So you want to be a blogger

OK, so I've wanted to write about this for a long time. Then I'd say, wait a minute, what do you know about it? Then I'd come to the conclusion: that depends.

Depends on whether the worth of this blog is measured in "views", shares, likes, followers, etc. or merely the daily fulfillment of writing it.

When I started keeping this blog in 2010, I think my main goal was to get a contract for my novel The Glass Character. And after something like 3 years of solid effort, I did, though I don't think it had anything to do with the blog.

What do I know from blogging? Nothing. I used the simplest template I could find and changed the header many times, even changing the title of it when the book finally came out.

So it failed in its first purpose. What is its raison-d'etre now, that I keep on with it with such ardor? I think there are two parts to it. In my case, I made a solemn vow, not unlike getting married (and I've been married 42 years - gasp! - so I think I know something about that), that I would write whatever the hell I wanted to write, just whatever topic struck my fancy. There would be no "shoulds". There would be no "musts". There would be no "popular" topics. It was pretty much wide open. I did delete a few which were too whiny or too personal. But I allowed myself the option of short fiction, lots of photos, Blingees, videos, and ESPECIALLY (my favorite form of illustrations) gifs.

I love gifs because they are a movie in a handful of seconds. If you use archival material, e. g. those very rare George Gershwin home movies, you can discover a lot about the subject. In these snippets, Gershwin hauls a little dog up by the scruff of the neck, and puts his hands around a woman's neck as if he is about to "playfully" throttle her. I could not get dates or a context for these, but made gifs of them because they fascinated me.

There is hardly any film of Gershwin, only a couple of bits of him performing, and those frustratingly brief private movies. Mostly he was shooting them, as in this few seconds of the one-of-a-kind genius Oscar Levant. One wonders why he at least didn't make some recordings of his piano playing, which was said to be gaspingly, even jaw-droppingly brilliant. Instead, he'd play in the background at parties with (actual guest list) Cole Porter, Otto Klemperer, Frank Capra, Jimmy Stewart, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, and (yes, even) Oscar Levant, standing around smoking, drinking champagne and gabbing. Probably no one really paid any attention.

Slippery as an eel, Gershwin was, really unknowable, so if I can just get a ten-second gif of him at the piano, and if I notice something new on tenth or twentieth viewing, so much the better.

So why Gershwin? He is my current happy obsession. I say happy because I've never enjoyed my obsessions more. Information is at my fingertips, and I can write anything I like, pro or con. So the blog tends to leap from one mad topic to another, but not before it has been thoroughly macerated and giffinized.

Some readers (if there are any) seem to believe that the overbalance of gifs on my blog trivializes it, makes it cartoonish, especially since old cartoons are my favorite subject (along with TV ads from the '40s and '50s). Well, too bad, I love gifs, and like everything else I am good at, they go unsung. Making them is really not that easy - try it some time.

What else? The other pledge, commitment, whatever, along with writing about anything that pleases me and/or makes me angry enough to HAVE to write, is to keep it up. Nothing irritates me more than to discover a really fine blog and to notice that the last post is dated 2011. There is such an "I-lost-interest" feeling about it, a lack of dedication. I think if you're going to keep one of these, you need to keep it, like tending a garden.

About views: I seem to average anywhere between five and (my all-time high) 99,085 - no kidding, I just checked it, it's nearly 100,000! - for a post called I See Dead People: Victorian Post-Mortem Photography. People are still reading this thing, because the number of views continues to rise. Fifteen more views and I'll be at 100,000! How is this? Hell if I know, but I did find a link to it on someone else's blog, a very popular one, I would imagine. I've had a few in the ten-thousand-ish range (Some Cats Know, which is really just a bunch of cat pictures) and more in the hundreds. But for the most part, I don't look.

About repeats. Yes. I do them. I do them because I have a very small number of followers. I do them because in no way, shape or form do I expect people to read this blog every day, or even every week or every month. Even I don't remember much about these repeats. I pick ones that I think are good, ones that I especially like.

Why do I do this? If hardly anyone reads it, why do I bother? I need it. It's like a diary, yet it isn't, because I have to keep most of the personal stuff out of it. The "blogger" develops a certain persona over time, and if that persona is enjoyable to inhabit, then it's fun and gratifying to keep a blog. Though there are topics I return to again and again (I mention "celluloid, Harold Lloyd and me" under the title, and old film/photos/film history/ads/cartoons do form a sort of nucleus for the other mad stuff going on), I don't restrict myself to one subject. It would bore the piss out of me, that's why. And if I am bored, you, gentle reader, will be too.

So I'm a blogger. I don't think it has made one iota of difference to my book sales, because book sales just don't stick to me. It's all very  flukey, like that one post that got 100,000 views, when many of the others (much better ones, in my view) get maybe 5 (four of them from me, when I go back to edit them).

So. You want to be a blogger? Go ahead, just make sure you enjoy it, follow your nose, don't be afraid to be quirky, don't pay much attention to views (even though the entire internet seems to revolve around numbers and popularity), and - this last one is the most important - KEEP IT UP. Nobody wants to find an absolutely wonderful, stimulating blog that ran out of steam in 2009.

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More cat pictures

Mia cuddling up in her new blanket. This was a rush job - I did it in 2 1/2 days! Grandma's blanket magic seems to cross the species border.

I think I'm going to stop writing, stop blogging, or else just give the blog over to cute cat pictures, which get more views than anything. Maybe they'll make a movie out of it. Margaret's Cute Cat Blog: The Motion Picture!

Mia Blingee shot. Miawwwww.

HERE SHE IS: the Mystery Kitten!

 

A new kitten in the family is a very big event around here. Mia is my new grandcat, kitty of my daughter's family. Not long ago they mourned the passing of Oscar, catriarch of the family for some 13 years.

And then along came Mia! Mia and I have yet to meet, but I've knitted her a special blanket (a rush job, I did it in three days) and made her a toy out of one of my famous jujus. Today's the day I see her for the first time.

Caitlin and Ryan are pleased as can be!

So's Mia. Miaaawwwwww!

Bonus Mia Blingee!

Bonus-bonus Mia Facebook profile picture!

Bonus-bonus-bonus Mia Facebook cover!

Amen, amen, amen, and hallelujah.

Just another eggplant

I have never been able to cook eggplant. My mother knew. She fried it, in the way people fried things then, in a lot of hot bubbling Crisco, and she fried it very slowly. The breading would become very dense and crisp from concentrated juices, and the middle was almost like a custard, smooth and jelly-like, with that salty-sweet punky eggplant taste and the slippery texture of the seeds.

Nor can I find it duplicated in a restaurant, though the occasional Greek place has a nice moussaka with a creamy, almost gelatinous texture. But enough.

I've posted before about how I have a thing for cars. Well, no. I hate them. I don't even drive, which is yet more evidence of my freakishness. I hate what cars have done to the environment and believe they are probably about 75% responsible for the planet's impending doom. Nobody thinks about this, but I do.

And yet.

It was years ago, a some-enchanted-evening moment when I saw this car, not exactly the one pictured but of similar shape and vintage. It was eggplant-and-cream, two-toned, with a lot of chrome in between.  It swooshed along elegantly as if driven along by some liveried chauffeur in the 1940s. And something happened to me then: I was transfixed. It was erotic, nothing more or less. I was electrified. Had that car been anywhere near me, I would have attached myself to the roof and held on for dear life while it accelerated madly and blew through red lights. I would have slid down that hunched, crouched back, the back with no wheels, tensed and animal-like. I would have wrapped myself around those balloon-like fenders, so blown-up that they're ready to explode like in that obscene Popeye cartoon where the tire blows up. 

The creature swanned around, did one more turn around the strip mall (for my benefit, no doubt), then disappeared. It was likely going to be displayed in a car show somewhere. I was not yet going to car shows - I didn't "know", not the way I know now. Now I go, and I look for that car, which according to Google is a 1940 Mercury Westergard custom. I may never find it, but I keep on looking. In spite of what everybody seems to think about me, I have always been the most wretched kind of optimist.

Elmer the Safety Elephant!

This was one of those late-night, treasure-trove finds that kind of made my head spin. It was a site of dozens and dozens of old (I mean OLD) photos of Kent County landmarks, especially schools in Chatham. I've already posted many pictures of McKeough School, a formidable-looking old brick building built in about 1906 that looks like something out of the Addams Family. But these shots were miraculous: it's Elmer the Safety Elephant!

Us kids eagerly looked forward to Elmer's visit every year. We were admonished to learn the "seven safety rules" (and I can only remember a few: look both ways before you cross the street; keep out from between parked cars; always carry something white at night). Then there was the Elmer the Safety Elephant anthem (Safety First) which is starting to make all this sound like the Hitler Youth or something. "Here's what Elmer has to say/On the streets you do not play. . . "

These photos were milky and bleary when I first uploaded them. They had the messy black border of an old Polaroid, the kind where you zip off a plastic cover with a sort of tar-like caustic substance on it. They were labelled with a white grease pencil. I decided to see if I could clean them up. I easily cropped them (and just now I realize that these are all scans, and would lose quality automatically), then hit the restore button. Oh boy! I was there again, one of those little tow-headed kids looking on in awe, standing in an exact straight line. Serried ranks.

I realize now that Elmer has huge blue eyes with lashes, making me think he's more of an Elephantina or Elephette. I only remembered the vast trunk, and the ears (and there was an awful rumor going on in about Grade 6 that Elmer's ear fell off, a real emergency when he was on his way to a visitation with the kids. The whole thing sounds like an urban legend to me.

I believe this is my Grade 6 class from Queen Elizabeth II School, the second school I attended. I recognize several of the teachers. I was given a battery of tests, I swear I remember this, in kindergarten, and I even remember a couple of the questions. I was asked to count to a hundred, and though I dried up at 29, the helpful teacher asked, "So what comes after the 20s?" "30s." "And what comes after the 30s?" (etc.) I got them all right. Then I was given a photo of an open field. "You've lost your wallet in this field. How would you go about finding it?" I did a sort of mazelike pattern from the outside in, something I frankly stole from my brother, but it passed.

So I began to take two grades in one year. In kid parlance, I "skipped". I was being prepared for a special, elitist Grade 5, the "Major Work Class" at QEII. This was one of those infamous '60s experiments in education in which bright kids all learned at their own pace, with little or no curriculum.

I had walked to McKeough, and I will never forget that blissful 10 or 15 minutes, which now seems like paradise. Suddenly I had to commute, a very long bus ride all the way across town. I immortalized our hapless teacher, Mr. Service, in my second novel Mallory: we drove him to a nervous breakdown by mid-term, and he had to be replaced. We kids had been told we were smart one too many times, and were beginning to turn into a sort of Smart Kids' Mafia. 

I didn't keep photos of QEII, though they exist, along with Chatham Collegiate (my high school) and The Pines Ursuline college, a nunnery where I took violin lessons. Talk about altogether ooky.

Didn't keep them because, except for the photo of my Grade 6 teachers, they don't especially interest me or twig any strong memories. They're just bland middle-of-the-road 1930s-built architecture, though CCI may be older than that.

Good to know they are there, however. Apparently, somebody still cares.

POST-BLOG OBSERVATIONS. Mostly the footwear. I notice many of the little girls in the front row are wearing their best shoes, Mary Janes with white knee socks. But I also notice argyle socks, and even saddle shoes, which I have always loved (but never owned, though I did have penny loafers in Junior High). I do remember being told to "dress up for Elmer", picking my Sunday School outfit which was unusual for a school day, my parents having received a notice that the distinguished elephant would be making his yearly appearance. When you think about it, putting your best clothes on for the benefit of a giant papier-mache head is a pretty bizarre concept, but no more bizarre than all the other things that happened at McKeough.

And where are all the black kids? Integration hadn't happened yet. By high school, that had changed. But I didn't find out until years after high school that Chatham was one of the termination points of the Underground Railroad, providing safe haven for runaway slaves before and during the Civil War. This should have been a point of pride, but it wasn't mentioned in school, not even once, in spite of Chatham's higher-than-average black population. My mother found out about it from a history book, not another person. I did sort of notice how many black kids there were, but I just figured it was a Windsor-Detroit thing (and by the late '60s, we DID know a lot about the Motown scene). Now I know that shameful and deliberate historical omission is as much a part of Southwestern Ontario history as those formidable old brick buildings.

Notice all the blonde heads! Nothing ethnic is going on here at all.

Though it isn't easy to make out in this photo, the kids faces are lit up with glee. Their body postures are full of eagerness and excitement. This Elmer visitation, like the McKeough School Picnic with the burning schoolhouse firecracker set off at the very end, is one of the highlights of their year, even though they come away from it with nothing except a bunch of safety rules.

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Who is the MYSTERY KITTEN?

 

Bu-sy day, bu-sy day, bu-sy day

Porgy and Bess: Gershwin's melodramatic trash

You know, it ain't that much different from high school. Maybe what happens there is what happens always. You have a great idea, nobody notices, or you're even seen as a freak. I look at my "views" and it's pathetic, because everybody else I know who keeps a blog has hundreds of views a day. I have almost none. It's not supposed to matter, and if I push it out my mind (hard, and each day), maybe it doesn't.

But am I putting anything out there at all that is of any use to anyone, besides me?  If I ever dare ask anyone, they tell me I'm not hustling enough or writing the kinds of things people want to read. I'm making the dire mistake of expressing my feelings and views rather than bartering: I will praise your work, not because it's any good but so that YOU will praise MINE, and thus we can reflexively call each other good writers (whether we've even read each other's stuff or not) and thus drum up sales. That is how it is done, and I'm not doing it, so once more I am fatally out of step. After writing "real" reviews for what now seems like a dismal and futile 30 years, it's dismaying, to say the least. And I won't do it, and so, the results, which I must live with. 

What got me going on all this? George Gershwin. Lately I have been obsessed with his death, which is too bad because it wasn't representative of his boyish, buoyant life. It was an awful way to end it, suffering alone from a horrible condition that everyone seemed to think was a form of attention-getting. He had cancer of the brain, which is not a condition given to malingerers.

And even Porgy and Bess - an opera that STILL creates controversy whenever it is produced anywhere, because nobody seems to be able to square three white guys writing a masterful opera about poor blacks in the South - he was trashed for it, though that didn't keep the crowds away.

I listened to this recording from 1935 today and just caved in, collapsed in tears. I don't know what it is. At first it was the sheer beauty and sheen of the voices, and the way they were being used; then it was the sense of pledging, of vows dearly made and nearly kept. There are aspects of music that can never be put into words, of course. Gershwin was speaking something never spoken before, in a language he invented as he went along. We notice the freshness, vitality, but also a profound sadness, and yes, a Hebraic quality that caused Oscar Levant to label it "the best Jewish opera ever written". You can layer the two on top of each other and see a lot of overlap, the core of it being the pain of exile.

All this takes me to an incredible, even jaw-dropping review in a new book I have on Gershwin. Vergil Thomson was a composer himself, a failed one who wrote scores for industrial films. One year he made $300 from composing, which is $300 more than I ever earn, let me tell you. Anyway, the review - I have to transcribe it out of the book here, but I'm going to take a crack at it, not just because it makes me feel better, but - because it makes me feel better.

"One can see, through Porgy, that Gershwin has not and never did have any power of sustained musical development. . . The material is straight from the melting pot. At best it is a piquant but highly unsavory stirring-up together of Israel, Africa and the Gaelic Isles. . . His lack of understanding of all the major problems of form. of continuity, and of serious or direct musical expression is not surprising in view of the impurity of his musical sources and his frank acceptance of the same. . . It is clear, by now, that Gershwin hasn't learned the business of being a serious composer, which one has always gathered to be the business of he wanted to learn. . .His efforts at recitative are as ineffective as anything I've heard. . . I do not like fake folklore, nor fidgety accompaniments, nor bittersweet harmony, nor six-part choruses, nor plum-pudding orchestration." 

Other choice words from critics included "tripe", "lamp-black Negroisms", and "melodramatic trash", and there were even anti-semitic references to "gefilte fish". Oscar Levant muttered during the intermission, "It's a right step in the wrong direction."

Dying seems to be a good career move for many. Only a couple of years after this recording was made, Gershwin's head exploded and he was gone. Only then did everyone begin to sing his praises, to recognize his greatness. Bickering over Porgy goes on even today, and maybe it's a good thing - keeps the edge on it, keeps people talking. Can three white guys write an opera full of black stereotypes and get away with it? Only if they're brilliant enough to see beyond race and social standing, rip off the veils of pretension to find the human souls beneath. These aren't pretty people, but neither are the thugs and prostitutes of Mahagonny.  They aren't there to prove a point, but to sing their lives, to let us hear. 

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Let's Talk: why we need it so badly

http://www.ctvnews.ca/health/lets-talk

There's a reason I post this link today.

Though it has gotten a certain amount of coverage by the mainstream press, mostly telling lame versions of "the clown story" ("But doctor, I AM Pagliacci!"), Let's Talk (sponsored, let's not forget, by Bell) is always well down on the list, because mental health simply isn't news. The fact we're just beginning to "talk", "break the stigma", etc. (or "reduce" the stigma, as it's usually expressed) in 2015 horrifies me. The fact that we have to set aside a day for it (but only one - let's not get carried away here) is discouraging, but it's better than nothing, I suppose. But I think we still have an Amadeus-cage/snake pit/cuckoo's nest mentality, or at least scorn, contempt and mortified silence.

I don't know what I'm going to do about all this, so I'll post this excellent link to many good videos, then re-run a piece that it cost me something to write.  Will it do any good? Will anyone even see it?

Let's not "reduce" the stigma: let's throw it out!

Every day, and in every way, I am hearing a message. And it's not a bad message, in and of itself. 

It's building, in fact, in intensity and clarity, and in some ways I like to hear it.

It's about mental illness, a state I've always thought is mis-named: yes, I guess it's "mental" (though not in the same class as the epithet, "You're totally mental"), but when you call it mental illness, it's forever and always associated with and even attached to a state of illness. You're either ill or you're well; they're mutually exclusive, aren't they?

So the name itself is problematic to me. It seems to nail people into their condition. Worse than that, nobody even notices. "Mentally ill" is definitely preferable to "psycho", "nut case", "fucking lunatic", and the list goes on (and on, and on, as if it doesn't really matter what we call them). But it's still inadequate.

There's something else going on that people think is totally positive, even wonderful, showing that they're truly "tolerant" even of people who seem to dwell on the bottom rung of society. Everywhere I look, there are signs saying, "Let's reduce the stigma about mental illness."

Note they say "reduce", not banish. It's as if society realizes that getting rid of it is just beyond the realm of possibility. Let's not hope for miracles, let's settle for feeling a bit better about ourselves for not calling them awful names and excluding them from everything.

I hate stigma. I hate it because it's an ugly word, and if you juxtapose it with any other word, it makes that word ugly too. "Let's reduce the hopelessness" might be more honest. "Let's reduce the ostracism, the hostility, the contempt." "Stigma" isn't used very much any more, in fact I can't think of any other group of people it is so consistently attached to. Even awful conditions (supposedly) like alcoholism and drug abuse aren't "stigmatized" any more. Being gay isn't either. Why? Compassion and understanding are beginning to dissolve the ugly term, detach it and throw it away. 

"Let's reduce the stigma" doesn't help because it's miserable. It's the old "you don't look fat" thing (hey, who said I looked fat? Who brought the subject up?). Much could be gained by pulling the plug on this intractibly negative term. Reducing the stigma is spiritually stingy and only calls attention to the stigma.  

So what's the opposite of "stigmatized"?  Accepted, welcomed, fully employed, creative, productive, loved? Would it be such a stretch to focus our energies on these things, replacing the 'poor soul" attitude that prevails?

But so far, the stifling box of stigma remains, perhaps somewhat better than hatred or fear, but not much. Twenty years ago, a term used to appear on TV, in newspapers, everywhere, and it made me furious: "cancer victim". Anyone who had cancer was a victim, not just people who had "lost the battle" (and for some reason, we always resort to military terms to describe the course of the illness). It was standard, neutral, just a way to describe things, but then something happened, the tide turned, and energy began to flow the other way.

From something that was inevitably bound to stigma in the past, cancer came out of the closet in a big way, leading to all sorts of positive change that is still being felt. But first we had to lose terms like "victim", because they were unconsciously influencing people's attitudes. We had to begin to substitute words like "survivor" and even "warrior". 

One reinforced the other. The movement gave rise to much more positive, life-affirming, even accurate terminology. That's exactly what needs to happen here. We don't just need to "reduce the stigma": we need to CAN that term, spit on it, get rid of it once and for all, and begin to see our mental health warriors for who and what they really are. They lead the way in a daring revolution of attitudes and deeply-buried, primitive ideas, a shakeup and shakedown of prejudice that is shockingly late, and desperately needed.

Why do we need to do this so badly? We're caught and hung up on a negative, limiting word that is only keeping the culture in the dark.  I once read something in a memoir that had a profound effect on me: "Mental illness is an exaggeration of the human condition." This isn't a separate species. Don't treat it as such. It's you, times ten. It's me, in a magnifying mirror. Such projections of humanity at its finest and most problematic might just teach us something truly valuable. Why don't we want to look?

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