The First Review!

The first review of the novel is in!  From the Amazon UK site:
first review!

I know I haven't been blogging enough.  I need some encouragement.  My music software project is taking up all my time.  You may ask me about it through the usual channels.

music programming

Sales are down 100%.  In the meantime, I've been concentrating on writing new music software.  Right now: virtual performers.  More on this later.  Much more.

Ch.1: Dessau to Görlitz by furnished hallway

Why pelicans?  I don't know, except that they are symbolic of Louisiana and compassion, since they feed their young by drawing blood from their own breast.  The set of books Ragnar finds in the basement of the guest house are a set that I found in the guest house of Florida State University's department of Music, where I stayed when I was giving a talk in 2001.

Now: the trek from Dessau to Görlitz.  Why Dessau?  It was the home to the Bauhaus.  All things international being loathed by fascists, they were forced to leave and ended up in Chicago, building the campus of my alma mater IIT.  First, though, they had a jazz band:

Notice the Dessau-Görlitz vector:  1100 furlongs east by southeast---in the direction of Sumatra:

A direct, purposeful walk would have taken about 45 hours easily spread over a week, but Ragnar has been meandering about the countryside (while remaining always indoors) for twice that.  Why Görlitz/Zgorzelec?  It's a double town that is not only a double German/Polish town, but a triple or quadruple Sorbian/Czech town, a Zgórjelc/Zhořelec poised between upper and lower Lusatia. Where cultures intersect, there you will find our hero.

too much communication: Twitter

I am now on Twitter as @MichaelOdradek.  Twitter suggested the name and my mouse must have sent out an unintentional double click because Twitter lept into action and named me that for all time.  Now, what shall I twit?

the fanpage: a circular announcement

The book now has a fanpage:

https://www.facebook.com/RemittanceManNovel

So far, it merely echoes the posts from this blog.  What else should it do?

Ch.1: The Margrave Woźniak

Ragnar is about to meet the margrave Woźniak.  Why a margrave?  Presumably because we are on the border of Saxony and Poland.  Why Woźniak, a common Polish name?  It began with farm machinery pushing westward across the prairie at the rate of thirty miles per year.  Cyrus McCormick, Jr., the president of International Harvester (his father had designed the reaper) built the "Men's Club House" of his McCormick Reaper Works at 2530 S. Blue Island Ave., Chicago.  In 1951, Stanley Wozniak, a Polish immigrant, bought the property and made it "Wozniak's Casino Lounge, No.2".  (No.1 had opened in 1938).  Have a look at the place; it's now an empty lot:

My fraternity used to hold its initiation dinners here.  Imagine a long-decaying Polish banquet hall:  red velvet wallpaper that you suspect has absorbed decades of airborne grease, chafing dishes of mostacholi, an open bar, all under eerie artificial light.  Best of all, there was a bowling alley in the basement.  Here is a picture of the main hall in the McCormick Days:

Here is a clip from the movie Backdraft (1991), filmed in the same room (the band in the background is The Drovers---they also played at our fraternity parties):

Backdraft (1991) at Wozniak's with the Drovers

Now I'll let the margrave shuffle around the town in his private corridors.  Next time, I'll tell you about the geography of Ragnar's journey.

Ch1: Picture of a Juggernaut

The wallpaper in the corridor is sage green as a tip of the hat to the aesthetes.  Who built the corridors?  They seem to be extremely extensive, yet little-used.  How often is the guest house ever visited?  There are so many mysteries.  Now, in that guest house, Ragnar marvels at a picture:

"...a huge cart was being pulled along a country road, marble pillars bolstering its sides, it contained dozens of people who looked like they represented the residents of a small town – tradesmen, wives, wealthy merchants, poor laborers, children, dogs, and there, the massive wheels rolling over the countryside, pulling the juggernaut along."

When I was about eight, we were taken on a field trip to Stan Hywet Hall,  the mansion of one of the rubber barons, F. A. Seiberling.  We arrived,

 entered,

 and found the twelfth largest house in the United States, a sprawling, tasteless idolization of Tudor England.

It was there, in a window, in a stairwell, possibly a service stairwell, that I saw the lithograph described above.

I asked about it, but it was the policy of our educators not to divulge any knowledge that might not be understood immediately (and so, from year to year, almost nothing new ever emerged).  The most I could get out of them was that it represented some idea of society current around the turn of the century.  What was it?  I still don't know, and I've never located the picture again.  I doubt the Seiberlings would have had this picture hanging in their house, but let's say it was something like this: