Greer Gilman's Blog, page 55

Dorothy Lathrop

Heavens, she was good.  I only ever knew her wonderful pictures for Hitty, but she won the first-ever Caldecott Medal.

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Time-travelling doll

Oh, she's lovely, in that inscrutable doll way.  Though not as world-travelled—or as literate—as Hitty.




I so loved that book as a child.  Hitty's a terrific character:  dauntless, powerless, and self-possessed, sound of mind and limb.  If you're six inches high—small enough to slip inside a muff or pocket—you can go anywhere.  And what adventures she had!  Mutiny at sea, with her ship burnt to the water; kidnap over and again; crow-theft; metamorphosis into a fashion-plate by a pinch-mouthed fanatical seamstress; abandonment; auction.  She was plucked from a snowbank by Mr. Charles Dickens; went in secret to hear Adelina Patti; was stuffed down a horsehair sofa by a mortified child.  She endured.

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Postscript:  Oh gosh, she exists!

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Word of unbinding

“The bynding of this booke is all that remains of my dear friende Jonas Wright, who was flayed alive
by the Wavuma on the Fourth Day of August, 1632. King Mbesa did give me the book, it being one
of poore Jonas chiefe possessions, together with ample of his skin to bynd it. Requiescat in pace.”

Sadly, another legend bites the dust.  Aw shucks.

At least I learned the magnificent term of art, anthropodermic bibliopegy.

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The Firefly Time-Lapse

"Being starry in the deeps of grass, the hillside mirrored heaven: darkly, as in moving water, still bright creation swirled."




So absolutely beautiful.  The artist is Vincent Brady. Music by Brandon McCoy.

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Veritas Non Sequitur

Here's my schedule for Vericon, the only F&SF convention I can stroll to.

Friday

8 pm–9 pm —Magic—How do you make it real?—M.L Brennan, Greer Gilman, Scott Lynch —How do you make it real?  When it’s normal for your characters, how do you keep it magical for your readers?  When your characters don’t understand it, how do you explain it to your readers?  How do you integrate magic into the world of your fiction?  Lead by TBD. (Sever 214)

Saturday

10:00 am–11:00 am —Poetry and Music—Jo Walton (M) Shira Lipkin, Greer Gilman, Patrick Rothfuss - What do you do with them, and how do poetry and prose differ? A Rhysling Award winner, the most poetic prose writer living, and the man who invented the Eolian and has his characters exchanging rhymed couplets in dialog discuss. (Sever 214)

(I didn't write this blurb!)

3:15 pm–3:45 pm —Signing, Harvard Bookstore.

4:00 pm–4:45 pm — Reading, Sever Hall (Exit, Pursued by a Bear!)

Sunday

12.00 pm -13.00 pm—Everyone Writes Funny!— Jo Walton (M) M.L Brennan, Patrick Rothfuss, Greer Gilman, Saladin Ahmed - Everyone has their own method of composition, some plan it all ahead, some fly by the seats of their pants, and some people are really really weird. Let's look at the specifics of how some of our guests do it.  (Sever 113)

There will of course be a Sassafrass Concert and a fabulous charity auction in aid of Heifer International.

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The next Mr Mybug

"You know you’ve hit the big time when you didn’t write your own work."

Ouch! (via sovay )

                                        The litmus test of true literary achievement is whether your works are deemed so great that you
                                        simply could not have written them.

                                        Janeites need no longer envy students of Shakespeare their intricate web of Renaissance conspiracy
                                        theories.  Whereas Shakespeare scholarship has long enjoyed the spectral presence of the Earl of
                                        Oxford, Austen studies can now boast a countess named Eliza de Feuillide.

                                        The self-published Jane Austen: A New Revelation alleges that "a poor, uneducated woman with
                                        no experience of sex or marriage" could not possibly have written the sophisticated works of social
                                        satire and enduring romance that we traditionally attribute to Jane Austen...

Nine (clearly a pseudonym for Two)

"An eyrie of children, little eyases..."

And I'm not in London.

{whimper}

That second child could play my Peter Whitgift; that fourth, perhaps, my Calder.

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Keep Watching the Skies

So I had to go to Connecticut, reluctantly, and negothick (bless her heart) thought she 'd cheer me up with a show.  There is actually a theatre in town—one man's impassioned vision, as it would be—and a Thursday night performance.  So she and mamagavone and I set out for the Spirit of Broadway.


[ We had no idea... ]

It's Plan 9 From 42nd Street!

Milwaukee, 1955.  At the top-secret Space Center, square-jawed Major Malone and his too-perfect-to-be-true aide, Rick, are watching the skies.  That is, they will be watching them, as soon as the Major's sweetie-pie daughter, white-gloved secret-geek Mary, fixes the monitor.  (She turns out to be diffidently good at everything from physics to linguistics.)  Enter shy über-geek, Trenton Corbett.  Hearts go pit-a-pat.  Secret weaponry ensues.  The man-mad, dauntless secretary Charlie measures (uh-huh) Trent and Rick for spacesuits, brushing off her shiny-faced adoring Billy, the boy from the diner, who keeps wooing her with unwanted deliveries.  "Adam and Eve on a raft!"

Then the time-honored cardboard flying saucer on a fishing line bounds in, and buzzes the Galaxy of Coiffures Beauty Salon.

Enter (dead-center) Zombina, the extraterrestrial Messalina, in a wig that would embarrass Dolly Parton.  Her blaster is played by a curling wand.  Her planet Wants Men.

After that, things get really silly.  Straight-arrow Rick develops a Boris-Badenov accent and a glittery frenetic grin.  (Only the villains are cartoonish; the good guys are B-movies.)  Trent defends Truth and Justice, with one arm protecting his glasses.  Zombina turns her devastating coloratura on these puny mortals.  When she hits E-flat in alt, they zombify.  You can tell when that happens:  they don sproingy-eyes.

Can no one stop her?

Only Mary and Charlie, wielding Trent's secret machine, as played by an eviscerated Electrolux, dangling what look like ether masks.  But even their valiant attack seems halted, teetering on the brink  of failure, when tap-dancing Billy leaps in with his Atomic Feet.  Zombina's voice soars higher, hyper-operatic—and breaks.  It tumbles into baritone; she chokes and expires, wailing "What a world!  I'm belting, beeeeeeeelting."

One terrific little show.  A glorious melange of space-cadet optimism, satire, and silliness:  it's like the PMRP Off-Broadway.  Lyrics, script, and score by James Valcq, and why haven't I heard of this guy?  One plucky little theatre, the Spirit of Broadway.

We all liked the score.  No show-stopper, nothing we went out humming, but a solid pleasure throughout:  flawlessly fifties, from "Rocket-Roll" to Tom Lehrer.  Nothing in air quotes, either.  Valcq clearly has the same affection for fifties music as for fifties pulp, untainted by irony.

Like the music, the actors played it absolutely straight, purely innocent.  They were all terrific, all half-dozen of them:  they sang, they shone, they danced, and everyone pitched in as Zombettes in beauty-shop turbans, or as diegetic doo-wop trios.

The three of us (front row, side) had hysterics.  By the end of the interval, we were singing out loud:  "Overture, hit the lights..."

And we came out wanting to bus all of you in.  You'd adore it.

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I Aten't Dead—Persephone

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Baloo, my boy

A very rich evening.  It began with dinner in the best and brightest of company:  sovay and derspatchel (now stepping out bravely on two legs), rushthatspeaks and gaudior .  The menu at the Sinclair is audacious and the service chaotic:  some of us were disappointed or misled, but there were some spectacular dishes.  I was particularly taken with the bone-marrow cornbread that came with the duck, with what Rush called the General Tso's brussels sprouts (an absolute transfiguration of the lowly Brassica), and with the not-too-sweet, not-at-all-gooey muffin-tin brownies, still warm, and topped with what tasted like peach Cumberland sauce.  Did I say that the menu was strange?  Rush was pleased with their Shirley Temple made with ultra-fierce ginger beer.  Not childlike at all.  I said they should have called it a Taxi Driver.

Afterwards, derspatchel and sovay and I headed to the Brattle to see Ben Wheatley's A Field in England (2013).  Which is...which is...all right, it's 90 minutes exactly, and is that Hugo long form or short form?  Because holy Hobbes' Leviathan, this thing is weird.  I can't even think what it's like.  Alan Garner meets Hammer Horror?  Withnail & I on psilocybin?  Beckett?  Blake?  Bergman?  Tom Stoppard's Apocalypse Now?  Alchemical black comedy at any rate.  Jack Daw's Pack on crack.

I think the sheer abstracted beauty of the black-and-white made it possible for me to bear the cruelty.  And be advised:  this film is brutal.  But so much else is so Nine:  high language mingling with low comedy; earth magic; Englishness; an apologetic demi-scholar in torn lace; Jack Daw's hats with battered feathers; wind in grass; soup with stoat bones; bawdry; and a scrying glass, at one point turned upon a rogue's poor tackle, manged with venery.

And one lovely unexpected moment.  There are these soldiers running from a war—a ruffian, a Bardolph, and a Baldrick—fallen in with an alchemist's apprentice, all in search of a rumored alehouse.  The astounding guns fade out behind them;  they are wading in sweet grass; and the fool starts to sing a lullaby.

Baloo, my boy, lie still and sleep
It grieves me so to hear thee weep...

A Lal Waterson moment.  Whew.

Later:  sovay 's review is brilliant.  If you haven't already, go and read it.

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P.S.  Ben Wheatley is now directing the new season of Dr. Who, with Peter Capaldi.  This is going to be...strange.