Daylight Saving Time, Bye Bye!

I'm sure all my readers—in the Temperate Zone—have some opinion about the changing of the clock time twice a year: setting the clocks from 1:00 AM back to 2:00 AM (or something like that) in the spring, so that when your alarm rings at 6:00 in the morning by the clock, it's really 5:00 by the clocks of anyone who did not adjust their clocks.  This is nice, for anyone who had been unhappy about it being so light early in the day, when you're not out pub crawling with your friends.

Then, sometime in the fall, on a date that's approved by Congress (just like the date in the spring is), around 2:00 at night, you're supposed to set your clock back to 1:00, which means that when your alarm rings at 6:00, it isn't so horribly dark, and it's safer for little munchkins to head out to the school bus stop.  (When I was a kid, I rode a bike, and my night vision was OK, and—in retrospect—so was the night vision of motorists who did not knock me down for 12 years.

Some people just don't like the hassle of doing this clock changing thing, and I'm one of them.  Sure, with DST you get more evening daylight in the spring and summer, and that's nice for kids, and other people, unlike me, who go out a lot.  I figure, though, that businesses could change their hours, to begin their day a little earlier in the spring and summer, and let their workers out a little early, too.  Why fiddle with the clocks?  Schools could do the same; start school a little later, say at 8:30 AM in the dark of winter, and revert to early starts in the months with long daylight hours, so that kids can go home early, and practice their cheerleading, or whatever they do. 

There's not a lot of agreement as to which time should be taken as standard.  Should we have DST (daylight saving time) year round, so that the sun will be highest in the sky at 11:00 AM, or Standard Time year round, so that the sun is highest in the sky at 12:00 Noon?  Some people want the former, some the latter.  Some people don't care which; they just don't want the clock change. 

K(A)HB

At the Gates of Heaven

My mother passed away the year before last.  She was a wonderful woman, taking into account the moral environment she was in.  She often led singing in church retreats and stuff, and was in some demand because she had picked up a lot of songs from Africa, Asia, Australia and the Middle East, which was considered a nice departure from the usual songs people were introduced to.

I was recently going through the junk in my piano stool, when I came across a photocopied page with the song At the Gates of Heaven, which would have been a perfect song for Helen to have taught her kids!

The basic idea is : At the Gates of heaven little shoes they are mending, for all the little barefooted babies who come in, so slumber my darling, slumber my baby, slumber my sweet, lulloo lullay.

The subtext is that scores of infants die, daily; they wind up in heaven, and it's come as you are, and they don't have shoes, so the people at the Gates have to outfit them.

These days, as Hamas unleashes terror in Israel, and Israel unleashes death on the Gaza Strip, we know that hundreds of infants are dying.  They're also dying in Syria, the Ukraine, Sudan, Russia—all over the world.  I'm not urging any particular loyalty.  But we ought not to isolate ourselves from this horror.  It is a constant,  ongoing massacre of the innocents. 

The Lullaby is thought to be of Spanish or basque origin.  It is sweetly sentimental, and the tune—which I don't know how to bring to you—is a gentle, happy tune.  Helen would have loved it. 

Kay

 

Enola Holmes

I just re-read Nancy Springer's story featuring Enola Holmes, the fictional, much younger, sister of (the also fictional) English private detective, Sherlock Holmes.

Sherlock Homes was the creation of the 19^th- century surgeon and author, Arthur Conan-Doyle.  (Talk about noticing things, Conan-Doyle was one of the earliest people to bring the idea of crime scene investigation to the forefront of public interest in crime drama.)  He was, for his time, sort of like Carl Sagan in the 70's, Neil DeGrasse Tyson today, more interested in the application of logic to combat sensationalism, in the news, and in popular culture of that time.

Now Nancy Springer, writing at the present time, has created this baby sister, Enola Holmes, roughly 20 years younger than Sherlock.  Enola just has to be a genius in her own way.  While Conan-Doyle had to write so as to capture the imagination of men of his time—since women were much less of an economic force at that time—in contrast, the engine that energizes Nancy Springer's writing is: feminism, as well as many other matters of social justice.  (Nancy represents in graphic detail not only the paralyzing restrictions on women and girls, but the squalor—and even the violence—that the poor of London struggled to endure.)

Not only does she succeed in making the gruesome facts somewhat tolerable to readers (especially young readers who can't be expected to stomach this sort of stuff as a matter of course), she has made Enola extremely relatable, from a 21^st century point of view.  Accomplishing all these goals at the same time is no mean feat.

The book I read was the first in the series, which has the job of describing how Enola leaves home, and immediately gets involved in the search for a missing aristocratic child.  It also pitches us headfirst into Enola's love of codes and ciphers, which is how she eventually reconnects with her missing mother.  An excellent piece of fiction. 

Kay

One Big Novel

Somewhere in the 18th Century--when people began to write about new literature that was emerging--some scholar conjectured that every author had one big book inside them.  Not only one big book, but certainly one real fabulous book. 

I'm reading dozens of books by the same few authors, and I'm coming to believe that each of them did write one fabulous story, but then had to struggle to write another good one.  (I'm not going very far with this idea, so I'm not going to hunt down examples to support my hypothesis, to convince you.)  The implication is that the best stories were autobiographical; they were drawn from the author's own life.  Because the amount of true-to-life detail they would otherwise have to dream up would be daunting for the typical author.  (At the moment I'm reading about a woman writing in the first person, and she describes her whole blended family, their occupations, their history, their attitudes ... Not that a writer with a good imagination couldn't do that, but it isn't easy!)

In my own case, I'm in deathly fear of destroying my alias, and if I borrow from my own life too heavily, and someone I know reads this stuff, it won't be hard for them to join the dots!

You have to understand that everything an author writes is drawn from his or her life.  Everything.  But if the author is careful, it can be modified enough that it won't be spotted and recognized by others who shared the actual event or experience.

For instance, there is an episode in Helen, in which she helps Janet to run a summer tennis clinic.  In another episode, years later, she tells Jeffrey that she helped with a tennis camp.  I have friends who are into tennis in a big way, though I myself am not, and that's how come I know lots of trivia about how the game of tennis goes. 

In Jane, for instance, I use lots of experiences from my own life--not going to tell you which ones--but the events are so fragmentary that you probably couldn't draw any inferences from them!

Another topic entirely: Hyphens and Dashes

This subject is probably well understood by many of you, but unfortunately those who have this strong urge to write, may not have been the ones who paid attention in English Composition.  (I paid attention, and I had an excellent teacher.  But many high- school kids are too distracted--with sports, or cheerleading, or romance, or MMOG's--to listen to their teachers.)

In the paragraph above, did you spot the dashes?  On this page, it comes out as -- two hyphens.  This is because it isn't easy to make the actual dash (if I find out how, I'll put one inside these parentheses — There it is!!  You press and hold the hyphen key, and a little mini- menu pops up.  Slide your finger up to the mini- menu, and select the longest dash.  There are two others; just ignore them), so I (and other bloggers who care about these thing) use an acceptable substitute, the two hyphens.

Do the actual hyphens ever get used?  Well, yeah, for some double-barreled names, like Huntingdon-Whitley; or some words that are usually hyphenated, like ... Jeeze, I can't think of one when I need an example ... oh: double- barreled gun, f'rinstance.

The dashes (or even fake dashes) usually occur in pairs, like parentheses.  If you left out the part inside, or in between, the dashes, what's left should make sense.  Of course it should make even more sense with the stuff in ťhe dashes!

In the above, once I discovered how to do an actual dash, I didn't change all my fake dashes, so that you'd know how to insert fake dashes.  Always the teacher; that's me.  Sometimes I use so many semi-colons that I feel embarrassed!  It looks a little bit learned ...

Kay Hemlock Brown

Voices

I was just reading a book that I had started, and then set aside for some reason.   I often do this, because when I take up the book again, I'd have forgotten what caused me to give up on it, and I can often connect with it fairly well, and even finish it. 

This particular story was strange and interesting.  The main character was a little obsessive, and she was in love with a girl who wanted to study abroad.  She found that she could not even sleep at night, thinking about what her girl was doing.  The girl, meanwhile, had broken up with her, probably not wanting to continue a relationship with such an obsessive lover. 

I had taken the book back up sort of in the middle, where I had (presumably) left off reading it, so I was suprised to discover that the main girl was in beauty school.  I had to think about that for a while.  Of course, there are people in beauty school, and they fall in love, sometimes with other girls, but it was just that I had hardly ever picked up a story about such a girl. 

Presently, she begins to date a girl who was in culinary school.  This was amazing, except that the girl from culinary school seemed to not be of very stable character.   (The main girl just mentions that she had thought about her former girlfriend, now back from abroad, and her new lover freaks out.)

By this time, I was fascinated by the story.  What was more, the author sometimes dropped into using the same careless grammar that the characters were using!  So the speech she was placing in the lips of the two protagonists was not just to make the narration and the dialog more convincing; it was the author's natural idiom. 

Well, on one hand, I was full of admiration that a clearly working- class girl who I would expect to have had trouble with writing and story-telling had surmounted these obstacles, and become an author.  On the other hand, I was upset that I could not expect her (the author) to be able to give a variety of voices to her characters, or create pictures of these characters, using voice as a tool. 

Is it a weakness in me,  as a reader, that I'm going to be distracted by this author's errors in grammar for this entire story?  Because I am; I'm dying to learn how the story ends, but the character is so dreadfully weak-minded that I'll be cringing continuously while I read.  But I have to finish this book. 

Kay

Pop Culture

I have to recognize that I'm totally out of touch with popular culture 😞.

One good thing is that pop culture is spreading out, and there are fragments of older pop culture built in, and I do recognize them.  But not playing video games cuts out a huge sliver of connections that I could have had. 

For instance, I failed to recognize a character called Kassandra who was evidently from a video game (Assassin's Creed Odyssey.)  I don't think I'm going to make the effort to familiarize myself with this game; its title makes me think it won't have much to offer. 

Kassandra, a character whose name I knew from the Trojan War, was a sister of Paris.  She could foretell events before they happened, but she was under a curse, which made those who listened to her disbelieve her predictions!  So she would tirelessly warn her family and her friends, and (despite innumerable instances of her having predicted correctly) they would laugh off her warnings.  I first was introduced to her by Marion Zimmer Bradley in the book Firebrand, and MZB had created a wonderful character; I just adored Cassandra (as you might have expected).  But tragedy followed her everywhere. 

Well, what can you do.  The ancient Greeks delighted in tragedy.  Some of the heroines of modern Japanese Anime are more pleasant to follow, such as, for instance, Kiki, of Kiki's Delivery Service!  It's a bit of a whimsical story, but that's the way it goes.  A surreal story that sort of grabbed me was Millennium Actress, which (if I understood correctly) took place over over a century.  (Must watch the DVD again...)

Kay.