English for the New Age

 "Lexie Hull been enjoying off-season with Friends and love ones. 💜"

I would have written: Lexie Hull has been enjoying the off-season with friends and loved ones.  Why do these sports-related posts have to be written as though Trump has written them?  (Or wrote them back when he could write?)  I keep wondering whether everything has to be written in this sort of broken English to make sense to kids.

I was reading a post on Fb about a pioneer woman, who had to unexpectedly take the reins of their wagon, when bandits attacked them.  Here's an excerpt from the passage:

Now, 'refused to die quiet' has the flavor of the words from an old western legend.  But we need an adverb here, and quietly is the only word that works.  Sure, we could make an exception here, to preserve the punch of the sentence as the AI wrote it.  It must have been an AI, because it shows all the signs of having learned its craft from digesting a ton of non-grammatical text.  But every exception makes the language rules more complicated.

Kay

AI Art: A Ripoff

As many of you readers know, DeviantArt is a website I joined, which initially was a place where artists showed off their creations.  I was hoping to get artwork for the covers of my stories. 

Recently, though, the members of DA have got on the AI Art bandwagon wholesale; in fact DA have created their own piece of AI art software, free for anyone to use.  (I think.)  I think it's fair to say that almost 80% of the art put up on DA now is AI generated.  (AI - generated = created by software, according to explicit instructions.  The instructions are called 'programming', and the programmer is regarded as the Artist.)

Honestly, the parameters of the image can be set almost any way the artist likes: any color of hair, any color of eyes, any build, any costume, any lighting ... It must sound as though I've actually tried this, but I haven't.  I know a little computer programming, and the way these AI programs would go is easy to guess. 

In conventional art, what we—or art critics—appreciate and admire in a work of art are a lot more than simply the choice of hair color and eye color and costume, and so on.

On top of all that, the programmer—or, anyway, the one who is using the AI art software—can supply a base image, from which the AI takes features that are wanted in the finished image.  So if the finished image looks like Taylor Swift, or Emma Watson, or Emilia Clarke, it's not really an accident.

I would expect that the number of people uploading this sort of artwork is rising, but the number of people admiring the artwork is probably plummeting.

Kay

What would she wear?

There's a major confusion in the way young guys (including older guys, I'm sure) approach figurative art (art with people), and how I approach it.

Let's use an extreme example: Joan of Arc.

Guys love to draw Joan of Arc (or Jean D'Arc), especially because of the romance of depicting a woman in armorplate.  Right away we must think: does it make sense to show a lot of decolletage?  Did she wear the armor for show, or to protect herself from arrows?  Won't an expanse of exposed bosom be a powerful target for arrows?

The same principle works for all female heroes: what would she wear, rather than what would I like to see her in?

Long Names

My pen name (Nom de Plume) is Kay Hemlock Brown.  I'm comfortable with it, because, well, basically both Kay and Brown are short, single-syllable names.

Of course, the whole thing is a fiction, which you ought to know.  When I was ready to self- publish the first story (the second part of Jane,) I decided to use a pen-name, just so I wouldn't be identified by my students.  (Luckily, they don't read anything, let alone sapphic romance, so I'm safe.  They didn't even read the syllabus, or even the questions on their exams!!)

Well, I'm noticing that authors of fantasy fiction are increasingly giving their heroines long, multiple names.  I don't get out much; I actually never did, so I don't have my ear to the ground.  It must mean something that they're doing this; it can't be a coincidence that an entire generation of authors—especially female ones—are giving their original characters (OC's, as they're called) long, fancy names.  The most recent one is Isabella Gabriella Angelina Aurora Renata Anastasia Fielding-Horne.

Her initials would be IGAARA F-H.  That's 26 syllables.  (Am I pronouncing the names correctly?)  In really big families, the mothers gave the infant names from many relatives, to make sure that the various namesake aunts would be favorably disposed towards the new family member.  Long names were selected to impress.  And hyphenated family names (like Fielding-Horne) to please two branches of the family; possibly the two parental lines.

My pen-name, in the nature of pen-names, wasn't chosen to please anybody.  In fact, Brown was chosen because of its very dullness, and Kay because you couldn't deduce anything from it.  (Did you know why Max Eastman chose to name his photographic process Kodak?  It was because he liked the letter k!! No better reason, in my book.)

Jane was chosen also for its simplicity or dullness, Maia was an abbreviation of Mayaserana, which was supposed to be the name of a princess.  So was Helen borrowed from the name of a princess.  Many girl- children were given names from princesses; we can assume that numerous little girls born in the fifties decade were given the name  Elizabeth, because people the world over loved Princess Elizabeth, and later, Queen Elizabeth.

Well, off I go to continue reading my story.

K

John Lennon's Birthday

John Lennon's birthday was October 9, 1940.

All four of the Beatles were talented musicians—I don't know enough about the matter to tell you about their musicianship in greater detail—but I think Paul might have been the greater performer, and John might have been the more gifted from a literary point of view. 

Once John meet Yoko Ono (whom he married), she introduced him to so much thinking, there wasn't room in his head for much more that Feminism, Liberalism, Pacifism, social commentary, and Social engagement, generally.  Of course, the popular media lumped all that together into Socialist Politics, and blamed Yoko for putting all that in his head. 

But now, many of us think like John Lennon; and MAGA hates it, and labels us Woke, but it just means that we're very aware of how Big Business and conservative politicians manipulate everything to get money out of the hands of ordinary people, and into their (businessmen's) own pockets.  And in the past, men have made sure that they controlled the family money.  That's still the way it is among conservatives.  The women are kept busy being responsible for the kids (and shooting dogs), while the guys handle the money. 

John Lennon was shot on December 8, 1980; the shooter is still alive, but in prison.  But I'm glad John Lennon was alive, even for 40 short years.  He greatly influenced how I view society.  He was ahead of his time; we have to thank Yoko Ono.

Kay Hemlock Brown