I'm falling desperately in love with a dog!
It's a female, and she belongs to a friend. She has declared that the dog belongs to me, too, but ... Anyway, I just have to blog about this sweetheart.
She is very old, and various estimates put her age at between fourteen and sixteen years. But she has the loveliest eyes, and beautiful coloring, and a lot of gracefulness in her moves. Of course, she's rickety, and her sight is weak, and her hearing is gone, and she's mostly interested in begging for food all the daylight hours, but, oh! I just want to hug her all the time!
So whenever I visit, this dog is hanging out in the kitchen, getting underfoot. (When I visit, most of the time we're fixing something to eat, so the dog follows her nose straight to the action. Now, by a process of association, she just comes over on spec.) My friend goes nuts, and yells at the dog, and when that doesn't work (the dog pretends not to hear, but it's clear to anyone that she's getting yelled at, and she's not that blind) my friend puts some furniture across the entrance to the kitchen area, to fence the dog out.
She just loves to go on a walk. When my friend puts on her sneakers, the dog comes and stands close, watching her intently. When her leash is finally pulled out, she prances around, impatient to get going! There is another dog, about a quarter of her age, a mere pup, but he's enormous, close to eighty pounds of pure muscle. He's rather a lunk, really, even if he is lovable and good natured. When an excursion is about to happen, the bigger dog gets so rambunctious that he often knocks the older one down, and gets a surly snarl from her. That was about a year ago; now she just staggers back, and keeps out of his way with a frown.
Once we set out, the older dog has the greatest grin on her face, and continues to grin until she's exhausted, or until she's back home. Meanwhile the big male dog is straining at the leash, his nose to the ground, trying to extract every bit of olfactory information from the route we're traversing. I don't know whether he's bright enough to make sense of all that information, but he's certainly sniffing it all up. And, of course, he has to pee on every significant post and shrub we come across.
The household also has two cats, who are very interesting. One is a middle-aged male stripey cat, with most amazingly beautiful eyes you ever saw. The other is a dainty little white princess, about half his age. A college friend was of the opinion that cats were barely about a tenth as intelligent as dogs, and I have to agree; cats are not aware of the moods of people at all. When they hop up and want to be affectionate, it is nothing to do with you; it is something that she decides to do all by herself. If you're upset with her, and not ready to play, they're surprised, and scurry off to get out of your way. In contrast, dogs have made a study of you, and know your mental state intimately.
I suppose there are extraordinary cats who know when you're down, and try to cheer you up. But I think that's more the exception than the rule.
A couple of times, as we were setting out, one of the cats wanted to come along, too! My friend was not confident about their ability to come home again, so we have to go back in the house, and shut the cats up, to prevent them from following! It was funny to watch them marching along behind us as we first set out! It seems almost certain that they can sniff their way back, but we didn't want to take the risk.
So I'm visiting fairly often, just to see the "critters," as she calls them. This could go somewhere.
Kay
Tuesday, January 26, 2016
Tuesday, January 5, 2016
My Fiction
When I first started writing, I was doing it for entertainment, and out of boredom. It might sound silly, but I was creating companions for myself. (I've explained most of that elsewhere, so I need not go into it again.) But, as I have said, some friends discovered my secret, and soon I was confronted with my stuff being read by, well, other people. At first it was just my friends, and only two or three of them. But a few years later, when I discovered e-books, the potential for a larger audience was suddenly very real.
Being a teacher, and not just of necessity, but because I just need to teach, I couldn't just tell a story, and leave it there. I'm ashamed to say that I wasn't just interested in entertaining my readers.
What did I want to do, other than tell a good story? Firstly --and don't take this the wrong way-- I'm not really good at dreaming up stories. What I think I'm good at, is imagining people. (They're mostly like me; that can't be avoided. Any writer who thinks any of her characters have not an atom of her own personality in them is just delusional. Some authors are just better at hiding the fact that their characters are an aspect of themselves.) And I'm good at imagining things happening to my characters. But I'm not good at the architecture required to make an overarching plot. That's just -- well, I can't do it.
Pretty soon, though, I found myself wanting to portray lesbian love, specifically, the satisfaction of lesbian love. Even more specifically, the pleasure of love between women apart from sexual satisfaction. To be honest, I have so little sexual experience that I have to use my imagination to the point of my brain getting overheated to depict even the least satisfactory physical love.
You have to bear in mind that, at the time I was beginning to write (and the time at which most of the writing was completed, really; all this was written back in 2001, 2002; I just polished the stuff up to get it published) love between women was still a threatening subject to most women. Finding out that one of their close friends was a lesbian, or bisexual, was almost a frightening thing--no, it was a frightening thing-- to most women. Certainly, straight women were thoroughly unhappy with finding out that a lifelong friend was lesbian; but more surprisingly, lesbian women were put completely off balance. It was not uncommon (and still isn't, in some circles) for a lifelong closet lesbian to rail against same-sex marriages, and the stupidity of the Supreme Court, and so on.
The reason for this was that the dynamics of interpersonal relationships back a decade or so ago, and certainly in the last century, and even more in the previous century, the dynamics were distorted by the need to keep secret. Older people probably have a vague understanding that the need to show the world a false heterosexual (or non-sexual, in the case of Catholic Priests) face drove even very moral individuals to behave in terrible ways. So when a typical person learned that someone was gay or lesbian, in the old days, it was under the most horrific circumstances: the person had usually been caught molesting a child, or the person had been discovered to have entertained a series of people of the wrong sex in their homes.
I set out to portray female lovers as affectionate, responsible, moral (for the most part; not entirely so in the case of Helen) people. They were loving to everyone around them, not just to their partners; they were affectionate in the usual way to young people; they were not predators (again, for the most part), they were embarrassed by the usual things: being discovered in a deception, being verbally abused just for who they were, feeling an inappropriate attraction to a married person, being the target of a crush by a student.
Being Christmastime, I listen to a lot of Christmas music, and read a lot of my Christmas stories, and get almost insane pleasure at how satisfyingly I wrote many of those stories. I'm not a believer; I thought I ought to say that to avoid deceiving my more religious readers. I never have been, even as a child. I loved to imagine the events of the First Christmas, but even as a child, I realized that it was a myth. (A myth, in my mind, is a sort of averaging of significant experiences, and responses to events, distilled into a story, to create a specific attitude in the listener. In the case of Jesus--who I'm convinced was an historical figure, even without sufficient evidence--it probably was to communicate the bewilderment of his family by his life path and his actions. He acted so contrarily to conventional wisdom that they were impelled to say that he was not really their child, and it was a short step from there to ascribe a divine origin for him. Self-sacrifice was an idea that was very slow in coming to the Western World, or to any civilized people. Women knew it well, but it was considered inappropriate behavior for a man.
Just last night, I was reading the episode from the Helen saga, in which she watches a collage of "Best Of" Messiah performances, and I was practically swooning over a paragraph here and there. Helen's last sweetheart, Marissa, a woman about ten years younger than Helen, home-schooled and sheltered to an unbelievable degree, is frustrated by Helen's chronic depression, ever since Marissa's mother died, and Helen announces her retirement in a fit of anger. Meanwhile, Helen had, a couple of years before, disguised herself as an actress and dancer, a completely fictional person, with a fake passport and everything, and acted in three movies. In the third, she had starred alongside a lovely Indian girl in a lesbian action-adventure, only to find that the girl was the sister of an old friend, Lalitha. But being in disguise, Helen could not reveal herself to the girl, so the young Indian falls in love with this person that Helen was pretending to be.
Shortly afterwards, the young Indian girl meets Helen as Helen, and to Helen's relief, does not connect Helen with her actress crush at all. Somehow, knowing that she had been "someone else" when they had met and sort of fallen in love, enables Helen to be cool.
Of course, the girl eventually, over a year or so, finds out. She is initially bitter, but now she knows Marissa, and she realizes that Helen just cannot be her lover; the homes of too many of her friends would be jeopardized. But she comforts Helen when the latter tries to get through the Christmas season somehow, despite being reminded at every turn that she has fallen out of favor with the Christmas choral music establishment. Comfort in an emotional sense entirely; it seems to me tenderness and kindness is infinitely more romantic than "getting it on." Perhaps I should have been a writer for soap operas.
Star Wars: The Force Awakens
Well, I saw this on December 17th, in a moderately full theater. It was a lot of fun (even if the masked Darth Vader like figure seemed a little silly to me). Daisy Riddle (Rey) was delightful, though I can't for the life of me think why so many new actors need to be New Zealanders or Australians. I think the US public has an insane fascination for foreign accents, in particular, Australian / New Zealander accents.
Minor Spoiler Alert: the movie also presents a Storm Trooper as a human being; about time, too. In wartime, people try to discourage any attempt to humanize the enemy, but to endure more than six movies without a look behind the mask of a Storm Trooper can only trivialize the military aspects of the saga. Even Tolkien resorts to portraying his enemy forces as subhuman orcs, to make it easier for readers to accept the idea of massacring them. Jane Rowling has her Dementors. But at this stage of the game, perhaps it is time that the soldiers had a face.
Kay
Being a teacher, and not just of necessity, but because I just need to teach, I couldn't just tell a story, and leave it there. I'm ashamed to say that I wasn't just interested in entertaining my readers.
What did I want to do, other than tell a good story? Firstly --and don't take this the wrong way-- I'm not really good at dreaming up stories. What I think I'm good at, is imagining people. (They're mostly like me; that can't be avoided. Any writer who thinks any of her characters have not an atom of her own personality in them is just delusional. Some authors are just better at hiding the fact that their characters are an aspect of themselves.) And I'm good at imagining things happening to my characters. But I'm not good at the architecture required to make an overarching plot. That's just -- well, I can't do it.
Pretty soon, though, I found myself wanting to portray lesbian love, specifically, the satisfaction of lesbian love. Even more specifically, the pleasure of love between women apart from sexual satisfaction. To be honest, I have so little sexual experience that I have to use my imagination to the point of my brain getting overheated to depict even the least satisfactory physical love.
You have to bear in mind that, at the time I was beginning to write (and the time at which most of the writing was completed, really; all this was written back in 2001, 2002; I just polished the stuff up to get it published) love between women was still a threatening subject to most women. Finding out that one of their close friends was a lesbian, or bisexual, was almost a frightening thing--no, it was a frightening thing-- to most women. Certainly, straight women were thoroughly unhappy with finding out that a lifelong friend was lesbian; but more surprisingly, lesbian women were put completely off balance. It was not uncommon (and still isn't, in some circles) for a lifelong closet lesbian to rail against same-sex marriages, and the stupidity of the Supreme Court, and so on.
The reason for this was that the dynamics of interpersonal relationships back a decade or so ago, and certainly in the last century, and even more in the previous century, the dynamics were distorted by the need to keep secret. Older people probably have a vague understanding that the need to show the world a false heterosexual (or non-sexual, in the case of Catholic Priests) face drove even very moral individuals to behave in terrible ways. So when a typical person learned that someone was gay or lesbian, in the old days, it was under the most horrific circumstances: the person had usually been caught molesting a child, or the person had been discovered to have entertained a series of people of the wrong sex in their homes.
I set out to portray female lovers as affectionate, responsible, moral (for the most part; not entirely so in the case of Helen) people. They were loving to everyone around them, not just to their partners; they were affectionate in the usual way to young people; they were not predators (again, for the most part), they were embarrassed by the usual things: being discovered in a deception, being verbally abused just for who they were, feeling an inappropriate attraction to a married person, being the target of a crush by a student.
Being Christmastime, I listen to a lot of Christmas music, and read a lot of my Christmas stories, and get almost insane pleasure at how satisfyingly I wrote many of those stories. I'm not a believer; I thought I ought to say that to avoid deceiving my more religious readers. I never have been, even as a child. I loved to imagine the events of the First Christmas, but even as a child, I realized that it was a myth. (A myth, in my mind, is a sort of averaging of significant experiences, and responses to events, distilled into a story, to create a specific attitude in the listener. In the case of Jesus--who I'm convinced was an historical figure, even without sufficient evidence--it probably was to communicate the bewilderment of his family by his life path and his actions. He acted so contrarily to conventional wisdom that they were impelled to say that he was not really their child, and it was a short step from there to ascribe a divine origin for him. Self-sacrifice was an idea that was very slow in coming to the Western World, or to any civilized people. Women knew it well, but it was considered inappropriate behavior for a man.
Just last night, I was reading the episode from the Helen saga, in which she watches a collage of "Best Of" Messiah performances, and I was practically swooning over a paragraph here and there. Helen's last sweetheart, Marissa, a woman about ten years younger than Helen, home-schooled and sheltered to an unbelievable degree, is frustrated by Helen's chronic depression, ever since Marissa's mother died, and Helen announces her retirement in a fit of anger. Meanwhile, Helen had, a couple of years before, disguised herself as an actress and dancer, a completely fictional person, with a fake passport and everything, and acted in three movies. In the third, she had starred alongside a lovely Indian girl in a lesbian action-adventure, only to find that the girl was the sister of an old friend, Lalitha. But being in disguise, Helen could not reveal herself to the girl, so the young Indian falls in love with this person that Helen was pretending to be.
Shortly afterwards, the young Indian girl meets Helen as Helen, and to Helen's relief, does not connect Helen with her actress crush at all. Somehow, knowing that she had been "someone else" when they had met and sort of fallen in love, enables Helen to be cool.
Of course, the girl eventually, over a year or so, finds out. She is initially bitter, but now she knows Marissa, and she realizes that Helen just cannot be her lover; the homes of too many of her friends would be jeopardized. But she comforts Helen when the latter tries to get through the Christmas season somehow, despite being reminded at every turn that she has fallen out of favor with the Christmas choral music establishment. Comfort in an emotional sense entirely; it seems to me tenderness and kindness is infinitely more romantic than "getting it on." Perhaps I should have been a writer for soap operas.
Star Wars: The Force Awakens
Well, I saw this on December 17th, in a moderately full theater. It was a lot of fun (even if the masked Darth Vader like figure seemed a little silly to me). Daisy Riddle (Rey) was delightful, though I can't for the life of me think why so many new actors need to be New Zealanders or Australians. I think the US public has an insane fascination for foreign accents, in particular, Australian / New Zealander accents.
Minor Spoiler Alert: the movie also presents a Storm Trooper as a human being; about time, too. In wartime, people try to discourage any attempt to humanize the enemy, but to endure more than six movies without a look behind the mask of a Storm Trooper can only trivialize the military aspects of the saga. Even Tolkien resorts to portraying his enemy forces as subhuman orcs, to make it easier for readers to accept the idea of massacring them. Jane Rowling has her Dementors. But at this stage of the game, perhaps it is time that the soldiers had a face.
Kay
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