The Author to Her Book

How many authors feel about their work, I'd say...

The Author to Her Book

Anne Bradstreet

Thou ill-form'd offspring of my feeble brain,

Who after birth didst by my side remain,

Till snatched from thence by friends, less wise than true,

Who thee abroad, expos'd to publick view,

Made thee in raggs, halting to th' press to trudge,

Where errors were not lessened (all may judg).

At thy return my blushing was not small,

My rambling brat (in print) should mother call,

I cast thee by as one unfit for light,

Thy Visage was so irksome in my sight;

Yet being mine own, at length affection would

Thy blemishes amend, if so I could:

I wash'd thy face, but more defects I saw,

And rubbing off a spot, still made a flaw.

I stretched thy joynts to make thee even feet,

Yet still thou run'st more hobling then is meet;

In better dress to trim thee was my mind,

But nought save home-spun Cloth, i' th' house I find.

In this array 'mongst Vulgars mayst thou roam.

In Criticks hands, beware thou dost not come;

And take thy way where yet thou art not known,

If for thy Father askt, say, thou hadst none:

And for thy Mother, she alas is poor,

Which caus'd her thus to send thee out of door.

Ravel on You Tube

I've been watching, or listening to, a number of You Tube videos of classical music performances over the last couple of weeks. Sometimes I've just listened while I'm doing something else on the computer; other times I've sat and watched the video, distracted from doing anything else altogether. 

I hadn't realised just how much music was available for one thing, though I'd known that just about any piece of music you wanted to hear, or see performed, can be found on You Tube these days. Which is extraordinary in itself. 

Tonight I've just watched a performance of Ravel's Concerto for the Left Hand. It was played by Hélène Tysman with the Orchestra of the University of Music Franz Liszt Weimar under Professor Nicolás Pasquet. 

Tysman gives a stunning performance, all the more so because concertos for the left hand are notoriously difficult, requiring the pianist to balance their body in a way that's quite different to normal, keeping an intense focus on just one hand, the very hand that in many pianists is slightly weaker than the other. The pianist is required to play, in this concerto anyway, right up to the upper register of the keyboard, which means leaning far to the right, maintaining the balance, and working across the body at the same time. It’s an achievement and a half to do it.

And there are some extremely difficult things to do in this piece: rapid octave passages, great thundering bass notes hit from a distance, intricate fast moving sections that have to be entirely encompassed under one hand. It's not a piece I'll be tackling any time soon...

I always wonder what a pianist practicing such a piece does with the right hand. There are no concertos purely for the right hand, so they can’t learn two different concertos at once, and obviously a professional pianist can’t let the right hand languish for weeks while the left hand does all the work. I’d be interested to know.

There’s an interesting comment part the way down the page relating to the video: Can people not look like they're bored during the entire performance! This is honestly an impeccable performance. I would be in awe if I got to play in an orchestra next to her. [I've corrected several errors in this comment for readability.]

The person commenting isn’t talking about the audience, but about the orchestral musicians. I personally didn’t think they look bored, although there seemed to be some odd grins and facial expressions at times, as though one or two were giving a nod to musicians in other parts of the orchestra. This isn’t entirely professional, but I guess these are students, so they might be given some leeway.

The young men’s dress sense could have been smartened up, however: several of them have their collars undone and their ties hanging loose. Perhaps it doesn’t matter, but I’m sure once they join a full-time orchestra such things won’t be allowed.

However, one more word on the boredom factor. I remember going to see New Zealand’s own Symphony Orchestra last year, and was quite surprised, as we waited for the concert to start, to see the violinists, who were the ones I could see most clearly, sitting there with faces that could have expressed anything from ‘not this piece again’ to ‘what an unpleasant-looking audience; I wonder if they have a musical bone between them.’

I don’t say that that’s what they were thinking, but they seemed very unfriendly, somehow. And at the end of the concert this same expression came over them, in spite of tumultuous applause. Curious.

Micro-managers

In the musical I've been writing with my collaborator the mother and father are going to a dress-up dinner at the beginning. However during the course of the story, the mother's dress gets torn. I was originally thinking that we'd need two identical formal dresses, one intact and the other needing repair, but my ever-creative collaborator said there's an easier way. Start off with the torn dress and have it invisibly 'mended' in some way at the beginning of the play.

I'm not sure why this is something I should be trying to micro-manage...in due course the costume people will deal with it, but I think I like to at least know about how these things are going to work. My collaborator is the same: even though we've sorted the script out, she wants to go through it and work out when scenery can be set, when it can be dispensed with, when tabs (inner curtains) close, when they open...and much more. In fact, if it seems like I'm a micro-manager, you should meet her! :)

And we still have to figure out how to fly some characters off the stage in one of the later scenes. It's going to be interesting.

Men's clothing

Some time ago I wrote an article for Triond entitled, 'Hitching Up'. It was to do with men wearing braces/suspenders instead of belts. For many people, braces are a thing of the past, and anyone seen wearing them is regarded as a little odd. It's only since I started my holidays this year that I 've started wearing a belt again, and that's only because I prefer to use a belt with the gardening/work trousers I wear.

For the past year or two, I've been wearing braces, and in general they're a lot more comfortable, especially if you've put on any small amount of weight around your middle. (And if you've lost weight, you're not forced to tighten your belt in order to keep your trousers in place.)

In movies, you often see executive-type people dressed in braces; it seems to be some sort of statement of authority as far as the movie costume designers go. In real life, of course, you don't see many braces worn at all, but maybe they'll come back into fashion again. They've done it before on several occasions.

The poet, Les Murray, notes that men's fashion comes and goes a good deal in one of his poems - The Dream of Wearing Shorts Forever:

....long pants, which have themselves been underwear repeatedly, and underground more than once....

Bow ties are another item of men's clothing that movie costumiers always associate with a particular type of character: psychiatrists are often given them, or those college professors who don't have a life out of the school. (The bow tie goes when the aforesaid college professor falls in love with some lovely lady, usually one who gets rid of her 'intellectual' glasses halfway through the movie, to show that she's a real person, and not just a brain.)

I can't say I've moved towards wearing bow ties in recent years; in fact I've moved away from wearing ties at all. The only time I put one on these days is when I'm playing the piano at some concert, and then the tie I wear usually has a musical theme and gets interested comments from those distracted from my playing by it.

I used to wear a tie to work all the time, and then when I became the assistant at OC Books (or the Otago Church Bookstore as it was in those days) my (female) Manager said to me one day: you don't have to wear a tie to work....and I never did again.

I read an article in Triond a while back (don't ask me to link to it, because I have no idea what it was called now) in which the female writer berated men for strangulating themselves with ties, as though there was something foolish about men wearing something that gave them a bit of colour in their costume.

The curious thing was that the writer seemed to fail to see that women who wear spindly high heels are likely to do themselves a great deal more injury than men - who don't actually strangulate themselves in a normal working day. One slip off your high heel and you can sprain, crack, break your ankle. I've never seen a guy fall over because he was wearing a tie....at least not yet.

High heels photo by Markusram

Happy Families

People go so overboard on weddings. It’s perfectly possible to get married for next to nothing. At the end of the day you’ll have had just as much fun – and a lot less stress. You won’t be worrying about the catering, the wedding flowers, the bridesmaid’s dress, the page boy, the flower girl, the music and everything else that some people get so uptight about.
My wife and I had a great wedding day. We had about thirty guests, maybe more. We both dressed up for the occasion: me in a purple suit with purple beribbed shirt and bow-tie (I still have the shirt); my wife in a long floral cotton dress she mostly made herself.
We had a cake, courtesy of one of my brothers-in-law, we had enough drink, and plenty of food, and it cost us very little. Some of our guests played the card game Happy Families (highly appropriate!) on the floor of our living room after the dinner was over and were still playing when we went to bed. Next day we flew to Rome (from London) for our honeymoon. The honeymoon cost a little more than twice as much as the wedding itself, but it was an all-paid affair, and we stayed in a delightful and very friendly hotel, and ate at the restaurant next door, because the hotel’s restaurant was being renovated. From memory we spent £50 on food and £50 on drink, and £120 on the honeymoon. Those figures were worth more thirty plus years ago, but they still weren’t extravagant.
So if someone is making a fuss about how much a wedding is going to cost, just remind them that it’s only the first day of many, and spending a life’s savings on it just isn’t worth it.

This picture of the wedding flowers was provided by Jason DeRusha (flickr.com)

Her day?

I came across a post on another blog recently which was aimed at wedding photographers (particularly amateur ones) and made a big deal about the way in which the wedding day is HER day – that is, the bride’s – and everything should be done to make it immortalised by keeping a record of every detail, from wedding flowers to cake, from what the bridesmaids wore to every miniscule button and bow on the bride’s dress. In fact, if nothing else got photographed, make sure it was the dress!
And don’t forget the church (interior and out), and the ushers’ shoes and the bows on the ends of the pews, and the spot on the clergyman’s nose, and the organist’s fingernails, and…
Well, you name it. But do you notice who’s missing out of this line up? Yup, the groom. Somehow or other we’ve got into the mentality that the wedding day is for the bride and the bride alone. It’s something our ancestors would have laughed uproariously at. In fact, it’s likely that they would have focused more attention on the groom, who, after all, was taking on a woman as his bride.
Perhaps Bridezilla and the like are to blame. Or maybe they merely reflect the absurdity of the current approach. Whatever the case, it’s time we got back to seeing the bride and groom as equally important on this day – after all, both of them are committing themselves to each other – and to forget this modern nonsense about ‘her’ day.

Photo courtesy of Jeff Egnaczyk

Casual Friday?

What is the point of casual Fridays in offices? It's one of those strange customs that's crept in over the years, and which doesn't seem to actually contribute anything. Maybe I've been out of the 'business formal' scene for a long time, and have forgotten that most men are still required to wear suits and ties, and most women have to 'dress up' when at work. But making one day a week 'casual' doesn't seem to contribute anything. Does it make people more relaxed at work? I'd hardly think so. And women, being women, will no doubt still dress up whatever the day is: they can't afford to be seen looking underdressed in contrast to other women in the office.

There's an interesting article on the subject on Wikipedia, which says that the idea of Casual Fridays goes back to the 1950s, but that it didn't take off much then. And then there was a period in the 90s when casual almost became the norm. I haven't had to 'dress up' at work for such a long time, I barely posses any real business clothes, and even in my current job(s) there's no need for what you'd normally call business gear – at least as far as I'm concerned. Earlier this year, when I got an interview with a legal firm, I went and bought a suit on the off-chance that I might get the job, and need to be suitably dressed. It was nice to have a suit that actually fitted – the one I already possessed had got a little tight, to say the least.

The trend seems to be getting away from casual on Fridays, or casual on any day, in fact. Casual dress can denote a casual attitude; business dress can denote a business-like attitude. It may not be truth, but it's worth bearing in mind.

While thinking about this topic I came across a blog called Canadian Headhunter. The post is obviously aimed at the bloke, and is written by a bloke, apparently. It has some good advice in it, even though not everyone might agree with the choice of clothing suggested.