Robin McKinley's Blog, page 30

I wish I’d never learnt even the concept of dogs

 

Pav is still in full bloody streaming heat and I want to run away from home.  Except I can’t because Darkness is trying to starve himself to death and my severely chapped hands* and I are the only thing(s) between him and the ultimate whatever.**  At that we’re not doing a great job.  He’s lost so much weight that he disappears behind his final pair of ribs:  there’s just spine and a tail.  Chaos is eating badly*** but he does occasionally eat a few mouthfuls that I haven’t had to pry his jaws open and stab down his throat.  A few.  He’s also pretty awesomely ribby—but Darkness is worse.  I have the radio turned up REALLY LOUD which goes a little way toward drowning out the incessant moaning.  I do frelling separate them for some hours during the day, usually taking the hellhounds back to the cottage and leaving Pav at the mews.  This doesn’t work as well as you might think.  There is less moaning, but it doesn’t stop altogether, and there is a lot of pacing and anguish.  She’ll be kidnapped by aliens, their agonised looks declare.  She’ll run off with a mongrel.†  And I feel like a bigamist, trying to satisfy two families.  And failing, of course.

I usually have a voice lesson on Mondays.  Ordinarily both voice lessons or the prospect of a voice lesson cheers me up but I feel that this week is a good week for Nadia not to have been teaching.  In the discouraging annals of Things That Squash My Voice Down Flat the present circumstances rank rather high.  Peter and I decided to have an excursion, this Monday afternoon without a voice lesson, but since neither of us is feeling exactly lively and enthusiastic†† we kept thinking smaller and smaller and . . . smaller. . . .

We went to the library.  Or what used to be the big regional library and is now the Random Media Centre full of random media.†††  And a few books. ‡  And a rather nice café.‡‡  So we hit the cheezy SF&F section first and then I took a detour to the knitting shelf ‡‡‡ on our way to the café.  And then we sat and read like a couple of old married folks out on an excursion.§

Of course then I had to go home to the hellpack. . . .

* * *

* My hands now smell permanently of dog food no matter how much I wash them^.  This is kind of off-putting when you’re eating chocolate.

^ Ow.  Yes, I’ve thought of one-use gloves.  But force-feeding is a delicate operation and even latex gloves are clumsy.  I suppose if I thought I was going to be doing this the rest of my life I’d learn to use the gloves.  But I’m not going to be doing this the rest of my life.  Pav is going to come out of season any minute.  And hellhounds will revert to being ordinarily crappy eaters rather than pathologically crappy eaters.  SIIIIIIIIIIIIIIGH.

** Yes.  Critters go to heaven too.  I say so.^

^ Although some of them may have quite a lot of repenting to do first.

*** But then Chaos never eats well.  He’s secretly convinced that he could live on air, if only I’d let him try it out properly.

† I don’t know if this is because Aroma of Bitch in Season hangs heavy on the air, despite frequent changes of hellterror bedding and mopping of crate and kitchen floor, or whether they’re just, you know, not stupid.  I have frequently noticed that dogs are not stupid at just the times when you wish they were.

†† Also there are these, you know, floods.  They do get in the way.  The uni campus on the outskirts of Zigguraton is impressively under water.

††† And men with beards.  HUGE beards.  Long thick massive losing-small-animals-your-iPhone-and-the-tickets-to-tonight’s-concert-in type beards.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many gigantic beards in a smallish area before—and they weren’t with each other for the Southern England Beard Festival either.  So what is it about beards and random media?  Not all geeks have face hair and only one of these guys really looked geeky.

‡ Snarl.  It’s a bit of a vicious circle.  Us book people are proportionately less likely to hang out at libraries the fewer books the new random media centres contain.  But libraries are morphed into random media centres because fewer people seem to be reading books—in hard copy anyway, she adds hastily.  Also . . . how many of us Book People suffer from Too High a Percentage of Disposable Income Is Spent on Books-itis, plus Life Is Short and the TBR Pile is Tall?  Although in my case what eventually killed off most of my go-to-the-library instinct is that the centralised Hampshire library computer system stank and I got tired of wasting my time.

‡‡ Not only did they have acceptable weedwash—I mean herb tea—THEY HAD SOMETHING I COULD EAT. ^

^  https://www.tyrrellscrisps.co.uk/vegetable/beetroot-parsnip-carrot-with-sea-salt

In case you’re wondering.

‡‡‡ The knitting half a dozen beat up old books quarter-shelf, speaking of snarl.  Knitting is popular and fashionable, you not-paying-attention random media people.  BUY MORE KNITTING BOOKS.

§ Okay, now here’s the philosophical debate.  I brought two of the knitting books home with me.  They’re both out of print.  One of them only has two patterns I’m interested in;  the other one has several, plus some useful-looking general how-to-design-your-own-version stuff.  Neither of these books appears on ravelry, and while the author of the book that appeals to me more has a lot of individual patterns from other books available for individual purchase, I don’t see any from this book.  I’ve wasted some time on google looking either for a used copy or for non-ravelry knitting sites where this author might also hang out.  Nada.

Now I’m a little touchy about copyright, since I myself earn my living thereby^—you can also insert a terse rant here on the subject of secondhand book sales kicking back nothing to living authors^^, so looking for a secondhand copy of the book I liked is just a kind of twitch, rather than any courtesy to the author.  But these books are OP and I’ve made a genuine attempt to find the patterns I’m interested in for sale somewhere.  Do I now brashly make photocopies?  Or not?  And if I do am I a bad person?  And if I don’t . . . why don’t I?  Presumably it’s legal, moral and non-fattening to knit something from a pattern from a library book?  Does it remain legal and moral as well as non-fattening only so long as you are doing it directly from the book?

I imagine the answer is that I don’t make copies, because the rights still belong to the author and there’s always a chance she’ll resell them somewhere—or hang them on ravelry or similar.  There’s also that feeling that instructions to make something are somehow different in kind to, say, fiction, but that’s probably illusory.  Creative rights are still creative rights.^^^

^ And so long as society still uses money, piracy is bad and evil and just because it’s on the internet doesn’t mean it’s free or that you’re not making some creator of something’s life unfairly harder and punching them in the morale they need to maintain to go on creating stuff you want.

^^ Paperback exchange and ‘reading copies’ for a few dollars/pounds, no blame, no harm.  But the signed first editions that go for a lot of money?  That’s stealing.  Full stop.

^^^ Please note that I write the blog last thing anyway and at the moment I’m even more chronically short of sleep than usual.   But it does seem to me that on-line knitting sites, chiefly ravelry but there are others, are a game-changer about knitting patterns.  Maybe I write to the author(s) on ravelry and ask her/them if any of these patterns are going to be reissued in a new book or possibly hung on ravelry?

An English (Wintery) Adventure, Part 2 – guest post by B_Twin

 

Hampshire and Beyond

Of course, despite my obsession with castles and historical buildings, the main reason for my visit was to catch up with friends. This meant that one evening there was a Meeting of the Mods and Hellgoddess. I’m actually surprised the sudden spike in Associated Energy didn’t throw us into next week.

As Robin has mentioned previously this meeting involved Southdowner, AJLR, myself and Robin. It was a very pleasant meal. I do recall champagne and brownies. (And the paintwork in AJLR’s hotel room was…. more suited to a vampire movie set. ;) )   As I had expressed a desire to go and see the (famous) monks I was ferried* down to the abbey. With a spare blanket. Just in case my thinned blood couldn’t cope.**

Let me just put in here that Robin is not exaggerating when it comes to describing how cold the abbey is. I could barely see the hymn sheet for the foggy breath I was exhaling. And I needed that blanket.*** It was the blanket though that ultimately got me into trouble. The service books are rather large and unwieldy and with one hand frozen in place clutching the blanket I had decided that the seats in front were level enough to rest the book on.

You know that little (dry) voice inside that likes to encourage you to change course? Hmmm. “But what if the book slides off the chair in front?” “Don’t be silly – I’ll catch it.”

Oh sure. Catch it. With one hand buried in a blanket.

And when the book, inevitably, slipped off towards me I reached out with my other hand* and I did catch it. Sort of. It would have been fine if the seats in front had been solid pews. And not individual solid wood chairs.

On a stone floor.

In a room designed to have acoustics good enough to hear a pin drop.

Have I mentioned that this happened in the middle of prayers?? ****

So as the heavy wooden chair in front shot forward over the stone floor, nearly tipping over in the process as it crashed into its neighbours, with a sound akin to a cannon firing** I was kind of wishing the wretched stone floor would open up and swallow me^.

Then I dropped the blanket.

I have been told that my membership in the Hellgoddess’s Klutz Club is now assured for decades to come.  *le sigh*

The trip to Hampshire was depressingly short-lived before I was whisked away to a seaside resort in a different part of England. (I don’t think it was because the rulers of Hampshire were concerned about the structural integrity of their county with my continued presence.)  And into the most inclement weather of my trip. Let’s just say that I am currently very impressed by the fortitude that must have been had by the soldiers atop Dover Castle in all weathers. The gale was so strong up there it was difficult standing upright. (Great castle though. :D )

Dover Castle on a wintery day

A wonderful trip – too short, as always – and plenty to look forward to on the next one. More bellringing^^ and even more photos. but probably in a summertime. ;)

 

—–

* which would have had icicles on it except for the fact I was wearing wool wristwarmers and fingerless gloves.

** very similar to a large, heavy oak door slamming shut on a large echoing room. Which may have happened on my way out. I don’t know if I will get a return invitation…#

# monks need a good laugh occasionally too you know.  I’m sure they’ll be begging to know when you’re coming back.

^ the self-control shown by the Hellgoddess at this point in not laughing at my misfortune shows how worthy she is of devotion.#

# awwwwwwww.~

~ please inform the hellpack.

^^ definitely need more. Especially after I’ve now experienced the amazing Dover Ringing Centre. (I managed 3 towers in 3 days which is pretty good considering I barely had any ringing this last year.)

* ha ha frelling ha.  Did I tell you about the lake?  You don’t know from ferried.  A fortnight ago you would have been ferried.#  –ed

# Aaaaaaaaand it’s back.  –ed ed

**  ‘thinned blood’ my blue freezing feet.  I am familiarly known by the monks as blanket woman.  And I live here.  And I’m from Maine.  Where we have central heating.  What I want to know is if novice monks being interviewed for suitability to the monkish way of life are asked if they’re good at being cold. 

*** yes.  I kind of thought you were humouring me when I gave you the blanket back at the cottage and told you to bring it along.

**** hee hee hee hee.  It was as good as a play.  Sort of a thriller where things jump out at you suddenly. 

KES, 117

 

ONE HUNDRED SEVENTEEN

I opened my mouth but nothing came out.  This was just as well since the likeliest prospect was that I would burst into hysterical laughter.  The kind that once you start you can’t stop.

Thug #1 dropped my arm—the one whose hand had Silverheart’s hilt in it.  Flowerhair would have swung round, impaled Thug #2 and disappeared into the darkness.  I managed—just—not to bury Silverheart’s tip in the ground again.  What do you do with your sword when you’re not hacking and hewing?  She’d—er—arrived without a scabbard.  And I wasn’t wearing a belt I could thrust her jauntily through.  Preferably without eviscerating myself.   But I was so rubbery with pain and shock it was just as well I didn’t have a belt to risk trying it with.

Thug #1 was running the stirrups down—well, that was something.  There were stirrups.  Two of my all-time favorite fantasy novels featured a cavalry that rode without either bridle or stirrups.  I’d adored this when I was nine and ten but the reality of both the likely development of my horse skills and the horses I was likely to meet had moved the concept into the realm of serious fantasy with the wizards, the dragons and the enchanted swords by the time I was going to summer riding camp in my teens.  Sigh and all that.  The world looks different when you’re ten.  Barring the bruises my ten-year-old self would be eating present circumstances with a spoon:  infinitely more delicious than a hot fudge sundae.  As you get older you get kind of reliant on your perception of reality:  like that your kitchen will not unexpectedly fill up with guys with swords (and guy-like things with swords and/or large teeth) and mayhem on their minds.  I didn’t even know how to describe what had happened since then.

Monster Horse shifted his enormous feet and stretched his neck out toward me.  Instinctively I went to reach back with the hand that wasn’t holding a sword.  Thug #2 let go of that arm and I laid my hand on Monster’s long Roman nose.  My brain caught up with this and I turned my head to look in surprise at Thug #2.  Astur smiled at me.  Of course.  It would be Astur.  His smile in this fever-dream was no pleasanter than it had been the last time Flowerhair had met him on the pages of FLOWERHAIR THE . . . something or other.  My memory was as sore as the rest of me.

“Defender,” he said.  It sounded like a title the way he said it.  But he said it the way a grunt might refer to an incompetent sergeant-major.

“Erk,” I said.

“Stay tha ’live long enough to take us out of here, eh?” he said.

I wanted to say “Where is here?” but I doubted I would find any answer illuminating.  The same went for “Where do you want to get to, exactly?”  Also “What do I have to do with it?”, but I wasn’t even tempted to ask that one.

I looked back at Monster.  One of my pet peeves about historical movies was the tack on the horses, which had usually come fresh from the Everything for the Horseperson warehouse just before filming started.  I didn’t know where I was or what century, or whether it was a century that had happened in the same timeline that I’d lived my life in up until recently, but Monster was not wearing a stainless-steel Pelham and a pony-club browband, which was obscurely cheering.  It shouldn’t have been:  if he were it might have meant that normal reality, despite all appearances to the contrary, was right around the corner.  If I could find the right corner.

The feeling of warm horsehair under my hand nearly undid me.  I wasn’t going to cry.  I’d cried enough lately—like I’d almost but not quite burst into hysterical laughter too much lately—I would quite like to stay alive long enough to get us out of here too.

“I’ll loft tha up,” said Thug #1, which is to say Murac.  The draggled-leather-and-beat-up-chain-mail person had disappeared back into the gloom;  Astur took hold of Monster’s reins.  Both of them turned to look at me.  Monster put his ears forward.  Despite his size he had fine small ears that pointed toward each other as he pricked them.

Reluctantly I looked back at Murac and Astur.  Murac was staring at me with what might be described as digusted dismay;  Astur was openly sneering.  Okay, I’m tallish and thinnish and a 34C.  Not impressive.  Even less impressive in a torn and dirty pink cotton nightgown decorated with rosebuds.  Extremely unimpressive in fact.  But . . .   I had a brief moment of sheer ugly fear but I more or less successfully banished it.  If they’d wanted to rape me, they’d have done it by now, and if they really thought I was this Defender person presumably they wanted to keep me undamaged.  Well, un-further-damaged.  I still tried not to shuffle my feet, and to find a more plausible-looking grip on poor Silverheart.

Murac made a not-bad attempt to blank out his expression, turned back toward Monster, bent, and cupped his hands.  He—reluctantly—glanced at me.  “Come tha on then,” he said.

More moaning

 

It’s raining again.

Pav is, of course, still in season.

Darkness is driving me bonkers.

Three is not the charm.

Diane in MN

Darkness is seriously lovelorn. Aaaaaaaaand has stopped eating altogether.

Darkness is not unique in this. Lovelorn boys frequently stop eating, so they can concentrate on the only and most wonderful girl in the world that you’ve hidden away somewhere.

Yes, I’ve met anguished canine swains before now, but they were not my problem.  Also, NORMAL dogs NORMALLY eat, so if they hit a FOOD IS THE ENEMY patch they don’t go skeletal in forty-eight hours.

EMoon

. . . I cannot imagine much worse than a bitch in heat . . . and two male dogs inside the house in a spell of rain and flooding. So the sympathy, and the awe that you are still sane dealing with it.

I AM NOT STILL SANE [she screamed].  NOT.  Not only is Darkness not eating* but he’s started doing this little tremulous singing thing that makes me want to kill.  him.

Diane in MN

Sometimes they start calling for their beloved.

AAAAAUGH.  This noise doesn’t even sound like a dog.  It sounds more like something hiding in the whooshing pine trees while Kes hides under the covers in her friend’s Adirondack cabin.  Unfortunately I know that it is a dog.  A dog that desperately wants to be TURNED INTO A HEARTHRUG.  He also just whines, of course.  I hate whining dogs.

(Sometimes she calls back. ::shudder::)

Well, Pav has occasional tantrums, but I think that’s about being locked up more than usual rather than about a woman wailing for her demon lover.  So to, um, speak.  But she’s not pushing at the boundaries of canine articulation the way (*&^%$££”!!!!!! Darkness is**.  I’ve ordered the bitch pants, rather after the fact, but this is only the second week and while with the luck I haven’t been having much of lately things will start to calm down the third week, if the pants*** arrive promptly I’ll still give ’em a try.†  It’s not like I don’t think I could stop anything happening before it finished happening—sometimes the size differential is your friend††—but I would expect the pants to muffle the effect somewhat, including [graphic description omitted because this is a family-friendly blog†††].

Meanwhile . . . I said it was RAINING?  It’s hammering it down out there again now—as I know because I’ve just been ferrying [sic] my assortment of hellish creatures back to the cottage in it, because I have a few more management choices at the cottage.  Hellterror has a brief sprint outside as a final opportunity for eliminatory functions;  hellhounds expect a ten-minute to quarter-hour stroll around the churchyard.   We are going to die.

We actually had a few hours of that random and not-entirely-persuasive phenomenon, sunlight, again earlier.  I took Peter to the farmer’s market and the hellhounds and I went on into Mauncester for a city walk.  Golly.  Egmont Street, pretty much at the bottom of the river valley, is sandbagged:  everybody’s gates and doorjambs are barricaded.  The river’s exploded its banks and sprawled across the road;  people in wellies briskly step over the sandbags at the doors and go about their business.  The river footpath that has been officially closed for some time now—that I have reported previously people are walking on anyway, self and hellhounds included, and splashing through the places where the river has climbed up to play with us—is now genuinely closed:  the footpath is a frelling millrace, and I am not exaggerating:  white water rafting at your doorstep.  You can’t even get to the red dedicated-dog-crap bin;  you have to go on to the next one.

And, speaking of dog crap. . . . If I don’t post tomorrow it’s because we never got back from the churchyard tonight. . . . ‡

* * *

* We had a brief exciting moment at lunch when, the hellgoddess having stuffed the first two mouthfuls down each of them, Darkness ate the last two by himself.^  And  therefore Chaos refused his, because we can’t have two hellhounds eating at the same time.

^ A four-mouthful lunch.  Yes.  We’re pretty much on starvation rations because as previously observed there’s a LIMIT to the amount of force feeding I’m willing to do.  If B_twin were here this week she might think about it a little longer before she said she’d seen skinnier dogs.

** I’ve tried singing (*&^%$££”!!!!!! Daaaaaarkness but it’s a little . . . screechy.

*** I went for their best-selling black with pink spots.  You did click through on that link the other night, didn’t you?

†  And there’s always next time.^  Yes I’ve thought of stowing her up at Third House but by next time that option shouldn’t be available . . . and I don’t actually like leaving a dog all by herself for long, especially one who isn’t used to it—especially one, furthermore, who is already being stressed out by her hormones—dogs are pack animals and some of the other three or four of us are pretty much always around in Pav’s life.  Also she has a rather majestic bark for something that weighs thirty pounds and I don’t want her making any unfortunate impressions on Third House’s neighbours.

But I’m certainly going to have to come up with A Plan.  But not until after the current epic is over:  I have no brain.  I’m as strung out as frelling Darkness.^^

^ I know I look like a clueless wonder not to have expected something like this . . . but dogs and bitches vary.  Sighthounds are often just not very engaged, as I have said, with things of the flesh, and the hellhounds’ attitude toward food might have led me to false hopes.  And I know dog people who have both genders entire in the same household and hair does not turn white overnight and nobody sleeps in a dustbin .  Of my three Darkness is the problem.  Pav is such a trollop anyway I can’t see a lot of difference, and when she protests her incarceration she just sounds CRANKY.  Chaos is certainly interested, and I wouldn’t leave him and Pav alone together (!!!!!!!!!!) but he’s not ruining anyone’s life over it.  Darkness is.  Mine.

That would be the human in supposed charge.  A well-padded dustbin with a soundproofed lid.

^^ Although I’m a little curious about the mechanism in my case.  Is it just that the situation is MY PROBLEM?  Am I picking up their stress level?  Are the pheromones—and to my dull human nose Pav only smells a little more strongly like she always does —winding me up in an unconscious UH OH TROUBLE way?  I would have thought excited mammalian hormones might have a generalised effect.

which just by the way isn’t much like the standard dog smell.  Maybe bullies are a different species.#

# Known, however, unfortunately, to breed successfully with dogs.

†† Diane in MN

Mind you, she’d have to stand on the sofa.

Maybe not. Two minds with but a single thought can perform surprising feats of cooperation, alas.

True.  I’m sure there are dachshund/Mastiff crosses out there.  But one has also seen, for example, a pony stallion giving his all between the tall thoroughbred mare’s thighs, and not where it’s going to do the job.  The point is that there is a sofa here, and I don’t want my reprobates figuring it out.

††† Although I was very impressed at the woman who tweeted me that she and her eight year old had enjoyed the Oatmeal link I posted the other night.

‡ I know, tomorrow is KES night, but you can’t murder me if I’ve been washed away now can you?

Whose idea was dogs?*

 

YAAAAAAH.  The balance of household horror has shifted:  the hellterror’s Swollen Bits have become less engorged and appear to be giving her less discomfort . . . but they have become ominously spongy and by the ratcheting up of the hellhounds’ concentration I would say The Time Is Now.  She’s easy—so to speak—she’s always been a shameless flirt** and now that she no longer wants to rip off the offending personal protuberance she seems to have reverted to her usual attitude which includes assuming there is the customary fun to be had caroming about the place and bouncing off hellhounds and furniture and why won’t I let her pursue this splendid and familiar course??  Furthermore Darkness, long proof against hellterror charms, is finally falling into line and I WON’T LET HER PLAY WITH HIM?  WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME??  A powerful aversion to the prospect of puppies is what’s wrong with me.  Chaos is still fairly la-la-la about the whole situation—Chaos, as previously observed, is chiefly interested in Chaos***—but Darkness is seriously lovelorn.  Aaaaaaaaand has stopped eating altogether.†

AND IT’S RAINING.  And raining and raining and raining AND RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAINING and rainingandrainingandrainingandrainingandraining and. . . .  Okay, it has been raining (and raining and raining) but I have MOSTLY been able to bolt out during brief cessations of the wet stuff whomping down from the scary-looking overhead and get my assortment of furry disasters hurtled.  I’ve mentioned here before that I’ve been mostly keeping (feeble) control of The Situation by making sure everyone is well hurtled,†† especially the hellterror, because she doesn’t get to riot around indoors as much as she’s used to.  Today I haven’t been able to get the multitudes out nearly enough.  YAAAAAAAAAAH.†††  Furthermore Pav’s even worse than the hellhounds about rain—come on you little madam, you’ve got fur dense as Goretex††† you are not going to melt—and there gets to be a limit to how far you’re willing to drag a four-legged breeze block that is causing further crater-like potholes with every resentful, resistant step.  She’d far rather go back indoors and RUN AROUND WITH THE HELLHOUNDS.  NOOOOOOOOOOOO.

Tomorrow has to be better.  Although the flood warnings are proliferating and getting closer and closer and closer and closer and we have a fresh prediction of gales tonight . . . .

* * *

* Whose idea was rain?^

^ God, you ratbag.  Don’t you know about subsurface irrigation systems?+

+ You ought to.  Presumably you invented them.

** Motto:  ‘whatever it is, flaunt it’

*** The reason he’s so stuck on me is because I am the Source of All Good Things as well as a few bad ones that he’s always trying to talk me out of.  Eating, for example.

† My hands are frelling chapped from the need to wash them thoroughly after each mouthful I stuff down a hellhound throat.  I only do one mouthful per hellhound at a time and go away—sometimes they eventually get bored and finish on their own.  But this makes for a lot of hand-washing.  Sigh.

†† As a result I’m a lot more thoroughly hurtled than seems to me at all necessary, especially when I’m a little dubious in the rude health department^ to begin with.  I tell myself that the more superfluous calories I burn off tottering after critters the more chocolate I can eat.

^ Rude, yes.  Health, no.

††† It’s funny, although with little ha-ha-ing to be had from it, we’re actually not that far off the standard daily hours of hurtling.  But there’s something very claustrophobic about the continuous thudding of the rain on the roof and the streaming of water down the windows and a louring grey sky so very low that you feel if you stretched your arm over your head you could poke a hole in it with your finger^.  Maybe it’s just watching the flood warnings creeping nearer and nearer—Warm Upford is already under water, for example, where we used to live—and wondering if the dog-food and chocolate delivery lorries are going to be able to keep to schedule.

^ Thus no doubt releasing a bruising cascade of additional rain

‡ AND FRELLING FRELLING FRELL DOES SHE SHED.  She sheds significantly more than both hellhounds together.  Wash hellhound blankets:  clean washing machine filter after.  Wash hellterror blanket:  pry open filter door^ wearing your flak jacket and shatterproof goggles and stand back.

^ I have raved here previously about the design idiocy involved but at least there is a filter:  most average UK-available washing machines don’t have them.

Opera. Yes.

 

I lay in bed last night listening* to Aethelstan playing chimney-pot rugby with his buds.  And today pretty much the entire Soggy Bottom road is under water, not just the bridge over the ford—and the lake at the Gormless Pettifogger** crossroads is back.  You can just turn around and go the other way, as some people do, and in another couple of inches I will too, but at the moment the small sea still passable by anyone who isn’t glamorously low-slung.  Wolfgang is neither glamorous nor low-slung.  So having ascertained there’s no one in the immediate vicinity who is going to plunge in before you, you take a deep breath, aim for the centre of the ominously shimmering water***, put your foot down and hold your nerve because your bow wave will briefly wipe out the view through your windscreen and if you stop you’ll stall.

Diane in MN

. . . Years ago, I took someone who didn’t have any experience of opera to see Butterfly, and it just about knocked her over. . . .

The first Butterfly I ever saw live, which was well into my opera-going career—largely because it wasn’t a favourite and so I wasn’t in any hurry to spend opera-ticket prices on it—included a Butterfly tittuping briskly onto the stage just before she sings Un bel di, wearing some kind of faux-Japanese footgear and . . . taking a spectacular header full length on the floor.  WHAM.  Ow.  Suzuki, who didn’t have a stage direction for this, just stood there with her mouth open†.  Butterfly, poor thing, pulled herself together, staggered to her feet . . . and sang.  In her defense, this was a touring company—I think it may have been the Met, back in the days when the Met still toured—so this was an unfamiliar stage with unknown hazards.   This sort of thing must happen to touring companies kind of a lot.  But I remember almost nothing else of the production—haven’t a clue who was singing, for example.

But opera doesn’t lend itself to realism (say I), it’s not what it’s for.

I think this is quite right. . . . I’ve always felt that the plots are secondary to the music anyway: the texts chosen by a composer might not hold up for a century or more, but the music is about emotional truth and that stays relevant and keeps us coming back.

Boldface mine.  TAKE THAT, RICHARD STRAUSS.  Yes.  Absolutely.  You can’t worship at—say—the Verdian shrine, which I do, faithfully, and maintain any dignity arguing in favour of equal textual validity.††  But the music is about emotional truth.  Yes.

Blondviolinist

. . . About ugly Americans and Kate showing up completely inappropriately off a US Navy warship… it’s an exotic opera, right? 19th (and early 20th) century Europe was obsessed with the Exotic Other… anyone outside the pale of “civilized” Europe. There are so many exotic tropes: childlike, naive (Butterfly) cruel, barbarian (Turandot), controlled by feelings more than reason (Butterfly and Turandot both), and over-sexualized (Pinkerton). The thing that’s hard to remember (at least if you’re American alive during US-as-world-superpower era) is that Pinkerton is every bit as exotic as Butterfly in that opera. It’s an Italian opera… Americans were exotic to Italians. So I don’t find it at all surprising that the librettist wouldn’t've checked his facts about who would’ve been allowed on a Navy warship: facts don’t matter when you’re writing about exotic peoples. They are the Other—we get to project on them whatever we want. . . .

I know you’re the professional musician with the PhD in music history and I’m not but . . . I don’t agree.  Or don’t accept this argument as adequate.  Chiefly for two reasons:  first.  Butterfly was written after the turn of the last century, and Puccini lived till the ‘20s.  I know they didn’t have the internet yet (!) but sheer bloody parochialism is always with us and is no excuse—just by the way, Americans are still exotic in, let’s say, rural Hampshire, England, in 2014, which blows my mind.  But a hundred years ago is not the Palaeolithic.  By 1900 you had precious little excuse for officially having no clue about the reality of other nations—or for not bothering to check big fat crude factoids like whether or not wives are permitted on US Navy warships.  Second.  These verismo bozos don’t get to have it both ways:  either there’s a veneer of genuine realism on their work or there isn’t.  I still call it a melodrama, not verismo†††, but part of what makes Butterfly both so effective and so infuriatingly manipulative is the gloss of ‘reality’.  The reason Butterfly works for me is because her role is so devastatingly magnificent:  her last aria, as she’s about to kill herself, is shattering.  And it carries me over seeing Kate trailing up the hill behind Pinkerton calling Butterfly!  Butterfly!  A lesser piece of work and Kate would throw me out of the story—and the agony—altogether.‡

I love Un Ballo in Maschera—which premiered the year after Puccini was born, in the mid-1800s—and that it’s supposedly laid in Puritan Boston doesn’t bother me in the slightest.  But, as I said about La Trav the other night, Verdi never wrote anything close to verismo as it’s usually defined:  he gets into people’s hearts amazingly‡‡ but most of his librettos are trash.  I’m also aware that Un Ballo got moved to a Boston locale for tricky European political reasons—speaking of exotic:  oh, the barbaric North Americans won’t care—but my point is it doesn’t matter.  It’s backdrop.  That’s all it is.  Fifty years later operas are beginning to be integrated into their storylines.  I know the march of progress isn’t a united front, but for example Jenufa was pretty much contemporary with Butterfly!!

And I’d better shut up before you get your PhD off the mantelpiece and wallop me with it. . . .

Bratsche

. . . my most common stabby thought while playing opera was always along the lines of “Can we PLEEEEASE stab the soprano now (maybe even by the end of the first act!) so we don’t have to play for her dying for the next 15 pages (exaggeration but not by all that much!)??” My biggest frustration with playing opera in general is that, yes, there are some absolutely ravishing parts of operas, but there is so much else that is just plain endurance on the part of the orchestra! At least the audience has the floor show (so to speak) to watch while the tenor or soprano repeats things over and over. . . .

NOOOOOOOO.  YOU ARE A PHILISTINE.  YOU ARE AN EVIL PHILISTINE RATBAG.  PUTTING MY FINGERS IN MY EARS SO I AM NOT HEARING YOU. LALALALALALALALALA.

Hey, that’s a thought.  It’s still (comparatively) early.  I could sing.

* * *

* ‘Sleeping’?  What would that be?

** Not my favourite pub.

*** Maybe it already is that extra couple of inches deep and I’m about to be very embarrassed and have to ring the RAC to send someone with chains and very high tailpipe clearance to rescue me.

† Not very living the role of her.

†† Ernani?  HAHAHAHAHAHAHA.  Il Trovatore?  HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. La Forza del Destino?  HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. . . . Stop, stop, you’re killing me. . . .

††† Il Tabarro?  Verismo?  Oh, right, wrapping your wife’s lover, whom you’ve just murdered, up in your cloak, so you can have the big reveal and spook her the frell out^, YES.  VERY REALISTIC.  VERY, VERY REALISTIC.  Melodrama.  One of the things that bites me about this story is that you have that sad and touching (in that manipulative way Puccini is so good at) scene earlier where the jerk of a husband turns all wistful and says they used to be happy together before the baby died and you think, oh, poor them, no wonder they’re having problems . . . and I’d even go with the murder.  Unhappy husband presented with worst fear:  his wife’s much-younger lover.  I DO NOT GO WITH THE WRAPPING THE CORPSE IN HIS CLOAK.  Husband is still wearing the cloak, you understand.  GROSS ME THE FRELL OUT.  Melodrama.

^ How to ruin someone’s day big time

‡ I may also be a trifle preoccupied with what a thankless role Kate’s is as it’s usually presented.

‡‡ I will take one Verdi to seventeen Puccinis any day.  Just by the way.

 

Previous caveats apply

 

Aethelstan is still out there, and his friends have brought friends.  We lost power for about fifteen minutes an hour or so ago while this laptop was turned off, unplugged and in my knapsack.  Therefore I suspect the Peculiar Way It Is Behaving–and the way the internet keeps cutting out–is not its fault.  If I don’t post later, it’s because I can’t.

A Day Almost Entirely without Incident

 

. . . except for Hurricane Aethelstan throwing himself around out there tonight, stomping and shouting, him and his chums, all of whom have loud voices and big feet.*  You know there was actual SUNLIGHT in Hampshire earlier today?  Sunlight.  Thrilling.  Random people on the street smile at you under such extraordinary conditions.**  It couldn’t last, of course.  Aethelstanian rain bangs against the door so hard it’s driven in over the sill, and the next morning your draught excluder will be soaking wet.

But earlier today I celebrated.  I hung laundry.  I went to the bank.  I bought dental floss.***  I did a lot of hellcritter hurtling.   Pav is, of course, still on heat, which means the hellpack are not doing much milling around together indoors, not because of the risk of literal puppies—it’s not like I EVER leave them alone EVER EEEEEEEEVER†—but because it makes the hellhounds anxious.  They’re pretty sure they should be doing something but they don’t know what it is.  Fortunately.  Chaos, who is chiefly absorbed in the thoughts [sic], feelings and immediate comfort of Chaos, is pretty willing to let whatever it is get on with whatever it is.  He’s also the one who has quite a lot of time for a manic hellterror under ordinary circumstances and he’s a little befuddled by current events but . . . hey.  Darkness, however, is disconcerted and disoriented—and very interested in the hellterror, for whom he has no use during the rest of their lives together under the same roof, interested in a shiny alert way I don’t like at all:  it reminds me of a stallion pulling his top line together to show off to a mare.  Darkness is the thinker of my little hellpack.  He may not know what sex is, but he’d figure it out, if I gave him the opportunity.  I am not giving him the opportunity.††

Still.  Barring the major rolling-eyed moan from Darkness every morning when he wakes up and she’s still there and she’s still giving off all those PHEROMONES I don’t really think either of the boys is all that bothered.††† The poor hellterror herself, however, doesn’t like whatever this is MAKE IT GO AWAAAAAAAAAAY.  She is, for her, subdued.  She is spending more time in her crate but ordinarily if I’ve, you know, lost track of time a little, there will be reminders that there is a crated critter nearby who feels that she has been crated long enough.  I am taking both hellcritter shifts out for longer and/or more frequent hurtles—WHICH IS INTERESTING IN THIS WEATHER‡—while I’m necessarily keeping them mostly separate and she’s not hucklebutting and she checks back to make sure I’m still on the other end of the lead far oftener than usual.  And she does not like that Swollen Thing attached to her back end.‡‡  I’m hoping this is adolescence.  If she’s miserable every time she’s in season I’ll have to make up my mind about that litter sooner rather than later, because I will have her spayed.

* * *

* Maybe they’re responsible for the knee-deep craters in the drive out by the gate into the parkland around the Big Pink Blot and its mews.  I assume that after the first person dents his or her Jag or Mercedes wheel rim on one of these extreme potholes something will be done.

** And at least you can see the random dogs coming from farther away in good light.

*** I had a cruise through the newsagent’s for new knitting magazines.  No new knitting magazines.  Sob.

† If I need thirty seconds to have a pee, I take Pav with me.  It’s okay, she’s easily amused.

†† Mind you, she’d have to stand on the sofa.  I suspect the ‘no dogs on the sofa unless invited by a human’ rule would slip their minds.

††† There are sex-machine sighthounds, but I think they’re rare.  Certainly the ones I’ve had anything to do with have been, at most, gentlemanly, and sheer indifference is not unknown.  Sighthounds are just not creatures of the flesh:  food.  Meh.  Sex.  Meh.  And there are many sighthound bitches notorious for coming into season invisibly—and out again stealthily, leaving the owner hoping for puppies at a loss [sic] again.  Who, me, boss?  Not me.  You’re thinking of some other bitch.  That nice spaniel, maybe.  She looks pretty hot.

‡ We had another epic downpour last night and the bridge over the ford at the Soggy Bottom end of town—the bridge that not long ago had enough water running over it that it came over the tops of the rubber edges of your All Stars—is now ANKLE DEEP.  No lie.  And blasting downhill like an Olympic slalom team.  Don’t go there.

‡‡ I do know that bitch pants exist.^  If she keeps her lady bits we’ll probably eventually go there.  I admit I don’t much fancy convincing her to wear them—this is the hellterror I can’t leave in her harness unsupervised for twenty seconds because she will eat it—but there’s also the fact that since she’s already oppressed by biology I don’t want to make it worse.

^ You can even get cute ones.  http://www.nappypantsfordogs.com/bitch-in-season-pants-8-c.asp

And speaking of the gruesome realities of critters, this+ made me laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh . . . but WARNING TO ANYONE OF A SENSITIVE [critter-free] NATURE:  YOU PROBABLY DON’T WANT TO READ THIS.  YOU SHOULD GET ON WITH YOUR KNITTING OR HAVE A NICE CUP OF TEA OR SOMETHING.

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/dog_paradox

+ Thank you southdowner and b_twin

Note

 

The lights are flickering madly on and off as Hurricane Aethelstan flails around out there, jumping in the ever-deepening puddles and whacking the trees with his big stick.  If there’s no proper post after this it’s because I’m off the air.  Curled up in bed with a good book and fresh batteries for my torch I hope.

A few more of the many aspects of voice lessons

 

Radio Three’s Live from the Met[ropolitan Opera] series has semi-migrated this season.  Sometimes it happens on Saturday as it always has, and which I admit is no longer ideal because I’m at the monks’ for most of it;  but sometimes it happens on Monday.  I am not in favour of the Metrofrellingitan Opera hammering me on a Monday.  I have my dinglefarbing voice lesson on Mondays.  I am feeling fragile on Monday evenings* when it comes on, if it’s a Met Monday night.  It was tonight.  And it was Madama Butterfly, for pity’s sake, one of the hugest soprano roles in the flapdoodling repertoire.**   I’ve decided to devote the rest of my life to collecting pieces of string too short to save.

I went in to Nadia today saying, I am having a crisis.  As crises go it is not an important crisis and since I have no intention of giving up singing it’s not really a crisis at all but I listened to my recording of last week’s lesson and TELL ME WHY I AM BOTHERING. 

She said, I wondered if I should let you tape last week.  You have a lot going on in your life right now and it’s sitting on your voice.  Yes, you have tuning problems, and you have a habit of going flat when you’re under stress, that’s you holding on.  You’ll get over this.  That’s why you’re bothering.  (Also, you love to sing.)  And right now?  Don’t obsess.  It’s the SITUATION.  It’s not YOU and it’s NOT YOUR VOICE.   Sing.  Keep singing.  Um, try to enjoy it?

I stared at her, wondering how much I was going to risk believing.  Okay, I said.  But . . . how do you STAND it?  I sound dreadful.

Only to you, she said.  Yes, you’re flat a lot of the time.  Yes, you sound worse than you did two months ago.  But I can hear a lot more than you can hear.  I can hear what’s underneath what’s weighing on you right now.

. . . Okay.  Just to be going on with, I’m going to believe her. . . .***

 * * *

* Fragile isn’t really the right word.  ‘First cousin to chopped liver’ might be closer.  It astounds me that I used to go bell ringing regularly on Monday nights, after Nadia.  I have thought that it was a sign that either the ME or old age was creeping up on me that I can’t any more but I think in truth it’s that I’m investing more in my voice lessons.  I’m not becoming a great singer, but something is sure getting winkled out of hiding and integrated with the rest of me.  This is a tiring process.

** I’m a late convert to Puccini.  I’ve always liked Boheme, but I was also always a little cranky about what seemed to me the bogus gloss of verismo, and yes, I know, Puccini gets on the list of verismo opera composers, it’s what he does.^  But stick to the tragic love story and let the poor starving artists thing be a little background colour, okay?  You can still bump Mimi off.  Violetta dies of consumption too and no one has ever accused La Traviata of being verismo.

But I failed to warm to Butterfly.  The ugly American aspect got on my nerves and Pinkerton bringing his wife along on his US Navy warship is a piece of suspension of disbelief I am incapable of.^^  And I always found Butterfly herself way too much of a blunt instrument for thwacking the audience into Tragic Mode.  ALL RIGHT.  I GET IT.  NOW BACK OFF.  I also heard Butterfly the first thirty times or so with Renata Scotto singing it and—sue me—I’ve never liked her voice.

I’m not sure what happened.  But ten or fifteen or twenty years ago—it was in England but at the old house—Un bel di, that old war horse among old war horses, Butterfly’s most famous aria and one of the most famous tunes in opera^^^, came on Radio Three and it stopped me dead in my tracks.  Oh.  I can’t even remember who was singing it.  (Not Renata Scotto.)  But .  . . oh.

The problem with having come round to Butterfly, however, is that the opera really is that emotionally manipulative and if you go along with it you squirt out the other end and fall with a splat like the last squeeze in an old tube of toothpaste.

^ Uh huh.  Now let’s talk about Turandot and ::PET PEEVE ALERT:: the homicidal fairy-tale princess who kills a lot of guys but is INSTANTLY CONVERTED TO SWEET FEMININITY BY TRUE LOVE’S KISS and everybody lives happily ever after, except, of course, all the dead guys, including the slave girl she tortured to death because the princess is a bad loser.  No amount of fabulous music can save this libretto and Puccini loses a lot of points for trying.

And Tosca?  Verismo?  Please.  A famous opera singer, her famous painter lover who is doing well enough to own a villa and the sociopathic chief of police.   And all of these people eat, wash, sleep and dress well.  It’s a melodrama.#

# I admit I can’t actually think of many operas I’m willing to call verismo.  Carmen, certainly.  Cavalieri Rusticana, which kind of started it all.  Maybe Pagliacci, which CR is often paired with.  Um . . . ~  But opera doesn’t lend itself to realism (say I), it’s not what it’s for.  Melodrama is what it’s for.  All these ridiculous people bursting into song all over the shop.  It’s a tough job for realism.

~ McKinley, stop thinking.  You have to go to bed.

And that it killed him is no excuse.

^^ Do your frelling homework.  Show me a maker-up-of-things, and I’m assuming it’s as true for painters and sculptors and performance artists as it is for writers, and I’ll show you someone who has got it wrong in public in ways that, if they are prone to insomnia, keep them awake at night.   But at least check the obvious stuff, okay?   Cheez.

Ask me how I know this.

Illustrators who blithely draw dogs and horses and haven’t bothered to make sure they know where the joints in their legs are should be . . . made to hose down kennels and muck out stalls and hang out with the occupants of each till they learn better.  There’s always a shortage of critter-care staff.  So these pinheads could be contributing to society while they de-embarrass themselves.  Call it a work-study programme.

^^^ And I’m sure it’s been used to sell loo rolls and coffee grinders and lawn mowers.

*** And while I was mostly still flat—and it’s not like I don’t know I have tuning problems, especially when I’m upset about something or feel overfaced by what I’m trying to learn to sing, BUT TAPING MY LAST TWO LESSONS HAS BEEN REVELATORY AND NOT IN A GOOD WAY—Nadia had a very good go today at releasing some of the seethe that’s going on under the lid I’ve involuntarily slammed over myself:  by the end of the lesson I was making my own ears ring.^

My warm-up exercises hadn’t started off too well and Nadia stopped, looked thoughtful, and said, what’s your favourite swearword?

Um, I said.  *&^%.

Okay, she said.  You’re going to sing *&^% on a descending scale.  Go.

*&^% *&^% *&^% *&^% *&^% *&^% *&^% *&^% /!!!!!!! I sang.

Excellent, said Nadia.  Now let’s try a song.

^ I didn’t tape it today. . . .