The Glass Character: yearning

Do you know what it is to yearn?

Have you ever yearned, I mean really yearned?

Yearned for something you wanted so badly it scared you?

I write, not so much for a living but as a vocation, or devotion. Maybe even a covenant. I can't get away from it, it nags and drags at me, it will have me no matter what. Writers often have dry periods or times when they wonder if they will write again. And I've had them.

I've also had times when the desert suddenly flooded, the cracked earth dissolved into fertile soil and life sprang up, seemingly in seconds: abundant life, green, floral, almost prehistoric in its lushness.

You have to wait for it, for sure. No matter what the how-to-be-a-writer manuals tell you, it can't be forced. But then comes the next part. Real writers want to be published, because - logically - they want to share their stories. The storytellers of old did not sit by the fire alone, and if they had, we would have no myths, no fairy tales, maybe not even language as we know it now.

And oh how hard it is.

Just put out an ebook, everyone tells me. I could maybe figure out how to do it (did someone say prehistoric?), but how many readers would I have? The market is flooded with ebooks right now. There is no quality control that I know of: anything can be slapped up there, like a Facebook post. And that scares me. Might I get 200 readers? 300? . . . 20?

Would I be eligible (because hope springs eternal!) for the Giller, the Governor-General, the B. C. Writer's awards, and even the Booker? No, because it's a bloody ebook and, in spite of what everyone keeps telling me, not considered the equal of a paper book.

I've had paper books out twice, and though it didn't quite match up to my extravagant dreams of publishing, I felt proud of them and still do. You can't delete them, though you may have to go to the library to actually find one.

When I wrote about Harold Lloyd, I committed the unpardonable sin of falling in love with my subject. This is a bad thing to do. Maybe it makes people uncomfortable, I don't know. But I have that awful feeling right now of one of those drill-bits slowly penetrating my chest. A yearning, the way you'd yearn for someone who is dead, or a lover who has spurned you and moved on.

Summer is so beautiful right now, it took until mid-August to get here, and it will slip away in a couple more weeks. Meantime I can't forget about this. I want it so badly. And everyone, but everyone is trying to talk me out of my feelings. I guess you don't get to feel this way: or does it just make people uncomfortable?

When I fell into this novel, I was transported, and could not wait to get to the computer each day to see what would happen next. It was the most magical writing experience I have ever had. Now comes a kind of hangover. I feel cursed, sometimes, as if the thing I want most will always be just brushing my fingertips, like a balloon that bounces up and out of reach.

I've been told: if I don't care about it, then maybe it will happen. If I don't think about it, then maybe it will happen. This is magic penny thinking, also designed to make me stop doing this, stop stop stop. I am not much good at indifference, in spite of the fact that it accurately describes the atmosphere in which I grew up.

Harold, listen, I want to see you in print because you deserve it. You deserve to be a household name again. I am scrambling on the side of a mountain, losing ground, and something has been stuffed into my mouth.

"But writing should be its own reward! Can't you just enjoy the process?" What if someone had told that to Dickens, to Tolstoy, to Hemingway, to. . . all right, my work bears about as much resemblance to theirs as a lion to a mouse. But you get my drift. Don't you? Don't you?

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

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

I am an elephant actor

http://www.kiddierecords.com/


GO ON THIS SITE! Go. If you are anywhere near my age, which is 106, give or take a week or so, you will love this.


If you were ever an introverted little kid who lived for stories, if you were ever a kid who incessantly played cheesy but beloved 78 r.p.m. records on an old Seabreeze, you will love this site because they are all there. Travels of Babar, Slow Joe, Build me a House, Pan the Piper, and (perhaps most astonishingly) Dick Whittington and his Cat, in which he calls the cat "Ripple-dee-dee": surely I had imagined that, and so many other things.

But no, here it all is. Not only that, this site is clear and pristine and EASY to navigate, unlike the atrocity of Stephen Fry's blog which seems designed to make me feel like a technical dinosaur and a clumsy, out-of-touch loser (not to mention old). There's nothing more unfriendly than a bunch of kids standing in front of someone in the playground speaking a secret language. It's puerile, guys. 


But I digress. For years now I've been trying to track down Children's Record Guild recordings, which made up maybe 75% of the records I had as a kid. These were record-of-the-month-club things that covered standard fairy tales as well as oddball music, as in Pedro in Brazil:


"What's the difference between a donkey
And a man who sings too long?
The donkey is born braying,
But the man has to learn his song."

At the time these were seen as "quality" recordings, the stories serving as a delivery device for great indigestible wads of culture (i.e. Sleeping Beauty had the Tchaikovsky ballet score moaning away in the background). But what had happened to them? Did they still exist in a dusty, scratchy heap in someone's basement? Could I get them on eBay?

The only sites I found offered the original 78 r.p.m. records for $50 and up, with maybe a CD copy on the side. I sometimes heard snippets, but only enough to make me depressed. I decided I was chasing yet another chimera (like getting published again? Sorry, I got another rejection today.)

But soft! What's this? I stumbled on this site today the way I stumble on all the better sites I've found. The deal is this:  they present one "new" (meaning old) record per week. This goes back to 2005, so there are quite a few of them in the archives. 

The titles are listed down the left side of the screen in chronological order. Click on a familiar title - and I found lots of them (for example, Jimmy Stewart narrating Winnie the Pooh and the Heffalump) - and the cover will come up on the right hand side, nice and bright and big, taking up half the screen. Click under that, and a nanosecond later, you are hearing for the first time in 50 years:

"I am an Elephant Actor."

(Trumpet fanfare)


Greek Chorus: "This Elephant Actor is going to make believe he is the Brave King Babar."


"I am an Elephant Actress."


(Trumpet fanfare)


GC: "This Elephant Actress is going to make believe she is the beautiful Queen Celeste."

And what is more, it is all free, free, FREE, as it used to say in the ads at the back of the Jimmy Olsen Annual. One of the few really generous things I've seen on the net. There's nothing like it. Go.

I saw him again last night

I saw him again last night

And you know that I shouldn't

To string me along's just not right

If he couldn't he wouldn't

But what can I do, I'm lonely too

And it makes me feel so good to know

That he'll never leave me

I'm in way over my head

Now I  think that he loves me

Because that's what he said

Though he never thinks of me

But what can I do, I'm lonely too

And it makes me feel so good to know

He'll never leave me

Every time I see that boy

You know I wanna lay down and die

But I really need that boy

Oh I'm livin' a lie

It makes me wanna cry

I saw him again last night

And you know that I shouldn't

To string me along's just not right

If he couldn't he wouldn't

But what can I do, I'm lonely too

And it makes me feel so good to know

 That he'll never leave me

A feast for the eyes

When I tried to find hurdy-gurdy music on YouTube, I first had to wade through innumerable versions of Donovan's lame '60s song, which doesn't even have a hurdy-gurdy in it. I vagely remembered Allen Ginsberg reciting his poetry (Howl, perhaps?) while cranking one of these.


I could not figure it out: it had a sound kind of like Highland bagpipes, but it could also sound very Middle Eastern. It had a drone in the background with a "chanter" playing a repetitive tune, perhaps due to the restriction in range. It was fingered, not blown, but wind instruments are fingered too, aren't they? I had to turn to Wiki, and they told me this:

The hurdy gurdy or hurdy-gurdy (also known as a wheel fiddle) is a stringed musical instrument that produces sound by a crank-turned rosined wheel rubbing against the strings. The wheel functions much like a violin bow, and single notes played on the instrument sound similar to a violin. Melodies are played on a keyboard that presses tangents (small wedges, usually made of wood) against one or more of the strings to change their pitch. Like most other acoustic stringed instruments, it has a sound board to make the vibration of the strings audible.



Most hurdy gurdies have multiple 'drone strings,' which provide a constant pitch accompaniment to the melody, resulting in a sound similar to that of bagpipes. For this reason, the hurdy gurdy is often used interchangeably with or along with bagpipes, particularly in French and contemporary Hungarian folk music.

So I was partially right. A stringed instrument that plays bagpipe music. Unfortunately I could follow this path all day (and for months) and collect more and more odd-looking, odd-sounding videos of rare or antique/obsolete instruments. I posted this mainly because the hurdy-gurdy looks so gorgeous, and at least appears to be ancient. The musical performance is minimal.

Help me, I'm lost! I need to get on with my work, and all this stuff keeps on intruding.

An instrument built for two

Now this one is strange, very very strange. I'm still trying to wrap my mind around the tromba marina, that huge horn-like thing that turns out to be a massive, elongated, rectangular violin. This must be an overgrown hurdy-gurdy, but in this case it's so huge that it has to be operated (surely not played) by two. The effect is oddly electrified, like a modern rock guitar, and I can imagine Jimi Hendrix's version of The Star-Spangled Banner played on this, though the elderly European-looking musicians probably wouldn't know it.

So what would you do with this to transport it, to get it from place to place: a flatbed truck? How would you protect it from the elements (because it looks like one of those outdoor instruments)? Throw a tarp over it? Shrink-wrap it? The questions never end.

I like to think the instruments we have today have grandparents, and great-grandparents, and so on and so on. The crumhorn somehow turned into a sort of oboe, the rackett into - well, perhaps the modern-day fire extinguisher, and then - there's this.

Maybe it's like the dinosaurs, or the ancient period of "megafauna" when huge mammals ruled the earth, giant sloths and beavers the size of an apartment complex. Maybe over the centuries, things slowly shrank to a more manageable level. Or maybe this thing is just a wild card, predating the electric guitar by at least a millenium.

So. . . what kind of eel is that?

This video proves that sometimes the ridiculous is. . . sublime.

Why Carrie Fisher scares me

"I had ECT yesterday, & the main thing that I remember about it is (other than hardly anything at all) that when they dragged me on my little gurney to its resting place beside Dr. Kramer and his machine that will electrocute me to adorable wellness………


Dr. Kramer gazed down at me and said, “Let’s see how much glitter you have on today!” But after studying me briefly, he noticed that I was virtually glitter free. “Am I to assume that this is a sign that you’re depressed? Should we shorten the time between treatments?”

The bottom line is that to ascertain whether or not I’m depressed these days, you no longer have to scrutinize my bummed out or beatific expression———just check and see how much glitter I’m sporting on my eye lids and such…………

I still haven’t un packed my bags and bags of glitter……….the glitter I used or didn’t use in New York———because I can’t imagine where I can keep it. So there it is, in bags and boxes, in my bathroom, waiting for me to make up my newly electrocuted mind."

This is a truly-authentic-reallyreallywrittenbyCarrieFisher blog post about her ongoing ECT treatments for depression. Like most people who aren't living in a cave, I found out about this several years ago, but I had no idea she was having treatments every six weeks.

It scares me.

I have to backtrack here. . . It was even more years ago that I saw her on 20/20 doing an interview about her "breakdown" (a term I hate more than washing machines, which it should only be applied to) and subsequent recovery. Carrie, a sort of latent bipolar who had flown under the radar, probably suppressing her symptoms with masses of drugs and alcohol, had exploded out of the container in a supernova of mania that was rather dreadful to behold.

But Carrie seemed to be having a great time talking about it. Her gestures were extravagant, her voice plummy, her eyes like pinwheels. In other words. . . she was still manic. On nine drugs or something, but still. I think people should at least wait to be well before doing these things.

A few years after that, she took the worst of her life's turmoil, funnied it up and put on a one-woman show based on her apparently-harrowing memoir (which I can't bring myself to read yet), Wishful Drinking. On the cover is a passed-out Princess Leia, braided buns perched on each side of her head like Kaiser rolls.

I have a problem here.

I have a problem when human pain is turned inside-out and transformed into a gut-busting ha-ha. Mental illness is NOT a ha-ha, and can't be treated as such without perspective (and perspective equals time plus distance). It can't be treated as a ha-ha until you get some sustained relief, get yourself back, find a true path of recovery and (the most important part) STAY ON IT.

Who am I to say that ECT every six weeks isn't the path? I'm not here to judge or play psychiatric expert. But the statistics I've seen on ECT and permanent brain damage are alarming.

Peter Breggin, a psychiatrist who wrote Talking Back to Prozac in the early '90s when Prozac was the sexy, new, revolutionary drug that would make everyone better (even people who weren't depressed), is dead-set against ECT in any situation. He speaks of subtle but cumulative neurological damage, particularly to short-term memory. Fisher laughs this off, which is an admission that she is indeed suffering from it. She says she can see old movies all over again and they seem like new.

He speaks of the denial of damage as a symptom of damage, which made my hair stand on end. If I was really brain-damaged, would I know it?

I don't know what got me on to all this: I guess it was the Stephen Fry documentary where he travels to Germany to explore his love of Wagner. That got me on to his program about bipolar (which I have only seen in bits on YouTube, because I find it hard and heavy going). He speaks to Carrie Fisher, of course, who in her usual flamboyant, even histrionic way makes her agonizing struggles into a kind of heroic comedy.

At the end of the interview when Fry speaks to the camera, he seems disturbed, his voice tinged with what sounds like pity. The camera did funny things during the interview, zooming in on tight closeups of her hands (I think she was wearing 37 rings or something) and bizarre little gee-gaws all over her house. The music had that disordered, slightly strange quality. It was obvious either Fry or the filmmakers had made up their minds in advance that she was cuckoo.

I don't know what to think about all this. When she began her alarmingly frequent ECT treatments, she gained a huge amount of weight and topped out at 180, so she pulled a Kirstie Alley and signed on with Jenny Craig. Now she's not just a poster girl for drugs; not just a poster girl for drugs and bipolar; not just a poster girl for drugs, bipolar and ECT; but a poster girl for drugs, bipolar, ECT and weight-gained-because-of-ECT. Soon she will be a you-know-what for the miracle of weight loss through the miraculous cult of Jenny.

Carrie Fisher scares me. Whatever hobgoblins are pursuing her, she's running from them, with all sorts of things that seem OK, with humour, with one-woman shows, with books, and with controversial psychiatric treatments that shoot electricity through your brain so you don't remember anything (and don't remember that you don't remember anything). What bothers me most is that there is no way in the world some people WON'T consider (or reconsider) ECT because of what Carrie Fisher has said about it. She is beginning to reduce the fear around it. But should she?

There is a cost to everything, but our culture doesn't want to hear about it. It's hooked on quick fixes. Nobody seems to remember the huge fuss about Prozac in the early '90s: it has all been forgotten. Prozac was the future, and it was going to revolutionize society. No one would be passive any more. We'd all be aggressively confident, extroverted firebrands. None of the pathetic introspection that makes people paint or write poetry.

Not only that, but this was the first antidepressant that was virtually side-effect free! This was proclaimed after the usual few weeks of trials with a very small sample of patients.

The guy who wrote the Bible on Prozac was named Peter Kramer, which just makes me wonder about the name of Carrie's doctor. Just a coincidence? Anyway, when the first few awful side-effects trickled in, they were vehemently denied as atypical or even psychosomatic. According to the trials, only .01% of people had sexual dysfunction from Prozac, something called "delayed orgasm". But eventually, the numbers settled out at something like 40%. (The other 60% were too embarrassed to report it.) And as for that "delayed" thing, it was delayed until sometime next Friday. 

Then came, oops, more problems. It seems a lot of people couldn't sleep on Prozac because they were constantly hyped-up and wired, necessitating adding another drug which kind of rendered the Prozac ineffectual. Eventually a new phenomenon was born called Prozac Poop-out, and it had nothing to do with your bowels.

Meantime, other new drugs were flooding the market, so Prozac was more-or-less swept away in the flood. It's not used at all any more, considered ineffective and far too bothersome in its side effect profile (the very thing that was used to sell it in the '90s).

OK then, what's this near-diatribe really all about? Unfortunately, someone who is in the grip of a psychiatric crisis is generally unable to make wise decisions for themselves about treatment. They are extremely vulnerable and will grasp at anything that seems to make sense, up to and including the advice of a famous, charismatic but very damaged middle-aged actress. So: let the sufferer beware. Most especially, be aware that Carrie Fisher may not be the best role model for mental health. To be honest, I think she's a burnout trying to stay afloat, and it's not funny. I'm scared for her.

And she scares me, too.

 

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%

Ricola

Arieseni,muntii apuseni

Tromba: ay, caramba!

Whoa, boy! What do we have here?  Yesterday I started digging around for info on medieval/baroque instruments. There were some lulus. Crumhorns, which look like you're playing a cane and which produce a sour, whoopee-cushion-like sound. The rackett, which is an incredible-looking object, a big round oxygen-tankish thing with holes all over it. People liked edgy sour honky sounds then, or else they had not figured out how to produce anything better.

Way leads on to way, as Robert Frost once said, and I kept digging out more and more obscure things. I knew a little bit about all those alp-horn-type instruments, but I didn't know they were a form of communication for the village. They could signal births, deaths, coming storms, and other occasions/approaching dangers. Kind of the social networking of 1000 years ago. There are whole ensembles made up of these endless things, which I saw an example of in Switzerland, and they play with such mellowness that I just don't want to hear 'em. No, give me the authentic honky ones, homegrown music played with lusty abandon by amateurs.

But then I found this "thing". I had no idea what it was, elongated but squared-off, not like any horn I'd seen or heard of. It made the most incredible sound, like a garage door opening. After a while I found out it wasn't a horn at all, but a stringed instrument called a tromba marina. Looked like one of those failed attempts to develop the cello or bass. I found very little repertoire for this thing, thank God, and I would imagine just schlepping it around would be torture, trying to get it into a 15-foot case or folding it up or something (the travel-size tromba marina?).

The instrument has a range of three notes, not even as good as a cigar box with rubber bands wrapped around it, but that's not the only problem with it. When I tried to find more tromba marina videos, I got these Spanish things with pictures of storms, tornados and stuff. So I guess it means something else in Spanish, or else it's already in Spanish and has a double meaning? Approaching danger to the eardrums?

I could not help but be reminded of the old Ricola ads: but to my horror, I could only find a very brief clip of the original ad from British TV. THE RICOLA AD ISN'T ON YOUTUBE???????!!! There are a hundred stupid variations, none of which seem to be on TV where I live, but I am not interested in those. They're daft. I want the guy with the horn and the lame singing.

Stephen Fry, Stephen Fry

Since this is a lovely and balmy day,
Let's look at a certain man today.

Not just any man, you see
But a man who is funny, ho ho ha hee.

Stephen Fry, Stephen Fry
When you come on public television,
it's almost like I die.

When you talked about Wagner
and Hitler and such,
I saw your green jacket
and just liked it so much.

You lost a lot of weight there,
you great big kermudge,
But I'm glad you found a shrink or
your brain might now be sludge.

Stephen Fry, Stephen Fry
When you go off to Bayreuth it just makes me cry.
When you sat down to play that piano so great,
It made my heart kaboom and palpitate.

And you surely got my sympathy vote
When you tried to hit one key and got the wrong note.

And when you did that show on bipolar disorder,
It made me just pack up and run for the border.

Stephen Fry, Stephen Fry
You drive me all nutty, I don't know just why.
Maybe you're crazy, that's part of your myth,
And even if you're gay I just wait for your kith.

I found out at last why girls like you so,
And boys of course too, vo-do-de-o-do.
Your face is all craggy, it looks so unique
Like Easter Island or a great mountain peak.

Yes, you have that Stonehenge look, you know
That makes the women moan very low.

I don't know how you do it, so effortless it seems,
So forever, silly person, you will dwell in my dreams.

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

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

Man Plays Fire Extinguisher!

The Worst Thing I Ever Saw On Public Access TV

Cavalleria Rusticana as you've never heard it before

This was another instance of coming in the back door: I was trying to find the name of one of those old penny-arcade flip machines where you put in a penny or a nickel and turned a crank and looked in a little window and a big revolving thingammy with photos attached to it flipped around and provided a crude kind of motion picture. These were peep-show things that often showed mildly dirty movies, all of 30 seconds long. I couldn't find the name of it, so couldn't really get any information or see any YouTube clips on it. At some point, having gone through zoetrope and a bunch of other names I can't remember because they were so weird, gizmatrons and walbergerscopes and stuff, the name mutoscope popped out.

A funny thing to call it, but that's what it was. The few existing functional mutoscopes are pretty pathetic to look at, the photos all rotten at the edges like the underside of a mushroom. Women dance around with scanty clothing on, a man touches a woman's leg, two women get into bed and tickle each other, etc. Hot stuff. Ministers and arbiters of morals thundered against them:

Public response

In 1899, The Times printed a letter inveighing against "vicious demoralising picture shows in the penny-in-the-slot machines. It is hardly possible to exaggerate the corruption of the young that comes from exhibiting under a strong light, nude female figures represented as living and moving, going into and out of baths, sitting as artists' models etc. Similar exhibitions took place at Rhyl in the men's lavatory, but, owing to public denunciation, they have been stopped."


A collector's site describes the contents of one such reel, "Birth of the Pearl" which "pictures a nude woman rising from a seashell and standing." The site notes "this reel has some damage to a whole chunk of photos. They are all in a section where there was full frontal nudity and the cards are quite worn off."

Pretty hot stuff, eh? But then I started to think about a movie I saw eons ago (EONS, EONS!: see former post) called Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson. I had a thing for Joel Grey then, and he looked plain sexy in this, with a full beard that was obviously real. He looked downright Biblical in it, and I lusted. Anyway, at some point one of BB's girl friends trucks a sort of musical contraption into the Wild West show. It was a big ornate wooden cabinet with a revolving metal disc in it, and it played this unearthly music. It took me a while to track these down, too: they turned out to be just music boxes, except with exotic names like 27 Inch Regina (which, come to think of it, sounds vaguely obscene). I think they produce a sound from another time, lyrical and sweet, reminiscent of antique merry-go-rounds and Victorian parlours with tweeting canaries. The tuning is actually pretty good on these two, and the pieces complex.

I don't know who made these, or how, but it must have been quite an art. I LOVE the clatters and bangs at the start and finish, reminding us that these are, after all, hunks of tin. A marvel of design and musicianship. The way the notes decay or die off is sweet and bell-like, making the notes float into each other in a way I find enchanting.