ANGELS OF THE REVOLUTION HAS NOW BEEN PUBLISHED, AND THIS BLOG HAS MOVED

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ONE OF TWO OPENING EPIGRAMS FOR MY UPCOMING NOVEL, "ANGELS OF THE REVOLUTION"

. . . for a time the [Weimar] Republic had a real chance.  Whatever some derisive historians have said, if the end of the Republic was implied in its beginning, that end was not inevitable.  As Toni Stolper, a survivor and perceptive observer of Weimar, has noted, the Republic was marked by creativity in the midst of suffering, hard work in the midst of repeated disappointments, hope in the face of pitiless and powerful adversaries.  I might add that it is precisely this easy pessimism, which then saw (and still sees) the Republic as doomed from the start, that helped to fulfill the prophecies it made. 

Peter Gay--Weimar Culture: the Outsider as Insider

WHEN IS "ANGELS OF THE REVOLUTION" COMING OUT?

A number of my friends and literary contacts on the web have been emailing me the last few weeks asking "when is Angels of the Revolution coming out?  You used to say on your blog here it would be 'later in 2012', and now it's 'to be published 2013' you sneaky bastard.  What's the hold-up?"

I am a slow writer.  I have been working on Angels of the Revolution for the last seven years or so.  This is despite the fact that it is not a large book (about 61,000 words).  Before that, I was working on another novel (also about WWI and the German Revolution -- a 190,000 word monster) which I had to put away for various reasons, but to which I hope to return.  In the meantime, Angels of the Revolution should be out within the next few weeks.

It is very interesting, as one approaches the end, just how many little details there are to attend to.  For example, one wants to get certain historical bits right.  Also, I have been negotiating with various places about the rights to use certain pieces of art or photography for the front cover.  But at this point, the expense and the limitations placed on these images would seem to indicate I must get my cover elsewhere.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE STASH

It is a little unusual but by no means unheard of for a Lefty like myself to be engaged in the hobby of plastic model building.  In particular, most of my subjects are military (planes, ships, tanks, etc.) and I am in particular a confirmed "treadhead" in that I build armoured fighting vehicles more than anything else.

I doubt anyone has collected stats on the politics of military model kit builders, but I would be willing to bet their politics range for the most part from the political center off to the Right.

So what is this "philosophy of the stash"? you ask.  Those of you already into this hobby, whatever subject you specialize in, know what a stash is.  It's that collection of "shelf queens" or kits that you buy intending to build some day.  And in some instances you really do build them, perhaps until they are done.  Or perhaps you just get half way through and lose interest.  My own personal record for length of time to finish a shelf queen is about 10 years or so so.  This was a 1/700 scale model of the King George V, one of the battleships that was involved in the hunt for the Bismarck.

But my approach to the stash has changed.  I estimate I have a stash of about 2 to 3 dozen unfinished kits.  This is by no means a large stash, as those involved in the hobby can tell you.  Some kits I may have bought a few weeks ago, others years ago.  I used to fight relatively resolutely the expansion of the stash.  There was no use, I thought, in buying kits I did not finish.  This was especially so since what tends to happen is that once you've had a kit for a while, the chances you will ever finish it go down markedly.  The King George V I mentioned above was a very rare exception to this.

But I have let my stash grow in the past few years, largely because I said to myself, what the hell, just thinking about and buying these kits is fun.  Furthermore, I am something of a "low maintenance modeller" in that I do not purchase "after-market" items, do not own or want an airbrush, and seldom buy a kit priced at more than 40 dollars.

I was a little concerned that the expanding stash would develop into a kind of addiction, or a bad habit, like excessive fast food consumption.  I was concerned that the more kits I bought, the less satisfied I would be with each one, and that a cycle of diminishing returns would result: increasing expense, decreasing pleasure.

I still think this sort of thing is possible without a little discipline.  But I have found with the expanding stash an unexpected side-effect:  my interest in old shelf queens seems to be increasing, not decreasing.  I have a 1/700 Japanese aircraft carrier (the Zuiho) I keep thinking about, and a Tamiya T34/76 that I stopped working on years ago but which is enticingly close to being completion and calls to me now and then.

TRAUDL THE TRANSVESTITE GOES TO WORK from my upcoming ANGELS OF THE REVOLUTION

     I wear a black woollen dress with close fitting sleeves, the dress snug until well down the hips where it flares out generously and swings freely half way down my calves as I saunter abstractedly down the Ku'damm, not giving a royal fuck.  I am wearing black leather lace-up boots with a high, blocky heel, and a snuggley little open-bottomed girdle with the French style horizontal boning all down the front that helps keep my thingy from showing without that unbearable gaff.  You just can't wear one of those things all day long without going crazy.
     I've been smoking Quahff given to me by an excellent friend, another Miss Thing, who's in the dance collective.  So I'm somewhat more, shall we say, effervescent than usual.  My hair is spiky, black.  I've painted my eyes very dark--luscious little Krepplingin!  I'm in a really good mood.  The sort of mood where things can happen, if only you can somehow grab onto them and ride . . .
     They say: your hair looks like you stuck your finger in a light socket.  I say: I did.  The light socket of Weimarstadt.  In fact, I stuck my dick in the open light socket of Weimarstadt.  Ka-Bamm!  Ravished by a city!  And I have come to life like Frankenstein's monster--a beautiful, shock-eyed monster--for the first time in my life.  I am Robo-Maria! Caligari's transvestite zombie!  Whatever!

from ANGELS OF THE REVOLUTION -- A WEE TEASER

     Weimarstadt.  Cobblestones, dirty, loud, rattling cars, people in black.  Uniforms--domestic and foreign.  Business suits.  Bowler hats, cloth caps, the well-dressed, people in rags.  Horses.  Cripples.  Lots of cripples.  Too many cripples.  Flashing neon and giant words and images looming at you from the sides of buildings, all trying to sell you something.  Tons of it.  "They broke their backs lifting Moloch to heaven."  Proud stone buildings flanked by stone lions, scrappy little brick buildings from before the empire, and a very few smooth, glass-sheeted towers signalling a new Bauhaus architecture, and perhaps a new world.  Shit from the sewers, geraniums from the Tiergarten, sweet, dusty, and fresh; horse sweat and old leather, gas and octane fumes, expensive perfumes, pungent body odour.  Ugly, dirty old cars with shimmying wheels, huge, sleek monster saloons with curtains inside the windows, ancient men on bicycles.  Even some Asians if you can believe it.  There's a "Chinatown" just like the Amerikaners would have.  The Chinese were brought over to clean up the mess when the war ended and they're not finished even now.  Won't be for years.  Were it not for her European clothing, Katyusha, with her round, mostly Japanese face, would probably be mistaken for one of them daily.  They are still getting blown up almost every day from leftover, unexploded ordnance.
     This is the centre of a stilled, a deadlocked revolution: sparked by the end of the war, temporarily halted in part by the threat of occupation by the war's victors, but too strong to be swept away by it.  Were the governments and businessmen ruling the Entente to have their way, every Red in Gothland would be put up against a wall and shot.  But there would be opposition not only in Gothland, but in the victors' nations as well.

PETER GAY ON THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC

These words, from Peter Gay's Weimar Culture: the Outsider as Insider, are one of the two epigrams for my novel, Angels of the Revolution:

. . . for a time the Republic had a real chance.  Whatever some derisive historians have said, if the end of the Republic was implied in its beginning, that end was not inevitable.  As Toni Stolper, a survivor and perceptive observer of Weimar, has noted, the Republic was marked by creativity in the midst of suffering, hard work in the midst of repeated disappointments, hope in the face of pitiless and powerful adversaries.  I might add that it is precisely this easy pessimism, which then saw (and still sees) the Republic as doomed from the start, that helped to fulfill the prophecies it made.