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:

The first sighting in the wild

Thanks to William Ryan Collins, a copy was sighted at Mr.K's in Oak Ridge, TN:

Ch1: Passageways

All right, three points first:

1. The date, June 1882, belies many intentional anachronisms to come, though it has a significance which will become apparent later.
2. The name Ragnar Maria Eisenwod with its odd, archaic surname suggests the poet Rilke (seven years old in 1882) and Ragnarök.
3. The motif of lying on one's right side will be explained later.

The most interesting thing, at the beginning, are the passageways---covered corridors that can stretch for miles, perhaps many miles, allowing indoor travel, from building to building, across continents. Inside, the passageways are like any furnished room.  

I think they are pure invention (unlike most of the strange things encountered in the book), but this blog has made me wonder whether I could have been influenced by any antecedents.  First, there are the historical ones:  The Maginot Line:

and two others due to Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of China (3rd C. B.C.):  The Great Wall:

and the network of secret passages and tunnels said to interconnect his many palaces in Xianyang:

These first two aren't really like the passages in Remittance Man, but the third, the Qin emperor's, come closest---whatever they were really like.

Then there are the personal ones, though real passages in the world today are rarely longer than what is needed to cross a street.  The Winnipeg Walkway, 2 km of passages that interconnect downtown buildings are famous, but I've never been there.  On the other hand, I grew up looking at the BFGoodrich headquarters on Main Street in Akron, Ohio:

The yellow oval is the approximate position of my father's office.  Then there is one I used to use every day, the one connecting Cardiff University's department of Physics and Astronomy (left) with its library and Trevithick Refectory (right):

The yellow arrow points to my office, room 13 in the basement.  I don't think any of these are really the origin of my fictional passageways (in which more novels should be set).  Before you go off to imagine backpacking across Eurasia indoors, here is one last aside.  Turn to the left in the last picture and you will see a stairway that appeared for a few seconds in an episode of Doctor Who:

Dedication: Time and Space Coördinates

I claim an auspicious date for making the dedication, the birthday of Confucius.

Also, it's a special date for me: the day I arrived in Cardiff, and three years later, when I, unfortunately, left.

As for the spatial coördinate, if you are in Chicago, you might try giving it to a cab driver, but the fare for 1250 miles will be a steep one. Chicago is laid out on a wonderfully regular Cartesian grid of furlong-sized blocks, with its origin at the intersection of State and Madison. This, mercifully, gives every point on the globe a Chicago coördinate. I listed my current location in these terms because the place where I am is completely unimportant, 10,000 blocks from home. Do come and visit, though.

The vector: 10,000 furlongs South by Southwest, as well as Confucius, his birthday, and the original grove of Academe will all appear much later in the story.

It remains to ask, where does 孔子 intersect with Chicago? Princeton and 22nd Place, six blocks north of my old apartment:

Dedication: The Platonic Academy

One of the themes begins with the dedication wishing Plato a happy 2400th anniversary. Anniversary of what? The founding of his Academy at Athens in 387 BC, the root, or, at least, the eldest root, of the modern, international, academic tradition. It will become apparent that the book is, among other things, a love letter to that spirit. So, in the fall of 2013, I thought back to that very first semester and realized that this was the best offering I could make. As far as I know, no one else celebrated, except for this one commemoration, a 2 euro coin:

The site is now a public park:

Take a moment to reflect, this is where it all began, in a grove sacred to Athena, dedicated to Ἀκάδημος, the savior of the city:

Pull up a rock. Make yourself comfortable. Tell me what you're thinking.

The paperback is available

The paperback is available at Amazon (and soon, through all other channels, including local bookstores), as is the Kindle edition. You can read the first chapter of the Kindle edition by clicking on the "Look Inside" icon. Here's a picture of the Kindle cover:

In the next post, the commentary will begin!

A commentary track and the paperback cover

I have puzzled over what this blog should be about. Remittance Man isn't Ulysses---its symbolism, self-allusion, and literary apparatus are fairly straightforward---but it does contain lots of little things---objects, references, and hidden messages---that could be fleshed out and commented upon. That is what most of the blog will be, at least for now---a sort of commentary track pointing out the many interesting things encountered by the hero of our poem. First though, a production note: the proof of the cover came out looking just like I thought it would:

It's a shame I lost the summit of the mountain, but it had to be this way. The paperback should be in some of the usual places online already, and available to stores and distributors in about a week.

The book has been written, edited, typeset, transformed into .epubs and .mobis, put up for sale on amazon: Remittance Man, and the first copy has been sold. Now you can buy your copy and dream, dream, dream.