Robin McKinley's Blog, page 119

Tangents

 

I just this minute received an email from someone who says that PEGASUS is the best book she ever read.  ::Beams:: *

            . . . And at this point I went off on a whole series of tangents, so I'll just have to tell you about today's singing lesson** and tonight's tower practise tomorrow. 

* * * 

* As I keep saying, the good, friendly book mail far outnumbers the bad and/or hostile book mail.^  But some of the stuff that comes up regularly, if infrequently, from the antipathetic division still baffles me.  Now, not all books and not all writers appeal to everyone^^, which is fine.  I have a few bizarre prejudices of my own.^^^  But if you don't like my books, don't read them, you know?  Life is short.  Find books you do like.  I'm resigned, after over thirty years in the business, to the people who think my books are toooooooo slooooooow.#  But there's a new variant of this, which is the people who think nothing happens in PEGASUS.  What?  Is there another book out there called PEGASUS?  And the post-blog variant on the evergreen question of the character, personality and shortcomings of authors is the 'I have read your blog and you are the most loathsome, arrogant and self-absorbed pillock I have ever [virtually] met and I'm certainly never going to read any of your books again.'  Oh.  Well, aside from whatever happened to 'if you don't have anything nice to say, shut the frell up'## . . . I totally understand wanting to back away from the writer of this blog slowly, murmuring words like 'Valium'### and 'how much tea does she say she drinks?', and watching me closely for sudden moves and/or sharp shiny objects.  Everyone in my life tells me I need to learn to calm down.  If you want to tell me too, get in line.  And the self-absorbed . . . sigh.  Well, yes, but do you know how hard it is to write a daily blog?  I'm the best material I've got, because if I say anything too outrageous I've only got myself to sue.  This includes getting my own research wrong, which can be embarrassing if it's about anyone else.  I also totally understand that I'm not to everyone's taste any more than my books are.  But the same principle applies:  no one's holding a gun to your head.  You don't have to read this blog.  I object to the epithets loathsome and arrogant.  I probably don't like you very well either, whoever you are.  I suspect you of having a deficient sense of humour. 

^ For which I am devoutly grateful.  Believe me.  Devoutly.  Grateful.  People who like your books are much likelier to buy them, and the bottom line is still that to keep writing, most writers need to keep eating.  Having a day job works for some writers but I don't have enough brain to have two real jobs.  Back in the days when I couldn't earn a living off my books I mostly did low-brain-activity stuff, like [ancient lost occupation alert] typing up clean submissible copies of other people's papers and mucking out stalls .   I spent two years full-time in publishing—in a proper job in publishing—and had to quit because I didn't have enough brain left over to write my own stories.  So are we clear about this?  I am VERY GRATEFUL for my readers.  THANK YOU.  They—you—mean I don't have to retrain as a till operator.   I have to write stories, so I would be sweating sentences and paragraphs on evenings and weekends , whatever else I was doing to keep eating.  But if I was having to waste eight-plus hours a day delivering flowers or pumping petrol, I would be writing a lot slower.  And I'm slow enough as it is.% 

Yes, often very similar. 

I was just talking to someone who said, never mind the tedium of holding millions of items over the bar-code reader—and the eternal poisoned chalice that is plenary contact with the public—think of having to listen to that beeping all day.~ 

~ There's a flap going on over here at present about raising retirement age because the population bulge of oldies is going to break social services some day soon.   What I am not seeing, although I admit I'm not following the debate very closely, is some discussion of the practical constraints on the elderly end of your work force.  Your average builder is not going to be up to carrying hods when he (or she) is seventy, whatever the government says.   Nor is your average nursery-school teacher going to be up to chasing three-year-olds all day when she (or he) is seventy—whatever the government says.  What are we going to train these people to do instead?  And when are we going to do it?  If your occupation is listed as 'nursery school teacher' or 'builder' will you get a postcard through your door on your fiftieth birthday telling you to report to the nearest retraining centre?  You also get less trainable as you get older.  And you need more downtime:  will the over-65s be allowed longer lunch breaks and shorter days?  Or are we trying to pretend that old age and death are something that only happen if you're careless? 

Or equivalent.  I would probably be looking for graveyard shift jobs.  I could go to bed after service ring on Sundays. 

% Ten novels in thirty years, approximately.  Ugh. 

^^ And a good thing too.  I wouldn't want to live in the Big Brother world where they did. 

^^^ Shakespeare, for example. 

# I permit myself to say that while no writer ever got it exactly right, I do write what I want to read.  As a reader I like slow—not too slow, but slow—I adore George Eliot, okay?  I'm one of those people who think MIDDLEMARCH is as close to perfect as any novel has ever got.   Discursive is good.  Discursive makes the world open up around you the reader, whether it has fairies and unicorns or snappy barouches drawn by matched pairs of bays in it.  The books that annoy me are the ones that are all action adventures.  Sit down and look at a tree occasionally, will you?  And tell me something about your mates besides that they have legendary swords with names like Meatgrinder and Eyeball Poker.  

Except for Will Ladislaw.  But I will entertain the argument that he's supposed to be less than Dorothea is worth, and it's all about irony and reality.  

I would not be good at writing this kind of story. 

## I'm so old.  Yes, I remember wearing white gloves and a hat when you got dressed up too.  

### I'm allergic to Valium.  —I arrived at this place of believing that standard doctor medicine is guilty until proven innocent—and that the side effects are usually worse than the disease—honestly.  

** I feel a bit guilty for the amount of time I've been spending on music and singing lately since I do try to swap what I write about around a bit to keep it more interesting.^  But it's really nice having so many of you on the forum talking about your own experiences.  Which reminds me.  I was chasing something in the forum today and fell into Talk for the first time in months.  And discovered several references that indicated that some of you posting believed that I would see them.  No.  Wrong.  If you want me to read a comment it HAS to go on a blog thread.  I'm a little time-challenged, you know?  I'm not ignoring you because I am arrogant and loathsome, I'm not reading Talk because I don't have time—but I like the idea that the Days in the Life 'community' can have its own conversations without me.  I should perhaps check with the mods and Blogmom about this, but I wouldn't object to a comment in a blog thread that you wanted me to read that wasn't about the blog post, if you follow me.  Or maybe we need a sticky thread at the top of the blog thread category for 'yo Robin read this'.  I'm still probably not going to answer—see:  time-challenged—but I do read through all the blog threads.  Okay, I don't absolutely guarantee to be awake at the time, but . . . 

^ You are obliged to be passionately interested in method ringing however.  You saw that in the fine print when you joined the forum, didn't you?

 

 

Una Voce Poco Squeak

 

I was just listening to Beverly Sills sing Una Voce Poco Fa* as I cut up chicken for hellhound dinner** and thinking, actually, that's not possible.  A Little Learning Is A Dangerous Thing, or, professionals get paid to do stuff for a reason.  I feel that even with my obsessive attitude I will be able to live comfortably without ever learning to sing a trill, but I would like to be able to sing turns and grace notes and accidentals and things.  Not this year however.*** 

Catlady:  I also used to sing baritone for a barbershop quartet. We won both competitions we were in, and after, the judges would come up and give us pointers (they were very invested in Cultivating A Love Of Barbershop in the Next Generation, so the pointers were all kind, encouraging ones) and I was told that I was good at what I did because they couldn't pick out my voice at all. Which was good, I suppose, as far as it went… 

Wait, wait, when I think of barbershop quartets I think in multiples of four.  You mean you were the only baritone and they said they couldn't pick you out?  Um.  No.  I don't think that's very encouraging.  But if you won both your competitions, why did you stop?

            The thing I've been thinking about, since there clearly are a lot of genuinely low-voiced women out there, is, why isn't there a complementary groundswell of bass and baritone women to balance the huge burst of enthusiasm for countertenors and male sopranos?  Anyone else want to sing the Conte di Luna? 

Glanalaw:  You used to have FOUR octaves? You are a freak! But the kind I wish I was. On a good day I have three whole octaves (sometimes a tiny bit more) – F below middle C up to the "Queen of the Night F" above the staff. Usually a little bit less. And I'm a trained (partially) singer, and that's considered to be impressive in the circles in which I run. 

I keep telling you:  they were not four octaves anyone would want to listen to.  If you've got three-plus octaves that people do want to listen to, than I am passionately jealous. 

            I could get down to the second A below middle C and up to the Queen of the Night F—so not quite four octaves.  On a very very very good day I think I had the bottom F too, but it wasn't usable because I couldn't rely on it.  Both ends were audible and on pitch . . . but that's all you could say for them.  Or any of the notes in the middle, for that matter.  With Nadia nagging me about leaving space and relaxing and dropping and breathing and supporting and so on I'm hoping to become a member of the back row of a good choir, but that's still the acme of my practical yearning:  I am just not solo material. 

As far as the breaks – I got out my vocal pedagogy book, which actually uses the analogy of shifting gears to describe changing registers! It also suggests that "normal" breaks happen more or less where you're describing yours. I am probably also supposed to be able to inform people of these facts without looking them up first. 

Piffle.  If God had meant us to remember all this stuff, he wouldn't have invented Wiki.† 

 (I just took my music history placement examination for the master of music degree and it left me feeling rather inadequate – I can't wait until the theory one next week. *sarcasm*) 

WELL I AM VERY IMPRESSED.  You've aced your theory by now, right?  What does a master of music do with her degree? 

harpergray:  . . . part of the diva-ness is that sopranos' voices are so much more exposed, which . . . means that soprano confidence problems are going to be more exposed too, I guess.

. . . I was coming at it from the alto side, where we just sort of watch it happen. 

Ah yes, the floor show.  No group of humans is complete without the floor show aspect of their particular brand of togetherness.  So far the Muddlehampton sopranos are rather well-mannered although there are potential gleeps elsewhere.  And unfortunately discretion will prevent me from telling you about any really good ones.  Feel free to dispense with discretion, since you're anonymous. 

That's not to say that it doesn't happen among us as well, but if you have confidence problems as an alto it doesn't stand out nearly as much. 

Yes.  The sheer physics of sound are just there.  They don't care if you like them or not.

. . . if I'm singing alto principal I'm old, ugly, pathetic, and the butt of bad jokes. I love G&S but I don't love Gilbert for his broad-mindedness.

True. In some cases, though, the alto principal is actually one of the most interesting characters in the piece. Iolanthe, for an obvious one, but if she's played well then I've found Katisha to be a really excellent character. Old and the butt of jokes, yes, but she leaves quite a bit of room for creating the depth that many of his characters often lack. . . . I may have given this more thought than is particularly necessary…   

No, but I agree.  I loved G&S because they told stories and I used to listen . . . more raptly than is particularly necessary.  And I would rather play any of the ugly old altos—Buttercup, Ruth:  I really fancied Ruth:  I never believed for a minute that she wanted to marry Frederic, she so clearly had her own agenda—than any of those twittish soprano heroines.  With possible reference to the next comment. 

Judith:  Boring?!?! Oh, I beg to differ. I wouldn't sing soprano, and therefore in almost all cases melody, for the world. 

I was being provocative again, you realise.  I write this frelling blog pretty well every frelling night:  I have to get some fun out of it somehow.  

Occasionally the sopranos get something interesting, like a descant, but it's very rare. In mixed sex choirs the altos get to blend in the middle with fantastic harmonies that challenge you musically, and in single-sex choirs — oh, then the second altos get to shine, holding up the bottom and still weaving in and out of an intricate harmonic line with the totality being a purity of sound unknown in a mixed sex group. 

Well, I just don't agree with you here;  whatever floats your boat, however, and I suppose it's also how you define 'pure'.  Part of the reason I'm clinging to soprano with both hands at the moment is because the tune is easier to learn, and holding my own line while everyone around me may or may not be holding theirs is still pretty exciting, like going over Niagara in a barrel is exciting.  When I can do this choir thing a little better and when Nadia gets me sorted out a little more—I really don't know what I'll end up singing.  I might, if enough of my range comes back usably, revert to what I did when I was a teenager, and get plugged in where they need the numbers.  That was fun.  But I have not performed a lot of music in my life thus far because aside from my freak range I didn't feel I had anything to offer—and an awful lot of the standard church choir music that I did sing alto to was incredibly boring.  And I wasn't clever enough, or educated enough, or motivated enough to fool around with the harmony myself.  Aside from the fact that the choir director would probably have stomped me flat if I had.

When I'm in groups of people who are just singing for fun I find myself automatically finding a harmonic line and singing it instead of the melody because it's just so much more interesting. 

I do know what you're talking about here.  I will start feeling my way into the harmony of a song I know well—for fun, as you say.  But you and I are clearly talking across a gigantic chasm of knowledge, skill and experience.  I'm happy singing soprano at the moment.  Or I would be happy if I could hit the dranglefabbing notes a little more roundly. 

I will admit that true sopranos have a lovely, pure quality to their tone, but then so do true altos. A choir of sopranos singing their line alone is a beautiful thing to hear for its light, clear sound. A choir of altos singing their line alone is a beautiful thing to hear for its richness and depth. One is what one is and one is stuck with it. 

One is who one is and is stuck with it as soon as one finds out what that is.  Meanwhile, I think you're selling sopranos short:  not every soprano is light.  And for that matter not every alto is rich and deep.  At which point I will pause to animadvert in the general direction of Fach again . . .  

* * * 

* http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmEFfeYRWeI  Although of course I'm listening to the entire Barber.  This one:  http://www.amazon.co.uk/Rossini-Barber-Seville-Beverly-Sills/dp/B000UYWG8U which is apparently, amazingly, still in print.  It was out of print for a very long time over the period when (a) I moved to England and had to buy all my electronic kit all over again^ and (b) it was almost impossible to buy a turntable for your decrepit LPs if you were the type of saddo who had resisted throwing them all out and embracing the new CD technology with the whole-hearted vision of the future it deserved.

            I've probably told you this before but Beverly Sills almost single-handedly turned me into an opera junkie.  It's not quite that simple—the first opera I bought for myself was the Franco Corelli Il Trovatore:  hey, the Sills La Traviata wasn't out yet;  nor was her Barber—but it was Sills where it became immanent and imperative.  She's also one of the reasons I've never got along with the Fach system of classifying singers:  I love her Rosina, for example, which is a mezzo part and Sills is a coloratura soprano—a coloratura soprano with kick:  'small voice' my tin teapot—the usual smug put-down of someone who can sing F above high C—she could make your ears ring in the back row, as I know, because in those days I could never afford anything better than the back row.  Fach.  Feh.  Mind you, I'm aware that Sills is not universally adored and admired, but she's on my LOTR list:  I feel sorry for people who don't love her, like I feel sorry for people who can't read LOTR.  She was also a revelation:  she was one of the singers who made the idea popular that opera did not have to be 'stand on x, wave your arms and sing'.  She could act, and did.  You still get the I-am-a-Coke-machine approach to characterisation in opera, but you get it a whole lot less than you did forty years ago, and some of that is down to Beverly Sills. 

            Blah blah blah blah http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beverly_Sills blah blah blah blah.

            Anyway.  When they finally reissued Sills' Barber on CD—La Trav had been out for years for some reason—I did die and go to heaven, they just sent me back.  But I got to keep the CDs. 

^ Granted this did not include anything resembling a computer, but you just flick a switch on modern computers and they run off what's available:  wimpy American electricity, homicidal British electricity, marsh gas, voles.  And I wasn't too broken up about leaving my iron behind.+  But parting from my stereo system hurt.  Peter, bless his pointed little heart, had figured out by then++ that music is my methadone, and if I am deprived of it for any length of time I start biting people and drinking their blood.  So for my first birthday in England, barely a fortnight after I got here, Peter gave me a new stereo and tickets to The Huguenots+++ at the Royal Opera House. 

+ t shirts rule 

++ He came over and lived with me in Maine for most of the stretch between the end of July when Everything Happened and the end of October when I emigrated.  I had to finish DEERSKIN before I started packing.  

+++ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Huguenots  Personally I think that even as grand opera goes, this one is silly.  But there is some very nice music, and it doesn't get staged very often so I was totally psyched to see it.  I think it was probably a little hard on my future husband, and may indeed be the secret canker that over the twenty years since ruined him for opera.  

** Yes.  They ate.  But we are in fact not out of the dark scary woods where the menacing roast chicken and the hellhound-noshing kibble lurk, and I'm feeling more than a little crazy on the subject, not to mention short of sleep. 

*** This year we're concentrating on a non-bat-like high A for Bruckner.  I now have my hopes pinned on what must be the fact that they won't want all of us for this frelling wedding.  They'll only want their best—which should let me off, thank you.    

† Which is of course desperately unreliable.  God's little joke then.

What's a Top Bar Hive? and why I want one (bees part two)

guest post by Abigail Miller

"Ahem.  You know you were going to produce at least one more beekeeping post …"

Well, erm, yes …   I guess Robin's been keeping track ;-)

Quick progress report on my bees:  seem to be thriving, but I harvested no honey this ferocious hot, dry summer*. All the flowers turned into crisps early in June, so the bees could reap very little nectar and pollen. I have been feeding sugar syrup since July, also pollen substitute.

In spite of a frigid week of sleet and snow in February, they seemed to be building up well, with several frames of growing brood. I was hoping to split the hive in two in April. But in March I did a major rearrangement, including forcing the queen off of her favored home brood frames into a new shallower, lighter-weight brood box. This was ultimately successful, but I think it really upset her. When I went into the hive a month later to do the split, there just wasn't enough brood to do it safely. So I entered the summer with one good-sized hive, not two smaller ones. Maybe a good thing, as the summer turned out.

My hive is the U.S. standard Langstroth type.** I started with a deep brood box and two shallow (5-3/4", much less heavy) supers for honey. Wanting to get all my frames the same size, I have now managed to convert to four medium-depth (6-5/8") boxes, two on the bottom for brood and two above in summer for honey.

Since these boxes when full are still quite heavy, my new as-yet-untenanted hive, waiting for the hoped-for split, is of eight-frame rather than ten-frame medium boxes. It has a very rustic cedar stand waiting for it, made from the wildly differing-diameter sections of trunk of a young cedar I cleared out of a field.

Before last spring, I had never heard of a top bar hive. During the final Q&A session in my beekeeping class, a student asked about them. The teacher was fairly dismissive, clearly considering them sort of new age, woo-woo, eco-freak stuff. I subsequently found info on them on Michael Bush's very valuable site, which has become my go-to site for practical beekeeping suggestions.

Top bar hives are all at one level, with 30-40 combs in a row and not stacked up. So right off, there is the advantage of not having to lift heavy boxes – you inspect and harvest one comb at a time.

As there is just the one level, the bees don't need to be given slots for travelling up and down in the hive. So the finicky and hard-to-nail-together frames with their bee-space-providing structure are unnecessary. The top bars are sturdy, wider wooden pieces that touch each other to make a solid ceiling for the hive (covered with a waterproof roof).

And the bars are just bars, not frames. No pre-made foundation is provided: the bees are expected to make their own comb. The whole comb, wax and all, is harvested. Either the comb-honey is packaged up, or the comb is smushed up, the honey strained out, and the wax harvested for candles, etc.

This is where the top bar enthusiasts really differ from the standard-frame beekeepers. It is a point of faith with the latter that it takes the energy of seven pounds of honey to secrete a pound of wax. I say "faith" because the research that produced this figure is … flawed, and not replicated … according to the top bar folks. But the idea is that if you reuse the drawn honeycombs, giving them back to the bees to refill with more honey, you get a higher yield. This is the basis for all the effort by the traditional hive keepers to use expensive centrifugal extractors to get the honey, and to store the empty combs all winter in vast pesticide-guarded storage spaces.

Top bar beekeepers point to the benefits of letting the bees build their own comb with the varying sizes of cells they want for worker brood, drone brood, and honey. Smaller cells than the ones promoted by the use of commercial foundation seem to be valuable in discouraging the varroa mite, an Asian pest that has travelled world-wide, except to Australia (hurray for the Australian customs and quarantine!)

Moreover, foundation, which is milled from recycled wax, has measurable levels of all the pesticides and treatments that are used in the commercial beekeeping industry. These compounds are not supposed to be in the hive during the period that bees are making the excess honey for harvest.

If the bees make fresh white comb each summer, it may still contain some chemical residues, simply because the environment as a whole does. But it is a far lower level. They do, in my one summer's experience (I gave them a few frames with comb guides and no foundation last summer), make comb just about as readily as drawing out foundation, given a good honeyflow. And you get a few ounces of lovely wax along with each comb of honey.

So this winter I am building a top bar hive.+ And if all goes well with my girls over the winter, I'm planning another split. Then I will have to rein in the more, more, more impulse. I have determined that three hives will be enough!++

—————————————

* The average daily high temperature here during the month of August was 104.3°F (40°C). Almost worse, the average nighttime low was 82°F (28°C). This was the hottest month ever recorded here. As I set up a little hose-end mister by the beehive to make a microclimate space of cooler air to help them keep their wax from all melting down into a lump, I did think wistfully of AJLR's bees in their green and pleasant land.

** L. L. Langstroth was a clergyman and beekeeper in Philadelphia in the 19th century. He took the "bee space"^ concept and used it to devise a hive that is standardized and relatively easy to manage. The boxes are 9-1/2" deep (shallower varieties also exist), 16" x 20", and hold ten 19 x 9-1/8" movable frames in which are mounted pre-made sheets of foundation. I believe the British standard hive is similar, except that the frames are shorter, so that the hive is more square.

^ Bee space is the dimension – 3/8" or 1cm – that bees will leave open in the interior of the hive. A smaller space, such as a crack in the wall, they will seal with resinous propolis. A larger space they will bridge and fill up with honeycomb. Setting the frames to maintain the bee space means that you can generally remove them for inspection and harvest without doing major violence to the structure of the hive.

+ Oh, yes, the other advantage is that the structure of the top bars is so simple that it is reasonable for a moderately accomplished craftsman to build the hive herself. And much less expensive than purchase price and shipping of a Langstroth.

++ Um. This is a persistent impulse. Ask me in five years how many hives I have ;-)

 

Music and a few critters

 

Oisin is learning to play this big scary Liszt thing* so I spent quite a lot of my cough-cough music lesson today listening to the organ and knitting.**  It's interesting how much you can begin to pick up just by . . . erm . . . listening.  As I keep saying the organ and I were not naturally best friends, and if it weren't for Oisin's passion for it I would probably have lived out my life quite satisfactorily without ever addressing my prejudice against the noisy bullying thing.  It still seems to me insanely complicated and I can't imagine how anyone gets their head around it.***  But as a result of hanging over Oisin's shoulder† a lot I'm beginning to pick up a little of what he's doing and what he's aiming at with all those frelling buttons.  Sure, I can hear (sometimes) when he pulls one out or pushes it back in that the sound changes, but I'm like, so?  It still sounds like an organ.††  He'd played some of the Liszt for me last week for the first time and I couldn't make head or tail of it and went home feeling like a dork and a bad friend.  This week I'd had a bit more of a run at it and was prepared.†††  There are moments when I almost half-get it:  the organ is an orchestra, in its own organny way, and as such is capable of thunder and lightning as well as astonishing delicacy.  As I also keep saying, if I were thirteen years old and talented I'd be all over organ lessons.  As it is . . . well, I need more time to knit.  At the moment if I will finish anything before I die of extreme old age is in question.           

There has been a slight setback on the hellhound front which is to say they declined to touch supper and I went to bed last night in despair.  But they were not ill today and ate lunch and dinner . . . in a close approximation of how a normal dog eats its meals.  So at the moment I'm saying (cautiously) . . . okay, whatever. 

Diane in MN:  I'm glad to hear that your boys are eating a bit more willingly. (I will not say any more because I don't want to be a jinx.) 

Yes.  I'm aware that putting our shenanigans around this matter on the blog is dangerous.  But it's been making me so mental for so many weeks now it was getting harder and harder not to say something about why I have turned an interesting shade of pale green and am leaving even more words out sentences than usual even me.  I am still hoping that we're headed in the right direction of happy well-fed harmony again—they've certainly been much more themselves the last couple of days. 

Shalea:  There are fat sighthounds in the world, but they're rare.

Sadly, not rare enough in the world of greyhound adoption — too many people think that their new pets should be bulked up to look like a lab. 

That breed varies so much because it's had the misfortune to get popular, but little old-fashioned working-type labs who, furthermore, are working, may show a rib or two on their smaller-than-the-giant-pet-mastiff-type-lab square bodies.  There's a lot of shooting country around here so we meet them from time to time.  Don't know if they're in your neighbourhood. 

Though I must admit to being a bit of an extremist on this point myself — greyhounds should show at least the last couple of ribs. No more that that certainly, and how much of the spine and pinbones are visible depends on the individual dog.

Yes, you're a lot more extreme than I am.  With the exception of the super-athlete I think two ribs is plenty and not absolutely necessary.  Although the retired greyhound that had pretty well convinced me to adopt one of his mates—and then I saw that ad in the paper for whippet cross puppies—was very ribby.  But then he also had a very round well-sprung barrel and big round muscles.  He was GORGEOUS.‡   I'm having trouble imagining a sighthound that didn't have a knobbly spine and prominent hipbones, but then I'm used to whippets with their humpy top lines.  Flat-backed greyhounds probably can be turned into sausages—to their detriment—supposing they ate. 

Stardancer:  Darn it! Now I want to start taking voice lessons again! 

Oh good.  Dooooo keep us informed of your progress.

            I may not be singing for the bishop after all, by the way.  This is one of the things that is supposed to Become Clear at the Muddlehampton AGM next week . . . except that one of the rehearsals they didn't tell us about was tonight.  You may remember that when the invitation/cattle call first went out I said I'd do it only if I could have the music well in advance because there was an awful lot of it to cram in in two rehearsals—especially for someone at the early sharp end of the learning curve of singing-with.  Turns out there are several more rehearsals—on Friday evenings.  Friday evening is home tower bell practise.  I was willing to miss one bell practise.  I'm not going to make a habit of it, both for my struggling band's sake but also for mine.‡‡  But if there were more rehearsals why didn't they tell us in the first place?  Even more disappointing than not singing Vaughan Williams for the bishop‡‡‡ is that Oisin had been invited to be in the choir—have I told you he sings?§—but he can't do Friday evening rehearsals either.  Oh well.  But I am going to start watching him closely for choir signs.  You know, he could perfectly well be a participating director of the New Arcadia Singers. . . . 

EMoon:  On voices. My mother sang tenor. I was an alto for years because I could sing low (not because I could ONLY sing low) and thought my upper range sounded worse. Octave below middle C, no problem. Lower than that, sometimes. I didn't sing as high as I could, thinking I had no quality up there. 

For people with gorgeous natural soprano voices this is probably never an issue but this is something Nadia talks to me about:  that your lower register may sound 'better' merely because it's stronger—most women talk in their chest-voice, and the voice is a muscle, etc.

But with a good voice teacher…lo, the upper voice now sounds better than the lower one. 

Sigh.  The jury's still out on what I am, and 'better' is a very relative term when applied to my singing.  I squeak at the top end and bellow at the bottom.  I have a ways to go.  I could just stick to knitting.§§ 

I had to learn to sing properly to get to that sound (not squeezing or pushing the upper notes, but letting them have the space they needed.) 

'Space.'  Yes.  Sigh.  One of Nadia's favourite words.  I squeak because I don't allow space.  

And my voice teacher says that "head voice" and "chest voice" are wrongly used for the most part–that the whole voice needs to be everywhere. 

YES.  This is what Nadia is beginning to try to teach me. 

That what happens to women singing low is that they don't know how to get the right resonance throughout, where it will do wondrous things to their lower tones. 

As well as to their upper, which is one of the things Nadia is trying to tell me—especially if I'm going to persist with this first-soprano scam.  One of the ways to give my bat-like squeakings a bit of depth is by (somehow) bringing the chest-voice resonances in.  Ask me in a few months about that 'somehow'. 

 I'm always being told not to get "chesty" because the furry quality isn't what he wants. (My next-seat-neighbor sings as low as I do, but without the furriness, and I can hear the difference now.)

 I, on the other hand, would be delighted to be accused of furriness.  Beats 'knife on tile'. 

For altos, opening up the top register gives you the chance to hear your full resonance and then urge that same quality downward into your comfort zone. That's what he says, and I'm increasingly convinced (hearing the change in my voice) that it's true–as the top opens up, the bottom gets better. 

Everything Is Connected.  Why can't we humans learn that?  [Discuss.]  

Annagail:  If you want to start a fight among voice teachers- a real one, complete with yelling and throwing things- start talking about registration. How the voice "fits together" is a huuuuuuge topic and no two teachers think the same way about it. We don't even actually know how many registers there are (largely because it depends on how you define a register). I could go into more detail if folks are interested but I will start geeking out about voice science. 

Please see previous request for a guest post.  I'm drooling here, okay?  Geek away.  Geek hard. 

In terms of women singing low- there're several issues here, one of which is that particular terms mean different things to different people. "Soprano" is a pretty catch-all term for all kinds of flavors of higher voices, but "mezzo" and "contralto" mean different things to opera/classically trained singers than they do to a "layperson". "Mezzo" to most people just means "middle to lower voice," but it's a fairly specific Fach, 

Fach makes me crazy.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fach  I see that the professional classical/opera singer world needs something like this but I look at the list of singers and want to—yell and throw things, speaking of yelling and throwing things.  I'm not convinced that all the specificity is all that useful.  Hrrmph.  However, I'm not an opera-house manager either.  —And yes, the mezzo has a much higher top end than most people realise:  you're only one note off the high C that makes you a lyric soprano.  Or something. 

requiring a more significant range than most people realise, but typically sitting in the middle voice . . . (The female leads in The Barber of Seville and La Cenerentola are both mezzos, and Cenerentola has some notes that sopranos would be proud of.) The tone is pretty specific. True contralti are very rare, but the short version of that is "alto" and that's what a significant number of women sing in choirs, thus confusing the issue. 

I've already apologised for calling myself a contralto—someone sounding less like Eileen Farrell would be hard to imagine—but very very very slightly in my defense, my it's-always-there-without-warming-up-and-isn't-too-squeaky-or-bellowy range, as confirmed by Nadia, is pretty well the standard contralto range:  E below middle C to the second E above.

Another issue is that a healthy lower voice- one that will carry- 

Ahem.  In a good way. 

requires a singer to use at least a touch of mix. 

YES.  Which is what all our voice teachers out there are trying to teach us to do.   With a greater or lesser sense of desperation.

In a voice which is poorly registrated (i.e. one with a big break, though there are other registration issues), refocusing work on the upper voice is necessary to strengthen it to enable a better blend throughout the voice. Even if you're a true mezzo or contralto, your lessons will probably involve helping extend your range up/work on upper register in some form or fashion. 

Yes.  You work on the weak bits so the whole will be . . . whole.

Even more issue- most English-speaking women have a relatively low speaking voice, especially compared to many Italian or French speaking women. This means that a non-singer will have a lot more initial comfort lower in her range because that's where her voice is all the time. 

The problem with that is the tendency to bellow.§§§  This is what Nadia has begun tackling with me:  to give that chest shout a bit of lift from the head voice.  Ask me about that in six months too. . . .

Last issue that I'll touch on- so much of voice lessons is undoing things! 

Yes.  In my case Issue Number One is letting the frell go.  Allowing my poor voice to have some space.  

Some people think of a trained voice as being unnatural and that if their higher notes require training to get that they're not actually part of their "real" voice. It's just not true- your "natural" voice is a voice that's released and free, not overly produced, but for most people, figuring out where they hold tension and how to release it takes training. I've met people with very naturally released voices (and congenially hated all of them) but they're rare. 

Allow me to join you in your robust loathing . . .

TO BE CONTINUED SOME MORE.      

* * *

* I want to say when is Liszt ever not big and scary.  Even his little stuff tends to be big and scary—I don't mean the pyrotechnics, I just find Liszt large.  And Liszt on a frelling pipe organ . . . golly.  

** He recommended the Mme Durufle performance on YouTube, which is, roughly, here:  http://www.youtube.com/results?search_type=search_playlists&search_query=Mme+Durufle+plays+Liszt&uni=1

I'm failing to get it to come up right.  It's in four parts, so every time you're feeling all engaged and go-with-the-flow the flow stops and you have to click up the next part.  But they could at least give you all four parts together.  You'll have to cruise down a bit for part 4/4, unless it's behaving better for you than it does for me.   Since I have broadband from hell^ at the moment I'm having trouble getting the wretched thing to function, but it's worth it if you can convince it to run.  This is another one I recommend supplementary speakers.  And be sure to listen out for the sound of the subway.  Oisin says there's been a conversation on his organ-programme elist about trying to get a sample set from this organ—St Thomas in NYC—but they're reluctant to try and do it around the subway noise.  Hee. 

^ Not my hell.  Some other shabby and badly-run establishment.

 *** Do you know, people say that about bell ringing.  Fancy. 

† Is it my imagination, or did he get politer when I brought out my long sharp pointy sticks? 

†† I'm so bad. 

††† Because I am bad, I told him that if he played any wrong notes he would be messing up my musical education. 

‡ There is a paranormal romance waiting to be written which involves a weregreyhound.  

‡‡ In our feeble days Niall has hit on the excellent ruse of making us learn some of the slightly more out of the way lower-level methods—I should be learning Cambridge minor, for example, and both Penelope and I would love a chance to grind away at bob major and Stedman triples.  But we haven't got the band.  But we do now ring Little Bob and St Clements.  I rang St Clements tonight accurately enough that Roger was surprised.  Snork.  

‡‡‡ I hope I'm not beginning a personal tradition of failing to sing Vaughan Williams for various events. 

§ Yes, the ratbag.  He hasn't told me yet about his membership in the Royal Academy^ or his one-man show coming up at the Tate however.  In his spare time he creates perfect miniature replicas of the Albert Memorial with matchsticks and a surprising amount of gilt paint. 

^ http://www.royalacademy.org.uk/ 

§§  Don't want to.   

§§§ Well nigh irresistible to those of us with weak thready voices.  Hey!  I can make NOISE!!

Bat-like squeaking

 

OH GODS IT'S PAST ELEVEN O'CLOCK AND I'M ONLY JUST STARTING MY BLOG POST. 

            It's been an unnecessarily eventful day. 

            But let's start last night (as I so often do).

            THEY WERE STARVING.  STARVING.  HELLHOUNDS WERE FAMISHED.  RAVENOUS.  THEY COULDN'T FALL ON THEIR SUPPER FAST OR FURIOUSLY ENOUGH.  They just about ate the bottoms of their bowls through to the floor.  Why don't you feed us better, they said pathetically.  You're so cruel and heartless.  We're dying of hunger here.  More!  More!  More!  Our stomachs are cleaving to our backbones!*  Darkness refused to go to bed.  He sat by his bowl in a commanding fashion—he's the one who figured out that sitting is the magic.  Sitting gets you fed.**  So when he wants more, he very deliberately catches my eye and then sits. 

            . . . And they ate lunch today.

            . . . And they ate dinner, although I admit there was a certain manifestation of flapdoodle from Chaos.  They were all over me when I got back from the Muddlehamptons, and I fed them dinner IMMEDIATELY because it was so late, and Chaos was all, no, wait, you don't feed us IMMEDIATELY when you return home, you have to wait till the excitement of having our hellgoddess back has subsided—one can't possibly eat while excited—all one's neurons are too busy elsewhere, there aren't any left over for digestion—and then it was no, wait, we don't have dinner at this time of night, we're supposed to have had it already, we can't possibly eat now*** . . . Hunger, of course, doesn't come into it.  SIIIIIIIGH.   Darkness, who is not a drama queen, tucked right in . . . and Chaos, after rending his garments and crying aloud to the indifferent heavens for a while, eventually followed suit.

            Whew.

            Today began way too early.  Tabitha had had to swap our appointments† to a morning.  I was being expected to function in the real world before noon.  Please.  Hellhounds were delighted:  Oooh!  Adventure!††  But this inevitably meant that we got back for lunch late . . . and I had handbells at 4:45, because the Muddlehampton Choir started up again tonight and all handbellers had to leave at 6:45—Go!  Go!  Now!  And don't come back!  —Till next Thursday!, because I have to rehurtle hounds and get on to St Frideswide.

            I was singing in the car on the way since I hadn't had time to warm up or practise or anything today and it occurred to me that having figured out where my chest/head voice break comes, more or less, I can (more or less) figure out what I'm singing.  I'm a high soprano for the Muddlehamptons.†††  Where's that frelling G.  Okay, there it is.  Eeeep.  Park car.  Race into church.

            People are still on holiday and we were only about two-thirds strength.  This became hideously clear when we tackled the second of the Bruckner 'Three Graduals for the Church Year for Mixed Voices [a cappella]', Os Justi‡, which has both a second and a first soprano part . . . and we only seem to have four first sopranos.  I'm hoping that it's merely my dismal attendance record thus far‡‡ and there are lots of first sopranos when I'm not there‡‡‡, but tonight there were four first sopranos . . . including me.  Fortunately also including Griselda, their star female turn, who actually has a voice, and who was out sick most of the summer.  I hadn't met her before—she is a rather imposing figure and is intimidatingly musical.  But I forgive her, because golly is she necessary.  Os Justi is full of high As.  I didn't sign on for As!  I only promise as far as Gs!§  —I'm a first soprano.  I'd better pull the A out of my hat/sleeve or retire to the seconds.  Except they need first sopranos.  So I stayed.  This still leaves us with one genuine high soprano—Griselda, who I would bet on for a high C beyond that A—and two squeakers, which would be me and Cindy, and a little old lady§§ whom I've yet to hear on any note above about a D.  Whimper.§§§

            Nobody asked me to leave.  Or join the altos.#

            And I have a rather terrifying armful of new music which I was told by a grinning librarian isn't all of it, we'll get the rest next week. . . .

            Of course there will be another week.  Yes.  I have that A.  I just don't have it very . . . reliably.            

* * * 

* True.  It's the way they're built.  Sighthounds, and things with lots of sighthound in the genetic mix, all have backbone-cleaving stomachs.  I daresay us dog-breeding humans created this rod for our own backs, but it still doesn't explain the attitude.  There are fat sighthounds in the world, but they're rare.  It's mostly the opposite.  Anyone would think that they knew they were beautiful and thin, like a human catwalk model living on lettuce and diet Coke.  

** Unfortunately not sitting does not get you not fed.  He's still working on that one.  Sigh.  

*** Yes you can!  YES YOU CAN!  This is the new schedule for Thursdays!  Get used to it!  Please.  

† Bowen massage.  One of the Big Three that keep me on my feet despite the ME:  homeopathy, vitamins, and Bowen. 

†† I take them along and then we have a hurtle while Peter is being drubbed and belaboured.  Tabitha lives on the edge of town, and there are fields and footpaths, but we've fallen into the habit of coming back through this extremely glossy new housing development because it fascinates me.  It's all terraces and blocks of flats but it's laid out with a lot of open communal space kept primped to a fare-thee-well by teams of gardeners trundling around on gigantic ride-on lawn mowers trailing small carts full of rakes and hoes and loppers and spades.  And the windows are all clean and there are never any bicycles left haphazardly across a pavement or a front garden.  It all looks like something out of The Prisoner. 

††† Note:  snork.  

‡  http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=uR2E2GJS45M

Does everybody know that 'os' means 'mouth'?  So this means the just or righteous mouth, and I am a frivolous person, I think this is funny, possibly because I am masquerading as a first soprano.  It's Psalm 37:  'The mouth of the righteous speaketh wisdom' . . . and so on.  It's not funny in context, but the Bruckner piece tends to be called Os Justi, and I think this is funny.  

‡‡ Which is about to change.  It's bad enough I missed the Messiah last April, but then I wasn't thinking of joining a choir yet either.  It's really bad that I missed singing Vaughan Williams' Turtle Dove this summer. 

‡‡‡ I hope it's not anything I said. 

§ Speaking of how much you can guarantee on a bad day 

§§ Read:  my age 

§§§ I am assuming that there are more Muddlehampton first sopranos out there and they will magically appear next week or the week after.  The Muddlehamptoms have a reasonably good rep, and they certainly tackle serious music—I can't believe they'd be choosing this stuff with all this top end if they didn't have performers for it.  There's lots of choir music out there that doesn't get above a high G for the sopranos. 

              The Bruckner, furthermore, is for a wedding.  Whimper.  They must have some first sopranos in a closet somewhere.  Note that I didn't know we did weddings.  I thought we sang two concerts a year and had long holidays.  But the AGM is next week and I am assured that All Will Become Clear.  Possibly something to do with the backwash of having written my membership-fee cheque:  as the treasurer's hand comes in contact with my cheque, the scales drop from my eyes and muffles from my ears, and . . . 

# As I'm writing this I'm listening to Natalie Dessay, who eats high Cs like salted cashews.

Howling at the Moon

 

The hellhound event horizon is a bit brighter today.  Yesterday was definitely the sucking black hole during which they ate about one quarter of their usual rations . . . at the end of about three weeks of increasing numbers of half- and two-thirds-rations days.  (Almost) total breakdown of hellgoddess.  I have no idea.  They drift in and out of digestive weirdness, and sometimes there are clear and graphic symptoms—besides the not eating—and sometimes there aren't.   The physical manifestations this time have been nothing like dramatic enough to explain the breadth and depth of the not eating.  Nice ribs, guys.  Really nice ribs.  I hate visible ribs on anyone who isn't an athlete in hard condition—the racing-fit of the obvious popular species, dog, horse and human, tend to be ribby, and lurchers who are keeping their owners' cooking-pots full often are as well.  Which is fine.  And there are plenty of pet sighthounds around with a full rack of ribs on display because many sighthounds think food is an elective.  I sympathise with their owners.   Even if my guys were normal, with happy normal GI tracts, I'd still be trying to slip a little extra food into them because I don't like visible ribs, but my guys are not normal, and having something to lose is a bit of, uh, padding against the rough stretches.  Like this one.  My best guess is that one of their unpredictable bad spells* managed to coincide with the last few weeks before it's time to worm them again, when they usually do start getting hinky about food.  If we have two days of bad eating in the same week my first thought is to check the calendar.  It should be the middle of September, but I couldn't stand it any longer and wormed them day before yesterday.  Yesterday, as already observed, was a dark night of the soul, but the one hopeful sign was that they weren't ill and despondent this morning—which they usually are** if they missed supper the night before.***  I was still saying 'if they don't eat lunch I'm taking them to the evening surgery at the vets''.  But they ate lunch.†   They've now eaten dinner. †† Whatever happens later tonight, we're doing better than we were yesterday.  And they were back to taking-hellgoddess-arms-off-at-the-shoulders mode on the afternoon hurtle, which generally speaking I discourage but in this case. . . . 

* * * 

Meanwhile as I said yesterday I got a lot of singing practise in, waiting (mostly futilely) for hellhounds to eat.  There have been a lot of interesting posts to the forum in response to my gibbling about singing and asking if any other singers wanted to make it a discussion.  

Catlady:  I'm an alto, tried and true . . . I just went to test my break and it is the A above middle C going up and the A below middle C going down. So the whole range in between can be either, depending on which works better for the song . . . singing in a choir, I just made it work, whatever it was . . . I have a lot of practice going into my chest voice, and that break was hard to find. So the hurdle does get shorter if you leap it enough times. 

Yes.   This is exactly what Nadia says—the more you do it the less of a 'break' it becomes.  What I've noticed just in the two days since we had this conversation is that merely by officially addressing the issue it's gone from 'that square peg will NEVER fit in that round hole' to what it's like changing gears your first week in driver ed.  It's dire, but you have some idea what you're aiming at, and you're (fairly) confident you'll get better. 

Joseph-ine:  At last! someone else who thinks my break is in an odd place! 

We've got only a sample of three so far.  Maybe Catlady and I are odd.

I can comfortably sing well up to an A (and have been known to get down an octave below middle C), and can only sometimes sing in chest voice to the Asharp/Bflat and B. It really depends on my voice on each day and if I bothered to warm up well or not. 

Well yes, but ALL singing is like that?!?  It's that 'your instrument is YOUR BODY' thing.  I was talking to Nadia about this too, because my Stress Levels Have Been Rather High Lately which means I've been singing rather . . . paralytically.  And she says that a lot of what becoming a professional means is just pushing the limits of how well you can sing even on a bad day.  ::Oversimplification alert::  But the idea is that if you can rely on being x good even when your Life Is A Ruin, you can afford to become a professional.  If you can't, you can't. 

Linnet:  I first discovered that women could sing tenor and bass when my sister got involved with a choir that was emulating Vivaldi's choir at the Pieta. The research seems to suggest that Vivaldi's music written during this period was actually designed for women to sing the tenor and bass parts. 

Well, sure.  He was writing for his foundling girls' school, yes?  What's interesting is that he just went ahead and wrote low parts for them.  Yaay Vivaldi.  I don't care what he thought he was doing—I kind of doubt he was a feminist—the point is he did it. 

It seems that a lot of women have more lower range than they think. 

I thought I was a freak in high school.  I've said this before, that when I was younger I had a (nearly) four octave range and so sang everything from baritone to high soprano.  But I was the only one moving through the ranks like this.  Mind you I'd trade two octaves of my old range in for half a dozen notes worth listening to, but you deal with what you have.  My other fond ambition—the first one being that I become both good and confident enough to survive an audition to a slightly better quality choir—is to regain three octaves.  I'm nearly there now very late at night after a couple of glasses of champagne on a really good free open flexible day, which would not be recently, but I want three RELIABLE octaves.  Which is going to take some work—if it's even possible.  

Harpergray:  In my experience, it doesn't seem so much that singing alto is unfeminine, it's that we do so well as a harmonious base line. 

Yes.  BOOOORING.  Which is why despite my confidence problems and what is probably my natural range, I will probably stay among the sopranos till Ravenel positively turfs me out.

And that's not all social imposition, though the diva-esque reputations of sopranos has certainly been well-formed over the years, at least as far as I've seen it. It's a lot easier for the lower notes to carry in this way than the higher. 

Well, Nadia, who is a soprano, says that part of the diva-ness is that sopranos' voices are so much more exposed, which is the other side, I think, of what you're saying.  But that means that soprano confidence problems are going to be more exposed too, I guess. 

. . .  singing alto in a Gilbert and Sullivan chorus usually follows along these lines: "I am a lonely alto, I only sing one note, and if I am lucky I sing…two." 

Yes, and if I'm singing alto principal I'm old, ugly, pathetic, and the butt of bad jokes.  I love G&S but I don't love Gilbert for his broad-mindedness.

I stumbled across this video a while ago, and it's a fun little song for choir altos. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HABEHXu40fw&feature=relat ed 

It would be more fun if she were a better alto.  It's a great song and she performs it well, but she's not a hearty resonant baritone.  

TO BE CONTINUED.   

PS:  ANNAGAIL.  GUEST POST.  GUEST POST.  —And I was being provocative, calling myself a contralto.  I don't have that chest resonance—just the sheer muscular strength of the fact that my speaking voice is deep, even for a (western) woman.  But then I don't have good singing resonance, full stop, which is why I will remain back row of the chorus.      

* * * 

* Caused by I have no idea.  Earwigs.  Manticores.  Alien spores from space.  Hellgoddess allergy.  Whimper.  The very occasional twenty-four hour double-ended geyser effect I assume is from picking up the sandwich-end or cookie some ugly careless slob has dropped in the street^ and is also usually fairly straightforward.  These longer murky fits of Food Is the Enemy . . . I have no idea.  I also have no idea how much the slinking and visibly oppressed spirits are a reaction to hellgoddess disapproval of this behaviour.  Some, maybe, but not all. 

^ I've never seen anyone actually doing this and I hope I never do.  I hate confrontation almost as much as I hate visible ribs—I'm a pretty good all-purposes coward—but my short fuse is genuine too, and seeing some asshole not only dropping trash but dropping trash that would make my dogs violently ill if they ate it+ might very well make me lose my temper too fast to remember that yelling at strangers may have unfortunate side effects. 

+ and, just by the way, which attracts rats, those well known and charming accessories to all human civilisation 

** especially Darkness.  Chaos is the drama queen, but Darkness has more sheer physical symptoms. 

*** I am neurotic, but I am PATHOLOGICAL with cause about the hellhounds eating. 

† Although it took Chaos two hours.  Drama queen, as I say. 

†† Very small lunch.  Very small dinner.  The point being to get/keep them eating at all.

Tunefulness, various

 

It's already the middle of the night and I've barely got down to the mews and addressed my broccoli.*  You see, there were handbells.  I know, handbells are supposed to be Thursday but they break out occasionally.  And what with ME and hellhounds and silly people going on holiday** and therefore failing to turn up for standard Thursday handbells I've been feeling Handbell Deprived.***  Tonight was Caitlin's first time at the cottage:  I think she grinned kind of a lot.  Cozy, she said.  She has a big house and a husband and two sons—six and eight years old, I think.  And two cats.  Well, one of the few things I don't have all over the floor is model train sets.  But we seem to have rung for rather a long time. . . .

            But it had already been a long day at that point.  Fiona was here.  FIONA, AKA WONDERWOMAN, FOUND MY COLOURED INKS.  YAAAY.  Well, guarded and cautious yaaay:  if you people keep telling me what to draw† I will probably start experimenting with colour again at some point, but given that I need to keep the labour-intensiveness a bit down for the immediate future of, I hope, churning out squiggles by the rmmmphfold, I'm not planning on colouring the Bell Fund doodles††, although evolution by tweaking continues.  A bit like running through too many drafts on a novel.

            Okay, it's time to confront hellhounds with food again.  Whimper. 

* * * 

* And sausages.  I don't only eat large scary green vegetables.  I only eat them first.  Does anyone else love The Plate Where All the Different Foods Are Touching Each Other as much as I do?  http://www.cartoonbank.com/1990/on-display-at-the-childrens-house-of-horror/invt/110181/

. . . Why is a copy of a simple little cartoon so expensive?   I don't need museum quality paper and a cubic-zircona-incrusted mat!  I just want something a little larger than a notecard to hang on a wall!^ 

^ I suppose I might buy the t shirt . . . 

** Don't you know that holidays are bad for you?  You come home and you've forgotten where everything is.  The teapot.  The washing machine.^  The secret stash of Green & Black's.  I had an email from a bell ringing friend a few days ago, freshly home from counting penguins in Antarctica or some such, who told me in hushed and tragic tones that she had nearly messed up her quarter peal of Double Trapezoidal Fungus Supreme, laid on as a special honour for the visiting Resplendent Panjandrumtate,  because her brain was still counting penguins.  See?  Don't go on holiday.  It's not worth it. 

^ Where exactly the spice rack sticks out over the washing machine, crouched under the stairs as it, and therefore you, are, so you can not hit your head on it. 

*** I'm also worrying about making handbells happen sufficiently punctually when I have to get hounds hurtled and myself off to the Muddlehamptons Thursday evenings again.^  Niall is, as we know, obsessive, but both Colin and Gemma seem to think there is life beyond handbells.  Although in Colin's case life beyond handbells usually means ringing a tower peal somewhere. 

 ^ I'm also starting to borrow trouble heavily about singing for the bishop in Constantinople, which is less than three weeks off.  How do I get myself into these things.  Somebody frelling cancel my email account, stuff keeps coming in.+    

             The big anthem is Vaughan Williams' Let All the World:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ef3ymMSPs_Y ++ which we're supposed to learn in exactly one rehearsal?  What?  Well, two rehearsals, but the second one is on the day:  we turn up a couple of hours before the bishop does, sing violently, and are then presumably sent off for a cup of re-energizing tea till it's time to panic and go mute which, in my case, after only two rehearsals, is probably a good thing.+++  

+ Like yarn sales.  

++ RidingWestward wrote:  Am I the only one who has been listening to different versions of Silent Worship on Youtube over and over again since I read the blog post last night? 

No.  And I got a head start, since I was home from my voice lesson by 6 pm.   But I hadn't realised this was what something so unfelicitiously named was.  Also I was confused by the 'Handel' part—I vaguely think of it as something by Thomas Moore or someone like that.  I love this song.  But then, I am a sap.

            Of what seems to be available on YouTube—although the maze that is YouTube keeps throwing them up just when you think you've found them all—my favourite is one of the first on the list, by Thomas Allen: 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Cb8jAF-NtA 

It would be a baritone.  But I sing stuff from Vaughan Williams' Songs of Travel and Finzi's Let Garlands Bring, so hey.  Also, I frelling adore Thomas Allen, so my computer may be doing that weird Big-Brother-is-paying-attention thing of bringing up stuff similar or related to stuff I've brought up before—which would include a lot of Thomas Allen.~

            Having a baritone for a singing teacher was one of those defences against falling on my sword, that year with Blondel however.   It's not that I couldn't tell that he had a deep dark furry Thomas-Allen-y voice and I . . . did not;  it's just it was easier to bear when it's like he is in a whole different category than the one I'm failing to be in at all.  Sigh.  There is no such defence with Nadia. ~~  But I don't think I'll fall on my sword just yet.  Possibly after the first rehearsal of Let All the World. 

Joseph-ine wrote:  I often think the lower range below middle C is poorly neglected. I too have that sort of voice, and tend to actually prefer singing tenor, because the belly of my voice sits right smack bang in their range. And also because they have some great songs! In the choir I joined this year, I was an alto . . . an alto is a fun part too . . . Unless you are singing right across the break – mine occurs around B flat, B and has to shift to head voice to get to a C, so I found it particularly difficult to sing all the time across this point. Of course it did get easier. However, I got to sing one of the tenor songs at the concert, and I am thinking I should push harder next time to see if they will let me sing that more often! It was fun! 

Blerg.  Well, you people with solo-quality voices are a whole different tiger.  I'm more of a dormouse.  But I entirely agree that lower women's voices are weirdly neglected.  What is it, unfeminine or something to sing below middle C?  Is this The Last Great Bastion Feminism Must Address?   I'm curious about where your voice breaks though—I've got most of an octave I can fudge from either end, from G below to G above middle C;  I break naturally approximately A (below C) going down and D (above C) going up.  I don't know if any of you other singers out there want to enter this discussion?  But today while I was out with hellhounds I was singing, pitching stuff down, to make myself sing across that break, since Nadia says the only way you stop sounding like you've just thrown a piston rod is by doing it a lot.  I think this is part of that lecture on 'the voice is a muscle and like every other muscle it needs to be exercised'.  Feh.

            I got a lot of practise at the piano today however waiting for hellhounds to eat.~~~ 

~ Including The Vagabond from Songs of Travel.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8ZG11e5cmY  I recommend supplementary speakers on this one. 

~~ That she's a genuine soprano and I'm a contralto pretending is not enough.  

~~~ The score so far:  one hit, one miss.  Diana in MN wrote:  Could be they ate (!) something they found while hurtling and picked up parasites. 

I wormed the little ratbags yesterday.  We live in hope.  Somewhat frayed hope. 

+++ Although Nadia is going to bring most of the music—it's not just the anthem, mind you, it's a whole frelling service with bags of frelling singing—next week and drag me through some of it.  Oh, you'll love the Vaughan Williams, she said.  I already do—it's the end of the Five Mystical Songs, which I adore—when someone else is singing it.  And then there's the Durufle, the music of which she says I won't have any trouble with . . . I'll have trouble with the Latin.  AAAAAAAAUGH.   What I'm chiefly hoping is that they'll put me next to someone who knows what she's doing.  I can follow like anything.  Especially if I'm mute from panic. 

† Remember:  Always Looking for Blog Material

†† Ajlr wrote:  I particularly like the very cheerful (at least, I think that's what the smiles are about) expressions on the little bat-faces. Presumably they're looking like that because each time you draw them it means more money has been raised for the renovations? 

Totally.

There Are Definitely Bats in My Belfry

 

I am very, very, very, very, very tired.  Very.  Life with hellhounds has been, frequently melodramatically, less than optimum for . . . rather a long time at this point.  This has been the worst, most extended spell of Not Eating, with ever-creative variations on this theme, since I got them off cereal grains three years ago.  I passed my wits' end about a fortnight ago. . . . *

            This has been part of why it's taken me so long to come up with a bats in the belfry doodle;  it's difficult functioning Beyond Wits' End.  HOWEVER. 

 

Ding dong. Squeak.

Because I am a twit, I managed to take all my drawing pens back to the cottage, so tonight at the mews, when I wanted to ink in some final lines I frelling couldn't.  Little doodles I start out in ink and it doesn't matter, but something this big [sic.  Hey, we're talking doodles here] where scale and so on do kind of matter** I start in pencil.  Your average ballpoint gets very sulky when asked to go over pencil lines.  And yes, it's done freehand.  Cough cough.  You noticed.  I realise there are drawbacks to this approach but ruled lines look so awfully . . . ruled. 

            Sigh.  It's about time to start trying to force some food into hellhounds again.  Sigh.  

* * *

* Yesterday, when I was mostly crawling around on my hands and knees, I was saying to myself, I am going to my voice lesson tomorrow, I AM GOING TO MY VOICE LESSON TOMORROW.  If it had been yesterday, I probably wouldn't have made it.^  But today has been better, if a trifle marginal.  And while I was going to my voice lesson, it was going to be a disaster:  I was trying to warm up after my lunch^^ while hellhounds were busy scorning theirs and my voice kept frelling cracking.  Whose idea was this singing thing anyway?  Stick to the piano which doesn't get all traumatised and paralytic.  Too late now.  I like singing, and you can do it in groups, and my group starts up again this Thursday.  Blerg.  So, here I am, with a voice crackling like an old radio and the Italian on the page has reverted to Etruscan and . . . I am GOING to my voice lesson.

            And, as these things can startle the mmgrmph out of you^^^, it went rather well.  Even my Italian has progressed from making Nadia wince to making her grin just a little sardonically.~   I've asked her to help me start teaching my chest voice to behave—with the caveat that she not tell Ravenel that I'm actually a contralto.  We've been mostly working on the top end because that's what I've wanted to do and because most of the fun stuff is written for sopranos, but I've got an entire octave below middle C that is barely getting a look in, and as my top register improves~~ the whole soprano/football hooligan split is becoming embarrassing.

            And—yaaay—I came home with a new song to try out:  another old soprano war horse:  Handel's Silent Worship, which isn't what you think, it's the 'Did you not hear my lady/Go down the garden singing?' one.  Except that I should probably be learning the Italian. . . . ~~~ 

^ All that frelling driving.  Plus being expected to stand up to sing.  Feh.  A Zimmer frame is too low:  Nadia insists on my standing up straight to give my lungs room.  No crouching.  Do they make extra-tall Zimmer frames?  I doubt Nadia's mum would appreciate a suggestion she have a flagpole installed in her music/dining room for the feeble to cling to on bad days.  

^^ I know.  Not ideal.  But all I eat is salad+ so it's not like it's lying heavily or anything. 

+ Menopause metabolism.  Sigh.  I need to stockpile available calories for the Green & Black's. 

^^^ But don't count on it.  Or fate will drop you in the egg custard. 

~ Thank you Cecilia Bartoli and Unknown Excessively Talented Young Woman singing Sebben Crudele on YouTube.  

~~   It's all relative you know 

~~~ Although the business of provenance is messy:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Worship

Also, that's one of the worst song titles ever.  Right up there with If You Can't Live without Me, Why Aren't You Dead Yet?^ 

^ No, wait, that's a great song title. 

** I was about to ask if anyone else out there is old enough to remember Jon Gnagy's Learn to Draw and bless my watercolour pencils but the kits are still available  http://www.weberart.com/signature/gnagy.html

 

Prospective things

 

Okay, WHEW.  Blogmom, along with scraping me off the ceiling several times today after last night's small epic of photographic disaster*, keeps reminding me that I still need to produce a bats in the belfry doodle so she can finish the auction-and-oddments list and hang the freller.  Yes.  Well.  This has been one of the pebbles in my All Stars the last few weeks—the kind of pebble that you can't frelling FIND when you take your shoe off**.  Sounds easy, doesn't it?  Bats in a belfry?  All you need is a bell or two and some bats.  The real problem has been my literal mind.  Since this is, after all, an auction/sale to raise money for our Change-Ringing-Bells Restoration Fund I have felt compelled to make some indication that the bat-infested belfry in question is a change ringing belfry.  Also, bells are frelling huge.  And bats are . . . frelling tiny.  I've been through more unsatisfactory compromises about all this than all the other doodles combined.  I was getting ready to take a deep breath and pull it:  no bats in the belfry doodle, it's beyond me.  But I've finally done it.  It still needs tidying up and I pretty well guarantee it's not what you had in mind . . . but it's a belfry with bats in it.  And given the amount of time I've spent figuring it out—including, don't forget, that it's something I can reproduce, supposing anyone (after all this) wants it—it may well be tomorrow's post in its entirety.***  People who aren't bell ringers are going to say, Huh?  And people who are bell ringers are going to say . . . Huh?

            Hey, it's a free country.  You can buy some other doodle.

            Meanwhile, I have got to get this photo thing sorted with WordPress.†  There is not only tomorrow's reveal of a deeply underwhelming bats in the belfry doodle in your immediate future but Aaron a little while back demanded proof that I write in my books†† and so I was thoughtfully looking at a few of the more emphatically vandalised††† and wondering if I could get a blog post out of them . . . hmmmm . . . probably. . . .

            But in the meantime it's been a long day and I'm feeling too chicken to tackle more photos tonight.  So I will leave you with a small harmless chick doodle.‡

 

Cheep cheep cheep

  

* * *

* Thanks to Blue Rose and a couple of emailers on the subject of making my over-my-head camera work better.  I knew I was signing up for the Grand National when I could barely post to the trot^ by buying this hot-blooded steeplechaser disguised as a mild-mannered hybrid^^ point-and-shoot camera but I admit I was not expecting something that just looking at the instructional CD would make me lose the will to live, let alone trying to read some of what's on it.  I know the thing can do everything I could ever possibly want a camera to do and probably quite a lot more.^^^ It's figuring out how to ask.  But you've made some nice stupid-user-friendly specific suggestions and I will absolutely give them a try.^^^^    

^ But hey, they've made the National easier 

^^ That's my problem.  Too much of that frelling hybrid vigour. 

^^^ I don't suppose it can do my taxes? 

^^^^Supposing I can figure out the cryptic runes.  

** Probably standing in the middle of a field with dancing hellhounds.  This happened to me recently and shortly before making the decision I was going to have to hop home finally discovered most of an inch of thorn that had driven up through the bottom of the shoe but only revealed itself on the inside when my weight was compressing the insole.  Cheez.  The countryside is dangerous.  

*** Both the post and the doodle in their entireties.  

† I've repeatedly suggested motherboards at dawn and WordPress doesn't even bother to answer.  A programme with no honour.  No wonder civilisation is in decline. 

†† A blog reader with no honour.  No wonder civilisation, etc. 

††† The ones most likely to feel the tip of my pencil—or, when necessary, red pen^—tend to fall in three broad categories:  homeopathy, poetry^^, and All the Rest of Non Fiction.  This last is a little overwhelming, but I want to try and find you something where I get into a really passionate argument with the writer. 

^ Yes!  Pen!  RED pen!  Sometimes nothing less will do!  —Although I am entirely with those of you who feel there is a special circle in hell+ for people who write in library books.  

+ The Dante's INFERNO we get in college is insanely abridged.  There are dozens—hundreds—of circles not in the standard university textbook.   Given the behaviour of many undergraduates you'd think they might want to leave a few more in.  Writing in library books and (say) leaving the dorm kitchen oven incapacitated with pizza-epoxy is only the beginning. 

^^ I had a not very interesting adolescent go at the Grecian Urn,+ for example.  The problem with Keats is that I fell in love with him way too young and the rarefied philosophy he inspired in me was pretty much on an intellectual par with the notorious gnomic revelations you write down when you're stoned++ and the next morning they say things like 'oxblood shoe polish' and 'fistiblet your glitches'—only more embarrassing.+++   

+ I apologise, sort of, for the other night's site.  Personally I feel that blue type on black backgrounds should be a criminal offense, punished by being made to wear varifocals while riding up and down an escalator with those barred treads—like in the London tube—which make them look striped.  The stripes are very important to the visual experience.  The malfeasant is to ride the escalator till he/she staggers off one end or the other and falls down.  This is life with varifocals—although in my case I do very well with them pretty much with the only exception of striped escalators—but it's also how blue type on a black background has always made me feel, even when I was younger and still had excellent vision with my contact lenses.

            I did, however, like the small frenzied prisoner in the upper right-hand corner, and the site is blessedly free of ads for 'Earn gigantic truckloads of money at home in your spare time only by PLEASE CLICK HERE FOR DETAILS' and those really awful¸ speaking of being kind to your eyes, flashing banners that say YOU HAVE WON SOMETHING!  YES YOU HAVE!  CROSS OUR HEARTS AND HOPE TO DIE!  JUST CLICK HERE!  Noooooo I don't think so.  But I've left sites early because I can feel myself about to manifest my latent epilepsy and go off in fits.~  I suppose the internet police have better things to do with their time but . . . 

~ They thought I had epilepsy when I was a kid.  I grew out of it, whatever it was.  But that sense that something is about to leap out of the shadows of your own body/mind and get you lingers in the memory, and flashing lights make me nervous as well as irritated. 

++ Not that I have any direct experience of this.  Of course not.  Old people were always old, you knew that, right? 

+++ Most of us were young once.  No, really. 

‡ Crossing my fingers now. 

 

Chick chick chick

 

OKAY, I CAN'T BLOODY STAND WASTING ANY MORE SODDING TIME TONIGHT.  WORDPRESS KEEPS EATING MY PHOTOS AND DESTROYING THE LAYOUT OF THE PAGE.  THIS IS GOING TO HAVE TO DO TILL BLOGMOM CAN TELL ME WHAT TO DO.  WHICH WILL BE TOMORROW.  I HAVE TO GO TO BED.

I have this silly habit of saying 'I want a night off' and then posting photos.  The thing is that photos are nearly as much of a time-ravenous hassle as text, it's just the hassle is easier on the brain.  I expend* a remarkable amount of time wading through the 1,000,000 photos I have taken of Subject X, whatever Subject X might be, nine-tenths of which will be frankly unusable or at least embarrassing, by which extremity I feel obliged to use a few of the last draggled tenth just because I've already frittered so much time on the frellers.  Also, as tonight, I'm DETERMINED to get a post out of Penelope's baby chicks—indeed, worse, I think I'm planning on getting two posts out of Penelope's chicks—and if the photos aren't good enough, well, that's just too bad.**  You may have to go cruise for edification elsewhere.*** 

AWWWWWWW

 

I had to stay outside the pen so as not to upset Mum, who is taking her job very seriously.

 

 

And today I've come home with a fresh 1,000,000 blurry photos of fortnight-old chicks. There is no escape.

* * *

 

 * She says, carefully not saying 'waste' 

** This applies particularly to certain categories of the population.  Photographers, for example.  Photographers should look away now.  This tirelessly fancy camera is certainly capable of the old photo grail of tack-sharp photos, but I have yet to find that button, or that selection on the menu.  The fact that the menu is about forty pages long on a microscopic camera screen and takes you several minutes to click through may have something to do with this^.  Chicks are tiny, fuzzy, and move too fast.  Arrgh.  Second category:  farmers and other people who raise chickens, who are going to find another clutch of nascent egg providers and poultry dinners about as enchanting as getting their shoes resoled.  A bit like me when some poor misguided marketing person or librarian is trying to tempt me with a convention . . . tempt?  Are you bloody joking?

            Anyway, to us civilians, baby chicks are cute.  

^ Also the fact that it gives you choices like 'aspect bracket' and 'IRI Resolution' and 'AF Assist Lamp', helpfully annotated with cryptic runes.  Just what I've always wanted, an aspect bracket.  Rather ominously there's also a menu choice titled 'conversion'.   The cryptic rune with that one looks a trifle Cthulhian.  

*** Here's a suggestion, as tweeted by Colleen Lindsay today:  "The good ship Literary Fiction has run aground & the survivors are frantically paddling toward the islands of genre." http://bit.ly/nKuvMR 

            I was going to retweet, but I couldn't decide whether to laugh in a good-natured sort of way—not my strong suit, as we know—or snarl, which is professionally incorrect, and probably politically too.  But (*&^%$£"!!!!!  Some of us have spent our entire long writing lives toiling away in the cootie-ridden swamp of genre, and I personally can do without hearing that maybe the posh literary elite have found something worthwhile in our dank and squalid backwater—even if it's merely the chance to earn a living by appealing to the verminously low taste of the masses.  Yes, I'm just a little allergic to being patronized.^  

^ Speaking of being patronised, and I will not embarrass her by naming her here, but someone posted to the forum a little while ago:  A wise old man used to tell me that PMS stands for Possible Murder Suspect, seeing that all women get that murderous gleam in their eyes when that time of the month comes around.

            Any bloke tried that line on me, and he'd leave shorter than he arrived after I bit his head off.  And I would not have had to be at my time of the month either.