Titania: The First Shoot!

Titania, the first film in Lisa Stock's Medisaga, just had its first shoot this last week! And Lisa Stock has been kind enough to share photos from the shoot and a brief statement about the scene and the mood of the piece (to read our earlier announcement about the upcoming Titania, which includes a plot synopsis and other information, go here):

Landscapes figure prominently in fairy tales, if not as separate characters themselves. We shot one scene this week on location where we'll shoot the rest of the film in September, giving us the effect of season changes for the film. This scene is a dream sequence in which Titania suddenly sees the landscape of her estate winter laden and stripped bare.


The metaphor is that of clarity - no leaves on the trees to block her view into the forest that haunts her, the sun vibrant and blinding when it comes out from behind the clouds. In the beginning of this scene she lifts a veil as though unveiling the truth - she is starting to put together the pieces of the puzzle, and when she wakes from the dream in the film has strength and insight she didn't have before.
--Lisa Stock

Titania, grounded on this estate after her wings are brutally torn from her body, must soon venture into the dark forest - which sounds like the premise of a great fairy tale or myth in the making. Equal parts poet, visual artist, and storyteller, Lisa Stock is one of the artists who brought us Through the Cobweb Forest and several compelling short films foregrounding the fairy tale as an ideal medium for addressing the issues of the woman's journey through an often hostile world. We are excited to see what happens with Lisa Stock behind the camera with a full cast of actors, her very precise instinct for lighting, music, and mood, and the determination of an artist in whose visions we sense that she has already fought her way through her own forest, to emerge on the other side with wisdom to share. Visit Lisa Stock's Medisaga site for more photographs from the first shoot, as well as other updates and backstory on the making of the film.

Robert Fagles is no longer with us

Dear readers, I bear ill news. Robert Fagles, classicist, scholar, and prolific translator (best known for his compulsively readable yet erudite translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey) died this last week, on Wednesday, at age 74. There is a beautiful obituary for him here at the Denver Post. This is a great loss to all who are interested in myth and the classics. It was Fagles who introduced me to The Odyssey, and to a love for Greek. Read this passage aloud, and you will see what this poet and scholar of ancient languages achieved in English:

Cables cast off, the crew swung to the oarlocks.
Bright-eyed Athena sent them a stiff following wind
rippling out of the west, ruffling over the wine-dark sea
as Telemachus shouted out commands to all his shipmates:
"All hands to tackle!" They sprang to orders,
hoisting the pinewood mast, they stepped it firm
in its block amidships, lashed it fast with stays
and with braided rawhide halyards hauled the white sail high.
Suddenly wind hit full and the canvas bellied out
and a dark blue wave, foaming up at the bow,
sang out loud and strong as the ship made way,
skimming the whitecaps, cutting toward her goal.
All running gear secure in the swift black craft,
they set up bowls and brimmed them high with wine
and poured libations out to the everlasting gods
who never die--to Athena first of all,
the daughter of Zeus with flashing sea-gray eyes--
and the ship went plunging all night long and through the dawn.

Ah, what a sea-sway rocking of poetry that is! The best obituary I think for any writer is to read from his or her work. Fagles showed English readers that Homer was meant to be read on a hill, the listeners swept up in the foaming of the waves.

Over the past decades Fagles had also published a translation of the Aeneid and of many of the Greek tragedies. He retired from the faculty at Princeton only a few years ago, in 2002, and last year was awarded an honorary doctor of humane letters; the faculty of Princeton awarded it to him for "four decades of feats on behalf of Princeton, as the founding father of comparative literature, as a gracious and wise colleague and as an inspiring mentor and teacher." To his credit had gone also the PEN/Ralph Manheim prize for lifetime achievement, the National Humanities Medal, and many other prestigious awards. The Denver Post article even reports that a reader once wrote to Robert Fagles asking him to suggest a name for his new cat. The classicist replied not "Aristotle" or "Pericles" but "Bobcat." Which is fitting: while a human being may look up to Aristotle or Pericles, I suspect a cat will probably look up to such an intimidating and athletic animal as a bobcat. We all have our own heroes.

I mourn the passing of one of mine.

Prehistoric Scenes in Fantasy

The "fantasy novel" as we know it deals most often either with a present or near-future urban landscape or with a mythical and heroic past - but it is a mythical past that extends back only as far as the invention of ironworking. I am curious how many storytellers who are serious about myth-making weave a picture of earth's prehistory into the mythic histories of their works.


Is the fascination our culture once had for dinosaurs and mammoths now forgotten? Jurassic Park would indicate otherwise - as would this story from the Rocky Mountain Dinosaur Research Center, a few years ago:

The Rocky Mountain Dinosaur Resource Center offered a reward for information leading to the return of the Albertosaurus head, stolen from the Monument Hill billboard on I-25 between Feb. 4-10. The head piece is 9 foot by 4 foot, really ferocious looking and weighs close to 100 pounds. Tire marks near the billboard site indicate it was probably disconnected from the billboard with power tools -- a lot of effort on the thieves' part and was removed from the scene after a weekend snow.

These are specialists among thieves! The story made me grin.

But back to the question - what fantasy writers find inspiration in the giants of the ancient world? (And I mean besides the obvious examples of Clan of the Cave Bear and its genre, and the Lost World / Land That Time Forgot genre of the nineteenth century.) I'll offer a few examples, in hopes that our readers may suggest a few more.

First, from J.R.R. Tolkien's The Silmarillion, describing the wars between the gods while the world was being made:

Now Melkor began the delving and building of a vast fortress, deep under Earth, beneath dark mountains where the beams of Illuin were cold and dim. The stronghold was named Utumno. ...And the blight of his hatred flowed out thence, and the Spring of Arda was marred. Green things fell sick and rotted, and rivers were choked with weeds and slime, and fens were made, rank and poisonous, the breeding place of flies; and forests grew dark and perilous, the haunts of fear; and beasts became monsters of horn and ivory and dyed the earth with blood.

Tolkien paints the prehistory of Middle-Earth with as much wonder and subtlety as he does the more recent history of Elves and wizards. Tolkien peoples the story with characters such as Orome, who hunts the monstrous beasts of prehistory with spear and bow, and sounds his horn, the Valaroma, in the dark forests - and Yavanna, who awakens the wild and ancient plants:

But already the oldest living things had arisen: in the seas the great weeds, and on earth the shadow of great trees; and in the valleys of the night-clad hills there were dark creatures old and strong.

No book I read as a child about the immense animals that preceded the tigers and deer that we know ever spoke of them with such poetry.

A second example: Orson Scott Card's Red Prophet -- Alvin Maker has climbed with the Prophet into the heart of a tornado to watch a vision of the earth's history:

He saw fish leaping in the sea, crawly life on the shore where the tide came in, and then bugs and other small critters, hopping and nibbling and catching each other and eating each other up. Them animals kept getting bigger and bigger, so fast Alvin couldn't follow the changes, just the earth spinning and him watching, huge monstrous creatures like he never heard of, with long snakey necks some of them, and teeth and jaws to tear down trees with a single bite, it looked like. And then they were gone, and there were elephants and antelopes and tigers and horses, all the life of the earth, getting more and more like what Alvin thought animals ought to look like.

And one more example - this one from one of Robert E. Howard's Conan stories, Beyond the Black River. I know it is customary to look down on Howard for his often turgid prose and for his pulp extravagancy, but his fiction remains my guilty pleasure. So I inflict this scene on you:

But suddenly the gate was no longer empty. A shuddering gasp swept over the village and men crowded hastily back, jamming each other between the huts. Balthus felt the short hair stir on his scalp. The creature that stood in the gate was like the embodiment of a nightmare legend. Its color was of a curious pale quality which made it seem ghostly and unreal in the dim light. But there was nothing unreal about the low-hung savage head, and the great curved fangs that glistened in the firelight. On noiseless padded feet it approached like a phantom out of the past. It was a survival of an older, grimmer age, the ogre of many an ancient legend -- a saber-tooth tiger.

What each of these tales offers is a recognition of the ferocity and vivid wonder (or horror) that fossils have held for us, a recognition of fossils as a wellspring of new myth -- whether that myth is centered around the conflict of the civilized and the primitive (as in Howard), the heedless rush of history (as in Card), or the theodicy of suffering (as in Tolkien) -- or indeed the triumph of the survivor and of the individual spirit (as in Auel). Is there not something that calls to us when we look upon the ruins of wonders that even our ancestors never got to see?

Gene Wolfe, in The Book of the New Sun, describes a man riding a baluchitherium through the wood -- the largest of all living mammals, a hornless rhinoceros that might have stepped over a small house -- and the beast squeezing itself between the trunks of two old cedars as a mouse might squeeze though a crack in the wall.


I also think of Gurney's Dinotopia series, which began as a series of paintings -- of a lost world where dinosaurs and humans live together -- and quickly became a series of bestselling (and very good) children's books.

Scientific discoveries about the prehistoric world are coming upon us fast and thick: the discovery of remnants of that world that still live, like the coelacanth; the discovery of a race of humans of hobbit height that once lived on an island in the Pacific; the discovery of dinosaurs that lived in Antarctica (Antarctica!), warm-blooded and large-eyed and able to survive through dark, sunless eight-month winters; the discovery of many new and strange species. Amid such wonders, what fresh myths will emerge in our new century?

Marco Polo and his caravan, on the eastern road to China, passed massive bones exposed by the wind in the Gobi Desert, and thought them the bones of dragons.

Morla, the Aged One

Here is a deliciously random picture and a delicious and random memory - Morla, the Aged One, in Wolfgang Petersen's adaptation of Michael Ende's The Neverending Story. While I have run into few stories or scenes of giant turtles or tortoises since this one, it has never left my memory. Does anyone else remember Atreyu climbing this "mountain" in the swamp, precariously pulling himself up by the branches and brush growing on Morla's shell? Or Morla's terrible sneezes, that would knock the young hero off his tree?

"Do you have a cold?"

"No...I'm allergic...to you...."

Why aren't there more giant and terrifically aged turtles in our stories? (Let's make some.)

Painted Feathers

Update 4/2: Go here for another post featuring Julie Thompson's art.

Update 3/26: See below for several updates -- we now know the source of these feathers.

These have finally made their way to my Inbox - they have been making the rounds via e-mail and blogs for a little while, and they are far more beautiful and unusual than most of the things that make the rounds.


They appeared under the heading Ispeshul Painted Feathers. Aren't they beautiful? They represent some extremely deft work, either with a brush on the delicate feathers or with a digital brush on a digital canvas - I am not sure which. I have been Googling "painted feathers" aggressively, and am (so far) no closer to learning where these come from. Instead, I find only a cyber trail of where these have been before - different blogs and forums, mostly.

Does anyone know:

* Where these come from? Update 3/26: We now know. Check out Featherlady Studio -- the link is provided by an anonymous reader.

* Whether they indeed exist outside of the digital world? Are they a graphic arts hoax (though they are so beautiful that I would not mind if they were), or is some talented artist actually painting feathers? Update 3/26: these feathers, it turns out, are no hoax. They are the hand-crafted and careful work of Julie Thompson, an Alaskan artist.

* The meaning of the word or name "ispeshul"?


Update 3/26: In fact, it would seem that there are a number of artists doing handpainted feathers - a craft that we knew nothing about until just now but that delights and astonishes us. For example, visit Painted Feather for a gallery of feathers painted in a quite different style. That web gallery offers a quotation from an Apache holy woman, which leaves us with much need for thought and pondering --

"To look through the eye of the feather would take me to that place of vision where I can see what's real and what's not."

Comments, anyone, on that quote -- either on its meaning or on applying such a quote to hand-painted feathers?

A Lord of the Sea

I'm afraid I'm ill and pressed for time, but did not want to leave the blog unattended, so here is a featured painting for the evening. A lord of the sea:


The painting is Ulmo, Lord of Waters, by Roger Garland (you can visit his gallery here), who is probably one of the most innovative and unusual of modern fantasy artists, a crafter of dreamscenes. The figure depicted is from J.R.R. Tolkien's Silmarillion:

At times he will come unseen to the shores of Middle-earth, or pass far inland up firths of the sea, and there make music upon his great horns, the Ulumuri, that are wrought of white shell; and those to whom that music comes hear it ever after in their hearts, and longing for the sea never leaves them again.

I feature Garland's art here because his painting does justice to Tolkien's poetry, speaking to it as one sister to another - it is more than just an illustration. It is potent, evocative. It is also one of the few art pieces I know that does justice to the concept of a sea-god.

Ah! the Ulumuri. There is an echo of Wordsworth in that - or rather, Wordsworth is hearing the same echo that Tolkien is.

So might I, standing in this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses, that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus coming from the sea;
And hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

Readers! Out of poetry, art, or song, what is your most memorable image of a lord of the sea?

Tu'i Malila

Here is a wonder out of the past: in 1965, a certain tortoise died in Tonga, 193 years old. While sailing the globe, Captain Cook had given it to the queen of the island in 1773; the tortoise was reportedly given a state burial.

The tortoise had a name: Tu'i Malila. It is a beautiful name, like singing in a forest. Tu'i Malila. There are photographs of the tortoise being visited by Queen Elizabeth (II):


When I first heard of Tu'i Malila, I wrote this, some time ago (and I unearthed it tonight in my notes):

I think all tortoises are philosophers. Ponderous as the living earth, they spend their first two hundred years thinking deep thoughts. They address, one after another, the mysteries of this and other worlds, watching each with keen eyes. At last, they are ready to act, but have grown too old and too tired from thinking of the world's pain, and they die of loneliness and sorrow.