From a globetrotting friend (hi, Cia!) come these lovely pictures of water puppetry from Saigon; she notes that “the skit topics seemed to relate to ordinary life along the water (catching fish) and mythical tales of dragons and folk stories.  There is a website which includes an English version: http://doanmuaroitphcm.com/Home/default.aspx When it has fully loaded there is an audio track as well.” Those greens! And the pleasure of seeing that puppets, like humans, are equally at home in the water.  (All photos courtesy Cia Lakin. Ignore the date stamp – these are current photos.)

. . . like Eric (hi, Eric!) who this evening – as we discussed Shakespeare, troublesome speech patterns, and why it helps to read The Great Books more than once (hint: age brings wisdom) – pointed out the connection between Christopher Marlowe and Derek Jarman and Edward II: Edward II, wow.  We were on the subject of Marlowe and I talked about a production I dearly wish I had seen, recently presented in Chicago by Sean Graney. And then we were off on the cultural stepping-stones; amazing where they intersect, and where they lead.

Nice shout-out for the trailer on Patti Abbott’s blog – she and I are Q&A’ing in preparation for next week’s “My Town Monday” post.  I’ll be in San Antonio, but my heart, as always, will be in Detroit.

I came across this scrap while digging backwards through some research materials for Under the Poppy, and was surprised – really surprised – to see it:

..stage, ragged blue curtains and dancing puppets and “Oh Meester,” one of the puppets croons, a lady-puppet with snarled red curls, “won’t you dance with me?  The music is so beautiful.”

“It would be my pleasure,” says the other puppet, a soldier-puppet in spurs and shiny braid.  The puppets are made to move by sticks and strings, it is something Ginevra has never seen but only read about: they are called marionettes.  At least Achille taught her to read. . . .

The puppets start swaying in their warped-flute dance but soon become hopelessly tangled, not because the puppeteer is clumsy but because he is very skillful, he has wrapped the soldier-puppet in the lady-puppet’s strings like a spider does a fly and “My mother warned me!” the soldier-puppet shrieks, and the people watching shriek too, laughing and shouting out advice – “Cut the strings!’ “Give her the boots!” – as if the soldier-puppet was a living actor.

What blew my mind about this passage was its provenance – the thing must be five or six years old.  It comes from a YA fantasy novel that I’d begun (can’t find the file and don’t remember the working title; maybe it had none?) and then set aside, having run out of fun and momentum at the same time.  There were no prostitutes in it as I recall, although there was a blind boy I liked a whole lot, and bees, who migrated to yet another book of mine (Kissing the Bee, a YA novel).  But voila, the puppets. . . . Where do we get our ideas?

Or, as our President-elect might put it: Yes, we can.

. . . means, for this citizen, the freedom to write: about puppets, and love, and darkness, and all the places where our desires intersect.

If you live in the States, VOTE.

This is totally brilliant: the Poetry Brothel. Finally, the seductive powers of literature given the proper louche setting! How I would love to be a whore for Under the Poppy here. . .