January was both funny and incredibly erotic.  Bernard Nightingale was played by Bill Nighy and Felicity Kendell by Hannah Jarvis.  I remember Nighy as being dignified, full of himself, but with an undercurrent of a rather touching vulnerability.  Kendell's Hannah was abrasive, prickly, defensive.  Thomasina was precocious in the first half, very much on her dignity in the second, and heartbreaking at the end.  As I recall, the only really false note was struck by Harriet Walter (who I usually love), whose Lady Croomb was all attitude and drawl with nobody home behind the mannerisms.

This cast was completely different.  Both men were snarkier, chillier, more calculating.  Tom Riley's Septimus is a real roue.  Despite being told that he was in love with Lady Croomb, I never felt that his attraction to her was different in kind or intent from his vertical poke with Mrs. Chater, or that his affection for Thomasina ever grew past the avuncular.  Which is fine, and fits the text, but actually ups the squick factor of the kiss and waltz at the end if we think she's in love and he's just kissing her because that's what he does with girls, even when they're mathmatics geniuses.

And as for Billy Crudup's Bernard.  Well.  I hated him.  Not the acting, not the concept (the text allows it and the culture demands it).  Certainly not Crudup, who is a ferociously committed and thoughtful actor.  Bernard.  As Crudup plays him, he's a cad, a bounder, the scholarly equivalent of the kind of man who sleeps with models because he knows other men will envy him.  He's abrasive, gleefully rude, self-satisfied--intelligent, but not quite as intelligent as he thinks he is, unlike Nighy's Bernard, who seemed to be a little afraid that he wasn't as bright as he thought he was.  This thrust the burden of the whole scholarship-as-passion theme onto Hannah and Valentine, where it rests comfortably.  Lia Williams is a fierce, concentrated, very human Hannah, who reminds me, well, of me when I was working on my dissertation and passionate about the ins and outs 15th Century Copyright Law and what they meant to the dating of King Lear.  Her body exists to move her mind from place to place and provide senses to gather data with.  She's too in love with the Death of Romanticism to be in love with anybody alive, and neither Stoppard nor the production judges her for that. (Although possibly the costume designer did.  Her clothes were fashionable without being either stylish or attractive, and far too fussy for someone who didn't care what she threw on.)

Hannah's real male counterpart, of course, is the numbers wonk Valentine, and Raul Esparza gives him a lovely geeky charm that made me fall deeply in love with him.  He may suffer from unrequited love for Hannah, but he never loses his dignity with her nor loses sight of what is really important, which is the beauty of numbers and mathematics and discovery--and the unity and warmth of his eccentric, scatty, mostly off-stage family, which he clearly loves.

And Thomasina?  Well, Bel Powley makes a great 13 year old--she's got the body-language, the unbridled enthusiasm, the slyness, the moments of unexpected maturity, down pat.  I believe she's a mathematical genius, I believe she weeps over the burning of the library at Alexandria, I believe she's turning her mother's hair gray.  I was very disappointed, however, by her playing the 16-year-old Thomasina in exactly the same way, body-language and all.  It came near to ruining the whole Septimus/Thomasina thread for me.

But I still cried at the end.  Gazing into the abyss will do that to you.

Ellen and I have participated in two informal readings of Arcadia (she doubled Bernard and Septimus; I was Hannah and Mr. Chater, as I recall.  On one occasion, our friend Dan was Lady Croomb, and did a much better job with her than Harriet Walters did, for my money).  We like to say it's an actor-proof play, and indeed, it's just as affecting (for us, anyway) read aloud by amateurs as on the page or in a professional production.  If you can't see it, in New York or in revival elsewhere, you should get four or more friends together, lay out some bread and cheese or order a pizza, brew up a pot of tea, open a bottle of wine, hand out the parts and begin.  Be sure and start with the opening stage directions--they help get you in the mood.  And make sure that the man or woman reading Thomasina is ham enough to deliver the speeches on algebra with all the emotion at their disposal.  For in Arcadia, the love of algebra--and of literature and of history--is the love that conquers time and death.

ETA to correct the unforgivable typo mentioned below.  Rufus, can you ever forgive me????

Desperately Seeking 1950's Maine Guidebook!

I needs it, precious.

I can go to Maine.  I can find websites full of Maine dialect, idioms, flora, fauna, recipes, boats, and weather.  But I can't know where tourists went and where they stayed and what they did when they got there without a contemporary guidebook.  Which the internet is not turning up, no, not even on the 6th Google page.  Possibly my Googlefu is at fault, or perhaps even my search terms (although "Guidebook Maine 1950's" and "AAA Guidebook Maine 1950" seem pretty straightforward to me).  In any case, I (and my Wizard's Apprentice) need your help.  In any form.

The window-dressing is just going to have to go into the second draft, I guess.  In the meantime, I shall turn Nick back into a boy again by the end of the chapter (and the end of the day) or know the reason why.

Decade Meme

I don't do memes that often, but I've been so fascinated by everyone else's that I want to play, too.

2011

In New York, the home of my heart, in a cozy, sprawling apartment that seems to purr and expand when people come and admire it, living with the woman I love, doing work I love, figuring out what kind of old lady I'm going to turn into.  I do more maintenance on myself than I used to:  regular visits to the gym and the chiropractor for my body, regular visits to the hairdresser to touch up my white roots.  But I am (thank God and my unknown parents) healthier than I was when I was 20.  Which is just as well, since I still have a backlog of travel and theatre to make up from my stay-at-home 30's.  I'm at a turning-point in my career, looking for new representation and a new publisher and maybe even a slightly new direction.  I've rediscovered some old joys:  teaching, knitting, cooking.  I've discarded some old hurts.  I believe I'm happier than I've ever been in my life.

2001

I was living in Somerville, MA, in a cozy 1910 farmhouse.  Masako Katagiri, the mother of my heart, who brought me up and loved me unconditionally and kept me sane, died in Japan, necessitating the last of my 9 week-long trips to Chigasaki for her Buddhist funeral.  Following her wishes, we brought back her ashes to be buried with my mother in the crypt of St. Bartholomew's Church, with the internment planned for September 15.  In New York.  It finally happened on September 24 (I keep a diary) and we all retired to the Waldorf Coffeeshop afterwards (it's a tolerably fancy ladies-who-lunch place now), past the National Guard, to talk alternately about Masako and the Twin Towers and eat strawberry shortcake (her favorite) and drink wine and get teary.  It was a bad year for people I loved dying, too--a young woman I loved like a niece had died early that spring.   Ellen and I were writing The Fall of the Kings, and most of our traveling was either to public radio conferences or SF cons.

1991

I was living in a 12-room Queen Anne Revival showcase house in Newton, MA, teaching Freshman Comp at Northeastern University, gardening a lot, and working on my second novel.  I had 5 short stories published and was beginning to believe I might be a Real Writer some day.  My partner was increasingly difficult.  She'd been being difficult for nearly 20 years, but it was  really beginning to dawn on me that things weren't ever going to get any better.  It had not yet dawned on me that I had any agency in the matter.  That didn't happen until 1992.

1981

I finished my dissertation (the second one I started) and graduated from Brown University with a PhD in Renaissance Studies, and decided not to enter the job market.  There were 2 jobs in my field in the country, over 600 applicants, and I'd written a scholarly dissertation at a time when Theory was sexy.  I continued to teach Freshman Comp at Boston University, where I'd been teaching whatever they'd hire me for since 1977.  We were in the Queen Anne revival, but it wasn't fixed up yet, except for the kitchen.  We heated almost entirely with wood stoves, and I did a lot of cooking because my partner was both gregarious and agoraphobic.  I read fantasy and science fiction whenever I wasn't playing housewife or correcting papers, and beginning to think that I might, possibly, be able to consider trying my hand at a fantasy story some day.  When I had time.  If it didn't bother anybody.  Not expecting it to be any good or anything.  But it might be fun to try.

1971

I was a junior at Vassar College, having applied successfully to go through the program in 3 years.  It seemed like a good idea at the time.  I accompanied my girlfriend (who wasn't agoraphobic yet) to demonstrations and sit-ins and discovered that large groups of shouting people, even when I agree with them, scare the living daylights out of me.  This has not changed.  My writing teacher had pronounced my stories trivial and pointless and my voice teacher had told me I sang like a nun about to take the veil, so I was going to be a Scholar.  I was being pretty good at it, too.  My parents had decided to move from New York back to the small town where my mother'd grow in up in central Texas, so I got a lot of experience negotiating the Dallas/Fort Worth airport and deflecting inquiries from interested young Southern ladies about my romantic status.  Some of them were already married.  Coming out did not occur to me.

1961

I was in 5th grade at a private girl's school in New York, learning about the Ancient Greeks, reading Robert Graves's I Claudius because my mother had it by her bed, spending a lot of sick days at home because every time I got a cold I'd have an asthma attack, and if anybody had invented inhalers yet, either we didn't know about them or Mama didn't approve of them.  We lived in a large apartment on the Upper East Side, my father worked in the Chrysler Building, and my mother went to Board Meetings while Masako took care of the house and me.  Looking back, it was a childhood out of the beginning of the century rather than the middle, privileged and insulated.  Also isolated.  I read a lot.

1951

I was born in the Tokyo Army Hospital to an unmarried nurse from the Midwest who gave me up for adoption.  A visiting general (Papa never said who) had arranged that my parents, who were too old to adopt through regular channels, should get the next available baby, who happened to be me.  My father was working for Pan American as a liason to the army, flying troops from Japan to Korea and back.  My mother was giving dinner parties and amassing an impressive collection of East Asian odds and ends, some of which I still have.  There was a baby nurse called Anne who Mama used to tell horrifying stories about.  Masako replaced her when I was 1, and moved with us when we came back to New York in 1954, where she stayed until 1995, when she insisted on going back to Japan.

American Clock

We journeyed out to Brooklyn today, to the Brave new World Repertory Theater at the Brooklyn Lyceum, where we saw a truly interstitial vaudeville/documentary/comic/musical/drama called The American Clock.

What to say about it?  It's an Arthur Miller play about the Great Depression, based on Studs Terkel's Hard Times.  It's got a central narrative that concerns the fall of a Brooklyn Jewish family from a big apartment with a view of the Manhattan skyline and a chauffeur and diamond bracelets to a row house with the mortgage 9 months overdue and everything hocked or sold, including the piano.  It's got secondary narratives--about their son, his friends, a farmer from Iowa who lost his place to the bank, a Communist organizer, a former shoe-shine boy who hits the rails, the president of General Electric, and a Wall Street tycoon who narrates the course of the crash and burn of the economy.  It's got a marathon dance (or at least 5 minutes of one) and a card-game around the kitchen table and a blues singer and some mighty fine tunes.  It's got scenes and monologues and choruses and solos and people bursting into song in the middle of a scene.  It's got slides of photographs of the actual Great Depression, low-budget but historically sensitive costumes, and a great, (if somewhat cold and drafty) playing space that gives every member of the huge (23 member) cast enough room to move and emote in.

It made me laugh and it made me cry, and it made me want to tie up every Republican in the country and force them to sit through it.  Twice.

We saw it with friends.  One of the joys of going to the theater with friends is talking it all over afterwards.  But at dinner, we found ourselves talking about everything but.  I still can't find much useful to say about it, and I'm not sure why.   The image that sticks with me, for all it's worth, is Robertson the banker's description of looking out the window of his Riverside Drive apartment onto the cardboard shantytown in Riverside Park, the fires and lanterns of the homeless and jobless burning all through the long, cold winter nights.

The run is about over, sadly, and in these economic times, with a cast as huge as this, it's not going to hit a big-time theater any time soon.  In 1991, there was a made for cable movie.  See it if you can.  Read it if you can't.  It's a wonderful play.