Cross posted to Space For Commerce.
…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.
A peaceful Hawaiin Sunday morning. A world at semi-peace — there *was* war in Europe, after all, but the US was thus far mostly untouched by it.
All of that changed in an instant. The sound of airplanes, the whistling of bombs dropping from the sky, the destruction and carnage to battleships and airfields that was intended to decimate our Pacific presence, and instead awakened a sleeping giant.
You can see photos of the attack here, but we don’t really need photos to remember.
If you’re ever on Oahu, make sure and give yourself time to visit the museum, and the Arizona memorial. It’s time well spent. And make time today to remember those who died 67 years ago today, when a peaceful Sunday morning was torn apart by the machines of war.
Update: You can read eyewitness accounts here
Light posting this week, for which I apologize lavishly once again – but this is the last week that I have to prepare for the launch of the heralded “Adelsverein Trilogy” – about which I have banged on about here for much of the last two years. Anyone who came to this blog looking for insights into late 20th century military culture must have been disappointed beyond belief by my excessive interest and scribblings about 19th century Texas history. Sorry about that, but people move on. I wrote a book based on entries in this blog, then another, and then I decided I liked writing novels so much that I took on a trilogy about the German settlements in 19th century Texas, the last volume of which achieved 500 print pages and was so thick that when I unwrapped my final print proof, I could only look at it and think in disbelief ‘I wrote all of that?!’ (for which my current editor would ding me for double usage; either a question mark or an exclamation point. Including both are superfluous.)
So, I took my publishers’ advice, and finished polishing and editing all three, to be available this month… next week, as a matter of fact. The first two books have been on, and then off, and then on again, as regards the behemoth internet book retailing All three were just set up this day on Booklocker (here, here and here) – although it is one of those funny turns of the modern publishing game that I actually have two publishers. The ISBN, the editing and the marketing is through Strider Nolan, and it says ‘Strider Nolan’ on the books, but the cover design, interior formatting, and the actual mechanics of supplying copies will be handled by Booklocker. All clear? Yeah, I know — it’s an odd situation, but then the current way of getting books published and out there seems to be melting down and reforming. It’s pretty well acknowledged now that unless you are one of the mega-biggie authors, you’re pretty well got to market your book yourself, scrounge the reviews, set up the signings, generate the postcards, flyers, book-markers yourself. Having the aegis of Strider Nolan on the Adelsverein Trilogy might have made it a little easier to get reviews in publications which otherwise might have shied off from the Booklocker Brand. Like the local newspaper – the San Antonio Express News, so I was informed loftily a couple of years ago – does not review publish-on-demand books. The implication that all such were low-quality, unprofessional offerings of limited appeal. Eh… we’ll see. Lately it seems that the best independently published books are getting better and better, just as the traditional publishers are going moribund, and their books more formulaic. Insisting on sticking to the same-old same-old strikes me as someone insisting absolutely on first-class tickets for the Titanic… even as the ship slowly sinks.
On Friday I began mailing all those copies of autographed copies of the trilogy to all of those who had pre-ordered over the last couple of months. After hitting the post office, I had a box, full of five copies of each volume to take to the Twig Bookstore in Alamo Heights; extras to have on consignment, in case the copies they had ordered for the launch signing on Thursday didn’t arrive. The management was glad to see them – everyone is getting pretty excited over the Trilogy, what with the local tie-in and all. There were some customers in the Twig, and they got excited, too. One of said customers immediately bought an autographed set as a Christmas present, saying that she hoped she had time to read all three before she had to wrap them up and give them to the person they were inscribed for. Not bad – the signing isn’t for another six days, and already the copies are flying out the door. I have another signing the following week at Berkman’s in Fredericksburg, still another at a large Borders bookstore here in San Antonio over the weekend before Christmas, a small bookstore in Fredericksburg which specializes in Texiana wants to stock them, the Pioneer Museum is also planning an event the first weekend after New Years… and I sent a copy of the first book to the manager of the Sophienburg Museum in New Braunfels – they might be interested in another event in January. No bites from the manager of the museum at the Goliad, though. Pity – the whole saga starts just there, and I drew a lot of information for that first chapter out of their website.
Unfortunately, I won’t see any royalty income from these various events, and from Booklocker until next month… and I have a couple of bills coming due. None of the places that Blondie applied for are hiring temporary help for this Christmas season, and my hours at the corporate call center have been cut as well. Not as many people making holiday reservations, apparently. If anyone else would like to order autographed copies, or make a donation through paypal, I would be ever so grateful. The next few weeks are going to be horribly busy, terrifically gratifying to me as a writer, and enormously promising … but a little tight on actual disposable income, otherwise.
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.
Dear GM, Ford and Chrysler, and their associated dealerships,
The more you insist on trying to steal borrow my money without permission to bail your sorry asses out of trouble, the less I want to buy your product. And my interest in buying a new domestic car – never strong – has been waning mighty fast this autumn.
If you want my business you’d best quit while you’re ahead.
That is all.
r/s
Brian Dunbar
Cross posted to Space For Commerce.
Dear Hollywood,
Marines don’t use the term A.W.O.L. Having a character use that term is a sign that you’re not paying attention.
It’s also Yet Another Sign that 99% of television is crap.
So, cut it out.
Thanks!
r/s
The Public
Cross posted to Space For Commerce.
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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“It was apparent that most of the dead were tortured. What shocked me were the telltale signs showing clearly how the hostages were executed in cold blood,” one doctor said.
“Of all the bodies, the Israeli victims bore the maximum torture marks. It was clear that they were killed on the 26th itself. It was obvious that they were tied up and tortured before they were killed. It was so bad that I do not want to go over the details even in my head again,” he said.
This was also inevitable …
The security forces that brought the bodies told us that those were the bodies of the terrorists,” he said, adding there was no other way they could have identified the bodies.
An intelligence agency source added: “One of the terrorists was shot through either eye.”
A senior National Security Guard officer, who had earlier explained the operation in detail to rediff.com, said the commandos went all out after they ascertained that there were no more hostages left. When asked if the commandos attempted to capture them alive at that stage, he replied: “Unko bachana kaun chahega (Who will want to save them)?”
It would be ideal to have the Bad Guys alive as prisoners – it’s difficult to interrogate a corpse. Information is important.
On the other hand, the bastards who launched the attacks on Mumbai made it clear that this is the way the game is going to be played. So if Sam the SAS guy or Dave the Ranger – or when it gets down to that, Carl Civilian with his trunk rifle – find a room full of of maimed bodies and a terrorist against the wall under his gun …
I suppose we’ll have to get our information from another source, hunh?
Unko bachana kaun chahega?
Cross posted to Space For Commerce.
President-Elect Obama startled me yesterday, in a GOOD way, by nominating General James L. Jones as the 21st National Security Advisor. I don’t know much about General Jones, but I’ve heard of him many times in my nine years of Joint duty, and it was all good. The Marines who had served under him, LOVE the man. Friends in Europe who were there when he was the NATO Commander SACEUR didn’t have a bad thing to say about him. That speaks volumes right there. Everything I’ve read about him over the past couple days have been positive.
I know there’s all sorts of talk about, “Even a broke clock, etc.” but this gives me pause. This is a GOOD choice for the National Security Advisor during a time when we’re not all feeling that secure.
I can’t remember where I read it or heard it, but a few years ago, I remember someone talking about, “How come we don’t have the smart people running the country? Really! Let’s get Warren Buffet to run the treasury, get Steve Jobs and Bill Gates to come in and straighten out our communications, get some guys from MIT to get our hiways back in shape.” This feels like some of the smart people are coming to Washington.
What a day Friday was! Real Wife was determined to hit the Walmart Black Friday sale, so we were up at 3:00 a.m., resolved to do our part for the economy. Red Haired Girl had been looking forward for weeks to this important first rite of passage, so off we went. RW has been wanting a Wii since we chaperoned RHG’s middle school graduation party last spring. RHG had already done the math and figured that there were other more important things for her final list, so, much to RW’s chagrine, she was not pushing for that. So, in the spirit of Christmas intrigue, we (RHG and I) have been poo pooing the need for a Wii for a couple of weeks. RW is one of the most selfless people I know, and she has been hiding her disappoint like a real trooper.
To give RHG a sense of Black Friday, I assigned her to stand in line for the Wii’s. She performed admirably, panicking only when told that it had to be paid for at the counter. A quick text message to me got that problem resolved. We are now co-conspiritors anxiously awaiting Real Wife’s Christmas surprise.
Normally we get out of the store early and enjoy a nice leisurely breakfast somewhere, but this year we had another mission. Barely an hour after getting home it was time to meet at the local high school for the charter bus to the state championship (class 3A) game at the University of Illinois stadium in Champaigne. Real Wife and I travelled both as fans and as chaperones for the cheerleading squad – in all we took five buses, with literally hundreds of others driving their own vehicles on the four hour trek.
This is only the second year that our school has played in class 3A (about 500 high school students), having recently merged with two other neighbouring districts. Ironically, the largest bloc in opposition to the merger was comprised of the sports fans who found it beyond the pale that former “enemies” should now be on the same team. In fact, our head coach and assistant coach last met in the playoffs at the 2000 state championship while in class 1A, where our school won handily.
The game was a barn burner. DuQuoin, a long time football powerhouse from southern Illinois, has a NCAA Division 1 quarterback prospect, and it was easy to see why. We went into the half down 7-0, having survived two of their drives to less than the five yard line. The second half was nail biter, with our home team down by 14-13 with under a minute to play. Our guys scored what would be the winning touchdown with 25 seconds on the game clock, succeeding with a two point conversion to bring the score to 21-14. On second down of DuQuoin’s possession one of our backs intercepted their pass with 14 seconds remaining. Chaos ensued.
All of the buses and most of the fans who drove stopped at the Home Style buffet before leaving Champaign. Despite having called ahead (we paid for team, cheerleader and band members in advance), it was a cluster**** of epic proportions. After waiting in line – outside – for an hour, RW and I decided to just head back to the bus, whereupon we were told that the driver had gone somewhere else to eat – with the bus. Anyway, 2 1/2 hours later we were on the road again. (BTW, if you are ever in Chapaigne I recommend that buffet – they even had steak fillets!).
Our buses were met at the edge of town at around 1:30 a.m. by firetrucks, ambulances, police cars, and anything else they could muster with a siren, as well as half the town. Everyone formed up in a parade and drove around for awhile before calling it a day a little after two o’clock.
Nobody was from Dallas City, LaHarpe, or Carthage that night – they were all from Illini West.
One final thought. While downloading pictures I noted one in particular that really caught my attention. I took it as the clock ran out, with focal point on the team. On a 10 megapixel camera at about 10X zoom, the image clearly captured the expressions of the Du Quoin fans – a mixture of horror, disbelief, and disappointment. They, after all, had travelled just as hard and long a journey. Nonetheless, the sportsmanship of both their team and their fans was first class. In that spirit I would like to congratulate both the Chargers and the Indians for a job well done.
(This is a reworking of an essay I wrote, now lost and unreachable in the old MT archives, in light of current events in India. It seemed to have particular resonance, in light of some informed opinion, that the attacks in Mumbai are having rather the same effect locally and to the Indian diaspora that 9/11 had on Americans.)
It wasn’t quite the oddest thing I ever saw in a military museum: for my money, that would be Edith Cavell’s dog, stuffed and mounted in the Imperial War Museum, but it was the most unsettling, the most heartbreaking. The object was in the little local museum in the northern English city of Carlisle, in a suite of rooms in the castle, dedicated to the local regiments, which had been distinguishing themselves in the service of the British Empire for two or three centuries.
My younger brother JP and sister Pippy and I had spent a couple of weeks in the Lake District, and stopped in Carlisle on our way north to Scotland, during our wandering summer of 1977. We were discovering, or in my case, rediscovering the country of our ancestors, but on the bargain basement level— staying in youth hostels, traveling on public transportation, and buying groceries in the local Tesco. JP in particular was the champion of the inexpensive lunch; purchasing a hard roll, a slab of cheese and a tomato, and then sitting on the curb outside the store entrance and eating the lot.
Our itinerary was dictated by curiosity, a list of must-see locations, and the availability of a youth hostel, which charged the equivalent of about $1.00 a night for members, and offered some primitive kitchen facilities, but limited the duration of a stay to three consecutive nights, and locked us out during the day. We had gotten terribly efficient at looking after ourselves, and locating and extracting whatever inexpensive and educational resources were available in a city or town, over and above whatever attraction had drawn us there in the first place.
The first order of sightseeing business; go see the church and/or cathedral. There was always a church or cathedral, most usually with something interesting in it, and for free, or nearly free. Next, hang out in the park; there was always a park, nearly always a pleasant place to sit and kill an hour or so, and eat whatever we had bought for lunch.
Then go see the castle. There was always a castle, possibly in ruins, and if not, there would be a small fee to get in, but there would be something fascinating and educational within. Carlisle’s cathedral was interestingly truncated, owing to a little local spot of bother called the Civil War. The castle seemed to have escaped serious damage, and we were pleased to discover the military museum, three or four tiny stone rooms, with narrow windows and cases full of old uniforms and medals, a veritable military mathom-house of memorabilia. I had begun to suspect that many of the things in this museum and in the three or four others that we had seen were donated out of despair: what on earth to do with Great-Uncle Bert’s old dress tunic? Kukri? Camp tea service? You couldn’t throw it away, donate it to Goodwill, or the English equivalent thereof, and you certainly didn’t want to give it house room, so donating it to the museum was the honorable solution. The same sort of curious things tended to show up over and over, though, and we had begun to see them as familiar old friends.
“Have you found the Queen Victoria gift tin, yet?” I asked. During some long-ago imperial war, the dear Queen had made a gift to every man in the forces of a little tin of sweets, at least a third of whom had kept the tin as a souvenir, and his descendents had given it to the local military museum.
“Two of them,” reported JP, “Over here. Right next to the piece of hardtack with a poem written on it.”
There was always a piece of fossilized and slightly bug-nibbled piece of hardtack. In one museum I had seen one with a heroic ode neatly covering the playing-card sized surface, written in neat, flowing letters.
“Where’s the cap-badge? I didn’t see it in the other room.”
There was always a cap-badge, slightly dented where it had deflected a bullet and saved the life of the wearer. Every museum had a variant on that; if not a cap-badge, then a canteen, or one of those tiny Bibles with metal covers. The only exception I ever noticed, was the small metal-covered aircrew first aid kit. It was perforated with a bullet hole. According to the inscription next to it, the bearer had also been perforated, but non-fatally.
The last and largest room in the Carlisle museum— which wasn’t much bigger than the bedroom that Pippy and I shared at home— had a large case in the center, filled with weapons for the most part: Malay knives, and ancient pistols and swords, but the most curious thing of all was on a little stand in the center.
“What’s with that?” JP asked, “It doesn’t belong here at all.”
It was a white muslin baby’s cap, one of those lacily ornate Victorian bonnets, with ruffles and eyelet lace, and dangling ties that would make a bow under the baby’s soft little chin. Our family’s christening dress was about the same style, carefully sewn with tiny, tiny stitches, out of fine cotton muslin, but our dress was in pristine condition, and this little bonnet had a number of pale rusty blotches on it. We looked at it, and wondered what on earth a baby’s cap was doing in a case of guns and knives, and I walked around to the other side of the case, and found the card that explained why.
“Oh, dear, “ I said, “They found it at the well in Cawnpore. The local regiment was one of the first to re-enter the city.” I looked at the stains, and knew what they were, and what had happened to the baby who wore that little bonnet, and I felt quite sick.
“Cawnpore?” Pippy asked, “What’s that to do with it?”
By the time I finished explaining, poor Pippy looked very green. I knew about the Sepoy Mutiny, because I read a lot, and some of Kipling’s India stories had piqued my interest in history not covered in American public schools. The British garrison— and their wives and dependents, and any number of civilians, in the town of Cawnpore stood off a brutal siege by elements of their rebelling Indian soldiers, and local nobles who thrown in their lot with the mutineers in hopes of recovering their old position and authority. Reduced by disease, shot and starvation, the survivors had surrendered on the understanding that they be allowed to take boats down river, but they were massacred at the landing, in front of a large crowd, in as grisly and brutal a fashion as can be imagined.
Only one boat managed to float away, but all but five men were eventually recaptured and killed. Two hundred or so women and children who survived the massacre at the boat landing were taken to a small house close by, and held as hostages in horrible conditions. When the avenging British forces and their loyal allies were a day or so away, the leader of the mutineers in Cawnpore gave orders that those last surviving women and children be killed. They were hacked to death by a half-dozen men from the local bazaar, and the bodies thrown into a nearby well. Men from the returning British relief force later reported finding that house awash with blood, throughout all the rooms.
The horror of that particular massacre inflamed British popular opinion to an extraordinary degree. Sentimental and earnestly chivalrous, seeing it as their special duty to protect women and children, to live by the code of a gentleman, to keep promises— the actions of the Indian mutineers at Cawnpore, in breaking a truce and killing defenseless wives and children, seemed calculated to outrage every one of those values held dear by the typical Victorian. Commanders and soldiers came to look at the blood on the floor of the murder house— shoe-deep by some accounts— and resolved that there could be neither parley or mercy with those who had done this. The gentlemanly gloves came off, and the Mutiny was put down, with no quarter asked or given.
Captured mutineers were dragged back to Cawnpore and made to lick the floor of the massacre house, before they were hung, or tied over the mouths of cannon and blown to pieces. It’s all in the history books— this one is most thorough, and I recommend it. In reflecting on this, and on the running battles being fought in the streets of Mumbai – which is India’s modern Wall Street and Hollywood all mixed together – I wonder how much history those responsible for these bloody scenes at hotels, a hospital and a railway staion may know, or do they only know their own? I wonder if they have any clue of how much they risk putting themselves as far beyond the pale as the Cawnpore mutineers, all for making a show for their fellows and sympathizers? Eventually, when a group of terrorists violate enough norms, those who have been made targents will run out of any patience and sympathy, and feel no particular obligation to observe them in the breach. Having sown a storm, I wonder if those who sponsered a coordinated attack on India’s major city have any notion they are in danger of reaping a whirlwind. It has happened before, you know. In that very country and not to terribly far away.
A baby’s little white ruffled cap, faintly spotched with pale rusty bloodstains: we looked at it again, and went away, very quietly.
Yeah, I know it’s Friday already, but you know you’d be upset if you missed it.
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
And how does Santa Claus get presents to the troops?
With style. And firepower.
“Ho ho ho – gunner – fléchette – naughty children”
“Identified”
“Up!”
“Ho … ho .. ho – fire!”
“On the way.”
“Ho ho ho – target shredded – cease fire”
Um, anyway. The turret rotates, the cannon fires confetti. Of course it won First Prize, Best Youth Group for Cub Scout Pack 9 in Waukesha.
Via.
Cross posted to Space For Commerce.
Seriously, however you ge your movie fix, watch this movie.
Funny, funny movie.
Our team won today, and they play the state championship game next Friday. What a house rocker!! Rewind to three days ago; the story all over town was that Terry Bradshaw (through a complicated connection that includes a former Bengals player originally from our school district) called our quarterback for a 25 minute chat. This reporter can confirm through reliable sources that said conversation happened.
The home defense was limp the entire first half (ending at 16-6) until the opponents were within the 10 yard line, which each time inspired the best running defense I have ever seen. Offensively things were no better – the constant running pressure typical of past games was ineffective.
I am a comparatively cerebral football fan, so while everyone else was freaking out I was wondering why our guys weren’t passing.
The second half favored the visitors with being the receivers of the kick and they got another score (with conversion) to bring the score at the end of the quarter to 23-6. We then finally scored again (now 23-13, fourth quarter, 10 minutes left). Our guys then played the coolest trick I have ever seen – while seeming to be huddling, they suddenly ran toward and short kicked the ball (no setting up of a formation) and recovered the onside kick. At that point there was a crisis behind us when a bleacher plank failed and about 8 feet worth of fans went down about… eight feet. There were no injuries (thank God, everybody was focused on the game). Our QB finally started passing, a consistent skill that had not thus far been apparent (but was today), and they won 27-23, with the final score made with only seconds to go. Our number 4 looked like Bradshaw.
A word of respect for the other team. They played well and fair, and it always moves me to see the pain in the faces of a team that has worked so hard and so long and to leave the field in defeat.
It turns out that Real Wife, related to her position as teacher, is also a kind of associate assistant cheerleader coach. I don’t completely understand her duties other than the fact that we sit with the coach at the fifty yard line at every game. Anyway, we will be riding as chaperones on the bus with the cheerleaders to Champaign. Another irony alert here; there was a time when I would have traded away my little brother (sorry Mike) for such an honor. Now I am thankful for MP3 and noise canceling headphones for the four hour ride. Red Haired Girl informed me that even though the other girls know who I am, I should pretend that we don’t know each other. Whatever.
I want to try something new. I’ll suggest the first line for a joke and you, Dear Readers, finish it. BTW, I am not involved in screening the comments at this site, so I would ask in the spirit of civility that we all show good taste and decency so as not to unnecessarily rile Sgt. Mom. Here we go:
“Barack Obama, Chuck Norris, and Superman walk into a bar…”
If you don’t have a teenager in your life you may not get the premise. In that case, find one and offer him/her $1.00 to explain (or go out and get a teenager – the former is a lot cheaper)
Working at a job I love.
Rehearsing a play I’m not tired of yet. Christo, we open next Friday, how’d THAT happen.
Trying to fill in time with family between all that, failing miserably. Will NOT be doing another play for quite a while. Beautiful Wife is supportive, Boyo thinks it’s good that I get to do something I love again, but it’s SUCH a time sink.
Life is good today. I loved the Air Force, but seriously, I’m digging this civilian thing a LOT. The only thing I miss about the Air Force? Training others how to do things. But I’ve just been put on the web board, so that may change soon as well.
Did I mention that I quit smoking again about a month and a half ago? Yeah. It’s funny how good it feels not to have your lungs burning and to have food taste so GOOD again.
Sorry I haven’t been writing much, but current events are simply pissing me off so I’m concentrating on my sphere of influence and the rest of it be damned.
… And with luck, the beginning of another – Wednesday afternoon I went to get the mail, after having put in a short day at the loathsome telephone bank job— which however much I detest, and however much I fear that I have no aptitude for, even though I am getting passingly skilled at their legacy data entry system, and can answer most stupid guest questions now from off the top of my head without looking at their fact-book website… oh, where was I? Oh, yes, the horrid part-time day job, where I am about the first to raise my hand and volunteer to leave, when the incoming calls begin to lag after I have put in a couple of hours. Of the class of ten that I trained with early in July, there is only another person and myself remaining, still putting on a headset and grimly tackling the intricacies of setting up for a shift, logging in to a computer database system that was cutting edge, the very latest word … about three decades ago.
At the time I took the job, having bills to pay, and knowing that I wouldn’t see any income from my books until December, I knew very well that the average tenure was about six months max. This is not the subtle way of saying that yes, Sgt. Mom has been fired again—no, this time I plan to leave on my terms and if I can endure—to leave only after scooping up enough of the time-and-a-half boodle earned through working on Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, New Years Eve and New Years…
Or maybe not. Life is short, too short to put up with working at a corporate call center. It is not the way I want to spend a minute of my life any longer than I have to, and at this point I might even boycott the casino/resort chain involved for the rest of my natural life. I have come to despise their insanely complicated guest services software program, their once-size-fits-all sales protocol, their demands that we treat their guests with every consideration yet not spend more than 340 seconds or so doing so… a whole long set of contradictory demands placed on phone agents. I’d walk in the door and begin to shake with suppressed resentment about every aspect of the place – the restaurants, the room facilities, all of it. I would hate it that much, for reminding me of the phone bank hell. Nope, the only good thing about this job is that it is a regular paycheck. Something to consider in this time of economic stress… but as they ruthlessly cut back all the part-timers hours at the end of October, there is absolutely no guarantee of that not happening again after the year-end holidays. With luck, they will be done with me at about the same time that I am done with them. Work for the tiny local micro-press is already picking up, almost sufficiently to replace those hours. Capitalism, what a concept, hey?
In the mail yesterday was the final hard copy proof of the final volume of the “Adelsverein Trilogy” – a satisfactorily fat paperback with a gorgeous color cover – I looked at it and thought ‘Oh my, did I really write all that?‘
Yes, of course I did – a long and complicated family saga, full of dreams, drama and ambitions, set in a place that I have come to know and love (even though I came to it quite late in my life) an epic chock-full of historic detail, fascinating people, interesting events… a sort of Texas version of Gone With the Wind. I have great hopes for it, and have posted many sample chapters here, as I wrote them. Being that much of the Trilogy is set in the Hill Country, San Antonio and South Texas generally, perhaps many of these hopes will be realized. The story of the Adelsverein colonists and their descendants has much wider appeal, across a couple of genres – so there you go. I will be ordering quantities of each of the books of the trilogy over the next few days, in order to fulfill pre-sold orders, and to have enough for upcoming signing events. If anyone wants a set, to be delivered by the release date (and in time to have autographed copies in time for Christmas!) please order them as soon as you can. I get a break for ordering 50 books at a time – and I probably won’t put in a massive order again until after Christmas.
End of one road, and the beginning of another. After Christmas, I will start on the next project, tentatively called the Cibola Trails Trilogy. I’m a writer, it’s what I do.
Hey, Representative Barney Frank, what’s the Big Idea [1] for bailing out the UAW Big Three Automakers?
Steve Inskeep: I want to ask you about something mentioned in that report from an economist from the University of Maryland. What makes you think the $25 billion would even be enough?
Rep. Barney Frank: We don’t think it would be enough. The way we have this structured, they will get $25 billion if the bill passes, with a lot of conditions. But they would have to prepare and file by March 31 a plan that shows how they plan to get much more efficient and to get cars that can be marketed.
But let me ask you about the first thing you said, Congressman, because you said you don’t think $25 billion is enough.
Right, I’m trying to explain to you how it works.
OK.
They get $25 billion — the federal government would be in the first position to be repaid. We will come ahead of the debt holders, the shareholders, etc. They file this plan on March 31. If, on March 31, the president does not believe that this is going to get them the viability with energy efficiency cars, they have to repay the loan; they get no more money. If they can show by March 31 a plausible way to go forward, then we would consider giving more money, again, under equally stringent conditions.
The test of any idea is ‘would I do it with my money’. Because that is what is really going on here.
I’m being asked to loan a whole bunch of money to three businesses that are over-extended, are saddled with a lot of debt and obligations their competitors don’t have, who have made some bad choices in the past and find themselves in a bit of a pickle.
They’ve got three months to work up a plan to make efficient cars and market them. Because, I guess, up to this point the boys in Marketing have been playing Hearts in the break room. God only knows what the engineers have been doing instead of their jobs, all this time.
Then they submit this plan for approval to a guy who has never worked for a for-profit company and whose business experience is nil.
And if this guy says ‘yes’ then I will loan these folks more money. How much more is not specified .. and the spokesman for the plan gets kinda shifty-eyed and starts talking about a bunch of hoo-ha when I ask how much.
Pass – but thanks for the opportunity! I think I’d rather keep my money in a high-interest savings account instead of .. well you didn’t say what the interest rate would be did you? Hmm.
I’ve got a better idea! Why don’t we draft a law so that any company could go to a special court and get protection from creditors while they reorganize? Jobs might be lost, but not all of them, some creditors might have to settle for partial payments .. but it is sure ’nuff better than the entire shebang going out of business.
Crazy idea, I know – but it’s worth a shot.
Cross posted to Space For Commerce.
[1] Idealism is based on big ideas. And, as anybody who has ever been asked “What’s the big idea?” knows, most big ideas are bad ones.
O’Rourke, P.J. (1994), All the trouble in the world. The lighter side of famine, pestilence, destruction and death. Sydney (Picador), 256
Our local high school football team plays a state semifinal game this weekend (class 3A – four or five hundred student enrollment). Victory Saturday takes us to Champaign next week for the championship game.
Our community has been an avid HS football town for many years, but until Red Haired Girl became a cheerleader we never bothered to go to the games. I have to say, the community has developed quite a pagan ritual, but it’s a lot of cheap fun.
The other day I was thinking about a little “thing” that the cheerleaders do; when a player is injured they all assume a crouching position, metaphorically not unlike a bunch of birds with broken wings. Once the player is walked from the field, they all jump and clap and everything is good.
I also made the observation that one of the cheerleaders seems always to be tending some injury or another – usually involving an Ace bandage – and right out if front of the crowd, as though to remind everyone that things aren’t just tough on the field.
On the way home from the last game, I asked RHG a hypothetical – If a cheerleader gets injured while performing a stunt, does protocol require that the football players assume the wounded bird position until said cheerleader is walked from the running track (with a corresponding stop of the clock)?
Having inherited my sense of humor, RHG liked the joke – so much so that she asked her cheerleading coach that very question today. She reports that Mrs. T. responded with a fake laugh and a strange look. I felt it time to warn her that there are two kind of people in this world – those that get your jokes and those that don’t, and that you have to be careful around the latter lest you make them nervous.
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!.
People who don’t like Meatloaf’s Bat Out of Hell remind me of people who are proud of the fact that they don’t own a television or are proud of the fact that they only watch PBS or The Discovery Channel. Good for you, but please STFU and let the rest of us enjoy “the crap” you find so offensive.
The creation of characters is another one of those miracle things. That happens in a couple of different ways. The ones who are historical characters are easiest of course; people like Sam Houston, or Jack Hayes, or John O. Meusebach, all of whom make appearances in the various volumes of the trilogy. There are biographies, and historical accounts of these characters, so it is simplicity itself for me to get an idea of what they were about, how they looked and spoke and what background they came from. This does have its distractions; I was waylaid for a whole week reading biographies and letters of Sam Houston, who makes a brief appearance in “The Sowing”, on the eve of the Civil War.
Then there are the ones which I made up: I start with a requirement for a character, a sort of mental casting call for a certain sort of person, usually to do something. It can be, to continue the movie imagery, anything between a starring role, down to just a short walk-on, bearing a message or providing some kind of service to the plot. I usually don’t get caught up in describing everything about them – which is a tiresome tendency I will leave to romance writers and authors who have fallen in love with their own characters. Just basic age, general coloring, tall or short; a quick sketch rather than a full-length oil painting. I also don’t bother with describing in great detail what they are wearing – that’s another waste of time. Just the basics please – work clothes, or dirty, or ragged, or in the latest fashion, whatever is relevant. And it’s really more artistic to have other characters describe them, or mention key information in casual conversation. That way allows readers to pull up their own visualizations of my characters, which seems to work pretty well and keeps the story moving briskly along.
On certain occasions, that character has instantly popped up in my imagination, fully formed. One moment, I have only a vague sort of notion, and the next second, there they are, appearing out of nowhere, fully fleshed, named and every characteristic vivid and… well, real. “Vati”, the patriarch of the Steinmetz-Richter clan appeared like that: I knew instantly that he would be absentminded, clever, loving books and his family, a short little man who looked like a kobold. His family would in turn, return that affection and on occasion be exasperated by him – but he would be the glue that held his family together. Another middle-aged male character also appeared out of nowhere, “Daddy” Hurst – technically a slave in pre-Civil War Texas, but working as a coachman for another family. His character emerged from the situation of slavery as practiced in Texas, where there were comparatively fewer slaves than there were in other Confederate states. Many of those so held worked for hire at various skilled trades, and also seem to have been allowed considerable latitude, especially if they were working as freight-haulers, ranch hands and skilled craftsmen. Daddy Hurst is one of them; I like to think he adds a little nuance to the ‘peculiar institution’. The only trouble with that kind of character is that if they are supposed to me a minor one – they have a way of taking over, as I am tempted to write too much about them. This was becoming a bit of a challenge with the final part of the trilogy “The Harvesting” since if I had explored all the various characters and the dramatic scenes they wanted – in fact, all but begged for – it would have easily been twice the 500 pages that it has turned out to be. In the name of all the trees that might have been logged to print it – I had so say no, not now. But I have taken note, and will try to work as many of them into the next trilogy. (Yes there will be another trilogy, focusing on some of those interesting side-characters and their own adventures; independent of the Adelsverein story arc. Look, if there are still stories to tell, why shouldn’t I tell them, as long as I can keep it dramatic, interesting, and involving enough to inspire the interested reader to plunk down upwards of $15 for the privilege of reading all about them? But the second-hand editions may go for a bit less…)
Where was I? Oh, characters, the third sort, evolution of… got it. That’s the other sort of character – the ones that I have started out with a certain idea of them, winging it a bit as I sketch out a scene for a chapter. Right there, they evolve, in defiance of my proposed plans for them. In my original visualization of their characters, as the romantic couple in the first book of Adelsverein, Magda Vogel Steinmetz and Carl Becker were supposed to be one of those sparkling and amusing Beatrice and Benedict couples, striking romantic and witty sparks off each other in every encounter, like one of those 1930’s romances of equals. Didn’t work out that way – he turned out to be very reserved, and she to be almost completely humorless. Beatrice and Benedict was so not happening! Within a couple of chapters of having them ‘meet cute’ when he rescues her niece from almost drowning— I tossed that concept entirely. I did recycle it for the romantic couple in the final volume; Peter Vining and Anna Richter. He was a Civil War veteran, an amputee and covering up his apprehensions and self-doubts with a show of desperate humor. She was the clever woman who saw though all those defenses, calmly sized him up as the man she thought she could live with and come to love… and asked him to marry her, never mind the exact particulars. It makes amusing reading, just as I had planned.
The pivotal character of Hansi Richter is the most notable of those evolving characters. He started off as a stock character, the dull and conventional brother-in-law, a sort of foil to the hero. A rejected suitor, but who had married the heroine’s sister as a sort of second-best. That was another one of those initial plans that didn’t quite turn out as originally projected. A supporting character in the first two books, by the third he moved front and center; had developed into a stubborn, ambitious and capable person, quite likeable in his own right – and carrying a good deal of the story forward as he becomes a cattle baron, in the years following the Civil War.
So there it is – as good an explanation that I will ever be able to come up with. All three books of the Trilogy will be available by the end of the month, from Booklocker, of course and also at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. I am setting up a number of signings – complete schedule will be posted here.
I suppose it does seem a little like magic, this storytelling thing. Explaining it, even to yourself, much less to other people usually results in bafflement. Like the old joke about dissecting humor being like dissecting a frog – by the time you are done, there is nothing but a bit of a mess and confusion and the frog is dead anyway. Mom and Dad are as puzzled by this aptitude in me as anyone else – they can’t for the life of them figure out how I came by the gift of spinning an enthralling story, of creating people on a page and making them so interesting and endearing that they care very deeply about them. Made-up people… and these are my parents, who have known me all my life. They can’t figure out how I do it, especially Dad, the logical and analytical scientist.
“Are you picturing it in your head, as if it was a movie?” he asked me once, and I suppose that comes as close as anything – although it is as much like to a movie as real life is, or maybe a hyper-life. I can see what the characters are seeing from all angles, know what they are feeling, the little things they do which betray that feeling, I can sense what the weather is like, how where they are smells… a couple of readers have pointed out that I do take a lot of notice of smells. Can’t account for that, either; just another aspect of the gift, I expect. The semi-employer who has also volunteered to edit much of Book 3 (which will be available after the first of the month- thank god and what a panic that has been!) also notes that I do pay particular attention to the weather, what the sky looks like, if it is hot or cold, rainy or clear. She noted this in particular as regards “To Truckee’s Trail”, which I didn’t think surprising, because living in a covered wagon, and in tents, walking ten or fifteen miles every day, of course one would have taken note of the weather. The weather would have governed every aspect of their existence for six long months, all along the Platte River trail, to Fort Hall, and into the wilderness of the Great Basin – never mind the Sierra Nevada, where weather would kill half of the Donner Party, not two years after the pioneers of the Stephens-Townsend Party dragged their wagons over the summit.
Don’t know where I got this sensitivity from – unless it was as a teenaged Girl Scout, being dragged along on all sorts of back-packing expeditions into the mountains; miserable experiences which usually resulted in making me sick from exhaustion and sun-exposure for a couple of days after returning from the worst of them… but I still hold in memory, the taste of sweet water, from a rivulet, high in the mountains above Lake Tahoe, and drinking it from my cupped hands. And also the experience of trying to sleep in a wet sleeping bag in March, high in the Angeles National Forest, after melting snow had trickled through our campsite all the day. After that one, I had a whole new appreciation of weather, even though I was never at any hazard for frostbite.
Places – I construct them in my imagination as carefully as I used to build miniature interiors; what is in the room, what are the walls made of, how sound is the roof, what do you see when you look out of the windows. What is growing in the ground outside? People live in these interiors – what would the imprint of their lives have left on that space. I saw a vignette at a miniature show once; an elaborate scene of a WWII fighter plane and a cross-section of the maintenance shed close-by, in 1-12 scale. The craftsman who had built the vignette had made the shed a show-piece of squalid disarray, including a thread of cigarette smoke rising from an ash-tray on the workbench. It was as if someone had just stepped outside for a moment… and that is such art, to make it so real that you can see the cigarette ash crumbling into the tray and a bit of smoke rising from it. In 1-12th scale, it was a real place, as real as any of those places I have built in my imagination.
People – that is one of the other weird aspects of this gift. I can read people, after a time. I have always been able to do this, not instantly – that is supposed to be one of those really, really useful talents, extraordinary valuable for a personnel manager, or someone doing job interviews, reading people as accurately as one of those instant-read cooking thermometers… but it is not mine. I’ve been fooled as well as anyone else, on short acquaintance. There have been people that I thought initially were major-league assholes who turned out to be quite the reverse, and people whom I had a good first impression of, who turned out to be so useless or malevolent that they should have been marked off with day-glo tape and tall plastic cones as a hazard to human navigation… but after six months of work-day association, I would know someone. I would know someone so thoroughly, be able to assess them down to the sub-atomic particle, with a fair degree of accuracy. This used to astound my fellow NCOs. They would not have realized some essential truth about Airman So-and-so, until I pointed it out to them. Then, with a shock, they would realize that I was right, and everything about Airman So-and-So would be understandable, out in the open, and perfectly transparent … and why hadn’t they have seen it?
I think that being able to create convincing characters might be somehow linked to this ability. Always, when I had to do a performance rating on a subordinate, my crutch in constructing this official bit of documentation was “What is the thing about this person which instantly comes to mind when you think about them?” And there would be the first sentence in their required yearly Airman Performance Report, and all the rest of it would flow after that. What is the key bit of their character, what is the essential bit that you have to know? Everything flows naturally from that… and so it is with creating characters. In my “Adelsverein Trilogy” I had to get a grip on what is their essential core characteristic. Everything flows from that: I couldn’t get a read on Magda and Carl’s children until I was writing a scene of their sons and Magda, digging up potatoes, before Christmas, 1862, during a year when they were living in poverty in Fredericksburg. Everything about the two boys became clear – the older was grieving and traumatized, the younger was taking emotional refuge in books, and would emerge as being elastic and undamaged by the experience. Everything about them was established – they would go in different directions, their reactions to various experiences would be complete as this sudden insight would take me – and everything would be coherent and sympathetic.
But of course, that is the other aspect – kind of an uncomfortable one, as far as I can see; seeing people at the best and worst, to know them down to their core – especially when it comes to people who are not all that admirable. That is actually the most challenging bit of writing a story – that is, writing about characters who are psychopaths. The major villain in Adelsverein is one if those – so cruel, so brutal – I actually don’t want to go there. I don’t like or sympathize with that character and I don’t want to go any farther into the story of him. No farther than it would take to outline the effect that he has upon the other characters, or how my main characters feel about how he meets his eventual doom. Which is as just as it is unexpected – or so I hope has appeared to anyone who reads all three books of the Adelsverein Trilogy.
(to be continued)
Tomorrow it will be one week after Senator John McCain lost the election.
And we STILL haven’t heard him come to the defense of Governor Palin. Nothing, zip, zilch, nada, bupkis.
I don’t know why, but I expected better of him.
I’m not saying the best man won, but based on how he’s let her get tossed her under the bus, I’d say the right man lost. Seriously, it takes a huge set of balls to blame her after that weak performance the McCain Camp called a campaign.
Oh and did you hear, Carl Cameron and Sheppard Smith are dressing in drag and performing “La Cage au Foules” complete with full frontal nudity and Bill O’Reilly performs a very hot gay porn scene with Keith Olberman? At least that’s what an anonymous source told me, so you know, it’s gotta be true.
UDATED: Apparently Governor Palin doesn’t share the love. Well okay then, never mind. And Doc, sorry for the visual.