Greer Gilman's Blog, page 26

The Book of Will

This play sounds terrific!



"In the early 1620s, a couple of aging actors named Henry Condell and John Heminges set about the task of publishing, in a single, bound volume, all of the plays of their late and beloved pal William Shakespeare. 'Just to have them all together,' their characters say in Lauren Gunderson’s terrific play about their escapade. 'So we know they’re safe.'”

Bless 'em.

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Who's there in th'other Deuils Name?

Going cold down the back of my neck at Macbeth, this Guy Fawkes Night.  Not at the witches, but the Porter.  Earlier that year, his audience had watched the players on another scaffold:  those terrorists who would have blown their world to atoms, and Father Garnet, who had shriven them.  The Jesuit had spoken from that other stage, attesting:  "I do not now equivocate, and more than I have confessed I do not know."  Then like the others in the plot, he was half-hanged, cut down, and gutted, and "equivocate" became the biggest buzzword  of the year, the most re-tweeted tweet, the blackest joke.  So when the Porter called, "O, come in, equivocator!" his audience, from court to groundlings, would have howled with glee.

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Not amused

Hey!  I just accidentally discovered that Dreamwidth has spilled the contents of my journal all over the web, something that LJ  (with all its faults) never did.  I am very unhappy about this.  How do I turn it off?

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I'll saddle and bridle my old black snail

Toward the very end of October, I went to sovay ’s traditional pumpkin-carving party. I love it dearly, though it’s not unfraught with dangers. One year, I managed to slice the end of my finger off on someone else’s knife. I just half turned to speak, and guillotined myself.  That takes talent.  This year I kept out of trouble by keeping the little Fox—adorable in cat’s ears with a long black tail—out of trouble: out of the knives and the pumpkin guts for Fox sake; and out of the sleeved books for theirs.

On Hallows Eve itself, I legged it up to Somerville for my old-accustomed dark diptych: the Dark Morris (by appointment) and the Souling.

This Morris is of the highest lineage, having been danced for Pterry himself some twenty-odd years ago, and sained by him.

At dusk, the drum begins, a slow inexorable thud, played by a grinning skeleton; and through the winter weeds come winding Death himself and his Morris.







They dance in silence, but for the drumbeat, slower than a lizard’s heart. Death comes turning through the tall weeds, scything; at his tail, the dancers follow, and they walk the labyrinth, with all of us as Totentanz behind. We pace the ghostly spiral to its heart, in silence; turn, and spiral out again.



This year, I got to bear the October pole: a garland of dead leaves on a staff, with all its flittering ribands cut from reel-to-reel tape: ghost voices in the wind.

After silence comes slapstick, the souling by the Paper Bag Mummers—“We never rehearse, we only perform!”





It’s always delightfully ramshackle, with improvisations. (I have fond memories of the year of “In comes I, Barack Obama / I am the hero of this drama...”) There are people who crowd their front steps and their porches, waiting for us, and they give us things, as is proper (souling plays are begging): candy and pizza and cider, even a bottle of wine.



The October pole goes rustling and glinting through the streets.



Up the thronged sidewalk we went, with children and parents coming down. We were passed by a box of Froot Loops. And serendipitously, all of a sudden, there were rushthatspeaks   and the Fox in their full cat suit, trick-or-treating, looking astounded at the uproar in the dark. A very little girl (perhaps four?) in a floofy princess dress fell in love with our Binky, a real horse’s skull who plays Dick—“Stand up, Dick!”—and asked his name, and patted him gently.



I hope she grows up to play Hamlet, with Yorick in her lap. This year’s Turkish Champion was brilliantly manic. I only took one turn, as the Old Woman. I got to ask the Doctor, “Where hast thou travelled?”

And when he bragged,

Through Hiccaty Piccaty, Iceland and Spain,
Germany and France and back again.
I've seen houses thatched with pancakes high,
Roads paved with dumplings,
Black puddings growing on gooseberry trees,
Little pigs running about with knives and forks in their backs
Crying "Who'll eat me?"

I adlibbed, “I never sausage a thing!”

As ever, there was a pleasant folkish-fannish party afterward, with Chinese from Zoe’s, and a good fortune-cookie game. When I asked, “So what did the actress say to the bishop?” the slip replied: “Let’s finish this up now, someone is waiting for you on that.” There were soul-cake ducks.



And as ever, Lynn Noel sang her magnificent “Tam Lin” by candlelight. She heard Ewan MacColl sing a tantalizing few verses of it many years ago—it has to be his tune—and reconstructed it. It doesn't set out to be pretty.  The balance of the iterations and onwardness is just right; the tune is shapely but austere, like early Gothic stonework; the drama is quite real but understated.  And she has a damned good voice.

The year has turned.

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"A Melon of his Neighbour"

Orgulous entry in a pumpkin contest.




The quote is from Thomas Rymer, 1678: "Nor can I be displeas'd with honest Ben, when he rather chooses to borrow a Melon of his Neighbour than to treat us with a Pumpion of his own growth."Hope your Hallows Eve is criss-crossed with Will o' th' Wisps and guising!

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Drumroll....

Waugh's crypt-o-thingie.





 Cue sad trombone:  waugh waugh waugh waugh.

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O for frog's sake

Evelyn's aspiring grandson rants again on Vere theory.

Waugh minimus so loves dancing on tables with no trousers on.

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"And certaine starres shot madly from their Spheares..."

In Helsinki, one may hear the young Tove Jansson, singing to herself. Her father sculpted her.

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Out of the whirlwind

O my!  Burdick's and Tosci's—twin gods in the Cambridge pantheon—have collaborated on an ice-cream sandwich!  You can get chocolate macarons with hazelnut ice cream; pistachio with Earl Grey; or almond with matcha.  Bliss.

I discovered this on my way to the Tilda Swinton festival at the Brattle.  So far this week, I've seen her in Sally Potter's Orlando (1993), and in two Derek Jarman films.  Orlando remains an absolute delight.   I love the wit; I love Orlando's glances through the fourth wall; I love the doubling of the scurrilous Nick Greene and the publisher, and the Sebastian and Viola casting of Sasha and Shelmerdine.  I adore Quentin Crisp's Elizabeth I.  (He was born to play that part.)  I love the Jacobean winter funeral, and the teacup topiary, and the perfectly truthful absurdity of most of the costumes.   I love the scene where (as I once wrote) Orlando "rushes in a fury into a hedge maze ... whisking round a corner, she emerges in another century, in another cage of skirt."

I confess that Tilda Swinton gave me Thea's fiery hair in Cloud & Ashes.  She's a fabulous muse—which is all I share artistically with Derek Jarman. 

Caravaggio (1986)  is imperfect and astonishing.  It was one of Sean Bean's earliest films, and Swinton's first.  The stagings of the paintings in the film are so perfectly Caravaggiesque—so blasphemous, numinous, intemperate, unmoving, shadowy, and dazzling, so cold and so  engorged with godhead.  They are clearly what the artist saw.  The canvases on screen are merely sketches:  art is what the camera sees.

Still trying to get my head around The Last of England (1987), which is incandescent.  It's so dazzling it hurts.  Literally:  I have eyestrain from the visionary flicker.  The rant is on the fall of England—all its goodness and greenness, every vestige of decency—under Thatcher, a gut-wrenchingly relevant anger.  Part of it I saw as Asmodeus' Books:  it begins with the auteur speaking as he writes a curse in a cluttered workroom, in a beautiful italic hand:  what he spells, is.  (Greenaway appears to have stolen that image, in a prettier, post-modernist take.)  Out of the whirlwind, I recall a few most vivid scenes.  There was an evocation of the Ford Madox Ford painting from which the film takes its name:  a huddle of despairing people at a harbor, underlaid with Marianne Faithfull singing, "Speed, Bonny Boat"—but they're prisoners.  There is no boat, and no Australia.  They've simply come to the end of ground.  There was a naked Poor Tom, gnawing on a demonic raw cauliflower.  It would terrify a vegetarian into eating sashimi—at least it doesn't writhe and flap.  No really—it looked like some sort of brain-bird with broken pinions.  And there were sequences of astounding beauty:  Pan dancing in a brickyard, and Tilda Swinton whirling in silhouette before the flames of the apocalypse.

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Arcadia

Near Walsingham, there lies a sleeping beauty of an early Tudor manor, legendary and impenetrably hedged. Sir John Guinness and his lady had possessed it jealously; were said have furnished it exquisitely, authentically. His collections—above all the paintings—were fabled. Not that anyone had ever been let in.



With my Norfolk friends, I’d been longing for a sight of it, prowling for threadbare places in the hedge, for glimpses of fantasticated brick.



Then Sir John was widowed: his beloved house went on the market, and for ages went unsold. You can’t just hand these places over to the National Trust—they demand an endowment. The upkeep at East Barsham was reputed to be £2,000 a week, just to whack the weeds and keep the roofs from tumbling in. The price fell and fell to £2.75 million. There were rumors that the Bee Gees secretly owned it (wait, I thought they were dead); that a cult had bought it, and it was randomly open for the sale of incense.

Straightway on my arrival, my friends said eagerly that the gate was open. They’d only just ventured in, and found a handwritten notice declaring: House & Garden + Tea £5. A snip. But a gardener sort of person had turned them away, saying we were closed today, that Roy had a session.

Roy?

This time, the sign said: House & Garden £10. No mention of tea. The gate was open once again, and we drove in. O my!





Sheer Lud-in-the-Mist.

We called out, and at last came an Igor-in-Wellingtons, out of some sort of construction zone way out back, with mud and machinery. Capability Brown, ploughing under? He was like an unbaked gingerbread man, all white dough, with visionary liquorice-button eyes. Sorry, didn’t hear you, Roy and I were just having some tea. He took our pounds and told us, Oh yeah, go anywhere you like, wander around, unless there’s a note on a door. Sometimes Roy is busy. Talk among yourselves. Only be careful going up them turrets. The stairs are just past the broken window.

He unlocked the great front door.

My gods.



It looked like something between a well-swept hippy squat and a private madhouse. Sparse, commonplace furniture (one mattress with the charity-shop tag still on it); the walls and tables stuck with clearly penned impenetrable psycho-babble koans; sub-Warhol paintings everywhere, stacked and hung. What looked like a student copy of Whistler’s mother. Huh? Rather a witty Elizabeth I. An entire new suite of unremarkable bathroom fixtures, none of it plumbed, with the bathtub in the place of a bed, and the old taps sticking out of the walls. A few books, mostly thrillers and lengthier psycho-babble, but including (I noted) Wolf Hall. Well-swept, I said; but that was downstairs.  Upstairs there were stranger Gothick passages: a mullioned window sill, thick with dead wasps; cobwebs; a papier-mâché dragon lying in a wilderness of fallen plaster, as if he’d roared the walls and ceiling down.






J., who has an eye for vintages, said the champagne bottles lying about everywhere were of spectacular breeding. The turret stairs, of terrifying steepness and narrowness, though luckily uncrumbled, were worth climbing, for the view of the ten chimneys.



Returning to the great hall, we found the front door locked against us. Spooky! But we sought out a back door with a key in it, and let ourselves out. This would have been a showplace garden once; even now, it’s lovely in a Dreamchild sort of way, with its prickling topiary. There are some terrific moss-grown stony garden chairs, like a stage-set for the Council of Elrond done by Rackham.



Again, we called the Igor out, and he came stumping: we had the backdoor key to give him, and besides, there was another party coming along, thrilled by the serendipity—the door just opened for us—and bemused.

This time, the Igor fixed us like the Ancient Mariner, and held us, talking nineteen to the dozen. Sorry Roy locked you in. I said to him, there’s free [i.e. 3] people in there, Roy, I said, don’t lock the door or nuffing, he always does this. He tells me, If I paid you, you’d take wings and fly away. And then where’d I be? He’s not used to having money, Roy. He had thirteen Mercedes here, all lined up, but I told him, what you going to do with all them? The neighbors been complaining we been cutting trees, but what if a branch smacked through a bus window and affected a little child? It’s common sense. They don’t like it that Roy’s been diverting the river. (So that’s what all the machinery is about.) What’s wrong with creating a water-feature?

Well!

Of course, we went home and Googled Roy like mad. He does appear to be an elderly pop-artist and cabinetmaker of note—none of the latter craft is in evidence. though much of the former. And—oh dear—his idea in buying the place was to turn it into a “boutique hip-hop hotel.” You just can’t do that with a Grade I listed building. As he should have known. So now he’s stuck with it, and restless.

Anyone want to go in on a bid?



We wondered too, about the Igor. Though he had a strong east London accent, he claimed to come of a centuries-deep New Forest lineage, and spoke knowingly of that Edwin Lutyens and that Gertrude Jekyll. And it was always we. Old retainer? Old partner? Bastard son?

On my last evening, a neighbor of my friends came over, and of course the conversation turned to East Barsham. Back in the day, Lady Guinness used to wander the Fakenham market in odd shoes. But now! The neighbor said that her son and his girlfriend had been round, and encountered the terrifying Roy, who stood before a doorway crying, “Go away! I’m treating a schizophrenic!”

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