Robin McKinley's Blog, page 110

Pollyanna be damned

 

TONIGHT'S FAUST FROM THE METROPOLITAN OPERA IN NEW YORK IS ONE OF THE WORST, STUPIDEST,  MOST PERVERSE PRODUCTIONS I HAVE EVER SEEN AND I HOPE THE DIRECTOR'S NEXT PROJECT INVOLVES  CARDBOARD, DENTAL FLOSS, AND MARKER PENS..   

            I HAAAAAAAAAATED IT.  AND I AM HAVING PROBLEMS HERE TONIGHT NOT USING LANGUAGE.

            Oh yes, and there will be spoilers.  Ironic in this instance. . . .

            There are two 'worst' aspects to tonight's large expensive cowpat.  The first is that Gounod's FAUST is a big, soppy romantic wallow, which either does or does not go fatally over the 'sentimental' line, depending on the point of soppiness saturation in your own personality.  I love it.  It's one of my desert island operas (with most of Verdi, about half of Mozart and one or two Rossini and Donizetti and . . .).  But it needs to be treated gently.  Try to take it too far out of its milieu at your peril.  This is to a great or lesser degree true of anything stageable, I would imagine, but opera generally is to my eye/mind/ear already dancing on the edge of irrecoverable silliness, and it's just not a good idea to distract an audience from the glory of the music to vexed and vexatious questions of plot and continuity.  IT'S ABOUT THE MUSIC.*  And that's really all it's about.  Any director who doesn't get this is a moron.

            There are a lot of morons out there.  I'm sufficiently hard-line about this that I further think that anyone responsible for a production that calls too much attention to itself is an up-himself prat.**  I know the arguments about 'freshness'.  I think they're mostly bunk.  I think that the majority of the opera-going audience doesn't have the chance to get tired of non-controversial productions because due to time, money, other things in their lives and how many operas are performed in a given year they don't see them often enough to get tired.  I think that most of the excuse for 'exciting' new productions is SELF INDULGENCE on the part of the theatre admin.  Bored with straightforward productions that give the singers the best possible chance to bring the audience to its knees?  Go sell washing machines.  And don't let the door bang you in the butt on your way out.

            I don't even know where to begin.  And I have to go to bed so I can ring bells tomorrow morning.  But here's the second 'worst' about tonight's show:  it was an absolute dream cast.  Jonas Kaufmann as Faust***, Rene Pape as Mephistopheles and Marina Poplavskaya as Marguerite.  Gods.  What they could do with this music.  And they mostly even managed it, despite very long odds against, like running a marathon on one leg and blindfolded.   Some of the close-up stuff did work a treat—the famous act-three seduction is pretty great, for example.†  But the bullsh—I mean, the poor creative decisions of this production kept getting in the way.

            So.  Anyway.  FAUST is a big, gorgeous, soppy, 19th century tragedy, with melodies to die for and buckets of emotional melodrama.  Gounod laid it in 16th century Germany, with probably about as much historical accuracy as Puccini lavished on MADAMA BUTTERFLY, so I'm not terribly fussed about slavishly following the libretto about this.  But the director has decided that his Faust is one of the scientists involved in the Manhattan Project.  What?  Mind you, you only know this because Joyce Di Donato tells you, as tonight's broadcast host.  There's no particular clue to the initial backdrop of an anonymous ruined building, a vaguely laboratory-looking stage, and some limping, blackened people who cross Faust's path. (He doesn't seem too perturbed by them.)  These unidentifiable victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki do however have a strange similarity to the blackened, jerking devils of Walpurgis Night.  Er, why?  And if those are WWII uniforms in act two, I'm Pippi Longstocking.  Although even if they are . . . wait a minute . . . this is after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs?  Then who are these soldiers and where's the war?

            And what is the giant puppet-soldier about?

            And why does a bloody deaths-head in a cape come on stage and glower at Mephistopheles at the end of some act or other, I forget?

            And if that's supposed to be a mushroom-shaped cloud at the beginning of act five (I think), how about if you locate a better piece of film for it?

            I'm getting ahead of myself.††  I acknowledge that what to do on stage while the overture unrolls can be a problem, but how about . . . nothing?  This is the orchestra's moment.  Let's listen to them.  But we have Kaufmann lurching around looking like a young man wearing a slightly greyed-over moustache, and a brief cameo appearance by some refugees.  Until Kaufmann started singing it was BORING—and there's nothing wrong with the music. 

            The basic set had metal stairs with lots of open mesh walkways running up either side of the stage—like the sort of thing you see in factories and military installations and nuclear power plants.  It had nothing whatsoever to do with what was going on, although I suppose it provided one of those theatrical grails, Different Levels.  It was a daft place for Marguerite to fall finally into Faust's arms however—but the worst in that scene was the Thing that Ate Schenectady-sized red roses that bloom up the back screen on Mephistopheles' command.  WHAT?  WHAT'S THAT ABOUT?  WHAT'S THAT GOT TO DO WITH THE ATOM BOMB, IF WE'RE RIFFING ON THE ATOM BOMB HERE?  Arrrrrrgh.  And speaking Mephistopheles—Pape was good.  He had the authority and just the right sneer—as well as the voice.  Faust is a tick, so you need someone with some charm as well as the voice, and Kaufmann (ahem) has these;  and what I'm coming to like best about Poplavskaya—aside from the voice—is that she gives dignity to these awful die-away soprano-heroine roles her voice dooms her to.††† 

            I really thought they might manage to wreck the end, it's so badly staged—gibbergibbergibber no I want to go to bed, it's not worth ruining a working Sunday for—but when Poplavskaya, on her knees, looks up and starts in on her final 'blessed angels, save me' music, it came together for me anyway.  IN SPITE of her then climbing some of that ugly laboratory ladder toward what we assume is heaven—in spite of the chorus standing around in lab coats singing 'Christ is risen'—what?  Speaking of jerking something out of its context, this is just ghastly—and then Mephistopheles sucks Faust down into hell.  Er . . . that's not how the opera ends.  He's saved too, through his pity for Marguerite, and remorse at his part in her ruin.  So you're staring blankly at the stage and . . .  the old guy from the beginning, with the moustache, reappears up through the floor, and this time he does drink the poison that Faust was about to drink at the beginning, except Mephistopheles showed up and promised him fame, fortune and babes.  He drinks the poison and dies.  WHAT?  HOW IS THIS SAVED?  By any context this opera is capable of fitting into, suicide means you're damned. 

            GIBBERGIBBERGIBBERGIBBER.  But I really have to go to bed. . . . 

* * *

* Just to be sure my colours are nailed to the mast here, I have no time for people who want to talk about opera as drama with singing.  Very very frelling few operas are well-made plays under all the twiddly bits.  You go to an opera, you park your intellect—not all your brain, but the logical part—at the door.  I've talked here before about the emotional reality of opera—I can forgive almost any absurdity as long as the big numbers give me a scalp-tingling rush. 

** Or herself, of course, but tonight's prat was a bloke. 

*** Be still my heart.   What has happened lately, that there are suddenly hunky opera singers?^  When I was still young enough to have fantasies, who was there?  Luciano Pavarotti? 

^ And what's a little drool among friends.  

† Not that this would have anything to do with my attitude toward Kaufmann. 

†† I PARTICULARLY hated the ending. 

††† Although I have a little rant I do about Marguerite:  she's got the devil against her, for pity's sake.  She was never going to win.  The particular challenge to Marguerite is to let her go mad convincingly.  She has plenty of excuse—her lover has run off leaving her pregnant, her brother, her only family, curses her for a slut with his last breath.  Nice guy.  Then when she goes to the church to pray she sees and hears devils.  Well, she is seeing and hearing devils.  It's in the libretto.  So it's not surprising she kills her baby—and a half decent production brings this out—infanticides generally not being wildly sympathetic.^  One of the WORST bits of tonight's big ugly redolent mess is the baby-murder, which happens on stage, with the pacing and the emotional resonance of buying a newspaper at the corner shop. 

^ Although Hetty Sorrel and Tess of the D'Urbervilles both come to mind.

Skiving off*

 

They sang COLD HAILY WINDY NIGHT.  Steeleye Span, that is.  Tonight.  At the concert Fiona got me by the hair, forced** me into her car as I moaned feebly:  I have to work!  I have to work!***, and made me come to with her.†  I could be happy just looking at Maddy Prior's clothing. ††

            I had brought my leg warmers.  That is, I brought a remarkably-crinkly-at-one-end skein of bitchy, tantrum-prone††† yarn, a pair of needles‡, and an increasingly battered-looking pattern, including the crib sheet Fiona wrote out for me MONTHS ago.  We had allowed lots of time to get lost in which we then didn't need‡‡ so I had a good half hour to get started again.‡‡‡  Aaaaugh.  Counting.  Aaaaaugh.  And Fiona would keep trying to talk to me.  What do you think this is, a social occasion?  Just because she can knit an incredibly frelling complicated frelling sock pattern on forty-seven double-ended needles and look around at the crowd and chat to her neighbour, who is laboriously going, one, two, three, purl, one, two, three, knit, DOESN'T MEAN EVERYONE CAN.

            And just by the way, some of what Peter Knight does on that fiddle isn't possible.§

            At the end Fiona said, so, are you glad you came?  There must be more Steeleye sheet music out there, I said, having had trouble not joining Rick Kemp for COLD HAILY.§§  I even asked Maddy herself about sheet music on the way out and she looked puzzled and suggested I write to Park Records. §§§

            And then we went back out to the car park, got in Fiona's car and drove merrily away in the wrong direction because she had decided we didn't need the satnav. . . . 

* * *

* It was a near thing.  Blogmom had sent along a last sale/auction order file which I had assumed was a few final sweepings-up, no big deal, and hadn't even bothered to open it—Fiona could do it when she came.  AND THEN IT TURNED OUT TO BE GINORMOUS.  Gaaaaaah.  WAAAAAAAAH.  I knew I was not, in fact, going to get everything out before Christmas^ but I did think we were totally heading downhill for the final assault.  No.  Wrong.  So the first thing Fiona had to do, having been obliged to reveal the awful truth, was prevent me from murdering myself messily in an assortment of creative and unpleasant ways. 

^ Once again, grovelling apologies.  There Is Too Much Going On.  And I really do have to finish SHADOWS before I can no longer afford to keep the hellhounds in a manner to which they have become accustomed. 

** I would make three of Fiona.  Well, two and a half anyway.  But she's very persuasive.  Especially when she shakes out a length of yarn in this sort of garrotte and clamps sharpened knitting needles between her teeth. 

*** And I have an opera tomorrow.  COGNITIVE DISSONANCE ALERT.^ 

^ I would like to say I'm going to a Metallica concert the night after that, but . . . no.  And the truth is I don't think I have the—er—mettle to go to a heavy metal concert any more.  I don't know what the audience at a Metallica concert is like these days, but back in my misspent youth+ I went to several fairly scary concerts where I was glad that my companion was a six and a half foot bloke, who, while soft-spoken and mild-mannered, looked like Mess With Me and Die.     

+ Remember that I misspent most of my youth in my thirties, so we're talking about the eighties. 

† You realise it's Friday.  Sacred Home Tower Bell Practise.  Only Steeleye Span could drag me away from my responsibilities.^ 

^ . . . But make me an offer.  A stroll across the Kalahari?  Sunbathing in Antarctica?  A new diving bell attempt to reach the bottom of the Marianas Trench?  Sure.  After all, Niall left me to cope last Friday.  

†† I am forcibly reminded, pretty much every time I go to a concert—or, for that matter, watch a clip on YouTube—that the one great thing about performing is the costumes.  It's pretty much the only thing I miss about being a travelling, live-appearance author:  the opportunity to dress up. ^  And Maddy's clothes are prime.  I was thinking about this tonight—while I sang along to All Around My Hat^^—that this is the one flaw in my choir-joining plan^^^:  choir members don't get to dress up.  I like a long black velvet skirt as well as the next woman but Maddy's flounced blue satin is waaaay to be preferred.  Unfortunately being a soloist involves . . . soloing.  I don't see a way around this.  Unless that's in a chapter in CHAOS I haven't got to/figured out yet. 

^ As demonstrated at Forbidden Planet a few months ago.  

^^ Maddy came to the front of the stage, thrust her microphone in our direction+ and dared us to be louder than Margate. 

+ Literally.  Fiona and I were in the front row.~ 

~ Fiona orders the tickets.  I just go where I'm told.  Chiefly into the passenger seat of her car. 

^^^ Supposing my incredibly tiresome throat stops being a frail heroine and lets me return to two-and-a-half-hour practises with the Muddlehamptons.

††† Yes I am thinking about simply buying a couple more skeins of hellhound-blanket yarn^ and using that.  Wait . . . did I just say BUY MORE YARN?^^ 

^ The pink option, of course. 

^^ I was reading Yarn Harlot the other night+ about stash, one of her favourite topics, and how the fact that you have more yarn than an infinity of monkeys could knit into bobble hats while waiting for that other batch of monkeys to produce King Lear++ doesn't necessarily mean you have anything to knit with.  Yes.  Her ratiocinations on this subject will not be mine, but in my case all my nice yarn is Waiting for Me to Learn What I'm Doing.  I can't just carelessly pluck a couple of skeins out of some tote bag and start on leg warmers.  Horrors.  

+ In the bath, of course.  Paperback editions of Yarn Harlot are ideal for the task.  

++ Macbeth would do.  And it's shorter. 

‡ Yes in the right size.  Please.  

‡‡ We will come to the topic of the drive home again in a minute. 

‡‡‡ The lights went down mid-row, of course.  Oh, now I'm in trouble, I said, and the woman on my other side . . . laughed.  So during the interval I said to her, do you knit?  I used to, she said.  I keep thinking I should start again.  Don't let me put you off, I said.  I'm a beginner, and this yarn is possessed by demons.  We parted amicably at the end:  next time bring your knitting, I said.

            Postscript:  I knitted five rows.  And then I ripped them all out again.  Sigh.  However, it more nearly resembled ribbing than my previous efforts.  It just wasn't ribbing. 

§ This is clearly stated in chapter mrrmngph of CHAOS.^ 

^ I'm reading/listening to it AGAIN, okay?  This is challenging stuff for someone whose idea of higher maths is a touch of St Clements minor on handbells. 

§§ He may be a great bassist.  He is not a great singer.  I admit that my crossover tendencies may not always stand me in good stead when judging folk singers, but I mostly feel that to be a lead singer of anything you either have to sound great, like Maddy^, or at least have a characterful voice, like Dick Gaughan—or Tom Waits or Leonard Cohen.  

^ Although she's still singing when a classical singer would have had to give up. 

§§§ http://www.parkrecords.com/  In case you're interested.  I mean, yes, I could figure out the tunes, and most of the lyrics are on line somewhere, but what am I going to give Oisin?  . . . Had I but world enough and time, I might write my own accompaniments, of course, but they would be a little non-standard.

 

ANOTHER RATBAG DAY

 

I took New and Shiny home with me last night and . . . just by the way . . . this going to bed with your technology is getting out of control in my house.  Two years ago I was only in danger of being crushed to death by falling piles of books.  Then I bought Pooka—but putting her on the shelf next to my bed made some sense because it's her phone number that the emergency-line button Peter wears round his neck forwards to.  (If neither I nor either of the two back-ups answers, they send an ambulance and ask questions later.)   Then there was Astarte.  But I'm afraid it is extremely luxurious lying at your ease with six pillows and a duvet, reading or cruising on your iPad.*  Reading.  I'm still a hard-copy girl at heart** but the joy of reading hundreds of loose pages of manuscripts on an ereader makes me so emotional I can hardly type.***

            Anyway.  I took New and Shiny† not merely back to the cottage †† but to bed, thinking that I'd have a nice low-stress post-relaxing-bath stroll through some of its arcaneries at a time of day/night that when I can't figure out what the *&^%$£"!!!!! is going on, it doesn't matter.  The first thing that happened is that it told me it had 98% of its battery charge. . .  and 1 hour and 58 minutes remaining.  Sound of Robin exploding straight up through the canopy and leaving a little dent in the ceiling.  It's probably a good thing it was the middle of the night so I wasn't tempted to ring any archangels.†††  Fortunately New and Shiny changed its mind and decided it had five hours left before I threw it off the (tall) bed and jumped on it.  But one of the benes I have been persuading myself with‡ as I flinch and whinge about the necessity of learning all this new software rubbish is the prospect of watching films on an unplugged-in laptop that can actually do this without gargling, stalling, running out of battery and falling over.  So New and Shiny had better.‡‡

            Meanwhile . . . my bell-ringing software won't run and several of the shortcuts on my desktop won't open.  SIIIIIGH.  I haven't even dared try my two monster programmes, the homeopathic RADAR and the musical Finale:  I'm afraid there will be blood and screaming.  And possibly entrails. 

            But my original point was that, having heaved New and Shiny to one side, to join Astarte and 1,000,000 half-read books on the other side of the bed, there is precious little room left for me.  I hope New and Shiny doesn't turn out to be a restless sleeper.

            I woke up this morning out of a dream of someone holding me penetratingly at swordpoint which turned out to be a corner of New and Shiny, schlepped all four of us‡‡‡ back down to the mews, and discovered . . . that my email inbox wouldn't open on the old laptop and crashed if I tried to persuade it and I couldn't get into New and Shiny at all because it was rejecting both my fingerprint and my password§. . . .

            At this point I did ring the archangels.  And then knitted while they remote-controlled into the Battle of Hastings being re-enacted in a small Hampshire mews terrace.§§  At the end of all this I had two more hellhound squares and a throbbing headache.  And it was nearly time to dash back to the cottage again to ring handbells.  Frelling Niall was frelling early, and there was a knock on the door (and a cacophony of hellhounds) as I grasped the handle to flush the toilet AND THE HANDLE BROKE.§§§ 

* * *

* Not to mention a whole new fresh approach to playing Montezuma on a bigger screen. 

** And the whole reading-in-the-bath thing is likely to keep me that way.  Although you suspect you have a slight skew to your system when you're waiting for the paperback not because you don't want to spring for hardback prices but because you want to read it in the bath.  

*** Sure cuts down on your second sheets though.^  And I've been getting through a lot of scratch paper lately, testing pre-doodles.  And pre-pre-doodles.  And . . . . ^^ 

^ Every now and then some mingy publisher sends you a ms where the pages have been printed on both sides.  Feh.  This should not be allowed. 

^^ Remember the doodle it took me four tries to get right?  I took #5 out of the envelope this morning, sighed, and put it back on the working side of my desk. 

† I know.  She? He? needs a name.  It'll come to me.  At the moment our relationship is a little testy and I might inadvertently name it Grendel or Grendel's Mother.  

†† And it BARELY fits in my tattered canvas briefcase equivalent.  AND IT WEIGHS A TON.  It might as well be a third hellhound.^ 

^ Hmmmm . . . . 

††† I did think about texting Raphael.  Texting is a very very bad thing when you have shortness of temper problems.  The immediacy of email is nothing on the diabolical immediacy of texting. 

‡ NEW OS.  AAAAAAUGH.  Archangels did warn me that I was going to have to move on from XP this time, but . . .  AAAAAAAAUGH.  Gods on toast, why doesn't someone come up with some stripped down programmes instead of the endless even-more-pumped-up ones?  Sodding Microsoft is like a factory turkey—it's already flabby and it's half water.^  I don't WANT a million more choices!  I didn't want about 80% of the choices in XP!^^ 

^ Not to strain a metaphor too far or anything, but its basic level of health is so poor it's also full of pre-emptive antibiotics.  

^^ Yes.  This blog post is also coming from the old laptop.  

And yes, they all have names.  The desktop—who is older than CHALICE, just by the way—is Seneschal.  This laptop is Gonfalon, and the little knapsack-sized one is Pennoncel.  

‡‡ Meanwhile, when the frell are they going to get both batteries and battery read outs a little more RELIABLE?  

‡‡‡ Three hellhounds, that is, and me 

§ And because this laptop was designed for the business market you can't merely turn off the security pass thingy.  What? 

§§ My purling is improving.  My counting is getting worse.  But maybe it'll be easier to pay attention when it's counting stitches instead of rows.  I'm eyeing the leg warmer pattern again. 

 harpergrey

I remember you mentioning that you are on Ravelry…may forum members add you as a friend? 

Of course you can.  For that matter I can't stop you.  But I haven't really figured out the purpose of friending on Ravelry.  Perhaps I haven't reached Full Knitting Saturation Point yet or something. 

§§§ Handbells after this were going to be unusually exhausting, but this was exacerbated by Colin deciding to call St Clements and bob minor spliced.  So you have not only to remember what frelling method you're ringing, but what the calls do to you.  The calls themselves are the same—at least I think they're the same—but since the methods are different you come out the other end of the calls into different places in DIFFERENT PATTERNS.  ::blergablergablergablerga::  Then we rang some little bob minor just to finish the brains-as-spaghetti job.  And then Gemma showed up so we had to ring MAJOR.

            And I have to flush my toilet by taking the lid of the tank off and YANKING till I can get a plumber in.  And have I mentioned I have Fiona coming tomorrow?  Yo, Fiona, how are you at cold water, limescale and yanking?

ARRRRRRRRRGH COMPUTERS ARRRRRRRRRGH

 

Computer Archangels were here for about two and a half hours today* and . . . an hour after they left I was writing pathetic HEEEEEEEEELP emails to Raphael.  This was once again out of office hours** and I was merely trying to get on his list for tomorrow earlier than I would be crawling out of bed to phone him, but hellhounds and I were out hurtling in the dark when Pooka started barking at me, and it was Raphael.  I explained that I was standing in the middle of a dark field about a quarter mile from my computer—through a good deal of juvenile hilarity going on in the background at Raphael's end.  I'll put the kids to bed, he said, good dad all the way**, and ring you back.  Which he did.  Which is why this blog post is coming to you at all. 

            The good news is that yes, indeed, I have a Brand New Very Shiny Laptop.***  The bad news is that it's up the wazoo with new frelling updated frelling software frelling, which, first, means it won't play with some of my old programmes and, second, that both my old computers which are all networked together are having tantrums.  OH HOW I HAAAAAAAATE MICROSOFT.  HAAAAAAATE.†  This also means, of course, that I can't USE the shiny, (allegedly) magnificently overpowered beast, because I don't understand all the weird  (if shiny) new stuff.††   This is, you know, a trifle counterproductive in a new computer. . . .

            Raphael PROMISES that the old Word file with the tender new SHADOWS on it will run just fine on Shiny and New.  Of course I trust him totally—implicitly, explicitly, and dancing the fandango—that's what archangels are for, to nurture and cherish mere mortals and to know more than we do about everything.  But . . .  

katinseattle

I want to hear more about Mongo. A lot more. Preferably a whole book with Mongo in it.  

This is in the process of being arranged.  I think he may even save the universe once or twice.

Aaron

I want to hear more about Mongo. A lot more. Preferably a whole book with Mongo in it.

A new record, a sequel request before the manuscript has even been submitted. 

MONGO IS A MAJOR CHARACTER IN THE CURRENT NOVEL.  I'M PLANNING ON FULFILLING THIS REQUEST IN THIS STORY, OKAY?  DON'T YOU HAVE SOMETHING ELSE YOU COULD BE DOING?  SOLVING GLOBAL WARMING OR SOMETHING?  OR WRITING A GUEST BLOG?

* * *

* During which I DOODLED.  There was one utter ratbag of a request^ that I did over and over FOUR TIMES before it was unlousy enough that I could bear to sign it and put it in an envelope.  

SarahAllegra

Just let it be said that I think being able to order [doodles and doodled books] on command later is a FABULOUS idea. 

Oh good.  I may even get to the point in another decade or so that I don't nearly have heart failure every time I raise a drawing pen over an open page in a book.  I got used to signing the frellers decades ago, but doodling is scary.   

BurgandyIce

I am going to miss [doodling] when I finish the last one.

Wait… can we help you with this and request random doodles?! 

Totally.  Just not yet.  

^ And no I'm not going to tell you what it was first because I wouldn't dream of being rude about a paying customer, but also because it's a perfectly reasonable request and if you don't draw yourself you aren't likely to know what is and is not drawable.  Or, possibly . . .  he/she responsible does draw, and cheers him/herself up on bad days thinking about the tortures of the damned he/she has committed me to.  In which case I hope the wall you hang it on—because of course this will be one of the special doodles that is framed and hung on a wall—is infested with both damp and deathwatch beetles and that one morning you will be uneasily awakened by a vague heaving sensation like a boat at anchor and then with a terrible roar that whole damp and beetled end of the house will collapse and you break a rib coughing in the resulting roiling clouds of plaster dust, not to mention shattering your great-grandmother's ornate Victorian bedhead, which was not built to fall ten feet through the first floor to ground level.

            The doodle itself, of course, will have been rendered into to tiny dusty atoms, which will mean that no one will ever again be able to pronounce on whether or not I successfully broke the unlousy barrier. 

Katinseattle

May I say, you do a really terrific line in curses. 

I get cranky.  

** Urgencies always happen outside office hours.  As any critter owner can tell you.  In this case I think computers totally count as critters. ^ 

^ There's a critter right now trying to convince he needs to be fed again.  This is so exciting a development—hellhounds soliciting food—that I've kind of fallen into the habit of feeding them four times a day. . . . REMIND ME AGAIN.  WHOSE IDEA WAS DOGS?

            . . . Pardon me.  Back in a minute.^

            The thing is, the underlying problem—that hellhounds believe that eating is optional—remains.   Therefore I have now created a situation where I have four times a day to get it wrong, instead of only two or three.  I've just let myself be seduced by the idea that if they're engaged in the process by asking for food, maybe . . . uh . . . 

^ ::Munching noises:: 

*** I assume Mum is in the next room getting around her second double Scotch.  The kids are both small and excitable.  

† I know.  If I were a Mac girl I could have pink.  As it is I have to make do with brushed aluminium.  Feh.  But I'm just not going to make the shift now, and fifteen or so years ago when I was first buying computers, you couldn't get Macs over here unless you were a geek and could do the support thing yourself.^  Also . . . I now have a pink-clad iPhone and a pink-clad iPad.^^  I don't need a pink computer.  But brushed aluminium?  Give me strength.  It's brushed circularly around the frelling HP logo.  Fortunately it will spend its life open and I will not be forced to look at it much.  But the exquisitely brushed aluminum makes Raphael's heart beat faster, and he wouldn't let me put the power cords and so on into the same tote bag with the computer in case I scratched it.  What is a frelling computer doing being made of something that scratches that easily.  Clearly the only answer is a laptop sleeve.^^^ 

^ Which would not be me.  Ahem.  

^^ And, Mac stuff?  It's not the second coming.  I'm just sayin'.  

^^^  http://www.coxandcox.co.uk/products/velvet-laptop-sleeve  And of course I'm going to spend another fifty quid to save six on postage.  

†† I'm too tired to work out a suitable curse for Microsoft.  It would have to be pretty intense.^ 

^ My mind will keep running on Gotterdammerung.  Magic gods-and-world-consuming fire.  Yes.  Although I have never been able to like a woman who rides her horse into a funeral pyre.  Your choice, honey:  leave the horse alone. 

††† The screen's pretty dazzling.  I could just stare at all the crisp new little icons and admire their sharpness and clarity.  Never mind what they might do if I risked clicking on them.^ 

^ Eeeeeep.

A Day Longer Than Its Hours

 

I have doodled*, I have SHADOWSed,** I have sung.***  I have hurtled.†  I am tired.  I tried to ring a few handbells with Pooka but the brain said ARE YOU TRYING TO DESTROY WHAT LITTLE OF ME IS LEFT?  GO LIE ON THE SOFA OR SOMETHING.  So hellhounds and I lay on the sofa.††

            Isn't it bedtime yet?  Maybe I'll go sleep in the bath††† till it's time to go to bed. 

* * *

* I made an alarming discovery this morning, as I was swearing at the latest FRELLING INSANE FRELLING REQUEST for a doodle^.  I know I keep telling you I enjoy doodling, and I do, and some of the insane ones are extra fun^^ after I stop swearing and settle down.  But I'm so conscious of still having 1,000,000,000,000 left to do IN SPITE OF THE FACT that you can hardly get into my office at the moment for the pile of stuff Fiona has to haul away on Friday, that the number of those remaining tends to be the main thought in my mind as I pick up my doodling pen.  But the alarming discovery is:  I am going to miss them when I finish the last one.  All very well that there's nothing stopping me from doodling for my own amusement . . . but there hasn't been anything stopping me for the last twenty years either, except not doing it.  Maybe I'll learn to think up captions and call them cartoons.  Maybe we can have caption contests.  And Blogmom has found a gizmo to create an order-a-doodle box for the blog, in case anyone is sorry they missed the sale/auction, or has thought of something particularly fiendish for their second cousin's brother-in-law's birthday next year.  But when she gave me this gratifying news she added, in her best headmistress voice, that she wasn't going to put it up till I was done with current orders, and I laughed a lot and said that that was fine, I'd have a nervous breakdown if she put it up any sooner. 

^ Maybe I'll have a whack at Gotterdammerung after all 

^^ I bet Gotterdammerung would be a blast 

**  b_twin_1 wrote:

Another day passes as a seventeen-year-old named Maggie.

mmmmm spoilers  

It gets worse.  And she has a border-collie-cross dog.    

. . . Mongo was totally thrilled by all the people (in Mongo's opinion we didn't entertain nearly enough) and since these were nearly all friends of his too no one said anything about getting long black and white hairs on their good clothes.  But after I stopped the third person giving him a piece of cake—sugar is so not a good idea with a dog that's mental to begin with—I hooked my hand through his collar and dragged him out.  He was all stiff-legged and resisting on the way to the kitchen door but as soon as I got him over the sill into the back yard he collapsed and turned into a sad hairy forlorn dog-blob.  I looked at him and laughed. . . .   He raised his head and thumped his tail hopefully. 

*** I got out the Christmas carol book(s) today.  Peter thinks I should learn In the Bleak Midwinter.  It's not totally unknown to me—and I'm a pushover for Holst—but it's not big in the bits of America I have sung carols in so I have to keep an eye on the music.  This perhaps in contradiction to part of the little chat Nadia and I had yesterday about concentrating more on fewer pieces.  Ahem.  Everyone gets to sing Christmas carols.  They don't count.  And . . . as I said to Nadia, I don't actually know how to concentrate more on a piece.  Once I get to the 'can more or less hit the right notes in the right order in the (relatively) right rhythm' place I am rapidly at a loss.  We will work on this, said Nadia.  Meanwhile I can just about sing all of Cold Haily Windy Night without getting tangled up in my own feet/voice and falling over.  This finding your own way through a folk song template is a bit of a freller.  But I suppose it might count as useful practise toward being able to Make Your Own Decisions about fancy art songs and sh . . . I mean, pieces your teacher suggests to you?

            Also, on the subject of confidence:  email from a music teacher friend today who says flatly that she's never had an adult student who didn't have confidence problems to a greater or lesser degree.  Trawling through my memory—which is, of course, mostly full of incidents in which I screwed up—I seem to remember that Oisin has said the same thing.  Still makes me wonder how we all got this way. 

blondviolinist

The only student I ever wanted to smack was a high school student who hadn't practiced for weeks, so I read her the riot act. (I read a pretty decent riot act, if I do say so myself.) 

Oooh!  Details! 

She looked at me and said "Why do you care? I'm paying you." 

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

She's lucky she got out of that lesson alive. 

I WANT THE END OF THIS STORY.  Like, how alive did she get out of that lesson?  Was she missing any limbs?  And did you fire her?

(I informed her in no uncertain terms that if it was money I wanted, I'd go work as a checker in the grocery store.) 

Sigh.  Yes.  In a good year I probably earn commensurate with the customer service drone in the booth playing Montezuma on her iPhone, but I still have grocery checker years.  New laptop^ or the kid gets another semester at college?  What a good thing I didn't manage to have kids.  

Horsehair Braider

These are, I guess, the same people who come up to a professional writer at a party and say with a smirk, Oh yes, I've always wanted to write a novel, I just don't have time. Urge. To. Kill.

::Bangs head on wall::  So like, what the FREAK is stopping you?! 

Erm.  The strong suspicion that I would not do my best work from a jail cell?

I hate that. I absolutely hate that. I used to show at this one really relatively prestigious show, and people would tell me, "We've got horsehair – we can do that." So finally at the next show, I sold little packets of horsehair, and people would ask me why, and I told them it was so they could braid their own horsehair. So I sold a bunch. THE NEXT YEAR, everyone came back to my booth and said, "This is really hard!!" and I said, "No s**t, Sherlock" and made a lot of sales. 

Yes.  There's also that slight brain disconnect about being able to do something at all, being able to do something well, and, even if you are capable of doing something well, how much time it may take to produce it to that level.  Most people probably can produce a book-shaped object, with 100,000 words arranged in groups loosely recognisable as sentences, but it's not what most of us would call a novel, and most people probably can braid horsehair into a fuzzy ring they could fit over a hand to hang round a wrist, but it would not be a thing of beauty.^^  And beyond that, even if you're good at it—novel writing, horsehair braiding, music teaching—you're still doing it for love, because you sure aren't doing it for the money.^^^  Most of the time this is okay—the idea of working this hard on a job I didn't love doesn't bear thinking about—but those moments when morons are getting in your face, it can be less great. 

^ Which may arrive tomorrow.  And not a moment too soon, because my email HAS GONE HORRIBLY WRONG.  Even if I don't take possession of a new laptop tomorrow, I'm going to have to have some archangel input. 

^^ I am one of those with experience of braiding horsehair that is still attached to the horse and . . . I never came close to rating in one of those 'best turn out' classes. 

^^^ There are good writers who make shedloads of money . . . but not very many.  

† Darkness has managed to hurt his back again—that is, Chaos has managed to hurt Darkness' back by body-slamming him when they were going 90 mph across a large field two days ago.  Frelling frelling frelling frelling.  DOGS.  WHOSE IDEA WAS DOGS.  So I am also tired because at the moment I am lifting Darkness in and out of the car.^ 

^ I only carried him upstairs once.  Fortunately he seems to have decided this is not worth it. 

††  Funny thing:  Darkness managed to jump on the sofa without any particular difficulty.^ 

^ Okay, the sofa is a lot lower.  

††† It's also WINTER out there.  The best time for scalding hot baths.

I came, I sang . . .

 

. . . conquering was in short supply, but two out of three is a passing grade.  And Nadia and I had a very interesting conversation about being a student and being a teacher and about learning and . . . ahem . . . getting hung up on the wrong things.  I'd been thinking a lot about this anyway since last Wednesday, and especially after various comments from friends and forum members about what makes a good student (or teacher).  The thing I've been most lately hung up on is that, at the age of eleven months and a fortnight off my sixtieth birthday, I still need to hear that it's okay NOT to be brilliant AND IT'S OK TO MAKE MISTAKES.  I still need to hear this!  I am not flouncing around out here to make you go 'there there Robin'!  I really DON'T KNOW these things!!  Sweet nondenominational deities, as someone on the forum recently said, I don't know this yet?  Well, I can fall back on how stupid I am, but that's boring and overdone.  But what it does make me think about, and not in a kindly, tolerant and forgiving way, is what passes for an educational system in the parts of the first world I know anything about.  Public money for music in school in the UK, for example, is pretty much nonexistent, except in a few small, local, determined areas where they've figured out ways of doing it for themselves.  There are still fabulous top-end schools for fabulous top-end students . . . but what the hell about the rest of us?  With this—and I think this is the barbed-wire enclosure that did me the most harm, and it doesn't seem to me it's changed that much in the last half century—goes the There Is One Way to Learn mandate, the one way being the way the Teacher teaches the Textbook, and if a student doesn't pick it up that way, well, too bad for the student, that is The Way.  There isn't much I did pick up via The Way.*  I suppose this is also striking me particularly hard at the moment because of all this physics and higher maths nonsense I am unwisely poking with a stick till it bites me.** 

            But at the same time . . . being dumb in maths and the hard sciences is sort of half-acceptable.  It's discouraging, but it doesn't actually break my heart that I don't know a cosine from an algorithm***.  MUSIC MATTERS TO ME.  I don't mind being a prat about calculus†.  But then I'm not paying a professional calculist to teach me to do it either, you know?  I appreciate that most music teachers are teaching the hoi polloi, because most people who take music lessons are and will remain amateurs.  But I'm still subconsciously convinced that I am Stepping out of Line by daring to take music lessons.  This was a huge amount of my trouble with the piano, that monumental solo instrument;  I'm fluffing the issue a bit with the singing, by having choir singing as my goal.  It's a shock to me, having fallen back into this antique rut of being a primary-school kid who can't carry a tune, to read Bratsche saying:  I completely agree with blondviolinist…the "I'm so good I don't need to bother" attitude is the only reason I've ever considered firing a student. I enjoy teaching anyone who is interested in music and in making progress (from wherever they start to wherever we get them). 

            One of the things that came out of my conversation with Nadia today was that while she knew I had left under a cloud last week, she had assumed it was because I was dismayed at how much worse I sounded in a small crowded room††.  Feh.  Not at all;  I'm used to the idea that I sound like crap—it's part of why I think I'm Stepping out of Line by taking singing lessons—I was upset because I couldn't do the simplest mechanical things—the homework things—like pronouncing the words or hitting the dranglefabbing notes.  Nadia blinked at me.  I know you put your time in, she said.  I can hear that you're working.  Trust me to do my job, okay?

            Erm. 

* * *

 * This is from quite a while back but I never got round to using it.  And it's still pertinent.

 Aaron wrote:

I was in that class not because they had twigged that I was really dumb, but because of a scheduling conflict caused by being new to that school system. But I was happy with the dumb kids.

I am interested to hear that this worked out. I got off sequence by skipping the second half of Algebra II and taking Trigonometry in the spring semester in a class consisting largely of seniors that had failed it the first time. For me at least, this was a mistake. While quietly playing blindfold chess in the back of the room with another student in the same situation was entertaining it has left my trigonometry at a "re-derive it each time you need it" level of proficiency. Conceptually complete, but too slow for real use. I took the failure to be a consequence of the different viewpoint of the other students (combined with my, admitted, lack of application). Your experience suggests that the instructor's contribution may have been what colluded with my failings to produce an unsatisfactory result. 

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.  Pardon me while I mop my streaming eyes and rub my aching ribs.  I realise that this thread has largely been about the detrimental effects of bad teaching, but there are still a few bottom lines here including that you are good at maths and I am not.  I'm willing to indulge a little friendly discussion of the possible fact that the way in to my maths brains [sic] is via a different channel than the standard—even the good standard—teaching paradigm, and that had I had a succession of Penelope Windsor Curries from my first essays in counting on my fingers I might not now turn green and queasy at first sight of any equation and, as the physics and maths books mount up, not have to give myself bracing little lectures on the subject of new horizons to conquer and that this unseemly and uncharacteristic proliferation is not because I've been taken over by aliens from Alpha Centauri (who, if present, are probably not having a good time). 

What is interesting about the class I was in however is that these were the screw-ups and the troublemakers—not the football hero dumbheads that had to be shoved through the educational machinery so they could go on being glossy and golden on the sports field to the greater regional glory of the school (yuck, just by the way), but the kids that were busy falling through the cracks in the system and would be either stocking grocery shelves or stealing cars in another year or two.  It was also mostly boys.  And they actually behaved for Mr X.  I don't know why.  Nice guys usually finish last, and he was not a dominant personality or any kind of disciplinarian.  But there was remarkably little misbehaviour in his class.  And most of us learnt some geometry.  I even got a few As. 

So while I think your description missed an essential point, yes, the teacher is crucial.  Which is where this conversation started. . . .

*Does being rude about calculus fail the Pollyanna requirement? 

While this is footnoted from a part of your comment I have not quoted, I could not resist saying here:  no.  Be my guest.  Please give examples. 

** Niall has loaned me his favourite calculus text:  Calculus Made Easy: Being A Very-Simplest Introduction To Those Beautiful Methods Of Reckoning Which Are Generally Called By The Terrifying Names Of The Differential Calculus And The Integral Calculus, by Silvanus P. Thompson.  How can you possibly not want to invite this man over for a cup of tea?  Since the second edition is 1914, this is probably not likely.  Still.  It begins with a proverb:  'What one fool can do, another can.'  The Prologue continues:  '. . . The fools who write the textbooks . . . seem to desire to impress you with their tremendous cleverness by going about it in the most difficult way.  Being myself a remarkably stupid fellow, I have had to unteach myself . . . and now beg to present to my fellow fools the parts that are not hard. . . .'  Hee hee hee hee hee hee.  How far have I got?  Well . . . One of the drawbacks to stuffing yourself with a large quantity of brand-new and strange information is the way it all falls back out again, like a front-loading washing machine if you don't slam the door fast enough.  And even if you do manage to get the door closed, the different bits inside get all muddled up together till you have no idea what any of it is.^  I was reading the chapter in CALCULUS about being able to ignore things that are small enough not to have a gnarly effect on your calculations, and thinking two things:  one:  this is one of the reasons chaos took a while to catch on.  Because mathematicians and physics guys were used to making tidy calculations where they could ignore the little stuff as either unimportant or static.  Sensitive dependence on initial conditions was very unpopular^^.   So you have to watch out about ignoring the little stuff.  That's in the Gleick.  The second thing I was thinking about is from the Hawking:  that while Newton's laws were badly screwed by Einstein, a lot of them still work well enough most of the time—and therefore people still use them.  Ignoring the little stuff.  Ouch.  That's my brain exploding. ^^^ 

^ All Wet Laundry is the Same Thing. 

^^ This, however, posted by Maren in response to my reference to the time-space-gluon-sensitive-dependence-on-initial-conditions continuum made me laugh and laugh. 

AKA a big ball of wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey…stuff. 

^^^ In common with all the people whose brains exploded after trying to follow Aaron through the mazes of Klein thingummies: 

It is actually easy to make a Klein Purse. You take two handkerchiefs and sew them together making a two by one rectangle. You give it a half twist and sew the short ends together to make a Mobius strip. Since we started with two handkerchiefs with four edges each and used up two edges in the first sewing and two edges in the second sewing the Mobius strip has a single edge four edges long. Pinch the edge together at any point and start sewing it closed. A single seam two edges long should do the trick. The Mobius strip only had one side and we didn't cut or interrupt anything so the result also has only one side but it has no edges since we used them up with last seam. A sphere has no edges but it has two sides, an inside and an outside. How is this possible? Obviously there is something wrong with the instructions but what? 

I actually do know about Klein bottles—I had a brief flirtation with topology+ many years ago, before I realised that it counted as maths and was therefore off limits—and long for a Klein bagel of my very own.  But it's the videos of Klein bottles that really do me in.  There are a lot of them out there.  I don't have a favourite, they all make me go 'ow'.  

+ Which Gleick describes as 'geometry on rubber sheets' 

*** Which furthermore I keep wanting to spell 'algorhythm'.  

† And if I ever get to the point of successfully working one of the problems YOU GUYS WILL HEAR ABOUT IT.  So maybe you'd better hope that I don't.  

†† It's quite a good room to teach in, she said, because anyone then trying to sing in a proper hall with proper acoustics will blossom.

Some of the Usual Brain Death Suspects

 

The auction winner of IMAGINARY LANDS requested a doodle:  'author's choice'.  EEEEEEEEEP.  This sort of thing makes my mind spin out of control.  A symphony orchestra dressed as Santa Clauses!  The flat earth balanced on the back of an infinity of turtles!*  Gotterdammerung!   However, after clawing myself off the ceiling, I decided on a sheepdog.  But then (I believe the winner to be a blog reader) I thought it might be a good idea to pin it up here and say IT'S A SHEEPDOG.  You know, from The Stone Fey.  Well, maybe you don't know, if you haven't read the story.  Anyway.  I was originally going to draw the whole serious, head-down sheepdog in full focussed herd mode, but it occurred to me that if you don't know that's what sheepdogs look like on the job you might think it was a mad wolf.  So we did lying down and looking harmless but alert.

non-traditional sheepdog.

Narknon. With breakfast.

 

The request was for an ELEGANT hellhound. I'm not sure I do elegant. This will have to suffice.

I've been doodling and I am BRAIN DEAD (again).  SHADOWS.  Gaah.  Blog post.  Gaaah.  Sing . . . VOICE LESSON TOMORROW.  AAAAAIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEE**. 

blondviolinist

Believe me, of the few students I've wanted to kick out of my studio, none of them had ever doubted their own talent. Not liking what's coming out of your instrument is the foundation of being able to change it. 

. . . Wait, wait, are you SERIOUS?  Not about the foundation for change—that makes sense***, but about the undesirable students??  Really?  I totally understand the lack of charm of a lazy egoist†, with or without talent, but what about the PATHETIC?††  —I have to keep reminding myself that all I'm aiming at is to get into a slightly better choir than the Muddles†††, which means sight-singing and surviving an audition.  And I make a perfectly adequate choir ‡ noise so long as I'm not trying to get into The Sixteen or the Tallis Scholars or something.  And Nadia needs to eat.  So okay, no, she's probably not going to fire me.  . . . But are you serious?  It's thinking Your Talent Is Enough that pushes patient teachers over the edge?  I know that Oisin fires people who don't practise.‡‡

Some purling. I hope.

blondviolinist

. . . It didn't help that I was wrapping the yarn backwards on purl rows for the first, oh, two years I knit. And I wondered why my knitting looked funny. 

jmeadows

SAME. Not with the purls, but knits. I wrapped my yarn the other way, so all my knits looked like "through the back loop" knits. I was always really confused why, when I followed the instructions to knit through the back loop, it looked like my normal knitting. And why my purls and my knits looked SO different on the knit side of stockinette.  

I love you.  LOVE LOVE LOVE.  I am so grateful.  I feel so much better.  And I'm not sure it shows in the photo, but I am getting the little 'v's so I ASSUME I'm purling.  You will notice that I can't count worth stale peanuts however—this was supposed to be two rows, switch, two rows, switch, two rows.  The gleeps are ad hoc.  

blondviolinist

I like ribbing! Well, ok, maybe it's not my favorite thing to do ever, but I don't mind it at all. 

Sigh.  I'm planning not to mind ribbing.  But then I was planning not to mind sewing up.  Very slightly in my defense, I don't think it's the sewing up per se that's the problem—it's the SPACE to lay the freller out and, even more, what you see when you lay it out‡‡‡, ie, it's NOT supposed to look like THAT.  I will probably have a similar reaction to ribbing.  Siiiiiigh.  But both Penelope§ and Fiona have said that you only have to pay attention, as in ATTENTION attention, for the first few rows, and then you can do it either by feel or at least by looking at it.  Penelope is knitting AN ENTIRE SWEATER in ribbing§§ which she does WHILE SHE WATCHES FILMS.§§§ 

Cymberleah

As one of the people who won an auction square, I have to say that a small but significant part of bidding on it was to have something that was going to hang over your head for a good while.

Books are good. Doodles are awesome. Having something owed me by one of my favourite authors? Priceless. This is a state of affairs that can continue indefinitely.  

I may love you even more than I love blondviolinist and jmeadows.  I am delighted to indulge you in this matter.  . . . . Maybe I'll learn to do edging to make the situation last even longer. . . . 

jmeadows

Now I desperately want Robin to have a pink motorcycle with sidecar for the hellhounds. 

Oh, so do I.  You can run the charity auction this time.  Vikkik will help. 

* * *

* Hawking, not Pratchett 

** Not in a good way. 

*** Even to me 

† These are, I guess, the same people who come up to a professional writer at a party and say with a smirk, Oh yes, I've always wanted to write a novel, I just don't have time.  Urge.  To.  Kill.^ 

^ If they got that 'jury of your peers' right, I would be shot out of the courtroom and back onto the street so fast the speed of my passage would blow out the windows.   

†† And possibly neurotic 

††† Eventually.  First I have to get back to the poor Muddles.  But believe it or not I'm still having throat problems and I really really really don't want to have to start all over after I go to choir practise and promptly oversing myself to splinters.  Last few days—since, ahem, Wednesday—I've been breaking up practise time into two official whacks^.  I found out some time ago if I warm up and then go away and come back later to sing properly, it works a whole lot better.  But I've been kind of pushing it since Wednesday—I AM GOING TO SING DOVE SEI^^ TOMORROW AND IT IS NOT GOING TO BE ANY MORE EMBARRASSING THAN MY SINGING EVER IS—and intelligent pushing means not much more than about half an hour at a time.  I can do an hour with Nadia because there's always a lot of talking and I don't talk to myself ( . . . much.  When I sing).  

^ Ah, the joys of working at home, six feet from your piano. 

^^ The first two pages.  I've started learning the third and last, but I want Nadia to go over it with me before I do anything too . . . daft.  

‡ I want to respond to some of what you've said about Rodelinda, but I did want to say . . . that was a joke, about Blythe being the best alto your little local choir ever had.  She's not my cup of overcaffeinated beverage, but if I sounded one sixteenth that good I would probably die of joy, so maybe it's just as well I don't.  The truth is merely that I don't find her voice all that interesting when compared to the Mezzos of Yore.  

‡‡ Or, alternatively, plays the organ for them, and then gives them cups of tea.  Sigh.  SOME DAY when . . . gods, when they perfect the life-extension thing and/or the thirty-six hours in a day thing . . . I'm going to get back to the piano properly.  It's just . . . there's no POINT to performing music if you can't perform it with other people somehow, and a choir is a better bet for those of us with more nerves than talent. 

‡‡‡ AAAAAAAAAAAUGH, etc 

§ Who was clearly trying not to laugh when I was telling her my purling problems.  

§§ It's even two kinds of ribbing:  it's fitted through the body and then flares out in a sort of peplum.  It's really cute.  In twenty years or so I may ask her where she got the pattern. 

§§§ I might have liked AKIRA better if I'd been knitting.  Of course, I have to look at what I'm knitting . . .

 

Rodelinda

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodelinda_(opera) 

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/16/arts/music/renee-fleming-returns-in-rodelinda-opera-review.html 

She goes to bed with her EARRINGS on??  No wonder she sleeps badly.  Never mind the business of being chained to her bed by the evil usurper who having (probably) despatched her husband is now trying to marry her to consolidate his claim to the throne. 

            Opera generally gets a lot of stick for the absurdity of its plots, and Handel may get more than most.  I'm probably the wrong person to ask because I'm tired of defending my hero Verdi, who wasn't always well-served by his librettists, okay?  I know.  I still love the operas.*  And Rodelinda does have some credibility problems.  How, exactly, did the usurper usurp, and why did the proper king leg it so quickly that the usurper doesn't even know what he looks like—this is crucial to the plot—leaving his wife and son behind?  But if you view the story within the three-act box of Handel's music without worrying about how it got there or how it's going to get back out again, it works pretty well.  And even with some reservations about this production the second-act reunion duet between Rodelinda and her husband made me cry.**

            Okay, here's the rude, anti-Pollyanna bit:  I didn't think a lot of any of the three principals.  I worshipped the ground Renee Fleming walked on when I first heard her—must be nearly twenty years ago.  Less so lately.  I'm not the only person who finds her style somewhat detached*** and while this works a treat for Strauss† it doesn't always work elsewhere;  and this may just be the terrifying luck of your-body-is-your-instrument singers but I haven't much liked what she seems to be doing with her voice as she gets older and it inevitably changes.  I thought her style worked better tonight than sometimes but I wasn't always delighted with the noise she was making.  She was Rodelinda (duh);  Andreas Scholl played Bertarido, her rather feckless husband, and he was the biggest shock to me.  I have been a big fan of his—and I'm extremely fussy about my countertenors—and I would have said he has a perfect voice for Baroque music:  pure, clear and exact.  You hear every one of those hemidemisemiquavers.††

            Well, you heard them tonight too, but they were kind of soft and fuzzy around the edges, which is not what you want.  The acoustic?  Maybe.  I don't know, and my ear isn't that good anyway.  But he's barely frelling audible.  If anyone as asking me—which they clearly are not—he's not an operatic singer.  You have to be able to punch it out there from the operatic stage;  he'd be fabulous in a small room with a harpsichord and a few viols.  Sob.  I wasn't expecting this at all.  And possibly because of the volume issue I felt his voice sounded over controlled—forgive me, but I kept thinking of Nadia saying 'don't be afraid of the notes'.

            Stephanie Blythe is the second one from the original production—I didn't know this, but apparently she and Fleming are an important part of why Baroque operas are being staged at places like the Met again after decades of neglect and no small amount of scorn.†††  So full points there.  But as a singer she has never done that much for me.  She's a mezzo or an alto or one of those dark rich things and she increasingly seems to me effective enough but strangely characterless.  Maybe I just have Marilyn Horne and Janet Baker (and Eileen Farrell and Lorraine Hunt Lieberson) too firmly fixed in my mind's ear, but Blythe sounds to me like a really great choir alto.‡

            The sparkle tonight was contributed by the secondaries.  I was particularly impressed with the evil usurper who is a dismayingly thankless role, and a classic Miser Leans Against Wall and Becomes Generous character to make the plot work out at the end.  But he brought it off.  Joseph Kaiser plays him as young and confused and torn between what he wants and what he knows is the right thing to do—and furthermore on the rebound from Blythe's character Eduige, Bertarido's sister, having refused to marry him (he thinks.  They get together at the end, after he leans against the wall).  The other standout is Unulfo, Bertarido's one loyal retainer, who is also the only person who knows he's still alive.  He's another countertenor, and while he isn't particularly loud either, it's a very bright, sweet voice—none of the odd muffling of Scholl's—and he doesn't sound strained or over-calculated. 

            I mostly liked the production too, although in a laudable attempt at distracting the 21st century sound-byte audience‡‡ from the long unspooling of A-B-A-with-twiddles there was perhaps at times too much stage business.  LEAVE THE FRELLING FLOWERS ALONE FOR PITY'S SAKE.‡‡‡  But four and a half hours?  Piffle.  It rips along. 

            Oh, and my purling is coming along nicely. 

* * *

* Except Falstaff.  Which I can only listen to by carefully forgetting everything I know about the plot.  

** Also:  they kissed.  I mean really.  People don't kiss in opera.  When I was first going to operas forty-odd (eep) years ago people didn't kiss in operas, but then they didn't act either so the kisslessness was just part of the strange Noh-like system that you either learnt to buy into because you were infatuated with the music, or you didn't, and stopped going to the opera.  Then acting started happening and very exciting it was too.  But there was still no kissing.  I've assumed this is because all singers are (totally justifiedly) NEUROTIC about their voices—and opera is stylised, there's no getting around it, and demands vast extents of disbelief suspension, so I can cope with the no kissing.  But tonight—kissing!  Genuine lips-to-lips germ-exchange KISSING!  And as a soppy terminal romantic, I like kissing.^ 

^  There is kissing in SHADOWS.  Just by the way.  

*** I was looking her up on Wiki and they call Violetta (from La Traviata, my fave of faves) one of her 'signature' roles.  Like hell it is.  You cannot do a cool Violetta—as I found out when I made that schlep toLondon two or three years ago to see her do it live. 

† I didn't like Capriccio last year because I didn't like Capriccio, which is a different issue, although Fleming's presence didn't help. 

†† You do not hear all the hemidemisemiquavers with Fleming. 

††† 'They're all too long and they all sound alike.'  You have to like Baroque music.  And the (a) sing something—(b) sing a slight variation of the first thing—(c) sing the first thing again with twiddles pattern is the way they did it.  First one character sings A-B-A-with-twiddles and then another character sings another A-B-A-with twiddles, and then . . .   But when they do it as well as Handel did—in Rodelinda among others—that's just fine.  I know Handel operas far less well than I should so while I vaguely knew that Rodelinda is about a captive queen who stands up to her jailer and is a Strong Heroine blah blah blah blah . . . actually, she is.  The scene when she confronts the usurper and says 'I'll marry you . . . if you kill my son before my eyes . . . and if you marry me, you will marry Death' is pretty fabulous.  I thought it was well staged here:  the kid^ is clearly in on it with his mum, and they both know what they're risking to force the bully to back down.

            The one piece of the emotional jigsaw that did not work for me at all is Bertarido deciding that Rodelinda is a worthless trollop for appearing to yield to the usurper's proposal.  HE'S THREATENING TO KILL HER KID, YOU MORON.  YOUR KID.  (Which is where she gets the idea for the confrontation.)

^ The kid, a non-speaking role, is unusually well done.  Non-speaking kids in opera are usually either puppets or pains.  This one has quite a lot to do and does it convincingly.  

‡ She also can't act.  She's a big girl—even a very big girl—but there are lots of people out there who can sashay bulk delicately.  I always feel extra guilty for my lack of convincedness when I hear her being interviewed, because she sounds intelligent and funny and no-nonsense and probably a great person to have as a neighbour.  As well as the best alto your local choir ever had. 

‡‡ Most of whom, as previously observed, are older than I am.  I had Pooka out and was texting to a Baroque-music-loving friend during the intermissions. 

‡‡‡ From what I felt was a very emotionally effective second act it came a bit unravelled in the third.  Bertarido manages to stab Unulfo when Unulfo is trying to rescue him, and they're all oh, never mind, gotta keep moving.  What?  Later when Bertarido is doing his A-B-A-with-twiddles thing at Grimoaldo, the usurper, about the fact that B had just saved G from being murdered by the one real villain of the piece, he says 'now go ahead and murder me so you can keep the throne', Rodelinda is just kind of standing there.  Granted this trick worked pretty well in the second act when she and her son did it—even so.

            Oh, and Dove Sei?  Bertarido's—Scholl's—introductory aria in act one, so I was sitting there going noooooo.  Lovely but underpowered.

In which Mercury stops being retrograde at least briefly

 

CAMBRIDGE MINOR!  YAAAAAAY!

            The day did not start off brilliantly when I slept through my alarm again.  Or no, I didn't sleep through it:  I said, oh, stuff it, I'll get up in a minute, turned it off . . . and the post didn't come through the door till eleven o'clock today.  YAAAAAAH.  On the other hand I wasn't due at the mews to meet Raphael till 11:30 . . . *

            And when, having rung Raphael and obtained a half-hour reprieve, hellhounds and I shot out down the front steps for a brief hurtle, I discovered that some redolent ratbagging rhinoceros butt has broken another of my big plant pots.  May a fragment of pottery be working its insidious way into the tyre that did the deed, and may said tyre go flat at the worst possible moment—perhaps when they're lost in the Scottish Highlands, they had left the spare in Hampshire to make more room for suitcases, the last house they saw was twenty miles ago and it was empty, it's after sunset, their mobile phone can't get a signal, and the vampires are getting closer.**           

            However, I do have my old laptop back wheeeeeew.  So at least I can SEE what I'm doing today.***  And Oisin put his teacher hat back on long enough† to sympathise with my traumatic Wednesday, saying that it was not even all that surprising that I was knocked off my perch by all the strangeness and that he guaranteed that Nadia was not going to fire me and did not say to her husband that night that she loved teaching singing except for that elderly neurotic American git who furthermore has no voice worth training.††  And (Oisin added) I should be brave about hearing an unbearably fabulous opera singer have a whack at Dove Sei tomorrow at the Met Live.

            Tomorrow is a long way off.  First I had to be brave about being in charge of tonight's tower practise.  Gemma had asked yesterday if we were having practise and might she come, and I told her that I was torn between begging her to come and telling her not to waste her time, since with Niall and Penelope absent we might end up with three people, cut our losses and go home.  It didn't look good for about the first ten minutes:  there were only four of us.  We got four bells up (ready to ring) and started making bad jokes about rewriting Doohickey Panjandrum Maximus (twelve bells) for minimus (four bells)†††.  But then, lo!, there were feet on the ladder, and we were six.  Eventually we were eight. 

            I hammered poor Monty harder than I meant to.  He's learning his first inside method—plain bob doubles, it's always plain bob doubles—which tends to be the first method you learn to call too.  I can call weeny touches of both plain bob and Grandsire doubles, but I've got a bit stuck calling 'observation' which essentially means that you the caller sail grandly through the method making your calls so that everybody but you has to do something funny and you're ringing all plain courses.  This is somewhat acceptable for a first-conducting learner—it's appalling enough having to remember to call at all, and trying to remember how many times you've called and how many calls you have left before the wretched method comes round—and when it does come round, to call THAT'S ALL which I almost invariably forget to do.   But Roger, who is an evil grinning troll, said that it was past time I learnt some other touch where I'd have to play too.  Grrrr.  Well, I know the theory, so I declared that I would do this—and in the best best-value tradition, I put poor Monty to ring inside again, so that we could both practise something.  Having, sunk in my own torment, forgotten that Monty doesn't know how to ring a touch . . . fortunately one of our good ringers was 'minding' him so no blood was shed, although there may have been a certain amount of burning-the-deputy-ringing-master-in-effigy after it was all over.  After Roger called THAT'S ALL because I forgot. . . .

            We had, as I say, eight ringers, but only four of us knew what we were doing.  I wasn't sure we were safe for ringing even plain courses of Grandsire Triples, but I put Monty on the tenor and distributed Leo, Gemma and me variously around the rest—and I rang two courses on two different bells I had never rung before, which is one of those things you're supposed to do—not get stuck on ringing only one bell:  you SHOULD be able to ring a method you claim to know from ANY bell‡—so I was feeling fairly chuffed after this, when I risked saying, since we only had about fifteen minutes left, Any requests?

            Edward looked consideringly around and said, we could ring Cambridge Minor.  I had thought of this myself, and had discarded it instantly.  Furthermore we rang it on the back six (bells)—Edward's idea—which meant Those of Us with Overringing from Terror Problems have a real artery-bursting situation when we've yanked something into the stratosphere that weighs seven or eight times more than we do as opposed to three or four times (on a smaller bell), and then have to try to haul it back down again without totally losing our place in the row.  Ahem.

            BUT I DID IT.  YES.  I RANG A FULL PLAIN COURSE OF CAMBRIDGE MINOR AND NOBODY YELLED AT ME EVEN ONCE.  And, not to boast unattractively or anything, I managed this in spite of several other people going wrong at various points along the way‡‡.

            After this I may even get through Rodelinda and Dove Sei tomorrow without bursting into tears.  Hey, how many of Nadia's other students can ring Cambridge minor? 

* * *

* Remind me to go to bed early tonight.  Well, earlier.  Earlier ought to be possible.^ 

^ I say this every night. 

** Or the rabid hyenas.  I'm not fussy. 

*** Predicted arrival of new laptop now the middle of next week.  Siiiiigh.  However, Archangel Corp is only Raphael and Gabriel and they're always doing umpty-jillion things at once, only possible for archangels, who have special auxiliary time and dimensional clearances not vouchsafed to the rest of us.^  And I know from experience that if I'm in real trouble they'll take an extra fold in the time-space-gluon-sensitive-dependence-on-initial-conditions^^ continuum, and rescue me.  

^ I'm not sure archangels sleep either. 

^^ Hey, I'm suffering with this self-education schtick.  Therefore you have to suffer too.  

† I have got so accustomed to his taking-the-mickey hat—over a pot of tea as we discuss how the world and our respective weeks have gone horribly wrong—that sometimes I forget. 

†† He's just saying that to make me feel better. 

††† You can do this kind of thing—I can't, I hasten to add, but posh conductors can—but it's a manifestation of despair and the presence of only four ringers/bells. 

‡ But then I would never claim to know Grandsire Triples. 

‡‡ You may get away with this even when you only somewhat know what you're doing if the unscheduled behaviour is happening at the other end of the row from you.  One of my favourite/unfavourite things is when two or three of the really good ringers get into an argument WHILE THEY'RE STILL RINGING about what's gone wrong.^ 

^ These are all people who never forget to say 'that's all' at the end of a touch they're conducting.

Mercury is retrograde

 

Jeanne Marie

Mercury is in retrograde. NOTHING has been going right for the last couple of days. I cannot say the right things, forget how to do simple things on the computer, stare at my office desk as if it will sprout something. Mercury is in retrograde. ACK! 

Great.  We have an EXCUSE.  I had to get up this morning, as I count getting up (and morning), because Raphael was finally coming to pick up my old saggy laptop to beseech it to pass on its secrets to the flash shiny new laptop still on the launching pad back at the office.  He was going to meet me at the mews at 10.  So my alarm went off at 9 and I said right, okay, yes, I'm getting up now and . . . the next thing I knew something large and heavy was thudding through the mail slot in the front door AND IT WAS TEN O'CLOCK.

            I was racing around putting my jeans on backwards and my glasses on upside down* when I heard a phone message coming in.  Peter's voice:  You're probably on your way, he said.  But Raphael is here.  HE'S ALREADY HERE????  WHY DOES HE HAVE TO BE ON TIME TODAY?  HE'S VERY OFTEN—HE'S USUALLY—LATE.

            Hellhounds and I were in the car in just about a quarter of an hour, which is a new record.**  And then we got halfway down Main Street and came to an abrupt halt because . . . I don't know because what.  There was some gigantic highway maintenance vehicle parked—parked—in the middle of the intersection, thus blocking four streams of traffic, while some dipstick in a yellow reflective jacket dragged his mechanical equivalent around in some arcane pattern too abstruse for us mere apoplectic mortals.  What was the thing?  It looked like a cross between a trotting-race sulky and one of those garden-hosepipe-winding gizmos available at your friendly local garden centre.  Aside from the invisible-rune marking I couldn't see it was doing anything.  Except blocking traffic, of course.

            We were eventually allowed to rejoin our lives, which had run down the road ahead of us.  I tore into the mews courtyard and . . . And . . . Raphael has a motorcycle.  Whimper.  I miss riding horses more than I miss riding motorcycles but . . . whimper.  So he packed up my laptop and the seventeen tote bags of programme discs*** and told me that he'd bring the laptop back this evening.  This would mean I would not have to write tonight's blog on my knapsack computer—a sort of two-palm-top.  It's totally brilliant for the train, or for sitting in a café nursing your sixth cup of tea and pretending to work, but it is not ideal for common use.  Its main disadvantage is that the frelling screen doesn't open far enough—because it's so small you need to be able to open it out nearly flat so you don't have to crouch down and bend your neck the wrong way like a horse against the bit.  Except that you can't open it that far, so you can either give yourself permanent vertebral damage or prop the front edge of the keyboard up about six inches.†  It's also missing a few keys because the keyboard doesn't have room for the full complement.  It has the triple-dranglefabbing ratbag key down at the bottom left that MAKES YOUR ENTIRE DOCUMENT DISAPPEAR IF YOU ACCIDENTALLY NICK IT†† but it's missing the option that will let you toggle easily to the bottom of your document and back again.†††

            You know the end of this part of the story, right?  Raphael rang me at about three o'clock and said he wasn't going to be able to get my old laptop back to me tonight because there was so much stuff on it it was taking forever to do the transfer.  So I'm hunched over the little knapsack 'top tonight with two Yarn Harlot books‡ raising the front end.

            Meanwhile, after watching Raphael teem down the road in a terrifying red-shift blast,‡‡ I took hellhounds for a sprint and then hauled all of us back to the cottage again in time for the arrival of the Nonpareil House Alarm Man to spend thirty seconds making my house alarm go FEAR!  FIRE!  FOES!  AWAKE!‡‡‡ to prove that it can, and then giving me forty-six pages of annual certificate and an invoice for enough money to hire the horn section of a medium-sized orchestra for a year.  The hellhounds were very glad to see him.  Oh, he said bemusedly, emerging from the fawn-and-steel-grey maelstrom, aren't whippets and greyhounds usually rather shy?  Some are, I said noncommittally.  Of course he came at the end of the appointment slot he was going to arrive some time during, by which time it was now hammering down rain, and hellhounds had to be hurtled again.  They hate their raincoats almost as much as I hate the frelling ergonomic keyboard on my desktop.  I wish the thing would BREAK so I could buy a new one. . . . .§

            AND NIALL AND PENELOPE ARE GOING TO THE OPERA TOMORROW.  WHAT DO THEY WANT TO DO THAT FOR?  WHY CAN'T THEY GO TO THE MET LIVE ON SATURDAY LIKE ME?§§   NOOOOOOO.  THEY'RE GOING TO THE OPERA TOMORROW.  WHICH MEANS I AM IN CHARGE OF TOWER PRACTISE TOMORROW EVENING.  Here I was feeling chirpy for the first time today, because Gemma was ringing plain courses of both bob minor and bob major on handbells tonight, straight through without looking at the lines, and may be going to make a handbell ringer after all.

             It was after this that hellhounds and I re-arrived, dripping, at the mews, and I discovered that I'd left my working hard copy of SHADOWS back at the cottage. 

            And now . . . I have to go sing.  Maybe I'll work on Eensy Teensy Spider. 

* * *

* Today was not one of my pinnacle of alternative fashion days either. 

** I had my socks in one pocket and my necklace and earrings in another.  I finally remembered to brush my hair after lunch.

*** He has three enormous carrier bags and . . . he had to do some substantial rearranging to get it all in. 

† Knitting-bag-sized knitting books are ideal for this purpose. 

†† In the time it takes to hit 'undo' you can have several heart attacks.  Now someone tell me what the hell this option is for?  The technological equivalent of the hollow tooth filled with cyanide in case you're captured by enemy agents?  WHOOPS—there went the immaculate proofs for superstring theory, the equations for cold fusion, and the recipe for foolproof meringues!  Sorrrreeeeeeee! 

††† Which is emphatically less than desirable for situations involving frequent footnotes.  However my knapsack computer predates the blog by several years. 

‡ Things I Learned from Knitting and At Knit's End.  And the whole works is raised up half an inch off the table by The A to Z of Knitting which has become my default beginner how-to book, not because it is a good book and has lots of nice clear photographs of things like which way to wrap your yarn when knitting and/or purling, but because it has ROSES on the cover.  http://www.amazon.com/Z-Knitting-Ultimate-Beginner-Advanced/dp/1564777847 

‡‡ I lie.  Raphael is a very nice, polite, corporate young man who left the gravel-strewn mews jigsaw courtyard tactfully, which is to say standing looking after him wistfully as he left I was not scarred for life by the backlash.  And . . . his bike is navy blue.  Which is very sensible if you want to drive it to work, when you're a nice polite corporate young man.  But I didn't know they even made bikes in navy blue. 

‡‡‡ The official Brandybuck horn is not available, but we do our best. 

§ But not till after I get SHADOWS turned in. 

§§ I've told you, haven't I, that this Saturday is Rodelinda . . . which means I get to hear either Renee Fleming or Andreas Scholl singing Frelling Dove Sei.  And I'm going to this one, even if—as seems likely if this miserable weather continues—I am a grand throbbing assortment of aches and pains again.  Snarl.