Greer Gilman's Blog, page 68

Out of the running

Above all:  I am very glad indeed to hear from my Boston friends.  I hope all are well.  My thoughts go out to those--athletes, onlookers, family, and friends--who are not.

And now in my shock I realize that I've always linked this race with feminism.  I remember when the big security issue of the Marathon was women sneaking in to run illegally. We thronged the road at Wellesley, cheering madly, wildly blowing on our horns and conches, dancing like maenads.  A friend's mother was the second ever to win the women's race:  by stealth.  It took her years to get her place in the official record books.  And I happened to be passing a flat screen in 1996 when the unwell Uta Pippig went into hyperdrive.  I remember the look on her face as she turned back--astonishment and exultation--and the blood and shit running down her legs.

Horrible to have those memories overlaid with fear.

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ETA:  The last mile was dedicated to the Newtown victims.  Their families were there.  Dear gods.

Silver and tin...

Twenty-five years and day.  Last night, I uncovered an ancient photocopy of the New Yorker article on mad Oxfordians that set me off on quarter-century rampage of glee and wrath.   The "irk in the oystershell," as I said of another tale.  And I did in the end get a story from it, though perhaps not a pearl.  If it is one, black and baroque.

...and pure gold.

Heard an evening of radio plays by the glorious Post-Meridian gang.  Them! is a tour-de-force of straight-faced fifties kitsch (with .... mandibles); derspatchel 's Crisis of the Cuddlykins is divinely demented.  Last chance to catch them is next Sunday at the MIT Museum.

(And isn't Responsible Grace a wonderful name for a church?)

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And a dignified finish ...

The late Mrs. Thatcher, in the words of the immortal Lal Waterson:

Dancing to Hilda's cabinet band
Doing the one where you never turn around
Up the hall slowly, down the hall fast
And a dignified finish on your arse

Put your right boot in, put it in again
Poll tax your girl in the middle of the ring
Privatize your partner, do it on your own
Kick the smallest one among you, promenade home

Swing your lady half a mile up the center aisle
Wage cut your neighbour, do it with a smile
Bow to the caller, dozie-dole the men
And deregulate the couple at the bottom end

Underneath the arches, make yourself at home
Walls made of cardboard, beds made of stone
Penny on the water, twopence on the sea
And threepence on the roundabout and round go we

(Recorded in 1990 by the ever-glorious Watersons for the BBC Northwest documentary, Hard Cash)

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Buz, buz!

Can't wait for this book on the authorship imbroglio, out later this month.  Shakespeare Beyond Doubt, Cambridge University Press.  Just look at that list of contributors!

Meanwhile, the Guardian thread rages on, like a swarm of demented hornets at a picnic, fighting for a jar of jam.

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ETA:  There will be a webinar on Friday 26 April at 6.30 pm (British Time), with Wells, Edmondson, and Ros Barber, author of The Marlowe Papers: A Novel in Verse.

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Beyond bizarre

Jeremy Irons objects to gay marriage.  What in hell is he smoking?

"Tax-wise, it's an interesting one, because, you see, could a father not marry his son?"

Say what?  Mother can't marry their sons, nor fathers their daughters.  There are laws.

"It's not incest between men. Incest is there to protect us from inbreeding. But men don't breed, so incest wouldn't cover that. So if I wanted to pass on my estate without death duties I could marry my son and pass on my estate to him."

At least Derek Jacobi's Oxfordian lunacy hurts no one living.

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So maybe I'll see you there

Last night I got to see the NT* broadcast of People, Alan Bennett's new play.

Lady Dorothy Stacpoole, the redoubtable Frances de la Tour in a rumpsprung, motheaten mink and wellingtons, crouches in her mouldering stately home in South Yorkshire, surrounded by abandoned coal mines, and shuddering with earthquakes.  It will never quite tip into the abyss.  It is everything I've dealt with in the last three years, only grander and crazier--at least I don't have a closet full of archival pisspots with the dregs of luminaries' urine.  Or Henry VIII's rosary mended with a luggage tag.  Or a cat bowl worth a continent.  (More's the pity.)  The house is bloody cold, unplumbed, torrentially leaky—there's a hipbath on the billiard table, catching the downpour-—and rotting away.  Dot's sister, a bossy archdeacon, with a channel-swimming girlfriend named Guthrie ("Still breasting the billows?"), wants to give it to the National Trust and be done with it.  Dotty loathes the idea of being prettified into Heritage, of being on exhibit to the hordes of people tramping through.  She wants to die there; she wants to sell the damned stuff for a mess of pottage and an en suite bathroom.  Her companion Iris--a little goblin-backed woman in a shapeless cardigan--knits and comments.  She has the full moon's pie-faced innocence (if the old moon wore barrettes in his wispy hair).  She's a little simple; she's piercingly straightforward; she's something more than a companion:  half servant, half sister.  Sometimes she and Dotty sing old pop songs together, and dance with abandon.

They are visited by a smarmy auctioneer, by a blithering NT** liaison, and by a porn film crew that wants a poster bed.  (And at the crucial moment, by a shortsighted bishop.)  That last group are revivifying.  They're kind:  the costume girl gives the ladies lotion and shampoo; the nice gay grip (who adores Dotty's old Schiaparellis and Balenciagas) fixes the boiler.  Bath time!  Bliss!  She takes to swanning about in her vintage outfits.  Iris is enraptured when the star drops his trousers, amazed as any baby at a jack-in-the-box.

It's not a perfect play. It's lopsided.  Some of satire slaps too hard; some of the bubbles don't break from the pipe but froth a little and splutter.  But O! what effortless Englishry!  What mastery of jackstraw conversation, all at angles to itself--tangential, fragile, acerbic.  What characters!  What quirks!

And the actors--above all, the silly sisters, Dotty and Iris--are magnificent.

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*National Theatre

**National Trust

Unlost

Wow.  They've found a fragment of Cardenio, a page cut round for baking pies on, up in Cumbria.

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The Hurdy-Gurdy man...

Is in the Square.  Spring is here.

In the long light, the children hunt eggs in the old burying ground:




And hey, swell news:  fjm and chilperic 's magisterial Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature (for which I wrote a chapter on language), has been nominated for a Hugo!  Congratulations to all who worked on this:  a true labour of love.

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The Cloud Appreciation Society

Not my heterocosm, but a glorious timeloft.

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Congenial

Had a lovely time at Vericon--which like my beloved Small Beer Press, should be "tiny, but celebrated."

To begin with, I had ashnistrike and S staying in the library, so there were civilized breakfast conversations (and fabulous brioche*) at Hi-Rise.

The Friday night panel on worldbuilding turned out to be just the excellent N. K. Jemisin and me (sadly, shadesong could not be there), so we set out to build a world with the audience.  Tremendous fun!  All together, we came up with a world divided between caffeine-non-responders and hypersensitives.  The Serenes are our priestly soldier caste, whose rites (something like a tea ceremony) were made to display their sublime detachment from the ecstasies of earth; they control resources and production.  Their working class, the Jitters, crave the product that they grow and are denied.  Their cult is ecstatic, and their saints die in prophetic frenzies.  All very silly and simplistic; but we did get to talk about the basics--economics, sociology, religion, ecology--and to sketch three or four possible plots that might arise from these circumstances.  I liked the coffee bears, which Serenes must slay with jade knives, single-handed, as a rite of passage:  I said they must be cappuccino-colored, with cream swirls.

Saturday morning's panel on Feminism in Speculative Fiction was headlong, fierce, earthy, and hilarious.  Once or twice a chariot wheel went over the edge, but we never plunged down the precipice.  ( papersky drives well.)  What was coolest, I thought, was the generational aspect:  we had come to feminism from the sixties--maybe fifties, if you count our childhoods--onward, and with stories of our mothers and grandmothers, with the responses of the largely young audience--first wave, second, third, and fourth--there was a tremendous oceanic sense of onsurge and recoil (with attendant rocks and whirlpools), and resurgence.  Exhilarating.

There were no books in stock for my signing (an oversight and apologies); far better, three young women came up to me with well-read copies (two Cloud & Ashes, one Moonwise)--and one gave me a translation of a Russian poem that she had done and illustrated.  It made her think of Cloud.  O my.

A small personal satisfaction:  three of my prints sold in the silent auction.

And I gave my best reading yet of "Cry Murder!"  All the panels were in a Victorian classroom--a toy amphitheatre with lovely acoustics**--truly a performance space.  So I hammed it to the hilt.  And to what an audience!  Of scholars, poets, students: listening and applauding.  (I got a laugh at the line, "O rare Tisiphone!"  How cool is that?)  The queer thing was that my Oxfordian was there (it's her beloved con as well, her alma mater).  Heaven knows what she thought or felt.  I was not kind to the god of her idolatry.  But she sat and took notes, and asked only when the book would come out.  If challenged, I would have said that many others have written speculative fiction about Oxford; only mine is not billed as biography.   I suspect there will be a campaign against it.

Most glorious of all:  Sassafrass came and sang in my living room last night, from the creation in ice and fire to the shadow of Ragnarök, the coming wolf.  In my house (which yet stands) were Loki and Odin, Baldur and Hella, Frigga, Snorri, and the Seeress.  Ragged at times--with only four singers, they were taking parts they'd never done--they gave some of the starkest, most austerely passionate readings of the songs I've heard.  It was like going into the roofbeams with a flickering torch, and seeing how the structure holds.  And Thrud, as architect-composer, sang for us their leitmotifs.  The four singing were Thrud, rushthatspeaks , gaudior , and tilivenn .  We five that were listening were me, papersky , rysmiel , and R, with Thrud's dad.  Nine weaving.

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*Even their butter pats are artisanal.

**And Inquisitional seats.