Greer Gilman's Blog, page 36

Oak-rooted and green-leafing

Happy 75th birthday to the incomparable Martin Carthy, the voice of England's memory.

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Let back and side go bear, go bear!

And speaking of textiles, a cloth-of-silver panel, thought to be from one of Gloriana's gowns has turned up in a rural church in Herefordshire as an altarcloth.  Love the bear!



There's a credible provenance: St. Faith's, Bacton, was the home church of Elizabeth's beloved and redoubtable gentlewoman, Blanche Parry, and it's where that lady's heart is buried.

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Harvest

The shopping serendipity continues. An errand lay through a rather chilly street fair, and I thought as long I was passing by, I'd look for stalls selling my old mainstay, long Indian skirts. (There used to be those sort of shops in the Square...)  At one, I found a good, ridiculously inexpensive all-cotton, in a nice Burne-Jonesy greeny-blue-grey. It even goes with the designer Tencel-and-linen shirt I found earlier this spring at 83% off.

And round the corner--well, isn't this a lovely silk?




Long and full and feather-light. The stallkeeper said it was made from a re-purposed sari.

If only they had pockets!

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Heaven knows...

Heaven knows my shelves are overfraught—but there’s a joint MIT/Yale University Press loading-dock sale this weekend, and I made out like a bandit on the Silk Road. A good booksale is exhilarating, mingling the attractions of wandering through a gallery of cabinets of curiosities and of seeing a meteor shower. Stars fell to hand, as if the heavens knew what might divert me.

I got:

Bruegel to Rembrandt : Dutch and Flemish drawings from the Maida and George Abrams collection (William W. Robinson)

Simply beautiful.

Wonders and the order of nature, 1150-1750 (Lorraine Daston & Katharine Park)

Ooh, prodigies! Monsters and celestial apparitions!

The world of the country house in seventeenth-century England (J. T. Cliffe).

Much about the mistresses of households, and their servants.

Making make-believe real : politics as theater in Shakespeare’s time (Garry Wills)

I like Witches and Jesuits, Garry Wills’s book on Macbeth. This looks contentious in theory, fascinating in detail.

Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s The dirty dust = Crè na cille

The dead gossip in an Irish graveyard. I’m there.

Found in translation : how language shapes our lives and transforms the world (Nataly Kelly & Jost Zetzsch)

On subtitlers, translators, and interpreters, of everything from war zones and diplomacy to anime and ads.

The ancient paths : discovering the lost map of Celtic Europe (Graham Robb) .

Looks like the Grand Unified Theory of Druidical Ley-Lines: all Europe as pareidolic celestial geography, mapped by a visionary who did 15,000 miles by bicycle. I find this stuff irresistible—after all, that’s how I made Cloud—but fantastical.

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In pursuit of the m(o)uses

Rasmussen and West's The Shakespeare First Folios:  A Descriptive Catalogue lists every watermark, ink blot, tear, wrinkle, worm-hole, wine-ring, wax-blob, pipe-burn, annotation, doodle, interloping facsimile, or child's drawing on every page of every known surviving copy of the 1623 masterwork.  Of the Marquess of Northampton's copy, they write:

"Five paw prints appear on signature L3, toward the beginning of Love's Labour's Lost, giving the distinct impression that a cat with dirty paws jumped up onto the volume as it lay open on a table or a lap.  It then appears that before it could take a full step the cat was snatched off of the book and then someone tried to wipe away the paw prints."

Pangur Bán!

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Prickt

Well, there went last night.  I was going to write about the glorious weekend of theatre Cambridge had given me—Arcadia, The School for Scandal, and the Moving Day hilarities at MIT—but I found a terrible rogue streaming file of the first night of the new Hollow Crown, and had to watch before it vanished.  Cut to ribbons, my dears, red and white—but what a flutter!  They've mingle-mangled 1 and 2 Henry VI together and squished them into both into two hours.  Somerfolk is Sufferset, Jack Cade has vanished, damn it, and for some bizarre reason, it begins with a disembodied Judi Dench speaking Ulysses' lines from Troilus and Cressida over a majestic shot of the white cliffs of Dover.  Figurez-vous.  Ah well, it was television to begin with.  Elizabethan box-set stuff.  But what faces!  What voices!  What shameless panache!  And of course it ends with the child Richard's silhouette hirpling out of the shadows.  They still have Cumberbatch up their sleeve.

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God for Harry! Houghton and Saint Will!

So I dropped by Houghton yesterday, as I've been doing, for another wander round the Shakespeare exhibition, and ran into a show about to start: scenes from the plays done by students. Sushi appeared, like Prospero's banquet without Ariel's harpy. There was just enough anticipation to go round the cases, nibbling. They (of course) have dazzling things to show: Harry Elkins Widener's First Folio; rare quartos; copies of the works owned and annotated by Melville and Keats; notes on the poet by Emily Dickinson and e e cummings; one of Dr. Johnson's dictionary slips; Charlotte Cushman's Romeo dagger; the handkerchief from Paul Robeson's Othello; C. Walter Hodges drawings; Ian McKellan's prompt book, with his notes ("The returns were excellent” but “the theatre was dirty").  Into this temple burst the Prologue from Henry V.  Then winding up and up, we entered scenes.  Richard boarded Lady Anne, and inquired of Samuel Johnson's portrait, "Was ever woman in this humour woo'd?"  (The Doctor did not condescend a reply.)  Macduff bewailed his pretty chickens and their dam, by cases filled with Keats holographs.  We passed through a little hallway lined with the Brontës' littler books to watch an excellent dram of Measure for Measure (the "cold obstruction" scene, done as well as I've ever seen it:  Isabella was so genuinely shaken that she couldn't turn the great brass doorknob to exit, and scrabbled at it most affectingly).  Then we descended for a terrific scrap of Much Ado, with the shelves as garden:  the gulled Benedick clambered library steps, backrolled under cases.  And I wished I could have more than a flash of their red-haired Beatrice, who made her way through the spectators like a ice-cold silver knife through butter.

What's more, Houghton gave us all packets of postcards on our way out.

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Willing

In celebration of Shakespeare's life and work, the CV and I have so far watched:

On Thursday evening, the Globe's Comedy of Errors and their As You Like It. Both excellent.

On Friday, their Henry IV, parts 1 and 2--Roger Allam owns Falstaff--and Henry V, then comparative scenes from the old BBC set (an excellent Fluellen) and The Hollow Crown (which could have been fabulous, if it weren't for being cut to ribbons and for Simon Russell Beale playing Falstaff as a bag lady, sodden with self pity).

On Saturday, we began with a magical Love's Labour's Lost by the Globe, which the wooden O was translated into a knot garden, and the arras was a palimpsest of wood and words; then saw the RSC's twinned Love's Labour's Lost and Won (that is to say, Much Ado About Nothing) bracketing the First World War: a good idea, with very good leads, which suffered from too many self-indulgent conceits. Then back to the Globe, which has yet to let us down, for Julius Caesar.

We hope tomorrow to get through the Sam Wanamaker Duchess of Malfi, the Globe All's Well That Ends Well, and the old BBC Pericles and Cymbeline, with the young Helen Mirren, of which both we have fond memories.

The Tollhouse cookies should just about see us through.

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Parlement of Foules

You can see what delight I had in drawing this for my Chaucer class, round about 1972.



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"...a novel packed into a pint pot..."

Oh, lovely!  A pair of reviews by tamaranth of my chapbooks Cry, Murder! and Exit, Pursued by a Bear.  They go to my head like syllabub.

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