Greer Gilman's Blog, page 70

"...the crows took up into the air..."

Lal Waterson (15 February 1943 - 4 September 1998)

Nine 

Now with added strangeness

Like this?

"A boy player in Shakespeare’s company is dead. The coroner has ruled it suicide. But two unlikely sleuths—the rival playwright Ben Jonson and the dead boy’s loving friend—cry murder. Their investigations lead them from the alleys of London to the sinister and brilliant realm of Venice, and deep into the corridors of privilege. Old secrets are revealed: by Shakespeare’s Fool; by a Venetian singer, long ago a lord’s toy and his captive. Ben—blunt, quarrelsome, a branded ex-felon—wants justice. His partner wants revenge. Others, of a greener world, would make them puppets of its own designs. And perhaps the boy who plays women is not what he seems."

Or "of a stranger world"?

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Murder, she wrote

I need a hundred-word thumbnail for the Jacobean story. Would this do?

"A boy player in Shakespeare’s company is dead. The coroner has ruled it suicide. But two unlikely sleuths--the rival playwright Ben Jonson and the dead boy’s loving friend--cry murder. Their investigations lead them from the back streets of London to the sinister and brilliant world of Venice, and deep into the corridors of privilege. Old secrets are revealed: by Shakespeare’s Fool; by a Venetian singer, long ago a lord’s toy and his captive. Ben--blunt, quarrelsome, a branded ex-felon--wants justice. His partner wants revenge. And perhaps the boy who plays women is not what he seems."

Can anyone do that in one sentence for an elevator pitch? I've just been using "A Jacobean revenge procedural: Ben Jonson, PI," but perhaps that's too allusive for the suits.

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Light is the left hand of darkness

This storm; another.

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There is beauty in the bellow of the blast

Cutting up something fierce out there.  It stings.

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Act of Providence

As negothick reminds me, it is 35 years since the Great Blizzard of 1978, from which the Buttery was born.  Conceived in a whirlwind!

I loved that blizzard.  What I remember is a carless city, with the snow deep enough to bury them; the snow sculptures looking like jade and carnelian, opal and ivory:  a city of kings; and the army come to plow us out on fabulous machines like cyberstoats the size of houses.

Is it not passing brave to be a king,
And ride in triumph through Persepolis?

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"Was ever woman in this humour woo'd?"

Now here is Richard III in the grand old Henry Irving style, as painted by the ever-glorious Edward Austin Abbey.  No expense spared on the pageantry.  But why is that fop in the margin wearing scarlet to a funeral?  If needed for the composition, why a popinjay?  Why not a prelate?




Abbey also gave us the ultimate Goth Hamlet, otherwise known as Ophelia's date from Hell.  Note the fuchsia cross-gartering, the boneless grovel, and the emo gaze; note her limp hand captured and her doe-in-the-headlights dismay.  Abbey's heroines should start a support group.




Captions, anyone?

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Was this the face?

Fascinating and infuriating.  The BBC has posted quite a bonny facial reconstruction done from Richard III's skull.  Quoth the project's Ricardian, "It doesn't look like the face of a tyrant. I'm sorry but it doesn't."  Of course it bloody well doesn't—this is PR as well as science, and they've taken pains to give him a pleasant expression for the cameras.  Skulls don't have faint smiles and fresh complexions.  And anyway, what does a tyrant look like?  Could she pick one from a line-up?  It's the belief in physiognomy as destiny that made me hurl The Daughter of Time across the room, forty-some years ago, and jump upon it howling.

I am all for a re-evaluation of the last Plantagenet; but I would not be at all surprised to find him a rather good king who valiantly overcame his disability and did away with his nephews for the benefit of state and self.  In short, a mess like the rest of us, not the god of Yorkist idolatry, a white rose unblemished.  Not that I admire Henry VII either, though I'd hate to have lost his son's daughter, that magnificent, unpleasant Queen.

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I am I

Richard III!

And wasn't that a beautiful piece of interdisciplinary sleuthing?

Next, please heaven, Cardenio.

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Quickening

"Alone the green girl rises, breaking from her bark of night. She flowers,
starry from the wood, whitenaked. Light of darkness, spring of winter:
over and again reborn as Ashes of herself, of Annis. Greenfoot in the snow
she passes, white in whiter mist. At every step a green blade springs.
Her wake is light."

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