Greer Gilman's Blog, page 92

...where late the sweet birds sang

And I've only now learned that my beloved Norma Waterson, who sang Cloud into being, has been critically ill and silenced.



This galaxy is fired.



Thank goddess she is on the mend.



There will be a benefit, and I would dearly love to help. Do you think I could auction some good archival prints of my Cloudish illustrations? And copies of my books, extravagantly inscribed? How would I go about setting this up?



Anxiously,



Nine

Bare ruined choirs

All within eleven months, three I loved: madamebuttery , my mother, Diana Wynne Jones. Travel well, my dearest wise and witty friends. I hope in some multiverse you've met.

Nine

Jam today!

Sisterly congratulations to Dubravka Ugresic, this year's Tiptree Award winner for Baba Yaga Laid an Egg.

"Baba Yaga Laid an Egg impressed with its power and its grace. Tiptree juror Jessa Crispin explains that the beginning of the book 'does not scream science fiction or fantasy. It starts quietly, with a meditation on the author’s aging mother, and the invisibility of the older woman…. But things shift wholly in the second act, with a surreal little tale of three old ladies, newly moneyed, who check into an Eastern European health spa. There’s another revolution in the third act, where what looks like a scholarly examination of the Russian fairy tale hag erupts into a rallying cry for mistreated and invisible women everywhere.'

"Crispin notes that the fairy tale figure Baba Yaga is the witch, the hag, the inappropriate wild woman, the marginalized and the despised. She represents inappropriateness, wilderness, and confusion."

Oh, that does sound marvellous.

And it's a wonderful Honor List.  Warmest congratulations to all!

Nine

...and an Andy Goldsworthy moon

Like all his work, ephemeral.








 



Nine

Moonwise

Gorgeous.  A Samuel Palmer moon.
 












(It is a splendidly clear night, but I was pushing my poor little camera far past what it will do.  I wish I still had film to play with.)

Nine

"...plotted and pieced..."

I spent the Summer of Love doing jigsaw puzzles.  Not just any puzzles, of course, but Springbok, which I fell in love with for their beautiful, unusual pictures--a page from the Très Riches Heures, a K'ang Hsi dynasty Chinese plate--and their odd-shaped pieces.  I did them to music.  I loved the making of beauty and order from a dazzling heap of shards; I loved the fitting of the pieces; I loved the riddles and the metamorphoses:  how a moon-edged cloud? a snow-shadowed hill? became a shoulder, and a corner of a face? a tangled thorn.

This was one of my very favorites:






It's from a Medici palace:  a tabletop in pietre dure--inlaid marble--a puzzle in cardboard of a puzzle in stone.  A prince had a portrait of his rarest china painted--cold mistresses but all exquisite--and the painting Gorgoned into stone.   I love it for its layers on layers of meta-ness.  Flowers painted on china; china wreathed with living flowers, set in stone; stone imaged and recut.  All stone:  the fragile and unfading porcelain (a gathering of many years), the brief garlands, their shadows.

And here is one more transformation:  the flickering image of a picture of a puzzle of a work of time.

Nine

Sticks, stalks, leaves and stones

To my delight, there is an Andy Goldsworthy Digital Catalogue.  It gives only his early work, and sadly, only thumbnails; but the lists are the stuff of magic:

Browse by form:

arches
balls
boxes
cairns
circles
columns
cones
cracks
curves
edges
gaps
holes
horns
lines
patches
piles
serpentine
shadows
spheres
spirals
spires
splashes
squares
stacks
throws
trails
trenches


Browse by material:

bark
birds
black
body
bracken
branches
clay

colour
earth
feathers
flowers
frost
grass
hands
ice
icicles
leaves
light
mud
peat
petals
rain
rainbows
red
reflections
rocks
sand
seaweed
snow
stalks

sticks
stones

string
thorns
tides
turf
twigs
water
white
yellow

Thea's new magic in Cloud & Ashes was inspired by his work.

Sticks, stalks, leaves and stones.  A living hazel branch, lapped all in poppy petals, blood and branching.  Leaves picked and shaded in a long streak on the earth:  from green through fire to dead black; from ashes to greenwhite.  Twigs in a round rattle.  Labyrinths of leaves, bark, foxfire punk; or drawn in rime.  Spirals of cracked pebbles, scratched white with another.  Cubbies of sticks.  Snailings and green horns of leaves, or burnished brown as copper:  stitched with thorns and plaited in one endless coil and spiral, nestled in the earth.  Leaves laid round nothing, bright and brighter toward the O.  The same, with pebbles, white and whiter round abyss or origin...

A night and day spent weaving stalks, an airy web of them, infilling all the crook and curving of a great low bough.

And in brief snow, a ball of it, built round and pierced by sharp small living wood.  A ball that rolled its own maze, green laid bare; that rounded on its journeying.

 Nine

"If anyone spots the Queen of Scots in a hand-embroidered shroud..."

The sibylline Anthony Lane calls the Oscars:

2013

“HOUSE”

After “The Queen,” “Elizabeth,” and “The Young Victoria,” which British queens remain to be explored? Step forward, Anne (played by a pitch-perfect Hugh Laurie), who reigned from 1702 to 1714, and who is now mainly associated with an elegant style of architecture and furniture. The last word in country-house period drama, with its soundtrack scored exclusively for cello, harp, and panpipes, and a controversial winner over David Fincher’s blistering, bang-up-to-date texting drama “Elimin8.” With Sir Michael Gambon, as Blenheim Palace, and a brief but scene-stealing turn from Dame Judi Dench, as a wingback chair with cabriole legs.

Nine

 

O for a Muse of Sack and Sugar...

"Masques were a little like the office Christmas panto, with courtiers performing paeans of praise to themselves, before vomiting over their shoes..."

Wish I'd seen this.

Though I have seen a magnificent (and quite authentic) courtly masque, directed by herooftheage  .  The one I wrote in 1973 was more like that first sentence, but with irony....

Nine

"The baker came by and bought his dust..."

"That was a madman, I'll be sworn."

For asakiyume  , who asked for legendary brands of flour:










Nine