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Sunday, October 13, 2013
Friday, October 11, 2013
Thursday, October 10, 2013
More creepy shit
I don't know about you - I mean I REALLY don't know about you because you're a unique individual with needs, desires, chromosomes, fingernails and a digestive tract that is all your own - but I find these new gifs plain creepy. They're some new technology that I haven't mastered yet, and aren't you glad? A supposed improvement on the jerky little things I've learned to make. But oh God, look.
There are all sorts of these now and they are being touted as some sort of breakthrough, but the thing is, even if the picture is clearer and more realistic, nothing really happens in them. You see a lot more action in one of my three-second Harold Lloyd clockhanger things.
Oh my God! How realistic! Look at that cake batter, how flowing and detailed. But howcum the pan never gets filled up? Must be a hole in the bottom, in which case this woman must be standing in batter up to her ankles. She's smiling, so I guess that's her particular fetish. I also like the fact that except for the particular detail of the batter, everything else is motionless. The woman is as still as the dead.
My personal favorite. I used to call gifs "three-second movies", but I think that's being pared down to "one-second". A nod and a wink. Then we're done.
Tuesday, October 8, 2013
Who wore it better? You decide
I have this habit of blogging first thing in the morning, and last thing at night. The rest of the time I am in purgatory.
No, sorry, I mean. . .
I mean that the editing process, the next step in preparing The Glass Character for publication in the spring, makes me feel kind of like I have glue in my veins. Or sludge. The process is oh, so long, so hard, extremely tiring and frustrating, and an all-around pain in the ass.
But soft! What's this? What light through yonder window breaks?
And why?
Why on earth is Harold Lloyd, our Harold Lloyd, our dishy silent comic-of-a-lifetime, our inspiration for the most aggravating and perhaps hopeless novel in human history, why is OUR Harold Lloyd dressed like a girl?
Oh, he looks beautiful, mind. That's not the issue. The turban, feathers, etc. are, well, rather becoming on him. He smiles softly, beguilingly. He looks not only comfortable, but content.
No, this isn't a Before/After shot, it's Carmen Miranda, famous for her banana-headed tropical outfits and shimmying around the stage. I can't imagine Harold shimmying - well, actually, he DID do a "shimmie" in one of his earliest pictures. I just find the resemblance striking, is all, though it could be that Harold is a touch more feminine.
FEMININE?!
I don't see him that way, never have, though a person I used to call my friend said (having watched her first and last Harold Lloyd movie): "Why do you like him? I thought he was gay." As if that's all that matters about any human being, a quick way to dismiss, to write off.
I have a bit of an insight here: this bizarre magazine cover (which I am convinced is real: it appears in too many places not to be, including in its original form on auction sites) could possibly have something to do with his lifelong involvement in Masonic orders and the Shriners. I've always been convinced these fellows are just a sort of Dull Men's Club, but lately, what with all this Illuminati stuff coming out, and all these TV shows that claim the image on the American $1 bill is some Satanic thing-or-other, you never know. Then there was all this CIA stuff during the Cold War, the mind games and experiments. Surely Harold wouldn't be mixed up in all that, would he? He looks too innocent. Or was this just a get-up for one of his pictures? I can't remember one where he looked quite so fetching.
And orange is definitely his colour.
Monday, October 7, 2013
Friday, October 4, 2013
35 words for magic
I have no time, I'm tired, need to go to bed. . . This process I'm in. This editing, re-editing, is far deeper and more challenging than anything I've experienced, I mean ever. Writing novels isn't for sissies (even if I feel like one), and editing definitely isn't. I'm currently in my third round just of my OWN revisions, never mind the editorial ones I'll be working on all next week. And I'm not through yet.
So what has happened to my passionate, stormy, sometimes-troubled but always compelling relationship to Harold Lloyd?
I'm discovering something shocking. I should have realized this before. The book isn't even about Harold Lloyd. It's about Muriel Ashford, the woman who pursues him obsessively over several decades. Harold is just her projection, her idee fixe, and exists only in her eyes. So how did I get on to this idea that I'd written a Harold Lloyd novel?
I couldn't approach him any other way. I too was "enmagicked" by Harold, got swept up. It's easy to be: the man gave off excitement and fizzing, popping sparks of charm. There was a rude obnoxious edge to him when he was a young knockabout, and I am not sure it ever entirely went away.
In the novel, I have to keep surgically removing certain things that crop up with alarming frequency. One is the word "magic", which, my editor tells me, I used 35 times. Nearly every time I see it now, I chop it off like a stalk of celery, and either come up with a decent synonym or just chuck the sentence out.
Did writing about Harold render me cliche-ridden? I wonder. I don't remember falling into those things before. But never before did I take the risk of stepping over the boundary into that smudgy midnight phosphorescence, a reality in which everything subtly jerks up and down and runs at the wrong speed.
The things I've been going through just lately have been extremely emotionally draining. I'm shedding yet another skin, but only because I have to. The urgency is coming from within. She not busy being born is busy drowning in her own bile. But there's nothing I can do about that. It's my destiny to peel back my own skin, to persevere.
So the covenant remains, the initial passion now shading into stamina, the need to continue.
Order The Glass Character from:
Thistledown Press
Amazon.com
Chapters/Indigo.ca
Wednesday, October 2, 2013
When all the joy within you dies
It's not often I find something this good on Facebook. In fact, it's not often I find anything at all. I have learned to "unfriend" boring, draining and/or toxic people, but you can't see their ugly insides, at least not until much later, when they post something so casually offensive it makes your hair stand on end.
There's a special circle in hell for people with toxic relatives. These are practiced happiness-suckers who siphon the life out of you, then ask you why you look so drawn and tired.
These are the twisters - the emotional corkscrews who have a phenomenal way of turning their abusiveness around and insisting that you abused them. How dare you accuse me of being abusive! Obviously you're vindictive, heartless, and a liar to boot (they inform you, while you slowly bleed to death from the corkscrew stuck in your heart).
Oh. The happiness-suckers. Schoolteachers: you couldn't get away from THEM, could you? Their shaming tactics, their favoritism (merely a weapon to make the marginalized, persecuted kids feel even worse) their petty dictatorship to make up for the complete lack of satisfaction in their lives.
Spouses. This can be exquisite torture that goes on for decades. I've known more than one widow who could barely disguise her glee at her husband's memorial service, then immediately booked the cruise she was never allowed to take while she was oppressed by a sour old tyrant.
But the worst is. . . this.
When it's your friend. A close friend. A friend you used to share so much with, it seemed you could almost read each other's thoughts. It can't go on that way forever, can it? It can't. Worlds go by, days and nights, and at some point, one of the two begins to fade.
But then there are the longer emails. What are these about? People she does not know and does not care to know, the small-town small minds. Her friend frankly hates them, rants and seethes and spews bile, yet insists that she is always friendly with them and never says anything critical to them at all. Then signs off with, Thanks for listening, I feel so much better now!, the perfect hit-and-run.
The choked-off conversations become chronic, her acid criticism of everything and everyone acting like so much weed killer, destroyer of all enthusiasm.
Does she even realize what is going on? It might be like the proverbial frog in warm water, who does not notice the gradual increase in temperature until it is cooked.
Why does someone give up? Why does someone just accept their discontent and not fight against it, or not even acknowledge it or believe it's real? More to the point: why is this so draining to be around? Why is there a sense of a dusty drawer with nothing in it?
Dead dreams are awfully inert, and posing is hollow. You can't hitch a Clydesdale to a race horse. But why does the race horse feel so bad? There is nothing more pathetic than a one-sided conversation, with one person running frantically back and forth hitting the ball from both sides of the net. It is humiliating; desperate. While the other person says nothing: not so much not caring as not even even noticing what is going on.
When you have been raised with silence and rejection as the norm (and by the way: the opposite of love isn't hate, as most people think, but indifference, just not caring one way or another), returning to it is agony. They say (and just who are "they" after all, a bunch of executioners?) that you invariably recreate the dynamics of your childhood in your adult relationships.
For years you play along, because for years you really did have a wonderful connection, but it dwindles and dwindles, and you feel a certain expectation to dwindle along with it. And you won't, because you can't. And then, when you finally do say something because you can't keep it to yourself any longer, you are subjected to disbelief (what are you talking about?), guilt, a sense of betrayal, a wounded (though perhaps never uttered) "how could you?" Or, even worse, an awful, artificial attempt to get the thing going again, inventing a sense of interest, asking after your dentist or the guy who fixes the roof.
Life seems to kill some people, to steamroll them, but then again, some people's courage just collapses, and from then on they do life by rote. Risk nothing, gain nothing. And you realize you can't do it any more, especially not after you find out that your friend's husband casually hacked your emails and has been reading what you've been sending her.
Friendship can be thrown into reverse, and it's an awful thing. It just hurts like hell, and of course YOU are seen as mean and selfish for claiming things are no longer satisfying. Bob Dylan said a couple of things - how is it Bob Dylan always knows how to hit it brilliantly on the head?: "He not busy being born is busy dying." And another one: "Her sin is her lifelessness."
After being destroyed in the fire of religion, I have no God left except life. But I know now that if you sin against life, there will be a cost.
I wish I had a friend like me
In middle life, I've come to see
I wish I had a friend like me.
To gather flowers constantly,
I wish I had a friend like me.
The game of life is rough and long
My self-worth fails, I'm not too strong
But when a friend seems right and true
I'll give my all, compassion too.
I don't know why it twists around
These so-called friends are blaming-bound
They muss and mangle with my head -
Abandonment's my daily bread.
I've been assured, you didn't make
These people sour, it's their mistake
But friends are chosen, after all
You did this, see, you took the fall.
But when I watch while souls implode
I think I've hit the mother lode:
Like nomads in the desert sun
I'll pack my things, and wave, and run.
Blogger's note. It's hard to go through things like this and not write about them, but the person involved either won't look at it or, if she does, won't recognize herself. Funny how the hurt party suffers even more by feeling like a fool for trying to make the whole thing work. Twenty years is twenty years. But all this "God has a purpose for all things" and "everything happens for a reason" and Hallmarky sayings about people growing in different directions and it's no one's fault are BULLSHIT because real damage was done over a long period of time, not only unacknowledged but unrecognized. Martyrs can do no wrong; they inflict suffocation and guilt on others, and get their jollies from it because no one can reply in kind. My part in all this is that I fell for it. I wish I had a friend like me.
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