While running errands this morning I found my way into a used CD/records store and picked up a CD of a 1986 recording of Sir Michael Tippett’s A Child of Our Time. It’s in excellent condition and a very good recording: Andre Previn conducting the Brighton Festival Chorus, with Sheila Armstrong, Felicity Palmer, Philip Langridge and John Shirley-Quirk. When I sang “Child” in second year University, it was the first piece of twentieth century music I had ever encountered that was non-trivial, that addressed the heart of the twentieth century in the way the great religious works addressed the heart of previous centuries, and it brought the same sense of revelation as the poetry of Carl Sandburg, the other plays of Robert Bolt, and David Gascoyne’s overwrought but-man!-powerful passion-piece “Ecce Homo”. A recording is not the same as singing it, but it has lost nothing of its power of its jagged lyrics, its brilliant, jagged music, and the rumbling, roaring spirituals.
Author Archives: Alison
Narcissistic monsters
Off and on I read modern supernatural novels. They make very odd reading, some of them, and I finally figured out why: all the characters in them who are placed central to the reader’s attention (I’d hate to think the reader’s expected to identify with them) are so profoundly narcissistic. Suzy McKee Charnas, talking about her werewolf protagonist in “Boobs”, described her adolescent mindset as “Whatever people do to me is horrible but whatever I do is OK,” or words to that effect*. That’s the mindset of the characters in those books. Even ones set up as heros, by the writing and the structure of the stories, are narcissistic monsters. Although they have frequent attack of angst – I don’t think I can even call it guilt, it is so impotent – about the fact that they’re killers, their behaviour never changes. They just go out and kill different people. Redemption, such as it is, comes in hunting down monsters worse than themselves.
*I like “Boobs” – because it is written straight, without false glamour or lashings of hypocritical angst.
M(es)s, glorious m(es)s
If 7151 words in a day is not a personal best, it’s in the top 10. That takes me from 0715-1130, 1300-1500 when the phone made such weird noises I had to answer it, 1545-1630 when I noticed the sunset (yes, it was a gorgeous clear day wot went by) was shaping up to be photographable. 1815-2145 when my brain gave notice that it did not have the oomph left for an emotional epilogue. Not to mention the bone-deep ache in both wrists, and in the base of my right thumb, which I hope are a consequences of starting weight training and not RSI – I promised them not to disregard their complaints too often. I switched off the sound on the phone, the answering machine – and it still persisted in wanting attention, so I unplugged it after I spoke to my parents – and the Internet – next door, at the wall where the cable comes in. If I could have gone down to the street to unplug it, I would have done so. It is such a time-suck, so easy to drift over when my concentration cycles down, and drop half an hour guddling pointlessly around. So, unplug the Internet.
But that 7151 words means that as of now the m(es)s stands at 135 541 words with the story so nearly told that by the end of tomorrow (if I don’t fall in the lake, trip over the dog or drive off the road tomorrow on the way to and from my I-am-reforming-and-getting-more-exercise-if-it-kills-me run in the morning) I will have have a sort-of-complete-but-holey-as-an-old-washcloth, drafty-as-an-old-pair-of-knickers REAL LIVE FIRST DRAFT to print out by the end of the weekend. It’s lacking essential descriptions, vital plot connections, dialogue refinement, consistency in terminology, and for that matter consistency in minor character names and descriptions, and too many people sound the same. I will no doubt have contradicted myself a dozen times, and I can only pray that none of those contradictions torpedo my climax and denouement, because I likes it the way it is. Writing for me is like building a bridge that decides to turn left in midstream and connect to another continent entirely. But it has life, by gum, it has life: a mob of bloodyminded characters out to get their own way – some of whom I will I discover I have forgotten entirely by the wayside and will need to account for, a roll call of the movie cast, or the prisoners; a problematic and not too implausible ecology that I will get to refine further; lots of decor; a certain amount of geography and weather, one of those climaxes that makes me wonder what would happen if they gave me the MMPI. Murder, mayhem, and the road to hell reached by the best intentions. It’s a mess, but it’s a glorious mess, and it’s all mine!
Rustycon
It was the best of cons, it was the worst of cons … Well, maybe not, but it definitely had its ups and downs. Lynda’s suitcase, full of copies of Throne Price and the Rustycon edition of Mekan’stan, failed to make the 20 minute tranfer in Vancouver between a delayed flight from Prince George and the on-time flight to Seattle. Lynda’s end of the telephone inquisition required to connect her (not yet found) luggage to her gave her roommate (me) some morbid entertainment. The joys of Explaining Oneself to Officialdom – particularly when said officialdom don’t have it together. Luggage reappeared mid Saturday morning, and Lynda undertook to divest herself of the contents in as many deserving directions as possible, on the premise that if it went awol on the return flight there would be nothing to lose!
Lynda started out on Friday with “Making Characters Die” and “Writing a Sex Scene in SF”, which was where I tracked her down after I rolled in at 9:30 pm or thereabouts, having taken the 506 from SeaTac, and not having lost my luggage. Though I discovered that while having carry on baggage searched was irksome, having to walk the length of Vancouver airport, retrieve my luggage from within a glassed-in carosel, prove it’s mine, lug it through US Customs and Immigration, reload it onto a conveyer belt etc, was enough to convert me to the principle of carry on and only carry on until they develop Transporters.
My first panel was “Make those Characters Speak Up!” with: Lynda, Kevin Radthorne, who was showing off (cool plastic stand!) his novel The Road to Kotaishi, published by Windstorm press. He did the cover himself using Bryce, and if he is not being utterly disingenuous about his lack of artistic talent, I gotta have that program! Susan Matthews, who has finally produced another installment of her Judiciary series (so I get to [a] read about how Andrej Kosciusko finally gets to make his break with Fleet and his damnable – and I mean it literally – job as chief surgeon and inquisitor … and lands up in even more trouble and [b] update my Medicine and Science Fiction page). After I went through my recitation of various subtleties of dialogue, learned largely from Bernard Grebanier’s book Playwriting and my love of drama, she said cheerfully “I cheat,” tossed off an example of the shorthand that the writer can use, taking advantage of modern cultures and assumptions, and then took the high road and described the intricacies of her polyglot, multicultural Judiciary universe.
The next panel we spectated at, “Contracts: your rights as an artist, author, or musician”, a one-woman show by Jennifer DiMarco of Windstorm Creative, followed by “To POD or not POD”, featuring Jennifer (“Pods are evil!”) DiMarco, Kevin (“Born of a POD”) Radthorne, Dave (“Multipod”) Duncan, and Jack Beslanwitch (whose alignment I am afraid I cannot recall). Though until I see one of those infamous machines in action, I’m not going to believe all the descriptions I get of it lining and binding without getting glue over everything! After that Lynda, Kevin and myself did “Developing your Creativity” with an abundance of writers in the audience, so we wandered cheerfully between rituals, angst, and works in progress, as well as Where Ideas Come From. (I’m in favour of Pratchett’s cosmic ray theory myself: in Wyrd Sisters he explains creativity as a sleet of particles of inspiration constantly bombarding the human brain – which every so often stops one or two. Certain unfortunate people – like the Dwarf playwright Hwel – have such high stopping power that they have difficulty finishing a sentence without having another idea.)
(Two entries merged into one, September 30, 2007; original first date preserved).
Stigma and denial
I’ve been tidying up my thinking somewhat since I wrote “From my dead hand”, getting straight (I hope) that there seemed to be a distinction between mental illness and the broader category of mental disorder, and discovering just how controversial the whole issue was.
A recent BMJ editorial and its responses give the flavour of the debate. The editorial writers favoured the narrow distinction, and argued in support of well-known research that mental illness (psychosis) is not associated with violence; while a forensic psychiatrist took issue with so narrow a definition, because it excludes the wider category of mental disorder (substance abuse and personality disorders) that do seem to be overrepresented among criminal offenders. The on-line responses to the editorial range from considered, poignant, to ideological. Unfortunately, we seem to have a choice between stigma and denial: stigma for mentally ill people (or anyone who fits the profile) who then endure societal and judicial discrimination, and denial of the increased risk associated with certain disorders, which in turn results in people not being able to recognize true danger signals.