Ghostly handbells and public blogging

 

The Saturday Radio 3 opera* is finally drowning out the sound of ghostly handbells.  I seem to have rung an awful lot of handbells this week and since I only know bob minor on handbells I have a bob minor tune groove in my brain that is threatening to bifurcate me.**   The really annoying thing about this is that yes, you can ring by the tune . . . if you're good enough.  EVERYTHING about handbells is if you're good enough.  I will never be good enough.  All that happens with me is that I think, uh, the tune doesn't sound right, and while I'm wondering if it's just that I've rolled down the wrong fork in the tune-groove*** . . . I go wrong.  Again.   

                 I went to bed at what should have been an acceptable hour toward being awake, coherent and post-hurtle at 10 am this morning for Niall to pick me up and whisk me off to Jericho or thereabouts, but it hasn't worked out quite as planned.  Furthermore Niall got all despotic and exigent and made me ring not merely the tenors, which is bad enough, but the three-four—the middle pair.  I wasn't allowed on the trebles even once.  Granted that Titus, who has to ring with only one hand, has the right to prefer the lightest pair of bells—but—waaah.

                However.  I am somewhat mollified by wearing my splendid new pink pullover.†  And Peter says I'm dragging this birthday thing out way too long and when am I going to post the glamorous restaurant photo?  Well . . . if there were a glamorous restaurant photo . . . but maybe tomorrow.  Maybe.  If I can't think of anything else. 

* * *

* Handel's Radamisto, since you ask.  Very twiddly.^

^ Radawho?  http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00vkp5t

** One of the resulting twain is going to be handbell FREE.^

^ What a good thing Niall doesn't read the blog.  He wouldn't like even a fantasy of a handbell ringer not ringing handbells.  However I'm starting to get a trifle jumpy about the number of times my bell friends who know about my secret alternative life as a professional story-teller mention that my blog has turned up again in one or another of the various bell threads.  Yes of course there's a lot of method-ringer activity on the web.  We're all geeks, remember?  It goes with the territory.  I mean:  um.   But it wouldn't be any fun, writing about bells or anything else if I were serious all the time.

            Aaron responded to this line from yesterday's blog:

I'm mostly used to the weirdness of yakking away about my life on line and in public and I haven't (yet) woken up sweating at 3 am and thought Why did I tell them that?
I grapple with this even as a forum poster. From the other, more public end, it must be materially more strange. I try to approach my posts as if I were talking to a couple of friends. . . . The idea of invisible (imaginary?) friends is in any case a bit slippery . . . [forum] readers include people with whom I have had no return contact at all. In the real world it is usually possible to have some idea of how far your voice is carrying. . . . I can't decide if seeing some of the local folk in the flesh at a PRC would reassure me as to the reality of situation or emphasize the difference between half a dozen of us talking over cake . . . and the echoless space of the forum.

Yep.  That nails it pretty well—from both sides of the forum, yours and mine.^  I have the additional weirdness of private emails from people who read the blog who, having praised/lambasted me for whatever, tell me about their ocelot farm or their mother's recipe for chocolate kebobs as if I had a clue^^, and sign off saying that they hope the hellhounds are doing well and I finally got the new door for Third House.^^^  What?  To some extent this sort of thing starts happening as soon as your first novel is published—or your first symphony is performed, or your first art show goes public, or anything else that has a bio of the creator attached—and the hellhounds appear thusly named on my book jackets.  But the intimacies of Third House require someone read the blog.  And a blog does raise your public profile to an order of magnitude roughly approximate to the leap between your pocket torch and Eta Carinae—which is what it's for if you're something like a professional writer.  But . . . gah.  I'm an introvert, you know?  I'm hyperventilating about this tower rep meeting Vicky seems to have inveigled me into—represent my tower?  Are you kidding? 

            So you have to get your head around the public blog/web presence boondoggle somehow that means you aren't saying ouch all the time.  And while the obvious basic principle is some form of the Golden Rule:  Do unto yourself worse than you do unto anyone else^^^^, the really really weird thing is that a public blog can actually help with the pathological privacy fetish, if you're a little careful and a little lucky.  Take my loathing of the author photo, which I've arrghed about here.  What I've always hated about author photos is they lie.  They freeze some tiny misleading aspect of you and go forth into the world giving everyone who's curious—and anyone who isn't curious wouldn't be turning to the author photo—the idea that the tiny misleading aspect they represent is you.  With something like a blog not only are your personal words getting out there^^^^^ as well as your professional ones, but you can frelling photo bomb till any of the curious are sick to death of you and aren't curious any more.  I'd hang more photos of me if I could ever remember to ask people to take them (ugh) and/or Peter didn't panic as soon as I hand him the camera (sigh). 

            Really it all comes back to my obsession about Othering.  You can't Other someone, for example, an author, if you recognise that they're a human being too.  Not that this is an insert tab A into slot B situation;  this blog is still only one cranky cow's mooings, and even when I'm getting it right I can only do what I can do.  I still get a lot of the wrong kind of weird mail, including from blog readers—but it's a start.  And it's a permanently open door—both from the forum side and the post side.  And I like that.  Yes.  For all the grind—and the terror—of a blog, I like the door, and the sound of the Othering monolith crumbling a little around the edges. 

^ I am going to tell you, oh go on, go to your PRC.  I'm scarier than most of my readers+, okay?  If you're fearlessly posting to my forum—which you are—you will find a mere three-dimensional cake party a . . . er . . . cakewalk. You can put a bag over your head for the group picture if you want. 

+ Mooooo

^^ Although I'd probably be pretty interested in the chocolate kebob recipe 

^^^ No. 

^^^^ which still leaves you slightly worried about whether your lesser victims will get your somewhat twisted sense of humour.  It's not like I'm good at being teased.  Ask Peter or any of my friends.  So my judgement here may be unreliable.  Something to worry about at 3 am. 

^^^^^ Some of them, carefully selected 

*** Because every one of those nasty 'bob' and 'single' calls changes the tune because it changes the order of the bells.  I can ring a plain course by the tune.  Unless of course I zone out and forget which pair of bells I'm ringing.  You can't win, you know.  Handbells are a nightmare.  Either you're struggling from split-second DING to split-second DING to remember what the hell you're doing and where the seventy-four snaky bell-pattern lines you're trying to keep track of have got to now^ or your mind wanders for a third of an instant because you do know what you're doing . . . and you have just time to think the tune's wrong and then you crash and burn. 

^A bell in each hand is far more than merely two bells, and this has nothing to do with any nonstandard anatomy of handbell ringers+ 

+ I wonder if Hindu tradition has ever invented some form of change-method ringing?  British change ringing is British, and (I believe) full-circle tower-bell change-ringing was invented here, and everyone else who's picked it up has picked it up from a Brit.   But Kali/Lakshmi/Ganga/anybody in six-arm mode could ring handbell minor all by herself.~  Fancy Kali bearing down on you, blue-black, red-eyed, and scary as frell . . . brandishing handbells instead of severed heads, glittering blades, and flaming chainsaws.  There are days when I'd find the handbells more threatening. 

~ And in ten-arm mode, royal.  

† Even if I did have to point out to my husband that I was wearing it.