Greer Gilman's Blog, page 6
May 7, 2021
Charm and strangeness
Handheld, the marvellous small press that has reprinted all of Sylvia Townsend Warner's fantasy short fiction, will be hosting this conversation on Kingdoms of Elfin.
Tuesday 11 May 2021 19.30 UK time / 20.30 Tübingen time / 14.30 EST Ingrid Hotz-Davies, Professor of English at the University of Tübingen, Germany, who wrote the Introduction for our edition of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Kingdoms of Elfin , will be in conversation with Greer Gilman, fantasy author and critic, and Kate from Handheld, about this marvellous and ground-breaking collection of stories about ‘a magical land populated by strange beings who look like humans and act like sociopaths’ (Strange Horizons).
This event is free, and you can register for it here.
Do take a look at Handheld's excellent list!
My thoughts on faerie have shifted. Having lived for a year and more in an underworld, I must say that the cold hill's side is starting to look pretty good.
Nine
May 4, 2021
Dryad
The other lovely thing this afternoon brought was this praise from a formidable reader. I'm thrilled.
Nine
May 2, 2021
New New England Gothic
For some reason, I found myself reciting Robert Frost in Fox's presence:
Me:
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and–—
Fox:
horror shape.
Robert Lovefrost!
He'll be published by the time he's 20, mark my words.
Nine
Me:
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and–—
Fox:
horror shape.
Robert Lovefrost!
He'll be published by the time he's 20, mark my words.
Nine
May 1, 2021
“Who undid the nine witch knots?”
Heavens, what a fabulous May Day!
Naturally, it started in the dark, as the only way I was going to be at the river in good time for sunrise (5:39 am) was not to go to bed.
We weren’t officially gathered. Few enough came and well enough masked that it felt unthreatening, out there on the chill and windy riverbank. Morris was danced; “Hal-an-tow” was sung, raggedly; and personal maypoles were given out: wands with long long fluttering ribbons. An ecstatic dog made off with one. The accordion played “Yellow Submarine” and other folk tunes, and we danced in our lone orbits.
It was all over by about 6:00 am. As it was dispersing,![[personal profile]](https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/hostedimages/1491408111i/22407843.png)
lauradi7dw
(who hasn’t missed a May Day at the river in 43 years) came with her husband. They were just in time to wish their Newtowne Morris friends a merry May. Then I took a turn up and down the river with them in the newborn light.
After that, I went home, admiring the luminescent trees, and slept for a few hours. Then I ordered in lunch, and read a little over my second morning tea.
How on earth had I missed Robert Macfarlane’s Landmarks (2016) all this time? I’ve read The Old Ways and The Lost Words, so I know that he writes my sort of stuff. This one is about the language of landscape in the British Isles, and it’s hard to think of a more Nineish study. Just in the first few pages, I learned that “Ammil is a Devon term for the fine film of silver ice that coats leaves, twigs, and grass when frost follows thaw” and that “teine biorach means ‘the flame or will-o’-the-wisp that runs on top of the heather when the moor is burnt during the summer.’”
Then Martin Carthy, who sang Cloud out of chaos over forty years ago, played an afternoon concert. gl!
He came on looking elfish, like a Rackham portrait of himself. My heavens, he’ll be 80 in a few weeks. In my mind, he’s still thirtyish, quirky and quicksilvery. Like so many of us, he confessed to disuse of his artistry in this last direful eternity, to “carrying a guitar around for a year.” No apology needed. Martin’s playing is oak-hafted as ever, with those plucked notes in it and that tolling, like a bell heard out at sea. At first his voice creaked just a little, like a wind in the upper branches; then it warmed. His mastery of pulse and phrase and storytelling is incomparable still. With that, he knows the ecology of folksongs: where they’ve grown, what they’re rooted in and how they bear, what sings in their branches. He finds them, as a countryman might choose a certain tree for a purpose; then he planes and polishes until he has the perfect tool for striking at the heart.
Martin sang and played two sets—two full hours—and if now and then, his memory of a lyric failed him, well, he knows ten thousand songs by now.
I hadn’t heard the variant of “Scarborough Fair” that he got from Goathland on the North York Moors. In the version that we all know, that he planed and polished, and that Paul Simon filched, the sea-harvest is tied with a peacock’s feather. In this, it’s a haddock’s skin.
His last four songs were a standout group, magnificently done. All songs of metamorphoses.
He sang “Willie’s Lady.” My first love, from the first time that I ever heard him live.
Willie’s malevolent mother has cursed his lady to the torment of an endless labor, never lighter of her child. But she (in Martin’s version) has her Willie make a child of wax; and his mother, crying out against the impossible birth, gives the solution:
“Who was it who undid the nine witch knots
Braided in amongst this lady's locks?
“And who was it who took out the combs of care
Braided in amongst this lady's hair?
“And who was it slew the master kid
That ran and slept all beneath this lady's bed?”
Then came another of Martin’s witty wives. In “The Devil and the Feathery Wife,” the man is about have his bargain with hell called in: he’s for the fires, if he can’t turn up a beast that the Devil can’t name. His wife has a plan: “‘Fetch me the basket of feathers,’ she cries, ‘of the geese that we had for our tea.’” I love the particularity of that line: look how carelessly rich we are now! And I love the Devil’s theology:
“By Christ!” he said, “What an ‘orrible sight
And I’m damned if I know what it is.”
Then came "The Bows of London," Carthy's version of “The Two Sisters.” Child 10, of course, is where I got A Crowd of Bone. I love how the disembodied voice of justice speaks from the shards of skeleton, the strands of hair. “He made fiddle pegs of her long finger bones” gives me the shivers every time.
And then “John Barleycorn.” Whew.
Like Barleycorn, Carthy draws his power from the earth and those who till it—and he gives it back to us a hundredfold.
And after that? I went over to the Scintillation Discord for the first time, found there was to be a scratch reading of Arcadia—I love that play—popped in to listen, and got called in at the very last moment to play Thomasina in Act 2.
What a day! That's undone a few of the witch knots tied by the pandemic year.
A Merry May to all.
Nine
Naturally, it started in the dark, as the only way I was going to be at the river in good time for sunrise (5:39 am) was not to go to bed.
We weren’t officially gathered. Few enough came and well enough masked that it felt unthreatening, out there on the chill and windy riverbank. Morris was danced; “Hal-an-tow” was sung, raggedly; and personal maypoles were given out: wands with long long fluttering ribbons. An ecstatic dog made off with one. The accordion played “Yellow Submarine” and other folk tunes, and we danced in our lone orbits.
It was all over by about 6:00 am. As it was dispersing,
lauradi7dw
(who hasn’t missed a May Day at the river in 43 years) came with her husband. They were just in time to wish their Newtowne Morris friends a merry May. Then I took a turn up and down the river with them in the newborn light.After that, I went home, admiring the luminescent trees, and slept for a few hours. Then I ordered in lunch, and read a little over my second morning tea.
How on earth had I missed Robert Macfarlane’s Landmarks (2016) all this time? I’ve read The Old Ways and The Lost Words, so I know that he writes my sort of stuff. This one is about the language of landscape in the British Isles, and it’s hard to think of a more Nineish study. Just in the first few pages, I learned that “Ammil is a Devon term for the fine film of silver ice that coats leaves, twigs, and grass when frost follows thaw” and that “teine biorach means ‘the flame or will-o’-the-wisp that runs on top of the heather when the moor is burnt during the summer.’”
Then Martin Carthy, who sang Cloud out of chaos over forty years ago, played an afternoon concert. gl!
He came on looking elfish, like a Rackham portrait of himself. My heavens, he’ll be 80 in a few weeks. In my mind, he’s still thirtyish, quirky and quicksilvery. Like so many of us, he confessed to disuse of his artistry in this last direful eternity, to “carrying a guitar around for a year.” No apology needed. Martin’s playing is oak-hafted as ever, with those plucked notes in it and that tolling, like a bell heard out at sea. At first his voice creaked just a little, like a wind in the upper branches; then it warmed. His mastery of pulse and phrase and storytelling is incomparable still. With that, he knows the ecology of folksongs: where they’ve grown, what they’re rooted in and how they bear, what sings in their branches. He finds them, as a countryman might choose a certain tree for a purpose; then he planes and polishes until he has the perfect tool for striking at the heart.
Martin sang and played two sets—two full hours—and if now and then, his memory of a lyric failed him, well, he knows ten thousand songs by now.
I hadn’t heard the variant of “Scarborough Fair” that he got from Goathland on the North York Moors. In the version that we all know, that he planed and polished, and that Paul Simon filched, the sea-harvest is tied with a peacock’s feather. In this, it’s a haddock’s skin.
His last four songs were a standout group, magnificently done. All songs of metamorphoses.
He sang “Willie’s Lady.” My first love, from the first time that I ever heard him live.
Willie’s malevolent mother has cursed his lady to the torment of an endless labor, never lighter of her child. But she (in Martin’s version) has her Willie make a child of wax; and his mother, crying out against the impossible birth, gives the solution:
“Who was it who undid the nine witch knots
Braided in amongst this lady's locks?
“And who was it who took out the combs of care
Braided in amongst this lady's hair?
“And who was it slew the master kid
That ran and slept all beneath this lady's bed?”
Then came another of Martin’s witty wives. In “The Devil and the Feathery Wife,” the man is about have his bargain with hell called in: he’s for the fires, if he can’t turn up a beast that the Devil can’t name. His wife has a plan: “‘Fetch me the basket of feathers,’ she cries, ‘of the geese that we had for our tea.’” I love the particularity of that line: look how carelessly rich we are now! And I love the Devil’s theology:
“By Christ!” he said, “What an ‘orrible sight
And I’m damned if I know what it is.”
Then came "The Bows of London," Carthy's version of “The Two Sisters.” Child 10, of course, is where I got A Crowd of Bone. I love how the disembodied voice of justice speaks from the shards of skeleton, the strands of hair. “He made fiddle pegs of her long finger bones” gives me the shivers every time.
And then “John Barleycorn.” Whew.
Like Barleycorn, Carthy draws his power from the earth and those who till it—and he gives it back to us a hundredfold.
And after that? I went over to the Scintillation Discord for the first time, found there was to be a scratch reading of Arcadia—I love that play—popped in to listen, and got called in at the very last moment to play Thomasina in Act 2.
What a day! That's undone a few of the witch knots tied by the pandemic year.
A Merry May to all.
Nine
April 28, 2021
Frolicking with transatlantic garlands
The incomparable Martin Carthy will be giving a livestream concert on May Day! May 1st, 2021, 3:00pm–5:00pm EDT (8:00pm-10:00pm BST). I rejoice!
I want to walk down to the river at dawn. Singing on May morning was one of last year's innumerable losses, small but sorely felt.
Nine
I want to walk down to the river at dawn. Singing on May morning was one of last year's innumerable losses, small but sorely felt.
Nine
April 23, 2021
And lady-smocks all silver-white
Happy 457th birthday, Will Shakespeare!
We're all getting on a bit, aren't we?
I just watched that birthday lecture on his monument that I was looking forward to, and Lena Cowen Orlin has done some fabulous close scholarship on all aspects of it, from the inscription to its genre to the portrait. She argues that it was commissioned by Shakespeare before his death. Contrary to tradition, she thinks it was sculpted by Nicholas Johnson, not Gerard the Younger (Dugdale, 1656, says Gerard, but he gets other forenames wrong, and may have been confusing father and son). Nicholas, like Gerard the Elder, was a noted maker of monuments, while the sole contemporary record of Gerard the Younger's work is of a fountain for the garden at Hatfield House. Nicholas, she believes, was in Stratford in 1614, supervising the installation of a monument to Shakespeare's friend John Combe (he left Shakespeare £5; Shakespeare left his nephew Thomas Combe his own sword). There is no direct evidence of the sculptor's stay in Stratford, but there are records of his onsite work on similar monuments. Besides, the Johnson workshop was in Southwark, quite close to the Globe Theatre. So Nicholas Johnson could have had opportunity to study Shakespeare's face.
Conjecture, certainly, but founded in research.
Orlin said that about a third of early-modern monuments were commissioned antemortem, and showed a picture of the plaque from one such, with a line clearly left blank for the date of death, which was cut by another hand. Likewise, there's a single-line blank space on Shakespeare's plaque, but with the death date crowded into one corner, broken into two tiny lines. Someone screwed up.
The style of funerary portraiture had only just arisen in Oxford, and is very particular: a solitary half-figure, gowned and with a cushion set before him, looking out at stayed passengers and not to heaven, signified a scholar or divine. Nearly all have books on their cushions, with now and then a skull. Shakespeare's is the only one with quill and paper. Orlin notes how the inscription picks upon the image: "Leaves living art, but page." She believes this may be how Shakespeare wished to present himself, to be remembered.
And of all the scores of monuments she's looked at, Shakespeare's is the only one with his lips parted (you can see his teeth), as if he spoke.
Nine
We're all getting on a bit, aren't we?
I just watched that birthday lecture on his monument that I was looking forward to, and Lena Cowen Orlin has done some fabulous close scholarship on all aspects of it, from the inscription to its genre to the portrait. She argues that it was commissioned by Shakespeare before his death. Contrary to tradition, she thinks it was sculpted by Nicholas Johnson, not Gerard the Younger (Dugdale, 1656, says Gerard, but he gets other forenames wrong, and may have been confusing father and son). Nicholas, like Gerard the Elder, was a noted maker of monuments, while the sole contemporary record of Gerard the Younger's work is of a fountain for the garden at Hatfield House. Nicholas, she believes, was in Stratford in 1614, supervising the installation of a monument to Shakespeare's friend John Combe (he left Shakespeare £5; Shakespeare left his nephew Thomas Combe his own sword). There is no direct evidence of the sculptor's stay in Stratford, but there are records of his onsite work on similar monuments. Besides, the Johnson workshop was in Southwark, quite close to the Globe Theatre. So Nicholas Johnson could have had opportunity to study Shakespeare's face.
Conjecture, certainly, but founded in research.
Orlin said that about a third of early-modern monuments were commissioned antemortem, and showed a picture of the plaque from one such, with a line clearly left blank for the date of death, which was cut by another hand. Likewise, there's a single-line blank space on Shakespeare's plaque, but with the death date crowded into one corner, broken into two tiny lines. Someone screwed up.
The style of funerary portraiture had only just arisen in Oxford, and is very particular: a solitary half-figure, gowned and with a cushion set before him, looking out at stayed passengers and not to heaven, signified a scholar or divine. Nearly all have books on their cushions, with now and then a skull. Shakespeare's is the only one with quill and paper. Orlin notes how the inscription picks upon the image: "Leaves living art, but page." She believes this may be how Shakespeare wished to present himself, to be remembered.
And of all the scores of monuments she's looked at, Shakespeare's is the only one with his lips parted (you can see his teeth), as if he spoke.
Nine
April 17, 2021
"To see the cherry hung with snow"
No metaphor.
It had largely melted, but ice still glittered on the trees. They look like ghosts.
Here they are a day or two ago: a lovely little skein of sisters, authentically Japanese. They mark a scholarly affiliation.
Nine
It had largely melted, but ice still glittered on the trees. They look like ghosts.
Here they are a day or two ago: a lovely little skein of sisters, authentically Japanese. They mark a scholarly affiliation.
Nine
April 13, 2021
crescent
So I was about to embark on cooking up a great potful of garlicky chicken stew to last me a week when I discovered that I couldn't find my mother's—or for all I know, my grandmother's—ancient wooden-handled crescent chopper. It's my one reliably sharp knife (it can go straight through a hubbard squash) and it's usually one of the very few things in this chaos I can lay my hands on. Hunting for it, I found the conical strainer (chinois) with a wooden pestle that I mislaid last year, so I couldn't make proper apple sauce, and then the chopper, under a pile of foody books. Thoroughly relieved, I glanced out the kitchen window, and saw this.
The Nine are chopping herbs.
Nine
April 5, 2021
Magic is in me!
Five weeks ago,I had my first shot. Things began to look more hopeful.
As of today, I am (please heaven) fully vaccinated. I bent the two-week rule very slightly, going yesterday to bring Fox and his family a little Easter gift of chocolate, and to applaud his performance as a Hat Zombie. It was blissful to see them. Fortunately, it was a lovely day, so we could have all the windows open.
And today,I did some modest masked errands: browsed a bookstore for eight or nine minutes, bought a slice of apricot almond tart. I walked home by way of Radcliffe, as I used to do, and all of sudden, I felt like Mary and Colin in The Secret Garden. “Magic is in me! Magic is making me well! ... I Shall Live Forever—and Ever—and Ever!"
Sometimes great scientific discoveries are the Magic.
In honor of the garden, I started my last-but-one Liberty puzzle, Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose. There are marvellous garlands in it.
Nine
As of today, I am (please heaven) fully vaccinated. I bent the two-week rule very slightly, going yesterday to bring Fox and his family a little Easter gift of chocolate, and to applaud his performance as a Hat Zombie. It was blissful to see them. Fortunately, it was a lovely day, so we could have all the windows open.
And today,I did some modest masked errands: browsed a bookstore for eight or nine minutes, bought a slice of apricot almond tart. I walked home by way of Radcliffe, as I used to do, and all of sudden, I felt like Mary and Colin in The Secret Garden. “Magic is in me! Magic is making me well! ... I Shall Live Forever—and Ever—and Ever!"
Sometimes great scientific discoveries are the Magic.
In honor of the garden, I started my last-but-one Liberty puzzle, Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose. There are marvellous garlands in it.
Nine
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