Tuesday, September 17, 2013

A sexually-transmitted, terminal condition







A few weeks ago I announced, giddily, like a bride-to-be announcing her engagement, the acceptance of my third novel The Glass Character by Thistledown Press. The elation lasted maybe five seconds. Like the song says, “I’ve seen that road before”.

Those who haven’t done it don’t realize. Writing the book is about 15%. There was great joy in writing this one because it’s centred around a subject I came to love – Harold Lloyd, one of the master comedians of the silent screen - but that’s just the trouble. Being too close to a subject can get in the way. 

I haven’t done a really close reading of this thing for some time. When I re-entered it for the sake of editing, which will be a long and winding process, I honestly wondered who wrote it. That person does not exist any more, but if that weren’t true I might be worried.  I know am not the person I was in 2008.

This isn’t good news or bad news, but it’s news nonetheless. In five years I’ve moved house psychologically, and in doing so I have had to leave many things behind. The shell is outgrown and constricting; the lobster must shed it and grow a new one or be crushed to death, not by outer forces but internal ones. 






One of my favourite quotes is the Bob Dylan philosophy-in-a-nutshell: “He not busy being born is busy dying”. I have known people who, for whatever reason, have chosen not to push back on the forces that try to flatten them, the forces that bear down on all of us whether we know it or not. They surrender, but not in the sense of letting that mysterious grace we can never understand work its magic.

The result is either stagnation or martyrdom or sour carping or just giving up. Their world gets smaller and smaller, and dealing with them is exhausting. A kind of blindness sets in, and a “them, them, them” mentality which abdicates responsibility for anything. I’d rather walk through the minefield, myself, though more than once I’ve come close to being blown up.

Anyway, enough about all that, I’ve re-entered Haroldland, and this time it is very different. I see things I want to fix or change on every page. And I have not yet really looked at my editor’s notes, which I know will be another round, or rounds. Will it come out perfect? It can't.  I hope it will glow more, have fewer contradictions or inconsistencies and a surer voice.  And I hope readers will be willing to come along with me.






The road isn’t just long and winding. There are switchbacks that make you think, “Why must I go through this again?” New Agers might say “life presents us with the same lesson over and over again until we learn it. Then we can move on.” Like a lot of ready-made, freeze-dried philosophies which have never been tested, this one is somewhat lacking.

Life is a sexually-transmitted, terminal condition with certain inescapable rules. Or truths. The culture has it all wrong, as far as I am concerned. It demands “triumph”, “victory”, a once-and-for-all conquest of all adversity, especially things like illness (and, God help us, mental illness, which is still seen as an embarrassment, a moral failing and a horror). If you don’t conquer whatever-it-is, if it doesn’t stay conquered, then there must be something wrong with you.

Few things are conquered, because life is ambiguous, complex, a chronic condition. It’s just something you have to live with (like the pompous assholes who always insist, “Oh, I’VE never had that problem. I’m just so sorry for you that you don’t have the strength to deal with it.”) If life-threatening challenges do return, everyone looks away, embarrassed for you, convinced you just don’t have your shit together or this never would have happened.






Aside from family, the fountainhead of my life, writing has been the consistent theme, and while some of my early efforts make me wince to think about, I am still glad I did them, glad I put it out there. The alternative is to let your dream die, and dead things begin to decompose after a while, to blight the soul, to stink.  To put it out there is still sometimes harrowing, but necessary, and because this life is made up of switchbacks and great hills that prevent us from seeing past the horizon, we can’t determine the results. Achieving goals doesn’t make people happy in a lot of cases; they either want more, whatever that is, or become convinced the world owes them a kind of adulation.

I have always been convinced The Long and Winding Road is a spiritual. I love this original version, which sounds pared-down compared to the sudsy Phil Spector wall-of-sound version that appeared on the Let It Be album. Paul sounds best on his intimate acoustic songs like Blackbird and Mother Nature’s Son. (The exception is the hair-raising Helter Skelter, the song that inspired Charles Manson’s act of carnage: strange that the Beatles’ most violent, harrowing song was written and performed by choir-boy-faced Paul.)






Many times I’ve been alone, and many times I’ve cried. Anyway, you’ll never know the many ways I’ve tried. Those annoying little Facebook homily-cards or whatever they’re called always say things like, “It doesn’t matter how many mistakes you make, so long as you keep getting up and trying again.” And so on. The only problem is, we live in a culture that DOES keep track of mistakes and often punishes people far beyond the extent of their missteps. We’re told to make lots and lots of mistakes, because that’s the only way we’ll learn.  But t
here's only one problem. Our careers or marriages or friendships or families can be brought down by only one serious, central mistake. 

I’ve written about this before because with few exceptions, nobody ever says it. It isn't popular and is seen as "negative" and somehow party-pooping. “Make lots and lots of mistakes” means – what? Take somebody’s pencil? How about having an affair with your boss, being caught taking office equipment, slapping your kid (just once, ever!), saying something really embarrassing while tipsy at a party, forgetting your seatbelt, forgetting your child's seatbelt,  texting while driving, texting while WALKING, looking at porn "just once" on your computer at work, sexting “just a little” with a co-worker and being caught in the act. . . 


I could go on. 




These are mistakes, are they not? Serious, full-bodied mistakes, but  things that people do every day. Should you welcome and even embrace these “because it’s the only way you learn”? Is losing your job or your marriage or even your child worth it?  
 "Oh, but we don't mean THAT kind of mistake," some might say. Only "honest" ones.  But the most serious mistakes aren't honest.  And even forgetting a deadline or losing a file can mean the end of your career. It can, and it sometimes does. The workplace is no longer a very generous or hospitable place, and it isn't only the security cameras that are watching you.

As usual, this piece is long and pretty winding. So what’s the conclusion?  Should we stay frozen in one place to avoid mistakes? I'm going to squeeze out one more homily here: "One must look, but one must also leap".  It's a two-part process.  Even the original, less-daring version, "Look before you leap," still assumes the leap will take place. And the "look" part means using your brain and not trying to do something that’s just goddamned foolish. 

I still find it hard to put my work out there, and I still do it, or I wouldn’t be sitting her clacking away every morning. Who reads it is, to paraphrase my favourite e. e. cummings quote, “none of my immortal business”. When you have a story to tell, you’d like to think someone will some day hear it. To that end, but also due to sheer fascination with the process, I have to stay on the serpentine path, bloodhound-like, often with only my nose to tell me what’s hidden in the brambles.









http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm


Monday, September 16, 2013

Illicit Encounters: or, blow me down, I'm Irish!









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ReligionAtheistEye ColourBlue
DrinkingNon-DrinkerHair ColourBlonde
SmokingTrying to QuitBuildAthletic
Height6'0'' (183cm) or aboveEducationGraduate/Masters Degree
OccupationIT/Communications
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Name: discombooberator
Age: 34
Star Sign: Sagittarius
Race: Caucasian/White
Location: Belfast, County Antrim
Marital Status: Living Together
Last Active: More than a week
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A Pint of Lager
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Female between the ages of 21 and 32
I haven't yet got round to completing a full profile. I've used IE's Profile Wizard to briefly describe myself and what I'm looking for.

I'm looking for someone who is:

adventurous, classy, erotic, feminine, groomed, hot-blooded, no-strings attached, open-minded, playful, sexy, spontaneous

Type of Relationship Friendship, Casual




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I would describe myself as:
sexy, erotic, hot-blooded, imaginative, sophisticated, altruistic

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If we were to meet this is what you'll see!
I am : blonde, fit, groomed, normal, medium build
Let me know with a message or VK if you're interested - you may persuade me to complete my profile



Since it's Monday morning, I feel it's time for a sociological treatise

I knew these kinds of sites existed. Hell, this is probably the mildest one you'll find on the internet, a sort of hookup site equivalent to dropping into the local pub. But it's the way I found it that it's interesting, to me anyway (though this is the kind of explanation that makes people's eyes glaze over. I'll have to invent a new story that's more entertaining, because somehow reality never measures up, does it? Which is the whole point of this piece.)

I sometimes watch the original Twilight Zone with Rod Serling, and on one of the episodes - a goofy thing with Orson Bean in it - Serling uses the word "discombooberated". I'm not sure  where this non-word originated, but I do remember it from childhood. Perhaps it was in a cartoon - a discombooberator, like the Wayback Machine in Mr. Peabody? - but to me it sounds like a Steve Allen term.





Never mind, it was unexpected and prompted an internet search. It was called a non-word and a slang word and a synonym for discombobulated, which is supposedly a real word. Then I found this British hookup site for married people called Illicit Encounters, featuring someone named discombooberator, an Irishman who had not even bothered to fill in his profile. He used some sort of mechanized profile generator which probably spewed out consistently Aryan blonde/blue-eyed/smart-as-hell/well-employed/non-drinking stats. The only place the profile generator slipped up was in the smoking department, but maybe that was left in to make the whole thing have a semblance of reality.

The fake swaggering was bad enough, but the conclusion - that an interested chick might make him bother to fill out his real information - was hair-raising. This was a play for the truly desperate, like Howard Wolowitz picking up fat chicks at Comicon (until he got married, of course. . . ). I see women going for this guy, I really do. The less we know about him, the better - isn't that true? And he's Irish! There can't be anything bad about him if he's Irish. Even if he lives across that mighty sea, it leaves lots of room for sexting and phone encounters and all those other baffling activities that seem to stand in for real human contact these days.



\


I've often heard it said that if you want a brief and harmless fling, pick a married person - not a person whose marriage is in shreds, because that might lead to an attachment, but someone who has a semblance of a good marriage (though not an "open" one - deception drips off of this thing, which is really the main attraction). Pick someone who's a little bit itchy and wants something on the side with no strings attached and - preferably - some Fifty Shades kinks in it to mitigate the vanilla sex (or non-sex) of the past ten years.

The site doesn't claim to do anything but provide information for these hookups, then leave the rest to the customers. This looks to be true. I would imagine there are code words for various types of sex ("friendship" meaning -what? "Casual" meaning - I can only think.) But I can't help but picture the face-time meetings they set up at the local Starbuck's, with two people searching and searching for each other: where is that guy, anyway? All I can see is some slob picking his nose. . . Don't tell me that bitch stood me up! And who's the fugly one over there, probably hasn't been laid in years. (Picture all these thoughts being thunk with an Irish accent.)  The flimsy masks they hold up for public consumption are suddenly fallen, revealing sad, lonely, not-very-attractive (and perhaps unemployed) people seeking an hour of escape through meaningless sex.







Then they both go home, wondering why their hookup failed to materialize, each of them sending the same message: Didn't see you. Oh, maybe we got the time wrong! No, I got a ticket for exceeding the speed limit on my Harley (lol)!  I broke a fingernail, didn't want you to see me that way. Heart heart heart. So it's time for another round of musical chairs, featuring human bodies instead of furniture.

Does this, um, like, bother them? Well, haven't people done this forever, before the internet even existed? I have another question for you: why does the fact that it has been going on forever justify it? Does this twisted rationalization make such hurtful, pathetic, dishonest behavior acceptable - and why?

Just askin'. With an Irish accent.


http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Sunday, September 15, 2013

Nervous guy on public access



I promise you, this is the last video! I know I've posted this before, but it bears repeating. It could only be real. Amazing how a man can get through a performance knowing only 10% of the words.


Man and Superman






Wizard of Oz 2011: Hanging Munchkin Found on VHS Tape




I just like the concept. The video is, of course, a hoax. But the vastly slowed-down picture and soundtrack is pretty frightening. Supposedly the munchkin committed suicide because he didn't make the Lollipop Guild.


 


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


k.d. lang - Pullin' Back The Reins (Video)



Just had to do some music today, I feel so played-out. As Oscar Wilde once put it (or was it Oscar Levant, or Oscar Mayer?), the two worst things in life are not getting what you want, and getting it.

Or, to quote Roger Sterling of Mad Men, the worst thing is seeing someone else get it.

I love this song because she is just turned inside-out and must be expressing some pretty heavy stuff. I once heard she was abandoned by her father as a child, a confusing heartbreak that inflicts the kind of unhealable wounds that make an artist.

As a young woman she fell in love with an older, straight, married woman, which must have been agony. This was the Athena that leapt fully-formed from the head of Zeus, the birthing of a supernatural being entitled Ingenue.

Yes. The divine wound that, for just one second, causes us to stop bullshitting (at least to other people) that everything is perfect in our lives. But try it. Try being vulnerable and see where it gets you. For every k. d. there are a hundred Marilyns (or Amys or Mindys or Anna Nicoles). Life under glass destroys people, though it's the thing we're all supposed to want.

To be Famous. To do something Really Impressive, while the really (really) impressive people insist it doesn't matter, that it's all art for art's sake, and that money is the least important thing of all.

So what is the most important thing of all?

I could say love, being an ageing hippie, and I know it for a fact, because it's all that's left when the rest of your life drops away under your feet. Being an instrument of love, embodying it, which I do very poorly, except perhaps when I am with my grandchildren who saved me from certain oblivion.

The least important? Posturing? Vanity? Narcissism? Shallowness? Fine, except that it seems to be exploding under the heady influence of social media.

The refrain goes like this: "My lfe's better than your life, my life's better than yours." It's typical for people to get very depressed after going on Facebook, but as with any other addiction, NEXT time is the charm, the next hit or drink or snort or click or "like" or "poke" or whatever-the-fuck, will do it for them, will get rid of this hollow howl once and for all.






Saturday, September 14, 2013

Whatever became of the wildwood flower?




In one of his most compelling songs, Gates of Eden, Bob Dylan wrote: "At dawn my lover comes to me/and/tells me of her dreams/with no attempt to shovel the glimpse/into the ditch of what each one means."

Not at dawn, but when I first get up, I find my mate sitting in his Lazy Boy reading the paper, listening to the radio and drinking coffee. I add one more activity to his multiple roster: listening to my dreams.

Not every morning, but just when I have had an unusually vivid one, one that stays with me for a while. This one is already dissolving like frost into the winter air.






I was about 20 years old. I wasn't "I", but this slender, pale wildwood flower of a girl, as if I were barefoot except I couldn't tell if I was barefoot or not. I was wearing a dress like Pippa Middleton's at Kate and Wills's wedding, very close-fitting white satin. My hair was streaming down my back, long and brown and straight and completely unstyled. (I have never looked even remotely like that in my life.) Anyway, I was in a church and was about to be married. I didn't recognize the church at all, or any of the people, though my mother was supposed to be there and I even had dealings with her but didn't know it, didn't recognize her. I had the feeling she might have been one of the people who tried to fuss with my hair.






At one point I even asked someone if the sides shouldn't be pulled up at the back in a ribbon or a rose, and someone else said, "You mean up? Please don't put it up, it looks so pretty that way," but I worried it would look a little too informal or even make me look uneducated and "backwoods". I only recognized one guest, my former English professor from 1991 who kept bustling around very urgently in a suit and tie, as if he was supposed to be doing something. The minister (a youngish guy with a lot of tousled brown hair, whom I had never seen before) kept getting up and blabbing to the congregation about things that I don't remember now.






At one point a woman ripped open buttons on the neckline of my dress (which went all the way up to my chin), leaving the front sprung wide open, and I thought of the man's collar in that Bugs Bunny cartoon, the tenor, when he couldn't stop singing. Then she said, "Ahhh, that looks better," though I worried it didn't look good at all and would look unkempt and out of control, but I couldn't check it because there were no mirrors in the place at all. All the way through this dream I kept hearing the music on this video, which I recently heard on an old Star Trek, a favorite episode called Shore Leave in which the crew of the Enterprise was on a planet where all your thoughts immediately materialized and became real.






There were all sorts of things, a knight, Don Juan, a tiger, Finnegan (asshole from Kirk's Academy days), but suddenly there appears Kirk's old girlfriend Ruth, dressed like an Athenian goddess and so heavily made up (like all Star Trek babes, probably for the grainy b & w TVs of the time) she could barely keep her eyes open. She looked like his date for the Academy grad party or something. Yes, this music came on and from the beginning I loved it, not for its sweetness but for the almost agonizing dissonance in the strings that underlay the innocent flute melody. Anyway, as I was preparing to get married, three girls I vaguely remembered from high school (actually, I only remembered one of them, Janet, who always beat the hell out of me in grades and getting awards) pulled up chairs at the front of the congregation and sat in a sort of triangle (not facing everyone) and began to discuss contract work and contractual obligations and how it was important to know exactly what you were signing.






At this point I stretched out between two chairs in my Pippa Middleton white satin wedding gown and took a nap, thinking I would look more refreshed for the ceremony. The three girls (only about 15) were giving a sort of seminar and no one thought it was unusual. Then I began to worry about the vows, which I had had nothing to do with. I was afraid the minister, who seemed somewhat fundamentalist, would say "love, honor and obey", and I didn't want the "obey" in there, I wanted "love, honor and cherish", but didn't know how to change this because I seemed to have absolutely no control over anything that was happening that day. In fact I seemed to be the least important person in the place, almost as if I were invisible or a walking ghost.






It was not until after I woke up and analyzed this dream that I realized the strangest detail of all: there was NO GROOM - no one, nothing! He was just a cipher, a non-entity. I did not even think about this, did not wonder about it, nor did anyone else. It did not matter at all who I married, in fact it was clear I was not marrying anyone. Hmmm, what else? In a side room, before the ceremony started, a few people I sort of knew from my old church were watching a video on a large flat-screen TV, a movie featuring dangerous mountain climbing. I watched it for a few minutes, then realized it was getting close to the time of the ceremony, so I said, "Will you pause it for me, please?", so I could watch the rest of the movie after I got married.






That flute music appears throughout the classic Trek series, whenever a particularly fetching young woman appears. It's almost a "fetching young woman" signal. The most poignant isn't the one about Ruth but the episode with Jill Ireland, long dead from breast cancer, who falls agonizingly in love with Spock on that planet with the spores that make you fatuously happy. At the end of it she doesn't just shed a tear, she really weeps, with red face and running nose, and Spock speaks to her as tenderly as a Vulcan can.


Watching these Treks again, they're better than the heartless parodies, though of course most of it is standard '60s action/adventure, and Sulu is particularly amusing in his ongoing romantic advances to Uhura (implying it's more acceptable for a gay Japanese man to romance a black woman). Kirk isn't as bad as you remember. Really, he's not. He only overemotes about 10% of the time. This is not the place for Shakespearean soliloquys (though one of these times I'm going to post his Hamlet from one of the daytime shows of the '60s), so he pretty much sticks to the action/adventure hero mode. But as the series wears on he gains levels of humanity, transcending such hokey lines as "No blah, blah, blah!"




The dynamic between Bones and Spock is brilliant, unique to television. DeForest Kelley has some real moments, especially inThe City on the Edge of Forever, in which he runs around crazed but is still compelling and completely believable. I can see how and why this quirky little series somehow spawned a dynasty. But what does that haunting flute music have to do with getting married to an invisible groom? And if that pale wildwood flower really is me, whatever happened to her?




The Invention of the Saxophone: take two




Blogger's note. God knows how many years ago, I was standing around in a book store leafing through a book of poems by Billy Collins. I found this amazing poem about saxophones, almost forgot it, then tried years later to find it on the net. No sign of it. As so often happens, I had to go back years later to find it, and by then I had done the unthinkable: written my own poem, which likely has unconscious echoes of the Collins poem. Unconscious, not because I was unconscious when I wrote it, but because I only read the Collins poem once in haste before the store clerk glared me out of the place. Do I need to tell you that the Collins' poem makes me want to stop writing forever?




The Invention of the Saxophone by Billy Collins


          It was Adolph Sax, remember,
          not Saxo Grammaticus, who gets the ovation.
          And by the time he had brought all the components
          together-- the serpentine shape, the single reed,
          the fit of the fingers,
          the upward tilt of the golden bell--
          it was already 1842, and one gets the feeling
          it was also very late at night.




          There is something nocturnal about the sound,
          something literally horny,
          as some may have noticed on that historic date
          when the first odd notes wobbled out of his studio
          into the small, darkened town,

          summoning the insomniacs (who were up
          waiting for the invention of jazz) to their windows,
          but leaving the sleepers undisturbed,
          even deepening and warming the waters of their dreams.



          For this is not the valved instrument of waking,
          more the smoky voice of longing and loss,
          the porpoise cry of the subconscious.
          No one would ever think of blowing reveille
          on a tenor without irony.
          The men would only lie in their metal bunks,
          fingers twined behind their heads,
          afloat on pools of memory and desire.





          And when the time has come to rouse the dead,
          you will not see Gabriel clipping an alto
          around his numinous neck.
          An angel playing the world's last song
          on a glistening saxophone might be enough
          to lift them back into the light of earth,
          but really no farther.

          Once resurrected, they would only lie down
          in the long cemetary grass
          or lean alone against a lugubrious yew
          and let the music do the ascending--
          curling snakes charmed from their baskets--
          while they wait for the shrill trumpet solo,
          that will blow them all to kingdom come




AFTER SEARCHING FRUITLESSLY FOR A POEM BY BILLY COLLINS CALLED THE INVENTION OF THE SAXOPHONE, THE AUTHOR TAKES IT UPON HERSELF TO WRITE ONE OF HER OWN


i don’t know who invented this
reflexive question mark of an instrument

but i think it was a good thing

for it’s great to look at,
with fat keys like frog eyes
and a big bell like royal jelly
you could keep flowers in there if you wanted to,
extra socks
or even a clock




Snakes kink too
and this sound is snakey
purply mauve as the deepest bruise
and raunchy
as a man in love

smoked as some cat of the night
disappearing over a fence
it makes leaps
(but only because it has to)





There is no
morning saxophone

this is a sound that
pulls the shades down

a hangover
howl
fading to twilight
or the blackmost
navel
of the night





Few can wrap their lips around
this gooseneck
without some harm coming to them
for this is an instrument
with a long history of
hollowing out
all but the most hardy

Bird flew into a pane
of glass and was
smashed





we don’t know why it does this to people
(maybe it was mad at him
for taking it all to such extremes)

but how could you blow this thing
halfway

i ask you

how could you rear back
in some great pained whiplash of the spine
without a sense of
terrible commitment





i never much cared for
saxophones myself
until i heard one blown correctly at last
jazz is a genre i will never understand
but perhaps that’s good
for like the priesthood, one must enter into it

without question
reservation

or doubt






  Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!


Shake, shake, shake: the Telus Hippo!



















Coolest Telus ad EVER: and it makes great gifs!


http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html