Extreme Brain Death, etc
Blah erg eh gah erfft groan snivel. I’m pretty sure I’ve used this title before, although the ‘etc’ may confuse the ’bot waiting to title it ‘extreme-brain-death-1407’ when I turn it into a shortcut to hang as a thread in the forum.* There get to be a lot of extreme brain death days toward the end of writing a novel, especially when the deadline is beetling down on you and you’re not done yet. What I haven’t been telling you, because there’s no point, is that I ran aground on SHADOWS with a horrible grinding noise about a week ago.** This is why I try not to write novels in a hurry, because forcing them along at a pace they don’t want to maintain tends to lead to this kind of thing. This is what I originally thought had happened with PEG II: I knew it was going to be long (ahem) and I thought it was just demanding a more leisurely pace, and I could wait it out. Politely. ***
You can miss signposts if you’re going too fast. I’ve been going pretty fast on SHADOWS, but mostly it’s been doing the mettlesome-steed thing and galloping along willingly. With the result that I was pretty far down the wrong byway when I realised that the landscape was going all peculiar. You may not know the difference between Piddling-on-Slepton and Greater Hatchflummery—they both have village greens and duck ponds—but you can make a good guess about whether you’re in a rainforest or the Riiser-Larsen ice shelf.† And furthermore while the story is delivered by the Story Council, some slack, not to say grace, is given to the scribe for rootling for vivid details, and I have a fertile little mind.†† I can not only have gone extremely wrong, I can have plucked all kinds of seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time-details out of the surrounding dramatic dazzle by the time I realise it should be parrots, not penguins. Oops. And of course the blizzard has eradicated my tracks. . . .
So, not to flog a poor innocent metaphor to death or anything, I’ve been kind of crouched in my tent, pushing earlier details around like checkers on a small travelling checkerboard, and waiting for the wind to die down so I can get my compass out and figure out where I went wrong. It’s a TOTAL FRELLING BITCH, waiting. It’s even a total frelling bitch when you’re not staring at a deadline. But there’s not a lot I can do until the blizzard subsides/the dust settles/the story forgives me for being a dork. Last few days I haven’t been listening to quantum physics while hurtling†††, I’ve been trying to, as you might say, deplot myself. Today I finally heard the parrots. . . .
So let’s have an Ask Robin to celebrate.
So I’ve been wondering this one for years, and I think I’ve checked everywhere else for the answer. In Hero, after Aerin defeats Agsded, she falls asleep and dreams three different scenes. One is of Hetta from Water and one is Harry, I thought. But the last one is of three men, one of whom we hear is called Tommy and one called Leo. Is that a story that is published somewhere and I missed it, or is it a story not yet written, or is it in a drawer somewhere?
I would totally swear that I have answered this one, but one of the new tenets of the rejuvenated Ask Robin, a bit like the rather inescapably evolved basic tenet of this blog, is that stuff inevitably comes round more than once.
No, that is not Hetta from POOL IN THE DESERT. Good grief. Check it out, people, I hear this a little too often. Even if you can get ‘the white walls around her were so high there seemed to be clouds resting on their heads’ out of a tatty little suburban garden, Hetta’s pool is specifically described as being surrounded by crazy paving, which is not ‘the flat earth around the pool was covered with squares of white stone.’‡ This wouldn’t matter, at least not till I finish writing the story about the girl in the other garden (Hetta doesn’t have long black hair either, but I don’t think that’s mentioned one way or another, since I’m mostly allergic to physical descriptions of my characters), whereupon everyone who’s assumed it’s Hetta is going to be confused. And I read stuff wrong in other people’s books all the time, and you can’t focus your best brain power on everything‡‡, and I write (and mean to write) curled-up-on-the-sofa, downtime kinds of books. But I do suggest you check this kind of thing if you’re going to write to the author, you know?
And yes, that is Harry.
Leo and Tommy and their companion are from the very first story I started writing about Damar . . . the one I lay aside because I realised it was too big and complicated and probably several books’ worth and I couldn’t cope . . . and wrote BEAUTY instead. Then when I went back to Damar I decided to start at what you might call an angle, with SWORD, and HERO was always going to follow immediately after SWORD (yes! It’s a prequel! I wrote it that way deliberately!). So Leo and Tommy are now one of the umpty-jillion Third Damar Novels still waiting in a series of beat up paper files and spiral notebooks.‡‡‡ If I live long enough. . . .
* * *
* Alternatively I could wait till a mod hung the thread for me, and then I wouldn’t have to notice.
** This is not wholly a bad thing, as it gave me a kind of break in concentration to get my bell tower resignation letter polished up and sent, which had to be done more or less right then. For all I know bits of my subconscious had been holding high level consultations about this. Including the bit that was holding my throat hostage and getting increasingly frustrated that I was ignoring the ransom notes. I feel this situation could have been arranged better but then I would think that, wouldn’t I? And by the way, about 75% of what Nadia did to me yesterday is still working—I was singing out hurtling today^ for the first time in weeks—and I may even practise tonight before I crash.
^ I wasn’t singing, however, when I frelling slipped in the frelling mud and fell frelling down squish. ARRRRRRRGH. At least I was wearing my raincoat which is old and falling to ruin anyway and I don’t have to worry about how it’s going to wash. (It probably isn’t. It is probably going to take this excuse to fall apart.) My jeans however brought half the frelling landscape home with them. Hellhounds were bemused. Usually they like me at their level but not so much when I’m screaming and floundering.
*** Convulsive shudder. Not infrequently in the last five months when I’ve been getting mental whiplash at the pace I am trying to make^ I’ve thought that having a story that WANTS TO BE WRITTEN even if it doesn’t want to be written quite this fast is ENTIRELY to be preferred to a story that . . . well, all right, it wasn’t PEG II’s fault I was refusing to listen to the whole ‘another two more books’ business. Still. I kind of feel it could have just let me write to the end of II and then stare into the abyss when I got there.
^ I know, I know, there are lots of authors who write two books a year, and some of them are even good books. I am not one of those authors. This is totally trampolining my tiny intellect.+
+ OH FOR PITY’S SAKE. Listening to Late Junction on Radio 3. Some intellectual# has taken AC/DC’s Hell’s Bells and turned it into a thoughtful piece of drooling ambient nonsense. Who are you trying to fool here. Those lyrics are not up to being whispered resonantly into a microphone too close to your mouth. GAAAAAAAH.##
# ‘An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.’ —Aldous Huxley
## Note that BACK IN BLACK is one of my all time favourite albums. Right up there with the Beverly Sills LA TRAVIATA. And equally patriarchal tripe in their different ways.
† Oh, look, there’s a penguin. Probably not a rainforest then.
†† Not much intellect. But lots of imagination.
††† SINGING is very good for encouraging brisk blood flow through the brain.
‡ One of the reasons I specified the crazy paving was that I thought I was preventing people from assuming it’s the pool—and the girl—from Aerin’s dream. Oh well.
‡‡ I think about this every time I go horribly wrong on a bell method I know perfectly well, possibly because I’ve been working too hard and have No Brain.
‡‡‡ There are some dead floppies^ involved in a few of the Third Damar Novels too, but I print everything out, so it doesn’t matter; if I picked any of them up now, I’d start a new draft on page one.
^ Floppy discs. Remember floppy discs?
Flu, hellhounds, SHADOWS and Jodi Meadows
Okay, that’s not your average mixture. Let’s have the good news first:
http://www.jodimeadows.com/?p=525
YAAAAAAAAAAAY. It’s alive!
* * *
. . . We are now, I fear, about to plunge down a steep slope. I was feeling a little odd last night but in my current state of whatever it’s always easy to put oddness down to a surfeit of quantum physics.* Unfortunately not so in this case. I nearly didn’t get out of bed this morning, except that there are hellhounds. And SHADOWS. Which is still due the end of the month. I can’t frelling believe I’m ILL again. I was ill in October, for pity’s sake**. I’m not sure yet whether this is merely (!!!!) a sick cold or whether it’s going to insist on the full panoply of flu. At the moment the jury is still out. But I feel like stale death on toast. AND CRANKY.
So I got out of bed at about . . . noon. I barely fell down at all. There are hardly any bruises from caroming off the four-poster on the way to the bathroom, which had mysteriously moved to a new location overnight.
I got dressed. I don’t guarantee that my tee shirt is on the right way around (who cares? It’s covered up by six woolly jumpers) but I got the shoes on the right feet.*** I hurtled hounds. Yes. I did.† Twice.††
And I worked on SHADOWS. I did.
. . . And this is as much blog entry as I can hold myself together for.††† Good night. May you sleep better than I’m likely to.
* * *
* Brief, according to my present state of non-brain, update on ABSOLUTELY SMALL: It’s all maths. I don’t know how even a crazed mathematician/physicist can have had the effrontery to look Average Reader in the face in the introduction and claim that understanding quantum mechanics does not require mathematics. You are so lying, Professor Award-Winning Scientist Bloke. It’s all maths.^
What is true is something else he said in the introduction however: that in most physics books the author says something like, blah blah blah blah, and here are the equations to prove it. And you’re supposed to read the equations. What’s different about ABSOLUTELY SMALL is that he then tells you the equations over in words. The equations are still there. You still have to deal with equations. They may not look like a lot of equations to Mr/Ms Science Brain but they are totally equations. But once he gets away from those poor cats waiting trembling in boxes for the Killing Look, he explains stuff pretty well.^^
If you’re up for it . . . it’s pretty fascinating. It’s so insane. It’s so not Newtonian.^^^ I also just love that most of it you can’t know exactly. HA HA HA HA ALL YOU CREEPY OVERBEARING SCIENCE BRAINS WHEN I WAS IN HIGH SCHOOL. HA HA HA HA HA. Granted I still don’t get it, but I’m a lot happier with the concept of a world that cannot be known/measured exactly—can’t be nailed down. This sounds a lot more plausible to me—more like my experience of the daily life this book is supposed to let me fit quantum theory into. ^^^^ And as he says, approximate doesn’t mean wrong: it means . . . approximate.
Anyway. It’s fascinating. But it’s probably not a book you want to strain to your bosom when you stagger off to lie on the sofa with hellhounds and minister to your brain-destroying illness.
^ Now that I’m committed, which is to say I’ve bought the thing, twice, audio and hard copy,+ I notice with a jaundiced eye that the three encomiums on the back cover about how This Is The Book We’ve Been Waiting for to Explain Quantum Mechanics in Daily Life are all by hard liners. There are two scientists and a lawyer. I’m sure he’s a very hard-line lawyer. And probably the author’s best friend since childhood. I want a hat check girl/boy or a brewer or ballroom dancing coach to tell me it changed their concept of life.
+ I cannot believe that anyone would survive the experience by audio only. If audio helps you focus, as it does help me, then the audio is worthwhile, and audible’s reader gets a medal. But you’re still going to have to have the hard copy. For the equations. If it takes the reader too long to say one of the frellers, you’ll have forgotten the beginning by the time he gets to the end. Lambda squared of the hypotenuse of the lobotomy . . . um. . . .
^^ I do wish he’d stay away from real-world examples. Even I know that a baseball is not a free particle, even when it’s left the field and is busy arcing over the stands. Speaking of the physics of gliding, however, is anyone playing Tiny Wings? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6pT_2E5xI0 I don’t know what I think of the game, but I love the graphics.
^^^ I have a new theory about why Newton was such an ugly piece of work as a human being. It’s because in his secret heart he knew he was wrong.
^^^^ Look at human nature. Look at hellhound nature.
** I think it was October. Autumn anyway. A few months ago. And my stupid throat hasn’t recovered from the last assault which is why the Muddlehamptons are forgetting my name. ARRRRRRRGH. And here I am again with an inflamed throat, a throbbing head, and that interesting kind of fever that makes you feel like you’re made of boiling aluminium. I RARELY GET THESE MALADIES. RARELY. Except lately ARRRRRRRRRGH.
*** One right foot. One left foot.
† I also deserve a medal. But so do they. At the ripe old age of five and a half, although generally speaking the advent of maturity is a little thin on the ground, they are very good about waiting till I get my crap together, even when I seem to be having unreasonably more trouble than usual with said crap, and of hurtling slowly, with pauses, once we get outside. I know the location of every public dustbin in this town . . . I also know the location of every bench, not that kerbs won’t do in a pinch. They probably just think I’m having a bad ME day. Multi-application hellhound training.
†† And the dog minder is going to take them out tomorrow. Another medal.
††† I told an American friend that what I really needed, Peter having made some excellent turkey stock for the bodily nutrition side, was someone to tell me Really Bad American Jokes. So she’s taken it upon herself to send me Really Bad American Jokes all day at intervals—for the support of my suffering soul. Here’s my favourite:
It’s the old west, and a newcomer to town sees there’s a big crowd gathered in the town square. So he spots the local newspaperman, and asks him what’s going on.
”It’s a hanging,” says the newsman. “They’re hanging Brown Paper Pete today.”
“Brown Paper Pete? Why do they call him that?” asks the visitor.
“Because he always wears brown paper pants, a brown paper shirt, a brown paper hat, and carries a brown paper satchel,” says the newsman.
“Wow,” says the visitor, “What are they hanging him for?”
“Rustling.”
She’s just sent me this one, but she says that I’m sick enough to worry her if I think these are funny.
Guy walks into a bar, sits down and orders a beer. While he’s drinking, he hears a tiny voice say, “Hey mister! I like your tie!” He looks around, but doesn’t see anybody. A few minutes later, the same tiny voice says, “Hey mister! Nice shirt!” Again, he looks around, but there’s no one around except him and the bartender. A little while later, the voice says, “Hey mister! You look like you’ve lost some weight!” So the guy calls the bartender over and asks him what’s going on. The bartender says, “Oh, that’s the peanuts. They’re complimentary.”
Absolutely clueless
Okay I’m having some trouble with Mr Fayer and his ABSOLUTELY SMALL. Has anyone else read it? In the first place. His Schrodinger’s cats. He suggests 1000 boxes with 1000 cats in them, one each. The cats—ALL the cats, each and EVERY ONE of the cats—are a mixture of 50% alive and 50% dead. Already I’m confused. What do you MEAN 50% alive and 50% dead? What? How? Why? By what MEASUREMENT (which of course is The Question*) are they 50% alive and 50% dead? What does this mean to the CATS? And then, having shut up all these possibly ailing and distressed cats in boxes, which cannot be a positive reinforcement of whatever their level of well-being might have been before you did shut them up in the boxes**, you start . . . opening the boxes. And by the fact of your opening the box and peering inside the cat magically—yes, I said magically—mutates into a pure state of either 100% aliveness or 100% deadness. WHY? THIS IS NOT HOW A CAT IN A BOX BEHAVES.*** Unless of course it DIES of a HEART ATTACK the moment it sees you. And after the first few hundred boxes you have a nervous breakdown as a result of your sense of responsibility for the deaths of (approximately) 500 out of 1000 cats. Not to mention the prospect of trying to support the liveness of 500 frelling cats until you can convince the RSPCA to come and take them away . . . and also try to convince the RSPCA that they shouldn’t sue the crap out of you for animal abuse, although, supposing they arrive before you run out of cat food, the vibrant, 100% healthiness of the 500 live cats should at least confuse the issue.
I don’t think I’m getting out of this example what I’m supposed to be getting out of it.†
And then there’s the whole ‘absolute’ size thing. He goes through the business of how we interpret size as relative. Something is large or small as soon as we have something to compare it to. A photograph of two rocks with a blank background tells us nothing about the size of the rocks till the background is adjusted to have a piece of human being in it for scale. I don’t myself see how this is a difference in kind with his ‘absolutes’ of ‘large’ being something you can set up an experiment to observe with a negligible alteration to the thing observed compared with ‘small’ being something you cannot set up an experiment to observe with negligible alterations—‘small’ means all experiments create non-negligible, which is to say substantial, alterations, no matter how clever you think you are, which pretty well futzes your experiment. How is this not relative? It’s relative to your ability to create an experiment with this or that outcome. It’s relative to your size and galumphingness. If we were the size of photons, we could create a sufficiently sub-photonic experiment to measure photons,†† photons being one of those absolutely-small things. I get it (I think I get it) that large means you can straightforwardly create useful experiments and small means you can’t, but—to this English lit major—this just means some science bozo is inventing new definitions for ‘small’ and ‘large’. That’s fine. The small and large part works. It’s the stuff around it I’m having some trouble with.
And then . . . back to reality . . . He says, ‘Imagine that a small boy weighing 50 pounds runs into you going 20 miles per hour.’ WHAT? How is this small boy weighing 50 pounds managing to run into you going 20 miles per hour? Turbo-charged roller skates?††† His parents should be had up for criminal negligence. Then he says, ‘Now imagine that a 200-pound man runs into you going 5 miles per hour. . . . The small boy is light and moving fast. The man is heavy and moving slow.’ EDITOR’S NOTE: that should be slowly. ‘Both have the same momentum. . . . In some sense, both would have the same impact when they collide with you. Of course, this example should not be taken too literally. The boy might hit you in the legs while the man would hit you in the chest. . . .’ Emphasis mine. He never does mention the boy’s propulsion system. I’m still worried about the chances of a small boy with negligent parents and turbo-charged roller skates living long enough to grow up and become a famous Olympic sprinter.
And finally . . . the maths question. On the VERY FIRST PAGE of the preface Fayer says that all we have to do is develop our ‘quantum mechanics intuition’ which is what this book is for. He says: ‘This lack of a picture of how [certain quantum-challenged] things work arises from a seemingly insurmountable barrier to understanding. Usually that barrier is mathematics.’ To understand these things not immediately obvious to the unenhanced human eye ‘ . . . requires an understanding of quantum theory BUT IT ACTUALLY DOESN’T REQUIRE MATHEMATICS.’ Emphasis again mine. ‘ . . . the presentation in this book is descriptive. Diagrams replace the many equations with the exception of SOME SMALL ALGEBRAIC EQUATIONS—AND THESE SIMPLE EQUATIONS ARE EXPLAINED IN DETAIL.’
THIS IS MATHS! THIS IS TOTALLY MATHS!
I don’t think it’s merely an excess of figgy pudding pressing on my brain here.‡
* * *
* See: absolutely small, which means that you can’t create a means to observe it without also creating non-negligible change to what you’re trying to observe. This is also a working definition of ‘spitchered’.
** Speaking of altering what you were trying to observe.
*** This is much more my experience of cats in boxes: http://www.cafepress.co.uk/+womens_dark_tshirt,137590640
† He says demurely ‘I have to admit to simplifying a little bit here. . . .’ Um. But it turns out all he’s referring to is the number of live and dead cats. You probably would not get exactly 500 of the one and 500 of the other. Oh. Okay. Like that addresses any of my problems with this parable.
†† And if he gets his totally-ignoring-reality Schrodinger’s cat metaphor then I get this totally-ignoring-reality itty-bitty extremely molecularly dense human metaphor.
††† Aren’t there some physics, speaking of physics, about how fast it’s literally possible for a substantially shorter rather than a substantially taller person to run, aside from talent and fitness and so on? Which means a small boy—fifty pounds is little—is even more unlikely to be going 20 mph. Without turbo-charged roller skates.
‡ EMoon:
Where is the digestion I had in my 20s, when immense amounts of anything I liked could be ingested without discomfort or weight gain or…whatever?
The one . . . the one thing to be said for having spent the last forty frelling years fighting my own personal daily battle with my waistline is that when I hit menopause and the diet wars became dirty, scorched-earth and take-no-prisoners, I was to some degree ready. I mean, I wasn’t ready, I’m appalled at how little I get to eat^ and how much I pay for it when I stray a spoonful of brandy butter over the line. But I am used to the mindset of Calories Are the Enemy, and most of my menopausal friends weren’t, aren’t and won’t be. I’m not utterly without, you should forgive the term, form in the matter of assuming all food is guilty until proved innocent.^^ This is not to say I won’t eventually get old and tired and say THE HELL WITH IT. I WANT TO EAT TOAST AGAIN. WITH BUTTER. AND MARMALADE. But at the moment—and this is a conversation I have had with myself at least every winter solstice holiday period for several years now, and at various less predictable times dotted about the calendar, and the situation is getting relentlessly more extreme—I’m still thinking about my rather ramshackle skeletal system, its weight-bearing capacity, and the hurtling of hellhounds, and I figure I can live like this a while longer. Which is, I repeat, not to say there will not come a day when I decide on toast.^^^ But preferably after SHADOWS—or the PEGASUS trilogy—has made me a multi-zillionaire and I can afford to replace my entire wardrobe.
^ And how much less than that I do in fact eat, so I can keep my CHOCOLATE and sugar in my tea.
^^ And in this courtroom, it won’t be proved innocent.
^^^ One might almost say ‘plump for’.
Pollyanna be damned
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, 19th century tragedy, with melodies to die for and buckets of emotional melodrama. Gounod laid it in 16th 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.
ANOTHER RATBAG DAY
I took New and Shiny home with me last night and . . . just by the way . . . this going to bed with your technology is getting out of control in my house. Two years ago I was only in danger of being crushed to death by falling piles of books. Then I bought Pooka—but putting her on the shelf next to my bed made some sense because it’s her phone number that the emergency-line button Peter wears round his neck forwards to. (If neither I nor either of the two back-ups answers, they send an ambulance and ask questions later.) Then there was Astarte. But I’m afraid it is extremely luxurious lying at your ease with six pillows and a duvet, reading or cruising on your iPad.* Reading. I’m still a hard-copy girl at heart** but the joy of reading hundreds of loose pages of manuscripts on an ereader makes me so emotional I can hardly type.***
Anyway. I took New and Shiny† not merely back to the cottage †† but to bed, thinking that I’d have a nice low-stress post-relaxing-bath stroll through some of its arcaneries at a time of day/night that when I can’t figure out what the *&^%$£”!!!!! is going on, it doesn’t matter. The first thing that happened is that it told me it had 98% of its battery charge. . . and 1 hour and 58 minutes remaining. Sound of Robin exploding straight up through the canopy and leaving a little dent in the ceiling. It’s probably a good thing it was the middle of the night so I wasn’t tempted to ring any archangels.††† Fortunately New and Shiny changed its mind and decided it had five hours left before I threw it off the (tall) bed and jumped on it. But one of the benes I have been persuading myself with‡ as I flinch and whinge about the necessity of learning all this new software rubbish is the prospect of watching films on an unplugged-in laptop that can actually do this without gargling, stalling, running out of battery and falling over. So New and Shiny had better.‡‡
Meanwhile . . . my bell-ringing software won’t run and several of the shortcuts on my desktop won’t open. SIIIIIGH. I haven’t even dared try my two monster programmes, the homeopathic RADAR and the musical Finale: I’m afraid there will be blood and screaming. And possibly entrails.
But my original point was that, having heaved New and Shiny to one side, to join Astarte and 1,000,000 half-read books on the other side of the bed, there is precious little room left for me. I hope New and Shiny doesn’t turn out to be a restless sleeper.
I woke up this morning out of a dream of someone holding me penetratingly at swordpoint which turned out to be a corner of New and Shiny, schlepped all four of us‡‡‡ back down to the mews, and discovered . . . that my email inbox wouldn’t open on the old laptop and crashed if I tried to persuade it and I couldn’t get into New and Shiny at all because it was rejecting both my fingerprint and my password§. . . .
At this point I did ring the archangels. And then knitted while they remote-controlled into the Battle of Hastings being re-enacted in a small Hampshire mews terrace.§§ At the end of all this I had two more hellhound squares and a throbbing headache. And it was nearly time to dash back to the cottage again to ring handbells. Frelling Niall was frelling early, and there was a knock on the door (and a cacophony of hellhounds) as I grasped the handle to flush the toilet AND THE HANDLE BROKE.§§§
* * *
* Not to mention a whole new fresh approach to playing Montezuma on a bigger screen.
** And the whole reading-in-the-bath thing is likely to keep me that way. Although you suspect you have a slight skew to your system when you’re waiting for the paperback not because you don’t want to spring for hardback prices but because you want to read it in the bath.
*** Sure cuts down on your second sheets though.^ And I’ve been getting through a lot of scratch paper lately, testing pre-doodles. And pre-pre-doodles. And . . . . ^^
^ Every now and then some mingy publisher sends you a ms where the pages have been printed on both sides. Feh. This should not be allowed.
^^ Remember the doodle it took me four tries to get right? I took #5 out of the envelope this morning, sighed, and put it back on the working side of my desk.
† I know. She? He? needs a name. It’ll come to me. At the moment our relationship is a little testy and I might inadvertently name it Grendel or Grendel’s Mother.
†† And it BARELY fits in my tattered canvas briefcase equivalent. AND IT WEIGHS A TON. It might as well be a third hellhound.^
^ Hmmmm . . . .
††† I did think about texting Raphael. Texting is a very very bad thing when you have shortness of temper problems. The immediacy of email is nothing on the diabolical immediacy of texting.
‡ NEW OS. AAAAAAUGH. Archangels did warn me that I was going to have to move on from XP this time, but . . . AAAAAAAAUGH. Gods on toast, why doesn’t someone come up with some stripped down programmes instead of the endless even-more-pumped-up ones? Sodding Microsoft is like a factory turkey—it’s already flabby and it’s half water.^ I don’t WANT a million more choices! I didn’t want about 80% of the choices in XP!^^
^ Not to strain a metaphor too far or anything, but its basic level of health is so poor it’s also full of pre-emptive antibiotics.
^^ Yes. This blog post is also coming from the old laptop.+
+ And yes, they all have names. The desktop—who is older than CHALICE, just by the way—is Seneschal. This laptop is Gonfalon, and the little knapsack-sized one is Pennoncel.
‡‡ Meanwhile, when the frell are they going to get both batteries and battery read outs a little more RELIABLE?
‡‡‡ Three hellhounds, that is, and me
§ And because this laptop was designed for the business market you can’t merely turn off the security pass thingy. What?
§§ My purling is improving. My counting is getting worse. But maybe it’ll be easier to pay attention when it’s counting stitches instead of rows. I’m eyeing the leg warmer pattern again.
harpergrey
I remember you mentioning that you are on Ravelry…may forum members add you as a friend?
Of course you can. For that matter I can’t stop you. But I haven’t really figured out the purpose of friending on Ravelry. Perhaps I haven’t reached Full Knitting Saturation Point yet or something.
§§§ Handbells after this were going to be unusually exhausting, but this was exacerbated by Colin deciding to call St Clements and bob minor spliced. So you have not only to remember what frelling method you’re ringing, but what the calls do to you. The calls themselves are the same—at least I think they’re the same—but since the methods are different you come out the other end of the calls into different places in DIFFERENT PATTERNS. ::blergablergablergablerga:: Then we rang some little bob minor just to finish the brains-as-spaghetti job. And then Gemma showed up so we had to ring MAJOR.
And I have to flush my toilet by taking the lid of the tank off and YANKING till I can get a plumber in. And have I mentioned I have Fiona coming tomorrow? Yo, Fiona, how are you at cold water, limescale and yanking?