Greer Gilman's Blog, page 62

Yardstellation

For my rainbow of friends.

(I adore setting things in spectra:  chairs, skeins, pencils...)

Nine

Bliss!

On Monday night, Toscanini's (bless 'em) turned over a corner of their shop to a dozen of my friends, to celebrate the appearance of Cry Murder! in a Small Voice.  There was unlimited ice cream for the butterfat-adoring, and a rainbow of sorbets for impassioned fruitarians--all any of us had to do was go up to the counter and say, "Nine sent me."   It was a table worthy of Ben Jonson, "outfaring Falstaff in his trencherwork, Homeric in his feast."

And the company was fabulous.  Kelly and Gavin at Small Beer Press had to be there in spirit, as did my dear BBW (on the left coast with her grandchildren), but there were still a dozen of us Nonads in attendance (including negothick , skogkatt , tilivenn , gaudior , sovay , and rushthatspeaks , with few more of my oldest and dearest friends and my newly-met Jonsonian acquaintance).  derspatchel sadly couldn't make it either, but we sent him some Pancake ice cream because, Pancake ice cream?  And the Tosci's folks—Gus himself, Adam, and the rest—were splendid hosts, and asked eagerly for copies of the book.

I read a teaser from the unpublished second novella, Exit, Pursued by a Bear:  a flyting match between Inigo Jones and a furious Ben.

negothick presented me with an enormous blue bowl, which I filled with a symphony of scoops in shades of brown:  Chocolate #3 (extra-dark), Belgian Chocolate, Orange Chocolate, Hazelnut, Butter Chip, B3 (brown butter, brown sugar, and brownies), and Amaretto Cherry (which as rushthatspeaks discovered, is dynamite in hot chocolate).  An evening of transcendent gourmandise beyond the dreams of Ganesha.

It was splendid, and it ought to become a tradition.

Nine

And did those feet?

Thanks to sovay and her ceaseless researches into British film, I watched an absolutely terrible copy of Penda's Fen (1974), written by David Rudkin.  His Fen lies somewhere in the marches between Garner and Blake--it would make a terrific double bill with The Owl Service (1969-70).*  After which the shattered viewer would be found in a cupboard somewhere, snipping things out of paper.

Garner and Rudkin are on the same spectrum—red-violet—both brood on spiritually unsettled boys possessed by myth.  For both, the power is indwelt in landscape.  Both see mere England as an overlay:  beneath lies sleeping Britain, which upwells and overwhelms.  But the forces in Garner are story, seeking for a crack in a psyche to invade.  In Penda's Fen, the visionary stuff is more like fractured poetry.  The adolescent Stephen's private mythos is made up of fragments:  Edward Elgar**, Joan of Arc, Blake's "Jerusalem," his sexual anxieties, his identity crises, his Manichean Christianity, with its angels and demons.  It could all be in his head.

Nine



*Conceived purely as television, Penda's Fen has no adaptation problems, but trouble with its much more ambitious effects.  How do you stage Revelations on a BBC Play for Today budget?  Perhaps the best effects were inadvertent:  the digitization broke down completely at the end, red-shifting into Hildegarde of Bingen.

**I don't think I heard "Land of Hope and Glory," but it's there in Stephen's politics, his impassioned armor of Englishness.

Heigh-ho!

Back from Farthing Party, and I must say that intelligent, witty, and wide-ranging conversations are a Great Good Thing.  As are road-trip breakfasts, petits pots au chocolat, crepes with maple syrup, and pretty much anything comestible in Montreal.  I was fortunate enough to be travelling both ways with rushthatspeaks , gaudior , and tilivenn through the mountains of Vermont, just now turning toward fire.  All the talk, on panels and off, was excellent, lively, engaging and engaged.  There was much good singing on Saturday and Sunday--blues, rounds, filk, folkrock--and a fraction of Sassafrass did "Full Fathom Five," in which I rejoiced.  And jonsinger , bless him, gave me one of his beautiful luminous bowls, which I named Selene.

This just in from matociquala :  "I just read nineweaving 's amazing, exquisite, precise, hysterically funny novella Cry Murder in a SmallVoice. It's going on my award ballots for next year."

Whee!

Nine

Serendipity

The ever-excellent tilivenn thought I might enjoy this paper on Ben Jonson.  So I thought:  so I went along.  Elegant seminar room, with an Edwardian Renaissance fireplace and an admirable oak table the size of the Field of the Cloth of Gold.  Round it, fourteen women and one guy.  When it came my turn to introduce myself, I gave my library bona fides; then said I'd written a Jacobean revenge procedural starring Ben Jonson.  That got a gratifying response—a murmur, with here and there almost a bounce of glee—capped by the presenter, who said, Oh, are you [Nine]?  I've read Moonwise!

The paper was on Jonson's last comedy, The Magnetic Lady--which I confess I don't know.  A fascinating reading of it.  I was listening for story ideas, and got some:  gynocracy, smock-secrets, cunning, the Danaides, Ben as jug, his emblem of the broken compass, Thesmophoriazusae.  Oddly, I heard a few things that I hadn't known about Ben but had already made up about him.  (Love it when that happens.)  Oh yes, and Dryden wrote SF.  Who knew?



Instructed ships shall sail to quick Commerce



By which remotest Regions are alli’d;



Which makes one City of the Universe;



Where some may gain, and all may be suppli’d.







Then we upon our Globes last verge shall go,



And view the Ocean leaning on the Sky:



From thence our rolling Neighbours we shall know,



And on the Lunar world securely pry.


Afterward, I gave copies of Cry Murder! to the presenter (who said she'd love to have coffee with me) and to the Chair*, who invited me to dinner then and there.  Six as of us, over Indian:  as lively and brilliant a dinner party as I've known.  There was the Jonsonian; her friend from Yale, a Nabokovian; the Chair, a down-to-earth and witty don; a woman who teaches rhetoric through Shakespeare at MIT; and the one guy, a cheerful young fellow who does Old Church Slavonic.  I gave them one or two of my party pieces and a sudden fantasy about the Mass Pike singing travellers to its stream:  a vision of silver dolphins leaping down the lanes, backed with Arions.  At which the Chair blinked, and praised my emblematic, early modern mind.

So behind in my packing.  So worth it.

Off to Farthing Party.

Nine

*I said I wasn't a Jonson scholar, and they both said, So?  Stoppard isn't a Shakespearian. 

How do I get to Blackfriars theatre? Practice, practice!

Has anyone else read Tiffany Stern's Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan (Clarendon Press, 2000)?  Fascinating.  And fairly radically different from the theatre practices we know.

First the author would audition the play to a small group of the sharers:  give a sketch of the scenario, read a few scenes.  If they approved, he'd go on to finish the play.  Then—customarily, not always—the poet would give a reading of the book to the inner company, by preference at a tavern.  (Hirelings weren't in on this; they'd have to clue themselves in.  "There's this nurse...")

Shortly after that, each player would get a copy of his part and his part only, with his cues.  (Not only did this spare the scrivener—it prevented the actors from flogging the script to a rival company or a printer.)  There was nothing else on the page, no names, no numbered acts and scenes.  Just his lines and one to three catchwords.  He wouldn't know how many others were in a scene with him, or to whom he was speaking, or when in the play.  No wonder poor Flute speaks all his part at once, cues and all.   The text itself was meant to clue him in on how it should be played, by its changes from prose to verse, or smooth to broken rhetoric, or you to thou.  There was an art to reading such pieces; and a highly specialized art to writing them.

Then they'd all go to their rooms (or an inn with a fire or a field somewhere they could shout) and study.  Sometimes alone.  Sometimes with a teacher:  for lesser actors, greater actors; for the principals, maybe the poet himself.  ("Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue...")  Ben Jonson was renowned as a magnificent, relentless practice teacher.  Boys worked with their masters, perhaps Desdemona with Othello, the Lady with Macbeth.   Ben's children with Ben.  Things that really had to be practiced together, they did:  part-songs, dances, swordfights, slapstick.  I should think they'd all start piecing the jigsaw together—wait, you kill me?

And then?  They had one full rehearsal—if they were lucky—and went on.

You remember that fiction that companies of players were only perfecting their art for the delectation of the Queen or King?  Well, it wasn't quite fiction.  A first night at the Globe was a tryout.  If the play flopped for that first audience, it went in the trash.  If it played, the company would note what worked, what needed punching up or cutting down, where the laughs were, where it dragged.   And the poet would revise.

Heaven knows what they did about blocking.  Perhaps they'd all learned patterns, like the figures in a dance, and as they went on, the prompter whispered, "Six."

Not much room in there for a Man of Mystery.

Nine

Frog's Knickers

Glorious essay-review on the history of swearing by the witty and learned Colin Burrow, Fellow of All Souls, none of it quotable on LJ except for his title, which I've borrowed.  That was his mother's (the late incomparable DWJ's) "favoured way of flirting with the ‘f’ word."

(This ties in beautifully with a lovely moment in a master-class on speaking Shakespeare:  Fiona Shaw, waked by a street argument outside her window, heard, "Lock up your bike!  Lock up your [frogging] bike!," thought "iambic pentameter," and went back to sleep.)

From the sidebar:  "Colin Burrow's Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity has just been published. He thinks it is the best thing he has written."  Oooh!

Nine

Harvest moon

        




Nine

Glory and trumpets!

Overture, beginners, curtain! Cry Murder! in a Small Voice is out!

And I am first-footed on Amazon UK:  he regrets only the brevity.

Small Beer Press was at the Harvard Bookstore warehouse this Saturday, with other tiny but celebrated presses and distinguished slender journals.  A lovely, low-key event.  There are other good bookish things upcoming.  I was talking with Small Beer about the new manuscript—I don't think it's giving away much to say that they love it—when a young woman came up to the table, and asked, "Do you have Cry Murder! in a Small Voice?"  Serendipity!  She turned out to be tempestsarekind , inspired by angevin2 's review.  Gavin and Kelly didn't in fact have a copy right there--they had a huge tableful of returns at $5 each--but it was a fabulous moment.  And a good conversation.

After that, I did a quiet browse and bought some fascinatingly weird books (John & Anne Hollander erotica? for $3? a picture book about a trick-or-treating Zen panda?) and one or two handsome ones:  a new Penguin edition of Orlando with good footnotes and a stunning cloth cover:  lavender cranked up to Quentin Crispness.

In keeping with the playhouse tenor of this year, I've been listening and reading masses of Elizabethan/Jacobean stuff:  besides the Garber class on later Shakespeare (her Othello on Monday was a stunner), I've heard some excellent Oxford podcasts (all good so far, but 14 and 15 were especially delicious).  Hearing those last two, I went straight to the library and got their books.  Right now I'm reading Tiffany Stern's most excellent Making Shakespeare:  "She argues that the versions of Shakespeare that have come down to us have inevitably been formed by the contexts from which they emerged; being shaped by, for example, the way actors received and responded to their lines, the props and music used in the theatre, or the continual revision of plays by the playhouses and printers."  Not the immaculate Shakespeare beloved of bardolaters, in short:  but Genius bodied forth in parts and scrawls and ill-timed breaking voices and the Procrustean bed of type; written and rewritten for certain players, playing spaces, and audiences; overwritten by the up-to-the-minute and the inattentive, the distracted, the miscalculating, and the just plain thick.   Gods, I love material culture.

Nine

The rose petal echoes

A most excellent brief review of Cry Murder! by our own sartorias .

It's been a splendid week for Shakespeare--inspired by tilivenn , my dear BBW and I have been auditing a class on his later plays, taught by Marjorie Garber.  Cool blue September and schoolwork--bliss!

Nine