Blogging Belshangles
Belshangles
Susan Altstatt here.
I have an MA from UCLA in Theater Arts. There, I won a Samuel Goldwyn Award for playwriting. If I’d stayed there, I probably could have entered the world of Hollywood screen writing without much difficulty. Instead, I moved back to Stanford. The Classics Department wanted me for a doctoral candidate, and gave me a full fellowship. Unfortunately, it soon became clear to me that academia is crueler than Hollywood. I quit rather abruptly, got married, and raised three girls.
But I never stopped writing, mostly historical fiction, which I made no attempt to publish, and painting, which I sold, but not in any organized fashion. Then, when my eldest daughter went off to UC Santa Barbara, I started painting and writing again in earnest. I tried submitting what I wrote to competitions, seeing if I could get prize money or an advance to spur my efforts on.
What I learned was that the manuscript that wins the contest money is, by definition, either The Vietnam Book or The World War II Book. (Incidentally, that still proved true in the ABNA competition I was in last year, of the five surviving semi-finalists in General Fiction, there was the World War II book, the Vietnam Book, two Chick-Lit books and Belshangles. The World War II book took it.) I learned I was not going to get anywhere with a massive historical novel about the 15th century conversion of the last pagan nation in Europe (Lithuania,) no matter how excited I was with it, and no matter how replete with the essentials (Sex, violence, and religion!) it might be. What’s more, I knew I was not, in order to compete, going to write my own Vietnam Book or World War II Book, I’ve never been to war. So, what subject of current interest could I write about?
HOW ABOUT SEX, DRUGS, AND ROCK-AND- ROLL? Rock concerts I’ve been to.
From 1982 to 1987 I lived under the imperative of taking my Number Two Daughter to rock concerts. Her elder sister had required no such transportation duties of me; by the time she knew concerts existed she already had friends with similar music tastes and drivers’ licenses. But Number Two Daughter’s penchant for rock music and rock stars started early, when she was eleven. She was (and is) a very forceful person: self-determined and independent enough to get on public transportation and go. But I quickly got sucked into ferrying her (and her friends whose parents were less obliging than I) to rock concerts. I had the time of my life. I was small and blond, dressed like the kids and could be mistaken for one of them if you didn’t look too closely. My own teen years had offered nothing as splendidly seductive as this. What I saw and heard entranced me.
The men I saw on stage were outsized Byronic heroes, and the intensity with which the girls (and boys) at their feet adored them was outsized also. The kids I knew were intelligent and came from intellectual families where both parents had graduate degrees and were Silicon Valley scientists. Their fandom had elements of the scholarly: they amassed huge collections, every version of every song their heroes had written, every book or article written about them, every photograph taken of them. I found myself fantasizing how a girl like this might meet her rock idol under circumstances that would allow her to form a genuine lasting relationship with him, not just a brief regrettable hookup. My girl, Andy Falconer, puts it this way:
From myself, my daughters, and their friends I could create a fictional protagonist. What I needed was a fictional rock idol for her to love. I mulled this over for a time, without much success. Then one night, I was subjected to an extraordinarily detailed and vivid dream, essentially the hotel scene, Chapter III of Belshangles. Tommi Rhymer and Harlan Parr walked into my life, uninvited and unannounced, and picked a fight with each other. They were not intentionally modeled on specific English rockers living or dead, though they certainly share characteristics with a number of them. I have no memory of creating or naming them. They just sprang fully armed from my sub-conscious, like Athena from the head of Zeus. I would think this incredibly hokey, had I not heard other successful authors confess the same experience. I’d been looking for a leading man, and to my total amazement, got two for the price of one. But once Tommi and Harlan had taken up residence in my brain, they wouldn’t shut up. I was like Coleridge’s wedding guest transfixed by the ancient mariner’s story: I “could not choose but hear.” And soon I could not choose but write.
After having said all this, I feel I should weigh in before the week is over on the death of David Bowie. David Bowie was not Tommi Rhymer and vice versa. However, the concert in the first two chapters of Belshangles is drawn closely as possible from the two “Bill Graham Presents a Day on the Green” concerts I attended in 1983. One of them headlined The Police’s Synchronicity Tour, the other David Bowie’s Serious Moonlight.
It was Bowie at whom I stared up in awestruck adoration from the mosh pit, and whose stage I got hauled under when one of my teen companions fainted. I have experienced only two performers who could hold a crowd the way he did. The other was Lawrence Olivier, whom I saw play Macbeth at Stratford on Avon when I was eighteen. I chased him across a midnight parking lot to get his autograph. Both those men put up their own fair show of Beauty Incarnate. Thank you, and rest in peace, Ziggy Stardust.
Comments, anyone?
Susan Altstatt here.
I have an MA from UCLA in Theater Arts. There, I won a Samuel Goldwyn Award for playwriting. If I’d stayed there, I probably could have entered the world of Hollywood screen writing without much difficulty. Instead, I moved back to Stanford. The Classics Department wanted me for a doctoral candidate, and gave me a full fellowship. Unfortunately, it soon became clear to me that academia is crueler than Hollywood. I quit rather abruptly, got married, and raised three girls.
But I never stopped writing, mostly historical fiction, which I made no attempt to publish, and painting, which I sold, but not in any organized fashion. Then, when my eldest daughter went off to UC Santa Barbara, I started painting and writing again in earnest. I tried submitting what I wrote to competitions, seeing if I could get prize money or an advance to spur my efforts on.
What I learned was that the manuscript that wins the contest money is, by definition, either The Vietnam Book or The World War II Book. (Incidentally, that still proved true in the ABNA competition I was in last year, of the five surviving semi-finalists in General Fiction, there was the World War II book, the Vietnam Book, two Chick-Lit books and Belshangles. The World War II book took it.) I learned I was not going to get anywhere with a massive historical novel about the 15th century conversion of the last pagan nation in Europe (Lithuania,) no matter how excited I was with it, and no matter how replete with the essentials (Sex, violence, and religion!) it might be. What’s more, I knew I was not, in order to compete, going to write my own Vietnam Book or World War II Book, I’ve never been to war. So, what subject of current interest could I write about?
HOW ABOUT SEX, DRUGS, AND ROCK-AND- ROLL? Rock concerts I’ve been to.
From 1982 to 1987 I lived under the imperative of taking my Number Two Daughter to rock concerts. Her elder sister had required no such transportation duties of me; by the time she knew concerts existed she already had friends with similar music tastes and drivers’ licenses. But Number Two Daughter’s penchant for rock music and rock stars started early, when she was eleven. She was (and is) a very forceful person: self-determined and independent enough to get on public transportation and go. But I quickly got sucked into ferrying her (and her friends whose parents were less obliging than I) to rock concerts. I had the time of my life. I was small and blond, dressed like the kids and could be mistaken for one of them if you didn’t look too closely. My own teen years had offered nothing as splendidly seductive as this. What I saw and heard entranced me.
The men I saw on stage were outsized Byronic heroes, and the intensity with which the girls (and boys) at their feet adored them was outsized also. The kids I knew were intelligent and came from intellectual families where both parents had graduate degrees and were Silicon Valley scientists. Their fandom had elements of the scholarly: they amassed huge collections, every version of every song their heroes had written, every book or article written about them, every photograph taken of them. I found myself fantasizing how a girl like this might meet her rock idol under circumstances that would allow her to form a genuine lasting relationship with him, not just a brief regrettable hookup. My girl, Andy Falconer, puts it this way:
“A really vast percentage of young girls survive their early years in love with horses. Then they discover boys, and the horses languish. Boys of a similar stripe pack their juvenile libidos into cars and motor-cycles. Most withdraw enough in time to marry the erstwhile horsey girls. But some stick with the cars.
Boys of a certain other kind love heavy-metal rock stars and read Soldier of Fortune. Most grow up, but a few go off to die in Africa. And girls of certain kinds love rock-stars too. (Usually different rock-stars.) When they get out of school they marry someone else.
Then one or two, much like their counterparts who really do make mercenary soldiers–– one or two marry rock stars. A statistical necessity after all, since rock-stars marry.”
From myself, my daughters, and their friends I could create a fictional protagonist. What I needed was a fictional rock idol for her to love. I mulled this over for a time, without much success. Then one night, I was subjected to an extraordinarily detailed and vivid dream, essentially the hotel scene, Chapter III of Belshangles. Tommi Rhymer and Harlan Parr walked into my life, uninvited and unannounced, and picked a fight with each other. They were not intentionally modeled on specific English rockers living or dead, though they certainly share characteristics with a number of them. I have no memory of creating or naming them. They just sprang fully armed from my sub-conscious, like Athena from the head of Zeus. I would think this incredibly hokey, had I not heard other successful authors confess the same experience. I’d been looking for a leading man, and to my total amazement, got two for the price of one. But once Tommi and Harlan had taken up residence in my brain, they wouldn’t shut up. I was like Coleridge’s wedding guest transfixed by the ancient mariner’s story: I “could not choose but hear.” And soon I could not choose but write.
After having said all this, I feel I should weigh in before the week is over on the death of David Bowie. David Bowie was not Tommi Rhymer and vice versa. However, the concert in the first two chapters of Belshangles is drawn closely as possible from the two “Bill Graham Presents a Day on the Green” concerts I attended in 1983. One of them headlined The Police’s Synchronicity Tour, the other David Bowie’s Serious Moonlight.
It was Bowie at whom I stared up in awestruck adoration from the mosh pit, and whose stage I got hauled under when one of my teen companions fainted. I have experienced only two performers who could hold a crowd the way he did. The other was Lawrence Olivier, whom I saw play Macbeth at Stratford on Avon when I was eighteen. I chased him across a midnight parking lot to get his autograph. Both those men put up their own fair show of Beauty Incarnate. Thank you, and rest in peace, Ziggy Stardust.
Comments, anyone?
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