A Unique Heroine from the Discworld

I decided to read a book by the late Terry Pratchett last week, and it featured one of Pratchett's most unique characters: Sybil Ramkin.

This is a spoiler, but the story is about the first encounter between Sam Vines, the head policeman with a bad attitude, and Lady Sybil Ramkin, a sort of local aristocrat cat lady, except that her passion was dragons.  She had scores of what were described as swamp dragons in her dragon kennels, and was a local authority on the critters.

There's a lot more to the story than that, but we hardly ever read more detail about Lady Sybil than in this book (except for one other story, Snuff, where we hear a lot about Lady Sybil as well).  There are leading female characters of many kinds that I have seen: the ultra-girly heroine who clings to her man or her woman, the feisty-but-feminine woman who is always ready with a cutting remark or a piercing glare; the tough woman who never gives up and is a match for most bullies; the elegant, sarcastic woman who is entirely above brawling with anyone; the motherly (or older-sisterly) woman who fiercely defends her brood and all underdogs; and the angry heroine with her back to the wall, who fights back like a cornered rat.  But Sybil Ramkin is a little different from any one of these.

Sybil is a distillation of all the delightfully ultra-healthy female aristocrats to be found in British literature; the Tally-ho types simply radiating enthusiasm and fabulous complexions, but are still inexplicably unmarried well past the age at which one expects marriage to take place.  They're not tomboys, exactly, but there's a little of that.  They're more likely to be indignant or occasionally censorious than bitter, or sarcastic, though Lady Sybil has been occasionally known to resort to sarcasm when taken off her guard.  She is Fiercely protective of Sam Vimes, until they're married, and they're blessed with a baby, when Sam is expected to take second place to the precious little brat.  Pratchett describes her as big, and in this book one gets the impression that she is bigger than is good for her.  In future stories, he moderates this description and conjures up an image of an ample sort of girl, but not one for whose health we feel anxious.  There is one odd feature of our fabulous heroine, namely that since her hobby is the breeding of swamp dragons, most of her hair has been flamed off, and she has to resort to wearing wigs.  I personally don't have a problem with this, but it conveys an impression of someone who is just a little more out of kilter than I'm willing to support in a heroine.  I imagine a hurriedly put on wig, and my mind rejects it.  If you're going to wear a wig, it has to be fastened down with the utmost care, and I don't see Sybil taking the time for it.  Finally, he describes her as having a big, fruity voice.  Booming is the word he uses.  Ok, for a piece of humorous fiction booming could be excused, but for a convincing heroine I think we need someone who may look like Liv Tyler, but has a voice more like Dame Maggie Smith, but louder.

It is interesting how Pratchett manages to support the fact that his character is an aristocrat.  If you think about it, the biggest tool in the aristocracy toolchest of an author is the aristocratic family.  Here, Sybil is an orphan, and her relatives (if any) appear to live far away, in Quirm, or Klatch, or wherever.  So Sybil has to be aristocratic all by herelf, supported only by old family retainers, and various ancient heirlooms scattered about her large castle.  Nevertheless, Pratchett is able to create almost the most aristocratic aristocrat in the entire Discworld Saga in Lady Sybil Ramkin.

Lady Sybil and Captain Vimes marry, of course, and they're blissfully happy; Pratchett goes to some lengths to portray this marriage as blessed.  And, to my mind, this unlikely couple is one of his most fortunate inventions.

Kay

News from Kay

Due to some serious injuries, for which I had to have surgery, I have had to take an extended leave of absence from work, without pay.  On one hand, this would seem to suggest that I have a lot more time for writing, but unfortunately it is very painful to type at the computer. I suppose I could try some voice-to-text software, but at the moment I'm just sitting here being sorry for myself!

I do think out plot ideas during these down times, so it's not all a complete waste.  But forced inaction is very bad for an author, at least this author.

More later,

Kay  

Trying to be a whole person in Trump’s America

That heading says it all, doesn’t it?

We all have to battle our tendencies to lie, and cheat, and be selfish, and take mean advantage of weaker people.  Some of the weakest people I come across are my students.  Some of them cannot do a single thing for themselves, but I just can’t make myself do those things for my students, because there’s a nagging feeling that sooner or later, these kids must learn to take matters into their own hands, and get their own answers.  But few of my colleagues really grapple with this problem; they just adopt, wholesale, some approach someone else has advocated.  I can’t be that objective about the matter.  When I throw them to the wolves, I want to have them watching me throwing them very carefully!

Our public radio station is now hurting for money.  At first, I thought, well, the more I support the station, the less the State and the Federal Government is going to support it.  If private individuals support it entirely, the government has that much more money for its slush funds, and of course they will just run out and lower taxes.  Apparently all the friends of members of State Houses are the super rich, and all they think of doing is lowering taxes at the highest income levels.  I just don’t understand it.  I would be embarrassed to be known as a friend of the super rich.  But not so for lawmakers.

Most of the characters in my stories are soft-hearted, sympathetic people who give, and give, and keep on giving.  I’m not that way, and so I suppose I had to make my characters that way, as one method of living a virtuous life vicariously.  The very first character I invented, Helen Nordstrom (my friends just could not understand why I chose her to be a Scandinavian-American, since I have practically no Scandinavian heritage whatsoever.  I believe that it was so that Helen would have no ethnic traits at all, since Helen’s ancestry plays hardly any role in her story) is an ultra-warm-hearted Polyanna of a girl.

I keep wanting to make Helen have ordinary failings, but I just can’t do it.  Her only failing is that she simply cannot resist any girl who makes a play for her; she just swoons right into their arms, with very few exceptions.

I was going somewhere with this, but I need to think it out a little more clearly!

Kay

Holiday Greetings from Kay Hemlock Brown!

Greetings of the season to all my readers, from me and my extended family!

Some folks can't quite see the point of this frenzied social activity at this time of year, and probably ascribe it to the fact that "Jesus was born on December 25th," and everybody must have got on the bandwagon!  In fact, I believe there is more than a little evidence that the historical Jesus was born at another time of year.  However, there already was a celebration of the Winter Solstice in Northern Europe, and the leaders of the new-fledged religion simply co-opted it.  It was a simple ritual to encourage the Sun into becoming stronger, and to bring the warmer seasons back again.  It was a time of getting together in families or villages and celebrating fellowship and friendship, at a time of year when there really wasn't much to celebrate.

There was nothing particularly winter-related in any of the stories of the birth of Christ.  The account of the Great Census of Augustus Caesar is based on fact; he did order such a census, but there were several censuses ordered of Syria (and the general region of Palestine) which Christian writers have desperately latched onto, but to my mind seem quite irrelevant.  Still, there's nothing to prevent anyone from celebrating the birth of Jesus on any day that they wish, and why not the Winter Solstice?

In any case, several branches of the Human Race, especially those that live outside the tropics, have chosen to celebrate the beginning of a new year at Midwinter, because in civilized times the main occupation of human communities was Agriculture, which would fall in the middle of the year.  So what we really celebrate at Christmas is the opportunity to start anew; that any miss-starts of earlier days were erased, and we resume with a clean slate.

Kay

Bah humbug! People Who Hate Santa Claus

I was reading a post on Facebook about How to Disclose to your Kid That Santa does not exist materially.  (All that means is that, Santa can be considered to exist in some figurative sense, but Santa is not a person whom you can, well, give a real cookie to.  Unless you consider Santa to be yourself, in which case you're wasting my time, and you should go elsewhere.)

I did not read the post, because I wasn't interested enough, but from the first several comments I got the impression that it was well written.  But then I came across a comment that some people had always hated Santa Claus!

That really got me thinking!  Why would anyone hate Santa Claus?  I mean, as a symbol of all the over-the-top commercialism of the holiday season, certainly, one can be deeply annoyed at all that he represents!  But to me, Santa Claus constitutes the remnants of a medieval bishop who is generally considered to have been greatly loved in his lifetime, and was celebrated as a saint.  You can search the Internet for the origins of Santa Claus, and one of the strongest sources for the religious origins is this bishop of a town near Myra in Turkey, belonging to the Orthodox strain of Christianity.  Not being unduly religious, I did not look up the dates and the details, but they are not hard to find.

It seems to me that if you hate the commercialism in which people indulge during the holiday season, I think the commercialism should bear the full force of your hatred; Saint Nicholas and his memory should not suffer, surely?  This tendency to get upset over symbols is a weakness in our society.  Basically, I feel, people indulge in all this furious gift-giving at Christmas to compensate for neglecting their friends the rest of the year.  Then they get into the habit of giving expensive but unwanted gifts during the holiday season, and this sets everyone up for being thoroughly depressed because often the gifts don't come up to the expectations of the recipients, and . . . it's too depressing to even follow up on the causes of the depression.  I don't give very elaborate gifts; I'm very bad at doing the whole Christmas Presents thing.  I strongly believe in appreciating people, but I'm bad at showing my appreciation.  My appreciation of particular people is invisible most of them, because I put them in my stories, and they never find out that I have!

This year, especially, I'm feeling the need to appreciate certain people very much, because they wanted so much for the election to turn out differently, and they are intensely cut-up about the outcome.  Many of them wanted Bernie Sanders to be the Democratic Candidate, and simply could not cope with Hillary Clinton.  Others were delighted that Hillary earned the candidacy, and were stunned that D.T. beat her at the polls--or at least, in the electoral college.  There could be any number of surprises on December 19th, when the College assembles to vote, but most of us are going to be disappointed.  (I sincerely hope I'm wrong.)

Giving Christmas presents to these disappointed friends of mine are not going to make them feel a whole lot better about the election, but they will certainly be cheered up (I hope) that I thought of them this season.  If I can't find something for each of them that they would find useful or entertaining, I'll just keep the money and do something nice for them when the opportunity arises.

My students are just finishing their final examinations, and, as always happens, they will promptly proceed to forget that I ever existed.  It is rarely that a college kid remembers the instructors from their freshman courses, unless it is someone utterly charismatic (which I'm not).  A pox on charismatic professors, anyway; nobody taught me to be charismatic, and I think college students should learn to be inspired by non-charismatic professors, because sometimes these non-charismatic teachers have the best information.

So, in conclusion, I am definitely on board with consoling my friends with small, useful gifts this season, if I can find appropriate ones.

Kay

Wagner's Meistersinger: Some flaws cannot be fixed

After seeing Meistersinger some years ago, and having written an episode of Helen Nordstrom actually conducting a performance of it, I now find that I'm less than thrilled with the opera as a whole.

Richard Wagner always liked to write operas that were major spectaculars: Wagner had anticipated epic movies a hundred years before movies were invented.  For his purposes, Wagner needed to find plots that were larger than life.

In his earliest attempts, the stories were fairy tales.  Then he went on to legends, and for a long time, his operas were inspired by various legends, or epic sagas, such as the King Arthur legends (and other legends which had been incorporated into the Arthurian cycle).  Then he went on to epic sagas of an earlier time, in which Wagner was no longer fettered by Christian morality, and Wagner was free to impute various interesting motives to the gods themselves, in their epic existential struggles.

For his last work, Wagner chose not so much a legend in the mythical sense, but the legend of an historical personality: Hans Sachs, a medieval German poet.  The plot line is a story concerning the annual singing competition held by the singing guild of Nuremburg, at which it had been announced that the prize would be the hand of the daughter, Eva, of the president of the guild Veit Pogner.  A young nobleman is visiting, Walther, and falls in love with young Eva.  But Eva has to remain unattached, in order to be given to the prizewinner!  So Hans Sachs must conspire now to arrange for the young knight Walther to not only gain admission to the guild, so that he can participate in the competition, but also for him to win it.  Luckily, Walther is talented, and does not face any serious competition.  A further complication is that, while Eva is supposedly infatuated by the handsome visitor, the twice-widowered Hans Sachs himself, and young Eva (who has practically grown up in Sach's cobblery) are extremely fond of each other.

Now, Wagner, by his very nature, was fond of complexity.  He is unsatisfied with Hans Sachs simply teaching the young knight how to put together a winning song that satisfies all the complicated rules of the guild, but has a few quirks to give it a little extra excitement.  He makes Sachs agonize over the entire business, and makes Eva agonize over the situation, and generally makes the whole thing an embarrassment to anyone who is paying attention.  The comedy is very heavy-handed, though one can almost see how a perfectly satisfactory story could have been salvaged from the elements that are present.  This is an opera whose duration is more than four hours, but it could be shortened considerably.  In fact, I daresay it could be trimmed by two whole hours, if it were to be made into a musical, even retaining some of the musically more interesting parts.

The First Act is where the visitor comes seeking Eva and her maid at the local church, where they're attending Mass.  Later on, the girls leave, and Walther attends a meeting of the singing guild, right after Mass, and is denied entrance to the guild, not knowing the singing Rules.  This is a fun scene, and introduces the pompous guild members, as well as a host of apprentices, all of whom are both apprentices to their particular masters as tradesmen, as well as singers.  Hans Sach's apprentice, David, is both an aspiring cobbler, as well as a promising young tenor.  Wagner's sung dialog proceeds quite briskly, but is filled with numerous irrelevant details.  It could certainly be hurried along considerably if the scene were to be rewritten in the style of, say, the opening scene of My Fair Lady, which accomplishes a huge amount of plot using a mixture of song and speech.

In the Second Act, later that evening, the scene is on the street between the homes of Sachs and Eva's father, the cobbler and the goldsmith.  The only other serious entry in the singing competition is the Town Clerk, a comic figure who accuses everybody of trying to steal his prize Eva away from him, which actually precipitates a riot on the street, which Wagner of course turns into a melee of epic proportions.  The riot is a lot of fun for opera buffs (and stage directors), but it could certainly be abbreviated, and merged into the Third Act.

In Wagner, everything is sung, even the dialogue.  The soliloquies of the Third Act could be shortened considerably.  (Hans Sachs muses that his job is to bring a little sanity into the insanity of his world, which has ever been the responsibility of artists.  Then he muses that perhaps it would be best if he marries young Eva, but he talks himself out of that temptation.)  The knight comes in, and reveals that he's seen a beautiful dream.  In a pivotal sequence, Sachs turns the knight's account of the dream into the first two verses of a song.  As one could expect, the dream is all about Eva.  The knight is sent away to get into is glad rags for the festival.  Then Eva comes in, pretending that something is wrong with her shoes.  Presently it emerges that she has come to see the young knight, who is staying temporarily with Sachs.  Walther is still asleep, but Eva is strung out, and needs some serious talking down.  The conversation goes as far as Eva wondering whether it makes sense that Hans himself should enter the competition, and win it, and marry Eva: how bad could that be, she wonders.  All this, too, goes on forever.  By the end of the scene, David, Walther, Hans, Eva and her maid Magdalena (Lena) all gather round at Hans's behest, to christen the newly-composed song, and sing a lovely quintet.

Now, in opera, a quintet is often its own reason for existence.  But in this case, it could easily be sacrificed, or at least simply played instrumentally, as Hans declaims what a wonderful song Walther has created, shortening things considerably.  There is a visit by the inane Town Clerk, which goes on forever, and fails to be the comic interlude it is intended to be.  The Clerk steals the paper on which Hans transcribed the words of the song.

Finally, in the Fourth Act, there is a lot of dancing and singing and general high spirits, in keeping with the Midsummer festivities, and of course the Feast of John the Baptist; more opportunities for tossing out some silliness that can't really carry its weight.  Then there is the competition, which would seem a little incompressible, and to end the opera, a major oration by Hans Sachs about German Art.

Historically, German Culture had struggled to overcome its fragmentation, because the political elite had been a bunch of jealous rivals, the remnants of the robber barons of the Rhine.  It was understandable that Wagner took this opportunity to praise German Culture, because in the 19th Century, too, it was still a struggle to push the German principalities into some semblance of being a modern nation, able to compete with the French and the British.  But today, the political subtleties of the play are too irrelevant, and of course, take up too much time as well.

So, I dearly wish someone would take the surgeon's knife to this opera, and convert it into a modern musical, with sensitivity and taste.

Kay

Music Education

[I originally posted this on Helen, (don't click, if you value your innocence!!) which has a warning about adult material!  This blog is a lot less "adult", so the post has been relocated here.]

In the heat of the recent events, I lost sight of one of my most important hobby-horses: music education.  My main heroine, Helen Nordstrom, is a professor of music at a (fictitious) Pennsylvania college.  She discovered a wonderful contralto (a mezzo-soprano, actually) on CD, and one Christmas, had been surprised to find herself on the same stage as this woman, Natalia Zemanova, a Czech settled in Paris.  Helen and Natasha become firm friends.  It just so happens that Natasha agrees to sing in a major musical event that Helen has mounted at her school: the Saint Matthew Passion, in which Natasha is singing contralto, and Helen is conducting (to the disappointment of Natasha, who wants Helen to give up this silly conducting, and sing.)

Anyway, during the days preceding the big performance, Natasha finds time to sit in on the classes of Helen and her colleagues.  Here are a few paragraphs from this episode.

Helen’s class was a revelation.  What Natasha had learned with diligence and hard work at the conservatory in Prague, Helen made simple for these youths.  They took it for granted that the material would be easy, and occasionally complained when it wasn’t obviously so.  In each instance, with infinite patience Helen questioned the student until the idea was clear.  She used the piano, recordings, the chalkboard, everything at her disposal, and by the end of the hour, had convinced the class of the simplicity of what she was trying to convey.

Afterwards she confessed that it had been a harder day than usual.

“You work so hard!” said Natasha sympathetically.  “In my conservatory, they would discourage the less talented ones.”  She smiled.  “If you had to teach my classmates and me, it would have been easy for you!”

Helen laughed.  “But out of these unresponsive, complaining lumps of rock will come musicians, parents of musicians, congressmen, senators, voters . . . I need every one of them!  In this country, Tasha, Music can afford no enemies.”

And so it is with everything we teach.  This is why the single-mindedness of some teachers lead us to think that their lives depend on the work they do.  The teacher is the invisible part of the larger picture, the part that everyone loves to vilify.

Kay