Greer Gilman's Blog, page 24

The Order of the Bath

Here's the transformation scene!



I got the wall color right on the second go-round. That first paint-store guy didn't listen to my instructions, and made it way too dark.



Love the floor tiles.



I think my old shower curtains (vaguely Charles Rennie Mackintosh) still work.



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A night on the tiles

So at long last I'm having some work done on the bathroom: replastering and repainting (great flakes coming down), new sash cord, etc. I may even spring for a less unaccommodating light fixture. I have always kept the original 1915 floor tiles because they're original, because someone laid all of those tiny Beechnut-sized white tiles by hand in a herringbone pattern. But they've always been in godawful shape, with ugly concrete patches where someone ripped up the plumbing 40 or 50 years ago. I'm thinking of caving in and laying new tiles.

I want something old-fashioned, to go with the 1915 pedestal sink.

Trouble is, I don't have a car, so it's difficult to look in person.

Nothing that I've found online seems to go with the wall tiles, which are cloudy greyblue, very changeable in different lights.



Set them up against other blue tiles, and they look flat lavender.





You can still get white herringbone tiles, but they would be inauthentic. There are colors, but a trifle hectic and harlequin.  (If only they'd chosen a few of the softer blues!  And you can't pick the wrong ones out like gumdrops.)



Sand-color?  That looks muddy.

What do my discerning readers think? 

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Homerathon!

Damn.  Just found out about this.

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Blood moon

Like so many things, it turned astonishing just as it vanished, but O my!  Worth clambering on the roof at 6:48 am for.

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A Conversation larger than the Universe

O my.  I'm in this.  At the Grolier Club!  In a glass case, like a faience hippopotamus.

A Conversation larger than the Universe represents the Grolier’s first-ever presentation of speculative fiction, in a highly personal selection of 70 books (many signed or inscribed by their authors), magazines, manuscripts, letters, and works of art, dating from the mid-eighteenth century to the present, on view in the second floor gallery from January 25 to March 10, 2018.  From Gothic romances to classic fantasies to cyberpunk and frightening dystopian fiction, the works map out a universe of hopes, dreams - and nightmares.

Thank you, Henry Wessells.

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Hedgerow

My wise friend C. sent me this first image with the note:  "This rookery-crowned vixen set my Cloud-sensors off."

O my!





So I looked for more creatures by this artist, and yes, they all came out of the Cloudish heavens, as if the Lyke Road were a blackthorn hedge in flower.



























All created by Ellen Jewett.

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Gosh

Well, that made my day.  Tromping through the Yard from the library, I was intercepted by a scurrying young woman.  "Oh, I love your aesthetic!"  (Who?  Me?)   She had no mean aesthetic herself:  a very short, very crinolined black dress, splashed all over with great crimson roses with seraphic eyes at their hearts, corroborated by a barrette of like eyes (set in peppermints) in her vivid scarlet-and-black tanager hair.  Black everything else, including orphanage-issue stockings and boots.  She explained:  "You don't see people who get blue."  For the record:  bluegreen shirt, greenblue long skirt, Prussian blue raincoat, bright royal blue bags.  I admired her aesthetic; we chatted a few minutes about Japanese fashion; I strode off, feeling chuffed.

I should have thought to ask, do you know about Arisia?

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How's Bayeux?

Build your own Bayeux.  Hours of innocent merriment.


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Common cause

This is especially for rushthatspeaks and gaudior , laid low by infections, and for that veteran marcher, the Fox. Yes, it was rousing and enspiriting. No, you didn't want to be standing on cold mud in a crowd for several hours.  sovay  , I hope that your reading went brilliantly.

I met up with my excellent friend C. and we found N. and R. (whose mother was Chip Delany's childhood friend, from so long ago that she calls him Sam), and their Raphaelesque cherub, who was revelling in mud, by witness of his trousers.

A very Cantabrigian crowd.























We met the cherub at the playground with the Viking ship, where all the infant veterans of marches towed their parents. Washington should be like this: busy and exploratory. Yes, there were small squabbles over who got to slide first, but the carousel kept turning.







Witness was borne.





In all the uproar, we couldn't find my dear friend B. (who gave me that glorious postcard of the ladies under the table with their teapot, chocolate, and books), but she texted us a picture of her sign:



This is our commonwealth.



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"But this rough Magicke..."

Alas, the great John Barton, founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company has died.  I strongly recommend that you find and watch his Playing Shakespeare, nine master classes in which he draws amazing, ever-deeper and subtler performances from the likes of Judi Dench, Ben Kingsley Peggy Ashcroft, Ian McKellen, Patrick Stewart, David Suchet, Sinéad Cusack, Susan Fleetwood, Sheila Hancock, Alan Howard, Donald Sinden, Michael Williams.  He believed that Shakespeare's lines themselves told actors how to speak his verse.

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