Cough
I am a walking cough; a cough on two legs; cough made flesh. Cough. Talking is a mistake.* Eating is perilous.** I think the arrival of the cough is supposed to indicate you’re improving.*** I’m too tired from coughing to tell. Cough.
But SHADOWS is still going.†
I am however cranky†† about the bad news about ultrasonic jewellery cleaners. I had thought part of the point of the ultrasonic gadgets is that they’re gentle on jewellery, possibly to the point of being so gentle they don’t really clean anything. (I do know that you can’t do anything to pearls except smile at them and wear them against cashmere.) I also didn’t know, or had forgotten, since I’ve barely worn my tourmaline ring in twenty years, that tourmalines are fragile. Feh. And yes, of course I can ask our nice local jeweller for advice about cleaning, but he will feel obliged to go all professional on me and I was hoping some of you guys might have the answer without the official hedging.††† Ah well. More little brushes and washing-up liquid in my future then. I guess I can bear it.
And before I bore you all to death . . . I am loitering frivolously with the thought of going ringing at Forza tomorrow. This is a really bad idea. I don’t have the time, I don’t have the energy, I have a novel to finish—the bells there are tricky sods, I already know Gemma is not going to be there, and I might find myself the only mediocre ringer present, with my usual additional burden of not being able to handle those particular bells and the supernumerary burden of the lurgy.
Maybe I’ll just stay home, and post a recipe. And cough.
* * *
* Why do hellhounds insist on waiting till I say something? Isn’t the mad waving of hands containing harnesses enough to tell them they should sit?
** Eating is always perilous. Ask Darkness and Chaos. AAAAAUGH. Having given the impression that he was on the mend last night, Chaos barely made it outdoors this morning to start the diabolical double-ended geysering all over again. AAAAAAAUGH.
*** http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/jan/09/new-year-health-regime-last The headline in the paper version is more eye-catching to me in my present state: ‘Dr Luisa Dillner Says Switch Off the TV, Stop Snacking and Start Exercising to Ensure You Feel Good Beyond January.’ I haven’t watched TV in YEARS,^ I am post-menopausal and my daily energy allowance is 3.5 calories and I NEVER snack, and I walk an hour and forty five minutes to two hours EVERY DAY. WHY DO I HAVE THE LURGY WHEN I AM A PARAGON OF VIRTUE?^^
^ I talked to Hannah today. “Hi,” I said. Cough. “Wow,” she said. She still hasn’t read CHAOS. After she does we’re going to read either JANE AUSTEN or CHARLES DICKENS by Claire Tomalin. Or both, because we have so much time to read. She was telling me about the TV programmes her daughters are watching and I’ve never heard of any of them. I haven’t been deeply involved in a TV show since BUFFY. No, really. ANGEL? Too gruesome. FIREFLY? Eh. It had its moments, but it never entered my heart and mind the way BUFFY did.+ It’s probably safe to say that I wouldn’t be writing my first high school novel at fifty-nine if I hadn’t watched BUFFY at an embarrassingly advanced age which was nonetheless more impressionable than it should have been. Which may or may not be a good thing.
Oh, and the mysterious non-cooperation affliction of our de-cabled TV? We changed the batteries in the remote and it still refused to climb away from BBC 1. So there was a knock on the door one afternoon and there was the Nice Man who had installed our freeview box who wanted to ask if one of us would read his CHILDREN’S BOOK MANUSCRIPT. Fortunately Peter answered the door and dragged him into the sitting room and thrust the remote at him. There are too many buttons on the wretched thing. And Peter is reading his manuscript. I had my mouth all open to do my rant on this subject which is that ASIDE from the fact that I am a cranky cow, what I think about an unpublished manuscript has no more to do with its chances of getting published than what Chaos or Darkness thinks of it.++ Go start researching AGENTS. What you need is an AGENT who likes your work. But I was forestalled by Peter’s old-fashioned gentlemanliness AKA the man is nuts.
+ And I’m the only person on the planet who didn’t/doesn’t like THE SOPRANOS or David Tennant.
++ Er—you aren’t expecting us to eat it, are you?
^^ Of course they also tell you to get seven to eight hours of sleep every night. They must be joking.
† And my email seems to have settled down . . . for the moment. Sort of. Or, possibly, not, and I just don’t know it. It was even weirder than I told you yesterday, as I eventually found out when I stopped abusing my damaged larynx with screams for vengeance and had a look for the easily findable stuff that had reappeared. When I got back to the mews and turned the old laptop on—which is the one I’ve been using the last several flu-demented days of filing and deleting—I was braced for what I’d just seen on the cottage machines. But what had come back was NOT what I’d deleted that morning. It was some OTHER stuff. Whimper.
So . . . I basically have no idea. GIBBERGIBBERGIBBERGIBBER. Right. Enough of that. I have a novel to finish.
As to why I still use Outlook . . . I forget. I will ask Raphael to remind me. I think it’s to do with my apparently somewhat unusual requirements combined with my total lack of patience, interest in, or skill in understanding anything to do with computers. I think it’s what they’re willing to support me with. The bright spot, such as it is, is that the shiny new laptop with the vibrantly hated Win 7 on it did in fact discharge its battery by 50% overnight despite being turned off. YAAAAY. For once something goes wrong even when there is an archangel present.
However, those of you hopefully offering advice about the hellhounds: I think you’re probably late to the party. Long-time readers have heard all this before. My hellhounds are five and a half years old and I spent the first two of their years of life on this planet trying to find out why they had diarrhea all the time. The answer is, as I eventually figured out with absolutely NO help from any of the fantastic and expensive panoply of vets, specialist vets, and specialist vets’ laboratories and techno-gizmo whatsits that I consulted, that they are allergic to all cereal grains. (Pancreatitis, as someone mentioned on the forum but I can’t find it now, is one of the things they were temporarily diagnosed for.) I’d tried an elimination diet nearly first thing, but I took them off brown rice while continuing to use barley and oats, and then swapped. It took me a long time to think of all cereals. But two years of eating something they were wildly and violently allergic to has left them with some permanent damage.
And the only time they won’t eat when I’m nearby is when they’re already looking for an excuse not to eat, and me being an ogre will do. (I think this has more to do with the fact that they know I want them to eat and I’ll be testy if they don’t.) I’m actually not very fond of the alpha theory. Why would a good leader want his/her colleagues not to eat? The alpha business as the great comprehensive answer to everything is less popular than it was, for which I am grateful. When it first came crashing out it was The Solution, and I thought, since it clearly didn’t apply all that well to my experience, that I just had weird dogs. Well, I do have weird dogs, but the alpha theory has also lost centre stage. I am, however, a great fan of what works. If something makes you and your dog(s) happy and healthy and comfortable and satisfied, then it’s the answer for you.
†† Cough
††† Note to self: The Answer never exists.
I can’t very well ask the fellow who bought the stones for us. That was twenty years ago in Maine and I have more or less deliberately^ forgotten everything about him except that he was a self-absorbed twit.
^ Ie making a virtue of Middle Aged Brain
But SHADOWS is still still going*
I still feel like stagnant pond scum and the water in vases where the flowers have all died. I wrote something today when Maggie has a very large purring cat in her lap and she says that it makes her eyeballs buzz. Yeah. Only I’m like that just sitting here. **
The day did not begin well when I woke too early and lay there thinking about an intractable bit of plot machinery while my thriving young cough gleefully explored its rapidly expanding capacities. Eventually I decided there was more rustling*** going on than could be explained by my cough-driven blood pressure thudding in my ears, put on a dressing-gown, stumbled downstairs, let hellhounds out . . . and Chaos bolted out into the courtyard and began erupting in both directions. OH JOY. We’ve already been having hellhound follies the last few days which I haven’t told you about because they wind me up and I can’t afford to snap and run off into the blue, I have a novel to finish.† I do know what started this particular too-many-ringed circus: Darkness heard a monster at the cottage the other night while he was behaving in a reckless manner—which is to say eating—and isn’t going to make that mistake again any time soon. Chaos missed the monster†† and initially attempted to carry on with the eating . . . but you can’t just lie about eating when your brother and life partner is crammed into the back of the crate becoming one with the, um, darkness. You could see the Dawning Horror creeping over him, although Chaos isn’t so much a back of the crate hellhound as a floormat with large beseeching eyes hellhound. NOOOOOOO. NOT THE BOWL OF FOOD. NOOOOOOOOO. Anyway. Things have progressed. Not in a good way. Today we appear to have added reality to the mess.
As I was hosing down the hellhound courtyard there was one of those chirpy knocks on the door, you know the one: tap, tap-tap-tap-tap-tap, tap, tap. GO AWAY. YOU DON’T WANT TO KNOW WHAT I’M DOING. I answered the door.††† It was the postperson, who handed me a Large Wodge of Stuff. I staggered under the weight, being weak and infirm from coughing. Will you be here in half an hour? he said in a voice to match the knock on the door. I stared at him through puffy red-rimmed eyes, a large pile of post and a bad attitude. I couldn’t think of a way out of it. Yes, I said. Oh good, he said, I have some packets for you as well. EVERYTHING I HAVE ORDERED OR ANYONE HAS SENT ME IN THE LAST SIX MONTHS ARRIVED TODAY.‡
And then Raphael showed up‡‡ to (a) take the shiny new laptop away and make its possessed-by-evil battery spin 360° and spew green bile‡‡‡ so we can demand a new one and (b) tell frelling Outlook to stop playing silly buggers and function again. I mean, again Raphael told it. It giggles feebly while there’s an archangel in the house and instantly goes off the rails again as soon as he leaves.§ ARRRRGH.§§ Since I’m presently trapped at home with SHADOWS, two mentally- and digestively-challenged hellhounds and a cough, I’ve spent some time trying to sort out my dreadful email inboxes. I spent a good two hours doing this this morning while I was waiting hopefully for the fifth or sixth mug of tea to penetrate so I could get on with SHADOWS. And when we went back to the cottage this afternoon and I turned on the desktop—and the knapsack laptop just to doublecheck—NONE OF WHAT I’D DONE ON THE MEWS LAPTOP UPDATED.
SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAM.§§§
* * *
* The end is actually in sight. It’s just nowhere near enough. I want to be able to see it without the assistance of the Hubble telescope.
** So maybe the ending is near enough. I just can’t make my eyes focus.
*** Nothing to do with brown paper.
Jabenami:
And, um, on the subject of bad physics jokes…
Heisenberg and Schrodinger are driving down the highway when they are pulled over by a police officer.
“Do you have any idea how fast you’re going?” the officer demands.
“No,” says Heisenberg, “but I know exactly where I am.”
“I’m going to need to take a look in your car,” says the officer and goes around to the back of the car.
“Did you know that you have a dead cat in your trunk?” the officer exclaims.
“Well NOW I do,” says Schrodinger.
And from xkcd, that incomparable fount of scientific wisdom:
And, while we’re at it:
Yeah. This is the kind of thing I think about at 5 a.m. when I can’t sleep and Mr Military Man is going to start crunching gravel soon. Does xkcd’s little brother write fantasy? Has his little brother recently started reading brain-exploding quantum physics which is having no discernable effect (he thinks) on his actual story-writing, but is making him feel like his own doppelganger?
† In twenty-three days. In case anyone else is counting.
†† We were having a typhoon.^ Wind, rain, banshees. The banshees have never bothered the hellhounds, but there is, I am assuming, a sub- or supra-banshee who has infiltrated the area recently, to the dismay of some sensitive hellhounds.
^ And I am so tired of resetting my phone machine, and the alien-invasion-klaxon back-up battery that protects the desktop from berserkers and boiling oil and is worse than the banshees. The typhoon went on for several days. I can go for weeks without getting any messages on my phone machine+ except from people like the dentist++ but over the three days of typhoon I think everybody I’ve ever met tried to phone me and have subsequently been variously waspish or petulant about my yet-again-un-re-set phone machine.+++
+ Probably because I never answer them
++ And I’m certainly not going to answer him. The nice young receptionist is leaving me increasingly forlorn-sounding reminders about my check-up however.~ Go away. I have a novel to finish. You don’t want me till I’ve finished my novel, and got paid. And I don’t want you at all, but . . .
~ There’s a special module in Dental Receptionist School about sounding forlorn.
+++ It’s not like I ever, you know, answer the phone.
http://www.quotegarden.com/telephones.html :
The bathtub was invented in 1850 and the telephone in 1875. In other words, if you had been living in 1850, you could have sat in the bathtub for 25 years without having to answer the phone. Bill DeWitt, 1972
Middle age: When you’re sitting at home on Saturday night and the telephone rings and you hope it isn’t for you. Ogden Nash
The situation is made additionally complex in my case because the phone that works doesn’t ring. The phone that doesn’t work does ring, but it’s the one in my office which is to say next to my bedroom and I certainly don’t want it ringing at me at an unsuitable hour, like any time before noon. So I leave it unplugged. Why should I plug in a phone that doesn’t work? Which means I don’t hear phone calls. Every now and then I’ll hear some clicking and muttering noises but by the time I figure out it’s someone leaving a message, they’ve rung off, and I didn’t want to answer the phone anyway, did I? No. I’ll listen to the message later. If I remember. If the banshees don’t wipe it first.~
~ I have a perfectly good email address. It’s not like people can’t get hold of me. Of course I don’t always answer emails either, but I do read them.
††† I have to draw the line somewhere. I already don’t answer the phone.
‡ Okay, I don’t know that it’s everything. Everything I know to worry about the non-arrival of. I’m well aware that anything that doesn’t arrive at its destination by Christmas enters an interdimensional time warp that laughs at both Heisenberg and Schrodinger, and re-emerges at an undivinable wave/particle node which generally involves being gnawed by dragons during the detranslocation and is most often rendered as March. But some of today’s haul was ordered/sent in November.
‡‡ I backed up politely, explaining that I had the lurgy. So do I, said Raphael cheerfully. I’ve had it since the beginning of December. And through two courses of antibiotics.
Moan.
‡‡‡ All right, I’m a little obsessed with undesirable effluvia at the moment.
§ It hasn’t tried undesirable effluvia yet. Small mercies. Or no, medium-sized mercies at least.
§§ So, arguably, I don’t have a perfectly good email address.
§§§ Don’t do this when you have a sore throat and a cough.
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.
ARRRRRRRRRGH COMPUTERS ARRRRRRRRRGH
Computer Archangels were here for about two and a half hours today* and . . . an hour after they left I was writing pathetic HEEEEEEEEELP emails to Raphael. This was once again out of office hours** and I was merely trying to get on his list for tomorrow earlier than I would be crawling out of bed to phone him, but hellhounds and I were out hurtling in the dark when Pooka started barking at me, and it was Raphael. I explained that I was standing in the middle of a dark field about a quarter mile from my computer—through a good deal of juvenile hilarity going on in the background at Raphael’s end. I’ll put the kids to bed, he said, good dad all the way**, and ring you back. Which he did. Which is why this blog post is coming to you at all.
The good news is that yes, indeed, I have a Brand New Very Shiny Laptop.*** The bad news is that it’s up the wazoo with new frelling updated frelling software frelling, which, first, means it won’t play with some of my old programmes and, second, that both my old computers which are all networked together are having tantrums. OH HOW I HAAAAAAAATE MICROSOFT. HAAAAAAATE.† This also means, of course, that I can’t USE the shiny, (allegedly) magnificently overpowered beast, because I don’t understand all the weird (if shiny) new stuff.†† This is, you know, a trifle counterproductive in a new computer. . . .
Raphael PROMISES that the old Word file with the tender new SHADOWS on it will run just fine on Shiny and New. Of course I trust him totally—implicitly, explicitly, and dancing the fandango—that’s what archangels are for, to nurture and cherish mere mortals and to know more than we do about everything. But . . .
katinseattle
I want to hear more about Mongo. A lot more. Preferably a whole book with Mongo in it.
This is in the process of being arranged. I think he may even save the universe once or twice.
Aaron
| I want to hear more about Mongo. A lot more. Preferably a whole book with Mongo in it. |
A new record, a sequel request before the manuscript has even been submitted.
MONGO IS A MAJOR CHARACTER IN THE CURRENT NOVEL. I’M PLANNING ON FULFILLING THIS REQUEST IN THIS STORY, OKAY? DON’T YOU HAVE SOMETHING ELSE YOU COULD BE DOING? SOLVING GLOBAL WARMING OR SOMETHING? OR WRITING A GUEST BLOG?
* * *
* During which I DOODLED. There was one utter ratbag of a request^ that I did over and over FOUR TIMES before it was unlousy enough that I could bear to sign it and put it in an envelope.
SarahAllegra
Just let it be said that I think being able to order [doodles and doodled books] on command later is a FABULOUS idea.
Oh good. I may even get to the point in another decade or so that I don’t nearly have heart failure every time I raise a drawing pen over an open page in a book. I got used to signing the frellers decades ago, but doodling is scary.
BurgandyIce
I am going to miss [doodling] when I finish the last one.
Wait… can we help you with this and request random doodles?!
Totally. Just not yet.
^ And no I’m not going to tell you what it was first because I wouldn’t dream of being rude about a paying customer, but also because it’s a perfectly reasonable request and if you don’t draw yourself you aren’t likely to know what is and is not drawable. Or, possibly . . . he/she responsible does draw, and cheers him/herself up on bad days thinking about the tortures of the damned he/she has committed me to. In which case I hope the wall you hang it on—because of course this will be one of the special doodles that is framed and hung on a wall—is infested with both damp and deathwatch beetles and that one morning you will be uneasily awakened by a vague heaving sensation like a boat at anchor and then with a terrible roar that whole damp and beetled end of the house will collapse and you break a rib coughing in the resulting roiling clouds of plaster dust, not to mention shattering your great-grandmother’s ornate Victorian bedhead, which was not built to fall ten feet through the first floor to ground level.
The doodle itself, of course, will have been rendered into to tiny dusty atoms, which will mean that no one will ever again be able to pronounce on whether or not I successfully broke the unlousy barrier.
Katinseattle
May I say, you do a really terrific line in curses.
I get cranky.
** Urgencies always happen outside office hours. As any critter owner can tell you. In this case I think computers totally count as critters. ^
^ There’s a critter right now trying to convince he needs to be fed again. This is so exciting a development—hellhounds soliciting food—that I’ve kind of fallen into the habit of feeding them four times a day. . . . REMIND ME AGAIN. WHOSE IDEA WAS DOGS?
. . . Pardon me. Back in a minute.^
The thing is, the underlying problem—that hellhounds believe that eating is optional—remains. Therefore I have now created a situation where I have four times a day to get it wrong, instead of only two or three. I’ve just let myself be seduced by the idea that if they’re engaged in the process by asking for food, maybe . . . uh . . .
^ ::Munching noises::
*** I assume Mum is in the next room getting around her second double Scotch. The kids are both small and excitable.
† I know. If I were a Mac girl I could have pink. As it is I have to make do with brushed aluminium. Feh. But I’m just not going to make the shift now, and fifteen or so years ago when I was first buying computers, you couldn’t get Macs over here unless you were a geek and could do the support thing yourself.^ Also . . . I now have a pink-clad iPhone and a pink-clad iPad.^^ I don’t need a pink computer. But brushed aluminium? Give me strength. It’s brushed circularly around the frelling HP logo. Fortunately it will spend its life open and I will not be forced to look at it much. But the exquisitely brushed aluminum makes Raphael’s heart beat faster, and he wouldn’t let me put the power cords and so on into the same tote bag with the computer in case I scratched it. What is a frelling computer doing being made of something that scratches that easily. Clearly the only answer is a laptop sleeve.^^^
^ Which would not be me. Ahem.
^^ And, Mac stuff? It’s not the second coming. I’m just sayin’.
^^^ http://www.coxandcox.co.uk/products/velvet-laptop-sleeve And of course I’m going to spend another fifty quid to save six on postage.
†† I’m too tired to work out a suitable curse for Microsoft. It would have to be pretty intense.^
^ My mind will keep running on Gotterdammerung. Magic gods-and-world-consuming fire. Yes. Although I have never been able to like a woman who rides her horse into a funeral pyre. Your choice, honey: leave the horse alone.
††† The screen’s pretty dazzling. I could just stare at all the crisp new little icons and admire their sharpness and clarity. Never mind what they might do if I risked clicking on them.^
^ Eeeeeep.