Robin McKinley's Blog, page 101

Three Books about Outsiders

 

My stomach is better.  But that may be because the ME came roaring in and took over, which is what it does.  In this case I think I'd rather be bone tired than sick and dizzy but I'd really rather not be either.  But merely tired usually permits lying on the sofa covered in hellhounds* and reading and this is clearly to be preferred over eyes that don't focus and running to the bathroom a lot.  However aside from the considerable entertainment derived from watching Oisin packing up his fancy electronic organ and its 1,000,000,000,000,000 feet of wiring and its 1,000,000,000 component parts this afternoon for the wedding he's playing tomorrow in a tiny organ-free church, and which I'm sure I could spin out into 1000 words if I had more available brain**, I have done nothing blogworthy today, so I thought I'd suggest a few books for you to read the next time you're trapped on the sofa with hellhounds.*** 

WONDER, R J Palacio

Anyone plugged into the kiddie lit world will already know about this one;  it's making a big splash on both sides of the Atlantic right now.  It's about a boy named Augie who knows he's ordinary—on the inside.  " . . . But I know ordinary kids don't make other ordinary kids run away screaming in playgrounds.  I know ordinary kids don't get stared at wherever they go. . . . I won't describe what I look like.  Whatever you're thinking, it's probably worse. . . . Next week I start fifth grade.  Since I've never been to a real school before, I am pretty much totally and completely petrified.  People think I haven't gone to school because of the way I look, but it's not that.  It's because of all the surgeries I've had.  Twenty-seven since I was born. . . .  I'm much stronger now, though.  The last surgery I had was eight months ago, and I probably won't have to have any more for another couple of years."  Even that little snippet should give you an idea how immediately convincing and appealing Augie's voice is.  WONDER is about how that first year in an ordinary school goes for a boy who is only ordinary on the inside.  (And then again maybe he's not so ordinary on the inside either.)  The majority of the book is told by Augie, but several other people take their turns:  I particularly like his sister, Via. 

Here's an interview with Palacio:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/feb/19/rj-palacio-interview-wonder 

MOCKINGBIRD, Kathryn Erskine 

This came out in 2010 and was a National Book Award winner, Young People's Literature.  The back flap about the author begins:  'As a resident of Virginia, Kathryn Erskine was devastated by the 2007 shootings at Virginia Tech.  In the aftermath of this tragedy, Kathryn was driven to understand how community and family—particularly families with special-needs children—dealt with this violent event, and how our lives might be different if we understood each other better.' . . . Um.  So, this is to tell any of you who either have or would have instantly put the book back on the shelf before you caught a fatal dose of worthiness, that it's a good read and a good story—that the moral rises gracefully and organically from the story.  And furthermore, it's funny, although most of the laughing hurts.  Caitlin, the ten-year-old narrator, has Asperger's.  Her mother died when she was three years old, but her older brother, Devon, has always explained the world to her—but now her brother is dead too, as the result of a horrifying event like the Virginia Tech shootings, and her father (and small blame to him) has gone to pieces.  It's Caitlin who has to figure stuff out, and help both herself and her dad figure out how to go on without Devon. 

            " . . . The librarian won't let you take the Physicians' Desk Reference home even if you hide it in the middle of thirty-two books.  She says you have to leave it in the reference section so others might enjoy it.  I don't think I should have to leave it in the reference section just so others might enjoy.  I know I will enjoy it.  But she says that's not the point.  She never does tell me what the point is but Devon says sometimes you just have to do what a teacher or librarian says even if you think it's stupid.  Also he says you shouldn't tell them out loud that you think it's stupid.  That's a secret that stays in your head only."

http://www.nationalbook.org/nba2010_ypl_erskine.html 

IN THE SEA THERE ARE CROCODILES, the true story of Enaiatollah Akbari, (by) Fabio Geda (translated from the Italian by Howard Curtis †) 

 This came out last year.  All three of these books nail you with voice right off:  "The thing is, I really wasn't expecting her to go.  Because when you're ten years old and getting ready for bed, on a night that's just like any other night . . . with the familiar sound of the muezzins calling the faithful to prayer from the tops of the minarets, just like anywhere else . . . I say ten, although I'm not entirely sure when I was born, because there's no registry office or anything like that in Ghazni province—like I said, when you're ten years old, and your mother, before putting you to bed . . . says, There are three things you must never do in life, Enaiat jan, for any reason.  The first is use drugs. . . . Promise me you won't do it.

           "I promise. 

           "The second is use weapons . . . never pick up a gun, or a knife, or a stone, or even the wooden ladle we use for making qhorma palaw, if that ladle can be used to hurt someone.  Promise.

           "I promise.

           "The third is cheat or steal. . . . You must be hospitable and tolerant to everyone.  Promise me you'll do that.

           "I promise.

           "Anyway, even when your mother says things like that . . . and starts talking about dreams . . . if you hold a wish up high, any wish, just in front of your forehead, then life will always be worth living . . . says all these things in a strange low voice . . . it doesn't occur to you that what she's really saying is, Khoda negahdar, goodbye."

            Enaiatollah is an Afghan boy, from a tiny village.  His mother has brought him to Quetta, a town on the Pakistani border . . . and left him there.  Alone.

             You get that far, and you have to read the rest, don't you?  You have to find out why, and what happens.   

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/in-the-sea-there-are-crocodiles-by-fabio-geda-trans-howard-curtis-2313603.html 

             People are different.  No they aren't, they're the same.  And Enaiat's mum has the right idea. 

* * *

* Who are, fortunately, willing to trade an abbreviated hurtle for more sofa time. 

** Yes I have been applying myself to SHADOWS.  At one-quarter speed.  Siiiiiigh.  At least when you're watching someone else coil up 1,000,000,000,000,000 feet of wiring no one is measuring the speed of your watching.  

*** I've found that knitting over hellhounds is not really very satisfactory.  Well, you can knit squares.  But very long leg-warmers trail over said hellhounds and cause restiveness.^  Or possibly this is merely an indication of my lack of experience.  Or my lack of spinal flexibility.  Although speaking of squares . . . I'm going to have to start carrying around two knitting projects in my knapsack.  I'm getting tired of fixing the mistakes in my leg-warmers that I made while knitting at stoplights.  I still have to look at what I'm doing for ribbing.  

^ And yes, I am severely tempted to design my own hellhound coat with attached leggings.  But that will have to wait till I know enough what I'm doing to do . . . something that no one who knew what she was doing would do. 

† Because translators don't get enough credit.  Says the woman working on (maybe) her second hundred words of Japanese.

A Visceral Response to International Women's Day

 

Well, I'm celebrating International Women's Day by . . . coming down with a stomach virus.  JOY. *  And here I had thought as I sat at choir practise tonight that my disturbing queasiness was merely the result of trying to sing frelling John Rutter's frelling The Owl and the Pussycat.**

            There is, however, a certain artistic symmetry to the situation.  Is anyone else . . . hmmm . . . unwowed by the concept of an International Women's Day?  Like women are some kind of special interest fringe group that needs to have a day named after us and dedicated to us to bring us to global attention?  Because no one will notice us and our bizarre, incomprehensible needs and wants otherwise?  What is the matter with this world?  

Corellia

I wonder how many times Clara Schumann thought "I should have listened to my father".

She didn't compose anything after the age of 36, but she continued touring and teaching as long as she was able to, and is credited with both changing the repertoire for concert pianists and for developing modern piano technique. Not a bad record for someone who had to be married to a mentally ill man…. 

Her father was still a bullying hysterical control freak, even if it turned out he had a point about Schumann.  Apparently greed came into it as well:  he kept her concert earnings while she still belonged to him.  She was well out of his clutches by pretty much any means.  (I've got the standard Clara bio at home on my TBR shelf.  I want to know, among other things, about Clara's mum, who, understandably, divorced her creep of a husband–but why did she leave her daughter behind?)  What I keep thinking about is that she went from the hands of one smothering madman to another:  very rough karma for a woman with fantastic talent.  (And we'll omit comment about that total little tick Brahms altogether.)  If Robert (a) hadn't wrecked his hand and (b) had stayed sane, I wonder how much of a career Clara would have had in any shape or form?  I don't deny Robert's fantastic talent—but he got to use his.  Clara had eight kids to raise, and a husband writing sweet endearments in their joint diary about how music was all very well but what he wanted his wife for was to be a wife. 

            I grant the injustice isn't all in one direction:  it's very nice and all that the bloke gets to engage with what's in him to put into service—but he also has to because he's got his useless wife and all their useless kids to support.  It's such a stupid system.

            And yes, Clara revolutionised piano playing and had a career as a concert pianist into her 70s.  But perhaps because I'm a producer rather than performer myself, I can't forget that she 'lost confidence' in her composing and, as you say, composed no more after the age of 36.  Have you heard what she wrote as a teenager, for pity's sake?  Sure, people burn out young sometimes.  But I don't think that was the problem here.  What-ifs are futile but yes, I mourn for the music that Clara didn't write. 

             And now, if you'll forgive me, I think I'll go lie down. . . . † 

* * *

* And I caught it by email.  Unfair!  It wasn't even an attachment!  But I missed a set-up-in-advance^ phone call a couple of days ago when I got an email from the friend in question saying that she had stomach flu and we'd have to reschedule. And here I sympathised, having NO IDEA she had coughed on her monitor and touched her keyboard with unsterilized fingers when she wrote to me.  So much for my internet security programme.  

^ Because the five hours' time difference with east coast America is a ratbag, because my so-called schedule has no grounding in reality, because I never know where I'm going to be even if I think I know what I'm doing, and because I'm not going to hold a long international call on Pooka's+ speakerphone++ out in the middle of a field.+++  

+ This aside from questions about iPhone battery life, the answers to which are ugly. 

++ Because I don't care what the dubiously-funded tests say about safety, I am not going to clamp my mobile phone to my skull for long periods of time. 

+++ And no knitting available. 

** One of his Five Childhood Lyrics.  I believe I was complaining about Sing a Song of Sixpence last week.  Sixpence is a doddle compared to O&P.  Because I am a poor sad ailing thing with minimal brain for blog-writing or teeth-brushing and to-bed-going I have just wasted a silly amount of time listening to as many O&Ps on YouTube that I can find . . . with disappointing results.  The soprano-destroyer is the descant over the basses singing . . . Said the piggy 'I will'. . . . when our line suddenly develops frantic wedding-march-itis for two bars, and then does it again a phrase later.  FRELL. FRELLFRELLFRELLFRELLFRELL.  And Griselda wasn't there tonight.  It was a bloodbath.  But I can't find a performance that does it justice—my impression is that this is through a combination of poor miking and the fact that the music is winning and the sopranos are losing.  If you listen very closely you can just about hear soprano-self-immolation^ going on in this one:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcB9j0ouGvE&feature=related

I will take it to Nadia on Monday.  It has a wholly gratuitous top A, but that's not the problem.^^  The problem is the tune.  Remind me why I wanted to sing in a choir. ^^^

^ Someone on Facebook a few nights ago—whenever I last used the word—said she enjoyed my blog for the vocabulary, and cited 'immolation'.  Oh dear.  I consider that basic idiom, like hellhound, frelling and ARRRRRRGH. 

^^ At home, most nights, I have a B.  It wasn't all that long ago that I only had a G at home.  After a glass of champagne.+ 

+ Champagne.  That's what this stomach needs.  Yes.   

^^^ Because it's too late to learn the violin, or some other your-body-is-not-your-instrument suitable for playing in groups. 

† But do have a cruise through these, some of which made me laugh out loud.  Which was kind of a mistake.  I merely highlight one that has bearing on the current topic.  http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/03/08/international-womens-day-jokes-funny-women-quotes_n_1330155.html#s760411&title=Jane_Austen

Something New to Worry About

 

So this evening I spent about ten minutes staring hopelessly at the line for Grandsire Triples—hopelessly because I know the sodblasted line, that's not the problem—carefully negotiated taking hellhounds back to the cottage and giving them their final hurtle around the fact that I apparently have a car that doesn't like to start when it's warm* . . . and set off for the abbey.  I haven't rung there in over a month, I think, due to a combination of family visitation, annual road tests that don't cover the connections to the starter motor, fancy practises for the upper echelons to essay Thirty Two Bell Marshmellow Lime Jello Cottage Cheese Surprise**, and random consecrated events suitable to an abbey requiring silence. 

            I didn't ring there tonight either.  There was another random consecrated event (requiring silence).  I didn't find this out, however, till I got there, having turned off my car that doesn't like to start when it's warm about two minutes before.  And the abbey town is one of these places that closes at 6 pm, barring the odd pub, and I did not fancy wandering its streets in the dark while I waited for my car to cool down.***

            So I sat in the driver's seat, getting cold, since it's still frelling winter here†, and looked up the abbey calendar on Pooka, which I should have done before I drove over, and . . . yup.  7 March:  bell practise cancelled due to RanConEvReqSil.  RATBAGS.  BULGING RATBAGS.

             . . . And then I turned the key and Wolfgang sprang immediately to life. ††  

* * *

I had an extremely friendly and polite email from a non-blog-reading doodle-buyer wondering if hers had got lost in the post.  Guuuuuuilt.  No.  It's still in the ink sloshing around in the pen lying on the doodle desk at the cottage.  I was thinking about this again as a result of the recent blogs and subsequent conversations about singing.  The chief reason I'm not getting on with the doodles any faster is because all doodling, even the umpty-seventh fanged muffin, takes at least a tiny fraction of a sparkle of creative energy, and at the moment ALL sparks, and sub-sparks, sub-sub-sparks, and immeasurably infinitesimal fractions of sparks are carefully swept together and hoarded for SHADOWS.  Which is, as you may have already surmised by the fact that I haven't mentioned it recently, running late ARRRRRGH.†††  It's multiply frustrating because really it's going very well, it's just going to its own frelling pace, which is not rapid.  It's not even slow as I measure my writing in glacial degrees . . . but it's slow for a book that was supposed to be finished in five months.  Siiiiiiigh. 

            And meanwhile, I have ME, and yet I insist on rushing all over the landscape, hurtling hounds, ringing bells . . . singing.  Pretending to learn Japanese.  Knitting is restful, right?  I don't have to list that among my vices.  I've blithered to you often before about coping with ME:  while forcing yourself to do stuff when you feel like death and yesterday's tea leaves is a really really bad idea and I don't care how many experts say otherwise, the other side of this is that you have to work at staying as fit and active as you can because the ME will take you down at the first sign of weakness.  'Use it or lose it' has extra resonance (and teeth) when you have ME.  Hellhound hurtling has as much to do with how much physical exertion I can stand and keep standing‡ as it does with how much hurtling two manic whippet cross deerhound longdogs want.  Fortunately this is a fairly successful overlapping series.

            Mental, emotional and creative energy are a different scale.  And, as with the physical, you use it or lose it, whether you have ME or not, but more dramatically if you do.‡‡  Bell ringing knocks the flimsy stuffing out of my brain and, especially on cranky bells, does a fair bit for upper body strength and flexibility too.  The algebra, pre-calc, quantum physics and the Japanese are . . . hahahahahahaha . . . well, I have a strange idea about what's amusing, okay?  And if I want to fall asleep in the bath with THE LANGUAGE OF MATHEMATICS or in bed at mmph-mumble o'clock in the morning learning a few kanji, well, it's better than slashing tyres and sticking chewing gum in parking meters.  It's still all pure mental, with a little frill of mostly frustrated and occasional flares of delighted, emotional energy.

            But I've had a sudden unsettling thought about the singing.  Singing lessons and joining the Muddles have been about making more and better noise, and about learning a little more music and a little more about music, and about producing what I'm learning a little more accurately and less excrutiatingly.  I do still play the piano, but I do it strictly for fun and goofiness and I haven't had a real piano lesson from Oisin in over a year.  I stopped composing somewhere around the time that PEG II began to demonstrate recalcitrance, although long before I realised what the recalcitrance was about.   I am just beginning to feel the stirrings of singing self-expression, and in my relentlessly naïve and credulous way am excited about this . . . . But that's not going to count as creative energy, is it?           

* * *

* We'd had our morning hurtle around stopping at the farm-supply store to buy more bagged, composted manure for the garden(s).  Where they had one till open, and a queue of about 637 people, two thirds of whom had complicated questions that required phoning the warehouse, consulting clipboards, and filling out complex forms.  ARRRRRGH.  But Wolfgang had plenty of leisure to go dead cold by the time I got back out there again and he started fine.  

** Who says technological progress is a myth?  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tWuG2oPL3o

The last time this pinnacle of the singer's art^ was mentioned here, this was not available on YouTube. 

^ Hmmmmm.   

*** I had my knitting with me.  I could have gone to a pub.  And yes, I do belong to one of those roadside-recovery groups^ but by the time they got there Wolfgang would be cool enough to start on his own.  Probably.  

^ This one:  http://www.rac.co.uk/breakdown-cover/ 

† I am tired of winter.  I am very very tired of winter.^ 

^ I hope it's not feeling obliged to stick around till I get my extra-long leg-warmers finished.  I've been thinking about them and their unfinishedness a lot the last few days because these jeans are too short and I really need leg-warmers to block the ankle draft. 

†† Hellhounds were, of course, delighted.  Since they're usually reasonably interested in supper I think they do clock the difference between getting fed on time and getting fed late:  if I'm there they mob me if I am still sitting at the computer when I should be cutting up chicken, and if I'm late they mob me at the door:  you don't need to take your coat off to chop up some chicken.  But Peter was playing bridge tonight, and I don't leave hellhounds unsupervised at the mews, so we had to get back down there.  And I have this little car problem. . . . I put Wolfgang's nose up against the corner of the brick-and-flint wall around my neighbour's parking slot in case the handbrake failed and left him running.  I also left the rear hellhound-access door open—flung open the door of the cottage, beckoned hellhounds out and they ran straight down the stairs and into Wolfgang.  Yaay hellhounds.  In my experience dogs don't much like going near a turned-on car.^  I locked up the cottage, threw their harnesses in after them, and we were off again in about twenty seconds.  

^ Would that this kept them safely out of the street.  

††† Not shouting!  Not shouting!  But I may have a few bruised fingers and possibly a new hairline fracture in my keyboard! 

‡ The cute side of this is that by focussing on your ME you don't have to think about how much of it is age creeping up on you. 

‡‡ ME, particularly what is (as I have to keep reminding myself on bad days) a mild case, is way, way far from the worst restraint and constriction you can have on your life.  I'm just talking about me here.

On Not Yelling at Your Computer

 

MMMMMPHHHHPHHHHHHMMMRRRRRGGGLLLL 

Peter said, I'm not dancing the hornpipe.  I'm not.  Besides, I don't know any hornpipes.  However . . . .

            Do I need to suggest you stop right there? I said.

            No, no! said Peter.  This is a supportive, constructive remark!  I was just thinking you might want to learn some angry songs!  There's a lot of good ranting in Handel, isn't there?  Sorceresses and things.  Since you like Handel.*

            Something of the sort had already occurred to me.**  I have also told you that I was in psychotherapy/counselling for a number of years***.  One of the bottom lines with each of the various psycho-disciplines my various shrinks had trained in is that you can't just stop something, to make a change stick, you have to replace the behaviour or the thought-pattern or the what-you-like with some other behaviour or thought-pattern or what-you-like.  So I warned Peter that if I am overcome with the need to shout at my computer I am going to start doing singing exercises. 

            So from this moment forward my day goes something like this:  clickclickclickclickclick.  Damn.  Click.  Clickclickclickclick.  Oh damn.  Click.  Click.  Click.  DAMN.

            Ee, ah eeee ah, eeee ahahahah, eeee, ah.  EE.  AH.  EEEE.  AH.  EEEE AHAHAHAH EEEE ARRRRRGAH.

            Good breath control.  Great projection.  This is so going to help my EXPRESSIVENESS.

 Blogmom 

I HAVE TO STOP YELLING AT MY COMPUTER BECAUSE I'M HURTING MY SINGING.

Oh, this is too funny. Made my day. 

I CAN STILL SHOUT BY EMAIL, YOU KNOW.† 

* * *

* A partiality I do not share with my husband.  Back in the days when we still went to live operas in London, I did manage to take him to Semele.  Afterward he said no more Handel.  —Hmmph.  Philistine.

            The furious aria that is going to come first to the average opera-goer's mind however, is the Queen of the Night's second appearance in THE MAGIC FLUTE:  Hell's vengeance boils in my heart.^  Excellent.

            I don't think so.  I still have happy dreams of regaining my high C, although I haven't decided yet if I mean a working C, which means I need a D to float down from, or a C to float down to the B from, but my high F days are past.^^  And, speaking of technique . . . yeep.^^^ 

^AKA Kill the beggar:   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_of_the_Night_Aria  

^^ I've told you I had a silly range when I was younger—I sang anything from high soprano to middling baritone.  I'm a little fascinated in hindsight what that upper register must have sounded like.  Like a needle through the ear, probably.  

^^^ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WNJyOKvKkM&feature=related 

** And about interpretation?  About COMMUNICATING with my audience the reality of the song?  I bet I could do anger.  I bet I could really do anger. 

*** And a good shrink is worth her or his weight in gold, jewels and obedient hellhounds^ several times over.  You think I'm overwrought and overreactive now. . . . My first shrink had a whip, chair and trank gun.   

^ Actually this wasn't a set up, but since I'm here . . . we were out striding over hill and dale beyond Warm Upford today.+  We turned at the top of the hill++ and were now walking on the near side of a low, thorny hedge, with a field on the far side.  I could see a person ambling along near the hedge on the other side.  Oh gods, I thought, she will certainly have a dog.  She did.  My heart sank.  But then—joy—I noticed she had it on a lead.  Hurrah hurrah hurrah.  We were, of course, going faster than she was.  We usually are going faster than the other guy.  And we were no more than about eight feet behind her when—without looking around—she leaned down and let it off the lead.

            Crapalooza.

            Okay, I thought, the hedge is pretty frelling thorny, and we're moving at a clip and can perhaps move a little clippier so by the time we get to the end of the hedge we'll be well out in front and . . .

            Bitsyboo! said the woman, who had finally noticed our existence, as we pulled even with her.  Bitsyboo!  Come!  Sit!  Wait!  Stand!  Stop!  No!  Bitsyboo!

            Bitsyboo was galloping back and forth along the hedge, frantic for a way through.  With this kind of persistence, of course the bloody thing found a way through and was on us at once.  Great.  Splendid.  Gak.  Frell me. 

            Fortunately it was friendly, more or less.  It was completely manic, and it did an awful lot of dashing, pouncing and growling, but it was pretty clearly play growling, and while Darkness is not the most reliable coal-mine canary, if we agree about a dog's intentions we're probably right, and he wasn't reacting to Bitsyboo—other than spare me which I powerfully agreed with.  We kept going.  We kept going at our best clippy clip because my experience is still that most pet dogs—I say nothing of working sheepdogs or hunting dogs or various other countryside menaces—are not particularly fit and if they aren't actively trying to gnaw bits off you you have a pretty good chance of just outrunning the miscreant. 

            The cries of Sit!  Stay!  Bitsyboo!  Come! were growing fainter in the distance, till they morphed into Excuse me!  Excuse me!  —I know what this means.  It means, would you please stop, so I have some chance of catching my dog because I am an incompetent moron and it is an untrained disaster, and if you don't stop I may never see it again. 

            No.  No, I won't stop.  You are an incompetent moron and I'm not in a good mood and next time LOOK AROUND before you let your untrained disaster off its lead.  I'm also running [sic] about twenty minutes behind time because every road in Hampshire is being dug up, including the ones that footpaths cross, and we've had to take an unscheduled detour and I don't feel like wasting another ten minutes while you (a) catch up and (b) play tag with your mutt.  And yes, if it were vicious we'd be standing in a tight little wodge while I tried to stay between it and my hellhounds and I am therefore being unfair to mere incompetent morons and I don't care.

            And yes, Bitsyboo did get tired before we'd sprinted the two miles back to Wolfgang.  I admit I'd've stopped before we got to the main road:  I have a deep dislike of blood, even incompetent moron's untrained disaster blood.

 + There's a house that got put up a few years ago in the middle of that heavily pheasanted and gamekeepered cultivated wilderness and I keep wondering what they do during shooting season.  Lie flat on the floor for six months perhaps.  Anyway.  The house has a peculiar name.  Let's call it . . . Botulism.  It's in that category.  Why anyone would want to name their house after a disease is a little beyond me.  Even if it's a private joke, still Botulism is what the world knows you as.  Fortunately I'm not likely ever to be invited to dinner there (even out of hunting season, when we get to sit in chairs).

            But it apparently exists in the Warm Upford Alternate Dimension.  It's got to the point that if we're walking along the little road at the bottom of the valley and have to press ourselves into the hedgerow to let a vehicle past, and the vehicle slows down to speak to us, I open my mouth to say, yes, it's half/a quarter of a mile ahead/behind.  Today we had turned off the road and were toiling up the hill again when I heard a commotion behind me.  I turned around.  There was a delivery truck on the road, and the driver had got out of his cab and was starting to run up the hill after me.  Miss!  Miss! he said (he was a serious distance away, you understand).  I stopped.  Do you know where mumblemumblemumble is?

            Yep.  Half a mile that way, on your left.  —And am I sure he was asking about Botulism?  Yes.  I could hear the B, the t, the l, and the fact that it was three syllables.  But if I wasn't used to people trying to find it, I might well have said, Bottlebrush?  Never heard of it. 

++ Yes, that hill 

† As I believe I proved just a few hours ago on the subject of frelling Facebook's latest draddarkle fambanged remodel, which Blogmom is going to have to cope with.

 

Important if muted news

 

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHASTOPMESOMEBODYHAHAHAHAHAHA

BUCKETOFCOLDWATERGOODFORHYSTERIAIBELIEVESPLAAAAASH 

* * *

So I had this list when I went in for my voice lesson today.  I wanted to ask about singing Fauré*, and various questions about singing with the Muddles**, and about surviving singing for Oisin and the whole insanely frustrating business of regressing under pressure***, and the way, if I miss a day, singing, I notice it more than I used to†.

            And then I said, there's another weirdness.  Used to be, if the sort of upper mid range—around C-above-middle-C, D, E—are stiff and closed down, there's no point in even trying to go higher.  Lately—and I can't even remember why I bothered trying—I've several times found that when those upper-middle notes are all sullen and dull the F, G and even the A†† still ring out like . . . uh . . . tiny, elderly gongs.

            You've been overusing your speaking voice, then, said Nadia, because that's exactly where the damage shows:  just above your speaking range.  On the phone, perhaps.  Do you spend a lot of time on the phone?  The phone is the worst for your voice, because you speak differently than you do face to face and your posture is probably appalling.

            My posture is appalling, I admitted, and furthermore I'm usually knitting.  But there are only two or three people I regularly have marathon phone sessions with, and . . . oh my gods.

            ??? said Nadia.

            My computer, I said.  I shout at my computer.  I scream at my computer.  I, er, scream at my computer . . . a lot.  And vigorously.  

I HAVE TO STOP YELLING AT MY COMPUTER BECAUSE I'M HURTING MY SINGING.  HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA 

I haven't told Peter yet.  I can't face how delighted he'll be.  He finds graphic violence upsetting for some reason.  He'll read the good (muted) news here first.  Maybe I just won't come down to the mews for a few days, till the hornpipe-dancing phase is over.  Of course this is relying on the idea that I can stop howling at my computer, which is even odds at best.  Maybe I'll give up caffeine and find a solution to world hunger while I'm at it.  And I think my voice is just going to have to deal with the occasional hellgoddess bellow at the hellhounds.  The funny thing is that I've been thinking that the Hellgoddess Bellow has become more impressive in recent months and that it probably has something to do with the singing lessons. . . .

            I also wanted to talk to Nadia again about one of the things that keeps coming up and coming up, which is this razzlefragdagging business of expression, of emotional interpretation, dynamics, all that sodblasted stuff.  And the way I haven't got any.  This came back to miserate††† me again because of singing with Oisin:  when you're also wasting an accompanist's time the one-note-after-the-other approach is even more unsatisfactory, even if a majority of them are the right notes.  Nadia again said that this is something that will come, that I'm still in the comparatively early stages of grappling with technique, and as soon as more of that comes instinctively the interpretation will come.  Inevitably—according to Nadia.

            Sigh.

            So we went back to Dove Sei, which I am now pretty much, you know, singing.  I'm going to try to sing it for Oisin on Friday‡ which will be interesting since I have quite the gift for fluffing my first entry which then wrecks what follows, but that's the kind of thing I'm supposed to be learning by singing with an accompanist.‡‡   

            And having run me through it for the notes a few times, Nadia basically dared me to express some of what's happening  . . .

            . . . and you know, I almost did.  Almost.  But I could hear it—hear the reality of what the song's about—sort of leaking out through the gaps in the barricade.  I'm going to do this.  I am.‡‡‡  

Black Bear

The whole business of "To You-Tube or Not To You-Tube" is interesting to me. Of course I don't sing in any real capacity—

NEITHER DO I, honeybun.  This is strictly for my own depraved and decrepit amusement.  The comments these singing blogs rouse from people who know what they're about exhilarate and terrify me.  Not me boss!  I'm a small local choir singer!§ 

but the singing I do for my own pleasure has always begun by being imitative. How do you learn how a song sounds if you don't listen to others singing it? 

Erm.  By struggling through the sheet music yourself?  I admit I don't know what ordinary, non-sight-singing people who can't pick out a melody line on the piano do, but that was the technology for a lot of years.  

Back in my high school orchestra days I remember being encouraged to listen to recordings of the pieces we were doing. Obviously different orchestras put different spins on pieces… but I don't get how it would necessarily be a bad thing to get other orchestras/choirs/soloists' sounds in your head when you're thinking about approaching a new piece. It's still going to be YOU when you do it, you know? 

But Nadia's point—and I might guess that it's different for an orchestra made up of a lot of different instruments than for a solo singer where every tiny individual interpretive choice is manifest§§—is that you will pick up performance with the music.  No singer worth listening to is merely singing the notes:  and think of any fabulous solo artist:  if it's someone you know and love and follow and listen to a lot, you'll recognise them within the first note or two.  That's about them, not about the music, even if it's their immediately recognisable genius that makes them such fabulous performers.  Nadia put this better than I can remember it, but she also said that she wanted to correct her students' own mistakes, not some weird kind of filtered extra layer of mistaking somebody else's performance.  I actually do get this.  You can't help mimicking—if you're learning something by mimicking, then it becomes part of the learning process. 

            And it varies, I guess, with what stage you're at.  All the hot divas talk about listening to other singers and who their favourites are and why—well, of course.  But they've also got huge reserves of their own talent and practise and their own carefully developed individuality.  I guess it might be a bit like reading to write:  you must read, you must read, you MUST MUST MUST read, read read read read read . . . but there are also times during my own writing that I must not read, particular authors or particular stories, because they'll start to run like wet dye into my own work. 

* * *

* The answer to which is that Nadia has already thought about Fauré for me and he's on her list but, she says, not yet, not because of the music but because of the language.  At the moment when I'm still only barely not letting simple Italian get the better of me, she says, is not the time to be adding French.  Also, she says, Oisin is fluent in French, and . . . DEFINITELY NOT FRENCH THEN, I said.  He corrects my Italian.^ 

^ I'm not saying it doesn't need correcting. 

** For example about singing twiddles:  you know, tiny decorative two- or three-note, well, twiddles, on the singing line.  I'm aware that mine are mushy rather than crisp, and I was much struck last Thursday, listening to Cindy on my left and Griselda on my right, how flawlessly sharp-edged Griselda's are and Cindy . . . sounds like me.  We're not wrong or off pitch or anything, we're just soggy.  Nadia says twiddles are harder than they look and . . . yes, learning to do them properly is in my future too.  Emphasis on future.  

*** Normal normal normal, says Nadia, adding that singing for Oisin is for me the equivalent of singing in public and OF COURSE I'm going to revert.  Oh but, I said, I do this, and I do that, and I do this other thing, it's so frustrating.  Not at all, said Nadia, that's excellent.  You're NOTICING.  You can't fix anything until you NOTICE it.  You just keep singing for Oisin, and keep noticing, and it'll improve.

            I love Nadia.^ 

^ She also said and DON'T go in there thinking you are supposed to fix EVERYTHING.  Choose a thing and decide to fix it . . . oh, by fifty percent, one out of four times that you do it. 

            Feh.  Foiled again. 

† And if you went hill walking six days in a row, she said, and took the seventh off, you'd be stiff on the eighth.  And if you'd got quite a bit fitter in the last year and went hill walking harder six days in a row, and took the seventh off, you might be stiffer on the eighth. 

            She also said, although not quite in these terms, ALSO, YOU'RE OLD.  Your voice has lost flexibility just like the rest of you has.  That doesn't mean you can't go hill walking, it just means you have to be a little more careful about warming up and warming down.  

†† Which seems to have suddenly stopped playing silly buggers—pretty much in the last fortnight, since I started going to choir practise again and it found out it was needed—and settled down. 

††† Well, it ought to be a word. 

‡ Supposing I can get another copy of the music out of my printer/copier without yelling at it.  

‡‡ Feh. 

‡‡‡ Supposing I can learn to stop shouting at my computer.

§ And . . . as I've said several times . . . your relationship to music changes when you're performing it yourself, however badly.  You don't have to do it well to derive an immense—and, you know, exciting—amount of horizon-broadening from the experience, and I will therefore learn as much as I can.  Or that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it. 

§§ And I could be wrong.  I know some orchestras also have a highly individual sound, and conductors have individual styles, which fans also recognise immediately.

 

Mechanical Mayhem and sundries

 

Yesterday WOLFGANG WOULDN'T START.  I ONLY GOT HIS GOOD FOR ANOTHER YEAR ROAD TEST STICKER ON THE WINDSCREEN THE DAY BEFORE.

            Long term readers with too much time on their hands may remember Wolfgang, my sixteen- or seventeen-year-old Golf VW, has an Erratic Fault.  If it would come and stay I would have him hauled off to the garage so they could FIX IT.  This erratic thing is a real toxic-pond-scum-sucker.  And, not surprisingly, it is slowly getting worse, because despite jolly chirpy chaos theory, Newtonian entropy still rules the everyday world, which includes things like cars.  Heretofore so long as I didn't park him (a) nose up and tail down (b) with a less than full tank of diesel (c) and try to start him again while he was still warm from having been somewhere already, I didn't have a problem.  And as long as I parked on the flat I didn't have a problem.  I ONLY had a problem if he was warm AND on a hill.

            He was warm yesterday.  But he was parked FLAT and his tank was FULL.  And he didn't start.

            Furthermore, the not-starting has never lasted more than five or ten minutes.  In this particular case the good thing was that he was in his very own parking slot at the cottage so if he just wanted to stay there indefinitely the traffic cops weren't going to come round in a couple of hours and remonstrate.  This is not a good enough thing.

            Because he did not start in five minutes.  Or ten minutes.  I got quite a bit of unscheduled gardening done* while I waited for Wolfgang to reattach the glifflemayer to the obstockling and get on with it.  But no.  And the hellhounds were getting very tired of the back seat.**  And so, cursing liberally and fluently*** I unloaded most of my briefcase equivalent into my knapsack, snapped leads back on immediately happy and reanimated hellhounds, and set out for the mews on foot, listening to my knees crackle and crunch.†  ARRRRGH.

            This morning I woke to SNOW.  SNOW.  "(*&^?%$£!!!!!!††  Vast, platter-sized flakes which . . . looking on the bright side . . . did not lie.  But they did make skittering down the cottage hill rather more interesting than I enjoyed. †††  So I didn't even bother with Wolfgang:  hellhounds and I had a local hurtle, came back to the cottage for me to slip into the costume for my pack mule imitation again, and trudged off to the mews.‡  Where I've been feinting with SHADOWS.

            I have a theory.  Wolfgang doesn't like being clean.  It makes him nervous. 

* * *

* Yaay, as far as that goes.  I'm desperate to spend some time in the garden.  But not quite on these terms.  

** Possibly because they'd already been there for half an hour on the way home from our walk in Ditherington when I noticed my favourite local nursery was OPEN for the first time this year.  I only bought six little green things!  Well.  Maybe seven.  But they were little!  

*** I added a couple of 'learn a new Japanese word/phrase every day!' sites to my Twitter feed.  But I bet they don't give you anything really interesting, like, May your sticky rice always crumble and your yellowtail tuna sashimi always leap out of your chopsticks onto the floor!  What's the Japanese for 'Mwa hahahahahaha'? 

† Six books on Japanese and the complete print-out of too many drafts of SHADOWS.  I'm still a paper girl at heart and have I mentioned that the old laptop^ has started making great swathes of text disappear if I try and move around in the file too much^^????  So I print everything out.   Just in case it doesn't all come back.  This has, of course, put my printer in a terrible mood, since printers live not to print, as we all know.  Mine furthermore has its dashboard specially designed to press its own buttons if you happen to breathe on it too hard let alone let a sleeve brush across it or the gods forbid you should be trying to copy something^^^ and let the cover of a book fall indiscreetly—oh the alarm bells and the screaming and the glinchfarking error messages!  I did not tell you that Oisin and I wouldn't have been able to try Britten's Salley Gardens on Friday anyway because I discovered that my printer had cleanly and beautifully copied the top half of page two twice . . . instead of, you know, the entire page two, top and bottom, in the standard positions.  It was so immaculately done that I'd spent several minutes trying to figure out what madness Britten was up to before I finally checked the original book.  But this would have meant that Oisin and I would have been reading off the same copy of the music, and I guarantee that you don't want my top A right in your ear.

            I had no idea that my printer had this interesting capability.  And I'm sure it doesn't, if you wanted it.  Which brings me to this superb and revelatory link, sent by the tireless and perspicacious b_twin:  http://work.failblog.org/2012/03/01/job-fails-what-really-goes-on/ which made me laugh immoderately, but then I am a poor weak technological fool. 

^ I did tell you that I decided that I couldn't face learning a new sodblasted operating system in the middle of pelting to get a novel done, so the shiny new (returned) laptop is holding the doodle desk to the floor and I'm still using the old one? 

^^ Yes, I tried breaking it up into several files.  This had no effect whatsoever, except that looking for things was even more of a ratbag. 

^^^ Yes.  It's an all in one.  This of course is always a mistake, but then all computer hardware is a mistake, and what this means is that I have one machine torturing me triply or quadruply rather than three or four machines torturing me individually.   

†† Speaking of fluent cursing. 

††† Especially with my knees still complaining about the day before. 

‡ And had an Interesting Encounter on the way.  About halfway down the main road we found ourselves approaching a Situation.  A woman was standing on the pavement, behind the open door of her car, staring at her mobile phone.  She had a dog on a long extending lead . . . and the dog had wandered over to the other side of the pavement and was standing up against the wall of a shop, staring at us interestedly.  This meant that the lead was stretched completely across the pavement like a trip wire.  Furthermore the dog was some kind of Staffie cross and a frelling big one—the other half might have been Lab, something big and square and deep-bodied plus the famous Staffie jaws, with the eight-hundred and sixty-seven teeth and the no-release mechanism.  We stopped.  I was hoping that the cranglefarbling woman would look up and notice.  She didn't.  She went on staring at her phone.  I said, "Excuse me."  Nothing.  I said it again, louder.  She looked up.  She stared at me like she had no idea why I was bothering her.  "I'd like to get by," I said.  Now, remember, the frelling lead is stretched across the entire width of the pavement, and never mind the pounds-per-inch of the jaws at the end of it.  She starts to walk across the pavement toward her dog and says aggrievedly, "It's not like she's a dangerous dog."  I've heard that one before.  "Well, how am I supposed to know that?" I said, as we went past—and she apparently wasn't a dangerous dog, because the frizzlegabbling woman was certainly not making any particular effort to restrain her.  But the woman said, by now clearly offended, "Because I am a responsible dog owner!"

            Right.  Like this is a tattoo?  It had better be on your forehead, because you don't have time, before battle is engaged, to pull it out from anywhere, like under your sleeve, and you certainly don't have time to get the card out of your wallet.  HOW THE FRELL AM I SUPPOSED TO KNOW YOU'RE A RESPONSIBLE DOG OWNER.  I'VE NEVER SET EYES ON YOU BEFORE AND MY FIRST IMPRESSION IS NOT A POSITIVE ONE.  But the woman is just getting started.  "I'm right here!  And she's on a lead!  And —"  But we're past her now, and barrelling down the last of the hill, and I'm wearing a scarf, a hoodie, and the hushy, crinkly hood of my goretex raincoat, which makes a sound like you're walking through a waterfall anyway and I'm getting a bit deaf.  I don't think I missed a lot.  But I could hear her screaming at me—"People like you!" blah blah blah blah.

            It must have been really bad news on her phone.

One-Legged Dog, Part 1 – Guest blog by Diane_in_MN

 

My working-breed club holds two rally and obedience trials each year, one of each on both days of a weekend at the end of January.  Our entry is very small, as we restrict entries to working breed dogs (think Boxers, Great Danes, Mastiffs, Newfoundlands, Samoyeds, for example), and these are not the most common breeds in obedience competition.  Our exhibitors like this, as it gives their dogs a chance to win the highest awards at the trial.*   And the small entry means the room isn't crowded and noisy, which makes it a great place to start an inexperienced dog in competition.  So this year I entered Teddy in his first obedience trial.

Obedience competition is not a dog event that is often shown to the general public.  It doesn't have the glamour of conformation shows like Westminster or Crufts, or the excitement of agility trials, with dogs running through obstacle courses and leaping over steeplechase jumps.  I like to compare obedience work to the school figures that competition figure skaters used to be judged on in the Olympics: a set of formalized exercises that must be done with great precision in order to obtain a top score.  The basic, or Novice, obedience exercises are heeling (both on and off lead), standing for examination, recall, and sit and down stays.  These sound like basic good behaviors for dogs, and so they are, but obedience competition requires that they be performed in certain very specific ways.  Heel position is strictly defined, and the dog will lose points if he forges ahead or lags behind the handler.  He is supposed to sit in heel position at every halt, and will lose points not only if he fails to sit, but if he sits slowly or crookedly or anywhere other than in heel position.  He is supposed to come straight to the handler when called, sit in front—squarely in front, not crookedly—and return to sit squarely in heel position ("finish") when told to do so.  And the handler is not allowed to speak to the dog after giving a single  command for each exercise.  The sit and down exercises are performed in a group, with all the dogs in the class lined up against a wall or ring gate.  There are many opportunities for the average well-mannered dog (or his handler) to fail to qualify (or "NQ") in an obedience trial.

The first-level obedience title is Companion Dog, or CD, and requires the dog/handler team to get three qualifying scores (170 points out of a perfect 200) in the Novice class under at least two judges.  I have obtained the CD title on one** dog, my bitch Zinka, who didn't go into obedience competition until she was six years old.  Zinka was a singleton puppy, so in order to socialize her with other dogs her own age I started her in puppy kindergarten at eleven weeks old, and she continued training throughout her life.  But she showed in conformation until she earned her championship, so she had to remain intact—the historical reason for dog shows was to select the best breeding stock, and in American Kennel Club competition, dogs and bitches must be intact in the conformation ring.  And her co-breeder and I had planned to breed her after she finished her championship, so it wasn't until after she had had her puppies and was spayed that I showed her in obedience.***   After training for six years, Zinka was totally bored with Novice exercises and didn't display much enthusiasm in the ring—she specialized in sluggish heeling and the death march recall—but she did qualify three times in spite of herself.****

Zinka at 3, finishing her championship.

Zinka at 6, getting her CD.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I had great hopes for my last boy, Zinka's son Atlas, who was a willing and enthusiastic obedience dog, but he lost a leg to cancer at age three and was then ineligible to compete.  So I was very pleased when Teddy turned out to be a good worker.  He started competing in rally obedience events when he was a year and a half old and earned two rally titles^, one requiring off-lead work.  I had planned to move on to the third level of rally competition before looking for a CD, but found that Teddy had a big problem with distraction^^ in the ring when off lead.  Given that obedience competition is more structured than rally, and that much Novice work is on lead, it seemed like a good time to get him into the obedience ring.  So we entered the Novice B^^^ class to test the waters and see how he'd do.

********************

* In an all-breed obedience trial, it's possible but unlikely that a working-breed dog will win the top award of Highest Score in Trial.  Our dogs are big (and so slower on sits) and were generally not bred to work closely with a human partner like herding dogs or gun dogs were.  Border Collies, Shetland Sheepdogs, and Golden Retrievers are the usual stars of obedience competition.

** In 17 years of training.  This tells you that I am not a hotshot dog trainer.

*** It's not easy to do obedience work with intact bitches.  They can't train effectively or compete at all for the three weeks that they're in season, and even if they haven't been bred, they have more or less symptomatic false pregnancies which definitely affect their behavior.  If you have a bitch who takes her false pregnancy seriously, you can lose three months out of every six.  Zinka took her falses very seriously indeed.

**** In her last trial, she followed the off-lead heeling pattern about fifteen feet behind me.  I think she caught up with me on the halts, but I don't recall that she sat once.  I believe she was trying for a score of 165, but she didn't quite make it and qualified with 171.  You bet we got a picture!

^ Rally obedience, or rally, is a relatively new event that was designed to bridge the gap between basic good behavior training and competition obedience.  Rally exercises use obedience skills in various combinations; less precision is required when performing the exercises, and the handler is encouraged to speak to the dog throughout their time in the ring.

^^ Let's be honest and call it paranoia.

^^^ The Novice class is divided into two sections, A and B.  The A section is open only to people who have never put an obedience title on any dog.  I used up my one and only shot at Novice A with Zinka.  The B section implies that even though the dog is green, the trainer is not, and handler errors are scored accordingly.  You will always lose points if you screw up, but you'll lose more in Novice B.

Even more singing

 

While I was working on SHADOWS and not listening to the radio earlier today an interview came on with some Ofsted* bloke about the brand-new report on music in schools in the UK.**  Music in schools in the UK is pathetic and getting patheticker*** but what caught my attention is the bloke saying that the official verdict is that even when there is music education offered at all there is too much talking and not enough . . . music.

            Sigh. 

 * * *

When I arrived at Oisin's this afternoon he was in a high state of boys-with-toys glee, having got the latest add-on to his fancy computer organ programme sorted.  Don't ask me, it's all way over my head.†  He was so happy, and, as I thought, distracted, I thought I might get away with . . . but no.  So, what have you brought me, he said.††  Ah, erm, I said.  But he goes deploying that old gimlet eye.  Drat.  He might not have noticed if I'd put the book in my knapsack.†††  But there it was, all large and shiny, Benjamin Britten's Complete Folk Song Arrangements.‡  So.  Yeah.  I sang.  We had a plunge at The Ash Grove and O Waly Waly which is what we'd done last autumn when I was still in a higher degree of squeakery than I am now.‡‡  I then (re)made the mistake of asking if there's anything he'd like to play, that I might have a quarter of a chance of learning to sing‡‡‡.  So, any of you out there sung any of Fauré's songs?  I love Fauré's vocal stuff, but I suspect it's harder than it looks.§

            I'd gone so far as to photocopy Britten's Down by the Salley Gardens for my accompanist cough cough cough because I like Britten's arrangement better than the one in my official music student's book, which I keep getting the timing of wrong because I've got the Britten in my head.  So maybe we could try the Britten . . . and then noticed that it has kind of a lot of top As.  Oops. 

Julia

Just as a thought . . . In my lessons, I was always told to think of it as placement of the voice, rather than reaching for or hitting the note. It's funny, but using different words actually can change my ability to make the right sound. I know that I have the note, but often when I try to hit it, everything gets tight again, and I can't do it… or when I do, it sounds wrong anyway.

But if I don't set myself up with the mindset of "I can hit this note and I'm not getting it and I'm so stupid, I can't do this aaaugh", and instead just breathe properly, find the space and let the note happen without stressing about it, the result is a much prettier sound. 

Yes.  All true.  I shouldn't have said 'hit'.  It's exactly the sort of eeek/antagonistic attitude that Nadia is trying to winkle me out of.  But I fall back way too easily into 'I'm so stupid I can't do this aaaaugh' especially when, for example, I'm on my way to choir practise and I know I'm going to need that A.  Stress?  Me?  Stress? . . . I wouldn't know not stressing if it bit me.  Ow. 

            Nadia says that whatever your range is everyone stresses about their top notes.  Sopranos do it.  So do bass-baritones.  And part of the irony is that it's got nothing to do with 'reaching' or 'hitting'—if you want to think in physical terms, the higher the sound the faster the vibration.  It doesn't go up and down, it just goes faster or slower.§§  And something that both Blondel and Nadia have said to me is not to think in terms of reaching up—since I insist on thinking—but of rising above the note and drifting gently down on it.  This, when I can stop freaking out long enough, works pretty well for me.  It opens up . . . whatever the frell it is that needs opening. 

            Nadia has also said that I should try just singing—do my warm up exercises away from the piano and check my top notes after I've sung them.  And when she's warming me up for my lesson I keep my eyes averted from the piano.  She can tell me what I sang later.  

Annagail

Different words have different subconsious connotations. New students frequently use the language of "reaching" or "hitting" a note, but voice teachers try to change this way of thinking about singing as quickly as possible, as "reaching" tends to make a note flat (reach up and barely touch the note) and "hitting" tends to make it harsh or come off the body (adding extra unnecessary effort when what is needed is greater release). 

Well, this was supposed to be the point of my joke about hitting it:  WHAM.  Nadia talks about space a lot.  Relaxing your throat to let your poor vocal cords/folds vibrate freely, but also using that empty space in your head, you know, resonant sinuses and things, letting the sound carom off . . . well, whatever.  Clearly I haven't quite absorbed this concept yet.  But I do know about the singer's smile—that it's about lifting and making space—and occasionally I manage to do this.  And my mouth opens a little more than it used to—Nadia says that my jaw will drop naturally as I get used to having space, as I learn to like that space.  One of the things she's been talking about recently, since I made my Great Breathing Leap forward a month or something ago, is that the first year of voice lessons is usually the hardest because it really takes that long before you begin to develop a good clear positive feedback loop:  breathing deep into your gut feels good and makes a nicer sound, so you do it more, for example.  And about jaw-dropping, she says that when I was first coming to her this time last year 'I couldn't have got a cigarette paper between your teeth'. 

. . . For me, thinking of placement was always a disaster, because "placing" a note gets translated in my overcontrolling little brain as "doing it manually", i.e. forcing a note to go exactly where I want it to go . . . This way (for me) lies shrillness, offkeyness, and lack of resonance. However, thinking about "placement" for someone  . . . without the overcontrolling issue can be a helpful way to get a note (or line, or voice) to focus. . . I had much better results when I thought of a high note as having directionality . . . 

Yes.  I'm still groping after this—I'm not sure yet what my practical theory of the whole nonsense is—of how to get the best noise out of me.  But I'm aware, occasionally, on very good days, of a sort of moving around within the liveness of music and making the contact or connection of sound with a few of its notes.  It's there, you know?  And if you're on form you can kind of chime with bits of it.

            Okay.  It's late, and I've been working on SHADOWS for kind of a long time. . . .  

It depends on what problem the teacher is trying to fix and where the student is coming from. . . . Learning how to get out of the mindset of "omg why can I not do this I was doing this yesterday in my lesson I am so stupid arrgh" is TOUGH. A lot of advanced singers struggle with it . . . Absolutely, allowing yourself to let something happen is by far the best way to do it- the trouble comes (obviously) after you start being hard on yourself. . . . 

And finding the line between 'working hard' and 'being hard on yourself' is, as ever, a ratbag.  We didn't try Britten's Salley Gardens today but Oisin said, oh, go on, so I'm putting it on the list for next week.   I can always take it off again. . . .

* * *

 * http://www.ofsted.gov.uk/ 

** http://www.ofsted.gov.uk/resources/music-schools-wider-still-and-wider 

*** Of course that's a word.  Oisin and I use it all the time when discussing the state of music in British schools. 

† Although in this case it was mostly on his hands and knees under the desk/manuals/whatyoucallem.  He's installed a bunch of foot buttons.  You know about organs?  I didn't, before Oisin.  You can pre-set your registrations, which is which of the terrifying range of stops you have pulled in or out, and attach a different registration to a different single foot or finger button, up to the number of buttons you have.  I would have said he has a lot, but apparently not to an organist.  He's going to put in a second row.  

†† Ah, the temptation.  A partridge in a pear tree?  Three calling birds?  A dead fish and a handful of empty sweet wrappers?  Six and a half stale brownies?^  A cubic zirconia that looks like the Koh-i-noor?  My first symphony? 

^ Stale?  Not bloody likely. 

††† Additional reasons for carrying a gigantic knapsack.  You can hide your music in it and pretend you didn't bring it. 

‡ Which is looking rather beat up from all the time it spends in my knapsack. 

‡‡ Now I can just about be heard over the frelling piano.  Did I say this last week?  He's got a GRAND piano in his rather tiny studio.  Okay, the studio is larger than a breadbox^ or my kitchen at the cottage, but not a lot bigger, and the grand piano is only a baby, but it's a medium sized Steinway baby in a very small space and singing to/with it is a bit like being hugged by a large bear.  You just hope it's friendly. 

^ Does anyone play Twenty Questions any more?  Or know what a breadbox is? 

‡‡‡ I'm still a bit stymied by how to make the experience worth his while.  He's a music teacher but he's not a voice teacher, and he's a professional accompanist, and it's not like I'm practising for a recital^ or going for an ABRSM^^ grade test or anything sensible/goal-oriented.  So . . . erm . . . 

^ HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA 

^^ HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA + 

+ http://www.abrsm.org/en/home 

§  Everything is harder than it looks.  And one of the things I'm going to ask Nadia this week—I have a little list—is about coping with singing with a someone/something that's doing something else.  I mean, not a choir, where there should be at least a few of you all doing the same thing and providing mutual support etc.  How do you just not get hugged to death by your large (friendly) bear?   The Ash Grove is one of the (very few) songs that I can sing with something that might almost resemble feeling if you were quick enough to catch it as it flashed by in an instant^ . . . but as soon as there's a piano I revert to snatching breaths and squalling.^^ 

^ Which you wouldn't be, of course, because if you were there, it wouldn't happen.     

^^ I'm still a lot louder than I was six months ago.  And there are moments approaching musicality.  Just not very many of them. 

§§ If I'm getting this wrong, blame me, not Nadia.  The stuff I write down in my notebook so I can doublecheck is always right.

Singing

 

Good grief.  Late Junction on Radio 3 is playing The Leatherwing Bat.*  I wonder how many other drought-oppressed inhabitants of bat nurseries are twitching in anticipation of a very wingy season. 

* * *

Okay. The day has been a success.  I hit the frelling A.  Repeatedly.*  Although Griselda was back this week so it didn't really matter if anyone else hit it or not.  Still, one has one's pride.

            Thursdays are now a bit fraught since I have handbells and choir practise, and while dirty dishes in the sink** don't necessarily give me a nervous breakdown*** still I prefer to get the uneaten food† put away and the four†† tea mugs washed up as soon as people leave.  It's not the dirty-dishes aspect that's the problem.  But four††† mugs looks like it might have been . . . gasp . . . a social occasion.  In my house?  Now that's nervous-breakdown fodder.  And then as soon as I hang up my rubber gloves hellhounds must be emphatically hurtled‡ and finally, with more luck than foresight, five minutes at the piano singing ee oo ee oo ee oo ee.  Where's that frelling A.  Gotcha. 

EMoon

I was much happier with Vivaldi 

I would love to sing more Vivaldi.  We're singing just the first part of the Gloria.  This was supposed to be for the wedding and was then pulled . . . but we're still learning it.  There was some hilarity tonight over plans to wedge the doors shut and put a bag over the head of the family member who has stolen our Gloria's slot to sing some inadequate solo, and do it anyway.  More prosaically I believe Ravenel is planning to add it to the programme for the summer concert.  Have I mentioned recently that we still have no idea what the programme for the summer concert is?  I feel like a lab rat.  Here, eat/drink/press this.  Never mind why.  

Schumann is unrelentingly emo. 

I would like emo if I could put it over.  I'm still at the 'try not to look like you're being tortured' stage.  Sigh. 

And I'm being pushed at the entire "Frauen-Liebe und Leben", starting with this one…and I think it's a bad match. Maybe when I was fifteen or so, but now? 

You at fifteen?  You are trying to tell me you weren't a snarling, ass-kicking feminist at fifteen?   I did the snarling—and the humourless—and the feminism, but I was way too afraid of my own shadow to attempt any ass-kicking.  Aside from the fact that I've had a tricky back my entire life and would probably merely have dislocated myself. 

At one week from sixty-seven? It's absurd….German ideas of womanhood…not me. Not me at all. 

Double sigh.  No one in their right mind, however teeny, would push me at this incredibly huge and complex song cycle . . . about which I feel rather the way I feel about Verdi's Falstaff:  I'm so glad I don't understand German/Italian so I can just listen to the music.  I find the story behind 'A Woman's Life and Loves' repellent in the extreme‡‡ and, because there's still some of that humourless fifteen-year-old feminist about me even now, I think it calls into doubt the whole pretty fairy-tale of the relationship between Robert and Clara.  Interesting that they had eight children and she didn't actually get much composing done, did she?  I always wonder about why she didn't manage to visit him at the asylum.  About what thoughts might have been going through her mind, consciously or unconsciously, after they carted him off the last time, like, I wonder if he's managed to give me syphilis?  Or any of the children?

            . . . Anyway.  Good luck.  It's gorgeous music, but I'll never sing it.  I'll never have the voice for it, and I don't think I could engage with it anyway.

. . . today's voice lesson, in which Svengali elicited better sound than I do at home (nothing new) 

::bangs head against wall::   Indeed.  Although I was making decidedly more noise, and particularly more noise at my top end, tonight than I was in October.   And as I say kind of a lot, all you need as a choir singer is to be on pitch and loud.  If Svengali has you singing a famous solo cycle however you may be in a lot of trouble.  Mwa hahahahahaha.  Please be sure you record your recital for YouTube so we can all hear it. 

and then I sang (it could indeed be called "singing" though not particularly good singing) 

Yes.  I understand this distinction. 

Schumann's "Seit ich ihn gesehen". I don't have German….at least in the choir I can panic and go silent for two notes while someone with better language skills sings. . . .  But. This was my assignment. I wrestled with it for awhile and finally gave up, going to YouTube, which helped. 

Svengali lets you use YouTube?  Nadia is really against it.  I think I blogged about this a while back.  She says that you pick up aspects of the performance without realising that's what you're doing—I was saying I couldn't sound like Marilyn Horne/Cecilia Bartoli/Janet Baker if I tried and therefore where's the harm.  So I now try not to.‡‡‡  It came up against this week.  An old stupid error that I thought I had eradicated in Dove Sei returned . . . just in time for my lesson.  ARRRRRGH.  I said sadly to Nadia, well, you see, I'm not using YouTube.  Good, she said.  

. . . So on the last go-round, where he swore he wouldn't stop me and I should sing through the whole thing while he played, I did. The triumph?  His next student knocked–Svengali invited him into the room (into the same room, with me, singing fairly loudly for me) and…my throat didn't close up and silence me. . . . 

YAAAAY.   Well done.  And you didn't lose your place.  This also counts, or it does with me.  I've had to deal with the 'someone can HEAR ME' from the beginning with Nadia, because of the layout of the house, made especially horrific the days that Wild Robert is there, as he was this week.  Uggggggggh.  But someone coming into the room?   Suddenly both the page and my mind are a blank. 

Now to sing WELL. (maybe.) 

You and me both, honeybun.  No maybe!  Just WELL! 

* * *

* Speaking of indoor wildlife:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2012/feb/29/how-long-do-spiders-live

How long do house spiders live? There's one in my bathroom and I need to know when I can stop strip-washing in the downstairs loo.  

I feel for this person.  Although that wussy little creature in the photo, feh.  You could pick him up in your weeny dilettantish plastic spider catcher, the one that is too small to employ against anything you need dedicated armament against.  I'm still waiting for my arachnoid license to exclude.  I can't imagine what's taking so long.  They assured me that the spider representative had signed the contract.  

** WHAM.  WHAM.  HOLD STILL, YOU RATBAG.  WHAM. 

** I had an email from Clotilda after she read the blog in which she was introduced. 

'I have also decided I am not letting her indoors at the cottage, where I haven't hoovered since approximately . . . when I turned the second draft of SHADOWS in.  Furthermore I suspect her of being a neat freak and never having dirty dishes in the sink.' 

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. HA. HA. Um… no.

That is not the case. . . . 

Ah.  Well, maybe we're the same species after all.   I realise it is important to establish friendly cross-species relations with other denizens of this planet, but some boundaries are easier to negotiate than others.  I have more trouble with spiders and people who always do the washing up promptly than I do with most things.  Give me a nice straightforward person-eating tiger over a neat freak any day.  

And honestly, I didn't even notice any dents on Wolfgang. 

That's very nice of you and all, but if you want to get anywhere in this life you need to learn to lie better. 

*** Which is a very good thing 

† Chiefly chocolate biscuits^ 

^ Clotilda brought chocolate chip cookies.  I wonder how many townships who've had ogres and dragons and things take up residence at the town borders and start demanding virgin princesses have had the sagacity to try a switcheroo with chocolate chip cookies?  I acknowledge that's a lot of chocolate chip cookies to makeweight your average princess, but it has to be worth a try.+ 

+ There's a story here, if no one has written it yet.    

†† Probably five.  Because I won't have washed that morning's tea mug.  Because I'm running late.  Sigh.  

††† Or five 

‡ YOU ALREADY PEED FOUR AND A HALF SECONDS AGO.  AND SIX SECONDS BEFORE THAT.  AND THREE AND SEVEN-EIGHTS SECONDS BEFORE THAT.  COME ON.  

‡‡ http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2001/may/11/buildingaclassicallibraryseries.culture7 

‡‡‡ For Nadia.  I have every intention of using it for the Muddles.  As I listened to the Five Childhood Lyrics this week after last week's practise.

A Day in Which Almost Nothing Happens But I Rattle on Endlessly Anyway

 

Happy Leap Year Day.

         Because we were a little short of hurtling yesterday I took hellhounds well out of town on one of our epic walks this morning.  It's one we haven't been on in yonks and yonks and they've relocated the freller which you aren't really allowed to do with legal public footpaths but at least it's still there at all.  The best relocated ones are when we're three-quarters through the long loop back to Wolfgang and we do not want to turn around, and Sleeping Beauty's hedge rears up in front of us.  The standard bad-attitude farmer's tactic is ploughing right up to the edge so you have nowhere to walk, but you can at least flounder on.  Worse is the electric fence set three inches from the hedgerow.  We've negotiated a few of these too, with hellhounds on strangle-short lead and clearly wondering what's sent me off my nut this time.  Chaos nonetheless managed once to sting himself and he turned around and looked at me reproachfully, the ungrateful cur.   Possibly my favourite is the dog-impassable stile.  I don't like lifting forty-odd-pound hellhounds over these things* and there's one chest-high one** that is a nightmare.  I haven't been that way in a while, to see if the frelling city council was sufficiently buried under infuriated dog walkers to have had the wretched thing altered.  Arrgh.    

            But I digress.  I never got very lost and the available paths were perfectly adequate, they were just kind of in the wrong places.  And there's one long stretch of open field where hellhounds were blistering away in all directions, checking back with me a good half a second before I panicked***, and blistering away again.  This meant by the end of our epic walk . . . I wasn't quite looking around for poles to rig a travois†, but I was beginning to wonder if it would come to that. 

            The rest of the day was pretty much head down over SHADOWS.  No, it is emphatically not going to be done tomorrow.  But it is moving along.  Just not quite fast enough.  I was supposed to go bell ringing tonight but I immolated this desire on the altar of getting paid sooner.††

            The good news is that Wolfgang has a brand-new 2012 tax disc yaaaaaay.†††  Now all I have to do is remember to put it on.  Ahem.  The other thrilling news is that someone emailed me the details of the Japanese country cookbook she was morally certain was the one I was quacking about the other night . . . and she's right.  More yaaaaay.  This was several days ago.‡  I instantly went on line ‡‡ and found a clean copy, since it's out of print and I have a deep dislike of cooking through other people's splashes and maculations, wrote the bookseller a query . . . and didn't receive an answer.  I didn't receive an answer to my follow-up either.  So tonight I capitulated and applied to ungleblarging amazon, which as we know has everything. . . and I now have a second Japanese cookbook on its way. 

librarykat 

My Japanese mother has to deal with the (she thinks) drastic changes in the Japanese language; she left Japan in the late 1950s after she married my dad. He was stationed there again from 1961-64, 

I was there then.  Shall we play the silly game of did we pass each other on the street?  We were in Yokosuka for the first year and a half— '61 to '62—and then Tokyo for the rest. 

and since then she's just gone back a few times to visit family. It's even worse for the Japanese in Hawaii- their great (and multiple great) grandparents left Japan in the late 1800s, so many Hawaii-born Japanese speak an archaic Japanese, and in dialects that have almost disappeared in Japan. 

This sounds a bit like the Appalachians?, where up till recently, since I don't think there's much untouched back country left, there were isolated areas where they still spoke the Queen's English—Elizabeth I, that is, not II. 

I remember a co-worker in the library system who hosted a Japanese college student back in 1992 – that student laughed at my co-worker's Japanese, which was fluent but so old-fashioned the student could hardly understand her. My husband was teased by his great-aunt and cousins when he visited Japan as a teenager; same thing – his Japanese was not only old-fashioned, but also too polite, his cousins informed him. 

This is one of the things that keeps stirring in the back of my mind as I plug on through my modern lessons.  I don't remember enough to be able to cite examples but that's certainly my impression.  I'm also sure—well, nearly sure—that I was told fifty years ago that there were five levels of politeness, although you probably wouldn't need the most extreme two they existed.  Modern lessons only even mention three and rarely deal with the third . . . and yet school lessons are always more polite than what you're going to hear on the street.  

When I lived in Japan as a young girl, the kids in the military dependents' school sang a little ditty to the tune of "London Bridge is falling down" – moshi moshi ano ne, ano ne, ano ne; moshi moshi ano ne, a, so desu ka. 50 years later, I can't get this out of my head! Apparently it's called "Denwa Uta" – Telephone Song. Translates roughly as "hello, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh; hello, uh-huh, ah, is that so" 

Oh gods I haven't thought of this in . . . fifty years.  Yes.  Oh dear.  Yes.  I was in one of those military dependents' schools, and . . . well, the other kids sang it.  Even then I was uneasy about the whole dissing another person's culture thing, and I wasn't sure if that's what was happening or not.

Funny thing, though, when my mother talked on the phone with her friends, her side of the conversation often sounded just like that! 

YES.  I loved this when I heard it.  But I was always too timid to ask a real Japanese person for details. . . . 

* * *

* And to think I complain when hellhounds wish to skip meals. 

** What do you do if you're short?  And have three Newfoundlands? 

*** This involves standing in the middle of the field whimpering and chewing on your knuckles and remembering the old lurcher rule that your dog will come back, but it will come back to the place it left you, and staring around for two little dots appearing on the horizon and hurtling toward you till you can recognise them as hellhounds.  Mine streak up to me, goose me energetically, and stare around hopefully, willing me not to put them back on lead yet. 

† It's pretty warm.  I could have lashed my coat between the poles.  With a combination of the bits of green garden string I always have in my pocket^ and the wire from my frelling mono earpiece which would then give me the excuse/impetus to buy another one preferably that does not make me crazy.  I've been complaining about listening to one stereo earphone for months—listening to chaos theory or Japanese language lessons this way isn't bad, but listening to music is dire—because I like to have some warning when we're about to be mugged by off-lead Fluffy, which requires one ear free to detect the panting breath and thundering feet of approach.  I haven't been able to find anything plausible online in the UK^^ and then Peter strolled into the local ironmongers a few weeks ago . . . and came home with a mono earpiece.  Calloo callay.  Except it's one of these gods*&^%$£"!!!!frelling D-ring things that fits entirely over your ear AND I HAAAATE IT.  Between glasses, earrings and hair there isn't room for it anyway.  ARRRRRGH.   But I do hear Fluffy coming, and I'm not always standing on the wire to the other earpiece after I've bent over to pick up freshly delivered crap and the wretched thing has fallen out of my pocket again. 

^ Except occasionally when I want one and there aren't any 

^^ America is apparently rotten with mono earpieces, well how nice for you 

†† Also it's a last Wednesday of the month which means that Wild Robert has a practise for us scum at some arbitrary tower while Forza is taken over by demiurges and celestial beings.  This month's arbitrary tower is in New Zealand or something.  I didn't think I could drive that far.  

††† I know you can do it online.  I already said I knew you could do it online.  I don't want to.^  Especially when I have a perfectly good husband who walks past the post office every day because it amuses him to buy his newspaper in person rather than have it delivered.  Although I hadn't known, till you and Nadia told me, that the database would already know that Wolfgang is insured, even if I've lost the damn form. 

^ And 'old' is a relative term.  In my case it means I'm old enough to say 'I don't want to'.  This middle-class first-world society I, and I assume most of you, live in is wildly overloaded with stuff to do, learn, experience, understand, seek, puzzle out, encounter, participate in, organise and reorganise your life by and blah blah blah blah blah.  I don't want to know how my computer works.  I just want it to start when I turn the key in the little hole.  Etc.  If Peter stops walking past the post office to buy his newspaper every day, I promise to learn to get my task disc online. 

‡ I'm still waiting for A SIMPLE ART to arrive.  Don't worry.  You will be the first to know. 

‡‡ See?  I'm perfectly capable of going online when I'm sufficiently motivated.^

^ This didn't do me a lot of good with the mono earbud however.