Greer Gilman's Blog, page 60

Are the stars gold paper or is the gold paper stars?

shewhomust has just written a fascinating review of a BBC documentary on P.L. Travers.

Here's what I commented:

Oh, I wish I could see that.

Mary Poppins and Irene's great-great-grandmother were my first intimations of the numinous. They gave me goddesses. There's more than a little Artemis in Mary Poppins -- the touch-me-not primness and the fierce self-sufficiency. "Is this a nursery or a Bear Garden?" And I loved loved loved the circus of the sun, moon, and stars, and the Christmas shopping for the Pleiades. The first story that I ever tried to write (as I remember) was essentially celestial fanfic. I must have been about six. (I couldn't really write at five. Too left-handed.) And though the compass story has been tarnished in retrospect, what it gave me then was a sense of the wideness and the strangeness of the planet. "O brave new world that has such people in it!" Again, I remember trying to draw that, at the kitchen table.

Heavens.  How could I forget Mrs. Corry? with her witchy barley-sugar fingers and her twinkly dress, pasting gilt-gingerbread stars on the heavens.

George MacDonald gave me labyrinths and clews, and a mystery of godhead:  how a glory can appear as straw and cobwebs and a withered apple.

I was passionate about the Oz books, too; but my witch and my scarecrow are from the movie.

Nine

"...nothing short of astonishing..."

Over at Strange Horizons, Liz Bourke reviews Cry Murder!, rather head-turningly. Those few of you who haven't figured out whodunit yet might find this spoilery.

A lovely late birthday present.

Nine

Year of the Bear

Above all (and in spite of all), this was the Year of the Good Quarto and the Great Wall of China, the year when my Jacobean chapbook came out and I wrote another, just that like.  Astonishing:  a fall of Perseids.  It was a year of poets and players, masques and music.  It was the Year of the Bear.



“Above all, the chapbook is gorgeous and is flying off the Small Beer table.  Can't go down the hall without signing one or two (even  three).  Borne up by this--and by more coffee than is wise--the reading was uproarious.  I strode and ranted, playing all the parts to the top of my bent; the audience held back its laughter, so as not to miss the next line; and to crown all, there was the most glorious synchronicity.  I was playing Armin playing a morality, and had just said "in comes Retribution--" when the great door was flung open and a hand with the 5-Minute sign was thrust in.  It brought down the house.”






“I only thought of this story three weeks ago.  rushthatspeaks and tilivenn were having tea to celebrate Cry Murder! and the mantel for the blue-and-white, and it came to me—whoosh!—like a falling star, between bites of a strawberry (with brown sugar and crème fraîche).


Wish me another story:  I’m a double prime today.

Nine

Pictures at an Exhibition

Oooh!  I think I've found the red art book, the one I had out of the library for most of my childhood.  "I can still see Hogarth's Shrimp Girl, Marc's Red Horses, and Holbein's Prince Edward..."  Yes.  And the Crivelli child peering round a corner at the angels; and the Picasso child taking his first steps; and Renoir's girl with a watering can.  And the scary St. Eligius.

Triumph.

Of course, I'd forgotten the (remarkably bland) title and author:  Famous Paintings by Alice Elizabeth Chase.  I've tried over the years to hunt it down by lists of the pictures, and finally ran it to ground on Book Sleuth.  Nearly the first thing that came up under art history, children.  I guess a lot of us fifties children remember it fondly.

Nine

Dragonish

Can anyone recommend dragon stories to be read to a 3 1/2 year old?  They are a "fiery introvert" with a "large wrinkled brain."  They know the name Smaug, but are thought to be a little young still for The Hobbit.

Thank you!

Nine

Strange roots

Will's quill?

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The Baywheaux Tapestry

Awww.

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The Baywheaux Tapestry

Awww.
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working men

John Eliot Gardiner on Bach:

"We know roughly as much about Bach the man as we know about Shakespeare. ... The finest chapter, “Bach at His Work Bench,” recreates what it must have been like to write, say, a cantata, thinking about which musicians and singers at the composer’s disposal had the chops to handle solos, overseeing slovenly copyists (and often stepping in to copy out the musicians’ scores himself), and then hurriedly rehearsing the piece maybe a day or two before the Sunday performance, all the while thinking ahead to the next week’s number even as he spent his days running a boys’ school."

Department of Cognitive Dissonance:

Sir Derek Jacobi says "My working class roots helped me play kings."  But only Elizabeth's son and lover, the begetter of her son and secret heir, could have written them.  Uh huh.

Nine

11 November

I saw his round mouth's crimson deepen as it fell,
Like a Sun, in his last deep hour;
Watched the magnificent recession of farewell,
Clouding, half gleam, half glower,
And a last splendour burn the heavens of his cheek.
And in his eyes
The cold stars lighting, very old and bleak,
In different skies.

Wilfred Owen