Sunday, March 2, 2014

My hero bares his nerves: hopelessness and hope in the writing life





When I renamed my blog after Harold's professional moniker, I made a vow to myself that I would not write "essays", that in fact I would write whatever-the-fuck I wanted to, always, because at the time it was all I had. So here lies a bunch of thoughts, along with a sinking, fainting hope, a glimpse of a deer; no, not a doe but a buck, magnificently muscled about the neck, which I feverishly pursue even in full knowledge of the spiked collar around his neck which proclaims, pursue me not, nor touch me; I belong to everyone, but not to you.

So. Lately on Facebook, which I have mixed feelings about, I've seen a few posts that speak to me, whether for good or ill. One particularly poignant piece was about a young woman, a university student, who experiences chronic low-grade depression which sometimes becomes disabling under academic pressure. Not one health-related agency in the school would help her, in fact they all looked either puzzled or embarrassed when she asked who she should approach, or just shrugged her off with "I don't know" (perhaps the worst of all, as if she was the only person in the world who had been diagnosed with some mysterious and untreatable disease).





What's that about? Is no one allowed to be damaged, to need surcease? Are we all supposed to be constantly stoking ourselves for the feverish race, the incessant jockeying for position (nowhere more in evidence than in academia)?  Or are people just craven in their inability to risk compassion?

I saw another post which frankly ravaged me, a poem I've quoted here several times:

Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind,
But as for me, hélas, I may no more.
The vain travail hath wearied me so sore,
I am of them that farthest cometh behind.
Yet may I by no means my wearied mind
Draw from the deer, but as she fleeth afore
Fainting I follow. I leave off therefore,
Sithens in a net I seek to hold the wind.
Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt,
As well as I may spend his time in vain.
And graven with diamonds in letters plain
There is written, her fair neck round about:
Noli me tangere, for Caesar's I am,
And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.

I know about that feverish chase, for it has occupied a huge chunk of my life to date. In writing a novel about the incredible life and career of silent screen comedian Harold Lloyd, I became enraptured, even inhabited. I felt I not only knew him, but was with him. (If that sounds totally nuts, I hope you'll at least read the book to find out for yourself.) And yet, there was always some aspect of him that was elusive, even unknowable.




Fainting, I rushed through the bracken, falling and getting up again, sometimes catching just a glimpse of the impossibly fleet deer with the glancing diamonds about its neck. Thomas Wyatt in his insane passion for the doomed Anne Boleyn knew of this, I am sure of it. The drivenness, the hopelessness, the failure that just stokes the fires of pursuit. 

Well, why not do something else, then? I realize with no small measure of horror that I'm really not much good at anything else. I have spent my entire life pursuing something that would appear to be doomed. Thus the Wyatt poem doesn't just speak to me: it screams in my ear, run. . . RUN!





And yet, and yet. I am still filled with a fizzy excitement about this book. I can't help myself. it relit the flame for me when I was sure I would never write a novel again, or at least one that I felt I could send out and sell. Blogging was a consolation, and, for a while, my longstanding gig as a book reviewer, until even that outlet dried up in the wake of nearly-nonexistent books sections filled with "canned" reviews. But surely I would never again allow the heartbreak of full-length fiction to take over my life. 

On Facebook I read of professional magazine writers who can no longer write for magazines, and I see why. I don't buy or read them except in my dentist's waiting room, but when I do, I keep searching for content and find virtually none, just the glossy flab of more, and more, and more ads. The actual magazine starts some 50 pages in, if it starts at all. Someone has deemed that readers want a brief chunked-up Facebook-type read, skip, skip, skip. I know I should not be so contemptuous of this, because the truth is I do it myself.




According to Facebook, and let's face it, Facebook is a different Facebook for everyone who is "on" it, things are pretty bad in literary-land, even in the once-comforting groves of Academe where you are no longer allowed to express your pain (perhaps part of the happy-face syndrome of social media). It's a crap shoot, though (more crap than shoot), and as people incessantly tell me, it has always been that way. A line from Dylan Thomas insanely jumps into my head: "My hero bares his nerves along my wrist". What does it mean? Jesus on the cross? Heroin abuse? Sex? Death? The Colossus that was toppled or washed away in a tide of booze? Thomas had every advantage a poet could have, was lionized and widely published and even (gasp) appreciated, and yet, like too many poets before/after him, the result of his "success" was that he went broke and died.

When I am in this turquoise/cobalt state I listen to too much Shostakovich, and as is normal for abnormal me, I fixate on one work and play it to death. Lately it has been the towering Fifth Symphony: not just any version, but the revered Bernstein interpretation from the 1960s. My hero bares his nerves, indeed. Bares his ache. I'm not sure what Shostakovich was like, though I remember reading that a great deal of his music was written for Mother Russia. Perhaps that even explains the triumphant ending of the searing, almost-unbearably dysphoric Fifth. OK, let's go major here, because really, we don't have any choice.




And the rest of the time he wrote movie music, which was probably kick-ass, and there's nothing wrong with that because 95% of movie scores are dreck. But he was keeping body and soul together, was he not? Nothing wrong with that. Or so it seems. We have no record of what he thought about it.

And as for Bernstein, once a magnificent bubble of brilliant ego, he deteriorated with the years, and NOT because after years of hiding he decided to come out of the closet. He deteriorated because, like Dylan Thomas, he drowned in alcohol, falling off the podium and propositioning young men at random.




Harold Lloyd didn't sell out, or at least I don't think he did. But in spite of the fact that he certainly didn't need the money, he made one last grab at a comeback in a strange film called The Sin of Harold Diddlebock.  This was shot in the early 1940s, and if Harold's "boy" of the 1920s was dated with the advent of sound, he was downright archaic in the '40s, when Tracy and Hepburn were working themselves into a comic fever. It's not that he didn't look good - he did - but in a sense, he was a 50-year-old boy, a man trapped in amber and stopped in time whose career and love life had not advanced in more than 20 years.

I didn't like this film, nor did the public, but what ruined it wasn't just Harold's legendary clash with the smart and snappy director Preston Sturges (who is named Sterling Prescott in my novel). It was the opening, in which for the first time we see the Glass Character deeply depressed. I still can't watch it: Lloyd is a subtle, mercurial and often brilliant actor, which is the key to his comic genius, and when he plays depressed, it's depressed. It's painful. We don't want to see the Boy that way. The picture was supposed to be a continuation of The Freshman, but since when was the Freshman supposed to turn out like this?




He chased after a successful comeback, and ran and grabbed, and for all his phenomenal determination, he didn't win, the prize slipped through his fingers. To his credit, he did NOT drown himself in alcohol or otherwise go insane, but turned his formidable energies to other things, positive, life-affirming things,  including philanthropy.

Is there a lesson? I am no good at lessons, or I wouldn't write at all. I simply have to do this, though I still don't know what "this" will mean. It took me three years of pain to find a home for Harold, I was beginning to lose all hope, and now this, another chance! I'd rather feel the pain of success (with all its attendant horrors) than the existential funk of failure, scrambling around to find meaning in it all.





My hero bares his nerves along my wrist
That rules from wrist to shoulder,
Unpacks the head that, like a sleepy ghost,
Leans on my mortal ruler,
The proud spine spurning turn and twist.
 
And these poor nerves so wired to the skull
Ache on the lovelorn paper
I hug to love with my unruly scrawl
That utters all love hunger
And tells the page the empty ill.
 
My hero bares my side and sees his heart
Tread, like a naked Venus,
The beach of flesh, and wind her bloodred plait;
Stripping my loin of promise,
He promises a secret heat.
 
He holds the wire from the box of nerves
Praising the mortal error
Of birth and death, the two sad knaves of thieves,
And the hunger's emperor;
He pulls the chain, the cistern moves.



"You had me at hello"

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!


Thursday, February 27, 2014

The kind of review you. . . somehow. . . just don't wanna get




I don't know how I end up on these things, but here it is - first of all, an Amazon.com review of one of Elizabeth Wurtzel's self-serving, self-involved pieces of tripe, then another, then another. . . and me wondering how a review could possibly be any worse, when I happen to know the author earns enough to put herself through law school in an extremely happy and floaty state.

It's a racket, this writing business. I think I'll go home now.

19 of 27 people found the following review helpful
1.0 out of 5 stars The WORST Book I've Ever Read...Seriously., February 13, 2005
This review is from: The Secret of Life: Commonsense Advice for the Uncommon Woman (Paperback)
While I pretty much liked Prozac Nation, Bitch, and More, Now & Again, this book was completely horrible. Everything about it is cliched. The writing is bad and trite and the advice is really just irritating. The advice is far from radical as well. If I flushed my money down the toilet it would have been better spent. If you are an uncommon woman and you want some commonsense advice, I would say don't spend your money on this trash. I think the only reason I read the whole book was because I couldn't believe how horrible it was. I'm personally offended that so many books don't get published, but this one did. What a waste.



1.0 out of 5 stars simply awful, Dec 21 2001
By A Customer
Self-serving platitude heaped on self-serving platitude then served up as "sass," from a spoiled, self-involved non-entity. Watch and enjoy as she, along with every other nineties excess, swirls into a well-deserved oblivion. Simply an awful --I hesitate to say "writer" --simply an awful phenomenon. Whoever mistook her for a role model deserves what they got. Another non-book from a talentless brat.
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3 of 7 people found the following review helpful
1.0 out of 5 stars So is this "Radical Sanity" repackaged?, August 11, 2007
By 
N. Charest (Rancho Cucamonga, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This review is from: The Secret of Life: Commonsense Advice for the Uncommon Woman (Paperback)
If so, then URP and shame on everyone for dragging out EW's least imaginative and most poorly written and confusing book and trying to pass it off as a new title. I know law school is expensive, but do what everyone else does and take out student loans. Wurtzel, you've snorted law school tuition 3 or four times over. Get a real job.
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Monday, February 24, 2014

Sister Wives Season Finale: or, how to kill a useless day



Forgive me, please - oh God, forgive me, for I have a nasty filthy habit and I enjoy the hell out of it. I'm powerless over it and it is just such hell, I'm about to join SWA (Sister Wives Anonymous).

I'm powerless over the Fundamentalist Mormon Brown family, who reside not in polygamist-friendly Utah but in Las Vegas. (Long story.) I'm shamefaced over the whole dang crew of them: Merry, Sheri, Dairy and Marvelle-Ann (or something). 

Sister Husband Kody Brown, who has no visible means of support except a fat salary from TLC, is the four-way hub of this mad domestic mess, dashing not from bedroom to bedroom but from house to house - meaning, the four brand-new custom-built homes the Browns purchased in their very own cul-de-sac after running away from Utah for some imaginary crime.




No one has any money in this family, but, sensing the impending meltdown of the entire system, they decide to plan an elaborate Commitment Ceremony (or four-way remarriage bash) costing, probably, at least $10,000.00.

Some 200 people are coming to this affair, if I may use that expression, so the Browns must know an awful lot of other polygs, some obviously from out of state. But this whole Walmart-catered affair, this stacking-green-plastic-chairs-and-rolls-of-white-paper-on-top-of-folding-tables-borrowed-from-the-local-high-school-gym deal, seemed salted with extras, people who would sit there, eat,and look interested while the Browns nervously read out an interminable Mission Statement which ran on much longer than the Ten Commandments. (I mean the movie version.)

But let's back up a little. All we really cared about, after all, was the four wives' dresses. And it's true, I really did have an interest in watching the process of these gowns being individually designed and created for them.

Oops.






For some reason, they picked about the worst person they could find, a young woman freshly graduated from"design school" who had obviously never made a dress in her life. Then they gave her three weeks to design and make four original, formal-quality gowns in three radically different sizes and styles. There were interminable shots of this young woman pinning, and pinning, and pinning the lopsided, saggy, inside-out, fraying, mismatched pieces of fabric on the wives. None of it looked good, and the general atmosphere was one of sweating alarm as the completely-inexperienced designer tugged and swore. Bringing her mother in at the last minute to keep the ship from sinking altogether did not help.

The whole dress story sort of collapsed, and I was actually shocked that it turned out so badly. Two of the four dresses had to be scrapped entirely ("This isn't working. Do you have something in your closet?"). The other two were unfortunate, like bad costumes from a high school musical, but were launched anyway so the enterprise wouldn't be a total flop.



Robyn, the skinniest and most Kody-worthy of the four (see photo above: now why didn't she wear THAT little red number to the ceremony, seeing as how it made Kody's eyes pop out?) picked a nice little funeral dress out of her closet, and Meri, who doesn't have the sense of a goat, went out on a mad spree and found something for $59.00 that LOOKED like it cost $ 59.00, so tight on her that her substantial abdomen and even her belly button pushed through the sheer fabric.

Well, at least the apple green color was good.




Christine, sometimes known as The One I Like, showed up in a sort of burnt-orange medieval maternity bathrobe, with huge pleated billows of fabric blowing back behind her. The tacky gold ribbons here and there did not contribute to the look. My only question is: where do you buy orange crimplene nowadays? Must be vintage, from Craigslist or some-such. Janelle, who currently seems to have the most fans on the show (it varies from season to season, if not week to week) would have looked nice if the amateur seamstress had  known how to sew. There were four or five bustlines at the front of this thing, meandering switchbacks of poorly-sewn, puckered seams that finally bunched up somewhere above her bust, making her look older and actually disguising her recent, impressive weight loss.




(l. to r.: Christine's unfortunate burnt-orange Camelot castoff; Meri's one-size-doesn't-fit-all, sale-rack special; Janelle's almost-but-not-quite royal blue dress, complete with three breasts and innumerable puckered seams;  Robyn's little black Mormon interment ceremony number. Perhaps because they see their husband only once every four nights, these gals know how to make do.)

The Browns really try - they try and try - but they just never get it right. I don't know what it is. Idiocy? Or is it the pressure of living in a fishbowl, of having cameras zoom in on life's every little crisis? No one even thinks of this. To most people, "having my own reality TV show" is the pinnacle of success and happiness. Everything will be wonderful from now on.

But we are beginning to see what happens when the seeds of narcissism, which I believe are present in every one of us, are watered weekly by reality TV's relentless drool. Les Fleurs de Mal begin to sprout, and eventually they take over.




But soft! What's this I see on the horizon? For reasons that no one is willing to explain, TLC is launchng an ALL NEW polygamy show called My Five Wives, trumping Kody's harem by a whole wife.

There have been whispers on Sister Wives lately about Kody "branching out", something he naturally feels entitled to, with or without his wives' approval. The rumor was seeded and watered when a "fortune teller" came on the show (like a Fundamendalist Mormon would go for that!) and predicted Kody would take a new wife, while everyone acted stunned. Now we see why. The pressure is on: competitive wife-collecting! We can't have FIVE wives on one show, and only FOUR wives on the other, can we? 






(These gals are so committed that they actually rehearse between events: note that one of them is away, presumably getting it on with Kody "Big Polyg" Brown.)


Is TLC phasing out the Browns at last? Am I right in suspecting this new show will be edgier and sexier, with younger, svelter wives and a husband who is not a complete boob?

More will be revealed.





Kody practices his second-favorite sport.





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


  Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!


Sunday, February 23, 2014

Everybody read this


http://mdpaust.blogspot.ca/2014/01/404.html


This gets into "issues" that I can barely approach, though I know I will have to eventually. That is, if the power doesn't go out. 




Wednesday, February 19, 2014

I LOVE THIS AD!!

The Glass Character: Here comes Harold Lloyd!





At last: my love has come along!  Harold Lloyd, who has obsessed my brain and ruled my heart for SIX years, is ready to show his face on the cover of my forthcoming novel, The Glass Character.

I've been looking at him for so many years, it seems strange that now he's looking back at me in one of his most famous (alarmed porcupine) poses. And though The Glass Character (Thistledown Press) won't be available for a few weeks yet, the cover has been finalized, and my excitement knows no bounds.

It's hard to know where to begin. Why Harold Lloyd? some people have asked me, and I have never completely figured it out. It's not as if I suddenly thought "this subject would make a good next novel", because I wasn't thinking in those terms. After two well-received but not-spectacularly-selling novels, my mind was turning to blogging and other more practical things.

Then Hurricane Harold moved in, a storm-front who knocked over whatever order there was in my life. Broke the whole thing wide open, sometimes quite painfully.

Harold Lloyd - and I've given this blog over to him, pretty much - was a legend in silent film, known variously as "the guy with the glasses" and "the man on the clock".




Like so.

I must have seen one of his movies on Turner Classics - in fact, without Turner Classics this novel never would have existed. I think I tuned in partway through The Freshman, the scene where his suit falls apart. I started laughing and didn't stop.

The thing about Harold Lloyd's comedy is -  it's funny. It makes you laugh. It isn't cerebral, it isn't sociological, it isn't "of its time" - it's of this bloody time, and  funny enough to knock you right out of your chair.

Harold Lloyd rocks.

So how did that initial fascination leap across the gap to an actual story, sustainable for 307 pages? Hard to say. Suffice it to say I fell in love. And a story of romantic/erotic obsession was born.

Now that we're out of the finalized-front-cover starting gate, I'm going to be writing more and more about this, because it would be too bad if this one (like the other two) got splended reviews and hardly any readership. Everything has changed since my last novel - and, more to the point, I have changed in ways that can't really be quantified.

("Quantified" - sorry about that!)




When I tell people I've spent six years on this project, they always say, "Oh, man, that must have been slow to write." They don't understand. It took a year and a half to write, and three and a half years to get to the point where it is actually in the starting gate and will soon (soon, soon. . . ) be in the stores.

On the shelves.

Whew.

I can't possibly get it all in now. I'm still trying to believe it. And though I will do everything I can think of to get the word out, I realize it's a whole different world: not only since I published my last novel Mallory, but since I began writing The Glass Character in 2008.

2008 sounds like a million years ago. So much has changed, I don't know where to begin. But he's coming soon to a book store or Kindle near you, folks: The Glass Character, Thistledown Press.

At last. . .







Order The Glass Character from Amazon.com

Order The Glass Character from Chapters/Indigo.ca


Saturday, February 15, 2014

A laugh and a half





I've gone Blingee!




For a long time, before I even knew what a gif was or figured any of that out, there were these sparkly things that you could find on the internet. Sparkly like old greeting cards with that sandlike stuff stuck to them. Mostly they were puppies and kittens and things. I hated them.

When I was swallowed up by the enchantment of the World of Gif, I turned disdainfully away from sparklies. To hell with them! I was a Giffinator now. That is, until my favorite gif site just pulled the plug on me. It doesn't work for shit now and turns out these small stretched uglies that I won't post.




While throwing together bad valentine verses that turned into a dissertation on writer's groups and why I hate them, I wanted to illustrate my points (and break up monotonous blocks of text, which is the main reason I use images) with tacky Valentine sentiments. It wasn't hard to find them. Nearly all of them, the really tacky ones anyway, were Blingees.




Something had happened in the interim, and now these were interesting. Tawdry, most of them, but in a good way. Some of them were wildly creative, just flashing with crazy energy. The animation had improved substantially to allow dancing figures and even, in one case, a walking one.

The hunt was on! I wanted to find them ALL. I wanted Bigfoot, I wanted Bob Dylan, I wanted William Shatner, Jesus, and everything else. What really triggered this search was a Blingee of a squirrel with a bottle of Jack Daniels beside it. WTFFF? It was so nonsensical, so incomprehensible, it was beautiful.




Blingees have been taken over by the cool element, the gangstas, though there are still lots of glittering ponies and bleeding Christs. Jesus probably accounts for 85% of Blingee images, a sort of modern update of the old lenticular pictures that flashed back and forth between the Crucifixion and the Last Supper.




I confess that I lost my virginity not long ago and Blingee-d the cover of The Glass Character (which I am not quite allowed to show you yet, but it's a doozie!). I had to keep the blings to one side to avoid covering Harold's face -  but strangely enough, at the bottom of the cover, the author's name turns out as Margaret Blingee.




I like that. It could be a pseudonym. I could at last be Cool. Margaret Blingee could wear things that Margaret Gunning couldn't get away with. Margaret Blingee could write cool things and win swell prizes. It would be a different life.




Puppy, don't chase that squirrel! "Dis muh nutz, you can't have em!"






Beautiful images that evoke Bob Dylan. Note the walking cat, and the angel perched on the roof playing a violin that releases a cascade of gold shimmers. The second one is Slow Train Coming.






Just beautiful.




 "For dinner, we're having moose chili and caribou hot dogs!"




I assume this cat is dead.







Uhhh. . . 




Blinged out.