Greer Gilman's Blog, page 8

Three of Hearts

Flight of Scarlet (Daniel Merriam) seemed just the right puzzle to inspire me for Boskone on this Valentine's Day weekend.

I have just three panels, like three exquisite little chocolates in a heart-shaped box. My mouth is watering. When I open it to speak, hope I'm smart.


The Lonely and the Rum: A Conversation
Friday, February 12
Griffin (Mtg Room), 9:30pm - 10:30pm

Greer Gilman, Michael Swanwick

Greer Gilman and Michael Swanwick discuss unique classic writers but of intense importance to them both. Others may, if they wish, listen in as they discuss the nothing-elseness of Tove Jansson, Hope Mirrlees, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and others.


Worldbuilding: Inventing New Folklore for Fictional Worlds
Saturday, February 13
Burroughs (Webinar), 7pm - 8pm

Adam Stemple, Vida Cruz, Miyuki Jane Pinckard, Greer Gilman, Karen Heuler

Folklore, myths, and legends abound worldwide. Indeed, they are often mined by fantasy authors. Fictional worlds, whether in fantasy, science fiction, or horror should have their own folklore. How do you craft new mythology for your world while conveying those myths and legends in a sensitive and compelling way?


Living in a Medieval Milieu
Sunday, February 14
Griffin (Mtg Room), 4pm - 5pm

Faye Ringel, Brenda W. Clough, Guy Consolmagno, Greer Gilman

What was it really like to live in the Middle Ages? How should writing about a medieval world reflect that reality? Is there anywhere today with that olde-time feeling? What science was commonly known, or known at all? Or rather, since science is a post-medieval concept, what natural philosophy was known?


What a fabulous crew of panelists! An hour for each conversation is going to be far too short.

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Tell me where is fancy bread?

So Tatte, my super-fine local bakery and café, has been a longtime favorite for pastries (kouign amann, croissants, orange upside-down cake, pear tart with frangipane, dark chocolate mousse cups...) and occasional festive brunches (they're best known for shakshuksa, but I'm very fond of their BLATs and their lamb hash with labneh and a poached egg on top). They've recently started doing a small set dinner menu, which I'd been meaning to try. That salmon with horseradish cream looked nice.

Faced with a fifth day of my chicken sort-of-cacciatore, warmed over, I revolted and turned to my phone. Hey presto, Caviar (which is part of Door Dash) gave me a code for 25% off on Tatte. Yay! Now I was brought up to consider delivery a shocking extravagance, but the pandemic has changed all that. None the less, I try to be canny, and stretch things over extra rice. As is my wont, I ordered two dinners, the salmon and lasagna, which were meant to do me for five or six meals, interspersed with aging fricasse.

But consternation! When the delivery guy came, there was only the salmon in the bag.

It's the wrong dinner, Gromit! And it's gone wrong!

I am impressed with Door Dash. With ten minutes before the café closed, they got a second driver over there, retrieved my lost lasagna, and issued a generous credit on my next order.

That second bag was awfully heavy. When I opened it, I found that Tatte, bless their kind hearts, had sent me a boxful of breakfast pastries—croissants, a palmier, monkey bread, poached-pear-and-almond muffins—with a charming note of apology.

My dish crumbleth over.

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ETA:

Woodstock in wheelchairs

Crip Camp is funny and fierce and inspiring.  It follows friends who met at Camp Jened in the early 1970s.  Unlike most summer camps in the Catskills, this one was run by hippies for disabled teens:  Woodstock in wheelchairs, and a nursery of revolution.  A righteous band of activists from Jened coalesced around the unquenchable Judy Heumann, and spoke out and fought and demonstrated for the human rights of people with disabilities.  They occupied buildings, and when the FBI cut off the phones, they went to the windows and signed.  They changed the world.

And there's a hell of a soundtrack, for us oldies.

I was cheering on the movement towards the passage of the ADA, when there was footage of protesters crawling up the inaccessible Capitol steps.  And I burst into a passion of tears.  Because that, that is what I'd hoped this country was about, their courage and their sense of justice. Their struggle for equality, accomplished step by step by step.  And that is what that unprintable mob a month ago wanted to destroy.  I saw their desecration overlaid on images of hope.

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Helms, deep

Hey, there’s a new film about Sutton Hoo (called The Dig). It’s on Netflix, where I can get hold of it. I'm thinking of a double bill with Ammonite.



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Xenophilology!

And just when we needed a shiny new timesink...

Welcome to the Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction. This work-in-progress is a comprehensive quotation-based dictionary of the language of science fiction. The HD/SF is an offshoot of a project begun by the Oxford English Dictionary (though it is no longer formally affiliated with it). It is edited by Jesse Sheidlower.
 

Just launched!

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Rounding the Horn

I feel like a storm-tossed traveller who has reached the Pacific, having tossed Queeg to the sharks.   Not that the sea isn't perilous, but there's an actual captain at the wheel.  Suddenly, strangely, I've an appetite for visual media.  I've never been a great consumer of film, except in intensive festivals with one old friend, and I've never owned a television.  For the past year, I've watched essentially nothing but small children's programs over Fox's shoulder and—as an election anodyne—The Great British Bake Off.  And now (among other things, both silly and serious) I find myself watching a mash-up of Monty Python episodes and Ken Burns's Civil War.  That's by far the darkest thing I've seen or read in this crisis.  It's still a long way back, but it's how we got here.  I'm processing.  And then I switch to Python, and every time I hear the Liberty Bell March, I see the orange excrescence waving on the airport tarmac, and the big foot coming down.  Squirch!

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Through the perilous night...

Watching the dawn from our foxholes.  Hoping for change.

Last time I heard "This land is your land" was at a march.

Verklempt.

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On air

Hey, I managed to get to virtual Arisia and appear, juggling Zoom and Discord on my tiny phone screen.  Eyestrain, but no disasters.

Obviously, we all sadly missed live meetings with friends, the hallways, the Green Room, the dealers, and Art Show.  On the bright side, I didn't have to take the T, and could hang around in my slippers, drinking tea.  I confess that after all this confinement, I really enjoyed seeing other people's spaces.  All those bookshelves not my own.

All praise to Programming!  There were some terrific sessions.  sovay   was reliably fabulous on panels ("The Monomyth Myth" and "Leadership in Science Fiction and Fantasy" were especially fine), and in song circles (ballads and chanteys).  Her readings from IgNobel-winning papers were the very sole of wit; and she, Ruthanna Emrys and Gillian Daniels read from some haunting tales.  "The Boatman's Cure" is fine-grained as flint, as sharp.  There are fossils in it.

Andrea Hairston and Vandana Singh are reliably excellent, and it was an unusual pleasure to hear from the Antipodes:  I got to do a panel with Gillian Pollack, sitting 16 hours closer to the end of this administration, on a bright midsummer afternoon.

My part in "Traditional Ballad Bingo"  was modest:  I was charged with finding the valuable virtual prizes, and was inspired to raid the MMA for trophies.

Late Saturday evening, I did "Through the Door: The Appeal of Portal Stories" with Kathryn Sullivan, M. Dalto, and Gillian Pollack (sadly, Genevieve Iseult Eldredge couldn't make it).

Here's the pitch I wrote for it: 

"Many of us begin with Alice. There the longing for the wonders of another world—just down the rabbit hole, just through the looking glass—is offset by the terrors: balanced, like the face/vase paradox, figure and ground. Which way am I going anyway? How far do I want to be lost? Other children start with Narnia or Neverland, which add to the wonders and terrors, seductions and punishments: Pan entices; Susan is disbarred. You lose a world by growing up. ('Leave off at seven'?) The Little White Horse is far gentler: even the exiles from this lovely little inner world get to keep its gate until they’re welcome in again, and even the baddies are embraced its in circle. For the hobbits, The Lord of the Rings is a portal story: we step over the threshold in their company, into an older, far darker and more glorious world than they knew. Then there are all those worlds mocked as tourist traps by Diana Wynne Jones in her brilliant Tough Guide to Fantasyland; then looked at from the flip side in The Dark Lord of Derkholm as eco-magical wastelands ravaged by corporate greed. My first book, Moonwise, is a portal fantasy. I had no idea where I was going with it when I started, only that I wanted in."

What I should have written, but did say on the night is:  Every book is a portal.  And I quoted Le Guin (paraphrasing Tolkien):  “Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory.”

Great panel.

My reading late on Sunday evening felt like a dress rehearsal in an empty theatre.  Technically, I did all right:  my timing was exact, I managed keep my face on screen while reading from a paper manuscript.  But the radio silence was unnerving:  I couldn't sense how I was going over.   Did anyone laugh?  I got a Discord comment on the lines of:  That was sounded nice but I have no idea what was going on.  That response (and I get a lot of it) always makes me droop.  What I love is when a reader says, On the page, reading you is like free-soloing El Capitan, but hearing you, I really got it.  Sigh.      

"Reading When the World is On Fire" (with Victoria Sandbrook, Lisa Batya Feld, Lena G., Lisa Padol, and Jonathan Woodward) was a joy.

"I wish I could say that I turned to the monuments of literature, the ones you can see from the moon. But no. At first, I could read only witty golden- and silver-age mysteries: books in which the order of things is broken and then comes together. This went with a passion for jigsaw puzzles, which also play at reversing entropy. After a while, I could manage great children’s books (all of Diana Wynne Jones and Tove Jansson), braiding in non-fiction about material culture, about the beautiful things humans can and do make: on costume (by the V&A ); on pottery (by Edmund de Waal ); on antique scientific instruments made like exquisite jewelry; on stagecraft in Elizabethan theatre; on language itself. As a species, we are really good at *things*; but less so at workable societies. We can invent astonishingly elegant mRNA vaccines. Persuading people to take them— Other friends have burrowed deep into the heart of darkness and the seeds of evil. I salute their valor. And still others have studied how the world might—possibly—be saved. I hail them. I want to hear from all of you. What has helped?"

All of us on the panel put together a booklist.

"All the World's a Stage!" didn't really need me. Not with people like Naomi Hinchen, Thom Dunn, Rebecca Maxfield, and Liz Salazar, who take "definitionally unzoomable" as a challenge.  If you say, "Well, there’s not going to be a dream sequence with interpretive dance," they've done it.  Shakespeare?  Goes without saying.  Commedia dell'arte?  Piece of cake.  They can even do slapstick, with a person on one screen socking a person on another.  In sync.  I asked questions, and made a few remarks on the philosophy of stage space, and fourth walls and the radio performers of the 1930s, lined up in their immaculate evening dress, tearing passions to tatters.

Rebecca Maxfield gave us Richard of Gloucester from 3 Henry VI.  I look forward to her Dream.

Hey, guys.  Break a link.

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Amuse-bouche!

My Boskone 58 Mini-Interview will be published here on Wednesday, January 13 at 1200 EST! 

"There are rooms for all, and doors to all your longed-for places.  You’re invited."

Bon appetit!

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Tap dancing on the radio

Arisia, ho!

On the bright side, my heavens!  Conversation!  With cool people!  I do love that I get the rare chance of being on a panel with Gillian Polack, all the way from midsummer in the Antipodes.  And, as it's midwinter here, I rejoice in not having to rise early and make my way by the Red and Silver lines and over that howling icy bridge to the Westin What-the-hell.

On t'other hand, that ice bridge has been replaced by the perilous narrow channel of Zoom, with my technically unhandy self going solo on the bridge.  Hope I don't self-torpedo. Wish me luck.


Traditional Ballad Bingo
Saturday 5:30 pm, Zoom Room 4

Angela Kessler (m), Greer Gilman, Jeremy H. Kessler, Dan "Grim" Marsh, Sonya Taaffe

Join the fun as attendees (that's you!) take turns performing traditional ballads for the assemblage. Listen carefully to mark your Ballad Bingo cards when you detect such classic tropes as drowning, pregnancy out of wedlock, or murder of a loved one. Compete for "valuable" prizes already in your house! Bingo cards will be provided ... somehow. Ballads from any tradition are welcome here.

Through the Door: The Appeal of Portal Stories
Sat 10:00 pm, Zoom Room 3

Kathryn Sullivan (m), M. Dalto (MaryBeth), Genevieve Iseult Eldredge, Greer Gilman, Gillian Polack

Fantasy and science fiction both love a good portal story, from being transported into a realm of magic and nonsense, the world of a video game, or an alternate dimension. We'll discuss what we love about portal stories, how the tropes associated with these stories vary across fantasy and science fiction, and of course talk about our favorite examples.

Sunday Evening Readings 2
Sunday 10:00 pm, Zoom Room 2

Greer Gilman, Walter H. Hunt, Stephen R Wilk, A. L. "Amy" Kaplan

Join some of Arisia's wonderful authors, while they read from their own work.

Reading When the World is On Fire
Monday 10:00 am, Zoom Room 2

Victoria Sandbrook (m), Lisa Batya Feld, Lena G. , Greer Gilman, Lisa Padol, Jonathan Woodward

2020 was a pretty tough year. In the middle of a global pandemic, racism (and racial discourse), and a US presidential election, many turned to reading. Some read to escape. Others read to learn more. What kinds of books did people turn to, and why those books, in particular?

All the World's a Stage!
Monday 2:30 pm, Zoom Room 1

Naomi Hinchen (m), Thom Dunn, Greer Gilman, Rebecca Maxfield, Liz Salazar

The show must go on! Intrepid playwrights have already adapted to the possibilities and limitations of Zoom plays. What are the considerations writers should keep mind when scripting their own tele-conferenced dramatic production? Who is doing this right? Panelists will also discuss any pitfalls they observe in these early days of the medium.

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