Reading coincidence

A few days ago I was trying to get a few more authors off of my unset gender list. I found a little information about Helga König but not much.

I am currently reading Die Mutter die ich sein wollte, die Tochter die ich bin. This book examines mother/daughter relationships as anecdotes. As I was reading one of the chapters, suddenly I came across the sentence "Überdies schrieb Helga König noch Bücher. Handarbeitsbücher." (On top of all that Helga König also wrote books. Needlework books.)

It was fascinating to read the biography of the woman I had tried a few days ago to find online.

I am genuinely puzzled. I thought that Helga was always a woman's name. I would not even have thought otherwise. While I do not speak, read, or write any Germanic language (other than English), I have enough familiarity with it (German, mostly) from relatives in my youth to have more than a passing familiarity with it. I even have a tiny New Testament that belonged to my granddaddy, in the old script, which lies somewhere in the depths of my cedar chest.

Is there an author on Library Thing who has a first name "Helga" who is male? What an interesting thought that is.

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I will admit that I mostly try to research the authors I expect to be women. That's why I was looking up Helga König. I would be very surprised to find a male Helga. But it is important to check that the name refers to a real person, and one who consistantly identifies as the expected gender. Some names are pseudonyms for someone of the other gender or for an author team. Some names can be either, often depending on language, which may not be known to those only speaking one language. Some people write first as one gender before gender change. You just don't know until you look them up.

In this case, Helga is female. She is pressuring her daughter to try to get a grandchild.

>4 MarthaJeanne: Good point about pseudonyms. I know of several authors who have pseudonyms that are the opposite gender (and the reasons for doing so are varied, in both cases). Thanks for answering.

BTW see Helgi Gudmundsson But these men are Helgi.

Trivia: Helge, Helgi are men's names and Helga is a woman's name. The Russian forms are Oleg, Olga. The name means "blessed, hallowed".

>7 anglemark:
I believe the English word 'holy' is cognate. Anglo-Saxon 'halig'.

>8 Crypto-Willobie: That's correct.

Going back to the original point about coincidences, I have the impression that this sort of thing happens a lot: you are thinking about a writer or a particular topic for the first time in ages, and suddenly you find references to them in all kinds of quite different contexts. It happened to me with Christine Brooke-Rose recently, for instance.

I assume that it’s partly a sign of how much information we routinely process and discard (you might have seen dozens of references to this Helga over the last few decades but never attached any importance to them) and partly that the non-random associations between the sources of information we look at overlap with the non-random associations in the life of the authors we’re interested in to some extent (the books you read are probably a bit more likely to be talking about German women of recent times than about most other sections of the human race).

Lyndatrue (#2):

I always research authors before filling in the gender field. I don't know who's using a cross-gender pseudonym, who just has a name conventionally associated with another gender (one of my neighbors is a woman named "Michael"), which names may be associated with one gender in one culture and another in a different culture ("Andrea" comes to mind - is the individual in question Italian or American?), who doesn't identify either as male or female. Researching, and leaving it blank if I'm not sure, hurts nobody - misgendering could.

>10 thorold:, agree about references you don't see until you're looking for them. I did a bit of English electives in university, mostly short fiction, didn't make much impression. Years later I'm discovering all kind of fabulous authors and wondering why I've NEVER heard of these people before. Haul out my old Norton anthology from those days and the table of contents is basically a who's who of all these names I know now, but never registered then.

MarthaJeanne, I can't come near topping your wonderful example & the one I remember has a book at only one end of the coincidence. But there was a passage in Fieldwork in which an earnest botanist in SE Asia tells of a bamboo that flowers at intervals of many many years; when it does flower famine often follows, though he doesn't explain why it would. I was struck by this and knew I must look it up to find had it any weak basis in fact or was it altogether fiction or local superstition. Went to make a cup of tea & whilst waiting for kettle to boil had a look at teletext headlines, one of which was 'Famine predicted in India as bamboo flowers'.

In a library book haul I got The Address and in it the main character ends up in the asylum on Blackwell island. In the same haul I got a NF book about Blackwell island.

Some time ago I planned a trip to visit family in northern Michigan. My daughter had fallen in love with the movie Somewhere in Time. I decided to treat her by taking her to Makinac Island and staying at the Grand Hotel where the movie was filmed. I went to a local bookstore here in San Diego - Wahrenbrocks - to find the book the movie was based on - Bid Time Return. The bookstore owner - Chuck Valverde - said he did not have the book; however, he shared some information. Matheson wrote the book while staying at the Hotel Coronado here in San Diego.The movie producer decided the Hotel Coronado was too cluttered with modern trappings and substituted the Grand Hotel. Then Valverde told me that the bookstore Christopher Reeves walked into in the movie was actually his bookstore in the book - the very bookstore I had walked into.

Going to the link for that book just made me sad, and nostalgic. I'll probably hit Combiners! later this morning, and point it out. The movie's been combined with the book, and it is otherwise a mess.

I now want to find an original copy of the book, since I like Matheson's style of writing, and was completely fascinated with the incredible coincidences you found, including that the bookstore you were in was the one in the film. Then again, an original copy (with the original title) goes in paperback form starting at $75.92, and hardback starting at $58.19, with a collectible listed at $499.99. Ouch. You'd better be very careful with your copy. It doesn't sound replaceable. I long to visit the bookstore you were in, but San Diego is very far away, and I'd have to do some serious time traveling.

https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/sdut-1n1book232016-final-chapter-local-trea...

Ah, well. So it goes. Sadly, my local used bookstore has many books by Matheson, but not that one.

>17 Lyndatrue: Sadly, Wahrenbrocks closed several years ago following the death of Chuck Valverde. I never did buy a copy of the book. Quoting from the book: "
The valet got my car and drove it to the front of the hotel. It's only been parked since yesterday afternoon but it looks strange to me; more like an artifact than a possession. It seems even stranger driving it. Overnight I've lost the feel. I called a few bookstores in Coronado; they had nothing. The place to go, I was told, was Wahrenbrock's in San Diego. The valet told me how to get there: Cross the bridge, go north on the freeway, exit at Sixth, drive down to Broadway.

• • •

On the bridge now. I can see the city ahead; mountains in the distance. Odd sensation in me: that the farther I get from the hotel, the farther I get from Elise McKenna. She belongs to the past. So does the hotel. It's like a sanctuary for the care and protection of yesterday.

• • •

Not much traffic on the freeway. There's a sign ahead: Los Angeles. They're trying to deceive me into thinking that it still exists.

Sixth Avenue exit up ahead.

• • •

Later. On my way back, ready to jump clear out of my skin. Christ, I'm nervous. San Diego really got to me. The pace, the crowds, the din, the grinding pulsing presentness of it. I feel uprooted, dazed.

Thank God I found the bookstore easily and thank God it was an oasis of peace in that desert of Now. Under any other condition, I might have stayed there for hours, browsing through its thousands upon thousands of volumes, its two floors plus basement of collected fascinations.

I had a quest, however, and a need to get back to the hotel. So I bought whatever was available; not too much, I'm afraid. The man there said that, as far as he knew, there was no book exclusively about Elise McKenna. I guess she wasn't that important then. Not to the public anyway, not to history. To me, she's all-important."