Greer Gilman's Blog, page 31

Reprise

Of a women's choir singing Ethel Smyth's "The March of the Women." Thomas Beecham visited the old warrior in Holloway Prison and reported that he found the activists in the courtyard "...marching round it and singing lustily their war-chant while the composer, beaming approbation from an overlooking upper window, beat time in almost Bacchic frenzy with a toothbrush."

This group is doing it properly!




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...and we'll all hang on behind

I don't ever march—I'm a vote-and-donation sort of person—but as the gentleman of our party's board neatly proclaimed:

Not Usually a Sign Guy, But Come On Now!

I met teenybuffalo   and a Somervillian party on the platform at Davis at ten, and waiting for them, watched a Niagara of pink surge down the stairs.  The Red Line was packed like tribbles in Tokyo, and the doors sliced our group in two—part of it ended up going out to Alewife, just to get a car to come in on.  Mid-car on the underground, we chanced on a congenial soul, a omni-capable-looking—you'd want her on your school board or in scrubs in the ER—woman of color in a Siberian tiger hat, and she and Teeny (in a long scarlet coat and low top hat, with a Bread & Roses sign) burst into song, and all of us anchovies joined in on "This Land Is Your Land" and "If I Had a Hammer."  That was totally swell.

Our snake re-united at Charles/MGH.

We couldn't get onto the Common, or hear much more of the speeches than fragments and roars——sounds like Elizabeth Warren gave 'em hell.  We stood on Charles Street, forty-deep, for close to two hours, waiting cheerfully for the man in the safety-orange bobble hat to wave us on—which meant that when the marching started, we were near the front, and stepped out with éclat, all round the Public Garden, up Commonwealth and back.  As we passed the first garbage truck marking the way, we chanted, "Public Works!  Public Works!"  And we sang!  "Roll the Old Chariot Along" with improvised verses ("A bit of human rights wouldn't do us any harm") and "What Shall We Do With the Nasty Woman?" ("Put her in the House and in the Senate.")

Sights and sounds:  people on balconies with rainbow flags; a pussy hat on the statue of William Ellery Channing; what looked like the mingled casts of Hair and Hamilton drawn up on the steps of the Arlington Street Church with a bubble machine, and a revolutionary rocking out in the bell tower; a pair of immaculately cool suffragists.  It was a gloriously fine day, which was part of why we marched:  the magnolias shouldn't be budding in January.

The only person I ran into by chance was a Parisian-born postdoc and trans activist who used to live in my building.

Some signs:

The Young Are At The Gates

Tweet All People With Respect

Build Bridges Not Walls

several longer passages from John Quincy Adams ("JQ!  JQ!"):  "The Manners of Women, are the surest Criterion by which to determine whether a Republican Government is practicable, in a Nation or not" and "Nip the shoots of arbitrary power in the bud, is the only maxim which can ever preserve the liberties of any people."

With Malice Toward None, With Charity To All

Dear World, We Are One Family, With Love, America

Immigrants Are America

I'm With Her (with omni-directional arrows)

I'm With Her (with the Statue of Liberty)

Grab Him by the Putin

Plato Was Right

Witches, We Need You

When They Go Low, We Go High (hand-crayoned by the young girl who bore it)

No Human Being Is Illegal

We Are Rising

You Have No Idea What You Have Unleashed

History Has Its Eyes On Us

Our Bodies, Our Minds, Our Power

Trump, Putin's Tiny Whiny Bitch

Our Rights Are Not Up for Grabs

Science Matters

I Will Not Go Quietly Back to the 1950s

Emperor Trump Is Not Wearing Clothes

Trump Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things

Hello, Highchair Narcissist

Make America Kind Again

Make America Think Again

Love Trumps Hate

Now Is the Time to Get Our Panties All in a Bunch (panty-shaped)

Keep Your Rosaries Off of My Ovaries

We Shall Overcomb

(and one small neat sign, yellow on black)

This Is Very Bad

When we got back to Charles/MGH, four or five hours later, there on the platform was our psychopomp—what else could she be?—the woman in the Siberian tiger hat.  I left them all singing down the line.

This march is dedicated to my grandfox.

Nine

Postscript:  marches on every continent (yes, Antarctica).

PPS:  175,000 marched, which is impressive, given the size of the city.    New York is estimating 400,000, and Chicago (which was too crowded to actually march), 250,000.  I know that people were coming from way out, but using the cities' official populations as a benchmark, just under 5% of New York and 10% of Chicago marched—and over 25% of Boston.

Intercalary

A late welcome addition to my Arisia schedule:


Every Panel is Halloween
James Hailer (m), Hillary Monihan, Greer Gilman, Leigh Perry, M J Cuniff
Sunday 5:30 PM

January is not too early for Halloween! It's the traditional time of Ray Bradbury and Susan Cooper, but there are many other scary stories and spooky tales on the borders of fantasy and horror. It's time to celebrate the mixture of wonder and terror, chills and whimsy that mark the end of autumn (or every day, on Tumblr). Bring us your favorite bits of spookiness. Tell us where, if anywhere, lies the border between Halloween and more traditional horror or traditional fantasy.

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Confabular

Speaking of objects in the mirror, good heavens! Arisia is coming up subito.  Hope to see some of you there.

Reading: Friesner, Gilman, Schneyer
Friday 8:30 PM
Readings by Esther Friesner, Greer Gilman and Ken Schneyer

Traditional Ballad Bingo
Saturday 5:30 PM
Angela Kessler (m), Zoe Madonna, Greer Gilman, Jeremy Kessler, Lynn Noel, Sonya Taaffe

A themed sing wherein attendees take turns performing traditional ballads for the assemblage. Listen carefully to mark your Ballad Bingo cards when you detect such classic tropes as drowning, pregnancy out of wedlock, or murder of a loved one. Cards will be provided. Compete for "valuable" prizes!

The 100 Year Old Barbed Wire: The Great War & SF
Sunday 1:00 PM
Sioban Krzywicki (m), Greer Gilman, Debra Doyle, Alexander Jablokov, Sonya Taaffe

We are in the midst of the centenary of World War I. The US was not hit badly by it compared to Europe, and in 2017 the centenary of US involvement (6 April 1917) is coming up. How did the war and its aftermath change society and our idea of the future. Could Brave New World or Things to Come or other early classics of speculative fiction been written without the war's impact? Why do so many alternate histories use earlier or later events as a changing point rather than this one?

Grounding Your Audience in a Sensory World
Sunday 7:00 PM
Ken Schneyer (m), Keffy R.M. Kehrli, Ruthanna Emrys, Greer Gilman, Sonya Taaffe

The five senses are appallingly underrepresented in modern fiction. Without sensory information, it's difficult to grab your audience and drag them into your protagonist's body. How do you portray senses other than sight? Can you use it to portray emotion? Where can you scrounge up alternatives for the words see, hear, feel, taste and smell, or "sixth sense" (psychic intuition)? Come learn how to describe your world in all of its glorious, sensory detail.

Another World, Another Time: Untapped Fantasy
Monday 11:30 AM
Cate Hirschbiel (m), James Hailer, Greer Gilman, Leigh Perry, Sonya Taaffe

We love our Medieval, Victorian, and Weird West fantasy, but there are a lot more times and places for magic and other worlds. Our panelists will talk about their favorite authors who went someplace different and what settings require more stories. How can we explore new settings and times while maintaining respect for the people and the cultures that reside there?

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In wood

A conversation with rushthatspeaks sent me back to re-read Gwen Raverat's Period Piece for the thirty-fifth or so time. It's one of my heart's-core collection of memoirs of quirky intellectual English families:  the Darwins here, the Knoxes, the Farjeons.  You want to seize people and read passages aloud.  Part of the intrinsic joy of Raverat's book are her wood-engravings.  I love them, as I love her illustrations of offbeat Victorian children's books:  Charlotte Yonge's Countess Kate (the sudden inheritrix of that title is hopelessly unladylike: farouche and over-ardent) and Elizabeth Anna Hart's The Runaway, with its fabulous madcap. Here's Olga, hiding in the shrubbery:



I'd seen and admired some of Raverat's wonderful engravings of landscapes, and of work in landscapes: shepherds and harvesters, but I'd never thought to look deeper—and my heavens! Ballads, fairy-tales, and myths!



I'll do as much for my true love as any young girl may,
I'll dance and sing all on his grave for a twelve month and a day.



The rain beats at my yellow locks, the dew wets me still,
The babe is cold in my arms, love, Lord Gregory let me in.



And stood at his bed feet...



Oer his white banes, whan they are bare,
The wind sall blaw for evermair.

There are witches...



...good folk...



...mermaids...



There's Death as co-author (a frontispiece for an edition of Sir Thomas Browne):



There's a Daphnis that makes me desperately wish she could have done my crow lad:



And a "Child-Stealers" that is wilder and eerier than the poem it illustrates:



Alas, most of what's for sale are real prints not reproductions, but the gallery's online.  Enjoy!

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Housekeeping

Questions for the collective intelligence:

If I import LJ to DW (both being active), what happens to the comments? Does one set overlay the other? Do both sets vanish? Do both sets appear?

sovay says "It is now possible to import comments from LJ to DW: there's a tickybox for it on the import page."

Where is this elusive tickybox? The only option I see is for Comments is "Disable comments on crossposts made to other sites." I haven't ticked it. How do I able comments?

Can anything be done about the decor? So far I've seen the lipstick-pink hair salon and the Greyhound bus station, circa 1975 (orange and navy, doubtless with those molded hard-plastic chairs that relinquish only with a pop!). It makes me very reluctant to spend any time here, either to read or to write.

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Objects in the mirror...

Like others, I am worried: will the ground beneath me vanish? I remember when the lights went out on GEnie—I think I hung on almost as long as the indomitable Lois Tilton in those last few hours. Saw her whirling by on an ice floe of disintegrating text. It was surreal.

Dreamwidth doesn't feel like home to me—more like an empty waiting room in a very odd shade of lipstick pink, or an afterlife, but—

This is Nine. Do you read me? Please comment, so I know you're there.

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For Twelfth Night

"I am not that I play."




A girl dressed in boy's clothing (Netherlandish, ca. 1750)

Cupboard-love:

If there were, O! an Hellespont of cream
Between us, milk-white Mistress, I would swim
To you, to show to both my love’s extreme,
Leander-like, — yea, dive from brim to brim.
But met I with a butter’d pippin-pie
Floating upon’t, that would I make my boat,
To waft me to you without jeopardy:
Though sea-sick I might be while it did float.
Yet if a storm should rise, by night or day,
Of sugar snows or hail of care-aways,
Then if I found a pancake in my way,
It like a plank should bear me to your quays,
Which having found, if they tobacco kept,
The smoke should dry me well before I slept.

— John Davies of Hereford, 1598

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Joy, health, love, and peace...

... to all in this season.

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Reborn from the ashes

The Statue of Liberty, now left-handed.

I hope to goddess it's a prophecy.

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