Meet Me in Strasbourg: A Romance Novel from which You Can Learn a Lot about Music

I recently posted an essay about the Stan Rice novel Meet Me in Strasbourg.

 

 

To many people, music is just a pleasant background noise. Occasionally a good tune will stick in a person’s mind. But in this novel, Tony’s experiences will show you how the more you know about music, the more meaningful it becomes, until it encapsulates your life. Examples include:

• The novel is centered around Die Winterreise, a song cycle by Franz Schubert which, like other Schubert song cycles, is about a lovelorn wanderer mourning the rejection of his love. Die Winterreise begins with the wanderer going to his love’s house to bid farewell to it. Then he sings about one thing after another that reminds him of how miserable he is. At the end, he gives up and joins with a penniless organ-grinder (Der Leiermann) on the street. Only Schubert’s astonishing music can rescue this poetry from utter depression. As the principal characters Tony and Aimée develop their friendship and love, their direction is certainly not that of Schubert’s wanderer. They swear that there will be no Leiermann for them! Then circumstances beyond their control intervene and crash their comfortable love.
• Tony composes band music, just good enough to perform. Having composed wind ensemble music myself, rather indifferently, I can testify that it is a very difficult task.
• Tony plays the recorder, and this music plays an essential role in bringing him and Aimée together.
• In a concert, the band plays an arrangement of the medieval hymn Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence, which has (as many of you can attest) an almost magical effect upon the mind. Its climax verse is “And the powers of Hell shall vanish as the darkness fades away.” Is this really true? The stirring music forces the question upon the minds of Tony and Aimée. I will write about this in my other blog, the one devoted to religion [https: christianagnostics.blogspot.com]. 

One could almost believe that, in Meet Me in Strasbourg, by Stan Rice, music is not a background but a character.

The Ecology of Fiction Publication, part one. Publishers vs. Kindle

I have frequently written on this blog about my non-fiction publications. But I have also written a huge amount of fiction. My fiction would be very hard to sell to commercial publishers, because I have so much religion in them. Commercial publishers think no one would want to read a novel about God and the meaning of life. Nobody, that is, except people like you who are reading this blog. You can learn a lot about the Bible by reading my novels. Commercial fiction publishers don’t like books that teach people things, especially about the Bible.

I am no amateur in fiction writing. I have been writing fiction for decades, often rewriting the same story or novel over and over until I get it as good as it can be. In the process, I have removed whole chunks of text that I originally thought were really good but which I admitted would not advance the plot and might, however well written, cause the reader to give up.

But I have almost no fiction publications—just in a couple of minor literary journals that no longer exist. I have earned a grand total of $25, which I sent to a writer and environmentalist who, unlike me, had no steady employment. So the question arose, decades ago, how should I publish my fiction?

The days of submitting manuscripts “over the transom” ended decades ago. Now, to approach an editor of even a small press, you have to be represented by an agent. When I started writing fiction, agents were actual people, and they sent me personal responses. But now, the prospective fiction writer seldom gets any response whatsoever, and if so, it is a form letter. I now have the suspicion, in the modern age of artificial intelligence, that agents almost never read submissions, because they already know what they are going to send to publishers: the works written by their friends, themselves under a different name, or by an AI program they have installed. They claim to be looking for new talent, but I simply do not believe it. In fact, agents may actually themselves be artificial intelligences. They may have their photos on the agency website, but they may not be actual people. An agency can leave the entire process—choosing which manuscripts, if any, to represent, and then sending them to editors—to artificial intelligence. I have encountered a grand total of about five agents out of hundreds who have given personal responses that indicate that they are human. An AI bot can write fiction that is as marketable as that written by most human authors. I guess what I am saying is that getting a fiction agent for a commercial publisher is practically impossible. I have been told this by many authors—you know, the ones that spend their time and money going to writers’ conferences.

For many years, an attractive alternative has been to self-publish on Amazon. Gone are the days of vanity presses, where the author pays for a few hundred copies of the book to be printed, and then the author has to figure out what to do with them. These are the days of Amazon, in two ways:

First, no commercial publisher can afford to do “print-on-demand,” because there has to be a minimum print run of at least a thousand books each day to justify the costs of printing. But Amazon can do it, because they sell so many books. It does not have to be a thousand copies of the same book. Print-on-demand is one of the Amazon options. If just one person wants your book, they can get it.

Second, e-books cost very little to produce. A Kindle book can be produced and sent to customers with very little cost, except for maintaining the servers. Once again, if just one person wants your e-book, they can get it.

Kindle publishing is rather clumsy. If it is just text, as in most novels, it works fine. But I have never seen a really satisfactory illustration in a Kindle book. It usually ends up really small and illegible.

The advantages of Kindle books are astonishing. The software, at least now, is relatively simple. You provide a cover illustration (just the front cover), a document with the whole book in it, financial information, the jacket blurb (which will show up on the Amazon site), etc. You can do it all yourself. If you mess something up, you will get an email telling you what to fix. The best part might be that the author gets to keep 70 percent of the money. In contrast, a commercial publisher offers 10 percent, which must be split with an agent. This would mean an author gets 8 percent. A hundred books (@$5.00) generates $500, of which the author gets to keep $350. From a commercial publisher, you would get $40.

Now, for the ecology of book publishing. It is like a tree or bush disseminating its seeds. There are lots of ways of doing this. A tree could produce a few, large seeds, inside of fruits that animals want to eat; or a lot of small seeds, that blow away in the wind. Wild plant species use both options, just like a writer could use the agent/publisher option or the Amazon option. There is, in the world of publishing just as in seed dispersal, no single correct way of doing it. I spent decades on the agent/publisher route, and am now ready to try the Kindle route. My first Kindle novel just came out today.

What you don’t want to do is to publish online and then ignore all publicity. Fruits and seeds dispersed by animals put a lot of expenditure into publicity—that is, into attracting animals to disperse them. Publicity—that’s what the next essays are about.

Debt and Instant Gratification

One of the supposedly Christian values is to stay away from materialism. But America, the supposedly Christian nation, is extremely materialist, and France, the supposedly secular nation, is much less materialist. 

I just finished sending in my French tax statement. I have not paid the taxes yet, since the French government will figure out what I owe and take it out of my bank account. But I had to let them know how much I’d already paid in American taxes, for which they will not double-charge me. Last year my French tax was zero; apparently my American taxes were higher. I do not need to report interest from savings accounts; the banks automatically send this information to the French tax bureau.

Even if taxes are higher in France, something of which I am not convinced based on personal experience, life is really nice here. Many services are available to the public. I am glad to live here. Life just seems calmer here.

One indicator of this is credit card debt. I finally paid all my consumer debt off before I left America, and here in France, not only do I have none, but it is legally difficult to get in debt unless it is for a mortgage. Americans, averaging $5915 in credit card debt, have the highest debt levels in the world; France is number 18, with an average of $1616. There are many reasons for this, of which I will mention just two.

First, France has really good health care and virtually nobody has medical bankruptcy. In America, medical debt is the leading cause of bankruptcy, affecting (according to Forbes) 530,000 Americans a year. Americans usually charge their expensive medicines to credit cards (I did), and this adds up to quite a chunk of change. It is over $600 per person. Medicines are cheap in France; for one of my medicines, forty times cheaper even without government insurance.

Second, the French have less instant gratification than Americans. The attitude in America seems to be, I gotta git me one of them things, while in France it seems to be, For what would I need that thing? The French spend less on personal pleasures (except wine and cheese), and I see very few ostentatious cars. Their number one vacation destination is someplace else in France. Gasoline is more expensive here, but their cars are smaller and they drive less, especially when commuting. They save up to buy small houses. Only hunters have guns, and not very many.

In this second way, I think the French are less materialistic than Americans. They are satisfied with waiting, and with less.

Department of War

Most of us have grown up hearing about DOD (Department of Defense), and this is still how it is universally known. However, the Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has decided to rename it the Department of War, and that is how you will find it on the official federal website. The index of departments and agencies still lists it as Defense, but its leaders consider it the Department of War.

 

 

It is difficult to overestimate the importance of this change, to America, and in the eyes of the world.

Consider how one would evaluate the effectiveness of a federal agency. If it is the Department of Defense, the question we need to answer is, Is America being adequately defended? I am not including those tasks that have been assigned to the Department of Homeland Security. Since most Americans do not live in fear of foreign aggression, we could conclude that DOD is doing its job and the Secretary of Defense is doing his.

But if we call it Department of War, then this department has to be fighting a war somewhere, or else it is not doing its job. If America is not fighting a war, then the War Department is effectively inoperative. This is why Pete Hegseth believes that, at any given time, America must be fighting at least one war. Otherwise, Hegseth is not doing his job.

People often ask if there is an Iran exit strategy. If not, what is it that we are trying to accomplish? But that is not the right question. We need to have at least one war, and from this war we must not have an exit strategy. We must be permanently at war. In this sense, the cease-fire is blocking the department from doing its job.

This is what our supposed allies think when they see us. Here is the view from the UK. We are a nation that must be permanently at war. War is our identity. And we must find someone to conduct war against. Right now it is Iran. Who will it be next? Will it still be Iran five years from now? Or will we find another target? But we must have one or more targets or else we, as a nation, are failures.

That, at least, must be the view of Trump and Hegseth.

The Only Way to Stop the Tide of Illegal Immigration?

The tide of illegal immigration from or through Mexico slowed down just once in recent years, and that was during the 2009 economic collapse, which was caused entirely by selfish billionaires trying to trick their investors. The Big Short, we could call it, as in the movie. This suggests that if immigrants see that they won’t find work in America, they will stop coming.

That is, the only way American can stop the immigrants is by making itself infernal. Hellish.

Already, this is the view that many Europeans have of America. European tourism in America has declined precipitously for several reasons, including social disruption and the danger of disease and gun violence. Why would tourists want to come to America when they have to stand in line many hours to get on an airplane, where they might get shot by a gun, and when they might get a disease that Europe has eradicated within its borders?

A funny little thing happened this morning at the post office, when I was mailing my taxes to America (federal and state). For many years, I have written “Internal Revenue Service” in such a way that “Internal” was clearly written with a T but which, with a little imagination, you could read as an F. I asked for delivery confirmation. Europe has stopped delivery confirmation directly to the United States, but the UK still does it, so Europe sends delivery confirmation parcels to the UK. (Fortunately, as I told the clerk, pas d’urgence.) He printed out my receipt with the tracking number, then wrote by hand the place to which I was sending the letter: He clearly wrote, in capital letters. INFERNAL REVENU. Perhaps he realized what it meant; in French, hell is enfer.

So if Trump turns America into a dictatorship in which, from one moment to the next, even citizens do not know what their rights might be, the economy will collapse and the immigration problem will be solved, come hell or l’eau haute.

Sexual Selection and Music: Nannerl's story

Something to think about (music and sex) as spring arrives.

Back when I was taking music courses as an undergraduate at the University of California, Santa Barbara, everyone was wondering why the great musicians were male. Not all of them, of course; two female composers, Thea Musgrave and Emma Lou Diemer, were on our faculty. Clara Schumann, Robert’s wife, was an example from the nineteenth century. More recently, there was Dawn Upshaw. But this list is very short, compared to the list of famous male composers.

It is easy to attribute this solely to male oppression of females. Male domination in music is just another example of male domination of society in general.

But there is another factor at work. Males often show off to other males, and to potential female mates, in the hopes of increasing their mating opportunities, within or outside of a pair-bond, in humans as in many other animal species. While this often takes destructive forms, such as war and abuse, it can also take creative forms, especially in big-brained humans. Artistic or intellectual creativity is often a way in which males can show off. We all know of the spectacular paintings on European cave walls. But those same caves echoed the music of bone flutes and drums by which musicians (perhaps mostly male) enthralled their congregations.

This happens more often males than females because evolutionary fitness in males often results largely from the number of mates, while this is not true so much in females. For a man, reproduction can consist of a single sex act, while for a woman the whole process of pregnancy, childbirth, and raising children may be her burden alone. Thankfully, there are many of us men who are nurturing and faithful rather than rapacious. But a male can have hundreds of offspring (or thousands, for Genghis Khan) while no woman can have that many. The inevitable result of sexual competition is that some men have lots of offspring, while most of the others compete with one another for whatever women are left.

Women also compete with one another to have the best males as the fathers of their children. Also, women need to have musical ability in order to recognize it in men. Anna Schindler, herself only a passable musician, nevertheless recognized the genius of Gustav Mahler and maneuvered herself into being his wife. Nevertheless, sexual competition is stronger in men than in women.

Sexual selection must have chosen whatever genetic basis there is for musical ability, in men more than in women. But that genetic basis cannot be found only in men. Men have a Y chromosome, which is largely a lump of useless DNA. The genetic basis of musical proficiency must be found on either the X chromosome or the non-sexual chromosomes, and this means that it shows up perhaps just as frequently in girls as in boys. In the absence of ongoing sexual election, musical ability, even if it began as a male characteristic, would soon equalize itself between the sexes.

And this is why even spectacular musical ability shows up in females even if it started in males thousands of years ago.

Everyone has heard of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who was clearly a musical genius. But did you know he had a sister who was perhaps just as gifted as he was? She was a superb keyboardist, and her father Leopold took her on concert tours throughout Europe at the same time as he took young Wolfgang. Audiences were perhaps even more impressed with the beautiful Maria Anna Mozart (nicknamed Nannerl) than with her little brother who could do musical tricks. But her father convinced her that her only chance for success was as a performer and teacher, and as a wife. While she continued teaching and performing until her own death, decades later than Wolfgang’s, none of her compositions survive. One movie I saw (of several that have been made) showed her, at about fifteen years old, sadly burning her compositions in the family fireplace. It turns out Wolfgang was a genius; but perhaps Nannerl was also. We will never know.

 

Natural and sexual selection, drivers of human evolution, are not destiny. The adaptations they provide must be continually maintained by culture, as I explained above. As culture evolves, the forces of selection can change. Thankfully they are already doing so. When I was in high school, most brass players in school bands were boys, except the very competent Linda. The girls chose flute and clarinet. When I was in California State Honor Band in 1974, I was the last chair baritone horn player. The first chair player (in the concert band) was a black girl. She was really good. I admired her for her pioneering spirit on her instrument and for the way she represented her ethnicity. This was an important part of my development, coming as I did from a racist family.

There are forces that try to suppress opportunities for women. A few years ago, there was a scandal among the Southern Baptists because male leaders often seduced females without serious punishment. The church’s response? There were a few women in positions of Southern Baptist leadership. The church removed them and forbade women to be in such positions at all.

But even religion cannot completely hide female talent. Probably every church choir director has heard of composer Natalie Sleeth. Things look pretty grim for women in conservative religion, but I suspect things will never get as bad as a Margaret Atwood novel.

The Tortilla Curtain: Nightmares about Possible Worlds

A lot of alternative-future fiction is nightmares about what could happen if we project current trends forward into the future. We could also call these alternative-fiction nightmares “prophecies,” because that is what Old Testament prophecies were: they were not predictions about what would actually happen, but speculations about what might happen if current (to the prophets, sinful) conditions continued.

Rolando J. Diaz wrote a collection of stories in 2007 called Tales of the Tortilla Curtain. In his stories, set in the middle of the 21^st century, the Tortilla Curtain was an actual very high wall that ran along the entire border of Mexico and the United States, like an unhealable wound. It had every imaginable type of technological gadget for detecting anyone trying to enter the United States illegally from Mexico, and then eliminating them. This would include land mines and automatic machine guns that would pulverize anyone crossing the border without prior authorization. Most of the border enforcement was coordinated by Dusty, the name by which the Data Systems Tracker was known. It was an artificial intelligence that pretended to be friendly. (Diaz wrote before AI became an everyday term.)

 

 

In story after story, the reader starts to get inured to clouds of blood and piles of torn, rotting corpses. This was a nightmare reification of the animosity that conservative Americans felt, then as now, toward immigrants from Mexico, originally walled wetbacks because they would swim the Rio Grande. American seldom felt animosity against the equally illegal, though extremely rare, frostbacks from Canada. Rolando’s stories pose the question, just how far would we go to lash out against people we with would not come to America? Would we be willing to kill them and to leave their bodies for work crews to shovel into trash trucks? To (if we were Hispanic Americans) shoot our own relatives?

The immediate cause of Rolando’s nightmare was the reaction of white Americans against Arabic people after nine-eleven, as we now call it. If white Americans could so passionately hate Arabs, then might they also hate Mexicans?

Note that Rolando wrote and published these stories not only before the first Trump administration but before the first Obama administration. Rolando could not have imagined (or maybe he did, but could not have actually foreseen) that Trump would campaign on the promise of actually building such a wall—thousands of miles and billions of cubic feet of concrete, with advanced technology. Such a project was always impossible and unaffordable, and once Trump got what he wanted—election—he conveniently forgot his promise. It became a metaphorical wall, at most consisting of extra electronic surveillance along existing fences.

And now, during Trump II, the reality may be less violent than Diaz described in his nightmare—not as many piles of dismembered body parts—but is more pervasive. The anti-immigrant hatred is not just along the border. It extends throughout the country, even most infamously in Minnesota, where ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement, in case any of you do not know) considers detaining even legal immigrants, and shooting and killing even white American citizens, to be an acceptable cost of their war against illegal immigrants. The federal government, with Trump’s enthusiastic support, pays ICE agents very well, gives them lots of benefits, allows them to wear face masks to hide their identity, and then lets them do whatever they want (though pretending to disapprove), up through and including killing people. Diaz’s wall was bleeding violence along the Mexican border; the real Trump wall cuts right through the heart of America.

It is possible that part of Trump’s Wall includes hostility toward other countries, not just our possible enemies, but also our allies. It seems to be part of his policy to make wild threats (We will take over Greenland! We will annex Canada!) against our friends. He backs off from them, but our allies have not forgotten. European leaders are still meeting to make preparation for a possible American takeover of Greenland, for example. This week, Marco Rubio is coming to France to discuss European support for the Iran War, which America started without even consulting our European allies. At the time of this writing, I do not know what might come from these meetings. It would be justified if the European leaders told Rubio, you started this war, you finish it, if you can.

In one of Diaz’s stories, an American citizen of Mexican origin was detained because he did not carry his passport with him when he happened to be arrested by federal agents. This raises an important question: do all Americans need to carry proof of citizenship (a driver’s license won’t qualify) at all times? Or, maybe, only if you have dark skin? (Which, incidentally, Diaz does not have.) This is starting to sound like the old Soviet Union, Comrade Trump.

Throughout Rolando’s book I found empathy. I would like to add one real story to Rolando’s fictional ones: the story of the little girl Josseline Janiletha Quinteros, who died in the desert in 2008 while coming to America to look for her mother. Alas her photo is no longer available.

Reading Diaz’s collection of stories made me shiver because his 2007 nightmare has elements that feel frighteningly like today’s news. An Old Testament style prophecy.