Moannn. . . it's Joan

Zoom-zoom-zoom-zoom!  Zoom-zoom-zoom-zoom!
"Ayyyyeee. . . maahhh-reeed Joaaannnnnnn. . . "

No, I did not imagine this show, though the memory of it seems to reside in the deepest synapses of my brain along with a fear of monsters in the closet. In other words, I was probably a baby when this came on, or else it was already in reruns. I remember the "doo-WAH, doo-WAH" chorus which you heard even during the show itself, as a segue to the next scene. I don't know if any other show did this. I kind of hope they didn't, because it was putrid, but IMJ was fascinating for revealing classic '50s mores: a cute little housewife, half out of her tree with absent-mindedness and spinny '50s incompetence, having to be married to the dull Jim Backus who only really came into his own years later as Mr. Magoo (and then there was Mr. Howell, but he was pretty dull too).

Old shows scared the hell out of me when I was a kid.  I didn't understand them and they seemed to come from a million years ago. Topper was horrible, hats and gloves and things moving around by themselves in mid-air. December Bride seemed to come out of the medieval period. Really, these shows were maybe about ten years old when I saw them, and I don't know why they seemed so ancient. Then there was "YE-E-E-SS, it's Pete and Gladys!"

I think it was this: in the early '50s, TV was just radio with pictures. Sometimes there was even a stage with curtains and an audience, as in Jack Benny.  Shows were loudly, formally announced in the same way: "The Jo-o-o-o-oan Davis Show! America's favorite comedy show! Starring America's Queen of Comedy (what, no Lucy?), Joan Davis!"  There was something smudgy and dreamlike, even nightmarish about the old shows. TV screens really did flicker then, which people still refer to, incredibly ("the flickering blue screen"). It's like asking, "Do you dream in colour?" Well, why the hell WOULDN'T you? Why are people so damned stupid?

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Simple physics

David Hykes is one of the world's masters in the art of harmonic or overtone singing. He has trained his voice in such a way that his chanting breaks the spectrum of sound apart into its component colors, much as a prism explodes white light into rainbows.


The sound is very very strange and it scares me, because it's a sound that really doesn't exist. It should be contained, one tone inside the other, like Russian dolls, but somehow through a trick of the human voice the individual sounds have popped out. To call the sounds eerie is an understatement. Not whistling; not humming; a little like a theramin, and yet not; and most definitely, not of this world.

Overtones are everywhere: most singers produce them once in a while, so that you  suddenly hear a silky trilling an octave higher that seems to burnish the phrase. Just as you focus on it, it melts away. I once heard them on a bus. The hummy roar of the engine kept producing a much higher, parallel sound, eeming up into the stratosphere in that same eerie way.


Did we invent music, or only discover it? I think it's the latter. There are laws of music, just as there are laws of physics. Our Western scale has seven notes, corresponding to the seven colors of the rainbow. (Middle-Eastern scales have quarter- and half-steps that we can't manage: I tried to play a computerized piano on this setting and my, did it sound strange, all flattened. I couldn't get a song out of it at all.)


Humans seem hard-wired to interpret musical sounds in certain ways: we often hear music in a minor key as "sad". It's hard not to immediately recognize celebratory music, military marches or music expressing passionate love.

Anyway, this brings me around to why this music scares me. I can't locate in my mind another sound like this: it's not beautiful in the normal sense, and when it hits that extreme shattered-crystal high, it's almost ear-splitting. It has a consciousness that is separate from the vocalizing that is producing it. It's saying, look, here is the physics of music, and isn't it strange? Do you want to hear any more?


I am fascinated, yet want to turn away, to stop listening. From what I have heard, when someone is chanting in a big resonant space, the overtones dwell way out somewhere in a little spinning vortex of their own. There's a sort of blank indifference to the notes. Simple physics. Why does this disturb me? Because I now believe that this is the true nature of God.

God is indifferent, doesn't love or care, just goes on producing life, masses of it. If there is to be love, we must produce it, must care for each other. There is no freestanding love, no Love, except perhaps as a principle. Where all this life came from, why it came, is a deep mystery that will never be solved by the likes of us. Why we were allowed to come this far is a mystery too, for we hold within our hands the power to destroy the entire thing.


There was a time, a very long time, when I believed in a benevolence, a personal God that loved each of us individually, had in fact loved us into being. I can't sustain it any more: I had a massive, shattering experience, an experience in fact in which I believed I actually stood before God.  And God was not Love. God just "was".


I stood before a dazzling indifference.

That ended it, ended my Christianity and all that went with it. This music is disturbing because there is no emotion in it whatsoever. It's like a machine. It's like something turned inside-out that shouldn't be. We don't want to know that the Universe is indifferent. We want to be loved. We don't want to know that we are responsible for the whole damned thing.


It's not even music, it's just a sound. Simple physics.

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Little Pain on the Prairie

When I was a kid there were certain things we were required to read, and the Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder was one of them. This was long before that sappy TV show: the tales were plainly and effectively told, reflecting a simpler but more gruelling time when pioneers broke the sod and made houses with their own hands.


Like Jo March in Little Women, Laura is the feisty, restless and often rebellious younger child, exasperated by the sweet nature and relative passivity of her big sister Mary. When baby Carrie comes along (later to be blinded by smallpox), Laura is caught between her marginalized position in relation to Mary, and the responsibilities of a sister who suddenly must carry a heavy burden of child care.

It's all tough stuff, fed to us in grade school to make us put up or shut up, to be happy with our own cushy situations because "look what those poor girls had to live through". And indeed, with outbreaks of malaria that almost killed them and a winter so harsh they nearly starved, they did have it rough, rougher than we can even imagine.

But I was gobsmacked to discover something I never knew about those little girls on the prairie.


They wore corsets.

I recently stumbled upon this passage from one of the books I never read: Little Town on the Prairie. In this one, the girls are older, coming of age:

[Mary is trying on a new dress that her mother has made for her, but she is unable to fasten it.]

Laura had a sudden thought. “It’s Mary’s corsets! It must be. The corset strings must have stretched.”

It was so. When Mary held her breath again and Laura pulled tight the corset strings, the bodice buttoned, and it fitted beautifully.

“I’m glad I don’t have to wear corsets yet,” said Carrie.

“Be glad while you can be,” said Laura. “You’ll have to wear them pretty soon.” Her corsets were a sad affliction to her, from the
time she put them on in the morning until she took them off at night. But when girls pinned up their hair and wore skirts down to
their shoe-tops, they must wear corsets.

“You should wear them all night,” Ma said. Mary did, but Laura could not bear at night the torment of the steels that would not let
her draw a deep breath. Always before she could get to sleep, she had to take off her corsets.

“What your figure will be, goodness knows,” Ma warned her. “When I was married, your Pa could span my waist with his two hands.”

Ye gods! Laura and Mary had to strap on those awful things, then go out and work in the fields!

I had trouble believing this, until I found some authentic images of "rural women" in corsets: it appears that no matter what sort of work you did, you were required to wear these things, because it wasn't decent NOT to.

The women above are plainly corseted. Like Pa, a man could practically span those tiny waists with his two hands.

A little harder to make out, but yes, these women, threshing hay or thrashing it or whatever-the-hell they did to it, are wearing corsets. The poses look a little unnatural, but nobody knew how to pose in those days because cameras were like something from Mars.

This is my personal favorite. The two cow heads make her waist look even smaller, a great optical illusion. Perhaps she took them around with her, even to the community dances, to boost her chances of a good match.

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The Victorian corset: it hurts so good!

Why is this woman trapped inside a corset? And why does she look so happy to be there?

In researching the fascinating, slightly kinky topic of the Victorian corset, I came across this amazing quote from one of my favorite actresses.

"Winona Ryder has credited her tight corsets with fueling her performance in The Age of Innocence by allowing her to channel her character's emotional turmoil. The actress insists her restrictive costume allowed her to give an authentic performance as a socialite engaged to a lawyer, played by Daniel Day-Lewis, in the 1993 period drama.

And despite feeling uncomfortable throughout the entire shoot, Ryder admits she is grateful for the painful garments. She tells Britain's Total Film magazine, "The corsets are a tremendous help to the performance, because you're playing a repressed person and you can feel the pain that they endured. My waist had to be 19 inches and they had to measure me every day. I would be on the floor and they would pull the strings until it was 19 inches."

"Daniel would wear his clothes home, he was very in character and I was like, 'You have no idea the pain I'm in right now!' But if I did it again I would want it the same way because it made my performance."

Ah yes, the corset: that curious object of female repression, ruthlessly squeezing a woman's body (no matter what size or shape) into a tiny hard cone, with bosoms thrust upwards and balanced on top like two ripe cantaloupes. In other words, corsets were as much for men as they were for women.

Or was it the other way around?

I adore Victorian costumery  - for that is how I see it, "dresses" being an inadequate term for the sumptuous, 50-pound confections that fit women's waists like a second (and imprisoning) skin. Even more than that, I love the ads, often full of whimsy like this almost unbelievable example for Ball's Corsets.

"Revolution in Corsets," it proclaims, depicting a squeezed-in Amazonian figure holding a sword and staff, her foot planted firmly on what is presumably that old-style thing that nobody wears any more. Meanwhile a herd of frightened women stampedes away in the distance. The Ball's Revolutionary Corset has triumped again!

And just look at the results. This is Miss Lettice Fairfax, and aside from the fact that she was named after a garden vegetable, I know nothing about her. Though frills at the shoulder and massive skirts provided an illusion of contrast, corsets took at least 3 inches off the natural waist, converting women's bodies into the perfect clothes-horse for gowns that must have been unbearably cumbersome and stifling to wear.

In fact, I have read that the ideal size for a woman's waist was the same measurement in inches as her neck.

Nothing is more revealing of attitudes towards corsets than these hokey, strangely beautiful ads.  They speak so clearly of those bizarre times, when a torturing undergarment passed without comment because it was so standard. No doubt no one really perceived the irony of a corset being called Harness. Not only that: this was an electric corset (electric items being a fad then, supposedly conveying some sort of tingly, healthful vitality to the patient), making one wonder if it didn't serve the same purpose as the modern vibrator.  Did it plug in? Did it have batteries? One wonders.

Some of my favorite shots display early celebrities such as a very young and girlish Ethel Barrymore (and these days, the hallowed name of Barrymore is only asociated with Drew, one of the most unattractive young women I've ever seen). In all her photos, her huge dark eyes look sad, her regal costumes displaying her like roast beef on a platter or a hugely oversized wedding bouquet.

Modern actresses probably dread wearing these things: they make the wasp-waisted gowns grip the torso like a very tight glove and provide a sort of crucial undergirding for the weight and volume of the skirt. But the little torture chambers can be surprisingly addictive. A British actress named Karin Cartlidge, starring in a TV version of The Cherry Orchard, told the London Times, "These bloody corsets do a lot for repression: I nearly fainted in one. I find them quite sexy; actually, it's a funny sort of thing. They hold you in like a cold iron hand round your heart, therefore all your emotions just seethe away underneath it. It's like being in a sort of prison and it's quite exciting, there's something erotic about it."

Indeed. I won't get into the sites that celebrate the corset as fetish-wear.  You know how to find them. Unless you're attending a Renaissance fair or working as a barmaid at Heidelberg Days, women don't endure these things any more except as fetish-wear. Most of these sites are extremely creepy. Some particularly slavish devotees "tightlace" day and night, though I don't know why anyone would do that to themselves.

Victorian porn could be very subtle. I wonder how many men found satisfaction (of a sort) in looking at these almost subliminally-erotic ads. Just thinking about what was under a woman's dress must have been completely unacceptable, which is probably why naughty French post cards were so popular. But did the proper Victorian woman somehow identify with the daring sauciness of the Valeine ad, or the soft-focus intimacy of the Royal Worcester?

Helena Bonham-Carter is still the ruling queen of the period costume. In A Room with a View, she smolders. With her masses of chestnut hair piled precariously on top of  her head like those water-jugs in the Middle East and her waist reduced to a thread, she swishes around in these dresses as if to the manor born. It must be tiring to pull a wagonload of suffocatingly heavy drapery around with you all day, but somehow she manages it.

And when she lets her masses of hair down, even in a granny-flanny, she still smolders.

Women had to do everything imprisoned in these things, even ride horses (and sidesaddle! It was somehow considered obscene for women to straddle anything, which makes one wonder about those Victorian families with ten or twelve children.) There were maternity corsets then which must have been agony to wear, and corsets for little girls, just to get them good and used to being squeezed until you couldn't properly breathe. Past the age of ten, normal respiration was left behind with all the other trappings of girlhood.

But over and over again, in researching this strange artifact from a very strange time, I found comments from actresses who had endured wearing these things, then had somehow fallen in love with them.

Emma Williams, star of the British series Bleak House, claims, "You get quite strict about your corset - it's like, 'Come on, tighter, tighter.' I had this gorgeous dress for a wedding scene, but it was ridiculously small. I nearly fainted, my corset was so tight. I wore it for eight hours, breathing really slowly so I wouldn't fall over. I'm sure I cracked a rib that day. . .  I had original Victorian corsets, so they were really heavy. I spent half the day crouching down to take the weight off my back. But you do get addicted to them. I might start wearing one round the house, doing the cleaning in rubber gloves and a corset. I'm a classy girl, me."

CODA: I just found these two incredible corset ads while looking for something else. They reflect two common features, or perhaps obsessions, of Victorian corset advertising: little scantily-dressed cherubs fluttering around and acting strangely, and "health corsets" that were no doubt meant to counter the anti-tightlacing "dress reform" movement of the late 19th century. Though corsets were probably about as healthy as tanning beds, they were pitched just as effectively. The ads often included doctors' endorsements (shades of Lucky Strike!), as if that settled the whole thing.

I have no idea what sort of voyeurism is being practised in this ad. I guess the fact that they're photographing the corset, not the woman in it, lets them get away with this overwhelmingly fetish-y shot. (And why is the corset being used as a planter?) This ad is for Warner Bros. Coraline: not, presumably, the movie studio, which didn't exist then - though I think we still see Warners undergarments of a different sort. Bras and things. Next time you think your bra is digging into you and it's torture, think on this and repent.

Ball's advertisements are without a doubt the best. This one boasts a "coiled wire spring elastic section", which today sounds like medieval torture but which then promised increased comfort and flexibility (i.e. you could take at least half a full breath). The caption reads, "Cupid whispers 'Ball's corsets are the best, wear none other.' And so say the medical fraternity."

 

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:

Amazon
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Barnes & Noble

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Thistledown Press

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Chapters/Indigo
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What's under that skirt?

ACK!  This has to rate as the most hallucinogenic 1930s production number I've ever seen, and I don't even think it's Busby Berkeley. Berkeley had a certain shiny, tappy, violently vulgar quality, while this scene, done in one incredible shot, with its swooping, suffocating curtains, dancers in skin-tight body suits and sweetly androgynous tenor soloist, is oddly sultry, even erotic: those silken drapes are hauled up as seductively as a bosomy chorine slowly raising her hemline to reveal God-knows-what.

That massive spiral-staircase turntable, the design of which must be the product of an evil mind harnessed to an over-the-top budget, keeps revealing ever-more-incredible sights and sounds, bizarre stylized dancers that look almost mechanical, operatic excerpts quickly followed by Rhapsody in Blue, and. . . at the top of it all, a Woman, immobilized as a bride buried up to the waist in cake-frosting.

Yes, she's a human cupcake, folks, looking positively edible, and I could eat her right now.  As the silken folds of those swooshy, almost liquid drapes slowwwwwwwly descend, evoking smoky boudoirs and perfume-reeking bridal chambers, we realize we have been taken on a mind-boggling trip through an abstract-art-deco/Freudian-dream-symbol-scape, a big round succulent spiral slowly sucking us into its insatiable vortex, a. . . Yes. It's eight minutes of glorious, strangely orgasmic movie magic.

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Can the dalmation change its spots?

Yes, I admit it. I do get depressed.

This is like a Dalmation saying, yes, I do have spots. Or something.

Just trying to set up this particular post, everything stopped. Quivered and flickered back and forth for a while, then froze.

I feel the twingy, warning signs of a toothache deep in the left side of my jaw. A few months ago I had to have an expensive root canal, a crown replacement and surgery on an abscess. Because of the inflammation the freezing didn't take, so had to be injected four times until I couldn't feel my whole head. (Up until then I didn't think such a thing was even possible. FOUR doses of novocaine? Actually, the last one was delivered in four shots, making it seven.) If this is going to be another dental disaster, it had better happen NOW before our insurance runs out.

I don't know.

I know you're supposed to be chipper, no matter what happens to you, or doesn't happen to you. It's fashionable, and when something's fashionable, 95% of people follow it in great sliding herds like lemmings without even looking at it, let alone questioning it.

If a lot of people are doing it, then it must be right. I even had this used on me (by a minister, no less) to prove the validity of Christianity. Nobody mentions Eichmann and his merry band of assassins.

There's a new documentary out called Pink Ribbons, Inc. which no doubt echoes many of the things I said about breast cancer fundraising in an earlier post. Not that I mind, but why does the damned movie get all this attention when my writing on the same damned subject doesn't?

No, I'm not being gracious, because I don't feel like it!
A very few of my 600+ blog posts have attracted hundreds of views, and one freakish one on Carrie Fisher's ECT treatments drew 12,000, but for the most part I get less than ten views per post, sometimes even zero. Imagine posting something that no one looks at, at all, ever.  It happens to me with alarming frequency. Does this mean I'm: (a) a shitty writer, or (b)cursed?

I've heard pop psychologists/New Age philosophers (an oxymoron if ever there was one) say, "Never take anything personally." They mean anything. I mean, even if your best friend socks you in the face, then laughs. Even if your name is left off your mother's obituary (no joke - it really happened to me, indicating they are so ashamed of me they won't acknowledge that I was even born.) Even if NO ONE is taking your manuscript seriously, not even looking at it! For I am convinced that no one in the publishing industry has read it yet, in spite of well over a year of attempts and even a few promising leads.

It has been completely ignored. Whited out. And I'm supposed to be OK with that.

If I express any of these feelings, certain predictable things happen. The first one: advice. Torrents of it. Even if I haven't asked for it (and I haven't!). This indicates that my feelings are "wrong" and I must be "advised" out of them. (No one thinks just to listen.) The most predictable advice is, "Just write for your own enjoyment and don't think about publishing any of it."

Hm. Dickens would've gone far on that, eh? Or how about Mickey Spillane. Anybody. Writing isn't knitting (and even when you knit, which I do, copiously, you like to think someone, somewhere is going to wear the thing that you're knitting. Or should you be happy to throw it in a drawer somewhere, or even just throw it in the garbage?)

But writers are told to do this ALL THE TIME. I know I go over and over this, it's probably pretty tedious by now, but no one expects a concert pianist to play in an empty hall. But writing is a cheat, something you can't really study, so it doesn't count as "art". Wanting recognition for it is somehow deeply embarrassing. 

There's an unexpected phenomenon now that might have helped my chances enormously if I'd only been able to use it: the flukey runaway success of the European indie film The Artist. It's a silent movie about silent movies, and it has stolen the critics' hearts (which means Oscar nominations, causing the public to rush lemming-like to the box office and rave about it afterwards,not because they liked it but because it's the thing to do). 


But when I began marketing The Glass Character, which BY THE WAY is about the life and career of the phenomenal silent film comedian Harold Lloyd, I didn't mention The Artist because I had never heard of it. I had never heard of it because IT WASN'T OUT YET. And even when it did come out, I brushed it off as too hokey. There was no way anyone would pay attention to something so marginalized and odd.

Woody Allen also made a period movie, now up for several Oscars, called Midnight in Paris. It's all about a writer disillusioned with his own times who is somehow magically transported to Paris during the 1920s and the great flowering of arts and literature called the Jazz Age.

I didn't think to use that as a marketing tool either because, well, I just didn't. It didn't occur to me, and the way I'm feeling now, with a major dental catastrophe only a wet blink away, I wonder if it would have mattered anyway.

Listen, this is a damn good book: Jeffrey Vance is probably the only person who has really read it, and he loved it. Jeffrey Vance co-wrote (with Suzanne Lloyd, Harold's granddaughter, whom he raised) perhaps the definitive Lloyd biography. My favorite one, anyway.

No one else is giving it the time of day. Even my queries aren't being read, and it's killing me.

Over and over and over again, I am being told to either self-publish, or e-publish. I am still hanging back. Though it doesn't mean I will never do it, every instinct in my body tells me to wait. I had enough trouble with distribution and promotion when I had a whole publishing company behind me. So many writers are doing this now that I think the market is being flooded. And I don't know how they put together a promotional tour with readings/signings, how they get the book into stores or reviewed in newspapers and magazines, or even significantly noticed on-line.

Are there editorial standards? I'm just askin', though I have that crawling feeling I shouldn't.

As far as I know, a novel published in this way would not be eligible for the Governor General or the Giller or the Booker or any of the other awards that can propel a writer from the literary doldrums into a position where (though we aren't supposed to want this, it's vanity, ego and other nasty things) people actually read our books.

Do I think the revolution will never happen? Things are in a state of flux now. Come back in ten years, maybe five. Maybe even three. But I wonder what the statistics are. How many self-published/e-published writers are becoming best-sellers and making decent money, or even a profit? One can usually pull out a single smash-hit, but what's the average? But even by askin', I'll be making a lot of writers angry and defensive (that is, if they read this at all). 

It's as if you can't ask anything or say anything (unless you're a non-writer, in which case you are required to give floods of advice on a subject you know nothing about), have to tiptoe around on eggshells or you'll end up a pariah, disloyal. I figured out a long time ago that there is a secret code among writers, one that I will never crack. But once a writer crosses over, is there any chance of reverting back to more traditional methods? I think publishers are pretty freaked-out by all this, though I think some of them are beginning to get on-board. Maybe it's that perceived lack of editorial standards. How should I know?

Along with the reams of other unsolicited advice, writers are forever being told to "toughen up", but guess what: if you toughen up, then you can't write any more. Writers are like tuning forks vibrating sympathetically with whatever buzz is going on around them. Not to agree with it, but often to criticize it and stand up to it. They serve a crucial but often completely unheeded function: to be the conscience of the world.


Being this cranky isn't popular. It exposes things, bare nerves that people don't want to see or feel. There's only so much novocaine in the real world. Another favorite ploy of people who know nothing about this is, "Well, I don' t feel that way about it, and I don't know anybody else who does." More lemming syndrome? Maybe. I can only have a certain emotion, or objection, or opinion, if others share it.

You're the only one. And don't you forget it.
I see why writers commit suicide, I really do. I can't because of my family, but if I did not have them, well, I see why they do it anyway. I don't see why successful writers do it however. I can't see why ANY successful person does it. They do, but it doesn't make a damn bit of sense to me.

Mothers, don't let your sons grow up to be writers! One way or another, they'll be shot through the heart.

P.S. if anyone actually does follow this blog, they will read this post and say, "Oh, I can't read it any more, it's just too negative and depressing." Then they will abandon it. (Not that I have any abandonment issues. Being left off my mother's obituary is totally OK with me.) Never mind that 95% of the posts are NOT negative or depressing. Every once in a while I just feel weighed down with all this and have to try to get words around it.

It's what writers do. Isn't it?

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