Greer Gilman's Blog, page 75

Archaeomythopoesis

From one of my hoards, an unremembered drawing.  I wonder what her story is.  Can you tell me?





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The Cartography of the Imagination

These maps are marvellous.

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And on the 777th day, she rested...

A self-portrait done at Cambridge in 1976, and the story of my life.  Someday soon, I will fall into an Aunt-Dahlia-shaped armchair with a cup of tea and exist.

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Down the Wall...

...is up in lights, over at Weird Fiction Review.  It's great to see it in print again, above all in such excellent company.  If you missed it the first time round, it's my post-apocalyptic Cloudish story, of children in a city under godblitz.

"Be sure to read it out loud," say the editors.

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Devoted to bread and butter

To christen my newly-revised sittingroom, I gave an impromptu tea party for an old friend, a scholar of Asian art.  We had egg-and-cress sandwiches with chèvre, lemon curd cake, plum tart, a small dense chocolate cake (that's it in the eggcup)--all from the obliging bakery up the street--and the last of this season's raspberries, with a good vanilla-bean ice cream.  The tea was Darjeeling, by Taylor's of Harrogate.  The conversation was excellent.

You can't quite see the pattern in the napkin, but there are dancing maidens damasked in the cloth.  "The Nine!" I said when I discovered them:  eleven napkins, and much later and elsewhere, the tablecloth.  Serendipity.

This is going to be a lovely and comfortable room.  I hope some of you will come to tea--it would be a joy to sup with you.

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Arrangement in black and white

Over the last year or so, I've been playing fox, goose, bag of grain with my stuff, my mother's things, here, there, and offsite storage.  (All praise to the_termagant , who is brilliant at this game.)  Last month, I hauled away a truckload of unsorted clutter; ten days ago, I travelled up from the country with a cargo of lovely things (cabinets and chests and teapots; intarsia, barley-sugar, blue-and-white--and O my! the forties, fifties hats).  The place is going to look lovely, one of these days.

A quarter of my books are in storage, and the rest have been hopelessly randomized, as we shuffled and re-shuffled bookshelves.  Now is the time for a grand re-ordering--but on what system?

How do you folks--collectors all--arrange your books?  Alphabetically straight through?  By genre?  Date of acquisition?  In a rainbow of spines?  Or is your sytem contextual?  Do your books live where you like to read them?  (Kitchen books, bath books...?)  Or in the corners where they fit?  Or maybe just where you put them down on a snowy Sunday in 1981?

A friend of mine once made a catalog of her books.  I looked it over approvingly, and noted the last item and its classification.  "BF?" I said, thinking of LC numbers.  "Shouldn't that be PQ?"

"BF," she said.  "Bedroom floor."

Tell me your sorting algorithms.

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Works

All praise to the Readercon committee, they who spoke to the earthquake.  They have acted mindfully and well.

It would have broken my heart to see Readercon implode.  It was the first place that I felt at home as a writer, the place where I've been dizzy with the joy of conversation.  It's the crown of my year.  I've been to 21 of their 23 cons; I hope to see many of you at my 22nd.  Let's talk about books!

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The horrid, the sublime

At long last, I got to see a broadcast of Danny Boyle's Frankenstein from the National Theatre in London—the spectacular one, in which Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller played creator and created, turn and turn about each night.

The audience was full of psyched-up Sherlockians, all young and squeeful.  One had come from Maine.  Another, a dark boy in an Evangelion T-shirt, lectured atonally; just before the light went down, he asked the universe in general, loudly, how they had solved Reichenbach Falls.  And the one next to me said she was passionate about the theatre and had just graduated the Conservatory.  I asked what had drawn her to the stage, and she said that she had made her debut at four in Madama Butterfly!  (Her mother, who was something backstage in ballet, brought her in at the last moment:  the little boy they'd cast had to be carried off terror-stricken.)  She remembers how her blonde wig itched; she remembers kneeling, pins-and-needles, gazing up at the source of the astounding noise:  a woman streaming sweat and sound and makeup.  The diva curved her hands round the child's head, as if to shield her from the shock of music.  It was baptism in the theatre:   full immersion.

Lights.

We got Jonny Lee Miller as the Creature and Benedict Cumberbatch as Frankenstein. 

Visually, the thing's astounding:  lightnings, embryonic webs of blood, a rain of gold light like the tatters of a galaxy.  There's a dazing vision of a train, uncomprehended:  like steampunk by Hieronymus Bosch.  And the Creature's uncompleted Bride is beautiful:  a goddess stitched of carrion.

This play is all the Creature's.

His scenes of origin are stunning:  how he twitches, writhes, rocks, staggers; how he tastes light, sees birdsong, tears at grass.  He mates ecstatically with rain.  He is raw, a welted Caliban; and for a time, his island is his own.  Not Eden:  but an interlude between hells.

The scenes with his old blind Chiron were bittersweet:  I knew what lay beyond.   They kept the philosophy, and swathes of Milton, which the Creature knew by heart.  Aww.  And then the next betrayal, fire, and flight.

And Frankenstein:  who is cold.  All as expected:  obsessive, overweening, driven, twitchy, vaunting, inhumane.  When he comes up against Elizabeth, he bumps away like a Roomba.  I wanted him to have some unexpected quirk or oddity, but he's even as a cogwheel.  Beautifully played, mind you, and he does lovely things with his eyebrows and his Caspar David Friedrich coattails.

After that, it's chase and treachery, a wedding promised and denied; a wedding violated.

It gets brutal.

It ends with an infinite journey northward, hell-yoked, into the white.  The left stump of darkness.

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"I know you all..."

Came back from a glorious Readercon—of which more later—and wound up unwinding with the BBC’s Henry IV, Part Two.  (I’d seen Part One last week.)

Stunning and unsatisfying, and I want to unravel why.

This really is Henry IV’s play.  Jeremy Irons is astounding as the dying king:  haunted, irascible, embittered, grim—and eaten, bone and marrow, by his guilt.  His cancer is Richard; his performance, living scans.  His scenes with Hal—a brilliant Tom Hiddleston—were scarifying.

It’s a beautifully attentive production—every servant, soldier, princeling, page, and whore is fully drawn, fully rounded.  This is not a backdrop but a world

And I loved this Hotspur.  (The Northumberlands were father and son:  the great Alun Armstrong and his Joe.)  Mad for certain, disjunct, distractible, obsessive, obnoxious, and so very very Northern.

But—

You’d’ve thought Simon Russell Beale was born to play Falstaff, had imbibed sack and sugar at his mother’s breast.  But damn it all, they went for pathos, they went for decay.  There's got to be some reason for Hal's fascination with Falstaff, yes?  Some wit and warmth?  But he was dying, England, dying from scene one.  SRB was actually funnier as Stalin (in Collaborators)--he had a kind of ranting roaring exhilarating comic energy, even as a psychopathic monster.  I would have loved a kindred Falstaff.

And now that I think of it, the design was part of the problem.  The Eastcheap characters were all in ditchbrown rags, to the point to Pythonicity; the court, in colder black and shades of gray, with a few scant splashes of deep red.  Elegantly sombre.  Austerely agitated.  They looked like ceremonious blackbeetles, somewhere in the castle cellars.  And the hollow crown was brass.

I think the director and designer wanted authenticity.  That is, to 21st-century eyes, distrustful of splendor.  But what medieval court was ever lusterless?  They knew their duty was to dazzle as the sun and stars.

And it wasn’t just the court who underdressed.   A subfusc Pistol?   A dun-colored Doll?  Drabs aren’t.

Maybe the production was shying--ere Henry was Fifth--from Olivier displays of glory.  Demythologizing.  Maybe they were recoiling from Richard.  Down, down I come; like glistering Phaethon.  Now there’s a king who played his symbols like a virtuoso, whelming in martyrdom.   (I haven’t seen the first play of this BBC tetralogy, but I hear it’s Fellini manqué.)  

steepholm sees the play as a balance of humours.

 “There's melancholic Henry IV; choleric Hotspur and Glendower; phlegmatic, self-controlled Hal; and not least, sanguine Falstaff. None of these men is satisfactory in himself, but combine them in the just proportion, and the play achieves a harmony beyond the reach of any of its characters. Now that I've put it that way to myself, the problem with playing Falstaff as SRB played him is apparent: it throws the humoural balance out of whack.”

A perceptive insight.  If Henry the Fourth is Saturn reigning, then you want your Falstaff to be jovial—Silenus at the least.

I would propose another imbalance in the film, of the mythic and mimetic.  Shakespeare knew not to make this history but something truer, being false.  Everything about this Falstaff’s performance is beautifully observed.  What’s missing is unseen.  (The force that through the green fuse...?)  Old as he is, he should be older still, a green man of the streets and cellars.  This winter king was dying in midsummer, moldy straw before Hal’s sickle blade had struck his heart.

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Another op'nin', another show

Could any of my Boston area friends give me a lift to Readercon on Thursday?  negothick will be otherwise engaged until the evening.

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