Elven polyphony

I'm not allowed to have favorites!

Ooh, so am I!

Oh, weird... I own maybe 3 soundtracks, and Great Expectations is one of them. And I took that CD back and forth across the Atlantic and all the way across North America with me because it tells a completely different story to me by now...

At risk of sounding like a broken record (or is that expression no long comprehensible to the iPod generation?), Imin is a little more complex than just your average smarmy elf rapist. He is still that, though.

I recommend "Intantu" as the album for discovering A Filetta. It's also relatively easy to find.

How creepy... it was the Mono song that drew me in too. The "tea and cigarettes" takes me back to... approximately nine years ago, yes.

You don't count as being a member of the iPod generation if you were buying the Great Expectations soundtrack nine years ago, though. Ever have a rotary phone?

Imin is supposed to be creepy, though he was originally never supposed to be anything. I told the story of how I made Lar's henchmen already. I think I've also mentioned somewhere that he's supposed to be repulsively attractive, or at least he is to me.

He's not as intellectually clever (kalever!) as Lar, but he's a crafty little guy. Street-smart, if they had streets? Otherwise he wouldn't be the oldest living male kisór. Also, I've not forgotten he's my Mirror Alred, so there are still some aspects of Imin that remain to be explored. I am looking forward to that.

And he's always a great way to end a post on this blog.

I guess it's not too odd that we like the same songs... if we like the one, we must have some intersecting tastes. I can't believe you don't have "Breakable" in there though. I would swap "Wishful Thinking" for that one, and add "Sunshower", but the latter more because the voice reminds me of many Soundgarden-related moments.

This is making me feel so oooold! I ran away to Europe in 1998 and that was my musical Pompeii moment... I was totally out of the reach of the American charts for a few years, living with a 14-year-older Frenchman and his CD collection, and by the time I returned to American civilization, I was totally clueless about what the Kids These Days were listening to. What do you mean, Smashing Pumpkins broke up???

And I think more people are attracted to Imin than care to admit it.

I found you on lastfm! You are so listening to the Great Expectations soundtrack right now! If I scrobbled from home, you would know that so am I! We are totally the only two people on planet Earth listening to the Great Expectations soundtrack at this moment!

What did I listen to during my pre-1998 years? Boring mainstream stuff I guess. Actually, exciting mainstream stuff, because there was also Mariah Carey and Janet Jackson and I know not what else going on at the time. Smashing Pumpkins, Nirvana, Nine Inch Nails, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, Rage Against the Machine, Bush, The Cure. A lot of Pink Floyd. Some Depeche Mode, which was something of a holdover from middle school. Around 1997 the cigarette-smoker to my tea-drinker introduced me to Portishead. Portishead and Smashing Pumpkins are the only two I still listen to regularly because they are the only two I loved enough at the time to carry to Germany and back.

Towards the end of that period I started listening to a lot of jazz. Mostly pre-1965 stuff, especially Bill Evans. I also had quite a collection of Irish and Scottish music, all in Gaelic, since I was learning Gaelic at the time. Later came the medieval polyphony period.

Lately I just listened to Pandora until they killed it for everyone outside the US. Then I switched to lastfm, which has the interesting feature of allowing everyone in the world to know what I'm listening to at work, in real time. Fortunately I have reached an age where I don't give a damn about how cool or uncool my listening habits are.

I'm not really sure how my mother never noticed MTV was of the devil. My brother and I grew up with MTV on in the background while we were doing other stuff. That was when it was all music videos all the time. Back in my day! *waves cane*

I got my first listen to a castrato recording back when I was doing research for our good friend Andronikos. I found it more creepy than anything, since it was clearly neither man nor woman nor boy. But creepy is just what I needed.

There are tons of languages I haven't looked at yet... Asian languages among them, which is why I never noticed that shortcoming of Pandora. What I liked about Pandora is that it could be trained. Lastfm doesn't seem to get it. You banned the last ten songs by Zap Mama? OK, but I bet you'll like this one! Fortunately Zap Mama will eventually run out of songs.

On the other hand, it can be quite broadening. My "Like A Filetta" station ranges from French hiphop (Corsican polyphony = French, French hiphop = French -> Corsican polyphony = French hiphop) to Buddhist monks (polyphony = polyphony!) Pandora never would have tried to pull that one on me. I like K-Rhyme le Roi and Fonky Family quite a bit as it turns out. Buddhist monks, not so much.

I have the impression lastfm bases their recommendations on tags too. Otherwise some of the stuff it plays me is just inexplicable. Unless there are so few people listening to what I listen to that they really are weird people like me to start with.

It might be OK if people only tagged with useful genre information, but if you just tag with names of countries or languages, it is dumb. What if every song in English was tagged "english" or "english language"?

And don't get me started on the "world music" tag. It kinda makes sense in a record store, where they have to put the foreign music somewhere, but as a tag it is so... condescending, or something. Like, let's just lump every music tradition from every country in the world outside of the G8 into one big mess! You like Zapotec love songs? You will love Mongolian dirges!

I think it would be hilarious if the "deceased" tag was used to dig up recommendations. Death: the great equalizer!

I was thinking that if you would be interested in hearing a castrato sing you might give a listen to Antony and the Johnsons. Umm, I'm sure he wouldn't appreciate the recommendation on those grounds, but he does have such an otherworldly, androgynous voice.

I like "The Lake", "Bird Gurhl", and "Poorest Ear". "The Lake" is particularly haunting because it's based on a lesser-known poem by Edgar Allen Poe. In yet another case of music getting entangled in my story, it always makes me imagine the big lake in Lothere, and what it was to Egelric.

So lovely was the loneliness Of a wild lake, with black rock bound, And the tall pines that towered around...

The poem may be a little creepy, but still a nice change from Poe's usual outright weirdness. He wrote it when he was quite young, though.

As for Egelric and his moodniess... as Lili once said, it would take a lifetime to get to the ends of him. And he's not yet dead.

I wish you could hear the Ab Eternu version of "Sumiglia"... I can't find a translation of the words, but I found a transcription of the Corsican if you're interested in following along phonetically (which is actually worth doing once, so you can appreciate the slow solemnity with which it is sung).

Corsican is somewhat similar to Italian if you know any. I know the song was written for a dead friend/relative. "Sumiglia" means "similarity", and I suppose the point of the song is that there won't be another like him. So it is a lament (and just the sort of thing the elves would sing).

I am not too keen about learning the words, though. I think you lose something even by gaining that understanding. Once the words resolve themselves into language, they lose some of their music, because that language part of your brain is too busy processing them. And in the case of a cappella, the words are the music, so it's doubly important.

Or maybe that's just me... I've already eaten of the apple of French and Gaelic understanding, thereby losing some of the first magic of la chanson française and all of those winsome, mournful Celtic songs my Mom used to listen to. Even parts of some songs in Arabic are beginning to make sense to me now. Ya habibi!

Your Mom likes flamenco, eh? I think my husband was a Brazilian in a past life, since he automatically starts playing something mellow & bossa nova whenever he sits down with a guitar, but occasionally he'll bust out into some flamenco, which is often quite a shock, especially when I'm doing dishes at the time and halfway in another world (usually Lothere). Unfortunately, no, I do not immediately start dancing. I am not worthy of him.

I had another look at the poem I linked to... looks like Poe revised it a few times, and Antony must have tweaked it a bit himself. The part I quoted is pretty much the same, but there is this from the song that's lacking:

Death was in that poisoned wave And in its gulf a fitting grave For him who thence could solace bring To his dark imagining Whose wildering thought could even make An Eden of that dim lake

I think Egelric deserves a dark imagining even more than a lone imagining. And he said dim! *dies* (my favorite word)

I loved Poe growing up, so maybe it's surpising I'm so allergic to the genre nowadays. I once checked a complete works of Poe out of the library, a new book that had a very queer smell that almost made me sick at first, on top of the spookiness of the stories. But by the time I was halfway through, I was literally cracking that book open in class to smell it, because that smell instantly evoked the pleasure of all those afternoons spent reading it. If only it had not been a library book! I still occasionally get a whiff of that scent from some other new book with the same paper or the same glue, and oh does it take me back to 6th grade!

That book also included miscellaneous illustrations from various editions of his stories, including one that obsessed me for... ever since, actually. The effect that drawing had on me was probably the cause of most of my artwork of the last couple decades having been illustrations of poems and stories, rather than random stuff. (Even when I draw or paint I like to tell stories it seems.) Harry Clarke's Ligeia. Check it out.

Is the point of art and music and poetry that you are supposed to interpret it for yourself? I never took any art/music/literature criticism classes so I don't know what the official stance is, but I admit I find the idea disappointing. It puts such a gulf between the artist and the audience -- as if artistic expression was vain and we can't make ourselves understood. As if the best we can do is hope to evoke something, without really being able to influence what.

It makes me think of that song by Alain Souchon, "Chanter c'est lancer des balles". "Singing is like throwing balls... balls we hit for someone to catch... helium balloons to lift men out of the rain... singing is like throwing balls, to break windows, or alone against a wall..." Pardon the ugly translation, but it reminds me of that idea, that you're just blindly throwing balls (or rocks) out there and hoping you hit something.

I'm still with Alred (not surprising since I made him): "The poet's entire purpose is to say what everyone knows and no one knows how to say." If the audience doesn't "get it" on some realistically attainable level (i.e. no one would expect you to come up with a translation of the Corsican merely by hearing it sung with sufficient talent and feeling) then I think the artist has failed.

But with my scientific training I am a member of the naive school of everything having to do with art. I would probably not get such great marks in a criticism class.

And belly dancing? The secret life of geologists: halide crystals by day, harem pants by night.

That illustrator (Harry Clarke) is awesome, and he worked in stained glass, too, which puts him up there to the level of sublime. I feel like asserting my Irish heritage every time I get a look at his work, just so I can lay claim to the same country as him. I spent many hours sighing over books about him, too, no matter how they smelled. My adolescent artwork was greatly influenced by him, and my adult is actually -- sometimes egregiously so, as this recent sketch shows.

I can neither dance nor sing, and I'm quite bad at volleyball. How's that?

I'm certain there are fashions in teaching methods like there are in everything. The whole "there's no right answer, it means whatever you think it means" school already causes my alarm bells to go off -- great for the self-esteem, but terrible for developing critical thinking skills, which is something that elementary and secondary education is terrible at (in the 'States) anyway.

As someone with an illustrative, story-telling bent, though, I have more respect for the "everything is a text" idea. (You've never heard "a picture is worth a thousand words"??) Though it can get a little silly if it's taken literally. "Everything is a message" might be a better explanation.

I think a cornflake box, as a form of commercial advertising that is intended to be read while half-asleep and in 2-minute doses, is the ultimate expression of that. If you're wide awake and reading a cereal box with a critical eye, its surreal feel-good banality is stupefying. Advertisers are acutely aware of the texts latent in everything: the images, the colors, the lighting, the persona of the spokesman, the music, and the actual text of the ad. (The printed/spoken words don't necessarily have anything to do with the real message anyway.)

So artists are probably aware of the same things, but we're just hoping they're using their powers for the forces of good instead of for evil consumerism.

I've had my majority of mediocre teachers and a few outstanding ones myself. As Sturgeon's Law says, 90% of everything is crud, and that includes teachers and their students. The mediocre kids get by by default, and the clever kids like you & me figure out "the format" as you say.

I mostly muddled along through English classes since the teachers were more interested in grammar and sentence parsing than creative writing. When I got to 8th grade, I think it was, and we did our writing year, we had a brand-new gung-ho writing teacher. On the first day she had us write a little essay about anything just so she could get an idea of our writing level, and on the 2nd day I got marched to the principal's office to be accused of plagiarism, since my writing was too good to have been written by an 8th-grader.

It all turned out OK since she got me to enter some writing contests, and she was like my coach -- I got to travel all over the state to write, and won some trophies and medals and stuff. Pretty cool, though I was more interested in Science Olympiad at the time, so I didn't appreciate it as much as I should have. Now I'm just hoping it wasn't the high water mark of my writing career.

Oh, I didn't see the part about the shoe having a text. (Although, as a item of branding and/or conspicuous consumption my comments about advertising may apply...) I'm glad I didn't have your sister's teacher, because I think I would have forgone The Format and written an essay entitled WTF? I am not certain who could have written the text inherent in the horse, unless it was the Heavenly Father, and even he probably wrote the horse in Hebrew originally, so which translation of the text did she mean exactly?

Actually as an adolescent I probably wouldn't have dared questioning it, but looking back on my education there are a lot of WTF essays that went lost over the years.

And looking back on some of the earlier chapters of Lothere I think that it took me a while to get past my 8th grade writing level. I haven't written so much prose... well, ever, actually. My pre-Lothere period was a year spent writing one poem per day, which helped with the alliteration and the meter of the lines and so on (I wrote a lot of sonnets so the unrhymed iambic pentameter tends to flow now), but doesn't help so much with dialog and, oh, plot and other important things.

My dream job is almost the same as yours!!! I want to be a travel[ing] writer, but I want to focus on food. I love to cook (and I love to eat), and I am interested in food cultures and dialects just as much as various languages. So I would love to travel around and write about the food of different places. Learning the languages as I went. That would be some kind of life. My husband doesn't usually encourage me to write, but he would like me to do that kind of writing. Maybe just because that would be "some kind of life" for him to tag along.

I think writing about Mhalwae could improve your travel writing skills, though, insofar as it will improve your writing skills in general. Also, I don't know about you (and maybe it's a holdover from my season of poetry), but when I am in the middle of writing, I pay so much more attention to the world around me. I absorb many more details, because I need them for my story. Watching people's gestures, or the way a bird goes about his business, or the color of the light, or whatever. That seems like one of the most important skills of a travel writer actually -- absorbing details in spite of getting only a somewhat cursory exposure to them. (Otherwise it isn't travel writing, but living-somewhere-foreign writing. Which is cool, too.)

I have vague memories of one story I had to revise in school... afterwards it was one of those things where you learn The Format and stick to it.

It's an interesting problem, though... as you said, that's an age where you're all angsty and working your way towards an opinion on all of those controversial, difficult problems. I don't know that making kids revise their stories so that people work through their problems is the best choice in terms of their development. (But what do I know? Absolutely nothing.)

However, in terms of writing, I guess there is a point to it. First of all, stories where life sucks and bad things happen, so you kill yourself, The End, are not often so great from a story-telling perspective. Narrative fiction is supposed to be all about resolving conflict. Sometimes I suppose the conflict actually is resolved by killing yourself, but it's quite possible to have a character kill himself without resolving any conflict and without tying up the story. So there's that.

Second, the more intense and more controversial the subject, the harder it is to do well. That's true just on a general level -- like wrestling a cougar instead of an alley cat. But it's even more true for teens... even if you've actually experienced the subject first hand -- had an abortion, attempted suicide or lost a friend, etc. -- you still lack the life experience to put that into context or look upon it with a less intensely self-centered point of view. That is the age where, if you haven't experienced some of those things, your best friend talking about you behind your back or the cute guy ignoring you are also overwhelming tragedies, so you're lacking some perspective.

So discouraging teens from writing about those things is probably wise from a literary point of view. I wish someone had told me that when I was 15 and oh-so-deep. I also wish this particular advice from writer John Scalzi had existed then, and I had read it.

But I would be willing to bet it's good for them to get it out there in that way, even if it makes the adults uncomfortable. Writing is such great therapy. But I'm sure it's much worse now, since the school shootings and stuff. Now drawing a cartoon gun can get a kid kicked out of school.

(Oh my God I just reread that, and I am so pompous. I am equally annoying at 31 as I was at 15, just in a different way.)

Your BF must find you so adorable. Look! Snow! Look! Falling leaves! Like a little kid. I miss the weather in Ohio, though. Boy howdy do we have some seasonal changes there. Baking and humid in the summer and blizzards in the winter. And the autumn leaves are so gorgeous there. The Pacific NW is so boring when it comes to autumn colors, and winter is just rain, and summer is just sun and cool ocean breeze, at least here on Vancouver Island.

It is so crazy that you find writing dialog difficult. I find it hard to write anything else. Looking back at some of my earlier chapters, they are nothing but dialog. You can't even guess where the people are, or if they're sitting or eating or walking or whatever, if you don't have pictures.

Lately I have been trying so hard to reduce the amount of dialog (even if people get straight to the point in a somewhat unrealistic way... realistic dialog is boring to read, even after you take out all the sentence fragments and the ummm's). And I've been trying to put in a lot more gestures, etc. Sometimes they can say a lot more than words, anyway, especially if you are using lots of "said sadly" and "cried joyously" in there. Better to make them hang their heads or leap into the air and let the reader figure the adverbial part out.

The only time I find dialog difficult to write is when I have a new character who doesn't have a personality yet. But the best way to develop a character is through dialog, so it has to be done.

It's funny you mention paying attention to your body, because I skipped the Tylenol today so I could pay attention to my menstrual cramps. Poor Brit is going to be going through childbirth soon, and that's the closest I could come on such short notice. Even funnier is the fact that I have not actually vomited in over 8 years, and nevertheless I seem to love writing about it.

Anyone who reads her way through all 31 comments to the bottom of this one is going to be so happy she did!

So funny that you can stop yourself from vomiting... and want to. I can't make myself. I have established that I do have a gag reflex, but I practically have to go at it with a bottle brush to find it. Sometimes when you're sick it seems like you would just feel better if only you could...

Otherwise I probably would have made myself throw up anyway, just for the story. Oh the things I won't do for my characters!

As for writing as therapy... If I want to do it at thirty...one then surely teens would want to. I don't think "rewriting to make an acceptable ending" is necessarily the right way to make it therapeutic, though. On the surface it sounds like the right thing -- "Ooh, we can make the kids understand there are other ways to solve problems than suicide" -- but I don't think that's how it works. It's not as if ending a story with a suicide means that the writer could not think of any other possible ending. But that is sooooo far out of my domain, plus I tend to be skeptical about psychology as a science anyway.

I have the problem with writing too much about people moving around, too. Standing up, sitting down, stepping closer to someone... Sometimes I have to remind myself I am not writing stage directions. The tricky part is the pictures... if I were writing without them, it would be easier. Do I need to say someone just stood up if you can see it in the picture? Or worse, am I only writing about it because of the picture? It is only lately that I have dared leaving some of those sentences out. I am still not sure though.