ENCHANTÉ – Dinner After Halloween
We were all seated. I could not see them. They had swoomed in at the last door ring.
They shuffled by, clothed in white garb, and sat down at the dinner table. I saw the chairs moving back and forth and the napkins unfolding. I sat down and welcomed my guests. Did I know who they were?
I soon found out. At my opposite sat Uncle Diederick. He sang his last song in jail. I recognized his drawl. He was accused of unlawful sexual behavior with minors in the stables. I will not draw on this any further because you cannot say anything bad about dead people.
On his left sat Aunt Irma. She always accused me of bedding every girl I could get my hands on and died, disinheriting me from her fortune. She still had this shrill voice, as I’d heard it in our last telephone call when she cursed me in her hospital bed because there was “this child that had to come again.”
Opposite her sat Aunt Ann, also one of those shrill women. She taught me horseback riding and yelled so loud each time when I didn’t sit straight in the saddle that my horse bucked with all fours in the air, me flying out of the saddle.
Next to Aunt Irma sat Willem B. I can’t reveal his last name because his family is so important that they would sue me if I did. He swindled every client on his way to the bank and became so rich that he was unable to count his money on his dead bed. He’d wanted to make me his heir too, but forgot to put it in writing, so the State got all the money. They never said “thanks.”
Opposite him sat the headmaster of my primary school. I couldn’t figure how he would turn up in this illustrious group of noble people, as he was a very ordinary man and a notorious child molester, hitting everyone with his cane who dared to be unruly or contradict him, jumping on our lecterns coming after us.
On the headmaster’s right sat Hans with the long earrings. She had this false smile and mean look and always entered the breakfast room, disturbing my quiet moment with my grandmother, only to gossip about everybody else with a double name in the village.
Opposite her – and next to me – sat Baroness B. whose name I cannot reveal either for the same reason as Willem B’s. She’d kicked me out of her vast apartment where I’d rented a room because the housekeeper had caught me copulating with a girl (the censor board sanitized this part of the sentence). Boy, was she mad.
On my left sat Aunt Phyllis, as an extra punishment. She used to come into the dining room and spat saliva with every word she uttered so that we kids held our hands over our plates whenever she appeared.
So I thanked everyone for coming and invited them to take some food, but nobody did. They chuckled, as they didn’t eat anymore, but they drank the good wine alright, glasses floating in the air.
Baroness B. whispered that she was still waiting for the last month’s rent I hadn’t paid after she’d thrown me out. I asked her where I could send the money, but she didn’t want to reveal her address.
The schoolmaster mumbled he was surprised to find me in a large house with expensive cars and a lot of money because he’d found me the stupidest kid in the class.
Aunt Ann yelled over the table why I wasn’t competing in the national horse shows, as I’d performed so well flying off my horse.
Uncle Diederick told us that his punishment in the afterlife consisted of having to clean stables for the rich, often confronted by beautiful girls he couldn’t like and unable to touch any beautiful boy that came his way.
Aunt Irma inquired if I had birthed any more children out of wedlock, and when I told her I hadn’t as far as I knew, she didn’t believe me and was going to find out about any hidden babies among the women she said she knew I’d known and slept with full force.
Willem B. sort of apologized for his forgetfulness but in revenge he was spooking the lives of the taxmen who’d stolen his money, and they were all going crazy and were being put in madhouses one after the other.
Aunt Hans with the long earrings told us she’d put an earring with a bug in Hillary’s bed to find out about her latest schemes. To my surprise, a lot of that became true after Halloween. Luckily, Aunt Phyllis had no saliva anymore and could not spit on my plate.
When they left cackling through the front door without opening it, I knew they were friendly ghosts now and might turn up again. The dinner was left untouched on the table but the glasses were empty. I went to my drawing room where my wife’s precious dolls occupied a whole sofa. One of them, a blond beauty I’d always hoped would come alive, suddenly started talking, her eyes winking at me. “Hi, Johnny,” she said. “I always wanted to see you again, and now I can. I am Fiona, the girl who gave you your first kiss. Remember?” I sat dumbstruck. Fiona died in a horrible horse-riding accident when she was sixteen. She kissed me in my grandmother’s vegetable garden when we were six. “Yes, of course, I remember. We were going to get married. I was inconsolable for years when you died. How come you are a doll?”
“Only for tonight, Johnny. Just kiss me once more, Johnny, and I go back to heaven.”
I took the doll, and she felt soft, alive, kissed it softly on the mouth, and the eyes winked again. Then it stiffened, and it looked straight ahead as if nothing had happened.
“Why are you kissing that doll?” I heard my wife saying to me. “And why haven’t you cleared the table yet?”
I had no answer.
ENCHANTÉ – Hurricane Hillary
This is going to be a rather personal essay. Matthew has left after much destruction. Now Hurricane Hillary is brewing that could be much worse.
All my followers know by now that I am a World War II kid who was liberated by the US in 1945. Boy, were we impressed by those GIs, driving their tanks and trucks, and rolling up those hated Nazis. The fun we had when the sun broke out, and we could walk freely on the streets again.
Ever since then we looked up at the US. Oh yes, there was always criticism about overpowering Washington and the CIA. But we felt safe. In the US, people believed in freedom and Christianity. They had great universities, the envy of many students in Europe.
credit: pinterest.com
Then the great Eisenhower became president in 1953, just after Truman had completed the Korean war. I was in boarding school then. We still remember the stories about the “yellow danger” (China) and “the Russians are coming.” Would we have a World War III? Somehow, Truman had stopped McArthur from defeating aggressive North Korea, because the US did not want war with China, which supported North Korea. I think this was one of the biggest mistakes the US made at that time. Now North Korea has metastasized into a nuclear madman.
credit: britannica.com
As off John Kennedy, the US has been slipping. We stood sort of on the wayside, still thinking the US was invincible, its people utter strong, its military overpowering, its science unmatched. But with the Bay of Pigs, we began to see the first fissures in the almighty US. All right, Kennedy stared down Kroutchev to remove his nuclear stockpile in communist Cuba, but the Pigs thing was not forgotten. Nonetheless, everybody remembers where they were when they heard when Kennedy was assassinated: I had just started my first job in Holland and when I visited a friend he came down the stairs to tell me the horrible news.
Then Johnson followed with his expensive Great Society and his losing battle of Vietnam, mainly because the US lost popular support due to a growing leftist anti-war movement, headed by Jane Fonda alias Hanoi Jane. Johnson knew he would not be reelected.
The era of Nixon finished in disgrace, again pushed to a large extent by that growing leftist movement. By then I had landed in the US for a job with the World Bank in Washington D.C. I remember talking to a foreign service friend at our regular dinners in town – we were both still bachelors – arguing about the pros and cons of Nixon’s Administration. We were both conservative guys, but I couldn’t support the destruction of justice. To me, that was one of the greatest assets of the US: law and order. I was mightily impressed with the Saturday Night Massacre when the Attorney General and his Deputy resigned when Nixon fired the Watergate Special Prosecutor. Somehow, the principles of justice were upheld, but it left a bitter aftertaste. Now we look at an even greater destruction of justice: Hillary’s private e-mail server in service of her pay-for-play at the State Department, thousands of e-mails destroyed that would prove her criminal intent. A White House, Department of Justice and the FBI all in sync to deny it, all led by the Democrat Party. Who was worse, Nixon or Hillary? And they want her to be President?
credit: presidentmash.com
As a foreigner in the US with World War II still in the back of my mind, I wanted it to remain strong and principled. But something happened along the way. There was a tendency towards socialism that I had found one of the most dangerous fissures in European society. When Carter followed Ford with his fireside chats, I began to wonder. When I had to pay 14% interest on a mortgage, I wondered even more. Was this still my admired USA? Then Reagan came and proved the best President in a long time, bringing sanity back to economic management and military strength.
Credit: Wikiquote
Unfortunately, things changed for the worse again when the Clintons appeared on TV.
My wife and I, both “resident aliens” and guests of the US, looked at that couple’s eyes. You know a lot about people when you look in their eyes. Those watery, slippery untrustworthy eyes of Bill and that false smile with those hard eyes of his wife, Hillary. Frankly, if that weird Perot had not messed up the reelection of the older Bush, that Bonny and Clyde couple would never have made it to the White House. But history wanted otherwise. You all know what happened then. The impeachment was no surprise to us. The stories about assaulted women being threatened by Hillary weren’ t either. The media played along in many ways. While Nixon resigned, Bill did not: the Senate prevented that, despite the Kenn Starr report. All Democrats voted “not guilty.” They always do when their own kin is endangered. Republicans throw their own kin under the bus as soon as somebody gets smeared by the left and its media.
wikipedia.org newsbusters.com
mrctv.com abcnews.go.com
nytimes.com
The US became more and more divided. The media became more and more partisan. We did not understand that. We used to watch CBS with Walter Cronkite. Then Dan Rather came on, and we felt an immediate bias to the left. When he faltered with his blank screen, we turned to ABC. We liked David Brinkley and Peter Jennings. But then Peter Jennings started his leftist tunes. We switched to Tom Brokaw at NBC, but he also seemed absorbed by the leftist body snatchers. What was happening to the Great USA? What did these so-called “liberals” want? Why undermine what was once a great nation? We could not figure it.
Credit: mediaite.com
Abroad on missions, I had no other access to US news but CNN. Soon, those guys were no better. Everything had a leftist tweet. They called it the Clinton News Network. I watched TV 5 in France instead.
Then George Bush came after the chad election with Al Gore who had invented the Internet. 9/11, the dot.com drama, the Iraq invasion and then Katrina. I had never seen so much biased media reporting in my life in one presidency. What the hell was happening? We watched Fox News, at least you got some fair and balanced information, although it always seems that the guys or gals “on the left” are paid to be on the left, and the ones on the right just the same. It’s a boring game. When Juan Williams comes on, I mute. We’re no longer watching Miss Megan Kelly’s show. We find her pedantic, condescending, and arrogant. Her first primary debate with Bret Beyer was a disgrace.
And then we got the Obama phenomenon. Again, my wife and I sat in front of the TV, watching this Senator guy talking everybody under the table. He said to Reid he had this “little gift.” The pied piper, we said. We have nothing against “black.” We are a mixed-race couple, me a Caucasian European, she of East-Indian descent. But he had been a collaborator with Saul Alinsky and Bill Ayers, both socialist statist and communist uprooters, sat in the pew with that freaking Reverend Jeremiah Wright with his chickens are coming home to roost, and wanted to fundamentally change America. Even our kids voted for the guy. What for? Because McCain was a fuddy-duddy. Now they regret that vote. You vote for a platform, and its incoming administration, not for a celebrity smile.
California gurls – Getty Images
We found Obama dangerous and could not understand these Obama girls and all these other people falling for him. Eight years of no economic progress, utmost partisan corruption in government, a broken national health system, the Fast and Fury weapons smuggle leading to the death of an immigration officer, a suicidal immigration policy, and a dismal racial divide. A reckless failed foreign policy that weakened the US tremendously and has put the world at risk. And so forth. You call that a “legacy?”
Nowadays, we are just shaking our heads. So many people seem to support Hurricane Hillary after all her obvious misdeeds for which anyone else would have been bigly incarcerated. Outsider Trump is vilified because of lewd remarks he made a decade ago when in the entertainment world and not even a “politician,” while he enunciates exactly the policies that the US needs to get back on its feet. But the only thing that the stupid media wants to talk about is sex (sex sells) while the ship is burning, and the major issues of immigration, security, economic revival and racial harmony are not even raised. Even his party jumps ship. What has happened to this once great USA?
It is no longer the land of the brave but has become the land of the knaves. Millionaire football players don’t want to stand for the National Anthem anymore. Bleu lives don’t matter. Catholics need to get rid of their medieval religious structure. Hey, what about those radical Islamists and their horrific horrible medieval killings?
Hurricane Hillary would destroy whatever is left of this great USA if you let her make landfall. You won’t recognize it anymore once she has passed. It’s too bad we don’t have a vote. Not that it would matter much. The ignoramuses of this country prefer to live in national decline and misery, as long as they get their goodies. Meanwhile, Bonny and Clyde would rent out the Lincoln Bedroom again. In competition with the Trump hotel around the corner on Pennsylvania Avenue. Trump builds things. Obama-Clinton do not build anything. Only profit from public service and taxpayer money and get rich with it. And that’s the view of a foreigner guest of the maligned USA.
You know for whom we would vote. We hope you would vote for the US revival ticket. Don’t think it’s in the bag for Hurricane Hillary, as the media want you to believe. There is that silent majority that never gets polled. They have been awakened.
Cheers,
John
Enchanting The Swan: http://amzn.to/1LPFw5o. Grad students and musicians Paul and Fiona fall in love when they perform The Swan and agree to marry, but paternal evil blocks their love. Will they play the Swan again?
Some Women I Have Known: http://amzn.to/1QIL94B. Piano John confuses playing sheet music with playing between the sheets. Will his anchors in life, Lady D and Audrey Hepburn, save him from self-destruction?
A Naughty Romance: http://amzn.to/2epkuTj. A piano affair leads to a surprising twist.
ENCHANTÉ – THE BOOK’S LIFE CYCLE
That’s how it goes, folks! Those who read books want to unload their bookcases and give them away to a book fair for charity purposes! I recently attended a book fair where they also invited authors to offer their new books. That’s a great idea and an interesting way of looking at a book’s life cycle. With our backs against the wall, our tables displaying our books, we watched book lovers buy books by the cartloads that were “discarded,” all displayed on rows of tables. Except ours.
Nobody realized the cruelty of that scene: us staring at our graves!
George Vercessi and me
I only became aware of it later in the day when I decided to lower the price of my new books by half to compete with the penny-priced tons of dead books in front of me. Books by John Grisham, Danielle Steel, Joyce Carol Oates, so many others, lined-up majestically together, waiting to be carried to the books grave.
We did have a few buyers, though. But next year, would we find our books also dumped on those tables or decaying in carton boxes?
For readers, do you know how much goes into writing and publishing a book? It’s unbelievable how much time and money it takes! And then you sell it for $10-15 dollars a piece at a book-signing or a fair, or if you are lucky in a Barnes & Nobles store.
It often takes more than a year to write a book. Suppose it’s a “good” book, and that, after months of querying, you are lucky to find a good agent to represent it. Then it takes 18 months before it is published, after many edits and re-edits, and sweat, tears, and curses. By that time it’s an “old” book already. Also, it’s not even “your” book anymore. So many people other than the author have meddled with it: your writers group, your editor(s), the agent’s input, the publisher’s editor, an endless process. Why would you even take the trouble to write?
Well, that’s the quintessential question. So many do! Every day, thousands of new books arrive on the scene on Amazon.com. If you self-publish, you sell at between .99 cents and 2.99 dollars (remember my blog about the US 99 cents craze – July 2, 2016?), which seems to be the range where the “greedy readers” buy. If there is one example of reader price distortion, it’s on Amazon. I heard of one good writer who sold many e-books at 99 cts, but got only one penny royalty per e-book. So if you sold 1000 books you earned 10 dollars royalty. Give me a break!
Still, as a writer, you want to get that story out, you must write that book. Maybe you have to say something that’s worth telling. Maybe it’s good therapy to get something off your chest that’s been bugging you all your life. Maybe it’s a character that has been spooking through your mind and imagination that spurs you to write about her. Or maybe you just like to scare the hell out of people (Stephen King, and he laughs all the way to the bank with it).
I know about industry because I worked a long time in trade and development economics. But the “writing industry” is a different cattle of fish. It’s not manufacturing or money lending. I realized that only after I decided to write myself. There are so many people learning to write, teaching to write, editing other people’s writing, writers conferences with hundreds of “speakers” about writing, advertisers, publicists, and booksellers, it’s huge. It has expanded exponentially since the first printer was invented in the mid-fifteenth century by the Dutchman Laurens Janszoon Koster. Of course, the Germans pretend that it was Johannes Gutenberg who was first, at about the same time. Let’s say both had a telepathic moment, to keep the peace and avoid a battle with and about Germans always saying Germany “uber alles.”
Laurens Koster in Haarlem – The Netherlands
I’m afraid we writers are the biggest suckers in all this. We pay for all those lend-a-hand services offered by the “eager providers,” the middlemen (or is it now middlepersons to be gender neutral?), with only a handful of us recovering our costs, and even fewer making a buck.
Poor Writer and Rich Writer
Still, I want to write that book because otherwise, the character keeps bugging me, night and day. I want to get her off my back and start with another one. Like changing girlfriends (or boyfriends, depending). One advantage: no alimony payments.
Till next time.
By John Schwartz:
http://amzn.to/1LPFw5o: Enchanting The Swan
http://amzn.to/1QIL94B: Some Women I Have Known.
ENCHANTÉ – THE URGE TO WRITE
It’s summertime and everyone is on vacation. So it’s a time to be quiet and reflect on things. The things I would’ve liked to do but didn’t. The things I could’ve done but didn’t. The things I should’ve done but didn’t. The things I should NOT have done but did. Oh boy, the list goes on and on. And there I am, looking at the blue yonder, the waves rippling over the azure lake, the swan coming by to chat, my watch staring at me as if it wants to stop.
I would love to play piano like Amad Jamal but I can’t. I would love to play tennis like Louis Federer but I can’t. I would love to write like Nora Roberts, but I don’t.
I did play classical piano pretty well but it faded: at a certain stage I noticed that I made no progress anymore. Stuck. Maybe I hated practice. Clearly, I didn’t yearn to get better at it and reverted to playing jazz all the time, which I did all right. My passionate Paris girlfriend and classical pianist, Geneviève, told me there was nothing wrong with that (See Some Women I Have Known – http://amzn.to/1QIL94B). I would’ve liked to play more tennis but back injury, tendonitis, and work priorities all fought against me. But I did complete an all right career and after 50 years of interesting work worldwide, I am now finally retired with a healthy savings account. So I should be happy, no?
Yes and No. I can’t sit still, hate to play golf and am too lazy to go hiking. So why not do some writing? The only thing you have to do is dream up a story, type it down on a computer, and post it on Amazon, is it not? Millions do. Easy, no? Well, not so. It’s like my tennis, like my piano, you must practice to get good at it. Know your words, grammar, syntax, and idiom. And what about my “content mind,” do my stories appeal to today’s readers? And what about my “craft mind,” do I use the right words, have the right rhythm, do I create sparks in my sentences, are my characters alive?
When I read, I use a notebook to write down words I don’t know or find interesting to remember. I underline sentences that I consider well-written. In the hope they stay with me and spark a good sentence of my own one day. The problem is that, as a non-native English writer, the words do not immerse in me as they do with a native writer who grows up with them. For him/her, words have acquired a lifelong meaning and feeling, are associated with memories, education, and experiences.
When I read in Dutch, my native language, I feel the meaning of words so much better because I grew up with them. They became my treasured treasure that I’d pick from whenever needed, and they spring up in my mind automatically when I need them. A native English writer acquired a similar treasure and can even “make up” words, something I’d never dare to do in English because it would almost certainly be wrong and scrapped by my editor.
As a funny example, I read the other day that “she wore a teddy.” Something to do with a teddy bear?
Since I did not know what a teddy was, I consulted Webster, which needed 20 words to explain its meaning! Probably any American knows from childhood what a “teddy” is (my wife, who is British-educated, did not even know!), and they would immediately associate it with their mother or sister, or perhaps a girlfriend (better). That sort of words is their permanent vocabulary treasure.
And so I go on, still learning to use idiom, syntax, and vocabulary. In addition to Some Women (in which Piano John confuses playing sheet music with playing between the sheets”), I wrote Enchanting The Swan (in which grad students and musicians Paul and Fiona agree to marry but evil blocks their love —http://amzn.to/1LPFw5o ). I am currently working on a third. Every day that I work on the “craft mind” I realize how little I know and how more I have to learn. I started doing this much too late. Young writers go through the same learning process, and they will also take time before they write their first good book. Even John Grisham and Stephen King (“On Writing”) admit that. But I started at the end of a long career, and won’t have that “luxury” of time to succeed. That’s why a well-known agent, Paul Levine, called me a “young writer” despite my white hair.
It’s “Spellbinding,” as Barbara Baig calls it (Writers Digest Books). Word(worth) reading!
See you next time and happy reading/writing.
amazon.com/author/schwartzjohn
ENCHANTÉ – Library of Congress cares for writers like Maarten Maartens
On July 5, 2016, Dr. Taru Spiegel, Reference Specialist of the European Division of the Library of Congress in Washington D.C., received John Schwartz to transmit two recent books with love stories written by Maarten Maartens, a nineteenth-century Dutch author writing in English. Maarten Maartens, alias Joost Marius Willem van der Poorten Schwartz (1858-1915) – a great-uncle of John Schwartz – wrote 13 novels and four volumes of short stories in English and became very famous with it. Ted Roosevelt received him – and his daughter – at the White House in 1907. He received an honorary degree at Western University in Pittsburg in 1907 and a similar award together with Thomas Hardy at Aberdeen University in Scotland in 1905. He lived in Doorn in the center of The Netherlands but frequently traveled to England to mingle with other well-known literary authors and critics, who became close friends.
The books transmitted were entitled “At Home and Abroad – Stories of Love”, a collection of 33 short stories Maarten Maartens published in various reputable magazines and compiled by Dr. Bouwe Postmus on behalf of the Maarten Maartens Foundation in Doorn, and “Maarten Maartens Rediscovered – Part II – His Best Short Stories” by John Schwartz. The latter is a summarization of the four volumes of short stories which Maarten Maartens published with various reputable English, American, and German publishing houses.
In November 2015, the LOC formally received “Maarten Maartens Rediscovered – Part I,” by John Schwartz, which is a summarization of Maarten Maartens’ 13 novels.
These summarizations contain much of Maarten Maartens’ own writing to give readers a flavor of the author’s outstanding talent. The same method was followed in the summarization of the short stories, although a few were so well written that they are fully reproduced. The LOC was particularly pleased to add the book by Bouwe Postmus to their Maarten Maartens collection because it was new material.
Above: Maarten Maartens 13 novels and 4 volumes of short stories, and “Letters by Maarten Maartens,” compiled by his daughter Ada van der Poorten Schwartz. Of course, at the top of the photo, the word “No” is missing from the “Food or Drink permitted.”
The Library of Congress, formally The Thomas Jefferson Building, is a very special place characterized by its famous Dome. First of all, it is the solemn silence that reigns in the reading and working rooms and that constitutes the prominent atmosphere in which researchers and readers can work productively, and “Forgotten Writers” such as Maarten Maartens can be studied and reside in peace. No cell phones, no picture taking, except in the public areas. Here follow a few pictures I could take as a “privileged visitor” of the areas where the public can’t go.
First, a few murals painted by the Brazilian painter Cândido Portinari in the Hispanic Reading Room, showing the arrival of Hispanic peoples in America, and the poster indicating we are in the European Division where Maarten Maartens’ books are kept.
Following are pictures of the main reading room, taken from inside the Valhalla of the LOC through a glass wall looking out.
Below the magnificently sculptured clock “Flight of Time” by John Flanagan that took seven years to complete and was shipped in parts from Paris before being installed in the Library when the reading room was finally finished in 1902. It is not unlikely that Maarten Maartens when visiting the White House in 1907 also visited this building.
Below a few pictures of the Hall of the LOC where tourists dwell and make numerous photographs.
We end with a view of the Washington Monument and the Capitol seen from the LOC.
All in all, a nice place for Maarten Maartens to be interred: in quiet and with friends who appreciate him.