We must be coming up to a major Neo-Pagan festival - I'm on the radio again.
Yep. Going in to the CBC tomorrow to tape an interview about Imbolc, or Candlemas, or Chandeleur, or Brighnassadh, or Feast of Saint Brighid, or whatever you want to call it.
Now, it's been a year since I've done an interview about my spiritual practices. You can actually dig back through the archives and read my rant about the disrespect shown to me by the last jerk who interviewed me. I did plenty of pre-interview work with the producer this time, and at one point I must have hesitated a bit too long, because she asked about my comfort level using certain words. I admitted to her that my last interview experience regarding the general topic had taught me a severe lesson and made me a bit interview-shy, and she's assured me that nothing of the sort will happen this time. She was quite horrified at the level of immaturity displayed by the man who put me through that mockery of an interview last February, and offered her sympathy, although she didn't sound surprised. Sensational journalism attracts listerners, after all, the same way sensational journalism sells newspapers. In general, though, I have a very good feeling about this interview tomorrow morning. Mind you, forty-five minutes of the producer doing pre-interview research did a lot to put my mind at ease, and I've never had a bad interview with the CBC, in all the years I've interviewed with them. I'm always treated courteously and with respect. Mind you, I thought the same about CJAD up until last year too.
No, this will be fine. Besides, this time I know to terminate the interview if it goes in a bad direction. We're taping, after all.
Barring major disasters, it looks like it will air Sunday morning on CBC Radio 1, which in Montreal is 88.5 FM.
I saw The Hours yesterday. As I expected, when I walked into my apartment afterwards, my husband looked up at me and said, "Good movie?"
Now, that's such a misleading question. Usually it means, "Did you enjoy the film?", but the phrasing also implies, "Was it a well-made film?", or, "Is it a bad movie?"
So I kind of shrugged and said, "It was thought-provoking."
"But did you have fun?" he persisted.
What kind of a question is that? The movie is about death, questioning the right to define acceptable quality of life, and who has the right to limit any individual's choice to end his/her life at any time. No, the film was not "fun". I didn't exactly "enjoy" it. But it was excellently directed, edited, and acted, and I could appreciate that, and appreciate the feelings it evoked from me, and the ensuing self-examination that began as the credits rolled.
I gave up. It was a quarter to midnight, and my husband was almost asleep, anyway.
"Yeah. It was a good movie," I said.
I dreamed this morning that I pulled out the sleeping bags we took on our camping trip to Pennsylvania last summer, and inside I saw something moving that looked like a little stuffed animal. I unrolled the sleeping bag and found three cats: a full-grown cat, a kitten approximately Nix's age, and a tiny, tiny kitten about the size of a mouse, with black paws and gingery fur.
"More cats!" I said. "And a tiny foxy cat!"
Evidently my mind was either (a) remembering our return from Pennsylvania to discover Scarlet's temporary feline boarder giving birth to kittens, or (b) afraid that I haven't cleaned out my camping gear correctly. Or both.
I haven't been sleeping well. Maybe that's all it is.
Ooh! Ooh! Just checked the mail! I have another parcel waiting for me at the post office!
Whee!
I'm just back from a wonderful tea break with my oldest friend. Like me, over the past two years she's been going through depression, reorganising her priorities, weeding out what's holding her back and creating room to focus on what she considers important.
It's so good to have a friend with whom you can share everything... yes, everything. The one in whose company you can bring just about any topic up and know that she'll take it seriously, no matter what. The one who laughs at the same kooky things you do. The one who knows where you're coming from because she feels pretty much the same way.
We may drift out of each other's lives every few years or so, but we always drift back. And that's nineteen years of drifting away and back, baby. Nineteen.
Eep. On one hand, that's grounds for a "we're how old!?" check. On the other hand, it's certainly a reason to celebrate.
We're quite alike. So much so, in fact, that we joked about our significant others checking in with each other to compare notes, making sure that we were still on an even keel.
Friends are blessings. Some come, some go, but I'm lucky enough to have several friends who have come back into my life some time after our first interactions, and they've become the best support system a girl could ask for.
So, thanks, y'all.
Now I'm torn: I desperate want to open The Rebirth of Witchcraft, but I keep thinking I should review my class for tonight, even though I prepared it first thing this morning.
I think the book wins.
Argh!
Ceri and I have been e-mailing back and forth about various things Celtic and mythological, and it's been driving me up the wall that I know I have information somewhere concerning these topics, but I can't remember where.
See, when you start reading and researching things just because you're interested, you rarely keep notes. It's just for fun, after all. Then you become more serious, and you make notes here and there on things that interest you. Then the random notes start coalescing into the connections you make between different authors and myths and characters, and before you know it, you possess a body of knowledge that's impossible to document, because it's a comglomerate of ideas and readings from all over the place.
We can't write down every single thing we learn from the outset. That's absurd.
Nor can we write down where we found an interesting idea, because it won't necessarily encompass the whole set of associated things that sprang into our minds when we first encountered it.
So what does one do?
Well, evidently one re-reads as much as one can get one's hands on, and reads with awareness, with a highlighter, sticky notes, and a pencil by one's side. No, better make that a pencil and a pen, the pencil to make notes in the text (come on, you'll have to do it sooner or later), and the pen to write notes on the post-its (because pencil smudge son sticky-notes).
One invests in a stack of lined notebooks from an office supply shop and begins to make notes outside the texts, as well. As one runs into ideas found in other texts too, one slaps a sticky-note with the other title (and pertinent page numbers and chapters) at the appropriate spot. It sort of creates an off-line world-wide web. (Except it's library-wide. Specifically, your library.)
This means photocopies of chapters from books you don't own (personal use, fair use of property and all that). It means investing in second-hand books. It means asking for books for your birthday, Kwaanza, Midsummer, whatever. It means using other people as resources.
It means documenting your sources, and leaving a trail of breadcrumbs.
Why is this so hard for people to do? WHy don't people understand the necessity of documentation? Why do people insist on making things up, or reading one text and assuming it's correct? (I love the Internet, don't you?) Granted, my way is a lot more work, but it's a lot more rewarding. It's a heck of a lot more enriching, too.
It also means you can cover yourself in case of difficulty later on when you feel the need to discuss the topic. Shoddy scholarship makes me spitting mad. I also frustrate myself because when I started all this, it was out of personal interest. Now, it's become something more. And I'd give anything to go back and keep better records, take clearer notes, in those first couple of years. It physically hurts me to see people refuse to keep track of their research in an effort to avoid more work. It only wastes energy, in the end. Sure, you've got the knowledge... but where I come from, unless you can back it up, that knowledge is just pretty wall covering inside your skull.
I know the average person doesn't operate by academic standards. I just wish more people would understand the importance of keeping track of research.
Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
That, gentle readers, is the sound of a bibliophile who has in her little paws on an out-of-print text that’s nigh-impossible to find at an affordable price.
Yes, indeed. The Rebirth of Witchcraft by Doreen Valiente. And it’s mine, mine, mine!
The parcel arrived half an hour ago, and I waited until now to open it. Three layers of packing (Three! I admire their devotion to protecting my purchase from the heartless, brutal postal system, but really!) I had to worry off before at last, it lay in my hands. I actually experienced a shiver when I turned it over and beheld the cover.
This is a text written by one of the central figures in the establishment of the modern practice of witchcraft, about the contemporary history of the practice from the beginnings of the twentieth century right up until the eighties. Eyewitness accounts from someone as influential and as respected as Valiente are rare. Everyone has a biased and subjective point of view, of course, but I’d be quicker to believe Valiente than some others. From an academic standpoint, this is a first-hand account of the politics and social struggles British witchcraft encountered as it re-emerged in the twentieth century and tried to settle into something coherent, and as such it’s a valuable piece of history, as well.
Apart from all of that, this is just a wonderful find. Second-hand, it usually runs between seventy and a hundred dollars, depending on its condition. This copy was only thirty. It’s shelf-worn, but no pages are missing, marked, or bent, and I wanted a copy to read it, after all.
New book! Out of print book! Rare book! Bliss!
I neglected to mention that my awesome-cool husband bought me a Ravenclaw house mug yesterday.
Mine! Mine! Muah-hah-hah-hah!
(The husband, and the mug. Neener, neener!)
I know you were all on tenterhooks, so I’ll end your agony: the Toronto Symphony Orchestra has announced their new conductor. It’s Peter Oundjian, the retired first violinist of the Tokyo Quartet who was forced to give up playing a few years ago because of hand problems. (Okay, I don’t know about you, but that’s a nightmare for a musician. Kind of like me worrying about losing my sight, being that I love reading and writing so much. When Oundjian announced his retirement from the Tokyo Quartet I was devastated.) The TSO has been operating under guest conductors for a couple of years ever since Jukka-Pekka Saraste left, so this announcement means that they have an artistic director again who can guide the orchestra under a single vision.
If this sounds vaguely familiar, it’s because our own Orchestre Symphonique de Montreal is in the same position. Charles Dutoit resigned last year and the OSM has sort of stumbled a bit without a leader. However, hope springs eternal, and rumours are flying that Kent Nagano is at the top of the search committee’s list. At the moment Nagano is the music director of Berlin's Deutsches Symphony-Orchester Berlin as well as the principal conductor of the Los Angeles Opera. (Not that he’ll have to give those up; heck, Dutoit was the principal conductor of a handful of international orchestras. Racks up the air miles, but hey.)
Well, we’re both still alive, we didn’t use copious amounts of Kleenex, and nothing valuable got smashed, so I’m calling yesterday’s NaNoWriEx session a success.
I really don’t know who Ceri has edited in the past; most of them must have been arrogant, insecure types, because she’s fantastic at offering creative, constructive advice, and helping you work things out. The point of handing a work like this off to someone else is so that you have a second pair of eyes seeing it for the first time to catch inconsistencies (which, bless her, she did) and take in the work as a whole and see how it balances.
We decided to hand them to each other with a minimal amount of editing, to see if the other reader would catch things we’d already pegged as problems, and sure enough, it was gratifying to hear her point out problems that I had already noted down to address – the resolution of a particular storyline, the use of minor characters in other places, and so forth. The good thing is she also pointed out other ways to resolve problems that I hadn’t seen. Likewise, the problems I talked to her about all seemed to be problems that she was already aware of or had anticipated in some way.
Moreover, Ceri put my mind to rest about things like my characters: she swore that every single one of them was different and an individual, and she loved them all. This made me squiggle with joy because I consider characters one of the most important elements of a story, something too many authors forget. (And for those NaNo participants from Montreal who are wondering… no, I have no clue when any of them were born, and what their favourite colours are. So there.) She also eased my paranoid fears regarding my portrayal of sensitive issues. What I wasn’t expecting was her comment that I had material for one or two more novels about these characters. I specifically did not plan a series, because so many YA novels end up as series… but it’s nice to know that I’ve created a sense of “life goes on”.
So! Back to the laptop! I have to add that penultimate chapter I had decided against in the orginal draft to tie up a couple of loose ends, incorporate her edits and word suggestions, and, well, the next step is shopping it around, isn’t it?
I love synchronicity.
Yesterday DaTaStReAmS showed up in my random BlogSnob table. Today, Ginger Girl showed up in Bill's.
Or maybe it's surreality.
I know that Future Shop is The Den of Evil, but damn, their CD prices are persuasive. When I stopped by on Sunday, I picked up the Chicago soundtrack for $14.99 (compare $18.99 at HMV) and the Treasure Planet CD for $9.99 (no matter what the HMV price might be, this is cheaper by a mile!). I checked the price of Tori Amos' Scarlet's Walk and found it to be $17.99 as opposed to $23.99, so yes, I know where I'll be picking it up. If I'm purchasing at a chain, I'd rather purchase at the chain which will take the least amount of my hard-won dollars, thanks.
As good as the Chicago soundtrack is, I'm slightly disappointed. The recording levels are a touch uneven, particularly in the Cell Block Tango. The entire introduction to the song is almost unintelligable, as are some of the monologues, which were loud and clear in the film. And of course, one runs into the problem of lacking visuals, so the songs don't pack quite the same punch in certain places - We Both Reached for the Gun loses a certain something when you don't see Richard Gere's voice issuing from Renee Zellweger's brightly painted lips in a ventriloquist act. My last regret is that for some reason the soundtrack doesn't include the tap-dance sequence.
Apart from that, it's good solid singing of good solid songs, and I'm glad my mother invited me along to see the film with her over the Christmas break.
Speaking of my mother, it's her birthday! Happy Birthday, Mum!
Someone had a lot of fun with this.
Much of it is alarmingly visually accurate, which scares me for some reason...
I took this weekend off: no weblogs, no e-mail. It was remarkably refreshing after a week of driving, goal-oriented work at the computer, writing articles and revising text and sending things off all over the place. I used my laptop instead of my desktop this weekend, and only sent one message out (a submission, naturally). I didn’t even sit down and read a book to relax, but you know, I don't feel as if I spent my weekend racing about and not taking it easy.
I lie. I did read a book. Two, in fact. Both NaNo novels of other local authors. It’s not quite the same kind of relaxing reading that I meant, though; I read these two books with awareness and a critical eye. Drat the writer in me!
Saturday evening I went out with one of my oldest friends for dinner and a movie. We saw Chicago, which was just as good the second time around. I haven’t seen the original All That Jazz, but this version was spectacular. Richard Gere is one of my least favourite actors in Hollywood, but in this film he manages to not only entertain me, but surprise me. Anything that has current stars singing their own songs and dancing their own numbers has my admiration (assuming they’re more than passable at it). We now have a standing date to see any musical that’s released on the big screen; having worked on musicals on and off together for six years or so means we appreciate them in a very particular fashion together.
It was a terrific evening. I forget sometimes why certain friendships persist even if we don’t spend a lot of time with one another, and a night out like this one renews my faith in something. I just can’t put words to it.
(Speaking of stars singing makes me think of Once More With Feeling, a.k.a. the Buffy musical, which reminds me that Alyson Hannigan and Alexis Denisoff are getting married. If you have to ask who they are, then you won’t care. Really.)
If you're a Secret Diaries fan, Cassandra has a new one posted on her livejournal: The Very Secret Diary of Theoden actually went up on Christmas, and I read it but I forgot to post it for you. Didn't remember until I checked it out today to see if a new one was up yet. Er.
My luck with books has been so-so for the past few months. Last week I finished the pile of books I got for Christmas, so I sorted through my many shelves of books to see if I could find something that (a) I hadn't read, (b) I had abandoned, or (c) really wanted to re-read. I pulled out Shadows Over Lyra and said, Woo, a whole three books I haven't read! I had picked up this three-in-one omnibus edition of some Lyra novels by Patricia C Wrede six years ago and couldn't get past the second chapter, so I put it away. Perfect, I thought!
Well, I got further than the second chapter, but wow, is it ever boring, and I think it's about to be re-shelved. I think I might need to find another home for it. Before I do, I might try skipping to the second book in the omnibus, and then the third. Maybe it's just the first novel that's bland and derivative and has boring characters. (I can hope, can't I?) I'm a bit confused, because I love Wrede's Enchanted Forest Chronicles, all her short stories that I've read, and her epistolary novel co-written with Caroline Stevermer.
Other books I've given up on: Carole Nelson Douglas' Chapel Noir, which is a novel about two women investigating a series of grisly Parisian murders that echo the little Ripper affair in Britain the previous year. When my favourite character (who has narrated the previous four novels in this series) was kidnapped, and I realised that she wasn't coming back in this book, I really lost interest. Another book to put back on the shelf. It's been sitting on my bedside table, where books I'm getting tired of sometimes go so that I can fall asleep (I won't get caught up in the action and read 'till two, you see), but being a grisly murder investigation, it's really not the type of thing that's conducive to relaxing, you know?
I've been valiantly trying to read Bernard Cornwell's The Winter King for t!, but the writing style really leaves me so completely neutral. It's a retelling of the Arthurian story in a style that imagines what actual Celtic history might have been like at the time - none of this flowery knights in plate armour stuff. It's about war chiefs and mud and politics, and while it's a nice change from the usual, I'm just not interested in reading yet another Matter of Britain right now. Nor have I been for the past five or six months, which is how long I've taken to read half the book.
I've have a bunch of books on order since the beginning of December - for example, the new Robin Hobb, the Charles de Lint Newford collection that came out in November, and the new Robert Jordan (which claims to be an end, but my sources indicate that the claim is ludicrous). (My view on reading Jordan at this point: I am in blood / Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o'er. (Macbeth III.v.) I'm also re-reading Ceri's novel. And I did another scan through my bookshelves and found Broken Blade, the third book of an Ann Marston trilogy that I put down half-read four years ago, having lost my reading momentum when she decided to change from third-person to first-person narration after the first two novels, which jarred me at the time. And my mother sent me home with a set of mystery novels by Dianne Day which look good, so maybe I'll tackle those next.
Reading's just been sort of fnyeh lately. You know?
And here I was, thinking that all fantasy artists were obsessed with the scantily-clad Amazonian warrior stereotype...
In complete contrast to my last post:
It was orchestra last night, and we've begun auditioning new conductors. There are two finalists for the position: the temporary conductor who led the orchestra for our last concert (who is one of our violists, and who has guest-conducted with us before); and another prominent West Island musician who has led various choirs, concerts, bands, Savoy productions, etcetera.
The formula? Each auditionee conducts the second movement of the Mendelssohn symphony that we played at the last concert; another movement of the same symphony, which we've played through but not worked on; and introduces a new piece of music for the orchestra to sight-read.
Last night, the surprise music our applicant conductor brought in was the overture to Mozart's Don Giovanni, which just happens to be one of my favourite pieces of music ever.
I was bouncing off walls when I got in the car at the end of the evening. I had played Don Giovanni. And it had sounded pretty darned spectacular for sight-reading and a half-hour of working on it. It's an energetic overture with plenty of drama, challenging in its precision but not overly discouraging in the technical aspect.
I enjoyed the evening immensely. The conductor had charm, great musical sense, and had us sounding terrific by the end of the evening. I wonder how much of that was an unconscious desire on our part to impress him, though, and more focus being given to a new face, familiarity breeding contempt, and all that. From experience, I know that our temporary conductor is just as talented, but in a different way. The entire orchestra grades these applicants and submits recommendations, and it's going to be a tough choice.
We'll see what transpires next week, when our temporary conductor officially auditions.
I woke up this morning with an uncomfortable memory, and I can’t shake it, so I’m going to try “writing it out”.
When I was in grade three, a boy on our bus came up to me and asked me if I wanted a piece of gum. I was surprised and shyly pleased, and went to take one.
Now, this pack of gum was one of those trick rigged things you can order from the back of comic books: it had a spring and a trap set in it to snap your finger when you reached in. The wire caught me on the sensitive skin just below the fingernail, and as a child I had an extremely low pain threshold. As I withdrew my hand, bewildered, hurt, with tears in my eyes and my finger already bright red and stinging, he laughed and laughed and said that he was going to play the same trick on our teacher when we arrived at school.
I sat on the bus and wrestled with my thoughts, cradling my finger to my chest. The hurt was beginning to be seasoned with a bit of anger as well. I wouldn’t wish the pain (physical and emotional) on anyone, especially not a teacher. I loved school; yes, gentle readers, I was a Hermione at school, down to the waving hand to answer questions. I loved all my teachers for opening new doors and presenting vistas of exciting information, and I didn’t want a single one of them betrayed, tricked, hurt as I had been hurt on multiple levels. Morally, I couldn’t stand by with the knowledge that someone might be hurt, and not act to prevent it.
So when we arrived in class, I went up to the teacher and warned her.
I don’t know what happened afterwards, but later that morning while we were working at our desks in calm silence, the boy slammed down his pencil and said, “Big mouth – big mouth – big mouth!”, each louder than before, punctuating his words with a fist on the desk. The students dropped their work. The teacher sat watching me, her arms crossed across her chest, and informed me that it was unjust to ruin other people’s pranks. You didn’t snitch on other kids.
I burst into tears. I hadn’t wanted her to be hurt. I had been protecting her. I remember glancing at my finger, already developing a tiny bruise across my finger, just under the nail. And then, I realised that she was smirking at me. She had planned this. She had directed this little performance. She was enjoying my state of shock, my humiliation, this further betrayal - betrayal by a grown-up.
At the time, all I knew was that I was being punished for doing something that I thought was right for someone I loved. Twenty-three years later, looking back, I am absolutely horrified at her behaviour. She humiliated students frequently, had favourites (of which I was certainly not one), taught unevenly, and made herself feel powerful by regularly manipulating her students against one another, passing on overheard comments and weakening defences by inferring meaning to them. Compared to the other teachers in the school she was young; she must have been about twenty-six at the time. I think we were the first class of her own, for she had been on the supply list the year before. This was behaviour I would have expected from a fellow student, but never, never from a teacher. Almost any other teacher would have thanked me for my concern and the information, and then later pretended to be surprised by the joke when presented with it by the other party, and no one would have been the wiser. Instead, she chose to humiliate.
Now, of course, I understand that she illustrates a type of personality that I have since encountered and dealt with, having learned a hard lesson and developed the beginnings of the requisite scar tissue at the age of eight. It taught me that you can’t automatically trust people in authority, which, along with the humiliation, was the hardest aspect of lesson to grasp. I had been raised to understand that I could go to almost any adult for help at any time, be it a Block Parent, a teacher, or family. This woman shattered that trust. Fortunately, she was in the minority among my teachers. There were some forgettable ones, only one or two bad ones, but overall, I had wonderful professors who encouraged and led by example as I was growing up.
Writing it out does help. I can look at it objectively, now, and see why it hurt so much on so many different levels. The episode is one of those crystal-clear childhood snapshots that you carry with you, one of those incidents that stays with you no matter how much else you forget, no matter how much you try to shake it.
Speaking of forgetting, I know that the boy had forgotten about it a few days later. For the teacher, it was just another little success, knocking a student’s self-esteem down, and she had probably forgotten about it by the end of the day. I have never forgotten it.
But then, I’ve always been too trusting, and I’ve always been hyper-sensitive. Silly me, expecting people to treat each other with care and respect, no matter what their age.
I have butterflies in my tummy. Ceri is going to read my novel today.
And yet, at the same time, I'm all excited. This afternoon, I get to read Ceri's novel.
Ceri and I have been passing writing back and forth for seven months now, and we've been doing a decent job of keeping each other on track. (By the way, Ceri, since you're getting 224 pages of young adult novel this afternoon, I'm going to hold back the 23 pages of the December chapter of the Great Canadian Novel that I wrote over the holidays for another time. Too much of a good thing, and all that, you know.)
Now, my husband has read this novel, and he enjoyed it, which was a tremendous reassurance; but Ceri's a writer, as I am, so she'll be simultaneously reading it for the story and with an eye to the technique, as well. Which is what I want, of course.
My butterflies don't know whether to panic or jump up and down. While they work it out, I'm going to have a cup of tea and set to printing this ungainly child of my imagination.
Well, that was an incredibly productive six hours.
Now I'll take a break, and back to work...
When will I learn that if I don't drink a cup of tea as soon as I pour it, it will be stone-cold by the time that I remember to pick it up for a sip again?
I am currently in the throes of craving a Coffee Crisp.
I haven't enjoyed the last few Coffee Crisp bars that I've eaten. I have, oh, maybe two per year. They just don't have that same lovely, deep, mocha-y taste that they used to have.
Great. So now my taste buds are indulging in nostalgia. Just what I need.
Here I am, back in the land of the living after sleeping a total of sixteen hours yesterday and struggling through a low-grade fever. I'm still not in top form, but it's nice to be able to get out of bed and perambulate, y'know?
In fact, I got dressed at noon and wandered into the kitchen to heat up some soup.
"Nice pants," said my husband. "I haven't seen those before."
"I got them from Ceri," I said. "They don't fit her any more."
He looked slightly startled. I'm not sure why; maybe it was a new-ish concept to him. It's a girl thing, I guess, to swap clothes if you don't use them any more. Whatever. I like these pants. They're comfy. And being the height that I am, low-slung hip-riding pants designed for an "average person" (as if there is any such thing) means that the waistband actually sits at waist height on me, so I'm doubly happy. (By extension, of course, it means an "average" regular fit chafes my rib-cage. I'm sort of glad the low-slung trend is still around so I can proceed to take advantage of it.)
Who decides what "average" is, anyway? Taking two extremes and making a pair of pants to fit a mythical person in-between the two simply means that the clothes fit no one.
Evidently I'm still too out of it to function in the real world. I think I'll go back to bed.
I'm only human. Which means that I like to be recognised for my work, like everyone else. I particularly like to be recognised for the work I do voluntarily, since it's a gift and I'm not expecting anything in return.
Two and a half years ago when Ceri and I and a couple of others got together to create the Montreal Pagan Resource Center, for example, we were aiming to create something for everyone in the city to use as a resource, Pagan or not. It was to be a place where people could go to do research, to ask questions, and to talk to others in a safe environment in an effort to share information about all sorts of religions. Eventually Ceri, and then I as well, gave up in frustration on the project. It wasn't worth the crap and resentment that the local Pagan community was throwing at us; not when we were volunteering so much time, energy and effort.
Why are voluntary leaders always unappreciated? Why is it that as soon as someone is paid for their work, it becomes "legitimate" in some way?
Patricia Telesco has written an interesting article that examines the concept of give and take in a spiritual community. One paragraph in particular caught my attention, and it begins with:
Scanning our rather dysfunctional family there has been great growth, but it has also come at a great price. We do not really honor our priests, our elders, our teachers -- for the most part I see these people burning out because everyone takes, and few give back.
I know exactly what she means. And unfortunately, it brought up all my old frustration with the local Pagan community again.
Oh, the MPRC is still around. Half of its founding members have washed their hands of the project, though, burnt out, frustrated.
As a teacher, like it or not, I'm a leader. I know that at some point I'll have to get involved in the community again. I'm not looking forward to it at all; my experiences with it over the past seven years have been 90% negative. Not much of an incentive to return, is it. Every once in a while I think I can make a difference, help create an environment where we can all support and learn from each other, and then I look at the notoriously apathetic local community's history, and their brick walls that I've run into in the past. How many times must I do it before either I or the community learns the lesson?
It's like a playground: everyone has to co-operate. It just gets so damned frustrating when some of us try and try, and eventually give up... only to hear the community complain about the lack of leadership. The hypocrisy chokes me.
And people wonder why I keep to myself.
Something I enjoy doing, if a film puzzles me, is reading about the production team's reasoning behind their decisions. So, when I found Scott's link to an interview with Peter Jackson and Phillippa Boyens about the changes they chose to make in The Two Towers, I was rather pleased. Almost as pleased as I was with their reasons for moving things about and re-interpreting characters slightly for the storytelling style that film as a medium requires. Their choices made sense. And it's not like one could just film LOTR word for word, after all - what a gods-awful bore that would be, if it were even possible.
So yes, there's mention of Faramir and his apparent contradictions (which seems to be one of the major issues people are having, if they've read the book), and Gollum, and other interesting issues that people have decided are just plain wrong. Speaking of which, folks, Aragon and Arwen have their own little love story in the appendices of RotK - go read it and stop complaining that Jackson's making things up. Inserting flashback sequences isn't a crime, for heaven's sake; by creating the appendix, Tolkien sort of employed a similar technique. How Jackson chooses to integrate it into the main tale is what should be focused on, and so far it's not as horrendous as it could have been. Quit griping.
The Two Towers was definitely better the second time around. I really, really think it had a lot to do with the bimbo who sat in front of us in Toronto and waved her arms whenever Legolas did something cool, cooed whenever he had a close-up, and squealed through every fight scene. Knowing that the film is made up of three-quarters battle sequences, you can imagine how irritating this became.
Yes, this viewing was definitely better. I even noticed this time when Saruman said the title of the movie, earning a golf clap. The pacing seemed a little more even, although I still think Merry and Pippin got short shrift in this film, not even getting to enter Isengard let alone welcome the rest of the fellowship as the doorkeepers when they arrive.
As the credits rolled, my husband said hopefully, “Do you think they’ll do a trailer at the end, for Return of the King?” “Not a chance, yet,” I said. “We’ll just have to come back and see it again in May or June, like we did last year.” Which is hardly a sacrifice, is it.
We watched the cast commentary of the Fellowship special edition DVD the other day, and wow; they really did just put all four hobbits in a room and let them talk, didn’t they? With comments from half a dozen other actors here and there, it made for great fun.
Ahem.
I would like to announce that my husband has just been contacted to start his old job in animation, as of eight o'clock tomorrow morning, at approximately the same pay he was receiving when he was laid off eighteen months ago.
We'd like to thank everyone who was supportive and understanding and helped us along, and we know that all of you will be as crazy with glee as we are right now. So I just wanted to let you all know before we stepped out for a celebratory luncheon.
Whilst cleaning out a bunch of drawers this week, I discovered a tiny pot of cosmetic micro-sparkles, employed as part of a costume a few Hallowe'ens ago and never used again. I'm not a sparkle kind of gal.
Well, part of Project 2003 is to learn how to have fun again, so I scooped some of the powder up and dusted it all over my arms and throat. What the heck, right? I'm at home, after all.
It's kind of quirky, and the sun outside catches it every once in a while, and I laugh at myself. So far, so good.
While I was in the living room getting a reference book, our little black kitten Nix hopped out of one of her hidey-holes behind a row of tomes and rubbed against my legs. I automatically bent down to pat her... and you know those micro- sparkles: even when you try to brush them off, a few still cling. Which means that they transfer to everything that you touch. For example, from my hands to her silky coat.
Voila - instant magic kitty. Here and there, glinting in the sun, there's a tiny random point of light in the depths of her midnight fur, like stars.
She's absolutely beautiful.
Okay, who let a seventies-throwback design the new Palais des congrès de Montrèal? It looks like a kid built a house with a pile of Jolly Rancher candies.
Honestly. Does no one have taste any more?
Humph.
To reassure yourself than the mind of man is actually capable of creating beauty, go see the Varna: World's First Gold, Ancient Secrets exhibit at the Pointe-a-Callières Museum of Archaeology and History in Old Montreal. Wonderful collection of goldwork and art from the area of Varna, a.k.a. Odessos, on the western shore of the Black Sea. Submerged by rising sea levels due to global warming not once, but twice - then struck by drought. Can you imagine? One of the most fertile areas in Europe, rendered uninhabitable for a good chunk of time until the Thracians came along and said, "Hey, this looks good for a headquarters while we try to unite the clans," never knowing that there were huge necropoli under the hills, or what amounted to a graveyard under the waves. The Greeks liked it too, and the Romans thought it a funky vacation spot as well. Like the rest of Europe. (Love those Romans, conquering without raising a harsh word. "No, no, we wouldn't dream of attacking you. Mind if we put a temple here and a garrison over there - since we're friends and all?")
Anywhats. If you're in the area, and need a quiet stroll through some lovely samples of hostorical art and craftwork, do stop by. The exhibit isn't overwhelmingly huge, and will only take you perhaps an hour to go through it. In fact, it's terribly relaxing, what with the constant sound of gentle waves, and a lovely soft light created by the masses of translucent blue fabric flowing through the middle of the exhibit room. Worth the money.
From Neil Gaiman's blog:
Have you ever noticed that your writers have changed? Semi-serious question. You’ll spend six months in a romantic comedy, then you turn around one day and you're in a ghost story or a medical thriller, or you spend a year in a kitchen sink, grittily realistic drama and then, without warning, your life turns into a sitcom...
It’s always sudden. It often happens with a bang. Ah, I think, when that happens to me. New writers...
Yes. Yes, that's it, exactly.
Sigh.
Whoa! This is a surprise!
Harry Potter's getting a brand new headmaster--and his name isn't Ian McKellen.
May I say, "I told you so?"
Except... it seems that the headmaster will not be played by any of the gents whose names were bandied about:
Following Harris' death from cancer in October, there had been much speculation over who would take over the role, with leading candidates supposedly including McKellen and even Harris' stand-in. But McKellen never seriously considered the role (he's already done the franchise thing with The Lord of the Rings and X-Men) and producers ultimately went with [Michael] Gambon, a classically trained actor who studied with Laurence Olivier and whose credits include Gosford Park, The Insider and the lead in the British miniseries The Singing Detective.
Well, well, well. Michael Gambon. This will be very, very interesting...
(Thanks, Ginger Girl!)
For everyone who's worrying about font, I'm tweaking the template in preparation for moving to another host. Things will be looking different now and again, and changing possibly frequently. Courage, loyal readers!
Happy new calendar day, everyone!
(Well, I do celebrate New Year's on the first of November, after all - what else am I going to call it?)
