Yes, Singing Bare has no message on his chalkboard. He is clearly nonplussed by the dozens of strange small things that have been happening for which he can find no cause… rhyme or reason.
One of the reasons he is nonplussed (here meaning confused and disoriented, not the new, controversial definition of nonchalance) is that Mickey is having trouble actually getting writing done. And yet, Mickey is definitely not suffering from writer’s block. The ideas still come in a flood that, if anything, drowns out older ideas that didn’t get written down before the brainstorms increased. There are currently three complete novels in my head waiting to get written down, and I added to none of them yesterday.
Poppensparkle is threatening to do to her novella what her sister, Derfentwinkle, did to her novella, turning it into the novel The Necromancer’s Apprentice.
The barrier is, of course, 30,000 words. More than that is a novel. Less than that is a novella. So, how do you do necessary world-building with a world of three-inch-tall fairies and keep it spare enough to fit into the shorter novella length? One can’t let such conundrums paralyze your writing. And yet, one can’t rely on the details in the previous book not needing to be repeated in this one to build a consistent fantasy world.
The problem with the primary WIP (Work in Progress for non-writers) is completely different. I left off in the middle of a Canto, as I often do to keep the flow going from one writing session to the next. And that normally is something I can just pick up and write the next time I sit down to it. Three weeks later I still haven’t finished the scene where Valerie is in the hospital and has to explain why her cousin Tim did something stupid to land him in the hospital in a coma… to Tim’s father, Uncle Rance. It is already written in my head. Just not in the perfect words. And I know it is stupid to wait for perfect words to magically appear. But I did… and they haven’t.
But the strange little thing that has Singing Bare nonplussed is actually a nudist thing. Both he and I share the problem of wanting to be a nudist, but not quite being able to cross that barrier. For him, as an imaginary turn-of-the-century Native American boy it is the inability to cast aside the loincloth, not because he’s shy, but because that sort of nakedness can get your ads canceled on WordPress. (Not that Mickey has ads.) For Mickey it is a matter of not being able to join a local nudist club because, although they allow single men to join, and married men with supporting wives can also join, but men with objecting wives are barred from applying. My wife is okay with me being a nudist as long as she doesn’t have to get naked herself. But she is unwilling to give any kind of written or verbal consent that will be observed by anyone besides Mickey himself. She would be embarrassed for anyone else in her religion to know that it was true that she was okay with her husband spending time naked socially.
So, I am not ashamed that I like the naturist-nudist way of life. I am sad that it took me so long to embrace it as a fact in life. And my wife has known about my belief in nudism since before we got married. She has only ever been opposed to nudism because she believes her religion tells her it is a sinful act. Yer, the Jehovah’s Witnesses believe that Adam and Eve were perfect when they were in the Garden of Eden. and the Bible says they were naked when they were perfect. So, since Witnesses believe they will all become perfect after Armageddon, they must also believe they will be naked after Armageddon. Right? Ah, well, that’s just one of those little dings life puts in the enamel of my being. One of those Stranger Dings.
Catch a Falling Star 
A Night at the Symphony
Last night my wife took us to the Dallas Symphony Orchestra for a performance of Gustav Mahler’s Das Klagende Lied (The Song of Lamentation). So, you can bet we were in for a happy night just based on the title of the piece. As you might’ve detected from the post title’s similarity to the Marx Brother’s movie A Night at the Opera, I took along my wacky mental versions of the Marx Brothers… whom I call the Snarcks Brothers. They are Scarpigo, Cinco, and Zero Snarcks. Think Groucho, Chico, and Harpo, and then my mental fartgas won’t prevent you from understanding quite as easily.
Jaap Van Zweden, conductor of the DSO, and aspiring impersonator of Grumpy from the Seven Dwarfs
Scarpigo, Cinco, and Zero Snarcs… so to speak…
Now, don’t get me wrong, I love classical music and I like Mahler okay. But his music tends to be depressing and sad. I don’t mean merely depressing and sad, but deep down at the bottom of the canyon with hill giants tossing boulders at your head in the midst of a thunderstorm symphonic sort of depressing and sad. It could really bum me out, so I was prepared to have Scarpigo lean over the balcony rail numerous times to shout “Booga-booga!” at the concert goers. And the Blues lost to the Sharks in the Stanley Cup playoffs already this past week.
Fortunately the DSO often adopts the old movie theater tactic of cartoon shorts before the feature film… the same way Pixar does for Disney now. They chose Aaron Copland’s Clarinet Concerto as the cartoon short. Now this is also supposed to be sad music, a single clarinet, a single harp, and a single piano… surrounded by violins, the gushing tears of every symphony orchestra. But it is Copland, my fourth favorite composer of all time, behind only DeBussy, Motzart, and Beethoven. As a synesthete, I can tell you that Copland’s music is always no bluer than silver, and tends to be more vermilion, rosy pink, yellow-orange and carmine red… more happy and passionate than depressing. Then too, Cinco Snarcks whispered in my ear that since I have this Van Zweden/ Grumpy thing going on already in my head, I should look carefully at the clarinet soloist. Yep, bald head, white hair and slight white beard and glasses… Doc! And the pianist, bald head and big ears… Dopey! The night would be Gustav Mahler and the Seven Dwarfs. Zero Snarcks was thinking about squeezing off a toot or three from his little horn and maybe using light cords hanging from the ceiling for an impromptu trapeze act, but he took one look at the elegant, swan-like harpist and fell too much in love to interrupt.
The main show, however, was everything I thought it was going to be, and worse. They had a translator screen hung from the cords Zero wanted to go for a swing on, that took all the incomprehensible choir-crooned lyrics and translated them from German into English. The story of Das Klagende Lied is taken from the Grimm Fairy Tale, The Bone Flute. It tells the tale of two knightly brothers, one good and one evil, who set out to win the hand of a very self-centered but beautiful queen. She can only be won by the finding of a special red flower that grows under a willow tree. The knights agree to split up and search the enchanted forest for the flower. Naturally, the good knight finds it and plucks it, putting it in the band of his hat. And just as naturally, the good knight flops down stupidly under the willow tree to take a nap. The evil brother finds his brother sleeping and sees the flower in his hat. So, like any evil knight would, he kills his brother and takes the flower.
Scarpigo’s comment on this particular story.
The evil brother then rushes off to the queen’s castle. A minstrel wanders past the willow tree, finds a gleaming leg bone, and immediately thinks, “I have to make that into a flute!” And when he does, the only song the flute will play is the lament about how the evil brother made meat pie out of his good brother and stole the flower. Then, naturally enough, the flute forces the minstrel to go play at the wedding.
I’m sure you know how it goes from there. The queen hears the bone flute’s enchanted song and flops down dead, apparently a heart-attack from shock. And if the queen dies, then the castle has to magically fall down on the new king, the minstrel. and all the wedding guests. A gruesome, terrible time is had by all.
So, I had a good time after all. Scarpigo leans over to whisper to me, “That was more fun than a barrel of monkeys smoking crack, wasn’t it?” Yes, purple, blue, blue-violet, and indigo music, and I am left depressed as hell. But when my wife asked how I liked it, I put on a happy face and said, “That’s the silliest thing I ever heard!”
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Filed under commentary, Depression, flowers, foolishness, goofy thoughts, humor, music, review of music
Tagged as Copland, Dallas Symphony Orchestra, goofiness, humor, Mahler, seven dwarfs, synesthesia