Greer Gilman's Blog, page 61

“The letters of this alphabet were trees”

I went on Thursday to a memorial celebration for Seamus Heaney, given by his friends and colleagues of the English Department here.  Readings, reminiscences, music (Messiaen, Janáček, a setting of “Kinship IV” by a young composer, Matthew Aucoin).  I was touched by the simplicity (no flowers, no bombast); by the young and old voices; by all the grey and white heads in the church; by the windows looking out on the embers of autumn in the rain.

And damn, that man could write!  Get him musing on the land or handtools or on alphabets and he’s unparalleled.  (That last poem was written for the ΦΒΚ Chapter here, and read by three undergraduates, stanzas in turn.)

I loved hearing the 9th-century originals of Beowulf and “Pangur Bán” with his translations.  The rain suited both.

I think my favorite anecdote was of Heaney as an impassioned young poet, going to look for Gerard Manley Hopkins’s grave in a Dublin cemetery.  There were of course two gravediggers.  The first:  “The Hopkins, is it?”  The second:  “That would be the convert.”

And Peter Sacks retold Heaney’s memory of being an altar boy, being given the priest’s biretta (a tricorn) to hold between finger and thumb, his awe and the heft of it mingling with a mischief:  he always wanted to “sail it into the sanctuary” like a little black bat.  Then Sacks read this:

Lightenings viii

The annals say: when the monks of Clonmacnoise

Were all at prayers inside the oratory

A ship appeared above them in the air.



The anchor dragged along behind so deep

It hooked itself into the altar rails

And then, as the big hull rocked to a standstill,



A crewman shinned and grappled down the rope

And struggled to release it. But in vain.

'This man can't bear our life here and will drown,'



The abbot said, 'unless we help him.' So

They did, the freed ship sailed, and the man climbed back

Out of the marvellous as he had known it.
Copyright © Seamus Heaney
Nine

Fire, we sing!

Remember Guy Fawkes.

Nine

Hurlyburly

Falling behind.  I hadn’t written up NTLive’s stunning Macbeth from the Manchester International Festival, with Kenneth Branagh and Alex Kingston as the thane and his lady.

It was performed in the nave of an abandoned church in Manchester—Macbeth as Elidor—with the apse full of great wax candles, dwindling with the kingdom’s hope, like Tenebrae.  The weird sisters came bursting out of niches like demonic saints.  The haunting dagger was (at first) a crack of light, navelong, as from a door.  The floor was mud, from which the line of kings came heaving up (“...the earth hath bubbles...”).

No other conceits, no interval:  just two hours of sheer Scottish play, like a dinner of bone marrow.  Bloody rich.

Exhilarating.

What I loved was the swiftness and clarity.  All of the players spoke Shakespeare magnificently, sound and sense, as if the language were their own. (The Scots among them speaking Scots.)   As if those terrible imaginings had only just waked in them.

This was the first performance of Branagh’s that I’ve ever liked—either his co-director reined him in, or he’s mellowed with age and stopped self-regarding.  Yes, there were histrionic moments from both the Macbeths, but the pace and the starkness acted as restraints.  Kept them steely and unsheathed.

They’re screening this again in Boston on the 4th and 25th of November, and elsewhere round the world.  Hope it’s somewhere near you.

Nine

"When the wind shook him the crows took up into the air..."

This came today, at All Hallows Eve.  It is absolutely beautiful.

I will light a candle for the soul of Lal Waterson, 1943-1998.

Nine

Pick me up, teach me Greek, I'm a writer

Remember Oxford Barbie?

He's here!

Nine

Gourdess

sovay gives a wonderful pumpkin-carving party every year, at which I try not to cut any fingers off.  I'm rather pleased at how my Mally-owl came out this year.



Nine

Not Bartholomew Fair...

Though October 19th offers a fine choice of saints, including Ethbin, Frideswide, and (not that) Cleopatra.  Today was a fine sunny day for the Boston Book Fair, and I went to hang out in Copley Square at the Small Beer Press table with Gavin Grant and Susan Stinson, behind a swiftly dwindling stack of her new book, Spider in a Tree.  (I sold a few chapbooks myself.)  Excellent company, a shifting scene of browsers, a splendid view of the BPL.

Every now and then, I'd get up for a wander round the bookstalls, sighing and buying.  I resisted the Folio Society's allurements, but I got a nice new Religio Medici and Urne Buriall from NYRB and struck gold at the Brattle Book Shop's bargain shelves:  some childhood library favorites, King of the Wind and Maria Mitchell, Girl Astronomer (which, with its companion book on Galileo, is dimly responsible for Cloud & Ashes); Anthony Burgess's Enderby's Dark Lady, and---



What?  The latter part of title suggests that they cleanly, bravely, and reverently burst through the bedroom windows of their errant comrades, strip back the about-to-be self-polluted sheets, and bustle those chaps into icy showers.  Singing and scrubbing.  But those first words....

Nine

Counterblast

The redesigned Oxfraud site is up.

Snazzy!

Articulate!

Well read.

And very silly.

Nine

I am fire and air

The sky was fire to the zenith and all round the horizon:  hemispheric.  No lens could compass it.  In a quarter of an hour, it was ashes and a spark of colder fire:  the evening star, as if by alchemy.

Nine

One of us

Grandfatherly man in drugstore to very small girl:  "That's a beautiful necklace you have on."

Very small girl;  "That's not a necklace--it's an amulet!"

Nine