Cora Buhlert's Blog, page 93

Christmas 2016

It’s time for the annual Christmas post, complete with photos, again.

Of course, the annus horiblis 2016 couldn’t even let up over the holidays and so actress Carrie Fisher suffered a massive heart attack and ended up in intensive care aged 60, while singer George Michael died of heart failured aged only 53. I am a big fan of both of them. And indeed it’s telling that among 2016’s many death of famous and notable people, there were hardly any arseholes, jerks and people the world won’t particularly miss. With the possible exception of Fidel Castro (and my personal views don’t match the standard US view in his case) and one or two retired politicians, most of the notable dead of 2016 were popular and beloved.

Meanwhile, here in Bremen, Christmas was warm, wet and windy. I spent the holidays with my parents. My uncle came over for lunch on Christmas Day, but otherwise we were on our own. And since I forgot my camera, all pics that follow are smartphone photos.

My Mom, my uncle and my Dad sitting at the table for Christmas Day luch.

The Christmas Tree

As always, I decorated the Christmas tree. This year’s tree, from my parents’ garden, had grown unevenly and also had a spot with hardly any branches in the middle, so decorating it was a challenge. Still, all things considered, I think I didn’t do too badly. Let’s take a look:

An overall view of the fully decorated and lit Christmas tree.

A look up the tree. The beeswax candles burn only for about half an hour under constant supervision. The LED light strings were purchased last year, since getting replacement bulbs for our old fairy lights was difficult.

A close-up view at the mid section of the tree. In the middle, you can see the barren part of the trunk, covered by clip-on twin angel ornaments from the 1960s. Also note the Tasmanian devil and the trio of Disney characters.

A close-up look at the top of the tree. These ornaments are some of the oldest. Many are around 50 years old and incredibly delicate. The big wood shavings angel is a personal favourite.

A side view of the top half of the tree. The apple ornaments are construction paper cut-outs and fifty years old.

A close-up look at the lower part of the tree with several porcelain ornaments and a reindeer. You can also see the construction of the candle holders with a counterweight.

I call these two ornaments, Santa and a little guy with a hat, Gandalf and Bilbo, because they kind of look like them. We also have the dwarves, all thirteen of them.

And here are two of the dwarves (and a cuckoo clock). The one with the black beard of Thorin Oakenshield.

I noticed the resemblance of some of the ornaments to Hobbit characters in 2012, when the first part of The Hobbit trilogy hit the theatres and set about assembling the whole adventuring party just for fun. .

Other Holiday Decorations

Department store mannequin Else is on the look-out for Santa in this atmospheric shot.

Here we have a parade of votive candle holders. The glowing Virgin Mary inspired my story “Our Lady of the Burning Heart”.

Christmas Presents

So let’s take a look at the presents. Like every year, I asked for books and got them. I’m also getting a new PC just after the holidays, though it’s not a Christmas gift, just a regularly scheduled upgrade.

Wrapped Christmas presents (my Dad’s)

Unwrapped Christmas presents (my Dad’s). The calendar is censored for obvious reasons.

Wrapped Christmas presents (my Mom’s).

Unwrapped presents (my Mom’s).

Wrapped presents (mine). Plus, K-S20 from Star Wars: Rogue One.

Unwrapped Christmas presents (mine). Lots of books and jewellery and one droid. I also got a bar of soap, which is not pictured here.

K-S20 skeptically eyes these books. Are these suitable reading for the discerning droid?

Coincidentally, K-S20 is the only character from Rogue One I’ve been able to find in action figure form. All other Rogue One action figures are standard Stormtroopers and Darth Vader, because obviously there aren’t enough Stormtrooper and Darth Vader action figures already. Of course, part of the reaon of the scarcity of Rogue One action figures not Darth Vader or Stormtroopers might be that (spoiler whiteout) everybody dies, but that has never stopped Hasbro regarding the other films.

Christmas Food:

The holidays are also a big time for cooking and eating, so let’s take a look at what we had for lunch and dinner over Christmas:

This is actually a Christmas present, namely a smoked fish gift box (quite literally a wooden box) from Bremerhaven. However, I already ate all of it, because it doesn’t keep for very long.

More holiday fish: This is red herring salad, a traditional North German holiday food. We always make a big pot of this and eat it for dinner during the holidays and for however long it lasts. The bright pink colour comes from beetroot. The recipe dates back to my grandma and is probably even older.

Christmas Eve lunch: Deer, stir fried with apples and mushrooms, served with red cabbage, apple cranberry sauce and bowtie pasta. Falls and winter are venison season, so venison of any kind of a traditional holiday food in many families.

Christmas Day lunch was crawfish etouffee. Due to time spent in Mississippi and Louisiana as a kid, I have a weakness for Cajun food, which is pretty much unavailable here in Germany, unless you cook your own. Luckily, crawfish is now available at many supermarkets the year round.

For Boxing Day lunch finally, we had pork curry made according to the recipe served aboard the vessels of the defunct DDG Hansa shipping company. It’s fairly complicated to make, especially considering the basic curry is accompanied by an assortment of pickled, so we only have it for festive occasions like Christmas or my birthday.

I blogged about this curry (which is not exactly authentic Indian curry, but more an interpretation of Indian curries by German sailors) in greater detail and with photos here. This time around, the add-ons and pickles were a bit different. It turned we had no banana left, since my Dad ate the last one, so we used chopped apple instead. Plus, we had Atjar Tjampoer, a Dutch interpretation of an Indonesian pickle, since I bought a jar of it during my recent trip to Winschoten.

Pickles to be served with sailor’s curry. Top row: Indian lime pickle, mango chutney, atjar tjampoer, chopped apple. Bottom row: Chopped pickled beetroot, chopped gherkins, chopped onion, chopped hardboiled egg

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Another new release for the holidays: Christmas Shopping with a Broken Heart

And here is the final new release announcement for 2016. It’s another holiday story, but one that is very different from St. Nicholas of Hell’s Kitchen.

For Christmas Shopping with a Broken Heart is a sweet and rather fluffy holiday romance in the vein of Christmas Gifts and Christmas Eve at the Purple Owl Café.

Christmas Shopping with a Broken Heart was something of an attack story, because the phrase that eventually became the title suddenly popped into my head. At first, I wanted to write a poem around it, but then I thought, “Hey, that’s a great title for a Christmas romance,” and started writing. Three days later I was finished and here is the result.

Regular readers may notice that Christmas Shopping with a Broken Heart is the second holiday story I have written that is set in a shopping mall just before Christmas. The other one is Christmas Gifts. And coincidentally, it’s strongly implied that both stories take place concurrently at the same mall. Plus, I strongly suspect that Shannon from Christmas Gifts snagged that last jar of cranberry sauce that Hannah and Owen can’t find later on.

Why malls? Well, for starters, visiting a mall at holiday time is an experience most of us can relate to, plus malls give strangers plenty of chances to meet and they offer any kind of setting you could possibly need, because a mall is basically an interconnected universe of little mini-environments. Hence, Christmas Gifts features a perfumery and a coffee shop, while Christmas Shopping with a Broken Heart features the plaza/entrance area, the mall parking lot, a supermarket and once again, a coffee shop. And yes, it’s the same coffee shop manned by the same barista, a Pakistani math student named Mohammad.

In fact, I may eventually turn Christmas Gifts and Christmas Shopping with a Broken Heart as well as any other holiday stories set in and around shopping malls I may still write (e.g. I have an unfinished holiday romance set at a Christmas tree lot on – yes – a mall parking lot). The only reason I didn’t yet officially link both stories in a series is that a) it didn’t occur to me until yesterday and b) I’m reluctant to make any changes to book listings or upload new content at a time where the backend at most e-book vendors is closed for the holidays.

So enjoy Christmas Shopping with a Broken Heart to give you that warm and fuzzy feeling for the holidays.

Christmas Shopping with a Broken Heart

When her boyfriend dumps her four weeks before Christmas, Hannah throws herself into holiday preparations in order to dull the pain. But nothing seems to help, until Hannah quite literally bumps into Owen, while Christmas shopping.

Hannah and Owen hit it off immediately. But Owen is nursing an old grief of his own…

This is a short and sweet holiday romance of 5900 words or approximately 20 print pages.

 

More information.

Length: 5900 words

List price: 0.99 USD, EUR or GBP

Buy it at Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon Germany, Amazon France, Amazon Netherlands, Amazon Spain, Amazon Italy, Amazon Canada, Amazon Australia, Amazon Brazil, Amazon Japan, Amazon India, Amazon Mexico, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Apple iTunes, Scribd, Smashwords, Inktera, txtr, Thalia, Weltbild, Hugendubel, Buecher.de, DriveThruFiction, OmniLit/AllRomance e-books, Casa del Libro, e-Sentral, 24symbols and XinXii.

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New Release: St. Nicholas of Hell’s Kitchen, a Silencer Christmas novella

I promised you more new release announcements in the run up to the holidays and here is number 2. This one is for St. Nicholas of Hell’s Kitchen, a Silencer Christmas novella.

Now I’ve always been fond of the Silencer series of pulp-style adventures set in Depression era New York City. However, the series has never sold all that well, since the audience for retro thrillers in the style of the old hero pulps is limited and many of them are perfectly satisfied with an endless supply of actual vintage pulp fiction. Never mind that the Thrillers –> Pulp subcategory at Amazon is cluttered with all sorts of bog-standard thrillers that have zero connection with actual pulp fiction.

As a result, I don’t actively write more Silencer stories, unless a good idea presents itself. However, one thing I’ve always wanted to do was write a Silencer Christmas story. All that was missing was the right idea.

That idea eventually showed up sometime in October, when I thought it would be fun to have the Silencer make his escape down a chimney and get mistaken for Santa Claus (which is exactly what happens in the opening chapter). My first idea was simply to have Lucy rattle off her wishes to the Silencer and Richard doing his best to fulfil them. However, that wasn’t a particularly satisfying story, so I added in some more conflict, namely that Lucy and what was originally her family were at risk of eviction from their apartment.

The apartment quickly changed into an orphanage. After all, it’s a Christmas story and the Silencer helping nuns and orphans has more impact. So once I had the orphanage, I also had the three remarkable (and absolutely not villainous for once, because the evil nun/priest trope annoys me to no end) nuns Sister Mary Margaret, Sister Agnes and Sister Bernadette. Coincidentally, St. Nicholas of Hell’s Kitchen also effortlessly passes the Bechdel test, since it has plenty of named women (the three nuns, Constance, Leah Levonsky, Dorothy Berwick, Melody Rumpus) talking among themselves about all sorts of things, including on occasion men.

Once the three nuns had laid out their plight, the information naturally led Richard (and me, since I’m very much a discovery writer) to Father O’Leary and the church of St. Nicholas of Hell’s Kitchen (which is entirely fictional BTW) which also gave the novella its title. As for why I chose to set the story in Hell’s Kitchen, I picked that particular neighbourhood, because it was an immigrant neighbourhood and crime-ridden well into the 1980s. The name of the street gang the Silencer is tangling with at the start is a reference to another well known heroic resident of Hell’s Kitchen. Plus, the religious connotations of the name were too good to pass up. Coincidentally, the Heaven & Hell Cabaret and particularly the scene where Richard stumbled into a dressing room full of chorus girls in angel and devil costumes also came about because of the theme.

Initially, I had planned for slumlord Paul Krays to be the main villain of the story. However, then the US presidential elections happened and my plans changed in that I made Krays merely a henchman of an even bigger villainous mastermind. And yes, any resemblances between Reginald Rumpus and a certain US real estate mogul turned reality TV star turned president are totally not coincidental at all.

Though you’ll also notice that the physical descriptions of Reginald and Melody Rumpus don’t quite match their real world counterparts. Instead, they were based on Wallace Beery and Jean Harlow playing a crass noveau rich couple living in a very white Art Deco apartment (so white that the cinematographer had problems filming it) in the 1933 movie Dinner at Eight. Here is a trailer for the movie BTW, which made me realise that though I’ve seen the film (I’m a big fan of Jean Harlow), I remember absolutely nothing about it except Jean Harlow and her spectacular gowns, Wallace Beery and that very white apartment. So in short, Reginald and Melody Rumpus are Donald and Melania Trump as portrayed by Jean Harlow and Wallace Berry.

I think I’ve mentioned before that the Silencer stories are among the most research intensive of my stories. Only the Alfred and Bertha stories require even more research, but the necessary info for those stories is usually much easier to find. The big problem with the Silencer stories is that the 1930s are still close enough to our time that many things are similar, i.e. there are guns, cars, airplanes, radios, movies, typewriters, etc…, but nonetheless far enough away that plenty of things we take for granted today didn’t yet exist. And yes, I admit that I occasionally cheat a little. For example, night vision devices were still highly experimental in the mid 1930s and only gradually came into wider use during WWII. And while acrylic glass was certainly around and Lucite was trademarked in 1936, there likely weren’t shoes with Lucite heels yet.

What is more, New York City has changed a lot since the 1930s, though thankfully the city or at least parts of it are well enough documented that it’s easy enough to find out what things look like today, whether they looked like that in the 1930s, when particular buildings were built, etc… That’s for example why the scene of Constance and Leah Levonsky walking along Fifth Avenue never mentions Tiffany’s, since Tiffany’s didn’t move to its current location until 1940. And indeed, all the buildings, hotels, stores and sights mentioned in the Fifth Avenue scene actually existed with the exception of Reginald Rumpus’ dark tower, which was based on some actual Art Deco skyscrapers with a bit of gothic flair added. The Bonwit Teller department store BTW was torn down by none other than Donald Trump to make room for the Trump Tower. And by the way, I’d like to make a shout-out to the Sherry-Netherland Hotel whose website has plenty of photos of its beautiful restored interior, which were exactly the sort of information I needed for this story. I’m not actually in the market for 400 USD per night hotel rooms in Manhattan, but if I were, this is the hotel I’d choose.

But even though there are plenty of photos of Manhattan in the 1930s around, photos of Christmas decorations in 1930s Manhattan are far more difficult to find. Hence, while it was easy enough to figure out that the Christmas tree at the Rockefeller Center has been around since 1931 (with a gap in 1932), though actual photos of what it looked like at the time were a lot more difficult to find. This page has some, though. The ice skating rink, meanwhile, only opened in 1936, i.e. it would have been brand new at the time the story was set.

Photos of 1930s Christmas decorations on Fifth Avenue were even more difficult to find. I could find a few interior shots of various department stores, but hardly any photos of street decorations, at least not in New York City. So the descriptions of display windows and decorations are largely much made up.

Regarding the F.A.O. Schwarz scenes, now I’ve actually been inside the Fifth Avenue flagship store of F.A.O. Schwarz. However, the building I visited was clearly built after WWII. Luckily, it was not just easy enough to find out where F.A.O. Schwarz would have been in 1936 (practically next door, it turned out), but I also came across this 1940 article from Fortune magazine which decribes exactly what the store looked like, how it was set up, etc… There’s also a photo gallery which includes plenty of shots of Christmas decorations from the 1930s and 1940s. The various toys described are all real toys from the 1930s BTW. I didn’t even have to research those, since I used to collect toys (still do, though I refrain from buying additions for space reasons).

The Paradise Lounge is obviously a proto Tiki Bar. Now Tiki Bars are mainly associated with the 1950s and 1960s, but the beginnings of the trend lie in the 1930s. Don, the Beachcomber and Trader Vic’s (still named Hinky Dink) both opened in the 1930s in California. Actress Dorothy Lamour also first donned her famous sarong (which has very little to do with an actual sarong) in the 1936 movie Jungle Princess.

But it wasn’t just settings and technology that required research. For example, I come from a Lutheran Protestant majority region and have never been Catholic, so I had no idea how confessions really work beyond what you see in movies in occasion, what the priest says, etc… Luckily, there are plenty of religious websites which have the relevant information.

The Hanukkah dinner at the Levonskys’ home (which I wanted to include just to show how diverse 1930s New York would have been) posed a similar problem. For though I know what Hanukkah is and what is being celebrated, I didn’t know what middle class Jewish families would have eaten. Once again, the web came to my rescue and to own surprise I found that most of the food was familiar to me, though I know it by different names.

Coincidentally, while the wife and daughter of pulp publisher Jake Levonsky have been mentioned in the Silencer series before (in Countdown to Death and The Great Fraud, to be exact), this is the first time we actually meet them on the page. I really enjoyed writing the bubbly Leah Levonsky BTW and I’m sure she’ll show up again.

Of the other Silencer regulars, Justin O’Grady shows up briefly towards the end (and reveals that he knows exactly who the Silencer is, even if he cannot prove anything). Constance has a more substantial role, though she is not actively involved in the action this time around. And Edgar, the kitten Richard rescued in Elevator of Doom, shows up as well. Plus, there is the possibility of a new addition to the family towards the end.

Talking of Elevator of Doom, that story has a gorgeous new cover, by the way, which also matches the Silencer series branding much better than the old cover did. And indeed, finding suitable covers for the Silencer series is another massive challenge, since illustrated or CGI retro stock art is extremely rare (and 1930s style imagery is even more difficult to find – Victorian, Edwardian, 1920s and 1950s are far more plentiful). Though I’m happy both with the new cover of Elevator of Doom as well as with the vintage Christmas tree on the cover of St. Nicholas of Hell’s Kitchen.

In short, St. Nicholas of Hell’s Kitchen takes us on a seasonal tour through the wintery New York City of 1936 and really has it all: action, thrills, romance, toy stores, tiki bars, burlesque theatres, orphans, nuns, chorus girls, villains and even a time-displaced Donald Trump analogue.

So what are you waiting for? Get your copy today!

St. Nicholas of Hell’s Kitchen

[image error]Christmas time in 1930s New York. After escaping through the chimney of an orphanage in Hell’s Kitchen, Richard Blakemore a.k.a. the masked crimefighter known only as the Silencer is mistaken for Santa Claus by one of the children and learns that the orphanage is under siege by both a gang of brutal racketeers and an unscrupulous landlord.

Richard vows to help the children and their guardians. However, it turns out that the attacks on the orphanage are only part of a much larger plot, when Richard’s quest for justice leads him into the upper echelons of Manhattan’s high society.

Soon, the Silencer finds himself face to face with one of the most powerful men in the city, while Richard and Constance struggle to save the orphanage and give the children of Hell’s Kitchen an unforgettable Christmas.

More information.

Length: 29000 words

List price: 2.99 USD, EUR or GBP

Buy it at Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon Germany, Amazon France, Amazon Netherlands, Amazon Spain, Amazon Italy, Amazon Canada, Amazon Australia, Amazon Brazil, Amazon Japan, Amazon India, Amazon Mexico, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Apple iTunes, Scribd, Smashwords, Inktera, txtr, Thalia, Weltbild, Hugendubel, Buecher.de, DriveThruFiction, OmniLit/AllRomance e-books, Casa del Libro, e-Sentral, 24symbols and XinXii.

Don’t forget that you can buy a bundle of all eight Silencer novelettes at DriveThruFiction at a reduced price.

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Seasonal Views of Winschoten in the Netherlands

I guess I’ll be alternating between seasonal photos and new release announcements up to Christmas.

Anyway, today I had an appointment in Winschoten, a town just beyond the Dutch-German border, which meant a 280 kilometer round trip shortly before Christmas. Not exactly ideal, but at least I got to take a few rather gloomy smartphone shots of Winschoten all decked out for the season.

The reason the photos are gloomy is because it was a grey and foggy day just before the winter solstice. If you want to see what the town looks like in slightly nicer weather (though that was a foggy day as well – fog being rather common this close to the North Sea coast), here are some photos from 2014.

So let’s take a look at Winschoten at Christmas time:

A Christmas tree along the canal with a typically Dutch drawbridge in the background.

Winschoten’s main shopping street is lined by 19th century brick houses and the 16th century bell tower of the Marktplein Church. Not the Christmas lights.

A closer look at the “D’Olle Witte” (the old white one), the 16th century bell tower of the Marktplein Church. The bell tower is actually separate from the church. In front, you can see the bookstore Bruna.

A look at Winschoten’s main shopping street street with Christmas lights. The rose motif refers to the fact that Winschoten is home to the largest rosarium in the Netherlands. In the background, you can see the tower of the 19th century town hall. On the right, you can see the HEMA discount department store with the tiled look typical for the chain.

The postmodern Winkelzentrum (shopping mall) ‘t Rond (The Round). The older building on the left houses an Automat diner, which still exist in the Netherlands (Winschoten has two in perfectly preserved 1950s look). The long line on the right is people queueing up for Poffertjes, little Dutch pancakes.

Finally, here is a shot of my lunch, scrambled eggs with veggie stir-fry, courtesy of the truck stop Autohof Apen-Remels.

No photos of the windmills (Winschoten has three) this time, since they are on the other side of town and I was eager to go home, once my business was concluded, because it gets dark at approx. a quarter past four at this time of the year and I don’t particularly like driving in the dark.

Though I did manage to squeeze in some shopping. Food mostly, Brussels sprouts, fresh cranberries, Gouda cheese, breakfast cake with candied ginger, rice crackers, atjar tjampoer (I should probably pickle my own some day), ketjap manis and gochujang, all of which are either not available in Germany outside specialty stores or at least not in the same quality (e.g. there is a huge difference between Dutch Gouda and what passes for Gouda in Germany and the Brussels sprouts were so much better than what you can buy in German supermarkets).

I also surrendered to the lure of the local Bruna store. Bruna is a chain of book, magazines and stationery stores in the Netherlands. As a teen I spent a lot of time at the Rotterdam Bruna store (my Dad worked in Rotterdam from 1983 to 1989) reading comics, which is why I’m familiar with most Franco-Belgian-Dutch comics going strong in the 1980s. I hardly ever bought any of them, since I couldn’t afford them (Franco-Belgian-Dutch style albums are a lot pricier than US-style single issues), but I read most of them and the staff let me. Plus, occasionally I managed to scrape enough money together to buy a comic album or an issue of Starlog (which they carried as well) or once, an imported book on science fiction movies for the enormous price of 65 Dutch guilders. That’s still pretty expensive for a book – even a non-fiction hardcover book – even twenty-eight years later, but considering I literally read it to pieces, it was well worth the price. I still have it, too.

So nowadays, whenever I find myself in the Netherlands and come across a Bruna store, I usually go in to check out the comics (alas, they no longer carry Starlog). And if something catches my eye, I buy it as a payback for all the comics I read in the store as a teen. Most of the series I read back then are no longer around, though Suske en Wiske (a.k.a. Bob et Bobette a.k.a. Spike and Suzy) is still going strong. I will always have a soft spot for them – since Suske en Wiske were for me what Archie is for many Americans, only that Suske en Wiske had aliens, fantasy lands and time travel – but I don’t buy the comics, because I aged out of the target demographic some thirty years ago. Indeed, I preferred Willy Vandersteen’s other series De Rode Ridder (The Red Knight) and particularly De Geuzen towards the end of my time in Rotterdram.

However, today I came across a new volume in the Worlds of Aldebaran science fiction series by Leo, which I quite like, so I bought that.

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New science fiction story available: Liquid Muse

Originally, I was planning to post some photos of the Bremen and Oldenburg Christmas markets today. But it didn’t really feel appropriate, given today’s news.

So I decided to postpone the photo post and do a new release announcement instead.

This is actually the first of three new release announcements to come in the run-up to Christmas. Yes, I’ve been busy, which is why this blog has been somewhat neglected of late.

Today’s announcement is for a near future SF story called Liquid Muse. It’s another story to come out of the 2016 July short story challenge.

Unlike most other stories originating from that challenge, Liquid Muse has no clearly defined inspiration. Instead, it was the result of the juxtaposition of an article on gentrification, a news headline on possible genetic link to human creativity and a call for blood donations that landed in the creativity pessure cooker of my mind and caused Liquid Muse to fall out.

It didn’t really fit in thematically with any of the other stories to come out of the July short story challenge, so I decided to publish it as a standalone. Coincidentally, it’s also one of the more explicitly political stories I’ve written.

Since Liquid Muse is largely about abstract concepts, I was unsure what to do about the cover. But then I came across a gorgeous piece of psychedelic art, which was actually supposed to be a visualisation of migraine.

I’ve always had a soft spot for the psychedelic science fiction covers of the 1960s and 1970s, not to mention for the psychedelic posters of Wes Wilson and Peter Max, so that was the look I went for.

Liquid Muse

Jonah Winter has developed the perfect creativity enhancing drug – one hundred percent effective, non-addictive and safe.

Ron Varnhagen has experienced the drug’s remarkable properties for himself and plans to invest in Jonah’s venture. But then he learns of the horrifying secret behind the drug and its production…

This is a short science fiction story of 2600 words or approx. 10 print pages altogether.

 

More information.

Length: 2600 words

List price: 0.99 USD, EUR or GBP

Buy it at Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon Germany, Amazon France, Amazon Netherlands, Amazon Spain, Amazon Italy, Amazon Canada, Amazon Australia, Amazon Brazil, Amazon Japan, Amazon India, Amazon Mexico, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Apple iTunes, Scribd, Smashwords, Inktera, txtr, Thalia, Weltbild, Hugendubel, Buecher.de, DriveThruFiction, OmniLit/AllRomance e-books, Casa del Libro, e-Sentral, 24symbols and XinXii.

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The Return of the Trolls and a New Release: The Cursed Arm of Driftwood Beach

I’ve been somewhat missing in action these past few weeks, because I’ve been hard at work finishing the Silencer Christmas novella St. Nicholas of Hell’s Kitchen, so I can publish it before the various e-book retailers close down for the holidays (which happens up to two weeks before Christmas for some of them).

On this blog, I also have some seasonal photos of German Christmas markets coming up as well as my comments on the return of the Sad Puppies probably (the post is mostly written, so why not?).

What is more, the troll-themed anthology For Whom the Bell Trolls: 25 Tales of Terror, Triumph and Trolls, edited by Lindy Moone and John L. Monk is available again. My story in the anthology is called “When Life Gives You Trolls, Make Lemonade” and it’s about a lonely troll looking for companionship on the Internet.

It’s a Smorgasbord of Trolls!

Funny, touching, titillating and suspenseful, there’s a story for every adult reader in For Whom the Bell Trolls, a unique, illustrated “antrollogy” by 24 international authors. Arranged from light to meaty fare, the book’s “menu” offers up fanciful and farcical stories, family-oriented tales, romance, mystery, even magically surreal literary stories — starring all sorts of trolls, from the all-too-real Internet variety to the man-eating, bridge-dwelling trolls of legend.

Buy it at Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon Germany, Amazon France, Amazon Netherlands, Amazon Spain, Amazon Italy, Amazon Canada, Amazon Australia, Amazon Brazil, Amazon Japan, Amazon India and Amazon Mexico.

Royalties go to charity (Equality Now), so what are you waiting for? Grab your copy today.

However, I also have a new release in a different series (well, it is a series now) to announce, namely the sequel to The Revenant of Wrecker’s Dock and the second story in the Hallowind Cove series about a fog-shrouded seaside town that is a magnet for weird happenings.

I initially wrote The Revenant of Wrecker’s Dock as a standalone, though I always intended to reuse the town of Hallowind Cove, should the right story idea come along. And eventually, the right idea did come along, while I was doing the 2016 July short story challenge.

Also in July, I visited Bremerhaven. Though Bremerhaven is a seaside city, it is not at all like the fictional Hallowind Cove. For starters, it’s a lot bigger, something of a tourist attraction and also a major sea port.

One of Bremerhaven’s main tourist attractions and one of its four big museums is the German Maritime Museum and its exterior grounds at the so-called museum harbour, which hold those exhibits too big for the museum proper. Most of those exterior exhibits are historical ships (you can see some of them in this post). However, there are also buoys, smokestacks, cranes, a harpoon and a wooden sculpture called the sailor’s arm, which is basically an almost six meter long wooden arm.

When I’m in Bremerhaven and have enough time, I like walking around the touristy Havenwelten neighbourhood and the museum harbour. And so I was wandering among the historical ships at the museum harbour, primed to generate story ideas because of the July short story challenge, when I walked past the sailor’s arm. And suddenly, the sculpture sparked an idea. “What if the arm wasn’t just an offbeat work of art, but the actual arm of some kind of giant? And what if the arm wasn’t happy about being separated from its body?”

On the train, I mused a bit more about that idea and suddenly realised that this was a Hallowind Cove story. So, once I got home, I sat down and started writing what would eventually become The Cursed Arm of Driftwood Beach.

In the story, we meet some old friends, namely Paul, Old Hank and Hugo from The Revenant of Wrecker’s Dock, again and also encounter some more of the residents of Hallowind Cove.

So prepare to be thrilled by:

The Cursed Arm of Driftwood Beach

A disembodied arm terrifies a seaside town…

Strange things keep happening in the permanently fog shrouded seaside town of Hallowind Cove, earning it the nickname “Harbour of the Weird”.

When a beachcomber finds a giant wooden arm on the beach, the people of Hallowind Cove are excited about a new addition to the town museum’s collection.

But the wooden arm has a mind of its own – and the tendency to go walkabout by night…

This is a short story of 2400 words or approximately 10 pages in the Hallowind Cove series, but may be read as a standalone.

More information.

Length: 2400 words

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Indie Speculative Fiction of the Month for November 2016

It’s that time of the month again, time for “Indie Speculative Fiction of the Month”.

So what is “Indie Speculative Fiction of the Month”? It’s a round-up of speculative fiction by indie authors newly published this month, though some Oktober books I missed the last time around snuck in as well. The books are arranged in alphabetical order by author. So far, most links only go to Amazon.com, though I may add other retailers for future editions.

Once again, we have new releases covering the whole broad spectrum of speculative fiction. We have a whole lot of horror this month, but also urban fantasy, portal fantasy, YA fantasy, space opera, military science fiction, post-apocalyptic science fiction, dystopian fiction, paranormal romance, gay werewolves, aliens, ghosts, FBI witches, aliens, southern monsters, sentient zombies, pods, starships, newcomers, clockwork alchemists and much more.

Don’t forget that Indie Speculative Fiction of the Month is also crossposted to the Speculative Fiction Showcase, a group blog run by Jessica Rydill and myself, which features new release spotlights, guest posts, interviews and link round-ups regarding all things speculative fiction several times per week.

As always, I know the authors at least vaguely, but I haven’t read all of the books, so Caveat emptor.

And now on to the books without further ado:

Southern Monsters by Cora Buhlert:

Three tales of monsters and terror in the Louisiana bayous.

When a young bride goes missing on her wedding day in Acadiana, the locals blame the Terror, the legendary monster that stalks the Crimson Bayou.

Remy Theriault does not believe in the Terror and he’s pretty sure the bride has done a runner. But the groom is his cousin and family is family. So Remy goes out to look for the runaway bride, only to find that sometimes, the old legends are true…

When their car crashes into the bayou on a dark Louisiana night, the swamp creature known only as Big Puffball might just be one family’s salvation…

When fishing boats go missing on the Mississippi River Delta, few people link these disappearances to the mysterious light that lit up the Louisiana sky only weeks before. But an astronomer from Tulane University makes the connection and discovers the horror that is the sphere that ate the Mississippi delta.

This is a collection of three short horror stories of 7700 words or approximately 27 print pages altogether.

End Game by Lindsay Buroker:

Alisa Marchenko has reunited with her daughter, and even though she hasn’t figured out how to get Jelena to accept Leonidas yet, she dreams of the three of them starting a new life together. They can return the Star Nomad to its original purpose of running freight and staying out of trouble (mostly).

Before that can happen, Alisa must fulfill the promise she made to Jelena: that she and her crew will retrieve young Prince Thorian, the boy who has become Jelena’s best friend. But Thorian was kidnapped by the rogue Starseer Tymoteusz, the man who wants to use the Staff of Lore to take over the entire system—and the man who may have the power to do it. Alisa doesn’t know why he kidnapped Thorian, but Tymoteusz once promised to kill the prince, so she fears they don’t have much time.

Unfortunately, Tymoteusz hasn’t left a trail of breadcrumbs. Finding him will be difficult, and even if they’re successful, facing him could be suicidal. To have a chance of surviving, Alisa will have to come up with her greatest scheme yet.

Haunted by Stacy Claflin:

The summer after graduation SHOULD have been the most exciting time of Mercy’s life.

Instead, on the way to an exciting overseas trip, she’s the only survivor of a tragic accident that claims the rest of her family. Then at her family’s memorial service, a ghostly hooded figure begins to follow her.

Her gorgeous new neighbor, Kit, who happens to run a paranormal blog, helps her discover what the hooded figure is hiding. Mercy thinks he’s angry that she survived the accident.

Could she be right?

Secret of the Master by Robert J. Fluegel:

It’s been two weeks since Tommy Travers broke a deadly curse in his town, one he accidentally brought with him from the World of Books. Being trained how to control his new power is more important than ever. As Tommy enters a book under the guidance of his trainer Amelia, however, the repercussions of the curse are not yet over. A wizard escaped from the World of Books read Tommy’s mind and he knows where the Gifted are. If the evil wizard finds a way to unlock his magic, the warehouse, the Gifted—the world—will be his.

Tommy and his new friends must find a way to gain back all they’ve lost. But time is running out, and there’s something Amelia hasn’t told him. A secret—one that makes him, an amateur Gifted who’s hardly begun training, the only one who can defeat Mephitis before it’s too late.

In this sequel to Gift of the Master, join Tommy as he finds his true place among the Gifted and braves his most dangerous book yet.

Generation by J.J. Green:

Humankind entered the age of deep space travel two decades ago, and Earth’s megacorps rushed to exploit the rich resources to be found on unclaimed planets. Prospecting starships roam the galaxy, racing to be the first to lay their hands on the new-found source of wealth.

But unknown horrors lie at the reaches of the great expanse, ready to be awakened by unsuspecting starship crews.

Chief Security Officer Jas Harrington’s job is to protect her shipmates from hostile aliens on new worlds. For the efficient if quick-tempered Jas, that hasn’t been too hard up till now. But her captain is drug-addled, and he’s hungry for the bonuses he gets from finding valuable resources.

When the captain won’t listen to Jas’ fears about a mysterious planet, he is compromised by contact with a strange life form—a life form that threatens to take over the entire ship and return to Earth, where it can spread its deadly infection.

Now Jas is in a race against time, struggling to quarantine the alien infection and prevent the aliens from achieving their goal: Generation. She doesn’t realize it yet, but as she fights to save her crew, the future of all humanity hangs in the balance.

Generation is the first of ten books in the Shadows of the Void space opera serial.

PODS! and Other Supernatural Tales by D.F. Holland:

PODS AND OTHER SUPERNATURAL TALES will take you on a spine-tingling voyage, where you’ll encounter deadly sea creatures, cursed objects, custom-made Hells, alien killers and other worlds – all in the blink of a gargoyle’s eye!

Hang on tightly as you read this collection of chilling, supernatural horror and fantasy – from the author of TALES FROM THE BEAUMONT HOUSE.

 

Magical Probi by T.S. Paul:

Probitionary FBI Agent Agatha Blackmore has just finished three grueling years at the FBI Academy at Quantico. She mastered every skill and task they laid before her. She now begins an Internship of sorts working for the Magical Crimes Division. Assassination, Murder, and Betrayal await her. How will she do in the real world? Will her Magick be enough to save her?

 

 

Clockwork Alchemist by Sara C. Roethle:

Arhyen is the self-declared finest thief in London. The mission was simple. Steal a journal from Fairfax Breckinridge, one of the greatest alchemists of the time.

Arhyen hadn’t expected to find Fairfax himself, with a dagger in his back. Nor had he expected his automaton daughter, Liliana. Suddenly entrenched in a mystery too great for him to fully comprehend, he must rely on the help of a wayward detective, and an automaton who claims she has a soul, to piece together the clues laid before them. Will Arhyen uncover the true source of Liliana’s soul in time, or will London plunge into a dark age of nefarious technology, where only the scientific will survive?

The Newcomer: Twelve Science Fiction Short Stories, edited by Alasdair Shaw:

From a young couple struggling to look after their baby to a new captain’s reluctance to take command of her ship, and from a sun-addled stranger’s appearance in town to the emergence of a sentient AI, the twelve tales presented here explore the central theme of an arrival by someone or something new.

There’s even an alien puppy.

The stories are:

Tithe by Griffin Carmichael

Exodus by Alec Hutson

First Bonding by Tom Germann

Ice Dreamer by J J Green

The Nanny by Cindy Carroll

Right Hand by Jonathan C Gillespie

What Make is Your Cat? by Richard Crawford

Kaxian Duty by Cherise Kelley

Lessons Learned by J Naomi Ay

The Humra by Laura Greenwood

The Hawk of Destiny’s Fist by James S Aaron

Repulse by Alasdair Shaw

Journey by Hollis Shiloh:

From the moment they meet, Nat feels a strong connection with the injured wolf…and later with the same gorgeous man. Nat is just an ordinary cop, with his own problems and insecurities, but if he can help Journey in any way, he’d love to.

He’d also love to date the sweet, handsome shifter, although that might be more complicated than he first thought. Two men navigate the waters of learning to trust, love, and accept themselves and each other, as they work to build a life together.

A Shifters and Partners Novel

Daughters of Death by Josiah Upton:

In Zaul’s mind, the game is over. After giving himself up to the APA, his true identity now lays bare before the walls of the nation’s largest Hybrid Reanimate facility, where he will rot for the rest of his undead days under the watch of cruel containment officers. No more disguises, no more deceptions, no more pretending to be human… And no future with the girl he loves.

But Genny cannot accept this new reality as easily. Compelled to repay his sacrifice, she searches for any way possible get Zaul out of the Facility, allying with both the living and the undead to make it happen. Zaul also forges unlikely friendships when he joins the Brains Club, a privileged group of higher-functioning containees who enjoy a better diet, recreational opportunities, contact with the opposite sex – and unsettling attention from the Assistant Director of the APA.

As Genny’s world unravels, Zaul’s becomes stranger. But only one constant is guaranteed: Caesar Ortega is hell-bent on destroying them both. When death and temptation are around every corner, can you keep who you were alive?

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Ruminations on the series finale of Mad Men or The world’s longest Coke commercial

In retrospect, I guess we all should have known better than to expect that Matthew Weiner would be able to come up with a decent ending or indeed any ending at all. After all, the TV show Weiner worked on before Mad Men, The Sopranos famously ended with a bell ringing and a cut to black, while “Don’t Stop Believing” by Journey plays, an oddly appropriate song for the master of unsatisfying endings, because just like a Matthew Weiner TV show, “Don’t Stop Believing” builds and builds towards a climax that never comes (and it’s even cut off in mid line in the Sopranos scene).

I never got into The Sopranos. I intensely dislike mafia stories and besides, I was disappointed when the hot new TV show from the US that had won all the awards turned out not to be about opera singers, as I had assumed based on the title in those days of limited internet. I think I watched maybe half an episode and that was it.

However, to my own surprise, since prestige TV shows that arrived with huge accolades from the US usually do very little for me, I found myself quite drawn into Mad Men, sticking with the show even as the German broadcaster shuffled it into ever more ridiculous graveyard slots (for my previous ruminations on Mad Men, see here) until the very last episode, which aired on German TV yesterday night.

I’m not even sure why I found myself so drawn into Mad Men, since I don’t particularly care for most retro television shows. And besides, Mad Men was frustrating much of the time from the very first episode on. I guess a big part of it was that the meticulously recreated 1960s setting appealed to the design buff in me, particularly in the latter seasons as the show moved into the cool half of the sixties. Another part was that I found all the bits about advertising and how it’s created really fascinating. And indeed, Mad Men would have been a better show IMO, if there had been more advertising and less soap opera antics involving the characters’ home lives, though gawking at the clothes and set design made even the annoying soap opera elements endurable.

Finally – and yes, sometimes I am that shallow – I kept watching, because I wanted to see, if Don and Peggy would finally end up together or at least share a night of red hot passion, because damn it, Jon Hamm and Elizabeth Moss had such a lot of chemistry and generated enough sparks to power the entire studio in every scene they shared.

In short, I was waiting to see if after the succession of Barbie dolls he married and slept with, Don would finally realise that what he really wants is a Midge. And yes, I did some searching around to find photos of vintage Barbie dolls that look just like Mad Men characters. Come to think of it, maybe that was another reason I kept watching Mad Men, because the fact that many characters looked like vintage Barbie dolls appealed to the former doll collector in me.

Anyway, for all us Don/Peggy shippers (I can’t have been the only one, can I?), we now know how that turned out.

To be fair, I actually think that Peggy is much better off with Stan, because Stan is solid and dependable, while Don is flakey and unstable and something of a jerk. Nonetheless, that was not what the story was building towards. Besides, it’s also telling that Stan’s declaration of love comes right after Peggy gets off the phone with Don and has clearly decided that she’s had enough of Don and his antics for good (and frankly, one of my predictions for the ending was “Peggy is finally fed up with Don and pushed him out of the window – hence the falling man in the title sequence”). Poor Stan is the consolation prize – she even tells him, “Oh, I never thought about you at all.”

It’s not even the first declaration of love Peggy has gotten over the course of the series – in fact, there are several moments where confused male Sterling Cooper employees fall to their knees in front of Peggy (sometimes literally) to declare their undying love, sort of. Pete Campbell, Duck Phillips, Michael Ginsberg, Ted Chaough, even Don himself (twice, including one time while he’s telling her he just married Megan) have all done it. Stan is just the last in a long line and the only one who gets a positive answer. Come to think of it, this isn’t even the first time Peggy has decided she’s had enough of Don and turned to someone else. She did pretty much the same thing with Ted Chaough.

So while I’m glad that at least Peggy got to have a happy ending with Stan (who’s a far better choice than Pete, Ted or – heaven’s beware – Duck) and the declaration of love via the phone scene itself is lovely, this still doesn’t really feel like a happily ever after to me.

Though Peggy at least gets an optimistic ending that sort of makes sense in conjunction with what has gone before, which is more than you can say for many of the other characters. Because while the last seven or eight episodes were basically an extended good-bye tour, where established characters reappeared, only to announce they were going off somewhere else – and we should give Matthew Weiner credit for at least attempting to give his characters closure – a lot of these fates did not ring true.

Let’s start with the company at the heart of Mad Men, Sterling Cooper and Partners or whatever it was called at the end. The company finally gets gobbled up by McCann Erickson, a fate Sterling Cooper has alternately courted and tried to avoid since the very first season, and dissolved. And for that matter, what on Earth has McCann Erickson, which is after all a real company existing in the real world, ever done to Matthew Weiner to make him hate them so much? Because frankly, as a writer I’d feel very uncomfortable (not to mention skirting a defamation lawsuit) having my character say the sort of things Mad Men characters repeatedly say about McCann Erickson about a real company. Though I suspect McCann Erickson doesn’t care and is laughing all the way to the bank, pleased about their increased profile. For example, before Mad Men I had no idea which company was responsible for all those lovely Coca Cola ads (and they are lovely, though I don’t even drink cola). Now I know.

Regarding the characters, I can almost buy that deeply closeted gay Bob Benson would go off the Detroit to work for some American car manufacturer or other, though I still suspect that Bob would have been much happier in New York City with its burgeoning gay pride movement (the Stonewall riots happened in 1969, i.e. about a year before the end of Mad Men). And yes, I know that New York City was considered in decline and crime ridden by the 1970s and 1980s and therefore no longer viewed as the place to be, so apparently to Americans, the characters getting the hell out of there is a happy ending. But if New York City is about to decline, Detroit is about to decline a whole lot worse.

Glenn Bishop suddenly finds patriotism and goes off to Vietnam, which is completely opposite to the earlier portrayal of his character. Roger Sterling suddenly deciding to move to Paris and get married to Megan’s mother of all people? Okay, so the scenes with the two of them were cute and it’s a good sign that Roger has finally decided to marry a woman his own age, but I still don’t buy it. I also think a Roger/Joan reunion would have been a better ending, especially since both are free now and even have a kid together.

But Pete Campbell who loves New York City so much that he cannot even tolerate living in the suburbs (not that I don’t sympathise) suddenly declaring his undying love for Trudy, on whom he cheated even on the eve of their wedding ten years before, and going off to Wichita in fucking Kansas? Yeah, right. I predict he won’t last six months, before he comes back screaming. Never mind that pretty much the last line he speaks on screen is a Terminator-like “I’ll be back” to Peggy.

Meanwhile, Ken Cosgrove gets fired, goes to Dow Chemical to take over the job of his father-in-law (who prophetically is played by Ray Wise) and promptly turns into a raging arsehole. Not only does that ending not ring true, it’s also a sad fate for someone who was one of the few likeable male male characters in Mad Men. Especially since he doesn’t go to work for any old corporation, but for one that is pretty close to the epitome of the evil big corporation (Napalm, Agent Orange, Bhopal, faulty breast implants and plenty of other scandals). Honestly, I’d much rather have seen Ken retire to become a full time writer, which his wife actually suggests to him at one point. Especially since Ken, Mad Men‘s resident SF writer, always struck me as an amalgam of several real life SF writers who worked in advertising for their day jobs. In short, I’d hoped Ken would turn into Frederik Pohl and not the nasty big corporation’s spokesperson.

Going on to final fates of Mad Men characters that do ring true, there is Betty and her impending death of lung cancer. Now I have to admit that I loathed Betty from the very first moment I saw her. This has nothing to do with the actress whom I have liked in other roles, it’s simply that Betty is a horrible person. In fact, I strongly suspected that we were supposed to loathe Betty, which is why I was very surprised that a lot of people did not loathe her at all, but felt sorry for her. Yeah, Don is a jerk and a complete failure as a husband, but since Betty was so unlikeable, it was hard to have any sympathy for her at all. Plus, any appearance by her always dragged the series into soap opera territory, especially when she continued playing a big role in the series even after she divorced Don and should in theory have been written out, much like Megan and most of Don’s various flings were.

So while it is of course tragic that a woman of barely forty and mother of three young children would die of lung cancer, I still found it incredibly hard to muster sympathy for either Betty or Henry, her equally loathsome second husband (who always looks like someone who’d molest his step children, plus he’s a Republican, which does not endear him to me barely two weeks after the US election). I do feel sorry for Sally, Bobbie and Gene (and it doesn’t help that Kiernan Shipka, who plays Sally, acts rings around much of the adult cast) and how Sally and later Bobbie desperately try to cling to normalcy for the sake of their mother, stepfather and little Gene, but not for Betty herself. Though Betty refusing treatment (even though chemotherapy was around in 1970, much to my surprise, since my biological grandmother who died of breast cancer in 1968 did not get any as far as I know) and the fact that her final requests to Sally focus only on what she wants to wear in her coffin and how she wants her hair done, actually do ring true to the way the character has been portrayed throughout the series (and kudos to actress January Jones who’s excellent in these final few episodes).

Her final phone call with Don didn’t do much to endear Betty to me either, since she tells Don point blank that she doesn’t want the children living with him, because children need a normal family with father and a mother (I bet if she’d lived, Betty would have become a fervent anti-gay marriage crusader along with creepy Henry). Now Don really isn’t about to win any “father of the year” awards, but in many ways, he’s a pretty typical absent father of the postwar era. And in his scenes with the three Draper children, it’s obvious that he’s fond of them (which may well be due to actor Jon Hamm being fond of children), which is why the scene a few seasons ago where Don confesses that he didn’t want his children never rang true, because it was pretty obvious he cared about them. Meanwhile, Betty is not just a horrible person, she has also been portrayed as an awful mother from the very start. Don may not make “father of the year”, but Betty has always been a hot candidate for the prestigious (not) Darth Vader Parenthood Award.

So were we supposed to loathe Betty? Were we supposed to feel sorry for her? Both? I don’t know. All I know is that I feel bad about not feeling sadder at her impending death, because what I see is a deeply unpleasant person meeting a horrible fate. The fact that the series kept almost gleefully pointing out all the smoking and the drinking with a big red arrow that said, “Look at those backward people. They don’t even know they’re killing themselves.” throughout its run doesn’t help either. Someone eventually had to succumb to all that drinking and smoking and Betty was the one who got the short straw. It’s also telling that in her final shot, we see Betty sitting at the kitchen table with a cigarette in her hand. And yes, I know I’m probably not objective regarding Betty, because I keep conflating her fate with my biological grandmother’s (whom I never knew and about whom I have very complicated feelings*) and because she represents the sort of conventional suburban married life I intensely dislike (and she married a Republican, too). So in short, Betty couldn’t win, at least not with me.

When those episodes first aired in the US, I’ve seen quite a few people complain that Betty was fridged, while all the jerky male characters got happy endings. So was Betty fridged? If it had only been Betty dying, I don’t think anybody would have complained, especially since – as I said above – someone had to succumb to all that drinking and smoking and drug taking. However, it wasn’t just Betty. Because women involved with Don Draper have the tendency to die, mostly of cancer. Both Anna Draper and Rachel Katz of the Jewish department store, two women who were important to Don, die as well, both of cancer, while his Beatnik girlfriend from the early episodes becomes a junkie. Don Draper is very much like Lady Mary from that other retro nostalgia TV hit, Downton Abbey. Have sex with them and you die. And in both Anna’s and Rachel’s case, the deaths were entirely unnecessary and typical fridging deaths, far more typical than Betty’s. Anna basically dies to get Don to pour out his heart to Peggy, for all the good that does to anybody, while Rachel (whom we haven’t even seen in several seasons) dies to set Don on his vision quest to find the “real America” or whatever that was supposed to be. And the Beatnik ex-girlfriend gets turned junkie to inspire Don to come up with that “We won’t do any tobacco ads no more” letter. Anna and Rachel both get fridged to motivate the male protagonist or teach him a lesson. Betty… well, I suppose she gets fridged, too, though it’s never really clear which lesson Don is supposed to learn from her death.

In general, I find that while Mad Men is chock full of jerky male characters, a lot of the women are deeply unpleasant, too, particularly the various wives, trophy and otherwise. I’m not sure if we were supposed to dislike Trudy Campbell and Roger Sterling’s second wife Jane, but I did. Unlike Betty, I did not actually hate Megan Draper at first sight, but I definitely came to hate her in the end. And that’s very much the fault of the writers, since it’s pretty obvious that the only reason Megan was brought in was that she looked great in the fashions of the late 1960s (and damn it, she did look fabulous – Megan always inspired the sort of wardrobe envy in me that Betty never did). In this house, we called her Twist and Turn Megan, after the 1967 all new Barbie model, which kids could exchange for their old models (see a TV ad about that here and imagine Don Draper created it), cause that’s just what Don did, exchange old model Barbie (Betty) for the new and improved Twist and Turn model (Megan). And once Megan had served her purpose, she was discarded, just like an old Barbie doll, while Don went for Malibu Barbies, quite literally.

So in short, Mad Men‘s woman problem wasn’t so much Betty, it was that all female characters who weren’t Joan or Peggy or the various secretaries were either unlikeable or discarded once they’d served their purpose or both. Note that while we got detailed explanations about what happened to Bob or Ken or Pete, Dawn or Shirley or Meredith were dispatched with a single sentence (and I’m still not sure what became of Dawn).

As I said above, back when the final episodes of Mad Men aired in the US, someone said that all the arsehole men got happy endings, while most of the women got tragic endings. However, having actually watched those episodes, I’d say that hardly anybody in the show gets anything approaching a happy ending.

Just try to look ten or fifteen years forward and imagine where those characters will be: Betty Draper? Long dead. Pete Campbell? Either deeply unhappy in Wichita and divorced from Trudy for the second time or equally unhappy back in New York. Megan Draper? She’ll never be a star, that much is clear, and she’ll probably die of an overdose sooner or later. Bob Benson? Probably dead by 1985, poor guy. Glenn Bishop? Dead or missing in Vietnam, poor kid. Ken Cosgrove? Instead of winning Hugos, he’ll be standing there trying to excuse and explain away Napalm and Agent Orange and Bhopal and all sorts of other scandals that can neither be excused nor explained away, losing a bit of his soul every single time. Roger Sterling? I hope he’ll find some happiness with Megan’s mother, though I suspect he’ll leave her sooner or later. Harry Crane? Still doing the same thing he always was, now at McCann Erickson. Ted Chaough? Who the hell cares?

The only regular characters I suspect will find some measure of satisfaction for Peggy, who’ll likely achieve her career goal of becoming the first female creative director and who has Stan, too, and Joan, who never found love, but who found success in business instead. And yes, it’s very telling that Joan, the very woman who was always seeing her job as a stepping stone for finding a good (i.e. wealthy) husband and not as a career, in the end chose her career over her latest partner and sent Bruce Greenwood packing (which made me cheer), while Peggy, who always wanted a career before a partner, ends up getting both. So let’s hear it for the working women, who braved sexism and wound up getting their own sort of happy endings.

Indeed – looking back over the entire series – my main criticism of Mad Men is that while the show is set in an incredibly cool era of liberation (the 1960s), the characters always default to the conventional choice, if in doubt. Though they are offered chance over chance to be free and live the lives they want to, whatever those are, in the end most of them choose a job with a big corporation (McCann Erickson, Dow Chemical, General Motors, Learjet), marriage to someone who fits the image and a house in the suburbs over whatever it is they really want. Just see the way people who rebel against that sort of life are portrayed. Roger Sterling’s daughter runs away to a hippie commune that is portrayed as dirty and unpleasant, basically one step away from Jonestown and disinherited, too. The copywriter (Paul something or other) who joins the Hare Krishnas (who are also portrayed as only one step away from Jonestown, which does not match the real Hare Krishna movement) and writes an incredibly bad Star Trek script. Megan Draper and her faux Bohemian actress life in Hollywood. Peggy’s photographer ex-boyfriend. Just be a good American, take that corporate job, get married to the right sort of partner, regardless if they are right for you, and move to the suburbs. Live the American Dream and don’t forget to vote for Donald Trump. That seems to be the message of Mad Men. Or is it?

Because as I pointed out, pretty much no one in Mad Men gets a happy ending, even if their individual endings seem happy to them at the time. Besides, the one main character who does not end the series stuck in a corporate job and a marriage with the right sort of partner is none other than our protagonist, Don Draper. Which is somewhat unexpected, since Don had always been the most eager chaser of the American Dream or what he believes it to be. After all, Don was always the one with the stellar career, the house in the suburbs and the penthouse apartment on the Upper West Side. He was always the one who married socially acceptable Barbie dolls, even though he clearly preferred a very different type of woman (older, more mature). Hell, Don Draper even stole another man’s name to get the life he felt he was supposed to want. So it is something of a surprise to see him reject all that in the end. Or does he?

Now I’ve said before that I’ve never found Don’s deep dark secret all that convincing, because I’ve never been able to see just what was so bad about having grown up poor and rural white during the Great Depression that Don felt the need to hide his background. Sure, if he’d been Jewish or Hispanic or African-American passing as white or a transman, then the big secret and identity theft would have made sense. But “I was dirt poor, my Dad was a violent jerk and I grew up in a brothel” aren’t the sort of backstory to make advancement impossible and likely wouldn’t have been in the 1960s either. After all, the Great Depression was only thirty years before, so a lot of people would have come from a background of poverty. Never mind that even today, many people in the US and Europe, including many whites, are only a couple of generations away from abject poverty. For example, while the paternal side of my family has been solidly middle class for several generations, on the maternal side there is abject poverty and homelessness only three generations back. So in short, pretty much everybody comes from a less than ideal background, if you go back far enough, particularly in a nation of immigrants like the US. If anything, the fact that so many Mad Men characters – Roger, Betty, Pete, Bert Cooper – come from generations of wealth is unusual.

And indeed I suspect that the writers noticed that Don’s deep dark secret wasn’t all that shocking, since they kept trying to make it more shocking. The fact that Don spent part of his adolescence in a brothel only showed up (with extensive flashbacks) several seasons in. It never really worked for me, either, because the whole “Don grew up in a brothel” thing relies way too much on the “prostitutes invariably are bad mothers and children of prostitutes inevitable become serial killers or other criminals” trope that I hate with a burning passion. And even though Mad Men tries to paint the whole “grew up in a brothel” thing as a horrible experience for Don, the narrative itself contradicts this again and again, since Don clearly keeps seeking out women who remind him of the prostitutes of his youth.

Again, it seems that the writers got this, so they tried to up the deep dark secret once again by revealing in the penultimate episode that Don believes he killed the man whose identity he stole. Once again, this revelation does not really work, for starters because it happens during an incredibly tasteless scene of unpleasant, drink veterans in Trump country swapping war stories, one of which involves some old dude telling in great detail how he and his war buddies slaughtered and apparently ate a bunch of German soldiers towards the end of WWII. Coincidentally, this isn’t even the only “American veteran talks about murdering evil Other in wartime and how horribly traumatising this was for him” scene I saw last week – there also was a very similar scene in Gotham involving the Michael Chiklis character. Now I know that American writers occasionally fall victim to the “US soldiers are automatically admirable” fallacy (rather than letting audiences from cultures where the military is not as venerated know just why this particular soldier or veteran is admirable). But what precisely is the purpose of these “Wah, I slaughtered a bunch of enemies and now I’m so traumatised” revelations? Do US screenwriters never consider that their works will be watched outside the US, often in the very countries whose citizens were just reduced to evil Others to be slaughtered, so the heroic American soldier can feel traumatised about it? And that “Wah, I slaughtered a bunch of people, but they weren’t Americans, and now I feel bad about it” makes most Non-Americans immediately hate the character in question?

So Don’s revelation that he believes he killed the man whose identity he stole not just happens at a moment, when I for one was still furious at the old guy who murdered the German soldiers who wanted to surrender, it also doesn’t ring true. For starters, Don does’t actually murder the real Don (unlike that old dude from Kansas), he drops his lighter, probbably deliberately, and causes an explosion, which happens to kill the real Don, whereupon our Don steals his identity. Which isn’t a nice thing to do at all, but I don’t believe for a moment that Don wanted to kill the real Don, because that doesn’t fit his character. And besides, if he wanted to kill him, there are easier ways than blowing up both of them. He probably just wanted to get injured, so he could go home.

So in short, Don’s deep dark secret, which wasn’t really all that deep and dark and shocking, was something of a weak link throughout the series. And indeed, when the secret was revealed to someone, the reaction was all too often “Who cares?”, going back all the way to the very first season, where Bert Cooper uttered these very words. And it goes on until the last episode, where Peggy asks Don, “What’s so bad about that?” So maybe the fact that Don’s deep dark secret wasn’t all that shocking to anybody but Don was the point all along?

Coincidentally, the final act of Mad Men begins when Don finally decides to blurt out his deep dark secret at the most inopportune time ever, in the middle of a client meeting. Since the customer in question is Hershey, purveyor of really, really bad chocolate, the scene didn’t quite work as intended in this house, since we basically looked at each other and said, “Wow, Don Draper was so poor when he grew up that he actually thought Hershey’s was good chocolate.” Interestingly, this scene was also the point where Don basically admitted that all the stuff he (and the other Sterling Cooper employees, e.g. Peggy does it, too, talking about the ten year old boy waiting for her at home) tells the clients and the people they’re advertising the products to was lies, nothing but lies.

That scene comes at the end of the penultimate season and leads into the final season, where sadly the writers drop the ball. First, we get several tedious episodes of “everybody hates Don Draper”, including previously likeable characters like Joan or Bert Cooper who don’t really have a reason to hate him. The reaction is also outsized – after all, it isn’t as if Don hasn’t had breakdowns before and they could probably live without Hershey and their dreadful chocolate (though Sterling Cooper in general and Don in particula have always been chasing lower quality products – Don after all declared his preference for Chevrolet instead of Jaguar) . Then, everybody’s attempt to oust Don lead to the whole company being sold to McCann Erickson (which we’ve been told throughout the series is a fate worse than a deal with the devil – honestly, what has McCann Erickson ever done to Matthew Weiner?), which leads to the company being closed and merged, which in turn causes Don to have another breakdown in the middle of a meeting and just run off to go in search of the real America or whatever that was supposed to be. Now Don’s final breakaway might have had more impact, if he hadn’t done that sort of thing before, several times in fact. In fact, Don keeps running off and vanishing only to reappear some time later, all the way back to that weird “hanging with the rich people in California” interlude during the first season, so the impact is somewhat diluted. And indeed, no one except for his latest secretary Meredith (who isn’t particularly bright) is overly worried about Don vanishing, because he keeps doing that sort of thing.

Don, meanwhile, goes on a roadtrip, first in search of the waitress he had a brief affair with, and then in search of the real (white) America, the meaning of life or whatever. As a result, the narrative meanders around for the last couple of episodes. And while Don’s odyssey through rural America might have been charming one or two years ago, right after the US elections they’re difficult to bear, because the people Don meets match every negative stereotype of Trump voters you’ve ever seen. It’s also telling that they’re all white – in a show that has been overly white from the start anyway. The “real Americans” are also jerks, one and all of them, who take his money, exploit him and in one case beat him up. I have no idea if this is the point Weiner wanted to make, but it’s certainly the message I got from those scenes post-US-election.

During his extended roadtrip, Don also sheds the insignia of the company man he used to be. He looses his suit, tie and hat and starts wearing jeans and flanel shirts, he begins to look scruffier, he gives his Cadillac, which he bought during the very first season, to a random teenager he meets en route and gradually reverts to the hobo he once was.

Eventually, Don’s odyssey leads him to California and the doorstep of Anna Draper’s niece Stephanie, who’s played by Caity Lotz, better know to geeky people as Sarah from Arrow and Legends of Tomorrow. Stephanie isn’t pleased to see him (plus, she either gave away her baby or had it taken away), but she takes Don along with her to a hippie retreat on the California coast.

Unlike the hippie commune to which Roger Sterling’s daughter ran away or the ashram where Paul, the copywriter, ended up, the Californian hippie retreat is not portrayed as one step away from Jonestown. Okay, so Don calls them a harmful cult at one point and compares them to the fundamentalit Christianity he encountered as a kid, but compared to pretty much every other variation of either traditional religion or new age spirituality we’ve seen in the series so far, the hippies actually seem pretty harmless. Yes, they are silly in many ways, particularly if you had variations of these exercises and sessions inflicted on you at school (The hippies even had the same bent wood chairs as my old school). But there is no doubt that the hippies are earnest about what they’re doing and that they apparently are helping at least some people, perhaps even Don. Coincidentally, the people at the hippie retreat are also one of the most diverse crowds seen so far in Mad Men. I found it interesting that there were so many older people, since I’d have assumed that places like this tended to skew young.

The head hippie is played by Helen Slater, Supergirl in the 1980s and the adoptive mom of the current Supergirl. Combined with the presence of Caity Lotz, best known as time-travelling undead assassin/superheroine White Canary, and the fact that the other leader of the hippie retreat looks a bit like Vandal Savage, I was briefly wondering whether I was watching a Legends of Tomorrow/Supergirl/Mad Men crossover.

Stephanie runs off after a random hippie woman confronts her about her lost/given away baby. And indeed it’s notable that there is a theme about abandoned children and the screwed up adults they become running through Mad Men, starting with Don himself via Glenn Bishop and his divorced mother, Peggy’s lost baby, the three Draper kids, the baby Megan never wants and eventually loses, the baby Joan never wanted and still decides to keep, Pete and Trudy’s daughter, who is so long awaited and still abandoned, Roger’s daughter who abandons her young son and icily tells Roger, “He’ll survive. I did.”, the neighbour kid who installs himself on Peggy’s couch all the way to Stephanie and her lost baby and the ambivalent feelings she has about that. It’s also interesting that Matthew Weiner was apparently born in 1965, i.e. he is about the same age as Gene, Kevin and Tammy. And in the US, it’s the children of what was eventually called Generation X, i.e. those born in the 1960s and 1970s, who suffered the most from their parents’ divorcing.

I have no idea, if Matthew Weiner’s parents divorced, but he surely knew children whose parents did and probably was terrified that the same thing would happen to his family. Even I knew that fear in far away Germany, even though divorce rates were pretty low when I grew up and we only had two children of divorced parents in a class of 25, a number that is much higher today. But even though we all knew very few people who actually had divorced, every kid I knew was terrified of divorce. So are we watching Weiner dramatising a childhood trauma here for the sake of all children of the 1960s?

One thing that would point towards that explanation is that the 1960s of Mad Men, though meticulously recreated, are no more the real sixties than the 1970s/80s of Life on Mars/Ashes to Ashes (another retro show that gave me the feeling of watching someone’s childhood trauma on screen) are the real seventies and eighties. What we are seeing on screen is a construct, recreated from bits of pop culture, from TV shows and movies, books and magazines and – yes – commercials and ads. That’s why Mad Men shows so many clips from real TV programs and recreates ads for real products. That’s why there are so many references to popular movies and TV programs of the period. That’s why the characters alternately look like Barbie dolls or movie stars. Because what we’re seeing isn’t the real sixties, but a recreation fashioned from childhood memories. By the way, it’s also a fact that people often consider the time just before they were born the most interesting historical period. I was born in 1973, so the late 1960s are incredibly fascinating to me.

Once Stephanie runs away (and also rejects Don’s attempts to help her, the third female member of his family to reject his attempts to help in a single episode), Don finds himself stranded at the hippie retreat. He hugs a random and not very hippie-like guy who feels invisible and like a cog in the machine during one of the group therapy sessions. And then he’s meditating with a bunch of other people on the top of a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean (and no, he doesn’t jump) and suddenly breaks out into a big, happy grin. And then there is a cut and we get this:

Yes, it’s a Coke commercial and a very famous one it is, too. And no, Don Draper had nothing to do with it nor was it created on a sunny California clifftop, but at Shannon Airport in foggy Ireland. The person who came up the idea for the spot was a man named Bill Backer, who worked for the real McCann Erickson, and the story behind it may be found here.

Okay, so it’s a great commercial and coincidentally it was the only time while watching the Mad Men finale or indeed Mad Men at all that I got misty-eyed, but then that ad always has that effect on me for some reason (though only as a commercial. The radio version of the song doesn’t have the same effect on me). It’s also telling that the genuine 1971 Coke ad contains more diversity than all seven seasons of Mad Men combined.

So what precisely does this ending signify? Does Don’s grin mean that his misadventures at the hippie retreat have just caused him to come up with the perfect Coca Cola commercial? Or is Don genuinely at peace, while the commercial is just there to remind us that every counter-cultural movement will eventually be appropriated and commercialised by the advertising industry? Though part of what makes the commercial so touching is that the innocence and earnestness feel genuine, as if these lovely colourful hippie kids really think that sharing a bottle of Coke will make everything better.

I guess we’ll never know and Matthew Weiner claims he doesn’t know either. Though my personal head canon is that Don Draper has been held prisoner in the basement of McCann Erickson since 1971 and has been meditating up every Coke commercial since then. The Christmas ad that’s currently running is Don recasting his troubled childhood into the idyll it never was. And yes, those Coke commercials are brilliant. I don’t even like Coke and haven’t had a cola of any kind in twenty-five to thirty years now and Coke ads still make me want to have one, before I remember how the stuff tastes. That’s pretty much the definition of brilliant advertising.

So the question that remains is what precisely was Mad Men supposed to be? An illumination of the advertising industry in the 1960s? A scathing critique of the American Dream and why it’s not a good thing to want? An equally passionate defense of the same? The angry cry-out of the abandoned children of selfish 1960s parents? Matthew Weiner’s attempt to come to terms with a childhood trauma. A combination of all the above?

Or maybe Mad Men really is just the world’s longest Coke commercial?

*It’s still difficult for me to refer to her as my grandmother, because to me she never was that (in my mind, she is “my mother’s mother” and the only reason I no longer refer to her as that is because people don’t get it), since I already had two grandmothers growing up.

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Photos: First Snow of the Winter 2016

And now for something completely different:

Last night, while US voters were busily burning down their country and handing a racist and sexist jerk the presidency, we also had the first snow of the winter.

So if you want to take your mind of depressing US politics, here are some photos:

The view outside my front door this morning. The street is covered in snow.

A look down the snow covered street.

A look up the snow-covered street. Note the frosted trees.

The meadow and the oak tree next to the house all covered in snow.

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Attention: Rant Incoming

I’m sick of misogynist, homophobic, xenophobic and racist white people.

I’m fucking sick of all those white people (and the overwhelming majority of them are white) who complain that their country of residence is not their country anymore, because now they suddenly have to endure all those other people, women, people of colour, LGBT people, refugees, etc…, entering their space, living in their neighbourhoods, going to school with their children, taking their jobs.

Warning: Rambling rant about Trump, Brexit, the AfD and entitled white people follows:

In recent months, we have been hearing a lot about how cosmopolitan liberal elites has supposedly lost touch with ordinary (white) people and ignore their fears. Because obviously every fear, no matter how irrational, needs to be taken seriously. We’ve been hearing how the media is failing those ordinary people by not representing their point of view – even though we’ve seen rightwing populists expound their views at length in every talk show and news program out there.

We’re constantly being implored that we must listen to those angry white people and their grievances. And you know what? I have listened to them. It’s kind of hard not to, since they’re literally everywhere, including among your neighbours and family, yelling how no one is listening to them. And I’ve come to the conclusion that what these angry white people really are is entitled. They’re practically brimming with entitlement, coupled with the fear that somebody else somewhere may be getting something they think they’re entitled to.

Last year, a brave journalist interviewed some protesters at a Pegida march in Dresden to find out what those people’s grievances were. There were people complaining about broken streetlights not being repaired (and refugees are to blame for that exactly how?), people complaining how their little prince or princess didn’t get into the school they wanted, people complaining about the pension system and so on.

But one old woman in particular stood out. She complained that the refugee home got a brand-new washing machine for free, whereas she had to make do with an old one. Never mind that the washing machine at the refugee home is either a machine donated or the cheapest and crappiest model available at the local big box electronics store. Never mind that refugee homes have one washing machine for twenty or more people to share (and unlike that old woman, I’ve actually been inside a refugee home). Never mind that most refugees come from failed states and outright war zones like Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Mali, Eritrea, etc… and have often had their homes bombed to smithereens and lost everything they ever owned. I teach German to refugees and I’ve seen the cellphone photos of houses, businesses, cars, libraries lost in the war. But all that didn’t matter to that old woman. Because here were people getting a free washing machine, while she didn’t get one. That’s pretty much the epitome of entitlement.

And that old woman isn’t the only person who thinks like that. Wherever you look at angry white people, you find a rampant sense of entitlement. Entitlement to good jobs, cheap flats, high pensions, free washing machines. Witness how many voters in former East Germany, France, Britain, etc… switched from voting for far left/Communist parties to voting for far right xenophobic parties. It’s hard to parse, because lots of voters all over Europe apparently did a 180 degree turn ideologically. But to many of those people, it’s not about ideology and has never been. It was about voting for whatever party promised to get them what they feel entitled to, while denying it to the other guy. Just as the fall of the Wall 27 years ago today was less about freedom than about bananas.

A lot of those people talk about returning to some golden age in the past, often the fifties, where things were better and everybody knew their place. But whatever golden age these people want to return to never existed or it existed only for a select few, while it was a stifling conformist hell for everybody else.

I wasn’t alive in the fifties, but I remember growing up in the 1970s and 1980s and believe me, a golden age it wasn’t. I’ve never known a world where people worked the same job at the same company for forty or fifty years. Yes, it apparently still happened to some people, but it was getting increasingly rare even by the 1980s. My father, a middle class engineer, changed jobs and companies seven times in my lifetime and at least once more before I was born, and he was far from the only one. The industrial die-off that so many pundits are lamenting now was already in full swing when I was a kid and teen. Regardless of what Norbert Blüm said, pensions were never secure, which was bleedingly obvious to everybody with eyes. Coincidentally, my Mom who started working in 1958, told me that good jobs were scarce back then, at least for women, and she had to take what she could get. Add to that a stifling atmosphere where everybody who was different in any way was viewed with suspicion, where I was badly bullied at school – by students and some teachers – for being “spoiled” and “bragging”, simply because I was different and had seen a bit more of the world than my classmates.

So yes, I’ve seen your golden age. I’m a straight white middle class girl from a nice middle class family in a semi-rural suburb attending a school that was approx. 90 percent white Germans with the non-Germans mostly white European immigrants. I’ve been there and trust me, it wasn’t golden. And if it wasn’t golden for me, then imagine how much worse it must have been for someone who was LGBT, an immigrant, a person of colour, disabled, etc… Sure, it’s far from perfect today, but still so much better than it was. Is it easy? No, but then it never was.

What irks me most about the angry entitled white people that now things are finally getting better, they want to roll everything back again, whether in the US, the UK, Austria, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Turkey, Russia, Poland, Hungary, Australia, etc… This post isn’t about Trump voters or Brexit voters or AfD voters or Hofer voters or Orban voters or Le Pen voters or Putin supporters or Erdogan supporters, cause at the root they’re all the same, angry and entitled people terrified of the future. These people want to destroy the world for everybody else, just because they cannot hack living in a modern globalised world. They want to retreat into their little monocultural bubbles and want to force everybody else along with them. And I for one am fucking sick of it.

We’ve heard angry and entitled white people whining over and over again how those cosmopolitan liberal elites don’t care about them. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, because I find myself giving less and less of a fuck about angry white people and their concerns, even where they have legitimate grievances.

For example, there recently was a report about an initiative to finally close the wage and pension gap between former East and West Germany, because even 26 years after Reunification, wages and pensions in former East Germany are still lower than in former West Germany, which is a bloody outrage, if you think about it. But as I listened to the report, I found that my first impulse was thinking, “Fuck them. Who cares what happens to those AfD and Pegida supporters?” And I felt ashamed, because at that moment I was no better than those nice and progressive Americans who didn’t give a fuck about the victims of hurricane Katrina or the Deepwater Horizon spill on the US Gulf coast, because hey, they’re all racists down there. Never mind that Katrina hit blacks worse than whites and that New Orleans was a vibrant, diverse and LGBT friendly city. Even though I’m fucking angry at Mississippi and Louisiana, the only part of the US where I actually felt at home once upon a time (and Kentucky, too, where I spent a memorable six weeks as a teenager) for voting for that shithead Trump. I also find myself feeling the same sort of resentment towards Dresden, home of Pegida and the city where my grandmother was born on this very day back in 1919. If she’d lived, she’d be 97 today. I’m not sure what she’d made of all this – she had demetia for the last few years of her life and kept forgetting even the fall of the Wall, the gift history decided to give her for her 70th birthday.

All this talk about the alleged divide between the liberal cosmopolitan elites, whoever they may be (I am apparently one of them, though I’ve never felt particularly elitist), and the ordinary people, whoever they may be, is driving a wedge into society, every society. And before you buy into that shit, ask yourself who profits from driving this wedge into society, who profits most from making those most likely to give a damn about poverty and the growing gap between the rich and the poor resent impoverished white people. Hint: It’s the very people who thrive on resentment, the very people who’d just love to dismantle whatever social protections there are left. Once more, poor people of whatever racial and ethnic background will be hit the hardest. But at least for the angry white people among the poor, those who might once have advocated for them might well say, “Fuck that lot.”

I’m angry at Trump voters and Americans in general today, just as I was angry at Europhobic Brits on Brexit day. I’m fucking angry at stupid and entitled white people who would burn down a world that wasn’t perfect, but at least pretty good and getting better, in favour of some imaginary golden age that never existed and will never come back.

I’m also scared, because now that the UK and the US have fallen to the forces of resentment and xenophobia (not to mention Hungary, Poland, Russia, Turkey) the parts of the world where I could imagine going, if things get bad here, has shrunk once again. I’m German, I know all about the rise of the Third Reich and I’ve always had a hypothetical get-out plan at the back of my mind, should things ever go that way again, ever since I was a teen. I strongly suspect I’m not the only one of my generation with such a plan, though most of us don’t talk about it. Things are still okay here at the moment, but we have a federal election coming up next year, a whole lot of angry and entitled white people and a xenophobic far-right party that would take away my livelihood, if they could, currently polling at 10 to 15%. The part of the world where things are good, where I could feel comfortable, even if I wasn’t born there, is steadily shrinking. And while being a Star Wars rebel and blowing up metaphorical Death Stars might have looked romantic and appealing at fifteen, it no longer does at forty.

Still, I fear we have no choice but to fight the forces of resentment and xenophobia, whereever we are. Help and support those who feel threatened and scared. Try to reason with those angry and entitled people that can be reasoned with and ruthlessly cut off those who cannot. Make it very clear that racist, sexist, ableist, homophobic, xenophobic talk is not acceptable. Even if it’s Uncle Bob who’s a swell guy, if he isn’t spouting hateful nonsense. Especially if it’s Uncle Bob.

Of course, if you cut off Uncle Bob, you might quickly find yourself disinvited from Christmas or Thanksgiving dinners, because a lot of people would rather accomodate the crusty old racist than those who refuse to deal with him or her. But ask yourself, are those really people you want to spend time with? Because most of us have long ago learned not to give a flying fuck what people think about us. Uncle Bob, however, he is a raging conformist and he cares. So let him and his ilk know that their racism, their sexism, their xenophobia is not acceptable.

Comments are closed. Angry and entitled white people, be angry and entitled elsewhere.

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