Holiday Greetings from Kay Hemlock Brown!

Greetings of the season to all my readers, from me and my extended family!

Some folks can't quite see the point of this frenzied social activity at this time of year, and probably ascribe it to the fact that "Jesus was born on December 25th," and everybody must have got on the bandwagon!  In fact, I believe there is more than a little evidence that the historical Jesus was born at another time of year.  However, there already was a celebration of the Winter Solstice in Northern Europe, and the leaders of the new-fledged religion simply co-opted it.  It was a simple ritual to encourage the Sun into becoming stronger, and to bring the warmer seasons back again.  It was a time of getting together in families or villages and celebrating fellowship and friendship, at a time of year when there really wasn't much to celebrate.

There was nothing particularly winter-related in any of the stories of the birth of Christ.  The account of the Great Census of Augustus Caesar is based on fact; he did order such a census, but there were several censuses ordered of Syria (and the general region of Palestine) which Christian writers have desperately latched onto, but to my mind seem quite irrelevant.  Still, there's nothing to prevent anyone from celebrating the birth of Jesus on any day that they wish, and why not the Winter Solstice?

In any case, several branches of the Human Race, especially those that live outside the tropics, have chosen to celebrate the beginning of a new year at Midwinter, because in civilized times the main occupation of human communities was Agriculture, which would fall in the middle of the year.  So what we really celebrate at Christmas is the opportunity to start anew; that any miss-starts of earlier days were erased, and we resume with a clean slate.

Kay

Bah humbug! People Who Hate Santa Claus

I was reading a post on Facebook about How to Disclose to your Kid That Santa does not exist materially.  (All that means is that, Santa can be considered to exist in some figurative sense, but Santa is not a person whom you can, well, give a real cookie to.  Unless you consider Santa to be yourself, in which case you're wasting my time, and you should go elsewhere.)

I did not read the post, because I wasn't interested enough, but from the first several comments I got the impression that it was well written.  But then I came across a comment that some people had always hated Santa Claus!

That really got me thinking!  Why would anyone hate Santa Claus?  I mean, as a symbol of all the over-the-top commercialism of the holiday season, certainly, one can be deeply annoyed at all that he represents!  But to me, Santa Claus constitutes the remnants of a medieval bishop who is generally considered to have been greatly loved in his lifetime, and was celebrated as a saint.  You can search the Internet for the origins of Santa Claus, and one of the strongest sources for the religious origins is this bishop of a town near Myra in Turkey, belonging to the Orthodox strain of Christianity.  Not being unduly religious, I did not look up the dates and the details, but they are not hard to find.

It seems to me that if you hate the commercialism in which people indulge during the holiday season, I think the commercialism should bear the full force of your hatred; Saint Nicholas and his memory should not suffer, surely?  This tendency to get upset over symbols is a weakness in our society.  Basically, I feel, people indulge in all this furious gift-giving at Christmas to compensate for neglecting their friends the rest of the year.  Then they get into the habit of giving expensive but unwanted gifts during the holiday season, and this sets everyone up for being thoroughly depressed because often the gifts don't come up to the expectations of the recipients, and . . . it's too depressing to even follow up on the causes of the depression.  I don't give very elaborate gifts; I'm very bad at doing the whole Christmas Presents thing.  I strongly believe in appreciating people, but I'm bad at showing my appreciation.  My appreciation of particular people is invisible most of them, because I put them in my stories, and they never find out that I have!

This year, especially, I'm feeling the need to appreciate certain people very much, because they wanted so much for the election to turn out differently, and they are intensely cut-up about the outcome.  Many of them wanted Bernie Sanders to be the Democratic Candidate, and simply could not cope with Hillary Clinton.  Others were delighted that Hillary earned the candidacy, and were stunned that D.T. beat her at the polls--or at least, in the electoral college.  There could be any number of surprises on December 19th, when the College assembles to vote, but most of us are going to be disappointed.  (I sincerely hope I'm wrong.)

Giving Christmas presents to these disappointed friends of mine are not going to make them feel a whole lot better about the election, but they will certainly be cheered up (I hope) that I thought of them this season.  If I can't find something for each of them that they would find useful or entertaining, I'll just keep the money and do something nice for them when the opportunity arises.

My students are just finishing their final examinations, and, as always happens, they will promptly proceed to forget that I ever existed.  It is rarely that a college kid remembers the instructors from their freshman courses, unless it is someone utterly charismatic (which I'm not).  A pox on charismatic professors, anyway; nobody taught me to be charismatic, and I think college students should learn to be inspired by non-charismatic professors, because sometimes these non-charismatic teachers have the best information.

So, in conclusion, I am definitely on board with consoling my friends with small, useful gifts this season, if I can find appropriate ones.

Kay

Wagner's Meistersinger: Some flaws cannot be fixed

After seeing Meistersinger some years ago, and having written an episode of Helen Nordstrom actually conducting a performance of it, I now find that I'm less than thrilled with the opera as a whole.

Richard Wagner always liked to write operas that were major spectaculars: Wagner had anticipated epic movies a hundred years before movies were invented.  For his purposes, Wagner needed to find plots that were larger than life.

In his earliest attempts, the stories were fairy tales.  Then he went on to legends, and for a long time, his operas were inspired by various legends, or epic sagas, such as the King Arthur legends (and other legends which had been incorporated into the Arthurian cycle).  Then he went on to epic sagas of an earlier time, in which Wagner was no longer fettered by Christian morality, and Wagner was free to impute various interesting motives to the gods themselves, in their epic existential struggles.

For his last work, Wagner chose not so much a legend in the mythical sense, but the legend of an historical personality: Hans Sachs, a medieval German poet.  The plot line is a story concerning the annual singing competition held by the singing guild of Nuremburg, at which it had been announced that the prize would be the hand of the daughter, Eva, of the president of the guild Veit Pogner.  A young nobleman is visiting, Walther, and falls in love with young Eva.  But Eva has to remain unattached, in order to be given to the prizewinner!  So Hans Sachs must conspire now to arrange for the young knight Walther to not only gain admission to the guild, so that he can participate in the competition, but also for him to win it.  Luckily, Walther is talented, and does not face any serious competition.  A further complication is that, while Eva is supposedly infatuated by the handsome visitor, the twice-widowered Hans Sachs himself, and young Eva (who has practically grown up in Sach's cobblery) are extremely fond of each other.

Now, Wagner, by his very nature, was fond of complexity.  He is unsatisfied with Hans Sachs simply teaching the young knight how to put together a winning song that satisfies all the complicated rules of the guild, but has a few quirks to give it a little extra excitement.  He makes Sachs agonize over the entire business, and makes Eva agonize over the situation, and generally makes the whole thing an embarrassment to anyone who is paying attention.  The comedy is very heavy-handed, though one can almost see how a perfectly satisfactory story could have been salvaged from the elements that are present.  This is an opera whose duration is more than four hours, but it could be shortened considerably.  In fact, I daresay it could be trimmed by two whole hours, if it were to be made into a musical, even retaining some of the musically more interesting parts.

The First Act is where the visitor comes seeking Eva and her maid at the local church, where they're attending Mass.  Later on, the girls leave, and Walther attends a meeting of the singing guild, right after Mass, and is denied entrance to the guild, not knowing the singing Rules.  This is a fun scene, and introduces the pompous guild members, as well as a host of apprentices, all of whom are both apprentices to their particular masters as tradesmen, as well as singers.  Hans Sach's apprentice, David, is both an aspiring cobbler, as well as a promising young tenor.  Wagner's sung dialog proceeds quite briskly, but is filled with numerous irrelevant details.  It could certainly be hurried along considerably if the scene were to be rewritten in the style of, say, the opening scene of My Fair Lady, which accomplishes a huge amount of plot using a mixture of song and speech.

In the Second Act, later that evening, the scene is on the street between the homes of Sachs and Eva's father, the cobbler and the goldsmith.  The only other serious entry in the singing competition is the Town Clerk, a comic figure who accuses everybody of trying to steal his prize Eva away from him, which actually precipitates a riot on the street, which Wagner of course turns into a melee of epic proportions.  The riot is a lot of fun for opera buffs (and stage directors), but it could certainly be abbreviated, and merged into the Third Act.

In Wagner, everything is sung, even the dialogue.  The soliloquies of the Third Act could be shortened considerably.  (Hans Sachs muses that his job is to bring a little sanity into the insanity of his world, which has ever been the responsibility of artists.  Then he muses that perhaps it would be best if he marries young Eva, but he talks himself out of that temptation.)  The knight comes in, and reveals that he's seen a beautiful dream.  In a pivotal sequence, Sachs turns the knight's account of the dream into the first two verses of a song.  As one could expect, the dream is all about Eva.  The knight is sent away to get into is glad rags for the festival.  Then Eva comes in, pretending that something is wrong with her shoes.  Presently it emerges that she has come to see the young knight, who is staying temporarily with Sachs.  Walther is still asleep, but Eva is strung out, and needs some serious talking down.  The conversation goes as far as Eva wondering whether it makes sense that Hans himself should enter the competition, and win it, and marry Eva: how bad could that be, she wonders.  All this, too, goes on forever.  By the end of the scene, David, Walther, Hans, Eva and her maid Magdalena (Lena) all gather round at Hans's behest, to christen the newly-composed song, and sing a lovely quintet.

Now, in opera, a quintet is often its own reason for existence.  But in this case, it could easily be sacrificed, or at least simply played instrumentally, as Hans declaims what a wonderful song Walther has created, shortening things considerably.  There is a visit by the inane Town Clerk, which goes on forever, and fails to be the comic interlude it is intended to be.  The Clerk steals the paper on which Hans transcribed the words of the song.

Finally, in the Fourth Act, there is a lot of dancing and singing and general high spirits, in keeping with the Midsummer festivities, and of course the Feast of John the Baptist; more opportunities for tossing out some silliness that can't really carry its weight.  Then there is the competition, which would seem a little incompressible, and to end the opera, a major oration by Hans Sachs about German Art.

Historically, German Culture had struggled to overcome its fragmentation, because the political elite had been a bunch of jealous rivals, the remnants of the robber barons of the Rhine.  It was understandable that Wagner took this opportunity to praise German Culture, because in the 19th Century, too, it was still a struggle to push the German principalities into some semblance of being a modern nation, able to compete with the French and the British.  But today, the political subtleties of the play are too irrelevant, and of course, take up too much time as well.

So, I dearly wish someone would take the surgeon's knife to this opera, and convert it into a modern musical, with sensitivity and taste.

Kay

Music Education

[I originally posted this on Helen, (don't click, if you value your innocence!!) which has a warning about adult material!  This blog is a lot less "adult", so the post has been relocated here.]

In the heat of the recent events, I lost sight of one of my most important hobby-horses: music education.  My main heroine, Helen Nordstrom, is a professor of music at a (fictitious) Pennsylvania college.  She discovered a wonderful contralto (a mezzo-soprano, actually) on CD, and one Christmas, had been surprised to find herself on the same stage as this woman, Natalia Zemanova, a Czech settled in Paris.  Helen and Natasha become firm friends.  It just so happens that Natasha agrees to sing in a major musical event that Helen has mounted at her school: the Saint Matthew Passion, in which Natasha is singing contralto, and Helen is conducting (to the disappointment of Natasha, who wants Helen to give up this silly conducting, and sing.)

Anyway, during the days preceding the big performance, Natasha finds time to sit in on the classes of Helen and her colleagues.  Here are a few paragraphs from this episode.

Helen’s class was a revelation.  What Natasha had learned with diligence and hard work at the conservatory in Prague, Helen made simple for these youths.  They took it for granted that the material would be easy, and occasionally complained when it wasn’t obviously so.  In each instance, with infinite patience Helen questioned the student until the idea was clear.  She used the piano, recordings, the chalkboard, everything at her disposal, and by the end of the hour, had convinced the class of the simplicity of what she was trying to convey.

Afterwards she confessed that it had been a harder day than usual.

“You work so hard!” said Natasha sympathetically.  “In my conservatory, they would discourage the less talented ones.”  She smiled.  “If you had to teach my classmates and me, it would have been easy for you!”

Helen laughed.  “But out of these unresponsive, complaining lumps of rock will come musicians, parents of musicians, congressmen, senators, voters . . . I need every one of them!  In this country, Tasha, Music can afford no enemies.”

And so it is with everything we teach.  This is why the single-mindedness of some teachers lead us to think that their lives depend on the work they do.  The teacher is the invisible part of the larger picture, the part that everyone loves to vilify.

Kay

The Elections (a duplicate post)

I'm sure the chapter of the election of 2016 is not closed, but I do need to bring some sort of closure to my blogging about it.

There were many dimensions to the candidacy of Donald Trump.

Economic issues--people, it seems, were more eager to have lower taxes than to support a liberal economy, with support for the poor, and concern for the environment;

cultural and social issues--a large majority of voters, including women, were less anxious about the empowerment of women, and rights for minorities than the rest of us thought.

Educational issues--it appears that Trump supporters were more angry about the leadership of the educated elite than the supporters of Hillary Clinton were anxious that the White House should get into the hands of the most ignorant and least educated among the conservatives.  Of course, these Trump supporters wear their lack of college education with pride.

As could have been expected, my friends on social media have struggled to deal with the outcome of the election, and are working out their anger in vicious posts that predict awful things in the days to come.  I, for one, am done with prediction.  What we haven't seen is the Elephant Bubble in the room.  It isn't a bubble, really; it is an enormous sound-proof blanket, separating those who have internalized the lessons of a decade, what we think of as altruism: coming to the aid of the poor and the powerless, trying to look at the world through the eyes of those who live outside the US, and even the eyes of Nature, if that makes any sense.  We thought of the Planet as a dumb being, grinding away according to the laws of physics and chemistry, but how can it be an uncaring, mechanical thing, if it is, as we suspect, the only astronomical object that is home to life?  It seems to me that the Earth watches in horror, as it sees life slipping away.

On the other side of our blanket, we see ignorant businessmen, who are more focused on such immediate things as cheap energy and gasoline, rather than the long-term goods such as renewable energy, cutting back on global warming, and slowing or reversing the pollution of the water and the oceans.  They probably do recognize that the environment is being destroyed, but dismiss the alarms raised by scientists as exaggeration, stemming from the greed for publicity that they have come to think of scientists as being addicted to.  Since that's more convenient for them to believe, that's what they believe.

But the social, cultural divide is the most heartbreaking.  For whatever reason (and probably not a calculated one) the Trump camp has settled on xenophobia and racism as their philosophical basis.  That has all been a secondary issue for Republicans for many years; something quietly trotted out in private at election time, as we saw in that Romney video of 2012.  But it has become a signature plank in the Trump platform, and as such, conservatives, especially the very young, dragged along with their elders, feel obliged to subscribe to that poisonous attitude.  I see it even in my students; they're practicing glaring at their foreign classmates, their minority friends and former friends.  Their looks seem to say: I have nothing against you personally, but it looks very much as though you had better keep a low profile in the future.  The conservatives probably have no inkling that this formal racial hostility is tearing white youth apart.  Or perhaps they do, and believe that it is a lesson young whites have to learn: to keep non-white, non-straight, non-American human beings at arm's length.  There are many who do not buy into it, but soon their stand is going to seem heroic.

There is a small chance that Trump was only play-acting about his xenophobia, or perhaps he was so troubled by the turbulence and violence in the Levant that he snapped, and decided to become hostile to everyone who was not just as White as he was.

Across the US, institutions of higher education are announcing their manifestos, informing their students that these colleges and universities shall be safe havens for minorities of all sorts: ethnic, sexual, political, and economic.  It used to be that American institutions had to spearhead sanctions against foreign nations whose policies were discriminatory against minorities and women.  But now, foreign banks and organizations are pulling out support for companies that are riding rough-shod over Native Americans.  Good for them.

So, dear readers, if you can bear to do it, I suppose this is the time for us to show how much decency and goodness we have in us, if we have any left!  The young people around us must see that all goodness is not gone forever.  In Alexandra, I portrayed an invasion of a country by a neighbor.  The invasion runs into trouble, and the enemy military leadership changes hands many times as they encounter obstacles, until finally an ambitious young woman accepts the reins of power (of the invading nation).  She takes into her service a woman who she discovers is a spy.  Out of fear, but still reluctant to give up the beautiful servant, she cripples her, and continues to use her sexually.  But the time comes when the general confesses to her crippled lover that she must give up the war, before all beauty is gone from her land forever.  Any fool can fight for wealth, for natural resources, for access to seaports, trade routes, the sorts of things that invasions sought to obtain for the invaders in centuries gone by.  But to fight for the health of the planet, for a good life for all people, for beauty: these are things that are new.  But they are good things.  And it is a different kind of fighting.

[Added later:]

During the last few months, my friends and I, and those wanting the Democrats to succeed, were torn; we learned that the majority of those who followed Trump were disillusioned with the political environment that has quietly settled in as normal.  Nothing good comes out of Washington, seemed to summarize their thinking.  The right thing to do seemed to be to talk to the Trump followers, engage with them, and try to persuade them about our way of thinking.  But wait: who are these people, anyway?  What do we know about them?

They think government is too expensive.
They think public health care is too much of a socialist idea.
They think cheap gasoline should be made available at any price, including sacrificing the environment.
They think educated people are tricksters and charlatans.
They think a minimum wage is a luxury we cannot afford.
They think people ought to keep almost all their incomes.
They think people who live in poverty have only themselves to blame.
They think that it is time that America was returned to the Americans (namely white Americans).
They think that gay marriage should be abolished.
They think that all muslims are either terrorists, or support terrorism.
They think that the US has been too easy on Iran and other nations, though some of them are convinced that Obama's hostility to Gaddafi caused some of the terrorist attacks on the US.
They admire Trump's tough talk about using WMD's against the Middle East.

They probably don't all agree that owning guns without restriction is a fundamental right, but they're okay with going along with that in return for the support of the NRA.

Is it feasible to engage with these people?  I would like to abandon them to their own devices.

Kay

More Political Witchhunts

Well, count me in as one more observer not surprised at Donald Trump's sexual abuse news stories.  But, as Donald T. himself remarks, this stuff is just a distraction; it is not the main reason I would not vote for him.  Some years ago, I too was appalled at what was considered major misbehavior by Bill Clinton in the White House.  It was even more appalling to have special prosecutors appointed to try to impeach him.  It was clear to everyone that the GOP wanted Clinton out of the White House for one reason only: the economy was thriving, and Clinton was immensely popular.  The perceived sullying of the sacred precincts of the White House was just an excuse.  To this day, Republicans will never concede that this is so.  They have begun to confuse their political rhetoric with absolute facts.  So now, the Democrats are also jumping into this desperate strategy of moral assassination, as if we didn't know that Donald Trump was just an overgrown fraternity boy, able to buy his way into women's dressing-rooms backstage at beauty pageants!  All this indignation is just a little obviously put on.  Getting on our moral high horses this close to the elections simply escalates the ongoing tendency to attack the opposing party's candidate on grounds that have little to do with political capability.

The Democrats have expended all their political ammunition already, and by every estimate, they should have had a lock on the elections by now.  But some Democrat amateurs are in a panic, on the off-chance that the GOP just might win the election.  In my opinion, what they have to lose is any hope of cooperation once their woman is elected President.  Do they think that all they need is to have Hillary Clinton in the White House, to have all their problems solved?  At this point, it is quite possible to have the first woman President in the USA sworn into office, only to have four miserable years of absolutely no progress, and go down in history as a total failure.  Successful politics is not about just winning elections.

The Democrats could win the White House, Congress, and a super-majority in the Senate, and still have four years at which they will look back in horror.  The country must not be further polarized, the extremists must not be encouraged to greater efforts, the name-calling has to slow down, any political gains made by the Obama administration must be consolidated, and conservatives of all sorts must be allowed to become comfortable with the fact that what the Democrats have done in the last eight years has not destroyed the country.  Gays and Lesbians did not fight for certain rights in order to crow at the rest of the country, or thumb their noses at straight folk, or humiliate Christians, or force homophobes into keeping their children home, while gays and lesbians indulge in furious public displays of affection on the streets.  As a private citizen sympathetic to the needs of homosexuals, I deplore thumbing the nose at those who consider that they have lost the battle against holding back LGB rights.  They have lost the battle.  But they need not be humiliated, despite the centuries of suffering the LGB community has endured.

Some of the resentment of the conservative rank and file is undoubtedly the fact that the African American community has advanced to the point of having one of theirs elected to the Presidency.  It should have been unthinkable for anyone to say: I hate the Democrats for electing a Black man to the White House.  But people are saying it.  Democrats and Republicans are jointly responsible for this state of affairs.

Democrats and other Liberals have long thought that they had succeeded in rooting out racism and prejudice, and sexism and xenophobia.  But they only succeeded in repressing it, and driving it underground.  It cannot be forced out of existence.  Only time, and generally improved standards of living can moderate this situation.  Let me repeat: racism and xenophobia and sexism will only go away if the standard of living of the general population improves across the land.  This is why there was a generally liberal atmosphere in the sixties, because people were not so impoverished that they had to make scapegoats of blacks and women and minorities.  Over the last forty years, the economic elite has skillfully drawn back to themselves the wealth of the country, and now the people are looking at blacks, minorities, women, immigrants, and more recently gays, lesbians and bisexuals as the cause of all their misfortunes.  To those who have abandoned all logic, it would naturally seem clear that Barack Obama is the last straw that has broken their financial backs.  Simply winning an election cannot put this right.

Finally, though the media is labeled by the Right as a tool of the liberals, certain conservative news sources have become propaganda machines for not just conservatives but ultra-conservatives, who view practically everything as a secret weapon deployed by Liberals.  So if and when the lives of ordinary people begin to improve under a Democratic administration, the conservative media has to be fought carefully and effectively and without letting up.  We must once again make space for facts rather than rhetoric and propaganda.  I think it's going to be a slow, grueling crawl back to sanity.  Vilifying Donald Trump at the eleventh hour will not advance the interests of those who want this, even if it will gain Hillary Clinton a number of votes from women.  We must not rely on the votes of women who have been bludgeoned into reluctantly voting in their own interests; they're going to change their minds very quickly, to yearn for the good old days when they used to enjoy being slapped by their menfolk.  Reasonable women have already made up their minds to try to prevent a Trump presidency.  All this indignation in the media and the Internet will only get in the way of fruitful cooperation in the next few years.

Kay Hemlock Brown

Greetings and Updates

I can easily imagine that the synopsis of the Jana story is not up to my reader's standards of excitement, but believe me when I say that it was probably the most action-filled story I have ever managed to write!  I love the character of the tempestuous Inanna; I only regret that I can't remember the name I had given her originally.  It was much more mellifluous than "Inanna".

This sort of detail doesn't come through in a very brief synopsis, but I had portrayed Inanna and her parents as people of limited means, but enormous dignity and pride.  Despite the young woman's unconfessed infatuation with the young Rider Captain, she tries her hardest to keep their relationship formal.  In the inn of the village at which they anticipate a midnight raid, they occupy separate rooms, and the girl is on the brink of hysteria, wanting to maintain her respectability before the Captain, of whom she is in awe, but also afraid to spend the night alone, for fear that if there is a disturbance in the night, that she would be left behind while "he" runs into the fight.

The plan that she has hatched is to pose as a prostitute across the river, in order to gather information.  Having been raped, she figures, she no longer needs to protect her virtue, and wants to sort of burn herself out in service to the Horse People.  Jana keeps insisting that it isn't necessary, but she finally gets the Rider Captain (Jana) to agree to sleep with her, so that at least one time she can have sex with someone she respects, before she submits to rape.  It is then that she discovers that Jana is a woman, and both Jana and she lie in the darkness, utterly shocked and embarrassed, and uncertain.  I simply have to discover the original manuscript, so that I can give you this chapter, and the few succeeding ones, with which I remember being very pleased at the time.

Let's change the subject.

This is one of the most satisfying times of my life, in no little part because of the pets of one of my friends, with whose family I spend many weekends.  I described earlier my interaction with one of the youngest of them, the little kitten who visits me early in the mornings, and marches up and down my chest!  There are a couple more of them, about whom I will say no more, except that if you have not experienced the affection of pets, you are in for a very pleasant surprise.

At work, and with my few friends, and with my widely scattered family, I am becoming very aware of how fortunate I have been, even if someone else in my circumstances might feel resentful.  I am not a particularly religious person, but at times like this I begin to understand why people are so certain that some higher power is watching over them.  I almost know there is no such higher power, but perhaps my own attitudes and values work together to keep me in this blessed state.  There is so much to deplore: the uncertain state of the electoral process this year, the silliness of so many of our fellow-countrymen whose foolishness had remained hidden thus far, but has now burst out into the open, various men both in uniform and civilians, who have given themselves new license to act on their prejudices and their fear; so many educated people, well off and well established, who have cast off the pretense of public-spiritedness, and have begun to act in a blatantly anti-social way; all these things should conspire to depress me utterly.

But I find inspiration in the kindness I observe in unexpected places, the sweetness of pets who have no axes to grind, the smiles on the faces of students who are simply in a good mood, for a change!  The humor of colleagues; the unexpected rediscovery of a forgotten, excellent activity for the classroom.  I often smirked skeptically when I read of some individuals who experienced what they called inner peace in the storm, but that's exactly what this feels like.  I don't think I need to believe in a supernatural power to explain this; I think the thought-habits of a mostly happy childhood, and the example of mostly well-adjusted parents, all work together to bring this feeling about.  I try not to be heavy-handed in whatever moral values I may put in my writing, but I think it is important to remind ourselves of the goodness of people, even if our experience for a time seems to indicate that good people might be the exception than the rule.  Remember that good people don't often make a big noise.  If you go on noise level alone, you will be misled.

Kay

Jana Episode 19: The Conclusion

[The conclusion was somewhat complicated, and I cannot remember the details in their entirety. Some minor characters suddenly become important, but I can't remember which ones!  Here goes, anyway.]

As Jana and Inanna flee northwards on two horses of the slain mercenaries, they need to get past several groups of the mercenary bandits, at various taverns along the way, and they learn more details about the invasion, and also about a covert action taking place in preparation for the invasion.  They also learn that the King's son has been discovered in the care of a certain important Captain in the army, who is currently with troops in the south.  This could only be a reference to Jana herself, and so somehow Leila and the boy had been discovered by the King, and have been taken to the palace.  Presently, it is discovered that there is a plot to kill the infant by a team of snipers, to demoralize the Horse People, or at least the King.

Jana is shocked, but she manages to stay calm.  But when she reluctantly reveals this to Inanna, she is furious.  Even never having seen the little boy in question, being fiercely protective of everyone, she is now so angry, she races off northward, with Jana chasing her, asking her to be careful.  They run down a roadblock, and Jana has to cover her with her arrows, and when they reach the easiest ford at which to cross the river, there are horsemen chasing after them.  They dismount, and Jana urges greater stealth as Inanna and she lead their horses to the water's edge, trying not to be noticed by the border guards, but as the horses reach midstream, the pursuing guards raise the alarm, and both girls are hit by arrows.  One horse is hurt badly, and dies in the water.  Somehow the horse that Jana is on gets across the river and up the further bank, and Jana barely manages to grab Inanna and get ashore, an arrow in her shoulder, and Inanna too is hurt, and soon the horse stumbles, and they have to walk, expecting to encounter a Rider patrol at any moment.  But they never meet one.  Jana is puzzled by the unprotected state of the border, but they drag themselves and the injured horse to a guardpost that is empty.  Jana binds up Inanna's injury, and then falls exhausted.

Some hours later, Inanna has recovered enough to nurse Jana back to consciousness, and to tend to the horse according to Jana's instructions.  In the wee hours, a patrol comes through, and mistakes Jana and Inanna to be foreigners, since they're dressed as people from the west.  With great difficulty, Jana establishes that she is the legendary Captain Jana.  Apparently the permanent patrols have been withdrawn to the Capital.

Jana is running a high fever.  She explains as well as she can about the plot to assassinate the little boy, but finds it difficult in her fevered state.  The two women are put in a carriage and driven at top speed to the City of the Horse People, just in time to witness an arrow kill Leila, who is walking in the gardens with the little boy.  But someone manages to rescue the baby, and the sniper is attacked and killed, after which there is a major battle at the river.

Too sick to participate in the battle, Jana remains in bed, but all the news coming in indicates that it is going well for the Horse People.  Apparently the citizenry have gotten up the courage to resist the mercenaries, and being attacked on two fronts, the Mercenaries are losing all their battles.

To Jana's surprise, Queen Ione's daughter, Princess Ianthe, has returned to the City of the Horse People.  Inanna, now serious, asks Jana to clarify the relationship between herself and the Princess.  "Why did you stop loving her?" she asks.  Jana really has no good answer; she had merely given up romance for about a year, but then Leila had come back into her life, and they had been companions until Jana had come to the aid of Inanna's village.  And now Leila was dead.

Ianthe visits Jana and Inanna, bringing the baby with her.  The King has asked Inanna Princess Ianthe to marry him; the baby's mother has found another lover, and matters are confused.  We leave the story at the point where Inanna and Jana are bewildered that there seems nothing to prevent them from pledging to each other, if Inanna could tolerate the uncertain life of being the lover of a military woman.

Kay

Jana Episode 18: Behind the Lines with Inanna

Jana, calling herself Janus, now, masquerading as a man, and Inanna [I'm not even sure that was the name I called this character! Still, it had to be something very feminine.  She was nothing if not feminine, and passionate], were marching from village to village southward, along a major road that paralleled the river, a couple of miles west of the border.  Everywhere they stopped for news, they found miserable subdued folk, in deathly fear of the mercenaries, and the young men who had been absorbed into the society of the mercenaries.  Jana made a convincing young man.  Inanna, unfortunately, was feeding her fury at the bandits who had killed her father, raped her mother, and raped her as well, all on the main street of their village.  Her own abusement had not proceeded very far before the bandits had had to flee.  The fellow who was upon her had been beheaded by Jana, which was one reason that she had attached herself to the young Captain.  Inanna's folk were, in the distant past, originally immigrants from this land, and she could speak the language haltingly, but out of desperation, she was getting very fluent in it very quickly.

Inanna soon stumbled on a plan.  She asked Jana to allow her to pose as a prostitute at an inn.  Jana was furious, and absolutely forbade it.  Inanna stared her down, and remarked that it appeared that the young man seemed to imagine himself as having proprietary rights over her.  "We have not sworn to each other, or anything of that sort," she said scathingly.  "I own my body, and if I lie with one of these bandits, and learn more than these ignorant villagers know, that will be a lot more than we have found out over these two days!"  But Jana --- or Janus, now --- was still stubborn.

Inanna put her hands on her hips.  She said she would travel alone.  If Jana showed up, she would simply say that 'he' was an idiot fellow, who would not take "no" for an answer.  Jana could offer to work at the stable, and if Inanna felt like it, she would allow Jana into her room, when she was done with what she needed to do first.

The very first village they came to, Inanna marched up to the innkeeper, and offered to wait tables.  It was quite easy to suggest to him that she could help entertain some of his guests, for a fee.  The first night, she took to her bed a youth brought in by his father or uncle, and softhearted Inanna was moved to be kind to the boy, and when Jana crept upstairs once the boy had left, Inanna was in tears of sorrow because the innocent boy had hated to leave.  The second night, a group of mercenaries had come in, terrorized the inn, and learning about Inanna, decided that they would take turns with her.

Inanna could not get much out of the group leader except that something big was about to take place.  He dressed himself, and called down the stairs for his second in command.  This man was a sadist.  He was very rough with her, and she lost her temper, and killed him with her knife.  Leaning out the window, she signaled for Jana to come up.

Silently, Jana and Inanna threw the body out of the window, and Jana ran down the back stairs.  Jana was feeling fey, and made a weird sound in the courtyard, to entice the bandits to come out.  Inanna, too had hidden near the door, and as each of the bandits emerged, the couple had killed them, and seven bandits were dead.

The innkeeper was horrified.  They will set fire to the inn, he said.  Jana assured him that they would never learn of what happened here.  Some of the men helped to drag the bodies into the woods, and Jana and Inanna took possession of two of the horses, and galloped back up the road.  They had learned that the mercenaries planned an attack on the City of the Horse People the following night.

Kay

Jana Episode 17: Border Wars

The border to the west of the Horse People was an enormous river that flowed northward, and emptied into the sea to the west of Queen Ione's lands.  Between the river and the settled parts of the Horse People's desert lands was an enormous band of forest.  Bands of bandits were reported as crossing through the forest, and raiding the settlements at the edge of the forest.  Receiving news of an enormous band heading for a showdown with the Horse People, Jana's rider group was dispatched, together with several other groups, all under Jana's leadership, and after a two-day battle, and heavy losses on both sides, the enemy bandits tried to haul their dead away, but were pursued back across the forest, and into the river.  The dead they left behind clearly indicated that at least half of the enemy fighters were mercenaries.

Things settled down briefly, and Jana left her troop with her adjutant, and came home for a short break, to see Leila, who pined for her mistress, and the little boy, who was a delightful infant, roaming about the house, getting into everything with a happy smile.  Jana and Leila were fast asleep when there was a banging at the door, and they found a messenger from the troop come to tell Jana that there had been yet another raid on a village. The boy was exhausted, and Jana and Leila helped him recover before Jana headed back south.

With the help of the villagers, Jana set up a warning watch, with young fellows along a chain of trees, watching from in hiding all up and down the river.  That night, there was warning sent along to the Rider camp that a raid was in progress. Jana and her troops were only in time to attack the raiders already trying to get back through the forest.  The village had dead all up and down the main street, and one young woman was lying on the ground, having just been raped, along with her mother.

Jana's words comforted the villagers, and she set the young victims to care for the more elderly victims, promising to return soon, to see how things were getting on.  When she had grabbed a short nap and gotten back, a number of villages had taken things into their own hands, and had formed a sort of spy militia.  The young woman whom Jana had spoken with earlier had lost her mother--the woman had killed herself.  The woman, Inanna, volunteered for the spy network.  It decided that the most likely next target was a village a little to the north.

Inanna had attached herself to the young Rider Captain, who appeared to be a young man.  With a few other members of the spy network, they stayed the early part of the evening in the village inn, and as the attack happened, Jana's riders fell on the bandits, and there was slaughter.  The remnants of the attack force were chased to the river, and it was soon clear that the Horse People would need to cross the river, and see what was happening.

In the night, Inanna discovers that Jana is a woman.  But this discovery only makes her more attracted to the young rider captain, but she is horrified at herself for falling in love with another woman, and furious at Jana for deceiving her.  Inanna is beautiful, and Jana is thoroughly off balance.  Meanwhile, Inanna is seething with vengeance, and wants to go across the river with Jana, and wreak havoc.  She does not know how to fight, and begs Jana to teach her.  The traditional weapon of women of the Horse People is the thrown knife, and under Jana's tutelage, the girl quickly discovers a talent for the thrown knife.

Jana decides to cross the river by herself, to do some spying, and finds herself accompanied by Inanna. Jana argues with Inanna to return home, but she refuses, and pretends that she has lost her mind, as she dances along, throwing her knife at the boles of trees in the forest.  Stripping naked, with their clothes tied in bundles, Jana crosses the river, with Inanna on her shoulders, singing at the top of her voice, despite Jana's entreaties to her to be quiet.  They are intercepted by a border guard who has his arrow aimed at Jana's head.  But after confusing the guard with some doubletalk, Inanna kills him with a knife through his throat.

The pair put their clothes back on, and approach a small town, and the inn of the town.  They discover that the country has been overrun by mercenaries from the far north, the same fellows who had planned to take over Queen Ione's land, headed by the Duke.

Kay

Jana Episode 16: Stefan, Alicia, Leila and Jana

[The previous episode, Episode 15, is here.]

When Stefan finally regained consciousness, as we saw earlier, Penelope's face was the first he saw.  Penelope's mother and Sofia (Queen Ione's personal maid, a girl of about 14, the oldest surviving servant in the Palace) both attested to Stefan (when she had left the room briefly) that it had been Penny who had cared for him in his weeks-long convalescence.

It wasn't long before Stefan and Penelope confessed their love for each other.  They were married in an austere ceremony on the Palace steps, as soon as Stefan was able to walk.  Stefan would never be as strong as he was; the blade had hurt his abdomen, and according to the primitive medicine of the time, they had managed to put him together too slowly to enable the stomach to heal completely.  But his mind was whole, and his legs were whole, but he could not remain standing for long.

Ianthe, meanwhile was beginning to relax in the City of the Horse People, but she could meet Jana only occasionally, and had to be satisfied with spying on the exercises of the riders through a high window.  One day, she begged to be allowed to visit the humble Horse Officer in her home, and was conducted there by Jana herself, and met Jana, and Ole and Eva, her adopted father and mother.  She learned all about how Jana had been abducted from among the warrior women of the north during a raid, and Ole proudly declared that Jana was destined to be a great warrior, despite being a woman.  Jana was, of course, deeply embarrassed by all this, but Ianthe listened, and remembered.

When the time came for Ianthe to return to her people, the bandit raids had increased in frequency, and Jana could not leave her work.  It was natural that Ianthe asked for Ole and Eva to accompany her to Heliopolis.  Once Stefan, Ianthe, Penelope and her mother, were all gathered in Heliopolis, Stefan finally felt comfortable with leading the kingdom, with the able assistance of his sister, and the advice of Ole and Eva.

With her adopted parents gone, Jana was utterly alone.  She was welcome in the palace, but now the King, long a widower, was learning that he missed the company of the lively princess from the north, and Jana tactfully avoided spending too much time in the palace.  Her mind naturally turned to that lovely young woman who had entertained her in the traveling village in which she and Ianthe and their squadron had spent that night.  After a sweep of the eastern border, Jana took her troop up to where the village had been relocated, and when she approached it, Leila saw her from far away, and ran to meet her, joy written all over her face.
"Take me with you, my lady!  Oh, please take me with you!  You are such a sight for Leila's eyes!"
"But what of your beloved mistress Alicia, the chief's daughter?"

Leila's look of joy waned somewhat.  It appeared that, while the chief's daughter had sent for Leila a few times and comforted her in the way of women, the young woman could not forget the princess from the north.  Alicia lusted for Princess Ianthe, and she had begged her father to conduct her to the City of the Horse People.  They had left for the City some weeks before, and the girl had not returned with her father.  She had evidently stayed with the King, and Ianthe.

Jana and her company spent the night, and in the morning, Jana got permission to take Leila into her service.  Permission was given, provided Alicia was informed as soon as possible.  Jana and her troop, with the addition of the gleeful Leila, returned to the City of the Horse People.

Jana made Leila comfortable in the home of her parents, and went to the Palace to greet the King, and inform Alicia, the Chief's daughter, that with her permission, Leila would come to work for Jana.  The Chief's daughter had become even more beautiful in the intervening months, and she seemed to enjoy life at the palace of the King of the Horse People very well.  So Leila set up the home of the Horse Officer to her liking, and to the world they were householder and slave, but in the dark of night they were lovers.

Some time later, when Jana visited the Palace, the Chief's daughter came to her privately, and revealed that she was pregnant with the King's child.  Jana was shocked, but realized that it was natural, because the young woman was tempestuous and lusty, and if the King had asked her, she would have certainly gone to his bed.  "The King must not know!" she said to Jana, her eyes full of alarm.  Jana sighed, and asked what she wanted.  She wanted to be hidden until the child could be delivered, and return to the Palace, as if she had never given birth.  Jana pointed out that the child would be heir to the throne, but Alicia was adamant: she was no mother, and the child should be brought up by someone more responsible than Alicia.  To cut a long story short, Jana arranged for the Chief's daughter to be conducted to Heliopolis, where she knew Ole and Eva would see to the welfare of both mother and child.

Some months passed, and the child was delivered, and Ole insisted that it should be brought to the Horse People, or it could become politically troublesome.  Jana reluctantly agreed to bring up the child.  When Leila saw the child, she loved it so much that Jana realized that this was the best possible arrangement.

[The story continues in Episode 17.]

Kay.

Jana Episode 15

In Heliopolis, Stefan is left holding the fort, with Penelope, and Penelope's mother, and of course Sofia and little Nina.  (Penelope's mother had been brought in for questioning, after Penelope had revealed that she had overheard plotting against the Queen.  Over time, Penelope's mother had become less defiant, and was now supportive of the beleaguered little royal family.)

The Duke, of course, was in the dungeon, and the Duke's son, a hothead, was on house arrest, from where there was daily news of agitation, propaganda against Stefan, and lots of rabble-rousing.  Basically, the Duke and his son were separately seeking a confrontation with Stefan, seeing him as the only one obstructing their right to the throne.

Stefan had gotten a message from the Duke in the dungeon, demanding the right to trial by combat.  At that time, this right could not be denied, and Stefan decided that he would grant it, and that he would face the challenger himself.  (As far as the Duke and the people knew, Stefan was no warrior.  Rumors that he had been tutored in arms by a girl, Jana, had been dismissed with laughter.)

Penelope was completely against the idea of a fight.  But her mother, having learned that Stefan was not completely helpless, reluctantly agreed to support the young prince, a mere boy of fifteen.  The Duke, predictably, was represented by his champion, his son.  When all parties assembled at the field of arms, they were amazed to see that not only was Stefan able to hold his own, but he was the significantly better swordsman.  Unfortunately, when he was delivering the death blow, at the last second the Duke's son was able to get in a slice to the prince's abdomen. The two opponents lay in the dust, one dead, and the other unable to breathe.

Penelope ran screaming down to the arena, and ripping her garment free, bundled it to stanch the prince's wound.  Only then did the people run down to aid the stricken prince. Penelope screamed for medical assistance, and made the surgeons crudely sew up the slashed abdomen, and presently he was lying in a chamber, surrounded by attendants, but Penelope sat by his side, watching the physicians, questioning them, urging them to greater efforts, holding Stefan down when they attempted bolder means for saving the boys, and controlling the spread of poison from the wound.  (At that time, the existence of bacteria was unknown, and the word poison was used to describe all that which had to be controlled, to prevent the spread of the damage that had been caused, and clear the path to recovery.)

Over the weeks, as Stefan lay unconscious, as his temperature returned to normal, signaling the defeat of the spread of poison, it was Penelope who remained faithfully at his side, dressing his wounds, feeding him food and drink, cleaning him off as needed, and hers was the face he saw when he opened his eyes.

Meanwhile, Jana, after a brief period of rest with her parents, was given a squad of her own, and presently became well known for great success in controlling bandit raids from the southeast.  The people of those parts were grateful for the help in securing their herds of horses, and Jana's fame grew.  Few knew that she was a woman; dressed in leather armor, she appeared to be a handsome young man.  As the army recruited younger men, the newcomers of Jana's own squadron were unaware that they were being led by a woman, since she was seldom addressed by name.

Kay

Continuing Jana!

When I first started this Blog, the intention was to serialize the stories I had been writing furiously over many years.  One of the first stories to actually be completed was the story of Jana, which was not updated past Episode 14 on this Blog.  (I can't remember whether I completed it after I started this Blog or before.)  Anyway, I am aghast that I abandoned any readers (not more than about 25 of them, luckily) who never got past that Episode!

Part of the problem is, of course, that back then I wrote everything on paper, and I have moved a couple of times since then, and living alone, I have to manage all my papers myself, and I'm a totally unorganized person.  (At least, that's how I feel; some friends think of me as super organized in things that matter!) Towards the end, I typed the story into my first computer, took it into work in the dead of night, and printed it out in the tiniest print imaginable, and brought it home to read through.  Then I made changes, printed out those, and interspersed the new pages ... you get the idea.  It was a mess, because of the size of the print actually making things much worse than they would have been otherwise.

I can't find the original manuscript, but I remember the story, so I'm going to read Episode 14 real quick, and then relate the remainder of the story.  Be patient if I keep going back to change what I write, because it has been fifteen years since I wrote the original story.  If I do find the original manuscript, you'll get to read it.

I'm going to put a summary of the story thus far right below here, as soon as I finish reading Episode 14.

Kay

Helen On The Run: The Lost Years

I have been getting this story ready to publish for close to a year, but it looks as though it will take at least a year more.  It is fairly long: close to 60 thousand words, and unlike the other Helen episodes it has a definite plot, and a sort of an ending.  True to form, the things I like about it are how it illuminates the character of Helen, and the characters of the children.  By the end of this story, Helen has given birth to her youngest, James, her only natural-born child.  The others, the three girls, are all adopted.  We also see the circumstances that lead to the middle girl, Erin, being taken into Helen's family.  Oh, it is a lovely story, possibly the most likable story of all the Helen episodes, to abuse a word.

Synopsis

Helen and her partner of the moment, Michelle, come under scrutiny from a state agency that oversees the welfare of adopted children, which has been subverted.  Succumbing to pressure from certain conservative citizens, the agency takes the children into custody.  The women are devastated.  It is halfway through the winter semester, and Helen, though sunk deep in depression, cannot bring herself to stop working on her courses, but she gets psychological counseling.  Her friends urge her to travel to Rhode Island to attend a national meeting, at which she presents some work she has been doing.  She meets a young man there, Jeffrey Gibson, whom she invites to Philadelphia on the spur of the moment.  Some weeks later, he takes up the offer, and spends a weekend with Helen and Michelle.

Just as Helen and Michelle are about to give in to total despair, Gena and Alison run away from the foster home, and manage to run back home to Helen, Gena pushing Alison in a stroller.  The women, taken totally by surprise, decide that the best thing to do is for Helen and the children to go into hiding.  The first half of the story is about how Helen, with some interesting help from a wonderful woman named Penny, manage to stay alive, and even give the children a degree of happiness and normalcy.  Helen has gone back into housing construction, as a carpenter and electrician.  Michelle escapes surveillance and joins Helen, but is picked up by the FBI while waitressing, and Helen has a narrow escape.

Helen is pregnant, and as she begins to show, it blows her cover.  Michelle is taken in, and placed in a house in the Sacramento area owned by Helen, presumably as bait for Helen. Helen decides to seek shelter with her mother's family, in St. Paul, MN, where she is unexpectedly offered a teaching job in a private school.  Her pregnancy is a good disguise, but the school administration has taken a serious risk, employing a teacher without proper documentation.  Soon, due to the principal being taken ill, Helen is appointed acting principal, having become very popular with the students and the teachers alike.

It is in the school that one of the most powerful scenes in the story takes place.  It is so beautifully set out that I have a horrible suspicion that I have read it somewhere.  When I recognize the source of the anecdote, I will give credit, but I have only vague ideas of its origins.  Or I shall have to remove it.

Anyway, young James is born, (and we're introduced to James's Dad, Jeffrey,) and during the graduation ceremonies, Helen is hauled off to the lockup.  We're also introduced to the amazing young woman who ends up falling in love with James's Dad.

Of course, the whole thing is a fantasy, even if there are scary elements in it.  Given that Helen is in hiding, with both children, everything happens in the least frightening way, true to the Helen tradition.

Kay

David Eddings: The Belgariad

The American author David Eddings wrote the five-book cycle called The Belgariad around 1984.  Though that's a lot of books to read--and each one is several hundred pages long--they're a fun read.  The whole thing is set up like a Greek mythic drama, with prophesies, a pantheon of gods, a creation story, a magical artifact, and a seven-thousand year old history that goes back into dim legend.  In some ways it is reminiscent of Tolkien's universe, but that's inevitable; Tolkien was a pioneer, and a brilliant one, and his writing sheds an enormous shadow.  Eddings's work is scaled a little smaller, but as a result is just a little more readable.  Tolkien's relentlessly heroic voice is absent, and so is that of the pseudo-historian; instead there is the slightly mischievous voice of the old storyteller.  (The historian's voice is not entirely absent, but it's a more modern historian, and not an academic from Oxford.)

The point of view is most decidedly masculine.  Eddings is an uncle, with all his avuncular foibles, occasionally taking a brief peek through a keyhole, or a sly smile at a young woman.  I have read two of Eddings's epic cycles, and in both he describes romance refreshngly more like a 19th century novelist than like an Arthurian legend.  He likes small, cute women, who are determined and powerful in their own way, though in the Belgariad, a central figure is the sorceress Polgara, who is portrayed as statuesque, and almost stiflingly competent, but who manages to earn our affection nevertheless.  Still, the stereotypes that Eddings evokes, though he stretches these molds relentlessly, are still those of a masculine viewpoint.  Having read books by male authors for a lifetime, I'm not frustrated; you have to take them as they come.

Trying to find some images to accompany this post, I searched under Belgariad on the Internet, and I was surprised to see how enthusiastic Belgariad fans were for a movie!  Just for fun, some of them have begun to illustrate their perceptions of the various characters on DeviantArt, and others have actually gone as far as casting the movie.

One choice for Polgara, the sorceress, and daughter of the senior sorcerer Belgarath the Ancient, was Catherine Zeta-Jones.  This is an excellent choice; I had never thought of her, even while I was trying to imagine the character for myself.  I imagined someone a little taller, with towering dignity, someone like Sigourney Weaver, but a lot more intense.  Sigourney Weaver's eyes are just too gentle, even when she's trying to be pushy.  The second choice was Lucy Lawless, of Xena fame.  She would be just perfect, except that I have never seen her act with a kid, and half of what Polgara does is to keep the hero, young Garion in line, and the young princess, CeNedra under control.  Unfortunately, too, Polgara is not an action heroine, which is something that Lucy does beautifully, but had to be a sort of strict aunt, which Catherine Z can do pretty well.  I also think the role of Belgarath the Ancient would be perfect for Michael Douglas, which is sort of tragic.

One of the choices for our hero, Garion, is Alex Pettifer, of whom I had never heard before today.  This guy is perfect; he is just the image in my mind of Garion, no doubt influenced very strongly by the terrible covers of the paperbacks.  In contrast, the selection for Princess CeNedra is Emma Stone, which sort of works, but sort of doesn't.  There's just too much humor in Emma's face, and though she could probably portray someone who's full of self-importance, I don't think she could be convincing as CeNedra.  It has to be a someone whose personality is that of a cartoon character, which gradually becomes human, and I can't think who could do it.  Actually, it strikes me that Renee O'Connor, of Xena fame could have pulled it off in her distant youth, but where to find someone of that sort, of the age of about 15?

Ian McKellen had been selected for the central role of Belgarath the Ancient.  But the author represents him as someone considerably rougher, coarser, probably deliberately intending to make a contrast with the Gandalfs, Obi-Wans and Dumbledores of contemporary epic movies.  Similarly, the role of Barak, the northern warrior who occasionally turns into a bear, was given to a sort of hunky young man who is all wrong.  Somebody on the lines of Bryn Terfel would be more appropriate, though it isn't a singing role!  The characters are numerous, and delicious; that alone ensures that the pentalogy has the ability to hold a reader.  Not a page goes by but I think to myself: I would have written this passage differently.  But, likewise, very often I have to stop and marvel at how well he has pulled of a passage.  He writes as if he were Belgarath the Ancient; something that does not make a whole lot of sense.  I have an idea about what it feels to be so very old, and at least of moderate intelligence.  And Belgarath does not behave or speak or think like a seven thousand year old person, though every once in a while he does protest that, look, he's old, and certain things don't surprise him anymore.  Nothing could surprise a 7000 year old man, and a 6980 year old woman (or whatever).

For those who have not read the books, please do.  No fantasy cycle deserves to be read more.  I haven't read Game of Thrones, and I have a queasy feeling that I could not enjoy it if I did.  But the Belgariad is a whole lot of innocent fun.  For those who have read the books, even one of them, searching on the Internet for images related to the story is very entertaining.

P.S.  For any readers from the British Isles, my sympathies are with you.  It is a sorry thing to have happened, that pettiness has triumphed over reason.  But things will invariably settle down, though it is difficult to tell what action the private citizen can take to help things along at this time.  At least, to know that we across the ocean are sending good thoughts your way may help give you a little hope.

Kay

Just Saying Hi, and other fabulous and essential topics

Not a lot has changed since I last posted to the Blog.  Of course, Donald Trump has continued to bluff his Whatever-ish way through the campaign season, and at this point it appears as though Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump will face off.  (But anything can happen; a lot of what goes on before the official nominations are over seems --at least to me-- as behind the scenes, and under the counter.  When it comes right down to it, the really important decisions are not for the general public to participate in.  So, is it a democracy, really?)

Anyway, as I see it, the important thing is not to let the bastards grind us down.  If we dwell too much on how powerless we are, we lose the motivation to do even the little that we're permitted to do, and that little can surprise the powers-that-be, and make them resort to desperate measures, as happened in the elections of 2000, where the Supreme Court had to thoroughly discredit themselves, and give the Presidency to George Bush, Jr, who was ultimately made the fall guy for the entire Iraq War Debacle.  (And a better fall guy we could never have found.)  So I'm focusing on my writing, and re-reading my favorite books, and such things as make me feel better than watching the news would make me feel.

I reported to you that I was re-working the Sleeping Beauty story with a lesbian angle (not a new idea; there is at least one other attempt), in the spirit of an erotic ballet, in literary form.  But that has come to a halt; I don't have a sufficiently uninterrupted period of time by myself, for various reasons, and so I just can't get any momentum going.

Several years ago, when I had left the --rather fantastic, at that point-- Helen story aside (because a friend of mine had encouraged me to write a story that had at least a slight chance of being read by people other than just me) I began to write Alexandra over a little more than two years, which meant that I had forgotten where I had left Helen.

After Alexandra was finished, I began to think of myself as a possibly mainstream writer, in the sense that the books had an iota of a chance of being read.  So I decided to write a Science Fiction story, based on the character of Helen.  In this story, Helen, disappointed in love, decides to join a space expedition, and is put aboard in hibernation on an enormous space ship.  After writing close to a thousand pages of that, I went back to Helen (which was still on actual paper) and discovered to my horror that I had made Helen have almost total amnesia, and Helen had been reduced to a simple woman whose memories stopped around the age of about 12.  Somehow I had shut this development away in my mind, and had forgotten it.  The Helen story was quite interesting, but there was no way that that Helen, who was an amnesiac and had lost all her musical skills, could be this Helen.

Obviously, I was not going to explain all that in a foreword to the Science Fiction story.  So I decided that these would be two different Helens, and arranged in the Summer of 2014 that I would publish the completed story in the Summer of 2015.  So in July of last year, I was furiously writing the ending of The Music of the Stars, which the science fiction story was called, and finally finished it a few days before it was to be released.

The Music of the Stars is a little different from a typical Science Fiction novel.  The story is not driven by dramatic scientific facts and events.  The issues are more intimate, and small-scaled.  Some of the topics I addressed are:
What is cloning really like?  Helen discovers that a certain person on the ship had cloned herself, and then the spaceship leaders persuade Helen to submit to cloning.  It isn't a dramatic thing; they create a embryo entirely of Helen's DNA, and place it in her womb, and she delivers it naturally.
What would it be like for a person to relate to his or her clone?  There are five clones in the story (one of them a combination of two people), and they are all reasonable, plausible, interesting individuals, in some ways like their "Originals", for lack of a better word, and in other ways, unique.
What is the future of various endocrine diseases?  Helen is diabetic, but cloning makes it possible to change the DNA in a minor way, to ensure that the clone does not inherit the disease.
What is it like to attempt to colonize a planet that is essentially an arid wasteland?  This has been addressed countless times, for instance in Dune.  But in those novels, the universe is so far removed from our own experience that the problems are solved in completely fantastic ways.  In contrast, I had approached it more in line with what we saw in The Martian, which, if you remove a lot of the drama, could easily happen this year or the next.  To my mind, that kind of low-tech extrapolation of our own experience has its own charm, quite different from the charm of the fantastic futures depicted in Star Trek, for instance.  It seems to be clear that most authors are not really interested in arid planets, too different from Earth.
How would kids react to participating in space exploration?  Unlike books in which little children are essentially background props, in Music, kids are front and center, mostly because I love kids and I'm a total pushover.
How will the process of hibernation interfere with and affect human relationships?  This is a little difficult to explain: to be specific, what if Helen is put into hibernation, and brought out of hibernation in 20 years?  Her friends would be 20 years older.  How will that affect their relationship? In most science fiction stories, this sort of thing either does not happen, or the hibernation is for so long that it is not an issue, or there is no interest in the phenomenon.

It is not that I set out to address these issues.  I just start the novel off, and then I allow the story to take the most natural course.  This does make for stories where the plot is not intensely dramatic.  But to my mind, everything that happens is far more plausible.  Unfortunately, high plausibility is not a hallmark of great fiction, so I have to resign myself to the fact that what I write is not going to be choice reading for the vast majority of people!

The most humiliating thing of all is that when I read fiction, I internalize the idiom, in some cases, so completely, that I suspect my writing will be derivative.  There are entire scenes that rolled off my fingers so effortlessly that I have the horrific feeling that I have read the entire episode somewhere.  Well, there's nothing to be done, until and unless I recall where it came from, in which case I have to either change it, or confess that I have been heavily influenced by X, whatever X is.

The last few days, I have been reading Music of the Stars, and I was startled by the ending.  Confessedly, the ending is weak; the story sort of ends a little abruptly.  But what startled me most were the details.  I was shocked to find that I did not recognize entire chapters; it was as if the thing had been written by someone else!  I'm growing old, I suppose, and it is thoroughly disconcerting to read my own writing and be amazed that I could write so well (if you would forgive me; as someone once said: it is not that the dancing dog dances well, but that it dances at all).

Ultimately, both the strength and the weakness of the story are the lovable characters in it.  I love each and every one of them (except a few of the older men, who literally are furniture and props!  But even they are --given that they are guys, and so limited in their lovability-- lovable in their own pathetic way) are characters whom I find lovable.  From Cass Hutchinson-Holt, the first character who appears, and who lives through most of the story, to Cass's little granddaughter, Summer Levin, the people are attractive to me.  And that's why I invented them; these stories provide me with people whom I could care about.

Kay.

Olivia Newton-John

Olivia Newton-John has one of the most magical voices I have ever heard.  I recently read somewhere that Hugh Jackman had confided to Olivia Newton-John that, when he was in school, he had a photo of her pasted on the inside of his desk, and kissed it every morning.  Well, Hugh Jackman, it could easily have been me.

Not only did ONJ have an angelic voice, but she also had an angelic countenance, and when the movie Xanadu came out, in my opinion she was at the height of her beauty.  I think she had suffered a few years of emotional setbacks, and a little of that pain was reflected in her eyes.  But in the movie, she flirted and laughed with her co-star (let me look it up ...) Michael Beck, as well as with Gene Kelly, and one could easily believe that she was divine, in a sort of 1980s way!  And the absolute pinnacle of her divinity was the song Magic, which was a no. 1 hit for her.

Here is the video on YouTube

Just close your eyes --some of the horrible style of 1980 still comes through the photograph-- and listen to her voice!  This is a performance of a lifetime.  Truly this woman was charmed.

Kay.

Jane in Canada

"Jane" is the book, of all the books I have published, that has been downloaded the most.  The biggest reason for its popularity, as far as I can guess, is that it is free.  But I greatly enjoyed writing it, and it is a lot of fun, not in the sense of being funny or exciting, but that there are several interesting characters, including a pair of twins, and a cute fourteen-year-old.

In addition, Jane is a sort of superhero.  Quite by accident, Jane attended a Metal Fetish convention in Baltimore, and acquired a reputation as a masked personality called Scorpia.  It was initially a lot of fun; she always wore a mask, of course, and disguised her voice, and soon she was getting requests for photographs which people wanted to feature in various commercials.  Jane established a website, with the help of her brother Artie, and after a while, she was being interviewed on various TV shows and radio shows.

At any rate, the book Jane starts at the point where Jane has tragically lost two girlfriends on 9/11, and shortly afterwards, and she has a lover who has been diagnosed with HIV.  We watch as the two of them face the problems of AIDS, and the girl dies, surrounded by Jane's family.

Jane is shattered, but her friends help her to carry on, in particular, two young girls who posed for her; Jane was a photographer.  And Jane is introduced to a supermodel, Gillian, who becomes Jane's closest friend.  The rest of the book is about how Jane, Gillian, and Gillian's twin sister, Angela, become Jane's sort of family in New York City, and their various little adventures.  The book ends with Jane getting involved with a new friend, Lisa Love, a reformed glamour model, who has the hots for Jane.  In fact, Lisa Love has the hots for both Jane, and Scorpia, not realizing that they are one and the same.

I just uploaded to Smashwords the further adventures of Jane and Lisa Love.  Entitled Jane on Holiday, the story goes as follows.  It is the middle of a heat wave across the US, and Jane and Lisa sneak off to a vacation cabin in a resort in the hills of British Columbia.  This story is rated at least R, so be warned.  On the other hand, if purple prose is all you're interested in, you might be disappointed.  I'm a sentimental slob, and my stories get moderately mushy.

Politics from Kay Brown

I know: you have other sources for your political opinions, and this is the last place you look for that sort of thing!  Anyway, I offer this to you, and then I will keep quiet.

Our family is sort of at the lower edge of Middle Class, which you can easily gather from reading any of the stories I write.  You can also gather that most of the satisfying elements in those stories come from interactions between people of different classes and backgrounds.  I have been deeply unhappy with Donald Trump's essay into politics, and for a long time I shied away from watching video of his speeches.  Anyway, this post is not an attempt to persuade anyone to frustrate Donald Trump's attempt to be elected President.  Whatever will happen will happen; I for one will not vote for him.

But we are seeing a phenomenon we have to take seriously; there is a swath across America of poor white people whom we have always viewed with annoyance and frustration.  They have never understood the dynamics of the economic stratification that lies mostly above them.  They only know that, of the underdogs of the political process, Blacks and minorities have an unfair share of power.  Even women have more power.  For more than two centuries these folks have been pushed further and further into the dust, and they are baffled and angry.

They have, intermittently, been subject to Marxist ideas, but they're deeply suspicious of these clever college kids who're throwing all this propaganda at them.  They're sure that if they go the route of voting the way they're being encouraged, they will end up being the losers.  The only language they understand is the put-down rhetoric of racism.  In a recent piece in Stir magazine, a writer traces the origins of the suspicion of these poor whites back to the early colonial days, when wealthy landowners actually fomented the distrust between poor whites and black slaves in order to disrupt the emergence of a dangerously unified underclass.

Having read that article, watching a Trump video, or a quotation from Trump, or a report about Trump makes a whole new kind of sense.  You can even watch Trump supporters at a rally explaining why they support him, despite the complete lack of meaningful principles in his essentially one-man campaign.

The inanity of the utterances of Trump supporters, their grammar, their syntax, their lack of logic, their stereotypes, their world view, their social principles, their paranoia, all suddenly makes sense.  And to think: these are our fellow-citizens.  But few or none of them avail themselves of the various aspects of the social safety-net that is available to urban Blacks.  They keep away from any sort of Government "hand-out" because of being unwilling to identify with Blacks, and hating the thought of associating closely with them.  I can imagine that they hate even entering an office that might be staffed by a Black or minority, or even worse, a Mexican.

And this is my point: no matter what happens in this election, this sector of our citizenry must be brought into our society.  Their faults appear to be the fault of foolishness and lack of intelligence, but an enormous proportion of what holds them back is education.  For years I thought that the shortcomings of US education were greatly exaggerated.  But we're talking about a different sort of education: the broadening of the mind that has little or nothing to do with formal schooling, and everything to do with awareness of the wider society.  Not just video footage of migrant workers, but some opportunity to interact in a positive way with people outside their immediate neighbors.  I can't see how it can be done, but as long as their insularity is allowed to continue, they will be a festering wound, and my heart goes out to their kids, who will inevitably absorb the prejudices of the parents for lack of alternatives.  It is no wonder that they view practically everything about the modern world with fear.  Donald Trump assuages their fears simply by not talking about anything substantive, except to assure these ones that he hates what they hate just as much, and that he has a plan.

If Donald Trump does get into power, and he betrays the best interests of these foolish innocents, he will be truly cursed.  I hope he realizes that there are eyes watching him that do not want to see him adding to his power and his wealth by crushing his blind followers.

Kay

Does Transgender Phobia move people to Pass Vicious Laws?

State Laws requiring anyone who uses a public restroom to use the restroom designated for those of the "correct" gender (namely that on the restroom-user's birth certificate) have been passed recently in North Carolina.  (In fact, I believe that's the only state that has this sort of law.)  The media is full of opinions from self-declared Progressives (among whom I counted myself) that these sorts of laws are motivated by hate, fear and suspicion.

Quite honestly, most laws have support from a variety of kinds of people, all supporting it for different reasons.  In this case, at least some of those supporting "Correct Restroom" legislation must be doing so for genuine reasons.  Half the women I know would love to go into a male restroom.  In fact, stories about intrepid female reporters who invade the precincts of the men's locker rooms after a football game are numerous, though I suppose it is easy for a gal to get a voluntary invitation into a testosterone-filled locker room!  But it seems to me that some progressives are deliberately turning a blind eye to the possibility that some users of restrooms are unhappy about even the possibility of someone of what they consider the wrong gender using it with them.  So far, most of those who are nervous about people whom they consider men to be using the restroom with them seem to be women.  But those making the most noise about transphobia and hate also seem to be women.  So we have, undoubtedly, a degree of bullying from women who are intolerant of those who prefer not to have "guys" sharing their restrooms with them.  And we have some bullying from women who couldn't care less about who is in the women's room with them (supported by the men who love them).

It is becoming very clear that progressives, or those who are progressive on this one point, who pride themselves on "not being prudes," do have a tendency to take up a bullying tone when it comes to legislation that they want to oppose, or push through.  It could easily suggest that progressives tend to be bullies on other issues as well, which upsets me.

I believe that anyone who objects to sharing a restroom with anyone else based on a gender issue is justified.  I would side--at this point in history--with those who oppose the opposition of restroom sharing based solely on race or national origin, or something that has been settled culturally.  Transgender individuals (and their support groups) would dearly love to consider that transsexuals have been completely accepted in society, but unfortunately this is not the case, and these laws are testing to what extent transsexuals are accepted.

I hope that the fact that I, as an author, enthusiastically support transgender roles (if not actual gender modification, at least not yet,) will convince my readers that I am not approaching this issue from a position of hate.  (Remember: non-support does not equal hate.  Those who take the "if you don't support us then you hate us" line are indulging in cynical rhetoric.  Progressives used to chant: If you're not part of the solution, then you're part of the problem."  I reluctantly tolerated this foolishness at one time because I believed in what those progressives were fighting for.  But now I have to put my foot down: just because this so-called "Transphobic" legislation makes conservatives happy is not a good reason for opposing it.

Having said that, the way in which it has been proposed (or made law) is cynical.  The question is not whether anyone should be permitted to use any public restroom, but rather whether anyone should have the right to privacy.  Now, if anyone were to demand a restroom to themselves because they did not want to use a restroom together with those of the wrong race, we would be upset.  But that battle has been fought, and culturally we have moved on.  But, you see, we can now provide totally private restrooms. Planes have them.  Restaurants have them. Hospitals have them. We can accommodate any level of privacy.  Why must we force anyone to use a communal restroom?

So, rather than force people to produce their birth certificates, which strikes me as wrong-headed in the extreme, we should permit anyone who is suspicious of their fellow-restroom-users to use a unisex single-user restroom.  If they balk at that, then we will have to address that problem.

Kay.

Author's Note: Why I begin writing a story, and how it goes its own way

I have just begun writing a new story, for a very specific reason, only to realize that I've tried to do this before, and it never goes the way I want it to go!

Before I talk about this latest story at length, I want to take an overview of the stories I have written, or begun to write.  (Most of these are published on Smashwords.)

Helen.  This is a story of a woman, from her mid-teens, to her early forties, and is a 2500-page saga, episodes from which are being published as a series.  Helen is my Galatea, a woman I created in my image of a girl with perfect imperfections, and so is a rather unusual entry in this list.  Helen is a multi-talented artist, but principally a musician, the musician that I wished I were.

Alexandra.  This was initially intended to be a paean to athleticism.  Alexandra was supposed to be a fighter queen, but it evolved into a tortured love story, with an ending that might not satisfy some readers: the estranged couple is reconciled.

Jane.  This started out as my exploration of the world of sleaze.  I was very much into porn and erotica when I wrote Jane, but I found that describing photographs was a lot less satisfying than looking at them.  But Jane gradually began to become a girl with a very distinctive personality, even if it was low-key.  Somehow, several tragedies struck at the same time, and Jane became more about being a human being than about sex and sensuality.

Prisoner!  This was the second story set in a Bronze Age in a parallel universe.  (The first one was actually finished on paper, but never transcribed, and now I can't find some pages of the manuscript.)  The story is essentially a lesbian love triangle.

That takes care of the stories that have been published, even if in an incomplete form.  But I've always wanted to write an intensely erotic story involving two young girls in love, with more graphic sex than in any of my stories that have made it to "print".  I love to torture myself with the thought of bringing one of these stories to completion, but they remain barely begun.

Heather and Alison.  This is set in an alternate universe that looks very much like parts of India, despite the name of the story.  It is a love story between two girls, one of whom chooses a monastic life, but who is thrust into political life by various historical forces.

Legs.  This was intended to be a college romance between two girls, one of whom is of Thai origin, while the other is an athletic Midwestern American girl from a highly religious family.  I had subconsciously wanted to make this into an erotic story, but the philosophical aspects are getting in the way.  I think it is going to be a story where everything does not go right, and where the couple is sorely tested, and comes through, even if not with flying colors.  Here, too, there is a musical thread: both girls discover that they are string players (violin and viola).

Julie and Karen.  The title is tentative.  Julie and Karen are twenty-somethings, who have married each other's brothers.  But Julie takes under her wing a young woman who is being abused by her boyfriend, but it turns out that the young man is homicidal, and the trio find themselves on the run.  I wanted to make it a story about ballet, but it has been stalled for a number of years.  Karen has always been attracted to Julie, both physically and simply as a friend.  For fear of alienating her, Karen continues to be cool.  The plan is that they have to live in hiding (a familiar theme in my stories!), and Karen has to join a ballet company in a small town, and as Julie watches the company rehearse, unfamiliar feelings for Karen are born in Julie's breast.

The Meadow.  In the Helen story, which was written over several years, Helen finds herself experimenting with computer-assisted animation.  (This is using software to help with creating an animated feature.)  Helen is driven by similar impulses as I am, understandably, and she wanted to create an animated Sleeping Beauty ballet, where both Sleeping Beauty, and her "Prince Charming" were girls.  Only, she wanted there to be a large amount of nudity in it, even if simply drawn nudity, so that many of the ballet scenes were nude ballet.  The Meadow is simply a literary version of this nude ballet.  I want it to be highly erotic, but innocent at the same time.  So far, the two protagonists have just met, and with great restraint, I'm trying not to let it become one long sex orgy.

Starting a Story
Unlike the majority of authors, I start a story with a rough idea of how it will go.  A very rough idea.  Most of what goes into it at this point is the setting: the circumstances, the place, the personalities, and a few events to start things off.

By this time, I have in my mind a good idea of what my characters are like, and then the crazy thing happens: new characters enter the story, and gently influence its direction.  These stories are so real to me that I find it very difficult indeed to force the story to go in a particular direction.  So I helplessly ride along, and somehow the stories end up being quite unique.  It may partly be that I have lived an unusually eventful life, by which I mean that I have been a spectator of some pretty crazy things.  Many of the stories I begin, intending them to be erotica, become mainline stories, because none of my characters are content to be purely sexual creatures.  The one that comes closest is Helen, and she's the most tortured heroine of all.

So, it's not that I'm a prude, but what makes people attractive to me are their minds.  As I fall in love with my own characters, I begin to focus more on what they're saying and thinking rather than their surface beauty, and the physical aspect of their relationship with each other tends to take a back seat.  If I decide that I'm not going to publish a story, at least the pressure I feel to appear to be a high-minded author will be absent, and I can allow myself to let it all hang loose!

Kay