Showing posts with label magic. Show all posts
Showing posts with label magic. Show all posts
Thursday, April 13, 2017
Monday, December 12, 2016
AWESOME images of Christmas!
Boy did it take me a long time to make this! I had to assemble some of my favorite Christmas images, but then the gif program didn't want to accept them, or even acknowledge them. They seemed to have disappeared in a puff of smoke. I kept working at it, found a better gif site (they are everywhere now), and lo! Here they are. These are things that remind me of the comfort, coziness and awe of the season. The Christmas squirrel is especially meaningful, reminding me of the squirrel in my favorite Christmas movie, National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. Enjoy! (You know as well as I do that the "awesome" is clickbait.)
Thursday, November 3, 2016
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
Sunday, April 1, 2012
The church at the corner of Gloria and Lloyd
I have a relationship with the unknown.
I mean the unknown unknown. I mean the what-the-hell-is-this, why am I experiencing all these strange coincidences (also known as "God's way of remaining anonymous"), all these strange happenings and feelings that make me wonder if there is indeed an Other Side.
My most laden experience, the one producing the richest vibrations, has been with Harold Lloyd. Since I began to research his life for my novel The Glass Character (just lately accepted for publication, to my delight), or even before that, I felt a weird sort of resonance with him. It reminded me of one of his funniest early films, Haunted Spooks, in which his thick black hair stands on end (a running gag created with electric current - I don't know how he survived it) when he sees a flour-covered little black kid running around like a baby ghost.
I suppose I should start at the beginning and recount the whole thing, all my experiences from early childhood, but I'd be here all day so I can only talk about last week., or at least the last few years. And that feeling, that feeling that "someone" is there, almost always on my left side, outside my body, in a sort of person-shaped bubble. Does he say anything? Not really, but I feel his presence or vibes or whatever-it-is I feel about people before I even see them.
In these visitations, he's always the older Harold, the never-mellowed Harold who remained fiercely interested in life, in women, and in a thousand different activities, some charitable, some just plain weird (such as taking something like half a millon 3D photos of naked women and paying them $50 each, which often included sex). But when I feel a presence like this - and believe me, I realize that this could be my imagination - it's pure essence, as if I am sipping the person through a straw.
So what was/is Harold like? Hard to explain. A complex man who seemed simple, even thought of himself as simple. Was he interested in this sort of thing, in the other world? He was too practical for that, a Midwestern boy raised and baptised in fundamentalist Christianity in the Bible belt. And yet, and yet.
I don't know much about masonic orders or Shriners or any of that stuff, except that it involves funny hats and go-carts. It's mainly, as I see it, benevolent, but there are always rumors. Not only was Harold involved: he rose through the ranks of masonry (if that's what it's called) all the way to Imperial Potentate of the Shriners: and he looked decidedly un-silly in that hat.
But there are other things apart from Harold Lloyd, lots of things, hard to describe. Not just knowing when the phone will ring, but who is on the other end and (this is the signifcant part) what they are going to say. "Guessing" the name of my newborn niece before anyone told me. I'm not a psychic, don't get me wrong, and most people who call themselves psychics vastly overestimate their abilities (or are outright frauds, like that sickening, grating Long Island Medium on TLC, the biggest display of phony producer-driven "magic" I've ever had the misfortune to half-see before I bailed).
There's another part of it however. Though we're out of touch now, I was once close friends with a professional spiritualist medium, a university professor with two masters' degrees and a PhD in anthropology. I saw him perform his mediumship in a spiritualist church, a rapid blur of connected images that, to be honest, didn't make much sense to me, though the audience was quick to pick up meanings that may or may not have been there.
Then there was my violin teacher, a psychic healer steeped in the ancient, spooky traditions of Eastern European mysticism. This is strange territory and seems to tap in to things like werewolves and homunculi. He did healing on me, and it felt good, but I wonder now if it was really as transformative as it was supposed to be. He was a loving figure however, benevolent and eager to help people, so I was never afraid of him or of his unusual ministrations. And yet, and yet, when I experienced a huge personal crisis in 2005, he wasn't there for me, and later on he accused me of abandoning him. This hurt me more than I can say.
I ran into a bulwark of belief that has always confounded me. Everything has to be a "lesson", everything has to happen for a reason, even if in truth things are just one big appalling blob of adversity. This is a subtle way, I can't help but feel, of saying "it's your fault", or, at very least, "you needed the lesson." I won't even go into how inhuman this belief system is for people who have lost a child or otherwise experienced nearly-unbearable grief.
Are psychics and mediums and the like really in touch with some other dimension? Am *I* sometimes in touch, or is my imagination making my scalp prickle like Harold? I've seen auras, or certainly sensed them. No matter how phony someone's public act, I see through it in two seconds. This may just be the human sense that gives us a nose for these things, a survival skill.
And yet.
They say there are no coincidences, but the Lloyd synchronicity, which at one point was so thick I was getting four or five examples a day, seemed to be smearing butter all over my skepticism. I watched a little movie, a British comedy called The Wrong Box, and saw four examples of Lloyd - maybe five - in the credits, the names of the actors, the Tontine list which was the backbone of the whole thing. Face it, Lloyd is just not that common a name. Another time we were driving along the highway to somewhere and bisecting it was a road called Lloyd Avenue.
"That's stupid," I said to my husband. "There can't be a road just sitting there in the middle of nowhere. And especially not a Lloyd Avenue."
But then came the topper. I turned my head to the right and saw a huge brick building, also just sitting there, butted right up against the busy highway, totally out of place. I looked at the sign and "kvelled": it said Gloria Evangelical Temple.
Gloria was the name of Harold's first child. And there was her temple, right at the corner of Gloria and Lloyd.
Another time I was watching an old Twilight Zone episode and looked at the credits and saw the name Suzanne Lloyd. That's the name of Harold's granddaughter, now CEO of Harold Lloyd Entertainment. It wasn't her, of course, but it was someone with the same name.
Just a coincidence? I! Don't! Think! So!
Things don't levitate by themselves or rise in the air, at least not so far, but reality is sometimes a weird mobius strip playing endlessly and curving back on itself. Harold was an accomplished professional magician from boyhood (made money off it as a kid), even after he lost half his right hand in an accident. He could make things disappear, then reappear with an enigmatic smile.
There were the three gold beads. A stupid story, really, but I've come this far, so I'll tell it anyway. I had a necklace made of tiny figures that were meant to represent my four grandchildren, and the beads were used as spacers. I had never owned anything like them. When I decided to mount the figures on a gold hoop earring and put it on a chain, something happened. One of the beads was missing. It just vanished. I don't remember dropping it. I got down on my hands and knees - it was doubtful I'd be able to match these, so I needed it back badly - and stayed down there a long time, going over every fibre of the rug.
Then I vacuumed the entire surface of the bedroom, sifting through all the dirt and fibres, then vacuumed again. Nothing.
I had to give up and try to find something else to use as spacers, but as so often happens in cases like this, I forgot about it and put the whole thing away.
Months went by, and though I was still pretty obsessed with Harold, I was shifting a bit, starting to move on. I was in my walk-in closet at the far end of the bedroom, as far from my jewellery case as possible. I felt something on the bottom of my foot.
It was the gold bead!
Seemed weird. Yes, weird, but. . .OK, somehow it got transported over there, on my foot? But wouldn't I feel it?
I went to put the bead back with all the other necklace material.
Wait a minute.
There was only one gold bead.
Even including the newly-found bead, I still had only two. I felt this phantom laughter, this twitting of my seriousness, this slightly nasty magician's satisfaction (for I have a theory that magicians are a little nasty, which is why I don't enjoy watching them perform) that seemed to say Harold was toying with me.
Fine then! I did it again! I put the bead back! I forgot about it! It was over, as far as I was concerned, and I could forget about the whole thing.
Months went by. The carpet was vacuumed several more times, and I obsessively checked in all the globs of filthy fluff for the lost bead. Nothing.
Then one day, getting dressed, just minding my own business, I saw something in the middle of the room, on the other side of the bed from my jewel case.
It shone a little. Jesus, no, it couldn't be!
I thought to myself: if I have only one bead in that case I will throw this sucker out the window, even get rid of the whole necklace. I opened the case and sighed to find there were two. My set of three was now restored.
Months went by. . . no, weeks I guess, when I was changing the lightbulb on a lamp in the other corner of the bedroom (I don't need to tell you how far away from the case). Then I felt something small and cold and hard under my foot.
For some obscure reason Harold wanted me to have four. A good trick on me. Things can't materialize out of nowhere, can they? But what about the loaves and fishes? Were they merely prestidigitation, or something infinitely more mysterious and profound?
I have a relationship with the unknown. I do not understand it and don't even want to go there, most of the time. Like a mirage, it can disappear if you pursue it. You see it in your peripheral vision, but when you turn your head. . .
When you turn your head, those three gold beads might just dematerialize, un-be, as they surely once were. As we surely all were, before we "were". And wherever that strange place is, there is no stopping us: we are all heading back there. Who knows when.
Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book
It took me years to write, will you take a look
Order The Glass Character from:
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA
Barnes & Noble
Thistledown Press
Saturday, February 12, 2011
I don't understand this at all: Harold Lloyd synchronicity
When I started this blog some months ago, I had a sort-of theme in mind.
I wanted it to be basically an ad for my fiction, so maybe, just maybe, somebody-out-there might see it and take some sort of an interest.
I mean, somebody who might be able to help.
This didn't happen. Instead, I became more close-mouthed than ever about the subject of my latest (unpublished) novel, The Glass Character, a fictionalized account of the life and times of silent screen comedian Harold Lloyd.
You know: that Harold Lloyd. The ordinary fellow, looking a little geeky in his hornrimmed glasses, who ended up doing daredevil stunts such as hanging off the hands of a huge clock 20 stories up.
I can't get into the complex, often paradoxical life of Lloyd right now. Instead, I want to write about some (many!) examples of synchronicity I've experienced since I began to research and write about this man a couple of years ago.
Synchronicity being, as I understand it, coincidences that don't seem like coincidences because of their existential/emotional significance. Or, in this case, sheer numbers.
It started small. I'd see the name Lloyd on a street sign, on the side of a truck or train, on a realtor's sign, in movie credits, in novels, in magazine pieces, in - well, it could be anywhere.
This escalated over time. It became routine to get at least one Lloyd-sighting somewhere, every day. I mean, every day. Sometimes, there were two or three.
"Oh, you're just noticing it because that's what you're writing about," my friend claimed. Ahhhh, maybe. But when I watched an odd little British comedy called The Wrong Box, I counted, not one, not two, not three. . .
There were five references to the name Lloyd, in the credits (2), in the cast (2), and even in a list, the Tontine, which was the pivotal subject of the movie. When people got bumped off, their name was crossed off the list. One of those names was Lloyd.
Would it surprise you if I said I am still getting this, nearly two years later? The name Lloyd jumps out at me from a newspaper article (but never when I am looking for it!), a doctor's sign, a DOG'S name (yes, a dog!), or just about anywhere else. And in Googling "Lloyd synchronicity", I had to give up after only a few examples.
One blogger kept encountering the name Frank Lloyd Wright, over and over and over again. A Kathrine Lloyd had a display of art prints called Synchronicity. Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer, a psychiatrist, contributed to a paper on synchronicity, a subject both acknowledged and discredited in the psychiatric realm. (Nobody wants to look that crazy, so everyone thinks they're the only one.) And so on, and on, and on, probably into the hundreds, if not the thousands.
Maybe I should tell you about the gold beads, or maybe I shouldn't, because I can't guarantee I didn't misinterpret this. Along with being a serious painter, dog breeder, amateur scientist, photographer, and Imperial Potentate of the Shriners, Harold Lloyd was a master magician, adept at sleight-of-hand (and this in spite of the fact that he lost the thumb, index finger and half the palm of his right hand in an accident early in his career). He made things appear. He made things disappear, then appear again. The coin behind your ear, or -
OK. Things started to disappear, but only in a certain spot in the house. It was in the centre of the bedroom upstairs. Watches went away. Rings. Gold pens. It was weird.
Then came the gold beads. Or, rather, the one. I have a necklace with four tiny charms, each representing one grandchild. I had these mounted on a gold hoop earring, and for some reason I wanted to unfasten it, perhaps to change the order of the charms.
The four were separated by small gold beads.
I unfastened the hoop, and, ta-poinggggg. One of the gold beads shot across the room and disappeared.
I was plenty miffed. I crawled all over the bedroom floor on my hands and knees. No gold bead. Vacuumed and vacuumed, then searched the gritty, fuzzy contents. No gold bead.
It maddened me. I looked for another gold bead, and could not find one just like it.
So I sort of gave up. Months went by. Maybe a year. I was walking around in my bare feet in the opposite side of the bedroom from the ta-poinggggg, then felt something sticking on the sole of my foot.
"Aha!" I cried. "Lloyd, you've done it again!"
I put the gold bead into a tiny drawer in my jewellery box.
More time went by, maybe months. I was walking barefoot in another part of the bedroom. I felt something stuck to the bottom of my foot.
Oh no.
Maybe, somehow, had the gold bead jumped out of the drawer? Or what? I knew I didn't have another one. I had already given up and replaced all the beads with shitty-looking ones, and glued the hoop shut. No more ta-poingggggs for me.
So I put the bead in the drawer with the other one. But you're not going to believe what happened after that.
I now have three perfect gold beads in the drawer. Does this have anything to do with the fact that the rather odd, not-terribly-common name Lloyd keeps popping up every day, sometimes two or three different times in different contexts?
What does it all mean? Lloyd always looks to me as if it spells something backwards. It almost spells "dolly".
It maddens me, because right now I have no prospects at all. I think The Glass Character is the best thing I've ever written, and at the moment it looks like it will die on the vine because agents and publishers won't even read my covering letter before firing it back at me with a (quite literal) rubber-stamped rejection that makes form letters look respectful.
Harold, either lay off, or help me here! I have enjoyed your presence immensely, but I can't believe it has no other purpose than to provide an odd but enjoyable experience, the kind you wouldn't want to relate at a psychiatric conference.
After all. . . they might think you're crazy.
Wednesday, November 3, 2010
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