Greer Gilman's Blog, page 45

Coming up Roses

"Trevor Nunn, the director, has announced he is to fulfil a long-held ambition to restage The Wars of the Roses, a spectacular theatrical event which was created 52 years ago by the founders of the
Whee!  Whoa!  Whew!

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The Further Adventures of Schrödinger's Cat

From the New Scientist.

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"The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers!"

Actors Shakespeare Project is running a terrific 2 Henry VI—how often do you get to see that?—for another two weekends.

Ten actors playing 48 parts:  sheer Elizabethan.

Badger me for a review.

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I get no kick

So my nice old iPhone 5 has been getting crankier and crankier about charging:  you plug it in and nothing happens.  Or it starts and it hangs.  Sometimes, I swear, it goes backward.  Which means it can't be backed up either, as the USB won't talk to bloody iTunes.  Nothing wrong with it when it's charged, no trouble holding a charge—the problem seems to be with the connection not the battery.   Having tried it with two different USB cords turned both ways up, plugged into everything possible—the desktop, the hub, and five or six outlets at home and abroad—and getting nowhere for a week, on Thursday I took it into the phone store.  By then it had flatlined.

The guy cleared the lint out, tested it and shook his head.  He thought there might be a speck of corrosion somewhere in the socket.  Had I gotten it wet?  Not that I know of, unless wiping the screen protector coutns as wet.  As I have an insurance plan, he said I could trade the old phone in for a reconditioned one, which came with an Awful Warning about penalties if Apple thinks I've been skipping it on ponds.

Of course, as soon as the new one came, the old one started responding, if I blew into it sharply.  At least some of the time.  I could back it up all up.

So why am I holding back?

I like iOS 6.   I don't think I can restore that.  I hate changing systems.

And I have a horror of killing my old pocket companion, of wiping its tiny brain.  I know it's just metal, and the contents are what matters.  But it's like putting down a pet.

And I've run out of time.

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Excellent well; you are a fishmonger

This is terrific!  Seventeen Hamlets and Poloniuses (Polonii?) do Act II, Scene ii.

Which do you like best?

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Awaiting the spring

...and then three come along at once.





Asleep.  Yet it will come.



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Leeuwenhoek'd

This is so cool—a 120x microscopic lens that pops onto a cellphone. If I had one, I'd go about capturing snowflakes,

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At the drop of a dactyl

Sonya's reading was lovely and subtle and intense; mine was fiercer.  I think (I hope) they paired well.  We had an excellent introduction and splendid listeners—it felt like an outpost of Readercon.  Thank you, audience!  Thank you, Porter Square Books!

Cloud & Ashes—making its debut in trade paper—looks very nice indeed, especially displayed beside Ghost Signs.

And a magnificent knitted nudibranch came to hear us.  How often does that happen?

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Plainchant

A reminder:  Sonya Taaffe and Greer Gilman will be reading at Porter Square Books tomorrow, Tuesday, 21st April, at 7pm.  Hope to see some of you there!

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Tongue, lose thy light; Moon take thy flight

They were celebrating the Bard in the Square on Saturday.  A hoarse-voiced woman in modern black and a ruff declaimed all of the sonnets to the pit (it took her four hours).  This crowd being this crowd, she had--well, not groundlings, exactly.  Walklings-by who stood.  A roaming company played scenes from A Midsummer Night's Dream all over:  the lovers' quartet ("How low am I, thou painted maypole?"), and most of the rude mechanicals' scenes.  Really broadly, as befitted the traffic.  And really well.  At "Find out moonshine," Peter Quince got out his phone.  Their tedious brief tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe was gloriously demented, as it should be.  Quince (aglow with pride and anxiety) kept shuffling his note cards for the prologue; Wall wore a painted tube like a sweat sock, and rolled it up so the lovers could whisper through his legs ("I kiss the wall's hole"); and Bottom managed the most spectacularly protracted suicide I've yet seen, working in every death they'd thought of, in crescendo:  he stabbed himself with a penknife, in attacks ranging from Sweeney Todd to seppuku; he flung himself from heights onto the bricks of the pit; he leapt just short of traffic when the lights changed; he hanged himself in Thisbe's bloody scarf; and finally, brought on a gas can full of water, and drenched himself:  which was trembling Quince's cue to flick a lighter...

Then there was cake.

And after, quite a few of us repaired to a nearby microbrewery for craft beer and more scenes.  Helena and Bottom did a fierce bit of Shrew; Quince was a brilliant Cassius; two Wellesley women—one tall as a crane, one boyish, blockish, with startled hair—did scenes from All's Well (not the Hamlet they brought cards for, damn it); two other women did a passionate balcony scene, speaking with their bodies to the heartbeat of the poetry; and Michael Anderson told stories.

Happy 451st, Will!

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