Art · Nouveau · Ho

Shortly afterwards, the messenger, about to depart, was stayed by the artificer’s sharp call. She ran to the carriage and tucked the leather pouch in beside the birdcage and the box, bidding the messenger a good journey.

A good journey he must have had, for scarcely had the moon waned to a crescent when he returned at the gallop, bearing a letter for the Queen. She opened it, noting the courtly terms of respectful address; shortly thereafter, she informed her daughters that His new Majesty had requested their presence at his court for the formal presentation of their gifts, and for the Coronation Ball, to be held at the next full moon.
( Read on... )

The three princesses nodded and withdrew, each to her work. The magician consulted her library of old and dusty books, until she found an ancient spell written in Byzantium by-- she gasped as she deciphered the signature-- Hermes Trismegistus himself. Straightaway she began casting circles, committing invocations to memory, seeking out long-lost pathways of truth and mystery.
( Read on... )

Story told extempore in the beer tent at Berkeley, to take a friend's mind off her aches and pains. Assembled from various bits that had been knocking around in my head for a while.

Once upon a time, there was a widowed Queen who reigned over a small but prosperous country. Its prosperity was due in large part to her careful rule, and she applied the same care to the raising of two of her three daughters.
( Read on... )

So Peter David, author of the excellent recent children's book Tigerheart as well as a whole bunch of other stuff, has been running a chain-story parody of the Twilight novels on his blog, entitled Potato Moon. Yesterday, it was my turn.
( Small potatoes )

Gravelly Voice Guy: In a world where human technology has propelled us into space...

(Montage of Apollo launch, Sputnik in orbit, Skylab, Hubble telescope, Mars rover, etc etc etc)

GVG: ...Where man has reached the moon....

(Grainy archive footage of moon landing with Armstrong saying "That's one small step for man...")

GVG: ...ONE BAT chose to defy the odds.

(Closeup of tiny bat clinging to Space Shuttle fuel tank during launch. Swelling violin motif.)

GVG: And make his mark...

(Pull back to distance shot of the Shuttle; v/o countdown. Violins grow ever more inspiring)

GVG: On histor--

(Liftoff. Standard giant fiery cloud of toxic vapour as Shuttle roars into atmosphere at bone-liquefying G-forces. Violins, too close to launch site, are vaporised)

GVG: ...Ah, shit. (pause) Wanna go get a coffee or something?

Io ch'armato sin hor d'un duro gelo
degli assalti d'amor potei difendermi
ne l'infocato suo pungente telo
puote l'alma passar o'l petto offendermi
Hor che il tutto si cangia al novo cielo
a due begli occhi ancor non dovea a rendermi
si si disarma il solito rigore
arda dunque d'amor
arda il mio core.

I who am armoured now in hard ice
From the assaults of Love will be able to defend myself.
Not even his fiery, stabbing arrow
Can pass into my soul or wound my breast.
Now that all things are changed under a new sky
To two beautiful eyes I must not again surrender.
If this same rigour should disarm itself
It burns then with love
It burns, my heart.

Seen through the eyes of a mask, all men are lords, all women beauties.

Men know this. It is why they come in flocks to Venice in the winter. I think it is also why our city’s law allows the wearing of masks in public from October until the beginning of Lent. Certainly we do not go masked for anonymity: in a city this small, no one is anonymous. We who once oversaw a trading empire that stretched from Asia to the Adriatic now have nothing to do but gossip. The cut of your clothes, the rhythm of your step, the way you hold a fan or climb out of a gondola will give you away, mask or no. Masks are useless for disguise. I think we Venetians simply could not bear to look at each other’s bare faces all year round.
( Read on... )

In the absence of fencing class tonight, I layered up and went snowwalking after sunset in Hyde Park.
( Stopping by woods on a snowy evening )
Midway through my walk, I felt the snow end: the northeast wind died away and all was still. The temperature rose above freezing, and on my way home the texture of the snow underfoot, even the untrodden stuff, was palpably heavier and wetter. By tomorrow afternoon it may well all be gone.

I'll miss it: the way it changed the shape and sound of everything and made London look clean for a minute or two.

I've decided to carry on translating Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and have started a new journal to do so: gawain_project.

I have to admit I never much saw the point of translating Middle English, since I think people should just read it, but it's true that the Northern dialect of Gawain isn't really comprehensible to an everyday reader. And besides, I wanted to tell you guys a good story.

It's winter, after all, and winter is the time for storytelling-- especially Arthurian tales. If you want to read Malory, winter nights are the best time. But although Malory clearly likes Gawain and gives him a lot of adventures, the Green Knight tale isn't in Malory. It isn't anywhere else but in this one manuscript, miraculous survivor of a library fire in 1731.

So if you'd like a good story to get us through the winter, then do add gawain_project to your Friends list. I can promise knightly quests, exciting travels, a beheading game gone horribly wrong, feasting, drinking, kissing, hunting and sexual harassment (of Gawain, by a lady.) See you there!

My translation of the first few verses of
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,
anonymous, c. 1380

The king lay at Camelot upon Christmas
With many loving lords, ladies of the best;
All these rich brothers of the Round Table
With right rich revels and reckless mirth
There tourneyed; true knights full many a time
Jousted full joyfully; these gentle knghts
Then returned to the court to dance and sing carols;
For there the feast was held for full fifteen days,
With all the meat and the mirth that men could devise,
Such gleaming glee, glorious to hear:
Loud singing by day, dancing by night;
All was high and happy in halls and chambers
With lords and ladies as pleased them best;
With all the joy of the world they dwelt there assembled:
The most famous knights under Christ's self
And the loveliest ladies that ever had life
And he the comeliest king that ever held court;
For all these fair folk were in their first age
on earth,
The happiest under heaven,
With their high-willed king;
To name a better host
Today were a hard thing.

( More revelry below )

Damn plants are at it again.
( the Holly and the Ivy )
Here are Winchester Cathedral Choir singing the classic version, and Renée Fleming with a small choir in a slightly more over-the-top arrangement.

Last night was the last night of Zauberflöte. I spent the preceding week in a state of high panic, making the instantaneous transition from sleep to anxiety attack every morning around eight. It took until the last night to get all the costumes completely finished, and some of it was finished in the most half-assed and drunken way possible-- but it did, more or less, get done.

When I took the job, I knew it would be insane, but I didn't foresee quite how insane. There was no designer, no tech team and no real producer (the conductor and principal tenor were co-producing). The lighting board operator and our ONE stagehand were only recruited the day before the tech rehearsal. Making this show happen called on all the skills I had (directing! language coaching! dancing! sewing! makeup! making a dragon out of cardboard, tubular crinoline and hot glue!) and quite a few I didn't. I anticipate a new crop of grey hairs sprouting over the next couple of months.

It took everything I had, and in dark hours, I thought it still might not be enough. I barely saw my friends; missed Whitby; missed orkamedies's bonfire; missed most things not immediately show-related. A historic election happened Stateside the day of our tech rehearsal; I was so consumed with tech nerves that I could barely summon the energy to care.

And yet, and yet. Before that evening's run, I'd had to read people the riot act about not being offbook and messing around in rehearsal. I'd been dreading it, of course, because I hate having to be the enemy; but the previous night's run had shown me an undisciplined, unfocused cast and given me The Fear about opening in two days' time. I told them they'd all made great strides since we began working together, and praised them for that; then said that each of them was capable of giving a far better performance than they currently were, and that they needed to take responsibility for the show, since it was theirs now. Then I read them the riot act, and said "I'm only going to say this once. You can mess around when you know it." Afterwards, I added "That was me being moderately tough. I hope you enjoyed it. Let's do this thing." And... they gave me a round of applause. And the guy who'd been messing around the most called out "We love you, Liza!" (He then learnt his lines and became one of the finer things about the performances.)

The first two nights, I was backstage helping run things, but last night I was up in the booth doing sound and supertitles, so I got to see the show: to see my artists at play in the world I'd helped create, and the audience laughing and applauding. And those singers were owning it: the music, the characters, the jokes, the story had become theirs, just as I'd hoped.

So, you know, it was worth it. It was worth it, for them. For the wild, weird and wonderful young singers whom I had the honour to introduce to this opera, and whom I got to watch as they took it and ran with it. When I thought I couldn't stay up another hour or sew another seam, I would think of the people I was sewing for. (Quite a few of them seem to have fallen in love with each other over the course of the show, which is all good, I hope.) (As for me, I fell mildly in love with several of them at once, which was... interesting.)

So, as I said to them at last night's cast party, we passed through the trials of initiation; we walked through fire and water, and none of us was the same when we came out the other side. I guess that a certain wild, rough magic is an inevitable side effect of doing this opera; but so is enlightenment, so is joy, so is love... and, finally, if we're lucky, wisdom.

Mozart gets the last word:

Silberglöckchen, Zauberflöten
Sind zu euer Schütz vonnöten.
Lebet wohl! Wir wollen gehn;
Lebet wohl, auf Wiedersehn.

I stayed up late last night to watch the Vice-Presidential candidates' debate. I wish I'd been drinking-- except that no amount of alcohol could dull the pain of watching that shit.

You'd have thought Americans would have learned from Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush that "folksy charm" is a truly lousy reason to support a candidate. Voting folksy gets you leaders that offer saccharine platitudes even as the economy crumbles and the world political scene fragments. It's like playing a down-home hoedown fiddle while Rome is slowly burnt alive.

Apparently, Joe Biden had been practicing all week in order not to sound overly aggressive or condescending towards Sarah Palin, because that would be perceived as sexism. But last night, all the aggression and condescension came from Palin herself. While shaking hands with Senator Biden at the start, she asked "Can I call you Joe?" And she did. When Biden asked if anyone was actually economically better off after eight years of the Bush administration, Palin accused him of focusing on the past: "Oh, say it ain't so, Joe! There you go again." Biden, by contrast, referred to Palin as "Governor" throughout the debate.

Reverse the roles for a second: for him to be that patronising and overfamiliar would have been seen as sexist. But for her to do it was fun! feisty! yay! On a foreign policy question, when Biden had delivered a fairly coherent answer on the rights and wrongs of US intervention in Bosnia and Darfur, Palin began her response with "[pause][giggle] "Oh, yeah, it's so obvious I'm a Washington outsider. And someone just not used to the way you guys operate." In a male candidate, this would have been rightly seen as sub-Dan-Quayle ignorance; but Palin made it look cute and girly. (Hillary Clinton, if she was watching, must have been reaching for a bottle of whisky and/or an UZI at this point. Hell, I'd have handed her both.)

Overall, Biden did his best to keep the tone of the debate at the level of policy, but it couldn't have been easy when Palin's response to every question was to make fawnlike eyes at the camera and deliver simplistic soundbites interspersed with "darn right," "you betcha" and, on one memorable occasion, "doggone it."

But here's the thing: Middle America will eat this shit up with a spork. Given a choice between an unpolished candidate trying to make coherent arguments based on the candidates' records and a six-ounce turd wrapped in a sparkly telegenic package, American voters will exercise their democratic privilege and choose the turd every time. See, instead of using big, boring words like "subcommittee" and "benchmark," she says stuff we can understand! She's cute as a button! She looks nice on the TV! I like her, and listen, she's telling me to vote for McCain!

Watching America fall for the cutesy-folksy act again is like watching your best friend get back together with her toxic abusive boyfriend for the sixth time. Only this time they're planning on having kids.

Those looking for a funnier, sharper rendition of last night's debate should go check out mightygodking, who liveblogged it. (In fact, you should regularly check out mightygodking, for he is awesome.) Meanwhile, if anyone needs me, I'll be getting shitfaced and playing shoot-the-TV with Hillary Clinton. So long.

Suspenders with drooping and/or trashed stockings- drink
Idiot with bells on ankles- drink
Gratuitous underwear exposure (intentional) - drink
Gratuitous underwear exposure (accidental) - kill your drink
Liza fails at German - drink
Liza succeeds at German - buy Liza a drink

It's one of those mornings when you pry your eyes open and Oh god.

He seemed so witty and dashing only last night! A blond Adonis, so infectiously cheerful, the life and soul of the party.

Nothing of this remains in the face currently mashed into the pillow barely a foot from your own. A viscous ribbon of drool runs from the corner of his cherubic mouth. Last night that pout was sexy. Now it reminds you horribly of a Cabbage Patch Kid.

Dimly, you remember how delighted you were at his interest in you. You fight the urge to gnaw your own arm off at the shoulder.

Maybe we just passed out. Maybe I didn't...
...hang on, I've got a campaign sticker on each nipple. Oh shit.

He sighs contentedly. As his noxious morning breath washes over you, you realise there's no escape: you've woken up in bed with a smug, moronic, bigoted Thatcherite named Boris Johnson.

Enjoy the next five years, suckers.

I'm informed that it's International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day. Today's mandate: "Give away professional-quality work online."

My offering is a ballade I wrote some years ago. A ballade, for those who don't know, is a French form with three eight-line stanzas and a four-line envoi at the end. Charles d'Orléans wrote armloads of them during his 25-year exile in England. In the play Cyrano de Bergerac, Cyrano improvises a ballade while duelling a foolish viscount in Act I. One of the unsung masters of the ballade in English was Dorothy Parker: you can find hers here, here, here and here.

This particular ballade was sent to my then-partner one Valentine's Day, along with some shiny new Calvin Kleins. Enjoy!
( Under here )

ceruleanst's genius translation of Pulp Fiction into Shakespearean English has already been linked all over the place, and justly so.

The MetaFilter link inspired MeFi's birthday gift to Shakespeare: the Pulp Shakespeare Thread. Some highlights:
Shakespeare Christopher Walken
"Girl, You'll Be A Woman Soon" as a sonnet
Dirty Harry IV, part 1
1601: A Shakespeare Odyssey

and my own small contributions: C'est La Vie in pentameter; Vincent's looking glass soliloquy.

Happy birthday, Shakespeare. You rock my world.
( my own, below: )

After a long day of sorting out boring serious stuff, I went slightly insane and roasted a duck for dinner.

The duck turned out to come with ORGANS inside. I am a grown woman and I ought to be able to cope with ORGANS. Instead I stared at them for a while, then made a small pitiful noise and-- shame of shames-- asked my mother to extract the ORGANS from the duck's cavity.

(My mother cannot read Stephen King novels or watch movies with swearing in them, yet she can be perfectly relaxed while up to her elbows in duck viscera. Go figure.)

I did force myself to chop the ORGANS along with the neck and the wings and make gravy out of them. The rest of the duck got rubbed with oil/soy sauce/sake/5 spice powder and stuck in the oven. It was pretty damn tasty.

The one ORGAN that didn't get used for gravy was the duck's liver. All through the roasting-and-gravy-making process, this shiny red liver was lying there staring at me. As you probably know, the liver is the largest organ in the body. This duck liver appeared bigger than an actual duck. "Just throw it out," said my mother as she left to go out to dinner.

So there I was: duck roasting in the oven, duck gravy simmering on the stove, huge pot of red cabbage looming on the back burner-- and, lying on the counter, this shiny red raw liver that, only a short while earlier, had been helping the duck's body filter toxins out of its system. What toxins does a duck consume? Do I even want to know?

Various thoughts went through my head:
1) Aaaagghhhh slimy duck liver.
2) You're not a vegetarian. Eating meat means consuming dead animals. Deal with it.
3) Out of respect to the animal, you shouldn't waste any part of it.
4) Even the ORGANS aaaaagghhhhh.
5) This was a happy organic free range duck. As duck livers go, this one is probably quite classy.
6) I like pâté, and I've never made it.
7) I'm a grown woman and I ought to be able to cope with ORGANS.
8) Aaaaaaagghhh slimy duck liver.
9) PÂTÉ. NOW.

So a quick Google search led me to this recipe. You'll note that it says "any sinewous bits removed." Both "sinewy" and "sinuous" mean something very different from the consistency of raw duck liver, which is about like meat Jello. ["jelly" to you Brits.] I found this out by extracting bits of stringy connective tissue with my fingers. I think it's safe to say I am now slightly more au fait with ORGANS. Plus, the pâté turned out pretty damn tasty. I used the zest and juice of an orange and some ginger liqueur. It got the speedlime seal of approval.

Post-duck, Speedy and I got creative. I'm painting a rather frightening sea monster onto a square of silk, and Speedy is doing something unnatural to the seat of her trousers with acrylics. Apparently it is meant to give male onlookers an "insta-boner." I'm impressed with this term. I think we have all learnt something today about ORGANS.

Yesterday and the day before, as I sat in the Sheldonian listening to the bazillion-hour rehearsal of Don Giovanni, I thought about my long, chequered history with this opera.
( power up the VCR )

I have absolutely no doubt that my future holds yet more weird shit involving this opera. I really don't want to find out for at least another couple of years, though. That's Don Giovanni: bringer of weird shit into all the lives he touches. No wonder he and I have such a magnificently fucked-up relationship.

...and to all a good longest night.

Here in DC, we've probably got a good hour or so more daylight than there will be in Britain. However many hours of darkness you have, may they be lightened with friends and flame, filled with pleasant dreams, and warmed by... well, any nocturnal activities you choose to get up to.

Meanwhile, here's the text of a Richard Strauss song that I love, with a translation I made today.

Die Nacht


Aus dem Walde tritt die Nacht,
Aus den Bäumen schleicht sie leise,
Schaut sich um im weitem Kreise,
Nun gib acht.

Alle Lichter dieser Welt,
Alle Blumen, alle Farben
Löscht sie aus und stiehlt die Garben
Weg vom Feld.

Alles nimmt sie, was nur hold,
Nimmt das Silber weg des Stromes,
Nimmt vom Kupferdach des Domes
Weg das Gold.

Ausgeplündert steht der Strauch,
Rücke näher, Seel an Seele;
O die Nacht, mir bangt, sie stehle
Dich mir auch.

-- Gilm zu Rosenegg

( My translation below )

Today, gentle reader, my subject is cheese. Cheese and poetry: two subjects that go together like... chalk and cheese.

Back in the days before television, the people of North America didn't have many choices entertainment-wise. In Europe you guys had culture, but in America the only culture related to cheese.

This was also, remember, before refrigeration. If you wanted to keep milk in a form that wouldn't go bad in a week, you made cheese. Big honkin' wheels of cheese. There must have been some point when the local cheesemaking clans downed one too many porters and decided that cheese could be bigger. But as is so often the case, it took a religious nutjob man of God to inspire the creation of a cheese masterpiece.
( Read on for giant cheeses aplenty )
For extra credit: If you were given an enormous cheese as a tribute to your mighty deeds, what would you do with it?