I Read Death, Daring, and Disaster, Because People Keep Dying in National Parks and I Want to Know about it

Death, Daring, & Disaster - Search and Rescue in the National Parks by Charles R. "Butch" Farabee Jr.
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book is probably more of a deep-dive than most readers would want, especially if you were mostly interested in deaths and extreme rescues in a specific park. For the best deep-dive into deaths in specific national parks, I’d recommend the Death in series. Out of all the volumes, I’ve only read Death in Yellowstone, but that one is SO good and I still quote it all the time. I even once made a small detour to visit a couple of bear cubs mentioned in that book--they’re now residents of a very nice zoo, and I’m sure they don’t even remember that time when they were babies and they ate literal humans.

However, if you’re also very interested in specific types of misadventures across the national parks, then this book is perfect as a round-up of all of them (and could really use an Index for that!). For instance, I enjoy reading about misadventures while caving, and it wouldn’t have occurred to me that one of the first recorded misadventures would be in Sequoia National Park, the story of a soldier discovering Lost Soldiers Cave in 1909 or 1910 and then promptly disappearing into it. The cave itself was apparently then lost for nearly 40 years before being rediscovered. I think this is the cave that is now referred to just as Soldiers Cave on the Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Park site, and that site also doesn’t say anything about this origin story… or if the remains of that original lost soldier were ever discovered!

It was also easy to get drawn into dramatic stories I’ve never before heard about, like the time in 1941 that part of a squadron of P-40 Warhawks crashed in Kings Canyon National Park. Four pilots died and four bailed out over the High Sierras--and then two bombers also crashed while searching for survivors! The wrecked plane of one of the survivors was eventually found, and there are anecdotes online about casual hikers perhaps finding other pieces of wreckage, but some planes are still officially missing. THIS is the kind of stuff that I find so interesting--imagine not even just actual humans, but actual AIRPLANES, we know exactly when they crashed, we know approximately where they crashed, and we still can’t find them! Blows my mind.

Okay, this story made me cry: in 1959, a park ranger in Glacier National Park got word that a grizzly bear was literally currently in the act of eating a hiker. So he ran over there, found that indeed, a 250-pound grizzly bear was eating a guy, tried to scare the bear away, couldn’t, and so instead he risked his own life to shoot the bear, even though this was super risky because what if the bear turned on him instead, or what if he shot the hiker? He did shoot the bear without shooting the hiker, though, rendered first aid, directed the rescue operation, and the hiker lived. I was curious about this story, so after reading it I Googled to see if there was more info, and y’all, here is where I started crying: fifty years after this event, Ranger Dayton and the bear attack survivor had a reunion! This post tells even more about that day and what followed. 

Okay, but then after all that I had to double-check that afterwards, Ranger Dayton had continued on in peace and happiness with no further crazy events. HOWEVER, he was actually the superintendent of Carlsbad Caverns during that time in the 1970s when terrorists tried to take it over, so yeah, he’s had himself more than his fair share of adventures.             

Here’s a photo of Ranger Dayton. I’m a big fan.

There are also some really awful stories, like the dentist who got caught in a blizzard on Mount Rainier with his two children and died saving their lives by blocking the entrance to the snow shelter they’d dug. Three mountain climbers, including a nine-year-old, died after falling into a snow cavern in Grand Teton National Park, causing an avalanche that buried them up to their necks in snow, and then drowning when that avalanche dammed the stream that was running through the cavern. Another mountaineer actually jumped into the cavern right after them but couldn’t save them because they were buried so deeply, and reading his report of how he kept trying to pull the nine-year-old out of the snow by his helmet and his little jacket while having to witness him drown was so awful. There are some photos here. 

One more interesting through-line is how every now and then the families of someone who has died because of their own carelessness in a national park have sued the national park service… and won?!? In 1993, two of the chaperones of a Mormon Church Explorer Scout group died when they led their kids through an extremely risky route that nobody had the training to do. Their families sued and got 1.49 million dollars. I was also an Explorer Scout that year, and Sergeant Martin would NEVER have put us in danger like that.

A lot of the stories are actually reprints of news articles of the time, which made the book a little more challenging to read, as the tone and style often changed, but I really liked seeing how each event was reported within its own particular cultural context. There were several block quotes that were harder to figure out the provenance of, which would be more problematic for citation, but didn’t bother me as a casual reader. To add to the confusion, sometimes the included photos related to the specific event being described, sometimes they depicted a similar event, and sometimes they didn’t seem to be chronologically or thematically relevant at all. I loved the photos, but I definitely wanted a clear, concrete association between each photo and the event it recorded. 

Honestly, what I think this book wanted to be was an encyclopedia. It has all the great stories, but it’s not the most pleasant experience to read cover-to-cover. But if it had a keyword index and more graphics and citations, it would be a stellar reference for one of my favorite Special Interests.

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I Read a Book about America's Founding Daddy, Baron von Steuben, and I Have Thoughts

Baron Von Steuben statue at Valley Forge, October 2024

Washington's Gay General: The Legends and Loves of Baron von Steuben by Josh Trujillo
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Baron Von Steuben and the issue of his queerness has been one of my Special Interests for a while. This biography is accessible, interesting, and brings up one of my related Special Interests, the impossibility of understanding sexuality, particularly queerness, in any historical context, along with the importance of trying to bring forth, discuss, and interpret historical queerness anyway.

One of the many complicating aspects of writing a biography outing von Steuben is that historical expressions/perceptions of homosocial relationships aren’t our contemporary expressions/perceptions. It’s a great example of the fact that gender, sexuality, and really even sex identity are cultural constructs. And because a certain cultural concept of heteronormativity was prescribed and assumed in all of the cultural contexts that von Steuben experienced, nobody thought it necessary to put into writing (that has survived, at least) exactly what the rules were for maintaining that heteronormativity, nor what rules could possibly be bent/broken and still maintain one’s heteronormativity. And because of the prescriptive nature of heteronormativity, people certainly weren’t writing down what rules they transgressed and exactly what that looked like and the extent of the transgression in terms of their contemporary society! So while I think it’s pretty clear that Baron von Steuben would have met our current contemporary society’s definition of gayness, there’s no evidence that he, himself, ever put it into words in such a way that we know for a fact that’s how he saw himself. And although it’s FAR more likely than not that his personal assistants/adopted sons Walker, North, and Mulligan, in particular, had some sort of sexual/romantic relationships with him, and in some cases some of them with each other, as well, Walker and North, for one, went on to have completely heteronormative marriages, and we have no idea how their male-male relationships impacted their self-concepts, nor how these relationships would have been viewed within whatever unwritten rules of sexuality that we also know nothing about.

AND our current concept of power dynamics and the taboo of power differentials within a relationship are very correct, but also very contemporary to us, so there’s no way to evaluate the morality of von Steuben’s strongly implied relationships with subordinates within his own contemporary culture. He absolutely had some relationships that we’d all consider criminal today… but were they then? We know there must have been some concept of some way to misuse the power dynamic between authorities and their subordinates and between older and younger people, because that gossip was used to discredit von Steuben back in Prussia… but did von Steuben’s behavior really meet that definition of misuse, or was the gossip about his relationships with teen boys back in Europe simply lies to discredit him? And later in America, when he did the same types of things and it was apparently fine… was it really fine, or did nobody simply care to protest? What were these younger assistants’ feelings about these relationships, and how did they experience them within their own contemporary views of work and emotional life? How would these experiences compare to, say, the experience of an underage wife to a higher-class husband, or really any wife to any husband, considering that women had no legal, property, or monetary rights, and sexual assault wasn’t an act considered possible between a husband and his wife, since the husband always had the “right” to sex with his wife? I haaaate strings of rhetorical questions in essays, and yet here I am, because we have no way of knowing what the reality really was, and it’s so frustrating that we don’t have time travel yet!

All that is to say that’s why tl;dr I’m distraught that this graphic novel biography doesn’t have a bibliography or even endnotes/footnotes. I want the sources that give the first-person statements that led the authors to their conclusions, and not even so I can try to argue with them, but so I can enjoy them, build context, and delve more deeply. Like, Baron von Steuben held a dinner party using his own funds for the entirety of the Valley Forge encampment, including the poorest, lowest-class soldiers, and the only cost of admission was that everyone had to be in their undies or naked? Please tell me where I can drink that tea straight from the source, please! The book notes that “John Mulligan’s written recollections and cataloging of von Steuben’s papers inform the first full biography written about the baron in the 1800s, after his death.” So… what is the title of that book?!? What would be some other authoritative but more current biographies to read? Or articles, even? Something peer-reviewed, perhaps? Hell, I’ll even take a PhD thesis! Since the book does bring up the problem of defining historical sexuality, I’d also expect to see some references or a bibliography or a recommended reading list for this. I did find a Valley Forge program (“The General Von Steuben Statue: Interpreting LGBTQ+ Histories of the Revolution”) in which Dr. Thomas Foster of Howard University drops a number of relevant book titles--The Overflowing of Friendship: Love Between Men and the Creation of the American Republic, Bosom Friends: The Intimate World of James Buchanan and William Rufus, Charity and Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America, Sex and the Founding Fathers, and Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity among others--so I’ve got a few to look up, but I’d rather have gotten relevant resources in an Appendix in this book.

Tangentially, but in light of that NPS program that thoughtfully discussed von Steuben and the relevance of interpreting LGBTQ+ histories, I was super disappointed when I went to Valley Forge earlier this year and did not see a single display, note, exhibition label, sign, icon, or ANYTHING that referred to von Steuben’s sexuality. Obviously, I get that the problematic nature of how sexuality was perceived in the 1700s makes it problematic to define von Steuben’s sexuality one way or another, but we all know that if you don’t bring up the possibility that a historical figure was queer, you’re basically giving everyone the impression that they definitely weren’t. And it’s not even just that they didn’t have signage, but I didn’t see any books on any kind of LGBTQ+ histories in the gift shop. I’ll even let you omit Washington’s Gay General from the shelf, since it has no bibliography, but there was nothing! I was so sad for all the queer young people dragged to Valley Forge as yet another boring stop on their boring family vacation who would have been SO excited to see some representation. Hell, I’m a 48-year-old bisexual woman in a heterosexual relationship, and *I* would have been excited to see some representation! 

I would have bought the snot out of a T-shirt with Baron Von Steuben’s face on it and the slogan “America’s Founding Daddy” and I would have put it on and worn it out of the store.

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My Kid Went to SEA and I Read a Book About It

The Robert C. Seamans in Auckland, New Zealand, November 2024

Reading the Glass: A Captain's View of Weather, Water, and Life on Ships by Elliot Rappaport
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I found this book while I was looking for any input about the very odd-sounding study-abroad program my college student told me she’d been accepted into. I mean, my perception of a study-abroad is a semester in Paris, or maybe Australia if you’re feeling really wild. You take some classes, you travel on the weekends, and you come back with a harmless affectation having to do with Vegemite or macarons or something. But, like… a study-abroad doing oceanographic research while sailing in a tall ship in the South Pacific? Does that honestly sound real to you? As for me, I low-key thought my kid was getting set up to be human trafficked.

Well, apparently the Sea Education Association IS real, and Elliot Rappaport captained for them for several years. So while everyone else was reading this book for the weather, which, to be fair, IS interesting content, I was reading to learn more about what life is like on a tall ship/oceanographic research vessel crewed primarily by college students.

I love how respectfully Rappaport writes about these student crews, while still telling cute and funny stories about them. On their first day at sea, he writes about them, “Stunned and eager, they rush to help, faces bearing the telltale signs of sensory overload and the glaze of freshly applied sunscreen.” Sounds about right, especially for my student, who in her one call home from a port in Tuvalu informed me of her realization that she “really needed to reapply sunscreen every two hours to keep from burning.” It’s not as if her mother has been telling her that her entire life or anything! Ah, well--everyone knows that experience is the best teacher.

In Rappaport’s writing, you see the benefit of experience, as the students transform from seasick and hapless students to competent sailors over the course of their couple of months together, and you get the idea that even when they’re leaving frowny-face Post-its on the navigational log or asking uncomfortable questions about colonialism in the South Pacific, Rappaport appreciates them and his valuable role in their education. I was especially interested to read his anecdote about seasickness and how it’s overcome, and to learn that even Rappaport occasionally suffers from it. I enjoyed his anecdotes of atypical adventures, the cyclones and storms, the occasional medical emergency on board, the time that they came upon a ship in distress in French Polynesia and the college student who happened to be a French minor was called upon to translate, but I’m also VERY happy to report that my student claims her own sailing was wonderful but fairly adventure-free.

At least, that’s the story she’s telling her mother…

My college student sailed on the Robert C. Seamans. Rappaport has this to say about the ship:

“The Robert C. Seamans is forty-two meters long, a sailing school ship built of steel and certified to carry a crew of thirty-eight on any of the world’s oceans. She has white topsides, tan spars, her gear well-kept but with the characteristic patina of working vessels. Her name is displayed on trailboards at the bow, raised wooden plaques that have from time to time been lost to the sea in severe weather.”

All of his stories and descriptions are equally as vivid as this description. I won’t lie and say that I was always following his meteorology explanations, because I really wasn’t, but his authorial voice is very real, both conversational and competent, if that makes sense. He’ll be telling you an interesting story about meeting a guy in a bar during a blizzard, and the guy telling him about being a rescue pilot and what his voice sounded like and how young he looked, and then he’ll hit you with, “On some days without warning you meet the people you most aspire to resemble, and in following can only strive after their example.”

Damn, Rappaport. That hit hard.

Even though I wasn’t reading for the science and geography lore as much as the “this is what it’s like to sail on a tall ship” lore, some proper facts did get pounded into my head. For instance, this fact I had to look up later to truly believe it: “The Hawaiian chain begins amid molten pyrotechnics at the eponymous (and geologically brand-new) Big Island and then runs northwest, farther than most people realize--a row of diminishing dots strung nearly to the 180th meridian, halfway to Japan.” There’s a really cool map on Wikipedia that shows the full archipelago! I also researched his brief anecdote about Moruroa and the nuclear weapons testing that the French did there, and OMG it’s so bad. And I found a new citizen science project in Old Weather, which transcribes old ship logs to collate the scientific data hidden inside. His section on Cook Strait also reassured me that I was justified in being miserable seasick on the ferry from Wellington to Picton, ahem. What else would one expect from “a giant funnel, set to amplify whatever wind exists into something more powerful”?

I’d love to read more histories by people with unusual career paths like this, especially sailors, which I honestly didn’t really think was still a career until my kid told me she was going to spend the semester being one. She’s an environmental scientist, and although she did proper scientific research on her trip, imagine the value of a thousand-plus years of ocean data that we’ve lost every time a sailor died without passing on their stories. The Old Weather database is unlocking the valuable information hidden in those ship logs, but imagine all the casual anecdotes we’ve missed that would have provided datasets about flora and fauna, ocean currents and weather, just from mining the lived experience of historical sailors.

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The Entire Fairy Smut Book Club Just Finished A Court of Wings and Ruin, and Part of It Was Actually Really Good! Most of It Was Not Tho...

You guys. Do you remember that my first introduction to fairy smut was back last Spring, when I was touring a college with my younger kid and saw a student-made flyer in a hallway advertising the "Fairy Smut Book Club," with a picture of the cover of A Court of Thorns and Roses on it? That's the entire reason why I got started reading this series! As the secret non-student participant and only active member of the Indiana chapter, I had to do my part!

On that topic, I have terrible news for you. My younger kid actually attends that college now, and I'm sorry to tell you that she reports that currently, there IS no longer a Fairy Smut Book Club. They weren't at the Activities Fair, they never post any meetings or activities on Bionic, and no more flyers have ever appeared in the hallways of the Old Library. 

Friends, I appear to be the last remaining member of the Fairy Smut Book Club. 

I promise to make them proud.

SPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILER

In all serious, DO NOT READ THIS if you ever want to read any of these books for yourself, because I want to properly write about them here, not play coy with the plot details.

If you've read them, though, here's my review of ACOTAR and here's my review of ACOMAF.

And here's a TikTok about what it's like to be me just to take up some more room on the screen in case you're still deciding...

Okay, if you're in, you're in. Here's my review of ACOWAR!

A Court of Wings and Ruin by Sarah J. Maas
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This has been eating at me for three books now, and so I’m just going to come out and say it:

Y’all, I don’t think that Feyre and Rhys and their good-guy gang are very smart.

I’m not going to go so far as to say that EVERY decision they make, individually or collectively, is flat-out wrong, but I’m definitely willing to say that most of their decisions are in the neighborhood of wrong-ish.

Except for when Feyre single handedly takes down the entirety of Tamlin’s Spring Court solely out of spite--that shit is HILARIOUS and is my favorite part of this entire series. It turns out that Feyre only becomes her truest self when she is being a petty little bitch, and I loved it. When they go low, you go lower, Feyre, darling! I literally cackled when she went so far as to get up in the middle of the night and go move around a bunch of rocks just so that during their fairy ceremony the next morning the first magical sunbeam would just happen to strike her and not Ianthe. Lol! Oh, and when she did a bunch of machinations to make Tamlin think that she and Lucien were having an affair, for no other reason than to piss him off! I want THAT Feyre to be my best friend and come with me to every social occasion!

Sooo…. that was the 20% of *this* book that I liked! See also: Under the Mountain in ACOTAR. If we’d stopped at Feyre’s reunion with the Night Court--I’d even have allowed that gross sex scene at the end, just because I’d been spared smut up to then--I’d have given this book 5 stars. Feyre as High Lady of Chaos and then on a buddy adventure with Lucien is just that good.

But then Maas has to go and spoil it all with another billion pages of bad decisions by people I think we’re supposed to see as smart?

BUT THEY ARE ALL SO STUPID! Which is understandable, I guess, as none of them are scholars or appear to have been academically trained in administration, politics, or bureaucracy. All their history seems to be oral, told in folk tale format? There’s also not a lot of logic, or even common sense, on display. When two more of the bloated cast of characters, Miryam and Drakon, make their miraculous appearance at the end of the book, it turns out that they hadn’t actually mysteriously disappeared at all? They’d just put a glamour over the island they’d been living on, so when fairies flew over it the island would look empty? And so everyone thought it was empty and they’d disappeared? But they hadn’t? It was just that nobody had ever thought to, I don’t know, LAND on the island and look for clues? Perhaps even look to see if they’d left a note saying where they’d gone? They were just all, wow, that island looks empty from the air, guess Miryam and Drakon disappeared what a mystery!!!

And part of their trouble is that none of the other courts trust them because Rhys spent the past several hundred years acting like a sociopath to protect his one special city. So maybe he should stop acting like a sociopath! Like, YEAH Tarquin hates you and doesn’t trust you and is unwilling to cooperate fully at first, thereby hindering your ability to defeat Hybern--you all acted like ABSOLUTE SOCIOPATHS to steal his artifact, and then you let that artifact fall into the enemy’s hands and now it’s going to kill everyone. MAYBE THAT’S WHY TARQUIN HID IT IN THE FIRST PLACE.

Oh, that reminds me! It’s actually 25% of the book that I liked, because my other favorite thing is how they all try to have a meeting of the “high lords” (vomit) and when Tamlin shows up, he is such a petty little douchebag and I loved it. He is my college boyfriend who, when I told him that I was breaking up with him, immediately became incensed and started screaming, “NO, I’m breaking up with YOU!!!”, and then my Uncle Sherman, who was sleeping on the couch in the den and woke up to the sound of this random-ass guy screaming at his niece out on the carport, had to come outside and be all “Young man, it’s time to go home.” Thank you, Uncle Sherman!

In all fairness, the 25% that I liked should have been more like 60%--it only wasn’t because this book is sooooo loooooong! At one point I lost serious momentum with it when hoopla auto-returned it and then when I went to check it out again for some reason like 12 people were randomly in line ahead of me and I couldn’t get it again for months, but even when I got it back the last four hours were, like… oh, right, we’re still at war and we’re FINALLY having a battle now! I keep forgetting because we keep going on side-quests to ally with people and save random magical creatures and visit other random magical creatures and make deals with magical creatures and come back to visit them again to for more wheeling and dealing or whatever and fight somebody else and have a chat with our allies and go visit the mortal world for a minute. Like, can we not do a little more of that off-screen? Or just… not?

And THEN I lost the book again for a few weeks when I had only 45 minutes left, and when I finally got it back I listened to those last 45 minutes while riding the TranzAlpine over the Southern Alps from Greymouth to Christchurch, and absolutely nothing happened in that time. Feyre talked with the legendary fairy people who’d been lost. She had a funeral for her father. Amren doesn’t drink blood anymore (and that whole side-plot to get her god powers unveiled was also stupid). For FORTY-FIVE MINUTES. UGH!

Arthur’s Pass is sooooo pretty, though!

I’m sorry to report that my second-book prediction was correct and Nesta and Elain ARE part of the ensemble cast now, and I still hate them. I’m especially pissed that Elain is mated or soulbonded or whatever to Lucien, because Lucien is clearly the hottest fairy and he does not deserve that. The second-hottest fairy is Cassian, though, so FUCKING SIGH. I think we’re supposed to see Nesta and Elaie as… redeemed? Sisterly? now, but they still act basically the same as those basic bitches who wouldn’t even help Feyre chop wood or skin rabbits in the first book, and I don’t care what kind of powers and shit they have now--they’re still not very helpful! But the wooooorst redemption is their father! I mean, come ON! We’re supposed to believe that the bastard who ALSO wouldn’t get off his ass to keep his family from starving, or at least give his youngest daughter a little bit of help every now and then while she singlehandedly kept their family alive, had an off-screen redemption and is now a knight in shining armor? Ugh, whatever. Whereas Tamlin’s complete personality change is totally believable because even in the first book I thought he was high-key gross, this complete overhaul of Feyre’s awful family does. Not. Work. I know it sucks that Maas wanted to do something different with them after she’d written them into a corner, but sorry, that’s just what happens when you write people into a corner. Pick a different plot that works with what you’ve already done! And honestly, it would have made Feyre a much more interesting character if she chose to fight so hard to protect the mortal realm even though nearly everyone in the mortal realm had been worthless pieces of shit to her. She should have had more of Greyson’s characterisation, because that dude was all, “I fucking hate you but fine, I will help you, because morals.”

I’m also a little sorry to report that my second-book prediction that Feyre was going to have Rhys’ winged babies was INCORRECT, gasp! I would have bet real money on that one! I was also really hoping Rhys was going to die at the end, and he kind of did, but only for a minute, sigh. So I guess they can have some bat babies in the next book. Which, at this point I have NO idea what the next two(?) books are supposed to contain? I’d kind of thought we’d carry the war on for longer, but nope, everything is all wrapped up! So what on earth are we going to plot next?

And there was a little bit of queer representation in this book, finally, but most of it was brief and uninteresting enough that you’d miss it if you happened to instead notice a deer next to your walking trail, or a squirrel ran out in front of you (I eventually took to listening to this book almost entirely on walks, where I couldn’t get away to do something, anything more interesting). The only “significant” inclusion was solely to give me an extremely disappointing #bisexualrolemodel, sigh. Or, rather, what Morrigan describes is actually being a closeted lesbian with some really terrible self-hating masking techniques, right? That was… genuinely upsetting to read, tbh. The fairy realm really needs more qualified therapists.

Oh, but the good news--for a fairy smut book, it wasn’t super smutty! Or at least… I don’t think? Just between us, the sex scenes are sooo cringy that I do the 15-second skip forward every time one starts, then repeat until it’s over, and the little snippets are still veeeeery cringey, but I don’t think I had to do that too many times, so yay! The psychic snapchatting between Feyre and Rhys is something I’m super embarrassed for them about, but hey--what mutually consenting couples do together is their own business. They don’t know we’re invading their privacy, so we need to give them some grace.

So, predictions for the next two(?) books:

Feyre and Rhys will have a baby, maybe even twins so they can have a girl and a boy barf. Maybe there will be a kidnapping plot or something?

The only possible overarching plot I can think of is something with those cross-universe old gods, just because they got brought up a lot in this book for not really any good reasons.

PLEASE do not let the POV shift from Feyre to Elain or, god forbid, fucking Nesta! Feyre already gets on my very last nerve but I will flat-out stop reading this series if I have to continue through the eyes of either of those worthless pieces of shit.

It won’t happen, but it would be HILARIOUS if we had another complete turn-around in the next book, so that Rhys is now a total dick and we cheer as Feyre falls into the loving arms of Tarquin. I would read the snot out of that!

As for the Fairy Smut Book Club, perhaps it was just a busy semester for the members, and they'll reactivate it next semester, fingers crossed. My kid has told me flat-out, numerous times, that no, she will NOT join the book club on my behalf, but she IS a member of the school's Sherlock Holmes book club, so I guess there's that. The other day she was all, "One of the other members is really obsessed with Holmes slash Watson... you wouldn't know anything about that, would you?"

And that's how I may or may not have found myself sharing fanfic recs with yet another total stranger!

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I Read Dark Carnivals and I Still Think Jaws is a Family Movie

Halloween 2018

Dark Carnivals: Modern Horrors and the Origins of American Empire by W. Scott Poole
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I’m not sure how one could rewrite the title of this book to clarify that it’s not really about the history of the horror genre and how it reflects the American empire, but actually about the history of the American empire, explaining and illustrating some of the events via action, sci-fi, horror, and thriller movies that speak to the politics of the day.

But they need to, because I kind of feel snookered.

During some chapters, mind you, we get a little bit more of the former, and Poole’s claims in these chapters are liberally peppered with film mentions and analyses. A discussion of Poltergeist (remember their haunted house is built on a graveyard that was also supposedly built on an “ancient Indian burial ground”?) leads to a discussion of the history of European settlers’ long genocide of the Native American peoples, which leads to mentions of other movies that also use this “ancient Indian burial ground” trope. But even in this chapter, in which there are numerous horror movies that hint at that genocide, these mentions of Pet Sematary, The Amityville Horror, and The Shining really are just mentions, along the lines of “Here are some other movies with the same theme.” I wanted an analysis of each of these movies and how each speaks to this theme separately. What is the significance of the usage of an “ancient Indian burial ground” to now bury only pets? Or the significance of the undead from that burial ground becoming murderous against their guardians? Or in Amityville Horror, the significance of the conflation of demons with the ancient burial ground and the Catholic Church as another force that the horror must stop? Or how about the general opinion that the parents made up the entire original story to get out from under a mortgage they belatedly realized was WAY too big for their finances? Or what is the reasoning for why the Native American genocide had its climax so long ago and we’re only just horroring about it in the 70s and 80s, as well as what it means that these three were all books first?

Dunno, because we don’t get into any extensive semiotic analysis of any cultural artifact within the bounds of this book. The lens through which we’re meant to be studying American imperialism gets forgotten quite a bit in favor of simply laying out and opining on the history of American imperialism.

Throughout his book, Poole implies a dual responsibility that Americans have, in tune with these occasional films that metaphorically present a select atrocity that has been committed by their country. Poole asks, are the movies meant to pacify us Americans, desensitize us to the real horror around us, and we should watch them and be pacified, or are the movies meant to motivate us, to break us out of our shells of ennui, and we should watch them and then revolt?

cupcake sharks circa 2009

Poole illustrates this duality via continued reference to Jaws (which he claims pacifies and desensitizes us) and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (which he claims motivates us to revolt). I think it’s interesting that out of the two, Jaws is a “family” movie that I’ve watched with my kids several times since they were small, once even with an entire themed family dinner that included, among other delicacies, blue Jello studded with Swedish fish and cupcakes with half a Twinkie on top, arranged and frosted to look sort of maybe reminiscent of a shark breaking out of the water if you turned your head and squinted juuuust right. Texas Chainsaw Massacre, on the other hand, I watched exactly once, mostly through my fingers, and do not plan to ever so much as be in the same room with again, much less screen for even my now-adult daughters, much less with themed snack foods. Although I have SO many great ideas--meatloaf and smoked sausage-heavy, but still--about Texas Chainsaw Massacre-themed snack foods!

ocean Jello, complete with whipped cream waves and a graham cracker crumb beach!

I thought the strongest parts of Poole’s book were his discussion of wars and conquests that were so overtly American imperialist that even a child could make the connection, and the films that were made by the filmmakers influenced by those wars. A director (George A. Romero) and a special effects artist (Tom Savini) who brought their experiences explicitly into the visuals they created is strong stuff, and one of the few insights that will make me watch some of these films with new eyes. On a similar note, I was stoked when Poole started writing about The Serpent and the Rainbow, a movie that I watched by myself on the floor of my den WAY too many times as an unwholesomely unsupervised child, and which probably now explains a lot about me, ahem, but I didn’t get a ton more from the discussion than I got from watching the movie a dozen times at the age of 13. It’s racist and sexist, and its depictions of Haiti are fucked up. Also, tangent: that’s a good way to describe JD Vance!

One of the more annoying and obvious flaws in the book, at least to me who loves myself a good recommended list, is the absence of an index that lists the movies and where they’re discussed. You would not believe how long it took me to flip through the book--three times!--to find the Poltergeist discussion that I remembered. And if Poole ever got back to that discussion I’ll never know, because I’d have to re-read the book to find it. And God forbid that he at least included a list of all the cultural artifacts discussed in the book so we can watch them for ourselves. It would also let us see the titles like Independence Day and Fight Club that were included in the book even though they’re not horror titles.

On the whole, I did think that Poole’s thesis question of whether we’re meant to be pacified or inspired is significant and relevant, and it’s something that I’ll continue to think about when I watch horror. Instead of this comprehensive-ish history that offers references to films, though, I’d rather have had deeper discussions of fewer, select moments of American imperialism, with more extensive film references and analyses intertwined. Some of these imperialistic moments are clearly more ingrained in our collective consciousness than others, and I think that the movies that speak to those moments are saying much more than Poole was willing to tell us about here.

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I Made a Little Quilt That Is a Ghost for The Little Ghost Who Was a Quilt

The best thing, for me, about having a small niece, is that I can still make all the cute children's things that I want to make, because I still have someone to give them to!

Honestly, I might actually make more things for my niece than I did for my own kids, if you don't count things like clothes or homeschool materials or collaborative crafts, because when my own kids were this little kid's age, I was too busy parenting little kids to get enough crafty time to actually make them cute things! My younger kid was four years old by the time I made her first quilt, oops!

So when I saw The Little Ghost Who Was a Quilt in a local bookstore a few weeks ago, and I was immediately charmed by it, and then immediately after that I wanted to make a little ghost quilt--I did!

Happily, the book's endpapers feature the quilt design of the titular little ghost, making it super easy to see what similar fabrics would look like. And even more happily, I did not have to buy a single thing to make this quilt! To be fair, a couple of the fabrics that I used are remnants that I'd previously bought with no purpose in mind, but everything else was honest-to-goodness scraps and stash, from the fabric for the top to the cotton batting to the cotton sheet I used as the backing.

All of the pieces are 5" squares. I wanted my quilt to be 10 blocks by 12 blocks, so I needed 120 blocks total. I sort of tried to keep the colors even between purple, aqua, and white, but it's a little blue-heavy. There are just a few grey blocks scattered in, because it turns out that I don't actually own very much grey fabric. The little ghost quilt in the book also has tan blocks, but for some reason I don't have ANY tan fabric, and anyway, I wasn't really feeling the tan colorway... which is perhaps one reason for why I don't own any tan fabric, lol!

To make the quilt, you lay out your pieces and rearrange them until you like the way they look as a whole, then stack them by rows, piece each row, then piece the rows themselves together, being quite fussy about lining up the corners:

Then you take up your entire family room floor making your quilt sandwich!

This is why I can never say that my creations come from a pet-free home, ahem. I would NEVER want my creations to come from a pet-free home!

I pinned my quilt quite well to the batting/backing, trimmed it out roughly, then quilted it via stitch in the ditch, earning myself yet another day of having a wonky back in the process. Why must quilting be so ergonomically incorrect?!?

Here's how it looks all nicely quilted and ready to be properly trimmed:

I got through trimming the batting before my supervisor came to check up on me:

I trimmed the backing to 1" wider than the quilt on all sides, then folded it in half twice, clipped it in place using every plastic sewing clip I own, and stitched it down:

Proper quilters use a blind stitch or another invisible stitch, but I'm happy with a plain old zig-zag.

And there's my little ghost quilt!

The lighting was soooo perfect right when I finished, but in the hour it took me to run out and do early voting, it got completely overcast. But I had to take my photos anyway, because Halloween presents are more fun if you can get them in the mail in time for the recipient to receive them before, you know, Halloween!

...and that's a bunch of cat hairs there on the purple block, sigh. I did wash it and dry it, and then go over it with the lint roller, before I put it in the mail.

Because you don't have to follow a pattern, just make sure that the pieces look cute together as a whole, this is actually one of the quickest quilts I've ever sewn:

I'm always especially pleased when I can work any of my favorite meaningful fabrics into a piece. Below, the smocked blue fabric used to be part of the only skirt that my older kid ever willingly wore. The silky white fabric to its right is actually from my wedding dress!

My favorite part, though, is that I used variegated thread to quilt it, and it looks so nice from the back!

Isn't it crazy that you can make something so substantial, and so pretty and perfect, entirely from materials you already have on hand? Historically, that's exactly what quilting should be, including reusing those bits of old clothes, and I LOVE that there's a children's book that encourages children to notice and care for the simple, unassuming gift of a patchwork quilt:

I didn't have any ghosts on hand to put into it, though, so that part's going to have to figure itself out later. 

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I Read The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs Because I'm a Sucker for a Gossipy Paleontologist

My amateur paleontologist glory days!

The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World by Steve Brusatte
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

In which I rediscover (for the hundred millionth time) that dinosaurs are awesome, and continue my journey to read everything ever written about them.

I was a Space Kid, not a Dinosaur Kid, so I didn’t actually get interested in dinosaurs until my older kid did, around the age of five or so. Let me tell you, you have not SEEN obsession until you’ve seen a five-year-old whose Special Interest is propped up, encouraged, and in every way indulged by a parent who’s just as obsessively taken it as her life’s mission to do such. The kid in question is now an adult doing oceanography on a research vessel in the South Pacific, and I’m still over here reading dinosaur books!

Allosaurus at age 5. I honestly can't remember if I scanned the picture backwards or if her reverse writing really was that extreme back then. She writes going the normal direction now!

So: dinosaurs. I most enjoy books written for the non-academic, and I MOST most enjoy books that mention the personalities involved, because I think it’s interesting to follow their research, look for their discoveries in the museums I visit, suss out any gossip about them… you know, the usual! So I liked all the name-dropping that Brusatte did, talking about his lifelong interest and work in paleontology, etc., nearly as much as I did the actual paleontology. Anyway, if you don’t at least minimally cyberstalk the other paleontologists that Brusatte mentions, how are you going to learn that Poland’s leading paleontologist, Grzegorz Niedzwiedzki, is high-key hot? “Steely face,” indeed, Brusatte!

I’m interested in the analytical work of paleontologists after they get home from the field, so I’m glad that Brusatte also talked about this quite a bit--probably so he could quietly be a bit braggy about his own contributions, but still. His contributions are pretty cool! I texted my other kid, who’s in college and worried that her Statistics class is too babyish, to tell her that Brusatte essentially uses statistics to make his dinosaur family trees and other cool dinosaur discoveries. She wasn’t that excited because she thinks dinosaurs are boring, but now she knows some more options!

We also get info about the historical paleontologists along with this history of dinosaurs. Although he doesn’t mention my favorite paleontologist, Mary Anning, which is fine because she didn’t actually find dinosaurs, he does briefly discuss my second-favorite period in paleontology, the Bone Wars.

checking out some of Mary Anning's best finds

What’s my favorite period, you say? The discovery of Sue and all the drama surrounding who got to own her!

Sue!

Oh, and he mentions my favorite non-dinosaur, the Sarcosuchus!

SuperCroc!

I also like hearing about the life and works of these paleontologists because they give me more tips and ideas for my own fossil hunting--that Riker Hill Fossil Site that Paul Olsen got national protection for is conveniently located in between the Thomas Edison National Historical Park (you’ve got to make advanced reservations for the house tour) and Morristown National Historical Park, and depending on how dirty you got fossil hunting, there’s a Medieval Times not too far away, either!

Also the Burpee Museum of Natural History in Rockford, Illinois, where I learned that I must go to see the most complete skeleton of a T. rex ever found. I’ve got extended family in Rockford, so I’ll be putting on my fake mustache and skulking around corners so I don’t have to small-talk, but I’ll be there!

And the Chicxulub Crater. I’ve actually been there before, but I have NOT been inside every single cenote yet, so obviously I have to go back.

I've been inside some of the cenotes, though!

I really appreciated the extensive author’s notes at the end of the book, with all the recommended reading I could want. I requested several more titles from the library, thanks to those notes, so I should be flush with dinosaur reading through the new year!

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