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Bleeeeerg etc
It has not been a good week, barring skylarks. You heard about Monday on Monday. Computer Men said they would return yesterday, bearing Peter’s computer and my printer, but they have decided they are coming tomorrow. They will, I hope, be able to return me to printability* here at the mews, but I have a Friday more Fridayish even than usual tomorrow, and so I will not be available to enable them to dedragon** the cottage desktop of its various little ways, like denying exit from the nuraddin address*** and refusing to open Windows all the way, so an open window scampers around the monitor like someone playing hopscotch. Nor can they investigate why the Walkperson refuses to take both CDs of an opera instead of merely overwriting the first with the second. Hey, it’s the same title, isn’t it? And the ‘disc 2’ probably gets lost after the repetition of the credits, containing as they usually do sixteen sopranos, a counterbassoonist, and the kookaburra for the mad scene at the end of the second act. I want my Gluck.†
Tuesday I bollixed my voice lesson. Whimper. I half knew I was going to; I was way too tired, I’d found two small but sordid inconsistencies in PEGASUS that I had to solve in exactly the same amount of space they were made in—your publisher will probably let you get away with resetting a very occasional line at the page proof stage, but that’s the limit—and the awful truth is that the five-star marketing plan is scaring me.†† So I went in there jumpy, distracted and underrehearsed, and sang like a person who was jumpy, distracted and underrehearsed, and it was pretty discouraging.†††
Wednesday I went to Ditherington bell practise for our first meeting on the sad new schedule of only second, fourth and fifth-if-any Wednesdays . . . except that it didn’t happen. Niall, Denis and I showed up . . . and spent an hour and a half ringing handbells—Niall never goes anywhere without his handbells—in a freezing cold transept because there was no one else there. I went home, emailed Marilyn and Wild Robert, saying, what happened?, and got a really annoyingly chirpy email back from Marilyn with a copy of the email she had sent all of us about the fact that there was only one Ditherington practise this month. Which Niall and I had both failed to write down.‡ Denis isn’t on Marilyn’s list; his honour remains unimpugned.
And I didn’t have a guest post.‡‡
Today because Colin cancelled and there were no handbells this evening‡‡‡ I decided to give myself a half day off from reading proofs and finish, or semi-finish, or get through draft 2B of, Frost and Fire and Ice to take to Oisin tomorrow: I will probably die of a broken heart if I frumple two music lessons in a row.
I’m a good girl: I hit ‘save’ a lot. I’d been working three hours or so, and was getting pretty tired, but I was also near the end of draft 2B and was feeling reasonably chirpy—ready for a hurtle, a cup of tea, and a return to page proofs. I was pretty sure when Oisin played it back to me tomorrow I’d go, yerp, what was I thinking of, at intervals, but that’s okay. I had something down to work with, and there were actual bits of it I liked. And I’d quite recently hit ‘save’ when I got an error message saying that Windows had a fit of the vapours coming on and was going to close Finale down. Yah boo sucks, I said, as it went KACHUNG off the corner of the piano, but, no big deal, I prodded it with a stick after a minute and woke it up again. And started resignedly putting the last few minutes’ work in again.
And noticed that there was kind of more missing than I was expecting . . .
It had eaten my entire afternoon’s work, despite the fact that I had ‘saved’ about ten minutes before the crash.§
I wasted about fifteen minutes trying to find a ‘contact us’ on the Finale web site that was a ‘contact us’ instead of a come on for lists of dealers and how you can follow them on Twitter and Facebook§§ or join their blog—GAAAAAAAAH—and then I emailed Oisin and a Wise American Friend, both of whom have suggestions for the possibility of ferreting the saved version from the bowels of the beast . . . but I still had to hurtle, read proofs, and write a blog entry, and I’m also a coward. A, furthermore, incompetent coward.
Maybe I’ll try their suggestions now.
Maybe I’ll just go to bed.§§§
* * *
* To the extent that I am ever ungleblarging printable
** Debug is nowhere near powerful enough
*** System Administrator says you’re a bad person and must not be allowed to run at large among the innocent populace
† I want my Gluck Orfeo with my Marilyn Horne and my other Gluck Orfeo with my Janet Baker—if the Walkperson can’t cope with 2 CDs of one opera it’s really going to have palpitations if I expect it to take on more than one recording of the same opera.
I can’t remember now when I watched the much-hyped Met production of Orfeo ed Eurydice on Sky. Recently. I do try to be colour/gender/poundage blind—if someone can sing and act I will avert my attention from the fact that they won’t see forty or a size twelve again, and are playing a tubercular seventeen-year-old. But the k d lang look wasn’t doing our short-Coke-machine-shaped Orfeo any favours, whose acting also had a strong Coke-machine flavour. However I would have encompassed all of this—since she did have a big, thick, rich—one might almost say chocolaty—voice . . . until we got to Che Faro Senza Eurydice^, an aria so familiar that even people who wouldn’t know an opera if it bit them on the leg^^ often recognise^^^, when she kumquatted the ending. What? —Yes, my reaction exactly. WHAT? You mess with Che Faro, I hunt you down and kill you. A Metropolitan Opera mezzo can’t possibly be unable to hit a top F, for pity’s sake??+ So what happened? Goblins in the TV crew?
^ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brGYq97Of6w
^^ And often assume it wants to when it’s only trying to, you know, play . . .
^^^ What is that? —Wasn’t it that ad for drain cleaner?
+ Even I have a top F, although no one in their right mind would call my voice thick, rich or chocolaty. I’ve been trying to ignore questions of range because as soon as I’m aware of being above C-above-middle-C I start closing myself down from sheer funk. But Blondel pointed out this week that as soon as I have a reliable G I can sing Dido’s Lament. Oh. Okay. Goal. Goals are good. Meanwhile, speaking of goals and Gluck, I have a new one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paride_ed_Elena
I am shamefully unfamiliar with all but about four of Gluck’s operas—the fact that he seems to have written almost as many as Handel is a trifle daunting—and I knew nothing about Paride ed Elena till Radio Three played one of Paride’s arias the other day which stopped me dead in my tracks. Want. To. Sing. That. It will be good if I can manage to find the frelling music; it’s not something that rolls to the top of your average search engine.
†† And then there’s stuff like the latest edition of SUNSHINE which I’ll show you as soon as I have a copy in my hot little hand. But due to Screw Ups By Persons Who Shall Remain Nameless^, this is having to be pushed through at the speed of a hellhound after a hellbunny, and I fall over too easily. This evening I got an email from my editor saying, hi, we need this cover text now. I sent it back to her in about an hour. But I’m still shaking like a leaf.
^Neither me, Merrilee, nor the editor in charge, which is all you need to know
††† And it may be just as bad next week, because I’ll only have just turned in the PEGASUS corrections on Monday, and will still be looking around trying to see where I left my life. I did tell Blondel that my so-called life has spells like this. But the week after that I’m planning to be brilliant. Um . . .
‡ We ring too many handbells. Really it’s bad for you.
‡‡ I have mentioned this on the forum, but just so no one gets the wrong idea, NO, even if no one sends me any guest posts between now and the 2nd of November, I am not going to keep printing bits of PEGASUS on Wednesdays and Saturdays.
‡‡‡ So last night was a good thing really.
§ And while this is not in the same category of meltdown, as I was typing that sentence, my email pinged. And when I went a few minutes later to look and see if anything cool was coming in^ I discovered that someone I have already put on my ‘blocked senders’ list has frelling come through again, as he/she has done several times already. What the bleeding (*&^%$£”!!!!!!
^ The Tyranny of the Ping
§§ Bite me
§§§ And furthermore Philip Langridge died. He actually died last Friday, but I didn’t hear about it till Monday and only caught up with the obituary yesterday.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/mar/07/philip-langridge-obituary
He was, speaking of acting singers, an actor. Last time I saw him he was scaring you silly as the witch [sic] in Hansel and Gretel: an opera I’ve never had much use for, partly because it’s usually played for a high smarm level. Not this one. More Bluebeard’s Castle than Goldilocks. I have him on CD singing Britten’s Peter Grimes and the weak, venal captain in Billy Budd . . . both of which are so brilliantly evoked I find them hard to listen to: I like the occasional speck of dawn in my unrelenting darkness. I love Britten, but he was maybe a little too good at the snake pit that is humanity.
I never met Langridge, nor know anything about him but what I heard in a few interviews, but I feel like I’ve lost a friend.
Lullaby from Pegasus
Yes. It worked. Finally. And no computers were killed. (So far as I know. Check with Blogmom to be sure.) Although this one is behaving a little strangely. . . .
And yes, Finale and I still have a few little wrinkles to iron out, but THIS HAS GONE ON LONG ENOUGH FOR NOW and I’ll try to get (for example) the ties sorted by, say, next Friday (or possibly Sunday) when, I hope, I’ll have part two to post as well.
Click to view/download PDF.
Lullaby_from_Pegasus
Ice This
Okay, what is this?
I mean, I know what it is. It’s ice. It’s a very strange ice self-sculpture as discovered in my rain gauge this morning. I’ve been trying to remember if there’s been any weird ice effects before this; we’ve been having hard frosts pretty much every night for a week or so I think—certainly last night and the night before. And we’ve had lots of hard frosts all winter long.
But yesterday was positively warm, so anything that might have happened the night before that would have melted. I also did some gardening yesterday and I’m pretty sure I would have noticed gnomish* water. But is there some inscrutable Memory of Water going on here?
All the ice crystals held hands/tentacles/tendrils/teenyweeny subatomic appendages when they melted yesterday and last night as they hardened up again since they were all friends now they started building a cheerleader pyramid? 
I haven’t dumped the rain gauge out since falling lake over the weekend—maybe it has something to do with the drastic slope of the gauge? Beats the heck out of me. Maybe I’ll send it to the New Scientist and ask them. They like stuff like this.
And it was a nightmare to photograph. I must have taken two dozen photos** and they’re all out of focus.*** These are merely less out of focus than the others. My camera has these little orange squares that tell you what it’s going to focus on . . . wrong. It can’t stand shiny translucent ice, so it just ducks around the orange squares and finds a nice daphne or plant pot or dead thing to focus on.
I emailed Blondel last night and said that I’d lost about half of this week to ME, that I’d just tried singing for the first time since about Thursday and . . . oh dear. That I still wanted to come for my lesson† but not to expect much. He emailed back that he was sure we could ‘make good use of the time’†† if I was feeling up to it.
Right at the moment about ninety percent of what I learn about singing every week happens in that single hour in Blondel’s tiny spare-bedroom studio. The ten percent is just me at home picking out the melody on the piano with one finger, or urgently re-re-listening to selected youtube tracks.††† I am hoping that eventually I can do some of that what-needs-supporting, where-it’s-tight stuff for myself, but at the moment all I ever seem to do at home—aside from trying to learn the frelling tune‡—is recognise that the noise I’m making is more good or less good‡‡ and beyond that it’s all unfathomable . . . squeaking.‡‡‡
Sigh.
I had forgotten more than I had learnt since last lesson § but at the end Blondel still said, I’ll have a new song for you next week. Your coloratura is really very good,§§ I’ll look for something else with coloratura in it.
Squeak.
* * *
* Gnomish: to do with gnomes. Yes, I want to say gnomic but that’s about aphorisms. Hmm. Aphoristic water. Woo ooh.
** I looove my digital camera. It took a little while. I was last on the block. I might still be last on the block without a digital camera except that Peter bought me one because he thought I was being silly about them. Silly? Me?
Now who’s going to fix my attitude toward my little videocam? Yup. I have one. Poor thing. It sure has stamina. It’s been buried in a heap of early draft manuscripts for months. I finally fished it out about a week ago and gave it a charge, expecting it to tell me that it had eaten itself and all its software, the way rechargeables do if they aren’t. Nope. Still working. So then I put it on its bendy feet, pointed it at the piano, and sang the lullaby from PEGASUS in front of it.
BIG MISTAKE.
The bottom of a pile of early draft manuscript isn’t nearly far enough away. Not in the same county.
*** And sometimes I don’t love my digital camera quite so much.
† Have I told you that my fourteen-year-old car passed his road inspection first go? That they couldn’t even find anything wrong? Evidently there hadn’t been a hard frost recently when they went to unlock the doors.
†† Good use of the time. Sigh. I might as well be ringing Cambridge and singing and composing the second parts of lullabies^ for all the forward I’m getting on PEG II. I’m getting tired of that blank screen. This happens to me; in itself it’s not a big deal; after the fairies^^^ finish moving the furniture around they’ll let me back in the house again. Meanwhile . . . well, if I miss getting it turned in on time, you’ll just have to wonder/put off reading PEG I^^^^ a little longer.
^ Did I tell you Peter wrote me a second verse? With variants. In case I want the stress on a different part of a line, he said. Golly. We’re collaborating more on this than we ever have for ELEMENTALS.
^^ Maybe I should take up knitting.
^^^ Or possibly gnomes
^^^^ Which of course you’ve already bought
††† Now that I’m beginning to learn it a little, Alfred Deller’s performance of Purcell’s Evening Hymn is much. Too. Slow.
‡ And all those horrible where-you-come-ins
‡‡ Or possibly more bad or less bad
‡‡‡ I have the video to prove it
§ SIGH
§§ Remember that this is teacherspeak and relative. It’s true that given the general level of direness my coloratura is better than you’d expect.
Redux, various
I WANT MY WOLFGANG. WAAAAAAH.
The good news is that Peter got out of Scotland about thirty seconds before they closed the border.* He came home this afternoon and instantly began reorganising my life.** This included ringing up the garage which, to my amazement, seems to think we can have Wolfgang back tomorrow morning. Fourteen year old cars and MOT tests are not usually a happy merger and I’ve been bracing myself for the conversation about the new car again.*** Even if we manage to limbo under the government bar however and get our sticker I imagine there will be a little list.†
Meanwhile today would be the day that I started to get out of bed and the ME sighed and stretched luxuriously and said, are you sure that’s what you want to do? Oh. Frell. You again. Well, yes, I do want to get up. I have hellhounds to hurtle and a piano lesson this afternoon and bell tower practise this evening.†† And no car.
I know we did this trooping up and down main street thing during the snow, but I’m not in the mood when I’m trying to hold it together with the ME riding me like a bulldogger with spurs. I am also reminded of how forcefully I object to walking anywhere without the hellhounds in attendance—two hours a day of hurtling is enough of the shanks’ mare option. Hey! It’s ten minutes to walk to Oisin’s from the cottage and back . . . having been back and forth to the mews to pick up my music and have a bit of a go at the piano.
Anyone who is paying the wrong kind of attention will have ascertained by now that I’m not posting the lullaby to PEGASUS this Friday either. I finally managed to get the freller printed off so that Oisin could actually see what he was playing . . . and he made several Small But Excellent suggestions††† that I now want to incorporate and I still have to relearn how to make dynamic markings on dranglefabbing Finale and then I will finally post it here. No, really. It exists.‡ It even sounds reasonably lullaby-ish. In fact I like it well enough that I’m going to ask Peter if he wants to write another verse so I can compose some variations.
I felt fairly dire while I was with Oisin although as I said to him I was expecting to feel suddenly a great deal better as soon as I left and any danger of my having to sing was past till next week. Sigh. I sometimes think I got into composing as a way not to have to perform.‡‡
I had already had an email exchange with Niall about tomorrow‡‡‡ and had warned him that I was feeling like something that ought to be pickled in formaldehyde in a jar on a mad scientist’s shelf but that I’d probably just about make it to tower practise, since we’re usually short handed these days and I ought to be able to manage rounds and call changes for our beginners. And then we had a funny band—three beginners and six hot bananas.§ And me. I was helping hold up one of the walls in a semi-comatose state while one of the beginners wrestled with ringing rounds on four, five and six §§ bells and then Niall made one of his passes round the room as a good ringing master will do and when he got to me he said, Are you ready to ring Cambridge?
Am I frelling what? No I am frelling not frelling ready to frelling ring frelling Cambridge. Am I clear?
Okay, said Niall. You can have a few minutes to look at the line.
Ah, adrenaline. What would I do without it. You know that’s one of the working definitions of ME? Exhausted adrenals? Yes. Well. At this point—Niall having passed on to fresh victims—I could feel my eyeballs throbbing to my suddenly heightened blood pressure. So I got out my diagram book and began staring at Cambridge while it went all glmxxxxxx on the page. Anthea came over to be supportive—two of our hot bananas tonight were Colin and his wife Anthea, who is one of my favourite people. You look at her face and you know It’s Going to Be All Right. Possibly Even When It Includes Ringing Cambridge. She is also a completely brilliant minder, which is a significant gift. Just because you can ring something doesn’t mean you can boost somebody else through it—especially boost them in a way that they learn something rather than merely collapsing into blindly doing what they’re told, which is probably more demoralising than breaking down. Anthea got me through my first couple of goes at Kent and it’s a lot of thanks to her that it began making sense to me as soon as it did.
I really did think that Cambridge was a bridge too far however. You don’t ring your first surprise method after a couple of sudden unexpected ten-minute cramming sessions because your ringing master(s) is/are wholly effing mad and your adrenals aren’t quite exhausted. Roger on the five was complaining that he didn’t feel like ringing Cambridge tonight and I said, don’t worry, this won’t last long, and Colin on the three, next to me on the two said, oh, yes it will.
And it did. We got through an entire plain course of Cambridge. I do wish to emphasize that this is absolutely due to Anthea’s crack minding . . . but I’ve been here before, learning something with Anthea at my elbow. We got through it. And I knew what I was trying to do even when I wasn’t seeing the bells to do it with.
I can do this. I am going to learn Cambridge.
Maybe I’ll even sing for Oisin next Friday.§§
* * *
*Joke. But apparently it’s pretty vicious up there. Our lot still have electricity and can feel their way through the snowdrifts, but a lot of people don’t and can’t. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/scotland/7325843/Wintry-weather-sweeps-Scotland.html
And then of course there’s New York. http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=119564§ionid=3510203
And I was complaining earlier about being pummelled by a little hail. I’m such a wuss. But look what came in the post for me today from Hannah (in NYC):
I’m trying. Clearly my solar capacity isn’t quite up to 3500 miles.
(Yes. That’s what you think it is, underneath, on the table. I’ll give you a better view one of these days. I know, you can hardly wait.)
The thing that amuses me even more about this item however is the tag: 
Post consumer material???
** It’s shocking how much disorganization can creep up on you in a mere day and a half.
*** No. But I admit if we have two winters in a row like this one, this time next year I will be thinking hard about a new four-wheel drive car. With waterproof locks.
† Frushipergug rods and bistamudze belt need replacing. Gradundabble connections should be tightened. The whimmerwhammer needs realigning. And while you’re at it you need a new engine, four new tyres, and a CD player.
†† And a novel to write.
††† I asked him if he wanted credit and he said no, no, no, just keep writing the stuff.
‡ So do the little flute piece I promised Jodi and the truly tiny violin piece I promised violinknitter. I’m just . . . a horrible coward. And I keep thinking I want to twiddle them a little more. . . .
‡‡ I wonder if it would work with Blondel. . . . I am such a hopeless case. I’m afraid to sing for Oisin, and I’m afraid to take one of my songs to Blondel. What do I think is going to happen? The end of the world?
‡‡‡ The other reason the ME was kind enough to come back today, aside from not singing for Oisin, is being able to say no I am not going handbell ringing Saturday morning. Although . . . sigh. I would like to ring with Titus and Rupert.
§ So to speak.
§§ One of the reasons ringing seems, when you’re first learning, to be coming at you from all directions is that the eenie weenie difference in timing and rhythm between, say, four and six bells, which when you’re learning to handle you have no sense of, makes a drastic practical difference in keeping your place.
§§§ Or take one of my songs in to Blondel. Maybe I could get him to sing the lullaby.
Tirra lira
. . . by the river, sang Sir Lancelot.* I hope he has a better voice than I do. Elizabeth Moon @emoontx and I have been having a little fun on Twitter about singing—those of you with long memories** may remember that it was a long comment from EMoon about having a voice lesson from her choir director that tipped me over the voice-lesson edge last summer, the difference being that she evidently has a voice worth developing and I don’t. I just have a strange lust for humiliation. Well, and voice lessons are doing what they’re supposed to do—they’re giving me a greater and more flexible understanding of what singing is. Whether this is going to have any real effect on my song-composing . . . feh, who knows? *** But I’m having a good time, and that counts for something.
My voice lesson today was way more fun than I was expecting. I went in there absolutely prepared for disaster. I’ve been thumping myself with the Evening Hymn and didn’t seem to be getting ANYWHERE.† My best guess is just that I haven’t tackled anything this early before and there’s more difference in mindset than I had realised.†† One of the surprising things is that the breathing is not (much of) a problem. Almost everything else is, but not the breathing. I said this to Blondel and he said, your breathing has revolutionised since you started last summer. —Yes. That’s even true.†††
But while today I was still horribly dependent on Blondel illegally playing my line to keep me on it I have some hope that by next week I’ll be able to let him play the accompaniment and twiddle away on my own. Just like James Bowman. Well, sort of. And we have to get back to Finzi.
But . . . oh gods I have to sing for Oisin on Friday.
* * *
* http://www.poetry-online.org/tennyson_the_lady_of_shalott.htm
Okay, sue me. I love The Lady of Shalott. I’m reasonably sure that I read the poem first; I was always reading reading reading when I was a kid, and it was years before the concept of pictures that other people had already painted for you—that you didn’t have to make up for yourself—really registered. Then, of course, like millions of other soppy preteens I fell horribly in love with the PreRaphaelites^ . . . and the truth is I’ve never really recovered, although I’ve stopped apologising for it. During my black leather Harley Davidson jacket phase I had so many chips on my shoulder some of them had to fall off^^, and the PreRaphs—and Tennyson—were among them.
But now I’m old^^^ I’ve stopped apologising for thinking Tennyson is a great poet too. This evening I have had the delicious experience of wanting my Collected Tennyson . . . and going into the sitting room and immediately laying my hand on it~. I needed to check on the spelling of tirra lira and was, predictably, immediately ensorcelled into rereading the whole damn poem. I then compounded this error by spending most of the next hour rereading Maud. Anybody else out there Marked for Life by Tennyson’s Maud, long before Night of the Living Dead, let alone Blair Witch?~~ It’s an extraordinary piece of work, and scared me silly when I was nine or so, not only because I couldn’t follow half of it.~~~
^ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lady_of_Shalott_(painting) : yes, the Waterhouse one that is, I believe, one of the best-selling posters of all time.+ But much as I love that painting, for representations of the Lady of Shalott I prefer this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HuntShallotlarge.jpg Generally speaking I’m not a big Holman Hunt fan, barring that he’s a PreRaph and I’m therefore obliged to dote; I think his colours are garish.++ But I like this one for the energy of it. She’s pissed off and she’s not gonna take it any more. Reading masses of Victorian literature at an early age probably did me a lot of harm in terms of believing that a girl can grow up to have her own adventures—all those drooping heroines, GAAAAAH—and the PreRaph Brotherhood+++ were no help. I tended to fall on anything that looked like it might be an exception with a desperate glee. It is a combination of the Holman Hunt painting, the Loreena McKennitt++++ song, and the original poem that will, some day, produce Red Sonja of Shalott, which is still festering in my back files, and emerges to bite my dreams occasionally. But first there’s RATPEG and then there’s ALBION and after that . . . I’m not sure. But it’s on the list.
+ I have it on a kitchen magnet. . . .
++ The Awakening Conscience? Ewwww.
+++ http://www.amazon.co.uk/Pre-Raphaelite-Sisterhood-Jan-Marsh/dp/0704301695 Yes, I know. And if you type in ‘PreRaph sisterhood’ on google you get a sheaf of sites. But that is now. This was then.
++++ http://www.quinlanroad.com/
^^ Despite the added width those black leather shoulders gave me
^^^ I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: the wrinkles and the sags and the slowings down and the weird aches in places you didn’t know had the equipment for aching and the loosenings and losses are a big drawback, but everything has drawbacks, and being old beats hell out of being young.+ Penelope and I were talking about this yesterday. The chief drawback, it seems to me, is the lack of future. When you’re young you get to look forward to being old. When you’re old . . . well. It does focus the mind. If you’re going to try it do it now. Voice lessons, say.
+ Some restrictions apply, of course, like the guarantee says. You can really screw up, or you can have incurably bad luck. But for the rest of us, old is better.
~ Bless you, Fiona, Queen of Alphabetization and the Rendering of Heaps.
~~ Neither of which I’ve ever seen, perhaps partly because I was early Marked for Life by Maud by Alfred Lord Tennyson.
~~~ Still can’t. I always assumed Maud herself died, as well as her revolting brother and the fruit loop narrator’s dad, whose gruesome end begins the poem (‘I hate the dreadful hollow behind the little wood . . . ’) and warns you that this isn’t one of your hearts-and-flowers Victorian ballads+ But it doesn’t really say one way or another. I think. Our nutter just sails off into the Crimean (?) sunset there at the end to an unknown fate.
+ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1hCN3-COYk A great deal can perhaps be explained by my not being prepared, at a tender age, to encompass both the original poem and the fact that someone managed to excerpt a bit of it and do this to it. Don’t go, Maud! He’s a nutter! —Although your revolting brother did strike the first blow. ‘. . . . And he struck me, madman, over the face . . . And a million horrible bellowing echoes broke/ From the red-ribb’d hollow behind the wood/ And thunder’d up into Heaven the Christless code/ That must have life for a blow . . .’ I’d forgotten that the brother, dying: ‘ “The fault was mine,” he whisper’d, “fly!” ’ . . . which our poor nutter does, though little joy it gives him: ‘. . . And my heart is a handful of dust/ And the wheels go over my head/ And my bones are shaken with pain/ For into a shallow grave they are thrust/ Only a yard beneath the street/ And the hoofs of the horses beat, beat/ The hoofs of the horses beat . . . . I thought the dead had peace, but it is not so;/ To have no peace in the grave, is that not sad?/ But up and down and to and fro,/ Ever about me the dead men go . . .’
** Who clearly need something better to be using them for
*** What I am uneasily aware it’s also doing is making me a terrible snob about other people singing—professionals, I mean, not chumps like me. Which is a self-indulgent rant for another post. But . . . it is also a way of developing your own from-the-inside-out experience of music, which is a good thing too.
† I’ve been reduced to listening to Alfred Deller on YouTube because he sings it almost a minute slower than anybody else. Not a big Deller fan I’m afraid. But his notorious laggardliness is a boon to the feebler student.
†† That and the frelling 3/2 time signature. By the way, you guys who said ‘coloratura’ to me about the Purcell twiddles . . . Blondel started to say today: this is almost colora— STOP, I said. I AM NOT READY TO HEAR THIS.
††† Yaaay Blondel.
