Greer Gilman's Blog, page 69

Gaudeamus igitur!

There's a con in my backyard this weekend!  HRSFA's Vericon (small but perfectly formed) is always a delight.  Lovely, lively people this year as always:   N.K. Jemisin, Tamora Pierce, Jo Walton, and others.  I have a pleasant schedule:  and Sunday free to enjoy the glorious Sassafrass concert! and the charity auction.  Last year's was a spectacular piece of performance art by Ada Palmer, who managed to get Sotheby's-like bids for a /c/a/r/d/b/o/a/r/d/ /T/h/o/r/ /h/a/m/m/e/r/ Domination of the Nine Worlds.  This year's donations are amazing.  More modestly, I'm offering seven archival inkjet prints of my Cloudish artwork, signed.

Friday

7:00 pm-8:00 pm

Panel: Worldbuilding.

Speculative fiction often involves creating worlds that are to varying degrees, different from our own. How do writers work to create internally logical worlds? How do they incorporate elements of our world into their own creations? And when the other-worldly nature of their creations isn't necessarily made explicit, how do they manipulate our understanding of our own world to hint at fantastical, unreal elements?

Greer Gilman, N.K. Jemisin, Shira Lipkin

Saturday

10:30 am-Noon

Panel:  How are women portrayed in speculative fiction? How do authors develop characters, storylines, even worlds that can illustrate various understandings of female/feminine identity; that reinvent or redefine these identities, transgress outdated social norms, and even develop new prototypes for the female and the feminine?

Greer Gilman, N.K. Jemisin, Shira Lipkin, Jennifer Pelland, Tamora Pierce, Jo Walton

2:30-3:15 pm

Signing at Harvard Bookstore: Greer Gilman, Shira Lipkin, and Jennifer Pelland.

4:30 pm-5 pm

Reading:  Greer Gilman reads from "Cry Murder! In A Small Voice."

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A chance which does redeem all sorrows

Malala Yousafzai is back at school.  May all girls everywhere be free to learn.

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A Winter's Tale

I dare not hope; but I want a miracle.   After 23 years, the F.B.I. has a lead on the villains who despoiled the Gardner.  "The bureau said it believed it had figured out who pulled off a famous heist of 13 works of art, valued at up to $500 million, from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum."  I loved those paintings, and above all, that Vermeer.  It's broken my heart every time I've seen the empty frame in its old place.

Please let them find the paintings, unhurt.

I want to gaze in wonder as the curtain's drawn, to see those paintings, fresh as if the colors were not dry.  I want the lost queen to descend.

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Demi-puppets

Stumbled on an extraordinary architectural supply store online. Their stuff is composition or plaster; large parts of their PDF catalog looks as if it were issued in 1883. And their wares are fantastical: nymphs frolicking with garlands, owls, green men, griffins, sphinxes, sylvans, cherubs. It's like the world's strangest box of Legos, Edgewood edition.

I rather covet these demi-puppets. Wonder if they'd fit on my mantelpiece?








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Nymphes des bois

In celebration of the snow last week, I went with BBW to St. Paul's (the brick basilica down by the Cafe Pamplona) to hear a concert of polyphony.  Being Barb, she found a narrow doorway to a spiral stair to the choir loft, where we sat in perfect solitude, enraptured.  My heavens, the acoustics in that church are amazing.  The music was spectacular and flawlessly sung.  We were blown away.  Above all, by Josquin's La déploration de la mort de Johannes Ockeghem ("Nymphes des bois, déeses des fontaines..."), and by Spem in Alium, Thomas Tallis's 40-part motet:  eight choirs of five voices.  (And you thought, say, a crown of sonnets, or a double sestina was complex.)  Did you know that Sylvia Townsend Warner edited that music?  Gorgeous textures:  mazes, and a sort of shearing discord, and spikes of sheer seraphic purity.  I sat there and thought of circumhorizontal arcs and Orazio in Venice.

They did "Lay a garland on my hearse" for an encore.

Ice cream afterward, and conversation.

Bliss.

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Slush ado

Just emptied a pint of water out of either boot.  Love snow.  Hate gutterslush.

It's been a fine busy week:  I wrote two rants for Small Beer Press on my 1603 mystery (with faerie interludes); revised the ten-minute play (an alchemical Tempest set in Connecticut, 1646) I wrote with negothick on another snowy evening, in Westerly (thanks, csecooney ! for a brilliant party); I designed a mantelpiece; ate cucumber sandwiches and my own chocolate cake with rushthatspeaks and gaudior , sovay , and tilivenn , in quiet celebration; rejoiced with derspatchel and sovay on their engagement (aww).

And I'm about to slosh out again, to hear a performance of Thomas Tallis' 40-Part motet, as edited by Sylvia Townsend Warner.  BBW is meeting me:  there will be ice cream afterward, and pictures of her gallant crocuses, whelmed in snow.

There's a good conversation going on at Myth Happens, about Much Ado.  Digging about in my desktop, I've found my review of a May 2005 performance under the elms in Harvard Yard.  They'd need boots and umbrellas now.  Enter the Watch, with shovels.

As it turned out, it was a fine Much Ado--a little ragged
about the edges, but well played. The director--a recent
graduate--did beautiful work with her gang of students.
Though it was billed as a staged reading, they acted without
book, and made free and confident use of their space: the
portico and steps of Mem. Church, with all the spring
blooming and twittering about their heads, and the audience
as arbor.

A good Benedick. His beard remained unshaven, but his
bearing changed. I could have wished that Beatrice had
showed a little more flash and sparkle in her opening
scenes, but she took fire: by "kill Claudio" she was
ablaze. A slow kindler, I guess. The whole "looks not like
a nuptial" scene was uncommonly effective; the grief and
anger of the women, almost Greek. Leonato was good; and the
Prince, handed the mitten, seemed genuinely wistful.

Nice touch: the watch were played by Beatrice, Hero, and
Ursula in cloaks, so they got to act their own Furies.

Oddly enough, this may have been the best Dogberry and
Verges I've seen. They're usually tedious, and not at all
brief. This Dogberry was a large fair curly-headed fellow,
like a poleaxed Bobby Shaftoe, and filled with the most
pinkly innocent complacency, plump and fragile, like a
balloon at the crotch. And neighbor Verges, Armin to his
Kemp, was played by a slip of a bitter-chocolate boy named
Krishna something. He was like a cross between Baldrick and
Ariel, with a dash of Titania's changeling boy: fool and
familiar, fiery steed, jade, crony, catamite, daw, and dog.
A lovely performance. Not all in the text: but it had that
shiver of the uncanny that you find in inspired clowning. I
would love to see him play a string of Shakespeare's
slighter fools.

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Moonrise and the Pleiades

All joy to sovay and derspatchel !

With much love from

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Harbinger

Huzzah!

London, 1603. Ben Jonson, playwright, poet, satirist . . . detective?
Someone is murdering choir boys and Jonson, in the way that only Greer
Gilman could write him—"Fie, poetastery."—is compelled to investigate.

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Mahvellous, dahling

A cold and sleety weekend, with two interludes of theatrical lunacy.  On Saturday, negothick and I went to csecooney 's fabulous playwriting party, and scribbled like maniacs, giggling.  We all read our efforts aloud, and you never heard four such glorious rigamaroles.  I felt like Jo March at a picnic.

On Sunday, I came back to see The Glass Menagerie at the A.R.T., right in my backyard.

Zachary Quinto as Tom had a face like a frost-bitten parsnip, long and scarecrow-sharp and blackavised.  Excellent sardonic performance.  A furious refusal to grieve, bottling huge internal damage;  sparks glittering from cracks.  I was picking up little flashes of gay in his frustration--there was an instant in one of his "yes, the movies" rants when he became Garbo in a silvery sheath evening gown, merely through body language.

Their Amanda, the redoubtable Cherry Jones, had an awful cold, dampening her resonances--and very slightly, her rhythms--in the first act.  There were nano-flubs, as if her stuffed head had muffled her timing.  A great pity, as she rises to a thing of pity and terror in the second act, a Moloch of Motherness..  (I think she must have stuck her head in a samovar in the intermission.)  Not willowy, this faded belle:  she's like Margaret Dumont in mothballs.  Her flounces are appalling.

Celia Keenan-Bolger played Laura's frailty as stiffness, as if her soul were in an iron brace.  That dress her mother gussied her up in was a derision, drooping and fluttering from her rigid body like a bag blown onto an aerial.  When the Gentleman Caller pats the floor for her sit by him, she goes down like spaghetti into boiling water, minimally pliant.

Of course, the Gentleman Caller is something of a thankless part.  (Hi, I'm commonplace and cheerful and callow, and I'll have to shatter your unicorn.)  Brian J. Smith was what it says on the tin.  Mind you, a fine fresh brand of GC.  You'd hire him.

Watching this time, I felt that Tony Kushner must have studied hell out of this play:  that cross-hatch of lyricism and painful comedy.

Beautifully directed.

And a notably excellent set:  two hexagons of shabby apartment, large and small; a fire escape spiralling into infinity; a moon in water.

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Heavens!

I so love this little toy.  Happy 540th birthday to the cosmoclast, Nicolaus Copernicus!

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