Wednesday, June 15, 2011

From the weird to the strange















































Strangeness leads to strangeness. I don't remember what inspired me to start painting, but it was at a time when I felt like I had nothing to lose: I badly needed some form of expression, a new one I hadn't tried before, and it didn't really matter whether I was any good at it or not.

At first I used plain paper gobbed up with poster paint, which soon became as wrinkled as a child's glitter-glue project, so switched to a sort of heavy stuff like construction paper. It turned depressingly brown after a few years. I fairly quickly stopped painting, realizing my brilliant works of art really weren't so hot. Mostly brush-stroke experiments, color patterns, nothing representational.

I just found scans of a few of them, and with my diabolical need to change things, I reversed the colors on a primitive program called, appropriately, Paint. Now they look eerily three-dimensional (I think) and say things (I think) they didn't say before (or did they?)

I recently tried painting again, this time with proper acrylics, brushes, etc., and got nowhere. It seems I have very little visual sense. My neurons are tangled around music, like Al Jolson's heartstrings around A-la-bammy.

So this is an experiment, a very weird one, which may be one-of-a-kind.









































How far can I go?

When you keep a blog like this one, you have to ask yourself from time to time how much of yourself you're going to reveal.

I sometimes think that if I uncovered the real truth about this writer's journey, I might scare prospective writers away. For much of it has been painful beyond expression. And I do seem to carry it alone.

There are writer's groups, but the ones I've sampled are social gatherings and/or arenas of competition. Writers are by nature a solitary lot. Can the process really be shared, or even described? Do I even understand it myself?






























I seem to have spent the past twenty-five years or so (or maybe it's more - I don't want to count) bashing my head against brick walls, while everyone tells me to just write for my own enjoyment. I doubt if they'd say that to a professional musician or a dancer or a brain surgeon, but they say it to me all the time.

Or just put out an ebook. But I want to win the Giller Prize! I really do.

That could be a factor, oh yes, my ambition, and my absolute fatal faith in my own work. Faith? Wait a minute, that must be wrong! But contrary to what people seem to think (people who, on encountering my discouragement, pat my hand and say, "There, there, Margaret, your writing really isn't that bad"), I believe fiercely in what I do. I think I am a damn good writer who has barely had a chance to prove herself.

So there.

I have more than paid my dues. People tell me it's tough all over. Yes. And this stuff just hits me directly in the self-esteem like a hard, unexpected punch to the solar plexus. The pain never really seems to end. Yet if you don't keep up a happy, jolly, optimistic face all the time, well then, hey, you might scare away a prospective publisher! So you have to assume a jolly, chirpy, superficial Facebook-like attitude. Or just stay off this topic altogether.

I know there are other areas of my life that cause me pain. This is called "the human condition" and I know I can't escape it. I tend to heap it all on one area, maybe because that gives me some form of guttering hope that some day it'll all be solved. All I need is success!

Well? If lack of success causes depression, and then you DO attain success. . .doesn't it follow? Or am I being simplistic again?































It causes me inordinate stress when people try to talk me out of my ambition. They're trying to make me feel better. But I don't want to feel better.

I want to feel different.

At the same time, I want somebody to "get it", a chronically frustrated need which I believe is behind a lot of this ennui. Yes, there is such a thing as existential pain, and I have drunk deep of it. I have come to believe that avoiding it costs too dearly. But most people seem to skate rapidly on top of it for a lifetime, or else make hay out of it, becoming vastly entertaining and provoking belly-laughs at how damn crazy this old life can be.

What it comes down to is this: we are the Facebook nation, offering shiny little tidbits of ourselves in a very public forum. We tweet and twitter and text and phone and dit and dot. Loneliness is said to be epidemic, but I don't see any. It only shows up on reality programs where people spill their agony, which apparently the rest of us find vastly entertaining.

These entertainers (for that is what they are) absorb all our toxins and vomit them up, so we can go on our merry way behind our plexiglass masks. Jesus, look at the hoarders and bipolars and fat people and drunks and fools. Thank God it has nothing to do with us.



This started out to be about my endless frustration in my chosen field (or maybe it chose me), and ended up here. Pretty bleak. So I guess I don't fit the slot I'm expected to fill.

If you feel "bad", that's "wrong". So you must strive and strive, and go out and party, and use cognitive techniques, until you feel "good" again. "Good" is "good". Anything else is unthinkable.


Tuesday, June 14, 2011

I'm sorry



These deserved their own post. Why am I so obsessed (today) with women's footwear? OK, what's the symbolism of women not being able to walk, only hobble? Of women sacrificing their health to a certain set standard (determined by men) of sexuality and "beauty"? I guess big hairy feet like mine will never be sexy. But at least I don't buy my shoes at Home Hardware (or fall off my heels).



 


Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book
    It took me years to write, will you take a look



Monday, June 13, 2011

Lenny Welch - Since I Fell For You



A brilliant, almost operatic performance of a truly great song. He owns this 100%.

Some day, my Prince will come























The things human beings do to themselves, and to each other.

I've always had a morbid curiosity about the ancient Chinese custom of footbinding: the practice of breaking all the bones of a little girl's feet, tightly bandaging them, and allowing the tissue to harden into a tiny slender hoof with very little circulation. With her crushed feet crammed into exquisitely-embroidered slippers, the little girl would be considered ravishing and, more importantly, marriageable. Feet longer than three inches (the ideal "golden lotus", comparing the foot to an inanimate object) were seen as uncouth. So mothers inflicted this horror on their daughters, just as it had been inflicted on them. Incredibly, this went on for a thousand years.



But what about this? What we now supposedly see as primitive, barbaric, and a form of systematic torture is still practiced today. I would not be surprised if women wearing these extreme heels (which, if they were even a tiny bit higher, would cause them to fall over backwards: perhaps even more erotically desirable than crunching around on the ends of your big toes) end up with serious or irreparable damage to their feet, even broken bones. Do podiatrists have to deal with these cases, or do women, secretly ashamed of the dark and fetish-y nature of their footwear, suffer in silence?

Just like those little girls who had to keep silence about the agony they lived with every day?




I could not find one picture of a Chinese girl or woman with bound feet who was smiling. Most bore a blank, stoic expression. There was nothing they could do. Their days were spent cutting dead flesh off their feet, removing gangrenous toes, and trying to kill the odor of decay that followed them around like a heavy fog.


Men found this scent arousing, and played around with the feet, inserting them into their rectums and such. I found a reference to this practice in a novel written by someone steeped in Chinese culture, so I can only surmise it's true.







While researching this ghastly topic in my usual obsessive way (hey, it's Monday, I'm trying to ditch a migraine, and the rain out there has no mercy), I discovered a tie-in to a familiar fairy tale, very much alive in the character of a wildly-popular Disney princess. This is something we feed our girl-children every day.

Fairy tales arise from a rich stew of culture going back countless centuries. All of them are somehow joined together, with eerie similarities across widely different parts of the world. Thus, stories from Asia often overlap with fairy tales from Eastern Europe or the United Kingdom.

We all know about Cinderella and the glass slipper. "Glass" may have been a misnomer, the result of a bad translation between a complex muddle of languages.

The common point in all these folk tales is the Prince's search for the maiden with a foot delicate enough to wear an impossibly tiny slipper.

A bound foot?

































Of course Cinderella didn't have bound feet. Just teeny, tiny little feet. It's not the same thing at all. But consider this.

Cinderella was royalty forced to live as a household drudge, with exquisitely tiny feet that gave away her hidden status. A peasant girl didn't have feet like that. Oh, no. In fact, no girl did, unless her mother at some point grabbed her foot and forcefully cracked it in half, tying the ravaged halves together so the arch would buckle and the toes rot. All in the name of the "three-inch golden lotus": Cinderella's fabled glass slipper brought to life.

All this exists in the mists of antiquity. Women still cram their feet into bizarre, deforming footwear, but it's just because they want to. Or maybe because their boyfriends want them to.




Lots of men have foot fetishes. I've never understood why anyone would lust after stinky, sweaty toes with thick ugly yellowish nails on them (unless you get a pedicure every week). Something you walk on. So to speak.

I'm not drawing any comparisons. Teeny, teetering shoes with very high heels don't make a woman look desirable. Brown oxfords are just as effective.

Just ask any man.


























(A post-script. As if this weren't gruesome enough, I found some photos of women whose feet had been permanently deformed by wearing "ordinary" high-heeled shoes. Not for the weak of stomach.)















Guess the celebrity feet! You're right. It's Kim Cattrall!


I'm afraid it's real



Now we know what insects looked like during the Cretaceous Period. Would make a good meal (of me, I mean).