The Glass Character

Tuesday, July 19, 2011

The powerless now

I don't know why I just wrote that story, the one about the dog. It occurred to me last night, came into my head, kept on bugging me, and my first reaction was, "No." I didn't want to write it. I knew it would end badly. I knew it would be about pain and abuse and powerlessness. I wondered what dark corner of my soul drove me to express all that anguish.

There's a theory floating around, mostly in these reality shows that I never watch (except Hoarders), that we somehow recreate (and recreate and recreate) the conditions of our childhood, especially the pain and grief. THIS time it's going to be different. It's a dynamic that comes out in relationships. Daddy will be gentle this time, Mommy won't end up in the psych ward, brother won't set fires and go to jail. Or just: I won't be a wimp, I won't be unpopular, THIS time I'll test myself at home, at work and at play, and come up shining.

And you know what happens?

Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight.

You don't win, because you can't. Childhood may be the template for adulthood, but I've started to think our only hope of being happy (unless we've been incredibly blessed with a happy childhood and unconditional love) is to shed it, shuck it off. Let it drop off like dead skin or a turtle shell.

I love a certain Bible quote, from Lamentations I think, which I put in one of my comments to good ol' Matt, my most faithful reader: it's all about being "new every morning".

I remember my affliction and my wandering,

the bitterness and the gall.
I well remember them,
and my soul is downcast within me.
Yet this I call to mind
and therefore I have hope:
Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed,
for his compassions never fail.
They are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.

Oh, so it's the Lord's great love that is new every morning, not us! If we're not so new, then we're obviously made from the crazy-quilt scraps of the past. It's hard to shake, after all. Why did we evolve with such acute memories, and why is the loss of memory considered such a catastrophe? Isn't it really a blessing in disguise?

And yet, and yet. Having said all that, I have a problem with the currently wildly-popular "power of now" theories that purport to solve every problem you ever had. Those psychologists on TV who hold the hands of hoarders as they scream bloody murder at their families say things like, we must live in the moment. "Now" is the only time we have.

That pretty much does away with planning of any kind. There goes your estate, eh? And learning? How can you learn from the past, or from anything for that matter, in a sealed bubble of "now"?

If we always lived in the now, human evolution would not have taken place, or at least not beyond the level of chimps, who are fully capable of ripping the faces off their loving caregivers. We evolved to learn from the past and plan for the future, so we wouldn't bloody starve or get eaten by something bigger than we were.

I've got nothing against the concept of "now", in fact for the most part it beats the pants off the past, except that it doesn't really exist. It could be said, as time slides along, that it's always now (for what other time can it be? The future? The past?). But at the same time, because time does not stand still even for a nanosecond, there is no "now", nothing static, not even a "moment" that we can stand still to apprehend. So if it's always now, and never now, for the love of God, could someone please explain to me: what time is it?

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

The Story of Skippy

One summer day in the city, a day when nothing out of the ordinary was happening, a puppy was born.

The puppy's family named her Skippy, for no particular reason. She was a creamy-golden cocker spaniel, very sweet-natured and beautiful. The children doted on her, the adults tolerated her, and for a while, everything was good.

But things change. The biggest people in the household, the Mom and Dad, weren't getting along very well. Skippy could hear them screaming at each other, and she crouched down on her belly in dread. One night there was an awful crashing and booming upstairs, and Skippy didn't sleep.

The next day, they told the children they had decided it would be better if Mom and Dad lived in two separate houses. The children knew it was their fault. Skippy wondered if it was her fault. Soon it became apparent that it was.

Neither of them really wanted Skippy. They didn't like dogs, she smelled, her fur had mats, and the vet bills! They argued and argued about who would take Skippy. The children kept their mouths shut in fear that Skippy would be taken away from them.

She was.

First the Mom and Dad thought about giving her to a shelter where she might find a "forever home", but then a friend of theirs, a man with many dogs, asked to take her, and they told themselves it was a good thing.

The children said goodbye to her tearfully. Mom, busy throwing all of Dad's things out on the sidewalk, said they should stop being such babies and keep quiet, so they did.

The man had many dogs. But he had no use for the new dog that cowered in the corner, her tiny stump of a tail wagging in a blur to placate him. Sometimes she peed on the floor, and he slapped her muzzle so hard she could not help but let out a shriek of pain.

Then he'd tie her outside for a long time.

Something happened while she was outside, and it became apparent that Skippy was going to have puppies. The man looked at her like he wanted to murder her. Skippy went under the bed to protect her unborn puppies. They were all she had.

The man had the decency not to harm her during her pregnancy, but when the puppies were born, they didn't look right, as if their father had been a Doberman or Rottweiller. Too bitter mixed with too sweet.

Very early one morning, Skippy noticed her puppies were gone. She never found out where they went. She mourned, whimpering, until one day the man threw something hard at her head.

She stopped whimpering.

But there was something gnawing at her, thousands of centuries of needing human beings to love and pay attention to her. One day she rolled over on her back to expose her belly, and the man kicked her hard. The sound she made cannot be described.

Though it was not like her to abandon her people, one day Skippy took a chance and ran away. She became a dog of the streets. Her survival instincts were sharpened, and when a person approached her she crouched down and let out a low growl.

She became more and more matty, and thinner from eating scraps. It looked bad for Skippy, and some days she just wanted to run in front of a car.

Then something happened. A girl was walking along the street, and saw two enormous liquid-brown eyes peeking out from behind a bush.

She crouched down and said, "Come on, girl. Come on."

It took quite a while for Skippy to come out of the bushes. She didn't know what to expect. But she knew, in a certain doggish way, that children shouldn't be harmed. No matter what the girl did to her, she would find a way to tolerate it.

There was a rope digging deep into Skippy's neck, so she hooked her finger in it and dragged her home. The pads on her feet were hot and sore from planting her legs.

Her mother said, Cindy, I don't know. We can't take in another dog. I think we should take her to the shelter right now. It's the best thing for her. Cindy cried, but did as she was told, knowing that it was her fault.

Skippy knew that it was her fault.

Things were bad at the shelter, all bleach and bars. There were a hundred other dogs there, either barking aggressively or cowering in corners. People came and went, poking and prodding, looking for something that would soon be their property.

Skippy knew that some dogs ended up in wonderful homes, and wondered how to act. She knew she shouldn't hope too much, but hope was the only thing that kept her going.

Then one afternoon, an old woman came into the shelter. Her eyes met Skippy's.

It was love.

It was love, and despite the fact that the old woman didn't have enough money to feed a dog, she took Skippy home, naming her Lady after the dog in the cartoon movie.

This was a home such as Skippy had never known. She truly was treated like a princess. She even wondered if the old lady could get her puppies back.

But then one morning, everything fell still. The old woman didn't get up.

Then came the argument all over again: who will take the dog? No one seemed to want her very badly. She was a burden no one could afford.

Then someone spoke up. A man who had many dogs. The family brushed her carefully, making her look her best. He took her home, put a rope around her neck and tied her to a post in the yard.

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
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

Barnes & Noble

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-glass-character-margaret-gunning/1117863913?ean=9781927068885

Thistledown Press

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

Chapters/Indigo
http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/the-glass-character/9781927068885-item.html?ikwid=the%

Monday, July 18, 2011

The ghost at the piano

Picture this.

It's sometime in the afternoon back in the God-knows-when, the fall or something, and I have a stack of files or books in my arms, and something comes on the radio and even though I am barely paying any attention to anything other than the rabid stress of the moment, suddenly - all the books slide out of my arms and onto the floor.

I am stunned.

Stunned in my tracks, because someone is playing something on the piano. Something sinuous, noir-ish, midnight-y, redolent of back alleys and cats on fences, of men in top hats kicking cans and regretting, of call girls lurking in shadowy corners, of. . .

I heard this thing, then got distracted I guess, because in an act of total idiocy I didn't listen for what the piece was called, or who wrote it.

It only took around twenty years for me to hear it again - it was called The Graceful Ghost, by William Bolcom - only this time it was played Wrong.

Wrong, as in jaunty, raggy, almost upbeat, probably the way it was intended to be played by the composer.

The version I had heard, sinuous, mysterious, smoky, almost stoned, had slipped away from me. And I still haven't found it.

I've bought several recordings of it, and always end up groaning because it's played in the same choppy, soulless way. Then I heard this YouTube version by this kid, this Grant Carvalho. The comments reflect people's absolute ignorance of what actually constitutes good music: no one seemed to appreciate it at all. They said it was nice, they said it was good, but that his technique was lacking and he needed to keep working at it.

It isn't "my" version, because no one, except that phantom pianist from 20 years ago, could ever reproduce it. But there's something awfully good going on here. Graceful it is, but tinged with melancholy. There's a care for the music, even a love. He's in tune with it. The dynamics are superb (in fact, it's the only version I have heard that has any). And this is a kid! A kid who, if he sticks to this, will be getting right inside music to a degree that very few can ever attain.

Why does this piece haunt me now? Three guesses. Harold Lloyd, Harold Lloyd, Harold Lloyd.

I can't talk about this or I'll jinx it, but because it's never going to happen anyway and I can no longer keep my grief to myself, I'll explain it. All through the writing of The Glass Character, my novel based on the life and loves of silent screen comedian Harold Lloyd, this music kept playing in my head. Not the jaunty version, mind you - and Lloyd could be plenty jaunty, part of the smokescreen he put up to hide his sensitive interior.

I mean that dark and sinuous, elongated, midnight tomcat version, like something out of a saloon in a Warner Brothers movie starring Bogart and Bacall. It played and played and played in an endless circle in my ear, the way ragtime does.

Writers can't help it, they see their works in print, and they see them as movies. It's because of these fat successes that come along once in a while and just grab every trophy. We won't even go into J. K. Rowling, who started off writing penny-ante fiction and ended up as the Oprah of kids' literature. Probably forever. Not that we get jealous, oh no. I just want a piece of what they have. I don't want the successes to succeed any less; I just want me to succeed more. Surely there must be enough to go around?

But apparently there isn't, and that's part of the reason many of the publishers I have approached have shut the door (not slammed, of course) before they have even looked at one paragraph of my work. They're full-up and no longer receptive. I remember the godawful rubber stamp, that "list is full", not even written by hand, and not even on a form letter but stamped on MY letter and returned in my dutiful self-addressed envelope. They didn't even have to pay the postage! I paid to have this thing tossed back at me without a single word of acknowledgement from a human being.

Then there are the rejections that arrive on Christmas Eve. I actually objected to one of them last time, sent off a protest letter, even though you are never, never, ever allowed to argue with a rejection, not even with the time it is delivered. Then in checking with some friends, I found that several of them had also received rejections on Christmas Eve, likely due to editors' habit of cleaning out their desks before flying off to Puerta Vaillarta for the holidays.

Why should we object? What's wrong with us? Don't we want to know what their decision is? Isn't it better to know before the holidays, so we can begin to plan a more effective strategy while everyone else is drinking eggnog and kissing under the mistletoe?

I didn't expect to go off on this tangent. I wanted to write about Harold Lloyd. If I can't stand the heat, I should just keep my mouth shut and pretend I'm happy with the way things have been going. I have something here, I know I do. It may rot in the bud, and there will be nothing in the world I can do about it. Am I unlucky? What's lucky? Whatever I'm not, I guess.

Even Harold's luck ran out eventually, in spite of all his elaborate superstitious rituals. But I'd like to have some luck, just a little, so I can have it run out on me, so I can say, I had my moment, and even though it passed, it gave Harold just a little more time in the sun.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Sunday, July 17, 2011

The two weirdest things in the world

The more Boobahs I find, the more Gaga I get.

Lascaux in Port Coquitlam

(See'f you can tell the difference: my brilliant granddaughter Erica started painting horses the other night. One of them turned out so well, I tucked it under my coat. This horse rivals those cave paintings in Lascaux, I think, except it`s easier to hang on my refrigerator.)