Was I behind the barn door?

There are things I just don't get.

As a writer, getting publishers to give me the time of day is extremely difficult. It's even harder to get an agent, though people generally say things like, "Well, just find one and they'll do all the work for you."

I also hear at writers' conferences (and sometimes whispered like a dirty little secret by other authors) that you have to go about it a whole 'nother way.

You have to make a leap.

What's a leap? you may ask. I'm sitting here trying to figure it out.

I think the guy who was lecturing at the Surrey Conference (damned if I remember his name, his book, or even what he looked like) was trying to tell us that mailing a printed manuscript on 8 1/2" x 11" white bond paper, typed and double-spaced with a 1-1/2" margin around the edges, with a stamped self-addressed envelope included or we'll never hear from them again, is just a little bit antiquated and will probably get us nowhere.

But that's the required procedure on 90% of publisher's sites.

This fellow saw that approach as marching in place, or even going backwards. He said we have to make a leap. Didn't tell us how, of course. OK. So how do we do it?

This is the only thing I can think of. It's something you hear every day, in every field: "it's who you know". You have to make "contacts". In this age of the internet, it's supposed to be dead easy. You can have hundreds, thousands, or (if you're Charlie Sheen) even millions in the course of a day.

For writers, this creates a degree of queasiness. We've all been told to make contacts. At the aforesaid Surrey conference, the publisher of a small but prestigious literary press was heading for the ladies' room. A fellow participant grabbed my arm and said, "Look. There she goes. Go after her!"

I couldn't bring myself to do it.

Then there was the girl in orange. I don't remember her book, either, or her name, or anything about her except that she was wearing a shriekingly bright orange shirt and rainbow suspenders. She looked like a particularly unattractive clown. All that was missing was the Bozo nose and fright wig.

"I'm a shameless self-promoter, and you should be too," she told us. (And by the way, why is self-promoting so often tied to shame?). You have to get attention any way you can. Make sure you wear something that people will remember."

But orange isn't my colour. Is this why I'm not getting anywhere with the three completed and (I believe) publishable manuscripts I have in hand? I can't just toss them away or delete them. Sorry to say it, but my first two got raves. "Fiction at its finest", etc. etc. Unless these were lies, I have to presume I have something to offer.

Not long ago, I did manage to make some, maybe, contacts. It happened in a roundabout way. There was a flurry of emails exchanged, then - silence. The usual silence that falls when the other person realizes I might actually want something: for example, to get a publisher to acknowledge that I exist.

Apparently I broke some awful taboo, for the same thing happened with another potentially fantastic contact. This person - well, this was sort of like having God on your Facebook, but I can't name him because I know I'm not supposed to - loved my novel, even raved about it.

And then. . . the same fatal silence.

When I committed the awful faux pas of disclosing the fact that I'm not getting any attention for my wonderful novel whatsoever, and wondered if he had any suggestions, the line abruptly went dead. Though I am supposed to make contacts and "work" them until I get what I want, at the same time, I am NOT supposed to do that, because it's embarrassing and an admission of failure.

Contracts are supposed to drift through my mail slot all by themselves. Advances for $200,000.00 are supposed to just appear on my bank statement. Oops, we're rich!

I don't care about rich. But it seems like my professional need for someone to look at my novels is just wrong, somehow. The work should be its own reward. I should quit trying to suck up to people, for God's sake!

So I should make contacts, but not make contacts. I should know exactly how to "work" these nonexistent contacts so they don't abruptly hang up the phone as soon as I express some sort of need.

Why does the whole enterprise become so repellent, then? Why do I feel that I've:

(a) broken some sort of awful taboo by even trying to contact anyone,

(b) embarrassed myself by handling it all wrong (i.e. expressing the need to get my novel published),

(c) blown it by "losing" that giant marlin once and for all, and not even having a clue what I did that was so wrong so I can fix it if it ever happens again.

There are times when I just feel like nothing. I know I'm good, finally, and it took decades to get that far, to overcome the feeling that I wasn't up to scratch. But I seem to need a James Mason to sit in the club and listen to me sing and tell me, "You're good. Very good. In fact, you're far better than you know."

In reality, there are no Norman Maines around, not in my life anyway. Even if it did happen, I'd find some way to blow it, and not even know how or why.

I don't understand the deal. If a writer wants to become well-known, they're egotists, narcissists, greedy, and maybe even outright frauds.

But we don't expect a concert pianist to play in an empty hall. Or a painter to carefully hide all her canvasses in the attic (or just throw them away). The very idea of it is absurd.

Writing fiction is an extremely ancient art form, going back to the time when humans first became verbal. After the grunts and shouts resolved themselves into words, we developed the need to make story.

At first, no doubt, it went something like this. On a hunting expedition, the water buffalo pawed the ground, snorted and charged straight at the hunters. But Ugh was so fearless that he ran at him with a roar and skewered him through the heart with his flint-tipped spear. (Never mind that it was really Gronk who killed the buffalo.) And that night, over a scrumptious meal of water buffalo filet mignon, Ugh would begin to speak.

"The water buffalo charged at us, and soon we knew we would all be dead. The other hunters tried to hide in the bushes, but I took my spear and ran it through his heart. He groaned and fell down, and now we eat his flesh to honor his spirit. (He adjusts his new water buffalo robe.) I thank the gods that I was given so much courage and strength, for I have saved my people from certain starvation."

Yes, writers were bullshitters then, too.

But if Ugh sat by the fire all by himself, it would all be. . . well, kind of pointless. There would be less urgency for language to develop, allowing us to retell the tales of everyday struggle that eventually evolved into myth.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, I want my place by the fire. I KNOW how to make story, damned good story, and nobody is interested and it's killing me by inches.

Like a fool, I keep trying, but it seems I can't put a foot right for all the landmines.

I don't want to be a star. But I sure would like to be born.

The Beatles - Rain (sing along with Paul)

The Beatles - Rain (turn up the volume)

If the rain comes

Rain fell on Skagit Valley.
It fell in sweeps and it fell in drones. It fell in unending cascades of cheap Zen jewelry. It fell on the dikes. It fell on the firs. It fell on the downcast necks of the mallards.
And it rained a fever. And it rained a silence. And it rained a sacrifice. And it rained a miracle. And it rained sorceries and saturnine eyes of the totem.
This quote is the kind-of-a-thing that makes writers wanna give up forever. It's the feverish vision of a strange sort of man, half Byron, half Donald Duck (and half Betty Boop, probably, though we don't know where that half is stashed).

I was trying to find the whole quote, because I know it goes on. So I found my punky-smelling, beige-paged copy of Tom Robbins' classic Another Roadside Attraction, and began to dig.

Because I haven't even had my breakfast yet, for pity's sake, I gave up, but I did find this:

The afternoon sky looked like a brain. Moist Gray. Convoluted. A mad-scientist breeze probed at the brain, causing it to bob and quiver as if it were immersed in a tank of strange liquids. The Skagit Valley was the residue at the bottom of the tank. Toward dusk, the wind flagged, the big brain stiffened (mad doctor's experiment a failure), and ragged ribbons of Chinese mist unfurled in the valley. The blaring cries of. . .
OH FOR GOD'S SAKE. Mercy. Mercy.

And it rained an omen. And it rained a poison. And it rained a pigment. And it rained a seizure.

This reminds me of nothing more than Bob Dylan's A Hard Rain's a-gonna Fall: I'll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it/And reflect from the mountain so all souls can see it. And I'll stand on the ocean until I start sinking/But I'll know my song well before I start singing.
Why? Why all this? If you read this strange, incoherent blog at all (and who does? I often feel I am shouting into the abyss, and I am beginning to realize that my chronic failure as a writer is a sign of an intractible Fate), you'll know about the cedar boughs outside my office window. They are vanes, omens, semaphores. They hang in three-dimensional layers, a sweet intimate bough that sweeps on my left side, a less-visible perpendicular wodge of green that doesn't want to talk to me, and behind all that, a backdrop of bush that just goes on and on.

We live in suburbia, but at night comes the trilling and squealing of shabby-looking pack animals, the kind that search around for garbage in the night. At first I thought I was going crazy with the sound. My husband, half-deef, couldn't even hear it. It was only much later that I found out what they were.

Anyway, this isn't about that.

Rain sweeps and drones in Vancouver, a close enough cousin to Skagit Valley to pass one of those primordial DNA tests (if only by a whisker). Yes. We have this too:

Moisture gleamed on the beak of the Raven. Ancient shamans, rained from their homes in dead tree trunks, clacked their clamshell teeth in the drowned doorways of forests. Rain hissed on the Freeway. It hissed at the prows of fishing boats. It ate the old warpaths, spilled the huckleberries, ran in the ditches. Soaking. Spreading. Penetrating.

Stop!

Pitiless, endless, suicidal, the rain takes up residence for some eight months of the year. No, twelve. Let's quit lying about this so we can go on living. As in northern Alberta, where I lived for many years, it can rain just like it can snow, any old time. In the middle of a grand day. It can split the merry blue sky like a railroad spike.

I like a storm. I love a storm when I am not in it. We don't get good hail around here (hail merry!), but in Alberta, once in a while a big satchelful of temporary diamonds would be dumped on the ground, and the air would hiss with ozone. The roof would thunder and dents would appear on the hoods of cars. Then a gleaming bounty lay on the ground, sublimating in sinuous vapors. Soon it'd just be that rice-paddy mush that's left over from a violent hunderstorm.

Here it's more temperate. Just a continuous pissing down on your dreams, a Monty Python foot crushing all ambition and hope.

I just realized something. Shakespeare bombed. He said something like, "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?", then goes on blathering about "the darling buds of May". Doesn't the idjit know when summer starts? There's a meteorologist on CTV news who knows better than that. And he's not the most celebrated writer who ever lived.

What's my point? Jesus! it's wet, and grey, and discouraging out there. I won't tell you what I've been going through with my work lately. It's the best of times, and the worst of times. Something spectacular might happen, but at the same time, it might be the end of everything.

Or, as usual, I will just be left hanging and face the same indifference, the averted face and cold shoulder, that my mother presented to me when I was born.

The opposite of love isn't hate. It's indifference.

The universe doesn't care. It's indifferent. But why do people have to be?
And what about my mother? My mother.

If the rain comes they run and hide their heads.
They might as well be dead.
If the rain comes, if the rain comes.
When the sun shines they slip into the shade
(When the sun shines down.)
And sip their lemonade.
(When the sun shines down.)
When the sun shines, when the sun shines.
Rain, I don't mind.
Shine, the world looks fine.
I can show you that when it starts to rain,
(When the Rain comes down.)
Everything's the same.
(When the Rain comes down.)
I can show you, I can show you.
Rain, I don't mind.
Shine, the world looks fine.
Can you hear me, that when it rains and shines,
(When it Rains and shines.)
It's just a state of mind?
(When it rains and shines.)
Can you hear me, can you hear me?
If the rain comes they run and hide their heads.
sdaeh rieht edih dna nur yeht semoc niar eht fI.
(Rain)
niaR.
(Rain)
enihsnuS.

Enter the Dragon

Today I found out that dragon floats are a traditional feature of Mardi Gras.

This one's a doozie, isn't it? I think it's all the same dragon.

I can only imagine the effort that went into constructing him. Do they keep him year to year, do you think? Where? Does anyone own a tarp that big?

Or does he fly off to some primordial Mardi Gras Dragonland to wait out another year?

Fallout

When I flipped my calendar today, I noticed that this isn't just any old Tuesday. Y'all know what Mardi Gras is, right? Those folks in Nawlins sure know how to put on a party.

Most of us have some vague idea that it's tied to Easter, but are not sure how.

Well, they'd be right. But more than that, it's tied to the cycles of the moon.

Ever wonder why Easter's on a different Sunday every year? Why doesn't it settle on one particular date, like Christmas or Ground Hog Day?

Because it falls on the first Sunday after the full moon, that's why, and cuz the moon's on a four-week cycle, sometimes it's earlier, and sometimes it's later. Ask the Chinese, who celebrate the Lunar New Year in a similar way.

You may ask: what does this have to do with Christianity? Nothing. What does it have to do with paganism and goddess-worship and Druids all that moon-related stuff? Plenty. The early Christians were smart enough to graft their big event of the year on a very old tree.

Before Mardi Gras even came along, it was called Shrove Tuesday. Most Christians don't have any idea what Shrove Tuesday actually means, except that there's always a pancake supper in the church basement, that damp place that always smells like the inside of a pumpkin, with undercooked pancakes on paper plates and kids spilling syrup and running around on a sugar high.

OK then, Shrove Tuesday is the beginning of six weeks of Lent. So what's Lent? Some people have some idea that it has to do with fasting and/or self-abnegation of some kind. Then comes Good Friday (the day Our Lord was nailed to a post to die: so why is it called Good?), and Easter Sunday, the miraculous day of Resurrection.

But it all has to be carefully timed to the cycles of the moon.

My bit of research into Shrove Tuesday was strange indeed. "Shrove" is the past tense of "shrive", which means to confess one's sins, to be penitent and grovel for forgiveness, and hopefully be absolved ("hey, I had a bad childhood"). If one is so absolved, they are described as "shriven". An unattractive word, if you ask me, resembling "shrivel", "shrine", and "shorn".

So what does this have to do with all those pancakes? Plenty. Before Lent, the traditional time of fasting, you had to use up every bit of fat in the house so the next six weeks would be a culinary disaster, everything sticking to the pan cuzzathefact they didn't have them-all Teflon thingy-dings then.

So yuz gorged yourself on sweet carbs on Fat Tuesday (which is a reference to the cooking fat, though in Nawlins it can have other meanings), then go into a long stretch of dire austerity. But I have a problem with all this. If you've been shriven already, why fast? Haven't you suffered enough?

It's hard to square stacks of oozing pancakes, Dixieland bands and drunken riots with the dreary plainsong of Gregorian chant. But after praying and fasting for seven or eight months, I think I've found a common point here.
Sex.
Illicit sex.

Can you guess what I mean?

Can you?

Can you guess why the Catholic Church is scrabbling so hard to apologize for all the horrendous abuse that has gone unchecked among their most valued clergymen for generations?

When you wake up from Mardi Gras, perhaps stuck to the floor with your own vomit, you may not be able to remember just who you were with last night. Isn't this something like those sweet little 8-year-old altar boys who try to push out of their minds a memory so horrific that they know no one will believe them?

I've got nothing against sex, folks, but it's too bad it's so often associated with drunken revelry, things you'd rather forget, and little boys and little girls trying not to scream because this kind of love is "special". So special that they dare not mention it to anyone at all.

There is a certain culling. The ones who can't make it. We don't know what's the matter with those people, why they can't get it together! Some of them even leave the church because entering the sanctuary makes them feel unaccountably sick. These are the ones that kind of sift down, doing horrible things like sticking needles in their arm, and eventually die.

Fallout.

I used to eat the bloody pancakes, pray out the bitter, penitent six weeks (never quite sure what I had done that was so wrong), and make sure I suffered terribly on Good Friday, until I realized one day that I had goddamn well suffered enough.
And that I wasn't going to be fallout. Not for anyone.

Tuscadera, wheel-a barra, some place in Mexico. . .

Did somebody say Tom Waits? Did somebody say Bob Dylan? This guy combined the best of both. I mean. . . "Wheeling, West Virginia, with everythin' that's in ya. . . " This was the first, and possibly last master of verbal jazz. (And he sang just as badly as both-a dem guys.)

She don't look back

(So howcum I'm posting this-all? I got reading Positively 4th Street again, maybe due to taking the guitar out of its dusty case for the first time in a dozen years. Or not? Anyway, these were kind of cool books, reviewed for an internet publication so's I can rerun them any time I want. They do go back a few years, but I heard-tell that Bob Dylan just performed at the 2011 Grammys, so I looked at the clip. It wasn't good news. He sounds like Tom Waits on Draino, a growling monotone that bespeaks shredded vocal chords. Is it finally time to wind up the Never-Ending Tour?)

Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina, and Richard Farina by David Hajdu
Farrar, Straus and Giroux 328 pages ISBN: 0-374-28199-8

Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan by Howard Sounes
Grove Press 527 pages ISBN: 0-8021-1686-8

During a weekend retreat at a Benedictine monastery earlier this year, I reconnected with one of the idols of my youth in a setting which was both wildly unlikely and oddly appropriate. “I’d like to play you some of the most spiritual music ever written,” Father John told us as he switched on the CD player to the howling bark of the greatest visionary popular music has ever known, Bob Dylan.

Appropriate, because after all, Dylan the master trickster pops up everywhere these days – on TV commercial jingles, in an audience with the Pope (in which he sang “Blowin’ in the Wind”), at the Kennedy Center as an awkward but grateful honoree, and even at this year’s Academy Awards.

He has been nominated for a Nobel Prize for literature and booed off the stage by hostile audiences for the sin of “going electric”. Throughout his monumental career as a troubadour of conscience, Bob Dylan has not reflected the times so much as predicted them, keeping one eerie step ahead of whatever way the wind blows.

It’s not surprising that on the occasion of his 60th birthday, various writers would attempt to capture his enigmatic presence in biography. This is a nearly impossible task, like picking up a blob of mercury that scatters into a million glittering bits. The problem is that Dylan has lived so many lives in one, all of them radically intense: the idealistic young folkie visiting Woody Guthrie in the hospital, the jaded rocker crashing his motorbike, the family-oriented country squire, the born-again Christian zealot, the actor (Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Dharma and Greg), the grizzled survivor on his famous Never-Ending Tour.

Just when critics were about to write him off as a has-been, he recorded the amazing 1997 Grammy-winner Time Out of Mind, followed up by the ultimate Dylan hurting-love song, Things Have Changed. Receiving his Oscar for best song, he looked frayed around the edges, exhausted by a life at the fringes of normalcy. But he still has those hypnotic, penetrating eyes – eyes that can see for a thousand miles, deep into the heart of life’s most fragile, compelling mysteries.

New York journalist David Hajdu has come as close as any writer to nailing Dylan’s mercurial soul to the page – a curious fact, given that POSITIVELY 4TH STREET does not center on him exclusively (but then, perhaps enigmas are best glimpsed out of the corner of your eye). The book recreates a charmed time, the era of the ‘60s folk boom with its burning idealism and compelling personalities. It was the perfect cultural milieu for a gifted, ambitious artist like Dylan to make his debut.
But as Hajdu points out, he wasn’t the only opportunist in the crowd. Joan Baez comes across as a curious mixture of brash confidence and quaking insecurity, using the ‘60s to her advantage in a way which in retrospect looks quite ruthless. “She just devoured everybody’s things,” a friend recalls of her ability to expropriate song material and make it her own. “I knew I could do what (the folk singers) were doing and a lot better than them,” Baez claimed.

Her Anglo-Mexican background made her a bit of an exotic, and she soon graduated from the coffeehouses of Cambridge to the Newport Folk Festival in 1959. Musician Bob Gibson gave her a push, but it was hardly necessary: “If I hadn’t ‘introduced’ Joan Baez, someone else would have. It was like ‘discovering’ the Grand Canyon.”

Such a force of nature seemed to be on a predestined collision-course with another astral body, a tightly-wound Minnesotan minstrel-boy newly renamed Bob Dylan. The former Bobby Zimmerman, a baby-faced Jewish rock musician from a small town, had remade himself in Woody Guthrie’s image and was busy charming the socks off people (particularly young women) all over New York’s Greenwich Village.

Dylan even mimicked Guthrie’s tics from Huntington’s chorea, causing fellow singer Eric von Schmidt to describe him as “a spastic little gnome”. But with all his charm, Dylan was paradoxically an extreme introvert; as Theodore Bikel reminisced, “He didn’t reach out to touch you. You had to come where he was.”

When these two supernatural beings joined forces, they immediately went supernova. Dylan’s embryonic talent to capture the political zeitgeist was cheered on by an enthralled, deeply infatuated Baez.
Meanwhile her little sister Mimi, still in high school, was developing a quieter but beautifully polished musical gift of her own. Destined to live forever in Joan’s giant shadow, she even ended up with a sort of faux Bob Dylan in the person of Cuban-Irish writer Richard Farina, whom she married at the tender age of seventeen.

The Farina of Hajdu’s account was not so much an original as a badly-smudged photocopy of Dylan’s blazing genius (“I could kind of see the strings,” one friend put it), a hanger-on who would stop at nothing to further his ambitions. While Dylan turned out such searing masterpieces as A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall, Masters of War and The Times They Are A-Changin’, Farina fiddled with a dulcimer and rehashed traditional folk tunes, winning over a surprising number of people on charm alone.
“He walked and talked as if he had been born wearing a cape,” a friend remembers.

Many believed he went after Mimi just to get to Joan, and the ploy worked. For a time there was a strange sort of romantic formation, not a triangle so much as a rectangle, Bob and Joan on one side, Mimi and Richard on the other, with flirtations flying dangerously in all directions.

Though Hajdu is very good at recreating all the fizz and spark of the folk era, he drops names at such a thick rate that it can make for hard going: “Carolyn and Richard had never met Mimi and Todd, and Mimi and Todd had not met Alex Campbell, a Scottish folk singer whom Carolyn , Richard and John knew.” There must be a less-awkward way to introduce the huge cast of players on the folk scene.

But like the magazine reporter he is, Hajdu just has to tell us who was there and what was said, giving some passages a distinct gossip-column flavor. Still, he does show us a Dylan bristling with paradox: stumblingly inarticulate in person, but a master communicator on stage; a protest-song writer par excellence who had virtually no interest in politics; a man both vicious (as in the slashing Positively 4th Street, a diatribe against all his old Greenwich Village friends: “I wish that for just one time you could stand inside my shoes,/You’d know what a drag it is to see you”) and deeply compassionate, as in the Ballad of Hollis Brown and Chimes of Freedom.

And he traces the inevitable falling-out between the King and Queen of folk, as Baez comes to realize that Dylan “criticizes society, and I criticize it, but he ends up saying there is not a goddamned thing you can do about it, so screw it. And I say just the opposite.” Dylan’s scandalously poor treatment of Joan on his tour to London further undermined the romance, which was destined to blaze briefly, then collapse.

A far worse disaster struck Mimi Baez Farina when her husband was killed in a motorcycle crash on her 21st birthday in 1966. Suddenly it was all over. Dylan abandoned folk and went electric; Joan Baez remained glued in the ‘60s, forever associated with that all-too-brief time when anything seemed possible.

For a more blow-by-blow account of the life of Bob Dylan, you couldn’t do much better than British writer Howard Sounes’ DOWN THE HIGHWAY. This book is as detailed and relentless as one of Dylan’s marathon-length songs (say, Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands or Desolation Row) and seems to go on as long as the fabled Never-Ending Tour. For Dylan addicts hungry for trivia tidbits, this is fine fare, but there is a certain fineness missing from the writing, a subtlety which would have helped capture the mystery of the man.

Here we learn that Bob’s nickname in high school was Zimbo, and that he piled his hair on top of his head in deliberate imitation of Little Richard. We find out that the last thing his mother said when he left home was, “Don’t keep writing poetry, please don’t.”

Though Sounes does acknowledge the greatness of Dylan’s lyrics (citing such classic lines as “he not busy being born is busy dying” and “you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows”), he tends to focus more on his subject’s messy, convoluted personal life with its dozens of complicated love affairs. Though Dylan made a brave attempt at marriage to Sara Lowndes and has been a loving father to his six children, he is not good husband material, and can’t even seem to hang on to his friends for long.

What emerges in Sounes’ book is a portrait of a desperately lonely man, isolated by his genius and an almost pathological social awkwardness. In some ways Bob Dylan is a bit of an idiot savant, supremely gifted in his words and music but handicapped everywhere else. But as Sounes points out, his strange charisma is so strong that these flaws only add to his mystique. As one record executive put it, “Is he a regular guy? No. Why would you want him to be?”

The baffling way he has always played with the press reflects a deep shyness and a reluctance to share private details. It would be interesting to know what Dylan would make of a book that probes his personal life so deeply, sometimes at the expense of what should be the main focus, his art.

Still, I was intrigued to learn that “Lay, Lady, Lay” was originally written for Midnight Cowboy (typically, Dylan missed the deadline), and that Woodstock legend Wavy Gravy remains a close friend. And yes, the musicians really were stoned on the infamous Rainy Day Women #12 & 35 (which, like a lot of Dylan classics, was done in a single take).

But let the master have the last word. In preparing to write this piece, I plunged back into those songs again and was astounded at their freshness and power, even decades later. This is the real reason Dylan is worthy subject matter for books like these. The man still has the capacity to move me to tears, especially in my personal favorite, his ringing anthem of the dispossessed, Chimes of Freedom:

“Tolling for the aching, whose wounds cannot be nursed,
For the countless confused, accused, misused
Strung-out ones, and worse,
And for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe –
And we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashin’.”

To that I say – amen, Bob; amen.

Guitar lessons

Caitlin's musical tastes are along the lines of American Idol and Taylor Swift, whereas mine are steeped in classical music (from childhood, whether I wanted it or not) and the folk craze of the mid-'60s. So who knows where this musical experiment will end up. I think she's a little young (7) to be starting, so I hope Mom doesn't Craigslist the guitar due to lack of storage space.

February, you may be little, but you're small!

"February is pitiless, and it is boring. That parade of red numerals on its page adds up to zero: birthdays of politicians, a holiday reserved for rodents, what kind of celebrations are those? The only bubble in the flat champagne of February is Valentine’s Day. It was no accident that our ancestors pinned Valentine’s Day on February’s shirt: he or she lucky enough to have a lover in frigid, antsy February has cause for celebration, indeed."

Tom Robbins basically had it right, for in spite of its weeny meanness, this month can seem endless. But even March is a half-assed month, not really knowing what season it belongs to; and April is like an old bicycle seat: "just enough spring in it to give you a pain in the ass". (This one is from my father!).

But there are compensations, if fleeting ones. Yesterday my four grandchildren went bounding out into a rare late-February snowfall (rare because we basically live in a rain forest) and created like mad: snowmen, snow forts, snow girls, castles, angels, freeform sculptures, Easter eggs, hockey pucks. And their Grandma and Grandpa similarly frolicked, in up to their knees.

But the difference is, Monday brings preschool and kindergarten, which they like a lot, and for me. . . just Monday.

We've nearly broken February's back. That should be good news for me, and I guess it is. But it's the same old blues. Is the universe trying to tell me something? Like. . .to shut up?

It could be that I just don't know how to "work" my contacts. Do I seem too hungry? Not hungry enough? Whenever this particular rule book was passed out, I either didn't get one, or lost my copy somewhere.

It was noteworthy to me that Kevin Brownlow, with whom I recently/briefly exchanged emails, appeared on the Oscars last night, having received an honorary award for a lifetime of devotion to the then-nearly-lost cause of silent film. It was cool to see.

What wasn't so cool is that the four men receiving honorary Oscars for their lifelong contribution to the movies weren't actually presented with their statues, just trotted out (three of them, anyway) for a brief moment of applause, then whisked away. It was all done so briskly that it caused a bit of confusion.

Soooooooo. . . it's the last day of this interminable month, the snowmen are melting, the Oscar analyses are fulminating away, the best-and-worst-dressed lists dissected. Soon it'll all go away, as everything always goes away.

And I'll be left facing the glowing screen, and wondering what is next.

A living dyoll

Rah, old dolly.

Kathy from Consort

I confess I am a recovering k. d. lang addict. Recovering, because I'm starting to think she's falling into her own cliches: the little groan at the beginning of the phrase; the breathless/breathy passages, the upswoop like a coyote or a cowboy yell, and (less frequently) the half-yodel. When she sang Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah at the opening of the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver (a very big deal for us: we live there!), she was on a big pedestal and dressed in a baggy men's suit. My husband said, "She looks like Wayne Newton."

It was true. She looks sort of puffy, and she doesn't smile much. I never expected her to stay androgynously waiflike (if there is such a thing), boyish with knife-trimmed nails, and cheekbones to die for. But I never pictured her getting this bulky, stolid like a middle-aged businessman at a Shriner's convention, getting lost in her (always-ugly) clothes. Long ago she was in a Canadian-made movie called Salmonberries in which she appeared, for a split-second, in the nude, and everyone revelled in the fact that she looked like a woman. Well, she IS, folks, no matter how gay or lesbian or woman-loving she may be. The physiological underpinnings are the same.

So, how does this affect my feelings for her? I don't know when I started to get turned off. Nothing ever matched her breakout Ingenue album, which I listened to about a billion times. Still Thrives This Love was my fave (and I'll try to find it), though there were no duds in it at all.

She's not quite phoning it in now, but the lang cliches are wearing a deeper and deeper groove, so that something has fallen down in and gotten lost. I think. She still has that legendary flexible voice, but it doesn't seem to speak to me any more. She doesn't produce the overtones that make a voice jump alive, and God, that swooooooping up to every note. Once in a while, attack it head-on, will you?

Nevertheless, this one is pretty good.

Lotte Lenya: We've lost our good old Mama

The Doors - Alabama Song (Whisky Bar)

So. This Alabama song has nothing to do with Alabama, surprisingly, but is the best-known ditty from Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht's dark vision of social corruption, Mahagonny. It's not exactly the kind of tune you can tap yer toe to.

When I found out the Doors had done it, I nearly fell over. The Lotte Lenya version isn't exactly what I remember either, but it's close. See, when I was a kid, I was a misfit, an outcast, a square peg (as in another brilliant song by The Doors, "When you're Strange"). I was just odd. But my sister, thirteen years older than me, was odder.

She was always going off to Munich as an exchange student, spoke fluent German (why? No one in our connection was even remotely German or Teutonic or anything), and wrote her Master's thesis in German on this strange, incomprehensible Mahagonny. It was plenty weird, but no weirder than the brick-and-board bookcases in the den that groaned under the weight of Schiller, Goethe and Freud.

In those days, everybody who was anybody had a hi-fi, and you played your hi-fi extremely loud. The louder it was, the more the bass rattled your teeth, the better your hi-fi was. When I brought friends home from school, the Moon of Alabama song would be on the hi-fi, and I'd have to try to explain.

But I didn't understand it myself. There was a lot I didn't understand, because nobody explained it to me. So I concluded that everyone else in the world already understood these things, and I didn't because I was feeble-minded and intellectually inferior (even though I was in a special advanced educational stream, for which I received no family praise at all). As a result, in order to compensate, I became very entertaining.

Things got even more confusing when my sister's drunken married friends groped me at adult parties, at which my glass of gin was always kept topped up. I was fifteen years old and they were something like thirty and it was supposed to be all right. My parents were sure it was all right: my older siblings were looking after me! They were doing me a favor, giving me a social life which I could never have on my own, and I was supposed to be grateful. It nearly destroyed me, but I figured I didn't understand that, either, and kept silent. Just as well, because if they didn't listen to me then, they sure don't want to listen to me now.

Oh, don't ask why. Oh, don't ask why.

Words from the master

In making inquries about my Harold Lloyd novel (The Glass Character), I scraped up my nerve and sent an email to Kevin Brownlow, who is without a doubt the world's foremost authority on silent film. Not only that: he knew Harold Lloyd personally.

I was quite taken aback that he responded so quickly, and with such detailed commentary, which I can't help but share here.


Dear Margaret Gunning

I am fascinated that you are so keen on Harold Lloyd. Me too, but it’s strange how people repeat the old cliches about his being ‘mechanical’ You will love John Bengtson’s book – it tells you so much about the places in which he worked.
You are a good writer, and it was a pleasure to read your extract. I would take issue with you on one subject – did they use obscenity when they swore in those days? T E Lawrence, in his account of barrack room life THE MINT, had his book banned because he repeated the swear words, which he was finally compelled to reprint like this; ---
But in talking to scores of silent film veterans, I heard plenty of swearing, but it was all profanity – ‘Jesus Christ’ – or ‘God almighty’ - presumably because of the strong Irish Catholic tradition in Hollywood.. When they got worked up it was ‘Son of a bitch’ I notice you use both for Hal Roach – ‘Jesus, Harold! Do you want to be fucking killed?’ (Roach’s family was from Cork, by the way.) You may be right, but I would be interested to know if you have any evidence.
I noticed, when I researched a script about silent era Hollywood (never made) how many words they used that have fallen out of fashion. ‘Everything’s jake!’ ‘Twenty-three skidoo’
By the way, motion picture makeup was yellow, not white. (The cameramen hated white )
As for the money earned by the top comics, Chaplin made three comedies to Lloyd’s eleven in the 1920s, but Chaplin’s still made more money overall.
Did you know there was a film magazine publisher and producer called Wid Gunning? Are you any relation?
I have written a book about making THE THIRD GENIUS, but as the rights for the documentary have lapsed, it won’t be possible to bring the programme out on DVD with the book as I did with the Chaplin and as I planned with the Keaton book. What a shame,
I wish you the best of luck with the book.
Warmest wishes
Kevin Brownlow

Ryan's Fifth

You wouldn't believe how long it takes (and how much experimental printing it requires) to make one of these little "Grandmark" cards ("Made with Love"). I got into it a couple of years ago, and now do it four times a year. Ryan is obsessed with cars. That's all you need to know!

Found at the back of the file drawer (and scanned and enlarged and and - READ IT!!)

Haunted, haunted (and haunted: the trifecta)

I want it to stop, but it won't. Today I found out about the winner of the Westminster Kennel Club Best in Show: a Scottish deerhound named Hickory. But that wasn't the thing that grabbed me. It was the owner's name.

Angela Lloyd.

This news came almost immediately after I watched a story on Dateline NBC about a young woman brutally murdered by a military hero gone mad. But it was her name that grabbed me:

(From the news story)

Hundreds of people filled a Belleville, Ont., funeral home Saturday afternoon as the community came together to honour Jessica Lloyd, the 27-year-old woman whose body was found on a rural road on Monday.
Before the service began, several members of the Canadian Forces entered the funeral home in uniform and wearing black armbands.
Small groups of people clustered outside the funeral home during the service, with one group of young women carrying a sign that said: "Rest in peace sweet angel."
Col. Russell Williams is facing first-degree murder charges in the death of Jessica Lloyd, 27, of Belleville, Ont.
On Friday, long lines of people had waited patiently outside the funeral home to attend the visitation for Lloyd, one of the alleged victims of Col. Russell Williams, the former commander of CFB Trenton.
Lloyd's cousin and brother both spoke at the service Saturday, and her brother paused to thank local law enforcement officials for their work on the case.

(P.S.: Less than half an hour after I posted this, I was washing dishes with the TV on in the background. A newsmagazine show I almost never watch called W5 came on, and the host announced himself: "Hi, I'm Lloyd Robertson."

Three? Well, yesterday there were two. Only.

Tell me there are no coincidences.)

Vincent, you're getting paint all over everything!

How many times have I seen this thing? Like Gone with the Wind or The Wizard of Oz, it just seems to come around.

Except that this one grabs me, every time.

Kirk Douglas excels himself, does better than he knows how, in portraying the awful and sublime life of Vincent Van Gogh. We all know Van Gogh's paintings from the coffee mugs and post cards and tea towels and various fripperies that bear his images. We have all heard reports of the multimillion dollars even his smallest canvases now command.

I didn't wanna do it, I didn't wanna do it. I had recorded it on my PVR a few days or weeks earlier and it was sitting there. It was on TCM, so I knew it wouldn't be carved up. I thought, after a shitty week, oh what the hell.

My husband has been away all week. Normally I use this sabbatical as a time for reflection, quiet, and going out to restaurants for one meal at 3 pm. This week was just - oh I don't know, it bored the piss out of me. Things went around and around in circles and some days I didn't even get out due to the wretched house-shaking monsoon outside.

I made fudge and I ate too much of really bad things, like back ribs and fries. I just felt discontent, as if I didn't fit my skin. THEN, early yesterday morning, the power went out, and I felt helpless. Not only was it cold and dark, but my lovebird began to shiver, and I realized with a shock that he wasn't going to survive dramatically dipping temperatures.

I panicked. I moved the cage all over the house. Is this warmer? No. It's already 63 F and dropping (when his usual room temperature is 72). I dithered around. I covered the cage with a tablecloth, wondering if he could breathe. He clung to the pointy roof of his palatial cage, silent and not moving.

Then I thought: what's the warmest room in the house? Our bedroom! During our rare Vancouver heat waves, it's absolutely awful, and sometimes I have to sleep downstairs. So I lugged his huge cage upstairs and gained purchase of 3 degrees, but it was not enough.

My mind spun around and around. Did we have any source of heat left? Should I stick him in my pocket or something? Then I thought: of course! Hot water. But my idea was not quite on-target.

I put a bowl of hot water on the floor of his cage, covered with a sieve so the dumb bird wouldn't try to bathe in it and scald himself. It bought me a couple more degrees. But it still wasn't enough.

Depressed and isolated, not wanting to go out because I had to look after this incubator baby, I phoned my daughter-in-law to ask if she had power. She did. She also had, right to hand, a number to call for info on power outages.

"But it'll take me hours. They'll put me on hold."

"No they won't. Try it."

They didn't. I got the information I needed in 30 seconds. The power would be on no later than 4:00 (and it was 1:00: would we squeak through?) She also suggested, instead of bowls of water that got cold in 2 minutes, to fill the bathtub with a few inches of hot water and wheel the cage into the bathroom and shut the door.

Within 15 minutes, I had set up the ideal sauna, and Jasper was thawing out, singing and chirping and ringing his numerous bells and acting like a bird again.

Anyway, all this shit ended at 2 pm, after 6 hours of blackout. It could've gone all night, in which case my bird would have died of hypothermia.

So, completely unrelated to this, or not, I was exhausted by the evening, lonely, sugar-logged, and just wanting any old thing to distract me. Maybe I shouldn't have picked Lust for Life.

Vincente Minnelli strove to make this movie as faithful to Van Gogh's paintings and life as possible. He dragged trees in to fill holes where they had been cut down. He put up a false front for the yellow house Van Gogh lived in with Gaugin (a bravura performance by Anthony Quinn, who likes his women "fat and vicious and not too bright"). Stories circulated about old women from remote places in Provence who gasped on seeing Douglas in makeup and exclained, "He has returned!"

A companion movie, a "making of" was shown after the main feature, and in it Douglas spoke fluent French to one of these elderly keepers-of-the-memory (who are all gone now). Why did it surprise me to see Douglas speak fluent French? He was the Ragman's Son (I read his auto-bio years ago, and he came up from such dire poverty that the family sometimes had nothing to eat). I associate him with powerhouse roles, Spartacus and the like,and that exaggerated growling voice beloved of impressionists (not the painters!) like Frank Gorshin.

I don't know what happened here. Some kind of transubstantiation. He - became. He felt this man. He slipped into his skin, his uneasy incendiary brain. The thing is, Van Gogh painted innumerable self-portraits, and all of them had something of Kirk Douglas in them. In some cases he could have been the model.

I don't know what my point is here, and I guess I don't have one. Life is a mess, and right now I'm a mess, full of sugar, lonely, completely stalled and discouraged in my work, yet still blown away by a couple of things.

The sun is shining right now. Shining on the high cedar boughs that garland my upstairs office view. The light is dappled and various, a Gerard Manley Hopkins light.

The sun is out. I never thought I'd see it again.

I don't know why we keep on. Sometimes it's wretched. Ask any genius. We have a spark of life in us, like a candle inside a blubberous whale. Van Gogh had to paint quickly because he knew he didn't have much time. "You paint too fast!" Gaugain roared at him. "You look too fast!" he growled back.

I'm not even going to try to tie all this together because life, as it is, isn't tied together very well. It's sloppy and hard to navigate. For me, anyway. It's better and worse. Some suffer more than others.

But I'm glad my little bird made it back into the light.

A three-Lloyd day

I don't know how someone
can love across the ages
or even haunt

coz I guess in strict terms
you really are a ghost
or maybe just a friendly spirit
who's decided to come around for a while

When you came into my life,
I hardly knew
you'd be everywhere I looked:
on street signs
in magazines
on the radio
and especially on TV

like last night
with that stupid Stephen King movie
about the Pet Semetary
when the guy turned out to be named (you guessed it!)
Lloyd


and like most days, there were others too
that popped out at me from my readings
(even when I wasn't looking
but, stranger yet, even when I was)
I tried to mind my own business
but my heart had been stolen
Harold, listen
send me a signal flare:
are you really there?

I feel you
I know it's weird
I sense you like heat in the room
and if I had those night-vision glasses
I think I could even see you

because now you live fully
in that world you half-inhabited when you were here:
incandescent
surreal
full of shadow
and shine

it's said the stars
from the early screen
carried a spotlight around inside them
but the way you faced fame was different
you were just doing your job

doggedly
sometimes with grim obsession
creating someone new
who stood out from all the grotesques
just an ordinary
jaunty fellow
with a bruised heart
and unexpected courage
an ordinary soul
that people couldn't get enough of
because they saw him in the mirror

Harold, I
I don't know where to start
I tried to write about you
I tried to write a story, put you in a story
and now I don't know where it'll end
Maybe nowhere
the fate of my (usual) work

This howls within me
for I wish sometimes
I had not had this inspiration
if my story goes nowhere.

It needs to be
for if pictures can be silent,
words cannot be

and I can only make story
in words.

Weather it's funny or not. . .

JOAN BAEZ "The Greenwood Side"

Bear with me, here. There's method in my madness.

Today I got writing about Songcatcher, a haunting movie about a woman professor's attempts to collect and capture folk music from the Appalachians in the early 20th century. That got me going, of course, on folk music.

I thought of one that my sister used to do (my sister, my sister), a harsh, dissonant thing called Down by the Greenwood Side (i-o). This was the version Ian and Sylvia made popular, sung in fifths I think, harsh and shivery. But today I found another version that shone with wonder and grief, sung by Joan Baez. The essential story is the same, though much more drawn-out. The tune, however, couldn't be more different, and it reminded me of something else.

I puzzled over this. Then I remembered. In the early '60s there was a song by Ewan MacColl called The First Time Ever I Saw your Face, and Gordon Lightfoot recorded a memorable version of it. It's hard to recognize here because the Roberta Flack version that came out a few years later kind of drowned it. Hers was drawled and drawn-out, smokily sexual and completely different from this more compact, folky (but no less heartfelt) version.

But the resemblance between the two, between Lightfoot's version and Baez's Greenwood, was what made my skin prickle. I wonder if MacColl even thought about it as he wrote his paean to erotic love. But the melody, those magic intervals that make up a tune, are so much the same, so full of mystery and ache.

So, listen to these two, and you tell me: do they sound the same?

GORDON LIGHTFOOT ~ The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face ~

Frail wildwood flower

Certain things, movies, books, people, lovers, are somehow relegated to the back of your mind. Or perhaps they sneak back there, or roll like nuts on a tilted surface. . . or stones, or. . .

A long time ago, it seems, I saw a movie that totally enchanted me. But for some reason, very little of it stuck with me except the bare subject matter: a musicologist tramping around the backwoods of Appalachia in the early 20th century, lugging a Gramophone to record the ancient ballads passed down since time immemorial. This much I remembered. But, shockingly, the rest was lost. No title, no characters, no plot, no year: just that mountain music, that sere and strident singing that a critic once said "would make thin glass rattle".

It would pop into my head, then sort of disappear again. I'd say to myself, I'll try to look it up on Google. Then I'd forget. Then, today, for some reason, I pounced. I had no idea where to start, so I entered search terms like "movie with Appalachian folk music on gramophone" and things like that. I knew that if the title did pop up, I would recognize it immediately.

It didn't take too long (God bless the internet!) until the title did pop up: Songcatcher, a 2000 film about a woman professor collecting folk music while living in her sister's backwoods school.

I haven't seen it yet, have happily ordered it from Amazon and hope I'll enjoy it twice. We'll see. Movies have a way of changing, over the years.

Peeping into it on YouTube, I see a lesbian relationship I had forgotten all about. I was kind of shaken by the harshness of the singing, with a sharp yodelly end to each line. These felt like authentic singers to me, so they must still be around. Yes, we have heard such strident sounds in the voices of Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton and June Carter Cash, but somewhat watered down. Most of these mountain songs, often called Child Ballads for some reason (let me look that up!), were composed by Henry VIII or somebody like that: I mean, somebody had to write them, didn't they? They didn't come out of the thin air. But they have that feeling of always having been there.

This started a flood in my mind: memories of the folk boom of the early '60s, when my older brothers came home from university toting guitars. They sang such weird old numbers as Cape Breton Mines, Geordie, Down by the Greenwood Side (ee-oh), In the Hills of Shiloh, Corn Whisky ("you killed all my kinfolk and sent them to hell"), and a truly awful number my sister sang called Poor Old Horse, Poor Old Mare ("the dogs will eat my rotten flesh, and that's how I'll decay"). She stuck to really morbid, hopeless things ("Wide and deep my grave shall be/With the wild-goose grasses growing over me") and seemed to relish them, singing them in an trained operatic soprano while plucking her guitar, which she held between her knees.

My brother Arthur, the one who died so young, was the best guitarist and the best at interpreting Cohen and Dylan. Especially Dylan, who could write songs that seemed like they were written generations ago: The Hour the Ship Comes In being my favorite.

What's the point of all this? There is no point. Music falls on the air, disappears. For millennia, none of it was recorded anywhere. An echo from some holler was the closest anyone came. Now we have it all, and most of it is lousy. It all sounds like that quasi-soul stuff made up of melismatic riffs and doorknob-rattling high notes rather than melody. Sucks.

Just let me hear some-more-that gram-o-phone music. . .

Songcatcher: at last I've found you!