The first pair of Red-Spotted Purple butterflies flew yesterday. Last night was chilly enough to cramp a lot of flowers' and butterflies' styles, but yes, spring is here! Cheer!
Censorship
Not that it really counts as censorship when someone doesn't want children reading a certain book at a certain age, which is what this story turns out to be. It's all about the idea that children are able to deal with references to sex and other body functions better as they mature. Children do not all mature at the same time. A book can be appropriate for 24 of 25 students in a classroom, but the 25th can be the bully who will make any discussion of sex, mental illness, personal hygiene, even flu symptoms, traumatic for the smallest child in the class. A good teacher minimizes attention to the body in a classroom.
But seriously...Scalzi's Lock In has a character whose gender isn't made clear. J.D. Edwin's Headspace trilogy ends on a planet where it's normal for humanoid children not to know which sex they're going to be until they're almost old enough for marriage. Ursula K. LeGuin's Left Hand of Darkness is about humanoid space aliens who show a gender identity only during their mating seasons, not necessarily knowing which one they'll be next time. It's speculative fiction. Does that kind of thing make people want to be genderless or gender-confused? Do bug-eyed monsters in science fiction make people want to be bug-eyed monsters? Isn't science fiction about the problems that would be likely to arise if a thing could exist? Many people don't like science fiction, but banning it only gives it a special appeal to the students who want to raise those people's blood pressure. Get a grip.
Movies
I hadn't seen or heard of any of Netflix's top twenty movie sellers, either.
Music
When we see "F. Mendelssohn" on a piece of music, we think of Felix. But Felix Mendelssohn had a sister, Fanny, who some thought was even more talented. Fanny was one of those women whose gifts really were suppressed by envious men. Anna Maria Mozart was comfortable with her having a musical talent while her younger brother had a musical genius, but the Mendelssohns were a less harmonious family.
Felix and Fanny composed and performed music together, but their father, believing that Felix's talent would earn his living while Fanny's was "only an ornament," promoted Felix's work and forbade Fanny to publish hers. (Some biographers think Felix was the jealous brat who pushed their father to insist on this.) Fanny Mendelssohn was apparently pretty enough that the family expected her to "marry well." Felix was not expected to have that option, so for Fanny to have competed with him would have been selfish and greedy, her family insisted. She found a husband who supported her musical career...but her father apparently held her to a contract that allowed her to publish only things on which she'd worked with Felix, only under his name, while Felix was alive. Neither sibling lived very long. Felix died in May 1847, not even 40 years old; Fanny died in November 1847, 41 years old. Her music was published after both siblings' lifetime. Both were trained to write in strict classical tradition, so questions of "better" probably apply more to specific pieces than to either sibling as a musician. Both were considered very good, and some of their best work was "theirs" rather than "his" or "hers." How convenient that they had the same initial...
For purposes of disambiguation, some people refer to "Fanny Bartholdy" (a name the whole family tacked on, after "Mendelssohn," to emphasize their identity as Christians of Jewish descent), and others to "Fanny Hensel" (her husband's name, which she used while living). She seems, nevertheless, to have been somewhere between one-third and one-half of "F. Mendelssohn."
I'd read this information before this weekend. I had not, however, found any recordings of music that's known to have been all Fanny's work, before this:
Transportation
Fellow Virginians may enjoy this documentation that it's possible for road problems to be worse than ours. Much much worse. I chortled.
Writing
Another pair of well-known synergistic partners in "creativity" were Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan Macy. A recent video, not recommended, claims that Keller's story was "fraudulent." He's referring to the version of it he got in primary school, which suggests that Sullivan only taught Keller how to finger-spell and then finger-spelled lectures to her at Radcliffe. Little girls who liked to read, in my time, probably all became Keller scholars as new books about her were pressed into our little hands; reading her collected works (collected, at least, up to the point where she identified her religion as Swedenborgian and her politics as Socialist) gives what is probably a more accurate impression. Keller had been a bright, precocious child for her first year and a half, so as a toddler she had learned some words and seen colors, which made it possible for Sullivan to teach her. Sullivan was poor, had poor eyesight, and had no other prospects in life but becoming Keller's teacher; even after marriage she (and her husband) clung to Keller's fame as a prodigy.
Keller's books weren't exactly Pulitzer Prize material. People read her writing, as Joseph Addison had said of a speaker of his time, as they would pay to watch a dog walk on its hind legs, not because it was done well but because it was done at all. A short essay, "Three Days to See," may be the only thing she ever wrote that would have been considered original and good if an able-bodied person had written it. But for a blind person's writing Keller's work was oddly...visual.
In her own letters and essays as in her unconsciously plagiarized story Keller seems to have been obsessed with the lights and colors she got from Sullivan's inaudible conversation, rather than writing about smell, taste, and movement as a blind person might be expected to do. She wrote in a goody-goody tone but it seems obvious that she felt entitled to use anyone else's visual imagery she could, whenever she thought it would improve an essay; I'm not sure that that's a bad thing, either--only that Keller seems to have known that her image wouldn't support any statements as frank as "If I can't see things, other people ought to be generous about seeing them for me."
Real blind people have been known to instruct their writing assistants to "colorize my story" when they're trying to sell their writing to the general public, so Keller's decision to publish a travel essay with a description of fireworks reflected in the water is not as bizarre as some think. Real writers, blind or otherwise, used to be told up into the 1970s that sight and hearing were "better" senses to appeal to than smell, taste, or touch, so that aspect of Keller's writing may also make some sense. The fact remains that Keller wrote clearly, vividly, and expressing strong opinions, only in synergistic teamwork with Sullivan. After losing Sullivan she wrote with help from other personal assistants, but never again in the writing "voice" she'd developed with Sullivan.
Sullivan herself...well, she died first...never published a book under her own name.
Is that a description of a writer, whose opinions were not destined for popularity, narcissistically exploiting a fraud? I don't think so. Considering the attitudes both women had to contend with, not only as women but as disabled and, in Sullivan's case, "shanty Irish," I think it's a description of two talented people who were shy about speaking or writing without literally holding each other's hands. With valid reasons. I think, if Sullivan had been a narcissistic exploiter, she would have found someone to market books about her role as Keller's Teacher--rather than leaving Keller to write her biography after she died.
With and without Anne Sullivan, Helen Keller wrote fourteen books. Several became hard to find in the mid-twentieth century. But have they ever been reprinted in this century.
I've long been bemused by synergistic teams in creative work. Anne Sullivan was neither the first nor the best known Sullivan to become famous as a collaborator. Rodgers and Hammerstein were an interesting pair. Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane. Clara and Robert Schumann. C.S. Lewis and his Inklings...
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