A moment in time

Michael Maniaci, Male Soprano Voice

Radu Marian, Handel "Lascia Ch'io Pianga"

Philippe Jaroussky "Lascia ch'io pianga" Rinaldo

High attitude

Whew. How can it be Monday already? Anyway, I don't think I've ever had as much trouble as I did with yesterday's post, and it had nothing to do with the content. Every time I try to cut n' paste, I either lose my formatting or end up with little tiny type, so finally I had to throw in the towel and leave it the way it was.

My exploration of the castrati, emasculated superstar singers of the 18th century, was fascinating beyond words. Way led on to way, as it always does, and I discovered several contemporary artists who described themselves as "male sopranos".

This is a whole 'nother thing than "countertenor", a technique I have always described as "bargain-counter tenor" for its strident tone, which can be nasal and downright irritating. These guys, however they do it, sing in soprano range with eerie beauty. It's not true that they "sing like women", for if you listen closely a male sensibility underlies the vocal pyrotechnics.

The first one I stumbled on was Michael Maniaci. On hearing him sing, I began to cry in about one second. I was blown back: this was artistry. Never mind that his voice sounds neither male nor female, and is impossible to compare to anyone else's (creating, at least on first listening, a strange disorientation). It isn't so much the voice as the delivery. He feels this, feels it in his soul, and he knows how to get it across.

Maniaci had to deal with a lot of abuse in his youth. He never quite went through puberty: at least, his larynx didn't, remaining pretty close to that of a boy's. Add to that a partial facial paralysis (which should have made serious singing impossible: just study the faces of opera singers and see how engaged all the muscles of the face are), and you have a recipe for teasing and ostracism. The man doesn't even have an Adam's apple, but he does have a good set of operatic lungs.

Did the castrati sound like this? Perhaps. In descriptions of castrati from the era, which may well have been overblown by fans, agents, etc., they were endowed with huge voices that could soar unnaturally high, hold notes seemingly forever, and brilliantly accomplish trills and arpeggios and all that sopranic singy-singy stuff (perhaps because their tiny thin vocal cords were flexible enough to get around it all).

I also stumbled upon Phillipe Jaroussky, whom some critics prefer over Maniaci for his authentic baroque sound, less operatic and generous of spirit but more ethereal and pure. But for real harum-scarum stuff, just give a listen to Radu Marian, a man who isn't a even man in the usual sense. Like Maniaci, he never fully went through puberty, resulting in the voice of a highly-trained, musically brilliant 15-year-old girl.

God, these guys! Marian is married, apparently. I guess we all wonder about "other" things, about sexual capability and stuff like that, as if it's any of our business. Which it isn't. I kept finding references to the awesome sexual capacity of castrati, which seemed pretty impossible to me, unless they meant highly-developed technique in bestowing pleasure upon females. Which is an entirely different thing from conventional "potency". There's more than one way to skin a cat, or please a lover.

I'll be posting some actual recordings here if I can get them, including Radu Marian and Philippe Jaroussky singing the same aria in two different keys. I guarantee you their voices will raise chills, and sound a little disturbing. However they do it, these men boldly sing where no man has sung before.

Gilded and gelded: giving your all for art

Of all the weirdnesses I’ve produced on this blog, this may be the weirdest. I don’t know what got me onto this, and it was not even a new topic, but it was the first time I’d explored it to this depth.

There was a time, and thank God it’s over, and a place, now more enlightened, when little boys who sang well were altered so that their voices would never change. Sounds innocent enough, until you realize that this was the kind of alteration farmers did to bulls to fatten them up and render them docile.

Yes. These little boys, usually on the verge of puberty, were subjected to the most barbaric procedure imagineable, all in the name of “art” (or, more likely, commerce). There was money to be made in transforming your innocent little choirboy son into . . . a castrato.

An awful word, isn’t it – though it does sound a bit like Capistrano, where the swallows come back to. Awful because this took place in the 18th and 19th centuries, mostly in Italy and other parts of Europe, when surgery involved a belt of whiskey and (if you were lucky) a sharpened knife. (Actually, the instrument, still in existence as a Medieval-looking artifact, resembles the jaws of a shark or a bizarre pair of scissors. Even I have limits here, and won't include a photo.)

The child probably wouldn’t get the whiskey because it wasn’t good for him. After the surgery, once he could walk again, he would be subjected (again, without his consent: “please, Daddy, may I have my testicles removed so I can be a great singer?”) to many hours a day of rigorous vocal practice.

From what I can gather from my usual ghoulish research, the boy would retain his small childlike vocal cords, but grow in stature and lung capacity so that giant gusts of air would be forced through tiny little reeds. Same principle as an oboe, really: and oboeists tend to go crazy and have strokes later in life from all that forced air.

This wasn't the only physical peculiarity of the castrato, who was quite literally emasculated, a eunuch with a permanently arrested sexual identity. The burst of testosterone responsible for beard growth, broadening of shoulders, deepening voice, and all the other yummy things that happen to men at puberty (excuse me, I forgot myself) just didn't happen. Joints didn't fuse and harden, with grotesque consequences: arms and legs grew unnaturally long, as did the ribs, resulting in a barrel chest. Good for singing, bad for looks.

The castrato's body was kind of like a fat woman's, with broad hips and enlarged breasts. Combined with long spindly limbs and a soft, rounded, beardless face, they must have looked Halloweenish, but the funny thing is, women loved them. Loved the androgynous look, and swooned when their operatic she-males sent their voices soaring into the stratosphere.

I try to imagine it in my mind, but it's not easy. A gorgeous soprano sound, stoked and pumped up by huge lungs, the volume sufficient to shatter glass. And then there was that legendary ability castrati like Farinelli had to sustain a note for a full minute. Like slowly letting the air out of a very large balloon.

We'll never really know what this freak voice sounded like, but we have an approximation. Just listen to Alessandro Moreschi, if you can stand it. He looks soft-featured, round-faced, almost childish, though in his photo he is well into middle age. All the portraits of famous castrati that I found look the same, as if they’re all genetically related. Some of them look more like multiples, hatched out of the same egg.

Actually, they are related, not just by vocal brilliance but by mutilation. Moreschi is called the “last” castrato because he was the only one whose voice was ever recorded. His singing gives you a tantalyzing taste of what audiences seemed to crave a few hundred years ago. The impression I get here is a voice desperately trying to be tenor. The “attack”, the interpretation, the way he puts the song out there, all have a masculine sensibility, like a tenor’s (and believe me, being a tenor isn’t just about singing).

Then, suddenly and without warning, it swoops into the stratosphere, throbbing for just one instant with beauty and glittering with overtones that somehow come through even on the most primitive recording equipment.

We do have countertenors today who can sing a kind of mezzo-soprano. But their voices tend to have a “hooty” quality, a falsetto which is, let’s face it, false: a man’s voice forced up through the nose into the various vibrating cavities of the sinuses. It's a little like Curly of the Three Stooges (and I have nothing against Curly - I think he was a genius - but that wasn't his real voice. He had a normal male register which he seldom used on the screen.)

Moreschi sings in a “true” voice, which, while technically weak, mannered and likely ridden to death by too much performing (like a race horse being forced to run on shattered tendons) is capable of an awful kind of beauty. Awful, because a man who isn’t a man can’t live in any way except through his music. Conventional intimacy would be impossible, and he’d appear and sound freakish.

Castrati were celebrated and petted like lap dogs, even rumored to be great lovers (which was not very likely), but were never considered normal men. This is a tortured sound, reminiscent of bound feet in gorgeously-embroidered Chinese slippers. Mutilated into beauty. I know I should, but I just can’t turn away.

Strauss gets his groove on: the Great Waltz (1938)

A long, strange trip

This falls under the category of why the hell am I doing this. You fall down the rabbit hole of a past you didn't even enjoy very much, and it's dreamlike and strange and every once in a while you hear a street name like Grand Avenue and a synapse fires with a sizzling SNAP.

I did find out a bit about Bob Sass, my first boy friend in Chatham. Nobody else approved of him because he was glum and a serious musician. At the time he was playing French horn, but when I finally tracked him down on a meticulous site called Chatham Music Archive, he was listed as playing "flugel horn, French horn, trombone, saxophone, etc.", in a high school rock band. I particularly like that "etc." part.

There were gazillions of little bands in Chatham in 1968 (apparently: I was surprised at how many). Among the very few names that jumped out at me were Sylvia Tyson (a high school friend of my sister's who was then known as Sylvia Fricker) and Paul Shaffer, who quickly moved on to greener pastures.

But this Bob, this first boy friend who made me lie down on the grass with him which I didn't really want to do, was in this band, Cold Sweat, led by one Leroy Hurst (from Windsor, formerly with Little Leroy and the Citations). Aside from Leroy, Bob seemed to do everything else.

Then came a heartbreaking story which may or may not be true: for after all, bands are volatile and break up, and high school bands from 1968 are known to blow apart in an explosion of bongs and beer cans. "Bruce Robertson took over on vocals for the last 3 or four months. In September of 1968 the groups (sic) van hit a steer on the highway near Lucan on the way home from a gig in Wingham. Bruce Robertson was killed and three other members of the band were hospitalized. The band never re-formed."

Well, I just don't know. Because it has an aura of Spinal Tap about it. Of the drummers exploding or something. Or kind of like The Rutles, which I think is funnier. But then again, maybe it did happen and I am being insensitive.

At least it wasn't Bob.

Just one more, because I loved him

This is what it looked like. . .

Hard to caption these, though many of them seem to come from the mists of antiquity.

What strikes me is how different my view of them is now that I'm an adult. I remember thinking our house was plain and ugly because it looked nothing like the flat-roofed, space-age designs of the '60s. You were supposed to have a new house, not one of these. The house is still there, but has been converted into a doctor's office, which means the inside must be entirely ripped out. When we first moved in I was three. Walking through the empty house, I wondered how we were ever going to live without furniture.

Rocky, yes. . . I've already written about this sturdy little cow-pony, who had more character than breeding. I still love telling Rocky stories. This is probably the time I put him out in the back yard with Willie and the cherry tree, and he broke loose and galloped all the way back to the stable.

Willie, well. . . he was a beautiful but temperamental dachschund my Dad was conned into buying by a breeder. He was already seven years old and turned out to be an ineffectual breeding stud with a lousy temperament, the worst pet imagineable. My Dad was a complete idiot.

The Sunday-go-to-church one, well, this is pure Leave it to Beaver, isn't it? Like something from Hilldale (or wasn't that Donna Reed? My brother and I, trying to make her human, called her Donna Peed.)

Which is what?

So which is what? Which one of these honkin' old brick buildings is McKeough School, where I attended from 1959 to 1964 (though it seemed like 20 times that long)?

I won't give you any hints, but I'll help you match the photo to the description. One of them is the Kent County Penitentiary. One is the Armoury in Tecumseh Park. One is a Baptist church with the inexplicable title of Duchess of Wellington. One of them is a munitions factory or something, and one is Park Street United, the church where my minister was thrown into jail for sexual improprieties (look it up: his name was Rev. Russell Horsburgh). And one is McKeough School. Oh-oh, that's six!

Since I am sure the suspense is killing you, I'll tell you. The first one is McKeough School, which operated, incredibly, until 2001. I remember looking up the web site in the '90s, and wondering why the whole thing hadn't fallen down. To me, it looks like a set for Jane Eyre or something, where they have to break the ice in the washbasins.

Why can't I get it any more?

These slabs of stuff were the building blocks of my childhood.

My Dad would bring them home for me from his school supply store, which also carried a few art supplies. Each slab was a different color. When I took it out of the package, there was a familiar smell. The plasticine smell.

Faintly chemical, a little like dirty socks. Not pleasant, but not unpleasant either. It didn't make me want to eat it, like Play-Doh, which has a biscuit-dough texture and a whiff of vanilla that makes it irresistible.

It took a while to work this stuff in your hands until you could make something out of it. I was always making something out of it, usually alone. I didn't use plastic cookie cutters or try to make Gumby or other "claymation" figures like the always-morally-correct Davy and Goliath. No one used the term claymation then, though I knew it had something to do with stop-action and being incredibly patient.

What I loved about plasticine was the fact that it never dried out, could be endlessly reused and recycled, got warmer and more forgiving as you worked with it. It was the ideal substance, the medium for my imagination as expressed through my fingers.

I still dream about McKeough School in Chatham, Ontario where I grew up in the '60s. Last night I dreamed it was no longer a historical site (as I think it used to be, before being shut down due to violating every building code in existence), and was being demolished.

My memories are fragmentary but powerful. The principal, Mr. Robertson, was an ex-army man who made us march in to military music ("Over hill, over dale, we have hit the dusty trail. . . "). He sometimes came in unexpectedly and had us stand beside our desks while he inspected the troops. We were expected to stand rigidly at "ten-HUT" until he said (no, I am not making this up) "at ease".

That school was old. The stone steps going in had hollows in them from countless thousands of feet. The basement where we watched "fill-ums" (mostly National Film Board hygiene things) was like somebody's pitch-black furnace room.

I remember things, like bringing 32 pink-iced Valentine cookies to school for the class (my mother did all the work, as I remember, turning them out grimly like a machine. Housewives kept score on each other then.) I remember the Monday after the Beatles came on the Ed Sullivan Show, when everyone was buzzing about them and trying to buy Ringo dolls. Our teacher, Miss Wray (an elderly spinster, like all the McKeough School teachers) finally said, "Settle down, class. This lesson has nothing to do with wigs."

Then there was Kennedy. We had some idea who Kennedy was, of course. How could we help it? Then one day in November the voice of doom came over the loudspeaker asking all the teachers to get down to the office, now. This was unusual, as the teacher had to ask the hall monitor to keep us in line for a few minutes.

When Miss Wray came back, she was ashen.

Then Mr. Robertson came on again and called recess: what was going on? It wasn't recess! I can't recall exactly how he communicated this, but somehow we all knew Kennedy had been shot and we were being sent outside, a nonsensical turn of events, though my adult self realizes they were probably trying to figure out what the hell to do next.

While we were milling about outside (the girls on one side, the boys on the other), Nancy, a girl who had been born in the States, started rallying us around her. We stood in a big circle in the yard and chanted, "Kennedy, Kennedy, rah-rah-rah! Kruschev, Kruschev, boo-boo-boo!"

It didn't do any good, though we were dismissed early after the faux recess, which we always thought was a good thing. My parents didn't say anything that I can remember, but Bullwinkle wasn't on, nor was anything else I liked to watch. It was all "coverage". Walter Cronkite nearly cried, which was scary, like Mr. Robertson crying or something. Confusion was everywhere, reaching its nadir as I watched Lee Harvey Oswald shot to death on live TV.

But what does all this have to do with plasticine? I'm getting to that, be patient.

At the end of the school year came the ultimate event: the McKeough School Picnic. This was a grand occasion with all sorts of sports, races and games, prizes given out, and a splendid fireworks display at the end (including the Burning School House, which didn't look like anything but always provoked subversive whoops of joy). I remember one year coming in third in the sack race, proving that even then, I was pretty good in the sack.

There was all sorts of food available for this event, bake table things and the like. My mother always made three kinds of fudge: chocolate, vanilla and coconut. To this day, I make damn good fudge with a similar recipe (the old-time kind where you boil up syrup to the soft ball stage - no thermometers, you wimps! - and beat the hell out of the molten liquid until it "fudge-ifies", as my kids called it eons later). She also made tons of popcorn using a beat-up old saucepan, put it in paper sacks while it was still sizzling hot, and drenched it with melted butter. Eaten fresh, it was agonizingly good.

But the plasticine! We're still getting to that. Along with all the other gorgeous things we did, there was the Hobby Fair. I don't remember much about it, frankly - maybe it involved crocheted toilet roll covers, stamp collections or something like that. There were ribbons given out, firstsecondthird. I had never won anything in my life, mainly because I never entered it.

Then, at the end of Grade Three, I got an idea.

I cracked open several new slabs of plasticine that my Dad had brought home from his store. (Don't ever think he bought them for me, because he didn't. This was excess stock that would have been returned to the manufacturer or thrown out.) I started warming it up in my hands, revving.

Then I began to build.

We had just "taken" a poem in school about the Pied Piper of Hamelin. It was endless, taking up page after page, a simple story crammed with detail and unfamiliar words like "nuncheon" and "sugar-puncheon". The most memorable lines are quite well-known: "Great rats, small rats, lean rats, brawny rats,/Brown rats, black rats, grey rats, tawny rats."

Rats!

I would make rats. I would make the piper, holding his flute triumphant and spiriting all the rats out of Hamelin. My fingers flew as I made rat, after rat, after rat.

I don't know what color they were. They must have rested on something, some sort of cardboard (though I think that came later: I wasn't thinking of an actual display). I don't know how many rats, exactly, but there seemed to be hundreds of them.

Surprisingly, I think it was my mother who said, "We have to enter this in the Hobby Fair." I looked up at her: it was highly unusual for my parents to acknowledge any sort of talent in me, with three older siblings (one of them thirteen years older) who seemed to surpass me at everything. Even then, I fully expected to understand my 23-year-old sister's erudition when I was ten.

So my rat-swarmed display was entered. Came the time for the judges to snoop around all the exhibits, looking to pin ribbons on them, or not. One of them stopped at my Pied Piper station and sniffed, "I don't believe a child in Grade Three could have made this."

As it happened, a neighbor lady, Peggy Aitken, was standing there and said, "Oh yes, she did! I saw her making it!" This wasn't true, but I appreciated the vote of confidence.

I won first prize. For my rats. For my Pied Piper of Hamelin. I don't know what happened to the display; I suspect it was recycled, like all my plasticene things. No one took a picture of it, and I don't know what happened to the ribbon.

Nice story. But the thing is, now that my grandkids have outgrown Play-Doh (which is only useful for mucking around and making fake cookies), I can't find real plasticine. It's just not anywhere. I've gone to that Michaels craft store and bought some abominations. It's called all sorts of different things, usually Modelling Clay (which it isn't: this isn't clay at all but some sort of polymer product that never hardens), Krazy Klay and the like. I once bought a huge rainbow package (the different colors now come in small tubes like fat pencils), opened it, and was knocked back by noxious fumes.

The smell was just overpowering. Like moth balls mixed with Varsol (a more foul version of turpentine). I did let the kids play with it once, thinking, it has to be safe, I bought it at Michaels!, but their fingers were coated in disgusting oily smears, and their fingernails looked like they'd been coal mining.

So I go on the internet to find out what the hell, and it's vague as usual: it sort of tells you where to buy the stuff, if you can get it. The slabs might still be made in Britain, maybe, if you're willing to pay L25 per slab and shipping and handling, and you'll probably still get the wrong stuff.

I want my plasticine back! My eldest granddaughter Caitlin, who is endlessly crafty and creative, is just at the "big rats, small rats" stage. She could make her own Pied Piper display (though it's more likely to be Lady Gaga and her legions of fans). Don't tell ME I have to make my own, using creosote, crank case oil and corn syrup.

I saw something on the net saying Plasticine, the original name brand, had been banned for being a biohazard. Nonsense! The original had a faint odor, nothing like the knock-you-back fumes of the crap I bought at Michaels. If kids ate it in great quantities, maybe. But that's also true of poster paint and Elmer's glue. I don't understand why, if actual Plasticene is banned, they don't also ban this foul Third World glop that won't come off your hands until it wears off.

Like so many things I've lost, I want it back, but it's unlikely. I'll keep on trying to find something decent at the dollar store, then pitching it out when it stinks or won't mold any better than a pencil erasor.

Oh, by the way. The Beatles first appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show on February 9, 1964. My tenth birthday, coming only three months after the Kennedy Assassination and four months before my Pied Piper victory. It was one of those years.

SNAP!

Please excuse the Spanish subtitles; I know they're moronic, but I can't find a version without them. This is "my scene", the one that melted me down completely the other night. Jesus, there are no words for it.

Quite possibly the most beautiful photo of Harold Lloyd EVER

What is it about you, Harold Lloyd? What's the mystery?

Part of it is, of course, the fact that you are plain gorgeous. Add to that superior acting skills and a naturally balletic/athletic grace, and you have a killer combination.

But most of all, Lloyd ("dolly" in anagram) had an indescribable charm, and a way of gently but insistently taking you on-side. His was often the humor of humiliation, something that might be hard to take from a lesser-skilled comedian. What he was saying, without coming out and saying it, was, "Sometimes life is embarrassing. Sometimes we feel plain foolish. Has this ever happened to you? Like this. Let me show you."

And he'd show you, and you'd groan and shake your head, seeing yourself, and you'd laugh. And laugh.

The best part, though, is the way he always won in the end. Some critics have misunderstood Lloyd (hell, most critics have misunderstood Lloyd, especially several decades after his films stopped being shown in about 1940), calling him a "go-getter", and explaining his waning popularity in the '30s by saying that his style of go-getting had got up and gone.

It wasn't that way at all. If Lloyd was driven by anything, it was romantic yearning. In fact, the few critics who did understand him have always insisted that he single-handedly invented the genre of romantic comedy.

In his most famous movie, Safety Last! (in which he scales that skyscraper and dangles off the hands of a huge clock), his task is anything but a foolish daredevil stunt: he has to prove himself to his fiancee, the peony-sweet Mildred Davis. Always there's that struggle to prove his worthiness, to put his personal anxieties aside for the sake of a higher purpose (and what purpose could be higher than love?).

In Girl Shy, when his "how to romance women" manuscript is laughed and jeered out of the publisher's office, he feels like such a failure that he's purposely nasty to the woman he adores, cutting her loose from a loser at the expense of his own heart.

My God! That's the most romantic thing I've ever seen!

Yes, and there's more. That race to the church at the end of Girl Shy: it's a flat-out epic, the shy, stuttering, failed writer galloping through hell-fire to prevent his (already spurned, but still adored) inamorata from marrying a callous bigamist. This sequence, one of the finest in movie history, has to be seen to be believed, and it's obvious he's doing most of the stunts himself, working without a net in the typical Harold Lloyd way.

Lloyd didn't like heights, and I don't know how well he liked thrills, but he seemed to need to seek them. Testing, testing himself all the time. Against what, we don't know. When I researched The Glass Character, my novel about Lloyd and his times, I discovered a complicated man who seemed simple, who maybe even thought of himself as simple. His intelligence was subtle, mercurial, and worked at light-speed. It's that canny look in his eyes, friendly, yet in some way sizing everything up. As he got older, that look deepened. The charming old gent was still fierce inside, still looking for a duel somewhere, maybe not so much to win as to prove to himself that he still had it.

Harold's nickname was Speedy. He liked it when people called him that. It's a boy's name, isn't it? - not the kind of nickname a middle-aged man might choose. Did the name choose him, I wonder - or was it Foxy, his charming, twinkly old Dad, a man who could sell snake-oil to an anaconda?

When he finally had to let go of an acting career that had become his life's obsession, Lloyd had to change gears quite dramatically, finally taking up a dizzy array of hobbies and athletic pursuits. What people didn't always know about him was his dedication to philanthropy. (He didn't believe in thumping his own drum.) Still, through the Shriners, he did a tremendous amount of good for children's hospitals. Especially burn units. Lloyd had been horribly burned in an explosion when he was still in his twenties. You don't forget a thing like that.

I can't say everything about Harold - can't say anything, can I? - except that I love him. The novel waits in limbo, and I don't know what, if anything, is going to happen to it. I ache to see it in print, for it's the work of my life. If it doesn't make it, I'm going to feel like Harold in that publisher's office. The look of devastation and the collapse of his dreams goes way back inside him, not just in his eyes but in his spirit, as if he has somehow, uncannily, made his soul visible. This isn't just great acting, it is a powerful actor's instinct for reaching into the psyches of his audience. What has just happened to me, dear viewers, has also happened to you, and you know it.

I really thought that when I finished writing The Glass Character, someone would get as excited about it as I was. So far the silence has been deafening. Hell, Harold's movies made more noise than this. Being ripped to pieces is easier than this indifference. I already posted about how I was literally rubber-stamped by an agent who wouldn't even waste a sheet of his stationery on me but sent me back my own letter with a stamp on the corner of it that said, "List is full".

I'm not supposed to take this personally, but it's kind of like losing an arm, and I can't let go of the obsession. Well-meaning people tell me to just enjoy the writing process and forget about all the rest. But as I've written before, it's like a concert pianist, trained over decades, being told he should be perfectly happy performing in an empty hall.

You're not supposed to fall in love like this, you're not supposed to be subsumed. It ain't professional. But it's the only way I know how to be. I caught a bad case of Harold Lloyd, and right now I've got it bad. I may never recover. Sometimes I wonder if I even want to.

My brush with greatness: Old Violet Eyes in the Eaton's store

This is from way-hey-hey long ago, 1996 I think, my newspaper column period, in which I turned out literally thousands of the things. How well I remember the stifling atmosphere, the restive crowd, the bottled water and mascara'd drag queens as we waited for just a glimpse of this Living Legend. I'm kind of lousy at scanning these old things and had to chop it up into pieces, so if you can't read it, tough potatoes.

The girl with the violet eyes

We all knew it had to happen. For the past several years, reports on her health had been increasingly bleak. At the end, all we had were a few cruel papparazzi shots taken through the fingers of someone trying to cover the lens. She was frail and slumped over in a wheelchair, but, extraordinarily, still carefully made up and coiffed for the cameras.

I don't need to tell you much about Elizabeth Taylor (who once snarled at a reporter, "Don't call me Liz!"), because she was a sort of one-woman pageant, or perhaps spectacle, for all of her 79 years. She belonged to her public, and on some level she always knew it, but, stubbornly, ferociously, she also insisted on belonging to herself.

She ran through an awful lot of husbands, many of them foolish choices (Eddie Fisher being almost as incomprehensible as Larry Fortensky). Two of them she called "the love of her life" (and only Taylor could have had more than one of those). I've always sought out Taylor bios compulsively, the best one being Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger's recent Furious Love, which concentrates on her unmanageable passion for the human wreckage that passed for Richard Burton.

Ah, Liz and Dick, Dick and Liz, horrible for each other and meant for each other, snapping and snarling and making turbulent love through two whole marriages that both enriched them (as in their brilliant collaborations in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf and The Taming of the Shrew) and tore them to pieces.

The description of Burton's slow agonizing descent into intractible alcoholism is particularly excruciating to read. Here was a lavishly talented actor who like Anthony Hopkins emerged from a tiny, stigmatized coal-mining country, but who - unlike Hopkins, who escaped in time - was constitutionally incapable of being honest with himself about the booze.

Taylor seemed to be matching him drink for drink, so what happened? Was she a lot tougher than she looked (which she had to be, surviving endless surgeries for all sorts of ailments and injuries), or was he just unusually fragile? There was always something disturbingly passive about him as he hitched his wagon to Elizabeth's blazing star. The Furious Love bio is peppered with charming little notes he wrote for her, calling her Twiddle-Twaddle and Fatso. He wanted more than anything else to be a writer and would sit and try to write a novel, finally passing out at the typewriter. It was all very sad.

I won't sit here and tell you stuff you already know. I'll only give you a few impressions: Elizabeth walking into the poolroom where Monty Clift is hiding out in A Place in the Sun, the two of them so preternaturally beautiful that the camera wants to hide its eyes from the blaze. Her bravura performance in Suddenly, Last Summer (almost ignored, though it is one of her best) in which she gives a 20-minute monologue breathlessly describing a secret so horrific her family threatens to bury it with a lobotomy.

In spite of being a successful child actress who gave a stunningly sweet performance as the ultimate horsy little girl in National Velvet, she lacked some of the equipment that helps an actress be taken seriously. She had a kind of unfortunate voice, with no resonance and a tendency to shoot up into near-squeakiness, but she got past that. She was so stunning that at first sight, men thought they'd been hit with a board. She got past that. And those world-famous violet eyes (yes, they really do seem to be a sort of bluish lavender in the early shots) and the voluptuos body with a waist so tiny she didn't need corsets for period dramas, and the screaming fishwife personal dramas played out right in front of us. All this she somehow incorporated.

And jewels, and dogs, and children, and more husbands and more husbands, and John Warner and obesity and a diet and a book and a stage career (not too stellar), and Larry Fortensky and Michael Jackson and AIDS campaigns and and and

This was a very long, very large life. I liked her, always did. Liked the way she laughed like a drunken sailor on leave (one critic said). And I can share a secret with you now. I was in the same room with her.

I can't say I exactly saw her, though a couple of times I glimpsed the top of her head and heard that famously squeaky voice. I was part of a crowd of hundreds of people pressed together on the stifling fourth floor of a department store in Vancouver, waiting for a visitation by the grand dame herself as she launched yet another fragrance, called White Poodles, or Violent Passion, or something like that. (Nobody gave a rip about the perfume.)

Gay men were jumping up and down to get a glimpse of her. Well, how did I know they were gay? When Elizabeth (I refuse to call her Liz, she hated that!) began to expound upon the fact that her little Maltese had "poo-poo-ed" on the hotel carpet, one of them said, "Too much infor-maaaaaaa-tion", and I can't imagine a straight man saying that.

Funny, because that huge crowd wasn't all older people as you'd expect. Every age and every gender was represented (so to speak). Hers was the greatest camp performance of all time, and people couldn't wait to see it.

But don't forget who she really was. Don't forget her shrieking harridan in Virginia Woolf reducing Burton to a pile of emotional wreckage. Don't forget Maggie the Cat almost bursting out of her white slip while an oblivious Paul Newman drinks himself into a stupor. She was a lot of people, yet somehow or other, in the midst of all the hullaballoo of her life, she remained herself. Big-hearted, big-chested, violet-eyed, rowdy, ladylike, Dame Elizabeth, shrieking harridan Elizabeth, caring human being surviving in shark-infested waters, her humor and even her supernatural beauty intact.

Paradise lost

I don't know if it's really gonna be like this, but Cavalia, a travelling horse show which is billed as a kind of Cirque de Soleil with horses, is supposed to be impressive beyond words. They claim to train their horses naturally with hand signals, and yes, I know it can be done, with years of patience. And it's a damn sight better than the foam-dripping mouths of horses with their chins cranked into their chests, hiking their knees so high they must risk injuring themselves with every performance.

You hear stories of heavy clunky boots strapped on to the feet of Tennessee Walkers, forcing them to lift their hoofs higher than they know how. Sometimes harsh chemicals are applied to their feet to blister them into obedience.

Anyway, it won't be like that tonight, as I watch in wonder on opening night of Cavalia in Vancouver. We lucked into four choice tickets from a news anchor at my daughter's workplace: all the anchors got free tickets, whereas the mere reporters, who work twice as long and hard, got doodlysquat. But fortunately, the 11:30 p.m. anchor couldn't attend, and so. . .

And so, four of us, my daughter, 7-year-old Caitlin, her little friend and I, will sit and watch (in good seats, saved for media who might write it up or broadcast a glowing report) as horses prance and dance, and riders twirl around balletically as they gallop in circles.

The horse is my totem animal, my touchstone, the essence of my soul, even though I never get to spend any time with them. This seems to symbolize the essential frustration I feel about living on planet Earth: I am forever thrust out of Eden, though there was a time when I lived there and didn't even know it.
That time whizzed by at light speed, leaving me behind to look around in bewilderment: where have all the horses gone?

This blog originally was supposed to be about The Writer's Life. Phoooey on that. If it is, it's a place to pour out the corrosive acid of having doors continually slammed in my face. The situation seems nearly hopeless, as I am long past writing for fun or amusement. An author, like an actor, is someone who has crossed a certain threshhold. Driving cab will never do it, though everyone seems to think I should just be happy I put those books out at all.

Well, maybe I should be.

Writer's workshops and conferences (and books and more books) tell you how to present your work to editors effectively. Yes. And that's about it. No one tells you how to navigate the desperate minefield of actually dealing with publishers when you are at cross-purposes with them, and when your agent continually sides with them as they slowly mangle your work to pieces.

What does all this have to do with Cavalia? Exactly nothing, except that horses, like publishing my novels, seem to be part of a great Paradise Lost that I wander around in every day. I must have had some sort of stupid expectation that I would go on publishing. I went on writing, after all, didn't I? I wrote three more books. And there they sit, warehoused.

I wonder if maybe this really is about the writer's life, as every other writer I've talked to tells the same bitter story. Yet, at the same time, someone is being published, or there wouldn't be a publishing business, would there? Well, would there?

It's just that the someone needs to be me.

Do I have to actually write something?

This is the best of times, and the worst of times, all glommed together.

Things are particularly sweet with my grandkids. For Ryan's 5th birthday, I knitted him a new blankie, his old one having been reduced to a pile of strings. Now he must transfer his attachment to a nice-looking one, which I hope he won't pull to pieces.

Caitlin's new lavendar fuzzy replaces her yellow fuzzy. She bit a big chunk out of it - no kidding, and she's 7. She wore away at the edge of it for a couple of years until it had a big semicircular bite mark on it. I begged her not to chew this one to pieces, as it cost about $45.00 to make.

NO MORE BLANKIES, I swear! Yes, I love making them, but it strikes me as silly to go on and on replacing them until they're in university or something, or getting married. "Where did the groom go?" "Oh, he lost his blankie. We'll just have to hold up the service."

In other news, things are moving along, or at least moving, maybe, in my search for a home/venue/a shred of hope on The Glass Character. I suddenly joined Facebook and feel foolish now because my "profile" was nothing but a desperate ad for the novel. I'll have to change it today if I can get the bally thing to work. I feel embarrassed, because I don't know Facebook from a hole in the ground and swore I wouldn't go there. BUT I REFUSE TO TWEET. I have a bird to do that.

I have a bird that whistles, I have a bird that sings.
I have a bird that whistles, I have a bird that sings.
But if I ain't got a contract,
Life don't mean a thing.

Just so.

Across the Universe (NOT the John Lennon song)

The "It's Life, Jim, But Not As We Know It" polka.

Lucy! In! The! Sky! With! Diamonds!

Guess I better say something about this. Before he became a total self-parody and general all-around show biz phenomenon, Shatner liked to speak-sing in the hammiest manner possible. Believe it or not, he was considered a good actor then, and it's true he could be a pretty good journeyman actor if he put his mind to it, which he usually didn't. I remember watching the Ed Sullivan show (I'm dating myself here, but there's no one else available tonight) and my Dad said, "Look who's coming on. It's that William Shatner fellow. He's supposed to be the next big thing, you know." He did, amazingly, Hamlet's Soliloquy. I don't remember how well he did it, but he wore an outfit sort of like the Jolly Green Giant, a tunic and tights (green, I think, but - oh, I don't know! I had a b & w TV!). It brought to mind all the soliloquys he did on the show (damn, that word is hard to spell): every week he had Some Big Important Speech. "WE. . . the PEOPLE!!!", or "You're gonna be. . . just. . . like . . .them" (the "grups"). "No more blah blah blah!" "I'm a grup. And I. . . Want. . .To. . .Help. . . You." Looking back at some of his photos, he was quite a good-looking guy, with a hint of sweetness to soften his masculinity. He ran to fat however, not a good look in polyester, and in one show where both Kirk and Spock had their shirts off, Nimoy won hands down in the bodacious space-bod category. He was very hairy, but in a nice way. A good Jewish boy, but so's Shatner! Not everyone knows that about him. He grew up in Montreal in the Jewish quarter. He 'n' Nimoy are best friends. I'll try to find the video about that. It's cute and very touching. And blahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahbl

Losing My Mind

Do I know anything about Dorothy Collins? No. Except that she kicks the hell out of this song. I heard Cleo Laine sing it many years ago and thought it was definitive, then heard it again this morning and collapsed into helpless tears.

You said you loved me. Or were you just being kind?

I could only write The Glass Character, which is 312 pages of unfulfilled love, because I know everything there is to know about Stephen Sondheim's paean to hopeless longing. I like the heroic, torch-song way she sings this. She just has so much voice, yet you get the sense she is only using about 3/4 of it. Oh God. I dim the lights. . .

I've lived inside that yearning, sometimes for years. I had this friend. . . he said he loved me; he was just being kind. I can't say more. I can't.

Did I somehow transfer that gut-twisting yearning to my main character, Muriel Ashford? Am I right now suffering the same anguish because nobody even wants to look at this novel, which I am sure is the best thing I will ever write?

Are you there?

Anyone?

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.