Important if muted news
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
HAHAHAHAHAHAHASTOPMESOMEBODYHAHAHAHAHAHA
BUCKETOFCOLDWATERGOODFORHYSTERIAIBELIEVE SPLAAAAASH
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So I had this list when I went in for my voice lesson today. I wanted to ask about singing Fauré*, and various questions about singing with the Muddles**, and about surviving singing for Oisin and the whole insanely frustrating business of regressing under pressure***, and the way, if I miss a day, singing, I notice it more than I used to†.
And then I said, there’s another weirdness. Used to be, if the sort of upper mid range—around C-above-middle-C, D, E—are stiff and closed down, there’s no point in even trying to go higher. Lately—and I can’t even remember why I bothered trying—I’ve several times found that when those upper-middle notes are all sullen and dull the F, G and even the A†† still ring out like . . . uh . . . tiny, elderly gongs.
You’ve been overusing your speaking voice, then, said Nadia, because that’s exactly where the damage shows: just above your speaking range. On the phone, perhaps. Do you spend a lot of time on the phone? The phone is the worst for your voice, because you speak differently than you do face to face and your posture is probably appalling.
My posture is appalling, I admitted, and furthermore I’m usually knitting. But there are only two or three people I regularly have marathon phone sessions with, and . . . oh my gods.
??? said Nadia.
My computer, I said. I shout at my computer. I scream at my computer. I, er, scream at my computer . . . a lot. And vigorously.
I HAVE TO STOP YELLING AT MY COMPUTER BECAUSE I’M HURTING MY SINGING.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
I haven’t told Peter yet. I can’t face how delighted he’ll be. He finds graphic violence upsetting for some reason. He’ll read the good (muted) news here first. Maybe I just won’t come down to the mews for a few days, till the hornpipe-dancing phase is over. Of course this is relying on the idea that I can stop howling at my computer, which is even odds at best. Maybe I’ll give up caffeine and find a solution to world hunger while I’m at it. And I think my voice is just going to have to deal with the occasional hellgoddess bellow at the hellhounds. The funny thing is that I’ve been thinking that the Hellgoddess Bellow has become more impressive in recent months and that it probably has something to do with the singing lessons. . . .
I also wanted to talk to Nadia again about one of the things that keeps coming up and coming up, which is this razzlefragdagging business of expression, of emotional interpretation, dynamics, all that sodblasted stuff. And the way I haven’t got any. This came back to miserate††† me again because of singing with Oisin: when you’re also wasting an accompanist’s time the one-note-after-the-other approach is even more unsatisfactory, even if a majority of them are the right notes. Nadia again said that this is something that will come, that I’m still in the comparatively early stages of grappling with technique, and as soon as more of that comes instinctively the interpretation will come. Inevitably—according to Nadia.
Sigh.
So we went back to Dove Sei, which I am now pretty much, you know, singing. I’m going to try to sing it for Oisin on Friday‡ which will be interesting since I have quite the gift for fluffing my first entry which then wrecks what follows, but that’s the kind of thing I’m supposed to be learning by singing with an accompanist.‡‡
And having run me through it for the notes a few times, Nadia basically dared me to express some of what’s happening . . .
. . . and you know, I almost did. Almost. But I could hear it—hear the reality of what the song’s about—sort of leaking out through the gaps in the barricade. I’m going to do this. I am.‡‡‡
Black Bear
The whole business of “To You-Tube or Not To You-Tube” is interesting to me. Of course I don’t sing in any real capacity—
NEITHER DO I, honeybun. This is strictly for my own depraved and decrepit amusement. The comments these singing blogs rouse from people who know what they’re about exhilarate and terrify me. Not me boss! I’m a small local choir singer!§
but the singing I do for my own pleasure has always begun by being imitative. How do you learn how a song sounds if you don’t listen to others singing it?
Erm. By struggling through the sheet music yourself? I admit I don’t know what ordinary, non-sight-singing people who can’t pick out a melody line on the piano do, but that was the technology for a lot of years.
Back in my high school orchestra days I remember being encouraged to listen to recordings of the pieces we were doing. Obviously different orchestras put different spins on pieces… but I don’t get how it would necessarily be a bad thing to get other orchestras/choirs/soloists’ sounds in your head when you’re thinking about approaching a new piece. It’s still going to be YOU when you do it, you know?
But Nadia’s point—and I might guess that it’s different for an orchestra made up of a lot of different instruments than for a solo singer where every tiny individual interpretive choice is manifest§§—is that you will pick up performance with the music. No singer worth listening to is merely singing the notes: and think of any fabulous solo artist: if it’s someone you know and love and follow and listen to a lot, you’ll recognise them within the first note or two. That’s about them, not about the music, even if it’s their immediately recognisable genius that makes them such fabulous performers. Nadia put this better than I can remember it, but she also said that she wanted to correct her students’ own mistakes, not some weird kind of filtered extra layer of mistaking somebody else’s performance. I actually do get this. You can’t help mimicking—if you’re learning something by mimicking, then it becomes part of the learning process.
And it varies, I guess, with what stage you’re at. All the hot divas talk about listening to other singers and who their favourites are and why—well, of course. But they’ve also got huge reserves of their own talent and practise and their own carefully developed individuality. I guess it might be a bit like reading to write: you must read, you must read, you MUST MUST MUST read, read read read read read . . . but there are also times during my own writing that I must not read, particular authors or particular stories, because they’ll start to run like wet dye into my own work.
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* The answer to which is that Nadia has already thought about Fauré for me and he’s on her list but, she says, not yet, not because of the music but because of the language. At the moment when I’m still only barely not letting simple Italian get the better of me, she says, is not the time to be adding French. Also, she says, Oisin is fluent in French, and . . . DEFINITELY NOT FRENCH THEN, I said. He corrects my Italian.^
^ I’m not saying it doesn’t need correcting.
** For example about singing twiddles: you know, tiny decorative two- or three-note, well, twiddles, on the singing line. I’m aware that mine are mushy rather than crisp, and I was much struck last Thursday, listening to Cindy on my left and Griselda on my right, how flawlessly sharp-edged Griselda’s are and Cindy . . . sounds like me. We’re not wrong or off pitch or anything, we’re just soggy. Nadia says twiddles are harder than they look and . . . yes, learning to do them properly is in my future too. Emphasis on future.
*** Normal normal normal, says Nadia, adding that singing for Oisin is for me the equivalent of singing in public and OF COURSE I’m going to revert. Oh but, I said, I do this, and I do that, and I do this other thing, it’s so frustrating. Not at all, said Nadia, that’s excellent. You’re NOTICING. You can’t fix anything until you NOTICE it. You just keep singing for Oisin, and keep noticing, and it’ll improve.
I love Nadia.^
^ She also said and DON’T go in there thinking you are supposed to fix EVERYTHING. Choose a thing and decide to fix it . . . oh, by fifty percent, one out of four times that you do it.
Feh. Foiled again.
† And if you went hill walking six days in a row, she said, and took the seventh off, you’d be stiff on the eighth. And if you’d got quite a bit fitter in the last year and went hill walking harder six days in a row, and took the seventh off, you might be stiffer on the eighth.
She also said, although not quite in these terms, ALSO, YOU’RE OLD. Your voice has lost flexibility just like the rest of you has. That doesn’t mean you can’t go hill walking, it just means you have to be a little more careful about warming up and warming down.
†† Which seems to have suddenly stopped playing silly buggers—pretty much in the last fortnight, since I started going to choir practise again and it found out it was needed—and settled down.
††† Well, it ought to be a word.
‡ Supposing I can get another copy of the music out of my printer/copier without yelling at it.
‡‡ Feh.
‡‡‡ Supposing I can learn to stop shouting at my computer.
§ And . . . as I’ve said several times . . . your relationship to music changes when you’re performing it yourself, however badly. You don’t have to do it well to derive an immense—and, you know, exciting—amount of horizon-broadening from the experience, and I will therefore learn as much as I can. Or that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.
§§ And I could be wrong. I know some orchestras also have a highly individual sound, and conductors have individual styles, which fans also recognise immediately.
Another day, another frenzy
I am now officially putting in for a day that ISN’T another of those FRELLING DAYS. I had a friend coming for the afternoon so the first thing was, of course . . . I overslept. I woke up to the sound of the Delivery Man giving up banging on the door and carrying the FORTY FRELLING TONS of gold-dust dog kibble* up the steep half-flight of stairs beside the house to leave it behind the gate, which is where I ask for things to be left, but that means I have to wrestle the wretched thing back DOWN the (steep) steps and then back UP the steps to the front door . . . and then womanhandle it through the maze of doors, puppy gates, hellhounds, etc to get the freller into the far corner of the sitting room which is where it lives because I have ZERO storage space on the ground floor of the cottage.** ZERO.***
Then I failed to learn today’s Japanese vocabulary because the pdf print out simply doesn’t contain this lesson and my memory is nowhere near good enough to assimilate much from someone chirping it at me two or three times while hellhounds and I are out hurtling†. I’m starting to get a little cranky about the shortcomings of this package. Also I’m back to the squeaky, breathy Ashley-san section again. Maybe it’s time I loaded up the Japanese for Dummies CD.
So hellhounds and I finally got down to the mews with about an hour before I had to go meet a train. I was outdoors with a bucket, rubber gloves and a sponge, peeling a few layers off Wolfgang’s exterior†† when Peter appeared at the front door and said, You are seeking to impress? Seeking to impress? I said. No, I am seeking not to horrify. I’ve also got the two pairs of muddy hiking boots and two and a half pairs of muddy gaiters out of the front footwell, had a quick—very quick—swipe with the dustcloth at the dashboard, and refolded the hellhound-rubdown towels so that the dirtiest bits are inside.†††
I came indoors again, both Wolfgang and I a good bit damper than we’d been half an hour ago, but Wolfgang isn’t dripping on the floor. I glance at the clock and start on hellhound lunch. Don’t forget to get some food into you, says Peter. Menopause metabolism, I reply, I don’t need food, and weren’t you going upstairs to have a nice lie down from which distancy and horizontality you can’t make unwelcome remarks?
Hellhounds won’t eat their lunch. AAAAAAAAUGH.
AND THEN MY COMPUTER SEIZED UP AND CRASHED.
When I tried to text Clotilda that I was going to be late I kept getting the ‘this phone number does not exist, you call that a clean car you filthy slut, your computer hates you and your dogs are weird’ error message.
I was half an hour late to the train station. Clotilda was, I think, so relieved to see me at all that her initial reaction to Wolfgang was muted.‡ I think the afternoon went okay otherwise. Barring the extremely nasty cup of tea I subjected her to. Ambience is not all and next time I have a tea-drinking friend visiting we are going to penetrate into the unambient end of town where there is a rumour of a tea-shop that serves the stuff I drink at home.‡‡ Then I forced her to hurtle hellhounds with me. Oh dear. Poor Clotilda. . . .
I’ve been following your discussion of the research you do for your books with a lot of interest. Just this week you’ve mentioned how you’re brushing up on your Japanese‡‡‡ for Shadows and the studying on bees you did for Chalice. As a dog person, I’ve always loved Deerskin for how dog-smart it is, particularly what Lissar learns and observes as she tries to raise the orphan litter of fleethound puppies. Having raised pups myself, there are so many little details in there that ring true to me. I always smile when Lissar uses the straw to get milk into the pups, because it reminds me of the way modern breeders tube feed (though with different equipment, of course). You even captured the fear of what might happen if milk gets in those little lungs. In fact, it reads so realistically that I have to wonder if your research for this part of the book involved more than just reading about puppy raising. Did this scene come from a real-life experience?
Thank you! I’ve never raised puppies from first infancy, no, but I did raise the litter of puppies which contained my very first dog, a white German Shepherd, when I was a teenager. They were not quite two weeks old when their mum decided she wasn’t cut out for motherhood and bolted, and I was in that la-la-la adolescent phase when anything to do with a subject you love is good so I was like, raise eight tiny unweaned puppies by hand? Sure! Arrrrgh. Well, all eight of the little frellers lived, so obviously the learning curve wasn’t too steep. The owner did keep half an eye on me, but she was already way over her head with other duties—she ran a riding stable as well as a kennels—and I was the kind of over-responsible tool who would sit up all night if that was what was required. If you’ve been through it, then you know about the very real danger of diarrhea in puppies—it doesn’t take much to tax them past what their tiny little metabolisms can cope with. Eight hours for a full night’s sleep is way too long, even with vet’s drugs (although the drugs may be better and faster-acting these days). I never used straws, but I wielded a mean eyedropper. I can’t now remember where I learnt about foreign matter in the lungs—but I’d survived pneumonia myself only about two years before this, so the fragility of lungs was probably still a vividly disturbing subject.
Catlady
Fostered a litter of kittens. All four kittens (and mama) found homes. One kitten’s home didn’t work out. I don’t even like tuxedo cats, I said, nearly crying with happiness as he leaped back into my arms.
He’s doing his best impersonation of a fuzzy ball right now in my lap, purring and dozing with ears the size of bat wings. Speaking of bats.
I love stories like this. I therefore forgive you for the reference to bats.
Tassiegal
If I am not mistaken [Haro] is a very well formed wire haired fox terrier puppy. At which point I melt and go SQUEEE! I love my terriers.
He does look like one, doesn’t he? And far more this week than last—if I’d got photos of him last week you’d’ve known he wasn’t. He’s really come into his own as diabolically cute. No, he’s a Jack Russell/Border cross, and while they are all frelling little terriers he looks like he’s going to grow up to be a very handsome scion of the genre.
Sigh.
* * *
* Yes, it’s a lot of gold dust. Priced accordingly. But if you want free postage—and at these prices you certainly do want free postage—you have to order it in upper tonnage.
** I have lots of bookshelves, of course. But bookshelves aren’t storage. They’re bookshelves. They’re a basic necessity, like tea, chocolate and champagne. And books. Oh, and there are never enough of them. Like tea, chocolate, champagne and books.
*** Did I ever do you my tapdance-with-added-arrrgh about my little row of dwarf appliances under the stairs? Most people have an under-stair cupboard. I have to keep my refrigerator, freezer and washing machine under there, and I swear the spice rack on the wall above the washing machine sticks a corner out, like someone putting a foot out in a slapstick comedy, every time I straighten up from doing something with laundry. At least I can employ language. It’s worse on handbell evenings, when the spice rack nails me as I’m getting the milk out of the refrigerator for everybody else’s tea. And they’re all right in the next room, and they’re all British. MMppphggggrhrhrhrhrhGGGH.
† NO. STOP THAT. WHATEVER THAT IS YOU MAY NOT EAT IT. NO.
†† Hey! He’s red!
††† I have also decided I am not letting her indoors at the cottage, where I haven’t hoovered since approximately . . . when I turned the second draft of SHADOWS in. Furthermore I suspect her of being a neat freak and never having dirty dishes in the sink.
‡ And I haven’t even mentioned his vibrant array of dents which might cause a feeling of insecurity in the timid.
Since I nearly always order on line I don’t worry about this interesting factoid from their opening page: ‘ We are open seven days a week from 10.00am to 5.30pm, and Sundays from 11.00am to 3.00pm.’
‡‡‡ ‘Brushing up on my Japanese’ HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. I now remember . . . maybe twelve kanji, although always for the wrong reasons. For example, the kanji for ‘father’ is described as ‘regrettably, hands wielding a stick’. Or, to my eye, two sticks. Or, how about this, from my lovely if over-optimistic READ JAPANESE TODAY: ‘The character for evening [squiggle] combined with the divining rod [squiggle], used by shamans and necromancers who worked at night to bring their customers news from the spirit world, made the composite kanji [double squiggle], meaning other or outside of. [previous double squiggle plus squiggle for person], gaijin, other-person, is a foreigner.’
Singing while hysterical
The day did not get off to a great start when I asked Peter why he still hadn’t taken Wolfgang’s paperwork to the Post Office (which is the standard way of doing it over here*) to get this year’s sticker, which he had said he would do. —I only think of this after Peter has gone to bed, of course, and have then forgotten by morning again. Clearly Peter has only thought of it in the morning, before I get down to the mews. I haven’t got a copy of the insurance, he finally said to me today. What? Peter doesn’t drive any more, but he’s still on the form and should still have a copy of the new one. No.
. . . Neither do I. Now I am a total flake with my head full of bell methods and Benjamin Britten folk song arrangements** and puppies and the rival virtues of beginning kanji books, but I’m usually pretty reliable about basic life stuff. Like the frelling insurance policy for the frelling car. BUT I COULDN’T FIND IT. PAAAAAAAAAAAAAANIC. Peter, however***, rang the insurance company, where a nice friendly woman said oh, yes, this happens all the time, we’ll put a copy in the post TODAY. Now I get to start worrying about the frelling Royal Mail. Yes, a first-class envelope should get here by tomorrow or at least Wednesday . . . but if it doesn’t arrive till after 5 pm on Thursday, first I will enshroud our local PO in aerosol Cool Whip†, and then I will drive to Muddlehampton practise anyway on the assumption that traffic cops will not be out in force after dark on a small back road in the wilds of Hampshire.
Anyway. I was not only hysterical but shrill with adrenaline by the time Peter rang the insurance company, and due to baby-sitting difficulties Nadia had asked if I could have my voice lesson early today . . . so I had to leap into the perilously-poised-on-the-brink-of-illegality Wolfgang and bolt away not having sung myself in first.
It was going to be a DISASTER.
It wasn’t a disaster. How did that happen? This breathing thing, this opening your mouth and letting the air in without making a big deal of it, this is really cool. You just sort of breathe and everything settles down and you have all these possibilities. Although Nadia says that for my next trick I want to learn to sound like I’m enjoying myself. O Waly Waly wasn’t too bad but Dove Sei . . . hey, it’s an aria from an opera. This is very threatening to the amateur coward.††
katinseattle
Did you hear that the Met is going to put on ‘Rigoletto’ this coming season? Set in the ’60′s Las Vegas. With the Rat Pack, mobsters and all that. Yikes. Glad I watch it on the radio.
Ewwwww. I saw Jonathan Miller’s famous New York mafia version in some revival or other and I might have liked it better if I’d seen the original, when it was a new idea. As it was I didn’t like it at all. I thought it was sordid for the sake of being sordid, and I think what makes opera work—at least 19th century swirly romantic opera—is that it’s not sordid, even when some of the characters are.††† Since Miller I swear everything has been given a New York mafia version: Turandot. The Magic Flute. Eugene Onegin.‡ So now it’s Las Vegas? Uggh. Clearly this is one I’m going to watch on the radio too.
blondviolinist
I don’t think I’ve laughed so hard at an opera synopsis since I heard Anna Russell explain Seigfried’s women relations in Wagner’s Ring Cycle.
Since I consider Anna Russell to be the apex of the musical food chain, I am deeply flattered.
Diane in MN
That great icon of nineteenth-century French literature, Victor Hugo, is responsible for this farrago.
Yes, Hugo is responsible for Rigoletto too—don’t know if there are any more Verdi operas to accuse him of ruining the libretto of?‡‡ The funny thing is that Peter says that he thinks the original Hugo play isn’t quite the platter of reeking lunacy that ERNANI clearly is. Someone with good working French could look it up.
According to the radio commentary, Verdi chose this play over some other subject and closely supervised his librettist.
WHAT? I knew Verdi was one of my heroes it is a very good thing I never met. And if I catch the rascal in the Elysian Fields some day we are going to have words. GAAAAAH. ERNANI is the sort of drooling nonsense that makes you throw popcorn at the screen and yell, HIRE ME! ‡‡‡
The commentary also referred to Elvira as a feisty sort of girl, at least as far as telling the king–she, too, being unsure of what exactly he was offering her–that his proposal (proposition?) was either too noble or too base for her.
Yes. I am probably wrong, because I don’t think Verdi or his librettist was particularly interested in making the mere girl clever, but this is one of the bits that I thought worked—and it made me want to rewrite the rest of the scene to fit. I heard it that she was extrapolating from what he was saying—which was mushy seducer’s drivel—and turning it into something precise that she could then scorn.
If she’d been seriously feisty, after listening to Silva and Ernani going on about the horn and the knife and the poison in the last act, she’d have grabbed the knife and stabbed Silva instead of herself, putting the frelling testosterone-poisoned boy idea of honor in its place.
Yes, although slightly in her defense, Ernani sends her on a wild goose chase to get her off stage while he moans to de Silva about his miserable childhood (which is course terribly relevant). When she gets back she is perhaps understandably nonplussed by the situation. I was so busy that night frothing at the mouth about the wide and lurid range of the plot insanity that I never got around to saying that Elvira does in fact stand up for herself—and that Meade plays her as such. She’s still a Verdi heroine, and it would certainly be possible to turn her into a wailing little victim—which Meade with, one assumes, some help from the director, signally does not do. Hvorostovsky makes an excellent job of being a brute, but Meade is the only character you could bother having empathy with. Despite her curious partiality for Ernani. Although I suppose given her other choices. . . . §
I agree with you about the singing, though. And Hvorostovsky.
No even remotely heterosexual woman with circulating blood in her veins would disagree with me about Hvorostovsky.
ajlr
I think the ROH ought to ask you to do the plot synopses in the programme leaflets for their repertoire. Although I suppose the sound of an entire audience giggling might tend to detract somewhat from the dramatic tension of what was happening on stage?
No, no, it would widen their audience base. It’s a great idea! Who do I send the highly professional inquiry, with appended samples, to?
* * *
*Yes, you can now do it on line. We’re old, okay?
** I sang for Oisin last Friday for the first time in . . . yonks.^ And after acknowledging, in what I don’t want to believe was a surprised way, that I’ve got louder, he REALLY ACTUALLY LITERALLY IN FACT SUGGESTED that we try some of the Britten folk songs again. Yaaaaaay. They’re huge fun, but hairy, because the accompaniment has nothing to do with what you’re singing and, well, if you know Britten’s music, he . . . had an interesting mind. I also like to think that there was a certain amount of friendly self- and mutual-torture going on, since he wrote at least some of the folk song arrangements for his partner Peter Pears and himself to perform together. Old married couples . . .
^ I may have told you that I went in the week before with a long fulsome list of totally adequate excuses why I hadn’t brought anything to sing. He looked at me a minute and then said, You mean you bottled out.
Um. . . .
*** It’s his job in this household to maintain sanity under stress.
† Supposing you can get Cool Whip in the UK, about which there seems to be some doubt. Personally I think Cool Whip would reach its product zenith as a nonviolent protest device, but then I am a crunchygranolahead who only eats organic chocolate.
†† I should be taking heart from the fact that it’s usually sung by countertenors who are (usually) not very loud.^
^ Yes I know there are qualities other than loudness. But on pitch and loud is all that is really necessary in a choir singer.
††† Someone needs to blow a horn and make that duke kill himself.
‡ I hope I’m joking.
‡‡ Yes I know Hugo didn’t write the librettos. But I’m not in a charitable mood. And it was his frelling translation of frelling Shakespeare that led to the libretto of Verdi’s FALSTAFF which I hate so much I’m glad I don’t understand Italian so I can listen to the music and not have a clue what’s going on.
‡‡‡ I have this reaction to a lot of movies.
§ Unless she gets a contract out of the king detailing the terms he’s going to set her up for life in after he gets bored with her. This is still the choice I’m backing.
Unexpected Valentine’s Day News
Okay. People. Listen to me please.
If you google ‘del toro emma watson robin mckinley’ you will get a very long page of hits. Here are two more or less at random:
http://www.themarysue.com/guillermo-del-toro-beauty/
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/guillermo-del-toro-beauty-beast-director-290166
If you leave the ‘robin mckinley’ off your search there are a lot more hits. Wherein lies my point. My point further includes the ‘has evolved since’ quote in the clips that include me and the fact that (apparently, this is not a world I follow) del Toro has a habit of running too many projects at once to predict with any confidence when he might get around to one in particular. EVEN IF THIS FILM IS MADE, WHICH IS IN FACT NOT VERY LIKELY, IT WILL NOT, REPEAT NOT BE THE SCREEN VERSION OF MY NOVEL.
I had no idea that news of del Toro’s BEAUTY AND THE BEAST project was about to be shot out there—or that there was news of del Toro’s B&B project. Which is another part of my point. Yes, Warner’s optioned BEAUTY* a while ago, but there are like 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 options bought for every ONE movie made, so while option money is lovely because you haven’t done anything extra for it except sign your name, I didn’t take it seriously. I’ve been optioned before. I did register the fact that it was del Toro and Emma Watson behind Warner’s interest, two filmy people whom I’ve even heard of**, an almost un-heard-of situation, and I therefore asked Merrilee about six months after signing if there’d been—by wild, unforeseen circumstance—any movement on the option, and she said there wasn’t. At which point I forgot about it.
Till this morning when I received an email including a del-Toro-Watson-McKinley link from a friend saying, Oh, hey, I’m impressed!, followed by about forty more emails and a tweet from people who love BEAUTY and are under the erroneous impression that (a) this means it’s going to get made and (b) del Toro’s movie (supposing it gets made) will have ANYTHING to do with the book.
So to reiterate: I KNOW NOTHING ABOUT THIS. I HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH THIS. Except that I signed an option contract a while ago. IT IS STILL VERY UNLIKELY THAT THE MOVIE WILL BE MADE. And IF IT IS MADE IT PROBABLY WON’T HAVE ANYTHING IN COMMON WITH MY NOVEL EXCEPT THE PRESENCE OF A BEAUTY AND A BEAST. Maybe. With del Toro you never really know. Which can be a good thing. If disconcerting.
And as the author of the book in question . . . if they make the movie, I hope they DO render my novel TOTALLY UNRECOGNISABLE. (Which that ‘has since evolved’ sounds like they will. Yaaay.) I’m not a fan of books into movies: they’re entirely different media, and not only do I think the translation process rarely does the book any favours, the reading experience is . . . well, it’s to be treasured. I don’t want it spoilt, for BEAUTY or any other good book, by even a dazzlingly first-rate film. I hate it that GENERATIONS of film-goers are now going to forget that LORD OF THE RINGS was a book first . . . or even at all.
I don’t know anything about Watson*** but del Toro has made some brilliant movies. His take on that very, very old and much retold tale of Beauty and the Beast could be fabulous. And if my version(s) helped inspire him, great. And the money I’d be paid for a film that was actually made would be very nice indeed.†
But I’m not counting these chickens before they’re hatched. And if they are hatched they won’t be chickens anyway. They’ll be velociraptors or harpy eagles or dodos or something.
And sure, I’d be glad of the rights money, if the movie is made. But what I’d like most of all is that some trifle of the movie publicity rubs off on the unrecognisable book . . . and a few more people READ IT. That is what makes a writer’s little heart beat faster. Readers.
* * *
Peter bought me a pink begonia in a pot for Valentine’s Day. The funny thing is he used to hate Valentine’s Day. But he’s gone all soppy with advancing age. I’ve had Valentine’s Day presents regularly the last few years. Not complaining. Not complaining. I said, I don’t have anything for you for Valentine’s Day†† and he said, no, no, this is one of those remaining genderist things, the bloke is supposed to produce a present. Oh, I said, burying my feminist instincts under the desire to keep on with SHADOWS, well, if you’re really determined, never mind the dozen red roses, I’d much rather have a houseplant.
Peter seems to think begonias lack fervour and ardency. But I like begonias. I can usually even keep them alive. It’s not that I don’t love a vaseful of red roses, but they don’t last long. Don’t you want your Valentine to last?
Also, there was champagne.
* * *
* and ROSE DAUGHTER, because this is how Hollywood works: they don’t want a rival B&B retelling if they can help it, so they block this one as a clause in the option for the other.^
^ Hollywood’s predilection for wanting control over EVERYTHING is a can of worms I’m not going to open here. But my desire to control my own books’ fate is why I regularly refuse to entertain film option offers.
** true confession: I’ve only ever seen the first HARRY POTTER film and . . . ahem . . . wasn’t hugely riveted. And while I loved the first HELLBOY I’m like, oh, there’s another one?, and I loved BLADE II but I didn’t know till I looked up del Toro’s filmography this minute that he directed it. I’m a Wesley Snipes girl. Although even Snipes couldn’t rescue BLADE III. But del Toro has the fantasy chops, certainly. They just don’t have a lot in common with mine.^
^ If his are chops, mine are sort of . . . pudding. Chocolate pudding.
*** Except that she had great hair when she was a little kid.
† Although loose change by Hollywood standards.
†† My day was further complicated by taking Wolfgang out to Warm Upford to the garage for his MOT.^ Or rather, driving him out there was not a problem, but it’s about five miles back to New Arcadia over hill and dale. Peter, coming in to find us crashed out on the sofa, said, were the hellhounds tired? No, I said, but I was. We generally have our longer hurtle in the morning, and by evening hurtle time, even early evening so we were back to town streetlights by the time it was dark enough to need them, I’ve been at SHADOWS for several hours and adventures are not entirely welcome.
Now, all fingers crossed that when I ring up the garage tomorrow he’s passed.
^ Required yearly road test.
Peter Dickinson
They certainly are too smart to be lost. I admit it’s tricky about the language, but we’re all still reading Charles Dickens—and Mark Twain, who is regularly subjected to gratuitous attempts to clean him up, which of course ENTIRELY miss the point. When Dickens was a racist, he meant it.*
I remember reading THE GLASS SIDED ANTS’ NEST for the first time** not long after it came out, which means I was still a teenager. It totally blew me away—I had at that point never read anything that was such a combination of sharp intelligence and, well, thrills, it being a murder mystery and all. I read all of the Pibble books, and (nearly) all the rest of Peter’s adult novels, some of them genre mysteries and some of them not, pretty much as they came out***. What can I say. He’s a brilliant writer.† And maybe I’ll go on about this some more some other night, when I haven’t already written enough words to make a blog post and when I haven’t put myself back an hour I needed for SHADOWS by inadvertently starting to reread GLASS SIDED which I had responsibly pulled off the shelf merely to check the original pub date. . . .
* * *
* I’ve recently written an introduction^ to a Classic Work of Fantasy Literature^^ that has exactly this same problem and I knew going in that I was going to be blunt about it. Here it is, I would say, and there’s no rationalising it away. But I love the book anyway and I hope you will too. Fortunately the editor agreed with me. And this is my take on this kind of thing: there probably are exceptions, but as a principle I would say that you don’t mess with what the author wrote. Introductions, notes, flap copy, author bios and so on can annotate what needs it. Again there are probably exceptions but generally speaking you’re already aware of historical context by the time you run up against something that makes you go ‘oh dear’—at which point you decide whether you can roll with it or not. Generally speaking I will roll with racism and sexism—both kinds of sexism, genderism and sexual-orientation-ism—and, er, classism, that’s (say) a century old or more . . . and diminishingly put up with it the nearer it is to the present day. I will pretty flatly not put up with it in any writer my age or younger, which means there are great swathes of modern literature, including F&SF^^^, that I won’t touch with a barge pole and, in some cases, make me froth at the mouth and wish to kill things.
I’m also aware that Twain’s hands aren’t clean either. He was still a man of his time. But I believe he was genuinely sending up the dishonesty and cruelty of the society Huck Finn found himself at odds with. Do you play the Who would you like to have a cup of tea with? game, about characters in books? (The rules of the game say they would cooperate. Whether you’d get along with them or not however is open to delicious speculation.) Who in HUCK FINN would you like to have a cup of tea with? Me, it would be Jim. Huck himself is only second.
^ Which is another story. Due to Circumstances Beyond My Control I found myself doing this at the end of January. Yes. This January. It was Stimulating. Not in a good way.
^^ I’m not sure I’m allowed to talk about it in public yet, and I can’t check till business hours tomorrow and I want this piece about Peter to go up NOW. I’ll certainly tell you when my intro comes out.
^^^ I’m a bit puzzled that Fowler+ says ‘whereas fantasies keep their timeless appeal, crime novels are subject to changes in society and language.’ What? Do we have to cite any examples past . . . oh, say, HP Lovecraft? ( . . . Edgar Rice Burroughs? Robert E. Howard? . . . JRR Tolkien? I can’t read Burroughs or Howard any more, but I still read Lovecraft, who is grotesquely racist++, and Tolkien, who doesn’t get his knickers particularly in a twist about miscegenation+++, but all of whose good guys are white and a lot of whose bad guys are swarthy.) And on the other side of the genre fence I don’t believe either Agatha Christie or Dorothy L. Sayers would win any awards for prescient political correctness and they’re still in print and, I believe, much loved.++++
+ Whose own books are a lot of fun and great reads, especially for those of us with a penchant for tangents.# The Bryant and May series is London as You Have Never Seen It Before (and Rather Hope It Stays Between Book Covers). http://www.bookreporter.com/authors/christopher-fowler
# ahem. ::whistles::
++ I belong to the faction that believes that part of why Lovecraft’s best creepy stuff is quite so effectively creepy is because he was so creepy a human being, with a menagerie of private demons. This makes me sad. Again, generally, I want to believe that the healthier a human being a writer is, the better they write. So if Lovecraft hadn’t been a sick dude maybe he’d’ve written The Great American Novel.
+++ Unless you want to count Saruman’s experiments with orcs, but that doesn’t give off miscegenation fumes to me. I could be wrong.
++++ Although not by me.
** AAAAAUGH. . . . And I’ve just spent the past hour reading . . . well, the first hour’s-worth of it again. Several things strike me, very much as they struck me thirty-odd years ago: how frelling intimidating I find it^: too clever by half, with both an intellectual sparkle and a creativity to scare me silly. The murder victim is—was—the chief of the remains of a primitive (black) New Guinea tribe who were moved to London to save what was left of them, by a (white) British woman who is nonetheless a member of the tribe. (In what manner she is a member of the tribe is one of my favourite bits. She’s also the character I want to have a cup of tea with.) This tribe, the Kus, are fully developed, with a history and a society, with rituals and habits and points of view, and these are totally fascinating.
The other thing about this book—and, for me, about all of the Pibble books—that glares out at you like a searchlight is how unpleasant most of the people are.^^ To me—and to the teenage American I once was—the reason the author gets away with the ‘wog’s and the ‘nig’s is because the people who use these terms are underlining their own reprehensibleness. ‘Wog’ and ‘nig’ may have been in common usage in England in 1968—I wouldn’t know—but I’d bet on it that you weren’t demonstrating the finest flower of humanity by using them.
^ I’m . . . what? I’m married to the author? You’re joking, right?
^^ Peter has kind of a line in scintillatingly unpleasant people. Most of the time I’m dazzled and drawn in and riveted by how plausible they are and how well the author understands them+. Every now and then they just make me cry.
Pibble himself is a case in point. I don’t like him. I never liked him. I don’t want to have a cup of tea with him. But I like his bitter, skittery mind, his own awareness that his self-deprecation is half-real and half-resentful, and that (I would say) there’s a deep depressive streak underneath it all. Yes. I get this too well. That I don’t like him makes this mix of comprehension and aversion all the more effective, all the more evocative, to me-the-reader.++
+ hmmm.
++ Favourite Pibble novel? Probably SLEEP AND HIS BROTHER. But really I should reread all of them to be sure. . . .
*** Up through into my era, that would be.
† I didn’t discover his kids’ books until I was well dug in to the murder mysteries—over a decade later, in fact, and after BEAUTY was out and I was working in the Little, Brown children’s department, and lo, on their shelves, a row of Peter Dickinson novels.