The pills I took were a bad idea

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust. T. S. Eliot The wishbone Today I had the thought, Do not, do not, on pain of freaking death, look backward, Look backward over your shoulder at anything that you Have done or that has transpired, Because you will have one of two reactions: You will hate what you have done, who you were, all the  mistakes You have made, all the chances not taken, Or else you will so love the times that were sweet  blossomings, Heady gardens of the mind, That you will ache for those times and die inside, Knowing they will never return. Today I had that knowledge, but did I absorb it? I never knew when things were crowning anyway, When moments were sublime, For they slid out from under me even as I experienced them. Far from trusting that these moments would come again, Which they would not, I tried to seize them, to keep them close, but they only  changed form In some incredible miracle from solid to liquid A collapsing snow castle. My life has been a road steadily pulled out from under me By some unseen hands And I’ve had to run to keep up with it To keep from falling on my ass Or hitting the back of my head. Run, run, fucking run. My life has been some sort of awful conundrum, An impenetrable puzzle that the newspaper Forgot to publish the answer to, With too many gifts of the wrong sort, things I could Never share because I was never given the chance: No, not never, for I tasted of the thing I wanted most, Or thought I wanted most, Like a tongue on powdered sugar. Births slingshot into nine-year birthday parties, And I see the infant I watched slide into the doctor’s hands Blowing out her nine candles, Looking about fourteen years old, Her hair up, her eyes knowing, Her smile splitting my heart. She looks nothing Like me or my side of the family, And the Spanish blood that lurks several Generations back is clear in her almond-eyed, Almost Castilian beauty. It can’t get any better, God won’t let it, In fact God is the reason for all this: I want to say, take me NOW so I don’t have to see any more, So that I will not be dragged to the awful breaking point, The point of disaster that I know is coming If I don’t get out of here soon. This puppet dance amuses me, Though the first time I saw it in that odd old movie It tore me to pieces. I forgot to mention in the labels That the music is by Bartok Who knew a thing or two about horror. I could say something now about puppets and strings, But I know it would be awful. I am in a labyrinth, somewhere in the middle so that It is possible to move in any direction And be equally lost. I hit Dead end after dead end, the board Tilted nastily so that the little silver ball Keeps on dropping through the holes.  I don’t want to read any more biographies, Don’t want to read about How lavishly gifted people Threw everything away with both hands Continually Because I don’t know what these things are Supposed to do for us anyway, Inspire us, Inspire revulsion or pity Or embarrassment or discouragement or what? I am told to try and try. But it turns out That this is what they tell people anyway, it’s kind of Standard, A form letter of advice, And I am the only one who pays attention to it. It has become clear to me Just today,  just this minute That my efforts are an embarrassment to everyone Because they didn’t really mean I SHOULD try – It is the best way to get rid of me quickly With no sticky feelings involved Or perhaps it makes them feel better, Which is what apology is really all about, It has nothing to do with the wounded party, Who smugly assumes the person is truly contrite. I have a certain  fascination for divination and Signs, Splintery snaps of the wishbone Dried on top of the fridge for months Yielding only the dessicated remains of a turkey or duck Knowing none of this ever comes true, That there is in fact no special protection, No amulet that holds off disaster, And the realization is strong, and inspires all sorts of Awful visions: Dancing along the edge of the Skytrain platform Feeling a little woozy As if the couple of pills I just took Might after all have been a bad idea. http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

All day, all night, Harold Lloyd (some of my favorite Facebook covers)

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They're fun, they're spooky. . . they're HALLOWEEN GIFS!

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More creepy shit

I don't know about you - I mean I REALLY don't know about you because you're a unique individual with needs, desires, chromosomes, fingernails and a digestive tract that is all your own - but I find these new gifs plain creepy. They're some new technology that I haven't mastered yet, and aren't you glad? A supposed improvement on the jerky little things I've learned to make. But oh God, look.

There are all sorts of these now and they are being touted as some sort of breakthrough, but the thing is, even if the picture is clearer and more realistic, nothing really happens in them. You see a lot more action in one of my three-second Harold Lloyd clockhanger things.

Oh my God!  How realistic! Look at that cake batter, how flowing and detailed. But howcum the pan never gets filled up? Must be a hole in the bottom, in which case this woman must be standing in batter up to her ankles. She's smiling, so I guess that's her particular fetish. I also like the fact that except for the particular detail of the batter, everything else is motionless. The woman is as still as the dead.

My personal favorite. I used to call gifs "three-second movies", but I think that's being pared down to "one-second". A nod and a wink. Then we're done.

Creep-o-rama gif!

Who wore it better? You decide

I have this habit of blogging first thing in the morning, and last thing at night. The rest of the time I am in purgatory.

No, sorry, I mean. . .

I mean that the editing process, the next step in preparing The Glass Character for publication in the spring, makes me feel kind of like I have glue in my veins. Or sludge. The process is oh, so long, so hard, extremely tiring and frustrating, and an all-around pain in the ass.

But soft! What's this? What light through yonder window breaks?

And why?

Why on earth is Harold Lloyd, our Harold Lloyd, our dishy silent comic-of-a-lifetime, our inspiration for the most aggravating and perhaps hopeless novel in human history, why is OUR Harold Lloyd dressed like a girl?

Oh, he looks beautiful, mind. That's not the issue. The turban, feathers, etc. are, well, rather becoming on him. He smiles softly, beguilingly. He looks not only comfortable, but content.

No, this isn't a Before/After shot, it's Carmen Miranda, famous for her banana-headed tropical outfits and shimmying around the stage. I can't imagine Harold shimmying - well, actually, he DID do a "shimmie" in one of his earliest pictures. I just find the resemblance striking, is all, though it could be that Harold is a touch more feminine.

FEMININE?!

I don't see him that way, never have, though a person I used to call my friend said (having watched her first and last Harold Lloyd movie): "Why do you like him? I thought he was gay." As if that's all that matters about any human being, a quick way to dismiss, to write off.

I have a bit of an insight here: this bizarre magazine cover (which I am convinced is real: it appears in too many places not to be, including in its original form on auction sites) could possibly have something to do with his lifelong involvement in Masonic orders and the Shriners. I've always been convinced these fellows are just a sort of Dull Men's Club, but lately, what with all this Illuminati stuff coming out, and all these TV shows that claim the image on the American $1 bill is some Satanic thing-or-other, you never know. Then there was all this CIA stuff during the Cold War, the mind games and experiments. Surely Harold wouldn't be mixed up in all that, would he? He looks too innocent. Or was this just a get-up for one of his pictures? I can't remember one where he looked quite so fetching.

And orange is definitely his colour.

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Something funny going on (weird-ass gifs)

Somethin' funny goin' on!

35 words for magic

I have no time, I'm tired, need to go to bed. . . This process I'm in. This editing, re-editing, is far deeper and more challenging than anything I've experienced, I mean ever. Writing novels isn't for sissies (even if I feel like one), and editing definitely isn't. I'm currently in my third round just of my OWN revisions, never mind the editorial ones I'll be working on all next week. And I'm not through yet.

So what has happened to my passionate, stormy, sometimes-troubled but always compelling relationship to Harold Lloyd?

I'm discovering something shocking. I should have realized this before. The book isn't even about Harold Lloyd. It's about Muriel Ashford, the woman who pursues him obsessively over several decades. Harold is just her projection, her idee fixe, and exists only in her eyes. So how did I get on to this idea that I'd written a Harold Lloyd novel?

I couldn't approach him any other way. I too was "enmagicked" by Harold, got swept up. It's easy to be: the man gave off excitement and fizzing, popping sparks of charm. There was a rude obnoxious edge to him when he was a young knockabout, and I am not sure it ever entirely went away.

In the novel, I have to keep surgically removing certain things that crop up with alarming frequency. One is the word "magic", which, my editor tells me, I used 35 times. Nearly every time I see it now, I chop it off like a stalk of celery, and either come up with a decent synonym or just chuck the sentence out.

Did writing about Harold render me cliche-ridden?  I wonder. I don't remember falling into those things before. But never before did I take the risk of stepping over the boundary into that smudgy midnight phosphorescence, a reality in which everything subtly jerks up and down and runs at the wrong speed.

The things I've been going through just lately have been extremely emotionally draining. I'm shedding yet another skin, but only because I have to. The urgency is coming from within. She not busy being born is busy drowning in her own bile. But there's nothing I can do about that. It's my destiny to peel back my own skin, to persevere.

So the covenant remains, the initial passion now shading into stamina, the need to continue.

Order The Glass Character from:

Thistledown Press 

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

Amazon.com

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

Chapters/Indigo.ca

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