Death Tolls

I'm typically insensitive to large losses of life.  Though I feel sadness at deaths in school shootings, they don't set me back to the point of being unable to function.  But somehow, the news of deadly floods in Nepal are horrifying. 

In retrospect, I'm beginning to feel the scope of the killings in Gaza.  Israeli soldiers are responsible for these massacres, and they are terrible to contemplate.  The psychic consequences for the adults are going to be vast.  I'm not an expert in psychology, but I know that inflicting cruelty and horror is traumatic for the culprit as well.

I know that I'm conflating two types of disaster: natural, and human-inflicted.  But they're horrors anyway, and we feel the pain.

K

Rhiannon Giddens

Just got back from Chautauqua, NY, where The Silk Road Ensemble was performing, originally curated by Yo Yo Ma, but now under Rhiannon Giddens.

Thr basic idea of the Silk Road performances is to present  a sequence of (folk) performances from a variety of cultures, transitioning smoothly from one piece to another.  They feature nearly a dozen expert musicians—African, European, Oriental, Asian, Indian, and so on; I could not identify them all.

Featured instruments were a Cello, an Accordion, several Violins, a Flute, Marimba, a Banjo-like instrument, a guitar, and several Drums of different sizes, from different traditions, including a Tabla set, a pair of Indian drums.  There was also a digital keyboard, that provided a drone background.

Rhiannon Giddens led a column of the performers, right through the aisle, leading a sort of audience participation routine.  (The chant she got the audience to join in sounded vaguely African, which made me wonder who this woman was.  It was only later I learned who it had been.)

Kay

Peak vs. Peek

This is a repeat.  I've already written about this pair of words. 

OK.  The word should have been 'peek.'  You don't sneak a peak.  It's peeks you sneak.  Sneaking a peek at the television screen.  Don't let me hear you making this mistake again.  <grumble, grumble.>

Reading Books I've Already Read

There is [yet another] book I've read before that I'm reading again.   It's called Suddenly, by M. E. Tudor, and it has some interesting features.

Firstly, it's about a cheerleader who unexpectedly falls for girl with a rough past (who 'runs with a bad crowd,' as they put it), but who has turned over a new leaf, and walks a dramatically new road.  Her past crowd begins to pester the main girl, and the other girl defends her very vehemently.  I like these two characters very much, and, of course, that's half the battle of writing a successful story: to create believable, engaging characters.  They have to be so convincing that the reader just can't abandon them!  I've written a few stories, as you know, but the main one—the extended story of Helen, split into a half-dozen separate pieces—was so specialized, that only a few readers could relate to the main character of Helen, and I sort of gave up.  (The subsidiary characters were a lot more relatable, and I focused on them.)

Secondly, there's the matter of voice.  The story is written in the first person, the cheerleader.  But the speech of the narration is that of a very middle-class teenager.  I've gone online, and read what Ms. Tudor has written in a lot of places, and in every case, the grammar, the vocabulary, the content of what she writes is most definitely adult, and humorous, and very different from what that cheerleader says in the book.  I've tried that—to write a first-person narration in the voice of a character—and it is very hard indeed!  (That's how I wrote Yraid, and I don't think I pulled it off.  Another story like that, Eyebrows, remains unfinished.)

The girl's (narrator's) mother is problematic.  She comes from money, and has very bourgeoise, superficial values: money, clothes, family, real estate, cars.  The cheerleader herself is far more down-to-earth, compassionate, values, streets ahead of her mother.  Her father is a much more reasonable person, and supports her friendship.  You have to wonder how the child of such a pair of parents could acquire such liberal values.  In my experience, most of our values are inherited from our parents.  Anyway, in the story it's a synthetic family; the father is a step-father.

Well, I encourage you to read this story; I have trouble inserting links, or I'd give you one.  It's on Amazon (though we 'antifa' people hate Amazon on principle).

Kay

Being Christian

I'm not a Christian in the sense of believing in a God, but I grew up in a Christian family, and to me, the objectives of a Christan life are almost the only objectives worth aiming for. 

But recently, I read that the murder of John Kennedy was very likely linked to his serious, no nonsense attitude towards the state of Israel.  Remember the book Da Vinci Code?  The religious leaders kept their hands clean, but managed to convey to unscrupulous operatives what they wanted—even up to murder—and the killings were carried out.  In the book (which was presented as fiction, and was probably mostly fiction) the assassins were given religious absolution in advance, so that they could plan their killings without the fear of eternal damnation hanging over their heads.  In the case of Israeli operatives, I doubt that the calculus of sin and punishment was as finely worked out as it was among the catholics, but the brutality of how they torture poor Palestinian children, performing surgery without anesthesia, etc, seems almost too brutal to be true.  But when I was a kid, hearing about the Kennedy assassination, I didn't have the slightest inkling that the state of Israel was even tangentially connected with it. 

I'm reading a book by Caren Werlinger, about a monastic order of nuns, and how their vague interest in (pre-internet) news from the outside world swelled to a flood after the Kennedy assassination.  Of course, the nation as a whole viewed Catholics with dislike and distrust, and some Protestants would have been pleased to remove a catholic president.  But the Israelis had the money (actually, American money) to exert the sort of pressure that works so well in this country.  Just the fact that this order of monastic nuns, who would never hurt or harm any being (other than each other!) would be horrifying themselves listening to the news on the radio, and being shocked at the murders of Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, makes me deeply sorry. 

I forgot where I was going with all this. 

Well.  Having religious beliefs helps to simplify life to a great extent.  But not enough to deal with Trump.  That wasn't the point of my Blog post today, but there it is. 

Kay

Sugar and Yet More Smoke

OK; head over to our sister Blog.  It's over there.