Greer Gilman's Blog, page 42

Who Can Be Finished With Alice?

(Every man identifies with Hamlet, it has been said, since every man imagines himself a disinherited monarch; every woman identifies with Alice, since every woman sees herself as the sole sane person in a world filled with lunatics who imagine themselves disinherited monarchs.)

Adam Gopnik muses on The Annotated Alice (one of the first books that I bought for myself).

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Reading Strange Matters

That fine critic Matthew David Surridge (who declined a Hugo nomination this past year, with reason and grace) has just published a digital collection of his Black Gate essays called Reading Strange Matters (Grace & Victory, 2015).  The writers he explores in it are an amazing set of modern fantasists, and I'm honored to be in their company:

Saints and Shrieks: Jeff VanderMeer’s Ambergris Fiction
A Ghost Put to Good Use: Ali Smith’s Hotel World
The Deep Structures of Dreams: Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84
Precise Transgressions: Ursula Pflug’s After the Fires
The Thinning of Thinness: Susan Palwick’s The Necessary Beggar
Raising the Golden Fortress in Oil Country: Minister Faust’s The Alchemists of Kush
Unconcerned with Genre: Lydia Millet’s Oh Pure and Radiant Heart
The Opposite of the Uncanny: Wonder and Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus
Cosmological Intertextuality, or, T.S. Eliot by way of Michael Moorcock: Hal Duncan’s The Book of All Hours, or, Vellum and Ink
Learning to Fly: Nalo Hopkinson’s Skin Folk
An Art Of Harmony: Mary Gentle’s Black Opera
Qualities of Richness: Steph Swainston’s The Castle Omnibus
Wandering Myths on Motorcycles: Drew Hayden Taylor’s Tales of Otter Lake, The Night Wanderer and Motorcycles & Sweetgrass
Digging Up The Dead: Hilary Mantel’s Beyond Black
Underneath the Centre of the Universe: Leah Bobet’s Above
Animal Stories: Johanna Sinisalo’s Troll: A Love Story
Urban Areas: Stella Gemmell’s The City
Urban Fantasy Gothic: Yangsze Choo’s The Ghost Bride
American Fabulation and Literary Fantasy: Matthew Flaming’s The Kingdom of Ohio
Voices and Echoes: J.M. McDermott’s Never Knew Another
Narrative Dance: Darcy Tamayose’s Odori
Stellar Archetypes: Greer Gilman and Cloud & Ashes
Reshaping the Undescribable Forest: Brian Catling’s The Vorrh
Every Kind of Story, All At Once: Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence

Think of it as a portable Readercon, road maps of the fabulous.

I love his look at Cloud & Ashes--not because he praises it, but that he gets it:  "In a sense, the book is a post-modern play with modernist theories about pre-modern folklore, imagining a world in which the theories of pagan origins and magical resonances for all these things is not only true, but that the magic and gods involved were real."

Many of you here would enjoy these explorations—do take a look.

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Fretful porpentines

The New Yorker replies:

"I don’t disagree with Shapiro, but, as a literary historian who studies the way Shakespeare has been reinvented, I’m struck that so many serious Shakespeareans over the centuries have argued the opposite: that Shakespeare’s genius had to be salvaged from the obscure, indecorous, archaic, quibbling mess of his language. For poets, playwrights, editors, and actors from the seventeenth century through much of the nineteenth, Shakespeare’s language wasn’t intoxicating so much as intoxicated: it needed a sobering intervention."

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Speechless

"THE Oregon Shakespeare Festival has decided that Shakespeare’s language is too difficult for today’s audiences to understand. It recently announced that over the next three years, it will commission 36 playwrights to translate all of Shakespeare’s plays into modern English."

So writes James Shapiro in the NYT.

Excuse me.

{sound of retreating footsteps, closing of doors; silence; HOWL of RAGE, enwoven with anathemata}

{clip of returning footsteps; glass continues to fall}

Thank you.

May triple Hecate and her hounds devour them, hands first, and all their hard drives fuse irreparably.

What in hell is wrong with these people?  They just let the Oxfordians hold a conference on their premises, and now they're cutting out Will's tongue.   Have they hired Richard Smith-Jones away from the smoking ruins of the New Burbage?

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O, who can hold a fire in his hand. By thinking on the frosty Caucasus?

My glorious friend B enticed me out on Wednesday (a November night, cold and rainy) to a concert of Georgian polyphonic singing and dance by Zedashe. She’d spent a week with them in the Caucasus a year or two ago, learning songs.

Hey, they had me at whole-goat bagpipe. Blaaaaat!

I love unadorned voices, and the Georgian style is splendid: strong-throated columns of sound, plangent interweaving melismata, outcall and response.

What I knew nothing about was the history and folklife. I caught myself thinking, “This is wonderful world-building ... No, wait.”

If I’m not misremembering, there was a Christian chant enwoven with a midsummer fire ritual, invoking sacred cattle bringing light on their horns. And they did it as a circle dance, like a Faroese ballad.

Wine has been made in the Caucasus since the Neolithic by burying grapes in earthen jars overwinter, and digging them up metamorphosed.

And Tamar, King of Kings and Queen of Queens is waiting to be fantasy.

The dances were amazing. Besides the stamp-and-shuffle proper to a ballad circle, there were virtuoso displays. I can only describe the style as body polyphony: a swift stiff scissoring of legs—something between a galliard and a Charleston—with serpentining arms; or a martial salute or a priestly (almost hierophantic) benediction, with the legs unbraiding like clay coils. There were versions of that squat-kick that we think of as “Cossack,” but done by two men, spiralling about a handclasp. Pairs of men or pairs of women danced challenges or unions; men and women never touched. Mixed dances were rivalries, two of one gender competing for one opposite. In one courtship dance, a man flirted back his tunic, to reveal his breeches crotch. Guess who triumphed? I only wish they’d done a sword-dance.

Here are some fierce little children from Tbilisi, spinning like Charybdis (dancing starts at 3:44, after the drumming). Sadly, the girls are backdrops here. I hope they got a chance to shine.

Here in Venice they aren't! I love that it's spontaneous.

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Story-seed

The writer Katherine Keenum has sent me this stunning and unsettling image by Rovina Cai.  It's Cloud.

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O more then Moone

What the camera captured, of course, was a smaller moon than I saw, outdazzled by the floodlit tower.  I love the way the spire is capped by another moon:  but gold not coppery.  This looks like an emblem of the unobtainable beloved:  the bloodmoon, mothlike, fluttering round La Belle Dame's tower, sickening even unto death.

He got over it.

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Blood orange

The metamorphosis began as a blister or a bruised nail.  The crescent sharpened as it shrank; swung clockwise; waxed.  At equipoise, the moon was fairy fruit, pellucid, powdered with unearthly bloom.  Unphotographable by my small camera.



As I walked home, the shadow dwindled to a scab, and fell off.

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That's called a "tree"

Overheard in passing, in a hey, kids youthful voice: "What if we grow, like, the world's biggest bonsai tree?"

I laughed all the way to Radcliffe Garden.

Feeling somewhat rootbound myself. Anyone want to ask me three or nine or seven questions?

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Metamorphoses

I've been playing with this for a few months. It began as an online image of a straightforward spectrum, overlaid on woodgrain, and by now looks something like an embryonic galaxy. I wonder what--demiurge? is great with this child.

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