1812 Revisited – War with Britain!

In scarcely a year it will be the two hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of the War of 1812, a war that was pretty much fought to a draw between the United States and Britain. What do you know about this conflict? Not much, I'm willing to bet. Even the hard core followers of the British Navy in the old days of sail, and there are plenty of those people, aren't aware of some of the battles that were fought on the Niagara frontier, or the role of the woodland Indians, or the fact that the New England states were so adamantly opposed to fighting the British that they were ready to secede from the union.

There is much interesting scandal to be known about the War of 1812. It ain't just dates and battles, folks. I came across stuff that you won't believe while I was researching background material for Bucker Dudley. There was treachery, cowardice, drooling incompetence, illicit sex, and raving madness. And that was just what went on in James Madison's Washington. I've decided to tear the veil from this little-appreciated conflict and tell you all. But it will take time. Watch this space for news of what happened two hundred years ago.

Prejudice, Pride, and V. S. Naipaul

Back in the old days, when a lot of the great ripping yarns were written, they were written for a very narrow audience, by writers of very narrow experience.

Case in point: Beau Geste (1924), by Percival Christopher Wren. The thrilling story of life in the French Foreign Legion and the fall of Fort Zinderneuf is marred by a scene in which the Beau stops on his way out of England to visit a pawnshop, where the writer pauses to invent and then insult a stereotypical Jewish pawnbroker. All of the readers were white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, you see, and if they weren't, they wanted to be, and if they didn't want to be, well, they ought to. So let's bash the Jews.

Nowadays when nearly everybody who reads either has Jewish friends or is Jewish (What! You don't know any Jews?) the scene stands out for the piece of offensive tripe it is. Jewish people aren't like that, if they're like anything in particular. But now that I see that the book came out in 1924, a mere decade before the rise of Hitler, who had lots of admirers in England, I'm thinking that something much more sinister was at work here than simple ignorance.

But what about V.S. Naipaul? He's the one I sat down to write about. He said last week that no woman has ever been his equal in the field of writing. Their heads are full of sentimental feminine tosh, he said.

Nonsense like that would have been accepted without a murmur fifty years ago, the same as slurs against ethnic groups. Today it is greeted with a huge public outcry. My writer friends are mad at him. I'm not mad at him. I feel a vague unease, as if a passing rabbit were taking a crap on my grave. There are men everywhere who want to belittle us and stuff us back in the kitchen. Even now some antifeminist Hitler figure is rising from the bowels of the Tea Party, coming to take away our shoes and strew tacks in the yard.

Is Naipaul the greatest writer since Shakespeare? I couldn't say. I've never read him. Nor have I tried to write manly literary fiction. We in the whodunit game are out to entertain people, not stun them with the size of our packages, though I wouldn't turn down a Nobel prize in the unlikely event that somebody showed up at the door and offered it to me.

Men who do nothing in this world but put words on paper have to puff themselves up somehow. I'm sure he's a better writer than I am; otherwise, why does he keep getting prizes? Still I think you'll agree that people will be reading Jane Austen and Toni Morrison when the name of V.S. Naipaul is forgotten. I've forgotten already what the initials stand for.

Touring the Designer House

Last week my friends from the Lambertville Streetwalkers (a walking group, not the other sort of streetwalkers), drove to Doylestown, PA, for a tour of this year's designer house. The official details for the house tour can be found on the designer house web site: http://www.buckscountydesignerhouse.org/.

It pains me to report that yesterday was the last day of the tour, so you can't go on it, but if you like the house it can be yours for a few million dollars. It's quite nice inside, though we weren't allowed to take pictures anywhere but on the grounds outside. The house was originally an old stone farmhouse, now greatly enlarged and modernized. I thought I'd show you a few of the pictures that artist Pat Shamy took of the grounds.

Here we all are standing in a light rain, having tramped
 appreciatively through the beautifully decorated rooms 
(each done by a different designer) until 
we were surfeited with decor.

The barn. No horses there right now, but after you buy it you can buy some horses
and hire a stablehand for a few dollars more.

Much of the decor is color-keyed to the barn.

Charming views, everywhere you look.

A great place to find a dead body, no?
Maybe I'll set a mystery novel here.

Thanks to Pat Shamy for the pictures.

Bleeders! Gorks! Chinkers!

No, I don't know what that means either, but it was the screamer headline on the Trenton Times sports page this morning. Those of you who follow sports probably know what it means. For the rest of us, it looks mighty like three expletives strung together. I like those expletives. Gorks, how I like them! (I'm always on the lookout for new expletives, especially since I vowed to actually stop swearing.)

When I was a little girl my best friend Deb Snyder and I used to try to swear. Since no one ever cursed in our presence--ah, those were gentler times--we had to make up our own curse words. The most terrible expression we had was "shad an the godost." It doesn't look like much in black and white but when you shout it, with the accent on the last syllable, it has a terrible power. I still use it sometimes when I bang my finger. What does it actually mean? I guess it means, "I am displeased."

Asterisks and symbols are good for representing real curse words on the internet, but one can't always remember whether a bad word is spelled "@#%&" or !@#$". So maybe the home-grown curse words are preferable. Oh, no. It's ten after eight already. Chinkers! My gorking blog is late.

Training the Brain

I took out a one-month subscription to Lumosity, that site that promises to improve one's mental function by means of little games. God knows I can use it. My brain is a shambles. We'll see whether their program actually does me any good.

First thing they do is ask some questions about one's lifestyle. Mine is pretty dull, no smoking, no drinking, moderate-to-low amount of exercise. Okay, I sit too much, but they didn't ask me that. Then one plays a couple of their little games to get rated on various mental skills. Then they send an email with one's recommendations and ratings. All this is free, by the way, in case you feel like indulging. You have to give them your contact info first, of course, so that later on they can hound you or shame you into signing up for the paid course.

My lifestyle was okay with them except for a few things. I wasn't taking on enough new challenges to suit them, and I wasn't regularly training my brain. I can understand how that would bother them. But one thing they found fault with puzzled me:

You're drinking a moderate amount of coffee or tea. Improve this.

At first I thought, Yes! I will increase my caffeine consumption. It's bound to make me feel more alert. In the immortal words of my father, if a little is good, a lot is better. But on closer examination I discovered that they actually wanted me to stop drinking coffee.

Give up coffee, my last vice? Never! Without caffeine I would spend my whole life in a total stupor. Maybe what they say is true, though. Maybe coffee ultimately makes me stupider, the way cigarettes ultimately make a smoker more nervous, craving nicotine to calm his nerves. I might try that. In some other life. If I do I'll let you know how it works out. Don't hold your breath, though, waiting for me to stop drinking coffee. I'm pretty sure it would be bad for your brain function.