In the Post

09. August 2012 · Comments Off on In the Post · Categories: Domestic · Tags: , , , , ,

I’ve been thinking for a while – based on my own use of the service – that the good old US Post Office is something well past its best-if-used-by date. Oh, no – not that it should be done away with as a government service entirely. But I can contemplate delivery of the mail only two or three times a week with perfect equanimity … which is at least a little tragic for there were times when the daily arrival of the mail was a much-looked-forward-to thing. When I was overseas, or in a remote location – like Greenland (and in military outposts today I am certain) the arrival of the mail (three times a week) was anticipated with keen interest, since it was our lifeline to the outside world. There were letters from family, loved ones, magazines, catalogues and packages with goodies in them – sometimes gifts, sometimes items ordered … the whole world, crammed into a tiny box with a locking door in the central post office; the magical envelopes, the catalogues and magazines in a tight-packed roll, the little pink slips that meant a package … and then, between one or two decades, it all changed.

Now, the packages come mostly through UPS or Fed-Ex. The various utility bills arrive as emails and are paid on-line. My pension and my daughters’ VA disability are paid by automatic deposit to bank accounts. Magazines? I dropped a lot of my various subscriptions through lack of interest (I am looking at you, Newsweek and Entertainment Weekly) or through the magazines or the publications themselves going under. My news and intellectual-contact jones is fed on-line. Email works for just about everything else save for birthday cards to Luddites like my mother. My various businesses as a freelance are conducted thru Paypal, or through email with my business partner. I realize that not everyone has this kind of luxury – and in the case of the zombie apocalypse or some sort of solar event that crashes the internet I will be SO screwed … but then I am not advocating abolition of the post office. Just that in those metropolitan areas in the continental US that are well-served by internet services and by the various rival delivery services, the Postal Service can probably dial it back, quite a bit. Nothing much comes in the daily mail any more, save the print equivalent of the stuff that I empty out of my spam email box. Really – I am never going to respond to the Capitol One offers for a credit card, so do they need to have their weekly c**p underwritten with tax dollars? My way back into the house from the group mailbox leads past my trash and recycle cans; convenient, as that is where the bulk of it winds up.

I’ll shed a nostalgic tear for the USPS, when they cut back services. I really will – as there are (or were) the occasional business that would send a payment check by mail, instead of an automatic transfer. And the businesses which depend upon cheap bulk mail deliveries will be set back a peg or two. I do dispatch my own books when bought by readers through media mail, and the workers at the post offices where I do and have done business are wonderful, competent and cheerful people (Yeah, I know that is SO much against the usual stereotype) … but otherwise I fear that the USPS is a zombie corpse, being kept alive out of habit. To enable it to keep shambling around in those places where it does truly provide a neccessary service, I’d be willing to give up delivery service on Saturdays and at least two weekdays.

I’d also be able to avoid encountering my slightly-deranged and very chatty neighbor, who haunts the group mailbox; another win-win, as I count it.

Country Roads and Confiture Bar le Duc

07. August 2012 · Comments Off on Country Roads and Confiture Bar le Duc · Categories: Domestic · Tags: , , , , ,

(For the anniversary of the beginning of World War One – which began August 1, 1914. This was supposed to be the war to end all wars, which ended instead three monarchies, came close to ending one republic and saw another empire totter … one of my best archive posts from my original blog.)

We drove across the border on a Sunday, my daughter and I, on a mild autumn day that began by being veiled in fog when I gassed up the VEV at the PX gas station at Bitburg, and headed southwest assisted by the invaluable Hallwag drivers’ atlas, open on the passenger seat beside me. Blondie shared the back seat with a basket of books, a pillow, some soft luggage stuffed into the space between the seats, and half a dozen Asterix and Obelix comic books. Fortunate child, she could read in the back seat of a moving car for hours. Not like me— child or adult, I could not even look at the printed word while underway without becoming nauseated.

“We’ll cross right over Luxemburg, and then we’ll be in France,” I said. “You know, Gaul.”
“Will there be indomitable Gauls?” my daughter asked, seriously. She was just coming up to five years old. Her favorite comic books followed the adventures of the bold Gaulish warrior Asterix, and his friend, the menhir-deliveryman Oblelix, whose tiny village was the last to hold out against the imperial might of Roman conquest, thanks to a magic potion worked up by the druid Getafix, which gave superhuman strength to all the village warriors. The drawings in the books were artistically literate, and there were all sorts of puns and word-plays in the stories – and they had been translated and distributed all over.
“There could be,” I said, noncommittally. Three or four weeks ago, we had left the apartment in the suburb of Athens where we had lived for most of what she could remember of life and taken the car ferry from Patras to Brindisi, on our way to my new assignment in Spain.

In easy stages I had driven the length of Italy, over the Brenner Pass, through the tiny neck of Austria, and across Southern Germany. We had so far stayed in a castle on the Rhine, a couple of guesthouses, a hotel outside Siena which could have been nearly anywhere, as it overlooked a junkyard on one side, and acres of grapevines on the other three, and another which covered two floors on the top of an office block in Florence and offered a view of the Duomo from the terrace. We had been to see ruins in Pompeii, the Sistine chapel, the wondrous Byzantine mosaics in Ravenna, a Nazi concentration camp, and a mineral bath in Baden-Baden.

“Where are we going to do first?”
“Buy some jam,” I said.
“What kind of jam?” my daughter asked.
“It’s very superior jam, made with currents. They pick out the seeds by hand with a goose-quill, so it’s very expensive and only made in this one little town in France, but it is supposed to be the tastiest on earth. It’s on the way between here and Paris.”
Well, it wasn’t any odder than anything else I had taken her to see in the time that we had lived in Europe. She curled up with Asterix, while the VEV’s tires hummed tirelessly down the road.

I could tell, without having to see a border sign, when we had left Germany. Germany was as clean as if Granny Dodie had dusted it all, and scoured it twice with Lysol, and then groomed all the grass and trees with a pair of manicure scissors. Houses and cottages were all trim and immaculate, not a sagging roof or a broken shutter to be seen – and then, we were in another place, where slacker standards prevailed. Not absolute rural blight, just everything a little grimier, a little more overgrown, not so aggressively, compulsively tidy. And the highway became a toll road, and a rather expensive one at that. I made a snap decision to take the rural, surface roads at that point, and the toll-taker indulgently wrote out a list for me of the towns along the way of the road I wanted, hop-scotching from town to town, along a two-lane road among rolling hills and dark green scrub-forest, and little collections of houses around a square, or a traffic circle labeled ‘centre’ around which I would spin until I saw a signpost with the name of the next town, and the VEV ricocheted out of the roundabout, and plunged headlong down this new road. (Good heavens, a signpost that way for Malmedy! Well, they did say snottily in Europe that wars were a means to teach Americans about geography, but I was interested this day in the earlier war, and my route led south.)

Always two lanes, little traveled on a Sunday it seemed. I had no shred of confidence in my ability to pronounce French without mangling every syllable, but at least I could read signs in Latinate alphabets. And this was Alsace-Lorraine, I was sunnily confident of being able to make myself clear in German, if required. The VEV’s tank was still better than half full, and it was only midday. Here we were climbing a long steady slope, a wooded table-land, and a break in the trees, where a great stone finger pointed accusingly at an overcast sky. A signpost with several arrows pointed the various ways farther on – Ossuaire …Ft. Douaumont … Fleury. A parking lot with a scattering of cars, the same oppressive sense of silence I had felt in places like Pompeii, and Dachau, as if even the birds and insects were muffled.
“What’s this place?” My daughter emerged from the back seat, yawning.
“There was a horrendous battle here, sixty years ago. The Germans tried to take it, but the French held on.”
“Indomitable Gauls,” My daughter said wisely, and I pointed up at the Ossuary,
“That place is full of their bones. We’ll go see the museum, first.”

This was the place of which the stalwart Joffe had commanded, “They shall not pass,” the place in which it could be claimed— over any other World War I battlefield— that France bled out as a significant military power. For ten months in 1916 Germany and France battered each other into immobility, pouring men and materiel into the Verdun Salient with prodigal hands, churning every inch of soil with shellfire and poison gas, splintering the woods and little towns, gutting a whole generation of the men who would have been it�s solid middle-class, the politicians and patriots, leaders who might have forestalled the next war, or stood fast in 1940. It was the historian Barbara Tuchman who noted that the entire 1914 graduating class of St. Cyr, the French approximation of West Point had been killed within the first month of war. For this was a wasteful war, as if the great generals all stood around saying “Well, that didn’t work very well, did it?— so let’s do it again, and again and again, until it does indeed work.” And afterwards, no one could very well say what it had all been for, and certainly not that it had been worth it, only that the place was a mass grave for a million men.

There was the usual little sign at the admittance desk to the museum— so many francs, but students and small children were admitted free, and so were war veterans and members of the military. I got out my military ID, and politely showed it to the concierge, a gentleman who looked nearly old enough to have been a veteran of Verdun saying
“Ici militaire…”
He looked at me, at the card, at my tits, and at my daughter, and then at the card again, and laughed, jovially waving me on to the exhibits; models and bits of battered gear, mostly, and a bit in the cellar made up to look like a corner of the battlefield, hell in a very small place, all the ground stirred up again and again. Supposedly, they had despaired of ever planting a straight row of trees; there was so much stuff in the ground.
When we came out again, the clouds were lifting a bit … down and across the river there was a golden haze over the town.

“Are we going to buy jam now?” my daughter asked.
“When we get to Bar le Duc. I think we’ll get something to eat, and stay the night there,” I said, and in that golden afternoon, I followed the two-lane road, the Voie Sacree, the only road into Verdun from the railhead at Bar le Duc, where traffic never stopped during the battle, two hundred trucks an hour, and 8,000 men shoveling gravel under their wheels day and night. The only visible mark left along the road were square white-washed mile markers, topped with a metal replica of a poilu’s helmet, like grave markers for a France gone sixty years ago.

I bought six jars of the confiture, six tiny jars of preserve as bright as blood, filled with tiny globes of clear red fruit. It was exquisite; saved for special occasions; I made them last for nearly a decade.

Personal Barsetshire

30. July 2012 · Comments Off on Personal Barsetshire · Categories: Domestic · Tags: ,

In January, 2007 I had just launched into the first book about the German settlements in the Texas Hill Country – a project which almost immediately came close to overflowing the constraint that I had originally visualized, of about twenty chapters of about 6,500 words each. Of course I blogged about what I had described as “my current obsession, which is growing by leaps and bounds.” A reader suggested that “if I was going for two books, might as well make it three, since savy readers expected a trilogy anyway.” And another long-time reader Andrew Brooks suggested at about the same time “Rather then bemoan two novels of the Germans in the Texas hill country, let them rip and just think of it as The Chronicles of Barsetshire, but with cypress trees!” and someone else amended that to “Cypress trees and lots of side-arms” and so there it was, a nice little marketing tag-line to sum up a family saga on the Texas frontier. I’ve been eternally grateful for Andrew’s suggestion ever since, but I have just now come around to thinking he was more right than he knew at the time. Because when I finally worked up the last book of the trilogy, it all came out to something like 490,000 words – and might have been longer still if I hadn’t kept myself from wandering down along the back-stories of various minor characters. Well, and then when I had finished the Trilogy, and was contemplating ideas for the next book project, I came up with the idea of another trilogy, each a complete and separate story, no need to have read everything else and in a certain order to make sense of it all. The new trilogy, or rather a loosely linked cycle, would pick up the stories of some of those characters from the Trilogy – those characters who as they developed a substantial back-story almost demanded to be the star of their own show, rather than an incidental walk-on in someone elses’.

I never particularly wanted to write a single-character series; that seemed kind of boring to me. People develop, they have an adventure or a romance, they mature – and it’s hard to write them into an endless series of adventures, as if they stay the same and only the adventure changes. And I certainly didn’t want to write one enormous and lengthy adventure broken up into comfortably volume-sized segments. Frankly, I’ve always been rather resentful of that kind of book: I’d prefer that each volume of a saga stand on its own, and not make the reader buy two or three books more just to get a handle on what is going on.

So, now I am well into that project – having written one (Which turned into two) and now on the second and third – when I got bored with one, or couldn’t think of a way to hustle the story and the characters along, I’d do some research, or scribble away on the other, and post some of the resulting chapters here and on the other blog. But it wasn’t until the OS blogger Procopius remarked “I like that you let us see the goings on of so many branches of the same family through your writings. The frontier offers a rich spring of fascinating stories!” This was also the same OS blogger who had wondered wistfully, after completing reading “The Harvesting” about young Willi Richter’s life and eventual fate among the Comanche, first as a white captive and then as a full member of the band. And at that point, I did realized that yes, I was writing a frontier Barsetshire, and perhaps not quite as closely linked as Anthony Trollop’s series of novels, , but something rather more like Angela Thirkell’s visualization of a time and place, of many linked locations, yet separate characters and stories. Yes, that is a better description of how my books are developing – not as a straight narrative with a few branches, but as an intricate network of friends, kin and casual acquaintances, all going their own ways, each story standing by itself, with now and again a casual pass-through by a character from another narration. And it’s starting again with the latest book, I’ll have you know – I have a minor character developing, a grimy London street urchin, transplanted to Texas, where he becomes a working cowboy, later a champion stunt-performer in Wild West Shows . . . eventually, he is reinvented in the early 20th century as a silent movie serial star. The potential for yet one more twig branching out into another fascinating story is always present, when my imagination gets really rolling along.

So – yes. Barsetshire with cypress trees and lots of side-arms, Barsetshire on the American frontier as the occasionally wild west was settled and tamed, a tough and gritty Barsetshire, of buffalo grass and big sky, of pioneers and Rangers, of cattle drives and war with the Comanche, war with the Union, with Mexico and with each other. This is going to be so great. I will have so much fun . . . and so will my readers.

Junker Delight

25. July 2012 · Comments Off on Junker Delight · Categories: Domestic · Tags: ,

This week in the neighborhood where I live was designated for the annual bulk-trash pickup – so residents were notified a week or more ago. Once a year we can put out on the curb … well, just about anything except concrete rubble and chunks of stone. The city sends out a couple of long open-topped trailer trucks, and a special truck with a large mechanized claw that reaches down and gathers up the bulk items.

Well, all of those who have not been picked over thoroughly by the pros … and the other neighbors, of course. This year, we were amazed at how little was left for the city crew, as the professional junkers had already descended like a swarm of locusts. Usually there are only two or three; they are easily recognizable. They are the people driving battered pick-up trucks, sometimes towing a rough flat-bed trailer of the kind usually used to haul yard-maintenance equipment – and pick-up and trailer piled tower-high with salvage. Rusted-out barbeques, metal frames of this or that, battered furniture of all kinds, upholstered chairs with gruesomely stained upholstery and stuffing and springs bursting out of the cushions, clapped out appliances and monitors, cheap furniture with the thin veneer peeling off the disintegrating pressed-board that it is made out of, and construction grade kitchen/bathroom cabinets that have been replaced by upgrades …

Yes, and if I am sounding very familiar with the contents of what is put out in front of my neighbor’s houses … it’s because I am. We inspect the bulk-trash offerings quite thoroughly ourselves, and have shamelessly selected a number of still-useful and/or salvageable items for our own use. At least half of the ornamental elements in our garden were picked out of trash-piles, including a good number of large pots, plant-hangers, plant stands, a standard to hang a banner from, shepherd’s crooks, bird-houses, the big pottery chiminea, a small ornamental bench … and those that weren’t gleaned from the bulk trash were bought at yard sales for pennies on the original price. So, I have that funky-junky shabby chic style going in the garden. It works, and it’s cheap. A good number of the plants in it were also rescued from here and there.

This year it seemed like there were a much larger number of junkers, circulating. As soon as it hit the sidewalk, within minutes – or hours at best – the battered pickup swooped in, and the item was gone. We noted that one neighbor had put out three or four clapped-out vacuum or carpet-cleaning units; they were gone by the next day. I had read somewhere or other, of a tinkerer who would scoop up items like this, repair and clean them, and sell them for a small sum on eBay, and was doing very nicely out of it, too. There are gifted amateurs, people like my Dad who could take apart an appliance and put it back together again and have it work, but there wasn’t – well, until a bit ago – too many many professional small-mech tinkerers working the retail trade any moe, not when it’s usually cheaper to throw it away and buy a new one. When I wrote about this once before, commenters waxed lyrical about items they had salvaged entire, or rehabbed for their own use; it’s all to the good, you know – it’s all being recycled, one way or another. Better to fix it up, and use it again, than let it take up space in the dump.

This year, we put out a garden chaise lounge made from lengths of two-by-four, which had weathered to the point that it was near to falling apart. We had actually picked it out of a bulk-trash pile five or six years ago, but now the legs and armrests were rotting away, the squirrels had raided the cushion (bought on sale at Lowe’s at the end of the season) and I didn’t want to take the time or effort to repair it. It was gone by the next morning. My daughter thinks another neighbor scooped it up. It will be kind of amusing to see if it continues going the rounds.

The Spectacle of Wrecks on the Internet Superhighway

19. July 2012 · 2 comments · Categories: Book Event, Domestic

I am not one of those people who thrive on discord – which may be one of the reasons that I gave up posting on Open Salon yea these many months ago. I am at heart a rather peaceful and well-mannered person who does not actively seek out confrontation, on the internet or in real life … no really, stop laughing! I merely present myself as someone who doesn’t suffer fools lightly, and who will not hesitate to squash them, which has the pleasing result of not being very much bothered by fools. It’s called ‘presence’… and has worked out pretty well, actually online and in real life. I can easily count the number of fools I have squashed … only a dozen or so that I remember. And none of them came back for seconds.

I don’t deliberately slow down to gawk at epic highway pileups either … except that in real life, everyone ahead of you has slowed down anyway, and the full spectrum of destruction is spread before you. And as for epic internet crackups … one can go for months without being made particularly aware of them, but this week my attention was caught by news of the mother-in-law-of all internet crack-ups to do with books. This one I must pay some attention to, as books are my vocation. It’s a more appalling spectacle than the Great Books And Pals/Jacqueline Howett Review Crackup of 2011, which should have served as an object lesson in how an author should not respond to a mildly critical review. This fresh slice of internet literary hell is what I am dubbing the Great Stop the Goodreads Bullies Cluster of 2012.

Goodreads, for those who have not had it wander across their ken … is kind of like Facebook for book enthusiasts. More specifically, for readers of books – although I do have an author page there, for all the good it does me. Not much; this is why I am not inclined to spend much time and effort on it. Anyway, it seems that a handful (or maybe more) of the regular Goodreads reviewers have earned a reputation for what is – or could be interpreted – as snark, scathing wit, or just dismissive disinterest. As the fictional food critic, Anton Ego said, “…the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little, yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read.”

Yes, it is fun and easy to cut loose with all barrels on some hapless bit of publication – and since the mad and wonderful world of books in this year of our lord offers such a wide array of targets, I can’t really blame various Goodreads reviewers for being rather spiky and judgmental about books. It’s a site for readers, after all. And there are plenty of wallbangers out there. (That is, a book so awful that you throw it across the room hard enough to bang against the opposite wall) But handful of Goodreads reviewers who have have been colorfully blunt in expressing their opinion of particular books now are classed as bullies? And that a handful of aggrieved Goodreads members (who may be writers, or just overly-impassioned fans) have set up a website, specifically dedicated to ‘outing’ those reviewers, terming them ‘bullies’ and tacitly encouraging other people to stalk and harass them online and in their real off-line lives. The irony, it burns. OK then – is the principle being established here is that the cure for bullying is … more bullying? Must be merely one of those interesting coincidences that the intended targets of Stop the Goodreads Bullies are women … oh, and the whole schmezzle of revealing Goodreads members personal information is a violation of the Goodreads policies, anyway.

Say, was there some act of Congress or the current regime passed lately which demanded that all book reviews are slavishly adoring, else the wrath of someone-or-other be excited? Is this the natural outcome of giving trophies for participation? Are certain writers thinking, “I wrote a book so I deserve nothing but glowing reviews for it?” I’ve reviewed books myself, often enough, and now and again administered an unfavorable or a mixed review. Not too many of those lately, as really don’t want to waste valuable hours reading a stinker, and fortunately the ‘Look Inside’ feature pretty much lets me screen out the really awful selections. A review isn’t a advertisement for the book; it is, or ought to be at the very least, a reasoned analysis of why or why not a reader should spend a good few hours of their life reading it. Nothing more, nothing less, although this rule is frequently trampled upon.

The bottom line is that the only response an author should make for a favorable, or even mildly critical review – and even if any response should be made is debatable among the cognoscenti – is, “Thank you for your consideration.” For a critical or scathing review – no response at all is best. There is no crying in baseball, and there should be no whining from authors; especially not to the extent of setting up a website to complain about being bullied. You put your stuff out there for everyone with the interest or the wherewithal to read it. Accept that there will be a number among them who will not like it, miss the point entirely, fail to grasp the whole point … well, grownups and professionals bleed about that silently and move on. Comfort yourself with those reviews and the appreciation of people who did get the point, and who loooooove it.

Frankly, I also comfort myself against unappreciative reviews by going and looking at my vast collection of publisher and agent rejections for Truckee’s Trail and Adelsverein. I think of it as the best kind of plate armor against bad reviews.

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