Greer Gilman's Blog, page 34

Out of curiosity

Did you teach yourself to read? At what age?

I did at two or three. My mother remembered my asking if I could read her a story. I can't remember not being able to read.

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Hieronimo is mad againe

The utterly fearless Theatre@First is doing a splendid, peripatetic Spanish Tragedy, moving in a Dantesque spiral through a park:   ascending to a hilltop and a hanging tree, beside a stony keep; descending to a grotto in a welter of madness, revenge, and meta-theater.  It darkens as it darkens.  At the blackest, a great moth caught itself in my hair, whirring like an angry star.  It was terrific.

For those of you who can't make it to one of the performances, play Spot the Bard.  Which of these lines are by Shakespeare?  Which by Fletcher?

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The Road goes ever on and on . . .

The very happiest of birthdays to my dear friend negothick —if not her eleventy-first, a milestone.  I remember her 18th vividly.

Wishing her joy, health, love, and peace.

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Elsewhere...

"Norway considers giving mountain to Finland as 100th birthday present."

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Still life

Remember those beautiful, melancholy paintings of cracked china that I fell in love with?  I mistakenly gave credit to an Erkin Kuvandikov.   The artist is simply called Erkin.  My apologies to him for this grave error.  Go, feast your eyes.  There are noble banquets to be had from empty dishes.

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Apocalypse when?

The sun did come up this morning, after all.

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An Alphabet of Embers

Rose Lemberg has made a beautiful anthology—an assemblage of oddities, an orrery of living stars.  I am delighted to be among their company.

Strange Horizons reviews:

"As such, these pieces are necessarily impressionistic and often dreamlike, sacrificing character and plot in favor of style and feeling. In this way the title is also aptly chosen, as each story is like a spark that glows as the reader breathes with it—but then fades quickly away."





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Contrariwise

Saturday began at breakfast with Jo Walton, Ada Palmer, and Cenk Gökce (they saw me in the endless queue, and beckoned).  Afterward, braced with oatmeal, I plunged into the sea of panels again with 200 Years of Frankenstein (Don D’Ammassa, Theodora Goss (leader), Jack Haringa, Kathryn Morrow, Faye Ringel). That was an exemplary panel:   an excellent conversation, earthed in deep reading, crackling with intelligence.  That's why I go to cons.

And at last, I had a panel myself!  Sorting Taxonomies (John Benson, Greer Gilman, Kate Nepveu (leader), Peter Straub, Jacob Weisman). Introducing himself, Peter Straub dumbfounded me by saying that, oh, by the way this person to his left had been the best Readercon guest of honor ever.  Me?  Amongst this dazzling constellation?  Good heavens, no.

Here’s what I wrote for my panel audition:

“I used to make rainbows of colored pencils (and before that crayons) and wonder: should I sort by hue? value? intensity? You could sort books from infrared SF to ultraviolet fantasy; from dark to light; from extravagant to understated. What draws me in, across genres, is voice. I like small scale, minute focus, oddity, the turning year, the comic.”

Maybe one day we could order books by Pantone number.

We were asked what we look for in fiction.  I said my Jane Eyre is not at all about Mr. Rochester:   what I turn to and reread is the description of the watercolors.  That’s often what I’m looking for in books:  that drowned arm with the bracelet; that vision of the evening star.  This desire, I suppose, is somewhat like C. S. Lewis’s Joy, though it’s not Sehnsucht, not longing for a paradise lost.  It’s a little like the classic sense of wonder, but intimate rather than sublime.  It’s—no, not an orrery, not a quite a toy.  It’s finding the true starry sky in a box in a drawer in a forgotten room.

Of course, sometimes I just want a happy ending or miserable orphans or fabulous snark.  Or the lamentable comedy of Pyramus and Thisbe:  a genre I call Why must the show go on?

Onward.

Crowded in at the back of a small room to hear Engineering in Fantasy (Scott Andrews, Richard Butner, John Chu, Ken Liu, Fran Wilde(leader), I couldn’t see who said “OSHA goes to Moria…” (Wilde?), but I think it was Chu or Liu who spoke of the bowman’s warped skeleton:  the living body engineered by doing for the task it does.

The next choice was just awful:  John Crowley’s reading or David Hartwell’s memorial.   Damn.  Dithering between doorways in the hall, I saw Crowley, who (with his usual modesty) said I should pay my respects to Hartwell.  I obeyed.

David was a gentleman and a scholar, and a great raconteur, the John Aubrey of our field.  His ties should be in the Smithsonian, suspended in a zone of light.  As it happens, he never edited me, but he did once nominate Moonwise as the single novel most emblematic of Readercon.  Wow.  The panelists praised Hartwell as a champion of writers he believed in.  There were some excellent (and funny) stories told of his generosity and percipience and outrageous fashion sense.  What I remember best is Suzy Charnas coming up and scratching her back against the railing of the ramp, like a cart horse.  She told how Hartwell had accepted  Motherlines when no one else would; and had pushed her to an ending she’d refused to write, that was (she realized) the true one.  Times how many hundred books?  That’s a legacy.

So I was very glad I heard that.  And still sorry that I missed The Chemical Wedding.  I just hope they get round to posting it.

At that point, I kept running into people I wanted to talk to, and went into hallway bottleneck mode, though I did catch the Tim Powers interview, which made me want to read him.  (I confess I haven't.)  I liked his understatedness.  And I like historical puzzlements and paradoxes.

rushthatspeaks knows this fabulous weird Chinese restaurant in Quincy, so we went there with sovay and Yoon Ha Lee.  Taipei does fiery wonders with shellfish, but what I couldn’t stop eating was a dish called "Sweet Corn w. Salty Egg Yok," which turned out to be individually deep-fried kernels:  unpopcorns.   Salt, fat, sweet, and crunch—all the food groups but chocolate.  The problem there was conversation, as the place reverberates like a kettledrum.  It was like trying to eat in Archer’s Goon.

A few steps away from the uproar is an elegant all-white and snow-silent Japanese dessert place.  Yin and yang.  They do strange authentic shimmery puddings.

Back at Castle Greyskull, there was negothick tickling the ivories for C. S. E. Cooney, all in mermaid green and likewise shimmery, singing fiery fox songs.

After that, it was talk talk talk.

I took my Sunday-morning tea in the green room with Kathleen Jennings, who was sketching in a most exquisite little emblem book, full of delicate and lively thumbnail drawings:  each no bigger than a stamp, and each a story.  Stamps for letters delivered by enchanted cranes.  She told me she’s doing a degree in Australian Gothic, art and literature.  Cool!  I beckoned negothick over, and we talked about Picnic at Hanging Rock, among other things.

I still had two panels left to go.  Coraggio!

New Worlds for Old (Susan Jane Bigelow, Greer Gilman, Theodora Goss, Lauren Roy, Ann Tonsor Zeddies). I know what I told them I was going to say:

“Imagined worlds reflect, retract, dissolve, recrystallize our own. But even what we call mimetic art will always recreate the world it claims to merely represent: the author's mind is a filter. Telling is a complex web of choices. I repeat the First Law of Fiction: there is no there there. Only language.”

I just can’t remember what we said.  I hope some one will remind me, as I thought it went rather well.

On my way to the Shirley Jackson awards, I met Delany in the lobby, waiting for his ride, and we had a long, sometimes rather melancholy, talk on time and memory and writing.  We grow old.   I said I hoped I wasn’t fangirling him. “No,” he said, “I’m fanboying you.”  I will wear a few things that he said at my heart’s core.

Afterward, I rejoiced to hear that Elizabeth Hand and Gemma Files had both won Shirley Jacksons.  Yes!  Thank heavens, the ceremony was recorded, so I could punch the air.

Every year, the quietly admirable Ellen Brody reads from the works of the memorial GOH.  This year, she did a lovely job with the hilarious “The Girl Jones.”

One last round of the book room, and farewell, world's bliss.

Kathleen Jennings read from her dissertation-in-progress, an illustrated Australian Gothic novella called “Flyaway.”  Fabulous!  The sheer placeness of the story made me think of Alan Garner, but funny:  a young girl, faced with a liminal silver-gold creature, a sort of primordial wolf-dingo, says tremulously:  “Good boy.”

Next I heard the last half of the Tanith Lee retrospective (Mike Allen, Gemma Files, Lila Garrott, Theodora Goss (leader), Sonya Taaffe.) By then it had become a lamentation on sheer waste, on a writer that dropped blood-red mulberries all over the ungrateful tarmac of the world.

In the very last hour, came Ace, Aro, and Age (F. Brett Cox, Greer Gilman, Keffy Kehrli, Sonya Taaffe, Jo Walton). There were only four panelists at first, all good people to have this conversation with:  so I joined them.  It’s a pity no one had signed up beforehand as moderator; though Jo did a fine job as pick-up, she hadn’t had the chance to prepare.  Nonetheless, some thoughtful and provocative things got said.  But only in the closing minutes did Sonya burst into an inspired rant on the differing virginities of  Athena and Artemis.  I wish we’d begun there!

rushthatspeaks gave me a lift home, and along the way said I’d like Supersizers, which I’m thoroughly enjoying.  So there!

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“So the boy had nothing of the fairies but chagrin and gingerbread.”

And so we came to Castle Greyskull:  louring from a cliff in Quincy, the new Readercon hotel lacks only a tremendous lightning storm to crown it. What is it with con hotels?  Over the years, we’ve all seen so many non-Euclidean solids and absurdist sites, with hallways by Escher and ballrooms by Shackleton.  Just here in greater Codville, we’ve known and loved the Hell Ziggurat, an exoskeleton of meeting rooms spiked about a great internal void, and the improbably half-timbered Rocket Cottage, with its bellhop guard of disspirited Beefeaters.

After the renaming of the rooms in Burlington (Enterprise, Envision, Enteric, Entropy, Enclitic, Emetic...), it was a relief to find myself in Rooms A, B, C, Blue Hills, and IV, V, VI.  And Nightwing’s very nice green room was Abigail Adams.  You could trust her for a cup of tea and a digestive biscuit.

Some glories and regrets:

The dealers’ room, as ever, was magnificent and ruinous:  a throng of houris in harcdovers, nymphs in paperback, all whispering, buy me, buy me.  I could have spent a month’s income at the Small Beer table alone.  And yet—the room was full of David Hartwell’s absence.

There was a fine opening panel on Science Fiction in Classical Tradition (John Crowley, Haris Durrani, Ada Palmer, Catherynne M. Valente, Jo Walton (leader))—but what were they thinking, not to put sovay and rushthatspeaks on it?  And not to make it two hours?

I gave a reading, in part from A Robe for to Go Invisible, the third tale in the Sirenaiad, the one with Jack Donne; but inspired by Juno’s recent exploits in space, I also read two little scenes from Exit, Pursued by a Bear:   Ben browsing the bookstalls in St. Paul’s yard, and discovering Siderius Nuncius, cool off the press; and Kit Marlowe on Watling Street, the Milky Way whose inns are constellations, at the pothouse kept by Old-Jump-at-Her.

Sadly, my performance was on Thursday night, when many of the audience who might have come were not yet at the con.  The tech guy asked if I minded if Readercon posts a recording:  if they get round to it, I’ll let you know.

After that, I heard rushthatspeaks read from an inrush of new story.  Lifelode meets—damn it all. I’ve forgotten what it met.  I will strike my brow when reminded.  Loved it.

I had Friday entirely off:  no panels, no appearances.  Can’t think when that’s last happened, so I determined to hear as much as possible.  It began with a treasured Readercon ritual for me, breakfast with John Crowley.  After that, I raced off to a celebration of the works of my beloved Diana Wynne Jones, for which her friend and late editor Sharyn November had (only just) come racing from New York.  I knew none of the other young panelists (but for sovay), but delighted in hearing rapturous praises (and few puzzled demurs:  no one’s flawless) from the writers she’d shaped.  I found myself (from the audience) likening Diana to a marvellous gyroscope, travelling impossible threadways at impossible angles, in a whirling dazzle:  yet always righting herself.

Next came Using Real Historical People in Fiction (Phenderson Clark, Jeffrey Ford, Tim Powers, Steve Rasnic Tem, Sarah Smith (leader)).  I noted that the otherwise impeccable Sarah Smith is still an Oxfordian, though covertly:  she referred coyly to “another ‘Shakespeare.’”  I suppose I will never know what possessed her.

Then came Why Don’t Animals Use Magic? (Erik Amundsen, Suzy McKee Charnas, Lila Garrott, Theodora Goss, Ann Tonsor Zeddies).  Somewhat uneven but fascinating conversation:  do animals do magic or are they magic?  Is ritual magic?  Suzy Charnas recalled a marvellous told-as-true story about ravens in a hidden canyon who’d made assemblages of owl feathers, stuck in crevices or weighted down with stones.  Apotropaic altars?  

Reading Works from Long Ago (Phenderson Clark, Michael Dirda, Delia Sherman (moderator), Catherynne M. Valente, Jacob Weisman) got edgy, as discussions do when Lovecraft and Kipling come up.  A great part of the hour concerned whether genius can make up for -isms.

I wish Liz Hand could have made her own recordings of Cass Neary.  That voice is irresistible to me:  I will follow it into places I don’t ever want to be.   She read from the fourth book in progress, from a scene on Charing Cross Road, with the bait of a lost manuscript found, a work so insanely occult that it sounded “like Dan Brown on bad acid.”  The theme of the hour appeared to be scary bookdealers, as Nathan Ballingrud’s reading featured another, this time with swamp zombies.

After that, it was apocalypse all the way down.  The weekend of doom, gloom, despondency, and glee began with The End of the World and After: from Mary Shelley to J.G. Ballard, Russell Hoban, and Beyond. (Chris Brown (leader), Jack Haringa, Faye Ringel, Henry Wessells, Gary K. Wolfe).

Last year’s Bad Influences panel was phenomenal:  I remember Maria Dahvana Headley, wrapped in a wisp of bookshelf-printed silk, with EXIT, PURSUED inked on her right thigh, and BY A  BEAR on her left, talking about tearing the sacred image of Susan Sarandon from her father’s Playboy, and eating it like a communion wafer.  This year’s instantiation, Badder and Influencier, didn’t quite come up to that, despite a stellar cast (Suzy McKee Charnas, Ellen Datlow (leader), Lara Donnelly, Maria Dahvana Headley, Mikki Kendall, Kelly Link, Livia Llewellyn, Vandana Singh).  Still, it was hilarious, sometimes revelatory.  A hard call, damn it, as it was up against Clockwork Phoenix 5 and Delany/Lingen in the reading tracks.  Why can’t I tri-locate?

At that point, I’d listened to seven straight hours of programming, and needed a cup of tea and a little quiet.

The next choice was also very hard, as it was Sonya Taaffe reading opposite Henry Wessells, with a preview of A Conversation Larger than the Universe:  an exhibition to be held at the Grolier Club in New York City from January to March 2018, assembled from his own private collection of first-edition fantastika.  Tough call, but after his marvellous talk on twenties fantasy a few years back, the one that gave me Stella Benson’s Living Alone, I had to hear Henry Wessells.  Much to my delight and awe, I found myself in his catalog.  Me!  In a room with Mirrlees, Tiptree, Crowley, Delany, Dunsany...!  And for that matter, Small Beer Press displayed beside Doves and Kelmscott.  Bliss.

A glitch in the files meant that several people’s Meet the Pros(e) sentences hadn’t printed, so I spent dinner time writing out (as neatly as possible), “So the boy had nothing of the fairies but chagrin and gingerbread.”  Thirty times.

The party, as usual, sounded like the goblins’ boiler room.

I was charmed to meet my brilliant cover artist, Kathleen Jennings, somewhere in the throng, at long last:  come all the way from Brisbane.  I rather overwhelmed her with praise and thanks—her work is both gorgeous and witty.  And unexpectedly, I came across a nice fellow whom I’d known only as Marjorie Garber’s excellent TA at Harvard.  I love that a very proper Shakespearean loves SF.

The eighties dance party (what!?! at Readercon?!?) began, and blasted me out of the room.

More to come.

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Contrafibularities

This year's Readercon schedule—quite modest, which means that I can actually go and hear other people.  Hope to see to see some of you there.

Thursday July 7

9:00 PM    A    Reading: Greer Gilman. Greer Gilman. Greer Gilman reads from a work in progress: a third Ben Jonson mystery, "A Robe for to Go Invisible."


Saturday July 9

11:00 AM    6    Sorting Taxonomies. John Benson, Greer Gilman, Kate Nepveu (leader), Peter Straub, Jacob Weisman. Why do we group our fictions by genre first instead of other possible taxonomies? For instance:--By relationship: what kind of relationship appears in this fiction, and how much is it foregrounded?--By level of violence: violent, nonviolent or anti-violent?--By prose: ornate, simple, vivid, inventive?--By paradigm: is this fiction centred on people, ideas, or action? Those are a few possible ways a reader might choose between works, depending on what they want to read--all of which might include any combination of genres. Our panelists will discuss ways they choose what to read, and give some comparisons of like works from disparate genres.


Sunday July 10

10:00 AM    BH    New Worlds for Old . Susan Jane Bigelow, Greer Gilman, Theodora Goss, Lauren Roy, Ann Tonsor Zeddies. Our GoHs have created their own worlds and retold stories. What's the difference in approach between creating from "scratch" and "reimagining"? Is one harder than the other? Do we ever really create worlds wholly our own or are we always cannibalizing bits of other worlds? Would we be able to tell meaningful stories in worlds utterly different from our own? How much of a world is physical and how much is societal behaviors and norms?

2:00 PM    6    Ace, Aro, and Age . F. Brett Cox, Greer Gilman, Keffy Kehrli, Sonya Taaffe, Jo Walton. Readers looking for asexual and aromantic characters in speculative fiction have to look hard. The only human characters who aren't likely to wind up married off are either children or the elderly, thanks to mistaken cultural notions about youthful innocents and withered crones. How can we expand speculative fiction to include explicitly asexual and aromantic identities, and how does that inclusion force us to also address our ideas about sexual and romantic orientations and age?

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