Monthly Archives: September 2002

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It’s over. My acclaimed return to the stage of retail (a limited-run engagement) is finished. I’m back in retirement.

Body count: zero. I’m still alive; customers are still alive; no co-workers were harmed during the course of this encore performance.

I learned a lot from this past week. The primary thing, of course, is that I was absolutely right to leave retail. There were other things, too, though, that put a few worries to rest. For example, it confirmed that the reason I left sales after eleven years is completely due to the customers, and not the actual work of running a bookstore. It also confirmed that I enjoy teaching more than working retail (not a surprise, but nice to know). And this week also proved to me that no one resents my departure from the store, and everyone really enjoyed having me back. Okay, so I’m insecure: I was worried about what management and staff really thought of me. You know how you have those sort of acquaintances where you don’t see them for a while and you run into them, and they’re distant and you wonder if you were ever truly friends? I was tremendously afraid people would be distant, proving to me once and for all that I was nobody special. Everyone was thrilled to see me, however, sharing news and making lunch dates, and I frequently heard comments to the tune of, “It’s so good to have you back.”

After work I taught a two-hour introductory survey of divination methods last night, and it went just swimmingly. I knew I was teaching it, of course, and I had all my handwritten notes in a notebook (written on a GO train in July, if I remember correctly), but it didn’t sink in until the end of the day on Wednesday thanks to the chance comment of a client. I realised that I hadn’t truly prepared the class, and as this would be the first time I was teaching it, I needed something a little more substantial than three 5 x 7″ pages of notes. So home I went, weary from a day of work, and spent my anniversary evening in front of the computer while my husband watched TV. My usual practice is to think about the new class for a few days, then sit down the day I am to teach it and type out the scribbled notes that have accumulated over those days of thought. Well, I completely forgot that I was working the day I’d be teaching this new workshop, and that I’d have to do it some other way, which unfortunately ended up with the two of us in separate rooms for two hours, and then falling into bed from exhaustion.

The workshop was a success, however, and I can add it to my roster of classes to offer again. I think perhaps another reason the knowledge that I had to prepare it slipped my mind can be attributed to the fact that my past three or four classes have been cancelled due to lack of registration. It makes sense; September is back-to-school month, and eighty percent of my class attendees are university students, who at this point are still settling in. The last thing on their minds is registering for extracurricular workshops! Looking at the registration book last night, though, I observed that October is already looking better, much to my pleasure.

I find teaching to be an odd experience. So much of it takes place out of the classroom, before the students even get there. When I develop a new workshop, I’m working in a vacuum; other than having a topic that has been generated due to observation of client interest in the store, there’s nothing to indicate the outline at all. I decide the direction, what information to give, what information to discard, the format, the books and web sites to recommend for further research, the exercises, and so forth. Alone at home, out of context, I always create a workshop that seems flat and about half an hour long. In action, though, it always springs to life and ends up pushing the two-hour time frame. The sweetest part, however, is the unsolicited thanks I get from excited students at the end of a class. When I then ask if this is what they were looking for, if it was what they expected when they signed up, inevitably I get an enthusiastic confirmation, and I can breathe a sigh of relief. I always ask if they have any suggestions of information they think I should add, areas we didn’t cover, which I think is an essential part of the teacher-student dynamic. It’s a dialogue, after all; as one of my Liberal Arts professors used to say, pounding his fist on the long table about which twenty of us were sitting, “This is a seminar, not a lecture!” A teacher who doesn’t listen to his/her students is a teacher who will quickly become unpopular and out of touch with the demographic to which s/he is contracted to communicate.

Enough about work. I intended to sleep in this morning, but after a week of getting up early here I am, awake and thinking. At least I’m in bed with my laptop. My plans for the day involve reading books, listening to music while doing nothing much, a bit of sewing, and maybe catching a bus downtown to stop by HMV to pick up a CD that I ordered in June which has finally arrived, and possibly that new shirt that I saw a week or two ago as well. Tonight, the company of good friends at a party; tomorrow, teaching in the morning and the memorial service for Andr�s in the afternoon. And on Sunday, my husband and I will finally be able to appreciate one another’s company and celebrate our wedding anniversary.

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Sometime on Tuesday night, while I was raising cider in honour of MLG, my conductor passed away “peacefully”, I am told, in the hospital.

Life can be very cruel, sometimes.

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Glenn Gould! Glenn Gould! Glenn Gould!

Yes, it�s his seventieth anniversary. Most of you probably don�t know that I am a massive Gould fan. Those who do are probably scratching their heads and saying, �I thought she got over that. Isn�t this her third wedding anniversary? Shouldn�t she be blogging about marital bliss?�

My marital bliss today involves being thrilled that my significant other enjoys Gould as well, thanks to me. Our first official outing was to a Gouldian book launch at the NAC in Ottawa and a film festival on Gould�s work (duly reported to the F-Minor group!). And, of course, a couple of years later, completely by coincidence, we were married on September 25th: Glenn Gould�s birthday. (It meant that I had to miss the bi-annual international Gould conference that I had been planning on attending, but well, after weighing priorities, I think everything came out all right, don�t you?)

No, actually, my husband woke me up an hour before I had to be up and brought me breakfast in bed this morning, and a rose, and tea. Very sweet. I couldn�t eat it, mind you (I can�t eat until I�ve been awake for a good hour or so), but it was a lovely thought.

He left, I turned on the radio, and lo and behold, it�s all Glenn Gould, all day on CBC Radio Two!

The agonising and unfair reality of things, however, means that I am working at the store today and I can�t listen to it. Argh! They�re interviewing people he worked with, playing clips of interviews done with him, asking Canadian and international musicians and producers for their opinions of his work, and playing Gould, Gould, Gould� fourteen whole hours of broadcast. I�ll hear a couple of hours tonight, but I wish I could hear it all!

I discovered Glenn Gould by buying a copy of his 1955 Goldberg Variations in ye old Sam the Record Man downtown. The playing was rough, spilling over with emotion and drive, and I was hooked. I did research, bought academic analyses, acquired as many recordings by Gould as possible that wasn�t the work of twentieth century composers (Bach, Bach, Bach!), and ended up outlining and writing a third of a thesis on Gould�s dual use of performance/recording and the written word as communication about music, for he wrote many articles and many of his own liner notes as well. I was supervised by a professor of drama in the English department, who was excited about the project and foresaw an examination board made up of people from the music faculty and the English department. Everything was green-lighted� and then my advisor vanished from the face of the earth. He didn�t return e-mails, didn�t return phone messages, didn�t respond to the drafts I left for him in his mailbox. The project trickled to a stop as I lost confidence in myself and the thesis, and my life went to hell in a handbasket as my first wedding was called off and various other problems surfaced in my life. Ultimately the thesis was abandoned, replaced by my brilliant (yes, I reread it recently) thesis on Nostalgia in the British Academic Novel: Reconstructing the Past in Thatcher Britain (available on microfiche, by interlibrary loan, and somewhere federal in Ottawa where all theses written in Canada go to rest in glory). This means that I have the bare bones of a major Gould work somewhere on a floppy disk (I shudder� it could be anywhere).

In the meantime, I was an active member of F-Minor, a mailing list about Gould�s works. In fact, if I search my birth name on the Internet, the first thing that comes up is a post to F-Minor from the archive. I have in the past few years received e-mails from strangers asking me questions about Gould and Timothy Findley for school papers as a result of this archive still being up and available to the public, which is flattering and slightly time-warpish. I unsubscribed from the list not long after the thesis fell apart, being so very hurt by the callousness of the vanishing professor (who went on to retire and not inform several students he was supervising), but going back through it this morning has me convinced that I�ll re-subscribe, if it�s still active.

Since I can�t enjoy the festivities today, do it for me! Visit the official web site at http://glenngould.com/gg/; or listen to CBC Radio Two�s Variations on Glenn Gould via the airwaves or on the Internet (Radio Two, down on the lower left), even if it’s just for a few minutes to get a sense of who this man was; and read about it on the CBC web site. I�m going to be late for work now because I blogged so long about a topic that I love, but since I�m not the one with the keys� as Bill would say, �neener, neener�!

Shock

I’m not sure where to begin.

I’m back at work this week — yes, retail; covering for another full-timer who’s on a well-deserved vacation. It was fun for about half a day. Then I started to get tired. I have thirty more hours of this, mostly with new part-timers I don’t know and have never worked with.

After work was my regular class that I teach on Monday nights. I was tired, but onwards I went. I wish things could have ended on a better note; I was trying to make them understand the individual steps in writing a research paper, and one student was seemingly being stubborn on purpose until we discovered that the term “research paper” meant something completely different to her than it meant to the twelve other students and the two professors. Misunderstanding cleared up. Frustrating at the time, though.

The I came home to two messages on my answering machine, one from my orchestra contact asking me to return his call, the other from a member of the LLO board asking me if I would help out backstage since I didn’t get the part. (Nice of you to ask; snowball’s chance in hell.)

I called my orchestra contact back, and sat down, stunned, as he told me that our conductor had been in a rather bad road accident on Friday, had severe head trauma, was in the Montreal General Hospital where unsuccessful surgery had taken place to staunch internal cranial bleeding, and was being kept alive by machines. So our weekly rehearsal has been cancelled.

This is the man who founded the orchestra thirty-odd years ago. Every member of the orchestra has been called and advised of the situation. Of course the rehearsal’s been cancelled!

The situation is even bleaker than it first appears. The family expects to make a decision within the next couple of days as to whether or not those life-support machines should be kept functional. Andres has just retired from teaching high school music to be there for his wife, who is battling terminal cancer. After a promising spring she has taken a turn for the worse, and now she has just been transferred to the Montreal General to be with her husband. Family is being summoned from his native country of Latvia and other places of residence. Evidently, things don’t look good all around.

I don’t know Andres other than as my conductor for a single year of orchestra. He has a sense of humour, a true love for music, the ability to communicate his ideas and visions, to corral forty adults of various levels of competence and with them create a thing of beauty. He taught years and years of string students at Lindsay Place High School. When I saw him last on Wednesday, he was in a wonderful mood.

The strangeness of knowing that he’s now lying somewhere hooked up to monitors and IV drips and pumps and tubes is unreal. It’s so difficult to maintain two opposing realities in the mind: that you expect upon extrapolating from the last time you encountered someone, and the reality that someone has told you which completely contradicts it. I suppose the necessity for closure is directly proportional to how well you know the individual in question. I’ve only known Andres for a year, despite the joy he’s brought me and the work I’ve done for him to meet the standards he’s set. My stunned feelings must pale next to those of the orchestra members how have worked with him longer than I, and to those of his already stressed family. I’m angry at the senseless tragedy; all I can do is pray, and I’ve been doing it since I heard the news. If he’s meant to live, let it be with peace and no pain, with health and positivity. May his doctors’ minds be clear, their hands steady, their acts inspired. If he is meant to die, then let him pass gently, with no further trauma, and may his family be spared further agony. He is an admirable man. Why did this have to happen?

This reminds me that if I walk away from someone in anger, or even indifference, there may not be another opportunity to erase that final image I’ll hold in my mind of them ever afterwards. Like my cats and our dog, he might not be there next time our orchestra gathers. My contact assures me that we’ll likely go on, although Andres was our heart. Perhaps we will; he wouldn’t want the orchestra to dissolve. Music is eternal, although people who create it are not. It will be strange, and it will be different; but for me, it will be a way to balance the senseless and tragic loss of life, if it is indeed confirmed that there must be loss of life. For every destruction, there must be creation, after all.

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My stunning Hallowe�en costume has been hanging up for a few weeks now, and yes, just as I had hoped, I�ve been looking at it and loving it and anticipating Hallowe�en with glee.

There�s just one thing. The next step involves making metre-long slices in the existing costume. Two of them.

It�s so pretty, and it looks so damned drop-jaw good on me. I�m petrified to ruin it, quite frankly. These two metre-long slices would really make the costume though.

S�okay. I have five weeks to work up the courage to do it. Well, four, because next week is chock-a-block full of work and teaching and such things. Three, actually, because I�d need a week to recover from the heart-stopping knowledge that I�ve committed hara-kari on a costume that�s taken me hours to get to this almost-perfect point. Now that I think about it, it�s only two weeks, since I�ll need a week to do the finicky final touches after I�ve hacked it apart, and then a week to rest and like it again while recovering.

Oh please, gods, let this work.

I feel the sudden urge to go fetal.

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Has it ever happened that you casually glance out the window and you don’t see any cars go by, or people on the street, or anyone moving in the dep across the way, or dogs in the park dog-run, and wonder if, just maybe, you missed the end of the world?

Auspicious Circle

I thought I’d blog something positive, seeing as how when I scan past entries I notice that I’ve been blogging bad news more often than not. I�ve been rather glum recently.

So! I had orchestra again last night, and there was new music waiting for us: Handel’s Toccata and Fugue in F (I think; I might be misremembering the key signature). There were only two copies of the cello part for this, and four cellists, so I shared with another cellist, the one of the infamous Canada Day concert shared stand. Now, when I share music, I end up squinting to my left, and I get dizzy. Sure enough, I couldn’t follow correctly, and rapidly became alarmingly nauseous. I stopped trying to play, and eventually laid my cello down quietly, stood up, left the stage, and sat outside in the cool fresh air, breathing deeply. I had a flash of “why am I bothering, I’ll never do this right” which surfaces every once in a while, ignored it, and eventually went back inside, figuring that if it got worse I’d just pack up and go home. I sat and followed the music until we switched to the Mendelssohn symphony, when I pulled my own stand forward and opened my own music. “Oh,” said my seatmate, “you don’t want to share mine?” “No, but thanks,” I said politely, “I’ll use mine, it has all my marks on it anyway.”

Now, the conductor has told us a few times now that this is a difficult symphony, and I’m still waiting for the proverbial piano to fall, because I’m having a ball with it. So we started, and every once in a while Sean or my old stand partner Walter (who now sits in the second chair, at the seemingly casual request of our principal cellist which everyone in the cello section knows is a veiled promotion and the mark of favour) would check on me: “Are you feeling okay? Do you need air? Water?” No, I was fine, I told them, my mind was somewhere else now, and so long as I didn’t think about my stomach I’d be all right. They were very kind.

From that point on I proceeded to have a fantastic night, first with the opening movement of the Mendelssohn symphony, then for the last ten minutes of rehearsal during the Rossini overture we’re doing. I truly adore these new strings; I do need a softer rosin, and I had to stand up and retune them (via the pegs, not the fine tuners) every twenty minutes or so as they stretch, but all in all, it went spectacularly well. So well, in fact, that time flew, and I wasn’t ready for the evening to come to an end. (I have never, ever understood why people are in such a hurry to leave something they do for fun.)

As I was packing up, Walter turned around with a smile and said, “You’ve been practicing; I can tell. Having the free time to do it is really showing. Soon you’ll be in my chair!”

Well, well, well. I think I must have glowed. “I do have the time, and the headspace,” I agreed, “but these new strings have something to do with it as well, I’m sure. Thank you.”

My intonation sounds more precise, my overall tone sounds more cohesive, and the sound in general is clearer, the bow moves more easily and articulation just seems to be more present than it did before. Having someone else notice really did wonders for my confidence. Maybe it’s the new bridge; maybe it’s the still-new bow; maybe it’s the new strings; maybe it’s all of them, plus me.

Hmm. Just looking at that list makes me add up how much I’ve spent on upgrading my instrument and accessories over the past nine months and wince a little bit — just a little bit. It’s cheaper than buying a new instrument, after all. And now that it’s all done, I don’t need to worry for a while.

I do sound better, and that I can even tell shows me how much I’ve improved over the past year. I love playing with these new strings, because I love the sound. Loving to play is a good thing, because I’ll play even more. And the more I play, the better I get. What a nice change from the vicious circles I usually get caught up in. What would I call this — an auspicious circle? Whatever the term, I’m thankful for it, and intend to keep on enjoying it, as well.