Greer Gilman's Blog, page 17

Tea for two

My dear friend B. and I have a pleasant tradition of celebrating our shared birthday, usually a month or two late, with tea and cakes and endless unwrappings.  This year I found a perfectly lovely new place to forgather, the Courtyard Tea Room at the Boston Public Library,  How had I not heard of this? 

As it's Copley Square, we dressed.  We have our hats, you know, though we didn't bring them.  I wore my teal cut-velvet scarf that B. gave me for another birthday, wound up in a wentletrap or Cumean sibyl's crown; B. wore pert red velvet ribbons in her hair.

For some reason, I hadn't been in the historic part of the BPL in ages, and I'd forgotten how absolutely beautiful the McKim building (1895) is.  Of course, I've always loved the wrought-iron flambeaux at the entrance, like witches' hands with diamonds on each finger, warding off and beckoning in.  I'd forgotten the signs of the zodiac inlaid in brass on the vestibule floor.  And then you turn right, down the tessellated hallway, and there it is, a stoplight-red neon sign:  BAR.  Bwah?  All the drinks have book names:  Tequila Mockingbird, Dorian Grey.

But through the bar is the Courtyard Room, serene and elegant.  It's the sort of place Mrs. Oliphant would bring Randy Melendy after the ballet, disentangling her dozen necklaces from all her scarves, having checked the Albatross.  And it's a marvellous, extravagant tea.  All loose-leaf, well chosen, properly made pots (I had several pots of a very nice second-flush Darjeeling).  There's a three-level curate stacked with exquisite canapes (cucumber!  salmon!  lobster!); scones (not a patch on Madame Buttery's, but whose are?) with cream and lemon curd and blood-orange marmalade; and alluring little cakes.  We ate and drank and unwrapped for hours.

I gave B. the stack of books I'd been stockpiling all year, one by one (non-fiction, especially memoir; hilarity; oddity; above all, excellent prose); she said she wasn't going to get out of bed for a month.  If I had to choose which of B.'s bagful of gifts I love best, it would have to be the gorgeous Tiffany scarf with peacock feathers woven into it, so very Nine-ish, and oh! such a hand:  mingled wool and silk.  But I also adore the little French pro-vaxx pamphlet, "Petite piqûre, grand effet," illustrated only with infectiously cute portraits of hedgehogs.  B.'s fabulous at found oddments.

And we talked, my heavens.  We go back a-ways:  to 1971, when she signed my Independent Study Card, and I wrote an E. Nesbit-ish novella.  B. denies ever teaching me to write; what she did was make a space in which I could write.  Anyway, B. reminisced about seeing Beyond the Fringe in 1962, and nearly falling off the balcony for joy.  We mourned Jonathan Miller.  We compared notes on Little Women; she recommended Woman at War (Kona fer í stríð).  Speaking of women and film, I told B. about my mother's brush with Hollywood.  Over fifty years after the event, she told me that she'd written a Nero Wolfe treatment, and had been in talks with Spyros Skouras (20th Century Fox).  "What happened?" I gasped.  "I met your father."

Of course, B. (in her Barbish way) chatted with the Uber driver (a Syrian) in Arabic.  She likes to know at least a few words of greeting in any language an immigrant might speak, but her Arabic is a passion.

It was such a delicious afternoon/evening that I floated off out of the car in a haze, leaving behind one of my bags of swag, and the driver had to come round the block again.  The tip I gave him was a thank-offering for the whole day.

Nine 

"A sad Tale's best for Winter: I haue one of Sprights, and Goblins."

 

From my preface to this gorgeous, dark collection of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s short fantasy fiction, a companion volume for her Kingdoms of Elfin. out next month from Handheld Press:

"Of Cats and Elfins brings together Warner’s uncollected short fantasy, from the lovely, Ovidian 'Stay, Corydon, Thou Swain' (1929) to her magnificent last Elfin story, 'The Duke of Orkney’s Leonardo' (1976). At its centre is The Cat’s Cradle-Book (1940), a collection of feline folktales, nimble and merciless. You will note the long intervals. Fantasy ran underground with Warner, flashing out like a hidden river, each time in a new landscape: witchlore; myth; folktale; invisible kingdoms. What they share is Warner’s worldview, her inimitable voice."

And here's the Cumean sibyl reading from "The Duke of Orkney’s Leonardo."



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"Now the first of December was covered with snow..."

Well, the snow is a lovely birthday present.

Not a bad year on the whole: I aten't dead. I wrote (mirabile dictu) a one-act play, a preface to Of Cats and Elfins , and a lecture on lunacy. I spoke and read at four cons, in Boston, Quincy, Montreal, and Dublin. I saw and heard some gorgeous things, like a house concert by Eliza Carthy and Heather Wood, and an exhibition of Helene Scherfbeck's paintings at the Royal Academy.



And I got to spend a lot of time playing with Fox, making ghost meringues and uproar. He has just (to my infinite joy) begun playing with words. He invents Finnegans-Wake-like names for imaginary creatures, and tells us that he comes from Neptune.  Right now, he hypercorrects his “d”s, so that modelling clay is (deliciously) “Plato.” Having told me one of his fantastical tales, he said, "Just kitting." Beat. "Just catting."

Aw.

Nine

Hallows with you all

Nine

Scintillation ...

... is a lovely little convention in Montreal's Chinatown, the successor to Jo Walton's Farthing Party.  The hotel has a pagoda on the roof and a labyrinth of koi ponds in the lobby, and its sidestreet is wall-to-wall great Chinese restaurants (with a scattering of Japanese) at startlingly low prices.

On Thursday night, I was in a mass reading at the Argo, Montreal's oldest (50+ years) Anglophone bookshop, which had been getting sad and shabby, and was bought by a couple of queer young SF devoté(e)s.  Long narrow hole-in-the-wall, packed from end to end with a listening audience.  The event was bracketed by Breton crepes beforehand and spectacular chocolate confections afterward at Juliette et Chocolat:  the S'mores offering came with an inverted brandy glass full of woodsmoke. 

On Friday, there was great dim sum (Kam Fung has started doing those wonderful sweet buns with molten egg yolk inside), followed by division into Expotitions.  I'd already done the botanical gardens, and the art and natural history museums (all highly recommended), and my palate is too unrarefied for an afternoon of serious tea tasting (white, green, and Pu Erh), so I went to the Jean-Talon market, and marvelled at the perfect fruits and vegetables, tasted the exquisite nibbles.

My panels were fabulous!  Folklore, landscape, and linguistics—what more could I want?  I even went into full vatic Nine mode, talking of the Cloudwood.  Uniformly splendid panelists throughout the con:  old greats and up-and-comers like Leah Bobet, and Tamara Vardomskaya, and a new guy named William Alexander.  The Ask a Scientist panel was brilliant and hilarious, and included both stunningly cutting-edge work, and a shoo-in for the IgNobels:  the marine biologist who's been making transparent labyrinthine models of dolphin vaginas and persuading reluctant guy dolphins to mate with them.  Of course, the fertility of dwindling species is a crucial topic, but what's fascinating is the cetacean trick of twisting in the water as a form of birth control.  Jonathan Crowe gave a great paper on the history of the epic fantasy map.  Su Sokol interviewed Rosemary Kirstein, and Marissa Lingen interviewed Sherwood Smith.  rushthatspeaks   had been going to interview me, and I am very sad they couldn't.  Next year, we hope.  Everyone missed them, and hopes they're doing better.  Instead, I did a reading of Little Kingdom (my play about Ben Jonson and Dame Ethel Smyth on the moon) with Emmet O'Brien—an excellent cold reader of blank verse—doing Ben.  He said it reminded him of The Good Place, which I take is high praise.

Very fine leafage in Vermont, especially on the way back.  Not a breathtaking year, but a nice performance, with everything exactly in balance.  There was just enough green left—say, a quarter--to make the turned leaves vibrant, yet almost no trees had gone over entirely.  No sad brown patches or bare limbs.  A white warp of birch trees.  Woods wading in sumac, to the knee in blood.

Nine 

I aten't dead

But my planets have been veering around like drunken shopping carts.

After my trip to Ireland and England, which was in unequal measures exhilarating and harrowing (travel nightmares, hoo boy, and friends' crises causing both upheavals and concern), I've returned to yet more stress.

I haven't allowed myself even to think about this atrocious miscarriage of justice, or I will bite through an umbrella.  Warning:  involves smugly monstrous parents and a dead child.

Remember that Amazon review I posted of an Oxfordian's ludicrous book?  It was a Swiftian dismantling of his errors, which are systemic and irrevocable.  He and his bastard friends have been doxxing the hell out of me ever since, and plotting revenge against me in their lurking places (I have spies).  Last month, they got the review deleted as "offensive," and have been gloating and smirking online ever since:  claiming in public that I recanted, and crowing in private over their coup).  I wrote a polite but firm letter to Amazon, stating that this was a clear case of revenge on a whistleblower.  And not the first time either.  A few years ago, these same Oxfordians had tried the same ploy on my comments, but I appealed and got them globally restored.  All I got back this time was a form letter telling me that I could repost the review, once I'd taken out the "offensive" language, but if there were any further complaints, they would have to bar me from comment on Amazon.  My offense, of course, lay in stating that the book is an abject failure.  If I repost this home truth, Stritmatter and his minions will simply have it taken down again.  What I need to do is marshall my screenshots of doxxing, and pursue the case, but—

Up came a deadline.  Following their gorgeous edition of Kingdoms of Elfins, Handheld Press is doing a second Sylvia Townsend Warner book, Of Cats and Elfins (a reprint of her rare Cat's Cradle-Book, an early Ovidian fantasy story, "Stay Corydon, Thou Swain," and her uncollected Elfin stories, including the glorious "The Duke of Orkney's Leonardo").  Some wires got crossed, and my introduction turned out to have been Due Yesterday.  I swallowed hard and said Monday morning.  I do not write quickly.  That is law, like gravity.  But I bloody well don't break contracts either.  Subsisting entirely on caffeine and theobromine, I plunged into the maelstrom.  And by Hecate, I got it in.  It's pretty okay, I think.  At least my editor said it was "beautiful."

But before I could draw breath, I discovered that I hadn't gotten my invitation to Arisia, possibly because I bowed out last year at the height of the scandal, being conflict-averse.  Panel choices were already closed.  The progcom very kindly and promptly re-invited me and gave me a day's extension, and I spent it madly writing up thoughtful little essays on my chosen topics.  When I audition for a panel, I put my heart into it.

Now all I've got to do (on top of my day job and all my other responsibilities) is get ready for Scintillation.  More panel notes, O joy!  More readings to prepare.  Oh yeah, and packing.  It will, I promise you, be a perfectly lovely little con.  I can sleep on Greyhound, right?  Except I'd be missing the drive through Vermont in October.

There have been glimmers of a bright side, honest.

Last night, I thought I needed a little book therapy, and tromped off to the Harvard Book Store in the rain.  I got The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare's Language and David Scott Kastan's meditation On Color.  That led to a wonderful conversation with a bookseller and a regular on dye-plants (the bookseller grows them); historical art techniques, with reference to the pigments used in Netherlandish paintings of the 15th century, Tibetan holy pictures, and the indigenous art of Florida; Cornellisen's fabulous shop in Bloomsbury; forgers; flint-knapping (both of the others had been anthro majors,and had done this.  I'm jealous.  All I've ever handled in that line is a blow gun.)  And this, O best beloveds, is why we need bricks-and-mortar bookstores.  As if you needed persuading of that.

Being with Fox is a joy.  At nearly three, he adores undersea creatures, cookery (he knows what spices go with apples, and he finds the cinnamon before I ask), music of all kinds, construction trucks, books, and discovery.  "I need a computer, so I can know things."  Just yesterday, we had a disquisition on his latest find, Patteopujoösaurus.  "I discovered it on the map."  Are they omnivores?  Yes, "they eat plants or meat".  No, they don't fly, but walk on "so many" legs.  "It's a rainbow one."  No feathers, but (bending his spine to display them) "it has spikes on the top."

Nine

All Kneeling

oursin rants here about the dreary bestsellers "now Unknown to History."

Anne Parrish (who made the lists in 1925, 1927, and 1928) deserves to be remembered.  She was painted by her cousin Maxfield Parrish; was a friend of Sylvia Townsend Warner's; and got M.F.K. Fisher her start, introducing her at Harpers. Fisher would marry Anne's tragic brother Dillwyn.

All Kneeling (1928) is a deliciously wicked little confection, set among Modernist Bohemians and Jazz-Age poseurs. Christabel, its anti-heroine, is sheer poison: a narcissist worshipped for her wounded soul, poured out in fifth-rate poetry.

All right, the novel's not Lolly Willowes or Orlando, but it's fine frivolous reading, a half-pound box of chocolates. There was a 1950 film, dimly derived from the book; but I understand that Joan Fontaine played it as melodrama.  Born to Be Bad?  Good heavens, no.  Christabel isn't a siren, she's a black hole, devouring adoration:  a climber, a plagiarist, a self-deluded fraud.  The point is:  how can someone so utterly ridiculous cause so much havoc?  She makes it seem a gift to be clawed by her.  I'd love to see this done as comedy, in the style of Love & Friendship.  Think of the outfits!  Think of the snark!  And I want their Christabel to speak her Secret Journal as she writes:

“Let me work at white heat, let me be molten in the flame!

“What is anything in comparison with this lonely shining Joy of Creation? This welling of the water from the deep below the deep, this blessed privilege of being the cup to hold the water that brims over for the thirsty? Nothing must interfere with my work, no thoughts of self, no selfish joy or sorrow. The bees have flown far, in orchards and meadows. Now I call them back to the hive, and in darkness and silence they make the golden honey.

“Oh, Passion of Work, fill me and flood me! Is there a World? I forget.”

Nine

Under a Starre-ypointing Pyramid?

Ooh. Milton marginalia in a First Folio? I've seen some dazzling, illusory claims in the Shakespeare world, which fade away like Prospero's great Globe. I'm rather hoping this one is true.

"The astonishing find, which academics say could be one of the most important literary discoveries of modern times, was made by Cambridge University fellow Jason Scott-Warren when he was reading an article about the anonymous annotator by Pennsylvania State University English professor Claire Bourne. Bourne’s study of this copy, which has been housed in the Free Library of Philadelphia since 1944, dated the annotator to the mid-17th century, finding them alive to “the sense, accuracy, and interpretative possibility of the dialogue”. She also provided many images of the handwritten notes, which struck Scott-Warren as looking oddly similar to Milton’s hand."

Scott-Warren writes  "It’s always annoying when someone tries to claim that they’ve discovered a lost literary artefact. I was myself a little bit brutal when, five years ago, we were treated to the supposed rediscovery of Shakespeare’s dictionary. In this as in other cases, there’s usually a lot of wishful thinking, plus copious spinning of the evidence to make it seem plausible, and elision of anything that doesn’t seem to fit. However, I’m going to make my own unwise pronouncement on the basis of just a few hours of research. I’m going to claim to have identified John Milton’s copy of the Shakespeare First Folio of 1623."

His images and arguments are both persuasive; and in a postscript, he adds:

"I’ve received a very positive response from several distinguished Miltonists who are confident that this identification is correct–and have been roundly rebuked for understating the significance of the discovery. On the basis of his knowledge of the development of Milton’s hand, Will Poole (who a few years back discovered the poet’s copy of Boccaccio’s Life of Dante) has suggested that the earliest handwritten addition (the prologue to Romeo and Juliet) probably dates from the early 1630s, but that the bulk of the annotations were likely made in the 1640s."

Meanwhile, Claire Bourne, who's been studying this obscure copy for a decade, is thrilled.

"It has never attracted scholarly attention, most likely because it would be very difficult to find unless you knew to look for it. It is not catalogued online, nor has it been digitized. Furthermore, it is housed in a public library that, despite its impressive special collections, is not frequented by many scholars working on early modern drama. Indeed, I heard about this copy by word-of-mouth from Peter Stallybrass when I was a graduate student in Philadelphia. He thought the annotations were interesting, and he encouraged me to see what I could find out."

I like the collaboration on this.

Nine

Viator advenit

Hey, I'm back.

It was something of a rocky road to Dublin, but the con itself was mostly excellent. Here, have some pictures until my sentences catch up with my body.

Nine

Through streets broad and narrow...

Goddesses willing, I'll be at the Dublin Worldcon, with a tiny but elegant programme.

All the universe’s a stage… Format: Panel

16 Aug 2019, Friday 14:00 - 14:50, Liffey Room-1 (CCD)

…and all the men and women (and robots, and wizards) merely players. William Shakespeare was a Jedi master at creating characters and building tension on stage. What can he teach us about how to craft a compelling genre character, and how to make completely unrealistic situations and people feel real, given the limitations of whatever medium we choose

Kaffeeklatsch: Greer Gilman Format: Kaffeeklatsch

16 Aug 2019, Friday 15:00 - 15:50, Level 3 Foyer (KK/LB) (CCD)

Reading: Greer Gilman Format: Reading

19 Aug 2019, Monday 16:00 - 16:20, Liffey Room-3 (Readings) (CCD)

That one panel is perfectly chosen.  I will (of course) be talking  about Shakespeare's language.

Haven't done a Kaffeeklatsch in ages, but I figure in an offworld crowd, there may be a few people who'd like to meet me.  Around here, I'm old hat.  ("We have our writers.")  I'm putting a folder of Cloudish constellations on my iPad, and hoping someone signs up.

Fifteen minutes for a reading?  Gosh.  This had better be good.

So who else will be there?

Nine