Greer Gilman's Blog, page 2

"Behind the undone chignon..."

Shakespeare by algorithm.

Nice try, but a-historical:  "chignon" was first recorded in English in 1783.  (A very few instances turn up earlier on EEBO in French-English dictionaries, but meaning simply the nape of the neck, not a coil of hair worn at it.)

Still an interesting article on computational stylistics.

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"...and your bowl it is spilled"

“The Snuff Taker” by Peter van de Bellman
Lord, I remember Peter Bellamy so vividly:  one foot on his amp, with his stubble-straw hair and his Rolling Stones T-shirt with the lolling tongue, bawling ballads.  You can’t air-flail a concertina:  you play it leaning into the wind and leather, fingering the keys like a skilled telegrapher, typing music like a dispatch.  It’s a clacks of an instrument.  Its music is carnavalesque, hence mournful.  As for Peter’s singing—his name was notoriously anagrammatized as Elmer P. Bleaty.  He’d a voice like a shawm, pitched somewhere between a jeer and apocalypse.  A voice like a goat cheese, like raw single malt:  you absolutely love it or you find utterly revolting.  The man with Laphroaig in his throat.  He sang his own settings of Kipling:

There was no one like 'im, 'Orse or Foot,
    Nor any o' the Guns I knew;
An' because it was so, why, o' course 'e went an' died,
    Which is just what the best men do.

Went:  he crossed that ford.

Damn it, he was 47.  It’s been thirty years since we lost him.  On Wednesday, a few of the musicians who love him—those he worked with and others who weren’t born yet—gave a memorial concert, “Tell It Like It Was.”

There were great sets from the compère, Mossy Christian, from Damien Barber, Brian Peters, and The Wilson Family.  It wasn’t all Bellamy’s material.  Gina Le Faux did a song of her own, called (I think) “Sweeting’s Alley,” about an 18th-century gender-binary flash lad. It wasn’t just comically donning a petticoat to befool Fielding’s gang:  at the shut-the-shutters-and-bid-them-goodnight moment, she said farewell to he.  Jon Boden did a spectacular performance of “The Land” (I love that song) and “Danny Deever.” Peter’s old comrade, the redoubtable Heather Wood, sang “Follow Me ’Ome,” as was her right.  She linked to Martin Carthy, who said he’d just had a knee replacement a day or two ago and was looking frail.  Bless him, he tried valiantly, but could not quite finish a song or a tune.  I fervently wish him a swift and perfect recovery.  He spoke beautifully about Peter and said that Norma was in the next room, but couldn’t speak of him at all without dissolving in tears.  The concert closed with footage of Bellamy from 1988, in full flight, and an exceedingly terrible striped shirt.

I’ve admired Bellamy for —great Boudicca!—half a century.  Back in (I think) 1971, my friend who would inspire Sylvie in Moonwise brought two LPs back from a trip to England.  These were the first English revivalist Trad I’d heard.  (I’ve never been any good at radio, so relied on happenstance and vinyl.) Both records were of unaccompanied voices.

One was Anne Briggs, who sang the first Tam Lin I’d ever heard, an eerie version from a Scottish Traveller :

And the Queen of Elven she called from a bush,
She’s red as any blood,
“I should have tore out your eyes, Tambling,
And put in two eyes of wood, of wood,
And put in two eyes of wood.”

Briggs sang like a bird in that metamorphosed tree, with a nest in the knothole where his sight had been.

The other disc was the Young Tradition:  Peter Bellamy, Royston Wood, and Heather Wood (no relation).  They dressed like foppish hippies, and sang like a late louche night in a dockside pub, circa 1840.  Eclectic music:  shape note, chanteys, the Agincourt carol, “The Rolling of the Stones.”   The harmonies go up your nose like quinine water.  They sting.

I loved it.

A decade later, when I was making yearly pilgrimages to the Whitby Folk Festival, I heard quite a lot of Peter.  He sang Child ballads via Appalachia, sea songs, cowboy stuff, his settings of Kipling (for that, he wore another T-shirt:  “Mr. Kipling Made Exceedingly Good Songs.”)  Some years, he did the daily newsheet, brilliantly:  artwork, puzzle games, jokes, mystifications. I wish I’d spoken with him more, but I was shy.  He was a terrific character:  brilliant, belligerent, witty, kind, mischievous, curious, passionate.

I’ve seen two transformative performances of his great ballad opera, The Transports.  In London in 1983, there was shadow-scenery, casting distortions of the singers all over the walls and ceiling of the QEH, and I had a vision of a great witch looming and scurrying.  That was Malykorne's creation.

At Whitby in 1992, the year after Peter’s death, Eliza Carthy took the part written for her mother, and it was heartbreakingly hopeful, a rebirth.

Late, late, the last night of the festival, I was coming up the cliff face from the glass-and-iron Spa, going to and fro on the path, in dark and silence but for waves, with the sea below me and beyond.  A shadow—a ghost?—came from behind me, and said softly:  “Peter wanted you to know that he loved Moonwise.”

Later I heard that his copy was full of annotations.  I’d give an afterlife to see those notes; and many afterlives to speak with him again.

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11th November

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Fifth of November

No fireworks, but I did have gingerbread, as dark and dense as I could find it.

Working on that handcut Oak Leaf puzzle from Five Frogs. The pieces are gorgeously Daedalean. Singly, they're a curious pale dusky pink, but as the leaf comes together, the red deepens.

Solidarity. We the pieces.

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Mythoarchaeology

My Cloudish conversation with Sofia Samatar, on the 30th anniversary of Moonwise, is now live at Uncanny Magazine, with illustrations by the author.  We dug deep.  I made new discoveries about my process and mythos.    I would love to hear from you, my readers and my friends.

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"Bright-fire-like barberries..."

Mirabile dictu. BBC Radio Dramatizations of Lud-in-the-Mist and Lolly Willowes!

With thanks to Michael Swanwick for sending these on.

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Hallows bow

Now, here, nowhere, on the threshold of winter, the old leavetaking sun comes guising, going darkward toward the light.  He is at once the farewell and the promise, the traveller and the way.




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There and back again

O my! That overnight in the Berkshires was absolutely wonderful! Taking the Fitchburg line was a brilliant idea (thanks, movingfinger  ): I could pick it up from the open-air platform at Porter, and outside of commuter hours, it's a huge train, sparsely peopled. I pretty much had the car to myself.  Compared with the bus, this is a mere fraction of the time, hassle, and exposure.  And L. could pick me up at Wachusett (the end of the line) without too much trouble. 

Above all, I love talking with my friends in their own spaces, and L.'s house is as much hers and as splendid as Mr. Badger's. It was built by a blacksmith in the mid-18th century: a great cage of chestnut timbers round a mighty chimney stack, running from a Roman-like brick vault in the cellar up to the bats in the attic. I love the way the attic stairs are embedded in the stack, like a vine round a tree. There is, of course, an old sitting-room-kitchen with an open hearth, and floorboards over a foot wide. There's a paneled dining room with an inbuilt spice cupboard, and ranks of famille rose (butterflies and bok choy) ; there's a brilliantly sunny, perfectly Austenian parlor that will be subtle soft grey-green. L. comes from a long line of flea-market haunters, so there are collocations of amazing oddments: oil lamps; bedroom china; a row of inch-high Shakespeares; prints hand-colored by herself; bowls and boxes of extraordinary marbles. There is the most perfect screened porch with white wicker furniture.

Outside the cabinet of curiosities, there's an acre of wetland, blazing with winterberries. I came too late for the fireflies, but L. is longing to dig a frog pond, a sanctuary for the tadpoles and a barracks for mosquito slayers. She's already built a tump and planted it with rare evergreens, carpeted with mosses and with painstakingly propagated four-leaf clovers . The annuals, well blanketed at night, were brilliant still; the roses, spilling over. An antique lilac had re-bloomed.

There was this.



That made up for the full moon whiting out the milky way.

But not quite for the sad leafage. Other years, there has been blaze and glory. This soggy year (it rained nearly every day in July), the maples have spot. Though we drove north in search of color, we got nothing but sad faded browns, and pale lemons, under a glorious sky.

We had lunch on a riverside terrace in Brattleboro, watching the sparkles on the water. Then we took a long walk up and down the riverbank. As you see here, lovely weather, shame about the anthocyanins.





I wish I could post this as a video: the runnels of water on the rockface glittered like ice. It felt like a metamorphosis about to happen.



This tree was corseted by a vine, since cut away by foresters. It looks like an awful warning in a Victorian dress reformer's woodcut.



There were turtles catching rays.



And a giant squid turning into a pine tree. Or vice versa.



Gorgeous rockface.




Really, only the sumacs had turned properly.  All of the mountains should have been that bright.  A great wave of scarlet and vermilion should have flowed down from Canada.




Just after we got back from Vermont, rushthatspeaks , bless him, came to pick me up.  He got to meet L. (whom he has known on paper for many years), and of course got a tour of the domain, encountering a bat and a butterfly.

Then the two of us talked all the way back to Cambridge, where we picked up some terrific Taiwanese  (Salted Crispy Chicken!) to eat on a park bench, and then (O joy of joys!) went to our beloved Tosci's, where I waxed ecstatic over a dish of Belgian Chocolate. I was practically speaking in tongues.  All was glorious until I went to show rushthatspeaks  a photo from Fox's birthday party, and—

—discovered that my phone was gone.  Dismay and panic, though which rushthatspeaks  upheld me like a hero.  Thank heavens, it was found by some good citizen who turned it in at a police station, from which I picked it up unharmed the next day.  But not before a tragicomedy of errors had ensued:  a panicky individual who shall remain nameless tried to call me, got the police, and decided I'd met with foul play....

Other than that, this was an utterly delightful sojourn, and amazingly restorative.

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Unleaving

The poor cat i' the adage is hesitating at another brink, darting out a paw.

A very old and dear friend has asked me to spend a day or two at her 300-year-old house in the Berkshires, in leaf season, for conversation and woods walking.

But I'd have to take two buses, changing in Springfield, and the T to the bus.  Dare I risk it?

I will have had my booster shot and Greyhound (if one can believe them) promises air-exchange.  Maybe if I could get a lift to the T, and if my friend could pick me up in Springfield instead of Northampton?

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Like the poor cat i' the adage

So Arisia goes live in January.  I've started to sign up, and I keep halting in my panel choices, thinking, what the hell am I doing?  If I don't feel comfortable going to a theatre for two hours for Macbeth, why am I even considering going to a con?  Even if the con has an admirably strict vaccination and mask policy, it's still in a public space, reached by the T, where random crowds (including people from out of state) will gather unpoliced.

I am vaxxed; will have had my booster shot by then, and a stock of N95s, but....

So:  wary or wimpish?  Should I finish signing up, so I wouldn't feel left out if things got better?  What are folks here doing?

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