Barbra Streisand says something terrible!

Barbra Streisand dares to display her moral compass to an incensed Robert Redford.

Something wonderful

This is a man who thinks with his heart,

His heart is not always wise.

This is a man who stumbles and falls,

But this is a man who tries.

This is a man you'll forgive and forgive

And help and protect, as long as you live.

He will not always say what you would have him say

But now and then, he'll say something wonderful.

The thoughtless things he'll do will hurt and worry you,

Then all at once, he'll do something wonderful.

He has a thousand dreams that won't come true

You know that he believes in them and that's enough for you.

You'll always go along, defend him when he's wrong

And tell him when he's strong, he is wonderful.

He'll always need your love and so he'll get your love

A man who needs your love can be wonderful.

This is a man you'll forgive and forgive

And help and protect, as long as you live.

He will not always say what you would have him say

But now and then, he'll say something wonderful.

Post-blog thoughts. This sort of welled up in me out of nowhere - no, it was somewhere. I had to trundle all the way in to Vancouver by bus today - God, it seemed like a long trudge, though I used to do it several times a week. Had to go see my doc. Had to go see my HEAD doc, as a matter of fact, who has helped me probably more than anyone else I can name, but just the fact that I GO to one is somehow ice-floe territory. But there you are. 

It wasn't quite time for my appointment on the 17th floor of this luxe building that has such a gorgeous lookout on the waterfront, it would be the ideal place to commit suicide if you could only get through that 2"-thick plate glass. At any rate, having had a bad lunch at the food fair and having a teensy bit of time left, I forced myself to walk into the "local book store" (a big impersonal chain I've called Big Booky in my posts), which I knew to be the only place that might still be carrying The Glass Character. "Still" referring to the three-month window most small-time authors get before having it all sent back to an unhappy publisher. 

Anyway, I walked past all the displays of useless high-end gift items, plus a few tables of mass mega-best-sellers by people everyone knows/no one knows, and ascended the TWO giant escalators - up, up, waaaaaaaay up - until, buried at the very back of the third floor, I found a rather small, obscure section called Fiction. And I began to hunt. Surely it wouldn't be there. But I had to look. In nine interminable years of non-publish-hood, I never again thought I would see a book of mine on a shelf in Big Booky or anywhere else (and in Vancouver, by now, there literally ISN'T "anywhere else"). And I saw the H's and I worked backwards and.

And, he was sitting there - listen. This isn't just a book. I wish you'd read it. It's a piece of my heart and it's still aching and breaking, even now. I came to be familiar with Harold the way some people must have actually known him, almost intimately. He was a heartbreaker. And I saw him up there, and oh God, and yes, there his is, by the holy. The phrase "something wonderful" kept echoing in my head after seeing him in all his blue-ness on the Big Booky shelf (and it's unlikely they have sold even one of them).

Something wonderful.

Then I thought of that melody, and couldn't get it out of my mind. I kept hunting for a good version to post here, and one didn't seem to exist. They were all oversung and schmalzed-up, the worst offender being Barbra Streisand, whose version I used to like 20 years ago. Then I found something strange - a delicate piano version, just the tune, in fact sounding more like music minus one, an accompaniment that peeled back the Broadway schmaltz to reveal the iridescence of the chords beneath.

I think Harold's character was a lot like the man in this lovely translucent song from The King and I. Then I got that yearning or craving or whatever-it-is, and because I can't make art I had to start pasting things up, to try to express some of this. I wanted to keep Harold out of it entirely, but I couldn't. If I COULD paint, maybe I never would have needed the head doc in the first place.

Order The Glass Character from:

Thistledown Press 

http://www.thistledownpress.com/html/search/genre/Fiction/the_glass_character_p580.cfm

Amazon.com

http://www.amazon.com/Glass-Character-Margaret-Gunning/dp/1927068886/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1395534131&sr=1-1&keywords=the+glass+character

Chapters/Indigo.ca

http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/the-glass-character/9781927068885-item.html?ikwid=the%2520glass%2520character%2520margaret%2520gunning&ikwsec=Home

Oscars 2013: who pulled off the dress

All this Oscar stuff! I look forward to it, I really do, and I’ve watched it for 30 years or more, but about 45 minutes in I always wonder what it is in me that triggers such self-punishment.

First there was this guy, this Seth somebody, Macfarlane or something. Looked like a used car salesman to me, or a Scientologist going door to door. And at first he’s pretty good, pretty funny, snappy and slightly jabby like you’re supposed to be. Then all of a sudden a GREAT BIG SCREEN slowly lowers down from the ceiling, and on it is. . .

William Shatner.

I have no idea why William Shatner is on this show. I like William Shatner, I admire his chutzpah (and he is Jewish, did you know that? From Montreal), and I do notice how he pops up everywhere, but heaven’s sake, here? It made no sense. Anyway, he went on and on about predictions Macfarlane would be considered the worst host in Oscar history, a statement that was eerily prescient.  Obviously this part was pre-recorded at his own convenience, because in the whole six hours or so, it was the only speech that sounded polished and un-muffed. But, moving on.

I did notice things, and I wrote them down on sticky notes as I watched, and by the end of most of the evening (I bailed at 9:00 o’clock after 3 ½ hours, though they had yet to perform the last, final, agonizing, closing musical number) I had a string of them as long as your arm. I finally had to stick the stickies to the stickies.

Screens kept dropping down. William Shatner? (one sticky).

How many standing ovations? (another sticky: everyone and his dog seemed to be getting one. If everyone is the best, then nobody is the best.)

Old singers. Shirley Bassey knocked my socks off for her sheer style, even if her voice faltered a bit. She nailed that last note, however, and looked elegant and even sexy, owning that stage. (Proving the old song was right: there is nothing you can name that is anything like a Dame.) Babs Streisand was a bit more disappointing, appearing frozen in time except for her very rusty pipes. She’s now a low contralto, and too careful for fear the fragile instrument will break (which it will, and soon). The tribute to Marvin Hamlisch was very touching however, as he did indeed leave us much too soon.

OK, two stickies down. Oops, some of these have things written on the back too: metal dresses.  Everyone was shiny last night, or almost everyone. Like they’d been dipped in molten gold or something. Well, if WE had personal tailors and dressmakers who fitted our gowns exactly to the contours of our bodies. . . no, we wouldn’t look that good, but at least we’d look better than we do now.

I took note of older women trying to pull off the gown, and most can’t. I liked Shirley Bassey’s netting idea: it looks like you’re showing a lot of skin, but you aren’t. It’s a soft-focus thing, and skaters use it to make sure everything stays in place.  I also liked some of the three-quarter sleeves on dresses: us women pushing 60 generally can’t flaunt a lot of upper arm. One older dame, well, 50 isn’t old, is it? – but she wore a white sleeveless gown and loose hair and looked a proper strollop. It just didn’t work. Do something else. Do what Nicole Kidman did, pull back the hair in a twist and let wisps float loose in front, a combination of structured and free. I have spoken.

(A tip, girls – nothing to do with the Oscars – if you’re a certain age, do not wear a low-cut dress with a push-up bra, or décolletage as they call it. Don’t, because even if it looks OK in the mirror, when you sit down to talk to somebody it will all squish up and wrinkle, just like the skin on your throat. Nothing worse than a wrinkled décolletage.)

I have George C. on one sticky. Oh yes, George Clooney! He said he sewed the beads on his girlfriend’s dress, and I hope he did. Later the host threw him a small airline bottle of booze, and he opened it and tossed it back. That George.

People who died. Every year there are a lot of them, and Old Hollywood is pretty much gone now. They always have that pre-recorded tribute, and it’s touching. But I am SO glad they did away with the former practice of having the audience applaud. Some dead people - big stars - got whoops and cheers (a standing ovation?), some just a smattering, and a lot of them dead silence because they were just “connected to the industry” or something, adapted the screenplay for Death of a Salesman or some other such nonsense and really weren’t important, it’s not like anyone ever heard of them.

WHAT was up with Renee Zellweger? Thank God she had two or three other presenters with her. My God! She couldn’t read. She has always been oddly squinty-eyed, but now she looked bizarre, and when she turned sideways her face sort of disappeared like it had been pushed in. Was she on something, just put in eye drops, or what? Richard Gere was sort of holding her up as she swayed (not that I would mind that), and when he showed her the card with the winner on it and said, “You take this one", she tilted her head very oddly and squinted her eyes almost shut and sort of pushed the card away. The next one was even stranger, because it was her turn to read the winner and instead she frankly handed the card off to someone else, Queen Latifah I think, who can still see. Has illiteracy struck her at a mature age? I wonder what has happened to Miss You-Had -Me-At-Hello.

That little black girl didn’t win. Good, because nobody can pronounce her name anyway, and we don’t need another Lindsay Lohan. If she wants to act, let her come back in 15 years.

Ang Lee is such a surprise, so humble and quiet. What a genius, responsible for a huge variety of movies that I can’t remember right now, but I’ll look them up. He can do anything, it seems, even be consistent. I won’t see Life of Pi, having suffered through the book, but I’m sure it’s good.

I was genuinely touched when the ethereal Daniel Day-Lewis won for Lincoln, and his wife leaped up and wouldn’t let go of his hand. I don’t know where else to put this, but there was a hideous Lincoln joke from Macfarlane that got a big laugh: "The actor who really got inside Lincoln's head was John Wilkes Booth."  It prompted a groan at first, but then he did some sort of "what? What? Did I say something?" and everyone roared with laughter. I know human beings are herd animals and will go along with just about anything (Hitler comes to mind), but this just seemed extreme.

But why was I so surprised? This is the States! The Vice President is running around telling everyone to go out and buy a shotgun! Hey, Lincoln couldn’t have been killed with a pea shooter, could he?

A musical mystery. There were some scenes shown from a foreign film called Amour, about an old couple: it looked like the wife was terminally ill and the husband was trying to help her die. The piano music however just mesmerized me because I had heard it before, and had no idea who wrote it. I finally decided it must be Schumann. Ransacked my CD collection and found very little Schumann on piano, but poked through another CD with SCHUBERT on it and hit pay dirt. Now I can find it on YouTube: the internet is kind. (It was the Impromptu #3 in G Flat Minor, in case you want to hear it yourself.)

And finally, as they say on Inside Edition: when they dropped another screen down from fairyland with Michelle Obama on it, I thought: Fixed. Rigged. Best Picture HAS to be Lincoln, but it was that other one, that – what’s it called anyway? Argot? Ingot? But I don’t watch this thing for the movies.

Life's candy, and the sun's a ball of buddah

Eye on the target and wham,

One shot, one gun-shot, and BAM -

Hm. Well, it isn't Mr. Arnstein I'm after, but something infinitely more elusive and devious (and it plays a mean game of poker).

I want to get published again. I need to get published again. I have three books written, all finished and ready to go. Three. All are publishable, as far as I am concerned. But has anyone ever seen them?

That would be a big "no".

People have weird ideas about being published. "Must cost quite a lot, I'd imagine. Are you going to take out a loan?" "Is your book going to be on the bestseller list?" "Don't writers all help each other get published - I mean, kind of like one big artist's colony?" Yeah, like I'm going to tell all my sneaky colleagues how to get published so their nasty little novel can kick MY novel's ass!

It isn't at all what you think.

When my dream came true, after thirty years of pining and longing and bloody hard work, it came true the same way it does for maybe 85 or 90% of writers. There was one big popping flare of fireworks, then fast-fading embers raining down, then . . .

nothing.

It didn't matter how good the reviews were (stuff like "fiction at its finest "- no kidding). They meant nothing. I was supposed to run all over the country on my own dime and try to drum up interest. But I also learned that readings and posters and web sites and all that shit made no difference at all.

So what does make a difference? Something called "buzz". If a novel is "buzzy", it automatically has tons of readers right out of the starting gate.

Buzz is like sex. No one tells you what it's all about, or how to get it. You just sort of fumble around, and fail most of the time. And when the novel fails to sell, guess who gets the blame? Mr. Agent? Ms. Publisher? Don't make me laugh!

I can't stop writing, which I guess means something, good or bad. I have kept writing and kept writing through the most hideous, soul-destroying crises of my life. I now have two novels and a book of poems, all of which I feel deserve publication. I WANT SOMEONE TO READ THEM, GODDAMN IT!

In many people's minds, this is sheer ego. "Oh, isn't writing its own reward? Can't you just do it for self-expression?" (Or, worse, "leave it for your children").

No one expects a concert pianist (or a gymnast, for that matter) to play in an empty hall, but we writers are seen as crass and egotistical if we want someone to look at what we've slaved over for years. Stories must be TOLD, not chucked into a drawer. An untold story isn't even a story.

So, Mr. Arnstein, you big galoot, you mustachio'd rat fink, I'm pursuing you once again. Like Barbra Streisand in that ridiculous sailor suit , it's one roll for the whole shebang.

Hey, all you agents, pundits, arbiters of literary taste - get ready for me, love, 'cause I'm a comer - so even if this fantasy-trip is a bummer -

NOBODY

No, NOBODY
Is gonna

rain

on

myyyyy

paaaaaa

(rrrrrrrr)

rrrAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAYD-UH!