Excitements, various and noisy

 

Looky looky looky at what arrived today!*  YAAAY!  (The hand, please note, is just to give you a sense of scale, although if you choose to admire the pink and purple stripes you are welcome to do so.)   I know Putnams has all sorts of plans about Fabulous Robin McKinley Publicity Packs, but I feel we are going to have to have a signed poster contest on the blog some day soon.

            And PEGASUS gets a starred review from PW [Publishers Weekly, the big American trade mag]:

Leisurely in its pacing, but rich in language and character development, this lovely tale concerns young Princess Sylvi and her singular bond with her pegasus, Ebon. Humans and pegasi have maintained an alliance against their land's other murderous species–taralians, norindours, and rocs–over many centuries, despite an almost complete inability to communicate with each other except, with great difficulty, through the aid of human magicians. But Sylvi and Ebon are different. From the moment they meet, they form a telepathic bond, something that could be a boon to both species. The powerful magician Fthoom, however, seeing their relationship as both heresy and a danger to the magicians' power, has vowed to end it. McKinley (Chalice) does a wonderful job of developing the pegasi culture, particularly their art and largely gestural language, as Sylvi and Ebon's relationship grows over the course of several years. Because this is only the first part of what is presumably a two-volume novel, readers may find the book's inconclusive ending frustrating**. Despite this, it's an enchanting fantasy that the author's many fans will love.

And in other local news . . .

            I sang for Oisin today.  Yes.  Truly.  LA LA LA LA LA LA.  Well, no, actually:  I sang that old warhorse of mezzo warhorses Che Faro Senza Eurydice and Finzi's Fear No More the Heat o' the Sun, which is usually sung by a baritone but hey.

             And we both survived.***   More or less. †  After last week's dire and horrifying challenge I have been singing rather earnestly this week, which is to say trying to claw back some of what Blondel could manage to trick out of me on a good day.  ARRRRGH.  And then this morning I overslept again and when I got down to the mews post-hurtle and was wrapping myself around some much needed caffeine while I checked my email and calculated that I could just about manage to get hellhounds fed and do a little pre-Oisin warm-up . . . there was an email from Oisin asking if I could come early. 

            I was not quite as early as requested and when I got there he was playing some scary thing on the organ, so I sidled past him and put my music on the piano bench—well muffled up so if you weren't actually expecting there to be sheet music present you wouldn't necessarily notice the presence of sheet music.  Then he played some other scary thing on the organ while I listened to my blood pressure rise and then he turned to me with an evil look comprised of three parts Fu Manchi, two parts Blofeld and a ghastly dash of Robert Mitchum in The Night of the Hunter, and asked me what we were doing today.

            And so, beaten, I unwrapped my music.  I had kept, ahem, forgetting to make copies for my accompanist, and had thought that I would race back to the cottage last thing and do it on my way, but this early deal had spoilt that plan.  But I didn't seriously expect this to foil the diabolical Oisin:  he has the technology.  He made his own copies.††

            On a scale of one to ten. . . . Uh.  Well, with Florence Foster Jenkins††† as one and Beverly Sills as ten. . . . No!  No!  I don't want to go there!  I can carry a tune!‡  That means I have more in common with Sills than Jenkins!  It does!  Oisin, of course, half ruptured himself being encouraging, but then he would.  And I have to say it's rather incredibly glorious having a proper accompanist.  It's a little ridiculous, like driving a Lamborghini to the farm store to buy compost for your thirteen million tiny seedling pansies, but it's pretty frelling nice.‡‡  We may even do it again.

            And now Oisin owes me a blog post.

 * * *

* Also . . . thirteen million more pansies.  I tweeted earlier that I CAN'T have ordered this many, and I'm sure all my Twitter followers sniggered to themselves.  Well . . . I HADN'T ordered them.  I hadn't.  I opened the first box with a sinking heart.  It contains my MYSTERY PLANTS!  TO THANK ME FOR BEING SUCH A GOOD CUSTOMER!  THEY'VE SENT ME FIFTY WALLFLOWERS.  FIFTY.  I can use about twelve . . .  except I've already GOT twelve, I put them in last winter and they've pretty much flowered all year, and I have no intention of taking them out while they're still on a roll.

            So, after clutching the kitchen counter and sobbing for several minutes I turned to the other boxes.  There are three of them, all taped^ together.  Only the top box has my address on it, and none of them have any labels whatsoever.  I opened them.  Pansies.  Yup.  More pansies.  Unknown pansies.  Lots and lots of unknown pansies.  Finally, in the bottom of the first box I find a small, damp, muddy sheet of paper.  It says:  we are very sorry we cannot send you the four Piccadilly Peccadillo pansies you ordered as part of the dozen total mixed tray of Piccadilly Peccadillo, Bilateral Bandolier, and Ratbag Rosencavalier pansies.  So because we're so nice we have sent you twelve MORE Piccadilly Peccadillos and nine hundred and forty-two Toxic Pterodactyls which you've never heard of, aren't on our web site AND we aren't going to tell you what colour(s) they are Mwa ha ha ha ha ha.  

^ Prodigiously taped.  Fearsomely taped.  Whoever did the taping believes in the Great Postal Dragons.  In fact may have a personal vendetta with the Great Postal Dragons.  Maybe we should start a club.  I wonder if the same dragons eat mail-order plants as eat books?  Or do they specialise, like different bees specialise in different flowers? 

** 'Frustrating' is the polite version.  I'm just hoping to escape without blood loss. 

*** I'm not really waiting for the polite little email from his wife saying that the Octopus and Chandelier is unexpectedly oversubscribed, and while they deeply appreciate my willingness to give up my Sunday afternoons for four months to be in the back row of the chorus, my presence will not be required.  Don't come, okay?  Don't show up.   

† Although I did catch him whispering to his wife just before I left.

†† Except for the leaving out of one page of Che Faro part.  Oh, never mind, he said, I'll make something up.^  And he'd've got away with it if that old sneakypants Gluck hadn't gone and written a new bit at the bottom.  WHICH I HAD TO SING UNACCOMPANIED.  I GET EXTRA POINTS FOR THIS, YOU KNOW.

^ This was kindness.  If I had to stand there another minute and a half while he fired up his scanner again I'd've fallen down on the floor in fits.  He was probably afraid I'd start gnawing on his pedalboard.  It's a small studio and a rather large computery organ thing.  And I was at the organ end so as to be as far away from that bloke at the piano as possible.  I also faced away for that top F in Che Faro.  The F is still there, but it has never been a thing of beauty.  

††† http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence_Foster_Jenkins  Be sure to click on the clip of her Queen of the Night.   There's a lot more on YouTube but you need a really strong stomach.  

‡ Usually!  Having the accompanist tactfully giving me my notes even when that's not what the composer^ wrote is very nice!  Oisin said that if he'd been doing it right I wouldn't have noticed.  Pleeeeeeease.  This is the kind of thing us voice students work on, when we have teachers, and will work on again.  Soon.  My first catastrophic confrontation with the Cherub is 1 November.  Unless he starts making like a dog minder and cancels.

^ Finzi is another sneakypants.

‡‡ As long as you don't, you know, think about it too much.