Yet another story, and a Reminder!!!

Sophie-the-Legs

 There is a minor thread in the Helen story that begins soon after she starts teaching at Westfield.   She is invited to a reception in Pittsburgh, and a young composer challenges her to premiere a still- to- be- written violin concerto.  Helen agrees, and it amounts to a commission, which is not an uncommon occurrence in the music world.

The concerto is written, and Helen plays it, but I always forget the name of the young composer.  Okay, it's Bill Yves!!!  This is so that I will never forget it again!

Back to the early days at Westfield.

Helen On the Run, I feel, marks the point at which Helen actually stops being a kid, and becomes an adult.  Even after this point, Helen still breaks out in some self-indulgent nonsense, and never totally grows up, even once she has met Marissa, at which point she grows up in some ways, but becomes sort of a baby in other ways.

In any case, the story of how she meets Sophie, the tennis player, and Rain (Evelyn Woodford), the language instructor, about her first semester at Westfield College, is very crowded.  Sophie-The-Legs, as Helen's students call her, is a lovely person, but she does not set herself as a potential love interest, which makes her very attractive, is a fun story, especially because she is a fun person, who is entirely outside the music world, and sees everything as new and fascinating.  This part was a lot of fun to write!  Meanwhile, Rain is an intense person, and that part was fun to write because it was so full of emotion.  I think I will have to cut one or the other of them out, and I can't decide which.  I can make Sophie a minor character, who is not a romantic interest, but (Spoiler alert) Rain continues to be an important character, who brings out certain very ugly aspects of Helen's personality.  I love both girls, and with some work I could feature Sophie in a little episode that doesn't interfere with the plot line.

By the way, don't forget: the two new stories, (Helen on the Run, and Helen and Sharon) are uploaded.

Kay

Helen, in Outline

Once again, let me remind you:  Helen was written years ago, just as escapism for it's author: me.  I kept it carefully hidden, to make it more exciting for myself, but also because I was embarrassed.  The literary value of the scribblings were low (and I'm sure many readers still think it is junk that doesn't deserve to have people looking at it, wondering whether to read it!  It takes all sorts, people.)

Anyway, I started publishing cleaned-up episodes from the story, and at present there are eight episodes from the Helen Saga (as well as a major story in which a Helen Nordstrom character is present, but where the character histories of the two Helens have major discrepancies.)  This is a overview of the entire business, so that you can select which segments will be interesting to you.

Helen, ages 12 - 18
In this period, Helen's mother has died, Helen wins a choir scholarship to "the college", a nameless college in Ohio, but her father is too depressed to take her in for freshman year.  Helen hitch-hikes her way to the school, with Janet and Jason Kolb, and meets Janet's mother, Elly.  Helen is early; the other students have not arrived.  There is an instrument-maker who is setting up an instrument-factory at Helen's college, and Helen is hired to help him.  Meanwhile, Helen helps Janet with a tennis program set up by the parks and recreation people.
The semester begins, Helen joins the choir, the tennis team, and hears recitals by a local chamber music ensemble that plays renaissance instruments: viols, lutes, etc, and is soon absorbed into the local Early Music scene, which is just beginning to blossom.  Helen is also interested in mathematics and computer science, and takes courses in those.
During the Winter Break, Helen is offered a job with a rich woman in Florida, to be a companion, and a tennis partner.  Janet and Jason also love tennis, and the lady invites them over, and pays for Janet to attend a program to train tennis coaches, and Janet qualifies to coach tennis.
Helen gets gradually more involved with Early Instruments through the workshop, and persuades the college to organize an Early Music Festival over the summer break.  The local PBS station gets Helen to give periodic updates about the progress of preparations for the festival, and her face becomes familiar to the regional public TV audience.  That winter, Jason is called up for the Balkan war, and dies on the way to the front.  Janet is pregnant, and the baby is born soon after Janet is widowed, and Helen and Janet decide to bring up the baby--Baby Elly--together.  Coincidentally, Janet's mother Elly (now called Old Elly, or Grandma Elly) also delivers a baby, Tomasina, who was accidentally conceived with Helen's father (it's a long story) and the two girls grow up together.
Helen makes friends with a girl called Cindy over the Internet, and it turns out Cindy has lost her memory, and is actually being kept captive by a prostitution ring.  Helen encourages Cindy to escape, and Cindy comes to live with Helen.  (Backstory: Lisa, Cindy, and the Violin.)  Helen is also there when the daughter of the president of her college has a terrible accident, and helps her until the Ambulance turns up.  The girl is Lisa, and her mother Pat plays violin for the local chamber group.  Pat is grateful to Helen, and lends her a valuable unconverted Baroque violin.  The violin suits Helen so well, that she quickly becomes an excellent violinist.  Cindy's memory returns, and she realizes that she is a violin instructor.  Cindy helps Helen to realize her full potential as a Baroque violinist, and then as a player on the modern (steel-strung) violin.
Helen gets a minor part in Mozart's The Magic Flute, meets a sweet guy, Kurt, a fellow-cast-member, and they decide to become a couple.  Helen begins to get invitations to play the violin repertoire with major orchestras, but over the summer, Helen and Kurt drift apart.
Every chance Helen gets, she is invited down to Florida, and she gets to visit a very special nightclub, where they present nude ballet.  Not all the performances are nude, but every evening, they present a few dances by girls dressed very scantily, or not at all, or only wearing body paint.  Helen falls in love with the daughter of the owner of the establishment, Leila, and Helen is Leila's first love, and they begin a passionate relationship.  Leila has been taught martial arts in her childhood, and one night, (long before Helen and Leila had met) Leila and her mother are threatened knife-point.  Leila fights back, and kills the attacker.  The incident leaves a deep scar on Leila.
The Nightclub features Helen and Leila dancing nude together, and their popularity spreads like wildfire.  The club begins to make a lot of money, and Helen gives her earnings to the rich lady who brought her down to Florida in the first place, Juliana.
Helen's affair with Leila makes Janet very unhappy.  Meanwhile, Helen begins to work for a men's magazine as a photographer, which is how she meets the Baker sisters.  Presently, Leila is also unhappy, and Helen also has a few admirers at school, and by the end of the school year, Helen has numerous lovers, but is deeply unhappy herself.

Helen, ages 19-21
At the beginning of the summer, Janet has decided to travel to North Carolina, where she has met a wonderful guy, a clergyman, with whom she has fallen in love.  She needs to bring baby Elly up with two parents, and Helen does not seem mature enough for the job.  Helen decides to visit Leila in Florida, and repair that relationship.  Two people whom Helen loved dearly, a boy and a girl, both had developed AIDS, and had died, and Helen was barely keeping sane.
A woman called Sandy meets Helen at the bus station, and asks whether Helen would like to help out at an all-girls nude tennis camp in Canada.  Helen is not interested at first, sensing trouble.  But she finally gives in, and joins the camp as a counselor called Pink Orchid.  The camp does really well, the girls really learn a lot of tennis, and Helen is a hero.  Helen has a brief visit with Kurt, but that doesn't work out.  Helen is now far happier than she has been in a long time, and decides to stay in Canada with the camp Nurse.  She drops out of school, and Helen and Nurse lead a life close to nature, growing their own food, hunting in the large tract of forest that Nurse owns, visiting the Native American tribe that lives close to Nurse's property.
Helen finds out that she is pregnant, but Nurse is confident that she can help Helen through the pregnancy.  Women have had babies without hospitals for years, she reminds Helen.  But it is soon clear that Helen is having twins.  Sandy is called in, and Helen discovers that Sandy is really Marsha Moore in disguise.  Marsha Moore is a Hollywood actress.  Marsha flies Helen out to her home in Bel Air, and despite everything, Helen miscarries, and Helen sinks into depression.  Helen and Marsha get involved in an intense and desperate sexual relationship, to try and kick Helen out of her depression, and this works to a limited extent.
Marsha and Nurse confer together, and decide that it doesn't make sense for Helen to live in the wilderness, occasionally assisting at a tennis camp; her destiny is to be a violinist, or an opera singer, or a teacher.  She has to finish college; after that, Helen can decide to drop out of society, if that's what she really wants.  As a first step, they suggest that Helen sign up as a camp leader for a girl's ballet camp in Europe.  Helen likes this idea, and the camp is a resounding success.  (Helen at Ballet Camp)
After Ballet Camp, Helen returns briefly to California, and she and Marsha try to settle down to couple-hood.  But Helen is bored, and Marsha sadly realizes that Helen needs her last year of college to grow up.

Helen, ages 21-32
Helen is readmitted to college, and meets a lovely Indian girl, Lalitha, who is a freshman.  Over the year, the two girls fall in love, but Lalitha's father wants her back home, having heard that his daughter has been behaving inappropriately with a certain American girl.  Helen follows Lalitha to India, where she is unable to prevent Lalitha from marrying a man she has no interest in.  Helen wanders around India for months, and gradually loses her memory, forgets her identity, and spends ten years in a Catholic retreat and farm, and Ashram.  She falls seriously ill, and the sisters take her in to the American consulate, which decides to repatriate the nameless American woman.  Helen has surgery, and a tumor is removed.  She has total amnesia, and Cindy offers to take Helen under her wing, and gets her settled at a farm in California run by an order of Catholic nuns.
Helen does well at the farm, discovers she can play tennis, and works in housing construction, and meets two little girls, Gena and Allie.  But the parents of the little girls are ill, and the mother dies, leaving the kids with Helen, and their father is later found dead.
Meanwhile, Lalitha and her little boy have been living in the US for many years.  Lalitha had called around soon after she had arrived in Maryland, and left messages asking to be informed if anyone heard from Helen.  Eventually she got word, and decides to take a cross-country bus trip, to meet Helen, and see whether she can help Helen recover her memory.
With great difficulty, Lalitha manages to help Helen recall her senior year, and Helen returns to Ohio, and her former professors help her to get accepted to graduate school in Philadelphia.
For a while, Helen and Lalitha are happy.  But the pressure of graduate school, and Helen's libido, are too much, and Lalitha asks to be allowed to leave.  She moves back to Baltimore to join her son and the widow of the missionary who had helped her come to the US.  But things go bad, and Lalitha moves in with a young woman who has been a glamour model, Trish.  Together with Lalitha's young son, they set up a home in a low-rent apartment, and barely make a living working in a store.  Lalitha's girlfriend gets herself pregnant with Lalitha's son's child, the young fellow barely old enough to be the father of the baby.  Lalitha has her work cut out for her, keeping Trish and her son apart.  Helen rescues them, and brings them back to Philadelphia, to work for her in a new instrument workshop she has set up.  Meanwhile, Helen is trying to resist the romantic overtures of Lorna, a high-school senior, who studies at a ballet school.  Lorna is infatuated with Helen, and makes highly inappropriate gestures of affection to Helen, much to the disapproval of Gena.  (Helen and Lalitha: the Lost Years)

Helen, ages 33-36
As it becomes better known that the talented violinist, soprano and conductor Helen Nordstrom is a lesbian, and the mother of two little girls, certain conservative elements start a campaign to have the children removed from Helen's care.  At this time, Helen is living with a well-known model, Michelle Smith.  The case is brought to court, and Helen loses custody.  But the two girls make a daring escape to return to Helen's apartment by foot (with the baby in a stroller), and Michelle advises Helen to take the children and run.  Helen buys an old junk car, and they head west.  On the way, Helen meets Penny O'Brien and her little daughter Erin, and they make their way to southern California, and Helen works odd jobs, and they live hand-to-mouth for a while.  Helen's cousin Marika Johnson learns how to get in touch with Helen, and presently Michelle joins them, and Helen gets construction work, and they are now fairly well off.
Helen has carelessly got herself pregnant again.  She had spent the night with a grad student from Rhode Island, Jeffrey Gibson, and paid the price.  They plan a deception, and tell their neighbors and friends that "Steve" (what Helen was calling herself) has to go help out with looking after the kids of his sister, "Paula".  Helen catches a bus as Steve, goes to Marsha, who helps her transform into "Paula", and a few days later, returns on another bus.  After Helen spends a few weeks as Paula, Michelle is identified by the FBI, and taken into custody.  Helen, Penny and the three children head north in a minivan than a friend helps them to buy, and Marika's younger sister, Heikki, lends them a cottage she owns in a little village outside St Paul.  Both Helen and Penny are given work at Ferguson School, a private boarding school in the village of Ferguson.
The baby is delivered, but Helen is once again spotted by the FBI, and brought before a Federal judge, who sentences Helen to six months in prison.  But the sentence is suspended, because of the many mitigating circumstances.  Penny has cancer, and dies in Ferguson, and now Helen has Gena, 14, Erin, 10, Alison, 2, and Baby James, who was born in Ferguson.  (The plan is to put this material in Helen on the Run:  The Lost Years.)

More in the next installment!

Kay

A New Story in the Works!

You might have forgotten by now, but I have been promising, for more than a year, to finish Helen On the Run: The Lost Years, but have failed to deliver.  It is a great story, and I want to end it well, though at this point a quick summary of what takes place might be all I can manage...

However.

A major story element in the entire Helen saga has not even been touched upon, either in this Blog, or at Smashwords.  It is almost the only real story, with a plot and everything, in the story of Helen, except for, well ... actually there are quite a few stories, such as Helen and the Flowershop Girl, which is a very short story, which is such an unconnected episode that I could easily excise it from the rest of Helen.  Helen and Lalitha is definitely a story, and so will Helen on The Run be.  But this one is important, because it really casts a long shadow on Helen's life, as well as affecting Helen's relationships rather strongly.  In fact, this story and its implications might well be considered to be the central plot of the entire series (thinking of the Helen story as a series, which it isn't yet.)

Temporary Cover

I'm going to call this huge story (presently at around 140,000 words) Helen and Sharon, which ironically refers to only one person:  Sharon is a fictitious character whom Helen masquerades as, in order to do some crazy stuff.  (The stuff is not as crazy as some of you might wish for; there is always an overlay of seriousness in these stories, for which I apologize, and to which I surely owe the limited popularity of the Helen stories!  And also the significant paucity of cats, which must surely disappoint cat lovers.)

Sharon is principally about a movie, which stars a redheaded warrior girl, Merit, and I would dearly love to have Merit on the cover of the book, and I'm tempted to actually create the cover by myself.  I would love to get myself one of these Waco tablets, and see if my minute artistic skills are up to the challenge of creating a storybook cover; who knows?  The smaller image in the cover illustration is the Princess, played by Sita, the younger sister of Lalitha, whom you might remember from Helen and Lalitha.  The central figure is from Wikipedia, which in turn credits the image to Jean-Pol GRANDMONT.  Either Mr. Grandmont created the marble statue and then 'distressed' it, or he took the photograph.

Successful Science Fiction Books about Musical Protagonists

Having written a Science Fiction (SF) story focused on a musician (Music on the Galactic Voyager) I'm naturally curious about how other authors have succeeded in exploring that dimension.  The only two that I know of are Anne McCaffrey, who has written such books in two of her series (the Crystal Singer series, and the Dragons of PERN series), and Marion Zimmer Bradley, who has three entries in her Darkover series (admittedly only two of which have a strong music theme).

Let's take Marion Zimmer Bradley first.  Music sneaks into her stories in minor ways not infrequently, but with Exile's Song, she introduces a female character who takes music very seriously indeed.  In the distant future, Marion Zimmer Bradley (or MZB, as she is called by her fans) envisions a cosmos where mankind has spread widely among the stars, and over the millennia has given rise to numerous unique civilizations on hundreds of planets, each with its unique culture.  There is one entire planet, called University, which is the entire galactic center for higher learning.

MZB's Darkover series centers on the planet Darkover, a planet in the system of a red giant, and the main conceit is that, over time, the inhabitants of Darkover boast an extroardinarily large proportion of people with psy powers.  The psy powers are carefully classified, and satify their own rules, sort of, and the families of psy powered individuals essentially rule the society.  After a particularly traumatic political upheaval, one head of such a family gives up his rights to his domain, (as the properties and lands of these families are called,) and goes off-world, to represent it as its senator in the interplanetary government.  He takes with him his daughter, and his second wife, his first wife having been a casualty of the political upheaval (the so-called Sharrah Rebellion).  The story centers around the little girl, who grows up in an entirely different planets, and then goes off to University (the planet, remember), and becomes a capable musician, with an advanced degree in ethnomusicology, that is the comparative musicology of various cultures.  (Actually, it should be called xenomusicology, because ethnomusicology is, to the best of my knowledge, the musicology of the musical arts of primitive peoples.)

The three books in which this character is the central one are among the last few that MZB wrote.  (Others have been written by MZB collaborating with other co-authors, but these three see the hand of MZB still prominent; in subsequent books, she permits her co-authors to fill out gaps in the stories presented in other books.)  I wondered why MZB left it so late to write a book with a protagonist who was a musician, and I had several theories.  One was that being a musician was merely incidental to the character; she may as well have been a poet, or an artist, or a biologist, but for obvious reasons she (MZB) wanted a discipline that was conducive to interplanetary travel (the musician travels into various planets, recording indigenous music, to be studied back in University), and appropriate for an innocent scholar; as you can imagine, an economist or a political scientist or a historian would make for far too canny a character for the interaction of the character with a particular society to be interesting.  A second theory is that MZB was, herself, a musical person, but did not initially have the expertise she needed to write a book centered around a musicologist, until she happened to discover someone who could help her out.  A third theory is that MZB actually met someone who became the prototype for the character.

The story begins really with this girl, Margaret Alton, accidentally having to revisit her native planet of Darkover, and discovering that she had very strong psy powers, which have to be schooled in order to prevent dangerous situations.  (Many of the Darkover stories take this route, of a character discovering psy powers, and having to go through the routine of how to deal with them, but this story really does a good job with it.)  Unlike other strong Darkover series characters, Margaret Alton has a lot of depth, because having her main interest being music, she is impatient with having to deal with this wholly (to her) unwanted talent for, well, mind-reading, and so forth.

Interestingly enough, MZB actually gives credit to another person for inventing the character of Margaret Alton.  I haven't tried to understand what exactly that means; it could be any number of things.

How successful is the story, and the character?  I would say that Margaret Alton is almost the most successful character this author invented.  She is innocent, but sophisticated, repressed, but MZB arranges for her repression to have been artificial, and it is removed, with interesting consequences.  Even when the repression is removed, and Margaret is able to express herself sexually, there is still great discipline, together with passion, which makes for a very attractive character indeed.  The story takes two volumes to unfold, and, I have to say, story wise it is a little too fantastic.  But you never notice the weakness of the plot; the character of Margaret (or Marguerida, as she is called on Darkover) is fascinating, and carries us with her.

The second author is Anne McCaffrey, who had created several SF series, two of which are the Dragons of PERN series, and the Crystal Singer series.  The latter series centers round the mining of a certain sort of crystal, which has to be sung to; the crystal sings back, and it is harvested.  Seems a little far-fetched to me, but though there is singing, there is really no music in the story.

The PERN series is about a human colony on an Earth-like planet (called PERN), and the settlers find an intriguing native life-form that resembles a miniature version of the dragons of ancient Earth mythology.  They genetically engineer a giant version of these little creatures, supposedly to help deal with a certain biological menace, and over the centuries, a symbiotic relationship develops between the humans and the dragons, even when the society regresses to a medieval level.

One of the most charming stories is that of Menolly, a girl who likes to sing.  In PERN, in the centuries after it has regressed to a Medieval culture, there are harpers, people who provide both music and history, and a sort of education based on an oral tradition. But the harpers are all men, and though Menolly would dearly love to be a harper, it is against the rules.  Menolly, furious at being denied this opportunity, goes off to live in the sea-caves, where she is stunned to rediscover the original little miniature dragons (from which, we know, the giant dragons were actually bred.  That all comes out in other stories).

It is interesting to contrast the character of Menolly with that of Margaret, and the two stories, and even the two series.  The PERN series, most of which is set in the medieval society, reflects the pleasure that McCaffrey has in writing stories within that background.  In contrast, MZB's stories get their energy from the interaction between the culture of Darkover (which is also creeping from a feudal one towards a sort of Renaissance culture) and the interplanetary space culture.  Darkover is a protected planet, which is a special status that forbids contamination of its technology with modern scientific technology and culture, something that the Darkovan leadership thinks is essential for the survival of Darkover.

McCaffrey, too, clearly identifies with the character of Menolly, but she has a much easier time of it, since most of what Menolly does is sing, and play a guitar or a little hand-drum.  In contrast, MZB's heroine Margaret can play almost any instrument, and arrives on Darkover already an expert.  Both women are musical through and through, and love music in all its forms (though Menolly obviously never encounters any music except that of the harpers among whom she lives).  Part of the tragedy of the professional musician in today's world is that they need to work with music so much that eventually they find it almost impossible to get enthusiastic about any music after a few decades of practicing the art.  This is just my observation, and I'm sure musicians will dispute this theory vigorously.

Menolly appears in a handful of the PERN books, and it is difficult to decide whether Menolly was merely an invention for the generation of a book or two, or whether she was the expression of a special interest of the author, Anne McCaffrey.  I'd like to think that both characters were the flowering of ideas the respective authors had been nursing along, until something enabled them to create the two characters; perhaps an expert who could give background, or an encounter with a musician with a particularly striking personality!  Anyway, these several music-related books, and these two musical characters are among the most delightful things in my bookshelf.

Kay, musician wannabe

The Sound of Music

I first saw The Sound of Music (somehow it needs to be in italics!) when I was about 12, during one of the periodic revivals of the movie; perhaps an anniversary.  I loved it to bits; very likely my passionate love of music of a certain sort was born on this occasion.  I loved Julie Andrews---and I still love her, of course!  What a wonderful role model for women who want to transcend the traditional stereotype, without surrendering all the superior attributes of the female sex---and I loved every one of the von Trapp kids, the younger ones more than the older ones, at first, and after later viewings of the movie, all of them, but the girls more than the boys!

The historical context of the movie is certainly important, but not the central value of it.  It was a musical, tenuously descended from the autobiography of Maria von Trapp, who, with her husband and family, settled in Vermont, to the best of my knowledge, and established a ski resort there.  The musical component of the play was derived honestly, because Maria was very much a musician, and was interested in folk music of all lands, and gained entry into the lives of the very reserved von Trapp children through music.

The movie really presented a story that was ultimately different from the true story, and in my mind, initially I imagined that Julie Andrews and the kids were the original protagonists!  As I grew older, and watched the movie on different occasions, I became gradually aware of the technical faults of the movie, and the DVD, and the compact disc, the screenplay and so on.  But none of that could detract from the sheer charm of the actors, especially Julie Andrews, the old-time dry humor of Uncle Max, the kids, who stayed in character even when they were rebellious, the angelic sweetness of the girls, as they looked after each other, and the youngest one Gretl (Kym Karath).

Many who are perfectly well balanced in their outlook inexplicably become cynics when talking about a movie such as The Sound of Music.  "Life is not like that," they say, "and in any case, the invasion of Austria was not like that."  Well, of course it could not have been like that; the production took immense liberties to create not only a profitable family movie (an immensely profitable movie, by all accounts), but a movie to which a principally American audience could easily relate.  I must say, however, that the artistic production created a movie into which a viewer---a young viewer, certainly---could sink herself, and almost believe that she was in Austria, especially Salzburg, where Mozart lived and worked for a time.  Furthermore, we're looking at these events through the eyes of Maria von Trapp, who most certainly overlaid a romantic wrapping on her experiences, as most survivors of those times would have done.  We cannot expect that the movie producers would go out of their way to look for gruesome scenes from those times with which to introduce historical accuracy into a musical play.

The revelation came as a shock to me, that many of my fictional characters were based on characters from the Sound of Music---I'll leave it to you to guess which ones; it is at least not a hard guess that Helen was based in large part on Julie Andrews, though not in terms of her undisciplined approach to love and romance---and the movie was most definitely a jump-off point for all my discoveries and adventures in learning about classical music of that time.

The music of The Sound of Music is wonderful, but I have to confess that, with a few exceptions, its charm is mostly that of nostalgia.  Once I start enumerating the excerpts I love, I suspect they will end up being more than half the songs!  Edelweiss, some have written, was not a folk-song at all, but a song constructed by Richard Rodgers.  I am skeptical, but it certainly is a lovely song!  The Do-Re-Mi song is a brilliant composition, unsurpassed by anything, except maybe 'Getting to know you,' from The King and I, and a few iconic songs like that.  I love the completely silly Lonely Goatherd, and the Farewell Song, none of which I can stand anyone singing but the movie cast.  The Sound of Music opening song, and How do you solve a problem like Maria, I enjoy from a dramatic point of view, though they aren't really wonderful as pure music.  Other songs such as Climb every mountain, and I have confidence, and (Oh god) Somewhere in my youth or childhood (I must have done something good), I can take, or more likely, leave strictly alone.

So this is my homage to this delightful, and increasingly under-appreciated movie, and its wonderfully talented cast of actors.

Kay Hemlock Brown

News and Opinion from Kay

I have very strong views on education, especially music education.  I still keep in touch with some of the colleagues from the places at which I have taught, and it surprises me how concerned they are about education, especially their specific fields.  "Chemistry is being neglected," says a tenured chemistry professor, and "Math is not being taken seriously enough!" exclaims a tenured math professor, and "there's too much emphasis on everything except foreign languages" insists a tenured professor in modern languages.  Am I different because I agree with all of them--to some degree?  Clearly, colleges have now been put in the position of having to give kids a general education, to allow them to function in society.  (Grade school used to do this, but in those years kids are awfully busy being kids.)  This frantic competitiveness when it comes to the various disciplines within a school seems needlessly . . . I don't even know the word for it.  (It's fractious.  I had a brain fart.)  It is as if they have never heard the motto: United we stand, divided we fall!  We must all hang together, to paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, or we will certainly be hung out to dry separately.  And who should know better that all subjects and disciplines should be given equal emphasis once those fields are introduced into the curriculum than college professors?  They seem to spend far too much time fretting about the stability of their jobs.

I think the central tragedy in our society today is the conviction that nothing is worth more than money.  We have grown up with people who have been preoccupied with material wealth for years, but somehow it never came to the point where it was all that mattered. Reputation, appearance, appearances (not the same thing), power, education, social standing, the public good, all these things mattered to some degree.  But a recent article about a Virginia economist called James Buchanan traces the roots of the economic and political strategy of the economic elite who mastermind the politics in Washington to this man.  He advocated not just the defeat of the welfare state, but the actual destruction of democracy.  Ayn Rand had a relatively sunny disposition, says the author of this piece, compared to Buchanan.  Reading it, one gets the conviction that Trump is merely a tool.

Well, as long as we're alive, we have to push back, and I have neither the inclination nor the training to contribute to the resistance which must take place.  But an important component to the upbringing of the sort of citizen who has a vision of the kind of world in which diversity and art and culture have a place is the proper education.

Whether we like it or not, our environment is educating our kids to believe that only money matters.  Well, our environment is mostly dominated by businesses.  What do we expect?  Money is the very blood of Business, so if we swim in a sea of business, money is inevitably the source of all energy.  Is this, I wonder, the origin of this panic-stricken urgency that so many on the Christian Right feel to proselytize everyone?  Well,  I have news for them: can't you see how your very evangelists have sold their souls to Mammon?  That is the fact that most makes me want to tear my hair out!  More than Trump, Christianity is a tool for this anti-Democratic cohort to dismantle the political philosophy of this, the longest-surviving constitutional democracy.

These Buchananites (as opposed to ordinary Libertarians, some of whom want extreme freedom in order to serve their fellow-man according to their own impulses--but, I'm convinced, not so these Buchananites) must go through life with the opposite of rose-colored spectacles; everywhere they look, they only see someone out to steal their money.

In Helen vs. Messiah, Marissa lies in bed, broken-hearted at the fact that Helen has retired from the concert stage, and apparently gone into a depressed funk.  Here's an excerpt --not the one I was looking for, which would have better illustrated how Marissa regarded Helen, but this will have to do:

Helen’s miraculous arrival a year and some months ago had made her life less of a disaster than it would have been.  In spite of all the heartbreaking obstacles Helen had been presented with, she had given Maryssa the strength to see the world as a place with possibilities, with kindness and friendship hidden behind its rough, harsh face.

That's the essence of it.  Just as Helen opened Marissa's eyes to see the world without being threatened by it, so education does the same for us.  An infant sees the world as its mother.  Then, as it grows older, and experiences its environment, a time comes--or could come--when all it sees is the rough, harsh face of the world.  If we cannot get beyond that intimidating facade, then we're fair game for those who see their environment--and I'm not talking about woods and streams here; I mean the world outside us--those who see the world as something to be mastered and dominated.  The recent history of the USA has this thread of exploitative domination running through it, and not in a happy way.

Those who aren't in sympathy with the aims of college education, see it as an opportunity for the wrong kind of people to indoctrinate innocent kids.  (If there are any college professors reading this: there are great dangers in trying to fight fire with fire, and indoctrination with indoctrination.)  What you can do is to present the basic interconnectedness of all things as something positive, and the world as something to be embraced and appreciated, rather than a hostile entity that needs to be put in a cage, and exploited for oneself (not even for the benefit of others among one's acquaintances).

That was exhausting to write; a thousand curses upon those who dream up these dreary theories which we must labor to address!  The rough harsh face of the world just looks a lot harsher today.
[more after the break:]

Politics

The policy of taking kids at the border away to hold separately sort of died not with a bang, but a whimper, as far as I can see.

Each time they dream up some executive order to rile up the Democrats (which is really what they're doing, and the Democrats know it, but can't help from reacting) it costs the government millions of dollars.  They're eating up their own financial reserves (thinking about the treasury as 'belonging to' the Republicans, which it may as well, seeing as it isn't money, but anti-money, to borrow an idea from the Physics people), which in turn means that they're adding to the deficit.  This means only one thing: the GOP has filled its pockets symbolically with all it can carry, and is preparing to allow the Democrats to deal with this unprecedented deficit.

If only the people-at-large understood the problems with deficit spending!  The national debt is now so large that the liberals and the Democrats cannot afford any social welfare.  Once the Democrats take Congress (and I'm almost willing to bet that the GOP will actually work in the side of the Democrats, because there's nothing for the GOP in taking Congress, and everything to be gained by seeing a Democrat Congress flounder for two years) all the Democrats can do is raise taxes again, pay down the deficit again, and try to prevent the Trumps from running off to Moscow.  Wait . . . maybe we ought to leave the deficit where it is, and maybe add to it a little.  Hopefully no do-gooders will step up to the plate to solve all the problems with brilliant out-of-the-box thinking . . . There may not be any boxes left, once 2019 rolls around.

Kay H. B.