One of my favorite folk songs is “Katy Cruel,” a cheerful ditty from the point of view of a young lady who has run completely out of [bleeps] to give:
Our Ms. Cruel comes from a distinguished (or maybe the right word is “notorious”) folkloric lineage.
There’s the Cruel Mother:
And the Cruel Father:
(Sorry, no video link here, just audio on the web page. But he’s cruel, believe me.)
The Cruel Sister:
And the Cruel Brother:
Hell, if I had a family like that, I’d leave town and take to drink, too.
Here’s Forbes Magazine – which really ought to know better – in the midst of an otherwise unexceptional article about the impact of the mega-success of Black Panther on the movie industry’s current reliance on producing a year-round series of blockbusters:
This is an entire pre-summer slate of would-be event movies getting steamrolled by one very big tentpole.
Squint a little with your mind’s eye, if you can, and try to picture what would you would be seeing, if this were a literal image.
Right. You’ve got a chalkboard getting squished by a support pole (I’ll even make it easier for you by assuming a circus-tent-sized wooden mast, rather than a flimsy aluminum pup-tent sort of thing) attached in some fashion to a piece of heavy road equipment. Which puts us squarely in Toon Town, if it puts us any place at all.
The moral of the story, if there is one: If you’re going to commit metaphor, for goodness’s sake take moment to visualize the whole thing first
What’s happening this weekend on March 3 is that my spouse and co-author, Jim Macdonald, is going to be doing his stage magic at the Vermont Winter Faire in Essex Junction, Vermont. This is an indoor faire, being held at the Champlain Valley Exposition event center.
Once again, he’ll be doing walkaround magic all day; this time, he’ll also be doing a stage performance at 2:30 PM.
If you’re in the area, come by and give him (and all the other vendors and performers) a look!
While idly mousing about the internet the other day, I followed a link to this page, which is all about an artist in Texas who’s been re-imagining images of classic Western heroes using female models, with awesome results:
And my thought, instantly, was “Damn, I want to read the books that those are the covers for!” Because behind every powerful image is a good story.
My offspring, they have a podcast:
It’s up at all the usual places.
(“Art in the blood, Watson . . . .”)
Jim Macdonald did magic again last weekend, and over at his place, he blogs about it:
(With bonus writing-related content!)
There’s a guest post by another magician.
Jim’s posting a lot about stage magic these days, which isn’t surprising; he was learning to be a magician even before he started learning to be a writer.
It’s all entertainment, in the end, and bringing the mystery. Art in the blood, Watson. . . .
…wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.
Shakespeare in the Park is doing Julius Caesar this summer, not Hamlet, but the reference is an apt one nonetheless.
Somebody’s conscience (or self-love, or something) has definitely been caught by this year’s modern-dress, Trump-inflected production of Julius Caesar, and they’ve unleashed the flying monkeys roused far-right protesters to disrupt the performance.
Shakespeare himself would have no doubt at all about what’s going on here. The twin questions of what makes a good ruler, and what can or should be done when the realm is suffering under a bad or unjust ruler, run like a streak of red through all his plays, from early ones like Richard III to later ones like Hamlet and The Tempest. He never comes up with any definitive answers – he was a playwright, not a political philosopher – but he certainly gives the matter a thorough inspection from all sides.
Make no mistake, what he was doing was Serious Business. The Elizabethan censors didn’t worry about bawdry†; they worried about sedition. Fretting too obviously about, for example, whether or not it could ever be a good and necessary thing to overthrow a reigning monarch could definitely be regarded as seditious if there wasn’t a convincing enough veil of “this all happened a long time ago, or in foreign parts, or both” thrown over things.
Art mattered. Shakespeare knew it. The lords and the groundlings at the Globe Theatre knew it. The Elizabethan censors knew it.
Furthermore, art still matters. The people who put on Shakespeare in the Park know it. The audience knows it. And the alt-right protesters and those who egg them on sure as hell know it, or this production wouldn’t worry them so.
†The general rule for reading Shakespeare, as articulated by Elizabeth Bear: “If it looks like a dick joke, it’s a dick joke. If it doesn’t look like a dick joke – it’s probably a dick joke.”
Or, Robert Frost gets it right again.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall….
Tree roots and the freeze-thaw cycle, to be specific.
The freeze-thaw cycle is also responsible for frost heaves, which can give the roads up here a corrugated appearance in late winter and early spring, and likewise for the epic potholes that show up a little later.
“When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d….”
“Come down to Kew in lilac-time . . . .”
Walt Whitman lived somewhat south of here, and his lilacs bloomed in April, the same month that Confederate guns fired on Fort Sumter, and that four years afterward saw the end of war and the funeral procession of an assassinated president:
Coffin that passes through lanes and streets,
Through day and night with the great cloud darkening the land,
With the pomp of the inloop’d flags with the cities draped in black,
With the show of the States themselves as of crape-veil’d
women standing,
With processions long and winding and the flambeaus of the night,
With the countless torches lit, with the silent sea of faces
and the unbared heads,
With the waiting depot, the arriving coffin, and the sombre faces,
With dirges through the night, with the thousand voices
rising strong and solemn,
With all the mournful voices of the dirges pour’d around
the coffin,
The dim-lit churches and the shuddering organs — where
amid these you journey,
With the tolling tolling bells’ perpetual clang,
Here, coffin that slowly passes,
I give you my sprig of lilac.
American lilacs, at least of the poetic variety, have carried that freight of connotation ever since. British lilacs, on the other hand, lead a more upbeat poetic life:
Go down to Kew in lilac-time, in lilac-time, in lilac-time;
Go down to Kew in lilac-time (it isn’t far from London!)
And you shall wander hand in hand with love in summer’s wonderland;
Go down to Kew in lilac-time (it isn’t far from London!)
The cherry-trees are seas of bloom and soft perfume and sweet perfume,
The cherry-trees are seas of bloom (and oh, so near to London!)
And there they say, when dawn is high and all the world’s a blaze of sky
The cuckoo, though he’s very shy, will sing a song for London.
The nightingale is rather rare and yet they say you’ll hear him there
At Kew, at Kew in lilac-time (and oh, so near to London!)
The linnet and the throstle, too, and after dark the long halloo
And golden-eyed tu-whit, tu-whoo of owls that ogle London.
For Noah hardly knew a bird of any kind that isn’t heard
At Kew, at Kew in lilac-time (and oh, so near to London!)
And when the rose begins to pout and all the chestnut spires are out
You’ll hear the rest without a doubt, all chorusing for London:–
Come down to Kew in lilac-time, in lilac-time, in lilac-time;
Come down to Kew in lilac-time (it isn’t far from London!)
And you shall wander hand in hand with love in summer’s wonderland;
Come down to Kew in lilac-time (it isn’t far from London!)
The lilacs in the yard next door are blooming as intensely and fragrantly as any of Alfred Noyes’s, as are the ones in front of half the other houses in town, not to mention the ones by the Congregational Church and the Civil War Memorial. Which comes back around to Whitman again, and the funeral train heading west from Washington to Springfield.
More items of cultural metaphor taking up space in my local reality.
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