Emma Bovary’s Wanted Poster

Here’s a very weird and interesting place: someone has started a tumblr blog of portraits of characters in literature, by taking all the physically descriptive bits from the books, and using law enforcement composite sketch software to bring them together. You won’t see period costume or make-up, but you’ll see the character’s face, as described by his/her author. Well, at least as far as a composite sketch can tell you about any individual’s appearance.
Some of them are a little surprising — many of us have our own mental version, or we remember an illustration, or even a film version of a character. The blogger has included all the descriptive sentences on which he based his composite underneath his creation, so that one can compare one’s own reading of the text.

Im Schnee

The snow is packed down in places to near-ice, in others just a dusting over actual ice, which makes walking sticks mandatory (and a sense of adventure, meaning, you’ll get down the hill one way or another!)

For my friend Roger, who I understand is a steam train fanatic (although the sign is actually for a tram crossing, which makes it all the more charming.) Reminds me of Monopoly.

Mr. Snowman is all ready to party down for Fasching. If you’ve no lampshade to wear on your head, a festive saucepan will do just as well.

Food For Thought

From Jenny Rivera:

Our natural tendency as humans is to measure ourselves by those around us. Some are worse about this than others, but singers are natural candidates for this because we are constantly auditioning against others, being compared to other singers, being asked to sound like other singers, being made to feel inferior to other singers when we’re not working as much as them, etc ad infinitum. And it really doesn’t help that our field is small enough that we can compare ourselves very specifically to very specific people, and decide immediately that we don’t measure up. The humongous problem with this is that we really are all unique individuals, and you can’t turn into a pineapple if you’re a banana. So you are setting yourself up for failure and unhappiness if you begin to play the compare game. … I am a banana, and some people really like bananas AND pineapples, and some people only like one or the other, and there’s not way to combine the two because then you get a Tangelo and those things are just creepy. Better to stick with what you’ve got and make as many banana cream pies and banana breads as you possibly can.

Singers: “What I’m Really Doing”

These things have been making the rounds, albeit mostly for non-performing-arts professions. Here’s a singer version, thanks to Google Images and a friend who knows her way around Photoshop. (I owe you lunch for this!)

Here’s another one, from a singer in the UK:

Baby, It’s Cold Outside

…but warm apple strudel with vanilla sauce and cappuccinos at a window table makes for a pleasant diversion from the weather. The lake is frozen in the shallow areas, thick enough to support the ducks but not people. This is one of the best times to visit the lake, when the tourists are away.

Returning to Innsbruck, I was already on the train when I learned that the rail service between Garmisch-Partenkirchen and Seefeld was out, due to danger of avalanches. A bus to Mittenwald and a taxi to Seefeld got me back on a train and homeward bound. I was fortunate to share the taxi costs with a nice older couple who wanted to know if I sang Lehar operettas, and an equally nice Russian kid (who grew up in Augsburg) who was going to look at shared student housing for his first semester at the university. Everybody I encountered was helpful and patient, which made the chaos tolerable. Thanks!

Reflections on the death of Whitney Houston, from a show-business standpoint:

My sympathies to her family. I hope her daughter is OK. Heaven knows, she must have been witness to a lot in her young life. Already I have read that Whitney Houston was a modern-day Judy Garland.

The people who work behind the scenes at the Grammy Award ceremonies must have thousands of stories about the musicians they assist. I wonder if they are under contract not to publish all that stuff.

Based on my own behind-the-scenes observations, I know that one doesn’t just turn up one day too drunk/high to perform. It’s a cumulative thing, where a performer can get completely wasted the night before and go on to sing a surprisingly, consistently beautiful performance the next day. I have seen this happen. For a while, it actually works. And then at some point it doesn’t. But as long as it’s working, as long as one can deliver, there will be little motivation to change that behaviour.

Sudden fame has been blamed for the downfall of so many people. The way I see it, we are all working in this business with different sets of personal emotional baggage. Some people are pretty stable even at a young age. Some people spend their careers trying to win some elusive approval to fill a gaping hole of need in their hearts. Some people break at the slightest criticism. Some people don’t listen to it at all. Some people need to self-medicate their insecurities away. Should fame suddenly shine on you, you are still going to be bringing those qualities/faults with you wherever you go. Money and your face on magazine covers doesn’t make any of that just go away. But the little dramas are now much larger and more public ones, and your drug of choice is now a lot easier to get. And now you can pay people to clean up the messes.

Media is an incredible thing. Voices just hundred years ago have been forgotten, unless they were lucky enough to be preserved in the new recording technology. Now, thanks to the internet, every one of us lives on. Strange to contemplate.

Happy 100th, Nana

What sibling drama has just happened here? The little girl on the left is my grandmother, with her older sister Helen and her little brother Frank.

Just a few years later, Helen died, and then a baby sister Marie, and then my grandmother’s mother. Here my grandmother, the only girl left in the immediate family, is surrounded by her three brothers and a cousin. Her father soon re-married, to a woman who preferred her own children to his, and this made life difficult. My grandmother left home as a teenager to live with other family, left school at 14, got work in town, met a man who gave her a child but did not marry her until 10 years later, when his mother died.

She was musically gifted, but her circumstances didn’t offer much outlet for its expression, outside of playing the organ in church. (Her child, however, was able to go to college and earn a degree in music education, and have a successful teaching career.)

Not long after her husband died (relatively young) from cancer, a woman she knew in town also passed away, and she contacted the surviving husband to offer her condolences. This led to the next chapter of her life — she married him, and was able to live a much more comfortable lifestyle. They moved out to a converted summer cottage in the country where she kept house, fed the birds, planted bulbs, sewed clothing for her grandchildren, and generally enjoyed life in retirement.

But something about her earlier life never allowed her to stop worrying — about us, about early death, about ruin, should something happen to someone on her watch. I think she was insecure about her security — never certain it wouldn’t all be taken away from her. Whether she really did worry or just learned to express herself in a worry-wort manner, I can no longer say. When we were kids, she drove us crazy with all that. She also had opinions we didn’t always want to hear, but she didn’t seem able to hold a grudge against anyone, even when the neighbor tried to stop the oil trucks (bringing her heating oil) from coming up their shared driveway with a lawsuit (he lost.)

Whatever it was, it didn’t affect her health much, as she lived to the ripe old age of 91, living by herself and getting into town regularly with the shuttle bus, doing the crossword puzzle, keeping up with the local gossip, writing letters to me overseas.

After she died, we found little notes throughout the house, in ceramics and in her desk, giving instructions as to what we should do with said articles after her death. In the last letter I have from her, she asked me to say a prayer for her soul when I sing. I would never have had the heart to tell her that I do not pray, but when I remember, I look up into the flyspace before an entrance and say, “Nana, this is for you.” She would have been 100 years old today.