A Few Pages After the First
No. Not quite. Nearly. Tomorrow. I know I said that yesterday. Well, I’m more caught up than I was yesterday. It still seems to me going well. I can risk saying that (I hope) because I know there will be days between now and the rmmph of March when it is not going well, when I am not a writer, I never was a writer, and I’m starting my retraining as a mechanic* in the next uptake.** Which is to say I know I’m going to be paying for good days whether or not I admit to having them so why not admit it? See: wrestling alligators, below.
Stardancer
I learned how hard it is to make a story. . . . I did learn to take something in the range of horrible/okay and shove it around into okay/pretty okay, even if I didn’t think it was anything I’d want to read. It’s HARD. I’d never realized before how much work it was, even for those gifted people in my classes who did “hear” their stories right off. Drafts and voice and tweaking and word choice and why is that character there again?
Thank you. Yes. It’s HARD. This is why The Urge to Kill people who offer to split the money with you if they give you their Great Idea and you do the dull stupid labour of writing it up because the idea is the hard part and besides you already have the name and the publishing contacts, is pretty overwhelming. Fortunately most of these offers come by post/email. Back in the days when I went to more live things and people used occasionally to offer this blithering asininity to my face civilised restraint was more difficult.
But. Yes. It’s like wrestling alligators. WHY IS THAT CHARACTER FOLLOWING ME AROUND? GO AWAY. YOU DON’T BELONG IN THIS STORY. Er. Do you? What have I missed this time? Writing is also brilliant and fascinating and enormous fun . . . but those alligators bite hard. And the regeneration of major body parts is tiring and demoralising and takes time, which you probably haven’t got.
EMoon
It’s downright scary sometimes how much your process is like my process…the whole thing about each character’s voice, each book’s voice, each book’s vocabulary, so sometimes I can’t hear the word I need–none of the first/second/third choice words works in that sentence and I can spend hours digging through dictionaries hoping to find the one right one. The stuff I have to write down (revolving door, uniform, etc.) that has to come out later because who cares, it doesn’t matter only some of the details DO matter and I don’t know which ones until the book’s done or nearly done.
Scary? Hmm. I find it exactly the opposite—this seems to me so obviously the way stories must break into storytellers’ brains, get heard/figured out, get written, that I find it far more unsettling when I hear about some other writer’s entirely different process. Those people who write out complete outlines—story arcs, what happens in each chapter, characters’ names, descriptions and relationships—people who create files on different aspects of story and characters before they ever settle down to write the story part of the story—that’s scary. I went through a period when I was a teenager of (mostly) secretly reading everything I could get my hands on on how to write—secretly as one pursues any vice, or any unadmitted longing—and some of the advice clings round me still in cold, sticky, cobwebby sorts of shreds. I absolutely believe in ‘whatever works’ but . . . brrrr for the file-keepers.
I mostly don’t write down stuff that will come out later. I tend to have faith that if I’ve left something out it’ll clamour to get into the next draft. Certainly stuff does come out, but not usually the revolving door and the doorperson’s uniform. But I do keep some notes as I go, and sometimes the marginal notes to the notes to the notes (to the notes) get a little cramped.
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* jaccairn
Also, MOT – I think I remember that yours is due sometime this month, It’s the sort of thing that might slip your mind when you’re so busy.
Snork. The things some people’s blog forum members remember. Thank you. Yes, Wolfgang is due this month and I’ve already booked him in.^ I hope you’re impressed. I’m so impressed I can hardly bear myself. (I think this is the first year I’ve ever remembered before the last minute.) Now I just have to implore the weather gods to be kind since the remains of the bus system between here and Warm Upford is not worth discussing. Hellhounds and I can perfectly well walk home one day and walk back the next, but not if we’re having gales and hail and winged monkeys and so on. Which we’re apparently going to have overnight. This is all because Peter had planned to go to Oxford tomorrow and have lunch with one of his cousins. No, no! said the weather gods, shaking themselves out of their long winter slumber, we can’t have promiscuous peregrinations! Where is that blizzard, we know we put it somewhere! —It hasn’t got up to freezing the last three days^^ and now we’re supposed to have SNOW. Ah . . . frell. Well, my yaktrax have been lonesome so far this winter . . . and snow will certainly keep me at home where I have nothing better to do than work. . . . ^^^
^ And he has to pass. Has to. In the first place I can’t afford a new car this year. In the second place . . . I still don’t want a new car. I want a new car less and less as I hear friends with shiny new cars talking about the way the computers in new cars run their lives. And go wrong, of course. You can learn to ignore that little flashing red light on the dashboard after the third time you’ve taken it in and paid £100 to be told there’s nothing wrong. Not so much the robot voice continuously telling you to fasten your seatbelt/add grinchflobby fluid to the ziggury system/placate the trolls with ham sandwiches.
^^ And my chocolate cosmos hate being indoors, so they’ll probably frelling croak this year too. Arrrgh. Furthermore, my gladiola bulbs arrived today. Gladiola bulbs are tender. Mail warehouses are rarely heated. At least mail warehouses where tender plants are held are rarely heated. Arrrgh. Don’t these mail-order bozos ever, you know, listen to the weather forecast? Hey, guys, we’re supposed to get three foot of snow tomorrow! Let’s ship all the banana trees!
^^^ Ajlr
I also wondered what the reaction of the hellhounds had been to the new Amazingly Loud Voice?
Chaos has always found my singing . . . disturbing. Darkness has always assumed that it’s just another daft human activity. It is perhaps hard on hellhounds that both at the mews and the cottage their bed is next to the piano/cheap electric keyboard. Chaos gets up and moves toward me cautiously, staring at my distorted face for clues. GO LIE DOWN YOU WRETCHED DOG.
I’m more worried about the neighbours. Do you remember—probably nearly a year ago now—I was fretting about singing at the cottage, where my office, with the keyboard in it, has the common wall with my semi-detached neighbour? (The keyboard itself, plugged into headphones, is silent.) The wall is floor-to-ceiling with bookshelves, but I can still hear my neighbour climbing the stairs on the other side. Don’t worry, said Nadia, you don’t make nearly enough noise.
I think I probably do make enough noise now. Ah, the disadvantages of success. I can still sing while I do the washing-up—it’s on the far side from the common wall. I also sing out hurtling, while hellhounds pretend they don’t know me, and my impression is that people are starting to move to the opposite pavement (I used to think this was just a reaction to rampant hellhounds). Hey, this probably happens to Deborah Voigt too. I wish it had any effect on aggressive off lead dogs.
** The GUARDIAN is running a publicity draw to win a full degree Open University course. Details tomorrow. The OU is highly thought of so I, who don’t have nearly enough to do, had an idle look through their course list. Their language department is terrible. French, German, Spanish, Italian, Chinese, Welsh (Welsh?^) and Latin and (classical) Greek. That’s it?
^ Yes, I know, good for them, Celtic languages are struggling for survival, but in the context of only six modern languages offered it seems to me a bit startling.
SHAAAAAAAAA. . .
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAADOWS*.
AND IT’S THE 30TH OF JANUARY. NO. IT’S ALREADY THE 31ST. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGHHHH.
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* I did go to my voice lesson. I told you yesterday, I’m getting even stranger, bent over my computer twenty hours a day^, and I thought it might even be good for me to go get strung out in a different direction, even if SHADOWS is frelling due frelling tomorrow.^^ Also I only just started singing again last week and—I wanted to go. It’s been a slightly dubious week in terms of practise—there’s still crud in my throat and all this emotional-aspect stuff makes me kind of jumpy—if you manage to miss with the carving knife you go to A&E, get some stitches and a lecture, come home, mop up the blood, keep the bandage out of the bath, be a little careful of yourself till the stitches come out, and hey voila, there you are. Another interesting scar. But when you’re trying to patch yourself together from some kind of immaterial wound, where and how you put the stitches in, and what constitutes the kind of bath you should keep your damaged limb out of—and what exactly the limb is—is not so straightforward. So I’ve been singing sort of cautiously, and of course I’m wildly out of practise and I have no time.^^^ Also, my voice still keeps disappearing on me—less than it was doing before, but every time it does I’m convinced that this is The End and I’m too old to be reaching for this nonsense anyway.^^^^ Nadia waggled her eyebrows at me in that disbelieving-teacher way and said, now as I remember it we found out last week that the chief reason your voice was dropping out was because you were letting it get cut off from its air supply. Oh, I said. Um.
So she made me frelling breathe for a while, and connect, and all that really annoying stuff you shouldn’t NEED to be told over and over and over and over and over and OVER. But you do, because you’re a moron. And then she ran me up and down some scales and some exercises and kept reminding me to breathe and to connect, and I could actually feel the air sinking down and lying with this lovely rounded, grounded weightiness at the bottom of my pelvis, and every now and then I also remembered to let it out again, and carry my voice with it. I had already admitted that occasionally this week when I wasn’t convinced I still couldn’t sing and was therefore producing a self-fulfilling prophesy of squawks and silences, I’d made a few noises that were fuller and freer than what I’m used to . . . and with the teacher-magic she teased them out of me today, and convinced them to bring friends. I was singing back up at the top of my range again—which I haven’t even tried at home since before I was ill, because I have been too busy feeling fragile, convalescent and overworked—and I was loud—me! Old no-voice me!— the kind of loud your average local amateur choir would be happy to have yelling from its benches—loud the way I don’t sing, especially at the top end where my brain is busy saying, no, no, wait, we don’t do that. Nadia stopped me where she did not because my voice was failing, she said, but because my brain was closing me down.
But. There’s life in the old cow yet. Mooo. Yaay. And I came home again all exhilarated and threw myself into SHADOWS.
^ That leaves two for hurtling hounds and two for sleeping. Other crucial activities like eating chocolate can be performed coincidently while typing.
^^ Later today. Shut up.
^^^ And the twenty-fifth hour is for singing practise.
^^^^ I actually raised this with Nadia today. How big an embarrassing moron am I being, taking voice lessons at nearly-sixty? For some reason I’ve heard like half a dozen times this last week that sopranos lose their voices really early and it seems sort of fated to be hearing this over and over again when I’m convalescent from the throat infection that had stopped me singing altogether—and ten months off my sixtieth birthday.+ And she said, two things: there’s no reason you shouldn’t last a good while yet as a choir singer—it’s professional sopranos that fold predictably early because of the colossal demands they put on their voices—and you’re lucky—you’ve got all the alto notes too. If you need to slip down to sing alto, you can.
::Beams:: Good. On with the voice lessons, then.
+ And before you answer that, I added, let me say that while this is all contingent on you being willing to teach me, I’ve already figured out that I’m in it for the journey. Never mind that thirty years ago I’d’ve had no voice to train either, all this trying to bind yourself together in a seamless whole to produce a sound is fascinating, even if the resultant sound is nothing much.
I sang. I rang.
Yessssssss.
I got up this morning convinced I was doing a really dumb, time-wasting-when-I-have-even-less-time-to-waste-than-usual, thing, going to my voice lesson when I’m still totally croaking.* I told myself that I had to go to Mauncester anyway, to pick up more organic composted farmyard manure for the garden(s) so I might as well tack a voice lesson on the end of it.** I looked dubiously at my music, which positively has dust *** on it, and decided to take the easy end of it along in case Nadia wanted to recommend this pathetic baby thing rather than that. And I took my notebook, of course, to write down her pearls, rubies and sapphires of wisdom.
So I got there and she said blandly, I think it would be a good idea just to attempt to warm your voice up a little—I may be able to advise you about how to work this week. Croak, I said. That’s fine, she said. We’ll start with the nnnn sound. We can add an actual pitch in later.
Nnnn, I said. . . .
Teacher magic. It’s amazing. Oh, I still have a throat full of crud † but my larynx isn’t made of cement after all and by the end of the hour I was SINGING. I was not singing well††, but I was indubitably SINGING. Nadia said (possibly a trifle smugly) that one of the reasons some of the notes just weren’t there—open mouth, nothing comes out—isn’t about my throat at all, but about the fact that because of all this emotional stuff I’ve shut down, and specifically I’ve shut my voice off from my air supply. And she taught me the Lip Trill, which she says is very good for reconnecting with your air supply because it’s so hard to maintain. All you singers out there will know the Lip Trill. What it really is is a blowing-horse imitation: you blow out through your lips so they go Pbpbpbpbpbpbpb††† It’s also supposed to relax the muscles around your mouth.‡ Which probably explains why I can’t do it. So now it’s homework. I have to learn to pbpbpbpbpbpbpb. She also made me do the opening-curtains thing to make me more positive, and the drinking-a-glass-of-water-on-a-hot-day‡‡ thing, which I hadn’t done before, to open my throat. Why does this stuff work. It is insane.
I had already noticed that what notes are available—and they’ve been creeping home one by one like party-goers after dawn, the last two or three days—are mostly the upper-middle of my register. I’m not even trying the top end, but my voice starts cutting out again around middle C, and I should have a whole octave below that. Nadia kept coming back here and I’d go croak and she’d move back up again. Finally at the very end of the hour something shifted and I began singing in my chest voice—usually, as these things go with me, the gear change into chest voice is not all that big a deal. Ah, she said, that’s what I was hoping for. And I was thinking chest voice = speaking voice = not speaking up for myself = duuuuuh. As I had said to her in my email asking to come for a non-singing singing lesson, I even wonder if the appalling revealingness of singing, depressingly unconnected with any excellence of said singing as it is, is the reason my body chose this method of trying to get my frelling attention.
Nadia said, I was planning on getting you singing today, you know . . .
I had about an hour between singing lesson and Penelope and Niall picking me up to go ringing at Glaciation.‡‡‡ Whapwhapwhapwhap: person trying to reorient. Whap. Which—ringing—felt totally normal . . . and really, really weird and sad and creepy. I haven’t got a tower any more. I’m just some random bell ringer who knows some people in this area. Brrrrr. But ringing rounds for beginners is always grounding as well as making you feel you’re contributing to the community§ and we managed to ring Cambridge even if I then went on to make a pig’s ear of an innocent touch of Stedman which I ought to be able to do in my sleep.§§ Slightly in my defense I was ringing on the one remaining bell I don’t know for Stedman—the three—and there are always moments of vertigo as you figure out where you are on a new bell in a familiar pattern. But mostly I just blatfarging botched it. But they didn’t tell me not to come back, so hey.
And I have gone around today thrusting my knitting under everyone’s noses and saying, Look! Ribbing! Real ribbing!
* * *
* Although there is a little Freelancers Must Stick Together too. Nadia doesn’t charge for legitimately missed lessons, so she’s losing money when I don’t come. This preys on my conscience.
** Going to the local farm shop would have absorbed about forty minutes out of my day. Plus voice lesson made it about three hours. Being really, really bad at arithmetic^ has its uses.
^ Possibly I mean ‘logic’ here.
*** And hellhound hair. But everything in these households has hellhound hair on it, including me, and I am in almost constant use.
† ::Grossness alert:: And I was gacking up horrible gunge on the drive home, after having all those secret inner bits stirred up by Nadia’s intervention. MAJOR DISGUSTING EWWWW. One of the oddities of this illness anyway has been how obsessively focused on my throat it’s been so I didn’t even know there was all that crudiferousness lurking. I find myself wondering if I went down a few archaeological layers and was ripping out stuff from some previous occasion when I didn’t speak up for myself when I should have.
†† But then I never sing well. Sigh.
††† When in doubt, YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gt7eTRyRKpA
‡ I don’t think there’s any of me that DOESN’T need relaxing. My hair needs relaxing. My fingernails need relaxing. Possibly especially a week before the book I’m working on is due.
‡‡ Beer if I preferred, she said. No, I said, the way I get into this nonsense of yours, I need to be sober to drive home.
‡‡‡ My voice lesson got moved later when it got made an hour long, and Colin’s practise has had a quarter hour added to the front end because he has a nice fresh growing crop of beginners who need cultivating. This is not ideal for me. On a bad ME day I’ll have to miss Colin, although give me a shooting stick to lean on and I can probably ring rounds for beginners even if I’m seeing double.
§ Contributing! To the [ringing] community! AAAAAAAUGH!
§§ Although given how well I’m sleeping lately. . .
Sunday
I went to bed late last night even for me*, having closed all the windows and curtains, hung a blanket over the back door (well, hey, it’s January) and closed the bathroom door since its window tends to funnel sound through into my bedroom.
The bells still woke me up. Siiigh. And then of course I couldn’t get back to sleep. This is going to take some getting used to. . . . **
HOWEVER. I wrote to Nadia saying, I still can’t sing, but could we maybe have a NON-SINGING SINGING LESSON? You can tell me about singing Micaela in a field full of sheep in Ghent in the rain and the Escamillo was old and fat and one of the smugglers had a terrible head and kept sneezing.*** Just so I could feel I was reattaching.† She wrote back saying, erm, maybe some language/pronunciation practise? FINE. WHATEVER. So I’m going to my voice lesson tomorrow for the first time in what may be a month . . . and never mind I still can’t sing a scale—only about every other note is even present—as I said to her, the larynx is about as flexible as cement. But the sore throat is GONE and the rest will come. †
Diane in MN
The EnchantedIsland
. . . is fabulous. FABULOUS.
YES YES YES!!!
I loved the production, thought the singing was fabulous, and generally had a splendid afternoon. I had never heard Danielle De Niese
She had a big push for what may have been her first album?, over here, called Beauty of the Baroque, which I bought because it has Dido’s Lament on it which is one of those arias I sort of collect. It’s nearly all very, very standard repertoire—Dido herself of course, Come again sweet love, Ombra Mai fu, Let the bright Seraphim and so on and I thought I was probably being a fool, but in fact I like her voice and her interpretations a lot.†† She’s got a new album out. Hmmm.
and was seriously impressed. (Ariel? Androgynous, but of course s/he’s a spirit, so gender may be irrelevant.)
I’ve seen the Shakespearean Ariel played both as male and as androgynous. Female would be fine. I don’t care, just make up your mind, which I felt they didn’t do in ISLAND.
I thought Costanzo’s voice worked for Ferdinand because Ferdinand is very young, and they wouldn’t have wanted another countertenor who sounds like David Daniels.
I might have bought his voice, despite my dubiousness about the salon-and-harpsichord type of countertenor—which I like fine, in a salon with a harpsichord—on the operatic stage, but the way they handled him, with the peach-satin-lined cape and the uniform emphasizing how slender he is, I thought in that context just made him a nebbish. He and Miranda are going to rule? I. Don’t. Think. So. But I’ve seen at least two reviews praising him particularly, so . . . I’m a cow. This is not news.†††
And I love David Daniels, but I don’t quite get why they cast a countertenor as Prospero, who’s an old guy.
Er—what does old have to do with being a countertenor? James Bowman is semi-retired at 70, but he’s still giving concerts. I thought this was a stroke of genius, myself, to cast a Baroque Prospero as a countertenor—and then get David Daniels, who actually has a voice strong enough to cope with operatic demands and the personal authority to go with it, to sing the role. Of course there’s not a lot he can do with the repulsiveness of the character, but that’s how it’s written.
He’s not a particularly nice monster, but he still has his feelings and his dreams, and he’s the only principal at the end who hasn’t got what he wanted.
Agreed. They should have conjured up a Papagena for this Papageno. I was kind of hoping that’s what Ariel stepped offstage to do.
Yes. Maybe they can do that in a later edition. Maybe we should write letters. . . .
. . . The singers–part of the Met’s young artist development program–who sang the Dream lovers were very good, and I especially liked the young mezzo who sang Hermia. She sounds like someone to pay attention to.
Agreed! She was the stand-out to me too. I was thinking, hey, this chickie could grow up to be a contralto. Mmmmmmm.
This was altogether a great show. I’d see it again, too, any time.
Let’s hope there are enough of us to make it so.
Heh. Definitely a process knitter, then, as opposed to a product knitter.
Oh, absolutely.‡ I knit at traffic lights, remember? And waiting for stuff to happen. (Like very long lights to change.) Some people meditate. I knit. It’s soothing. It’s also a Positive Time Out From the World thing, which is why it’s so perfect for opera intermissions, which are too long for those of us who think we should be doing something. That there might conceivably be a PRODUCT at the end of one of these long yarny tunnels would be awesome. Slightly in my defense, you know, I bit off way more than I could chew with my Three Secret Projects. I eventually decided I couldn’t inflict them on anyone, and kind of collapsed in a damp little heap on the floor.‡‡ And I started with the idea of leg warmers, as some of you may (unfortunately) recall, and when I had an instant nervous breakdown about the ribbing, Fiona had the brilliant idea about the hellhound blanket. And now, a year later, I’m maybe ready to try again.
If you can knit for an entire year without a single finished object to your name and still enjoy knitting, then you are definitely a Knitter with a capital “K.”
Snork. But it’s process Zen knitting, you know?
RIBBING! IT'S RIBBING! It's not very even ribbing, but it's RIBBING!!!!
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* Made easy by reading BEFORE I FALL by Lauren Oliver. http://www.amazon.co.uk/Before-I-Fall-Lauren-Oliver/dp/0340980907/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1327273485&sr=1-1
Yowzah. This is another of those books—like WINTERGIRLS, say—that I had zero interest in—I might almost say violent, bigoted zero interest in—get away from me with that thing. It’s a Sensitive Teen Age Novel About Learning The Important Stuff. Oh, And The Heroine Dies. Since this is the most famous part of the set up, I don’t consider that a spoiler. Anyway, I frelling hate sensitive teenage novels, and one of the sub-categories I particularly hate is when the main character dies (sensitively), but FALL is another book that reached over my prejudices, grabbed me immediately and doesn’t let go. It’s just a very, very good book. I had about a million people tell me to shut up and read it. ALL RIGHT. I’LL READ IT. FEH. You could argue that I’m too old to have a clue about the spot-on-ness of Oliver’s take on the spectacular horribleness of the high school popular crowd—but I’m not too old to say that she’s deadly accurate about people and the misuse of power.^ And while a lot of the reviews emphasise how horrible Sam and her crowd are—because the point is that as Sam relives her last day over and over, she becomes less horrible—one of the things that struck me was how easy they were to find sort of (horribly) likeable. Far more human than you might have thought if they were laughing at your shoes/knapsack/hair or not inviting you to their parties. But then Oliver has bags and bags of style, and I’m a sucker for style. I sometimes think it’s the rarest writing gift of all.
^ And the antics of the popular crowd have not, in fact, changed all that much in the last half century. The big local high school, which is pretty much first choice for anyone in this catchment area, is about four blocks from here. I see a lot of teenage group activity and it all looks pretty familiar. A bit more personal tech is all.
** I want to get this mostly off the front page, however. Anyone riveted by my private soap opera, the conversation continues in the forum.
*** Opera singers—and Nadia isn’t chiefly an opera singer, but she’s done some—always have amazing stories.
† The president/secretary/oddsbods man/assistant director of the Muddlehamptons has kindly kept me on the mailing list. They’ve got a wedding in late April, singing three old war horses of the standard choir repertoire and I so want to be there.
†† One of the idiot reviews of ISLAND that I saw said that de Niese couldn’t sing Baroque music. What?
††† I also acknowledge that being a major character who only comes on at the very very end and has to give a kind of And All Will Be Well From This Day Forward Because I Am Here aria out of nowhere is a rough one, and he did it with poise and charm.
‡ I think we’ve had this conversation before. I feel a little^ . . . embarrassed. Surely knitting ought to be about product?
^ NO NO. NOT SHEEPISH.
‡‡ It’s not all bad. It’s significantly slowed my rampant stash acquisition.
Singing and leftover turkey
Priorities: I had a close encounter of an unfortunate kind tonight with a large, turkey-slashing knife, partly, perhaps, because I rarely have close encounters with large, turkey-slashing knives, and am less than adept. The wretched thing skidded and was coming for me and I had just enough time to think ‘it’s okay, I’ll still be able to type’ before it changed its mind and did not sink half an inch into the ball of my thumb, squirt blood all over the kitchen, and require a nine-fingered sprint to A&E.
Jacky
About the woman who starts the flash mob and where she gets the nerve. My 2 sisters and I sang in a choir a generous 1 hour bus ride from home. We sang on the bus on the way to and back home again. Singing in public is easier if you start young enough, and if you have good experiences of it. We were on occasion either applauded, or inspired others to join in. It wasn’t a scary thing. It was exhilarating.
I take your point (and good for you), but this is not quite the same thing, at least not from where I’m sitting trembling in my seat. There were three of you, and a bus full of people is still a lot smaller and more organised an audience than that shopping mall food hall with a couple hundred or something* people milling around.** My empathy keeps stalling on the fact that I haven’t got a soloist’s voice, but I can imagine being one of the other choir members standing on a chair and adding to the uproar. But that first woman . . . among other things, if I were her, I’d be worrying that they’d clap a bag over my head and be ringing emergency services before enough of the rest of my gang got going to prove that there was method in the manifest madness.
Glinda
As for the first woman singing in the flash mob – I think soloists are born, not made; I used to have a reasonably decent singing voice, but never ever wanted to be a soloist.
Again, I can’t (ahem) speak to the singing aspect because I haven’t got the voice to not want to solo with. But about performance . . . there is not necessarily alignment between ability and attitude in this, as there is also not in so many things. Think of Florence Foster Jenkins.
I remember when I was still running occasional writing seminars. The hopefuls that made my heart sink were the ones who worked like blazes, had totally the right attitude about putting in their hours and honing their craft by experience . . . and who apparently had no talent, no ear, no imagination whatsoever. I didn’t feel it was any part of what I’d been hired to do to tell anyone this—after all, I could have been wrong—and there’s always something practical and pertinent you can say about someone’s writing if you think about it. And then there were the clearly talented ones who couldn’t be bothered. ARRRRGH. So they’d give you one perfect poem or—usually—two and a half perfect chapters which they weren’t going on with because it was beginning to dawn on them that it was going to be work.*** If you could yank that one person’s natural skill and replant it in the drudge. . . .
It was one of the greatest shocks of my life when I was sent out on the road for the first time after BEAUTY came out and I was a shiny new thing, and I discovered that I could do public speaking. What? Where did that come from? I was absolutely not made to be able to put myself over in person. Clearly there is some mistake.†
I had been thinking about singing performance however which made me rewatch this clip†† from a slightly different angle. Last voice lesson we got into a mix up with our music again, which is to say that theoretically I have accompanist’s copies of everything I’m working on and theoretically Nadia already has her own copies of (nearly) everything because it’s music she’s accustomed to teaching. But I managed to leave at home my extra copy of something she’d managed to leave her copy of at home too. So she sang it with me.
This has happened a few times before. I always enjoy it, which may or may not be a good thing.††† But this time what I particularly noticed was the difference not in our voices per se—which is to say she has one and I don’t—but in our performance. She invests what she sings, even when it’s something that she doesn’t herself sing. I don’t invest—even when it’s something I’m (supposedly) working on. I stand there like a little plank with a sort of weak buzzing noise coming out the top end. Sigh. This is sort of a good thing in that I’m developing enough brain-space even while I’m singing to make observations—there is a very strong herding-cats element to singing—but it doesn’t tell me what to do about an observation like ‘eww’. We’ve talked about trying, about how to relax and stop trying, to let the music move through you—not unlike letting a story move through you, you might think, but I haven’t found the musical on switch yet. Siiiigh. Watching these people singing the Hallelujah Chorus this time I was thinking, I bet I can pick out which are the actual choir members and which are the audience singing along. Okay, maybe some of the choir members are horribly embarrassed at what they’re doing . . . but I don’t think they’d stay members of that group if they embarrassed easily. Therefore the trying-their-best but plank-like ones are the audience. . . . Where is that frelling ON switch.
I’ve been trying, this fortnight while I haven’t got Nadia to take things to, various ruses to startle myself into singing with some feeling. I’ve been singing Christmas carols all my life, so those should be terror-free and familiar enough to take risks with. I’ve reverted to some of my favourite old folk songs, like Greensleeves (or What Child Is This) and Early One Morning and Ash Grove and Down by the Salley Gardens, which have very simple flowing lines, and come as near to making you flow with them as any mere music can do. I wander around the sitting room‡ singing, sometimes merely standing facing in directions other than into the piano and the wall behind the piano, and sometimes singing while walking. Sometimes singing in a furrin language helps—both Non lo diro and Santa Lucia are better in Italian. Sometimes singing furrin is just more intimidating—Caro Mio Ben and Dove Sei still feel wildly, ridiculously, shamefully beyond my reach—despite the fact that I find them beautiful and respond to them, just not in any way I seem able to let out of my mouth. ARRRRRGH.
There’s one semi-exception to all this. Generally speaking/singing I sound least pathetic on the simple old folk or folk-style songs. And Se Tu M’Ami is still technically beyond me—I’m pretty sure I told you Nadia tried delicately to discourage me from tackling it, it’s just every frelling thing I sing seems to be mournful and here’s one that isn’t. That’s where Santa Lucia comes from—she gave me that one because it’s cheerful. Too late, though—I was already well stuck into Tu M’Ami. And of all of them, and however technically calamitous my efforts are, I most get into Tu M’Ami. With Tu M’Ami I have occasional little glimpses of how the dynamics arise organically from the line of the song.
I feel that my perverse streak could take a break here any time.
Melissa Mead
My maternal grandma used to give me socks. Generally argyle. I came to love “grandma socks,” and now I can’t look at argyle socks without missing her. I still have a couple of pairs of “grandma socks.” They’re getting holey, but I won’t throw them out.
FOR HEAVEN’S SAKE, WOMAN, YOU NEED TO LEARN TO KNIT.
* * *
* I’m not sure how much you see even in the long shots.
** Although people in the hall can probably escape more easily if they’re not in a social-uplift mood. You’d have to be extremely grinchy to get off at the next stop and wait for the next bus. Grinchy and possessed of a great deal of spare time, bus schedules being what they usually are.
*** On the whole give me 90% work ethic and 10% talent rather than the other way around, but you do need the 10% talent.
† The Personality Creation admin is clearly as screwed up as the Story Council. There may possibly be some delivery system problems as well.^
^ ‘If no one is there, please stick it in the kid third from the right’.
†† This clip, for anyone who doesn’t read this blog faithfully every night: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXh7JR9oKVE
††† It’s a good thing for a choir member to like singing with other people. It may not be a good thing for a student to like having a teacher to hide behind.
‡ Much to the consternation of the hellhounds, who are a bit dubious about my singing anyway, and feel that if I move away from the piano toward the centre of the room I should be going to go sit on the sofa.