Napoleon by de la Mare

 

“What is the world, O soldiers?

It is I:

I, this incessant snow,

This northern sky;

Soldiers, this solitude

Through which we go

Is I.”

 

– by Walter de la Mare (1873-1956)

 

N.B. I am rethinking my opinion of Bonaparte after reading Barbero’s The Battle and, naturally, Cornwall’s Sharpe’s Waterloo.

 

Newest Member of the Family

 

So proud of Patch, now a thirteen-year-old Middle Schooler on her way to High School in ten months! She saved up all her allowance money, plus the money we’ve paid her for doing odds and ends and projects she promoted to us since we’ve moved down her to Texas, and decided to buy this little guitar, to the right of mine in the picture above.

Wow!

At first, two weeks ago out of the blue, she sprung on me that she wanted to buy a ukulele she saw hanging in the music store we frequent every now and then when they need reeds for their school instruments or I need a new gadget for my electric guitar setup. Why a ukulele? Well, she tried my acoustic guitar and thought it was too big for her hands. She wants to play guitar eventually, as two of her good friends do, and she thought a uke would be a good stepping stone.

When we got to the store yesterday, we discovered the price was $20 more – $90 – than advertised on the pic she took. Turns out it was on sale back then, but that was over. Now, rather than haggling over price with the sales staff (I’m not a good haggler), I spotted a small starter guitar for $110 hanging on the wall. Well, it took little effort to convince her on purchasing the more expensive (and better) product, especially since I sweetened the pot by stating I would throw in $10 plus pay for the sales tax and a bag of picks, so she’d only have to put up a cool C-note. She agreed.

Last night I taught her the names of the strings, the G-chord, the D-chord, and a simple blues progression. Oh, and the notes for “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” That’s it for now. Maybe in a week I’ll teach her how to tune it, and maybe the E and C chords. She’s a personality that has to be pulled, not pushed.

But I did give her this ultimatum: I want her to be able to play songs with me this time next year.

Return to Middle-earth

 

Despite my heartiest efforts, my children are not Tolkien fans. Perhaps it’s the coarsening of our culture and the desensitization that entails; perhaps its oversaturation of all things from the pen of the Professor since the dawn of the new century. All I knew was that when I first read it forty years ago as a young lad entering high school, no one else seemed to know about it except for one uncle and one of my pals. It opened up a world of magic and hope, goodness and virtue, my first encounter with an entirely new world. After reading through the novels I’d spend hours and hours soaking up the information in the two massive Tolkien encyclopedias that were out, piecing the history of Middle-earth together, part detective, part archaeologist.

I wanted this thrill for my two daughters, for at least the past six or seven years.

But despite a passing interest in The Hobbit, and a ten-year-old Little One inexplicably forcing her Grammy to buy her a ratted and torn used copy of The Fellowship of the Ring, neither one read much of Tolkien. That fire never ignited.

So I was quite surprised when three weeks ago they suggested we do a Lord of the Rings movie marathon.

I’ll take it!

Thrifting is one of their hobbies, which they normally do with their mom. Now that we’re here in Texas, they’ve discovered about a half-dozen quality stores to hunt at. The last one they dragged me to one Sunday afternoon. I go in with them initially, for two reasons: to make sure the place ain’t sketchy, and to see if there are any used books for sale. This place was borderline acceptable, and they did sell books. They also sold DVDs. So, for a dollar, I picked up a three-DVD set of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings theatrical releases. Nine hours and twenty minutes of Tolkien. I found the movies acceptable interpretations, not without fault but with some certain charms, when I first saw them in the theaters nearly two decades ago.

I hadn’t watched them in at least a decade, so I figured I’d do a marathon of all three on a day I found myself alone should the ladies go out for the day.

A week or two after this the Mrs. had her sales meeting come up. She’d be flying up to New York City for six days, and I’d be watching / entertaining / chauffeuring my two teenaged hellions, in a new land navigating a new job. So it was to my utter surprise and delight when they suggested the marathon.

It took us eight days to get through the trilogy. Usually because we only had an hour a night to watch it after homework was done and dinner was prepared, eaten, and the kitchen cleaned. We do maintain a strict 9:30/10:00 curfew for them (basically electronics get turned off at that time). And the girls prefer showering before bed. Factor in a late night dining out over the weekend, and that’s the reason it took eight days.

And they were into it, right away! Didn’t hurt that as teenage girls they had certain crushes on certain actors and / or teased each other about potential crushes. Even the Mrs. infatuation with Viggo Mortensen was brought up several times, with various “Ews!” and “I can see that.” But even better, they got into the story. Patch was a little rusty on the geo-politics going on in the background, so I’d have to explain that to her on her early morning school drop off, which told me she was ruminating about it over the night.

[… clenches fist in glee …]

But what a wonderful eight days! Imagine spending such a drawn out time in Middle-earth! The Shire, Bree, Rivendell, Moria, Lothlorien, Rohan, Isengard, Fanghorn Forest, Helm’s Deep, Rauros, the Dead Marshes, Gondor, Minas Tirith, Osgiliath, … Cirith Ungol, Mordor, and Mount Doom, ... and then the Grey Havens.

I hope they got an appreciation for the physical, mental, and spiritual ordeal Frodo went through. I hope the message of courage, perseverance, loyalty and friendship sunk in. I hope they got a sense of the wide-scale cold war between Good and Evil that occasionally erupts into hot war in our current contemporary culture, as seen in metaphor in Tolkien’s writings. I hope they can decipher the hidden Catholic imagery in the story. I hope …

Right now the best takeaway is a possible budding interest in the Professor’s works. Little One is not a reader at this stage of her life (the only non-school-assigned book she’s read recently is Stephen King’s The Stand, which she’s been working her way through over two years, which translates to a rate of about two pages a day). But Patch is a reader. Her most recent notch was Dean R. Koontz’s Lightning, which I bought for her as a birthday present two months back. I can see her wending her way through Middle-earth. She’s about the age I was when I first did.

So that was my highlight early in November. Perhaps this time of year, when the sun sets noticeably early, when the frost first drifts over the Texas plains, when the cold bright moon casts wraithlike shadows … maybe I’ll have to start a new tradition of watching and re-watching some Tolkien with the girls

(But not The Hobbit trilogy!!!)

Book Review: Dracula

 

© 1897 by Bram Stoker

I’m kinda ashamed of myself, amateur literati of science fiction, fantasy, and horror that I claim to be, that I’ve never read Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Yeah, I saw the Bela Lugosi black-and-white Universal movie as a kid. I saw the Christopher Lee Hammer version around the same time. And not only did I see Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 Bram Stoker’s Dracula, I even visited his vineyard, which has an entire wing devoted to all his film memorabilia. As the lady giving us our tour said, quoting the great director, and I’m paraphrasing: “Godfather bought me a mansion in Napa; Dracula bought me the vineyard.”

Well, this year I cracked it. Took me about ten nights over the course of … thirteen days … to finish it, read over the Halloween holiday down here, just as the nights are starting to turn a bit crisp. It was a good mood setter, as I read most of it at night after everyone went to bed, in the semi-darkness of my living room. I’m glad I now have this notch in my reading shelf, along with Frankenstein read a few weeks earlier. This was like a bucket-list kinda thing.

First thing to note, is that, similar to Frankenstein, Dracula is an epistolary novel. That is, a novel made up of letters, or, more specifically, diary entries. It seems everyone not only kept a diary at the end of the 19th century, but all these diarists were quite prolix and prolific. No detail escapes the pens of these observers, all presumably written in the twilight hours before sleep. Even dialects are written out in their diaries phonetically.

The 19th century epistolary letter is like the “found footage” movie phenomenon that began with The Blair Witch Project and continues twenty-five years later to this day. And readers of epistolary novels must do what viewers of found footage movies must do: suspend belief, and allow the story to unfold, however it may be told.

Which is what I did.

In truth the experience was a mixed bag. I’ll assume you know the story; the Lugosi and Coppola films do not deviate too much from it. The novel can be divided into three parts: Jonathan Harker and the Count at the castle, the turning of Lucy and the reaction of her three suitors, and the hunting of Dracula. The first part I found creepy and page-turning, though I couldn’t get the image of Keanu Reeves out of my head. I thought the second, by-far-longest part regarding Lucy, though eerie in areas (“Bloofer Lady”), dragged a lot. I bet in abridged versions of the novel this section is cut nearly in half. The third part, which begins with Van Helsing’s exposition regarding the Count, was quite interesting in a cat-and-mouse way. This was the best part.

I liked how Stoker dropped some clues through Van Helsing of the vampire’s origin, such as veiled references to a school of the devil (which I had heard about from other sources years ago). Whether truth or myth, it was legitimately spooky. I enjoyed how the Count stayed one step ahead of his pursuers, and even tried to bluff his way to overwhelm them with his powers. Stoker portrays the vampire as a filthy evil beast deserving of no sympathy, and he got none. However, I did feel a pang of sympathy for the one of Lucy’s suitors who succumbs to his wounds in the fight with Dracula at the very end.

Overall, I award the novel a B+.

It got me thinking of what else should be on the bucket list regarding horror. In my twenties I read a lot of it, mostly King and Koontz. But since then, reading three or four horror books a year, I filled in the holes in the history or horror quite nicely. A lot of Lovecraft and Poe. Forays into modern horror with Clive Barker and Peter Straub. Classics here and there like The Haunting of Hill House, The Exorcist, Silence of the Lambs, and The Terror, to name but a few.

But what else? Who else?

Nothing really sticks out at me as far as modern horror goes. I do have a curious interest in gothic horror of the middle to late 1700s. Maybe for next Halloween I’ll read The Castle of Otranto (1764) or Vathek (1786) or The Monk (1796). It all depends on what I can find and what my gut tells me about each book. Oh well. The quest continues …

 

Makarios

 

God forgive me a sinner, for I have never done anything good before Thee

But deliver me from the Evil One, and let Thy will be done in me

So I can open my unworthy mouth without condemnation, and praise Thy holy and majestic name all the days of my life

Father, Son and Holy Spirit, now and forever and to the ages of ages, Amen.

 

Return to Napoleonic France

 

Over the past eighteen months or so I’ve been reading a lot about warfare. Specifically, World War II. I enjoy more “birds-eye” books rather than “ground-level” ones, “strategic books” on the art of war rather than “tactical” books on the practice of it. And there’s a reason. The atrocities committed by the Nazis tends to destroy one’s faith in humanity, and more. It wears one down. Not only the atrocities by Hitler’s band of evil thugs, but also those committed by the Japanese and the Soviets. Even the allies are not immune, with the questionable ethics behind their use of strategic air warfare, i.e. the firebombing of civilians in Tokyo and Dresden.

There’s also another angle why I’m taking an undefined break from World War II. It’s the Sovietization of the workplace, and the public square, that’s happening in America c. 2020-21. Read or talk about Nazis, and soon enough you’re accused of being one. It’s inevitable. Same thing goes for the Civil War, of which I was an interested student since 2012. With the craziness behind America’s current Race obsession, white supremacy, and the tearing down of Confederate statues, one best not discuss the Civil War, the war where 250,000 white Northern soldiers gave their lives for the ultimate goal of ending slavery.

Anyway, about six or eight weeks ago, when I was mulling all this over in my head, I remembered Napoleon. Over the years I’ve read several books on the Napoleonic era (roughly 1796-1815). In college I had a great history professor who ignited this interest to the point where I read two books on the French Revolution on my own. This lead to an immense biography of Napoleon, which I enjoyed immensely. In 2017 I read a neat book called Napoleon as Military Commander, where each chapter delved into one of the man’s 12 or 15 great battles. Two years later I read a different thick tome of biography. So I realized, why not dive into the Napoleonic Wars? Surely 2020-21 America wouldn’t have a problem with me doing that, would it?

Another factor that steered me in this direction was the search for an epic book series to lose myself in. Someone on some internet bulletin board recommended the works of Bernard Cornwall. He wrote a dozen or so paperbacks featuring Napoleonic soldier Richard Sharpe over the course of Napoleon’s campaigns. Sounded interesting and the endorsement was legit. So I used birthday money and purchased two of those books. They’re on deck.

Then, scanning the World History shelves of a massive used books store, this softcover 450-page tome caught my eye:

The Battle: A History of the Battle of Waterloo, © 2003 by Alessandro Barbero (translated from the Italian by John Cullen)

Once my Halloween reading, Dracula, was completed, I leaped into it. It’s a fast read. I am hallway done with the 424 pages. Each chapter is a manageable 5-7 pages that examines a certain area of the Battle of Waterloo in a way not too deep to get lost in the weeds but deep and clear enough where one can visualize and follow the battle. The whole thing moves in an easy, chronological order, and contains many interesting facts.

For instance, this one:

Several historians and students of the battle, over the years, have analyzed the relationship between battlefield deaths and logistics. Consider the musket, the main weapon used by the infantry. A rather poor weapon and highly inaccurate. Curious generals at the time tested various models. If one shot a musket at a target 30 feet wide and 6 feet high, at a distance of a hundred paces, about 75 percent of the shots would land. However, in the heat of battle and the fog of war, with targets moving and shooting back at you, this figure could dwindle as low as 5 percent.

One historian looked at the data and concluded that for every battlefield death, 459 musket balls were fired. Another came up with a figure of one out of 162. Yet another proposed a one out of 227 calculation. For my amateur musings, I took the rounded average: one out of every 282 shots were lethal.

So if you were in a formation of a hundred infantrymen, facing another similar formation at a hundred yards of basically open field, advancing and firing upon one another, what are your statistical chances of survival?

Well, consider the fact that the musket could be fired twice a minute and each engagement lasted about ten minutes. That’s about two hundred shots a minute heading at you and your fellow men. Two thousand in a typical encounter. If 5 percent hit their mark, then a hundred musket balls would land. One for each member of your group. Not all would be lethal, however.

Now look at that one out of every 282 shots being lethal. In this scenario, seven men would be killed. (2,000 shots divided by 282 lethal ones.) Though you’d have nearly a hundred percent chance, on average, of being hit, 93 percent of the time you’d survive with minor or major, nonfatal wounds. Still, I marvel at the courage these men must have had to fight these battles.

Review of the book to follow in a week or two.

Gogh!

 

See this picture?

It’s my new favorite picture. Well, maybe not my favorite, but after Sunday, it’s one that definitely intrigues me.

What happened Sunday that triggered this interest in a painting I had never seen before?

The painting is called “Starry Night over the Rhone,” and was created in September of 1888 by Vincent Van Gogh. On Sunday I saw it for the first time. Well, not the original, for that sits in a museum in Paris. No, the “Starry Night over the Rhone” I saw was a replica at the Arlington Van Gogh Interactive Exhibit.

You must have seen the ubiquitous advertisements for the Van Gogh Interactive Exhibit. They’re all over the internet. I’ve been seeing them – and clicking away from them – for probably more than a year now.

But the wife thought it would be a neat thing to do with the little ones, now in high school and middle school. Patch, our just-turned-thirteen youngest, is a natural and gifted artist. Little One, now seventeen, has a keen photographer’s – and photoshopper’s – eye. I shrugged and figured it would be a pleasant ninety minutes, and I might learn something.

I’m here to tell you that if you have some time to kill, a modest interest in the arts, and about $40 to spend on a ticket, to go see it. Well worth it.

Unfortunately, the Mrs. booked it on a Sunday when the Cowboys were playing in town. Their stadium is adjacent to the old Rangers stadium, which is where the exhibit was located. (It did not take up the entire baseball stadium; it was a group of six or seven rectangular rooms, each of which could hold about twenty people.) Our tickets were for 3 pm, but we got there late, just as the football stadium was emptying out. Mobs of Cowboys fans cluttered the streets and caravans of cars cluttered the roadways egressing the surrounding parking lots.

So after a frustrating half hour we finally found parking for the exhibit. My only beef is that masks were mandatory. Two drunk Dallas fans – girthsome ladies wearing giant foam cowboy hats – followed us into the elevator. Once out, we showed our tickets and went inside. The ladies asked for a bathroom, and were politely declined.

The first rooms held replicas of Van Gogh’s paintings as well as giant boards detailing his tragic life. I knew he died young by his own hand – Lust for Life starring Kirk Douglas as the tormented painter is one of my favorite biopics – but did not know that he died at age 37. I saw his self-portraits, his sunflower paintings, the swirling, more famous, other “Starry Night,” among many others.

Then we got to the interactive rooms.

This was my first taste of V-R, virtual reality, and it blew me away. We sat on stools and put on the V-R helmets, and I was Van Gogh. I rose from my bed in my Spartan room, went down the stairs, exited, walked through town, through a meadow, down to the docks. Along the way I talked about art, colors, expression. Paintings would materialize out of thin air putting my words into action. I could turn this way and that, stare at a cow, at ravens, at the blue and red houses along the river where Van Gogh himself lived and painted. It was hyper-surreal and I enjoyed it immensely.

Another room held three-dimensional representations of his paintings. The one I found most interesting was one of his room, which he painted three different times three different ways. After that we went up stairs into the largest rectangular room, where dozens of projectors flashed moving paintings and images of the painter, morphing this way and that, drizzling along the floor, spiraling among the ceiling. The orbs of starry night spun weblike among the walls. The rivers undulated and pulsated acid-trip like around us. And all the while the most beautiful soundtrack played. Not quite Debussy, but just as evocative.

The last room was a gift shop. Because the wife bought us VIP tickets, we all got posters. We’ll frame one. The girls bought earrings which featured a Van Gogh motif. I asked the lady behind the counter if they sold a CD of the music we heard in the immersion room. She said no, and commented that a lot of people ask for that.

So I learned a little bit about Vincent Van Gogh. Both my girls painted their interpretations of the other, more famous “Starry Night” in school. I framed Little One’s, but when Patch got to do her version Covid hit, and we never were able to retrieve it from the school. I had wanted to frame both and hang them side by side in my writing office. Oh well. I have other Patch works to frame, once they’re all unpacked.

Afterwards we hit the girls favorite Dallas sushi bar, that one a mile or two from Dealey Plaza I blogged about way back in August.

Oh, I forgot to mention – passing through the gift store, in a good-natured attempt to embarrass my three girls, I loudly exclaimed, in a moderately crowed room, “So this VAN GOGG [rhymes with “bog”], he was a painter?!?!?”

What's Hopper Been Up To?

 

Also known as, Where in the World is Hopper?

Still living in an unnamed Dallas suburb, starting our fifth month here. Not much has changed since I last posted that enigmatic dog soup photoshop two weeks ago. Work is progressing as I’m learning the policies and procedures of my new multinational masters, becoming more efficient at my tasks and thus becoming less stressed out at the weekly and monthly deadlines that hurl themselves at me with abandon. The wife is excelling at her job as well, even more so than I, which is nice because it’s the major reason we moved down here from blue to red state. The girls are adjusting at their schools. All is on a fairly even keel.

We still manage to do some fun stuff every weekend. The girls enjoyed Halloween two weeks ago, dressing up as characters from this thing called Minecraft. They each scored a generous amount of candy in their rucksacks, and I was surprised that our own doorbell only rang about 10 times in the three hours I sat in my well-lit front office. We live on the corner of two streets across from a neighborhood park, so I was expecting more foot traffic. As a result, I will be forced to eat two large bags of candy leftover for the trick-or-treaters.

Broke out the telescope to view Jupiter and Saturn. Resolution was too low to see Jupiter’s bands, but I’m almost positive I saw Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto. Little One is sure, too. The rest of the evening we focused on the quarter moon, until she got bored of it.

I’ve been alternating periods of sluggishness with periods of brisk walking. I even broke out the weight bench and bars. I have a 15-pound bar for bench pressing, squats, etc., a triceps bar for that muscle, and a curl bar for that exercise. Also about three hundred pounds of metal weights. Patch says she’d like to start lifting with me, but she’s in between seasons right now (Volleyball in the Fall, Soccer in the Spring) so they have her lifting and running at school. Not having done any serious lifting in almost 15 years, I tested it out with her spotting me. I was able to bench press 105 pounds ten times. Don’t laugh; I could probably go heavier but I’m at an age where things will break easily if overdone.

My guitar playing has leapt a plateau. Not only have I written enough material for three albums, not only have I learned about twenty new songs to play on the electric, but I’ve seemed to have developed a nice, melodic vibrato, something that had eluded me and relegated me to songwriter / rhythm guitar status during my active days. I like playing the leads on “Beck’s Bolero,” “Blue Sky” by the Allman Brothers, the little solo in “White Wedding,” and the syrupy stylings of George Harrison’s “Something,” among others. Even trying my hand at Van Halen (“Jump,” “Running with the Devil,” “Ain’t Talkin’ Bout Love”).

And I’m continuing to work on my shrouded-in-secrecy magnum opus. It’s like chipping away at a massive block of granite and hoping something like Rodin’s Thinker will somewhat appear before I exit stage left of this earthly existence.

Anyway, more to come. I’ve written a few blog posts to put up here every other day or so. These include a revisit to Middle-earth, a revisit to Napoleonic France, a revisit to Jimmy Page and John Lennon, and a review of my Halloween reading, Bram Stoker’s Alucard.

Hope to see you back …

 

Inside Joke

 

(Courtesy of Little One, my resident photoshopper)