A Wonderful Aria

A song—a classical aria, really—that is, in my mind, one of the pinnacles of Helen’s vocal performances, was a number from Handel’s Messiah, unfortunately one that is not very well known outside the circles of die-hard Messiah fans.  It is featured in an episode in which Helen, who was deeply depressed at the time at her rejection from the circles of  Baroque sacred vocal music, began to re-assess her own capabilities, and begins to believe in herself.  (At the same time, Helen was beginning to realize how much Sita had come to love her.)

The aria is I know that my Redeemer liveth, a lovely aria, very long, very lightly accompanied, and to my mind, difficult for typical listeners to appreciate, precisely because of its length and the light accompaniment.  The melody has to be carried entirely by the soprano, because the accompaniment is so light.  

Back when I was a kid, and more Romantic adaptations of Messiah were still not in disrepute (as they were just a few years later), all these arias were accompanied by the full orchestra: flutes, clarinets, oboes, horns.  Wagner had shown how this could be done pianissimo—very softly—so that the vocal line was like an exquisite string of pearls on a velvet cushion.  But, to those who demanded authenticity, that was not the point.  The original only was accompanied by the violins!  Only the lute or harpsichord, and the bass line, probably just a cello, or a couple of cellos.  That was all!  So we have the soprano singing for all she’s worth, supported only by violins and bass.

There is yet another problem, namely the text.  The song is about physical resurrection, something that hardly anyone believes in.  Of all the things Christians believe in, and those of us who are CINOs—Christians In Name Only, this is the principle that is among the first to be rejected, together with the Virgin Birth, and the Resurrection.  We may love Jesus, and we may follow his teachings as far as we can, because they are not easy; but I, for one, have never believed in those magical things that we were supposed to believe.  It is a tragedy that so many jettison the teachings of Jesus along with the mythology.

So when the soprano sings that she knows that Jesus is alive, I can imagine scores of listeners shutting off their ears to the words of the delusional librettist—the Apostle Paul, in this case—and trying to obtain satisfaction in the music alone, which is so difficult, given that the entire piece is so vehement in its message.  (Here is a performance that is more moderately accompanied.  Do not try to imagine that, when Helen sings this tune, that it sounds like this; I imagine it quite differently.  Here is another performance.  Lynn Dawson can look beautiful while she sings, something that many sopranos cannot pull off!)

Helen, the character, was not created to be a philosopher.  The only instance where she tries to think about abstract things is this one, where she struggles with the text of this song.  All the rest of the time, she was thinking of the children, about music, about her teaching, and mostly about the people around her, especially if they were struggling with something or another.  I wanted Helen to be, above all, a compassionate woman, and to some extent, that was Helen’s only, or at least her principal, saving grace.

As I have written about before, there is an interesting episode that I have left out of all of the published Helen stories, because it is difficult to squeeze into them, timewise.  At first, I had her teaching at Westfield only for two years.  But now it appears that she would have to have taught there for at least three years, to have done all that I had written about; in which case, if I were to include another Westfield story, this episode could find a place there.

The story is briefly as follows.

Helen returns to Westfield, to hear that one of her colleagues in the Math Department has been the victim of a hit-and-run incident.  There is some suspicion that one of his students was responsible, because evidently there was severe animosity between them.  The students are suspicious of each other, and the administration is at a loss as to how to complete the semester for those students in the particular class that seems to be the one that was most hostile to the late professor.

Someone happens to have told the President that Helen had a strong background in mathematics, and it ends up that they have Helen taking over the course.

Helen struggles as never before, and the students struggle, and bits and pieces of information emerge from the Police murder investigation, and the course is slipping downhill, but Helen, and a couple of students manage to salvage it, and it ends much better than anyone had any right to expect.  One of the students is Angie Connors, who emerges as an important character in Helen’s Concerto.

As you can see, I was preoccupied with this aria, and I think I must go listen to it sung in a version from the sixties, when the authentic performance movement did not yet have a lock on Baroque performance as it had from the Seventies onward!  If I have interested a reader to listen to that aria, I would be delighted!

Kay Hemlock Brown

Who is Kay Hemlock Brown?

Just to clarify:  most of you know that I'm incognito; this means many of the pieces of information that I give, that you would normally expect to be able to use to identify me, really presents a person who is different than me.  Kay Hemlock Brown is just a nom de plume, or a pen name.  There are many good reasons for this; the best one is that I do not want to be "outed" as a writer of fiction, including lesbian fiction.  (This is a holdover from when I first started writing, when alternative preference was not as well accepted as it is now.  A lot has happened in twenty-five years.)

The time has come, though, for me to decide what the details of the Kay Hemlock Brown persona are.  This is not absolutely necessary, but I'm just in the mood to give it a good try, especially since I have stumbled on this method of creating a profile picture that is so interesting!

Kay is a female; that hasn't changed since I started writing, or since this Blog was created.  These days, in more progressive forums, or places where ideas are exchanged (such as this Blog site, or Deviant Art, or Facebook or Instagram, for instance,) people are allowed to have fluid gender, that is they're allowed to declare that, well, they're female, but would prefer to be regarded as gender-fluid, that is that in some situations, they would not respond to certain things as a female.  In addition, the concept of transsexual is gaining ground.  Exactly what people mean by that term is not clear, and different people can mean different things by it.  For instance, it could mean a person who intends to change their gender, possibly through surgery; and have begun taking hormone treatment to enhance the outcome of the surgery, or prepare for the surgery; they could even decide to take the hormone treatment, and go no further; they could choose to wear male clothing, which means that they are transvestites as well, or cross-dressers, and so on.  I am none of these things.  In fact, a woman wearing male clothing is not even remarked upon today; we have successfully hijacked most items of male clothing and made it our own!  (That reminds me of a book I was reading: Escort, by Emily Hayes.  I would cautiously recommend this story, but the story is very carelessly edited, which is rather a turn off.  In any case, one of the main characters in the book, Ashley, likes to dress in masculine style.)  It would help if I were hip to all the terminology that lesbian women use to describe themselves, but being a recluse has its disadvantages!

Kay is young, but not as young as she used to be!  When I read lesbian fiction (why would I read any other kind?), I'm beginning to see dialog that is most definitely not part of my own idiom, or my dialect.  I'm just barely within the age-group where you greet your friends with "Hey."  I used to say Hi almost all the time, but now, Hey is creeping in.  I started writing in the late 90's, if that helps you to date me.  I couldn't possibly be less than 20 years old, because I would have written those books before I was born!

Kay is very plain.  In fact, I ought to be honest and say: Kay is a dog!  But when I started this Blog, the first thing that struck me was that here is an opportunity to be attractive!  I put up, as my profile picture, a well-known piece of art of the 19th century.  As I got bored with that, I kept changing my profile picture to other, less well-known portraits of really pretty women, until this software came along, and I could put up an image that looks a lot more like me than those early pictures!

Kay hates to read badly edited text, despite the fact that her own writing has spots where the editing has major lapses.  Unfortunately, the process of uploading a story to Smashwords is so clumsy that, even after I finish editing some errors out of a story, I drag my feet in uploading it.  The first few weeks after uploading a story, I work quite busily, replacing the early, error-filled editions with cleaned-up versions.  Then the process slows down, and comes to a halt.  (I wish there were a means where readers could--politely--alert an author to any remaining errors; I would love that.)

Kay would love to use more exclamation points (!), but when you use too many of them, their value gets diluted.  In Yraid, for instance, I started off using hardly any exclamations, but then it seemed as though Aggie was a sort of morose person.  (She starts off being pretty morose, actually.)  I also like to use semicolons; these things are supposed to be used when you have two sentences next to each other, and they make better sense if they were combined into one sentence, without using a conjuction, such as 'and' or 'but' or something like that.  But I also use them when I'm making a list, and there are commas within the list items.  For instance, if you were giving a list of your favorite songs.  You could do this most of the time, separating them with commas.  But what if one of the songs had commas right in the title?  I would then separate the titles with semicolons, and the comma could go right in the title, where it belongs.

Kay likes to use italics.  I use them everywhere I can; I think it makes the text appear more sprightly, it makes the dialog look more lively, it gives a better approximation of the vivacity of the speech of a young person.  Young people often emphasize particular words to get their meaning across, instead of using cue words.  For instance, look at these two sentences.

I liked the costumes better this time.
It was the costumes I liked better this time.

I think I'll stop here; it's better to put in additional information as I think of it, rather than strain to think up other trivia that isn't important!  I hope everyone is keeping safe, and avoiding big indoor gatherings that have the potential for becoming major spreading events.  That gives me an idea; I think I will create an avatar wearing a mask, and put it up temporarily, if that is possible.

Kay

I'm Frustrated with DeviantArt

Most of you are aware that I joined the DeviantArt Website in order, mainly, to get high-quality covers for my Smashwords publications.  But once I arrived there, I realized that I could fulfill another of my greatest interests: to create digital art.  Some of the examples of things that could be done digitally (which I'm using in the sense of: not with actual oil and canvas, but using a computer), in ways I found fascinating, except for one aspect: the subject-matter.

Many of the artists on DA are very young.  Not that I am dreadfully old, but I feel ancient compared to the extreme youth of these kids!  I love them, and have gotten to know many of them, and many of them are aspiring writers, and many of them would be close friends, if we ever met, but the sources of their inspirations will forever be outside my own circle of interest.  The many stories I see are brutally, and superficially, sexual.

I love to write erotica.  I don't like to talk about erotica, because I think of erotica as a rather private thing.  And the crudeness of described sexuality has to be, in my mind, moderated with gentleness, and emotion, and caring.  These are ideas that would be considered too heavy for my friends on DA.

Even the mature adults on DA, even though they are certainly craftsmen of an incredibly high calibre, seem focused on their little niches, and are difficult to touch.  Sometimes a random comment I make on some artwork pierces their shell of mechanical politeness (everyone on DA is polite to a fault, and I initially saw my remarks frowned upon), only to discover that we only had that tiny fragment of an area of discussion in common.

There are photographers who have access to absolutely beautiful models, some of them just stunning, among the most beautiful women I have seen anywhere.  There are cosplayers, that is, people who like to dress up as characters from illustrated books or animated movies or games, or even the movies, and get themselves photographed.  The art here is in the makeup, the costumes, the poses, etc.  Above and beyond that, some of these people---mostly women, as it happens---are amazing actresses; they can portray an emotion that a scene requires just perfectly, to produce what we would call a tableau, a scene.  But the concerns of these women are centered around wigs, and costumes, and makeup.

In a vague sense, DeviantArt is about artistic perversion, I believe, judging from the name of the website; somehow they have hit on the idea that, if they downplay the perversion aspect, they can make a lot of money by providing a forum in which digital images can be hosted and, ostensibly, discussed.  Some commerce goes on on the site, from which the site makes an income.

I have learned an enormous amount by hanging around on DA.  The people there are generous with their knowledge, and even with their Art.  But until I learn to keep a certain distance from some of the art, which seduces me into thinking that I can relate to it extremely deeply, I am going to cause myself to bleed unnecessarily by bashing against artwork that was never intended to be bashed against!

You must take this post as what it is: a rant against having to be an objective art critic.

Kay H.B.

A Slightly Expanded Version

I often find myself thinking about various supplementary information I could insert in a book, and it was worse with Yraid than it had been for other books.  So I added a page or two of this stuff into an 'Afterword', and uploaded that as a new version.  So far, only one reader has downloaded (or read) the free portion of the story, so I suppose, only he or she will be surprised with this supplementary stuff.

This has nothing to do with anything, but I now have a far more accurate picture to represent me on any site.  They always encourage us to upload an 'Avatar', as they call it, but now I can put one up, rather than the arbitrary picture I have up presently.  (In case you're wondering, it is an actress of the last century, a very attractive woman, and I am more than satisfied with how well that portrait served my purposes.

The new picture has already been uploaded on both Smashwords and DeviantArt.  I only mention it here because this would otherwise be a short post indeed.

This is no more only a little closer to my image than any of the others were; but nevertheless, it is a signifantly modified image of me (whereas the others were not images of me at all).  On the left is the face without a smile, and on the right, with a smile.

Well, enjoy.

A New Story From Kay Hemlock Brown—That's Me

Our final Cover (Gina deLuna)

Dear Friends:

A couple of weeks ago, I started a new story, on impulse, and I just finished it last night, and posted it on Smashwords!

I know this is sudden, but I'm so grateful that I still had it in me to complete a story this quickly.  It is a first-person story, which I have never tried before.  It is about a girl who has just graduated college, and started work at a restaurant.  I intentionally wanted it to be "a humble occupation," as she describes it herself.

She looks down on all her classmates, all through college.  But now, she doesn't have any friends, and she reaches out to her former roommate, and gradually learns to relate to people.

It starts off slowly, but becomes a little intense at the end.  I don't remember enough about my own feelings while I was writing the story, to be able to tell you why I wrote it this way.  I still worry about whether some of the things I put in there were a little gratuitous, but none of you folks have ever commented on anything, so I just know you're not going to read it and tell me!

Molly, on the Ramble

I can't urge you to buy it and read it, because it isn't free.  I guess I will make it for free eventually, but right now it's selling for a couple of dollars.

I don't even have a decent cover for it, and I couldn't even think of what I would put on the cover.  There is a dog in the story, a Boxer; maybe that's what I'll put on the cover, though that would be sort of false advertising.

So, go ahead and procure the book, if you're so inclined (how about that word, eh?  Procure...), and convey your response to the story to me somehow.  I leave the method to you.

Kay

P.S.: We have joined the Summer Sale, just for Yraid.  (That's 'Diary' spelled backwards.)

Stories Still In The Works

Actually, these stories are still mostly being written.

• "The Apartment of the Goddess" is about someone who unexpectedly finds herself in another planet.  (I might never finish this one; I've totally lost interest in it.)
• "Heather" is also a story set in a parallel earth, a love story about two cousins.
• "Emily" is about a college teacher who has a nervous breakdown, and takes a semester off and has an adventure.
• “Jana, Warrior Girl”. This one is complete; I lost the last part of the manuscript, so I had to complete it from memory, but it needs to be fixed up.  (It is about an alternate Earth in the Bronze Age, and set in a parallel Middle East and Mediterranean.)
• “Honeymooners”. This is about a pair of lovers who get it together in “Helen’s Concerto”, but who hit the real world with a vengeance, as we’re all doing. I need to wait a few months or a year, since it will depend on how things turn out for all of us; you know what I mean.
• “Julie”. Two friends from childhood learn about a woman who’s being abused, and encourage her to shelter with one of them. But the abusive boyfriend is unstable, and vows to hurt them. When he bombs the house of the girl who took the woman in, they decide it is time to go into hiding. Unfinished.
• “Legs”, a story of two college mates. One of them is a swimmer, who has awesome . . . you guessed it.
• “Yraid”, a story of a rather morose woman, who is very critical of everybody. I realized that the main character seems to be channeling “Daria”, from the animated feature that used to be on MTV. That put a damper on my inspiration, but I’m going to continue with the story anyway.
• “Andromeda”, a lesbian take on Sleeping Beauty. It has been done, but this is going to be different. It is sort of an erotic fantasy, so almost any other project takes precedence over it.
• “Etta and the Composer”, which is about an attempt to create an automaton that is a representation of the composer Johann Sebastian Bach. Don’t steal this idea, you guys; it is awfully easy to implement this idea badly.

Man, that was tiring enough to write down; I have no energy left to reflect on the situation.  Stay safe.

Kay

Laura Adams: Sleight of Hand

I had read this book some years ago; it is written by Karin Kallmaker, under the pen name Laura Adams.  The story was a very ambitious project; it is about three stories concerning the same characters; the first story is set in the 5th Century, about St. Ursula, who was ostensibly a convert to Christianity from the She-Bear Cult, and several young women who were either members of her circle of meditation, or admirers whom she encouraged to travel with her.

The two other stories are both set in the present time, in different places.  One is of a girl called Ursula, living in England, who meets an American tourist, falls in love, and once the visitor has returned home, follows her to the US, and meets a group of mystics in the US, with whom she uses spells of defence to protect herself and her friends from an evil influence that seems to want to destroy her.  Each of these young women are associated with a specific girl in Ursula's circle, in the fifth century.  The final story centers around a girl, Autumn, who makes her living as a conjuror and card sharp in Las Vegas, who cannot remember her past.  Echoes of the adventures of St. Ursula reach back to her too, gradually enabling her to work true magic.

The story proceeds in layers, switching back and forth between the action on the ship which is contracted to carry the unwilling St. Ursula to her husband, but whose captain Ursula and her friends persuade into taking her to Rome.  Events on board that ship run parallel to crises taking place in Pennsylvania, and in Nevada.  As the story proceeds, we find Ursula realizing that her love for her companions--in particular one stalwart girl--pales in comparison to her desire for the captain's daughter, who corresponds to the young amnesiac Autumn in Las Vegas.  As the modern-day protagonists see the action on board the ship in dreams and visions, they learn all about each other, though naturally Ursula's circle of friends are jealous and suspicious of the captain's daughter / conjurist Autumn, whom they never meet in the present day, but whom they have seen in mystical scenes.

Karin Kallmaker has the gift of writing very intensely emotional prose.  In addition, she uses the chants of Hildegard of Bingen (a 10th century mystic and composer, who composed several poems and chants to St. Ursula), whose poetry motivated the feelings of Karin Kallmaker's protagonists perfectly.  While the poems express the longing of the devotees for the presence of the object of their devotion, they also beautifully express how their devotions frequently crossed the line into romantic yearning.  Ursula, as an innocent but flawed wielder of powerful magic, is the perfect pivot for the stormy passions of the girls who want to protect her, and who also yearn to join with her, but cannot relax their vigilance without succumbing to the evil force that wants to possess and destroy Ursula.

This story is the first of three books:

Sleight of Hand,
Seeds of Fire,
Forge of Virgins,

but the third book apparently never got written.  Based on the obvious difficulties of writing a piece of fiction on two layers, I could easily imagine how easy it would be for Karin K. to shrink from the task of completing the trilogy.  It would be a snap to complete it badly, but to complete it with a third book in the quality of the first two could be too demanding of anyone.  (It is also quite possible that there may have been conceptual inspiration from some human source for the first two books that has, for reasons known only to Ms. Kallmaker, slipped from her fingers.)  Still, I am wishing, and wanting, as hard as I can, that Karin Kallnaker will complete this trilogy, which could be a modern-day classic.  The confluence of music, history, witchcraft, mysticism, romance and adventure is irresistible

K. H. B