A staunch launch

So I'm building up to my launch. With just six weeks to go till the release of my first book, I'm preparing the orchestra/band and the outfit, the two most important things to ensuring a staunch book launch.

This woman clearly has no idea what she's doing, not an instrument in sight and a skirt so tight there's a very real danger the launchees will be distracted from buying the book, which defeats the purpose entirely, although in her case it seems she is the book, so perhaps she can be excused her distracting outfit.

Except for the pink, there's no excuse for wearing pink to a book launch, or anything else, really. And as for purple, well let me just say I hope the book's good, though that isn't usually a requirement for a successful book launch.

She could also do with stocking a few more books at her launch, as there's nothing worse than being caught short, when thousands turn up to your launch and you only have hundreds of copies of your book. It's not a good look.

For a staunch launch, the sort I am planning, first of all you need a good drummer, with a reliable band or orchestra to provide the necessary symphonic accompaniment for the drum roll as you make your way up to the podium to the rousing applause just for writing the book (as well as for your well-chosen outfit), that continues as you smile graciously through the deafening applause then finally, after several minutes, raise your hand, with maximum humility, to suggest it might be time at last to begin the main event: hearing you, the author, speak. Because if there's one thing authors do well it's speak, especially to vast crowds. That's why they write, in order that they might get to speak.

Fortunately, in my spare time I sing in a band, so lining up a drummer and other instrumentalists is not a problem. I'm still working on the outfit and the speech, however, but wanting a staunch launch I think I'll go with a black and white theme for both, no shades of grey - or pink - for me.

Good luck with that, I hear you say, and I thank you, but I'm not going to need it. I don't even need you to come to my launch if you happen to be in Auckland - or anywhere else in the world and inclined to travel - and not doing anything special on Tuesday 3 May between 6.30 and 8.00pm (Devonport Library, drinks and nibbles provided). But if you did decide you might just as well show up to lend a hand with the applause, and admire my well-chosen outfit, and hear my well-chosen words, be warned, staunch queues are expected.



 





   

Knees Please Me

I slipped and hurt my knee
but thought it nothing much
then found myself
less carefree
walking with a crutch.

They say it's an effusion
which means it's not a break
I should feel lucky
it will mend,
be thankful for my fate.

But when will it mend
that's what I want to know,
as I can't run or dance
time hobbles
awful slow.

Still all is not lost
I have another knee
and posed on my crutches
I look rather fetching
you can see.

Me no pause

I was turning fifty. For the party at Mum’s I’d stocked up, filled half a drawer with paper pulp, thrown a t-shirt over the whole unsightly stash as a decoy in case Mum investigated, as she sometimes does, making sure I'm using the drawers she clears out specially for me, the same drawers I used as a child and still consider mine. Funny what you don’t want to share with your mother.

She didn't know I had been bleeding for sixty days straight and only stopped the week prior to flying over, the progesterone pills finally kicking in, hopefully not sowing the seeds of dementia in the process, presuming they were not already sown. 

There’d been so much blood at peak times through those sixty days, if that returned the day of the garden party, with white marquee and matching furniture, it would be Carrie all over, only I couldn't blame my mother, at least not directly.

I’d have to leave the party running, get M to give some excuse, jet-lag, age-grief, something slightly less bloody. They could sing Happy Birthday to me through the window, a Rapunzel-type situation, only blood flowing instead of hair. If it came back in full force, enough to shoot the tampons straight back out into my hands, there’d be no happy about it.  

But the blood never came. I turned fifty. They sang Happy Birthday to my face, smiling in spite of itself. We ate truffle cake, with me put in charge of the knife, so many slices I feared I’d never get one and might have to put the knife to a use less sweet; to draw my own blood, indeed.

Then we went home, the unused contents of that childhood drawer repacked together with regret and the accumulated gifts, none of it useful. 

Months went by and I realised the blood was never coming back. I’d menopaused for my fiftieth birthday. Happy birthday!

But then it did come back. Regret and relief in equal measure. Me no pause not yet. 

P-Day

You'll be pleased to hear that the P in this post is not for poo. Indeed I can fairly safely say we're done with poo for the foreseeable future (at least as far as this blog goes, one is never done with poo entirely), having finally sent off the precious pongy parcel in the pongy pooey post.

So no. The P in this post is not for poo. Rather, it is for print. For today is the day that my precious first book,volume one of my childhood memoir, is at long last sent off to the printers to be returned in due course as the fully publishable article, all being well. I think it goes all the way to China....

And a long row to hoe it has been getting to China and P-Day, I must say, with a final bump in the flow of that row coming just last week when the publishers decided on a dramatic last-minute shift in the cover design, from a picture of me dressed as a dancing stork - and why not! - to a picture of some random girl dressed as a random girl, indeed a random girl who looks almost nothing like me; she is European, that is about the only likeness.

Never mind. There's no use crying over spilt stork, and I am assured by the sales people involved that the dancing stork on the cover of the advance copies wasn't selling, as far as pre-orders went, and that a generic, pretty young girl, is more likely to sell than a less conventional girl dressed up as a stork with a balaclava and beak on her head, though why exactly they didn't say.

Indeed I don't think they really know what sells off the book-store shelf or why, and can only go on what has sold before, never mind the wildly varying contents of each book; apparently people do judge a book by its cover. But knowing my book as only a former dancing stork can, if book sales today are all about what sold yesterday, the dancing stork is doomed to go the way of the dodo.

Still, in the meantime I'm celebrating P-Day in style, hobbling around on crutches after a mysterious knee injury on Tuesday, looking, with my long skinny poles for legs, not unlike a stork, indeed. Revenge, that's called; revenge of the dancing stork.  

The Lady and the Man

I'm sorry to follow my poo post with another post involving faeces (I'm having a shitty week), but at least there are a few more options on the image front for this one - and apologies in retrospect for the last image, which was the best I could do. It's poo plasticine, if that helps.

Last night we went to see The Lady in the Van  based on Alan Bennett's memoir. And although literal shit was featured in the film, with Bennett at one point expressing the view that 'caring is about shit', after having to clean Maggie Smith's shit off his boot (as one does), this true to life, down with the shit, quintessentially British story, was, otherwise, as sweet-smelling as any I've seen.

Maggie is of course perfect for the part of a highly educated, slightly demented but deceptively sane dropout, and is rightly nominated for a Bafta for best actress, and Bennett, who makes an appearance late in the film for which he wrote the screenplay, too, has rightly benefited from his generous accommodation of the actual lady in the van parked -- with a whole lot of shit, actual and other -- for 15 years in the driveway of his fairly posh house, which is the house used in the film.

I do love memoir, I must admit, and although this story is only 'mostly true', as it states at the start, that is true enough for me. Indeed no reproduction is all true, only life itself is that. But the good memoir has that ring of truth to it that makes a clever, if quiet, mockery of our over-written manufactured 'truths', by showing us just how fantastic, quirky and good -- or bad -- as the case may be, real life is. You can't make this shit up, in short. And that is just as well.

Shit does happen indeed, but the reward and the good is all in the recovery, as they rightly say. All in those small, true acts of heroism that reassure, and entertain, if done right, as they are here, such as the writer holding the hand of the stinky old lady in the van when she asks him to on the night before she dies, neither he nor she knowing it will be her last (though perhaps she has an inkling).

And that bit of the story is all true, as Bennett states in the film for the sceptics among us. And in that simple gesture you know the humanity of the man and of the lady in the van. She is saying thank you and he is saying, it's all right, just before she quietly dies. What better way to end a film - or a life.        

Posting poo

Turning fifty (shiver) you imagine feeling old and wanting to sleep more, perhaps being invited on an 'over 50's' bus tour of the botanical gardens. And all this happens and more, don't worry.

But what you're somehow not prepared for, but also happens, pretty much on the very day of your birthday, is that you receive an urgent request for your poo. And how do they want your poo? They want it in the post! The poo post.

So there you are, turned fifty, which should be bad enough, having to decipher a 23-step manual on the painfully undignified business of how to collect your smelly business, being sure to put the blotting paper in the toilet not the bag, and not before the pee goes into the toilet, which must not be at the same time as the poop (!). After that, in a tearing rush lest the pooped paper sink (!!) you do some stinky excavation with a much too-thin-for-the-job stick, and when that's done, wearing your arm extensions, you courier said stinky stick and said stinky stick only into the zip-lock plastic bag provided and seal it TIGHT, before proceeding in a calm and collected fashion to the nearest poo post box, carrying your meaty envelope and trailing a string of salivating dogs, to post it to those whose job it is to receive posted poo.

Well, in theory I'm sure that's all very well and good and important to science and possibly even the saving of the planet. But in practice, it's easier said than done, and it's not all that easy said. It's also a little unfair, I think, to impose such an undignified procedure on the newly elderly. Why not instead treat us all, as a 50th birthday present, to a free doctors visit where the bulk of the operation can be handled, in every sense of the word, by a trained professional. I feel a strongly scented letter to my local member coming on.

Meanwhile, they're still waiting for my poo; I seem to have come down with a sudden and inexplicable case of chronic constipation.

   

 

Bad faith

Rifling through a collection of popular records from the 1960s, 70s and 80s recently, I found these two covers among the 150-odd albums of mostly male musicians, with men - never naked - depicted on the covers.

This young girl on the cover of Blind Faith by Blind Faith (1969) I couldn't believe. Look it up and you find there was some controversy over the cover, but not because the girl is naked, which is barely mentioned, but because she was so young. Apparently she was eleven.

The 'artist' (male, of course) employed to produce the cover, who came up with the idea of using a very young 'innocent' girl, said it was all about the 'spaceship' the girl is holding (looks more like a plane) symbolising material achievement and the advancement of human knowledge, and the 'innocent' girl symbolises the untainted delivery of this 'tree of knowledge' into the world. Bullshit. Why must she be naked?

The naked woman in stilettos on the cover of The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking by Roger Waters (1984), is not quite as offensive as the naked girl-child, but it's pretty crass stuff. And aren't these sorts of images supposed to be reserved for the R-rated pages of Playboy magazine, etc. I mean this is a naked woman asking to be picked up and taken for a ride on the cover of a record, openly displayed and sold to anyone.Why bother censoring films if this is out there for all to see?

There was a bit of controversy about this cover too, but not much: 'it was condemned by some feminist groups' is how Wiki summarises - and dismisses - the controversy. But later versions appeared with a black strip over the woman's rear end, rather a case of too little too late, I should say, as it still leaves in place an otherwise naked, provocatively posed, woman asking to be picked up (and fucked).

Roger Waters sings on the album about his mid-life fantasy of committing adultery with a woman he picks up on the road, presuming she is hitch hiking because she wants sex too, of course. He doesn't sing about that.

This wouldn't wash today, would it? I don't think it would, and that must be a progress of sorts. That's all I've got to say about that, oh, and that the record collection belongs to my husband.