Round-up Sunday

 

 You know, like leftovers for supper.  Sometimes it's really good leftovers.

 First.  In response to loud public outcry*, here at last is the paragraph Peter wrote about how he came to write In Defense of Rubbish: 

Following the reference in R's blog I've been reading that stuff I wrote about rubbish.  It was an accident that has haunted me for forty-odd years.  My second, or maybe third book was on the short list for the Carnegie medal.  At that time the medal meant nothing to me, I'd never heard of it, but as a result I was asked to speak at a conference on children's literature in Exeter.  I said I'd talk about science fiction.  Rash.  I'd read very few contemporary children's books (Alan Garner's  Elidor is the only one I remember now, none of them was SF).  The result was unsurprisingly thin.  Anyway, when I got to Exeter I was out of my depth.  The atmosphere was bafflingly intense.  A passing remark of William Mayne's at some previous conference was quoted in a reverent half-whisper.  I felt more and more depressed and irritated and out of place, and almost at the last minute decided to bulk out my feeble essay on SF by saying something about my feelings.  There wasn't time to do anything more than scribble a few notes, and then I had to make it up as I went along.  I got some laughs (that line about Paradise Lost in haiku was part of what I said) and a bit of applause when it was over, and felt nothing but relief that I seemed to have got away with it.  But then teachers and librarians started coming up to me and telling me that it really needed saying and asking for copies, and I had to tell them there weren't any.  That didn't solve anything.  Once home I started getting letters asking for permission to reprint in a collection of kidlit pieces the writer was putting together, some of them explaining that they needed a devil's advocate viewpoint to balance things out, and there wasn't anything else available.** So I had to try and cobble something together, but I couldn't of course reproduce the crazed improvisatory zest of the original talk. I know I had more than one go at it. I can't remember where the version on my website came from.  The copyright date refers to the time when I was compiling the website, so I may have had a final go then.  I'm relieved to see it's nothing to be ashamed of.

Second:  I've been meaning to post this . . . well, since BlueRoseNZ tweeted it.***  http://www.tor.com/blogs/2010/09/two-beauties-two-beasts-robin-mckinleys-beauty-and-rose-daughter 

What I find most attractive about it is that it's written with such, ahem, intelligence.  This is more unusual than it should be in book reviewing, it seems to me—this is why I so rarely read my own reviews:  I don't need the kick in the head.†  Maybe it's because Walton is herself a writer.  I think she's dead on about the differences between the two books—and the similarities, although I'd never quite said to myself that the beats fall in the same places.  I suppose I'd say . . . well, of course.  That's the heart of the story.†† 

           I am, however, appalled at the suggestion of Stockholm syndrome:  and can Walton have missed that each Beast takes some pains to tell his Beauty that the threat to kill her father was empty, and that she doesn't have to marry him?  I also hesitate to reiterate the obvious, but these are novels based on a fairy tale:  and the rules are different.   The Beast is (literally) a monster with (literally) a human heart and, as such, desperate:  hence the ugly behaviour and (empty) threats.  To me his age doesn't reflect  how much older he is than Beauty as much as it does the depth of his despair—and how long it took him to learn to be 'human' again.  (The Beauty in ROSE DAUGHTER hasn't only been there a week in a getting-to-know-the-chap manner.  It's, you know, a metaphor.  Jeweltongue even says Beauty's been gone seven months.)

           I've thought about whether or not I noticed the creepy overtones of how girl meets boy [sic].  Erm.  I would have said I did, actually, that that's a lot of where the story comes from:  the horrible with the good.  Is the Beast a good guy or a bad guy?  How do you tell?  Are you betraying yourself if you fall in love with the guy who tricked you?  (How do you tell?)  But where people's creeped-out lines run vary—even within the liberating confines of fairy tale.  My lines run past the heroines who don't talk:  the girl with the twelve swans for brothers, who has to weave shirts out of nettles and can't talk.  And the king marries her anyway.  Ewwww.  A big, a really, really, really big thing for me about Beauty and the Beast is that they talk:  they do get to know each other.

           I was also thinking about my first exposure to fairy tales when I was a little American girl in the '50s.  I don't know how old Walton is, or what it was like over here, or what her first book of fairy tales was, or why one grabbed her rather than another.  I've told this story many times before—Andrew Lang's Beauty and the Beast sank through my skin and became My Story more or less on contact.  Maybe I was built that way anyway—but the other thing, the huge thing, is that as a little American girl in the '50s this was the FIRST fairy tale I'd read where the girl does something.  She chooses to take responsibility for what happened to her father, and goes off to the castle to face the Beast.  She doesn't just passively react, like the swan-brother girl with her blistered hands.  SHE DOES SOMETHING.    Everything else, for me, is kind of by the way.  

And last but not least, in response to my blog last night about semi-attending a music seminar, EMoon posted this to the forum: 

Growing up, we had the piano my mother could almost nearly afford: a Baldwin Acrosonic spinet. Nice little piano, on which I learned what I learned, and faked what I didn't. (I didn't learn to read music well at all, with only a year and a half of instruction, but I played by ear…) We had a lot of fun with it; in the days when people would sing around a piano for fun, friends did so. I had that piano here when we first moved here, and our son started on it (and if he had not developed language might well have become a musical savant–at five he was playing along with a recording of Moussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition.")                                                                                                                           

           Then one evening we'd gone to a nearby town with a mall to eat at the cafeteria (practice in eating out for autistic kid.) Across from the cafeteria was a piano store. Up front was a used Steinway baby grand. I made the mistake of walking up to it. Every rational neuron in my brain screamed "Don't touch it, don't listen to it." Every string in my heart yearned. The salesman said "Would you like to play it?" I did, just a little. Enough to hear its tone. Her tone (her name is The Duchess. She is quite firm with me about some sloppy habits I'd developed on the spinet.) 

           I told myself, firmly, that I wasn't good enough to deserve such a piano. I went home and called two friends and said "Tell me not to buy this piano" (with, no doubt, naked longing in my voice) and they both said "Buy that piano." And one said "And if you need some help…"

            I called the piano store the next morning, and then got organized to drive over to that town. And discovered that to buy a Steinway, I could not wear jeans (in which I live) because this was a Steinway and it deserved respect. I wore a nice skirt. And lady shoes. And wrote the check with trembling hand.

             The Duchess deserves a better pianist (I'm still lousy, though playing little tiny elementary Bach things on her is sheer delight.) The Duchess deserves a better room with better acoustics. The Duchess deserves someone who has time to practice daily. But she sings to me when I do play, and I feel connected to Real Music with her. She gave me courage to try for a better choir.

             Yes, indeed…get the best instrument you can afford, whatever your instrument is, because it will exert moral force to improve your musicianship. †††

 I love this story.  And, EMoon, I'm so glad you have a good piano. ‡

* * *

 * Thank you! 

** Peter and I have just had a ROW about this line.  I keep saying, it's not only that they wanted a devil's advocate.  It's also that they agreed with you.  Peter keeps saying, It doesn't matter if they agreed with me!  There was nothing else available so they had to use it or have nothing on the other side!  I say, They wouldn't care there was nothing on the other side if they didn't think the other side was worth arguing for!  Peter says, It's only that it was the only thing available!  Peter is doing his Disappearing Englishman trick.  It's not that he's a good writer and has a good point to make.  It's that they were stuck with him.  That explains the two Carnegies that he did win too, you know.  There just weren't any other books published those years and the judges had to give the medals to somebody.  Gah. 

*** Thank you! 

† Not that bad reviews can't be intelligent.  But I will remind you of what I have often said on this subject, which is that so few reviewers have got alongside the author before they start in on what the author did wrong that all that is left is the kick in the head:  there isn't anything useful there, and kicks hurt.  I will add that while praise for the wrong thing is a lot easier to handle, it's still very unsettling.  And carries with it the discomfiting possibility that the reader in question will eventually notice that you're not writing the books she thinks she's reading, and then she'll get cross because you aren't writing the books she wants to read.^  And then she'll tell you you did it wrong.^^

^ If I get one more comment on how swoony and sexy Con is I may . . . try to get a place at the Royal Academy and make a late-life career change to piano accompanist.

^^ I say she, because the majority of my readers are female.  I'd say a higher percentage of my fewer male readers complain, but I could be mistaken. 

††If I do it again, as I threatened to in the afterword to ROSE DAUGHTER, the 'beats' will fall in the same places again.  Although I could probably get a blog post out of why I think this isn't the full, hmm, story—about what happens when you sit down and literally tell the same story again.  And she's right of course about SUNSHINE.  That's why one of the stories Sunshine tells the Be—I mean, the vampire, in the beginning, is Beauty and the Beast, and why she wonders if an illustrator has ever made the Beast a vampire.  Yes I know what I'm doing.^  Well, sometimes.  Sort of.^^ 

^ Heavens.  I may have just had a small but perfectly formed revelation on why I like, and like working with, enforced getting-to-know-yous, like Beauty and the Beast—and SUNSHINE—and JANE EYRE.  Stay tuned. 

^^ And no this does not mean that I'm just not telling you that she ends up with Con at the end of the sequel that I haven't written.     

††† I felt a little guilty about my rant last night about buying a good piano.  Even a cheap Steinway—which my 1897 upright is, as Steinways go—is a major chunk of change.  Lots and lots of people flatly don't have the cash.  I'm not totally clueless about this.^  But the principle remains the same:  buy the best instrument you possibly can, because it'll boomerang on you and make you take your music more seriously.  I'm sure EMoon is telling the literal truth when she says her piano inspired her to try for a better choir;  I wonder if I'd be composing if I were still using my faithful old bottom-of-the-range electric keyboard.  I can pretty much guarantee I wouldn't be singing.  And there are sometimes ways to get at good instruments if you're determined enough.  If you take lessons, for example, try to impress the hell out of your teacher with your earnestness if not your talent, and he may, as Oisin did, let you practise on his piano sometimes.  

^ I was so frelling poor for so frelling long.  

‡ Drat.  Still haven't written about author self-promotion.  Tomorrow—!