Rob Baker > Recent Status Updates

"...even when I couldn't see it I liked knowing it was there for the depth and solidity it gave things, the reinforcemnt to infrastructure, an invisible, bedrock rightness that reassured me just as it was reassuring to know that far away, whales swam untroubled in Baltic waters and monks in arcane time zones chanted ceaselessly for the salvation fo the world" (304).

"How could the apartment have seemed so permanent and solid-looking when it was only a stage set, waiting to be struck and carried away by movers in uniforms?" (193).

I wasn't crazy about Tartt's very successful "The Secret History", mostly because the characters were all so unlikeable, but her writing style was superior, and this book won the 2014 Pulitzer, so...

Initial impressions:

---Good: great writing; interesting storylines; rich, complex fictional universe

---Worrisome: wordy; heavy-handed symbolism; very precocious 13-year old (way too observant and articulate)

A Scrabble friend calls the author from an airport in Greenland, excited because he had a real-world sighting of a little-used Scrabble word:

"'I spotted a sign nailed to a tree. In big letters, it said 'Umiaq for Rent!'

"'You're kidding me!' I was as excited as he. This was a word nerd's version of people seeing the image of the Virgin Mary on a piece of toast or a tree stump" (12).

"Some people thought I had been brain damaged; some thought I was crippled; some thought I was blind. It seemed as if I were not hurt enough. People wanted it to be more" (146).

"Many years after that summer, I met a woman on a bus who asked if I was MIchele McBride. I said, 'Yes,' and she started to scream, 'Why did you live and my son die?'" (142).

"Through the fire and its aftermath, I learned that disaster does not breed those strong, jolly, humble heroes that we read about it newspapers and books. Real survivors experience anger, panic, jealousy, guilt, self-doubt -- all those feelings people never like to talk about, but which are as important and as powerful as bravery" (ix).

"...in which the tantalized hero does not move to act at all--the tiniest impulse toward amplitude or self surrender, let aloneintriuge or adventure, peremptorily extinguished by the ruling triumverate of Sanity, Responsibility, and Self-Respect, assisted handily by their devoted underlings: the timetable, the rainstorm, the headache, the busy signal, the traffic jam, and most loyal of all, the last-minute doubt" 15

"His celebrated blend of sympathy & pitilessness is nowhere more stunning than where the bemused isolate steels himself to be carried away, only to discover that his meticulous thoughtfulness has caused him to wait a little too long or that acting with bold and uncharacterisitic impetuosity, he has totally misjudged what had somehow managed to entice him out of his manageable existence and has made everything worse"

Our latest book club read....and my first Philip Roth book.

"Everything undeniably true struck me as transparently false as soon as I wrote it down, and the greater the effort to be sincere, the worse it went" (8).

5/26/1805: Lewis first sees the Rocky Mountains:

'When I reflected on the difficulties which the snowy barrier would probably throw in my way to the Pacific... it in some measure counterbalanced by the joy I felt in the first moments I gazed upon them.

As I have always held it a crime to anticipate evils I will believe it a good comfortable road until I am compelled to believe differently' (227).

On Nov. 4, 1804, at Fort Mandan (North Dakota), Lewis and Clark met a French-Canadian trader, Toussaint Charbonneau. He was hired by the Corps as a translator.

He had two wives. One was 15 and pregnant. She had been kidnapped by a Native American tribe and taken from her home near the Rocky Mountains, and made a slave, then lost in a card game to Charbonneau.

Her name was Sacagawea.

On Aug. 20, 1804, the only member of the Corps of Discovery to die on the journey succombed to appendicitis.

They held a ceremony for him and buried him at a site they named Sergeant Floyds Bluff in modern Sioux City, IA.

They also visited his gravesite nearly two years later on the return trip.

"On Aug. 12 (1804), at 5:00 p.m., what Clark called a 'Parrie Wolf' appeared on the bank and barked at the passing keelboat. The captains had not previsiously seen this animal, or read anything about it...

The animal was a coyote. Lewis and Clark were the first Americans to see one" (153).

Capt. Lewis "looked up to see a blanket of white coming down the (Missouri) river. He went to the bow to stare down into the water. The keelboat and the white whatever-it-was came together. It turned out to be a sea of white feathers, over three miles long and seventy yards wide".

The feathers came from a flock of white pelicans covering several acres on a sandbar, preening themsevles in their summer molt.

At 3:30 pm, on May 21, 1804, "to the cheers of crowds on the bank, the expedition set out. As the keelboat turned her bow into the stream, Lewis and his party cut themselves off from civilization. There would be no more incoming letters, no fresh supplies, no reinforcements, nothing reaching them until they returned.

The captains expected to be gone two years, perhaps more. Lewis and Clark were as free as Columbus"