Greer Gilman's Blog, page 41

Remember, remember

Guy Fawkes, cut down alive, was gutted, the empty bloody bag of him thrown down and butchered.  Remember, when the fires leap:  the fear was real.

In James Shapiro's The Year of Lear, he studies Shakespeare's vivid, dark, barbaric age:  and above all, 1605-1606, the year of apocalypse forestalled, the year in which the King's Man finished the first, the darker version of Lear, and wrote Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra.  (Burbage played all three leads that astonishing year, as well as Vindice and Volpone.)

Terrific book.

Nine 

Souling

It began at dusk, in silence but for the thump of bone on skin and the brishing of the scythe in leaves.  The dance led in and inward, spiralling:  there is a labyrinth, half-hidden in the umbered grass.  We walked it in procession, iris to the eye, and out again.




We bore a garland on a pole: the wreath of wintry leaves, the streamers of magnetic tape that glittered elfishly.  A silent music.  I imagined it could sing itself:  a crowd of voices.



You can't take ghosts and shadows with a flash.  I have some bald clear pictures that obliterate the mystery of the play.   With lighting, it's a lark.  In shadow, death and resurrection.




Over ...



... and over ...



again.



After one death, a very very young child toddled up to the body and tugged at it: why doesn't this get up?

We had some wary watchers.





And at least one autocrat:




The simplest stage effect is death itself, the skull beneath the skin.











Afterward, we doffed our paper tabards, and sent out for Homeric quantities of Sichuan from Zoe's.  There was ale; there was cider; there were homemade doughnuts.  And as always, Lynn Noel sang her marvellous "Tam Lyn" by candlelight.

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Stump angel

Speaking of frost in Durham...

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Spring and fall

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Dark backward and abysm

An old friend asked if I remembered a couplet from a court masque that I wrote in (gulp) 1973. He thought of the lines before I did--it was his song--but I found myself singing another. This was for a Brythonic warrior, woad-streaked: his part was Raw Courage.

Orion wears a coat of sparks
And starry galligaskins
But men may see what man I be
Without my first dismasking

Caesar and his clangy rout
Came o’er the Thames’s margent
I blued my cheeks and cracked their breeks
As they were whelks of argent

Now William and his swaddling band
Of knitted knights came paddling
I slit their scales from gills to tails
And roasted them like codlings

Some died for vermeil Lancaster
Or the blanchéd rose of York
I went in fine as a sops-in-wine
And ‘scaped the potting fork

O fashion is a wanton sport
A nuisance without numbria
But a Briton fights in seamless tights
Completely unencumbria.

Silly stuff--but by Toutatis! I remembered it.

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Going Clytemnestra

My friend the Renaissance scholar rants on the waste of women's lives for sheer effect in Game of Thrones.

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Common ground

The city has been digging up my park all year, and it's full of chainlink, machinery, and holes.  I've had to walk all the way round it, instead of cutting through:  a great annoyance.  Still, the oldest trees remain (knock wood), though the foliage this year is not as glorious as many.  And the playground still makes me want to be seven.  Besides the Viking ship, there are amazing things to climb on and gyre in, swings (too small for narrow grownups, much less me), and a little labyrinth, no more than a curve and a curve-back and a curve:  but it's higher than a small child's head, and there's a secret place inside it, with a curved bench.  I wish I'd had it to read in.

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Mazes

The new Raven Books on Church Street has opened.  The very first book I saw in its window as I passed was Labyrinths:  The Art of the Maze, by a visionary Italian who's a planted a paracosm in his garden, all of bamboo:  "no one has ever been killed by falling bamboo ... its elegance is as flawless as that of the Bodoni typeface."  Reader, I bought it.  It's almost too large for my lap, full of metaphysics, meditations, archaeology, and artwork.




On Sunday evening, I went to the opening of the new exhibition at the MFA:  Class Distinctions:   Dutch Painting in the Age of Rembrandt and Vermeer.  I knew from all the banners they were going to have the lady in the pale yellow jacket--paler still than this, like floating island--looking up from her letter;




I hadn't known they were getting The Astronomer from Paris.  Holy Christ.  It was like looking up for the new moon and discovering a comet.




Two perfect beauties, which is two more Vermeers than Boston has had since the Gardner tragedy.  I so deeply loved that painting.  I mourn it.

They also have the cover of The Embarrassment of Riches, with that strange still child in pink fawn and silver blue, who is not on those paving stones.  Not in Delft.



These galleries will take several visits to go round:  there's so much to study.  I liked the room full of working women:  lacemaking, ironing, louse-combing, whoring (she looks blowsy and dead tired, and is holding a gold coin the size of a Nancy button).  Round the corner, three tailors stitching, crosslegged on a table.  No more twist! And a barber-surgeon cutting corns.  Skaters; acres of black satin stretched over prosperous paunches; a landed couple with ten pretty children wreathing garlands, and five more in heaven, naked and diaphanous, with a servant boy behind their hillock, an Ethiope with a pearl in his ear.  I loved the three tables, set for three classes of meal, from earthenware and wooden spoons to green glass rummers to exquisite Chinese blue-and-white.

And speaking of tables, I was expecting wine-and-cheese-and-fruit for the members' opening.  No such parsimony.  We got a fabulous Dutch meal:  salad with aged Gouda; pea soup with smoked sausage (snert); rustic breads; potato-and-pickled-herring salad; salmon with mustard; braised short ribs with a root-vegetable mash (stamppot).  Yum!  There was something enchantingly pink in tall glasses, said to be gin with elderflower liqueur.  No tea or coffee though, and no dessert.  I suppose pancakes for a crowd aren't practical.

Over supper, I conversed with a nice woman whose son had just spent his gap year studying katydids in Mozambique.  What a world!

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October sky

I like my city.

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The Cumberdane...

... is a pretty good Hamlet in himself, but the production—!  It's incredibly jumpy and self-indulgent, the text is weirdly cut, and nearly everyone is gabbling as if they haven't a clue what the words mean.  Bah.

The last Hamlet I saw was the David Tennant one, which I thought remarkable for language:  just about everyone in that seemed to be speaking words in his or her own tongue, as if they'd just thought of them.  Here, they're all just shouting Hamlet.

It begins, not on watch, but with Hamlet playing old gramophone records to himself and asking himself "Who's there?"

Horatio is a weedy little homeless hipster with a backpack and a chin beard, and a slight lisp.  Not whom I'd choose to tell my story.

The set is vulgarly huge and overdressed:  the court is seated at an endless, Alice-like table, underneath appalling chandeliers out of one of Tennessee Williams's acid trips, and Gertrude appears to be wearing an albino peacock on her head.  Folks, can we just listen to the play here?

The Ghost?  Unkingly.  Tough little fellow like an Irish sergeant in a torn and muddy uniform, which he strips back to show his tettered latex skin.  More like a Hammer zombie than a Ghost.

And Hamlet does the antic scenes hiding in a toy castle, out of which he crawls in a tin soldier's uniform, surrounded by "amusing" toy counterparts.

The portrait of Claudius is a commemorative plate.

And then they do the whole second half knee deep in mud, inside the palace.  I mean there's mud in Ophelia's piano, sliding off in clumps; the grand staircase is a slump of mud; and as everyone's in black (except Hamlet), you can barely see the fencing match for mud.

I hate this director.

Ah well, at least the gravedigger was cheerful, singing to his graveside radio with a legbone for a mike.

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