There isn’t much to say: I love the Met in HD program, and yesterday I had a thrilling, delightful, thoroughly revelatory time at Don Pasquale.
Category Archives: Music
Favorite (Joe) Dick Ever
What I have for you at Favorite Thing Ever today is not exactly stream of consciousness… more like a Canal of Canadian Content. Where I wind up, eventually, is Hugh Dillon’s awesome solo album, Works Well With Others, which is a sort of musical “What if?” What if Joe of Hard Core Logo had lived well into a wiser middle age? This isn’t exactly that album, maybe, but it can feed that fannish desire.
If what you’re itching for is more technological, Kelly has a love poem to her new Kindle up.
Das Rhinegold
What can I say about the opera? We had never been to a Wagner before, in part because it was not something I was expecting to entirely love. I’ve heard enough of the music to know it’s not my favorite: I like Mozart, Puccini, and Verdi. But this is the glory of the Met in HD–you’re not risking kabillions on an experiment.
The results of this experiment were mixed. These broadcasts sell out fast and our seats were painfully close the screen. We could see the pixels at times, and they had a glitch with the satellite right at the beginning. But the Rhine maidens were very sexy and weird and the staging was ambitious. And I really heart Bryn Terfel, who sings Wotan. So I walked out saying “Yep, I suspected that might not be my cuppa.”
I was glad I went, though. One can’t love all operas (or all anything) equally, but I always enjoy going. And it was a perfect activity for what turned out to be an incredibly rainy day.
The other thing that was very sad about the adventure of Saturday was that once again we planned to eat at Nuba, only to get there and discover they’re not open. This is the third time, I think. I had been looking forward to that lovely wonderful spicy cauliflower all morning. I had brought snacks, but you cannot sit in an opera munching noisily away, and when we left the theater we thought we might as well get to the restaurant. The blood sugar got a tad low.
Plan B, as always, was to hoover up the food I’d brought and haul ass through the downpour to Memphis Blues. Why are they the go-to place? Because they bring your food in five minutes, dammitall, they don’t care if you eat with your fingers, and I’ve never shown up there and found a locked door. They gave me a barbecued lamb sandwich and a salad, and equilibrium was restored.
MB is right next to the Santa Barbara market, so on the last leg of the journey home, we went apple shopping. Only when we were safely home and ready to dry off did Kelly realize I hadn’t bought enough onions for the holiday perogies. So she went back out into the rain to buy some more, along with something else I had forgotten. I curled up by the fire with a book.
Journey – Interview with Louise Marley
Louise Marley’s first novel, Sing the Light, was published in 1995, and was followed by two sequels, Sing the Warmth and Receive the Gift. She blogs at The Red Room.
I had the good fortune to discover her writing just after that, when I reviewed her astounding feminist SF novel The Terrorists of Irustan, which came out in 1999, for Scifi.com. After that, I jumped at the chance to read her other books. I said this about The Glass Harmonica in 2001:
The Glass Harmonica is a novel that will haunt readers long after they have moved on to less complex fare. . . it leaves me torn between the desire to reread immediately and the hunger for Marley’s next outing.
My feelings on that subject haven’t changed: Marley’s work is lyrical, deep and interesting and I can’t get enough of her.
At one time a singer with the Seattle Opera, she had a foot in two worlds for a number of years before retiring from music to write fulltime. I started our interview by asking about the shape of her life now, and got this response:
Like you, I live in the beautiful Pacific Northwest, and a lot of the time it feels like the rainforest. I don’t sing professionally anymore, but I still love to do that, as well as practice yoga, play golf, and spend time with my Scottie. I teach for the Long Ridge Writers Group, and I write. It doesn’t seem like too much activity, but I’m always busy!
As I write this, I’m celebrating the publication of Mozart’s Blood (, which is officially out tomorrow, June 29th. This is a book that was perhaps the most fun to write of all my dozen novels. It covers four hundred years of history and music, and features a reluctant vampire who just happens to be an opera singer. I did research in Milan and in New York (touring the opera houses in those cities, and had a wonderful time with all of it. Now I’m at work on a similar book which features Brahms. Not vampire, but certainly paranormal. There will be three of these–the third will be either Puccini or Verdi. Detect a theme?
We use to say, in the world of singing, that if you could do something else you should go do it. I’ve had the experience twice now of a real compulsion to do something. I knew I wanted to sing at the age of five, and I never wavered. When the urge to write overtook me, I didn’t try to resist at all, although I didn’t expect to make a career out of it. I thought I needed a hobby! (I can hear you laughing, Alyx. Stop it.) It was when I was reading my first book aloud to my first writing class, and getting a positive response, that I realized writing was a great deal like singing: it’s a performance. I was hooked, and I’ve stayed that way.
I was always an science fiction and fantasy reader. I cut my teeth, as it were, on the Oz books–all eight of them, or whatever there were–and then graduated to Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover novels. I read everything I could get my hands on, like so many folks in our genre. I love fantasy and science fiction and all its little offshoots. The genre is drama at its most dramatic–a bit like opera, don’t you think?
I attended Clarion West in 1993, and it’s not putting too fine a point on it to say that in terms of my writing career, it was life changing. I had been studying writing, taking courses, meeting with a writer’s group, but the six weeks of Clarion crystallized everything for me. My class was a bit of a difficult one, I think, and a number of the attendees aren’t writing now. I can assure you no one that year thought that I would be the one to sell a bunch of novels. But everything I heard there, and the input from my classmates, made all the difference in my work. They were so talented! It’s a shame that some of them haven’t kept writing.
Sing the Light was in revision with my agent when I went to Clarion. I had just found him–as in just before the workshop began–but he made me rewrite three times before he thought the novel was ready to sell. Then he placed it in two weeks. Won my undying admiration!
For a while, after I retired from my musical endeavors, I just wrote. Now I teach as well, but I worry that some of my writing energy gets spent teaching. I’m sure that’s a concern for all writers. I’ve been able to keep up my output, so far, and I love teaching, so I suppose I’ll continue. The dream of an uninterrupted writing day is still that–a dream. I tend to have complicated days in which I do housework, walk the dog, take a yoga class or play golf, cook, teach–and somewhere in there I write. The one consistency is that I write every day, whether it’s half an hour or four hours. Every day.
I’ve had the same struggle in publishing that I did in my singing career: It’s hard for me to be businesslike about it. I loved singing so much! There was nothing more fun than putting on a long dress and my big earrings and going to stand in front of an orchestra. I adored the opera, the staging rehearsals, the collegiality, the costumes–all of it. It was hard to care whether the fee was a thousand dollars or a hundred dollars. I just loved doing it. Now, as a writer, I’m tempted down the same path. I love writing. I love creating a world, whether it’s a fantastical one or a science fictional one or a historical one. I adore learning what make characters tick (resonates with all those opera roles) and I invariably fall in love with the best ones. I’m incredibly fortunate to get paid for doing something so satisfying.
Naturally, human beings always want more. I’d like more success, and the money and security that come along with it. But I’m delighted to be a working writer, to be active in the business, to have editors recognize my name, and most of all–above everything else–to have acquired a readership. An audience. Bless their hearts, every single one of them!
Readers curious about Mozart’s Blood can find out more at Louise’s web site–the section about the novel features not only a Virtual Book Tour, musical suggestions, a list of ten discussion questions for book clubs. It also has a Book Club Party Kit, with suggestions for menus, costumes, music, and decorations! You can find her Facebook Fan page by searching for Louise Marley.
Hammer hammer, saw saw
I converted alyxdellamonica.com to a WordPress site in June of 2010, with the goal of integrating the static site about my writing with the more dynamic content of my blog, which originated on Livejournal, and whose archives still live there. I have great plans for this site, and given my posting habits, I know that all of the areas you see in the menus on this site will soon be brimming over with new, up-to-date, recent, sexy content. I will continue to grab text fragments and post mini-reviews of books as I read them, talk film and TV, discuss the music I’m listening to as well as whatever I’m singing with my choir, and write about food, wine, cheese, and eco-consumerism.
I am also getting ready to launch an interview series, Journeys, which will discuss the career paths of various authors in the SF and fantasy fields.
I could dig up old posts on some of these topics and whip off a few new ones, if I wished, but I want this process to happen organically. I want to write good thoughtful posts, things you will enjoy, things that will make you hungry or thoughtful or maybe even mad once in awhile–things that will get you talking. In the meantime, this post is just a quick note to say I’m sorry there’s nothing more on point here just yet, and to beg your patience while I generate content that’s really worth reading.