nineweaving

03:15 pm: Cloud & Ashes: O blithe New-comer!
Here is a space for comments.  If you ask me about my work or world, I will try to answer.

I hear thee and rejoice.

Nine

01:21 am: "O Proserpina, For the flowers now, that frighted thou let'st fall From Dis's waggon!"
"Cloud and Ashes Told in Flowers" by Lieserl.

A garland for my book. How lovely.

Nine

01:11 am: Come buy, come buy
Small Beer Press is having a fabulous sale to benefit Franciscan Children's Hospital, where Gavin and Kelly's Ursula is growing round and strong, and so utterly gorgeous that the goblins gnash their teeth—but her cradle is well-guarded:
$1 from every book (or ebook, zine, subscription, etc.) sold from now until December 31, 2009, will be donated to Franciscan Children’s Hospital. This includes all pre-orders! *** Please do consider ordering items at full price as the difference between the full price and the sale price will be donated to Franciscan! ***

Wouldn't you like a Shelf of Small Beer with every title they've published? Or a Thumbdrive, if you've run out of bookspace? How about A Working Writer's Daily Planner 2010?

Come buy!

Nine

12:35 am: Winterlight
My dear birthday twin, who's good at jaunts, called this morning to take me to the planetarium for a showing of "Winterlight: Stars and Symbols of the Solstice" with music by The Revels. Just my cup of tea: I like being inside of Stonehenge when the haunting little measure of the "Abbots Bromley" is piped, and the sun rises.

Afterward, we had coffee. Barb had a copy with her of Brenda Ueland's If You Want to Write (1938), with a blurb by Carl Sandburg. I leafed through it. Lively stuff. If her ecstatic visions of your Inner Artist are a shade too Blakean, her wit and commonsense are most attractive. Don't write about yourself writing about your story, she says; don't put yourself weeping in the foreground of a tragedy, or laughtrack your own jokes. She gives an example:

"I love you," said Brenda Ueland to Brenda Ueland.

"I love you too," Brenda answered shyly, with a sincere look in her fine, strong face.

Nine

11:51 pm: Lucullan
A lovely quiet birthday. Mine last: sometimes me and my not-kindred twin don't get around to our tea for two (figuring spectacular patisserie and dozens of silly little parcels) until April.

negothick, bless her, sent a bowl of chocolate.

movingfinger is in town, and brought me a pot of star-white cyclamens, and took me out to dinner at Casablanca. That was spectacular: she had the venison osso bucco with wild mushroom risotto; and I had the duck terrine with pomegranate seeds and the quail with figs. I felt like Trimalchio. They'd boned it, all but the elfin wings and drumsticks, so I didn't have to craunch it up like Gigi at her Aunt Alicia's, and stuffed it with black quinoa, goat cheese, oyster mushrooms, and andouille sausage. She had sweet potato soup and I had a cloud of butternut squash with just a glimmering of maple. Then we both had the chocolate and brandied cherry clafouti, which was well worth the wait.

After which we went to the Cambridge Artists' Cooperative (I got my pleated silk jacket there for Readercon), where she fell for a fabulous hat and got it. (Sueded shearling, greeny bronze, with a deep deep crimson rose.) I fell for a quilt, a glass world drowning in a sea of glass, a wooden stack of books concealing boxes, and a brocaded bluegreen jacket: and got none of them.

However, I had something glorious awaiting me at home: The Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. Bliss.

Nine

01:01 am: O my goddess!
Cloud & Ashes has fan art!


Margaret by *Lieserl on deviantART

Lieserl, the artist, writes: "Margaret is badass. She's the granddaughter of the (goddess of) Moon. Here she is wielding her sky-looking glass and her pack of tarot cards."

Now I want the manga.

Nine

03:58 am: "There was a star danced..."
Happy birthday, papersky and crowleycrow ! The muses must smile on December.

Nine

04:40 pm: Robert Holdstock
What's poignant for me is that I've yet to read him. Fool that I am, I was waiting. And now I'll never get to have that conversation with him in the borderland between our woods.

He walks in his ever-autumn. Winter will not come.

Nine

11:55 pm: submersible moonphase
I know it's just an ad for knock-off watches, but the phrase is rather glorious. I am tempted to set a competition: for the best poem or flash fiction on the theme of "submersible moonphase."

Nine

12:21 am: Nick Nick
Watched the RSC’s magnificent Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (filmed 1982) and marvelled for the fourth or fifth time at the coup du theatre: at the sheer audacity, complexity, simplicity of it; at the way a London crowd will coalesce, a momentary wall or stagecoach trundling into mist; at the brilliant double triple and quadruple casting, hero overturned as villain, neatly as a string catscradles; at the Gothic glee of it, the shameless innocence, the slakeless energy, the plenitude—Ah, damn, the thing cries out for semicolons. And I wish, yet again, that I could screen it for Jo March.

What book, film, art or music would you give what character? You may delight, amaze, instruct, or counsel. No fair giving Lizzie Bennet Pride and Prejudice. We’d all implode.

Nine

10:15 am: From a book of emblems
I dreamed the other night about the sharp stump of an apple tree—not felled but struck and broken—round which grey-brown rabbits were running, widdershins. No dance; and if a ritual, offhanded. Not at all a fairy picture—I have a mug hand-painted with Titania and her rade so mounted, out of which a good child drank her milk—but Novemberish, sad and wild.

Nine

11:36 pm: Winter sun
It's being a rough month, so I was very happy to find this comment by Matt Denault:

"This year Greer Gilman's Cloud & Ashes seemed to me probably the greatest achievement in SF&F...years in the writing, a feminist approach to a type of tale Gene Wolfe is known for, one of masks and hierarchy, with also a Wolfean attention to language."

Nine

12:28 am: Lots of quail in Cremona
Fortunately, the Actors' Shakespeare Project held over The Taming of the Shrew for a few more performances, so I got to see it after all. And well worth it: that was the neatest use of the Induction ever. As you'll remember, there's a framing story, in which the drunken tinker Christopher Sly is hauled off in a stupor to a sumptuous upper room, dressed grandly, and convinced with overdone obeisances that his reality has all been madness, that he is truly a lord awakened from a dream. A worried potboy is dragooned to play his lady, pawed and pinched. And a company of players are brought in to act this comedy for him.

As this company does it, the frame is contemporary. But the players are too few, doubling and tripling roles nonsensically, until one by one the people in the barroom take the stage, changing caps for capes and feathered bonnets, wearing ruffs with their suits and ties. Sly on the sidelines follows the script in a battered paperback, hunched over it and muttering the lines to himself, objecting, jeering, calling out for definitions—"I trow"?—until like Bottom he can stand the shadows no more and takes the stage, bestriding it and roaring. Even then, he keeps and brangles with his text until Kate snatches it and flings it to the crowd, and he is full Petruchio.

And the busboy is Bianca. Dude.



I've come to girl it slenderly in Padua;
If slenderly, bent-genderly in Padua.
If my lord has a cod of gold
Then my god, how the sod's been sold...

He's prettier than Katharina even still—she's a nutcrackerish virago, all whipcord and blaze, while he is all girlish and twirly, with an undertone of pout. And sings her lessons in a pretty alto, the Latin as scat and torch. Nice casting all around: Tranio, the clever servant masquerading as the heir is small and elegant and black, while the foolish young master is plump and affable and round-bespectacled, like something from the Drones Club.

It's a riotously knockabout production—overhead pipes are swung upon, groins are kneed, and Kate hangs a bound Bianca from a hook and then upends her. The thwarted dinner scene is played like touch football; the cook's stewpot is overturned on his head in a hail of carrots and potatoes, and Petruchio clangs on his tin helm with a ladle. And the confrontation of the true and false fathers—each wearing Chip Delany's beard—is done as the mirror scene from Duck Soup.

That Speech ("I am ashamed that women are so simple") is pretty much an insoluble problem. They come closer to solving it, by paradox, than I have seen. The director softens it somewhat by having Petruchio kneel beside Kate when she offers her hands to his boot, and there's a hint of conspiracy between them. Nothing new in that interpretation; but what rocks is that both the other froward wives are played by men. Bianca is the busboy still; and Tranio is now an ain't-no-flies-on-this-widow, in pearls and a silver wig. Score.

After Kate and Petruchio go off with the wager, as the party's breaking up, Bianca snatches off her wig as if it's too damned hot for her, and her newly wed husband gazes with his jaw dropped, is about to speak—

The lights go up.

Nine

02:01 pm: "I'm certain that if I took even one sniff..."
Old book smell has been analyzed as "a combination of grassy notes with a tang of acids and a hint of vanilla over an underlying mustiness."  Ah, the scent of home.   But beyond nostalgia, gas chromatography could be used as a diagnostic for the preservation of old books.

Nine

08:18 pm: "You go about the school so exactly like Minerva!"
Off being an Angel in the House, so I've loaded up the iPod with Edwardotorian light reading—it makes a spiffy torch for those secret passages!—and I've been flicking my way through golden-age Angela Brazil, up to 1922.  Of course, I'd much rather have the books—nice, chubby, fluffy things with cocoa stains and awfully jolly plates—but the pixels will have to do.  Heaven knows, I'd hate to wake up in a girls' school, but the stories are  utterly comforting, smooth and sweet:  like bowls full of floating island.  Even the titles make me smile:  The Madcap of the School, The Jolliest Term on Record.  They're all the same and all different—seaside schools, moorland schools, Georgian halls, dissolved abbeys with optional ghosts; shy girls, snobs, hoydens, madcaps,  malaperts, twenty girls or two hundred.  Mind you, Brazil can't plot for toffee, but she knows fourteen.  There are misunderstandings, meannesses, masquerades, undying crushes,  ghosts which aren't, and the occasional uprising in the Fourth.  (She has rather a pash for gipsyish brunettes.) There are censorious or adulated mistresses; there is frolicking with garlands on the lawn, in Attic attitudes.  There is real landscape, done in watercolor—and not only English.  Much to my surprise, there are jaunts to Sicily.  She must have visited and fallen madly in love, pressing flowers, taking note of the picturesque:

"You can always tell a brigand because he never carries an umbrella."

So, what featherweight reading do you like?

Nine

06:15 pm: Small Beer!
Congratulations to my beloved publishers, Kelly Link & Gavin J. Grant of Small Beer Press and Big Mouth House, on their World Fantasy Award!  Congratulations and commiserations to all the winners and the brilliant runners-up.  This must have been a heartbreakingly difficult year to judge.

Nine

04:14 pm: "The language is the story..."

There's an excellent long review of Cloud & Ashes—an essay, really, by Paul Kincaid—just up on the SF Site.

"I am drunk on the words, I am feasting on the allusions that are both timeless and contemporary, that seem to take us to the very root of folklore and to its most modern expression, that is every legend you have ever heard and a tale you have never encountered before. It is pure story; enter at your peril..."

I rejoice.

ETA:  I am particularly pleased that he noted this:

"Above all, I have barely hinted at how much it plays with gender roles, how much it has to tell us about the role of women in shaping the world, indeed how every potent active character is female."

Nine

11:55 pm: Dark Morris

      But on a certain day when the nights are drawing in, the dancers leave
   work early and take, from attics and cupboards, the other costume, the
   black one, and the other bells. And they go by separate ways to a valley
   among the leafless trees. They don't speak. There is no music. It's very
   hard to imagine what kind there could be.

      The bells don't ring. They're made of octiron, a magic metal. But
   they're not, accurately, silent bells. Silence is merely the absence of
   noise. They make the opposite of noise, a sort of heavily textured silence.

      And in the cold afternoon, as the light drains from the sky, among the
   frosty leaves and in the damp air, they dance the other Morris. Because of
   the balance of things.


      You've got to dance both, they say. Otherwise you can't dance either.					

						--Terry Pratchett

Nine

08:27 pm: Midden
They were digging up the Yard again today; having staked out the back yard of the Indian College in the proper chessboard pattern, they were bringing up the earth in dustpans and shaking it down on screens.  Rather nice to have a 17th-century midden on the premises.  And maybe they found Caleb Cheeshahteaumuck's shoe nail.  Who could tell?  Their best finds were on display:  pipestems and quarried-window-leading; shoe leather, oyster shells, a button; gnawed sheepshanks, clinkers, and nails.  One of the bacca pipes was marked "Davidson Glasgow," of all places.  And I note that none of these ever look smoked—you'd think they'd be deeply stained with nicotine, but no, all the pipestems that I've ever seen have been as ghostly white as the woodland plant, and must have been broken as often as eggshells.  And hurled on the middens for their afterclass to find.  There was a 17th-century lead musket ball, about the size of a sourball candy, but astonishingly heavy in the hand; being shot with that thing would be brutal.  There was a very nice shard of slipware, maybe from an ale mug or a jug.  From the upper levels, 18th- and 19th-century, they had smashed crockery and one rather tawdry gilt ring, now stoneless—was it flung aside angrily? lost and mourned?

Postscript:  the Staffordshire Hoard it's not, but the continuity is moving.  All these brawling scrawling boys are long ago, all dead; and yet the light must be the same now, and the leaves whirling down.,























Nine

03:05 pm: Thumb enchanted evening
"This isn't the Avocado, is it?"

"No, it's the Pumpkin."

Overheard at the doctor's office, and O gods, am I thankful not to be the Avocado, who seems to have tried to cut one that was cradled in her palm, with disastrous results, poor thing.

You may be pleased to hear that the Pumpkin is coming along pretty well (as far as anyone can tell under the Surgifoam).  I got a nice new bandage—a three-handed job—neat and small and shining like a good deed in a naughty world.  I can still hitchhike after midnight, but it's no longer cartoonishly huge.  And I got a goodie bag full of gauze and tape and surgical gloves.

Nine