Souvenir de la Malmaison, 11
. . . And a few hours later. Waiting for the storm. This is not just rain proof, this is supposed to be hurricane proof. With considerable heart-in-mouth reliance on the buffering effect of ten-foot walls around a small space. But that’s thirty six clothes pegs.* I wish I could remember what I bought that came in such a gloriously long swathe of bubblewrap so I could buy it again. The two bulges are the three-sided bags that laptops come in. I don’t think I can afford a new laptop every time it’s going to rain. Even every time it’s going to rain just before Souvenir is due to flower.
* I didn’t exactly count. They come in 36-peg packets and I used an entire packet.
Souvenir de la Malmaison, 1
The day before the rain began. Look at those big fat beautiful buds.
Crabby person on blogging
Peter passed this–in newspaper form–to me*, saying, do you want to read this? The headline howls: BLOGGERS WHO BARE ALL ABOUT THEIR LIVES NOW FACE A BRUTAL BACKLASH.
Well . . . yes. Are we supposed to be surprised? That ‘now’ is ingenuous. Blogging used to be called ‘gossip’. You’ve always needed to be careful what you say over the back fence to your neighbour or to the boss’ secretary over the water cooler**, because you don’t know who they’re going to tell, or who whom they tell will tell. Blogging, it’s just a little more straightforward. You only have to put it out there once and . . . there it is.*** You may be lucky but it seems to me you want to assume that you won’t be and behave accordingly. I’ve had a privacy fetish all my life so I’m not hugely tempted to be indiscreet here, but just as a failsafe I have a short list of people in the back of my mind that I pretend are reading every word (when in fact I’m reasonably sure they wouldn’t be caught dead coming anywhere near a blog by me), and this is like a klieg lamp over the set. Anything that shouldn’t be there is removed immediately, before the cameras start rolling.†
So the article is here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/may/25/digitalmedia.blogging
And my chief reaction is, Where was this girl’s†† brain? I’m sorry for anyone who’s having a miserable time††† but the word ‘twit’ is rising irrepressibly to my lips/fingers. You trash someone in public, they’re really very likely to try to trash you back. I’d hazard that people you’ve slept with are probably going to be especially touchy that way. Someone else who also blogged about her love life is quoted in this article: ‘When the people in my life knew that my interactions with them were potential fodder for something I might write, things changed.’ Gosh. Imagine. So, I wonder who the first detox clinic for out of control all-baring bloggers is going to be named after?
Peter is allowed, we spend a lot of time sitting on opposite sides of the same table, but I get a bit testy at all the ‘ooooh, there’s a blog backlash’ flapdoodle. Anything there is, there’s going to be a backlash. Another universal constant, like the speed of light. ‡ The bigger the thing, the bigger the backlash. Blogging’s got pretty big.‡‡ Duh. And there are always twits, and twits make backlashes so easy.
http://robinhobb.com/rant.html
One of you sent this link to me originally (sorry: I’m supposed to be keeping track of who sends me links now, but this was from back when I was only supplying names with recipes) and I read it and thought it was very funny, and then saw some reactions to it that I thought were a trifle odd: what you might call the wrong kind of serious. She’s making a valid point but she’s doing it, you know, humorously. ‘Vampires of the Internet . . . it is NO COINCIDENCE that blog and blood begin with the same three letters! . . . Look at your hands, where your wrists hover so lightly above your keyboard. What are those minute, strange marks there, on your pulse point? Could they be punctures the size of a pixel? . . .’ People take stuff in more easily when it’s funny, they let their guard down. You can even take the point and still laugh.
You can also still have a blog, if you want to. It’s your life and your time and your decision. ‡‡‡ I like Robin Hobb’s rant.§ Most of the rest of the ‘backlash’ I look at with my yokel face and go, What the–?
* * *
* . . . several days ago. I’m slow. This is not news.
** Do offices have water coolers any more? And did people ever collect around them?
*** The drawback is that it’s harder to change your story. Sure, you can edit, but most people remember what they read better than they remember what they heard. ‘Oh, well, maybe she did say six husbands and £600,000,000. I could have sworn it was two husbands and £50.67 and they argued about who got the kune kune pig.’
† If cameras still roll. They probably just flash digitally at 186,281 blinks per second.
†† Yes. Definitely girl.
††† I’m sorry for child molesters and axe murderers–what a life they’ve given themselves. But I’m sorrier for their victims.
‡ But they’re arguing about it.
‡‡ So big that publishers and agents now think that their authors should be doing it.
‡‡‡ And for the record, this blog doesn’t eat my writing. It eats my life.
§ I wonder if anyone did a mass-mailing^ of Hobb’s rant to publishers?
^ Mass link mailing.
Peter answers
(R. leave typos in)*
You’ll gather that i@ve always been a slower writer** than R– two-fingered, about a third of her touch-typing speed. a tenth of thast now. If you’ve ever known a good knitter stricken with a\RTHRITIS And still attempting to use her needles, that’s what tryping’s like these days less than — ypu can work out where those two words belong. I’m leaving the typos in on purpose to prove my point. |Not dpoing them on purpose.
Furthermore, time is limited. Ok I still have the usual ration of 24 hours as day, minust sllep. Not of that these days, either. A couple of naps in the day don’t make up for the night losses. But “usable” time? Good writing time. An hour and a half if I’m lucky. And even writing straightforward e-mails and such, though nothing like a s wearing, comes at a cost. I’m crossing a desrt on my last tank of petrol and I’ve got a cou[ple of books to deliver when I get there.
That’s why, though I enjoy your company, I don’t propose to join in the conversation all tnhat must. Thing of me as grandad sitting contendly by the yearth in hizs shawl a\nd slippers while the party twitters and laughs around him.
Enough of that. Thank all of you who like my garden. It’s not like that all year round. I used to go out and dig and fossick and cosset tenderlings in howling blizzards. Not now. Furthermore it photographs surpirisingly will. That path by the pond looks much more dramatic in the picture than it does for real*** . Gardens za\re extremely tricky. I’ve never seen a photograph that that did anything like justoce to to Robin’s enchantig†, hidden away, organised†† tangkle.
Oh yesm and I’m waiting eagerly for her to cook me some of yopur recipes.†††
Good luck, everyione. PD
* I said, I can’t leave all the typos in, it looks awful, and Peter said, yo, earth to McKinley^, that’s the point. So I’ve been muttering and moaning–who among us does not have to do some tidying up after the fingers have been flying semi-trammelled across the keyboard? Also Peter has very large hands and just getting all of his fingers on a keyboard at once is advanced tactics. And he used to produce some pretty interesting paragraphs when he was still using a typewriter:^^ and you can change your mind mid-stroke on a typewriter. But . . . well . . . I’ve never taken well to being edited for my own good, so, I guess . . . ^^^
^ Peter has never said ‘yo, earth to McKinley’ in his life
^^ He and I both used typewriters well into the Computer Age. Indeed I’m still threatening to have my beloved IBM Selectric 1 gilded and put on a plinth. The only reason I stopped using her is because the typewriter repairman could no longer get replacement parts.
^^^ And I like minust sllep. I can use that in a book some day. Minust Sllep: a minor magician, not to be trusted. And contedly by the yearth in hizs shawl. Sounds like something out of Mary Webb.
**Only blogs and emails! Comparative backlist, I lose. Although a lot of Peter’s books are short, and writing short is not one of my skills. See: better than half my novels started as short stories. For that matter the word count of the first eight months of this blog would probably scare horses and small children.
*** Wrong. I especially like the little triangles of plants where the pond path meets the path path. And the frogs, of course. And the newt. They’re very dramatic.
† Thank you. I think it’s a little enchantig.
†† Semi organised! Semi organised at best! I was out there this afternoon with bamboos, string and secateurs, trying to tie up the damage from yesterday’s beating and thinking oh gods how did I get into this mess . . . er . . . how do I get out of it, the path has disappeared . . . it’s like the Old Forest, only smaller.
††† Yes . . . well . . . um . . . er . . .
Wet Wet Wet*
Hampshire has been cancelled till further notice; we’re under water. Southampton train station was closed today due to flooding–Southampton being our main metropolis, so that’s serious closing. I wouldn’t want to be at Waterloo this evening, looking at the departure boards. I think I’ve already posted about the winter of 2000/1 when we had five foot of water in the cellar at the old house and every morning you ran downstairs and flung open the cellar door and looked to see if it had risen any higher: the people nearer the road were wearing waders in their sitting room.** And all the roads were flooded: you had to get in and out by farm track. Times like these living in a town on high ground feels like a really good idea. Although it becomes moot as soon as you become an island and the delivery lorries can’t get in and out. However I saw a big truck outside Tesco’s today while the hellhounds and I were failing to dash between the raindrops so I guess we get to eat another day at least. And the weather tomorrow should be better. I hope so. The kitchen hung with wet hellhound towels and really soaking All Stars is not amusing; neither is getting a crick in your neck staring out the window and hoping for a break in the downpour. We did get our break this afternoon, and we went out and cantered through the surf with the wind in our hair, and didn’t feel at all like an ad for gracious living.
And I haven’t even mentioned the gale force winds. The rain is being driven so hard that it’s coming through the crack in my stable-style front door, despite the jigsaw fit between the two pieces which is supposed to prevent exactly this. So I have water running down the inside of my door and pooling on the floor. I don’t have any spare towels left. I woke up a couple of times last night to the shrieks of the wind monster clawing at the window-frames. Indeed I even slept in this morning. I should have got up as usual and gone to my desk since I couldn’t take the hellhounds out, but the water was cascading down my bedroom window like someone was standing on the roof*** and pouring it out of a pitcher while the wind grabbed the eaves and screamed. And I opened one eye, muttered, eff this for a lark, closed the eye again, and suddenly it was an hour later. I took hellhounds out because I had to but we were all soaked through in a quarter hour–even in heavy rain we can usually hang tough for thirty minutes. Not today. Later on I managed to get them out for twenty minutes. When we walked–I mean hurtled–past the church the wind was having a go at ripping the flagpole off the top of the tower. The delphiniums, as I write, are still standing. Tiny walled gardens also have their virtues.
I’ve spent most of my working day composing. I hate it when a story doesn’t want me around for a day or two; it makes me feel unreal. Self identified as a writer? You can’t begin to guess. But now that I’ve discovered composing there’s at least somewhere for all that anxiety to go, other than gnawing its way up and down my stomach lining, I mean. I’ve been working on Song II–you may remember that when I took it in to Ossin the first time and the second time he kept talking to me about Benjamin Britten and speech rhythms, and sent me away again. One of the many things on this extremely steep learning curve I’m having trouble with is the idea that you can just up and change your time signature as often as you like–every bar if it suits you and your speech rhythms. I’m used to thinking that you find your time signature and then you stay there: it’s something you get to lean on. Nope. No eternal verities. Furthermore there’s four verses to Song II and–back in the soft days when I thought I was writing in 3/4–I also thought I could repeat one for three. Nope. Not that either: the speech rhythm changes. Feh. And even I knew at the outset that you don’t want to set it di dah di dah di dah di dah,† which would be very boring. I’ve got far enough this time I’m starting to put the left hand in. Wheeee. I hope Ossin doesn’t rip it all back out again, like a crooked seam.
But I’ve also been banging away at Song II for so long–especially with these enforced pauses for ME attacks, speaking of booooring–that I was starting to worry that I’d lose being able to ‘hear’ it, which is just like being able to ‘hear’ a story, only different,†† so–which is the same sort of just what I do when I’m afraid I’m on the edge of rewriting a story once too often–I started setting another poem. More wheeee. This one is not a mournful ballad so I can finally get out of D minor. I couldn’t live without D minor.††† But the speech rhythms are all new and strange, almost conversational, not ballady at all, oooh, new stuff, coool. Ouch goes the brain: Hey, anything interesting on television–?
Oh but the real news [sic] is . . . I’ve been singing. Sic. Out walking with the hellhounds. It makes them nervous. They keep turning around and looking at me anxiously. Is she in pain? Should we run away and find someone and bark significantly while waving a front paw‡ in an explicatory manner? It’s worse than that too because not only is it a frightful noise but the only songs I seem to remember the words to are even more frightful. Imagine having a lovely walk through the Hampshire countryside‡‡ when your idyll is interrupted by the not-distant-enough sound of someone bellowing Drink to Me Only With Thine Eyes or Shall We Gather at the River. I’d better settle on the tune to Song II soon, so I can start learning to sing that, which is where we came in. . . .
* * *
* I’m feeling very 80s. The ME, the hellhounds and I^ spent some time on the sofa this afternoon and I watched an episode of Beauty and the Beast, which I haven’t seen in decades. Oh those 80s shoulders. Oh those 80s hemlines. Oh the gorgeousness of Linda Hamilton. And oh the incredibly seductive tripe of the set up: All the money you could possibly want so you can have the fab apartment and the even more fab clothes (and in spite of the shoulders a lot of them still look pretty amazing, although some of that is just Linda Hamilton reflection, like putting a mirror behind a vase of roses) . . . and work for the DA’s office because you have Ideals. Oh yes and the telepathic bond with the big hairy guy who lives in the cellars, so you can get in all the trouble rescuing innocents^^ you could possibly want to get into because at the last possible minute in any deadly confrontation there will be a roaring noise and all the bad guys will fly across the room/landscape and whang into a wall/tree and fall unconscious to the floor/ground. And there will be a hairy shadow looming in the general direction of said succour from which briefly emerges our shaggy hero so he and Linda can exchange anguished looks redolent of telepathic bonding and hopeless love. And then you, I mean Linda, can escape without wasting time finding out if the bad guys are dead or merely unconscious. I mean, they’re bad guys. It’s a great life, I want it. ^^^ The best bit really is the enchanted underground world. All that beneath Manhattan, I had no idea. Although it perhaps does help explain why the storm sewers and things collapse so often. I’m afraid the moments when Cathy and Vincent stand around making poetic welding noises at each other generally make me reach for the book I could be reading, although the millions of candles on the balcony look is very appealing.
I’m a trifle fascinated that it’s being run over here at all however, let alone a quarter century after its prime. If they’re into historical American TV I wish they’d run Murphy Brown. Which started in the 80s with a similar hemline problem.
^ Sigh . . .
^^ I’m getting my low-fantasy TV programmes mixed up here. Speaking of ME and the sofa, I discovered Charmed during the eighteen months I spent horizontal eight years ago.
^^^ Preferably without the shoulders however.
** True. It got on national TV.
*** Given the pitch of the roof, this would be a very good trick.
† Microsoft keeps trying to change this to did ah did ah did ah. GO AWAY.
†† No, I’m not trying to be a cow. It just works out that way.
††† Actually it’s not D minor, it’s A minor. Except the way I’m using it it’s D minor only without the Bb. I basically have no idea. I’m not really too swift at this music thing.
‡ That’ll be Darkness then. Chaos doesn’t believe in paw-waving. Sigh.
‡‡ The ‘lovely’ is assuming you’re not up to your knees in mud and constantly being bashed by dripping half-fallen-over shrubbery.