Some thoughts on being Intuitive

Recently I've been more and more thinking of myself as an intuitive writer/composer/actor.  Creatively I work by discovering the creation piece by piece rather than forming it carefully in advance. Certainly I've worked on structure, and the musical (Grimhilda!) was pretty well structured, but I think that was because I had someone else assisting with that side of things.  On my own the process of structuring something (especially something large) doesn't come easily to me. 

The intutitive aspect is probably also why I tend to absorb stuff, like books I'm reading, rather than learning the details, or the arguments. Even though it hasn't been consciously 'learned', the information will often turn up when needed at a later time. I don't have to search my brain for it; it arrives in some sort of subconscious way. 

I learn how to do things properly if I have an enthusiasm for them, but I'm not good at retaining 'facts' or 'information' by trying to learn them. I tend to absorb them in a way that I don't understand - probably like a child learns language. 

This intuitive approach can be unhelpful at times, especially when you know something you've written isn't working but can't see why, or you know a piece of information, but getting it to come to the surface is a problem, or when faced with the need for lateral thinking, you seem to fall over completely: the ideas will come, but long after you need them for that situation.   

I look with some degree on envy on those writers who can churn out work at the drop of a hat; they plan the structure, and then just get on with it.  I have to discover the whole thing (or a good deal of it) before I know I've got anything to structure.   

Yet give me a topic - like getting rid of moths, for example - (and even better, a deadline to go with it) and I'll produce something out of the blue.  I won't have any idea at the beginning where it's going, but it will slide out of the brain bit by bit and then, with a bit of editing and sorting out, it will be formed.  I used to do a lot of my columns for the Star Midweeker in that way...especially it they were needed the following morning and I hadn't managed to write anything in time. If I needed to do any research, I'd do it once the thing was done - generally.  Although this wasn't a hard and fast rule.  

The flash fiction I've written for the Flash Frontier site has tended to arrive in this way: having a theme means I've got something for my subconscious to get its teeth into, and having a deadline helps as well.  And I remember writing a couple of songs by request for our current church, and doing them with ease at a couple of days' notice.  It helped, again, that there was a topic, and a deadline.  (And at our previous church I wrote a script and several songs within a very short time because we had to start rehearsing so we could present the thing by a certain date. Amazing what happens when you're under that sort of pressure.)

However, things that involve a lot of facts and information, things that needed compiling into order, from different sources, are sheer hard grind.  I can do them, and it's usually satisfying in the end, but the process is much harder for me than doing something that has no obvious order when it starts.  This was the kind of work I did in my last job before I retired.  It took a lot more concentration than the purely creative stuff does.  Which is curious.

 

Updating the list of plays

This is now being updated here. 

14th Feb 2015: This is yet another update to this list. It's easier to keep it in one place rather than blogging all over again...I've also included the authors of the plays, something that for some reason I failed to do previously. 

Back in October 2011 I listed out the plays I'd performed in this century. The ones I acted in before that were in the 60s, so I've pretty much forgotten the details, though I did have a couple of small roles in a curious comedy called Lady Precious Stream, which we performed at the Globe Theatre in Dunedin. I also had some roles in one act plays that we performed the British Drama League competitions.)  

Early 2012 was taken up with working on Grimhilda!, as a repetiteur (rehearsal pianist), occasional assistant conductor, general factotum. No acting, but plenty of associated work. After that a bit of a hiatus until Easter this year, when our church put on a play in celebration of Rosalie Macgeorge, the first Baptist missionary to leave New Zealand. She went to what is now Bangladesh, and only survived the climate and the diseases for four short years.

The following is a complete list of productions I've been involved in this century:

1.      Mr Beaver in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, [second production by Narnia Productions], 2004 (Teachers’ College auditorium) - Director (and scriptwriter): Erina Caradus

2.      Uncle Andrew in The Magician’s Nephew, Sept 2005 (Teachers’ College auditorium) - Director (and scriptwriter): Erina Caradus

3.      Mr Dussel in The Diary of Anne Frank (Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett), 2006 (The Playhouse) - Director: Liz Nisbet

4.      The Father in And Then They Came for Me (James Still), May 2008 (Globe  Theatre) [also co-directed with Carol Krueger]

5.      Reepicheep in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Sept 2008, (Mayfair Theatre) - Director (and scriptwriter): Erina Caradus

6.      Ormonroyd in When We Are Married (J B Priestley), May 2009, (Playhouse Theatre) - Director: Natalie Ellis

7.      Jacob Marley and Mr Fizziwigg in The Christmas Carol (adapted from Charles Dickens' story; dramatist unknown), Nov 2009 (Mayfair Theatre) - Director: Liz Nisbet

8.      Pianist/Composer for Love – or Nearest Offer (Hugh O'Brien), Apr 2010 (Playhouse Theatre) - Director: Natalie Ellis

9.      Rev Harry Harrington in Shadowlands (William Nicholson), May 2011, (Playhouse Theatre) - Director: Natalie Ellis

10.   Paravicini in The Mousetrap (Agatha Christie), October 2011 (Mayfair Theatre) - Director: Bert Nisbet

11.  Grimhilda! - general all-round dogsbody [Mike Crowl & Cherianne Parks/music by Mike Crowl] April-May 2012 (Mayfair Theatre) - Director: Bert Nisbet

12   Reverend Hinton - Harvest Field: the ministry of Rosalie Macgeorge (Greg Brook)- March 2013 (Otago Boys High School Auditorium) - Director: Greg Brook

13   Al Lewis in The Sunshine Boys (Neil Simon). The Playhouse, June 2013 - Director: Natalie Ellis

14.  Padre in Hamp (John Wilson) The Playhouse, August 2014 - Director: Bert Nisbet
15. Sir William Rollander in Verdict (Agatha Christie), The Playhouse, March 2015 - Director: Natalie Ellis

Making the most of the time

Just came across a long extract from William Barclay, on the subject of writing that I posted on one of my now-defunct blogs. There's some very good advice for writers in it, but one particular thing struck me afresh. He writes: My second rule is Keep Going. One of the greatest time-wasters, I find, is the habit we have of saying: 'I've only got twenty-five minutes. It's not worth starting.' But I find it is always worth starting. To return to John Wesley, he did most of his reading on horseback. It is amazing how much you can get done in the odd quarter-hour or half-hour. There is not one unit of time that cannot be used.

Wesley, according to Barclay, preached forty-two thousand sermons in fifty-three years, averaged four thousand five hundred miles per year in travel, and wrote or edited four hundred and fifty books.

I think this is something worth noting, that we don’t use those odd minutes well.  I used to be able to cope at a job in the Dunedin City Council where the phone would ring constantly, and you had to get on with your other work fitting around the phone calls. You learned to move from one thing to another without difficulty. It was somewhat the same at the bookshop: you’d be in the middle of something when a customer walked in.  Drop one thing, take up another, and then come back to the first. Yet I was very productive in those days.  In my last office job, it used to annoy me when the person senior to me would interrupt my work, especially if it meant putting something aside completely; but in fact it was no different a matter than in those other places. 

These days it's not a matter of interruption so much as of making the most of the odd minutes I do have (yes, retired people can be surprisingly busy in a day!) Some piece of creative work can be moved forward a paragraph or two in quarter of an hour - it's not the same as getting a sustained period of time,  but it's still of value. The thing is to do that rather than flitting through Facebook or Twitter or something else. Or writing blog posts about doing it!

John Wesley: Riding a Horse Whilst Reading a Book
by Richard Gilmore Douglas

Suitable place

I think, to have a wall fountain in your house, whether a slate wall fountain or some other design, you'd need a house that can accommodate such a design feature.  Soothing and all as these things may be, having one drizzling down your wall in a room that was barely large enough to fit you and the family dog, is probably not ideal. On the other hand, I'm sure one would go well in one of those large houses we walked passed in St Clair the other day, the ones that overlook the sea, with the horizon cutting the view sharply in half, and the cliff edge falling dramatically away from your backyard. 

Compressed

While checking through Evernote for items containing the word, compressed, I came across an article which talked about ten things you can do to improve your computer's performance.  I immediately tried one, that of dealing with some of the items in the start-up of the computer.  Skype has been insisting on starting up when I open up the computer, and getting a call from a relative when you're still in your pyjamas and haven't put your teeth in is a bit disconcerting.  So that's been sorted. 

I've was interested to note however that the article also talked about opening up your computer and cleaning its inside.  Crikey.  That sounds a bit scary.  Making the computer work without opening anything extra up is enough at the best of times; opening the machine itself sounds too technical for words.  Not that I haven't been inside a computer a few times in the past, but that's usually been out of necessity, not for a spring clean. 

Anyway they suggest, among other things, using a can of compressed air to dust the interior parts.  Don't touch anything!, they also warn; just let the air do the cleaning.  You don't need to set out and buy air compressors for the task; that's overkill (or is likely to kill your computer dead, from the inside out).  A small can is all that's needed. 

Continuing on with the subject of compression, I was reminded that there's talk of using cassette tapes as data storage, in this case, big data storage, like all the information that floods through Facebook on any one day, or the 1 petabyte of info (that's a million gigabytes to you) from the world's largest radio telescope.  Now presumably, just as you won't be using a full scale air compressor to clean out your computer, you won't be using one of those manky old cassette tapes you've had stuck in a box since the 80s to store any data on.  These tapes will store "35 terabytes of data - about 35 million books worth of information - on a cartridge that measures just 10 centimetres by 2 centimetres."  The tape will be coated with particles of barium ferrite.  Of course you all know what barium ferrite is, but I had to look it up on Wikipedia, and truth to tell, I wasn't any the wiser when I had. Anyway, this fancy stuff seems set to change the way we store data.   As long as the cat doesn't get hold of the tape, and play at running around the kitchen with it, unravelling it as it goes...

Superannuation

Yesterday there was a bit of flutter on Twitter about a pensioner in the Hutt Valley who was now being made to pay back his student loan - which he took out in 1999 for study - because the recent increase in the pension has meant he's crossed the threshold for repayments.  He complained about this being unjust, and got called a 'cry baby' in some places, as well as being reviled on Twitter.   I think the 'cry baby' post was perhaps a little over the top, but I guess that paying back the loan was always a possibility.  (It's a very small amount, though see below.)

However, what I found unpleasant on Twitter - and on the site where he was called a cry-baby - were the sarcastic and aggressive comments of younger people who have yet to experience what it's like to live on a pension, and nothing but a pension.  This is the pension where, if you're married, you actually get less each than if you're single.  Yes, I know there are ways for two people to economise, but why should they be treated as some double act financially just because they're married?

This is the pension that has been paid for in advance by years of taxation.  I worked for nearly fifty years.  I paid tax throughout that time.  I paid for that superannuation over the fifty years I worked.  Younger people go on about how they're paying for superannuitants.  No, they're not.  Superannuitants have basically paid for their pensions through their tax, just as those now working are paying for their own future pension. 

This is the pension that is about half of what I was earning before I retired. The figure I earned in my last three years of work was possibly the highest I'd ever received, and it wasn't anything like NZ's mean income.  I'd often worked for incomes that were considerably less than that.  Earning that kind of money makes it very hard to put anything away for your retirement, so in the end you're forced to rely on the superannuation.

I'm grateful for the pension, make no bones about it.  However, what many younger people won't be aware of is this little catch.  My wife isn't yet 65, but no longer has a job.  Because I'm on a pension, thankfully she is able to receive a 'supplementary' pension.  As a result, until she's reaches the age of 65, my superannuation figure goes down somewhat from the normal payment, and her payment equals mine.  So we get less than many married pensioners.  During the year she was able to pick up some work.  However, between us, we're only able to earn $100 a week over and above our pensions - until she reaches 65.  (The $100 a week, is of course, taxed, as is the pension itself - something many people don't think is the case, including Michael Laws.) The part-time, casual work she did in the last Work and Income year caused us to go over that threshold figure.  Every dollar she earned over that $100 a week, is taxed at the end of the income year at 70%.  This is not a typo.  You have to make up your mind whether you think it's worth working and having some cash in hand, or whether it's not and thus avoiding the additional tax you incur (it's worked out at the end of the W&I year). 

Perhaps I would at one time have thought superannuitants had it easy (although I was aware what my retired mother was receiving for many years, and it was never much).  But in fact many superannuitants in the country are much worse off than we are, and we don't exactly consider ourselves flush for cash.  So before you start criticising those over 65, think about what they may really be earning.  Once they've paid for the essentials each week (if they can afford to do that) there's next to nothing left.  Not much to show for years of giving your life to your country. 

Busy, as usual

I've finally managed to post on one of my other blogs another one of the letters I wrote to my mother from London back in 1968.  This one discusses the Double Bill we presented (Angelique and Dido and Aeneas) and the imminent Christmas holidays. 

I haven't had the time to type up more of the letters recently: there have been several things on the go. I've been working on the latest draft of the novel version of the musical I wrote, Grimhilda!, and getting some feedback from people about different chapters.  I'm learning the lines for another play, The Sunshine Boys, which I went straight into after finishing the play we did for our church's 150th anniversary.  And I'm working on various pieces of music: one of them is the accompaniment for Enesco's Legend, a piece written for Trumpet in C, but the soloist in this case will be playing a cornet.  It's a good piece, but has some sections that take quite a bit of working out in terms of time, with hemidemisemiquavers scattered about all over.   I'm also (slowly) writing another piano piece: it started off well, but has stuck one of those points that music sometimes does. 

Twice a week I've been going to a course run by English Language Partners; it's to learn how to tutor a person for whom English is a second language.  This is done in their own home, on a one to one basis.  I was supposed to be there this afternoon, but had a spell of ill-health yesterday afternoon/night, and so was still feeling rather under the weather when I got up this morning.  The last session is on Wednesday, so I'll need to be there for that.  It's been an interesting group: included amongst the participants have been two Muslim ladies, two women and a man with Chinese backgrounds, along with half a dozen or more Kiwis. 

And of course, my wife and I have been going for some long walks.

Keeping fit

Recently I wrote about a walk in which we discovered Braeview Crescent; it was just one of a number of decent walks we've been doing of late, walks that may be up to seven kilometres long and/or an hour and a half (or more).  Some of the time we've used the Intriguing Dunedin Walks books, but over the last three days we've done walks that we've just discovered for ourselves.

On Thursday we left the car opposite where the Monarch is berthed, down at the wharf, and did the old Crowl family trick of turning left, then right, then left again and so on. Nearly seven kms later we'd got all the way to the University area, walked around some of it and come back to the car via a different way.

On Friday we did a rather more adventurous - and more exhausting walk.  (The Thursday one had been almost entirely on the flat.)  This time we parked near my son and daughter-in-law's place in Helensburgh Rd, climbed up the street to discover that Wakari Rd ran across the top, walked right along that road for quite a distance (doing detours into Caleb Place and Joshua Place - yes, I know - and discovering that one of them had a little walk through a private garden that was open to the public).  Then, in due course, we went down Polworth Rd towards Burma Rd, which runs through the Ross Creek reserve.  We thought we'd give ourselves some variety and go through the bush, but the track we were on dropped off a small cliff in two different places, which wasn't ideal - so we backtracked onto Burma Rd, found the usual track that we've been on before and climbed back through that until we reached Cannington Rd.  Thought we'd be clever and take a shortcut through the golf course - and managed to, though with the dog in tow it seemed likely we might suddenly get thrown off the green.  Managed to find a gate to climb over and then did the relatively heavy climb back up to Helensburgh Rd.  Had a cup of coffee with our daughter-in-law after around two hours walking...

Today went out to Tomahawk, and climbed up it until we reached Centre Rd, which we then proceeded to climb until we'd done 3.5 kms of climbing.  What views!  The sea on one hand, the lagoon on the other, Saddle Hill in the distance, Brockville at the same level, fields, cows, horses, sheep (pong!).  All made all the better by a glorious sunny day.  Plainly the wind is strong up that way, however, as the macrocapras were bent almost completely over in places.  We were going to climb up to the monument that sits on one of the peaks, but there didn't seem to be a road to it from Centre Rd, so we went as far as the bend and came back again.  Got in the car and went back up to the Tautuku turn-off, and discovered the most wonderful old stone house down at the water level.   We'll have to do the Tautuku walk another day.

1. I talk to a horse (but he don't listen to me....)
2. Celia at the highest point we reached.
3. One of the views from on high.

Being random, as the blog's title implies

1. My wife and I were outside this morning in the sun chopping down the upper half of the holly hedge that separates our house from our neighbours' place.  It was a beautiful morning.  We then spent nearly an hour around 1pm talking to my son and his wife in the States, on Google's equivalent of Skype, went to go outside and found it was pouring with rain.  Since then the temperature's dropped considerably and we're now trying to get the house warm.  After all the fine weather we've had any cold day comes as a bit of a shock.

2. A friend lent me a copy of Edmund Gosse's book, Father and Son, a couple of weeks or so ago.  I'd heard of this book over the years, but never got round to reading it, even though it has some status amongst the English classics.  What an odd book!  Gosse was the sun of Philip Henry Gosse, who was a famous zoologist in the 19th century, around the time of Darwin.   He was also a Puritan Christian, as was his wife - the mother of Edmund: she died of breast cancer when Edmund was still under ten years old.  Philip married again, a few years later. 

The book is supposedly the factual memoirs of Gosse as a child, and of his relationship with his father, who, according to the book, was virtually a recluse, and a very rigid Christian.  (Gosse's mother was as puritanical as her husband, according to Gosse junior.)  The book claims to be fact, but later biographers of both father and son have found a good deal of fiction in the writing.  It's very much the view of a man who has cast his parents aside along with his religion, but in writing about it he colours the characters of his parents - his father in particular - in such a way as to make the reader recoil from them. Knowing that Gosse's writing is more biased than not is quite helpful in reading the book: you see how he shows himself as the one treated somewhat unjustly, when in fact this was apparently less than the truth.  He also, perhaps unwittingly, shows himself as rather pompous and quite class conscious.  Those who are lower than him in the social scale are written about in such a way as to show that Gosse despises them - it's not just what they do, it's how the author describes them.  For example, in describing John Brooks, a poor man who doesn't do the right thing according to Gosse's lights: John Brooks was a heavy dirty man, with a pock-marked face and two left legs...  I'm not sure how Brooks manages to have two left legs, but doesn't it immediately make you feel he's something of a monster?

I'd got to a point with the book where I thought I wouldn't finish it, but I will.  However, Gosse has lost my sympathy quite some time ago! 

3. I'm currently learning lines for the play, The Sunshine Boy, in which I'm playing Al.  He has a substantial enough part, but it's nothing like as long as that of the main character, Willie.  There's a great deal of humour in the play, and it'll go across well with an audience.  The line-learning has kind of interrupted my latest attempt to learn Psalm 119 (the longest in the Psalmody).  It's a tough psalm to learn, but I'm making slow progress on it.  I'm also singing with the Sunny Side Up group tonight, at one of the retirement villages, and I'm revising words and music for that as well.  So the brain is getting quite a work out at present!

Watch the fingernails

It's a pretty sure bet you'll come out of Danny Boyle's latest movie trying to figure out all the twists and turns in its plots.  It's probably a good idea to give up, because I suspect the plot doesn't actually hold water too well. 

Trance starts off with telling us how a certain London art auctioneers manages its security - especially when it has a painting for sale that's likely to bring in more than 25 million (and that's pounds, I assume).  James McAvoy is the narrator at this point as well as being part and parcel of the set-up.  And then the set-up becomes the real thing, we go through the process for real, and the two main characters that we've met so far both turn out to be not quite what we were told.  McAvoy comes off very badly in the ensuing rough and tumble and winds up in hospital for weeks, with, among much else, his memory damaged.  The bit of his memory that's damaged holds the key to where the painting that was stolen went, and so off he goes to a hypnotherapist to find out where the painting is.  Except that none of this is quite as it seems, and by the end of the movie, everything we've seen is either in someone or other's mind, or is a lie, or is twisted.  Cassell is exposed as the villain of the piece very early on, and stays a villain throughout...except that he's not the real villain, and the hero isn't quite the real hero, and the hypnotherapist, while certainly a hypnotherapist, is also a good deal more.  Even the ending has some ambiguity about it. 

Critics of the movie have complained that the plot can't be explained properly, and that's right.  But this is a plot with not only an unreliable narrator (in the brief patches when he acts as one) but at least one other very unreliable storyteller, and a director who cheats at times.  Keep your wits about you, and keep an eye on the damaged fingernails. 

The direction is superb, of course, with a great deal of mirroring and reflecting of the actors, a lot of use of people on different sides of glass, or seemingly in touch when they're not.  If the story was even more unbelievable than it is, this would still be a very watchable film.  The cinematography is top notch as well (Anthony Dod Mantle also worked on Slumdog Millionaire), and the music is extremely unsettling - in the opening exposition, for example, the music is running with a different edge to what we're watching, and you're trying to think why this should be. 

It's not uncommon for audiences to have to keep up in modern movies - we're often given less information than we require and have to make assumptions - but Trance takes this to the extreme; like Inception, it leaves you guessing quite a bit of the time, even in its last stages. 

Undiscovered Dunedin

My wife and I went for an hour and a half walk yesterday, using one of those Intriguing Dunedin Street Walks books as a guide.  They were written by Paul Hayward in the nineties, and there are either four or five or them.  A number of things have changed since the booklets were first published, but fortunately none of the streets have moved, so this is a plus! 

The other plus is discovering bits of Dunedin that have existed longer than I have and yet I've never realised they were there before.  Yesterday's big surprise was finding Braeview Crescent.  Now, to those who live in the street, or know people who live there, the Crescent will come as no surprise, but, as Hayward notes, it's not a street you find easily: one end is only accessible by a pathway. 

The more interesting thing is that as you come down the pathway you walk into what Hayward calls the equivalent of an English country lane, complete with (very high) hedgerows, and blackberries growing wild (and not sprayed with poison either, as far as we could tell).  But the next surprise is that once you get past the hedgerows you discover that you're walking along the edge of a cliff, one that drops some hundred metres or more down into the lower Leith Valley area.  You get a marvellous view over the North end of the City, but you also take your life in your hands if you go too close to the edge.  Fortunately the dog wasn't interested in doing so, though I imagine if we'd taken my youngest son there when he was a child, we would have had our hearts in our mouths.  I can remember my brother-in-law, years ago, being shocked at how casual my son was in regard to danger: at that point he was on top of the cliffs at Tomahawk. 

Anyway, after the cliff-top excitement you find that there are houses built on plateaus at the edge of the cliff.  Great views, but I'm not sure if they would be my ideal location. 

The Hayward books are great for helping you discover lanes that you've never noticed before, little pathways that run between streets.  I'm sure most cities have these, but they're easily missed.  We went down one this morning that had the rather over-the-top name of Mentone Avenue.  It was barely wide enough to walk down with your arms stretched out.  It apparently has some connections with Menton, in France, where there is a villa that writers can go and live in for a year, courtesy of the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship.  Most lanes are unnamed: they're just a way to get from A to B.  They serve their purpose and good on them!

Vibrato

While driving to a rehearsal for the group, Sunny Side Up, today, I was thinking about the use of vibrato in singing because a bass singer in Don Carlo, which was on the car radio at the time, seemed to be making excessive use of it. I have a bit of a thing about vibrato: I tend to think that it's an overdone practice, and certainly opera singers from some countries make more use of it than others.  Supposedly vibrato is natural in a singing voice.  If that's the case I'm not sure why certain singing teachers insist on increasing the use of it, something that young singers often find quite hard.

String players and wind players make use of vibrato too, some to an extent that it becomes irritating.  Again this seems in part to depend on the nationality of the player.  Vibrato isn't quite the same as tremolo - pianists can play tremolo, for instance, whereas they can't do vibrato in any sense - but the words do get interchanged.  Thus when you go to buy a Floyd Rose tremolo at GC you're basically buying a tremolo for your guitar, since a Floyd Rose tremolo is a type of double-locking vibrato arm to keep your guitar strings from going out of tune when you produce a tremolo effect.

Apparently if you say the words, Floyd Rose, guitarists will understand that you don't mean the person, Floyd D Rose, [pictured at left] the man who invented the locking vibrato arm, but the device itself.  Thus a person's name gets taken over by his invention, as did Alessandro Volta's name by electrical voltage.

The Sunshine Boys

I've been offered a part in the Repertory Society's coming production of The Sunshine Boys, a play by Neil Simon.  I'd heard this was in the offing three or four weeks ago, and got a copy of the play to read.  It's very funny, sometimes in a kind of aggressive way, and the three main characters are great to play.  I'm doing Al, who doesn't appear till the second scene. He's the bête noire of the main character, who's being played by Bert Nisbet.  Bert's character is onstage for a great deal of the play - even when he's not onstage, he has lines that he has to fit in from offstage.  I'm relieved that I have several sections of the play when I get a break - and time to cram up on my next lot of lines, no doubt! 

Apropos of this, I've been memorising Psalm 119 over the last few weeks - it's a slow process, because there isn't a kind of narrative flow to the psalm.  The sometimes seemingly random statements - which use the same words over and over in different ways - don't easily connect to one another in the brain, so you have to have all sorts of links to keep track of things.  The part in the play is a piece of cake to learn by contrast with Psalm 119, so in a way I've been doing some mental exercises in preparation.  However, it's also the longest part I've ever learnt, I think, and will be kind of tough to deal with.

I was in a play last week on the life of Rosalie Macgeorge, the first missionary to leave New Zealand from the Baptist Mission Society.  I had only around twenty-five lines in the play all up, and for once I was word-perfect.  My aim is to be word-perfect in this play too, because I feel that if you don't get the words right, not only does it do a disservice to the author, but it also makes it harder to remember whether you've got the line quite in its proper shape.  The brain delights in muddling those who don't learn things exactly (it can muddle those who do know things exactly).  It may seem picky to want to learn the thing perfectly, but I know from experience that if I don't I'll have trouble at some point in the performances.

More on the adaptation process

I wrote a few days ago about adapting my musical, Grimhilda! into a book, and how I was feeling quite disenchanted with the process, as it was proving a great deal more difficult than I'd expected.  I don't know if getting that off my chest helped or not, but I've now done more work on the first three chapters and have handed them out to some other people to read and comment. The responses have been pretty positive all round. So perhaps it was just a matter of getting up and running again.

Last year, when I started the adaptation process, the big pull initially was to keep everything that was in the musical's libretto.  Not a good idea.  I got gradually more adventurous and added in detail which clarified the story further, and broadened its parameters and allowed things to breathe.  On stage everything happens within a short period of time (about an hour and half in this case) and it's all in real time even if you're covering a day or a month or several years.  In a book, time is far more flexible, and I began to allow for that as well.  But I still got to the end of the first draft feeling increasingly unsatisfied.  And by the time I'd gone through three or four more drafts (I think the first chapter was on its sixth), I was beginning to get thoroughly fed up with it all. 

But that was back in August last year.  Coming back to the book has been a pleasure.  Things are working, and I can better see which details are needed and which are not - and where other things can do with expanding a little. 

I was further encouraged when my daughter told me the other day about a friend of hers.  This woman had come to see the show (back in April/May last year) with her eight-year-old daughter (I think that's her age) and the daughter was very enthusiastic, wanting to know when the sequel was coming up!  Crikey.  I'd met this little girl briefly at one of the performances and she was star-struck at meeting the author.  This will probably be the only time in my life when someone is star-struck, so I'm making the most of it. 

Nock, Prokofiev, Sacagawea

I've been playing some Mike Nock pieces over the last couple of weeks, as well as a number of short pieces by Prokofiev. The former are playable, the latter in some cases playable, in some cases very difficult.  But the interesting connection they have is that evidently both the composers have quite large hands, with considerable extension between the thumb and the little finger.  I write music in which I assume that other people will have a hand about the same size as mine - so there are tenths that I find comfortable to play, often included a third note in the middle. 

But Prokofiev's tenths (and occasional elevenths) are a different kettle of fish: they include other notes that make the stretch that much wider, and while I can manage them in some cases, in others they're just beyond my playing without arpeggiating the notes.  Nock doesn't do this very often but when he does it's plain he has the same sort of stretch as the Russian.  In some places it's assumed you'll comfortably reach a top note while holding others further down the keyboard.

On a totally different topic, I came across the Sacagawea coin the other day.  I'd never heard of Sacagawea and had to look her up (I didn't know at first whether it was a person or a thing).  She was an Indian guide who accompanied Lewis and Clark on some of their expeditions and was highly respected for her skills and mediation with various natives they met on the way.  Yet another woman who was in no way inhibited by some people's idea that women should keep their place.

Heart and Heaven

Caught up on a couple of old movies recently: Places in the Heart (1984) and Heaven Knows, Mr Allison from 1957.  The first stars Sally Field in one of her best roles, and the second has a relatively gentle Robert Mitchum co-starred with Deborah Kerr.  Kerr plays a nun, so for most of the film only her face is visible.  Other body language is almost minimal, but this doesn't stop her giving a wonderful performance.  

Yes, both the movies are old-style, tear-jerkers, the former focusing on forgiveness and the latter on an impossible relationship that nevertheless transcends its boundaries.  Places in the Heart is a story about forgiveness (there's an echo of the beginning of Les Miserables early in the piece) and how people who ought not to get along can manage to do so if they're willing.  It also has a curious subplot that never quite connects with the main story.  In this Lindsay Crouse plays Field's sister whose husband, played by Ed Harris, is having an affair with a mutual friend.  Obviously Crouse connects with Field because they're sisters - they have a few short scenes together - but for the most part this story plays out by itself almost in parallel with the main one.  At the very end all the characters are gathered together in church for a service.  A wonderful travelling shot begins with Harris being forgiven by Crouse - the touch of her hand on his is enough to tell us.  The camera moves from row to row as each person receives the communion wine, and finally we see Field's deceased husband sitting beside her.  He was accidentally shot early in the film by a young and very drunk negro, who was subsequently lynched. The camera moves a foot or two more and there is the negro boy.  He whispers to the husband, Sorry, and there's a look that might mean all sorts of things on the husband's face, but none of them are antagonistic.  It's a strange ending that comes out of nowhere - there hasn't been a hint of the surreal prior to this.  For all that, it's in keeping with the tone of the movie and its theme.

John Malkovitch plays a blind boarder who's foisted upon Field as a way to forestall her having to sell the house.  Of course they eventually learn to get along, but the performance by Malkovitch is somewhat over-the-top (Malkovitch is always over-the-top, you might think) and for me it jarred. 

Heaven Knows etc is a story about a marine who lands on a deserted island in the Pacific during the Second World War.  It's not quite deserted: a nun has been left behind on the island through some odd circumstances and the two begin a rather edgy relationship.  The Japanese arrive, take over the island, but fail to realise it's not quite as empty as they think.  They also fail to notice that their supplies are getting lower than they should be as Mitchum does a daring night raid on the stores. Eventually the US arrives on the island and conquer the Japanese.  That's pretty much the story, but Mitchum and Kerr invest the script with a great deal of warmth and humour, and humanity.  Kerr's character might seem a bit too much a member of the weaker sex at times, though Kerr brings some feistiness to the part, and Mitchum is given the chance not only to be a gentleman but also to be very protective gentleman.  The actors manage to make both the people credible, and John Huston films the whole thing with minimal fuss, knowing that he can rely on his two main cast members to do all the work. 

Intriguing words

I'd never heard of the company, diptyque, (no capital letter) until today, and to be honest at first I was more intrigued by the word than by what they actually sell! It's a French brand name, and the word goes back to the Greek (see below). Although there's a good deal of information about the company and its history on its beautifully designed site, it doesn't seem to say where it got the name from.  

The distinctive oval-shaped stickers appear on all their products as well as the rather curious arrangement of the letters of whatever the product is - in this case, Baies candle by diptyque. Baies is a mixture of blackcurrant and Bulgarian rose, I believe, and early in their history the company produced English perfumers for French customers. 

But back to that word, diptyque. Its origins are similar to our English word, tryptich, meaning a painting that consists of three sections.  I assume there's an English equivalent of diptyque too, presumably spelt: diptych.  Yes, of course there is. 

Talking about interesting words, I came across this one yesterday: Occlupanid.  Apparently this was coined by the delightfully named Holotypic Occlupanid Research Group [HORG] as a generic term for the humble bread tie (occlu, close, pan, bread).  The Wordways column in this morning's paper has a number of other interesting words that we could well start using again (the English language is full of words that have been left behind, sadly).  Usufructry, for instance.  This means the temporary possession of a piece of land that doesn't belong to you, and making use of it: you might graze sheep, if you had any, or pick the apples off the trees on the land.  It was kind of like taking windfalls before they'd actually fallen.  

A four-headed pillory!

Fixfax is the Scottish word for a pillory (it's also spelt/pronounced paxwax in some dialects).  It's typical of that English usage of two identical sounds separated only by the first consonant.  (There's a name for that, but don't ask me at the moment what it is.) 

There's also nuncheon, which belongs to the family from which we get luncheon, and truncheon.  There aren't many words in this family so it's quite good to come across a long-lost relation.  Nuncheon is the virtual equivalent of luncheon, except it relates to drinking.

And finally sockdolager, which is apparently one of those words that arose serendipitously out of the blue one day: it means a knock-out punch.  'I've given him a sockdolager, and that's put him in his place.' 

Actually, not finally, after all.  I forgot to mention that the earlier use of the word treadmill was as a means of punishing people who'd been naughty in some way.  Prisoners were supposed to 'become wearily repentant of their crimes.'  Sounds a bit like the modern treadmill, says my wife.

Tracks and blackberries

My grandson broke his arm a couple of days ago, the first member of our family - children or grandchildren - to do so.  And he did a good job of it too, breaking two different bones. We've had some near misses over the years, but not a single plaster cast between us.  My younger son, who had a great propensity at one point for damaging himself, managed to lose a toenail when another child slammed the door on his foot, and had four trips to A&E within six months to get stitches for various splittings open of his skin that he gave himself.  One was walking into the end of the bed, as I recall, another occurred when he banged his head on the metal edge of the counter at the supermarket (fooling around in the trolley, of course)...and there were two more, the details of which I can no longer remember, but my wife no doubt will.  He didn't electrocute himself, either, when he cut a live cord with a pair of scissors. 

Anyway, I was reminded of this because this morning my wife and I went for a walk along the back of the old houses in Caversham, between the fences and the railway line.  We discovered that instead of being inside the protective fence we were on the wrong side of it, (having gone over a chain barrier that didn't seem to bar anything in particular) and walking through tall grass next to the line itself.  That was okay, since it wasn't dangerous.  We were following a path that other people had already forged through the grasses, while the dog danced his way through what probably seemed like a bit of a forest to him.

However, the wasteland we were walking on became increasingly narrow, and we decided to climb up the bank as soon as we had the opportunity, and go over the fence.  We spotted a section where the fence was broken down in some way, and other people had gone up, making a bit of a path between the thistles and blackberry bushes (yes! blackberry bushes with unpoisoned blackberries on them!).  I began the climb, slipped on something and, with nothing to grab hold of, slid back down the bank a little and fell over onto my elbow.  The bruise isn't impressive enough to photograph, unfortunately, but it obviously hurt, because when I lent on the table just now to do the crossword, I knew pain.  I was still scrambling to get up and out of the clutter of weeds and brambles and you name it when the excursion train came along.  'Silly old codger trying to climb the bank.  Shouldn't be down here beside the tracks in the first place.'  I didn't actually hear anyone say this, but I'm sure they did.

Anyway, I eventually got up on my feet again, with the help of my helpmeet, and then the dog and I scrambled up the path, hopped over the broken fence, and waited for my wife (she had her faithful walking sticks with her, and that gave her some stability).  I hoisted her up and over the last section and we were back on the path we'd intended to be on in the first place. 

The fence obviously doesn't count for much.  On the way back, we noticed that a large playing field that's in behind the houses on South Rd has an opening straight out onto the path beside the tracks. There's nothing to stop a child running up and over onto the railway line.  Odd.

Talking of blackberries - when we were in England in 2007, we were out in the country one day and stopped for a picnic lunch.  Just nearby were a host of blackberry bushes, full of ripe blackberries.  I knew that these bushes are regarded as noxious here in New Zealand, and asked someone else who was there whether these ones were poisoned with spray or not.  He looked at me as though I was daft: why would anyone poison blackberries? 

They were the most delicious blackberries I've ever tasted.

Adapting

After the production of Grimhilda! was over, I wrote the draft of a book version of the musical.  I thought this would be an easy task, but it turned out to be full of hooks that I kept getting stuck on.  On the stage, a dramatist doesn't have to explain everything: some of what isn't in the script will be filled in by the actor, or by the director - or even by the music.  Things are pared down in a stage script: the scenery is often the bare minimum, just enough to convey an idea of the place.  Time is loose; even though it pays to keep things within a certain specific period (such as a day, or a night, or two weeks), the actual chronological time can be stretched and tightened as the scriptwriter desires.  There's no clock on a stage (and if there is one, it's often a bit of a nuisance).  The background of the characters may be left quite skimpy - in the musical we didn't tell the audience what the parents did for a living, where Toby went to school, why the toys were as big as the 'real' adults, how Mr and Mrs Map could possibly be married when they were separated by a parchment (and why didn't they just rip it up?)  All these sorts of things are irrelevant on stage; the audience lives in the particular moment, and can ask itself questions afterwards, if it so desires. 

With a book, it's necessary to fill in all sorts of details for the reader, otherwise their imaginative landscape can seem very bare.  The reader may not pay attention to all this detail (I'm a terrible one for missing vital points by skim reading) but it needs to be there.  Even in modern novels, there has to be a sense of a real place, of real time, of people having real jobs and having to go to work, or a real neighbourhood in which they live, and much more.

In the musical we could start straight into the action by showing, quite briefly, that the parents didn't give their son much of their time.  In the book, it proved very difficult finding exactly how to start things, how much explaining to do before the action started, as it were, and perhaps most importantly, why these parents were so selfish.  And then having explained a great deal of that, it was a matter of taking unimportant bits of those details back out again.  It was all a bit like the conga: you put your detail in, you take your detail out, you put your detail in and you shuffle it about. 

I was reminded of all this by seeing an ad for a diamond engagement ring, because of course, part of the story of Grimhilda! concerns a diamond mine run by the villain of the piece.  What, on the stage, was a relatively small space in which the 'diamond mine' existed, and in which the dozen or so workers worked, couldn't be as small and as barely inhabited as that in the book.  I had to re-imagine the mine altogether: it had to be a much bigger place, and there needed to be a lot more people there (though I avoided adding in yet more names and personalities - in fact two of the women in the musical became one person in the book).  It had to be placed within towering mountains, and as soon as the mountains appeared (they're only mentioned in the musical), it became a matter of how tall they were, how impregnable, and so on.  Was there grass on the mountain sides?  Were the paths steep and slippery?

The worst business of all was dealing with the death of the other little boy in the story: Jackie Axelquist.  He's mentioned a number of times, and is a vital part of the plot, but how he died isn't discussed.  Unfortunately, you can't just say in a book that Jackie died.  There are no bones on the skeleton, and skeletons aren't very attractive to readers (unless it's a horror story).  You have to consider what details to include as to how Jackie died, and then you realise that this could be quite grim for the younger readers of your book.  Oh, what a task I set myself!  :)

I have a book on my shelves (yes, I still have some left after the big purge) called How to Adapt Anything into a Screenplay.  It's by Richard Krevolin.  It would be a useful book, no doubt, but it's remained one that I haven't really got my teeth into yet.  But more than a book about turning anything into a screenplay, what I need is a book called: How to adapt your own musical into a book.  If you know of such a piece, tell me about it.  I really, really need it.

The Fall

[Spoiler alert.]

Tarsem Singh's film, The Fall, is a visual extravaganza, with some utterly beautiful shots, many extraordinary locations, a great deal of imagination, and a performance from a young Romanian actress called Catinca Untaru (she was eight or nine at the time the movie was made) which is as natural as you can get on film.  Even some of her mishaps with her lines have been left in and add to the charm.  She plays opposite adult actor, Lee Pace, and the pair are fine together. 

Regrettably, The Fall starts out with a good idea, with humour, with a great deal of fantasy, but increasingly becomes incoherent.  What could easily have been a film to delight children (my grandson was watching it until it suddenly became increasingly violent) turns into a film that loses its plot - literally. 

Both Alexandria (Untaru) and Roy Walker (Pace) are patients in a very casually-run hospital around the time silent movies were becoming increasingly successful.  He's a stuntman, and has had a nasty accident jumping off a bridge, on a horse.  The horse dies, and Walker is left paralysed in his legs.  Alexandria has had some fall in which she's broken her arm (she spends most of the movie with it stuck up in the air at an awkward angle). They meet by accident, and he begins to tell her a long and fantastical story about five men who all have a passion for revenge on the wicked Governor Odious.  Initially the story is simple and like a folk-tale; it also chops and changes at the whim of either the storyteller or the listener.  We also understand that Alexandria sees the events in quite a different way - at times - from what Walker intends. 

Unfortunately, Walker more and more adds in elements of his own life and misery, and instead of the story working towards some grand climax and romantic ending for the main character, the Black Bandit, it becomes a brutal and unpleasant tale in which the other four characters die at the hands of Odious' soldiers, along with the savage who has assisted them, and the monkey belonging to one of the adventurers (called Charles Darwin, but only remotely resembling the historical man).  The Black Bandit even admits to being a coward (he was also prepared to shoot his beloved). The story somehow comes into Walker and Alexandria's own time, and with real people are included.

Walker tries to commit suicide, with the apparent assistance of Alexandria, and though he doesn't achieve this, he takes to the bottle, feeling that his life as a stuntman is over.  In a long and not very successfully worked-out sequence, Alexandria, both in reality and in the story, pleads with him to face life again and move on.  He eventually does, and the last sequence has the hospital patients watching the movie that he was originally making, and we hear that he goes on to work as a stuntman in dozens of other movies.

It's a great pity that the movie becomes so downbeat about three-quarters of the way through.  It loses any continuity it might have with the earlier parts, and the two sections are quite inconsistent in style.  The whole film shows a lack of being thoroughly worked-out - even within the ever-changing world of the story there has to be an internal consistency, and this is lacking.  (I've seen a couple of other movies over the years that tried to switch part way through from being a comedy to a tragedy; it didn't work there either.)

We only discover late in the proceedings that some of the characters in the story are based on people in the 'real' part of the movie.  It would have been far more effective if we'd understood this earlier on.  And there are a number of oddities: one example is when the five bandits (as they're sometimes styled) capture one of Odious' caravans in the middle of the desert. A princess appears out of the door.  She's preceded by a young boy, her nephew, (so she informs the others), but extraordinarily he's just left behind, and no further mention is made of him.  The old rule applies to all storytelling: if you're going to introduce a character who appears to have a purpose in things, then you'd better make sure he does, or you alienate your audience.

Equally, it takes some time before we realise who the Princess in the story is based on: the only attractive woman in the cast up to that point is one of the children's nurses.  But it isn't her, and she never actually has anything to do with Walker.  The Princess is apparently the movie actress that Walker is in love with; she's gone off in real life to live with the actor who plays the hero in the movie being made at the beginning. He turns out to be the model for Governor Odious.

I know how difficult it is to structure a story well and I understand that especially in fantasy writing it's easy to leave loose ends.  Unfortunately, this so seriously undercuts the values of this movie that it makes the audience irritated and frustrated.  Given that Tarsem spent four years making the film, you'd wonder that he didn't give himself just a bit more time to pull it all together in terms of the story.  (And he had two other writers on the job, anyway.)

Breach and Mr Nobbs

Last night we watched a movie, Breach, which I felt I'd seen before, yet I didn't have any memory of how it panned out, or even of Ryan Phillipe in the main role.  Yet in an early scene, when Phillipe meets up with Chris Cooper (at his snake-eyes best) I was sure I'd seen it some other time, and there were scattered moments throughout that seemed familiar.  Perhaps it had been on TV somewhere, and I'd caught it out of the corner of my eye while I was supposed to be paying attention to something - or someone - else.

Anyway, it's a well-cast piece (the impecable Laura Linney is in it too) and though it might occasionally be felt to be just a little too slow for a thriller, it certainly has some suspenseful moments.  Taken at its own slightly curious pace, and with the cast all in top form, this is worth watching.  It's based on the true story of the uncovering of one of the US's top spies: Robert Hanssen.  While working for the FBI, he was systematically giving away the country's secrets to the Russians.  Cooper plays a man full of religious hypocrisy, mistrustful of everything that might be slightly out of kilter, and bullying in his treatment of his subordinate (Phillipe).  Phillipe is the new boy on the block who helps the old-timers in their task of bringing Hanssen to justice.  While playing the part of a clumsy, unintelligent youngster - for Hanssen's sake - he's actually having to deal with the razor-sharp mind of his superior, keeping him at bay whenever he's suspicious of anything in his very ordered world.

Another slightly slow movie - intentionally so - is Albert Nobbs.  The title role is played by Glenn Close; it's an extraordinary achievement.  The role was obviously close to her heart, since she was also involved in the script and production.  Albert Nobbs is a woman making her living as a male waiter in an Irish hotel run by an arrogant and devious woman (Pauline Collins) who claims to treat her staff well but is in fact mostly unaware of the reality of their daily lives.  She's certainly unaware - as are the rest of the staff - that Nobbs is actually a woman, and Nobbs intends to keep it that way.  As an orphaned teenager she dressed up as a man to take on a temporary job, and then found that it was economically sound to remain a 'man.'

We know from the beginning that Nobbs is a woman, of course, since we know that Close is playing her.  However, there's a wonderful moment quite early in the piece when a broad-shouldered, tall and lanky male housepainter also turns out to be a woman; she's the widow of a man who abused her until he died and she's also found it worthwhile maintaining the pretence.  These two form a friendship - Nobbs can finally talk to someone who understands - but there are other complications which I won't reveal here. 

Close is surrounded by a mostly British cast (some of whom are Irish, but the majority English) and her Cockney accent works well.  Her tight little face, her movements, her submissive approach all combine to create a wonderfully sympathetic character - it's necessary that we're sympathetic in the light of her attempts later in the film to form a relationship with one of the younger maids (Mia Wasikowska) in the hotel. 

It's a small-scale film, but one that was worth making.