Carl > Recent Status Updates

“There’s good news” and “nothing could be trouble at this point” (ch.5): as the hostage crisis grinds with no end in sight, Patchett seems to have intentionally diluted the sense of conflict and danger. Given our sympathy with the innocent hostages, this should be a good thing, but it also risks a devolution into banal tedium. Would it be immoral for a reader to hope for just a wee bit of violence?

First novella, Ringolevio, hummed along. Glad I’m not in ‘70s New York.

(It was smallpox in Huck Finn, not plague.)

I did a bit of research: O’Brian was apparently referencing an historical case of a British captain using that ploy, not Twain’s fictional one.

I may be constantly at a loss to understand all the nautical terminology, at least I’m able to get a good laugh by recognizing that Stephen Maturin fakes out the dangerous Spanish frigate Cacafuegos by using the same “plague” ploy that works for Huck Finn in ch.16 of Twain’s classic!

The Overstory challenges one of my unwritten theories as a reader: “preaching damages literature.” I felt a similar unsettling when reading The Monkey Wrench Gang, which the group of five characters has recently devolved (evolved?) into. I trust Powers; it’s not going to end cleanly. And “unsettling” is itself valuable. But I wobble.

Kate and I stopped for lunch at Salt Springs State Park, and we decided to hike the Hemlock Trail, because it advertised trees half a millennium old. Reading The Overstory makes one alert—that really is the word—to the majesty around us.

I can easily imagine that the government fiends currently hell-bent on turning national parks into drill sites would roll their beady eyes at Powers’ earnestness. Their loss.

Memoirist Tobias Wolff wrote, “The truth is in the memory because the memory is all we have.” Reading Hong Kingston’s book that is categorized as “memoir” puts that freeing epigraph to the test.

This is nothing like a traditional memoir. It’s like it taunts a Westernized reader, saying, “You must be disoriented out of your idea of a life’s narrative before my talk-story can take root in you.”

I’m loving the history and the literary lenses. (I’m a big fan of Prof. Garber, who was on my thesis committee lo those many years ago, and was very generous to me.) Not every episode in the book seems fully aligned with the subtitle’s premise, but it’s a very enjoyable read nonetheless.