Delia Sherman's Blog, page 9

Bordertown Reading!

It's a big week for anthology readings in the Sherman/Kushner household.

WELCOME TO BORDERTOWN (Random House), has been out for two whole weeks!

Celebrate with us at NYC's wonderful children's/YA bookstore, BOOKS OF WONDER

Thursday, June 9th, 6:00 pm
Books of Wonder
18 West 18th Street
New York, NY 10011
http://www.booksofwonder.com/events06...

Co-editors Holly Black & Ellen Kushner, and authors Alaya Dawn Johnson, Delia Sherman, Annette Curtis Klause & Cory Doctorow will be present to discuss the book and sign copies.

Special Guest Musician:  Violinist Joe Kessler - Ellen's longtime collaborator on stage projects including Thomas the Rhymer and Esther:  Feast of Masks - and a former member of Boiled in Lead, a band that influenced the Bordertown series!**

Special appearance by the New York kids who helped us make the BORDERTOWN Mockumentary Video - which will also be shown!

Reading at Jefferson Market!

blackholly  , ellen_kushner  , jeffford2010  , glvalentine  , Steve Berman (whose LJ name I can't find), and I, are reading from the new Vampire anthology TEETH this Saturday afternoon at the beautiful Jefferson Market branch of the NYPL.   If you're wondering why I picked trapeze girls as my icon for this post, you'll just have to come and hear me read.  Or buy the book.

Here are the details.

The Goodness of Cons: Imaginales

We're back in Paris, wrung out like sheets in a mangle (can you tell I've been reading Dickens?), but very happy from four wonderful days with the folks at Imaginales.  My French has gotten a work-out, even though everyone who had even a passing acquaintance with English was kind enough to allow me to speak English when my brain froze (which happened mostly in the afternoons), and my comprehension, anyway, has improved exponentially.  I am the proud owner of a wonderful bande dessinee about Irish immigrants to NYC called Tir Na Og, with glorious art by Elvire De Cock.  She also did the art for a BD about the 60's steamship France, upon which Ellen and her family sailed to France when her father moved the whole family there for a year when he was on sabbatical (which is why she speaks French so well).  Which we also bought.  Elvire drew a perky little France 60's hostess for Ellen on the frontispiece.  In pen.

Great happiness.

Also, something happened that mostly happens at cons.    Appropos of something I said about a story I was working on, Trudi Canavan's husband made a remark over lunch, our first day that set off a chain reaction in my brain that had me walking around in one of those irritating wonderfully creative dazes, where there's so much going on in your back-brain that you keep walking into people and lamp-posts and staring at people you've known for years as if you've never seen them before.  It's fixed the central problem of my plot and my heroine's motivation--not to mention changed her social class and her backstory and completely changed the way I'm thinking about my next novel but one.  Yes, I thanked him.  And I realized (again--it's one of those sunrises over Marble Head that happen fairly often) that talking to people you don't know, whose minds work differently from yours and whose world-view is slant or perpendicular or in another plane altogether from your own can only help your writing.  You can't expect an insight like the one I got this weekend, and it doesn't happen every time, but it's one of the reasons I love going to cons.

The town of Epinal is charming.  While Ellen signed books and wowed everybody with her faultless French accent, I went to the basilica--a church somewhere on the cusp between Romanesque and Gothic, with arches that were thinking about being pointed, and lovely little curlicues at the top of the columns inside. Not a lot of decor or fancy carving or acres of stained glass, just a serene space of high, grey arches and flickering votive lights before chaste stone altars.  You could tell it was a working church, both in the practical sense of charity and community, and the spiritual sense of a place where people prayed regularly.  I was glad to see it.

There was an abbey attached to it, surrounded by houses in which noble ladies once lived (their names are posted above the doors) in the 17th and 18th Centuries.  What they were doing there, when the abbey was founded, for what purpose, and with whose money, I don't know, because the musee was closed, with no times posted on the door.  I sniffed around the old walls of the town, though, and poked into little back streets where the modern had trodden very lightly indeed.  I bought a hank of remarkably beautiful silk yarn, recycled from unraveled saris, from a tiny and very practical-looking knitting shop on a street behind the church.  And then I went back to the convention.

The con itself was like nothing I've ever attended.  It was set up as a kind of perpetual signing, with each author assigned a space at long tables arranged in a hollow square.  All Ellen's in-print titles were arranged around her space, and she was officially scheduled for a "signing" after each panel, giving readers who had been charmed by her intelligence and French accent a chance to come and buy her books and get her signed without having to count on running into her.  Seasoned French pros pretty much spent  the whole con manning their spaces.  The books were provided by one bookseller, who handled all the transactions.  It was exhausting for the pros, but they sold a hell of a lot of books.  And the readers were very happy, too.  Not sure if it would work in America, though.  There were a few other booksellers, mostly second-hand and small presses with their own tables.  One t-shirt booth.  One Goth splendor booth.  A body-painting booth.  And that was it for the hucksters' room.  The attendees were legion--7-8th grade age kids on a school trip with their teacher (!), AARP-age couples and singles in split skirts and sensible sandals, Goth girls in black lace, corsets, and sky-high heeled boots, Goth boys with manga-length hair and sweeping black coats, young couples with strollers, plus folk of all sexes, sizes, ages, and fashion opinions--not fans, necessarily--the con (panels and all) is funded by the city council to bring tourism into the town, and so is open to everybody who wants to come in.  But readers, certainly.

I didn't mean for this to get so long.  Tomorrow, while we're waiting at the airport (or maybe on the plane), I'll write some more.  Right now, Paris is beckoning.

Random Parisian Notes

1)  It's lovely to make an omelette with eggs that taste like eggs.  The butter doesn't hurt, either.

2)  Sometimes, you just have to stay in and take a deep breath.  Even in Paris.  Even when the sun is shining.

3)  A burning interest in the same subject can eliminate a lot of language barriers.  Yesterday, my knitting-related vocabulary was significantly widened.  Pelote, for example, is a ball of yarn.  Yarn itself is fil.  I can't remember what the yarn lady called the mottled, variagated violet-purple-blue-pink linen I bought (other than pas terrible, which apparently means "wicked good"), but there's a word for that, too.  She apologized for speaking no English and praised my accent, and by the time I'd gotten my change, I'd pretty much lost the stutter.  Un peu de confiance indeed.

4)  Le Bouillion Chartier may be full of tourists, but it's no more touristy than it was in the 1870's, so that's no change.  The waiters are cheerful and cheeky, the space is gloriously gilded and mirrored, the tableclothes are checked, and perfect strangers are seated next to one another.  The protocol is to pretend they are't there, and after a moment of intense self-consciousness, I managed very well, with Italians to our left, and a series of single, somber French businessmen eating sausages to my right.

5)  Walking across the Ile de la Cite in front of Notre Dame is like walking through a movie set.  There are crowds of people, a backdrop of jaw-dropping beauty that doesn't look quite real, and a great, if diffuse, sense of purpose in the air.  One of these days, when I've got more time, I shall have to brave the incredible lines and go inside again.

6)  Ditto the Conciergerie.  I've walked by it hundreds of times, and read a lot about it--there's a trunk story about it I'd like to go back to at some point--but somehow, I've never actually made it inside.  And there's a tour and everything.  Next time for sure.

In other news, we're leaving tonight for Epinal.  Ellen's got an eye on the volcano situation, and is making back-up plans for if we get stuck here.  I'm caught between hoping we will be (who wouldn't?) and panic that we will and I won't have time to get ready for Hollins.  The syllabus I can mostly do here.  But I can't very well pack and organize for a 6 week absence when I'm already absent, can I?  No. 

Ah, well.  As Ellen says, it's in the hands of Providence.

Merry-Go-Squares and Magic Men

Today's theme, friends, is Magic.  Or, perhaps more accurately, serendipity crossed with art, married to a certain willingness to frighten the horses, if only just a little bit.

The first magic was yesterday, at the Manege Carre de Senart (1).  We did go back, in company with the lovely Melanie Fazi, a French fantasy writer we me in Nantes 2 years ago.  We bought a book of tickets, 2 rides each, and circled (as it were) the square, scoping out the best creatures to ride.  The place was all but deserted--just a few parents and children, mostly too young to sit on a bug alone, so we pretty much had our pick.  We started out on the ox--big as Babe of Paul Bunyan fame, though not blue.  I sat on its forehead in a little cast-iron chair and fiddled with levers (I had access to two), which proved to flap the ears.  Ellen, in a kind of side-car below me, pulled the ox's head to the right with a long, wooden, oar-like object.  Melanie, on the other side, wielded a left-turning oar.  We kept that ox thoroughly busy flapping and turning its head, until we got distracted by watching the kids making their fish go up and down on lifts and some very little kids twitching their insect's feelers and waving their legs.  For the second ride, Melanie soared skywards on a fish, and Ellen and I mounted our beetle and wasp/cicada/whatever it was she was riding.  Made me feel like a elfin knight in one of those Victorian fairy paintings, only less well accoutred.  I totally forgot we were the only unaccompanied adults there,  gave in to my inner 10 year old, and pulled levers and twiddled knobs and twirled round and round and round.  Until the carousel stopped, and we had to get off and re-enter the real world again.

The second magic was after dinner.  We were intending to eat in, owing to having bought a duck breast and a lovely fennel bulb and some of the freshest garlic I've ever seen.  But the apartment was full of 14 year old boys doing their art history homework, and we didn't want to derange them, so we trotted across the street to an Algerian restaurant our hostess recommended to us.  She was so right.  I've never had such good merguez--not all that spicy, but full of flavor and tender as a maiden's dream.  And Ellen was very happy with her chorba.

We ate outside, since the evening was a good one for being outside, and watched the neighborhood walk by in all its diverse splendor--not a fashionable person in sight, but acres of style.  We had gotten to the point of sipping an after-dinner sweet mint tea and thinking about taking a walk when a  street musician appeared with a oud, both handsome but somewhat the worse for wear.  He really knew how to make that oud sing--and an oud is not the easiest instrument in the world to play.  After a few songs, he went around with his little purse, gathering whatever people were willing to give him.  I'm not sure how it happened, but we ended up having a long conversation with him (beginning in French and seguing into English once he'd figured out were were American)--about ouds and lute music and his father, who was a musician and taught him everything he knew, and the different modes of music in Algeria (where he is from), from Arab to Sephardic, and his three children and two divorces.  His English was fluent if eccentric.  He kissed our hands on parting and told me, quite kindly, that I'd lose my stutter if I just spoke with more confidence.  Easier said than done, but I'm working on it.

The third magic was today, when our friend Maud took us on a walking tour of the quartier.  It turns out that Belleville is a lot prettier than I'd have guessed, just walking up and down the Blvd. Menilmontant.  And overflowing with artists.  As we walked down narrow little back streets that have been decorated with tags and posters and little mosaics, we saw a man on a ladder pasting up an almost life-sized cut-out grisaille silhouette of a man with his legs crossed while a friend photographed the process.  As we passed, a woman stopped to a picture of the scene, so Ellen whipped out her camera to get a picture of that, and I took a picture of Ellen taking that picture--a conceit that pleased me mightily.

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1.  Please forgive total lack of accents in my French. I don't know how to add them; and even if I did, I'd undoubtedly have them sloping in all the wrong directions. 

Des Capes et des Epees

There was an exhibition of medieval sword-fighting in the courtyard of the Cluny museum today, and we were there--in company with our friend Maud and her 14 month-old son Gabriel.   Medieval sword-play (as the speaker pointed out) was nothing like the choreographed dances we see in movies and on the stage.  The point was to dispatch your opponent as quickly and efficiently as possible, fairness be damned.  Knees in crotch, dagger in eye, pommel in teeth, grabbing his blade in your gauntletted hand and pushing it aside so you could slit his throat--all in the early fighting manuals.  Watching him disarm another historical fighter coming at him with a dagger, wielded overhand, made me understand thoroughly why underhand is a much better idea (unless your target is supine and preferably asleep).  Most swordfights (14-15 c, anyway) would only have lasted a few seconds, and medieval swords weighed a lot less than I'd thought--less than a kilo.  All good to know.

Gabriel was equally fascinated by the swords and the water faucet, which drained into a business-like gutter down the middle of the courtyard.  Ellen got to wield a sword afterwards, and we went into the shop and bought a book on knights for our goddaughter, who loves all things chivalric.  We may go back to Cluny and see the actual exhibit on the Art of the Sword.  Or not.  After a 3 year absence from one of our favorite cities on earth, 5 days is just not enough time to see everyone and everything, even if EK were completely up to par, which she isn't.  Lots better--much less coughing even than two days ago--but still lower-energy than she'd like to be.

Paris, Paris, Paris, France, France, France

On my bathroom door in Somerville, I had a poster of Eloise in Paris, (of Plaza Hotel fame), sail-bellied and sassy.  Which is just how I feel right now.  We're in Belleville, on the Avenue Menilmontant, with a Friday market right outside, well-supplied with bright-eyed fish, tomatoes the size of a small dog, rhubarb, strawberries and cherries like rubies and garnets, three completely different kinds of artichokes (I bought the purple ones, because . . . purple artichokes!) and tome de brebis, which I can never find in NYC, and love beyond all reason.  We brought it home and ate it up, yum, yum.  And then we fell over, because the jet-lag isn't easy either way, even when I've had plenty of sleep, which I had.  And then, we met up with a friend at a place called Le cent-quatre (104), near the Canal St. Martin, in the 18eme.

It's a truly remarkable part of Paris, one I haven't spent much time in before.  Traditionally, it is working-class and immigrant, which now means mostly African and Arab.  There's also a large Sephardic Jewish population, as well as 20-somethings and artists hanging on by their fingernails in a city where the rents (when you can even find something to rent) are (as in every other big city on earth) getting more expensive by the day.  Le cent-quartre is a community and art center occupying what used to be a state funeral home, built in the 19th century on the theory that even the poor should be able to have proper pompes funebres.  It's huge, all red brick and white limestone and interconnected courtyards, and it houses (among other things) a community education center and classes in everything from hip-hop to literature.  Currently, it's playing host to a carousel, which is one of the coolest things ever I've seen.  It's like nothing else on earth, except the Elephant in the Ile de Nantes, which makes sense, seeing as it was made from the same workshop.

Unlike most carousels, this one is square, and steampunky as all get out, with mechanical bison and elephants and frogs and anatomically-correct bugs to ride on.  And not only can you ride on them, you can move their wings/trunks/legs/mouthparts with levers.   Unhappily, it's only open weekends and Wednesdays, so we did not ride on it or see it working.  But we did get to ogle the animals, unimpeded by small children and gawkers.  And we can come back on Sunday for the Full Experience, so that's all right.

The weather, which had been all cotton-woolly and lowering, cleared into a beautiful spring evening.  We sat with our friend in a peniche (a house-boat, only this one was a bar) called Antipode and watched some young and old guys playing boules together and caught up on our various lives, then went to Tables, a wonderful restaurant in the 104, where the chef was ambitious, the decor was industrial, and the food was ambrosial.  The most remarkable dish was foie gras shaved into very thin slices and sprinkled with vinegar and olive oil, but my fish was excellent, too.  Ellen and I shared dessert--green tea mousse, sour cherry compote, and a bit of cake soaked in coffee at the bottom.  Yum.

Now we're back in our friend's apartment, typing away to the hum of conversation and the clink of cutlery from the restaurant downstairs, which probably won't be as charming when we're ready to go to bed, but that won't be for some time yet.  Because, hey, it's only 6pm at home, and we're not even vaguely acclimated yet.  I don't mind--I spent the part of last night when I couldn't sleep working out the plot of a Dickensian/Trollopean Victorian short story with wizards and political intrigue, and am anxious to get it started. 

I'm very glad to be here.

To The Guild of Master Craftsman Publications

Dear Guildmaster:

In re. your book Tea Cozies 2.

Pretty pictures.  Cute cozies with even cuter names.  Attractive and easily read instructions.  High marks for font, layout, design, paper.  Alpha +, in fact.

For everything but the proofreading.

I embarked on Assam (an elephant, for the curious, with a scarlet and gold headdress.  The spout makes the trunk.  There are tusks and bells and tassels.  You could purely die of the cute.  It's for a raffle, of which more when it's closer to happening.).  One side, the other side.  Moss stitch, holes for the i-cord to pass through at the top, easy-peasy.  Ears--piece of cake.  Bells.  Fussy, but perfectly straightforward.  Headdress.

Impossible.

After an hour or so of staring at the pattern for the gold scalloped trim, trying it this way, trying it that way, messaging the friend who had recommended the book to me (innocently--she's never made Assam), picking it up, putting it down, doing laundry, cleaning the kitchen, putting my kit-bag together for our upcoming trip to France (Wednesday), it finally dawned on me.  The sentences of the entire headdress section had been printed out of order. 

This makes you lose faith, you know?  Which was probably just as well, because I discovered that using the 3.75mm needles for the tusks (as instructed) resulted in tweedly little 2" tusks instead of 3" tusks, as specified.  Even on the 4.0mm needle, the tusks were too short, so I added 4 rows and an extra increase, which actually looks about right.  And I have grave doubts about the guage of the headdress, too.

And, unfortunately, about every other pattern in this book, because sheesh.  Being a stubborn soul (and strongly desiring the cabled teapot in Aran wool), I'll probably venture in again.  But you're on notice.

No love,
Delia

Carson McCullers Talks About Love

I've always admired Suzanne Vega.  I like her wordy, impressionistic, slightly trippy songs.  I like her slightly monochromatic voice.  I like her reserved, wry stage persona that 's more "If you like me, that's nice, but if you don't, that's fine" than "Love me love me love me" or "Worship at my feet or die."  I like her pointed face and her long, long hands.  And I never, never expected to see her on the stage of a pocket-handkerchief theater in the West Village, doing an extended monologue with musical interruptions on the life of Carson McCullers.

But that's just what I did last night.  And I enjoyed it very much.

I'll tell you right up front--the music is better than the monologue.  The lyrics are taken from McCullers' stories and events in her life, and they're lovely.  There's a number called "Harper Lee" ("the mockingbird is not the only thing I'd like to kill") and a retelling of "The Ballad of the Sad Cafe" that encapsulates not only the novella but how it feels to read it.  The music is more melodic than I'm used to with Vega, the result, possibly, of having been written with Duncan Sheik, of Spring Awakening fame.  And she delivers it, as always, from her heart and back in her throat, fluid and dry, earnest and detatched--very like McCullers' writing, now I come to think about it.

She delivers her lines the same way, and it works.  Mostly.  There's a little too much business with booze bottles, cigarettes she never even pretends to light, drinks she picks up and puts down, coats she puts on and off.  She's physically awkward, standing stiff-legged in a tweed skirt that hits her shin at a funny length, the elbow of her drink-holding arm propped on the wrist of the other.  Which would be fine, and completely appropriate to the subject, if I had had a stronger sense that the awkwardness was McCullers' and not Vega's.  I could never forget she was acting, and that acting doesn't come naturally to her.  Still, what a wonderful character Carson McCullers is--a kind of sub-Colette, who would have loved to be all brash and arrogant and joyously hedonistic and self-centered and bisexual and performative, but was prevented from going her length--because of her temperament, because of life-long chronic bad health caused by an attack of rheumatic fever when she was 15, because it was very, very hard to be a joyous bisexual hedonist in America in the 30's and 40's, even if you are naturally self-centered and arrogant, which she certainly was.  To be fair, she seems really to have loved her husband Reeves McCullers, however difficult the marriage turned out to be for both of them

And that's what I got out of the performance, knowing little to nothing about McCullers going in.  Which counts for a great deal, I think.

So, yeah.  Go see it if you can.  You'll get an insight into a real American original. Suzanne Vega is a fascinating performer, and I have a lot of admiration for someone pushing herself out of her comfort zone like that.  And the music's great. 

New Essay On Interfictions Zero!

There's a new essay up, about Mosaic Novels, on Interfictions Zero!  J M McDermott makes a mosaic of his own, covering texts as diverse as Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories to Maureen McHugh's China Mountain Zhang to Divisadero, by Michael Ondaatje.  It's illustrated by a lovely original sketch by Michael Kaluta.

Go read it and comment.