Book Notes

What You See Is All There Is

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A few notes about narratives in today’s world.

We need to acknowledge that the narrative is not the story or, more accurately, that it often has as much connection to what really happened as Rice Krispies has to rice (or, if you like, that oat milk horchata with double whip has to real coffee). There might be rice and coffee somewhere in the ingredients; the narrative might share a few facts with actual events but is really just a heavily processed item.

You have an event, and the narrative is what is created to lead you to what you think you should think about the event. George Floyd dying on a street while in police custody, Jan. 6 protesters in the Capitol, a President Joe Biden wandering off during an event. Those are facts.

The narrative purports to provide meaning, to help you to “understand” what is going on. Floyd is about systemic racism; Jan. 6 is about insurrection; Joe Biden was just curious about what was happening off-camera, and is still sharp as a tack despite what right-wing conspiracy theorists would have you believe.

Political narratives:

1) Mimic the human inductive process of assigning larger meaning to events, but then seek to exploit through interpretation the gap in human understanding between what one sees and reality.

2) The narrative is manipulative, it is meant to guide you toward a predetermined conclusion.

3) Narratives are designed to operate within a time-bound system. They are not meant to stand the test of time, but rather to move the ball down the field toward a larger outcome.

So, having said that, why should we believe a single word that Jake Tapper writes in his book?

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The Vanished World

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I read the various news stories about the latest Islamic-inspired mass murder in India with a mixture of odd emotions. One of them being ‘Oh dear, radical Muslims again, behaving in that manner which we have come to expect,’ the second being a degree of sadness for a place and a time that I have never been a part of, but am sort-of-acquainted with, and the third being straight-out nostalgia for a vanished world. Or several vanishing worlds. I was moved to take down and re-read a murder mystery from the collection in the hallway segment of the home library – M.M. Kaye’s Death in Kashmir.*

The mystery is set in the mountains in the first chapters, and then in a garrison town on the plains, and finally on Kashmir’s Lake Dal, all described most lovingly by a writer who knew them well, eight or nine decades ago. It takes place in 1947, as the British were packing up to leave India for good and all. M. M. “Mollie” Kaye’s family had served the so-called ‘Raj’ for generations; father to son, to son, to mother, to daughter, serving and doing their bit, spending their lives there, in various capacities. Military, missionary, civil service, the railway network, overseas banking, industry, trade – generations and decades spent in the Far East in various capacities.

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History Friday – Rescue 9-’49 – Or a Heroic Exploit by the 19th Century Army Officer that Fort Rucker Wasn’t Named After

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Lately I have been refreshing my memory and knowledge of Gold-Rush era California. Relevant volumes are already fringed with small Post-it notes, making it easier for me to come back to a particularly vivid description of a place, a curious character, the presence of someone later-well-known, or an interesting yet little known turn of events. For example, William Tecumseh Sherman was in California in 1848, as the aide to the American military governor, perhaps – or maybe not – afire with impatient envy of his fellow West Point classmates who were serving in the active theater of the war with Mexico. I had wanted to work him in as a walk-on character in The Golden Road, but my main character’s adventures never intersected with WT Sherman, except for delivering a newspaper to his house in San Francisco.

Anyway, an interesting sidelight to the history of the Gold Rush happened towards the end of that first year, 1849. It seemed as if half the world rushed into California, by land, sea or a combination thereof, eager to start collecting gold nuggets as big as peas and beans (or even bigger) off the ground. Some intrepid gold-seekers came through Mexico, or across Texas and New Mexico Territory, but a substantial number came by the established route; starting from the various jumping-off places along the Mississippi-Missouri. Such adventurers surged along the Platte River to Ft. Laramie, over South Pass, to Fort Hall, the Humboldt River, then up and over the last hurdle of the Sierra Nevada mountain range. At a point in present-day Nevada, the route deviated into several branches.

Those travelers – worn-down by the last few hundred miles through desert, low on supplies, having lost draft animals to hard-use, near-starvation and low-grade harassment by Indians – looked for an easier passage through the high mountains than the difficult Truckee route. They also hoped to avoid the ghastly experience of the Donner-Reed company of three years previous; caught in deep snow, with cannibalism the only alternative to death by starvation. Many chose a slightly easier passage toward the south called the Carson pass. But a portion of the late-season ‘49ers were diverted north, on a cutoff advertised as a short-cut to the northern gold fields – a short-cut talked up by rancher and entrepreneur Peter Lassen. Which it was, sort of … but it led through the Black Rock Desert and equally hard, waterless country, which demolished morale, supplies, and physical endurance of ‘49ers who were close to the end of all those. (A smaller, very misguided and disjointed company went even further south and blundered into – and out of the Death Valley – rescuing themselves by pluck, luck and the courage of several able members of it.)

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History Friday: The Handcart Saga

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(The return of History Friday at Chicagoboyz – a break from current events!)

Last week my daughter picked up a lavishly-illustrated book at a thrift store that she thought I might be interested in, and it turned out that I was, since the next book (a YA adventure, and sequel to West Towards the Sunset) will touch on interesting doings in the far West – in California, the Nevada Territory and the Mormon colonies in the Utah Territory. We had lived in Utah for three years when I was assigned to Hill AFB. Utah is rather like Texas in that both states have a rather distinct culture and off-beat origin story, at least in comparison to most other western states. The epic journey of the pioneer handcart companies from the jumping-off places in the Mid-West to Salt Lake City is one of the cultural underpinnings to the LDS Iliad, the foundation-cornerstone of Deseret, and an epic of faith, and self-organizing heroism not very well-known outside the LDS church. And thereby hangs the tale related in this volume.

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Rare and Fine Books

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(A break today from matters political.)

Some time ago – as things are counted in internet time, which is sort of like dog years in that before the turn of this last century was pre-history, 2000 was kind of like AD 1, making the first decade analogous to the Roman Era. Anyway, along about the early Dark Ages-Internet Time, I became a partner in a Teeny Publishing Bidness, run by a woman who was the hardest-driving editor in the local literary arts community. We used to joke that Alice G. had been married three times, twice to mere mortal men, and once to the Chicago Manual of Style. She was also enduringly faithful to observing the Oxford Comma. Because of her serious night owl habit, she preferred self-employment, mainly as a freelance editor and owner/proprietor of the Teeny Publishing Bidness.

A mutual friend who saw to her basic computer needs, was also my sometime employer. In a mad stroke of business/matchmaking genius, he believed Alice and I would be an excellent professional fit … and so, it turned out to be. Among other things, our clients could contact us directly, any time of the day or night. Alice took me on as a junior partner, we shared the work, split the profits and got along very well in that partnership for five or six years. Alice had connections among the mildly well-to do and artistic in San Antonio and for almost thirty years had done quite well out of doing bespoke and high-quality books for businesses, institutions, and for local writers who had sufficient income to support an extensive print run through a lithographic press.

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