Greer Gilman's Blog, page 49

Dance, witch, dance

A lovely review of my old story "Down the Wall," reprinted in The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women.  Nina Allen has quoted from and briefly reviewed every last story in the book, starting here.  This looks to be an amazing anthology, and I'm thrilled to be among such brilliant, edgy, august, and dazzlingly diverse company.

Nine

Put a fork in it

Good gravy!  I am fascinated (and astonished) by this Thanksgiving bill of fare, listing each state's most-often Googled dishes, as compared to other states.  (Turkey is ubiquitous.)  The Times cautions, "You should not interpret the dishes here as the most iconic Thanksgiving recipes in each state, or even a state's favorite dish. It’s possible that some dishes are so central to a state’s culture that people there don’t need to search for them on the web, for instance."

There are dishes here undreamt-of in this snooty Eastern enclave.  I mean, ooey gooey bars! pig pickin cake! dirt pudding with gummy worms! frog eye salad!  That last came first in Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, and Wyoming, and third in Utah, where it was topped by funeral potatoes.  The Times demurely comments that their "Stylebook warns against overusing the word 'unique,' so we’ll just tell you that we’re not aware of any other salad that combines pasta, fruit, eggs, whipped cream and marshmallows."

Actually there's nothing that this country won't call salad:  there's pretzel salad, strawberry pretzel salad, pretzel jello salad, snicker salad, cookie salad.  All of them "whipped-cream delivery devices."

Some states have robuster palates:  West Virgina likes deer jerky, and Maryland, sauerkraut.  Some are staunchly tradtional:  good old Squashachusetts and the Nutmeg State are for gourds and creamed onions, and Alaska for cranberry relish.  Virginia votes collard greens.  Oregon is all about vegan.   Illinois craves velveeta.  (What?)  Tennesse does coca cola cake.  There are offerings I thought would rank higher--but no.  String bean casserole, apparently, is fading out.  Even jello isn't what it was--or maybe these are dishes everyone does in their sleep.

Ethnic goodies embrace lefse (not only in Minnesota but in Washington state).  Arizona favors turkey enchiladas.   Florida likes flans, coquito, pavochon.

What else looks good?  Persimmon bread, smoked salmon dip, corn pudding, crab dip, apple cobbler, cornbread dressing, chocolate chess pie.  Mmm, turducken.  Garlic mashed potatoes, mirliton casserole, maple glazed carrots, venison stew, creme caramel. ...

What are your Thanksgiving dishes?  What have you escaped?

Nine

Puzzle-path

So for ages now I've been promising myself a really pretty wooden jigsaw—talk about a frivolous indulgence!  I really like the look of Liberty Puzzles, both their choice of images and style of cut.  Just look what they've hidden in the Primavera!





And how they've made Europa out of Europe:







But oh, those Vermeers!

Liberty does cut custom images, and I've long wanted to send them this Jan Brueghel, The Allegory of Sight, which is a great favorite on my iPad.  My game is to do each part of it separately, as far as I can—the view through the window, the orrery, the blue and white vase with the flowers, every painting—and then put all the littler puzzles together into one big one.  But at that size, you can't see how absolutely stuffed it is with pretty things.  It took me a long while to notice that the monkey has spectacles.






And now there's this:




I could see Liberty cutting out each cosmos individually, five spheres.  Sadly, this group falls into one of their categories, Stolen Art.  The Fourth Day is lost.

(The montage is mine.  Have I made the bars broad enough?)

What do you think?

Nine

A sail! A sail!

"Hieros Gamos," a Cloudish vignette, will appear in Rose Lemberg's An Alphabet of Embers.  This looks to be a lovely anthology.

Nine

By the pricking of my thumbs...

O my.  There are witch marks carved in the timbers at Knole:  scorched with a candle flame, and scored in a tangle of maze marks to entrap demonic spirits.  They are under the floorboards and round about the fireplace—chimneys are vulnerable—of the state rooms prepared for a visit by James I.  The oak was felled in 1606, within months of the Gunpowder Plot.

This makes me grin.

Nine

In the shadows

And thank you, Fiona McCarthy, for this discovery:  "the pre-Raphaelite painter Simeon Solomon, whom Burne-Jones continued to befriend after Solomon's arrest in a London public lavatory made him a virtual outcast and ended his career. Connoisseurs of male eroticism hung their Burne-Jones pictures alongside their Simeon Solomons."  Wilde was a collector.

You bet he was.  "Bacchus":



"Dawn" (I could swear that he's smoking):




"Sappho and Erinna in a Garden at Mytilene":




"Sappho Taken from Erinna":



And Solomon was pushing at the envelope in other ways.

"Rabbi Carrying the Law":



And wow, "Portrait of Fanny Eaton," a study for the head of Miriam:



A stunner of color!  Rossetti described her as having "as having ‘a very fine head and figure—a good deal of Janey."  And a beauty she was.  Here's a portrait in chalk by the little-known artist Walter Fryer Stocks:



I would love to see that on a cover.

Nine

Along with the raggle-taggle Angels, O!

A cold clear windy day, and all the leaves have blown away to dress the angels.  Where?

After six years of boarding and hammering, the old Fogg Museum has reopened as a new glass lantern, crowded up against Le Corbusier's concrete dream of grand pianos copulating.  All three of the University collections—all the old beloved objects with hundreds on hundreds more from the Harvard art-caves, never shown—are merged.  Go play.

I slipped round there this afternoon for a preview.

O my!  That's a stunning space—or interpuzzled spaces.  There are glassy outposts here and there, filled with, oh, random Bernini terracottas.  The galleries are thematic, with piece speaking to piece across centuries or millenia.  And because there's space, the lesser characters, the little things—the art world's cameos—can speak.  There's space, not just for a Japanese-inspired print by Mary Cassatt, but for a whole long series of its states and proofs.



I wandered about, greeting old friends lovingly, entranced with the new. (They had what? and they never showed it?)   I had Ben Jonson as a head-guest in among the antiquities, admiring the kraters.  I learned a new word for a genre new to me:  Weibermacht, the power of women.  And I danced for joy on seeing all of Burne-Jones's raggle-taggle angels in a row:




Five days of his Creation, anyway:  the Fourth was stolen, damn it, of which Oscar Wilde wrote, "... and the crystal glows like a heated opal, for within it the creation of the Sun, Moon, and Stars is passing."  Over the years, the Fogg has now and then hung one or another of the Days, but I can't remember if or when I've ever seen the week.  They're confronting the artist's mermaid, drawing down her drowned mortal to the vaults of the sea. Mine.



No postcards as yet in the Shop, which is filled with all manner of aesthetically seductive useless things.  There are tables in the courtyard, a good, light-filled space, with a café.  With macarons.  It looks like a nice place to write.

Nine

Guy

Nine

On the eve of All Souls

O my! There are spirits in the air.

I love Halloween. I look forward all year to the souling in Somerville: an evening of ramshackle mummery, improvisation, and ballads, with Chinese.

On my way there, walking fast, I had a visitation by a spirit, waiting on a bridge in Paris for John Donne. The vision was as bright and heavy and elusive as a waking dream.

By the time I reached the park, the thing was swelling in my head so hugely, that I nearly turned and left straightway to go and write. I did stay for the Dark Morris, which is silent and contemplative, and I walked the spiral labyrinth, but I wasn't up for riot in the streets.

This never happens.  I love revelry.

But I walked home again, trying to catch hold of sentences.  Sometimes at the very end of a project, I get a white-out of story, a whirlwind of snow; these were more like gossamers.

I don't know if the thing is any good, but it was imperative.

Nine

"We few, we happy few, we band of brothers..."

This day is called the feast of Crispian:
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when the day is named,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say 'To-morrow is Saint Crispian:'
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars.
And say 'These wounds I had on Crispin's day.'
Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot,
But he'll remember with advantages
What feats he did that day: then shall our names.
Familiar in his mouth as household words
Harry the king, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester,
Be in their flowing cups freshly remember'd.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember'd;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.

Nine