* * *

* I did go to my voice lesson.  I told you yesterday, I’m getting even stranger, bent over my computer twenty hours a day^, and I thought it might even be good for me to go get strung out in a different direction, even if SHADOWS is frelling due frelling tomorrow.^^  Also I only just started singing again last week and—I wanted to go.  It’s been a slightly dubious week in terms of practise—there’s still crud in my throat and all this emotional-aspect stuff makes me kind of jumpy—if you manage to miss with the carving knife you go to A&E, get some stitches and a lecture, come home, mop up the blood, keep the bandage out of the bath, be a little careful of yourself till the stitches come out, and hey voila, there you are.  Another interesting scar.  But when you’re trying to patch yourself together from some kind of immaterial wound, where and how you put the stitches in, and what constitutes the kind of bath you should keep your damaged limb out of—and what exactly the limb is—is not so straightforward.  So I’ve been singing sort of cautiously, and of course I’m wildly out of practise and I have no time.^^^  Also, my voice still keeps disappearing on me—less than it was doing before, but every time it does I’m convinced that this is The End and I’m too old to be reaching for this nonsense anyway.^^^^  Nadia waggled her eyebrows at me in that disbelieving-teacher way and said, now as I remember it we found out last week that the chief reason your voice was dropping out was because you were letting it get cut off from its air supply.  Oh, I said.  Um.

So she made me frelling breathe for a while, and connect, and all that really annoying stuff you shouldn’t NEED to be told over and over and over and over and over and OVER.  But you do, because you’re a moron.  And then she ran me up and down some scales and some exercises and kept reminding me to breathe and to connect, and I could actually feel the air sinking down and lying with this lovely rounded, grounded weightiness at the bottom of my pelvis, and every now and then I also remembered to let it out again, and carry my voice with it.  I had already admitted that occasionally this week when I wasn’t convinced I still couldn’t sing and was therefore producing a self-fulfilling prophesy of squawks and silences, I’d made a few noises that were fuller and freer than what I’m used to . . . and with the teacher-magic she teased them out of me today, and convinced them to bring friends.  I was singing back up at the top of my range again—which I haven’t even tried at home since before I was ill, because I have been too busy feeling fragile, convalescent and overworked—and I was loud—me!  Old no-voice me!— the kind of loud your average local amateur choir would be happy to have yelling from its benches—loud the way I don’t sing, especially at the top end where my brain is busy saying, no, no, wait, we don’t do that.  Nadia stopped me where she did not because my voice was failing, she said, but because my brain was closing me down.

But.  There’s life in the old cow yet.  Mooo.  Yaay.  And I came home again all exhilarated and threw myself into SHADOWS.

^ That leaves two for hurtling hounds and two for sleeping.  Other crucial activities like eating chocolate can be performed coincidently while typing.

^^ Later today.  Shut up.

^^^ And the twenty-fifth hour is for singing practise.

^^^^ I actually raised this with Nadia today.  How big an embarrassing moron am I being, taking voice lessons at nearly-sixty?  For some reason I’ve heard like half a dozen times this last week that sopranos lose their voices really early and it seems sort of fated to be hearing this over and over again when I’m convalescent from the throat infection that had stopped me singing altogether—and ten months off my sixtieth birthday.+  And she said, two things:  there’s no reason you shouldn’t last a good while yet as a choir singer—it’s professional sopranos that fold predictably early because of the colossal demands they put on their voices—and you’re lucky—you’ve got all the alto notes too.  If you need to slip down to sing alto, you can.

::Beams::  Good.  On with the voice lessons, then.

+ And before you answer that, I added, let me say that while this is all contingent on you being willing to teach me, I’ve already figured out that I’m in it for the journey.  Never mind that thirty years ago I’d’ve had no voice to train either, all this trying to bind yourself together in a seamless whole to produce a sound is fascinating, even if the resultant sound is nothing much.

Yessssssss.

            I got up this morning convinced I was doing a really dumb, time-wasting-when-I-have-even-less-time-to-waste-than-usual, thing, going to my voice lesson when I’m still totally croaking.*   I told myself that I had to go to Mauncester anyway, to pick up more organic composted farmyard manure for the garden(s) so I might as well tack a voice lesson on the end of it.**  I looked dubiously at my music, which positively has dust *** on it, and decided to take the easy end of it along in case Nadia wanted to recommend this pathetic baby thing rather than that.  And I took my notebook, of course, to write down her pearls, rubies and sapphires of wisdom.

            So I got there and she said blandly, I think it would be a good idea just to attempt to warm your voice up a little—I may be able to advise you about how to work this week.  Croak, I said.  That’s fine, she said.  We’ll start with the nnnn sound.  We can add an actual pitch in later.

            Nnnn, I said. . . .

            Teacher magic.  It’s amazing.  Oh, I still have a throat full of crud † but my larynx isn’t made of cement after all and by the end of the hour I was SINGING.  I was not singing well††, but I was indubitably SINGING.  Nadia said (possibly a trifle smugly) that one of the reasons some of the notes just weren’t there—open mouth, nothing comes out—isn’t about my throat at all, but about the fact that because of all this emotional stuff I’ve shut down, and specifically I’ve shut my voice off from my air supply.  And she taught me the Lip Trill, which she says is very good for reconnecting with your air supply because it’s so hard to maintain.   All you singers out there will know the Lip Trill.  What it really is is a blowing-horse imitation:  you blow out through your lips so they go Pbpbpbpbpbpbpb†††  It’s also supposed to relax the muscles around your mouth.‡  Which probably explains why I can’t do it.  So now it’s homework.  I have to learn to pbpbpbpbpbpbpb.  She also made me do the opening-curtains thing to make me more positive, and the drinking-a-glass-of-water-on-a-hot-day‡‡ thing, which I hadn’t done before, to open my throat.  Why does this stuff work.  It is insane.

            I had already noticed that what notes are available—and they’ve been creeping home one by one like party-goers after dawn, the last two or three days—are mostly the upper-middle of my register.  I’m not even trying the top end, but my voice starts cutting out again around middle C, and I should have a whole octave below that.  Nadia kept coming back here and I’d go croak and she’d move back up again.  Finally at the very end of the hour something shifted and I began singing in my chest voice—usually, as these things go with me, the gear change into chest voice is not all that big a deal.  Ah, she said, that’s what I was hoping for.  And I was thinking chest voice = speaking voice = not speaking up for myself = duuuuuh.  As I had said to her in my email asking to come for a non-singing singing lesson, I even wonder if the appalling revealingness of singing, depressingly unconnected with any excellence of said singing as it is, is the reason my body chose this method of trying to get my frelling attention.

            Nadia said, I was planning on getting you singing today, you know . . .

            I had about an hour between singing lesson and Penelope and Niall picking me up to go ringing at Glaciation.‡‡‡  Whapwhapwhapwhap:   person trying to reorient.  Whap.  Which—ringing—felt totally normal . . . and really, really weird and sad and creepy.  I haven’t got a tower any more.  I’m just some random bell ringer who knows some people in this area.  Brrrrr.  But ringing rounds for beginners is always grounding as well as making you feel you’re contributing to the community§ and we managed to ring Cambridge even if I then went on to make a pig’s ear of an innocent touch of Stedman which I ought to be able to do in my sleep.§§  Slightly in my defense I was ringing on the one remaining bell I don’t know for Stedman—the three—and there are always moments of vertigo as you figure out where you are on a new bell in a familiar pattern.  But mostly I just blatfarging botched it.  But they didn’t tell me not to come back, so hey. 

            And I have gone around today thrusting my knitting under everyone’s noses and saying, Look!  Ribbing!  Real ribbing!  

* * *

* Although there is a little Freelancers Must Stick Together too.  Nadia doesn’t charge for legitimately missed lessons, so she’s losing money when I don’t come.  This preys on my conscience. 

** Going to the local farm shop would have absorbed about forty minutes out of my day.  Plus voice lesson made it about three hours.  Being really, really bad at arithmetic^ has its uses. 

^ Possibly I mean ‘logic’ here. 

*** And hellhound hair.  But everything in these households has hellhound hair on it, including me, and I am in almost constant use. 

†  ::Grossness alert::  And I was gacking up horrible gunge on the drive home, after having all those secret inner bits stirred up by Nadia’s intervention.  MAJOR DISGUSTING EWWWW.  One of the oddities of this illness anyway has been how obsessively focused on my throat it’s been so I didn’t even know there was all that crudiferousness lurking.  I find myself wondering if I went down a few archaeological layers and was ripping out stuff from some previous occasion when I didn’t speak up for myself when I should have.  

†† But then I never sing well.  Sigh.  

††† When in doubt, YouTube.   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gt7eTRyRKpA 

‡ I don’t think there’s any of me that DOESN’T need relaxing.  My hair needs relaxing.  My fingernails need relaxing.  Possibly especially a week before the book I’m working on is due.  

‡‡ Beer if I preferred, she said.  No, I said, the way I get into this nonsense of yours, I need to be sober to drive home. 

‡‡‡ My voice lesson got moved later when it got made an hour long, and Colin’s practise has had a quarter hour added to the front end because he has a nice fresh growing crop of beginners who need cultivating.  This is not ideal for me.  On a bad ME day I’ll have to miss Colin, although give me a shooting stick to lean on and I can probably ring rounds for beginners even if I’m seeing double. 

§ Contributing!  To the [ringing] community!  AAAAAAAUGH! 

§§ Although given how well I’m sleeping lately. . .

I went to bed late last night even for me*, having closed all the windows and curtains, hung a blanket over the back door (well, hey, it’s January) and closed the bathroom door since its window tends to funnel sound through into my bedroom.

            The bells still woke me up.  Siiigh.  And then of course I couldn’t get back to sleep.  This is going to take some getting used to. . . . **

            HOWEVER.  I wrote to Nadia saying, I still can’t sing, but could we maybe have a NON-SINGING SINGING LESSON?  You can tell me about singing Micaela in a field full of sheep in Ghent in the rain and the Escamillo was old and fat and one of the smugglers had a terrible head and kept sneezing.***  Just so I could feel I was reattaching.†  She wrote back saying, erm, maybe some language/pronunciation practise?  FINE.  WHATEVER.  So I’m going to my voice lesson tomorrow for the first time in what may be a month . . . and never mind I still can’t sing a scale—only about every other note is even present—as I said to her, the larynx is about as flexible as cement.  But the sore throat is GONE and the rest will come. † 

Diane in MN

The EnchantedIsland
. . . is fabulous. FABULOUS.

YES YES YES!!!

I loved the production, thought the singing was fabulous, and generally had a splendid afternoon. I had never heard Danielle De Niese 

She had a big push for what may have been her first album?, over here, called Beauty of the Baroque, which I bought because it has Dido’s Lament on it which is one of those arias I sort of collect.  It’s nearly all very, very standard repertoire—Dido herself of course, Come again sweet love, Ombra Mai fu, Let the bright Seraphim and so on and I thought I was probably being a fool, but in fact I like her voice and her interpretations a lot.††  She’s got a new album out.  Hmmm. 

and was seriously impressed. (Ariel? Androgynous, but of course s/he’s a spirit, so gender may be irrelevant.)

I’ve seen the Shakespearean Ariel played both as male and as androgynous.  Female would be fine.  I don’t care, just make up your mind, which I felt they didn’t do in ISLAND. 

I thought Costanzo’s voice worked for Ferdinand because Ferdinand is very young, and they wouldn’t have wanted another countertenor who sounds like David Daniels.

I might have bought his voice, despite my dubiousness about the salon-and-harpsichord type of countertenor—which I like fine, in a salon with a harpsichord—on the operatic stage, but the way they handled him, with the peach-satin-lined cape and the uniform emphasizing how slender he is, I thought in that context just made him a nebbish.  He and Miranda are going to rule?  I.  Don’t.  Think.  So.  But I’ve seen at least two reviews praising him particularly, so . . . I’m a cow.  This is not news.††† 

And I love David Daniels, but I don’t quite get why they cast a countertenor as Prospero, who’s an old guy.

Er—what does old have to do with being a countertenor?   James Bowman is semi-retired at 70, but he’s still giving concerts.  I thought this was a stroke of genius, myself, to cast a Baroque Prospero as a countertenor—and then get David Daniels, who actually has a voice strong enough to cope with operatic demands and the personal authority to go with it, to sing the role.  Of course there’s not a lot he can do with the repulsiveness of the character, but that’s how it’s written. 

He’s not a particularly nice monster, but he still has his feelings and his dreams, and he’s the only principal at the end who hasn’t got what he wanted.

Agreed. They should have conjured up a Papagena for this Papageno. I was kind of hoping that’s what Ariel stepped offstage to do.

Yes.  Maybe they can do that in a later edition.    Maybe we should write letters. . . .

. . . The singers–part of the Met’s young artist development program–who sang the Dream lovers were very good, and I especially liked the young mezzo who sang Hermia. She sounds like someone to pay attention to.

Agreed!  She was the stand-out to me too.  I was thinking, hey, this chickie could grow up to be a contralto.  Mmmmmmm.

This was altogether a great show. I’d see it again, too, any time. 

Let’s hope there are enough of us to make it so.

Oh, absolutely.‡  I knit at traffic lights, remember?  And waiting for stuff to happen.  (Like very long lights to change.)  Some people meditate.  I knit.  It’s soothing. It’s also a Positive Time Out From the World thing, which is why it’s so perfect for opera intermissions, which are too long for those of us who think we should be doing something.  That there might conceivably be a PRODUCT at the end of one of these long yarny tunnels would be awesome.  Slightly in my defense, you know, I bit off way more than I could chew with my Three Secret Projects.  I eventually decided I couldn’t inflict them on anyone, and kind of collapsed in a damp little heap on the floor.‡‡  And I started with the idea of leg warmers, as some of you may (unfortunately) recall, and when I had an instant nervous breakdown about the ribbing, Fiona had the brilliant idea about the hellhound blanket.  And now, a year later, I’m maybe ready to try again.

If you can knit for an entire year without a single finished object to your name and still enjoy knitting, then you are definitely a Knitter with a capital “K.”

 Snork.  But it’s process Zen knitting, you know?

RIBBING! IT'S RIBBING! It's not very even ribbing, but it's RIBBING!!!!

* * *

* Made easy by reading BEFORE I FALL by Lauren Oliver.  http://www.amazon.co.uk/Before-I-Fall-Lauren-Oliver/dp/0340980907/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1327273485&sr=1-1

Yowzah.  This is another of those books—like WINTERGIRLS, say—that I had zero interest in—I might almost say violent, bigoted zero interest in—get away from me with that thing.  It’s a Sensitive Teen Age Novel About Learning The Important Stuff.  Oh, And The Heroine Dies.  Since this is the most famous part of the set up, I don’t consider that a spoiler.  Anyway, I frelling hate sensitive teenage novels, and one of the sub-categories I particularly hate is when the main character dies (sensitively), but FALL is another book that reached over my prejudices, grabbed me immediately and doesn’t let go.  It’s just a very, very good book.  I had about a million people tell me to shut up and read it.  ALL RIGHT.  I’LL READ IT.  FEH.   You could argue that I’m too old to have a clue about the spot-on-ness of Oliver’s take on the spectacular horribleness of the high school popular crowd—but I’m not too old to say that she’s deadly accurate about people and the misuse of power.^  And while a lot of the reviews emphasise how horrible Sam and her crowd are—because the point is that as Sam relives her last day over and over, she becomes less horrible—one of the things that struck me was how easy they were to find sort of (horribly) likeable.  Far more human than you might have thought if they were laughing at your shoes/knapsack/hair or not inviting you to their parties.  But then Oliver has bags and bags of style, and I’m a sucker for style.  I sometimes think it’s the rarest writing gift of all.  

^ And the antics of the popular crowd have not, in fact, changed all that much in the last half century.  The big local high school, which is pretty much first choice for anyone in this catchment area, is about four blocks from here.  I see a lot of teenage group activity and it all looks pretty familiar.  A bit more personal tech is all. 

** I want to get this mostly off the front page, however.  Anyone riveted by my private soap opera, the conversation continues in the forum. 

*** Opera singers—and Nadia isn’t chiefly an opera singer, but she’s done some—always have amazing stories. 

† The president/secretary/oddsbods man/assistant director of the Muddlehamptons has kindly kept me on the mailing list.  They’ve got a wedding in late April, singing three old war horses of the standard choir repertoire and I so want to be there. 

 †† One of the idiot reviews of ISLAND that I saw said that de Niese couldn’t sing Baroque music.  What?  

††† I also acknowledge that being a major character who only comes on at the very very end and has to give a kind of And All Will Be Well From This Day Forward Because I Am Here aria out of nowhere is a rough one, and he did it with poise and charm. 

‡ I think we’ve had this conversation before.  I feel a little^ . . . embarrassed.  Surely knitting ought to be about product? 

^ NO NO.  NOT SHEEPISH. 

‡‡ It’s not all bad.  It’s significantly slowed my rampant stash acquisition.

Priorities:  I had a close encounter of an unfortunate kind tonight with a large, turkey-slashing knife, partly, perhaps, because I rarely have close encounters with large, turkey-slashing knives, and am less than adept.  The wretched thing skidded and was coming for me and I had just enough time to think ‘it’s okay, I’ll still be able to type’ before it changed its mind and did not sink half an inch into the ball of my thumb, squirt blood all over the kitchen, and require a nine-fingered sprint to A&E. 

Jacky

About the woman who starts the flash mob and where she gets the nerve. My 2 sisters and I sang in a choir a generous 1 hour bus ride from home. We sang on the bus on the way to and back home again. Singing in public is easier if you start young enough, and if you have good experiences of it. We were on occasion either applauded, or inspired others to join in. It wasn’t a scary thing. It was exhilarating. 

I take your point (and good for you), but this is not quite the same thing, at least not from where I’m sitting trembling in my seat.  There were three of you, and a bus full of people is still a lot smaller and more organised an audience than that shopping mall food hall with a couple hundred or something* people milling around.**  My empathy keeps stalling on the fact that I haven’t got a soloist’s voice, but I can imagine being one of the other choir members standing on a chair and adding to the uproar.  But that first woman . . . among other things, if I were her, I’d be worrying that they’d clap a bag over my head and be ringing emergency services before enough of the rest of my gang got going to prove that there was method in the manifest madness.

Glinda

As for the first woman singing in the flash mob – I think soloists are born, not made; I used to have a reasonably decent singing voice, but never ever wanted to be a soloist.  

Again, I can’t (ahem) speak to the singing aspect because I haven’t got the voice to not want to solo with.  But about performance . . . there is not necessarily alignment between ability and attitude in this, as there is also not in so many things.  Think of Florence Foster Jenkins.

             I remember when I was still running occasional writing seminars.  The hopefuls that made my heart sink were the ones who worked like blazes, had totally the right attitude about putting in their hours and honing their craft by experience . . . and who apparently had no talent, no ear, no imagination whatsoever.  I didn’t feel it was any part of what I’d been hired to do to tell anyone this—after all, I could have been wrong—and there’s always something practical and pertinent you can say about someone’s writing if you think about it.  And then there were the clearly talented ones who couldn’t be bothered.  ARRRRGH.  So they’d give you one perfect poem or—usually—two and a half perfect chapters which they weren’t going on with because it was beginning to dawn on them that it was going to be work.***  If you could yank that one person’s natural skill and replant it in the drudge. . . .

            It was one of the greatest shocks of my life when I was sent out on the road for the first time after BEAUTY came out and I was a shiny new thing, and I discovered that I could do public speaking.  What?  Where did that come from?  I was absolutely not made to be able to put myself over in person.  Clearly there is some mistake.†

            I had been thinking about singing performance however which made me rewatch this clip†† from a slightly different angle.  Last voice lesson we got into a mix up with our music again, which is to say that theoretically I have accompanist’s copies of everything I’m working on and theoretically Nadia already has her own copies of (nearly) everything because it’s music she’s accustomed to teaching.  But I managed to leave at home my extra copy of something she’d managed to leave her copy of at home too.  So she sang it with me.

            This has happened a few times before.  I always enjoy it, which may or may not be a good thing.†††   But this time what I particularly noticed was the difference not in our voices per se—which is to say she has one and I don’t—but in our performance.  She invests what she sings, even when it’s something that she doesn’t herself sing.  I don’t invest—even when it’s something I’m (supposedly) working on.  I stand there like a little plank with a sort of weak buzzing noise coming out the top end.  Sigh.  This is sort of a good thing in that I’m developing enough brain-space even while I’m singing to make observations—there is a very strong herding-cats element to singing—but it doesn’t tell me what to do about an observation like ‘eww’.  We’ve talked about trying, about how to relax and stop trying, to let the music move through you—not unlike letting a story move through you, you might think, but I haven’t found the musical on switch yet.  Siiiigh.  Watching these people singing the Hallelujah Chorus this time I was thinking, I bet I can pick out which are the actual choir members and which are the audience singing along.  Okay, maybe some of the choir members are horribly embarrassed at what they’re doing . . . but I don’t think they’d stay members of that group if they embarrassed easily.  Therefore the trying-their-best but plank-like ones are the audience. . . . Where is that frelling ON switch.

            I’ve been trying, this fortnight while I haven’t got Nadia to take things to, various ruses to startle myself into singing with some feeling.  I’ve been singing Christmas carols all my life, so those should be terror-free and familiar enough to take risks with.  I’ve reverted to some of my favourite old folk songs, like Greensleeves (or What Child Is This) and Early One Morning and Ash Grove and Down by the Salley Gardens, which have very simple flowing lines, and come as near to making you flow with them as any mere music can do.  I wander around the sitting room‡ singing, sometimes merely standing facing in directions other than into the piano and the wall behind the piano, and sometimes singing while walking.  Sometimes singing in a furrin language helps—both Non lo diro and Santa Lucia are better in Italian.  Sometimes singing furrin is just more intimidating—Caro Mio Ben and Dove Sei still feel wildly, ridiculously, shamefully beyond my reach—despite the fact that I find them beautiful and respond to them, just not in any way I seem able to let out of my mouth.  ARRRRRGH. 

            There’s one semi-exception to all this.  Generally speaking/singing I sound least pathetic on the simple old folk or folk-style songs.  And Se Tu M’Ami is still technically beyond me—I’m pretty sure I told you Nadia tried delicately to discourage me from tackling it, it’s just every frelling thing I sing seems to be mournful and here’s one that isn’t.  That’s where Santa Lucia comes from—she gave me that one because it’s cheerful.  Too late, though—I was already well stuck into Tu M’Ami.  And of all of them, and however technically calamitous my efforts are, I most get into Tu M’Ami.  With Tu M’Ami I have occasional little glimpses of how the dynamics arise organically from the line of the song.       

             I feel that my perverse streak could take a break here any time.   

Melissa Mead

My maternal grandma used to give me socks. Generally argyle. I came to love “grandma socks,” and now I can’t look at argyle socks without missing her. I still have a couple of pairs of “grandma socks.” They’re getting holey, but I won’t throw them out. 

FOR HEAVEN’S SAKE, WOMAN, YOU NEED TO LEARN TO KNIT.  

* * *

* I’m not sure how much you see even in the long shots. 

** Although people in the hall can probably escape more easily if they’re not in a social-uplift mood.  You’d have to be extremely grinchy to get off at the next stop and wait for the next bus.  Grinchy and possessed of a great deal of spare time, bus schedules being what they usually are.  

*** On the whole give me 90% work ethic and 10% talent rather than the other way around, but you do need the 10% talent. 

† The Personality Creation admin is clearly as screwed up as the Story Council.  There may possibly be some delivery system problems as well.^ 

^ ‘If no one is there, please stick it in the kid third from the right’.  

†† This clip, for anyone who doesn’t read this blog faithfully every night:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXh7JR9oKVE 

††† It’s a good thing for a choir member to like singing with other people.  It may not be a good thing for a student to like having a teacher to hide behind. 

‡ Much to the consternation of the hellhounds, who are a bit dubious about my singing anyway, and feel that if I move away from the piano toward the centre of the room I should be going to go sit on the sofa.

In which we take all the boxes, the bags, the ribbons, the wrapping paper, the already-broken bits, the totally unidentifiable shreds of whatever and the stuff that should go straight to Oxfam and bundle it up somehow and start making vague plans to have a Major Dump Run in the near future.

I think I’m suffering Caloric Hangover.  Or that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.*  I started ABSOLUTELY SMALL on Pooka on the morning hurtle** and it’s like . . . what?***   Oh, gods, frelling science again.†   I thought it was going to be the last lost volume of THE BORROWERS.

I’m also still listening to Christmas carols while hellhounds and I lie on the sofa admiring the view††† and reading about roses and maths.‡  This year’s favourite album is an old Maddy Prior and the Carnival Band one:  Gold Frankincense & Myrrh‡‡ which I slap back into the player every time Peter is out of the room for a bit.‡‡‡  The lyrics are included.  Maybe I could try singing along. . . . 

* * *

* Mmmm.  Christmas pudding with brandy butter.  Mmmm.  

** The drawback to frelling holidays is that TOTALLY FRAUDULENT sense that you HAVE MORE TIME TO DO STUFF.  Of course in the present situation what I haven’t got is more time, but there are only so many hours a day I can spend on SHADOWS without a total systems crash, and trying to defibrillate wetware can be tricky.  So I spent some quality time this morning, while I was testing the amount of caffeine required to get us on line, putting 1,000,000,000 pairs of All Stars back on their shelves^ and hoovering up the ankle-deep shed geranium petals in the cottage attic.  And in consequence found myself eating lunch at 3 pm again.  Drat. 

^  Yes.  I have All Star shelves. 

*** I’m also having some trouble with the narrator, who I think in an attempt to sound properly serious and scientific instead sounds like your old chemistry teacher who really wanted to fail you.  

† Although I suspect Fayer of having forgotten, or rather of never having known in the first place, what it’s like being an ordinary dumb^ non-science person.  In my day one of the few things I ‘learnt’ about the scientific method was that it was lofty and detached and had no contact either with individual subjective humanness^^ or with whatever was being studied.  The scientist stood at the correct distance with his (or occasionally her) clipboard and took cool objective notes.^^^  Then they discovered that inconvenient business about how the simple fact of observing certain things—teeny subatomic particles, say—changed them, and what do we all do now?   In this 2010 book Fayer mentions in passing at the beginning that ‘of course we interact with what we observe’ . . . and then keeps going to make his real point about the ‘absolute’ difference between small and large.~  WAIT A MINUTE.  EVERY SCIENCE TEACHER I EVER HAD~~ IS STANDING IN THE BACK OF THE ROOM AND GIBBERING.

            And if that’s not bad enough, he starts with Schrodinger’s damn cat.  But @juliagertrud posted the perfect answer to all things Schrodinger’s cat on Twitter a few days ago:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itQVDA6_TME&feature=g-user-u&context=G2ac07aeUCGXQYbcTJ33bJuwRQr7QRamAJkMSiCooYTc_y_vBnibw

And I’m delighted to hear that Schrodinger himself called it ‘burlesque’.  

^ I’m still going to get back to you on the not-calling-myself-dumb thing.  But not tonight.  

^^ ‘I ate too much Christmas pudding last night.’  ‘Is that really cute lab tech trying to catch my eye?’  ‘If I don’t pick up my dry cleaning soon they’re going to give it to Oxfam.’

^^^ This is, just by the way, one of the reasons I bailed on the scientific method.  There is no such thing as objectivity.  Except in a pure, philosophical, Plato’s-cave sort of way, which is of limited use down here on the ground. 

~ Which seems to be—but I haven’t got my hard copy of the paper book here to check, and this is probably another one I’ll have to listen to twice—that ‘absolutely small’ means that you can’t set up an experiment that won’t disturb it to a disruptive degree.  ‘Large’ means that you can set up an experiment that will not be derailed by the fact that you’re observing it.   I think this is deeply cool (supposing I’ve got it right).  It’s like you grew up with north, south, east and west and if you ever said well what about in or out or Middle Earth you were given detention.  And someone is now telling you no, it’s vortex, gron, megabat, dibbleworthy and trout, and it’s more like Middle Earth than it is like north and south.  Oh.  Okay.  Give me a minute.  I think I’ll like this.  If maybe you could just give me a bucket of ice water for my head. 

~~ This would be up to fifty years ago, remember.  Fifty years ago we were still hunting mammoths with spears. 

†† Diane in MN wrote:

May your computer come to the miracle step of its flowchart and return to normal function. 

How I love Sidney Harris, who decades before xkcd^  was telling us science was funny: http://www.leasingnews.org/Sidney_Harris/probability.gif

http://two.leasingnews.org/cartoons/RUSTY-(5).jpg

. . . And who clearly also has dogs.

            But we will not discuss my computers the day after Christmas.^^ 

^ http://xkcd.com/54/ 

^^ The fact that there is a blog post is all you need to know on the day after Christmas.  

††† Didn’t get any tinsel up today however.  Hoovering the attic was enough.  But Georgiana did come for tea and trained Peter and me rigorously in Kindle use.  I had to go download a couple of new things onto Astarte afterward just so I didn’t feel all hopeless and retro.  I wonder if I can convince Peter that his Kindle needs a name? 

‡ Now there is a combination to fry the eyeballs and turn the brain into pancake batter. 

‡‡ Which I bought that year, 2001, when we saw them live at South Bank . . . and I was too chickenlivered to ask for an autograph.  Yes.  Really. 

‡‡‡ When I was first over here we had to negotiate how long and how intensely I was allowed to play my Christmas music.  Generally speaking I play it nonstop from Peter’s birthday through New Year’s and stop, and Peter promises not to kill me.  Although we do get the MESSIAH all year. 

Susan in Melbourne wrote:

To which I offer http://www.youtube.com:80/watch?v=ZCFCeJTEzNU, but you’ll have to watch, not just listen. 

My favourite is this, and I can’t remember how I first saw it, but it may well have been someone on the forum: 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXh7JR9oKVE

Which you also have to watch as well as listen.  One of the things that makes me catch my breath every time is that very first woman standing up and singing.  In the circumstances where does she get the nerve? 

I’m not READY.  Hells, I’m not started.  I REALLY must get the Christmas decorations out of the attic at Third House . . . tomorrow.  Must.  Really.  Our nice little plastic tree has one rather serious disadvantage, which is that it’s a ratbag to put together* . . . and after Peter retires snarling** I will have to slam all the ornaments on at extreme speed.***  I ALSO HAVE TO WRAP ALL THE PRESENTS.  Well, all of Peter’s presents.  I withdraw further and further from the whole Christmas thing every year—the official clan and/or people I don’t know very well and/or owe favours to tend to get plants by post† and charity certificates of one sort or another.††  Peter still gets presents.†††  Which means WRAPPING.‡

            I have a novel to write.  In five weeks.‡‡

             . . . .I’m listening to Handel’s MESSIAH on Radio 3.  A while back, and I can’t remember which singing thread, there was a certain amount of giggling on the forum about how doing it yourself makes you more critical of other singers, and I meant to say, but I think I never did, that it also makes you more in awe of other singers.  How do they do that.  Wow.  Golly.  Swoon.  Adore.  Despair. †††  What I do find absolutely true however is that doing it myself, however feebly, engages me in other people’s performances to a degree that is sometimes frelling inconvenient.  It’s beginning to remind me of what a cow I can be about other people’s books—I don’t care if it won the Pulitzer, it’s not good enough—which is marginally more understandable in my professional field.  It’s just shameless when I start getting snippy-pernickety about singers.  But . . . this is a very nice MESSIAH, but where is the passion?  ‘He Was Despised’ shouldn’t be beautiful, it should make you cry.§  

* * *

* Peter does this.  But I’m not giving him much running-in time.  

** This is approximately the only time all year that I see Peter snarl. 

*** Fortunately there are rarely speed traps in Peter’s sitting room. 

† Which I’m extremely relieved to report seem mostly to have arrived with a loud simultaneous thump today.  This includes mine.^  One of which is clearly frost damaged and since there hasn’t been any local frost in several days^^ has to have happened en route somewhere.  SIIIIIGH.  The fact that any recipient of a little frill of festively decorated twigs that looks more like a voodoo fetish than a live plant will know that it’s not my fault is very little comfort.  

^ Since they have this system for the orderer to order something for herself by ticking ‘myself’ during check-out, you’d think they could follow this through so that ‘myself’ doesn’t receive a card that says, ‘look inside for a message from the person who gave you this gift!’ and in my case says ‘Happy Christmas, Mrs McKinley Dickinson!’ which begs the question slightly about ‘to’ and ‘from’.  ^^^ 

^^ Except the imaginary kind that gives the indoor jungle something to complain about the nights I don’t bring it in.  At the moment I can’t bring it in, the top of the hellhound crate is covered with not-yet-wrapped Christmas presents.  One them is kind of . . . large.  No frost tonight.  NO FROST TONIGHT.  ARE YOU LISTENING?  —It was tipping it down earlier, creating a bottleneck of wet, cranky, last-minute-shopping people midtown even of little New Arcadia.  Hellhounds and I sat in Wolfgang, listening to the rain drumming on the roof and feeling smug, having returned from our hurtle about forty-five seconds before the heavens opened.+  I am now paying for this complacency, as the frelling weather has cleared off and the temperature is dropping . . . and dropping . . . ++ 

+ I spent that forty-five seconds chatting to Phineas, who encouraged me to let the air out of the tyres of Mr Gormless, should I be so unfortunate as to have contact with his misdeeds again, and whom Phineas apostrophises as not the full shilling.  

++ Speaking of plants, Katinseattle wanted to know about this one from Gemma’s gift:  http://www.hardys-plants.co.uk/product.asp?plant=131  

^^^ There’s a Schrodinger’s cat opportunity here, although in this instance the cat is permitted to be alive in both its states. 

†† I give driblets and drablets all over the shop including the obvious big guns like Amnesty, Greenpeace, Medecins sans Frontieres, National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children—insert your forty-six favourite charities here.  But I do like to give slightly cheerful things at Christmas, although I realise this is the wrong attitude for celebrating the birthday of someone who was willing to be crucified in the hope it would do the rest of us some good. 

            Admirable intentions don’t always translate into reliable admin, and there are several Big Holy Green Guys I will no longer touch with a barge pole, but for anyone who’s interested, here are a few UK furry-critter organisations that I’ve been subscribing to successfully for years.

http://shopping.rspb.org.uk/c/VirtualGifts.htm?utm_source=rspbwebsite&utm_medium=navigation&mediacode=T06ITH0221

What they offer you varies from year to year, but I’ve put in an awful lot of hedgerows.  

http://www.dogstrust.org.uk/sponsor/default.aspx?view=all

Lurchers and sighthoundy critters never seem to need sponsoring, or not for long.  At present I sponsor Hamish.  I admit I have just a flicker of doubt about these guys:  your sponsoree never dies, they’re always placed with a private owner and so don’t need sponsoring any more.  Really?  

http://www.guidedogsgiving.org.uk/sponsorapuppy/?gclid=CJju7qCnma0CFUUPfAodYFhsmg

I’ve been doing this so long and they roll over so fast I can’t remember the name of the current half-grown critter.  But the cuteness factor is extreme.  Not only do you receive regular ‘pupdates’ of your own protégé but they send you stuff like the Guide Dog Puppy Calendar every year which is all little fat furry darlings and is a good thing to stare at while you’re waiting for your first cup of tea of the day to turn black. 

              And I’d belonged to the Bat Conservation Trust for years before I realised I had a problem.  I hadn’t noticed you can now adopt bats.  I, of course, don’t need to.^

http://www.bats.org.uk/pages/adopt_a_bat.html 

^ Hee hee hee http://www.bats.org.uk/ecards.php?action=ecard&id=43 

††† So do a variety of friends.  But rarely at Christmas.  Or at their birthdays.  When I get around to it.  Sometimes it takes years.  There’s this box in the corner of my bedroom. . . . 

‡ I suppose the next boundary to withdraw over is wrapping . . . but stuff looks so pretty after it’s been wrapped.^  I’m hyperventilating slightly about Peter’s Very Large Present however.  It’s . . . Very Large. 

^ Aside from questions of blog photos. 

‡‡ Only four people showed up for tower practise tonight YAAAAY.  We hardy few barely waited the obligatory quarter-hour before declaring a bust and all rushed downstairs and out into the night.  The other three may have gone to the pub.  I went home to SHADOWS.  Which is still going well, except for the ‘five weeks’ part. 

‡‡‡ Why don’t I take up knitting?^ 

^ I haven’t ripped out the leg warmers lately.  Because I’m cravenly knitting hellhound squares. 

§ Sung in this case by one of my new heroes, Iestyn Davies.  How embarrassing.  But . . . http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qH3E64G0oCI

Bronwen emailed me the end of last week that she was going to be in this area on Monday, and could she drop in?  Sure, I emailed back.  I have my voice lesson Monday afternoon, but we can go ringing with Colin in the evening, if you like.  I can meet you at the cottage after my lesson, at 6:30 or so.

            . . . I was hoping I might come to your lesson, she answered.

            WHAT?  ARE YOU FRELLING JOKING?

            I was, in fact, so blitherblathered, nonplussed and gobsmacked by this insane and unexpected request that I couldn’t immediately think of what to say, other than NO.  AND NEVER DARKEN MY DOOR AGAIN WHILE YOU’RE AT IT.*  Since I’m fond of Bronwen I restrained this natural impulse and . . . emailed Nadia.  Do you have a policy about people sitting in?  I said.  Do you . . . by any chance . . . FORBID it?**

            This was happening last night at about two a.m.*** when I am perhaps not at my best anyway.†   For some reason†† Nadia hadn’t answered by the time I crawled out of bed again (later) this morning . . . and meanwhile the hours were ticking by and Bronwen was climbing in her car and turning the key in the little hole††† and . . . and . . .

            And when I went to warm up today with my piano at the mews I couldn’t sing at all.  Here I had been comforting myself that at least yesterday’s indisposition (which has much lessened, thank you) had had nothing to do with my throat . . . and I still couldn’t sing.  I was producing these nasty horrible thready little noises.‡  Ugggh. 

            Beginning to panic now I texted Nadia saying, perhaps you didn’t see my email (which I sent at about 3 a.m. and you’re probably feeding your kid her oatmeal before facing your first student of the day and haven’t checked your inbox) and thank the gods this time she answered, and in Best Professional Manner, that she did not have a policy about sitters-in and she did not object to teaching with an audience, but that she felt that unless this was a run up to an exam or a performance it was not helpful to the student and advised against.  YAAAAAAY.  I pretty well burnt my fingers racing to email Bronwen:  NOOOOOOOOO.‡‡

            Then we’d managed to get the lesson time crossgartered somehow so I was waiting‡‡‡ for half an hour before Nadia was ready for me which did not help my tension level any. §  So when it was finally my turn I went in and, setting my knapsack down and removing my music as if I were an insufficiently tested beta model, squeaked that I had been ill yesterday and today I can’t sing at all.  When I admitted upon questioning that it had been a Digestive Issue Nadia said, well, of course.  The bottom half of your body isn’t speaking to the top half, so you’re not getting any of the support you need not to sound thin and reedy.  Lie down on the floor and breathe.

            So I lay down on the floor and breathed.§§

            And, after that, the lesson went pretty well.§§§

            At the end she said, your homework for the next fortnight is to go home and ENJOY singing all these songs you’ve been working so hard on.  ENJOY.  You know about ENJOY, right?

            Oh.  Kind of.

            And then I came home# and finally met up with poor Bronwen.  And we went ringing at Glaciation.##  We came back to the mews for supper and then she knitted while I got on with SHADOWS.  It’s very . . . shadowy.  In a good way.  I hope.   

* * *

* And you can post that knitting book you borrowed back to me.  

** Please.  Please forbid it.  Please.  

*** Having spent an unhealthy amount of time bringing the jungle indoors again.  No frost tonight.  Yaaaaaaay. 

 † I’d also just found out that I’d been a thundering and inexcusable scoundrel to a harmless and inoffensive member of the human race and was reeling from the karmic backlash.  This does not serve to focus the mind in a positive way. 

†† I realise this will come as a shock to all of you, but not everyone lives by their email, their texts, their DMs, and their tweets.  Fancy.  And a substantial number of these non-virtual people have children still too young for email, texts, DMs, and Twitter.  Very real, small children.  

††† I spent SIXTY ONE QUID filling Wolfgang’s petrol tank today.  SIXTY.  ONE.  QUID.   Strongest argument for internet shopping that I know.  The next time I fall afoul of one of these barking and berserk sites that demand four passwords that add up to the square root of 19^ and then tell you that according to numerology your birthday declares you to be an axe murderer and/or a bad financial risk and therefore they are rejecting you and the credit card you rode in on . . . I will whisper to myself ‘sixty one quid’ and persevere. 

^ 4.358898943540674  http://www.math.com/students/calculators/source/square-root.htm 

‡ It’s all relative.  Nastier, horribler, threadier.  And definitely littler, which in the circumstances is just as well. 

‡‡ Under most ordinary conditions I have no problem saying No, and please fall in a large mud puddle on your way out.^  But I know that I am a neurotic wet^^ about singing and performing, and—I also understand being interested in the process.  What happens in a voice lesson with a good teacher is just interesting, and never mind if the student sounds like a hamster someone just sat on.^^^  I ought to want to spread the voice-lesson joy around.  Well, I do.  Just not in a way that involves someone having to listen to me sing. 

^ And may you be wearing drycleanable-only.  

^^ Possibly a neurotic muddy.  And my ego absolutely needs the delicate cycle. 

^^^ Shrill and flat. 

‡‡‡ Knitting.  I’m producing a very nice series of hellhound squares in varying textures of knit and purl.  This activity is interspersed with ripping out the first half-dozen rows of leg warmer again. 

§ Possibly the small-child-amusing CD of small-child songs Stella was listening to in a rapt and pensive manner had something to do with this.  When someone is trying to lisp breathlessly and, as you knit, wait for your voice lesson and try not to think about the half a page of SHADOWS you could have got through in this half hour, you are thinking (testily) that they are probably getting paid for the noise they’re making, and here you are paying for the privilege of trying to sound less like this. 

            Okay, I have never lisped.  And I’m only breathless when I forget, uh, to breathe.  Still. 

§§ Her mother came in with a cup of tea for her while this was going on.  Don’t worry, said Nadia, she’s used to my students lying on the floor.

§§§ I was probably just really grateful that it was only the two of us.^ 

^ And the cat. 

# Muttering about sixty-one quid 

## Where I was pretty much a disaster on all fronts SIIIIIIIGH.  I haven’t really got enough brain for a voice lesson and a tower practise in the same day.  Especially when there’s a little matter of a novel to finish in six weeks.

It’s absolutely tipping it down out there.  Again.*  Yesterday Peter had warned me that the weather was going to turn torrential by evening, so hellhounds and I had had an extra-specially hurtley hurtle in the morning, looking over our shoulders at the vast sneering grey bulk of the coming storm.**  I then had my head down over SHADOWS all afternoon and ignored the warning signs of tempest.***  By the time we got out it was sheeting and hellhounds were not amused.  I have raincoats for them and they were still not amused.  Look, guys, I said, pee and crap fast and we can go indoors again.  I think internal systems tend to shut down under meteorological abuse, however, and we didn’t have a long walk but we didn’t have a short one either—with me hauling them along at the farthest extents of their long leads while they gave me the full treatment:  tucked tails, humpy backs, flattened ears, and laser-eyed reproachful looks.  Mind you I’d much rather have lap-of-luxury-prone hellhounds than these hearty bounding things that think weather trying to beat you to the ground the better to drown you is an adventure—I’ve dogsat too many working hunting dogs who can’t wait to rush outside and look for grouse or tapirs or whatever the hell and can’t understand why you’re being such a poor sport about a little rain/hail/hurricane-force wind/alligators.  But yesterday was extreme.  Today would have been even more extreme except that the dog-minder tells time better than I do and she took them out on their afternoon hurtle before it started getting dangerous out there.  It was starting to rain ominously when I came out after my voice lesson, and the wipers were on high-extra-plus by the time I got home.

            What with everything else going on I think I haven’t mentioned that I’ve had rotten week for singing.  I think there’s been some rudeness from a minor virus involved, but the result has been that I haven’t wanted to risk aggravating the scratchy-almost-sore croaky situation.  ARRRRRGH.  This is the sort of thing that if I weren’t trying to sing I wouldn’t even notice. †   This is why singers are so neurotic, Nadia said cheerfully.  I’ve told you that before. 

            Yes, but . . . Okay, it’s much worse— much worse—for a professional singer.  But if you sound like Jonas Kaufmann or Deborah Voigt it’s understandable that you get a little stressed if your shining, high-mettled thoroughbred comes lame out of its loose box one day.  As a singer I’m one of those Thelwell ponies where you can’t tell how many legs it has, let alone whether it’s sound on all of them or not.  When I get discouraged because I’m sounding even more rubbish than usual it’s like don’t be frelling ridiculous.

            So it hasn’t been a good week.††  Also when you can’t practise enough you can’t derive the benefit of practise either, so I went in there today for my third hour-long lesson thinking, she’s going to tell me the hour was a mistake and we should go back to forty-five minutes.  And she’ll do it kindly. 

            She didn’t.  She told me that everyone has to learn how their own voice works, but that I’m extremely unlikely to be doing mine any damage, so to go ahead and keep experimenting with the limitations imposed by rude viruses.  The hour shot by.  The teacher-magic worked and I sounded better than I have since . . . at least last Monday. 

            I’m even noticeably learning Dove Sei.    

* * *

 * My poor garden.  I swear, when I hand SHADOWS in and doodle my last paid-for-already doodle, whichever comes second, I am going to spend a fortnight DOING NOTHING BUT GARDENING.  I may come indoors for meals.^  The blog will devolve to photos of mud and large green bags of future compost.^^  But at the moment I am grateful not to be watering pots.    

           We had our first hard frost three nights ago and I just threw up my hands—I haven’t got two hours to bring everything in and take everything out again—I don’t even have two hours to finish getting the summer/greenhouse set up, stocked up, and then regularly watered—speaking of watering.  Meanwhile I got off much more lightly than I deserved three nights ago.  I know it was a hard frost because we came home in it—I had to chip Wolfgang’s windscreen clear^^^ and we then came home sideways.  Geraniums and snapdragons often come through a degree or two of frost, although you can’t count on it, but the begonias and fuchsias usually don’t, and they did the other night.  I think the only thing I lost were the chocolate cosmos, and they are a ratbag to drag through the winter indoors so while I’m sorry I’m also relieved.  Maybe I can find two hours somewhere before the next frost. . . . 

^ Especially if this is happening in February.+ 

+ I wish.   

^^ Especially if this is happening in February.+ 

+ I wish.  

^^^ This is the third year in a row I’ve told myself I need to get a serious scraper instead of the shy little doodad I do have, clearly made for ornamental use in the Maldives.  It’s still better than fingernails.  

** Sunday morning hurtles are always at least a little aggrieved because of this bell ringing shtick, and the prospect of an extra-long Sunday morning hurtle is not always welcome.  By Sunday afternoon/evening hurtle I’m significantly brain dead, but I’m also full of caffeine.  I’m beginning to think that Monday evening practises are also always at least a little aggrieved because of this voice lesson shtick, although at least I can mainline a little more molasses-coloured tea between getting home from the one and going out again to the other.  Once-a-month Old Eden tonight, and a better turn-out than usual^, but this included one beginner and two people only just learning to ring inside, so the rest of us were mostly filling in for learners to bounce off of.  Minimal brain necessary.  Yaay.^^ 

^ Thanks to McKinley’s phone wiles, but they’re pretty much the same phone wiles every month, it’s just this month they worked. 

^^ Brute strength, however, is required for the frelling bells.  I wonder what chaos theory says about possessed-by-demons change-ringing bells?  What’s the physics of a 360-degree-turning bell, first 360° degrees in one direction and then 360° degrees in the opposite direction, securely riveted on a rigid frame, and you’ve just about got it figured out how hard you have to yank the wretched thing to make it complete its circle and suddenly between one yank and the next it comes down on you like a stooping falcon?, which is to say it doesn’t rise from straight down 0° to 180° straight up, it rises perhaps twelve degrees and sticks like it’s just hit a wall, and there you are turning purple and hauling on the bellrope till you can feel the blisters coming, trying to hoick it back into place again, and meanwhile you’ve probably totally fallen off your line through the pattern and you may have two or three people yelling at you, but then again maybe not, because they’re out of breath hauling on their own anvil-like bells.

 *** Long whippy rose stems beating against the windows like chains and the occasional thud of a raindrop the size of a latke.  

† I’ve been trying to remember how much of this nonsense I put up with when I was singing for Blondel.  It doesn’t seem to me it was this bad, but I’m hoping that’s because all of my singing at the beginning was basically a kind of undifferentiated wizened squeal, and by now I’d be noticing the somewhat better days from the very much worse ones whoever I was singing for . . . and not that I’ve angered the Upper Respiratory deity and it’s going to be a ratbag from here on.  I also don’t yet have a clue, besides finding out the hard way, when I can sing through an incursion of throat crud and when I’d better not.  

†† Turns out there’s a serious drawback to gaining a slightly better grasp of, um, music.  I don’t sing favourite arias out hurtling because they’re too hard.  I keep going wildly adrift and can’t find the tune.  But this is changing.  I was, for example, singing Marguerite’s final music—the angels-save-me bit^—pretty accurately this morning.  Except it’s my voice.  

^ ‘Anges pur, anges radieux, Portez mon ame au sein des cieux’ is what my libretto says.

Mornings.  Gaaaaah.  Sunday mornings after an opera are always more than a little aggrieved, and I blew a few gaskets last night.*  GAAAAH.  

Nycteris

I’m not a traditionalist, and up in my wee brain is my own directorial take on Faust that takes place in a college town in the US during the Vietnam war that I will impose on some community center before I die. . . . 

IMO when a concept sucks is when it is unconcerned with telling the story or worse, it is trying to tell a different story than the one the music tells. 

I’m not a hand-on-heart card-carrying traditionalist;  if you promise you’re telling the story**  I’ll gladly come to your community centre.***   I’ve seen, for example, LA BOHEME in modern dress, and it works just fine.  Young impecunious artists still starve in garrets—and it’s still perfectly possible to die because you can’t afford medical treatment.†  But that’s the thing:  you’re not allowed to turn what something is into something it isn’t.  I wouldn’t automatically throw out Faust as Robert Oppenheimer†† . . . but you do have to tell Gounod’s story if you’re using his FAUST. 

Diane in MN

I like Faust a LOT, and despite people who get snarky about it because it has good tunes and big numbers, it can be very powerful in a good production.

It’s a 19^th century soap [opera].†††  A lot of the old war horses are—my favourite Verdis, for pity’s sake, LA TRAV, AIDA, RIGOLETTO . . . OTELLO too, although that’s much more of a well-made play underneath than most.  

The final trio raises the hair on the back of my neck every time. 

Ah.  Yes.  I burst into tears.  Every time. 

I thought the singing was terrific (although I have one quibble: Poplavskaya’s voice sounds too mature to my ear for Marguerite, who is very young and very naive; it’s hard to hear Poplavskaya as anything but a grown-up), 

I agree.  And while I like Poplavskaya’s voice, I’m a little nonplussed that she is quite such the flavour of the month . . . and last month, and next month . . . at the Met.  Surely she isn’t the only . . . um, well, I’d call her a lyric soprano, but I’m probably wrong.  Someone who has the proper range and warmth for roles like Marguerite.  But she does sound too old for Marguerite—one of the reasons you-the-listener shouldn’t just write Marguerite off as a stupid little misery is because she is that young and naïve—and she is also all alone.  Everyone but her brother is dead, and he’s off fighting . . . somebody or other.   But this is perhaps the one advantage that someone who saw it has over someone who only heard it—I’m not sure Poplavskaya puts over innocence, but she sure puts over tragedy.  The scene with her utter turd of a brother‡, after Faust (with Mephistopheles’ help) puts a sword through him, and he’s dying and blaming her at the top of his lungs, she’s kneeling beside him, holding out the medallion she’d given him when he went off to battle and that he’d yanked off in a fury when he found out she was dishonoured, oh my, she does that well.  And despite her being too old and having too much self-possession, I could suspend my disbelief for that third-act seduction.  Faust’s role is pretty straightforward—he wants to get laid, and he wants it now.  I’m not faulting Kaufmann in the least—he does it up prime.  But Marguerite has a much harder task:  she has to both want and not-want, and do it without just looking like a drippy virgin or a cock-tease.  I think Poplavskaya succeeds. 

but the introduction of the crying/silent baby didn’t go over well with me. 

That may be the low point of the entire opera for me—even worse than Faust’s suicide—perhaps because the infanticide is crucial to the plot and Faust’s suicide is just another of this idiot director’s high concepts.  But the way the baby dies is so repellent.  Marguerite has been besieged by devils at the church, poor wretch, and runs off.  Some of the chorus clusters round her for two or three seconds, blocking her from view, and then they move away and she looks exactly the same as she did two or three seconds ago except that her front is now flat, and she’s holding a distractingly bad doll approximation of a baby.  She kisses it absent-mindedly and then rushes over to the sink . . . ah yes, the sink.  It is a Symbolic Sink.  Faust drinks from it in the first scene, and Siebel—Michele Losier, another excellent singer‡‡—derives her holy water from it to rejuvenate her withered flowers.  SPARE ME THE HIGH CONCEPTS.  It also sits in the middle of the stage . . . being a sink.  ARRRRRRRGH.  Anyway.  Marguerite rushes over and thrusts the baby into it.   I think she’s supposed to make a mad grimace at this point, but if so, her nerve failed her, because what it looked like to me was—oh gods, get this bit over with fast.  

And the ending, as described by Margaret Juntwait this afternoon and you tonight, can only be called bogus. 

Yep.  Highly bogus.   Lowly bogus.  And in-betweenly bogus.

AnguaLupin

I think this is the first time my views on a Live in HD production didn’t match up with yours. I (mostly) liked this Faust. Of course, that may have something to do with the fact that I actually don’t normally like Gounod’s Faust, so almost anything they do to it is an improvement. It’s so damn Victorian. “Oh, look, our favorite morality tale ever, do hold still while we hit you over the head with the morality bat. And while we’re at it, the religion bat, too. Wait, wait, you’re running away! Come back! We finish the opera with a paean to Jesus!” Gah. 

Yes but . . . you don’t like the opera.  I entirely agree that it’s a fairly sick-making morality play.‡‡‡  If you can’t suspend your disbelief that far—and no blame if you can’t—then this opera isn’t for you.  I don’t like Shakespeare, but I’m not going to praise a production of one of his plays for making it not Shakespeare.  Well, okay—I might—but only tongue in cheek.  No, really . . .  

* * *

* We had exactly eight ringers, one of them Monty, and so Niall, thank the gods, took the conservative course and we only rang call changes.  I am therefore still alive to tell the tale. 

** And you have the singers.  Ahem. 

*** I will bring several of my own cushions.  Community centre seats . . . 

† Although it’s harder in France than some places.  I believe their national health care is one of the better systems. 

†† And the fact that it’s been done isn’t necessarily damning either:  how many times has Beauty and the Beast been retold?  I’m not a John Adams fan, and one production of NIXON IN CHINA has been enough for me;  I heard highlights from DR ATOMIC and thought, right, that’ll do.  In theory backdating Oppenheimer to the most famous operatic FAUST sounds kind of interesting, and when someone sent me the link to the NYTimes review  http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/01/arts/music/a-review-of-the-metropolitan-operas-faust.html?_r=1&ref=metropolitanopera I read it and thought oh, well, it’s a critic being a critic^ and tried to hope for the best.  I now think he was being kind and restrained. 

^ Which is perhaps a rant for another day 

††† http://www.museum.tv/eotvsection.php?entrycode=soapopera seems to think opera is an ironic choice, but I’m not so sure.  The reason I can’t watch soaps^ is because nobody does anything except have sex and nervous breakdowns.  When does anyone earn a living or do the housework?  But you need some kind of plot, probably implausible, to hang the sex and nervous breakdowns on, and opera is pretty much the same thing only with tunes, and it’s also over in a few hours. 

^ Barring a flirtation with DARK SHADOWS in my youth but I couldn’t actually, ahem, stick it for long either 

‡ Admirably played and sung by Russell Braun.  That’s a hell of a cast to keep up with, especially when you’re playing the scum from the bottom of the black lagoon, and he did it really well.  

‡‡ One of my minor pleasures is a really good cross-dressing girl.  You know the theatrical swagger that a good female actor playing a man puts on?  I love this when it’s done well.  Losier did it well. 

‡‡‡ And when the CHRIST IS RISEN comes up in the subtitles I’m sitting there thinking . . . um . . . sometimes I’d rather not be reminded what they’re saying.  I’m not a Christian, so that is my bias, but it also does seem to me a trifle inappropriate here.

TONIGHT’S FAUST FROM THE METROPOLITAN OPERA IN NEW YORK IS ONE OF THE WORST, STUPIDEST,  MOST PERVERSE PRODUCTIONS I HAVE EVER SEEN AND I HOPE THE DIRECTOR’S NEXT PROJECT INVOLVES  CARDBOARD, DENTAL FLOSS, AND MARKER PENS..   

            I HAAAAAAAAAATED IT.  AND I AM HAVING PROBLEMS HERE TONIGHT NOT USING LANGUAGE.

            Oh yes, and there will be spoilers.  Ironic in this instance. . . .

            There are two ‘worst’ aspects to tonight’s large expensive cowpat.  The first is that Gounod’s FAUST is a big, soppy romantic wallow, which either does or does not go fatally over the ‘sentimental’ line, depending on the point of soppiness saturation in your own personality.  I love it.  It’s one of my desert island operas (with most of Verdi, about half of Mozart and one or two Rossini and Donizetti and . . .).  But it needs to be treated gently.  Try to take it too far out of its milieu at your peril.  This is to a great or lesser degree true of anything stageable, I would imagine, but opera generally is to my eye/mind/ear already dancing on the edge of irrecoverable silliness, and it’s just not a good idea to distract an audience from the glory of the music to vexed and vexatious questions of plot and continuity.  IT’S ABOUT THE MUSIC.*  And that’s really all it’s about.  Any director who doesn’t get this is a moron.

            There are a lot of morons out there.  I’m sufficiently hard-line about this that I further think that anyone responsible for a production that calls too much attention to itself is an up-himself prat.**  I know the arguments about ‘freshness’.  I think they’re mostly bunk.  I think that the majority of the opera-going audience doesn’t have the chance to get tired of non-controversial productions because due to time, money, other things in their lives and how many operas are performed in a given year they don’t see them often enough to get tired.  I think that most of the excuse for ‘exciting’ new productions is SELF INDULGENCE on the part of the theatre admin.  Bored with straightforward productions that give the singers the best possible chance to bring the audience to its knees?  Go sell washing machines.  And don’t let the door bang you in the butt on your way out.

            I don’t even know where to begin.  And I have to go to bed so I can ring bells tomorrow morning.  But here’s the second ‘worst’ about tonight’s show:  it was an absolute dream cast.  Jonas Kaufmann as Faust***, Rene Pape as Mephistopheles and Marina Poplavskaya as Marguerite.  Gods.  What they could do with this music.  And they mostly even managed it, despite very long odds against, like running a marathon on one leg and blindfolded.   Some of the close-up stuff did work a treat—the famous act-three seduction is pretty great, for example.†  But the bullsh—I mean, the poor creative decisions of this production kept getting in the way.

            So.  Anyway.  FAUST is a big, gorgeous, soppy, 19^th century tragedy, with melodies to die for and buckets of emotional melodrama.  Gounod laid it in 16^th century Germany, with probably about as much historical accuracy as Puccini lavished on MADAMA BUTTERFLY, so I’m not terribly fussed about slavishly following the libretto about this.  But the director has decided that his Faust is one of the scientists involved in the Manhattan Project.  What?  Mind you, you only know this because Joyce Di Donato tells you, as tonight’s broadcast host.  There’s no particular clue to the initial backdrop of an anonymous ruined building, a vaguely laboratory-looking stage, and some limping, blackened people who cross Faust’s path. (He doesn’t seem too perturbed by them.)  These unidentifiable victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki do however have a strange similarity to the blackened, jerking devils of Walpurgis Night.  Er, why?  And if those are WWII uniforms in act two, I’m Pippi Longstocking.  Although even if they are . . . wait a minute . . . this is after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs?  Then who are these soldiers and where’s the war?

            And what is the giant puppet-soldier about?

            And why does a bloody death’s-head in a cape come on stage and glower at Mephistopheles at the end of some act or other, I forget?

            And if that’s supposed to be a mushroom-shaped cloud at the beginning of act five (I think), how about if you locate a better piece of film for it?

            I’m getting ahead of myself.††  I acknowledge that what to do on stage while the overture unrolls can be a problem, but how about . . . nothing?  This is the orchestra’s moment.  Let’s listen to them.  But we have Kaufmann lurching around looking like a young man wearing a slightly greyed-over moustache, and a brief cameo appearance by some refugees.  Until Kaufmann started singing it was BORING—and there’s nothing wrong with the music. 

            The basic set had metal stairs with lots of open mesh walkways running up either side of the stage—like the sort of thing you see in factories and military installations and nuclear power plants.  It had nothing whatsoever to do with what was going on, although I suppose it provided one of those theatrical grails, Different Levels.  It was a daft place for Marguerite to fall finally into Faust’s arms however—but the worst in that scene was the Thing that Ate Schenectady-sized red roses that bloom up the back screen on Mephistopheles’ command.  WHAT?  WHAT’S THAT ABOUT?  WHAT’S THAT GOT TO DO WITH THE ATOM BOMB, IF WE’RE RIFFING ON THE ATOM BOMB HERE?  Arrrrrrgh.  And speaking of Mephistopheles—Pape was good.  He had the authority and just the right sneer—as well as the voice.  Faust is a tick, so you need someone with some charm as well as the voice, and Kaufmann (ahem) has these;  and what I’m coming to like best about Poplavskaya—aside from the voice—is that she gives dignity to these awful die-away soprano-heroine roles her voice dooms her to.††† 

            I really thought they might manage to wreck the end, it’s so badly staged—gibbergibbergibber no I want to go to bed, it’s not worth ruining a working Sunday for—but when Poplavskaya, on her knees, looks up and starts in on her final ‘blessed angels, save me’ music, it came together for me anyway.  IN SPITE of her then climbing some of that ugly laboratory ladder toward what we assume is heaven—in spite of the chorus standing around in lab coats singing ‘Christ is risen’—what?  Speaking of yanking something out of its context, this is just ghastly—and then Mephistopheles sucks Faust down into hell.  Er . . . that’s not how the opera ends.  He’s saved too, through his pity for Marguerite, and remorse at his part in her ruin.  So you’re staring blankly at the stage and . . .  the phony old guy from the beginning, with the moustache, reappears up through the floor, and this time he does drink the poison that Faust was about to drink at the beginning, except Mephistopheles showed up and promised him fame, fortune and babes.  He drinks the poison and dies.  WHAT?  HOW IS THIS SAVED?  By any context this opera is capable of fitting into, suicide means you’re damned. 

            GIBBERGIBBERGIBBERGIBBER.  But I really have to go to bed. . . . 

* * *

* Just to be sure my colours are nailed to the mast here, I have no time for people who want to talk about opera as drama with singing.  Very very frelling few operas are well-made plays under all the twiddly bits.  You go to an opera, you park your intellect—not all your brain, but the logical part—at the door.  I’ve talked here before about the emotional reality of opera—I can forgive almost any absurdity as long as the big numbers give me a scalp-tingling rush. 

** Or herself, of course, but tonight’s prat was a bloke. 

*** Be still my heart.   What has happened lately, that there are suddenly hunky opera singers?^  When I was still young enough to have fantasies, who was there?  Luciano Pavarotti? 

^ And what’s a little drool among friends.  

† Not that this would have anything to do with my attitude toward Kaufmann. 

†† I PARTICULARLY hated the ending. 

††† Although I have a little rant I do about Marguerite:  she’s got the devil against her, for pity’s sake.  She was never going to win.  The particular challenge to Marguerite is to let her go mad convincingly.  She has plenty of excuse—her lover has run off leaving her pregnant, her brother, her only family, curses her for a slut with his last breath.  Nice guy.  Then when she goes to the church to pray she sees and hears devils.  Well, she is seeing and hearing devils.  It’s in the libretto.  So it’s not surprising she kills her baby—and a half decent production brings this out—infanticides generally not being wildly sympathetic.^  One of the WORST bits of tonight’s big ugly redolent mess is the baby-murder, which happens on stage, with the pacing and the emotional resonance of buying a newspaper at the corner shop. 

^ Although Hetty Sorrel and Tess of the D’Urbervilles both come to mind.