Greer Gilman's Blog, page 81

Fire and fleet and candleight

Wrong night for this, I know; but I have wills on my mind:

"fire and flet (corruptly fleet): 'fire and house-room'; an expression often occurring in wills"
1539 My wife to have ... fyre & fleete in my haule & kechin.

This above all has been Year One of Jarndyce & Jarndyce.  I have, shall we say, learned a great deal about human nature in its less attractive aspects.  It goes on.

Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln ...

Oh yes, and I orchestrated a memorial service.

I have been slowly clearing attics, cellars, and closets of sixty-odd years of Stuff.

I dealt with a nightmare set of proofs (they typeset the Wrong Draft!).  All praise to fjm , chilperic , and the Cambridge University Press for patient help with the surgery and life-support.  You can't tell that Humpty-Dumpty was shattered.  And it will be a beautiful book.

I got to Arisia and Boskone, and away to Readercon and Farthing Party.

I wrote a story.

My friends are ever-glorious.  Long life and all happiness!

Nine

"Villagers all, this frosty tide..."

“It was a pretty sight, and a seasonable one, that met their eyes when they flung the door open.  In the forecourt, lit by the dim rays of a horn lantern, some eight or ten little field mice stood in a semicircle, red worsted comforters round their throats, their fore-paws thrust deep into their pockets, their feet jigging for warmth.  With bright beady eyes they glanced shyly at each other, sniggering a little, sniffing and applying coat-sleeves a good deal.  As the door opened, one of the elder ones that carried the lantern was just saying, ‘Now then, one, two, three!’ and forthwith their shrill little voices uprose on the air, singing one of the old-time carols that their forefathers composed in fields that were fallow and held by frost, or when snowbound in chimney corners, and handed down to be sung in the miry street to lamp-lit windows at Yule-time.”

Carol

Villagers all, this frosty tide
Let your doors swing open wide,
Though wind may follow, and snow beside,
Yet draw us in by your fire to bide;
Joy shall be yours in the morning!

Here we stand in the cold and the sleet,
Blowing fingers and stamping feet,
Come from far away you to greet—
You by the fire and we in the street—
Bidding you joy in the morning!


            —Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

Nine

Let dons delight

Oh, lovely.  The TLS Christmas Quiz:  now no longer a competition but an entertainment.  One hundred questions under twenty headings.  Let's do it!

1 Author’s own prefaces. Whose?
2 Second lines. Of which plays?
3 Again and again and again
4 Bicycles
5 Bells
6 Country Houses. Found in which novels?
7 . . . and housekeepers – of which houses; in which novels?
8 . . . and cooks and chefs
9 Eggs
11 . . . and uncles
12 Double-barrelled names. Occurring in which works?
13 Fictional newspapers. Found in which novels?
14 Hats
15 Disrespectful rhymes. Whose?
16 Fictional characters with the names of birds
17 . . . with the names of animals
18 . . . and with the names of fishes
19 Books within books. Who wrote them and in what novels do they occur?
20 Finish with Finnish

Some are dead easy!  But I'll let you pick the plums.


calimac
1d. Gaudy Night. (Easier)     calimac
2d. Twelfth Night         angevin2
2e.  Is Importance of Being Earnest, no?     nightspore
3a. is Larkin, but can't remember the name of the poem without checking. And then it's not remembering, is it?         steepholm
3c. Bishop's elegy on Lowell.         nightspore
4d. Bertrand Russell?         nightspore
5c. The Monk in the Canterbury Tales angevin2
7a. The Remains of the Day. (Easiest)     calimac
7b. Jane Eyre, but I couldn't remember the name of the house without Googling.         goliard
Thornfield, isn't it?         steepholm
7e. The Secret Garden.         steepholm
9a. Gulliver's ... (oh come on, that's too easy)     calimac
      Somewhere Gulliver went         houseboatonstyx
      Lilliput.         nineweaving
9d. Dunno. Rose Macaulay's was a duck egg.         houseboatonstyx
10a. Thurber's, I think.         calimac
11a. Tristram Shandy's, yes?     calimac    Yes, Uncle Toby. nineweaving
12b.  Wodehouse, isn't it?        calimac
      Wodehouse.  Ah, someone posted that while I was posting. To be more particular, Gussie Fink-Nottle.     nightspore
      Passim. Most spectacularly in Right Ho, Jeeves.  nineweaving
12c. Hurry on Down by John Wain. Lord, I thought I was the only person still living who'd read this.         calimac
13a - Trollope, Palliser novel, The Prime Minister, iirc         nightspore
13b. Scoop by Evelyn Waugh         calimac
13e. Harry Potter (pretty much all of them)  angevin2
15b. W.S. Gilbert in Patience (an attachment a la Plato for a bashful young potato or a not-too-French French bean!). The singer is Bunthorne.  angevin2
16a. Clarice Starling         nightspore
16b. Philip Swallow, Changing Places by David Lodge.         calimac
16c. Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird  angevin2
17b. I can't believe I overlooked this.  Adrian Mole.         calimac
17c. Peter Bullcalf in 2 Henry IV  angevin2
18c.  A P Herbert's Albert Haddock         steepholm
20c Nick Narrator in The Great Gatsby         steepholm
      Carroway.     kore_on_lj



Nine

Footlights

Oh, now this looks wizard:  British theatre for rental or download.

Much Ado About Nothing (David Tennant and Catherine Tate); Macbeth (David Morrissey); As You Like It (RSC); The Comedy of Errors; Into the Woods; and other plays, new and old.

Now if only the National Theatre would follow up their astounding broadcasts with DVDs.

Nine

Lightfast

To my northern readers:  Wishing you joy at the light returning;

To those in the antipodes:  Turn and turn about is fugue:  your spring will follow;

And to those in the middle parts of fortune:  Happy equipoise!

Nine

A proper cup of tea

In memoriam Christopher Hitchens.

"It's quite common to be served a cup or a pot of water, well off the
boil, with the tea bags lying on an adjacent cold plate. Then comes the
ridiculous business of pouring the tepid water, dunking the bag until
some change in color occurs, and eventually finding some way of
disposing of the resulting and dispiriting tampon surrogate. The drink
itself is then best thrown away, though if swallowed, it will have about
the same effect on morale as a reading of the memoirs of President
James Earl Carter."

Nine

Totentanz

The ongoing crisis remains—well, critical.  Absurdly unpleasant.

To cheer myself up, I've gone to see a comic monster of a Stalin eat Mikhail Bulgakov's soul, and a moorish dance of skeletons.

On Thursday night, I saw a broadcast of the National Theatre's mordantly brilliant The Collaborators, a new play by John Hodge, who wrote Trainspotting.  Black black comedy :  but the exhilaration of the art bore me up above the utter horror of the story—until it could not.   "It’s man versus monster, Mikhail. And the monster always wins."  I mean, we're talking Stalinist purges and the breaking of an artist's soul, and it was magnificently witty.  Hilarious, even.   All praise to the actors, and above all, Alex Jennings and Simon Russell Beale.

The chorus of cloaked figures out of Molière, death-tellers in their old-blood raven masks, linked eerily with Revels.

This year's Christmas Revels was billed as 16th-century French:  which on Planet Revels means anything from Africa to Abbots Bromley.  There were moorish dancers with light canes, looking like a cross between rapper-sword and Fred Astaire; there was the world's finger-cymbal virtuoso; there were Romanian garlic dancers.  Gotta love it.  This year, the light of the sun, moon, and stars were stolen by Death:  an insouciant Old Boney in a scarecrow's slouch hat.  He was, without herald, everywhere:  sauntering on a catwalk, leaning on balconies, in among the audience.  His spoils were recovered by three fools, each the namesake and avatar of a heavenly body.  Perdidit spolia princeps infernorum.  I loved them fishing from the ship of fools, and reeling up the drowned moon; I loved that the horned men of the Abbots Bromley were crowned with stars, as if a zodiac danced; I loved that the Sun himself was slain by the sword-dance.  He came on like Le Roi-Soleil, as played by a pantomime dame, from his three tall plumes to his twinkly little beribboned high heels—and died nobly.  (He was resurrected with garlic and mistletoe:  there's a new one.)  The Totentanz of skeletons to "L'homme armé" was marvellous.  And Death was slain by a mirror.  Nineish stuff!
Nine

Lie there, my art

After the last few appalling days, I fled this evening to an all-student production of The Tempest, in the prettiest of half-round theatres.  It looks like something the Duchess of Newcastle might own for her private theatricals.  There's a photo in the lobby that I love, of a 1909 all-girl production of The Merchant of Venice by the Radcliffe Idlers Club, enthralled with their beards and tights.  Liberation!  They all look so dizzy with joy.

This Tempest was a swift little ship of a production:  two and a quarter hours, no intermission.  No masque.  I liked the part of the set that was about a cord of old books, a rock on which to sit or stand; I was somewhat bemused by the shelves full of tchotchkes upstage.  What, they brought a boatload of old bric-a-brac?  I did not much care for the recorded sound track (very filmic) which was a trifle over loud.  Those words don't need it.

The actors were all about nineteen, with no effort made to distinguish generations.  Prospero looked like Miranda's brother, in torn jeans and a paint-splotched T-shirt.  He'd modeled himself on Mark Rylance, I think:  that soft-voiced hesitant unherdness.  (I liked when he had to turn his back to Gonzago and laugh, so as not to hurt the poor old fellow's feelings; yet he was almost crying:  dear gods, he hasn't changed a bit.)  He could speak the verse.

Ariel, alas, could not:  at least not beautifully.  Damn.  Adequately is inadequate.  But oh, she could move!  Years of ballet, I should think.  She had that dancer's trick of keeping her face always toward you, and could leap and land like thistledown.  And was an excellent flautist besides:  that she could enchant with.  She looked rather like a Teenier Buffalo, but had to speak all her songs.  Damn.

They cast a woman as Caliban, but kept his pronoun.  Tough to bring off--people the island with Calibans, how?--but she was good:  rageful and feral and farouche.  She could do an unshrill anger:  which many women can't.  She played him as damaged--as mutant--as if some horrific teratogen had malformed him, body and spirit:  and she dimly knew it.  As if Sycorax's womb itself were bathed in poisons.  And she played him as land-crippled, dragging herself along in a shapeless gray robe, half Wyeth's Christina and half selkie.  The hair though, was pure Helena Bonham-Carter.

Antonio was fascinating.  He looked (and sounded) like some half-remembered actor from a German film of the early thirties:  elegant, epicene, decadent.  Black patent-leather hair, white insolent face.  Like the love-child of Peter Lorre and Richard E. Grant.  Full thirties evening dress, with pumps.

Trinculo was good, an immensely long fellow in a tiny Arlecchino's jacket.  He could tumble, too.

But I fell in love with their Stephano, who had the voice and presence of a music hall star:  a small, shrewd, raucous Yorkshirewoman in a disgraceful morning coat.  You could see the remnants of command in her, the true butler's port and bearing, wried about thirty degrees out of true:  by port.  She could have ruled Milan (far better than Prospero), were it not she had bad sack.  I spoke briefly with her afterward, and she was English but not Northern: her mimickry was fooking flawess.

And I liked the design of the piece:  art as magic, magic as art.  As we came in, Prospero was painting at an easel on the stage, as Ariel flitted to and fro with paints, and Miranda slept.  He was in some creative vortex:  getting something down which possessed him.  His picture was turned from us:  but was clearly the storm.  Then he rose and slammed the canvas down—crack!—on the stage, and that was the thunderclap:  so the play began.  His robe was his painting shirt.  All of Ariel's masques and transformations were paintings:  of goddesses, of monsters.  There was a canvas downstage, flat out on the floor, at which Prospero worked, at which nearly everyone worked.  Miranda and Ferdinand painted side by side with small neat brushes, like children with a glorious new project (let's paint all of Narnia!):  their ardor expressed in exquisite carefulness.  As their love is in the text.

And at end, when everyone had gone, Caliban dragged on, and took possession of the paints:  slashing, scrawling, splashing, smearing, slapping with both hands.  Mine mine mine mine...

Nine

Illegitimum non carborundum

The oddest conjunction:  the silent tents of Occupy (I have yet to see anyone go in or out, but the Yard is locked down); the full crimson-coated brass band (their leader standing on John Harvard's pedestal, wearing a Santa hat), roaring out "Gaudeamus igitur, veritas non sequitur..."  No one else there.  Were they rallying ghosts?

Nine

Apologies

And shortly after I posted this, all hell broke loose on the home front and nothing got done.  I am sorry to disappoint.

Nine