It’s almost here… any minute now… just a little more time. Wait for it…
(looks at watch and wanders off, mumbling)
TNR’s “Shock Troops” diarist is just the gift that keeps on giving. After reading this, and shaking my head, I sent the following email to “editors@cjr.org” offering this feedback:
I read with interest and considerable amusement Mr. McLeary’s comment, as regards the wanna-be Hemmingway, Pvt. Beauchamp and the kurfuffle-du-jour over his “Shock Troops” article in TNR:
“How dare a college grad and engaged citizen volunteer to join the Army to fight for his country! (Which is something that most of the brave souls who inhabit the milblog community prefers to leave to others.) ”
I doubt that I am the first, and probably won’t be the last to write to inform Mr. LcLeary that the term “milblog” is a contraction of “military blogger” and in current usage means “members of the military, their families, or veterans who blog”.
Such veterans and currently serving military members took the lead in reviewing and debunking Pvt. Beauchamps’ extremely dubious stories, offering an expertise in military culture and current events in Iraq which seems to sadly lacking at TNR. And to judge by Mr. McLeary’s off-hand comment, it appears to be also lacking at the CJR.
BTW, all military officers are required to have a college degree, as a prerequisite for recieving a commission. These days, it is not uncommon for enlisted members to also have degrees, either before enlisting, or to work towards one while in service.
I myself came into the service with a college degree, but while I flatter myself that I am a much better writer than Pvt. Beauchamp,…so are most of the milbloggers out there. TNR would have been better-served with practically any of them.
Sgt. Mom, TSgt, USAF (Ret)
The Daily Brief
This tempest is far outgrowing it’s teapot; is anyone making more popcorn? If I get any reply, I’ll post it.
Note, as of 9:45 CST: recieved the following reply from Paul McLeary, at CJR:
“I’m getting slammed with emails about this, but I want to answer
every one, because I think that it’s important. Here’s the email
that I sent to the Mudville Gazette milblog, who posted part of it
Sunday afternoon.
————-
I really walked into this one.
I actually spend a lot of time on milblogs. I was careless in my
choice of wording when I wrote the piece. What I meant was the
whole community of blogs that have sprung up in the same universe
as milblogs — Hugh Hewitt, etc., who act tough about the war, but
have never served, and have never left the comforts of their
air-conditioned offices to see what might be going on in Iraq or
Afghanistan.
I’ve written a lot about milblogs, actually: Interviewed Matthew
Currier Burden for CJR, as well as a couple soldiers who were
blogging for the New York Times. I’ve also spoken to, and exchanged
emails with Yon and Bill Roggio and such, and I blogged the whole
time I was in Iraq back in ’06, which doesn’t make me a milblogger,
but hey, it’s something, I guess.
Like I said, I really stepped in it because I didn’t take the time
to clearly define what I was talking about.”
OK, so honor is served. Says something that he is replying to emails on a Sunday evening, and admitting to not paying proper attention to detail. On that account, I’ll give him a pass from being the milblogosphere’s chew-toy du-jour. Go ye therefore and sin no more, but what any other milblogger does is up to them, of course.
This weekend is a pause in the mad waltz of the writers’ life marathon; between the kerfuffle-du-jour of Pvt. Beauchamp, the milblogs’ rebel without a clue, and me spending a couple of days at an assortment part-time jobs… and next week when proofs of The Book will be finalized, and I have to start marketing it. Yes!!! It’s nearly here, “To Truckee’s Trail”! Any day now… please buy a copy, when I post the link to Booklocker’s catalogue! I need to buy the software to update my literary website, a decent new printer to generate my own marketing material and letters, and to buy the advertising on websites where they just can’t afford to give it to me out of the goodness of their own hearts and appreciation for my talents as a fairly OK genre fiction writer!
My friend, Dave the Computer Genius has referred me to a handful of his clients who have need of admin-secretarial help a couple of times a week. They are most often small entrepreneurs and hobbyists, who maybe have taught themselves a little with the computer that they bought from Dave to use for their home business, don’t quite understand how to generate what they need and want out of it, and are willing to pay me to come and do it. Or for me to show them how to cut and paste in pictures, pretty up excel spread-sheets, enter useful contact data in their personal scheduling software, and to perform heavy-lifting… like do Google searches. Eh… it’s part-time, pays enough to make going to their workplaces (usually a home office) and leaves me the afternoons to write.
Yeah, writing… still have time to do that. By my calculations, I’m about halfway through “Barsetshire with Cypress Trees – and a Lot of Sidearms”. That is the epic about the German settlements in the Texas Hill Country. Right now, I am plunging into rather interesting territory, with an account of the storms of the Civil War, as they were weathered in Gillespie County. When I talked to my parents on Friday, I was reminded of how interesting, in the sense of the old Chinese saying, that completing this volume is likely to become. One of their circle who they let read all my manuscripts as they are written, is a retired professor of English. She’s a very experienced teacher and editor, and I particularly value her critical feedback. Mom let me know that she has just finished reading the first volume, and has made many, many notes… but that one was a long critique about settler-Indian relations, as I had written about them.
Which… since I am trying to write as accurately as I can about the Texas frontier, circa 1845-1885 means that the opinions and beliefs of the characters that I am writing about are not particularly socially correct by today’s lights. I will not commit the literary sin of “presentism”; that is, putting the attitudes and opinions of a late 20th century person into a 19th century character and either imputing that this person is very brave and non-conformist to be so advanced, or implying that 19th century people were just like us but dressed up in funny costumes and with horses instead of automobiles. Most 19th century Texans hated and feared the Indians; it’s an anachronism to pretend otherwise. There were curious exceptions to this, and all sorts of interesting shadings. Sam Houston and Robert Neighbors were distinguished in their lifetimes for their friendships among various tribes, and for their effective consideration of Indian interests. Members of the Lipan Apache and Tonkawa bands fought alongside Jack Hays’ Ranger companies, and the German settlements negotiated and kept to a peace agreement with the Southern Comanches that was never broken, even though other Indian tribes eventually began raiding at will in the Hill Country. It’s all a great deal more nuanced than someone looking backwards from the late 20th century might give credit for… and I haven’t even gotten to slavery and racial relations, yet. About all I can promise to do is to clean up some of the intemperate language. Which puts me up to the same challenge as Robert Lewis Stephenson, of writing about obscenity-spouting people… without actually using obscenities.
That’s going to be fun, since I am running into all kinds of interesting people and situations, in my first quick pass through Civil War period memoirs and histories. Texas was on the far fringe of the Confederate South. According to one of my notes, the biggest slave owner in the state on the eve of the Civil War owned 300 slaves. The second and third biggest owned far fewer than that… which meant … Off on another track here, which will be reserved for another post.
Bottom line, I am having fun with this. Especially since I have always hated Gone With the Wind, and that romantic lost cause and noble Confederate cavalier crap.
A model of an aircraft carrier… made entirely out of Legos.
(link courtesy of Rantburg, the source for all things civil and well reasoned.)
Well, it took about a day longer than I estimated for the Beauchamp-TNR kerfuffle-du-jour to expand to the size of the Hindenburg, metaphorically speaking, and then explode like a couple of wads of dubble-bubble chewing gum once the upper expansion limits had been reached.
Wow, look at all that sticky pink stuff all over the place… some of that is stuck in places and on people who will probably never be able to peel it off of themselves and go about their business as usual. Having written and published the “Shock Troops” pieces is a richly deserved embarrassment, but I don’t think the two most responsible parties will ever acknowledge that their own actions had a part in bringing on the landslide-quantities of fall-out. I imagine they will find some handy other party to blame it all on.
But I can almost bring myself to feel kind of sorry for young Pvt. Beauchamp, and Franklin Foer; it’s all a jolly good game, until someone gets hurt. And no one ever starts out intending to put themselves under the million-eyed, coldly analytical publicly-wielded CAT-scan that is the blogosphere. The inexperienced editor of stalwart and once-respected legacy media magazine probably had no idea of the firestorm that would erupt, once milbloggers and veterans began looking carefully into “Scott Thomas’s” curious accounts of vehicular canine-icide, trash-talking in the dining facility, and games with dead things.
If all one knows of the military life is the movies… especially Vietnam-War movies, such an account must have seemed quite credible. Sad to know that of all the staff at a mag like TNR, there was no one on hand with any sort of experience in the military in the last twenty years or so, who could take a look and say, “Look, there’s something not quite right about this.” Or even to do as Cpl. Blondie did, when she read about running over dogs with a Bradley. Which was to fall about laughing, and then to say, “Whatta pile of bull-s**t!”
And as for Private Beauchamp; I don’t think even the most relentless narcissist really would enjoy having their Myspace page fisked down to the sub-atomic level, and their own person, and every shred of their writings relentlessly and coldly analyzed by thousands of strangers. But then again… he put it all out there, on Myspace and in the TNR. . Made no real secret of wanting to be the next Wilfred Owen/Ernest Hemmingway, but comes off as a haphazardly educated, very bright, self-centered young idiot with an elevated sense of his own talent and not a shred of sense. He is still young enough to grow out of it; honestly a lot of people his age are idiots, but most of them improve over time, and exposure to real world of consequences.
And he sucks as a writer, too, which is even sadder. He doesn’t have that certain gift; that way of “seeing” that a writer has to have. Oh, you can have the vocabulary, you can sling together the sentences, and it all will parse on the page, but unless you can “see into” other people, and sense how they think, and deal with their foibles and take on their voices, your words all fall rather flat. Intuition, empathy, whatever you call it; if you have it, you can create people on a page, you can write about a place or an event and make it so other people can see and feel it also. Good writers, good story-tellers have that, but narcissists can only fake it for a little bit, about as far as Pvt. Beauchamp did. What a waste of time and tuition, and TNR’s reputation, just to mince up and re-hash outtakes from “Full Metal Jacket” and “Platoon”, for the titillation of the readers. And what a waste for the magazine. Of all the milbloggers on active-duty tours in Iraq, Mr. Foer had to select this unconvincing, unobservant fabulist, and throw his magazine’s authority behind him… because his wife/significant other worked there. How lame. What a smack in the face to the hundreds or even the thousands of better writers among currently serving milbloggers.
It is a curious coincidence that just as the milblogosphere is reveling in the righteous joys of thumping another credulous editor of a formerly-pretty-reputable legacy media venue… here we are dished up another heaping helping of military bashing from a couple of personalities that I have never heard of. Allegedly, this doofus is claimed to be a regular on Saturday Night Live. The hell you say… is that show still on? Wow.
Whatever A Whitney Brown’s problem is, I’ll bet it’s damned hard to pronounce. And this guy at least had a few remaining shreds of decency left to him… enough that he pulled his post about how the modern military was creating mass murderers and serial killers…
Ops, scuse me, while I go outside, and flag down that idiot with the car speakers which go whoop-whoomp-whoomp at such a deafening level that his car actually sounds like it’s farting. I’m going to chop up his inconsiderate ass into quarters with a chain-saw and Fed-Ex each quarter and his head to five different places…
No, just kidding. But not about the car stereo… it really does sound like the car is farting.
Now, where was I? Oh, yes… military = killers. Got it. Kind of the point actually, in an official, just-doing-our-job, ma’am sense. Yes, we kill those who have been designated as our enemies; neatly, efficiently, and without particular prejudice. Unsanctioned, off the books free-lancing is still frowned upon, however. Just so we’re all on the same page, here.
Still, to note all this is to wonder… why all this perfectly rotten press now? And without the obligatory “Of course we support the troops!” in this round of being pissed-on… guess they’ve noticed we’re not buying the claims of the stuff just being rain.
I do wonder what has brought the usual suspects to a fine frothing boil; I haven’t seen such hysterical insistence on the brutality and licentiousness of the soldiery since the putrid days of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Makes a bit of a change from painting them as poor widdle disadvantaged and victimized cheeeldren who had no other way to get ahead than to listen to the siren allure of the recruiter, which is the alternate method of denigration to date At least the “brutal and licentious” bit will give the troops credit for being grownups. Sort of.
But no credit for anything else, and credibility is where this whole thing is going… oh, not by any deep-laid strategic plan. More like some kind of subconscious hive-instinct, an irrational passionate urge to make the Iraq war and the whole WOT thingy just go away. And to go away without any blame attaching to the usual suspects, win or loose. Loose is always in the cards, of course. The middle east has been a veritable snake-pit for decades. If it reverts to type… no skin off ours, as long as we’re safely out of the middle, and a repeat of Saigon, 1975 can all be safely blamed on the Bush cabal. With appropriate tisk-tiskings, of course.
But…. What if the “surge” is working? What if the Iraqis are stepping up to the plate, and taking real control of their lives and their country? What if all those nice hardworking reservists and those high school graduates from Nowheresville, and those Marines from flyover country have managed to pull of a shaky miracle, and in another fifteen or twenty years, Iraq looks like South Korea, only with palm trees and more sand?
Wow, wouldn’t that be a facer for people like Senators Kerry and Murtha, for the Kos Kidz and the staff of the Guardian, among a long list of others… like A. Whitney Brown? Their advice has been spurned, and they are in peril of being shown up by the people that they secretly, or in some cases, not so secretly, hold in contempt. Makes it kind of hard to maintain that effortless air of superiority over lesser mortals, so of course, something must be done!
When old-time autocrats didn’t like the message, proverbially, they shot the messenger. The new autocrats in the legacy media, the nutroots, or in the higher ivory-towers wouldn’t be so crude. They’d rather denigrate the messenger; the troops and the leaders alike. Taint them by association; paint them as sociopath degenerates, brutal and vengeful and incompetent. Shame them into silence, make them shrink back into the little Nowheresvilles they crawled out of, put away their uniforms and their medals, and hide their associations away in the corners.
Really, it makes it so much easier to betray allies and friends, when these pathetic little people and their stupid “duty, honor and country” just forget all of that and do as their betters like A. Whitney Brown tell them.
And that’s what I think is going on here. Your mileage may vary, of course
Just a quick update on the current book, scribbled between slaving over a hot computer, a couple of job assignments, and mundane things like… oh, I don’t know, cooking meals? Taking the dogs out for a walk. (Er, drag-around-the-block. They. Drag. Me. Just to make that point absolutely clear.)
The text is uploaded to the printers, and the cover is finished and approved… it has all taken nearly two weeks to accomplish this; much longer than I expected. I hope this might be some kind of indication that business is absolutely booming with the POD houses. I was clawing the walls with impatience all this week, but the cover is well worth the wait, thanks to B. Durbin’s very generous offer to let me use one of her photos of the Truckee River. (Appropriate credit is given, natch!)
So, once I have a hard copy in my hot little hands, and approve the whole thing, “To Truckee’s Trail” will be in the booklocker.com catalogue, all 272 pages and eighteen long chapters (with notes!) of it; a gripping read of adventure and discovery along the 19th century emigrant trail to California. I’ll be doing some more marketing, and scrounging for reviews and ad space here and there, and generally trying to sell a good few copies of it. At the very least, I can claim to write fewer clunky sentences per chapter than Dan Brown, of “The DaVinci Code” fame! (That blasted book was unreadable, to me… I kept tripping and falling headlong over sentences that sounded like entries in the current Bulwer-Lytton Bad Writing Contest!)
And I’ll be scribbling away on the Adelsverein saga, or “Barsetshire with Cypress Trees and a Lot of Sidearms”. Going by my latest chapter outline revision I’m about halfway through volume two, although as complications and side-stories develop, this is guaranteed to expand to epic proportions, so to say. There are just so many interesting people, and fascinating scenes, dramatic and historic events; a kid in a candy store has nothing on me! Of course, I can’t help writing about them, I tell stories, it’s what I am driven to do. I just completed a tension-filled account of the local Confederate provost-marshal’s men searching a house for a draft-evader… on Christmas Eve… the searchers being unaware that the man they are looking for is dressed as Father Christmas. (In the parlor, with his family… and everyone who knows what is going on is frantically pretending that nothing is the least bit out of place.)
But three volumes of about twenty chapters each… and my chapters seem to clock in at 6,500 to 7,000 words each… that will mean 400,000 words.
So, back to slaving over the hot computer keyboard…
Later: Just realized upon consulting the archives, that today is exactly one year to the date that I was fired from (Boring Corporate Entity Inserted Here) and decided to try for that “best-selling writer brass-ring-thingy”! With the very book that is about to be launched upon a hopefully breathlessly-anticipating world. So, I have way to go to beat out that Harry Potter book… still, funny old world, innt it?
I am following the latest milblog kerfuffle-du-jour with mild and expectant interest, and with absolute confidence that Mr. Foer of the New Republic was sold a bill of tainted goods as regards the charming reminiscences of one “Scott Thomas” and his service in Iraq. There is such a whiff of improbability about elements in the “Shock Troops” story, as if they were all proceeded by the statement, “No s**t, this really happened to this dude that this other guy told me about”!
But… severely burned and maimed woman survivor of an IED explosion being driven out of the dining facility by crude mockery? (And no one remembers this woman, or the incident, or stepped in to stop it?) Never mind about what she was still doing at a forward base… or who she was. Nine out of ten, any woman tough enough to hang with the military long-time, as a service member or contractor is tough enough to not only kick ass but to serve said ass up on a silver salver with a tasteful sliver of carved tomato and a spring of parsley.
A soldier wearing a decaying child’s skull on top of his head… presumably under his cover or Kevlar for a considerable period? Taken from a mass grave that no one else ever heard about? And no one else notices… let alone comments on the smell? I’ve been out in the hills and encountered dead animals enough to know that decomposing flesh has a particularly memorable and piercing reek. No mention is made in “Scott Thomas” story of other soldiers barfing up their socks at encountering it full-strength and at length..
And a Bradley driver making a sport of running down dogs. Wary, fast-running street dogs. With a very noisy, slow-moving tracked vehicle, which affords limited driver vision and not much maneuverability. In an environment were anything off the side of the road might be a hidden IED. Yep, sure… pull the other leg, sport, that one has bells on it.
Mind you, I am not insisting that soldiers are incapable of being crude, cruel or immune to the allure of gallows humor. I have quite good recall, as does my daughter, of many incidents in our own service, that if repeated, bald and unadorned would not reflect particularly well on anyone involved. But such stories would be congruent in details and with technical authenticity, and in a psychologically realistic fashion… and we both would be able to supply names, approximate dates, locations, units… all that stuff. Nothing happens in a vacuum in the military, as I have noted before. There are always other eyes. Perhaps the editors of NR are still unconscious of this… and a little too apt to throw themselves on a narrative which confirms their basic beliefs about the military and/or the war in Iraq. It’s not like this hasn’t happened before, (Jesse McBeth, anyone?) and no less a journalistic luminary like Sy Hersh has been cleaning up on the lecture circuit for years on material as revolting as it is thoroughly sanitized of confirmable detail. Winter Soldier, Redoux, indeed.
So… just another fabulist encountering a credulous reporter or publisher? Perhaps. Or, maybe a soldier playing the old game of “gross out the civilian”, or even “Let’s see how much incredible s**t we can get this poor sap to believe” for his own amusement… which would be my guess. There is a sucker born every minute, as the saying goes. Unfortunately too damn many of them are now working for the legacy media.
Once more into the breech, my milblogger friends; putting this kind of story under a microscope is a necessary, if unpleasant chore. Sort of like taking out the garbage to the curb. Has to be done, regularly, otherwise the house becomes unbearable. Allowing narratives like this to go unchallenged is to let our friends, our children, or our comrades to be depicted falsely in the legacy media hive-mind… as falsely as Vietnam veterans were painted for years as drug-abusing, baby-murdering, unstable misfits and freaks.
And if you give a miss to this one, don’t worry. I am sure that there’ll be another one, bubbling up to the top of the media hive-mind; just as thinly sourced, just as revolting, and just as debunkable.
Another thread here, with nice graphic!
California in the Gold Rush era was by all accounts a wild and woolly place for a good few years after discovery of gold, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. Until that moment in 1848 when John Marshall found gold in a mill-race under construction at Coloma, California had dreamed away the decades as first a Spanish and then a Mexican colony, remote from practically everything, lightly settled, and with a small economy based on cattle ranching… not for beef, in those days before refrigeration and the railway, but rather for their hides. Yerba Buena , which would soon be renamed San Francisco was a sleepy little village of at most about 800 residents.
But in the blink of an eye, historically speaking, everything changed. The world rushed in, both in a matter of speaking, and literally. By 1851 some estimates put 25,000 people in and around San Francisco; those seeking gold and those seeking to make a living in various ways from those seeking gold. For a few mad months and years, even otherwise respectable and responsible citizens were more interested in gold than in attending to civic affairs. This was not at first much of a problem. Most gold-seekers, or Argonauts as they were called, were basically inclined to be law-abiding… even in the absence of heavy law-enforcing authorities.
But there was a minority amongst them who were not so inclined. In the absence of enthusiastic law enforcement, or even any law enforcement at all, they settled down to enjoy that happy (to them) situation to the fullest, forming a loosely-knit gang called the “Hounds”, which mainly targeted the non-Anglo, Hispanic miners and merchants, principally Mexicans and Chileans for bullying and general extortion. When a riot by the Hounds resulted in the destruction a part of town called “Chiletown” on the slopes of Telegraph Hill, a coalition of businessmen headed by long-time resident Sam Brannon concluded that up with this situation they would not put. They established a tribunal to housebreak the “Hounds”, arresting and punishing or exiling the gang leaders. Almost as an afterthought they also established a police department, charging a recently arrived Argonaut named Malachi Fallon with establishing a police department. Fallon had some tenuous connection with police business in New York City, in that he had been a prison-keep at the Toombs. On the strength of that sketchy resume, he went to work, establishing a force of about thirty constables operating from a single flimsy building.
Thirty police officers pitted against a shifting population of over 25,000 did about what could have been expected; at best, well-intentioned but ineffectual. Given that most of those 25,000 were young males, from a hundred different nations, hungry for adventure, riches and strong drink, touchy about personal honor and mostly well-armed… Malachi Fallon’s little band would have had as much luck emptying the Bay with a teacup as they did of keeping order. When crime eventually began to surge again, it was whispered that the police force was in cahoots with the criminal elements. Whether it was corruption or incompetence, the solid and law-abiding citizens were long out of patience by 1856 and not feeling inclined to debate the difference. Another committee of vigilance was formed, and when all the shouting was done, San Francisco had a reputation for being a place where lawbreaking was not tolerated. For long, anyway. And so it was, all across the West, especially in the mining towns, in the early years, when towns sprang up like mushrooms, practically overnight.
The people who lived in them would have law, and security of their homes, their persons and their possessions. They would demand it of the governments they instituted for themselves. And if those governments could, or would not deliver it, for whatever reason, the citizens would go and deliver it for themselves, however ham-fistedly.
Found at random, though Chicago Boyz…
All we need is time.
If we have time, of course.
Among those brawling, restless borderers drawn to Texas like a trout going upstream during the tumultuous decade of the 1830s was a tall, ambitious and somewhat eccentrically skilled young man from Tennessee named John Salmon Ford. Like fellow adventurers, James Bowie, William Barrett Travis, and Sam Houston, his personal life was already fairly checkered, including one divorce. Unlike the first two, Ford would live through the tumultuous affair that was the Republic of Texas. Like Sam Houston, he would survive all the vicissitudes that an active life on the Texas frontier could throw at him, and die in bed at the ripe old age (for the 19th century) of 82. I assume he was mildly surprised by this happy chance. He had survived the usual accidents and epidemics of an age which predated antibiotics and germ theory in general, any but the crudest of surgeries, and routine vaccination for anything other than smallpox. He had also survived service in two wars and innumerable campaigns along the borders and against various hostile Indian tribes, several rounds of frontier exploration, election to public office… and as a newspaper editor, in the days when public discourse was conducted metaphorically with a set of brass knuckles.
He arrived in Texas in 1836 at the age of 21, having missed Santa Anna’s campaign against the recalcitrant Texans, and Sam Houston’s momentous victory over him at San Jacinto by a bare month. That was about the last significant historical event in Texas that John S. Ford would miss. He would be in the thick of it for the next sixty years, and at the end of his life he would sit down and turn his pen to writing his memoirs, which would fairly double as a history of Texas in the 19th century.
Over that time, Ford embraced a variety of causes with vigorous if sometimes unwise enthusiasm: unionism, temperance, know-nothingism, and secession, and education for the deaf. But he began his career in Texas with a medical practice in the settlement of San Augustine. He had studied medicine in Tennessee, with a local doctor, and under the rather sketchy standards of the time was qualified to hang out a shingle. He spent eight years there, practicing medicine, teaching Sunday school, and riding as a volunteer ranger with a series of local companies… including one commanded by Jack Hays. He also taught himself law. One supposes that San Augustine was a small town, where residents had to double-up on various jobs. In 1844 he was elected to the Texas Legislature as a pro-annexation platform, and took himself off to Washington on the Brazos. He served a term, married (for the second time) and decided to give up medicine for the newspaper business, specifically a weekly paper called the Texas National Register.
Ford was very much a partisan of Sam Houston, the hero of San Jacinto, who was not all that popular in Austin; Ford leapt to his defense with gusto. He and his partner changed the name of the paper to the “Texas Democrat”, and campaigned persistently for such things as more and better schools, and effective defense of the frontier. It was for the time, a rather liberal newspaper… and Ford participated gleefully in every ruckus raised in a state where the political scene usually resembled the ‘tomcats in a sack’ model. But in late 1845, Ford’s wife fell ill, and soon died, in spite of all he could do. Grief-stricken, he took himself off to join the company that his old friend Jack Hays was raising… for Mexico was disputing with the United States over the Texas border. Ford eventually became the regimental adjutant, and from his practice of writing “rest in peace” or “RIP” below his signature on the required reports of casualties, the nickname of “Old Rip”, which followed him for the rest of his life.
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To: Senator John Murtha, D. Penn (12th District)
From: Sgt Mom
Regarding: A Certain Matter in Regards to Certain Marines
1. That would be the Marines accused of murdering civilians in Haditha, Iraq in November of 2005, by you among a host of others.
2. This story seems to indicate that the whole case is falling apart faster than the Duke Lacross rape case. (see attached)
3. I, and other veterans await your apology to those Marines charged. You were quick enough to pile on with accusations of war crimes and atrocities, using the handy pulpit afforded to you as a member of Congress…. regardless of how it might have affected the outcome of an investigation and/or trial.
4. I’d like to see the apology given the same placement on the front page, and the same depth of coverage as your original statements, but I am not holding my breath.
Sincerely,
Sgt. Mom
PS: Congressman Murtha’s contact information is here. For… ummm. Whatever. (Keep it civil, people…)
Such an occurrence is popularly said to be a sign of the impending apocalypse, or global wamening (or coolerizing or whatever the current cause for hysteria is) or even just something like another Michael Bay movie.
Wait, there is another Michael Bay movie out? No S#*t?! Well, just goes to show you, there might be something to it.
Because it’s happened, and if I had thought of it and Blondie were quicker with her cellphone camera, we’d have the evidence that the Lesser Weevil and the Percival-Cat are more than just a large, rawboned boxer-pit mix of a dog, and a small, timid grey cat who happen to share the same house and a mutual affection for the same set of humans. They are indeed, the best of friends.
Or they just might share a freakish interest in soft furniture and mutual body-warmth. You can never tell, I suppose. The two of them are a bit of an odd couple, in more ways than just the species difference.
I wouldn’t have expected Percy to have become the boldest of the resident cats, when it came to establishing a rapprochement with the dogs. When I first began to tame him, he was so timid that I thought he was a feral. It was the careful and gradual work of months for him to become so accustomed to me that I could even touch him. Once translated into an indoors cat, he spent the first three or four months huddled miserably in various hidy-holes, fleeing all human approaches besides my own, and having any friendly feline overtures cruelly spurned by the senior cats, Henry VIII, Morgie and Little Arthur.
Over time, though, he adjusted… especially when Blondie’s three-legged flame-point Siamese, Sammy joined the household. Sammy and Percy buddied up together, in the manner of two nerdy kids spurned by the middle-school in-crowd becoming friends… even though they both have since reached some kind of grudging acceptance with the senior cats.
The advent of Lesser Weevil and Spike made for a drastic re-grouping of the territory. Instead of the cats having the run of the house all day and night, and sleeping wherever they wish, the dogs now pretty much have my room, the den and the living room during the day, and the cats have the other half; Blondie’s room, the hallway and the closet where the washer and dryer live. Only at night, with Spike sleeping in my room, and Weevil in her crate, do the cats have undisputed reign over the entire house. The senior cats, that is.
Sammy and Percy don’t seem to care in the least about the dogs. Sammy was raised by some people who kept a large herd of Chihuahuas, so that was no surprise, but for Percy to be similarly casual… playful, even! That’s one for the books. Over the last couple of months, he would romp with Spike, and allow her to nip at him, responding with a bat of his front paws, only fleeing to a windowsill when the play got too rough. He wouldn’t do that with Weevil; she is an enormous lump of dog, compared to his dainty grey self. But when he was curled up on the seat of a chair, Weevil would park her nose and head next to him, and he would set to work washing her ears and licking the top of her head. Very amusing to see; this is why we took to calling Percy our little gay hairdresser of a cat.
Last night, we were watching television in the den, and Weevil came and curled up on the sofa next to me… yes, we let the dogs onto the furniture. I mean, the cats are allowed onto the chairs, and so is Spike who is hardly any larger than the cats, so why not the Weevil? How can we make the distinction? That would be size-ist, or something… and really, she curls up into a very small shape, quite compact for such a large dog. (Look, I hold on to some standards, ‘kay? I don’t let any of them onto the kitchen counters!!) And after fifteen minutes or so, Percy hopped down from the back of the sofa, and curled up next to and half on top of her. They slept so for the best part of “Eureka”.
If I had a big enough den, I swear I would buy another sofa… with the dogs and cats and all sleeping on it, there is barely enough room for me, these days.
So the writers’ life waltz as it applies to the current book project “To Truckee’s Trail” has accelerated to a particularly mad whirl. The final text of it has been reviewed and is set to go to the printer, and all that I lack right now is the final cover, which one of Booklocker’s designers is working on, presumably even as I write this.
I have a list of possible reviewers to send hard copies to, when I have them, and another much longer list of possible markets; various museum bookstores and independent bookstores in towns along the historic emigrant trails.
And I have promise of aid and assistance from a couple of proprietors of various blogs as regards an advertisement… but I need to put together a “skyscraper ad” 160 x 600 which they can plug easily into their ad-space. I have no idea how to do this… (sob! I’m only a writer, I’m not a designer or a techie!) Is there anyone out there who can do this, or advise me, or walk me through it? This ad will have a pic of the cover of “To Truckee’s Trail” and some interesting blurbage.
Email or comment, please. I can promise a copy of the book, with a personal inscription, and my heartfelt thanks.
As of approximatly 6 PM, CST, this blog passed a not-insigificant milestone… our 200,000 auto-spam comment!
Yes, of course it was deleted… and, thanks to the anti-spam software installed by Timmer (all hail, all hail!) sometime around Christmas, none of these disgusting abominations actually sifted through to be posted. But the software includes a spam-o-meter. It was kind of like watching the odometer of the VEV turn over to 200,000. I can vividly recall that moment! It was while I was driving to work at Lackland AFB – On the 90, just a little way east of Wilford Hall… but a little uncertain about the year. Say early fall, 1996, just before I retired from the USAF!
I run my nimble fingers through the moderation queue a couple of times a day, heartlessly emptying them, all these pitifully miss-spelled attempts to look like a chummy, friendly comment, flogging prescription drugs, diverse alternate sexual experiences and perversities, payday loans… and now and again the occassional almost-legitimate looking business or service, which looks almost embarrassed at being caught in such disreputable surroundings.
Really, most of the spam comments are of such resounding stupidity as to make me wonder why on earth they bother. Absolute gibberish with a link to a website flogging pharmaceuticals sent out several hundred times over to the same website isn’t likely to last long enough to garner a link or two… nor is a vaugely complimentary mention of the colors and design of this site, especially if it has been sent about three or four hundred times with the same exact errors in spelling. And a comment larded with a hundred links to assorted pharmaceuticals or sexual kinks… like, if it wouldn’t make it through a Yahoo spam filter, why would it make it through ours?
Anyway, thought I would make a note of this. Carry on with your regularly assigned duties.
The crescendo of the writers’ life waltz, as I have been calling it, is yours truly making a determined end-run around the established behemoths of the literary industrial complex, thanks to contributions gratefully received from fans and supporters… and from Mom and Dad. I have been able to pull in enough to start the process rolling for “To Truckee’s Trail” with those nice people at Booklocker.com. I have sent them the formatted text, and in a short time, they will have one of their contracted artists do the cover, and once I approve it, they will include it in their website and catalogue… and there you go, Sgt. Mom’s next book. It’ll be available on Amazon.com, of course.
It’s not just going to stop at that, though. It just doesn’t. I will be buying a box of copies, to use to generate reviews in various websites and magazines. Once I have a nice collection of kind words, then I will use the cover art and the kind words to purchase advertising space, and to print up some folders or flyers to send to various bookstores. Do you know how many museums there are, along the Western emigrant trail, and how many of them have bookstores? You may not, but I am making a concerted effort to build a list of each and every one, and I’ll know when I am finished. I’ll also know about any independent bookstores anywhere in towns of note along the trail… especially if there is any kind of trail-related tourism in that town. All hail Google, the avatar of the DIY advertising campaign!
It’s been dawning on me, that perhaps the world of book-publishing, or as I have begun to call it, the “literary industrial complex” is beginning a slow downward spiral in the face of the POD revolution, the internet and DIY marketing, and even the availability of quality color printing at Kinkos. All those processes that were once owned by a big publisher because the technology involved was huge, complex and expensive… now they are reduced, pared down and available to anyone who cares. Once upon a time, doing a book on your own used to be called a vanity press, and it cost a bomb, but now self-publishing is within reach. The resulting books aren’t any more dreadful than what is churning out of the traditional publishing houses; so much for the sneering about vanity presses, and writers so pathetically eager to be in print.
It’s been kind of curious, to hang around in the book and publishing blogs, and read what insiders say about it: that agents are harried and harassed, and have only enough time for a tenth of the good-quality stuff that crosses their desks. That publishers are risk-adverse… and like the producers of block-buster movies, want that sure-fire good thing that is just like the last fifteen or twenty sure-fire good things that came down the pike. It’s a crapshoot for writers; even if you do grab the brass ring, and get a deal from a traditional publisher, you’re likely to be treated like dirt anyway… and wind up doing most of the marketing yourself. So, POD looks more and more like a viable alternative.
And I am wondering if the literary-industrial complex is going to start feeling the pinch of competition, and considerable dissatisfaction from the consuming public… just like the major news media is feeling now. Old news stalwarts like the NY Times, Newsweek and the CBS evening news are all beginning to tank. Bloggers like Michael Yon can do news reporting from a war zone, expert analysis comes from someone like Wretchard at Belmont Club, and the dreaded Mo-Toons o’Doom were featured on more blogs than were published in newspapers. The entire news industry looks fair to going down like that enormous spaceship in that old Disney movie that spiraled down into a black hole, emerging in the fourth dimension as something entirely different… what was the name of that flick? Anyway, I wonder if current technology is going to send traditional book publishing in the same direction.
(It was the custom in many 19th century communities to have a public reading of the Declaration of Independence as part of the 4th of July Festivities. It’s a good tradition, and I hold to it on this site.)
The Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen United States of America
When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. –Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.
It is reported in the aftermath of the car-bomb attempt on the Glasgow airport terminal, that bystanders yelled “let the ****er burn!” as rescuers attempted to extinguish the fire burning on the clothes and flesh of one of the aspiring jihadis.
This happening and the fact that it was even noted and reported may be seen as a kind of harbinger. It may be an indication that the masses, or the ordinary people, the proletariat… or whatever you want to call the non-elite are no longer buying the load being sold to them.
Time after time, over the last five years, the plummy-voiced public intellectuals, the emollient gentlemen from CAIR, or the European equivalent thereof, the glad-handing politico and the exquisitely face-lifted news reporters have assured us, solo and in chorus of several things:
We have been told that Islam is a religion of peace, and that it is just an infinitely small minority of Moslems committing these outrages, not representative of the whole at all.
We are also assured confidently that if we are not satisfied with that assurance, then it means we are just some kind of ignorant red-necked, yob racist.
We are also assured that it’s all to do with Israel oppressing the Palestinians, or the US oppressing the Iraqis… and never mind that while the wholly understandable rage of gentleman named Mohammed may be directed towards American troops, or Israeli settlers… the concrete actions taken to express that rage, seem to land everywhere else. No convincing explanation is ever given for this… other than the multitudinous dead are not Muslims, or not good Muslims, and therefore had it coming anyway.
Pointing out in all reasonableness that the Lutherans, or the Amish, or the Presbyterians are not carrying on like this does not seem to butter any parsnips.
We are also assured that any such plots carried out, or interdicted before they are actually carried out are actually a plot by the CIA, or the Mossad, or some dreadful Bushitler plot to take away our civil rights and foment anti-Moslem xenophobia.
Never mind that the airwaves emanating from the Moslem world are full of spittle-flecked orators, seething and fuming and threatening exactly such actions, and cheering them on, except when they actually happen and then everyone reverts to item one. It seems a pity to have to give the CIA, Mossad and the Bushists all the credit, though.
It has often been speculated by the prescient and those students of history that another outrage on the scale of 9-11 committed by radical Islamists somewhere in the First World, whether tied to an identifiable country or not, will call down quite dreadful repercussions upon the Moslem population of the country where it happens. There has been speculation about why such a catastrophe has not happened, yet. Perhaps the loosely connected web has been sufficiently disrupted to prevent developments along that line, that the A-list plotters and experienced technical experts have been neutralized… or perhaps it is their intent to avoid an action that will unify an outraged First World and call down just such a reaction. Perhaps the continuing series of smaller actions are a deliberate policy; inflicting the death of a thousand cuts upon us, a constant dribble of incidents and deaths; towards the same end, but without attracting retaliation on a massive scale.
But if that is so, then the reaction of Glasgowegian air travelers suggests that a tipping point may be near. The cumulative effect of bombings, murders, foiled plots and Muslim riots over matters as diverse as newspaper cartoons, ennobling of controversial writers, and the spurious desecration of Korans may be coming to a head… for all that we have been told all this time to look away and pretend that we don’t see a thing. The whip hand of “How dare you, you racist!” and the velvet glove of “Islam is a religion of peace!” may soon fail to have any effect at all.
If ever there was a movie that would give you the serious munchies, this is it. Ratatouille may not the first big foodie movie, but it is definitely the first animated foodie movie, and luscious on every level. Visually, it’s a feast; The Paris skyline cannot possibly look as beautiful in real life as it does here, in this tale of a young rat with dreams beyond his station in life.
Remy (voiced by Patton Oswalt) has a discriminating palate, and an unstoppable urge to be a chef, inspired by a cookbook “Anyone Can Cook” written by late five-star chef Auguste Gusteau and watching too many hours of the French version of the Food Network. When Remy and his whole rat-clan must depart their country home at speed, Remy is separated from the other rats. By chance, he finds his way through the sewers of Paris, and winds up in the holy of holies: Chef Gusteau’s restaurant kitchen, now run by his none-too-ethical senior, Chef Skinner (voiced by Ian Holm).
He teams up with the very junior Linguini (voice of Lou Romano), the garbage-boy, pot-washer and general help, desperately inept and just as desperate to keep his job. While Remy can understand Linguini and human speech in general, Linguini cannot understand him. But with practice, they work a means; Remy sits on his head and pulls at his hair; he is the chef, Linguini his means. Can they meet the exacting standards of the uber-restaurant-critic, Anton Ego (voiced by Peter O’Toole)? Well, of course… this is a movie with a happy ending, but how they do it, with the aid of Remy’s family is where the fun of it lies.
This is one of those animated movies with an absolutely painterly aesthetic, as complicated and gorgeous as one of those 19th century academic visions. The restaurant kitchen where much of the action takes place is a real, tactile place, and the action is non-stop. I am left to wonder if Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential had some influence, especially with the characters of the other kitchen staff. It would have been nice to for them to have had a little more of the action, but never mind. I am sure I missed most of the sight gags, on the first time through; not the send-ups of the cooking magazine covers that featured the late Chef Gusteau, though. This is another one of those rare and lovely movie treasures like Chicken Run, which adults and children can enjoy together… although they probably will be laughing at different things.
(crossposted at BNN, here)
So, we went to see Ratatouille this afternoon, and are still giggling. I will do a review tomorrow, when I am finished giggling.
Or, I may be giggling until next weekend. To tide you over, a recipe for “ratatouille”… in which no rats are harmed.
Combine in an 3-quart ovenproof casserole:
3 TBsp olive oil
1 small onion, finely chopped
1 clove minced garlic
1 1-lb eggplant, cut into 1-inch cubes
2 medium zucchini, cut in 1-inch slices
1 1-lb can whole tomatoes and their juice, chopping tomatoes roughly with a spoon
1 tsp basil leaves
1/2 tsp salt
Cover and bake in a 400 deg.oven for about two hours, until vegetables are very soft, uncovering and stirring once or twice. Serve garnished with parsley.
(from Sunset “French Cookbook” 1976 edition“)
As an aperitif, the website for the movie.
And I am still blegging for funds to cover printing and publicity for my next book, “To Truckee’s Trail.”
PS: The introductory short to this is a hoot, too!
After gamboling playfully in the literary trenches for much of the last year trying to get some official interest going, as far as rewarding my own literary ambitions with… I don’t know, the odd spot of cash and acclaim, I have somewhat mixed results to report. It takes the form of a sort of good-news, bad-news joke.
The bad news is: Tor Books (or their subcontractor who actually has to plough through the submissions showered upon them) have rejected both “To Truckee’s Trail” and “Adelsverein, Pt. 1” (or as we like to call it “Barsetshire with Cypress Trees and a Whole Lot of Sidearms”)
The Good News is that they have done so just this last weekend, instead of when I expected to hear from them, which according to my original calculations was September… which means that I can briskly move on to Plan B now, without wasting another two months.
What, you didn’t think I had a Plan B? My dears, I was a single parent and a career NCO, I always had a Plan B. And a Plan C through M, N, O and P, too, come to think of it.
It’s not been a wasted year; I am becoming as insouciant about brushing off rejection letters as if they were mosquitoes. Really. I am seriously amazed at how little impact the usual sad little SASE envelope with the rote rejection form or letter enclosed has on me now. The depression lasts for about ten seconds, and then I throw it into the file I keep for them with a cheerful comment along the lines of “Your loss, dickweed!”… And then forget about it as I go on and write another half chapter. I used to be quite crushed by this, but now… as the T-shirt says, “I’m just amused”.
I’m also obsessed… but as I am a pretty OK writer and a not-to-bad storyteller, this is a somewhat useful quality. The race is not always to the swift or the strong; sometimes it goes to the persistent and/or obsessed. And sometimes I do come up with a right pretty turn of wordsmithing.
During this last year I have been scribbling madly, some of it even for work that I got paid for. OK, so some of was for laughably small amounts, but I have made some connections, and credentials along the fringes of the scribbling game that will — I hope — help quite a bit as I carry out Plan B.
It’s been pretty educational, also to lurk meaningfully in the comments neighborhood of a lot of book and literary-industrial blogs. Such interesting and fascinating nuggets to be mined out of the gravel there, some of which confirm what I suspected from the beginning… like whenever I set foot in Barnes and Noble and took a good look at the shelves… which is that there is a hell of a lot of dreck out there. The traditional publishing world seems to be swamped up to it’s gorgeously nipped and tucked neck, which kind of seriously affects how they can handle the not-inconsiderable quantity of fairly OK to Pretty Damned Good. It’s still a numbers game, as the head of the consulting firm that I worked for, something like four or five jobs ago used to say.
So, maybe if only 5% of the manuscripts floating into agents’ offices, and publisher’s submissions sub-sub-sub contractors are good for anything other than landfill. Everyone thinks they have a book in them, and the fact that in most cases it should have stayed right there is beside the point. The OK to Pretty Damned Good stuff is still an absolutely unmanageable quantity. All the competent and ethical agents seem to have about all they can do to look at hundreds of similar OK to Pretty Damned Good submissions clamoring for their attention and time and make a snap decision on accepting and managing the tiny percentage that will pay off with the least amount of effort on their part.
Yeah, they kept sending me these letters admitting that they just didn’t feel the passion for my book that they felt was necessary to represent me adequately. So, apparently no one feels sufficiently passionate about “To Truckee’s Trail” except for me, and about a dozen people who have read the entire thing and loved it passionately as well.
Unfortunately, all those people were just readers and other writers… so, here goes Plan B.; a fund drive to do a POD version, to buy advertising, and put review copies where they will do the most good. I think I can promise an autographed copy of “To Truckee’s Trail” to anyone who contributes over a certain amount. *
Hey, it works for Public Radio, doesn’t it?
*Later – suggestion from commentor Peregrine John on amount: A paperback copy – autographed! – for donations north of $30
I have only had to run the sprinkler to water the garden once, so far this year. A rainy spring is extremely unusual … well, at least for the whole twelve years that we have been living here. There has been a nice, deep-drenching rain about every week and a half, almost as if it has been scheduled. The only thing to equal it was four or five years ago when for some mysterious reason tropical storm systems kept stalling right over Bexar County for several weeks at a stretch. Not only was Memorial Day weekend rained out that year, but the Fourth of July weekend also. And not just plain old pitter-pat little showers, but a full bore tropical deluge that went on for hours. And days. And weeks.
Everyone went around expressing their surprise that South Texas appeared to have a monsoon season, although I think the story of kayak racing on North New Braunfels avenue between the Nacogdoches and Austin Highway intersections was an exaggeration. Not an impossibility, though. It is one of the embarrassments of our fair city that it is entirely possible to be swept away and drowned within city limits, given sufficient rainfall over certain urban locations.
The upside is that everything is green – green, green, green and ever more green; gardens, parks, highway verges and hillsides. The wildflowers have lasted for weeks longer than usual. Every tree has put out vigorous new growth as regards branches, and the crepe myrtles all have great piles of old bark shredding off their trunks, like snakes shedding their old skins for the new one underneath.
Our neighborhood was scheduled for the bulk-trash pickup during this week just past. We’re still waiting for the huge trucks with the mechanical claw that reaches down to scoop up the great piles of rotting fence palings and landscape timbers, building waste and cut tree branches. On Monday when I went out for a run with the dogs, I saw no less than three tree-trimming services at work on various streets – and an equal number of battered pickup trucks driving very slowly down the blocks, pausing to look at those piles featuring other items – mostly busted furniture.
I think my neighborhood is moving slightly upwards on the socio-economic scale. The people moving in lately have taken to throwing away a better class of stuff. Last bulk-trash pickup week, Blondie and I scored a sturdy wooden chaise-lounge very neatly constructed of two-by-fours, which gravitated to our back yard once I made an oilcloth covered mattress for it. Until it became too hot, it was pure bliss to lay out on it in the afternoon, with a cool breeze stirring the branches overhead and the scent of sweet-olive, almond verbena and jasmine teasing the olfactory senses. When Blondie bought a long extension cord so she could take her laptop out there too, blogging nirvana was achieved.
Gleanings this year were not so rich, but also garden oriented; the junkers with pickups may have beaten me to the good stuff, unlikely as that seems. I did score one very heavy terracotta garden urn in perfect shape (no cracks or damage) and a pair of shiny metal spheres the size of softballs that were the bodies for a pair of a wire-form garden ornament flamingoes. The wire had gone to rust, so I popped out the spheres, and took them home.
They’ll make very satisfactory gazing spheres – and better yet, gave me the chance to walk in the house and say to my daughter,
“So, you wanna polish a pair of big steel balls?”
Or more measures from the accelerating writer’s life waltz! One day of paid work at the office yesterday, but two weeks left to myself on such projects as a couple of reviews, and a couple of books to read for upcoming reviews…. And a CD that I simply must listen to and come up with some cogent observations, even though I have never heard of any of the artists. Even Blondie hasn’t heard of most of them; it’s a soundtrack CD for the TV show Kyle XY. So far the only ready observation that has come to my mind is “gosh, where does the poor lad put the salt when he eats celery in bed?” which will only amuse people about a third of a century older than the main demographic for the music.
I’m here all week… try the veal, and don’t forget to tip your waitress
I am galloping away on the Civil War segment of the current epic, having completed the first six chapters, slowly building up to the tragedy which drives the rest of the book (and the subsequent volume) , the murder of a fairly major character by a vigilante gang. And no, I would not be talked into a reprieve; I had always planned this, since I began jotting down notes on various striking incidents and people, and working out how to weave characters and a plot around those particular points. The death of this character sends everyone around – friends, family, and distant connections off on various abrupt tangents… and that accounts for about 75% of the rest of the plot. I have more than just the bare-bones idea on conversations, subsequent incidents and scene descriptions, so I expect the rest of the first draft will move along pretty briskly. This is the Civil War… when the story starts to drag, I can always arrange to have someone in a battle. Or to sneak around on a dangerous mission, or something… the possibilities are nearly endless. I suspect that if I hadn’t broken it out into three parts “Barsetshire with Cypress Trees and Lots of Side-Arms” would be about the thickness of a concrete block when finished. The Fat Guy, who has read some bits of it insists that it would sell in Texas like $3 a pound chicken-fried steaks, and asks what are they thinking of that I don’t have any more nibbles from publishers than I do?
I ran across another writers’ webside, who does historical fiction also (different period) and was amused to note that she also sets out a humongous chart, tracing incidents and accidents, and character’s development, and when children are born (or conceived!)… when you are dealing in a story that spans several decades, and pivots around historical events, keeping track of it all is absolutely key! I have a chart that contains about six different historical time-lines, from national down to local, maps out three different families, four romantic pairings, two towns, one feud… and the rise of the Texas cattle industry. At the very least this means that when two characters meet in an Austin saloon in March of 1847, I know what their small talk would have been about!
But as soon as I finish the draft, then I will need to sit down and read… a lot. If the chart and my chapter outline are rather like the bones, and the first draft is the inner organs and muscles and skin and all… then the final draft is getting it into shape, doing a bit of nip and tuck, and applying the couturier outfit, manicure makeup and hairstyling. All these details that show, and I like to get them right; as a matter of pride and of not wanting to be nibbled to death by those ducks who are mad for that particular event or period. I can’t imagine anything more embarrassing than having an expert enthusiast look at a particular episode and say, “No, it didn’t happen that way, it’s quite impossible,” and then refer me to about a dozen authoritative tomes that would have set me right to begin with. And this applies to smaller stuff, as well: what was the name of the fanciest retail store in Austin, on the eve of the Civil War? Who did daguerreotypes, and where was that studio, or was there more than one? When did the various militia troops recruited by the Committee for Public Safety begin to wear gray uniforms, and who supplied them? Where was the stage stop in various towns, and how often did the stages run… and what was the average travel time? What were people talking about, after church on a Sunday, or in a tavern, or on a long scout into the Llano? All this and a thousand more questions potentially come out of just about every paragraph, when you are trying to write it looking through the lens of a different century than the one you know first and best.
All this is part of making a convincing venture into the past, and showing it to the present, making it real and breathing, dust-covered and glorious… which is a way of saying that I need some books now, either that the library doesn’t have, or that I will need for months longer than they will check them out to me… should any of our readers want to help me make it a little farther down this trail. I posted a list here, and will add to it as the need occurs, or subtract as I am able to buy them myself. More happy blogging this weekend. I promise.
Regular reader Robert D. emailed me overnight, letting me know that an ace in two wars, General Robin Olds had died over the weekend.
In my early time in service, General Olds was famous for a defiantly non-reg mustache, and for having flown with Chappie James over Vietnam, forming a duo nicknamed “Blackman and Robin”.
He was a colorful character; these days seeming like a character in a swashbuckling adventure novel, or a movie serial.
More here.
For the troops, courtesy of Instapundit. Normally, I don’t link to stuff that the Blogfather of us all notes, as I assume that everyone knows about it, once he has linked it. But this is one of those exceptions. (The technique is called “editing to the beat”, BTW)
It’s a rhetorical question, to which the answer is probably “straight down the same old drain that it has been circling for thirty years and which have become even more circumscribed since the latest intifada and the election of an even more unsavory lot of gangsters than Yassir Arafat if that were &&$#@ing possible and why the &$##@ does anyone still care?” I certainly don’t, except for a lingering bit of curiosity about how long until… oh, but I’ll get to that.
Now the whole of Gaza looks like a sandy and surrealistic version of “Escape from New York”, combined with one of those nature films which have quantities of rats or scorpions or something equally unattractive, all crammed together at the bottom of a pit, or in a wire cage and either frantically clawing/stinging each other to death… and trying to escape, while the dispassionate camera stands above the tangle, and watches.
Watching dispassionately is about all that is left for all but the die-hard pro-Palestinian adherent to do. The rest of us have becoming increasingly disabused of our illusions and our natural sympathies. Fifty years of sucking on the international charity teat, and being waved as a bloody shirt every time someone gets a little narked at Israel, or the Jewish community, or the US, or whatever the middle-east cause du jour is. Thirty years of murdering Americans, culminating by rejoicing in the streets after 9/11. The unstoppable torrent of lies, sickening violence, whining self-justification, of children dressed up in little bomb vests, of honor killings and mob killings and plain old killings. Of hijackings and assassinations, and the desecration of Christian holy sites. The corruption of international agencies tasked with responsibility for looking after three, or is it four generations of those who backed the wrong side in a war they thought they might win, the perversion of the news agencies who are supposed to do more than shill for one side, and of intellectuals who have rather more invested in striking a pose in an artfully draped kaffiyeh…
Nope, every shred of sympathy I ever had for the poor, pitiful Palestinians dissolved about two years ago. In the words of a tee-shirt I used to have, “I used to be disgusted. Now I’m only amused.” And not even very much amused, since there is really only thing I have left to wonder about in this regard. And that would be, how soon the usual media shills, international charity busy-bodies and intellectual frauds will start prancing around, telling us how sorry we have to be for the Palestinians and demanding that we “do something”. Oh, yeah, and I wonder if it will have any effect this time around, outside the very small circle of media shills, international charity busy-bodies and intellectual frauds. Even Jimmy Carter must be getting fed up.
In answer to those impassioned pleas, I will do something, of course. I will go and make more popcorn.
(Another one of those amusing e-mailed lists, posted at the Far East Network Yahoo Group chatroom)
1.) Only a true Southerner knows the difference between a hissie fit and a conniption, and that you don’t “HAVE” them, — you “PITCH” them.
2.) Only a true Southerner knows how many fish, collard greens, turnip greens, peas, beans, etc. make up “a mess.”
3.) Only a true Southerner can show or point out to you the general direction of “yonder.”
4.) Only a true Southerner knows exactly how long “directly” is – as in: “Going to town, be back directly.”
5.) All true Southerners, even babies, know that “Gimme some sugar” is not a request for the white, granular sweet substance that sits in a pretty little bowl on the middle of the table.
6.) All true Southerners know exactly when “by and by” is. They might not use the term, but they know the concept well.
7.) Only a true Southerner knows instinctively that the best gesture of solace for a neighbor who’s got trouble is a plate of hot fried chicken and a big bowl of cold potato salad. (If the neighbor’s trouble is a real crisis, they also know to add a large banana puddin’!)
8.) Only true Southerners grow up knowing the difference between “right near” and “a right far piece.” They also know that “just down the road” can be 1 mile or 20.
9.) Only a true Southerner both knows and understands the difference between a redneck, a good ol’ boy, and po’ white trash.
10.) No true Southerner would ever assume that the car with the flashing turn signal is actually going to make a turn.
11.) A true Southerner knows that “fixin'” can be used as a noun, a verb, or an adverb.
12.) Only a true Southerner knows that the term “booger” can be a resident of the nose, a descriptive, as in “that ol’ booger,” a first name or something that jumps out at you in the dark and scares you senseless.
13.) Only true Southerners make friends while standing in lines. We don’t do “queues”, we do “lines,” and when we’re “in line,” we talk to everybody!
14.) Put 100 true Southerners in a room and half of them will discover they’re related, even if only by marriage.
15.) True Southerners never refer to one person as “y’all.”
16.) True Southerners know grits come from corn and how to eat them.
17.) Every true Southerner knows tomatoes with eggs, bacon, grits, and coffee are perfectly wonderful; that redeye gravy is also a breakfast food; and that fried green tomatoes are not a breakfast food.
18.) When you hear someone say, “Well, I caught myself lookin’ .. ,” you know you are in the presence of a genuine Southerner!
19.) Only true Southerners say “sweet tea” and “sweet milk.” Sweet tea indicates the need for sugar and lots of it – we do not like our tea unsweetened. “Sweet milk” means you don’t want buttermilk.
20.) And a true Southerner knows you don’t scream obscenities at little old ladies who drive 30 MPH on the freeway. You just say, “Bless her heart” and go your own way.