Magic, or No Magic?

This is going to be a complicated post.

First off, my new story, about the romance between an African American girl and an Elf (tentatively titled the girl with the pretty eyebrows): a chunk of it is available for reading on one of the pages of this blog.  It was easy to get started with, but not to continue with, I'm afraid.

Secondly, I have a bit of a political idea to air, though I will try not to offend any of the political folders into which people have grouped themselves.  Here goes.

We all learn a little biology, a little botany, a little physics, a little chemistry, and so on, in school.  But, since the time of Aristotle, you can guess that the volume of science that mankind knows, and the volume of science that ordinary people are expected to know, has absolutely exploded.  Aristotle would be amazed at how much we know.  But I'm willing to take a guess that, long before the stage at which our teachers expect us to top out, we've already experienced a combination of emotional overload, as well as information overload, and we let the information come in through one ear, and out through the other.  It's mostly because we're kids (this all happens around the age of about 14) and we also buy into the idea that we can't afford to remember all this, especially because we're unlikely to ever use it.  Then, BOOM!  We're in the middle of a pandemic, and people are expecting for us to use all this 9th-grade knowledge that we have so carefully prevented ourselves from absorbing.  What we do is think of all the stuff that happens inside gadgets we use as being slightly magical.  We think of microwave ovens as being slightly magical; we think of air fryers as being slightly magical (actually, it's just a low-powered blowtorch), we think of our smart phones as being magical, etc.  Some phone companies encourage this belief.  But we are accustomed to thinking about vaccines sort of as though they're magic.

And worse, this new vaccine works in a more hi-tech way, using genetics.

Now, genetics does not have to mean tinkering with our own DNA.  A few years ago, I went on a reading spree about genes and DNA, and I found that the vast majority of things that our DNA does, is to manufacture proteins.  The proteins go along our bloodstream, and do all the things that need to be done, like get a baby started, or repair a tear somewhere, etc.  But one family of tasks can't be done with a single protein.  This task is fight infections!  To fight infections, popping out a single protein won't do, because all mammals are really designed to fight diseases---which means bacteriums---that they haven't seen before.  Of course.  There's no point in fighting only familiar diseases, because an unfamiliar one is sure to come along any day.

So what the DNA does is generate disease-fighting "machines", that modify themselves to fight new germs.  One of them meets a new germ, and learns how to fight it, and spreads the word to the other "machines",  and the war is on.  Be assured that these "machines" are not part of our DNA; they are one step removed.

The new vaccines capitalize on this process, to make these machines more efficient.  They teach those machines to defeat one of those spikes that the COVID virus has.  But the spike has enough information in it for the "machines" that get hold of it to destroy the entire virus, so, yes: there's a little bit of spike in the vaccine, as I understand it.  But the spike itself is harmless; it's the rest of the virus that hijacks our lung cells, and forces them to generate more viruses.

It's a sneaky, mean little virus, but the best weapon against it are our own virus-fighting machines, and the vaccine is a sort of Coach, that helps them learn to fight the virus.  Now, because I am not sure how much microbiology you have picked up, and sadly, the science teachers in different schools teach their students wildly different amounts of science, some folks are going to be able to understand what I'm saying (behind the strange anthropomorphizations that I have described).   Some of you might be affronted at having to pull out all that dusty information that you hoped never to have to use again.  But this vaccine is such an effective piece of chemistry, despite the tiny number of people who get the infection even after being vaccinated, that it is sad that there are so many who reject the vaccine.

A lot of people reject much of the science behind other things as well, such as Climate Change, and Election Security.  They have long ago relegated science to the same box as Miracles, and Magic, and they feel that rejecting science is a cousin of rejecting magic.  Rejecting magic is good, right?

But rejecting the vaccine is not a partisan choice, except that Pres. Biden promised to end the pandemic in so many days.  GOP leaders are waiting to mark down this failure to end the pandemic as a win for them.  But a win for the GOP leaders would seem to be a huge loss for the GOP rank-and-file, because their seniors, and their kids are going to suffer.  There were even some politicians who, in a weak moment, said that their seniors were tough enough to take a little hardship on behalf of The Cause.  That's just plain foolish, and I'm not going to write any more about that sort of testosterone-speak.

A Great Epiphany

Hello, dear readers of this Blog!

As you know, I have two blogs; this one, and one focused on the Helen story.  I don't really need to maintain them separately now; that's just a relic of the times when the "Fiction from Kay Hemlock Brown" blog was more about my writing, and the "Helen" blog was more about slightly more R-rated stuff.  If you're using the standard interface, there are links to the other blog on each of them.  If you're using the mobile interface, you have to cross over using some other method.  (My own method is too lengthy to have to describe to you ...)

Well, as I wrote a few days ago, the book I last read, at that writing, was "The Lady's Guide to Celestial Mechanics", a wonderful book.  I was disturbed by the little explicit sex there was in that---very little, really, compared to some other stories---but there was another notable aspect.  One of the women involved was a powerful and rich member of the nobility.  The book I have just finished reading is a simple story set in modern times, but one of the women is a super-rich divorcee.

This seems to be almost an inevitable feature in many stories, and perhaps more in lesbian fiction.  As I wote in the last post, even in my own writing, one of the characters was invariably someone powerful for some reason, and more often than not, someone who was wealthy.  Now, I have a reputation, at least among my friends on DeviantArt, that my politics lean a little to the left.  (Or a whole lot to the left, which is somewhat alarming.)  Should I feel obliged to write stories about rich, and/or powerful people?

Thinking about this a little more deeply, the essential ingredient in these sorts of stories is more subtle than wealth or power: it is glamour.  People do not read stories unless there is glamour involved.  One of these days I'm going to write a story about two women lovers, neither of whom is glamorous at all.  And we can watch its popularity plummet.

It's probably too late to de-glamorize my Elf story; having an elf in it already means magic, and magic means glamour.

If any of you readers find a story that is worth reading, but does not have any glamour in it, just let me know!

Kay 

Elves

Well, I hate to be so capricious (inconstant, mercurial, unstable--Google) so that you readers are unable to rely on what I say, but ... though I said that I'm unlikely to do any more writing at all, I have started a---quite unambitious---writing project!

I have recently embarked on a completely new story, unrelated to almost anything I have written before, about an African-American girl and---get this---an Elf!

Now, I have noticed that many stories, especially fantasy stories, have something in common, that is, that their chief protagonists are celebrities, or nobility, or rulers, or people otherwise with a certain degree of financial power.  Let me confess this situation in my own stories first:

Alexandra ---the queen of her country.

Helen stories ---a particularly wealthy woman, who has her own corporation, etc, and at one time was  a college professor, a movie/TV star, and a conductor.

Jane ---a somewhat wealthy girl, because of her artwork.

I have excuses.  The reason, at least in my case, for choosing occupations, or circumstances, that give these protagonists so much (financial) power is to enable them to do things that they otherwise could not do.  I myself cannot fly anywhere I want to go, or get a room in a hotel anytime I want; but I wanted my heroines to be able to do that.  But now, I'm beginning to want different things.

All my life, though, I had to be clever about how I traveled, how I saved up money to stay in a hotel, etc.  I wasn't broke, but I had to be careful about what I spent.  I used to have a car, and drove carefully, to use up the least amount of gasoline, and calculated the shortest paths between where I was, and where I wanted to go.  It was strange to write about a person who could pick up and do whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted.

Lately I have been reading a lot of popular literature---I couldn't possibly read enough of it to be able to say that I'm familiar with the genre; there is so much of it!  But quite a lot of it deals with ordinary people, with no particular claim to power, and I found that strangely attractive.  It is important, from an educational point of view, not to represent (in fiction) that being wealthy is a normal condition, just because it isn't.  The wealthy have appropriated most of the wealth of this country, (and the world), and if we pick a person at random---and surely my readers ought to be typical citizens; I would hate to think that my audience consists of people who come from the wealthy classes exclusively---we must assume that that person must be of limited means.  And I must assume that it is annoying, or at least disconcerting, to read of a protagonist who was inexplicably wealthy.  (But this is America, and most ordinary people love to read about people who are many orders of magnitude richer than they are; for instance, that's all what Reality TV is about.  One of the stars of Reality TV even ran for president, and won.)

So my two protagonists are going to be very ordinary people, including the one who was an elf.  I must create a world where the elves have poor people among them, too.

Kay

The Lady's Guide to Celestial Mechanics

I have been reading one of the most astounding books I have read in a while.

This work, by Olivia Waite, an author who has written a romance by the above name, between two women, somehow landed in my hands, and pretty soon, I could not put it down.  The story is set in 19th Century England.  The chief protagonist is a young woman who had worked with her late father, who was an astronomer, by making hand-calculations to support his astronomical observations.  (In that time, theories of the motions of planetary objects had to produce predictions, based on hand calculations, and these calculations were often carried out by women!  At any rate, this service of our heroine is presented here as a novelty.  But a story of a lesbian protagonist who is a mathematician, and an astronomer!  How wonderful!)

One of the most wonderful things about Olivia Waite's writing is: the language; by which I mean, the tone, the speech, the voice of the narrative.  I often deplore the stories about bygone times, where the idiom is modern.  It does not work.  The language of those times very closely reflected the inequality between men and women; there were a thousand ways in which women were subtly shamed or patronised for their words or their actions, and it cannot be done in modern speech without missing the proper tone.  This is a weakness in numerous movies, as well.  The caution with which our heroine, Lucy---who was of humble background---or rather, the woman who loves her, who is a countess, tries to find out whether Lucy is open to being the object of the countess's love, is very refreshing indeed.  It would not have been appropriate for the countess to drag Lucy into her bedroom, and make her move there.  It had to be all approached much more circumspectly.  Circumspection is rather an alien concept to so many authors, especially lesbian authors, because so few lesbian authors are in the closet, and forced to behave circumspectly.

Olivia Waite's writing is beautiful, because of how poetical it is.  She writes about nature, about flowers, about music, about embroidery: things that I could never write about intelligently, because I hardly notice them!  I am such a failure in that department...

I just had to write a review of the book at a point when I have only gone halfway through the book.  (I keep doing this.)  Amazon did not permit me to write a review under my pseudonym, since I had not racked up a sufficient dollar amount of purchases with them, so the review must be done here.  I have read two more books that are truly wonderful, but I will not review them here, because I feel that Olivia W's book needs to be presented independently.  Hurry out and get a copy!

Kay

Istanbul, not Constantinople / Fascinated, not Obsessed

I'm pleased with Lalitha having been repaired, and with many of the stories being downloaded from Smashwords!  Of course, this pops me back (thinking of this situation as a stack) to the state of being unsure whether the stories are really being read.

Of course, they're being sort of read; perhaps not from beginning to end, or as we would have said back in the days of Agatha Christie: from cover to cover.  I have to be content with readers reading just a paragraph or two; or just using the stories as masturbation aids.  I understand the need, but it still makes me queasy.

To turn to something completely different, I went on DeviantArt, the Art website---where I initially went to find artists who might help me create covers for the books---and wrote that my libido, and with it my creativity, have sort of faded out completely.  I'm not sure whether it makes better sense to make that sort of confession here (in the Blog), or there (in DeviantArt).  I was getting treated for a certain medical condition, for which reason they had to tinker with my hormones, and I found myself abruptly losing all interest in sex.  Of course, that is a blessing, in some ways, for someone who has been terrified, all their life long, with beginning relationships.  (Once a relationship begins, it is a lot less terrifying.)  But, you might have heard that it is our sex drives that make all sorts of creativity possible.  In my case, it apparently is; and now I can't write fiction.  I can't write romantic fiction, which is almost all that I wrote, though I can still write these hypochondria-laced blog posts.  I had been casually informed by the KHB Repair Agency that my natural hormones will return, all by themselves.

Now to turn to something even more completely different: I have recently become aware of the popular singer and YouTube personality Billie Eilish.  I don't know much about her; there are sites that contain Billie information, but one has to dig rather deeply to get anything.  She seems to be at the point in the arc of her fame where she doesn't want to release a statement about herself for fear of alienating somebody.

One of the things I like about her is that she's such a flawed androgyne!  She's an androgyine---I mean, just look at her!---and she's just beautifully imperfect, which makes her so easy to relate to.  A few months ago I saw Stephen Colbert interviewing her, and she came through beautifully (on Zoom, even) though I thought Colbert just couldn't quite get what she was trying to convey.  Colbert always seemed, to me, to present a very masculine affect; and in response, Billie was greeting him very warmly and politely, but in a definitely feminine manner.  So, though at certain levels, Billie presents herself as androgynous, I think her persona reponds to whomever she is responding to, with a complementary gender identity.  Warning: I'm not an expert in this sort of thing, and I have stopped believing in that sort of expertise anyway.  I think psychology is more of a religion than a science!

Though I deplore having lost my libido, however temporarily, I have to confess that I still have a craving to hand out hugs to anyone who seems to be sad, or in pain, or just unhappy.  Not guys; only girls or women.  What does that say?