Not bluffing

 

Much too tired again.  Bleaugh.  Even a hardened old veteran of the Story Wars such as myself eventually grows weary of being pummelled, throttled and stomped by Work in Progress.  Yo, didn't your mother teach you any manners?  It's probably my fault—I didn't raise PEG I right and PEG II is determined to outdo the older sibling in heinousness and writer persecution.  Maybe I should complain more, play for pity.  Ohhhhhhhh, singing, what misery.  Ohhhhhhh, bell ringing, what wretchedness and suffering.  Ohhhhhhhh, roses, it's all blackspot* and thorns.

            I was out carolling to the hellhounds (and the sheep) this morning, and I thought, Wait a minute, why doesn't this count as warm-up?  And while I don't know why, I bet it has something to do with the over thinking thing.  Just singing for fun?  I what?   No no no.  Not on the permitted list.  Okay, now tell me why—and I'm aware that I'm not alone in this—as soon as I decide that I want to learn to do something better it immediately stops being fun and becomes hard and earnest and work?  I know that responsibility and application—and obstinacy—are good things, generally, but is it really necessary that they stomp** all the fun out? 

            Oh gods, it's already Thursday again the day after tomorrow and I'll have FORGOTTEN EVERYTHING when I go back to the Muddlehamptons.  AAAAUGH.***

Mismatched Socks says:

My teacher used to have me practice singing a piece entirely on the vowels, because it forced me to pay attention to them. It's harder than it sounds, at least until you get used to thinking about vowels all the time.

Nadia had me try to sing a few lines of The Ash Grove—Eeeeaaaaoooo—only on the vowels a fortnight ago.  It was extremely ridiculous.  But occasionally when out hurtling—and singing something I don't quite remember the lyrics to—I shift over to vowels, rather than singing la la la or unnnnnnh.  Just for laughs.  But it gives me a good excuse to drop my jaw and Make Space for the Sound.  Which is another of Nadia's things.  Also, if I don't know what the words are, I can choose my vowels.

Diane in MN

I have been taking dogs into conformation rings for almost twenty years, and self-consciousness and over-analysis and too much thinking about it accompany me every damn time, so if you get the trick of doing this, I will congratulate you wholeheartedly and then ask what is it? Interestingly enough, I don't feel this way when I go into an obedience ring, even though the potential to be made a fool of by the dog is much greater. Resigned to the inevitable, I suppose.

But isn't it also to do with the fact that you have more to do in the obedience ring?  The outcome has at least some more to do with what you do?  As I understand it, conformation is rather awfully a crap shoot a lot of the time, and you're almost totally at the mercy of the judge's own views on the matter.  With obedience while there's certainly (too much) room for interpretation (I know this with great gruesome clarity from dressage tests) but you do have to be able to heel and sit and stay and so on (or walk, trot, canter, and make round circles), and you know the result if you fail.  There's something for your brain to do.† 

            The trick, I assume, in frelling singing like in frelling everything frelling else, is going to be learning where to put my brain, so it can do the most good and the least harm possible.  If I learn that trick I will certainly let you know.

E Moon

David is also a fan of bluffing. My problem is that most of the time, when he says "Pretend you're an opera singer" my brain sees a vast stage populated by real singers, all properly costumed and made-up and with bios in the program, and a highly critical audience out front, all dressed up, and overweight & aged me in jeans and T-shirt and my mud-stained, manure-stained shoes, my bare face hanging out and my hair scraped back into its usual "three pins will hold it" knot, and I open my mouth and squeak.

Occasionally–very occasionally–I can take on the persona briefly, but at that point my music-reading brain unhooks from my voice (opera singers already know the music, right?) and I start making up what I'm singing instead of singing what's in the score. If I play the part, some part of me knows it's fake, and plays it for laughs.

You're not helping, you know.  You're not helping at all. 

            In the first place, you have an excellent bio.  How many books have you written?  In the second place, overweight is far from either unknown or a source of discrimination in the opera world.  And you brush up just fine, or people wouldn't keep asking you to cons. 

            And speaking of cons, you're not going to try to b*llsh*t me that you don't have a public persona, are you?  Please.  The trick here—for you and me both—is tweaking the writer-persona into a shape we can use for singing.  Unfortunately the 'earning a living by SALES OF BOOKS' doesn't work as spur here. 

            I've always loved dressing-up—preferably inappropriately††—and one of the less gratifying aspects of choir membership is the extremely boring clothing most choirs seem to expect their members to wear for public performances.  White shirts and black trousers or skirts:  Yuck.  One of the few compensations—indeed inducements—for having to go be an author in public is getting to wear silly clothing.  Hmmph.

            But . . . yeah.  The curse of an overactive imagination.  I'm extremely sorry to hear that you still have squeaking problems.  I don't want to squeak!  No squeaking!  I don't want to hear about squeaking! 

Ajlr

Apropos of the being able to write anywhere, do you also find that the Story – whether the current one or something else that tries to elbow its way in – also can arrive when you're anywhere? You've described in the past how some of your most useful development times can come with hurtling the hellhounds and I wondered if a (fairly) long period of such simple (!) physical movement allows you to listen more productively than, say, a series of shorter and more mixed activities?

Yes.  Anywhere.  The more inconvenient the better.  And yes, I'm probably at greater, ahem, risk out hurtling—overactive body like overactive mind (see above).  Hurtling gives my body something to do so it's not fidgeting and I can think of other things without having constantly to mind [sic] it. . . .  For example I'm trying to write a guest blog about the stories that folk songs tell—the story-telling aspect appeals to me as much as the music carrying it along, and my favourite folk songs are almost invariably ones that also tell a good story—and this morning while hurtling I was entirely deflected from both the guest blog and PEG FRELLING II by a story arriving unheralded but with a decisive thump in response to listening for the 1,000,000th time to an old folk song that has always bothered me because it tells the story wrong.  Now, do I want to risk pissing PEG II off even more by taking a day to scratch an outline down? 

 * * *

* http://www.gardenersworld.com/how-to/problem-solving/rose-blackspot/

Also rust:  http://www.gardenersworld.com/how-to/problem-solving/rose-rust/

And mildew:  http://www.gardenersworld.com/how-to/problem-solving/rose-powdery-mildew/

There are plenty of others, but these are the big three.  Unless you choose badly, are very unlucky, or have a ratbag climate, roses are not hard, as I keep saying.  But anything that puts on a flower show as spectacular as roses do needs liberal amounts of food and water.  If they don't get them the evil blackspot, rust and mildew fairies will likely visit your garden.  And gardening organically does mean that you will probably have some spots and speckles however well you take care of your roses.  The rose world is catching on to the need to breed for disease resistance rather slowly.  Even a mere twenty years ago when I was first buying hundreds of roses and then watching kind of a lot of them turn funny colours and keel over, the philosophy was that you had to spray . . . and breeders didn't give a damn about anything but how spectacular the flowers were.  This is changing.  But not fast enough.

** Speaking of stomping 

*** And furthermore I'll have just come from my first handbells in a fortnight and that is sure to have been chastening, if not downright traumatic.

† Forget the test route.

            I've also trotted a few horses around a conformation ring and hated it.  The perceived helplessness not only makes me a bigger klutz, it makes me stupid. 

 †† Generally speaking I find being old much to be preferred over being young, but it does make me sad that I'm too old to wear my barely-butt-covering black leather mini any more.  Okay, probably too old.  I did say 'inappropriately'.