Greer Gilman's Blog, page 64

Exit, pursued by a bear

Taken within this hour.  Look how he has a rag of Antigonus's shirt, and is rending it.

I am pondering a second Ben, which may or may not involve Inigo Jones, Queen Mab, Kit Marlowe, and the succession.  I can say no more.

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And the livin' is easy...

The Yard police have taken to swooping about in Roman chariots, like Segways on steroids.  A pretty sight, like SF Asterix.  In winter, we have tiny snowplows, nimble as alterno-squirrels.

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In a green shade

Still musing on crowleycrow 's Utopian talk at Readercon.  Some of us have been imagining Audenic Edens ever since.  Mine would give me a stone manor house--a little one, like Green Knowe--in a Cloudish sort of landscape.  Not the howling moors part of it, but Dales/Cumbria, with pleasant little mountains.  There'd be proper woods, though, with flaming bright New England falls and deep-snow winters.  (I would have red squirrels and hedgehogs, bluebells and blackthorn; but also dogwoods, sugar maples, and real fireflies, not glowworms.)  The springs would be English and endless, and the summers green and dappled, bright but never hot.  I'd ask for lots of wind and rain.  The seacoast would be near enough when I wanted it, a walk.  The cloudscapes would be fabulous.  The night sky would be truly dark, ablaze with stars.

Oh dear.  I guess I'd need servants—say, a gardener and a fabulous cook.  But she'd be drily witty, wise, and independent.  She'd have a kitchen like Mr. Badger's, in which I could visit her by invitation, for a pot of tea and new bread.  Perhaps the bookshelves and the blue-and-white would dust themselves.

The cities would be Florence in the 1500s, Prague in 1910—with bits of Delft and Bruges.  But then any museum that I wanted, any theatre, any library, would be a pleasant train ride with a book and a basket of sandwiches.  I could pop over to the Globe in 1600 for the afternoon; or buy a picture of Vermeer's at his studio.

And all my friends would have portals.  We could visit, inter-Eden.

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Most tyrannically clapped for't

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.

Afterward, there was a modest clamor for sequels, and Graham Sleight, clever fellow, suggested that each murderer should be a different Shakespeare pretender.

Hee!

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Most tryrannically clapped for't

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.

Afterward, there was a modest clamor for sequels, and Graham Sleight, clever fellow, suggested that each murderer should be a different Shakespeare pretender.

Hee!

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Pareidolatry

May I point you to the Oxfraud site, which Jonathan Bate [!] has called "marvellous"?

But really, some of these transcendent theorists exist in a realm beyond satire, like this genius, writing on Ben Jonson's praise of Shakespeare in the First Folio.


There are four 'Shakespeares' in the poem, four 'forth's', four 'for's' on each page, forty outsized fonts, unitalicized in a poem that is otherwise italicized.

Then for a check on randomness, try seventeen lines up from the end of the first page: "Thou art a Moniment, without a tombe." It is also the 22nd line from the beginning. Add 2+2=4=vier=Vere. We could go on for a hour.

The Jonson eulogy was set up as a hoax on the unknowing reader and a key to identifying the actual author for the knowing reader. But the hoax became politically convenient tradition and tradition became customary truth--like any unexamined belief system.

A final joke: Ben Jonson's closing salutation. 'Ben' is followed BY A FULL COLON, ad hoc, as though to say nota bene, pay attention. Then IO follows. IO in Italian sounds as E-O, the Earl of Oxford's initials. The literary allusions from Jonson's own epigrams continue in considerable depth, but that will do for notice that we are laughably gullible if we take this document at face value. Which is exactly what the prior reader has done, dignified contrived ambiguity as primary evidence. In other words, invested in a fallacy.
BY A FULL COLON!  You can't make this sh!t up.

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Good Quarto!

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Breath held

Gods willing and the press don't choke, there will be copies of Cry Murder! for sale at Readercon!  It took nine days from Hey, let's do this to the last few tweaks to the typography (moments ago).  I have made an offering to the gods of Xerography.

As soon as I have a finished cover, I will show you.  Can't wait!  I have the sketch by Kathleen Jennings, which is so fabulous that a friend wants it inked on her left shoulderblade.

Dizzy with joy and sleeplessness.

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"Vast inflatable characters were a regular feature of his shows . . ."

And speaking of Dionysiac, sovay just sent me this obit for Mark Fisher, mad genius of the rock'n'roll spectacular.

I had no idea.

I feel his detumescence earns a grander elegy.  Something like:

The crown o' the earth doth melt. Pink Floyd!
O, wither'd is the garland of the Stones,
The LED is blink'd: young op'ning acts
Are level now with gods; the stage is bare,
And there is nothing left remarkable
Behind the visiting stars.

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Brightness falls

Dionysos did the fireworks this year.  Imagine wine of these grapes!




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