Chasing a Novel….

OK—I’ve read James Patterson, who tells me that I should lie to myself. I should tell myself that the novel I intend to write in National Novel Writing Month (abbreviated NaNoWriMo) is gonna be great, gonna sell a zillion copies, gonna make the 50 Shades of Grey lady look like a piker. And Patterson should know, because he holds the Guinness Book of Records for the most bestsellers on The New York Times list.

For the stuff that I want to do, I’m fairly disciplined—no surprise there, right? Which means that my house is a mess, but I write each day. So the discipline isn’t the problem—it’s the imagination.

Of which I have none….

Consider it—there is a couple three tables down from me at the café where I write. Shouldn’t I be able to think of a story, shouldn’t I be able to weave a tale, just from the slump of his shoulders, or the fact that she is looking at her phone, not at him.

They argued last night, of course. The same argument they’ve been having for a month: he wants them to have a baby, she doesn’t.

“I had enough SHIT FROM MY MOTHER,” she screamed at him. “I don’t want to do that to anyone. And my therapist says I’m not ready.”

“You’re never ready,” he said, trying to be reasonable. ‘Christ,’ he thought, ‘if only she could hear herself…’

“Maybe in a year,” she said.

“Said that last year…”

“Look, Jim, I just want time for us to be together as a couple. Too many couples have children and then they’re parents, not couples. And then they end up in thirty years not really knowing each other….”

‘She’s so beautiful,’ he thinks, ‘why don’t I believe her?’

‘The problem started after her mother visited,’ he thought. ‘She was so simple, so sweet before her mother came. It’s like all the mistrust and suspicion got dumped onto her. Christ, just because your mother had a rotten divorce, do you have to spoil your own marriage?’ 

He turned over in bed and feigned sleep.

It was his fault—he’d always had this thing for younger women. And now, here he was, in his third marriage to a girl in her early twenties. And he? Forties, still good looking, hair graying at the temples, but look…time runs out for men as well as women. It may be more psychological than biological, as it is for women, but it’s still there. He doesn’t want to be in his fifties with a newborn crying in the middle of the night. But he could handle it now.

Now, he looks at her, absorbed in her phone. He sees the way her earring falls from her earlobe, and remembers the thrill, the first time he had whispered, “I love you,” into that ear.

“Let’s not fight again,” he says. It seems as simple as that.

She tenses, and thinks that the issue will never go away, never get settled. It will end her marriage, as it ended her mother’s. Although that was another woman, not the kid thing. Would Jim stray? Had he already? Or did he have some lined up, someone in the wings?

“It’s not like I want to fight,” she says. Is he putting all this on her, again?

“Then let’s not….”

She gives him a wary smile, and looks back down at her phone.

“Michelle texted me—they’re at the Butterfly People, about to have lunch. You want to join them?”

He doesn’t like either Michelle or her partner, and he hates the pretension of the Butterfly People. But the silence between them? Wouldn’t it be better to have anything else but that?

“Sure,” he says, and tries to look happy about it.

She stands up, reaches for her purse, brushing her husband’s hand in the process; he was about to give it to her. The touch seems as fragile, as fleeting as the relationship itself.

She moves away, ahead of her husband, pushes the door to the café open, and steps into the street. She doesn’t know: in a week she will miss her period, in a month, Jason will be born.

Now then—can we tweet this to Patterson?

Fourth Shade of Grey—When Opera Isn't Sung

OK—there are some times when opera is not sung, but played. There’s the overture, for example, which starts the opera and which does a couple of things. First of all, it gets people to their seats, if not to stop talking (the tradition had been to ignore the overture and just keep chatting—hint, don’t try it today…). It introduces the themes, perhaps, as well as sets the mood. Finally, it’s just traditional.

Any orchestral music played at any other point in the opera gets called something else. Often, it will be called a prelude, sometimes an intermezzo, perhaps a dance like a waltz or polonaise. And here again, the idea is to set the mood and introduce the themes that will be heard—and sung—later.

So James, in 50 Shades of Grey, has the heroine listening at one point to the Prelude to the first act of La traviata. And it’s typical Verdi—tuneful, cheerful, and sticky. Get ready, you may be whistling this all week.  

Nice, hunh? Right—nothing substantial, but there's a place in the world for light and pleasant. 

But if you want heavy, I can give you heavy. In fact, Richard Wagner mines heavy like Reynolds mines aluminum. And here, I gotta come out—Wagner is one composer that makes me want to run screaming out of the opera hall. Nor am I alone—Clara Schumann wrote that the opera from which the clip below is taken “was the most repugnant thing I have heard or seen in all my life.” And a young Richard Strauss said that the opera, Tristan und Isolde, "would kill a cat and would turn rocks into scrambled eggs from fear of [its] hideous discords.”

To be fair, the conductor Bruno Walter said, “So there I sat in the topmost gallery of the Berlin Opera House, and from the first sound of the cellos my heart contracted spasmodically... Never before has my soul been deluged with such floods of sound and passion, never had my heart been consumed by such yearning and sublime bliss... A new epoch had begun: Wagner was my god, and I wanted to become his prophet.”

So there are two camps on Wagner, and very few people who are neutral. Oh, and be sure to eat a full meal before embarking on a performance of any opera Wagner wrote, because after hours five hours of sturm und drang, you’ll emerge famished if you haven’t. Granted, as Mr. Fernández once said, there are beautiful moments in the opera—and hours in between them.

Here, at any rate, is the prelude from the first act of Tristan und Isolde—you be the judge.

Sometimes, for apparently no reason, the people in the opera decide, “hey, let’s dance!” In fact, it was the tradition in the Paris Opera that every opera also had to have a ballet. So Gounod, in his opera Faust, decided to stick a ballet into the last act; in the ballet Faust, having sold his soul to the devil, is presented a series of visions of a particularly ghoulish nature. And though it is often omitted—Faust is an expensive opera to mount, and throwing a ballet into it seriously ups the tab—it adds a lot to the opera.   

The final two pieces are right on the border of terminal sweetness. The first, Massenet’s Meditation from the opera Thaïs, is frequently hauled out as an encore piece, as it clearly is here. The second piece, the Intermezzo from Cavalleria rusticana is also frequently performed as a concert piece.