Greer Gilman's Blog, page 44
July 5, 2015
All hang together
This year's fireworks were aliens.
They came like a sudden Voice, a presence on a rooftop speaking in harshly in command:
Or like the airiest of viruses:
They came in disguise as Earth scientists, in Einstein's wig:
As a Whistler:
Or as chimneysweepers, gold, then come to dust:
They floated, like galactic jellyfish:
Or crawled like the Thing from the Crab Nebula, by way of Innsmouth:
The whole effect was eerily apocalyptic, like an Edward Hopper dystopia:
Nine
They came like a sudden Voice, a presence on a rooftop speaking in harshly in command:
Or like the airiest of viruses:
They came in disguise as Earth scientists, in Einstein's wig:
As a Whistler:
Or as chimneysweepers, gold, then come to dust:
They floated, like galactic jellyfish:
Or crawled like the Thing from the Crab Nebula, by way of Innsmouth:
The whole effect was eerily apocalyptic, like an Edward Hopper dystopia:
Nine
July 4, 2015
What do you call a sheep with no legs?
A cloud.
I just got this fortune cookie. It's a Sign.
Nine
I just got this fortune cookie. It's a Sign.
Nine
July 3, 2015
Pricked off
The passage of SB 277 in California last week was outshone by the two SCOTUS decisions—whew! and wow!—but is still a fragile victory for health. No shots, no school. And no exemptions, save for good medical reasons.* It's a victory for children, and for everyone they might sneeze on: the infants too young to be vaccinated, the frail elderly, the immunocompromised, the unlucky. Lives will be saved. No wonder the anti-vaxxers are hysterical.
They're fighting tooth and nail to get this overturned.
They scare me.
Just look what they've loosed on the world.
There's the crunchy family in Ottawa who thought that not vaccinating their children was wisdom; reconsidered; and before they could act, found themselves in quarantine with pertussis, with seven desperately wretched children whooping and puking.
There's the unvaccinated six-year-old boy in Spain who just died of diphtheria, of "the strangling angel," like a child in a Victorian storybook. His was the first case in Spain for 28 years: his doctors had to have the antitoxin flown in from Russia. And even with the antitoxin, even with all the resources of a modern hospital, they couldn't save him. His parents now say that they were "tricked" by anti-vaxxers.
And there's the four-year-old in hospice in California, dying of a complication of measles. He never had a chance to be vaccinated: he was an infant when he caught it. SSPE is a horrific death, stealthy and inexorable, which may arise years after what seemed an uneventful course of measles. Even if a patient doesn't die of measles (1-2 deaths per 1,000 cases), or its insufficiently rare aftereffects (1-2 deaths per 10,000 cases), recent studies have shown that just having measles screws with the immune system for up to three years afterward, leaving the patient more vulnerable to other diseases.
And don't get me started on polio...
Sadly, the only thing that might get through to the crazies is an epidemic among their snowflakes.
Nine
* Dead certainty: crank doctors will be making a fortune from crazy parents, signing false exemptions.
They're fighting tooth and nail to get this overturned.
They scare me.
Just look what they've loosed on the world.
There's the crunchy family in Ottawa who thought that not vaccinating their children was wisdom; reconsidered; and before they could act, found themselves in quarantine with pertussis, with seven desperately wretched children whooping and puking.
There's the unvaccinated six-year-old boy in Spain who just died of diphtheria, of "the strangling angel," like a child in a Victorian storybook. His was the first case in Spain for 28 years: his doctors had to have the antitoxin flown in from Russia. And even with the antitoxin, even with all the resources of a modern hospital, they couldn't save him. His parents now say that they were "tricked" by anti-vaxxers.
And there's the four-year-old in hospice in California, dying of a complication of measles. He never had a chance to be vaccinated: he was an infant when he caught it. SSPE is a horrific death, stealthy and inexorable, which may arise years after what seemed an uneventful course of measles. Even if a patient doesn't die of measles (1-2 deaths per 1,000 cases), or its insufficiently rare aftereffects (1-2 deaths per 10,000 cases), recent studies have shown that just having measles screws with the immune system for up to three years afterward, leaving the patient more vulnerable to other diseases.
And don't get me started on polio...
Sadly, the only thing that might get through to the crazies is an epidemic among their snowflakes.
Nine
* Dead certainty: crank doctors will be making a fortune from crazy parents, signing false exemptions.
July 1, 2015
Something aesthetic, something frenetic...
My Readercon schedule this year is small but delectable, a little box of intellectual bon bons
Thursday July 10
9:00 PM
Books in Conversation.
Greer Gilman, Catt Kingsgrave, Scott Lynch, Cecilia Tan, Rick Wilber.
Books and texts are often said to be in conversation with each other, with some writers openly discussing how they wrote something in response to another work in genre. The classic example is Samuel R. Delany's Triton and Ursula K. LeGuin's The Dispossessed, which can both be read as a conversation with each other as well as with Joanna Russ's The Female Man. A more recent example is Lev Grossman's Magicians books, which are particularly in conversation with the work of C.S. Lewis and J.K. Rowling. Our panelists will discuss what their work is reacting to, and talk about where this impulse comes from.
Friday July 11
11:00 AM
Mystery and Speculative Crossovers.
Meriah Crawford, Chris Gerwel, Greer Gilman, Nicholas Kaufmann, Adam Lipkin (leader).
There are many books that draw from both the speculative fiction and mystery toolboxes, in both macro ways (China Miéville's The City & the City and Peter F. Hamilton's Great North Road are catalyzed by hard-boiled murder investigations) and micro ways (urban fantasy was initially defined by its relationship to noir, now often more evident in tone than in plot). Where is this crossover most satisfying? How do magic and advanced technology open up new avenues of investigation or methods of befuddling the detectives? How have trends, tropes, and developments in each genre influenced crossover works?
2:00 PM
Where the Goblins Go: A Tour of Hells and Underworlds.
C.S.E. Cooney, Greer Gilman, Jack Haringa (moderator), Faye Ringel, Sonya Taaffe.
Many types of underworlds feature prominently in religion, folklore, horror, and fantasy. We will discuss the varied roles of hells and netherworlds in world mythology and how authors from Dante to Valente have explored (and exploited) these concepts in fiction.
5:00 PM
I Put Books in Your Books So You Can Read While You Read.
John Clute, Amal El-Mohtar, Francesca Forrest, Greer Gilman, Kenneth Schneyer (leader).
Nested stories consist of at least one outer story and at least one inner story. Usually the characters in the outer story are cast as the audience of the inner story, as in Hamlet or the Orphan's Tales books. But inner stories have another audience: the reader. How do we read inner stories? When our attention is brought to its story-ness, are we more conscious of being the audience than when we immerse ourselves in outer stories? Do we see ourselves as separate from the audience characters—thinking of them as the "real" audience even though they're fictional—or do we connect with them through the mutual experience of observation? And when do inner stories take on lives of their own, separate from their frames?
Saturday July 12
1:00 PM
Reading: Greer Gilman.
Greer Gilman.
Greer Gilman reads from a third Ben Jonson mystery, a work in progress: A Robe for to Go Invisible.
Nine
Thursday July 10
9:00 PM
Books in Conversation.
Greer Gilman, Catt Kingsgrave, Scott Lynch, Cecilia Tan, Rick Wilber.
Books and texts are often said to be in conversation with each other, with some writers openly discussing how they wrote something in response to another work in genre. The classic example is Samuel R. Delany's Triton and Ursula K. LeGuin's The Dispossessed, which can both be read as a conversation with each other as well as with Joanna Russ's The Female Man. A more recent example is Lev Grossman's Magicians books, which are particularly in conversation with the work of C.S. Lewis and J.K. Rowling. Our panelists will discuss what their work is reacting to, and talk about where this impulse comes from.
Friday July 11
11:00 AM
Mystery and Speculative Crossovers.
Meriah Crawford, Chris Gerwel, Greer Gilman, Nicholas Kaufmann, Adam Lipkin (leader).
There are many books that draw from both the speculative fiction and mystery toolboxes, in both macro ways (China Miéville's The City & the City and Peter F. Hamilton's Great North Road are catalyzed by hard-boiled murder investigations) and micro ways (urban fantasy was initially defined by its relationship to noir, now often more evident in tone than in plot). Where is this crossover most satisfying? How do magic and advanced technology open up new avenues of investigation or methods of befuddling the detectives? How have trends, tropes, and developments in each genre influenced crossover works?
2:00 PM
Where the Goblins Go: A Tour of Hells and Underworlds.
C.S.E. Cooney, Greer Gilman, Jack Haringa (moderator), Faye Ringel, Sonya Taaffe.
Many types of underworlds feature prominently in religion, folklore, horror, and fantasy. We will discuss the varied roles of hells and netherworlds in world mythology and how authors from Dante to Valente have explored (and exploited) these concepts in fiction.
5:00 PM
I Put Books in Your Books So You Can Read While You Read.
John Clute, Amal El-Mohtar, Francesca Forrest, Greer Gilman, Kenneth Schneyer (leader).
Nested stories consist of at least one outer story and at least one inner story. Usually the characters in the outer story are cast as the audience of the inner story, as in Hamlet or the Orphan's Tales books. But inner stories have another audience: the reader. How do we read inner stories? When our attention is brought to its story-ness, are we more conscious of being the audience than when we immerse ourselves in outer stories? Do we see ourselves as separate from the audience characters—thinking of them as the "real" audience even though they're fictional—or do we connect with them through the mutual experience of observation? And when do inner stories take on lives of their own, separate from their frames?
Saturday July 12
1:00 PM
Reading: Greer Gilman.
Greer Gilman.
Greer Gilman reads from a third Ben Jonson mystery, a work in progress: A Robe for to Go Invisible.
Nine
June 30, 2015
A terrible movie is born
It came to me unbidden: Prospero's Mooks.
Nine
Nine
Out of the whirlwind
Ooh! Just stumbled into this:
It's metaphysical poetry in chalk. I dare you to walk a step further.
I love anamorphosis, viewed edgelong, as in Holbein's death-slashed humanism:
Or gathered in a glass, like a whirlwind in a witch's spell:
That frog is sculpted.
This is how they did it late in the Renaissance:
That's how I'd paint Hopkins, beautifully, minutely dragged and tattered, gathered to a glory in his vision.
Because the Holy Ghost over the bentWorld broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
Nine
It's metaphysical poetry in chalk. I dare you to walk a step further.
I love anamorphosis, viewed edgelong, as in Holbein's death-slashed humanism:
Or gathered in a glass, like a whirlwind in a witch's spell:
That frog is sculpted.
This is how they did it late in the Renaissance:
That's how I'd paint Hopkins, beautifully, minutely dragged and tattered, gathered to a glory in his vision.
Because the Holy Ghost over the bentWorld broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
Nine
June 29, 2015
June 28, 2015
June 25, 2015
Tilleul
So there’s this hale old linden on the corner, yellow-pale with bloom, starred over with incipient tisane. It wafts the most entrancing scent: greener than roses, honeyed, yet uncloying. “Oboe ... not clarinet,” as Sylvia Townsend Warner wrote of bean flowers. It transfuses; yet eludes. If you bury your nose in blossom, there is only an undernote.
I’d like to meet its dryad.
Nine
I’d like to meet its dryad.
Nine
June 21, 2015
Leapfire
On the eve of the solstice, I stopped to watch a tumbler on the street, a mischievous, mercurial young fellow in starry shorts, with braids raying out like a black sun. This was his finale.
Being Nine, I thought of my crow lad, leaping scythes in Cloud.
Dream well at midsummer.
Nine
Being Nine, I thought of my crow lad, leaping scythes in Cloud.
Dream well at midsummer.
Nine
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