Greer Gilman's Blog, page 28

"It's like IKEA, but for junk"

I lost it at the carrot sharpener.

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Where fashion sits...

The last word in elegant prams went by, one of those leggy things cradling a hooded nest.  I could see nothing of the baby but an immaculate white cloud of blanket and a pink starfish hand, holding an iPhone.

A Warner Brothers cartoon for the twenty-teens.

I hope that phone was a toy...

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The great Globe itself...

"Emma Rice's last season in charge of the Globe opens with loud defiance."  If she can't have it, she'll trash it.

Remember that appalling Midsummer Night's Dream?  Her Romeo and Juliet outdoes it in vulgarity.

"I see no reason why Shakespeare’s words should be screeched."

This production "roars and giggles and stamps its feet. ... The ball scene is engulfed in a chorus of YMCA; Romeo turns into the Columbine killer."

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Contrafibularities

Readercon 28.  Gosh.  Here's what I'm on:

Thursday July 13 9:00 PM    
A Hero by Any Other Name.
Randee Dawn, Greer Gilman, Elaine Isaak, Kenneth Schneyer (leader), Tamara Vardomskaya.

Would Maleficent be less terrifying if her name were Suzy? Would Arthur Dent and Zaphod Beeblebrox have been able to have each other's adventures? In literature, names can serve as shorthand to imply a character's age, ethnicity, time or place of origin, and emotional and psychological makeup. This panel will explore the art and psychology of character names. Friday July 14 3:00 PM
Good Influences.
Scott Edelman, Greer Gilman, Elizabeth Hand (leader), Rosemary Kirstein, Ilana Myer, E.J. Stevens.

In contrast to the bad influences panel from past Readercons, these panelists will discuss authors who were positive influences on their writing during their formative years. Who showed them what good worldbuilding is, what strong narration looks like, and how to deepen a plot with social commentary? Panelists will share, discuss, and praise their problematic and unmitigatedly awesome mentors.

5:00 PM   
The Deaths of Gods.
Martin Cahill (leader), Greer Gilman, Max Gladstone, John Langan, James Morrow.

In Philip Pullman's Golden Compass series, two children literally kill God. In Victor Koman's The Jehovah Contract, a hard-boiled PI is hired for the same job. Max Gladstone's Craft books and Robert Jackson Bennett's City trilogy explore the deaths of gods in polytheistic worlds. How do these narratives of mortals killing supposed immortals differ from ones where gods destroy one another? It's too simplistic to think of these as atheist narratives; how do they explore the power of belief, and the intrusion of incontrovertible fact into a belief system? Saturday July 15 10:00 AM
We Have Always Lived with the Magic.
Phenderson Clark, Greer Gilman, Victoria Janssen (leader), Kate Nepveu, Naomi Novik.

Guest of Honor Naomi Novik's Temeraire books take a slow and clever approach to a common issue with alt-historical fantasy: if magic has always existed, why have historical events gone essentially the same way that they did in our magicless world? Her focus on the familiar territory of Western Europe during the Napoleonic Wars gradually broadens to include other regions that look very different. This panel will examine this and other techniques for integrating magic into history, including using the appearance or reappearance of magic as a timeline divergence point, limiting magic or paranormal entities to a particular region of the world, portraying paranormal communities or magic-users as hidden and secretive, and entirely reinventing history from the Neanderthals on up.


2:00 PM 
Reading: Greer Gilman.

Greer Gilman reads from a work in progress. Sunday July 16 12:00 PM
Sororal Friendships in Fantasy.
Greer Gilman, Naomi Novik, Julia Rios (leader), Tui Sutherland, Fran Wilde.

One of the central relationships in Guest of Honor Naomi Novik's novel Uprooted is between the heroine and her best friend. Agnieszka and Kasia were raised together and have a deep bond that is explored throughout the novel. This depiction of female friendship is unusual in fantasy fiction and gave rise to much discussion (and no small amount of fanfic from fans who either wanted to see more of the friendship or felt it ought to have been a romance). This panel explores sororal friendships in fantasy and the ways they can alter or comment on familiar tropes such as the maiden in the tower and the questing band of brothers.

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Fourth

Had a lovely, low-key Fourth with sovay  's hospitable extended family, including her cousins gaudior   and rushthatspeaks  , and their little Fox (aged 8 1/2 months) in a Delft* blue-and-white onesie, like an animated chocolate pot.  (They're too tall for a teapot.) spatch  , alas, had to work.  choco_frosh   very kindly gave me a lift to the festivities, which he adorned until he had to rush off to ring one of the bells for the 1812 Overture.  I've never asked who does the cannons.

Besides excellent company, there was a lavish repast:  lobster! along with the classic trinity of hamburgers, hot dogs, and potato salad.  There was Virgil's root beer (and other potations).  There was home-made—though not hand-cranked this year**—strawberry ice-cream.  (To every season, churn churn churn...)  spatch   and sovay  had made a perfectly cloudlike angel cake with sharp lemon curd and whipped cream.  Sublime!

Fox was having a perfectly amazing afternoon, meeting in swift succession their first spoonful of strawberry ice cream, their first slide whistle and first bongos, their three-year-old cousin's trampoline***, and their first (architectural) step, which they handled triumphantly, clambering both down and up

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*Or maybe Royal Copenhagen.

**The replacement crank was still in transit.

***They can just about stand for a second or two without a handhold, before going boom, but they were eager to *J*U*M*P*.

Eton Mess

Flour on Mount Auburn had a variant of this today.  Traditionally, it's strawberries dolloped with heavy unsweetened whipped cream into which shattered meringues have been folded.  Fabulous!  Their take used raspberries--they swirl beautifully--and added slivered almonds, which I didn't think improved the dish.

It's proper to the Eton-Harrow match, so totally Lord Peterish.

I had mine in the Radcliffe garden on a bench by the fountain, watched by a quizzical tapestry-rabbit, on a flawless June day. The irises and peonies have nearly all gone by, but the roses are in full cascade.

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Translated

The Actors’ Shakespeare Project is back on form.  They’ve done some amazing productions over the years—a water-elemental Twelfth Night and a galleried Henriad and a Cherry Orchard so poignantly comic that I forgave them for doing it in an inaccessible venue in the wake of a blizzard.  They’d found an immense drawing-room of exactly the right period to play it in, and packed it up around the audience.  Oh, and that 2 Henry VI, with Gloucester doubling as Jack Cade as Mr. Punch. 

But they’d lost ground of late.  Last season, they did A Winter’s Tale with so few players that Mamillius had to be a small voice off.  Doesn’t work.  (The best local Twelfth Night I’ve seen had a wonderful grave child with a teddy bear, who haunted Leontes’ soliloquies.)  The ASP Hamlet last fall was swallowed by the church they played it in; their Tempest (with Prospero and Milan cross-cast) had a sadly weak Miranda and Ariel, but an absolutely cracking Caliban/Stephano/Trinculo trio.  I was getting worried.

But they’ve come back amazingly this spring.  They did a stunning bath-house Edward II, with “Vndique mors est” painted starkly on the wall behind the audience.

And I’ve just come from a lovely little Midsummer Night’s Dream, directed by the Revels veteran Patrick Swanson, in which the double and triple casting works like a marvellous toy.  Oberon and Titania/Theseus and Hippolyta, of course; but also Egeus/Bottom and Philostrate/Puck; and a quartet of endlessly inventive young actors as the lovers and the rude mechanicals and their Pyramus and Thisbe avatars and the fairy court.  (The downside being that they can’t snark at themselves in their play.)  All excellent, but I was much taken with two new players.  Equiano Mosieri is a scarily enticing Oberon, all menace and mischief.  Monica Giordano as Snug is the epitome of all Helena’s insecurities; but just at the end of her performance you see her lose herself in Lion, batting and blowing and inhaling that mantle with a kittenish ferocity.  When she steps back, she’s glowing like a child with joy.  Steven Barkhimer is most of an utterly fantastic  Bottom (his me-thought-I-had is played by someone else’s arm, upholding an apple which Titania bit).  And he plays the bones, duetting with Titania on finger cymbals.  Bliss. 

The rest of the music is a cello in the gallery, and songs (their “Philomel, with melody” setting is lovely).  There’s no scenery, except a rollaway bank-whereon for the FQ and Bottom; the effects and properties are goofy, the magic flowers being trick bouquets, and Peaseblossom &c. being puppets.  Hermia’s dream, though, is amazing:  a serpent made of fairies, advancing through and through each other’s legs.

A young girl (nine? ten?) I spoke with in the intermission had had her parents bring her back a second time:  “This is my favorite play in the world.”  That’s doing Shakespeare right.

Three more performances, Saturday and Sunday

I bought a subscription to their upcoming “Downfall of Despots” season.  I hope it works.

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First contact

"An amateur historian has unearthed compelling evidence that the first Australian maritime foray into Japanese waters was by convict pirates on an audacious escape from Tasmania almost two centuries ago..."





 Hamaguchi wrote of sailors with “long pointed noses” who were not hostile, but asked in sign language for water and firewood. One had burst into tears and begun praying when an official rejected an earlier plea.

A skipper who looked 25 or 26 placed tobacco in “a suspicious looking object, sucked and then breathed out smoke”.

He had a “scarlet woollen coat” with “cuffs embroidered with gold thread and the buttons were silver-plated”, which was “a thing of great beauty, but as clothing it was gaudy”.

[...]
 

The skipper gave instructions to a crew that “in accordance with what appeared to be some mark of respect” followed orders to remove their hats “to the man, most of them revealing balding heads”.

They “exchanged words amongst themselves like birds twittering”.

A dog on the ship “did not look like food. It looked like a pet.”

 

 

Another samurai chronicler called Hirota noted the crew offered gifts including an object he later drew, which looks like a boomerang.

One sailor bared his chest to the disguised samurai to reveal a tattoo of “the upper body of a beautiful woman”, Hamaguchi wrote.

Another produced “a big glass of what appeared to be an alcoholic beverage and indicated that we should drink”.

“We declined by waving our hands, upon which they passed the glass around themselves, one by one tapping their heads as they drank to indicate the good feeling it brought them, and finished the lot.”

Yo ho, me hearties.

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Cloudburst!

After our chilly wood-near-Athens spring in which the blossoms lingered in a trance of green, and everyone had shocking colds, it was (quite obscenely) 100º today.  The skies have just opened and I went out and danced—rather wimpishly, under the portico, as I think there was hail mixed, and some fine fierce lightning banging away like Jove's stapler.  I refuse to be spatchcocked by the gods.

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Antikythera!

Wheels within wheels.



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