Greer Gilman's Blog, page 7

That skull had a tongue in it, and could sing once

The psychopomp beckoned...

sovay   (who is rightly the poetry editor) asked me for a poem for  The Deadlands, a new "monthly speculative fiction magazine, exploring all aspects of Death and the borders it shares with the living."  So I wrote one.  Or rather, I said at once that I'd love to, but I can't write poetry.  Then toward dawn, I switched off the light and and the first lines happened.  This is vanishingly rare:  you will probably see more spectres in your lifetime than published lyric poetry by me.  My last effort was in 1994.

I join a company of spirits.  So far, the contributing poets with me are M.J. Cunniff, Shweta Narayan, s.j. bagley, Romie Stott, Marissa Lingen, Mike Allen, R.B. Lemberg, Jeannelle M. Ferreira, Gwynne Garfinkle, Zin E. Rocklyn, Gemma Files, Erik Amundsen, Mat Joiner, Leah Bobet, C.S.E. Cooney, Carlos Hernandez, and Bogi Takács. As sovay   has just written, "These are people who know from ghosts, grief, bones, and boundary-crossing."

Besides sovay  , the sextons are Sean Markey, Elise Tobler, David Gilmore, Brandon O'Brien, and Cory Skerry,

Pomp needs circumstances, so give here to see the undead rise and walk.

Mourners, you can make this happen!

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Aries

That wizard of design at Liberty has outdone himself with their 2021 spring list.

I’ve had my eye on the “Story Map of France” since it previewed in February: a pleasant picture, as full of whimsies as a Christmas pudding is of plums.





That mermaid! That sea serpent! Jeanne d’Arc! The Three Musketeers! Napoleon! And is that Jean-Jacques Rousseau seated on an invisible green bank?



Then came “Hawaiian Islands”—not as pretty a picture, to my mind, but the cut is a tour de force. There’s barely an inch that isn’t whimsical.








And just yesterday they unveiled “Leopard.” Not quite fallen for the picture: I love the celestial aspect; pity about the pink.




But O my! Just look at this cut! Those “zippers” tell me it transforms (like “The Hunt”)



—and certainly, the two halves of that glorious sun must somehow reunite. I adore the planets and the mazes, and I'm deeply curious about the metamorphosis.




My number should come up any day now. The queue is dwindled now to 27 business days (down from 58 or 59). I suppose I could chose one and then another? Which leaves my whole longstanding wishlist still ungotten.

Chris Wirth, their founder, gave a Zoom talk on “The History and Theory of the Jigsaw Puzzle,” under the auspices of (heaven help us) the San Diego Mensa. He was inspired by a fabulous inheritance from his great-aunts of 35 Falls Puzzles, handcut in the 1930s by Mary Belle Jones of Chagrin Falls, Ohio. (Her husband rubber-stamped the figure pieces; their children made and unmade the puzzles as quality control.) The Windsors discovered them andtook them up (which I don’t hold against the artisans), and made them a craze,

Wirth said that Liberty unthinkingly left their online shop open the first weekend of the lockdown, and came back on Monday to find the great pandemic puzzle rush in full flood, with a 30,000-puzzle order backlog. Their factory can turn out 500 a day. They had to halt ordering from March until May, which is when I came in.

They would love to get back to giving factory tours: they used to save the whimsies from flawed puzzles to give out to children. Aww.

It sounds as if they have just the one genius puzzle designer. May the heavens keep him well.

And meanwhile, Artifact’s stock has burgeoned, with lovely offerings, new and revived. A year ago, they had just three or four in stock.

This Odilon Redon was the last one I completed.




Isn't this cut pretty!




I love how the fierce little warrior is held in the moon-curve of the vase, and how one black flower is a crow.

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Dew from the still-vaxxed Bermoothes

Second shot!

It was such a fine spring day that I walked there and back, almost to Alewife Brook, a minute or two quicker than Gmaps said I would. A very pleasant stretch of the avenue, past saris and socks and artisanal ice cream and crockery and vintage clothes and origami papers.  There was a slight figure in the doorway of a CBD shop, proffering cups of something-or-other.  Alice, Ariel; Ariel, Alice.

Waiting out my two weeks, hoping that I will be safe to play indoors with Fox (he would love to spend time with my Munch inflatable, whom he's named "Worry Man"), and browse in a few of those shops.  Bookstores, ho!

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“Mars is a rock - cold, empty, almost airless, dead. Yet it’s heaven in a way."

Nasa has unofficially named the touchdown site of the Mars rover Perseverance after Octavia E. Butler.  Her place in the errant stars joins Bradbury Landing.

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Metamorphosis

No one else has this puzzle: it is unique. I had it done maybe twenty years ago from a photo of mine, taken in a bluebell wood beloved of DWJ. That was a magical hour.

But when the puzzle came from Wentworth, I was disappointed. The pieces all looked far too pale and blurry, and the scant handful of whimsies were ludicrously feeble—a cricket bat, I ask you! A toy car!  Discouraged, I put it away. I didn’t want a pale shadow of a numinous memory, so I kept not doing it. And even in this last year of intense puzzling, I would rattle the red box and set it aside.

But just now I had a few days, waiting for the next parcels from the puzzle club, so I thought I’d fit it in. And like an unregarded chrysalis, it hatched. It's a morpho.

Yes, the whimsies are still cartoonishly puny—anyone for tennis? Yes, the pieces don’t interlock, and atomize at the merest brush of a sleeve. But the pallor in the individual pieces is a scattering effect, like taking just one teaspoonful of colored water from a jar. As the image grew, it saturated. I could swear there was depth in the landscape. The photo's still blown up a little more than is optimum, but viewed at a proper distance, it’s pleasantly impressionstic. And the cut is quite good—fiendish even—with those interlocking circles and a great many false edges.






As I worked and it grew on me, I started worrying that I’d lost pieces—you know, that thing where the sort of teakettle piece that goes right there eludes all searches, and turns out to be two quite other shapes. I didn’t want want it to be marred in the restoration.

In the end, it was all there, and it took me back to the morning of the world.







I love the way the leafing branches float like clouds, above the air-sea of the flowers.

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I can dream...

Someone bought a 15th-century Ming bowl for $35 at a yard sale in Connecticut. I'd have a hard time parting with that beauty...

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Virtual unfolding

Fascinating!  Archivists can now read unopened 17th-century letters without breaking the seal.

Reminds me of the recent work on protein folding.

I wish I had that sort of brain, but I'm hopeless at spatial skills.

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Divine Presence To Be Shot

Vaxxed!

Pfizer. Second shot scheduled in three weeks exactly.

Still can't believe my great good fortune.

The week before last, the whole scheduling system went under. Occasionally, a spar would drift by: a single appointment, say, at dawn in Deerfield (100 miles away in the Berkshires, and I have no car). This last Thursday, I started hunting at midnight. Nothing showed up until 8, and when I pounced, they vanished.

At elevenish, having spent 3 hours in the Kafkaesque maze that is the Massachusetts vaccination site, mocked by phantom appointments and randomly thrown into a "waiting area" with queues of up to 15,000 minutes (not joking), I gave up and lay down. Half an hour later, Beth Israel Lahey pinged me with an invitation. Could I do Monday? At 3? On my street? (All right, nearly two miles up my street, but still...)

Hell yes!

I have no idea how BILH got my name. They're part of the Byzantine complex of health facilities associated with my former employer, but I haven't met with any doctors there. I'll call it a miracle and leave it at that.

The blessed rushthatspeaks gave me a lift. I could have walked, but I rejoiced in their company: this was a rite of passage.

All very orderly and cheerful at the clinic, with balloons. I remarked on the administering nurse's cap, tie-dyed with paw-prints all over it. She said she was retiring as an OB to breed German short-hairs. "From babies to puppies."

An older patient, who must have been having her second shot, was asking: Can I really have a friend over? "For Scrabble and tea?"

Waiting afterwards to make sure I wasn't going into anaphylaxis (I wasn't), I watched this flash mob. A peaceful, joyful, singing crowd—what could be less like 2020?




I hope that all of you, your friends and families, will get your turns, as quickly as possible.  To arms!

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Tray bon

Now that I feel up to reading more intently, I’ve been puzzling less. Still, I’m a member in good standing of the Hoefnagel Wooden Puzzle Club (which has a very large and varied library, mostly Artifact, but with some jigsaws from Liberty, Peaceful, and assorted handcutters); still getting a new Liberty whenever my number comes up (every two months or so), and a new Artifact when a really pretty one, like “The Unicorn in Captivity,” comes back into print. I’ve done over 23,000 pieces since May.

Strangely enough, despite all that practice, I’ve never found a truly comfortable set up.

Having started in a tucked-away underbed drawer (cats, child), I quickly acquired a big puzzle board with a parapet and sorting drawers; then another, as the antlered Hunt and the Map of Florence wouldn’t fit on just one. And the thing about a board on a table is that it takes up the whole damned table, and you’re either standing and stooping or sitting and craning. The light on mine isn’t optimal either.

I’ve thought of all sort of solutions. An architect’s chair? A coffee table? Expensive, uncertain, and the goddesses know I don’t need more furniture in here. Stacking books underneath the board, to bring it up under my short-sighted nose? Precarious. As for the light, this sort of work needs a flood not a spot. You don't want that piece you're looking for to be in the penumbra. A new standard lamp? See above, under expense, overcrowding. Or I could rearrange the entire room to bring the table under an overhead and closer to the window? No way. Besides, that does nothing for the ergonomics.

The way I really like to do close work–like writing, drawing, sewing, puzzling—is on my lap. So I’ve taken to doing sections of puzzles in the sorting drawers, in my nice comfy well-lighted armchair. A few puzzles are small enough to fit inside a drawer; others will only just fit on the flip side of a drawer, in imminent danger of sliding off and losing pieces. Anything larger, I have to do as patchwork, bringing finished sections to the board and transferring them: an awkward, fiddly, risky process. Puzzle crumbles worse than piecrust. Lillian Gilbreth would have had a conniption.

I thought of and rejected those bed tables with fold-down legs: they’re not quite big enough for the puzzles in my queue, and can’t be turned portrait.  The puzzle boards with legs I've seen tend to be spindly and overpriced, and too wide for my chair.

Then on Saturday, I discovered Ottoman Trays. Doesn’t that sound impressive? The chichi ones in rare woods are quite popular on wedding registries. I got one in bamboo: very light, very pretty, and twice the size of the sorting drawers. It came on Monday, and it’s brilliant! It fits on my knees, with a corner resting on—of course—my ottoman. I can turn it easily to any angle. And most puzzles that I do—not all—will fit entirely within it.





Two puzzles, two days. Whee!

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Unlocking the library door

This will be an untidy parcel of a post, like a bundle sent to a kid at college with all the unpackable oddments she'd left behind, and a tin of cookies to share, and new trinkets.

The title was inspired by this passage from Sylvia Townsend Warner's letters, which came into my head today, and had to be hunted down.

To George Plank 7:iv:1961

"You have the nicest hand with a parcel. I can’t think of anyone to match you in parcelling except perhaps Henry Tilney, to whom I attribute all the graces. Mr Knightley’s parcels would never come undone, true; but think of all the paper & string involved. Elinor had to do up all Edward’s: Edward required a good deal of buttoning and unbuttoning, though she enjoyed his dependence on her: the butler did all Marianne’s & Colonel Brandon’s. Mr Darcy did exactly three parcels a year, for Lizzy’s birthday, for New Year’s day, & for their wedding anniversary. The product was excellent, but he took hours to achieve it. And locked the library door."

That was a splendid Boskone! Zoom actually worked, mostly smoothly, though three of us panelists—me, Brother Guy Consolmagno, and Brenda Clough—were nearly locked out of virtual room in the very last hour of the con. Fortunately, we did squeak in, and had a fabulous talk with Faye Ringel on the "Medieval Milieu."  Every age knows that it's modern times, love it or loathe it.  I recalled my favorite howler from a medieval-ish fantasy:  their sacramental noonday meal was called "midden."  What in hell was their editor smoking?  My conversation with Michael Swanwick on "The Lonely and the Rum" was a joy, an exhilaration like dancing on the high wire with a tea tray on my head, and not falling off. "Inventing New Folklore" was a lower-key pleasure. I told Ronald Hutton's story about a folklorist upbraiding the Teaser in the Padstow Oss procession: he wasn't performing as her theory of the ritual ordained, so he was Doing It All Wrong.  That's a high cultural crime.  The cool thing about invented myth and folklore is that the author's mad theories are true for that world.  If you like, The White Goddess can be their physics textbook. 

There were many lively, even brilliant, panels, and with no divertissements like hallway chats, the dealers' room, or the art show, I listened in to something just about every hour of the con, sometimes jigsaw-puzzling as I listened. Nice to be able to get tea for myself whenever I liked. Wonderful to see people from all over the world: Gill Pollack from Canberra, Aliette de Bodard from Paris. She led a lovely meet for fountain-pen aficionados. E. C. Ambrose gave an excellent talk on the history of astronomical devices, from prehistory to Galileo, from all over the globe. The panels are still up for members of the con to stream, and I immediately went and heard Faye Ringel's talk on New England vampires that was scheduled opposite my Swanwick conversation.  I am so enjoying the luxury of seeing all that I missed, at my leisure. A con without those difficult choices—if I go to X, I'll be missing Y—has been an unexpected perk.

A dozen of my classmates from my college dorm met this afternoon, from as far away as Abu Dhabi. Women from the Seven Sisters rock! This is the class that chose Shirley Chisholm as our commencement speaker. This is a school that believes in service. Out of that small group, one is a middle-grades social-studies and science teacher, doing both virtual and live classes; one has spent a lifetime working for Native American peoples as a clinical psychologist and policy maker; one is an Episcopal priest deeply involved in social justice (she worked with one of the earliest AIDS ministries); one is an ACLU lawyer under serious threat; and one NP came out of retirement, and has given so many hundreds of vaccinations this month that her thumbs are bandaged.  Just a nice bunch of women.

Afterward, I took a walk in the snow and sun.  Raven Books was all but empty when I passed by this afternoon (there's often a queue, so I window-gaze wistfully), so I stuck my doubly masked face in, and at once spotted a copy of Magika Hiera: Ancient Greek Magic & Religion. Snapped that one up like a duck on a junebug.

Oh la la! Just look at this new Liberty puzzle, a Story Map of France. Fabulous whimsies!



Of course, it debuted a week after my number came up, so it had to go on my impossibly long wishlist.  What sang to me this time was Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose. Much as I love winter, that day my boots were wet through, and I wanted a secret garden.




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