nineweaving

11:33 pm: “The Road,” she wrote, “is made of Travellers" (further on)




Nine

09:26 pm: “The Road,” she wrote, “is made of Travellers.”
So I saw this really pretty photo of the Milky Way, and thought of Ashes (being clearly obsessed).

Her shadow's there already.

Here's the dark fantasy version (otherwise known as Daughter of Children of the Corn); and here's another take:






Nine

05:25 pm: Wainscot panelling
Some excellent notes on Readercon 19 here and here. At least some of her experience Venned with mine; but she had the wit to write it down.

Note: according to negothick, the Spanish in Pan's Labyrinth is not only Castilian but in part archaic. Pan speaks to Ofelia as if she were a Renaissance princess.

Nine

03:03 am: Mine eyes dazzle




Nine

02:27 am: Jacketed
One thing I talked about at Readercon with Small Beer: no matter how lovely or appropriate my cover design for Cloud & Ashes might be, if the suits think it looks too dark or introverted--if it doesn't leap from the shelf--then it's no go.

I looked at my last version and its counterpart, the "corn goddess" sketch, which is brighter but not at all celestial; then I tried a patchwork of them, which suggested torn scraps of parchment. Interesting, I think, but rather too fussy. And all of this is way too distracting from my work.






Nine

12:39 am: Hurly Burlington: Thursday
Regretfully, I passed over "Snape, Gollum and Other Moral Linchpins" and "Every Critic His Own Aristotle" for a workshop on "Reading Aloud for Writers" given by Jim Freund. Given how often I've been told that I write for the ear, I've been wanting to record for podcast, and I was after technical advice.

After that, I went to a screening of The Polymath, or, The Life and Opinions of Samuel R. Delany, Gentleman, a film by Fred Barney Taylor. Not for the squeamish, of course, but an astounding life: his monologue ranges from raw sex (50,000 partners so far, he reckons) to his philosophy of teaching (filmed with jump and clatter on a moving train); from speculative fiction to his fear of jumping under subway trains; from a lynching in his family to urban metamorphosis; from the ghosts on Brooklyn Bridge to utopian visions. His intelligence is vast, his bulk and beard rabbinical; his wit is dry. The filmmaker's style is somewhat edgy, mingling black and white with acid color, still with jitter, rare and fading home movies with footage from Birth of a Nation. Recommended.

More anon.

Nine

11:59 pm: Drinking down the moon
Back from Readercon, dazed with language. Ah, such conversations, with such madly brilliant friends. All hail the word!

Nine

09:09 am: Penny for the crows
Small Beer is now taking orders for Cloud & Ashes.  Inscribe your name in the heavens!

Nine

08:00 pm: Glory and Trumpets!
  Now I can tell you:







Readercon!  Be still my beating heart.  Such amazing company!  And Small Beer is bringing out Cloud & Ashes in May!

{tiptoes discreetly to window, opens it to the moon}

Squeeeeeeeeeeeee!

Nine

06:48 pm: Something aesthetic, something frenetic...

Something for everyone: a comedy tonight!

The Readercon preliminary schedule is out.  Here's mine:

Friday 11:00 AM, Salon F: Panel

Over the Hills in Farah's Way: Four Categories of Fantasy.  Ellen Asher,
John Clute, Gregory Frost (L), Greer Gilman, Sarah Micklem

Every Readercon attendee is urged to pick up and devour a copy of Farah
Mendlesohn's Rhetorics of Fantasy, in which she describes four types of
fantasy distinguished by the relationship of the protagonists, and hence the
reader, to the fantasy world.  In the portal-quest fantasy  (The Lion, the
Witch, and the Wardrobe or The Lord of the Rings), the protagonists leave
their mundane world and cross through to the fantastic, and the protagonists
and reader discover and understand the new world together. In the immersive
fantasy (Perdido Street Station or The Iron Dragon's Daughter), the
fantastic is presented without comment or explication as the norm for both
the protagonist and reader.  The intrusion fantasy (Dracula or most of
Lovecraft's short fiction) is in many ways the opposite of the portal-quest:
the fantastic enters the ordinary world, where it is met with awe, shock,
amazement, or the like.  (Most intrusion fantasies are horror, but there are
interesting exceptions.)  In the liminal fantasy (Hope Mirrlees'
Lud-in-the-Mist or Little, Big) there might be an intrusion into the
ordinary world, but the reader is disoriented, estranged, or challenged by
the casualness with which the protagonists accept the intrusion or by their
doubt of its reality.  We'll discuss the usefulness of the taxonomy and look
at each of the categories, highlighting the most interesting of Mendlesohn's
insights.


Friday 7:00 PM, NH / MA: Reading (60 min.)


Reads from her forthcoming novel Cloud & Ashes (2009).


Saturday 12:00 Noon, Salon G: Panel

Fantasists as Modern Philologists.  Debra Doyle, Greer Gilman, Lissanne
Lake, Faye Ringel (L), Sonya Taaffe

Philologists believe that the study of an ancient language is inseparable
from the study of its classic texts in their historical and cultural
contexts--that understanding a language, the people who spoke it, and the
stories they told in it are ultimately the same thing; there is no doing one
without the others.  It strikes us that this fascination with the interplay
between language, culture, and story is reflected in the works of some of
the best writers of fantasy, beginning of course with Tolkien, himself a
philologist of renown.  Who are these writers?  How do their works reflect
this attitude even when they're not actually inventing the languages of
their imagined societies?


Saturday 2:00 PM, Salon F: Panel

Sing Along With Text.  Greer Gilman, Matthew Jarpe, Caitlin R. Kiernan,
Allen Steele, Sonya Taaffe (L)

More and more often writers are providing their readers with soundtracks to
stories.  Sometimes they are actual playlists, posted online at the author's
website or blog or cited in a book's prefatory material; or they may be
collections of song quotes, appearing as chapter titles or epigrams or
squirreled away within the text itself.  Often an author will simply list
the music they were listening to while writing the text, but they can also
construct the soundtrack after the fact.  What do authors gain from making
these "extras" available or referencing music so insistently in the text?
How many readers are following along, and how does this change the reading
experience?  Are we moving towards a new mixed medium, or is this just a
fad?

Nine

11:07 pm: Insubstantial pageant, fading






Taken on the Fourth before the fireworks began, the only picture of a sequence to survive.  The others faded from the camera's memory even as I looked.

Nine

02:38 am: Metropolis Regained
Wow.  Just wow.  How did I miss hearing this?  The lost footage of Fritz Lang's Metropolis--that cineaste's Grail--has been found in Argentina.  Scratched and faded but complete.  What next?  Love's Labour's Won?

Nine

04:40 pm: Melting in the Dark
Dear goddess.  One can now buy a "historical character" doll from 1974.  I think I still own that blouse.     

I can see the storybooks now:  "Julie Does Hash" and "Julie Does Disco:  Later Tells Her Children She Did Punk" and "Julie's Father Sits Screaming at CBS" (complete with accessory TV set in authentic black-and-white and her father's old Nixon button).  Not to mention "Julie's Big Brother Comes Home in a Box."

Nine           

03:05 pm: "This dreadful pudder o'er our heads..."
Another sky-rocking gutter-buster.

Nine

04:50 am: Aftermath
































All over in ten minutes.

Nine

05:55 pm: "Wiry and white-fiery and whirlwind-swivellèd ..."
Wow.  On instinct I ran upstairs in time to see the green sky sunder, and a great rain come down, up, sideways, widdershins, and strange.  For a minute or two there was absolute grey-out, lightning-crazed, and the hailstones rattling down like God's dice-box.  A cold front like the reaper's Scythe.

If there weren't such fierce lightning, I would have danced in it.  Things were struck:  you could hear the engines wailing, like a tocsin from drowned Ys.

Nine

05:15 pm: Cloud map

Here is the alphabet of Cloud & Ashes, the elements of which the book is made, its charm and strange:  all taken from a text cloud’s  first two hundred words.

Earth, water, fire, and air are elemental of course; as are sun, moon, stars, and heavens.  Here are stone and ashes, blood and bones.

I am very fond of crux words, of ambiguities, grammatical and lexical: of light; of spring and fall.   Hopkins is my daemon.

Take fell,
Of course, all of this is perilous to contemplate.  I risk ending up like that poor novelist  (once Angry and Young, now aging and sad) in Small World, who was told his favorite adjective was “greasy” and who never wrote another word.

Nine

09:39 pm: Bewilderment

Is anyone here running Wordle on a Mac? It's an utterly entrancing toy and I want to play with it, but it doesn't work on either of my machines (an iMac G4 and an iBook, both running OS 10.3.9) or in any of my browsers (several Firefox versions, Safari).  That one I posted the other day was done at work (bad Nine, no biscuit).  At home, I can neither create word clouds nor see others' creations, which is intensely frustrating.  All I ever get is a grey blank with a red X at one corner.

Yes, I've made sure that I have the latest version of Java.  (Damn it all, Java is native to Mac.)  Yes, I've enabled "Java" and "Java script" in all  my browser preferences.  Are there old files buried deep that I should trash?  Or is Wordle a program that won't run without 10.4 or .5?

Gnash!

Nine

06:16 pm: "An earthly nourice sits and sings..."
"Harbour seals (Phoca vitulina) can steer by the stars."  O marvellous!  So what we sing is true:  a selkie knows the way from Sule Skerry to his lady's bed, from croft and cradle to the deep beyond.

Many thanks to sovay, for the study!

Nine

05:25 pm: Year Hinge
Last week's TLS has a review by Ronald Hutton of two new books on Stonehenge:

"Other than that, we are still left with a conclusion which can be surmised without the aid of excavation: that it was the work of a bunch of reckless, megalomaniac, elitist carpenters. They were clearly carpenters because they worked stone with techniques much more appropriate to wood, such as mortise-and-tenon joints. They were megalomaniac to have tried that at all, and even more so in their choice of stone. It is very rare to find a prehistoric monument in Britain made of large stones that were obtained from more than five miles away. The huge sandstone uprights and lintels of Stonehenge were dragged about twenty miles, while the smaller but still substantial blocks called the Altar Stone and the bluestones were obtained from more than a hundred miles further than that; as the crow flies and not as the person tugs, paddles and sails...Finally, they were elitist because, unlike the hundreds of other stone circles of Neolithic Britain, Stonehenge was constructed as a series of screens, to conceal the activities of what could only have been a relatively small number of people (or deities or spirits) in the centre.

"Beyond that, all is speculation. Among archaeologists it currently comes in two favourite forms. One, most prominently associated with Mike Parker Pearson, is that Stonehenge was essentially a place of the dead, to which the living came at the winter solstice, to commune with their ancestors and consecrate the remains of the recently deceased. They did so in procession from the huge earthwork and timber monuments at Durrington Walls, a few miles away, after enjoying pig roasts and other fun of the fair. The other speculation, of which Timothy Darvill is the main exponent, is that it was essentially a temple sacred to a particular god or god and goddess, to which people travelled on pilgrimage to question oracles and to be healed. As usual with archaeology, both concepts were inspired by ideas from outside the discipline: the former is based on tribal customs in Madagascar, and the latter on ancient Greek tradition and the medieval pseudo-history of Geoffrey of Monmouth. Both have strong circumstantial evidence in their favour, and neither can be proved..."

Alas, the theories of Stonehenge as a great star wheel, a sort of lithic Antikythera mechanism, seem to have faded.  At least among scholars:  they are vivid as ever to the reading public.  (Hey, if I were building a world with a Neolithic culture, that's how I'd do it.)  The alignment with the midwinter sunset is marred, downfallen with the Great Trilithon; but the midsummer sunrise stands.

Nine