Greer Gilman's Blog, page 79

Songs of Innocence and of Experience

Christ Church has the pretty custom of an egg hunt in among the stones of its old graveyard:  a lovely metaphor of resurrection, with its outburst of running children through an iron gate.  Some years it snows.

I go to the river on May Day; of late I've been souling on Halloween.  I do New Year's at the Buttery, for auld lang syne.  I've been to one or two memorable seders (those mashed potato golems in Prague...) and I hope to dine at Christmas with friends.  If I'm in town, I like to see the children gathering life in death.

Nine

Cold comfort

Seals Bare Feet

Put the seals bare feet into a cooking pan.  Cover them with blubber and keep in a hot place until the fur comes off.  Then it is time to eat the seals bare feet.  You can cook them or eat them without cooking.

Owl

Take feathers off from owl. Clean owl and put in cooking pot. Have lots of water in pot. Add salt to taste.

Eskimo Ice Cream

Grate reindeer tallow into small pieces. Add seal oil slowly while beating with hand. After some seal oil has been used, then add a little water while whipping. Continue adding seal oil and water until white and smooth. Any berries can be added to it.

From a little Eskimo Cook Book prepared by the children (mostly Inupiat) of  the Shishmaref Day School in 1952.

Fragile then, their world is drowning now.

Nine

Exit, pursued by a bear

All the world's a stage!  On the wintry last of March, four of us saw a stunning Winter's Tale at the Yale Rep.  They had a terrific Leontes, who was hunched as if there were a spear of ice through his heart, transfixed and juddering; a goddess-like Hermione,whose stillness was sublime; a fabulous jazz Autolycus, who slid and sparkled like quicksilver, poured down from his head; utterly beautiful design.  And a magnificent shambling bear, a comic terror out of Angela Carter.  The only disappointment was their Perdita, who could indeed dance like a wave o' th' sea, but spoke like a duck pond.  And of all lines, they cut hers about Proserpina.  What?

I hope crowleycrow can see this before it melts away like April snow.

Next fall, they're doing Hamlet.  With Paul Giamatti, Prince of Schlubs.  That will be ... fascinating.

This afternoon, I got to be the April Fool in a fabulous reading of King Lear at teenybuffalo 's mountain fastness.  csecooney was Lear and her mother Cordelia:  which inversion may be a theatrical first.  Among others, whose LJ handles I don't know, negothick was Regan, gyzki Gloucester, and our hostess Oswald and others.  Alarums and thunder done extempore.

The day ended with a lively chorus of "Bedlam Boys."

Nine

Perish the baubles!

Just back from a broadcast of the National Theatre's She Stoops To Conquer , a lovely, raucous, joyous production, a sort of mannerly Bedlam.  And such costumes!

They're doing Timon of Athens next fall.  With Simon Russell Beale.  O my.

Nine

Moon, Venus, Jupiter

O my heavens...

Nine

Technical

Does anyone here know why LJ won't rotate images properly?  It used to; now it won't.  I have some lovely portraitwise pictures that I want to post, but when I try to upload them, LJ knocks them on their sides.  When I try to flip its landscapes back into portrait, it just stretches and squashes the image to fit its horizontal frame.  Ghastly.  Sometimes I think I've saved an image in portrait, but if I go back to the gallery, it's warped again.  If I try to post one of these temporary saves, it will only work at thumbnail or medium; then if I click on the posted image, it goes back to the Procrustean version.

Any workarounds?

Thanks.

Nine

Moon, Venus

A wind like a silver knife.

Nine

Morpho

So tragically, I'll need a new iPad.  As the culmination of a disastrous week, poor Butterfly slid off a table and cracked her screen.  She's been my dear companion for a year and a half, and gave her life nobly.  I want to name the new one for her:  Psyche.

This time, I think I'd like connectivity.  Mostly I've been fine with just Wifi, but it would be nice to have a fill-in when I'm out of range.  Being constitutionally averse to cellphones, I hadn't realized that you choose at the inception:  AT&T or Verizon.  They're different machines.

The threes are said to be dazzlingly beautiful, but they only have 4G.  It won't work in Europe--not for several years--and it certainly won't work in rural Connecticut, where I need it most just now.

The twos are now deprecated and on sale.  As far as I can gather for 3G, Verizon is said to have better coverage over here but none in Europe.  Which leaves AT&T.

Advice from users?

Nine

Frau Noah

Oh, lovely!  "Flowers":  a newly discovered short story by Sylvia Townsend Warner!  Four of them—but sadly, unavailable on this side of the Atlantic.  So frustrating.

And an excellent essay by Sarah Waters in the Guardian.

Warner is one of my pantheon.  I've loved her voice forever.

"She saw herself as 'Frau Noah leaning out of a window with a coffee cup in her hand admiring last night's flood'; I can see her as a clear-eyed river goddess, or the numen of a spring. Wise-hearted and well-tempered, she began as a scholar of early music, and her prose is formally Baroque. 'Her heart was with the hunted always,' said her friend William Maxwell. Yet at eighty, when her mortal love had died and she was 'tired of the human heart,' she wrote on the unkindliness of faerie. Kingdoms of Elfin is a last book as ruthlessly exquisite as a silver frost."

Nine

Earworm of the Red Abyss

You know that syrupy music you get in Chinese restaurants?  The maraschino sweet-and-sour cherry Robitussin kind?  And the plinkety sort?  Like cicada ukeleles?  Those.  Alternately. For a solid half hour of one tune:  the theme from Gone With The Wind.

Not even the thought of Rufus Sewell's nostrils flaring to it* could divert me.

I fled.

Happy Leap Day!

Nine

*As Seth Starkadder departing for Hollywood in Cold Comfort Farm.