Greer Gilman's Blog, page 67

Spring

Oh, I do like Cambridge in May.  I just stepped across the way to breathe the lilacs and the apple blossom, now in perfect bloom; and came in with a young woman holding her new-made doctoral gown.  Roots, flowers, and fruition.

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Contemplation

O my!  This year's Readercon looks to be blissful.  Just leafing through the panel sign-up, I've been smiling--I'm going to need three of me to hear it all.

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Watered silk

I would love the kimono--or the hangings.

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Coming along

How are the proportions?  Should the top shelf be a little thicker?




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A branch of May

Heavens!  A sublimely beautiful morning.  These are for Marian.






Nymphs...



...and shepherds.  Brueghel in Arcadia.





Sunrise at the river




Hermes' bicycle



The joy of battle



Merry and Pippin have a go (no strings attached)




Unite and unite...



Swan brother

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Tochter aus Elysium!

It being such a lightstruck, lifting day, I thought I'd walk down to Mount Auburn Cemetery for a breath of spring.  All very green and birdy:  life in death.  As I came along to the pond reflecting Mary Baker Eddy's pretty temple to herself, I heard another sort of voice, plaintive and wavering, amid the brisk birds.  Someone unseen, standing in the little round temple, had a violin and was playing Beethoven's "Ode to Joy," very slowly and haltingly.  A note, a phrase, a fumble; over again; that phrase twice, got it; now a little further, halt; a line; and just as I came up, they played the whole beginning through and departed.  If on wings, I didn't see.

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Little eyases!

Shakespeare's Globe is setting up a company of child players (boys and girls) to do Jacobean drama.  They will open with The Malcontent.  Gorgeous!  (And seriously, I have really got to get to The Duchess of Malfi, done by candlelight.)

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Mad about the boy

And a happy approximate 449th birthday to Will of Stratford!

My copy of Shakespeare Beyond Doubt is winging its way. I am reading two beautiful and complementary books on Shakespeare and the things of his world, cataloging an exhibition at the British Museum:  Neil MacGregor's Shakespeare's Restless World and Jonathan Bate and Dora Thornton's Shakespeare: Staging the World.  I so wish I could have seen the show they celebrate.  (Did you know that James VI & I owned a suit of samurai armor?)  The Actors' Shakespeare Project is doing Pericles now, so I may yet obliterate the memory of the one at Adams House, an atrocity that would have made even Darren Nichols cringe.   (The relief of the famine at Tarsus was done by putting a Poptart in a microwave and waiting through an endless minute of its revolutions for the ding.  So clever.)  And by happenstance, the next book in my grand sweep though the Golden Age of murder turns out to be a Shakespeare mystery:  Ngaio Marsh's Killer Dolphin.

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"...alive, conscious, captured...”

Let's hope he talks.

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ETA: What struck me is that he was found because the lockdown was lifted: someone went outside and saw blood on the boat cover. I had thought he might have crawled away somewhere to die. Also striking: the brothers appeared to have had no strategy whatever. They just hung around until their pictures were posted, then went berserk.

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The only fear and terror of the world

Tamerlan.  Great Jove, the world just went SF.  A nightmare and a twisted dream.

I'm fine.  I stayed up far too late watching this unfold online, and then got waked by a string of anxious calls.  There are sirens out there.

I have tea and books and Wifi; remarkably, I have half a cold chicken, chutney, salad greens, and Tosci's ice cream.  I can sit this out.

All of you:  be safe and well.

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