Posts
Just a quick note to say - if you are that way inclined - Richmond Magazine is running a poetry competition on the theme "A Poem for Kew". So if you write poetry, or are inspired to by the idea of winning a joint Premier Friends membership of Kew for a year, have a look:
http://content.yudu.com/Library/Azu9u/RichmondJan09/resources/index.htm?referrerUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.yudu.com%2Fitem%2Fdetails%2F27768%2FRichmond-Jan-09
Details are on page 9.
Would anyone be interested in contributing to a poetry-sharing team blog, by the way?
Thursday, 29 January 2009
I just ate my lunch: Jansson’s Frestelse (the spelling of which I’m sure is wrong!). Fish, potatoes, onions, garlic, black pepper and cream. The easiest fish pie in the world, and in my opinion the best. Followed by a Delicje malinowe, which is a Polish raspberry jaffa cake. Cor, yum. This is a fairly unhealthy lunch, of course, but I’ve got a cup of green tea and a pile of clementines to finish off with, which will tip the balance back a little towards antioxidants and vitamins and so forth.
Going home tonight to make a cauliflower and parsnip gratin. Yes, making and enjoying good food is definitely one of the aspects of creativity, albeit one which is seldom cited as such. As I’ll have the oven on I may bake biscuits as well…
More and more I feel in sympathy with Rebecca West’s definition of creativity as being a continuum, running from someone baking a good cake at one end to the work of Mozart at the other. Gardening is in there, as well as cookery, and so are all the activities derided by the Fine Art world as “crafts” – knitting and patchwork quilting, making greetings cards (I have a nice range of hand-made valentines, if anyone is interested), making jewellery, clothes-making, pottery and clay-modelling… the list is, to coin a phrase, endless. While personally I think “Clay artist” is an unutterably silly piece of newspeak, and “Craftsman potter” sounds noble and authentic, and altogether rather good, I do heartily dislike the implied minor status generally accepted as implicit in the terms “craft” and “craftsman”.
Especially let no-one who wants to be taken seriously as a fine artist permit themself ever to be called a “good craftsman”. To actually be good at the basic skill of one’s art form is the kiss of death, relegating one (in some people’s eyes at least) irrevocably to the ranks of the amateur. How nonsensical that is…
These raspberry jaffa cakes are the tops, by the way. Good old Gudi Food Stores. I love Ealing.
Going home tonight to make a cauliflower and parsnip gratin. Yes, making and enjoying good food is definitely one of the aspects of creativity, albeit one which is seldom cited as such. As I’ll have the oven on I may bake biscuits as well…
More and more I feel in sympathy with Rebecca West’s definition of creativity as being a continuum, running from someone baking a good cake at one end to the work of Mozart at the other. Gardening is in there, as well as cookery, and so are all the activities derided by the Fine Art world as “crafts” – knitting and patchwork quilting, making greetings cards (I have a nice range of hand-made valentines, if anyone is interested), making jewellery, clothes-making, pottery and clay-modelling… the list is, to coin a phrase, endless. While personally I think “Clay artist” is an unutterably silly piece of newspeak, and “Craftsman potter” sounds noble and authentic, and altogether rather good, I do heartily dislike the implied minor status generally accepted as implicit in the terms “craft” and “craftsman”.
Especially let no-one who wants to be taken seriously as a fine artist permit themself ever to be called a “good craftsman”. To actually be good at the basic skill of one’s art form is the kiss of death, relegating one (in some people’s eyes at least) irrevocably to the ranks of the amateur. How nonsensical that is…
These raspberry jaffa cakes are the tops, by the way. Good old Gudi Food Stores. I love Ealing.
Tuesday, 27 January 2009
Tell me a story...
It’s Tuesday afternoon and the ‘phones have gone quiet. Conversation has turned to odd topics (kinky-sounding abbreviated names, intra-species breastfeeding…). I’m looking at a picture of a very strange object which someone has sent in – a sort of hollow terracotta tube with a dish-shaped foot – and wondering who at Kew would know what the flipping heck it is. Various theories were voiced as the picture was passed round the office, varying from the possible through the facetious to the downright rude, but so far it remains a mystery. We’ll see what Stewart Henchie makes of it.
Got some more writing done last night. There’s nothing quite like getting on with it to kick-start the solving of what have earlier appeared really knotty problems. After being beaten at University Challenge (admittedly by Corpus Christi, who I think are going to win overall, with something like 350 to my puny 235) I needed some light relief. Writing and playing “Renaissance of the Celtic Harp” repeatedly did the job perfectly. I think I’ve got to the end of chapter two. Whoo-hoo!
I’m very happy to be finding as I write that the whole thing is taking shape in ways I hadn’t envisaged. This is a story I conceived years ago, as a fairly straightforward space-opera, when I was a “Star Trek”~ and “Star Wars”-mad teenager. It had sat quiet in the back of my mind ever since, much as “Gabriel Yeats” did, simply because I liked the principal characters and felt they interacted well. Frankly, I thought the story was the weakest part, but now I’m actually having a go at it I’m pleasantly surprised to find that there is more to it than I’d originally thought. That sounds terribly self-aggrandising – embarrassingly so. At bottom this is still a western set in outer space, a pretty standardised genre which I make no pretension of revitalising. Far better writers than I will ever be already have that task in hand, anyway…
I’m just happy that when I lifted this particular pot from back-burner to main-burner, it turned out to have a bit more thematic substance than I’d expected. Why is the “alien” alien? – and why do we develop, and hold to, the loyalties we do, and let others go?
There’s a large back-burner in my mind where this story was sitting, and others still sit today; the oldest dates from my teens, the most recent from last autumn. They need to sit on a very low hob and brew for a while, like decoctions.
Back in the late summer of 2005, when I was trying to get my new life in London and my new job at Kew back on track after the chaos and unhappiness of my father’s death, I began working through some of the exercises in a self-help book called “The Artist’s Way” that I had bought shortly before he was diagnosed, and had never had time to start reading. The author, Julia Cameron, has written a lot of this sort of thing; I’ve read several of her books. At times she’s a little too breezily Californian for my tastes, and I feel myself getting all British and stiffened in the upper lip in response; and at times her huge self-confidence astounds (and slightly repels) me. But she’s very good on tips and tricks and ways to keep your creative juices flowing. I remember a cold, damp autumnal day when I was on duty at Lion Gate all day (boringboringboring) when I was reading this book and decided to do one of the exercises; it was like opening the back door and suddenly seeing that far from living in an inner city I had the South Downs out there. That was the exercise that got me writing again, after what was by then ten years of solid, dedicated focus on my visual art work. I had forgotten I’d ever had any other creative dreams; in fact in reading the book I was hoping to kick-start myself into some painting after a fallow period.
This was the exercise I did that day. IT WORKS; so if you don’t want to uncover your lost creative dreams, look away now.
Imagine you are a filmmaker, and you have been asked to make a film and given a generous budget, with no strings attached, by an independent film production company. Their only stipulation is that you make work that really matters to you. What film do you make?
Don’t think about it too much, just make notes. If you find yourself thinking about more than one project, make notes on all of them. If you know who you want to cast, note that down, too, together with why you want those particular actors (& don’t worry, “because he/she is hot” is a perfectly adequate answer to that question!). If you know why this or that project matters to you, write that down too. When you’ve made all the notes you can, then and only then do you start to look at them dispassionately and try to analyse what you’ve come up with. What have you written, and why? Why is this the film you want to make? – why is this what really matters to you?
It’s weird; it disarms all those inner restraints that kick in going “you can’t, it won’t happen, that’s just a silly daydream” and so forth. After all, it’s just a game, isn’t it? – you know you aren’t going to make a film. It’s like saying “What would you do if you had eighty million pounds?” Because the exercise is fantasy it frees you to think about things that otherwise you might have buried under a thick layer of muffling insulation. Mind you, if you want to make films in the first place it may work slightly differently…
In my case, I didn’t hesitate for even a second; I instantly began listing stories I wanted to tell. They varied enormously in subject matter. The one obvious connecting factor was that these stories mattered to me; not their content or their meaning or their message, or any idea of their supposed literary merit, just them as stories. All of them were stories I’d “always meant to get around to writing”. I sat and looked at my three pages of notes and thought “So why aren’t I writing them, then?” And the next day, I began to write “Gabriel Yeats”.
Very sincere and heartfelt thanks, then, to Julia Cameron, for that one. For more of the same, see “The Artist’s Way”.
http://www.theartistsway.com/
It's worth the look...
Got some more writing done last night. There’s nothing quite like getting on with it to kick-start the solving of what have earlier appeared really knotty problems. After being beaten at University Challenge (admittedly by Corpus Christi, who I think are going to win overall, with something like 350 to my puny 235) I needed some light relief. Writing and playing “Renaissance of the Celtic Harp” repeatedly did the job perfectly. I think I’ve got to the end of chapter two. Whoo-hoo!
I’m very happy to be finding as I write that the whole thing is taking shape in ways I hadn’t envisaged. This is a story I conceived years ago, as a fairly straightforward space-opera, when I was a “Star Trek”~ and “Star Wars”-mad teenager. It had sat quiet in the back of my mind ever since, much as “Gabriel Yeats” did, simply because I liked the principal characters and felt they interacted well. Frankly, I thought the story was the weakest part, but now I’m actually having a go at it I’m pleasantly surprised to find that there is more to it than I’d originally thought. That sounds terribly self-aggrandising – embarrassingly so. At bottom this is still a western set in outer space, a pretty standardised genre which I make no pretension of revitalising. Far better writers than I will ever be already have that task in hand, anyway…
I’m just happy that when I lifted this particular pot from back-burner to main-burner, it turned out to have a bit more thematic substance than I’d expected. Why is the “alien” alien? – and why do we develop, and hold to, the loyalties we do, and let others go?
There’s a large back-burner in my mind where this story was sitting, and others still sit today; the oldest dates from my teens, the most recent from last autumn. They need to sit on a very low hob and brew for a while, like decoctions.
Back in the late summer of 2005, when I was trying to get my new life in London and my new job at Kew back on track after the chaos and unhappiness of my father’s death, I began working through some of the exercises in a self-help book called “The Artist’s Way” that I had bought shortly before he was diagnosed, and had never had time to start reading. The author, Julia Cameron, has written a lot of this sort of thing; I’ve read several of her books. At times she’s a little too breezily Californian for my tastes, and I feel myself getting all British and stiffened in the upper lip in response; and at times her huge self-confidence astounds (and slightly repels) me. But she’s very good on tips and tricks and ways to keep your creative juices flowing. I remember a cold, damp autumnal day when I was on duty at Lion Gate all day (boringboringboring) when I was reading this book and decided to do one of the exercises; it was like opening the back door and suddenly seeing that far from living in an inner city I had the South Downs out there. That was the exercise that got me writing again, after what was by then ten years of solid, dedicated focus on my visual art work. I had forgotten I’d ever had any other creative dreams; in fact in reading the book I was hoping to kick-start myself into some painting after a fallow period.
This was the exercise I did that day. IT WORKS; so if you don’t want to uncover your lost creative dreams, look away now.
Imagine you are a filmmaker, and you have been asked to make a film and given a generous budget, with no strings attached, by an independent film production company. Their only stipulation is that you make work that really matters to you. What film do you make?
Don’t think about it too much, just make notes. If you find yourself thinking about more than one project, make notes on all of them. If you know who you want to cast, note that down, too, together with why you want those particular actors (& don’t worry, “because he/she is hot” is a perfectly adequate answer to that question!). If you know why this or that project matters to you, write that down too. When you’ve made all the notes you can, then and only then do you start to look at them dispassionately and try to analyse what you’ve come up with. What have you written, and why? Why is this the film you want to make? – why is this what really matters to you?
It’s weird; it disarms all those inner restraints that kick in going “you can’t, it won’t happen, that’s just a silly daydream” and so forth. After all, it’s just a game, isn’t it? – you know you aren’t going to make a film. It’s like saying “What would you do if you had eighty million pounds?” Because the exercise is fantasy it frees you to think about things that otherwise you might have buried under a thick layer of muffling insulation. Mind you, if you want to make films in the first place it may work slightly differently…
In my case, I didn’t hesitate for even a second; I instantly began listing stories I wanted to tell. They varied enormously in subject matter. The one obvious connecting factor was that these stories mattered to me; not their content or their meaning or their message, or any idea of their supposed literary merit, just them as stories. All of them were stories I’d “always meant to get around to writing”. I sat and looked at my three pages of notes and thought “So why aren’t I writing them, then?” And the next day, I began to write “Gabriel Yeats”.
Very sincere and heartfelt thanks, then, to Julia Cameron, for that one. For more of the same, see “The Artist’s Way”.
http://www.theartistsway.com/
It's worth the look...
Friday, 23 January 2009
End of the week already...
It's Friday again. Good grief.
Last night I did no writing. I ate pizza. I drank rum and apple juice. I watched tv. In short, instead of feeding my soul and unleashing my creativity I took time out to do s*d all. Is this the same as procrastination? I don't think so - but then, I wouldn't, would I?. Seriously, there is, I am sure, a big difference between taking a break and never doing anything in the first place. One has to let the cistern refill, if you'll pardon the metaphor (note to self: must see if I can think of a more poetic phrase than that).
It's a sticky issue - on the one hand, one must make that total, Calaf-like comittment, but on the other hand one must stay alive, and although "man does not live by bread alone", man does not live by paint alone, either; nor by words, nor by sitting in the lab staring into the electron microscope until one's eyes bug out... (Please don't shriek at me for putting "man"; I'm just continuing the phraseology of the quotation for tidyness' sake. I have noticed I'm not a man [even if some men haven't!]).
There's a wonderful line in one of Ursula Le Guin's essays; I don't think I can remember the exact wording, but it is something like this.
"Apollo, god of the sun, of light, reason, music and the arts, blinds those who press too close in worship. Don't stare at the sun. Go into a dark bar with Dionysos occasionally."
The ancient Greeks understood this; they wouldn't have had a god of reason, light, music and the arts and a god of excess, of letting your hair down, festive release and drink, and the theatre, if they hadn't seen that these are not opposed but complementary forces. One cannot have order without chaos, or light without darkness. Or work without rest. Complexity is all; only connect.
On a totally different note, here's a funny news item;
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/18/20090123/ten-italian-job-cliffhanger-conundrum-so-a56114e.html
Have a good weekend.
Last night I did no writing. I ate pizza. I drank rum and apple juice. I watched tv. In short, instead of feeding my soul and unleashing my creativity I took time out to do s*d all. Is this the same as procrastination? I don't think so - but then, I wouldn't, would I?. Seriously, there is, I am sure, a big difference between taking a break and never doing anything in the first place. One has to let the cistern refill, if you'll pardon the metaphor (note to self: must see if I can think of a more poetic phrase than that).
It's a sticky issue - on the one hand, one must make that total, Calaf-like comittment, but on the other hand one must stay alive, and although "man does not live by bread alone", man does not live by paint alone, either; nor by words, nor by sitting in the lab staring into the electron microscope until one's eyes bug out... (Please don't shriek at me for putting "man"; I'm just continuing the phraseology of the quotation for tidyness' sake. I have noticed I'm not a man [even if some men haven't!]).
There's a wonderful line in one of Ursula Le Guin's essays; I don't think I can remember the exact wording, but it is something like this.
"Apollo, god of the sun, of light, reason, music and the arts, blinds those who press too close in worship. Don't stare at the sun. Go into a dark bar with Dionysos occasionally."
The ancient Greeks understood this; they wouldn't have had a god of reason, light, music and the arts and a god of excess, of letting your hair down, festive release and drink, and the theatre, if they hadn't seen that these are not opposed but complementary forces. One cannot have order without chaos, or light without darkness. Or work without rest. Complexity is all; only connect.
On a totally different note, here's a funny news item;
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/18/20090123/ten-italian-job-cliffhanger-conundrum-so-a56114e.html
Have a good weekend.
Thursday, 22 January 2009
Thursday lunchtime
At the risk of sounding like a monomaniac (as if!), I want to report that last night was interesting.
Firstly, on the music-while-you-work strand, I tried “Pelléas et Mélisande”; hopeless. It’s one of my favourite operas, with its limpid, pellucid colours and heartbreaking story, and always moves me deeply, even in the deeply weird and visually stifling production at the ROH a while back. But as music to work to it was useless. I could type, or I could listen, but there was no combining the two, and no drawing inspiration from the one to feed the other. “Pelléas” simply had to take my world over. So I turned it off, and played “The Cunning Little Vixen” instead. I cry buckets at “The Cunning Little Vixen”, at the theatre. Sitting in my own little room, I could relegate it to background music without a flicker, and wrote happily for the duration.
Which would seem to support the “language” theory; I can put to the background what I cannot understand verbally. But I still think there’s more to it than that. The fact that I can’t sublimate “Zauberflöte” is one clue. Another is the fact that I wasn’t really not listening to the Janacek (sorry about the erratic appearance of diacritical marks; I’m having trouble finding the ones I need here). It was feeding me. I wrote on the swell and depth of the music; not simply cut off from background noise by something more pleasant, but uplifted and inspired by it. “Pelléas”, although hardly insistent musically, insisted upon dominance; what happened between me and the “Vixen” was more of a fusing of equal spirits (hah! - and you don’t get to write that every day!!).
On the which distinctly kinky-sounding stuff, I’ll go on to “secondly”!
Secondly, the playing-out-the-scene-before-you-write-it thing worked really well. Really well.
I’d always had the idea that this particular scene would follow a fairly talk-y line. The fact that two of the protagonists are speaking mutually-incomprehensible languages was a snagging point, and I had decided that “playing it out” with that element omitted (so that I would not have to keep stepping out of my role-play to remind myself of my invented alien grammar!) would help me to get it straight. It did; I realised it wasn’t working. The problem was partly too much talk, partly, I suddenly felt, that one of my characters simply wouldn’t behave this way.
I sat down, re-wrote the whole thing, and am happy.
I’ve read other writers, discussing their own work, talking about the way that the characters take on a life of their own and “don’t want to do” what they, the author, have planned for them. It sounds deeply suspect, until one has the same experience oneself. It really is a most peculiar feeling. In this case, it has almost opened out a whole new aspect of the character; how she responds in stressful situations, and how that links into her background culture and her system of loyalties, her general way of dealing with things… I had never thought about this before; I should have done, but I hadn't; and now I have. I'm sure the best thing would be to be an accomplished enough writer to think of all these things straight away, when first conceiving a story. But as it is, the fact that I have thought of this at this stage cheers me enormously. It means my heroine is coming alive, as it were, on schedule.
Maybe, on second thoughts, it would not be good to have everything totally sorted-out ahead of time. Would these people come alive at all, if they were that thoroughly controlled?
So anyway - I am feeling pretty pleased with life just at the moment.
Firstly, on the music-while-you-work strand, I tried “Pelléas et Mélisande”; hopeless. It’s one of my favourite operas, with its limpid, pellucid colours and heartbreaking story, and always moves me deeply, even in the deeply weird and visually stifling production at the ROH a while back. But as music to work to it was useless. I could type, or I could listen, but there was no combining the two, and no drawing inspiration from the one to feed the other. “Pelléas” simply had to take my world over. So I turned it off, and played “The Cunning Little Vixen” instead. I cry buckets at “The Cunning Little Vixen”, at the theatre. Sitting in my own little room, I could relegate it to background music without a flicker, and wrote happily for the duration.
Which would seem to support the “language” theory; I can put to the background what I cannot understand verbally. But I still think there’s more to it than that. The fact that I can’t sublimate “Zauberflöte” is one clue. Another is the fact that I wasn’t really not listening to the Janacek (sorry about the erratic appearance of diacritical marks; I’m having trouble finding the ones I need here). It was feeding me. I wrote on the swell and depth of the music; not simply cut off from background noise by something more pleasant, but uplifted and inspired by it. “Pelléas”, although hardly insistent musically, insisted upon dominance; what happened between me and the “Vixen” was more of a fusing of equal spirits (hah! - and you don’t get to write that every day!!).
On the which distinctly kinky-sounding stuff, I’ll go on to “secondly”!
Secondly, the playing-out-the-scene-before-you-write-it thing worked really well. Really well.
I’d always had the idea that this particular scene would follow a fairly talk-y line. The fact that two of the protagonists are speaking mutually-incomprehensible languages was a snagging point, and I had decided that “playing it out” with that element omitted (so that I would not have to keep stepping out of my role-play to remind myself of my invented alien grammar!) would help me to get it straight. It did; I realised it wasn’t working. The problem was partly too much talk, partly, I suddenly felt, that one of my characters simply wouldn’t behave this way.
I sat down, re-wrote the whole thing, and am happy.
I’ve read other writers, discussing their own work, talking about the way that the characters take on a life of their own and “don’t want to do” what they, the author, have planned for them. It sounds deeply suspect, until one has the same experience oneself. It really is a most peculiar feeling. In this case, it has almost opened out a whole new aspect of the character; how she responds in stressful situations, and how that links into her background culture and her system of loyalties, her general way of dealing with things… I had never thought about this before; I should have done, but I hadn't; and now I have. I'm sure the best thing would be to be an accomplished enough writer to think of all these things straight away, when first conceiving a story. But as it is, the fact that I have thought of this at this stage cheers me enormously. It means my heroine is coming alive, as it were, on schedule.
Maybe, on second thoughts, it would not be good to have everything totally sorted-out ahead of time. Would these people come alive at all, if they were that thoroughly controlled?
So anyway - I am feeling pretty pleased with life just at the moment.
Wednesday, 21 January 2009
Wednesday lunchtime...
The laptop worked again, come last night. I hope it doesn't do this to me frequently, though, as it is pretty wearing on the nerves. However, I got my transcription done, and went on from there. I did make myself eat first, too, always a wise move for me, as I tend to get very absorbed in my work. Last night was no exception to this; it was at well after midnight when I realised that it was no longer early evening and I would have to go to bed at some point.
I have left my protagonist about to be stabbed in the throat, which spurs the imagination onwards... Obviously as this is in a flashback the reader (well, putative reader, for now) will already know that he survives unharmed, but it is still exciting to work on how to write it. This is the moment two of the principal characters first meet, so it needs to be right. The meetings in "Gabriel Yeats" all wrote very smoothly (the love scene was probably the toughest thing to write, followed by the last few paragraphs of the penultimate chapter). So I am hopeful that this one too will come off just so.
I can see it all in my mind's eye already. Tonight when I get in I'll make some tea and then go all through it as if I were improvising it for camera. I've found this very effective as a technique for making sure dialogue actually sounds, and actions actually feel, like the characters in question and not like me fumbling at playing them. That sounds contradictory, but it seems to work, for me. I enacted the whole of the scene on board HMS Merganser when Simon is preparing Felix' body for burial, and cried until I was almost sick; and that was how I knew that particular scene had gelled.
Slept appallingly. I don't know if this was the fault of my supper; I had made risotto, and then found when I was serving myself that my parmigiano had sprouted a nice blue-green colony of penicilium or some such. Cobblers, cobblers, cries Dent. I was forced to put grated Leicester cheese on it, which was not unpleasant, in a rather unctuous and melty way; but way too mild, not the dark, tangy kiss of proper parmesan.
Last night was the Eve of Saint Agnes, when supposedly one can, if one is a single woman, put herbs (Italian mixed, in my case) in one's shoes and ask for a dream of one's future husband/partner/One True Love (and then get one, obviously). I dreamed of someone I happen to know is happily married, and famously uxorious to boot; and then of buying lettuces in a rather nice street market. So, unless the lettuces were symbolic, I can't help feeling St. Agnes let me down rather. Maybe it was the Italian mixed herbs.
At least I can get on with my writing again tonight.
I have left my protagonist about to be stabbed in the throat, which spurs the imagination onwards... Obviously as this is in a flashback the reader (well, putative reader, for now) will already know that he survives unharmed, but it is still exciting to work on how to write it. This is the moment two of the principal characters first meet, so it needs to be right. The meetings in "Gabriel Yeats" all wrote very smoothly (the love scene was probably the toughest thing to write, followed by the last few paragraphs of the penultimate chapter). So I am hopeful that this one too will come off just so.
I can see it all in my mind's eye already. Tonight when I get in I'll make some tea and then go all through it as if I were improvising it for camera. I've found this very effective as a technique for making sure dialogue actually sounds, and actions actually feel, like the characters in question and not like me fumbling at playing them. That sounds contradictory, but it seems to work, for me. I enacted the whole of the scene on board HMS Merganser when Simon is preparing Felix' body for burial, and cried until I was almost sick; and that was how I knew that particular scene had gelled.
Slept appallingly. I don't know if this was the fault of my supper; I had made risotto, and then found when I was serving myself that my parmigiano had sprouted a nice blue-green colony of penicilium or some such. Cobblers, cobblers, cries Dent. I was forced to put grated Leicester cheese on it, which was not unpleasant, in a rather unctuous and melty way; but way too mild, not the dark, tangy kiss of proper parmesan.
Last night was the Eve of Saint Agnes, when supposedly one can, if one is a single woman, put herbs (Italian mixed, in my case) in one's shoes and ask for a dream of one's future husband/partner/One True Love (and then get one, obviously). I dreamed of someone I happen to know is happily married, and famously uxorious to boot; and then of buying lettuces in a rather nice street market. So, unless the lettuces were symbolic, I can't help feeling St. Agnes let me down rather. Maybe it was the Italian mixed herbs.
At least I can get on with my writing again tonight.
Tuesday, 20 January 2009
A mixed evening...
Very frustrating - my ancient laptop is packing up. It's practically a museum piece, it must be over ten years old and it was second-hand when it came to me, and the letter "v" sticks (turning "live" into "lie" and "beloved" into "beloed"), but I am fond of it. And it wouldn't turn on yesterday. I was so fired-up with wanting to write that I set-to with some scrap paper and got some work done; but pen-and-paper is slow compared to typing, even typing as bad as mine. I put on "Rosenkavalier", though, and I put my head down and stuck at it.
I often work - writing, painting, drawing, the lot - with music, and I have found that certain kinds of music uplift and inspire me; light, pleasant stuff that doesn't have any real guts is fine, as are folk music and world music (Alan Stivell, Tina Malia, kora music, for example), and truly great music is fine so long as it is instrumental (Bach's solo violin works are fanastic to write or paint-to) and isn't heartbreaking (I don't think I could paint to Mahler 3, for instance, as I'd be crying too much). Singing is fine too so long as it is NOT sung in a language that I understand, as I then listen too much to concentrate on what I'm doing.
This is a pity, as it rules out a great deal of opera, which is probably my all-time favourite music. If I listen to "Billy Budd", for instance, I am completely gripped from the beginning, and would be incapable of applying brush to canvas except to leave a trail of random daubs, until the very last bar. (Okay, so I have the Hickox/LSO recording, with Simon Keenlyside and Philip Langridge, which is pretty rivetting stuff). And, although I don't speak Italian, I do speak Spanish, and I've listened to enough Italian opera to have picked up a lot of vocab from it; I find myself hanging on every word of that, again, despite the idiocy of many libretti (I'm sorry, but "Mille serpenti mi devoran il petto", anyone? Really, how silly is that?! Have YOU ever said that, even when seriously pissed-off?!). Ah well; musically they are the cream of the bunch, those big nineteenth century Italian operas, and I feel rude not giving my full attention to really great work. Yet I can semi-sublimate "Rosenkavalier", a truly magnificent opera on the stage, and any amount of lieder, even with my favourite lieder singer in action. The only clue I can find in this confusion is that I speak barely twenty words of German (& those are mostly things to eat and drink). Yet I can't blot out "Die Zauberflöte"... so that puts paid to that theory.
Anyway, I did get some writing done last night, as I'd hoped - but not as much as I'd hoped. And IF I can get the laptop to behave again tonight, I shall have to transcribe it all, which is a bit boring when one wants to rush ahead with exploring the story, and the method of telling.
I knew when I first conceived this particular story that from the reader's POV it would have to begin at a particular point, and therefore at least one part of the narrative would have to be explained in a flash-back of some kind. Easy to think of in theory! - not so easy to write. Part of what got me started was suddenly "seeing" how I could write it; one of the principal characters is imprisoned, awaiting trial, probably going to be sentenced to death, and is visited by someone who can penetrate his mind. Cue flashback; the events that led him there are connected to the events he recalls, and I am having a lot of fun trying to convey the confused and eddying state of his thoughts. If I can, I'll work "E lucevan le stelle" in, for a joke; after all, given the character's situation it's pretty appropriate. "Gabriel Yeats" is full of references to music; mostly "Die Zauberflöte" and the Brahms violin sonatas that I have Simon Cenarth playing at a couple of salient moments. We'll see, we'll see...
I often work - writing, painting, drawing, the lot - with music, and I have found that certain kinds of music uplift and inspire me; light, pleasant stuff that doesn't have any real guts is fine, as are folk music and world music (Alan Stivell, Tina Malia, kora music, for example), and truly great music is fine so long as it is instrumental (Bach's solo violin works are fanastic to write or paint-to) and isn't heartbreaking (I don't think I could paint to Mahler 3, for instance, as I'd be crying too much). Singing is fine too so long as it is NOT sung in a language that I understand, as I then listen too much to concentrate on what I'm doing.
This is a pity, as it rules out a great deal of opera, which is probably my all-time favourite music. If I listen to "Billy Budd", for instance, I am completely gripped from the beginning, and would be incapable of applying brush to canvas except to leave a trail of random daubs, until the very last bar. (Okay, so I have the Hickox/LSO recording, with Simon Keenlyside and Philip Langridge, which is pretty rivetting stuff). And, although I don't speak Italian, I do speak Spanish, and I've listened to enough Italian opera to have picked up a lot of vocab from it; I find myself hanging on every word of that, again, despite the idiocy of many libretti (I'm sorry, but "Mille serpenti mi devoran il petto", anyone? Really, how silly is that?! Have YOU ever said that, even when seriously pissed-off?!). Ah well; musically they are the cream of the bunch, those big nineteenth century Italian operas, and I feel rude not giving my full attention to really great work. Yet I can semi-sublimate "Rosenkavalier", a truly magnificent opera on the stage, and any amount of lieder, even with my favourite lieder singer in action. The only clue I can find in this confusion is that I speak barely twenty words of German (& those are mostly things to eat and drink). Yet I can't blot out "Die Zauberflöte"... so that puts paid to that theory.
Anyway, I did get some writing done last night, as I'd hoped - but not as much as I'd hoped. And IF I can get the laptop to behave again tonight, I shall have to transcribe it all, which is a bit boring when one wants to rush ahead with exploring the story, and the method of telling.
I knew when I first conceived this particular story that from the reader's POV it would have to begin at a particular point, and therefore at least one part of the narrative would have to be explained in a flash-back of some kind. Easy to think of in theory! - not so easy to write. Part of what got me started was suddenly "seeing" how I could write it; one of the principal characters is imprisoned, awaiting trial, probably going to be sentenced to death, and is visited by someone who can penetrate his mind. Cue flashback; the events that led him there are connected to the events he recalls, and I am having a lot of fun trying to convey the confused and eddying state of his thoughts. If I can, I'll work "E lucevan le stelle" in, for a joke; after all, given the character's situation it's pretty appropriate. "Gabriel Yeats" is full of references to music; mostly "Die Zauberflöte" and the Brahms violin sonatas that I have Simon Cenarth playing at a couple of salient moments. We'll see, we'll see...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)