With a Splash of Schadenfreude On the Side

26. March 2009 · Comments Off on With a Splash of Schadenfreude On the Side · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Politics, Rant

Ok, so in the main, I’m kinda torn. Watching the Fresh Prince of Chicago and his administration melt down is pretty amusing, in a sick, sadistic sort of way; I wake up in the morning, and turn on the computer now, and wonder if the State Department has gifted the Turkish Prime Minister with a bobble-headed Mohammed, or presented President Sarcozy of France with a fine selected case of box-wine and a tastefully gift-wrapped tube of deodorant. Seriously, after the cut-rate Box ‘o Movies to Gordon Brown – in the wrong format yet – I don’t think I would be all that surprised to read of the above official gifts being dispensed by the administration of the guy who was supposed to make the whole world like us again, after that uncouth Cowboy Bush. That’s the trouble with being surreal and humorous in these dark times – just when you had thought up something that you assumed was impossibly, comically far over the top – there it is, all over the headlines. The serious headlines, not at the Onion, or Iowahawk.

I have to admit that seeing all the ecstatically worshipping minions of the main-stream press who drank the hopey-changy Kool-Aid all these months ago, waking up with an ‘omigawd, what did I do last night’ hangover… That’s also kind of fun, too. In a grimly amusing, ‘didn’t I warn you not to trim your short’n’curlies with the weed-whacker’ sort of way. Hey, I will get my jollies where I can, and “I told you so” is one of life’s great unsung pleasures. Watching the major media organs collapse like a dirigible with a slow leak is also no end amusing, especially when it happens to be those very same organs who kept banging on about Governor Sarah Palin’s inexperience, as compared to the Anointed One’s sanctified role as a ‘community organizer’. Live by taking political sides – perish from the same. Thanks. My only regret is that in future, I may not have anything packing materiel for stuff to be mailed out of state. A couple of sheets of newsprint were always good for that.

I said, all these months ago, that Barak Obama was an attractive, empty suit, with a pleasant voice, a puppet of Chicago machine politics, with no discernible bad record – and what did you – or 52% of the electorate, or whatever percent actually did vote for him – have to go and do, but elect him, just because he was so cute, with the year-round-dark-tan, glamorous and exotic background and (insert fangirly squeal here) besides, he made such cool-sounding speeches! So now, here he is in office, the ultimate Affirmative-Action candidate/American Idol fave – stuck in a hideously exposed position, under the pitiless lights, with no possible way to vote ‘present’ and go on doing what he seems always to have done – which is to move on. Having had some experience in the real world, I’ve see his like before; the favored golden candidate, one of those charming and ambitious fast-burners who go all the way up, glad-handing and using all the way, and never staying long enough in any position to actually do the job. They generally leave before the damage they have done becomes evident. As the old saying goes, they leave the stink behind them. Alas, this time, he is stuck, like a treed cat, up on top of the highest telephone pole in the land, with no graceful way to come down.

So that’s the thing – I would be amused, save for all the damage that was done, getting him up there, and all the damage that will be done, when he comes down. (To be continued.)

(Note – re-posted to allow comments. There is a bug in our system which dislikes apostrophes in the titles of posts.)

Sunday Afternoon at the old German Free-School

16. March 2009 · Comments Off on Sunday Afternoon at the old German Free-School · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, Literary Good Stuff, Old West, Veteran's Affairs

So, ages ago, Karen M. who manages the speaker’s schedule for the German Texan Heritage Society emailed me to ask if I would like to come and do a talk about the history of the Adelsverein in Texas, and how I went about writing three historical novels based on those events – which are dramatic to the nth degree and which hardly anyone outside of Texas has ever heard of. Of course I said yes, how could I resist any organization which contains a large number of people who are, or might be interested in my books, and whose’ tag-line on their website is “Guten Tag, Y’all?” Besides, they offered refreshments for afters; I will work for cookies and punch. Perhaps someday I will be able to throw all sorts of hissies and demand Perrier on tap, a fruit tray and a private dressing room before engagements, but that day is not yet – really, my sense of entitlement is all but stillborn. Either that or I haven’t become jaded – darn it, I still enjoy these things, once I get over the initial panic of standing up and looking at all those strangers or almost-strangers in front of me, waiting for me to say something deathlessly witty. This is where having been a broadcaster comes in handy. I know that I have spoken, through a microphone or a TV to larger numbers of people, but those audiences were not ‘there’, not in the same room. On those occasions, I could fake myself out, pretend that I was only speaking to a handful of people, be casual and friendly, informative and remember to stand up straight, not pick my nose and not cuss in front of them … but having them all look back at you – that is another kettle of fish. Fortunately, I am getting accustomed to a live audience…

Blondie programmed the GPS unit, and I did a google-map search for the venue, which was described as being “The Old German Free School” in beautiful downtown Austin, Texas… which is, I feel only fair to point out, really quite beautiful, as it is spread over a number of scenically lumpy and rather nicely-wooded hills on either side of a lovely deep-green river. A lot of the streets were strategically and alternately one-way, but – thank god – there was no particular festival going on, which might have clogged traffic unbearably – but we did have to go to one exit and then zig-zag through another couple of streets which afforded us some nice views of assorted college students enjoying their last day of spring break, and one particularly large complex which seemed to be ‘street-people central.’

The old German Free-School turned out to a lovely antique two-story building, constructed of stone, and stone and plaster, and stone and plaster over rammed-earth, a long structure just one room deep and turned sideways to the street, with balconies and terraces overlooking a series of pocket-gardens connected by stairs. Most of the rooms opened onto balconies or the terraces, with long windows on either side, which reminded me irresistibly of 18th and 19th century townhouses in Charleston or Savannah or Beaufort, built up on narrow town-lots with the narrow end of it to the street. All of the rooms had tall windows on either side – to ensure a good draft through the room, essential in those far-distant summer days before the invention of air conditioning. It had just gotten over being unbearably chilly and rainy, so the rooms were quite pleasant. The German Free School was the first institution of public education in Austin, according to one of the members of the society who came for my talk. In the mid-1850s, there were sufficient numbers of German-speaking settlers who were totally exasperated with the lack of educational resources; the only option for educating their children was to hire a private tutor, or send them to the Anglo-American ‘Sunday Schools’. According to my informant, one of the founders was totally fed-up, (possibly with listening to all his fellows kvetching about the subject) so he threw down a thousand dollars in gold and growled, “So, build a school!” and there you go – apparently the Free School predated the Austin Independent School District by at least a decade.

There were about fifteen or twenty attendees – and the room was fairly small, so I went ahead and used the podium, with my notes and my pictures of certain relics and locations, 81/2 by 11 pictures mounted on foam-core board, with little hinged supports to hold them up – all of essential items or evocative locations in Fredericksburg. It really went well, this time – I have quite a sort-of-planned talk-with-notes that I use for these occasions, a list of notes, names and things that I simply must cover, and in the proper order; not a set script, for that is the absolute death of this kind of event, just a memory-jogger of the high points. This is the best and most-spontaneous seeming kind of talk, I am not bound by an every-single-word script and can play up or play down things, and respond immediately to what the audience seems to be most interested or engaged in. I wing it, every time – but a wing-it with some sturdy yet invisible supports! Finished with a reading – a couple of pages from “The Gathering” – about the feast and bonfire the first settlers held among the trees of what would become Fredericksburg, and took questions until everyone repaired for punch, home-made coconut cake and a plate of little baked pastry and sausage nibbles.

The members of the audience were all enthusiasts – the very best kind of audience an author can ask for, for they had interesting questions and a lot of knowledge behind them – even if only one person among them had actually the Trilogy. Doris L. purchased the Trilogy and read it all – her husband is from one of the old Gillespie County families and by one of those interesting coincidences of history and the internet and all – it was her husband’s several-times great grandfather who owned the sheep-flock that a boy named Adolph Korn had been watching over, when he was taken by raiding Comanche Indians. Adolph Korn’s g-g-I don’t-know-how-many-times grand-nephew Scott Zesch wrote bout his life and the ordeal of a number of children taken by Indians from the Hill Country in his book “The Captured” – which was one of my references in writing Book Three “The Harvesting” – about the multi-leveled tragedy of young children taken captive by the Comanche or Apache and later returned to their white families. Some of the other questions asked of me were about Prince Solms – who I do still think was rather an idiot, in spite of what one of his particular partisans could say. Sorry, buying into the Fischer-Miller Grant was not an act bringing any particular credit upon Prince Solm’s financial or political acumen. Also, the train of personal servants and his insistence on his title of nobility – not a good move, all around, no matter what his qualifications as a serving military officer might have been in other fields. Although there was an excellent point made, about how perceptions about Germany and German settlers went to the bottom of the tank after about mid WW I or so.

Until that very point in time and history, and in most places in these United States – being from the German settlements and of German ancestry were seen as pretty favorable things. It was OK to be one of ‘the folk’, to remember Germany as it was… until history and Germany changed; the place that these hard-working and cultured immigrants came from, the place that they remembered with fondness and reminiscent affection morphed into something ugly. That Germany – or those duchies and principalities that they came from – all of those places changed during their absence, into something that they would not have recognized, these innocent and trusting immigrants, taking ship from Bremen, carrying their memories and those wooden trunks with them, hoping for new lives but recalling their old country. But in the 20th century, their new country would fight two wars against the old – against what the old country had become, while they were busy building lives and towns, bringing up their children as free citizens of their new country. Funny, how history happens, when you are just trying do your business and get by.

All in all, a most gratifying Sunday afternoon spent, in the company of book and history enthusiasts.

Having a Tea-Party

13. March 2009 · Comments Off on Having a Tea-Party · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Politics, Veteran's Affairs

It appears that San Antonio is brewing up a tea party too, along with all the others in the works for April 15th. The grand plan is to throw a thousand tea-bags into the San Antonio River – how the River Authority will feel about that, also have no idea how they would feel about me adding a little milk and sugar – well, that’s the way I drink my tea… and even though we’re as mad as hell about an impossibly pork-packed, and most likely totally counterproductive stimulus package which most of the Congressional numb-skulls who voted for it never read… there is no need to let the standards down.

More here. Blondie and I plan to attend, and to take pictures. Any suggestions for signs would be appreciated; something witty, literate and short would be appreciated.

The Horns of a Dilemma

10. March 2009 · Comments Off on The Horns of a Dilemma · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun and Games, General, Media Matters Not, Politics, Rant

Yep, it truly is a bit of a dilemma – is the just newly-new and fresh-out-of-box purveyor of hope ‘n’ change and all that – just beginning to gleam with a discrete and gentlemanly film of flop-sweat? Mom always used to say ‘never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity’ but as I scan the newsblogs of late, I am seriously torn: is the man of hopey-changy acting out of deliberate and long-considered malice? Or is he just an arrogant, medium-city pol with delusions of grandeur, now dug into a job which is so far above his head that he would need a couple of floors worth of elevator to even get level with the demands of a position that a narrow majority of American voters, a large portion of the MSM and such international hacks as the BBC airily assumed he was more than equal to?

Eh – I just don’t know, can’t decide… and can’t even figure out which of those two options is the lesser of evils. And here I was, lo, these many moons ago, pointing out that his resume was thinner than Callista Flockhart’s thighs, and all he really had going for him was that he looked so nice and talked so sweet, and a dismayingly large portion of the traditional news media were drooling over him like fan-girls in the presence of Menudo – (the boy-singing group, not the tripe soup.) Yes, even with a series of unfortunate friends and associates, like the Reverent Wright, Bill Ayers, the entire Chicago political machine and a scarily resentful BAP of a spouse, he was hauled like a juggernaut, by the labors of his supporters and a complacent media into the highest office in the land. So there he is, rather like a fly in amber – except that everyone pretty much knows how he got there, unlike the late 19th century British politician of whom a similar comparison was made.

But now that the One has been duly anointed, blessed and installed – what next? Chaos, disaster, and the stock market dropping like Michael Moore stepping off the top of a tall building seem to be the order of the day. And the Russian-language gaffe over a gag gift ‘reset’ button, and the really unfortunate gift exchange with the British PM. Ugh – that was truly cringe-inducing. Al and any other British readers – I deeply apologize: a couple of cheap toy helicopters and a gift-package set of DVD movies apparently pulled at random out of the “miscellaneous white-elephant gift assortment closet” that most sensible social persons keep as a kind of emergency fallback when presented with last-minute present-giving occasions. But there are people and occasions where something pulled out of that closet is appropriate and expected – like unit Christmas parties, or Red Hat association affairs. A State Visit by the head of another state is not… especially when the poor man is going blind and the DVDs are the wrong format, anyway. Honestly, until this week, I thought our gummint had a very efficient protocol office who would keep track of occasions, and of the likes and preferences of State visitors, the general suitability, utility and tastefulness of formal gifts — just to prevent embarrassing things like this happening at the highest levels. Perhaps all the people who had expertise in these matters were let go in January, and replaced by twenty-somethings who are – or were, until last week – relatively innocent in the savage requirements of the higher good taste. Still – a very hard and embarrassing lesson, which may cost the One with regard to foreign allies, farther down the line. The other option is, of course – the tacky gift-giving was a deliberate slam. Hard to know which bodes worse; petty and deliberate malice, and the joys of sticking it to ‘the man’ or just plain administrative incompetence? In any case I do apologize, and note that I did not vote for him. Whatever criticisms that Al and others might have about GWB – at least the point can be made that none of his state visits had this kind of fall-out in their wake.

Oh, yeah – interesting times. Pass the popcorn.

On the Marquee in Lights

05. March 2009 · Comments Off on On the Marquee in Lights · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Literary Good Stuff, Veteran's Affairs

Perhaps not in lights, but it was definitely my name on the marquee in front of the Butt-Holdsworth Memorial Library in Kerrville last Saturday. Blondie took a picture, so we have the evidence. It seems that they like to do author talks on Saturday afternoons, and it would appear that Phillippa Gregory or Diana Galbadon already had busy schedules – so the librarian in charge of author-wrangling emailed me to ask if I would come and talk about the Trilogy. Of course I said agreed; I’d much rather drive an hour and talk with a group of people about my books, or local history, or the vagaries of 19th century frontier Texas then sit at a small table in the front of a big-box bookstore and watch shoppers carefully avoiding me for an hour or so. There’s just no contest there – and frankly, doing a talk and answering questions is much the better way to build my local fan base anyway.

This talk turned out to be for an audience of about a dozen or fifteen, in the basement meeting room of the library, which – since it is built on a steep hillside overlooking the river, looked out on a stone-paved terrace and a line of trees at the edge. I’d feel such an idiot, standing at the podium and talking to such a small group, so we circled the chairs and sat down. As it also turned out, most of the audience hadn’t been able to read any of the Trilogy yet, not even the librarian. Although the library does have a single copy of all three books – they have hardly spent any time at the library and the reserve list for them is lengthy. Gratifyingly, as soon as they return, out they fly again! Excellent news for me, and perhaps they might even consider buying another set, if Adelsverein is going to be that popular.

For my talk, I did a brief overview of the entrepreneur scheme, the grand plans and bungling that doomed the Mainzer Adelsverein, outlined how I came to be interested in such a relatively obscure historical event, and what I did for research, and how I really had to make up very little regarding the various historical events that I touched on. Amazingly, most of the people present – just about all of them from Kerrville or close by – had not heard much about either the Adelsverein, or the travails in the Hill Country during the Civil War, so much of I had planned to talk about was a) new and b) interesting. All in all, a pleasant afternoon, well spent – although we did have to hustle back to San Antonio in time for me to get to work – in my ‘author’ tailored suit and well-chosen accessories, which proved something of an astonishment for the Saturday evening co-workers, who are used to seeing me slop around in something considerably less professional-appearing.

On Tuesday evening, with my computer returned to me and functioning more or less normally (fried mother-board and CPU, but all docs retrieved and saved – whew!) I followed up the library talk with a book-club meeting, on-line and through an organization called Accessible World, which provides books to the vision-impaired. Nan Hawthorne, another author and IAG member, had finagled me into putting the Trilogy into the Accessible World library, and Book One was the book to read for Accessible World’s historical novel book club. So that made another very gratifying hour, linked into their internet ‘conference room’, with about fifteen people who had read “The Gathering” and loved it, loved the characters, and had lots of detailed questions about what was real, what were the character’s motivations, and why had I written things in the way I had. Now, that was an hour that went past very quickly. It’s caviar to the writer’s soul, hearing from people who have read your books and are passionately interested. It makes up in a small way for the months and days, spent alone but for the world that you have created in your head, when you hear from people beginning to share that world and to become as engaged and interested in that world as you are.

And as of this morning, and possibly thanks to a wonderful write-up from David Foster at Chicagoboyz – the Amazon ranking for all three books of the Trilogy was at and around 150,000, which is possibly the highest it has been at since all three were released for sale in early December. So it appears that I am a few steps closer to being a famous ‘arthur’!

Data Stream

04. March 2009 · Comments Off on Data Stream · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Rant, The Funny

Still waiting to see if there will be another “Tea Party-San Antonio” in the near future, in which case Blondie and I will happily join in; the weather is fine and mild, and I wouldn’t mind at all a chance to actually commingle in the real-world with some of the other people that I know are getting more than a little annoyed with the current administration. As another commenter remarked on another blog – and it was so apt that I have promptly stolen it and used with great effect ever since: “I knew the Obama administration was gonna be a train wreck; I just thought it would make it out of the station first.”

The nice thing about having low expectations is that one is very rarely disappointed in a politician, and often quite pleasantly surprised. At this point in time, all I am reduced to asking of our elected public servants is that they would cover their mouths when they cough, and to kindly refrain from sexually molesting barnyard animals and interns in public – and there have been moments over the last couple of years, when I wondered if that were asking altogether too much. The passing spectacle is just getting to be all to much; the affirmative action President and his race-mongering attorney general all hot to have conversations about race in America, as if we haven’t hardly been having anything else for the last forty years. Then there is Sen. Dodd with the charming Irish cottage and his sweet-heartedly favorable mortgage arrangements – and his many friends in the House and Senate who also appear to have had similar friendly arrangements with their mortgage lenders. Follow that with a chaser of the pols who scrambled to explain their omission in paying taxes … jeeze Louise, does everyone going into politics these days have amnesia when it comes to filing their income tax report?

And the stock market has been dropping like a rock over the last two days, to the tune of ineffectual bleating by the Anointed One, who appears to be making the discovery for the very first time – that what he says does, indeed, have effects in the real world, outside the arena of Chicago politics. It would be amusing, watching him twist and turn – if it weren’t for the very real repercussions. It’s also amusing watching a variety of Obama media fans from last fall owning up to second thoughts now that their guy is actually ensconced in the White House. Nice timing, sports – very nice timing, indeed. Sorry, mediawhores, in my own mind and after your performance coming up to the election, you are now firmly and irretrievably stuck to him. Would it be racist of me to draw a comparison to the tar-baby? Perhaps – but it is apt enough. You are stuck on to him for good, and even if you break free at the last minute, you will still have all that icky tar smeared all over your face, and the rest of us will point and laugh, as your TV network or newspaper goes down to insolvency and you look for another job.

Interesting times – just as that ancient Chinese curse prescribes.

(Later – another perspective, found courtesy of Rantburg, home of all that is surly and cynical.)

Reminder – Wild West Monday is Coming!

25. February 2009 · Comments Off on Reminder – Wild West Monday is Coming! · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Literary Good Stuff, Old West

And more here, at “The Tainted Archive” – one-stop shopping for all fans of traditional westerns … which the Adelsverein Trilogy is, sort of, if you bend down and squint at it sideways.

Memo: On the Fear of Open Discussion

19. February 2009 · Comments Off on Memo: On the Fear of Open Discussion · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun and Games, General, History, Rant

To: Atty-Gen Holder
From: Sgt Mom
Re: Not having open discussions about the r-word

1. Well, thanks, your attorneyness. Just thanks. After about forty years about being called racists when we open our mouths on any topic remotely to do with race, now we get whipsawed by being called cowards for not opening our mouths. Look, we got wise about noisy race-hustlers long since… is it OK to lump yourself in with them? With Al Sharpton, Jesse the baby-momma-banging-hypocrite Jackson, and Spike Lee and all the rest of the easily offended crowd with the dark year-round tans?
2. Frankly, no one really digs being screamed at when we had one of these mandatory equal-opportunities encounter sessions, and no, it never much changed anyone’s mind, and these little sessions hardly ever cleared the air much. It just took up however many hours were mandated by whoever dictates those matters.
3. It did, however, shut up most of the virulent white bigots… forty years ago. I have a heck of a time recalling the last time in real life that I actually heard someone in a social setting uncork some casual racism, misogyny, or anti-Semitism, so mad props for social pressure and all that. Pity one can’t say the same of thug-rap music, but then I’m white so I’m probably disqualified from commenting on that.
4. Let it be noted that we do, in fact, have discussions about racism with friends and acquaintances of all color – but they tend to be those people who we are fairly sure will not come f&$#@ing unglued and begin screaming and calling us racists when we decline to blame ourselves personally for everything to do with race relations in the United States over the last couple of centuries.
5. Hoping this memo will prove of help in assisting you to understand this, although I am not gonna hold my breath about it. Will we have to listen to you bang on about this for the rest of the Obama administration? (God, it’s going to be a long four years!)

I remain,
Sgt Mom

PS – Just as a reminder, a good chunk of the Founding Fathers were not slave-owners, and very much disapproved of chattel slavery… and seventy years after the founding, we fought a particularly bloody civil war over that very issue. Do history much. AG Holder?

Thrift Shopping

18. February 2009 · Comments Off on Thrift Shopping · Categories: Ain't That America?, General

Honestly, I can’t help but think that I am way ahead of the game when it comes to an economic down-turn, incipient depression, bubble-bursting, or whatever the heck the mighty media organs want to call it. I lost three jobs alone last year, before the major misery even started. I’ve already processed the grief, adjusted to a fairly Spartan lifestyle, and gotten very well adept at bargaining with institutions demanding money from me. I cobbled together another series of paying ventures, including fifteen hours a week at the phone bank – which does have as a virtue (perhaps it’s only virtue!) that it is at least reliable in providing work hours and the resulting paycheck. Amazingly enough, I’ve lasted there long enough that many of the other drones on the floor know me by name, which is nice enough, I suppose – but I still call it “The Hellhole”. My original plan called for quitting around Christmas – but alas, Blondie loosing a job of her own put paid to that notion. So – tight budget all around, and welcome to the joys of bargain hunting, at yard sales, thrift-stores and in the untidy shelves at the back of various retail establishments labeled ‘clearance’ or ‘final sale’ or ‘70% off!’

I don’t know if I will really ever be able to embrace full retail prices again, after this year. I don’t think I will ever be able to walk into an upscale shop and cheerfully pay the full price for something, without feeling an incapacitating twinge of regret. I guess I have just enough of my grandmother’s canny puritan soul in me, and how it has a chance to flower. Unlike Granny Jessie in the Great Depression, though – we will not be keeping chickens. That’s going a little too far. But we have picked up a barely-used bread machine (at a yard sale for $10) and make our own bread, since I have a liking for the very expensive wheat varieties that are loaded with fiber and flavorful seeds and spices, which cost better than $3.00 a loaf at the Humongously Enormous Big-Ass Grocery. So one step closer to self-sufficiency – and Blondie is teaching herself how to knit. Much more of this, and I can see us living away off in the country with a satellite dish, a generator, our own water well and a milk cow. Talking over this whole gestalt with Blondie, and neither of us can remember the last time we bought a non-food item at full price. Everything has been on sale, second hand, bought in bulk at Sam’s Club or an ethnic grocery, or made at home. Even the ink cartridges for my printer are recycled from Cartridge World.

And this is not to say we don’t have a lot of quiet fun with this – we have bought some lovely, frivolous things for practically pennies and even some items which miraculously replaced those lost in the fire at Mom and Dad’s house in 2003. This very week at the new Goodwill Store which opened in our neighborhood, Blondie found a round silver-plate drinks tray which – after ten years worth of grimy black tarnish was cleaned off of it and she checked the now-visible hallmark – turned out to have a market value of about a hundred times what she spent for it. And there was also an odd set of crystal glasses, all jumbled among a long shelf of glassware. These were as fragile as bubbles, and appear to be hand-etched with a bamboo pattern; four with a short stem, three with a long stem and three which look like miniature martini glasses. I think they are Japanese, since they look so much like a set of crystal that I bought in the BX there ages ago. Blondie adds them to the collection that she is setting aside for her own house, against the day when I am a best-selling author and can buy her one.
I was much more interested in a find on a table of books: a stack of the old Time-Life series about the foods of the world. Mom had a subscription to the series in the late 1960s; each volume focusing on the food of a particular country or region came as a two-part set. One was a lovely, lavishly illustrated examination of the country and it’s cuisine, and the other a small spiral-bound collection of recipes. Of course, Mom’s collection was among those lost in the fire, and the ones I found at the thrift shop were the coffee-table book only – but still, I was very fond of that series. The cooking of provincial France, of Spain and Portugal, of Great Britain, and Scandinavia…. I think those books were where we all learned to be adventurous about food. It’s good to have them back.

The Proud Tower and the Buccaneers (Part 2)

15. February 2009 · Comments Off on The Proud Tower and the Buccaneers (Part 2) · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, World

One of the most curious instances of the rich American heiress for old European title exchanges was the marriage of Consuelo Vanderbilt to the Duke of Marlborough; the wedding itself was covered with breathless interest by the media of the time – which since it took place in 1895, meant coverage by newspapers only. However, the wedding was as lavish, and the interest in every tiny detail as intense as that paid to the nuptials of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer. It took place at St. Thomas Episcopal Church on New Yorks’ 5th Avenue, and the crowds of spectators outside the church and for a good way down the avenue was so thick that squads of policemen could barely force enough of an open way between them for the invited guests. The inside of the church was lavishly decorated with flowers – pink and white roses, swags of lilies, ivy and holly, arches of ferns, palm leaves and chrysanthemums. No expense was spared – even more astonishing was the fact that Consuelo Vanderbilt and the Duke had only been engaged for about six weeks and only known each other for barely a year. She was barely eighteen, reserved and sheltered, the very pretty daughter of a woman with a will of iron and ambition to match. After her marriage, she would blossom into one of the acknowledged beauties of that era: Playwright James Barrie supposedly said he would wait all day in the street just to watch her get into a carriage.

Alva Smith had married for money herself – having pursued, wed and just recently divorced the oldest grandson of Cornelius Vanderbilt, called ‘The Commodore’, who had founded the family fortunes in shipping and branched out into railways. Her own father’s fortunes were sadly diminished by the Civil War, and Alva resolved to secure her own future and those of her family by marrying rich. She emerges as a domineering, driven and stubborn woman with a fiery temper. Very few people ever said ‘no’ to Alva Vanderbilt, least of all her own family; neither her parents, either of her husbands, or any of her children. Her own mother, a cultured Southern belle spoke French, and traveled widely in Europe with her children in those distant days when it meant a long voyage on a sailing ship. In a fragmentary memoir written late in life, Alva recalled that her mother had made a yearly order of clothes for herself and her daughters from a Paris dressmaker. All the clothes they would need for the next year would arrive one time – a means which was sufficient for that era, but not when Alva was raising her own children. By that time, being rich and in the social set meant a degree of ostentatious competition that is purely mind-boggling to contemplate today. Everything about those at the very top of the social network still astonishes, beginning with the ‘summer cottages’ built at the edge of Newport, Rhode Island. Alva was responsible for one of the most lavish, ‘Marble House’ which seemed like nothing much but a couple of square acres of the Sun King’s Versailles, set down in the New World. The balls and parties that prominent members of this high society threw for each other also defy belief. At one infamously grand banquet, an artificial river filled with live fish ran the length of the dining table – and guests were provided with little silver shovels to search for jeweled party favors in the sand at the bottom of the river. Such a grand dinner ran to course after course of elaborately prepared dishes, and an ordinary day for a society woman might involve changing clothes four or five times over. And Alva Vanderbilt was one of the leading social lionesses by the time her daughter was of marriageable age, despite having divorced William Vanderbilt.

Divorce was almost unthinkable in that milieu – and yet, Alva went ahead with it; she would marry her daughter off to a nobleman, and having achieved that apotheosis, would marry again herself, to Oliver Belmont – another wealthy member of the Gilded Age’s highest social circle. Incredibly, she would have a contented marriage with him – and maintain her high position in that society – until his sudden death from complications of appendicitis. Almost without a moment’s hesitation, Alva would involve herself in the campaign for women’s rights to vote, using her considerable wealth to fund suffrage organizations and publications, to lobby in Washington and among the highest levels. She would fight for women’s property and political rights with the same stubborn intensity that she applied to any of her previous enthusiasms. In fact, she became something of a militant – and after her own death in 1931, had a full suffragette’s funeral, with women pallbearers and choir. Never mind the contradiction, of being for women’s rights, yet having dictated Consuelo’s marriage and overruled any of her daughter’s considerable misgivings.

Consuelo married reluctantly, in obedience to her mother. In spite of that, she serenely adorned the great estate of Blenheim Palace – which her marriage settlement helped repair and renovate – and the highest levels of British political and social circles equally. She was one of the noble wives who carried the canopy over Queen Mary at the coronation of King George V. She would produce two sons, and is thought to have been the originator of the expression ‘an heir and a spare’. The marriage was not happy; she and the Duke were of different and incompatible temperaments and Consuelo had something of her mother’s spine. They separated barely ten years after their lavish wedding day, and divorced in 1921, upon which Consuelo married a wealthy French aviation pioneer named Jacques Balsan. She achieved no small victory in managing to remain on easy and affectionate terms with her ex-husbands’ family, which included his redoubtable cousin, Winston Churchill. Her further life adventures included escaping with her husband from France in 1940, and returning to live in the country she had departed nearly half a century before. Amazingly, she lived until 1964 – and if pictures taken of her are any guide – she was still amazingly beautiful.

(No particular reason for writing all this – I had heard of these women in a vague sort of way, but the entire book about them was rather fascinating.)

Wild West Monday

10. February 2009 · Comments Off on Wild West Monday · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, Old West, Veteran's Affairs

So, I belong to a number of different chat-groups about books, and historical novels and Westerns and all … and at one of them, fans of Westerns are trying to raise interest in that particular genre, by mobilizing other fans, around the world to go into their local library or bookstore and ask for Westerns – any western, new, traditional or somewhere in between. The thinking is, we can achieve a critical mass of fans, and maybe take the book-selling world – if not by the throat, maybe we can gum their ankles a little, when it comes to stocking genre Western books. Which are really madly popular, but you’d hardly know it, to look at the shelves in your local Borders or whatever.More here, thanks to Gary Dobbs of “The Tainted Archive“.

Gary says, in part:

“At the moment we are in a situation where bookshops control the market (a select amount of buyers chose the titles they think we want to read ) and they seem to think all we want to read are massive tomes with more padding that substance. The days of cheap paperbacks that existed to entertain, excite and delight are long gone. Strange when those are the reasons we started reading in the first place. But it doesn’t have to be so – so come on get involved, hit the bookshops, hit the libraries. All of us on MARCH 2nd.
Come on get involved.”

Not just my books, which count as Westerns if you get down and squint at them sideways, but a whole range of others. Some of the classics are being profiled at Gary’s blog, and I would like to throw in a mention of a book by the micro-publisher who helped me launch The Adelsverein Trilogy, Michael Katz at Strider Nolan. His Western is called “Shalom on the Range”, and is about the adventures of a Jewish railway detective who knows nothing about the west but what he has read in dime novels, investigating a train robbery in the 1870s. Think ‘Seinfeld on the Prairie’.

Mark it on your calendar, if you are a fan of Westerns: March 2 is Wild West Monday!

The Proud Tower and the Buccaneers

09. February 2009 · Comments Off on The Proud Tower and the Buccaneers · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History

I am immersed in a schedule of reading over the next few weeks, devouring omnivorously a stack of books from the local library branch, another stack from my sometime employer at Watercress Press – she has a splendid collection of Texiana – and re-reading some of my own not-inconsiderable collection. This is where the stories, characters and incidents are planted and begin to grow and entwine; but the soil they sprout from is composted from all this reading, if I am allowed to milk out the gardening metaphor as far as is possible… well, anyway, circling back to the beginning again – I’ve got a tall stack of books about Texas, about the Gold Rush, and the 19th century in general. Too many to stack up on the nightstand, so the overflow is piled up on the flat-topped cedar chest, in three or four tall stacks. One of the potential story-lines in the projected trilogy is about how the American cattle business boomed and collapsed in the 1880s, which is about the very same time that many of the most popular envisionings of the Wild West were laid down in the form we have come to know best. It is also the setting for the concluding volume of my projected new trilogy; picking up the story of the next generation of the Becker family, once the Texas frontier calmed down a little.

There were a lot of other things going on at about that same time, including a veritable explosion in the number of American millionaires. In the post-Civil War years, enormous fortunes were being made in industry, from building railways, in steamship lines, in mining, in mercantile interests. The post-Civil War decades increasingly came to be dominated by ‘new money’ men, beside which the ‘old money’ families – with fortunes based on land, banking, the fur trade, sailing ships, or cotton and rooted in the earlier decades of the 19th century began to appear pale, and dull to everyone but each other. Mark Twain called the latter decades of that period ‘The Gilded Age’ – and he didn’t mean it particularly as a compliment, even if people have used the expression ever since as implying something rather fine. Twain meant it in the sense of something cheap, of a microscopically thin layer of gold overlaid on cheap metal, something flashy, over-ornamented, an object which would not wear very well, but caught the eye and impressed no end in the short term.

That era seemed strange and uncomfortable to someone who remembered an earlier day – for all it’s comforts, convenience, riches and plenty. Changes came thick and fast; the telegraph, the transcontinental railway, the ease of taking a steamship passage across the Atlantic and being there in a week or so, where once it had taken months. Americans of the upper crust began traveling for pleasure and for education, rather than strictly business and in numbers, once the crossing became relatively pleasant and short. The United States had never, even before the Civil War, been particularly isolated, but the 19th century world became appreciably smaller. Mark Twain himself became a part of this trend, by participating in one of the first great American tourist excursions, the 1867 voyage of the “Quaker City” to the Holy Land and elsewhere, which was documented in one of the funniest travel books ever, “The Innocents Abroad”.

It was an interesting time, no two ways about it – and one of the interesting aspects is that there were so very many assorted experiences recorded in the years between the end of the Civil War and the turn of the new century – rich pickings for someone like me, doing research. One of those collisions that I am interested in exploring is the same collision that Twain wrote about so humorously: the Old World and the New. There were quite a lot of opportunities for them to collide, and nowhere more than among the very newest of the new money, or even the semi-new money of the New World and the aristocracy of the old. One book I picked up at random was a joint biography of Alva and Consuela Vanderbilt – of whom I was sort-of-aware, mostly because the Vanderbilts are one of those filthy-rich families that you can’t help not having heard of, and because Consuela Vanderbilt was married off – mostly unhappily – to an English Duke. It was kind of ick-making to think about; fabulously wealthy American heiresses married off to the impecunious inheritors of ancient name, royal favor – and crumbling stately homes. Their vulgar American new dollars in exchange for an old name, a title and a coronet with strawberry leaves on it; it’s hard to decide which is more awful, the decayed noblemen hunting for heiresses that they would condescend to honor with their titles and past-due bills, or the social-climbing and wealthy American families of a supposedly democratic and more or less equalitarian nation going all weak-kneed at the thought of a title in the family.

(to be continued)

Sunday Afternoon at the Dog Park with the Lesser Weevil

03. February 2009 · Comments Off on Sunday Afternoon at the Dog Park with the Lesser Weevil · Categories: Ain't That America?, Critters, General

There is a dog park, hidden away in the back forty of McAllister Park, a sprawling public park/semi-wilderness area in Northside San Antonio. It is formed by a large fenced area, about half an acre of trees and shrubs, dotted with benches, a pavilion with a concrete table and benches under it, a couple of structures that hopefully the dogs might find amusing to run through or jump on top of and a lavish number of heavy trash cans and dispensers offering what my daughter describes as ‘poopy-bags’. There is a paved path leading around the perimeter of the fenced area, the rest of it being spread with free mulch generated by the city waste disposal department’s industrial-sized tree shredders. Another long paved path leads from a parking lot: on any given afternoon when the weather is fair and mild, and most especially on weekends, that path is alive with leashed dogs and their people. The dogs are normally wild with excitement, for they are either coming from or heading toward their social-hour, play-date or mad-minute. It must be something they look forwards to all the rest of their limited, doggy lives – if they are capable of retaining a pleasurable memory. I rather think they are; at least they know, through constant repetition, that something nice is about to happen. Spike and the Lesser Weevil are insane with excitement every morning when I put on my exercise things; for they know that it means the morning walk is imminent. So when the dogs are decanted from their owner’s cars in the parking lot on the third or forth time around – they must know. By the time they get to the double-gated entry-way enclosure to the park itself they are usually mad with excitement

It was one of our neighbors told us about the park; admittedly, we were nervous when it came to the whole off-the-leash concept when it came to the Lesser Weevil. We know that she is part Boxer; it’s obvious, just to look at her. But we don’t know for sure what the other half is, and suspect that a considerable lashing of what is usually described in screaming headlines as ‘pit bull’ is included in her genetic makeup. She is adoring and lovable to all humans. Without exception everyone she meets is instantly her bestest friend in the whole wide world, and the way she went all gooey and affectionate over the cable guy was quite embarrassing – especially since she is supposed to be a guard/watch dog. No, we have no apprehensions about the Weevil and humans – it’s other dogs, and only now and again in the early months that she took an instant and abiding dislike to another dog on a leash. If she had not also been on a leash herself, and for Blondie or I instantly half-strangling her in the pinch-collar, it might have gotten very ugly. But our neighbor assured us, over and over – that it is all right, the dogs seem to govern themselves very well, off leash, and the more there are of them in the confines of the park, the better they all behave. So we took a chance – and we stuck very close to her that first time, and waited until she had behaved well for the first half-dozen dogs who came romping up for a bit of friendly butt-sniffing.

Weevil still does not play quite so uninhibitedly with the other dogs as some of them do. She will chase a thrown tennis ball and race with some of the others, but she will stay fairly close to Blondie. And Spike basically attaches herself to my ankles, never going much farther than ten feet away, even if there are other small dogs – Shi Tzus, Jack Russells and Chihuahuas and the like who want to play with her. It was quite lively this last Sunday; not least because it seemed to be Big Dog Day. No kidding – don’t they keep insisting that everything is bigger in Texas? Sometimes people tell us that the Weevil is a big dog; no, she actually is rather agreeably medium-sized. On Sunday she looked positively dainty, next to a Newfoundland the size of a small sofa (there were three of them there, that day), two mastiffs who topped out at a couple of hundred pounds each, and a Great Dane who looked big enough to put a saddle on and ride like a horse. No kidding, that last dog’s nose alone was bigger than the smallest dog present – a four-month-old Chihuahua puppy, too small even to be put down on the ground among all those specimens of canine gigantism.

And of course, the Weevil behaved herself – how could she not, when the whole place was seething with dogs; dogs running, chasing tennis balls and each others’ behinds, begging to be played with and petted, and romping in front of, or behind their people making a slow circuit of the path around the park? No, it was a good day and good for her – and kind of a relief to know that Blondie has trained her to obedience well enough to trust her off the leash and with a large number of other dogs.

Lawmaking in Haste

23. January 2009 · Comments Off on Lawmaking in Haste · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun and Games, General, My Head Hurts, Technology, Working In A Salt Mine...

…and repenting at leisure, or so it would appear with a new consumer product safety law, which will go into effect in about twenty days. Yes, indeedy, Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008, or HR 4040 which is supposed to take effect February 10th, was supposed to strike a mighty blow against the forces of evilness and icky lead contamination in children’s toys, but instead looks fair to bankrupting all sorts of micro-and home businesses in the US, instead – and to plunge a dagger into the hearts of all kinds of well-meaning handicrafters, thrift-stores and various enterprising individuals scrounging a living by selling stuff on e-Bay. Not to mention any parent on a budget, hoping to save some of their diminishing funds by purchasing second-hand clothing, books, toys and accessories for their children.

And I am not about to be frivolous about the problem of lead contaminates in children’s toys, although the temptation is there.

(Hey, did you hear the one about the shipment of lead from China that was turned back at the port of entry because it was contaminated with children’s toys?)

Yes, lead is not healthy for children or other growing things, and frankly, those manufacturers knowingly or unknowingly contaminating their export crap with lead, arsenic or any other dangerous substance ought to be taken out and have their pee-pees whacked with iron bars. Repeatedly – so yes, there ought to be a law. But oh, what a lesson in unintended consequences there is in the hurried and apparently careless formulation of this one! No lobbyists around who speak for the thrift shop industry, I guess, or the little workshops making this or that specialized product, or all the little church ladies across the US, piecing quilts or knitting baby-clothes. The law as written flatly mandates a level and degree of safety-testing which – it may might be argued and probably already has – is appropriate to a large manufacturing industry. Say, something that churns out product by the box-car load daily, weekly, or even hourly.

What got overlooked until the last few months, what with all the good intentions about ‘protecting the cheeeeldren’ was that all those mandated testing of all the elements of every product meant for the use of those under the age of 12 also applied to just about every body who makes stuff for kids, either for sale or charity. Everyone from the guy with a small woodshop making high-end traditional wooden toys, to the lady with the small business making ornamented hair scrunchies, those little businesses making doll-clothes or children’s clothes will fall under this law. Even the POD publisher who designed and printed my own books – they do children’s books; Or they will, up until February 10th. Heck – this law might even apply to me; I made clothes for my daughter, and now for my niece. Once upon a time, I also made bespoke doll-clothes and stuffed toys for sale at church bazaars and craft shows; I still have several boxes of finished outfits in the den closet, which is where they will remain, now. I’m not out all that much, for this was a hobby for me a good few years ago, but serious crafters who depend on small retail sales of their output are stuck with an inventory that they can’t sell legally, or even give away, after having invested in their raw materials and done the work. According to the scattering of news stories (linked here, here and here) second-hand and consignment stores are already feeling a pinch; how can they possibly test every garment or toy, according to the letter of the law? They are either refusing donations or consignments of those items, and very likely making plans to dump those stocks already on hand into landfills or into the market in the next couple of weeks. The fines are insupportable for an individual or a small business; practically no one wants to risk being charged with a violation of the act. Assurances that ‘oh, no – boutique handicrafters and second-hand stores will not be prosecuted under this act, everyone knows it’s really meant for the big mass-producers’ are falling flat among those most concerned. And rightfully so – for what is a law that is on the books, but enforced by bureaucratic or prosecutorial whim? It is a suspended weapon, to be used selectively against people who have drawn the unfavorable attention of the state upon themselves.

And it is purely ironic, that just as the economy is in dire straits, with businesses large and small going through tough times, and individual entrepreneurs doing their best to stay above water, and people who are desperately trying to economize – a consumer safety law is about to wallop those very same small businesses and entrepreneurs whose hold on economic security is least secure. It’s almost as if the captain of the Titanic called for another iceberg to crash into the other side of the ship – just to make sure the whole thing sinks on the level.

Random Thoughts on Getting What You Ask For

18. January 2009 · Comments Off on Random Thoughts on Getting What You Ask For · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun and Games, General, Politics, Rant

So the impending Obama ordination/coronation/apotheosis is nearly upon us and of course the media is all girlish a-twitter, breathlessly declaiming yet again how extraordinary, how very historical, how bright-new-day-adawning it all is… meeeh. I switched over to a strict diet of the classical station two weeks ago, it was all getting to remind me of girly fan-mags like Tiger Beat going all gushy over Herman’s Hermits and the Monkees, and I have a low nausea threshold, anyway.

Still, there he is, and there he will be, in all his Urkel-geek glory – attended by a fawning press establishment, and the multitudes who see in him whatever they wish most to see – and no doubt trailed by all sorts of unsavory connections from the old Chicago hood. Commander in Chief, President of the Good Old US of A, and the current Resident of the White House – I shouldn’t wonder if he and the rest of his family might not be thinking second thoughts about the whole thing, at this point. It’s probably pretty different, actually being the one at the tippy-top of the chain of command, rather than just being able to skate past, by voting “present” .

Wish ya luck, Baracky… I really do. Wish ya luck and a real thick skin. You wanna hark back to Abraham Lincoln? Take a look at the pictures of him, before he took the Presidential oath the first time around, and then the pictures of him as he was starting his second term. Looks a couple of decades older, doesn’t he? But that’s what four years will do to you, in the highest office in the land. It isn’t all standing up and making mellifluous speeches to the adoring crowds … but I daresay you’ll be finding that out very shortly, of you haven’t already.

I shouldn’t sound all that discouraged, really I shouldn’t. We’ve had worse chief executives over the 19th and 20th century, although some of them were such pale nonentities considered over the long haul that even the actions they took while in office are relegated to the footnotes. I am sure people felt passionately about Millard Fillmore, at the time of his election, although at present I have no idea of why. The long haul tends to even out the bumps and the dips in the road. What was Warren G.Harding, after all, but a temporary rut, a long-ago embarrassment with a hatchet-faced wife, a mistress in the downstairs broom-closet and a scandal at Teapot Dome. At the very best (and we will be extraordinarily lucky if this is the case) Barak Obama might turn out to be presidential material like Truman – a hard-headed, competent and personally uncorrupted man who emerged relatively unscathed from a perfect sink of a political machine every bit equal to that which made Chicago famous. At worst, he’s Jimmy Carter with melanin.

Hey, I’m an optimist – I can dream.

And you know what the nicest part might be? Maybe we can finally hear the very last of “Amerikka is teh most racist nation evveh!” I’m personally looking forward to cutting off at the knees the next race-hustler who tries to lay that one on me. Really, I am. Almost as much as I am looking forward to hearing Garrison Keillor lampoon Barak Obama on Prairie Home Companion – or the Saturday Night Live crew do a similar parody.

Just to get them inspired, here’s a link to an entry on Protein Wisdom which has the most perfect photoshop eveh of the post-coronation appearance. Enjoy.

Are We Not Having Fun

31. December 2008 · Comments Off on Are We Not Having Fun · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun and Games, General, Politics, Rant

I know, I know, late to the party on all this, but I have taken such viciously cruel enjoyment in the spectacle of our very own totally unbiased, completely politically neutral commentariat/mainstream news media pretzel themselves into Gordian knots trying to explain (with increasingly redder faces) to us dumb proles why Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg is justly naturally qualified and specially ordained to rest her tuchas in the seat formerly held by The Fresh Prince of Chicago, but that Sarah Palin, as a sitting governor, former Mayor and office-holder in her local PTA just doesn’t have the experience to be the Vice President of the USA.

Seriously – I love watching them squirm. Mind you, I am sure that Ms. Schlossberg us a very nice person, and anyone who knows a bit of American history can think of any number of occasions where a surviving spouse or total stranger was named to fill out a suddenly vacant term of political office with no other qualifications than a family connection and a familiar name. It’s just that watching various sycophantic news-critters scramble for cover is so darned amusing; really, oughtn’t they have hesitated for a couple of seemly moments before breaking out the knee-pads and waving the palm-fronds and singing “Hosannah! A Kennedy is come among us, Hosannah in the highest, for it is Camelot returning!” That Ms Schlossberg came out among us and stood revealed (apparently – and I will give credit for her just having a bad day and worse advice) as a relatively inarticulate, upper-middle-class air-head, with absolutely no experience in political life other than just standing there and being ornamental, and not a shred of anything resembling a qualification other than her maiden name and a sense of nobless oblige – well, really, it was pretty funny. But then I have odd tastes in comedy – I thought Mr. Bean’s Holiday was funny, too.

The only reassuring part about this whole farce is that it instantly became evident to practically everyone, save those die-hard Kennedy worshipers outside the state of Massachusetts (all half-dozen of them) that as a tenable proposition, Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg in the Senate flew about as well as a twenty-pound lead brick. Perhaps we are not as close to a house of lordly, hereditary nobles as I feared.

Life and Times of a Bowerbird

27. December 2008 · Comments Off on Life and Times of a Bowerbird · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, Literary Good Stuff, Memoir, Working In A Salt Mine...

A bowerbird, or so I read years ago in National Geographic, or Smithsonian, or one of those other popular magazines with a bent towards science and nature, was a native bird species peculiar to Australia and the farther reaches of New Guinea, which had the curious habit of decorating its nest with all sorts of colorful bits of this and that – glass, shells, colored leaves, pieces of glass and plastic, berries – anything and everything which caught it’s eye and which it liked enough to pick up and take home, arranging it with all those other finds in pleasing patterns. This apparently makes sense to the bird doing the arranging, because they seem to be quite set on those patterns. They will, according to researchers, also restore bits that are deliberately disarranged back to the pattern which they chose. It also seems, according to the internet (which I turned to in confirming this tiny and almost useless bit of knowledge – hey, it’s on the internet, so it must be true!) it is the male birds who do this, so this is where this simile falls apart. I am, and have always been of the female persuasion and pretty happy overall with that designation, although in a truly just universe, I would have preferred looking a hell of a lot more like Audrey Hepburn, as well as having her mad dancing skilz.

But I do have somewhat of a similarity to the bowerbird (of whatever sex) because I collect stuff, random stuff that is attractive and catches my eye, and which I can arrange in attractive patterns. I do this when I write, or more specifically when I am reading and researching for what I am preparing to write. I never know what particular bit will engage my interest – and some items are very odd bits indeed. I keep coming back to them, and by this I know that they must be an element in the story. For “Adelsverein” I kept returning to the Goliad Massacre of 1836, to the kidnapping of children from the Hill Country by raiding Indians, to a throw-away comment in an old memoir – a then-senior citizen recalling that his youngest sister actually wasn’t of his blood, she was an tiny orphan found and rescued from the Verein camp on the Texas Gulf Coast, never able to recall her real name. I also kept circling back to the recorded memory of an elderly woman, recalling proudly that she was 90-something and didn’t need glasses to thread a needle – and also recalling that the husband she loved, and had been married to for only 13 years, being taken away by the Hanging Band during the Civil War and hung, for the crime of being a Unionist in a Confederate state – all this, in spite of her attempting to sneak his revolver to him. Reading about these tiny events was like getting a small electrical shock, or perhaps recognizing something that I had known in another lifetime. These combined with any number of other bits and pieces of frontier lore, with small and humble items seen in museums, with paintings and sketches of scenery, daguerreotypes and memoirs, even a 1850’s travelogue by a famously observant political writer who did a horseback journey through antebellum Texas and the south. Thrown into this mix are my own visits to various places in the Hill Country, my own first-hand observations of clear green rivers, their beds paved with round marble-white gravel, sessions with subject matter experts in frontier arcane, the memory of certain people and conversations — and then arrange it all in a somewhat-logical pattern. Just like a bowerbird, although my own bower is a famously complex excel spreadsheet of a dozen and more categories, organized by month and year. All those pretty, shiny bits are plugged into the place where they seem to me to belong.

In a year or two, there is a book come out of it, all; a ripping good adventure yarn with the added benefit of having the very best bits of it based on historical fact; not bad for a bowerbird.

A Deep-dyed Villian

21. December 2008 · Comments Off on A Deep-dyed Villian · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, History, Literary Good Stuff, Old West, World

He really was a black hat, this particular villain; he was known and recognized throughout the district – around mid 19th century Fredericksburg and the German settlements in Gillespie County – by a fine, black beaver hat. Which was not furry, as people might tend to picture immediately – but made of felt, felt manufactured from the hair scraped from beaver pelts. This had been the fashion early in the 19th century, and made a fortune for those who sent trappers and mountain-men into the far, far west, hunting and trapping beaver. The fashion changed – and the far-west fur trade collapsed, but I imagine that fine hats were still made from beaver felt. And J.P. Waldrip was so well known by his hat that he was buried with it.

There is not very much more known about him, for certain. I resorted to making up a good few things, in making him the malevolent presence that he is in “The Adelsverein Trilogy” – a psychopath with odd-colored eyes, a shifty character, suspected of horse-thievery and worse. I had found a couple of brief and relatively unsubstantiated references to him as a rancher in the Hill Country, before the Civil War, of no fixed and definite address. That was the frontier, the edge of the white man’s civilization. Generally the people who lived there eked out a hardscrabble existence as subsistence farmers, running small herds of near-wild cattle. There was a scattering of towns – mostly founded by the German settlers who filled up Gillespie County after the late 1840s, and spilling over into Kendall and Kerr counties. The German settlers, as I have written elsewhere, brought their culture with them, for many were educated, with artistic tastes and sensibilities which contrasted oddly with the comparative crudity of the frontier. They were also Unionists, and abolitionists in a Confederate state when the Civil War began – and strongly disinclined to either join the Confederate Army, or take loyalty oaths to a civil authority that they detested. Within a short time, those German settlers were seen as traitors, disloyal to the Southern Cause, rebellious against the rebellion. And they paid a price for that; the price was martial law imposed on the Hill Country, and the scourge of the hangerbande, the Hanging Band. The Hanging Band was a pro-Confederate lynch gang, which operated at the edges of martial law- and perhaps with encouragement of local military authorities.

J.P. Waldrip was undoubtedly one of them – in some documents he is described as a captain, but whether that was a real military rank, or a courtesy title given to someone who raised a company for some defensive or offensive purpose remains somewhat vague. None the less, he was an active leader among those who raided the settlements along Grape Creek, shooting one man and hanging three others – all German settlers, all of them of Unionist sympathies. One man owned a fine horse herd, another was known to have money, and the other two had been involved in a land dispute with pro-Confederate neighbors. Waldrip was also recognized as being with a group of men who kidnapped Fredericksburg’s schoolteacher, Louis Scheutze from his own house in the middle of town, and took him away into the night. He was found hanged, two days later – his apparent crime being to have objected to how the authorities had handled the murders of the men from Grape Creek. It was later said, bitterly, that the Hanging Band had killed more white men in the Hill Country during the Civil War than raiding Indians ever did, before, during and afterwards.

And two years after the war ended, J.P. Waldrip appeared in Fredericksburg. No one at this date can give a reason why, when he was hated so passionately throughout the district, as a murderer, as a cruel and lawless man. He must have known this, known that his life might be at risk, even if the war was over. This was the frontier, where even the law-abiding and generally cultured German settlers went armed. Why did he think he might have nothing to fear? Local Fredericksburg historians that I put this question to replied that he was brazen, a bully – he might have thought no one would dare lift a hand against him, if he swaggered into town. Even though the Confederacy had lost the war, and Texas was under a Reconstruction government sympathetic to the formerly persecuted Unionists – what if he saw it as a dare, a spit in the eye? Here I am – what are y’all going to do about it?

What happened next has been a local mystery every since, although I – and the other historical enthusiasts are certain that most everyone in town knew very well who killed J.P. Waldrip. He was shot dead, and fell under a tree at the edge of the Nimitz Hotel property. The tree still exists, although the details of the story vary considerably: he was seen going into the hotel, and came out to smoke a quiet cigarette under the tree. No, the shooter saw him going towards the hotel stable, perhaps to steal a horse. No, he was being pursued by men of the town, after the Sherriff had passed the word that he was an outlaw, and that anyone killing him would face no prosecution from the law. Waldrip was shot by a sniper, from the cobbler’s shop across Magazine Street – no, by another man, from the upper floor of another building, diagonally across Main Street. He was felled by a single bullet and died instantly, or lived long enough to plead “Please don’t shoot me any more”. I have created yet another rationale for his presence, and still another dramatic story of his end under the oak tree next to the Nimitz Hotel. I have a feeling this version will, over time be added to the rest. Everyone who knew the truth about who shot Waldrip, why he came back to town, how the town was roused against him, and what happened afterwards, all those people took the knowledge of those matters to their own graves, save for tantalizing hints left here and there for the rest of us to find. The whole matter about who actually fired the shot was kept secret for decades, for fear of reprisals from those of his friends and kin who had survived the war. This was Texas, after all, where feuds and range wars went on for generations.

So James P. Waldrip was buried – with his hat – first in a temporary grave, not in the town cemetery – and then moved to a secret and ignominious grave on private property. The story is given so that none of his many enemies might be tempted to desecrate it, but I think rather to make his ostracism plain and unmistakable, in the community which he and his gang had persecuted.

As noted, the Adelsverein Trilogy is now loosed into the wilds of the book-purchasing public. All three volumes are now available through Amazon.com: Book One here, Book Two here ( wherein the Civil War in the Hill Country is painted in great detail) and Book Three, in which Waldrip recieves his just desserts, under a tree by the Nimitz Hotel Stables.

Still More Books

20. December 2008 · Comments Off on Still More Books · Categories: Ain't That America?, Eat, Drink and be Merry, General, Literary Good Stuff, Old West, World

Another signing event, last night at Berkman Books in Fredericksburg, for the Adeslverein Trilogy. Berkman’s is one of those nice little independent bookstores, holding its own specialized little niche against the overwhelming tide of big-box-bookstores and internet sales; Texiana, lots of events with local authors, curiosities, antique and used books. The clientele is a mix of adventurous tourists and local residents who don’t care to drive to San Antonio or New Braunfels in search of their reading matter. And they have two cats on the premises – I promised that I would frisk Blondie on departure, to ensure that neither of them had stowed away to come home with is. Berkman’s in a rambling old house on Main Street, a little removed from the main tourist blocks along Main Street… which, however, is slowly spreading along the side streets, and east and west from Marketplace Square. David, the owner, had ordered ten copies of each volume, and there has been considerable interest – even some notice in the Fredericksburg Standard. Kenn Knopp, the local historical expert who volunteered (kind of glumly, as he is the first to confess) to read the manuscript of the Trilogy, only to be astonished and thrilled as he got farther into it – was going to meet us an hour before the signing started. He had a friend, Annette Sultemeier, whom he wanted me to meet. Ms Sultemeier is also a local historical enthusiast, and still lives in her family’s house nearby. James P. Waldrip, the infamous leader of the pro-Confederate Hanging Band, who persecuted local Unionists during the Civil War was supposed to be buried in the back yard of her family home. Waldrip figures as the resident villain in the Trilogy, and his come-uppance under a tree at the edge of the old Nimitz hotel property was described in Book Three. Supposedly, he was buried in that unmarked grave, outside of the city cemetery, to escape desecration of his resting place. He was an especially bad hat, with many bitter local enemies.

There was a nice crowd at the signing. David had thought there would be many more people at the signing than there were, but I didn’t mind. This way, I had enough time to talk to people and answer questions. Enough of them were coming specifically for the Trilogy anyway, so I didn’t have that awful experience of spending two hours, watching customers come in the door and sidling around the desperate author, sitting at a little lonely table with a pile of books. Almost everyone bought all three books, many intended as Christmas presents. The last customer of the evening was almost the most rewarding to talk to. This was a young college student named Kevin, fascinated by local history and majoring in it, who read about the signing in the Standard, checked out my website and came straight over with his mother. He asked a great many questions about research, and bought Book One… and his mother bought Two and Three. Christmas present, I guess!
Afterwards, Kenn Knopp treated us to dinner at the Auslander Restaurant, which we had eaten at once before, and recalled as being pretty uninspired foodwise, and kind of scruffy on the inside. Apparently it has since been renovated, for now it was very comfortable, and the food was terrific; jagerschnitzel to die for, accompanied by little crispy potato pancakes about the size of a silver dollar. Blondie and I walked back to the car, admiring the Christmas lights, all along Main Street. There seem to be many nicer restaurants along Main Street now – it was quite lively on a Friday evening. Blondie noted there were many more wine-tasting rooms, too. The Hill Country is slowly becoming the new Provence, as I predicted a while ago, or at least the newest Napa-Sonoma-Mendocino, as far as wine production is concerned.

It was a great way to finish up the day – the interest in my books being almost as much of a satisfaction as the food. I have been warned, though; the event at the Pioneer Museum, on January 3rd will be even bigger, and the local history enthusiasts will come armed with even more searching questions.

Books, Books and More Books

18. December 2008 · Comments Off on Books, Books and More Books · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, Literary Good Stuff, Local, World

After a good deal of agonizing and back and forth with Angela at Booklocker, all three volumes of the Trilogy are up and in stock at Amazon – which is kind of a relief, since most fans who want to buy them on-line will buy them there, Amazon.com is apparently becoming the Walmart/Target/Costco of on-line shops. That is, in the sense that the place is mind-blowingly huge, and has everything imaginable and at a competitive price, but unlike them in the sense that it is completely automated and you can never find a real human when there is a problem. And also there are no senior citizens in a felt Santa cap and plastic gloves offering samples of chocolate cake or cocktail nibbles.

The PJ media rep very kindly added all four of my books to the Christmas Shop page for books. I might yet get some sales out of it, although it is hard to tell, other than the sales rank for them bobbing up and down like yo-yos from one day to the next. This week, being the week when the Trilogy is properly launched in the neighborhood where it all happened, a hundred years ago and more, the action is in local bookstores. Traditionally it’s difficult for POD books to get a toe-hold in brick-and-mortar bookstores, unless the writer buys copies in bulk and puts them on consignment. The wholesale discount from the retail price of the book is pretty steep, usually starting at 40% , and with a guarantee of return of all unsold copies – traditional bookstores have overhead and a budget, you know. Unless they have a darned good reason to stock a local author, and some assurance that those books will fly out the door, it’s consignment all the way. The economic burden is placed on the author to prove at his or her expense that the book will sell.

This time around, in writing about the Hill Country, I seem to have hit upon that winning formula. All my consignment copies for the launch event last week sold – all but a single copy of Book One – before I even walked in the door at the Twig. They have ordered five more of each, and bought them outright from Booklocker. This is at some expense, and without guarantee of return of whose copies with don’t sell… but last week proved to everyone’s satisfaction that they would sell. Hell, they took pre-paid orders from at least three people at the signing. Berkman’s Books in Fredericksburg have also bought outright no less than ten copies of each for a signing event on Friday and emailed me to say they wish they could afford fifty, for interest is getting pretty intense. There was a notice last week in the Fredericksburg paper, with a line at the bottom that the Adelsverein trilogy was endorsed by the local German Heritage Foundation. A bit of a thrill actually, for this may inspire even more descendents of old-time families in Gillespie County to buy a copy to see if I have made mention of their ancestors. A bookstore on Main Street which specializes in Texiana also wants to stock the Trilogy, and so does another one in Kerrville, which request came out of the blue, after the owners saw the notice. The first weekend in January, I will have a talk at Fredericksburg’s Pioneer Museum, for which the bookstore manager there has bought an amazing quantity of copies. He also promised to bring out some of the exhibits in the museum that had given me ideas for possessions of the Steinmetz and Richter families.

After Christmas, I will start on getting the Trilogy carried in other areas with a local tie-in. Yeah, an imminent depression/recession/economic reversal (or whatever the newscasters want to call it) is a heck of a time to start trying to sell books in a big way, but I note that it didn’t stop Margaret Mitchell and Gone With the Wind.

I’d write a few hundred pithy words about current politics, with Obama, Blagojovich, and Caroline Kennedy, but I’m afraid it would all boil down to “what the hell did you expect, people?! Obama is out of Chicago machine politics, and didn’t I say so months ago?” I’ll give that dead horse carcass a couple of vigorous thwacks at a later date, but right now, I care more about my books and Christmas, in that order.

Launched!

12. December 2008 · Comments Off on Launched! · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, Literary Good Stuff, Local, Old West, Working In A Salt Mine...

Well, there was a nice crowd at The Twig last night at my launch event for the Adelsverein Trilogy – even though all but one copy of Book One had sold, even before we walked in last night! Sort of embarrassing, since I then had to fall back on doing autographed book-plates for people to stick into the front of copies they ordered… And my daughter forgot her camera, as we wanted to have pictorial evidence.

Nice Q & A session from almost a dozen people; a nice elderly couple of ‘freethinkers’ from up Comfort way, who were familiar enough with the history to know what I was talking about and to be interested, two very knowledgeable and dedicated local fans, another couple- the wife of whom is the Queen of the Red Hat chapter I belong to, one of my current semi-employers… and a shaggy young man who had been hanging around on the back porch of Cappyccino’s – the little cafe next door, who followed us in. I think he started off being more interested in my daughter, but he seemed to become quite fascinated by trials of the German settlers in Gillespie County. I kept getting very happy vibes of approval and interest, especially when they asked questions about obscure local historical matters – like, about the massacre of Unionists at the Nueces during the Civil War, and I knew all the detailed ins and outs. One of the dedicated fans said he had read the sample chapters at my website and asked about the first chapter of “The Gathering” – had there really been German-American or German immigrants present among the Texians massacred at the Goliad? And yes, of course there were – half a dozen, according to records. I gave chapter and verse, practically page references. The fan looked enormously pleased – I had the feeling I had sailed easily over a pre-set challenge.

I read a bit from Book One, a couple of pages detailing what happens to the steerage passengers on a wooden sailing-ship, during a violent storm in mid-Atlantic. Nothing good, you may be assured – violent sea-sickness, hysteria and bodily fluids sloshing around on the deck are the least of it. Blondie says I read too much and too fast. Still and all, a much better signing than last time.

All three books are too available, here, here and here, from Booklocker.com. Amazon has them all up now, but most discouragingly shows them as being out of stock. Really, sometimes I wonder if they really want to sell my books at all. Apparently, there was a bit about the Trilogy in the Kerrville newspaper yesterday; so had an email query from a local bookstore there. They do mostly used and antique books, but they carry Texiana, and would like to carry the Trilogy. Bit by bit, sportsfans, bit by bit.

I topped off the evening with an interview on an internet radio station show run by another IAG member , even thought I was so tired I practically dropped in my tracks. Something revivifying about being ‘on air’ so to speak. In the theatrical world they call this “Doctor Footlights” – the adrenalin kicks in and you feel better almost at once. (For the interview, enter the site, go to archives, then the list of hosts, pick host Lillian Cauldwell – my interview is there already – Dec. 11)

Ready to Launch

09. December 2008 · Comments Off on Ready to Launch · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Literary Good Stuff, Media Matters Not, Old West, Veteran's Affairs, Working In A Salt Mine..., World

Timing is everything, they say – and if I knew six months ago that the economy was on the verge of tanking, I don’t think I would have tried to do anything different with my scheduled release of the Adelsverein Trilogy – the saga that I have been working on for two years and a bit. This will make my third-through-fifth book out there. The third time is supposed to be the charm. Thanks to the accumulated book-writing, book-marketing and book-selling experience at the Independent Authors’ Guild, I think I will come closer to getting it right, this time – like delaying the release so as to allow six months to get some seriously earnest reviews, from publications like “True West” and others. ( Reviews posted here. I’ll be pounding away on the “True West” review for years – decades, maybe.) Such was the wise counsel of writers who had done it before.

Taking their advice also, I worked a lot harder at getting local signings and attempting to interest local museums. It was a lot easier this time around, honestly. The only places that I could interest in “Truckee’s Trail” were a couple of outlets in Nevada and Truckee City – there’s only so much one can do at a thousand-mile-plus remove, especially if you can’t claim to be a local author. But having a book-three books – with several Texas settings, and fifty years worth of interesting and famous or obscure Texas characters contained therein – that something much more appealing to work with in generating local interest. My dance-card, otherwise known as my signing schedule is beginning to fill up, and praise be, I might actually have some local media interested. As in the old-fashioned, print-on-dead-tree kind, which people do still read around here. And let’s face, it Texans are passionately interested in history. They remember more than just the Alamo.

The kick-off is Thursday, at the Twig Bookstore in Alamo Heights. 5 PM. I don’t know which is my worst fear about this event: that I’ll sit there for two hours and sell maybe one book…. Or that Blondie and I and some friends of ours who have promised to come along for moral support will walk up to the place and the line to get into the Twig will be down to the next block, and they’ll run out of books before the first twenty minutes. I’d prefer the second, of course.

Wish me luck. I couldn’t have done it without you all.

PS: All pre-sold sets are in the mail. The final volume should be up at Amazon any time now. All three – The Gathering, The Sowing and The Harvesting are already at Booklocker.

Decking The Halls…

08. December 2008 · Comments Off on Decking The Halls… · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, Memoir, Military

…and the boughs, and the front of the house. Blondie and I are staying in Texas this Christmas, so we got out the Christmas tree and the various tubs of ornaments, and strings of lights. I can’t claim that we do anything remotely like the full Griswald when it comes to Christmas cheer, but we do put together a very nice traditional tree, with presents underneath and all. It’s an artificial tree – sorry. The only live trees available in Texas are half-dead by the time they are bought, are hideously expensive and shed needles all over, coming and going. The current tree is, alas, artificial and sheds needles (in the form of narrow, needle-like slips of plastic) – but was not expensive, even the first year that Blondie bought it. And it actually looks very nice, once decorated, and with equally artificial springs of poinsettia inserted between the branches, to fill in the gaps. We will leave the giant inflatables, the miles of lights, the bows and the herds of wire-form deer, the banners and ribbons and all to the various enthusiastic neighbors. Really, I wonder what the Chinese workers who manufacture this stuff think of it all … the giant inflatable Santa riding a Harley, the teeter-totter with Santa on one end, and three fabric reindeer on the other, and the eight-foot tall snow-globe a family of carolers and a blizzard of plastic fluff whirling around inside. Probably wonder about the sanity of the American consumer, not to mention their aesthetic taste. Frankly, I haven’t got the energy that some of them have, to redecorate seasonally – not just at Christmas, but every month.

I do like our own Christmas tree, though – it’s quirky, just like Mom and Dad’s tree used to be, with a similar accretion of ornaments. When Mom and Dad’s house in Valley Center burned some years ago in the Paradise fire, one of the first things that Blondie and I thought about missing was the Christmas stuff. At the time, we were pretty sure that some things had been saved out of Mom and Dad’s house. After all, we had been drilled on the eventuality of fire for years. We were fairly certain that in such an emergency, no one would spare a thought for three crumbling cardboard boxes full of Christmas stuff, stashed in the rafters of the garage – the garage which turned out to have been the first to go up in flames. Gone the 1930’s Santa-Claus lights and the crumbling four-colored printed carton they had come in, decades since. Gone the Anri Christmas angels that I had sent from Italy, the pipe-cleaner and bead ornaments that JP and I had constructed in grade school, the assorted blown-glass balls, the red and white stockings with our names knitted into the tops, which Granny Jessie had done for each of us; for Mom and Dad when they married and produced us all. Gone the hand-knit stocking for Blondie that I had bought for her at a craft-fair in Utah, with a black kitten knitted into the pattern, and her name that I had added in chain-stitch… all of that gone to ashes, which were scraped up by a bulldozer and carried away, in preparation for rebuilding the house.

Our traditional Christmas stuff is now devolved on my own collection, as eccentric as ever my parents assembled, for I now have a record of celebrating thirty years of Christmasses on my own, and all the ornaments to go with it. I only occasionally was back at Mom and Dad’s for Christmas during the time that I was overseas. In the meantime, in between time, I generated my own collection. The oldest of the lot – thirty felt-covered round ornaments, trimmed with lace, gilt ribbons, fake seed-pearls and jewels, to adorn the little plastic tree in my room in the barracks in Japan, when I first went overseas. These were augmented with a flock of little birds, made of satin and ornamented with silk embroidery – they came from India, and I bought them at a base Christmas bazaar at about the same time. Both sets have proved fairly indestructible – since they can stand a drop to a hard floor. For a couple of years while in Greece I bought a single box of ornaments from one of the high-end catalogue retailers every year: the paper-mache globes covered with red and green curlicues, the stuffed teddy-bears with little scarves, and the vintage wooden airplanes are from that period; the airplanes looked especially fine, hanging from the ends of the branches, as if they were whirling in some endless tree-shaped dog-fight. There are the terra-cotta ornaments from Portugal that look like ginger-cookies, and dozens of traditional German wooden ornaments; little Santas on the backs of whales, or in the basket of a dirigible, angels and little sleds with piles of presents, Father Time with a tiny golden key… all those bought when we were in Spain and I went TDY to Germany every January for a broadcasting conference. A handful of Anri flying angels – those bought when we passed through Rome on our way to Spain. All very traditional and conventional … until we get to the three Enterprise spaceships, and the shuttle-craft, with their tiny blinking lights. I bought the first of those when we came back to the States, the very year they brought the Star Trek ornaments out. I wish I had a Tardis ornament, but I don’t even know if they make one. The rest of the tree is filled with things bought on sale, usually after Christmas and saved for the next year. Blondie contributed four blown-glass ornaments she bought in Egypt, when she went there in 2001 for Bright Star. Those are hung very carefully at the top of the tree, being not nearly as hard-wearing as my own first Christmas ornaments.

It’s more than a Christmas tree – it’s a sort of family history, a history that only families know.

Wow, I’ve Been Out of It

06. December 2008 · Comments Off on Wow, I’ve Been Out of It · Categories: Ain't That America?, Media Matters Not, The Funny

I didn’t even hear about them Rickrolling the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade.

To give you a little background:  Rickrolling is a bait and switch meme, sending someone a link  with something like, “Hey, go watch this cool video about cute kittens.” or cool explosions or etc. and then spoof the link so that it takes you to a video of Rick Astley’s 1987 hit, “Never Gonna Give You Up.”  The more absurd or inappropriate the link and/or person you’re Rickrolling, the better.  Apparently Rickrolling Scientologists is especially gratifying…don’t ask me why, seriously, I don’t know.

But when I heard about this, I had to look it up.  How many millions of people watch the Macy’s Parade?  More people were Rickrolled on Thanksgiving than in the two years prior.

Cartoon Network, I salute you.

The Mild, Mild West

02. December 2008 · Comments Off on The Mild, Mild West · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, History, Old West

I succumbed to the blandishments of the overloaded bookshelves at Half-Price Books last Friday, whilst getting a good price on some redundant DVDs. I just knew I shouldn’t have wandered into the section housing assortments of ‘Texiana’ but I did and I was tempted. Since I can resist anything but temptation, I gave in and bought a slightly oversized volume (with color plates!) with the gripping title of “German Artist on the Texas Frontier: Friedrich Richard Petri” for a sum slightly less than the current price on Amazon.

Who was Friedrich Richard Petri, you might ask – and rightfully so for chances are practically no one outside of the local area might have heard of him, he finished very few substantial paintings, was only resident in the Hill Country of Texas for about seven years, and died relatively young.

He was one of those student intellectuals caught up in the ferment of the 1848, along with his friend and fellow-artist (and soon to be brother-in-law) Hermann Lungkwitz. Upon the failure of that movement to reduce the power of the old nobility in favor of something more closely resembling a modern democracy, the two of them resolved to immigrate to America, that promising new land. Once there, they settled upon traveling Texas, where the Adelsverein had previously established substantial enclaves of German settlers, and the weather was supposed to be particularly mild – a consideration, for Richard was plagued by lung ailments. Besides Hermann’s wife, Petri’s sister Elisabet, other members of their had families joined them: Hermann’s widowed mother, and his brother and sister, and Petri’s other sister, Marie. They would become part of the second wave of settlers in the Hill Country; probably just as well, because neither of the Lungkwitz men or Richard Petri had any skill or inclination towards farming, or any other useful pioneering skill. Hermann and Friedrich were artists, Adolph Lungkwitz was a trained metalsmith and glass fabricator.

Traveling by easy stages down the Mississippi to New Orleans, and then presumably by regular packet boat to Indianola, the Petri-Lungkwitz families arrived in New Braunfels. They rented a small farm there in the spring of 1851, but did not intend to settle in New Braunfels permanently. It seemed they wished to look around; and so they did, house-hunting and sketching scenes and quick portraits of each other and the people they met. Hermann Lungkwitz later made use of these sketches and scenes in an elaborate lithograph of San Antonio. In July, 1852, the families settled on 320 acres at Live Oak, about five miles southwest of Fredericksburg – and there they settled in, trying to make some sort of living out of farm work and art. They were unaccustomed to the former, although from this account, they seem to have sprung from stock accustomed to hard work, if not precisely in the sort of agrarian work required to make a living in a frontier settlement.

They seem to have gotten along pretty well at that, for the book is full of sketches, watercolors and finished paintings by Petri and Lungkwitz; accomplished and vivid sketches of their friends, their families and the countryside around. There are landscapes of the rolling limestone hills, the stands of oak trees and meadows around Fredericksburg, a distant view of the town, with a brave huddle of rooftops, a poignant sketch of Elisabet, mourning beside the grave of hers and Hermann’s baby son, who lived for only three weeks after his birth. There are sketches of their farmstead, of neatly fenced areas around the two small log houses in which they lived, charming sketches of his sister’s children and their pet deer, of theatrical productions in Fredericksburg – all elaborate costumes and ballet dancers – and of the women in the family going to pay formal calls, balancing their parasols, sitting primly in the seats of an ox-cart. There are sketches of friends, of officers from the Federal army’s garrison at nearby Ft. Martin Scott, of sister Marie’s wedding to neighbor Jacob Kuechler. And there are elaborate sketches of Indians, mostly people of that Comanche tribe which had signed a peace treaty with the German settlers of Fredericksburg and the surrounding areas, for Friedrich Richard Petri had a sympathetic eye and considerable skill. Oh, this is indeed the American frontier, but not quite as we are accustomed to think about it – that never-never land that is the popularly assumed picture that comes to mind whenever anyone thinks “Old West”.
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Another Day, Another Dollar

26. November 2008 · Comments Off on Another Day, Another Dollar · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Home Front, Iraq, Veteran's Affairs, Working In A Salt Mine...

And another dirty shirt, so to speak. Blogging has been sporadic here; what with doing reviews, working two jobs, the odd bit of housekeeping here and there, and other stuff. Frankly, all my focus is split between setting up events in support of the “Adelsverein Trilogy” (last chance here to purchase copies for delivery by Christmas! Getcher copies of the greatest epic about the Civil War and its aftermath since Gone With The Wind! Gripping drama, true love, savage murder and bitter revenge… and cows! Be the first member of your book club to say that you have read it!)

Not much energy left over, at the end of all that. Matters military? I’ve been retired from the Air Force for ten years now. It was a blast, and a learned a lot, got to travel to the far ends of the earth, meet unusual and interesting people… but I’m in another part of my life now. I don’t want to go pounding on about being a veteran for the rest of my life, as if I had never been or done anything else.

Iraq? Looks like it’s all over, and the good guys won. What a turn-up, eh? I kind of thought it would take a couple of years longer, a slow process of institutions and infrastructure being rebuilt or constructed new. We’d keep a couple of bases there, out in the country and American forces would rotate in and out, in another short while it will be an accompanied tour, and they’d be tourist busses parked in shoals in front of archeological sites like the Hanging Gardens, and Ur of the Chaldees. Tourists would eat ice-cream from street vendors, and little bits of barbequed something on skewers, and walk up and down the promenade by the river, as it turned silver and gold, from a spectacular sunset. Bagdad would be prosperous, full of tall buildings and profitable businesses – like Seoul today. Veterans of the war would return, and look around and say ‘what-the-%#@!?’. Essentially, it’s in the hands of the Iraqis. We’ll lurk around in the background for a bit, or a couple of decades, but the heavy lifting is just about done.

Does look as if we ourselves are headed for another long, economic wobble. Been there. Seen that. I’ve already lost three jobs on that account in this year alone, and Blondie has lost one, and no one is hiring temporary sales help for Christmas this year, so it’s hard to say how much more ghastly it can get for us. Much as I dislike the whole concept and the whole soul-killing processes of the place, it looks like I will be staying on at the Hellish Corporate Phone Banks for more than the six months that I originally planned, or until book sales pick up. As it is, it looks like I am stuck there for only about fifteen hours a week as it is. I put up my hand and volunteer when the call volume falls off, and four whole roomfuls of people are sitting in their cubicles, twiddling their thumbs and chattering to each other. This afternoon, the two college-age girls in the cubicles next to me had a box of new crayons and were coloring in the pictures of My Little Pony in a coloring book.

Yeah, that’s a disturbing image. Slightly more disturbing was a talk with William, the Gentleman With Whom I Keep Company last weekend. He retired from a heroically long stint as a public school teacher, and has a pension paid by the state of California… which for the month of November was one-quarter what it was the month before. One-time-only glitch with his check? An attempt by the state comptroller to fiddle around with things at the end of the fiscal year? Or a harbinger of something more serious … like the budget of the state of California at the top of a long, slippery slope. William hasn’t gotten any credible explanation out of anyone for this… but if the December pension check is down by the same amount, he foresees having to go back to work, too.

Interesting times, for sure.

(I have just ordered copies of all three books of the Adelsverein Trilogy, so the first two or three fans to order them will be in luck, otherwise, I won’t be able to get autographed copies to you by Christmas. Books One and Two are already there at Amazon, here and here, and at Barnes and Noble, here and here

Adelsverein Passing In Review

16. November 2008 · Comments Off on Adelsverein Passing In Review · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, History, Veteran's Affairs, Working In A Salt Mine..., World

Just a quick update – it’s about three weeks until the official launch of the Adelsverein Trilogy. I should get the final approval print copy of Book 3 – The Harvesting this week from the publisher. The reviews are starting to come in – first, the all-important but short and slightly puzzling one from True West, on their website here. (I really don’t recall writing anything about tornadoes, though. But the important part – a review in True West!!)

Another slightly longer and appreciative review here, at Western Fiction Review. Fun fact; Steve M. the mad fan of Western fiction is actually located in the UK. Must be some sort of cosmic payback for all those American ladies writing breathless Regency romances, or tales of the doings of the Tudors.

Another workmanlike and short review at Midwestern Reviews… mystifyingly parked not at the genre fiction page, but at the American History page. A compliment… I think.

Not a compliment, about the dialogue in this review… sorry, Victorians really talked that way. Just crack a copy of Charles Dickens or Mark Twain. (Consider a grumble about the dumbing down of the American reading public to be inserted here… what, they didn’t talk like the characters in an episode of Friends?! No, sorry. Ah, never mind – although I am beginning to grasp the essence of the eternal writer grumble about remembering a critical comment longer than all the complimentary ones.

Also, amusingly enough – although this blog is a member of PJ Media and on Da Blogfaddah’s blog-roll, I can’t say that I have been particularly overwhelmed lately with helpful links and materiel interest in my attempts to reclaim certain essential American stories, and to publish interesting works of genre fiction outside the mainstream of the American Big-Ass Publishing Combine. So it goes, I expect. To them who have, more shall be given. To those who don’t… suck it up, hard-charger!.

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