Robert Carter's Blog: http://novelcarter.blogspot.co.uk/, page 13

Death Valley Scotty -- True Gold

There is a mystery at the heart of the Death Valley Scotty story. Did he or did he not have
a gold mine?

What first compelled me to write this novel was the thematic richness of Walter Scott's
story. It seemed to say that money is what we all think we want, but what we really want
is contentment -- and the ingredients of contentment cost surprisingly little.

This novel is about love and friendship and the truly important things of life that we are
apt to take for granted or to overlook. They are encapsulated in the freedom from pain
(Albert Johnson's injured back), the realization of dreams, the establishment of real
friendship, the leaning how to laugh and the appreciation of the beauty of the natural
world. The gold here only plays the role of 'siren' -- the seductive distraction that draws
us off the proper track of life. When true contentment is gained, the ownership of gold
becomes unimportant.

This philosophy is heartwarming and uplifting. It has a consolation for the common man
who has no hope of riches: that the rich man has gone up the wrong road anyway. It asserts
that we're all as good as one another, irrespective of what we own, which seems to me to be a noble idea that I've heard somewhere else.

Death Valley Scotty

Death Valley Scotty

This is a name well known to many Californians and Nevadans. It is also the title of my
latest novel.

Walter E. Scott was born in Kentucky, but he lived almost all his life in California, and
he is buried in Death Valley. He was a "true character". His fascinating life spanned the
transitional years from the Old West to the new, the youth of Los Angeles and the creation
of Hollywood, many of whose stars befriended him. It was quite a surprise to find that a
novel had yet to be written about him, so I decided to write about him.

Scotty began as a cow-puncher, later rode in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, and became
famous as a gold millionaire, but his real skill was keeping people guessing. He managed to
keep himself in the newspaper headlines for half a century. Scotty's life was so rich that
I found myself with the luxury of having too much material to choose from. Events
represented in the novel as all having taken place during the summer of 1905 actually took
place over a much longer period but I telescoped time for dramatic purposes. It's what we
writers do.

    "He sleeps quite as well one place as the other. But he does like to keep his body clean and is   
     always bathing; and I have never seen Scotty in my life when he wasn't freshly shaven. Part of      
    the water in his canteen is always kept to shave with."

So said Albert Johnson's wife, Bessie, who grew to know Scotty well. Scotty's story has for
me something of the true American spirit about it. He was a natural showman who could ride
and shoot and prospect along with the best  but he was hall-marked with some particularly
American virtues - a shrewd self-reliance, a man of the great outdoors, a man who knew how
to live free. There's no doubt that he loved razzmatazz, but he could recognize life's true
values behind the tinsel. California is, even now, still a young place, and whenever I'm there I find a yearning for history and for historic figures. Walter Scott is to me an authentic Old California hero.

Yes, I have just bought a camera ...

Is this  a picture of:

a)     structures growing on the surface of Mars?
b)     the top of my lawyer's bald head?
c)     something else entirely?



Answers on a postcard please. And apologies to Clive Anderson.

Still living in Snowland

Well, the Olympics are over and there's a sense of national regeneration in the air here in London, but
I'd just like to remind you of an aspect of our culture that still needs to be raked out and stamped on. But first a few questions:

Do you, noble reader, consider yourself well educated? If you do, then answer the following:

1) Do you know what a ribosome does?

2) Could you state any one of Kepler's laws of planetary motion?

3) Are you able to write down an example of a differential equation?

A big "no" on all three? Don't know even where to begin? It doesn't matter, you can always Google it, right?

Actually, you shouldn't be having any trouble, because these are all pretty basic questions if you have a nodding acquaintance with science.

We are still living in the Snowland of 1959, C.P. Snow's divided culture, and you should look him up on Google. Suffice to say that Snowland is a place in which the properly educated make the half-educated feel uncomfortable, and the ignorant are marginalized without knowing it.

Only a fool misunderstands the difference between stupidity and ignorance. In this context, "ignorance" means having never learned any science or maths, while a true fool is one lacking the ability to understand either. Fortunately, there are many more in the former condition than there are in the latter. The basics of science aren't hard to grasp, they aren't hard to teach and they aren't hard to recognize as important. They can be taught generally, while engendering a tremendous sense of wonder in the student, but most importanly this stuff must be taught to the kind of people who go on to form our elites. If it isn't obvious why, then you really are a fool.

In a society that will soon have to make its living once again by knowing how to profit from understanding how the world works, comprehending the works of Michael Faraday is going to be far more important than digesting the works of John Keats. The point here is an important one. All the scientists I know (and I know a few top ones) have usually had a representative exposure to poetry, but the literati I've know have absolutely no idea about science or maths, and what's more: they tell you so with a degree of pride.

Not only does this educational black hole make them dangerously ignorant, it often makes them resentful. The BBC, and especially its Radio 4 "Today" Programme, became notorious for slighting comments about newsworthy science items, with shy-away phrases like: "We'll have to get a boffin to explain that to us", and: "All rather beyond me, I'm sure." Announcers who had no trouble pronouncing the name of an obscure African dictator, would stumble over the most commonplace scientific term, and the stumble would be worn like a badge of pride rather than the stigma of ignorance it actually was. The sub-text running through this kind of treatment is, "Neither you, Dear Listener, nor I, know what these outlandish people (the aforementioned boffins) are talking about, and we don't really want to know, do we? But we've been aked to report it, so there it is."

Not really good enough, is it?

Some years ago I had reason to visit a cubicle in the lavatories of one of Oxford University's science labs on South Parks Road. A wag had drawn on the wall an arrow pointing at the loo roll; above that he had writtten, "Humanities Degrees, Please Take One."

Be warned.

A Place by Any Other Name

Can somebody please explain to me why the Indians have changed the names of three of their best known cities?

I refer, of course, to: Bombay, Calcutta and Madras. (I'm sure these places are not alone, and there is a rolling program of doing this.) There is a governmental foolishness about this kind of thing that defies description let alone understanding. It's like London being renamed by some crazy despot "Londinium", or the American government foisting "New Amsterdam" on New York.

What purpose does it serve and who is the maniac behind it? Perhaps his brother is a publisher of atlases and globes.

A Rose by Any Other Name

Thousands of emails have been pouring in, telling me that Namgyal Wangdi wasn't the man who first climbed Everest along with Ed Hillary in 1953. Well, I exaggerate: I have received comparatively few emails on the subject. But the concensus seems to be that it was someone called Sherpa Tenzing.

Well, you see, I set a trap for you, my noble readers, because Namgyal Wangdi was Sherpa Tenzing. Actually, referring to the man as "Sherpa Tenzing" is rather like referring to Ed Hillary as "New Zealander Ed", because Sherpa Tenzing's actual name was Tenzing Norgay. (Norgay means "lucky".)

So, who's this Namgyal Wangdi feller?

Ah, well, the name Tenzing Norgay was a name given to Namgyal Wangdi when he was a child by the prior of Rongbuk monastery. It means something like "lucky pilgrim." Isn't that fascinating.

Bizarre Economics

Mervyn King - no, not Mervyn "The King" King the darts player, and not Mervyn King the England bowls international, nor even Mervyn King the South African judge - I mean Sir Mervyn King - the Mervyn King as it were, current governor of the Bank of England ...

Has there been a wager over how many times Mervyn King can be mentioned in one short blog? Am I going for the name droppers' world record in Mervyn King mentions? Is this some curious experiment connected with search engine optimization as regards Mervyn King?

No.

I just wanted to say that even Mervyn King, with all he knows about money (presumably), could not explain a recent lump of modern economics that recently befell me. Get this:

I have an old Sony camcorder, and old Sony camcorders have a screw thread at the front on which you can mount accessories such as filters and the like. This thread has a diameter of 37mm (don't ask me why.)

I recently found, on my beloved ebay, a pair of lenses: one x0.5 wide-angle, the other x2 telephoto, contained in a handy little leatherette case. It seemed too good to miss, so I placed my bid, and at the fall of the notional hammer I acquired the same for a bargain £3. This bargain soon more than halved, however, since to actually take possession of the item I had to stump up a further £3.50 in postal charges, a tad more, note, than the actual value of the item.

Once the lenses arrived, I discovered that they were not threaded for 37mm, but for a measely 28mm. Since it would have cost me a further £3.50 to return them to the remote isle from whence they came, I sucked it up and went hunting for a gadget that would solve my problem.

The gadget in question is called a 37-28 step down adapter ring. Not an ideal solution, as the photographers among my readership will know, but it will probably suffice for what I want, which is rostrum work.

There is, these days, only one recourse when a body wishes to acquire an item as specialized, not to say exotic, as a 37-28 step down adapter ring. To attempt to find a small, friendly local photographic shop would be absolutely out of the question. This is, after all, London, and small, friendly local photographic shops are hard to find, mainly on account of the rents, which are not inconsiderable hereabouts. Add to that the traffic chaos of the Olympics and ... no, no, no, no!

So it was back to ebay.

There were five 37-28 step down adapter rings listed. Four were from China, which three out of the four spell "Hong Kong" since they know that the average Brit will trust "Hong Kong" more than "China." (This is an artefact of our imperial history and need not concern us more here.) The point is that the four Chinese rings were priced at between £2 and £2.50, including shipping. The one remaining ring, sourced from a UK distributor based in Britol, weighed in at a whopping £8.99 including shipping.

More than three times the price!

Now, I know we're not talking gigantic Mervyn King-like sums here, but it's the principle: the Chinese can get one to me, despite being 10,000 miles away at less than a third the cost of the one coming from Britol, which is, what? A hundred miles away?

To add insult to injury, they all come from China anyway!

Good luck sorting this economics stuff out Merv, old buddy. It's certainly beyond me.

How many p's in ipod?

Can you name either of these two august gentlemen? They are as my gandmother used to say, like two peas in a pod. The answer shall be disclosed hereabouts in coming days.

Word Love

I guess it might be a little surprising to hear that a writer of fiction would choose as one of his most loved books a work of reference, and such an unconsidered one at that.

It happened like this: when I was a kid I happened across a little dog-eared gray-blue hardback that must have come from the 1920's because in the back was a section on "Terms of Special Note in Modern Warfare." It mentioned words that had, I supposed, come out of the First World War. It also had an art nouveau pattern on the cover, which I found oddly compelling and an impenetrable title: Blackie’s Compact Etymological Dictionary.

I went to a proper dictionary and looked that peculiar word up. Now I know that some people think 'etymology' is something to do with bugs, but actually it's about the origins of words, which was interesting to me, because even at that tender age I loved words. It's not unknown for writers to get interested in the tools of their trade. I became that kind of writer. I love words. I love their organic chemistry - the ways they'll fit together, or won't fit together. I love the music they make, and the way they're able to arouse the strongest of passions.

Of course I love all that, for manipulating words has been my chosen art. But I also love words for themselves. To me, they are like seeds that carry inside them the essence of culture. No English speaker can entirely forget the Greeks or Romans, while we still have a word like 'television' hanging around in our vocabularies.

As an English kid in Sydney, Australia, I got my first taste of where words came from, and why they’re spelled the way they are. I began to appreciate the many different sorts of English we have and how they got to be that way. That, in turn, fed into an interest in history. I found out, through examining words, that each age stamped itself on a language, and that the past was another country where they did things differently. Years later, I started to understood the many ways in which words could become mightier than swords.
So let's hear it for Blackie’s Compact Etymological Dictionary. One of the books I have loved the most.

Even More General Arthur Cigars ...

I promise you, noble readers, that this will positively be the very last time I will mention those annoying General Arthur cigars, unless of course, an overwhelming response to the contrary forces my hand. But, anyway, since I have allowed myself one more drag, I'd just like to say this:

As my noble readers will by now recognize, one field of human endeavor that I like to keep half an eye on is advertising. Now, General Arthur cigars vanished sometime during World War One, and it's always interesting when a brand fails, because there has to be a reason for it.

One obvious reason is the rise of the cigarette. But that only explains the decline of cigar smoking in general (if you'll excuse the pun,) and not the demise of our favorite brand in particular. I would like you to look at things from the point of view of Jacob Wertheim of 174 West Fifty-eighth St. New York, New York: the civil war was over and one of its victorious generals was General Arthur. (Actually, Chester A. Arthur didn't do any fighting. Being a lawyer, he was given the rank of brigadier-general and given the task of raising and equipping troops for the N.Y. quota.) After the war he returned to doing what lawyers do best: opening other people's wallets and using the contents to run for political office. Doubtless he thought that, as a political candidate, it would not do a man any harm to have his picture distributed around the nation on millions of boxes of cigars. It was, after all, the closest thing to television they had in those days, and if that didn't help get Arthur to the vice-presidency, then I'll eat my treasured Stetson.

When, in 1881, that other civil war general, James A. Garfield, managed to get himself shot dead, Chester Arthur became president. Having built up a brand called "General Arthur", Jacob Wertheim could now hardly change it to "President Arthur," so they soldiered on (if you'll excuse a second pun) with the old name. The trouble with a brand like that is that thirty years down the line, and well into a new century, not only was the civil war ancient history, but so was Chester Arthur - Chester Who?

In today's terms it would be like the J. Walter Thompson Agency trying to push "Jimmy Carter" cigarettes. No offence to Jimmy (after all, he is family) but it's not exactly what you might call catchy.

Of course, if you have (through reading this blog) become an avid fan of the General Arthur cigar, you may read about them again by purchasing a copy of "Death Valley Scotty" my latest novel, exclusively and electronically available to all readers at their nearest Amazon, Barnes and Noble, &c., &c.

Hmmm ... what was I saying about the hard sell?