Greer Gilman's Blog, page 32

from Lightfast to Leapfire...

Wishing you joy at the light returning.

(And to my friends in the Antipodes, a glorious summer.)

Nine

Taking in each other's washing

Did you know that Kirkus is selling reviews?  I didn't.

Discovered this when a self-published Oxfordian book got a rave from an Oxfordian, probably a crony of his.  (Close readers recognize the crony's notable stylistic quirks.)  Even if the author didn't say, "Send it to X," who else is going to offer to review this dreck?  And who's going to pay $575 for an honest bad review?

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Lamentations of a Luddite

At some point I will have to surrender my university email address.  I hold it now by grace and favor, and someday my sponsor (for whom I do the odd job of research) will retire, and I'll be faced with the unenviable task of informing everyone with whom I correspond that I've moved, and changing all my log-ins and subscriptions.  Oh joy.

However, the university is making its email a nightmare to deal with.  I may have to relinquish it.

About six months ago, they migrated everything to Outlook, a program which I have to use in my geographical research job, and which I cordially loathe.  To begin with, it makes everything written in it look cheap and chirpy, like tweets.  Couldn't I keep Thunderbird as a front? I asked wistfully.  I like Thunderbird:  it's old-fashioned and text-friendly, and it plays well with my old iMac.  Oh no, they said, but we can fix you up with Apple Mail.   Gee thanks.  That doesn't even have a "next message" function, fer chrissake.  And it's incompatible with all my old mail, so I have this unbridgeable gulf in all my conversations.  Meanwhile, behind the interface, Outlook is running things, and it's a bully:  every day it sends me messages saying, We didn't think you should read this, but if you really want to see it, you can click here and we'll eventually forward it to you with our own datestamp.  Do it soon, or we'll kill it.  I find this officiously intrusive.  (One of the reasons the university adopted Outlook, I think, is for the hive-mindedness:  supposedly, it's given everyone a common and synchronic calendar.  I hope they also get a private one, or everyone will be taking each other's cats to soccer practice and their children to the vet.)

As if that weren't enough, any replies I made from my iPhone or iPad stopped turning up as sent mail or in my inbox, so I couldn't see my half of a correspondence, except as quoted.  Eventually, I tracked them all to the ghost town of my old account, which is a cul-de-sac:  it can still receive (though it shouldn't) but not send.  And they abided, thick as leaves in Vallombrosa.  They'd all turned back to Thunderbird.  And because Mail is an entirely different creature, I couldn't even transfer them to a working folder.  Things got—fragmented.

Then a week ago, Mail died.  Just like that.  Every time I opened it, it crashed.  Fortunately, my small devices still sent and received, or I'd run mad.

I had one of those spooky consultations where (from somewhere in the clouds) a ghost tech Ouijas your cursor.  After trying everything he knew or could look up—trash this and trash that—he told me to re-install my operating system.

Oh great.  First I had to clear space on my backup drive (which was silted up); then do the backup:  a lengthy process.  Then I couldn't find my Snow Leopard disc (I told you I was old-fashioned), and decided it would cost less in time and aggravation to replace it.  Then I had to reinstall it.  Then I had to download five updates, and install each one in turn.  Then I opened Mail.

It crashed.

So I got another ghost techie in.  He couldn't revive it; said my OS shouldn't ever have worked at all with Exchange.  Why don't you bring your desktop in, and we'll fix it up so it runs El Capitan?

No thank you, not just now, I said.

So he set up Outlook, and I eyed it loathingly, and asked, So how do I archive my mail?

Archive? he said.  Why?  You've got 50 GB in the Cloud.

Yes, and when I close my account, it all vanishes, as if it never was.

Couldn't I just have Thunderbird? I said wistfully.  And bless his heart, he rigged it up by a back way, quite cleverly.  I spent a joyous few hours reuniting all my conversations sundered in the middle—until I discovered that now my Gmail doesn't know me, and that Outlook has vengefully trashed my work account.

Ah, technology!

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"That kind of novel"

I've been reading, so to speak, under the covers with a flashlight.  Having adored The Brontës Went to Woolworths since forever—marred as it is by thirties snobbery—I was delighted to find a lot of Rachel Ferguson coming back into print, thanks to Dean Street Press and their fabulously named, slightly wonky Furrowed Middlebrow imprint.  What set me off was re-reading bits of Monica Baldwin's I Leap Over the Wall (1949), a tried-and-true open-anywhere bedside book.  Miss Baldwin was a niece of Stanley Baldwin's and so a modest star in the great Macdonald sisters constellation:  Burne-Jones, Edward Poynter, Kipling, Angela Thirkell, and all.  She entered an hermetically enclosed order of canonesses in 1914, just before the First World War, and came out in October 1941, at the height of the Second.  It's the autobiography of a time traveller.  Baldwin flung herself whole-heartedly and awkwardly into war work, encountering Life—fleas, jazz, munitions girls—and wolfing down all the fiction she could get her hands on.  She especially praised Frank Baker's Miss Hargreaves (1939) and Rachel Ferguson's The Brontës Went to Woolworths (1931) and A Harp in Lowndes Square (1936), and being fond of the second, I got my hands on the first and third, as well as Ferguson's Alas, Poor Lady (1937).

Miss Hargreaves is the invention of the narrator of Miss Hargreaves—he and a friend sketch out a mad, elderly poet in a flight of fancy, an act of unintended sorcery that summons her to his comic destruction.

The Brontës Went to Woolworths concerns an insular, eccentric, witty family—a widow and three daughters—who are co-creators of a real-time saga, a warp of their mundane life into which they weave their fantasies and fandoms:  a seaside pierrot, an elderly judge, an insufferable tin doll, the Brontës.  It's a cross between real-person fanfic and the loom of the Fates.  Slightly sinister whimsy.

A Harp in Lowndes Square is darker.  Another stage-mad quirky family—late Victorian this time—is poisoned at its roots by the monstrous Lady Vallant.  There is an appalling secret, a haunted staircase, second-sighted twins, who give the ghost-child Edward VI a flip book.  Heartbreaking and hilarious.

Her next book is mimetic and politely absolutely furious. Alas, Poor Lady follows the long downfall of four distressed gentlewomen, sisters, cheated of their lives by a halfwitted tyranny of elders.  Not a romp.  Ferguson makes up for snooting the poor governess in Brontës by turning the tables, showing Miss Scrimgeour in the thankless service of godawful households—though the author does briefly treat Scrimmie to one of her signature eccentric families, who love her dearly.

After that, for some reason, I found myself re-reading David Copperfield, still on the go.  I am not a great Dickensian.  But this one and I go back a long way.  I remember being about seven, reading it so hard I missed my homeward schoolbus.  The Murdstones are compelling.  A few years later, I wrote a satire of it, The Persecution and Assassination of Charles Dickens, &c., which was actually performed by my ninth-grade classmates.  All I can remember of it was the casting of an eerily perfect Mr. Dick.  I still don't see what David saw in that bounder Steerforth or in that squeak-toy Dora, but I'm fond of Miss Betsey Trotwood and Traddles.

The Dickens I love best is the RSC production of Nicholas Nickleby.  When I watch it, I always imagine Jo March at my elbow.

Nine

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each

I crossed a threshold today.  No turning back, though it's an ominous world here Over the Hill.

There were some rainbows in among the louring clouds:  an utterly glorious February fortnight in England, spent with old friends and all the arts; a tiny but splendiferous home Shakesfest in April in Maine; a far-too-brief sudden trip to Chicago on the train (always wanted to do that); and a blissful week at folk camp (Martin and Eliza Carthy!) in August with my silly sister negothick . It was a vintage year for enjoying the arts.  And above all, I got to welcome an enchanting, curious, and ever-changing small person into this world.

This year's first:  I sang in public.  I was determined to bring something of my own to camp, so I remade Child Ballad 270, "The Earl of Mar's Daughter":  reworked the lyrics, fit a Playford tune to it, stood up in a ballad session and sang.  I was absolutely terrified.  All my life I'd thought I was a loud, flat, gruff, raucous, chorus-wrecking alto.  No.  Turns out I'm a tiny soprano.  The voice coach tested me:  tweet twitter warble chirp. Who me?  It felt almost like a gender reassignment.

Beyond deaths and politics, I hope there's light.  I hope that I get to spend time with said small person as they grow; that my dear friends will get well and stay well, and as happy and productive as they can be; that we'll have each other's company; that no one else will be run down in a crosswalk (thank you, 2016); that Jarndyce will be over; that I write something new and strange.

Nine

Ceci n'est pas une pierre

An Orazio Gentileschi, painted on a ground of lapis lazuli, last shown at the National Gallery, London—



A portrait of an unknown man by Franz Hals—



A Venus by Lucas Cranach, owned by the Prince of Liechtenstein—



—all of doubtful provenance, all discovered by one Giulano Ruffini, all suspected fakes.

I love it.

Whoever this ring of forgers are, they’re damned brilliant. The "Gentileschi," in particular, is stunning. Look at how s/he’s created air and water out of stone, has painted by not painting.

I haven’t seen anything this good since Stephen Greenhalgh stopped knocking out antiquities in his garden-shed. He was only caught when he tried to flog three “Assyrian” reliefs to the British Museum, and they found a spelling error in his cuneiform.  Damned by a diacritic...

Nine

Escapism

Diana Sandys, who writes advertising copy in the thirties, explains:

“It’s like this. Tobacco – except snob-cigarettes – is nearly always sold homosexually – Chaps Together, you know. Or occasionally one builds on the over-compensated Oedipus – Dad Advises Sonny-boy. But chocolates are quite invariably sold heterosexually – Boy Brings Girl Box. But with these I’m going to try Women Together. Women stuffing them after tête-à-tête teas, women clutching half-pounds at chummy matinees. And I’m going to have them called the Sappho Assortment. A good name, I think; splashy and prodigal associations, exotic word, and yet difficult to mispronounce–”

“But I don’t know about pronouncing. I rather think you’ll have female dons – all tense and arm in arm, no doubt, as you want – going to their favourite sweet-shop and asking for Sap-foh.’

Diana made a note. ‘I’ll go into it. But there will have to be snob-appeal too. Boy Brings Girl Box runs much further down the income-levels than Women Stuff Box Together. I shall be going for the eight-room-upwards public, which means they must sell at a higher price than they intended. Have one of the twirly ones.”

                                                          —Michael Innes, Hamlet, Revenge! (1937)

Oh yes, there's a plot.  Some frightfully important people are doing an amateur Hamlet at a country-house weekend; Polonius is murdered in III.iv.  But with Innes, you’re not along for the mystery, really.  You’re after paragraphs like these.

And speaking of closet scenes, were people really as insouciant as this in 1939?

An Oxonian is on a train with his tutor:

“The diplomatic. You know Hugo is going in.” And Timmy smiled happily. He was always in love. At the moment, Winter understood, it was a desolatingly orthodox man at New College.

“Your Hugo Toplady? I expect he was at Eton?”

[...]

Timmy stretched himself and assumed an expression of deliberate, blood-chilling idiocy. “It’s wonderful, isn’t it,” he said, “to know a chap like that?”

Winter looked about the compartment. “Timmy – at your boy-and-girl school – did they ever cane anybody?”

“Absolutely not. I am virgin of the rod.”

“I see no reason why it should be too late to begin.”

Timmy and Toplady could almost be a nascent Caldicott and Charters, the naïf and the incipient blimp:

Timmy, now farther down the platform, was revolving about a tall young man in the most inflexible uniform of travel: bowler, umbrella, and the yellowest of gloves. Timmy was evidently in a quiet ecstasy. “I say, Winter – do you know Hugo Toplady? Hugo, this is Gerald Winter.”

Toplady, with the air of one who makes an important decision with practised rapidity, said, “How do you do.” Amid vague remarks all three bundled into a cab. They jerked out of the station into the recurrently astounding uproar of London.

“I’ve been telling Winter,” said Timmy, “about the Spider affair. He is confident he can solve it.”

Winter opened his mouth and was forestalled by Toplady. “A horrid foolery,” he said. “One sees that it is a joke, but decidedly not the sort of joke one sees.” He tapped the floor of the taxi with the attenuated ferrule of his umbrella.

“Not the sort of joke one sees.” Timmy, repeating the words as he might repeat a particularly precious line of Dante, contrived to tread deftly and cruelly on Winter’s toes. Timmy’s loves were always fortified by irony. One day, Winter reflected, he might be a great lover; he had the not common ability of adoring what was actually there.

Everyone at this particular disrupted house-party refers to “that awful boyfriend” and “Timmy’s Toplady,” and the satire is all about Englishness, not sexuality: “Timmy was still clinging to his Hugo, and his Hugo’s cautiously wandering glance could be interpreted as searching the room for the right sort of old school tie.”

The closest the narration comes to a wink is a mention of “sea-green pyjamas”—and really, Lord Peter could have worn those, when his primrose ones were being hand-washed.

Even when Timmy drops his Easter-Island idol for a girl, it isn’t a conversion:  the baffled Hugo has shown the affronted Timmy’s love poems to his grandmother, hoping for an exegesis, and “it was not critical appraisal that Timmy designed.”  And so “Patricia came and Hugo went: it was the order of things in an adolescent world.”

Nine

Comforts

Tatte in the Square sells kouign-amann.

Jigsaw puzzles.

lydy 's afghan (tessalations of rainbow)

The little fox.

Books, of course.

What are yours?

Nine

It was sad when that great ship went down

Others have said what I would say.

I wasn't looking at live news on Tuesday—I hate it.  I kept doing other things as long as I could, and when I couldn't I went out to listen to the Yard.  When there's good news, it blooms with light on light, as swiftly as a desert.  There's a buzz, breaking into chant.  Dead silent.  Dark.  Two or three people walked by me, talking in low, angry voices.  I heard "—fuck third-party—" and that was it.

I hope his handlers keep the code from him.  He can have a toy red button to push with his pudgy little finger.

I am afraid of his handlers.

I am afraid.

Be safe.  Work on.

Nine

Shout, shout, up with your song!

I set forth to vote in a threadbare old green skirt and purple shirt, rummaged out in honour of the suffragists, singing Ethel Smyth's "The March of the Women"—it's been running through my head for days. 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!




The white in my tricolor was played by a Wellesley tote bag (from I forget which reunion), and was rapturously hailed by a Class of 2011 going in. She's off to the big vigil at the college tonight.

A classmate reports that "my bees are out and busy. I'm taking that as an omen: GIRL POWER!!"

This is inexpressibly moving: a tendril of green springing up beneath the asphyxiating dumpster fire:

Nine