Shiloh National Battlefield

AKA Shiloh National Military Park.

Back when I worked for the National Park Service jokes about "cannonball parks" were common. Cannonball parks tend to attract two kinds of visitors: military history nerds and dog walkers. I have no clue what type of underground network exists among dog owners to alert them to the charms of walking Fido in a cannonball park but every cannonball park I've been to had more dog walkers than "real" visitors. Even Shiloh, which isn't exactly on the edge of a housing development like Kennesaw Mountain, had a dude walking two dogs in the rain. And there are almost always a zillion monuments to various dead troops. Thus, I'll confess doing site visits to places like Wilson's Creek didn't thrill me even though Wilson's Creek is refreshingly monument-free.  

Military history has never been a strong interest of mine and, let's be honest, a battlefield is a remarkably depressing place. You get to walk around a site that witnessed incredible carnage and then learn that despite thousands of people dying or being horribly wounded the battle didn't resolve much. Shiloh gets designated as the first major battle in the Civil War but all it seems to have accomplished is hundreds of bodies wound up in mass graves. The battle was in April 1862. The war didn't end for another three years. 

But I digress. Shiloh is the first cannonball park I've visited that really flaunts its cannonballs. Giant stacks of fake ones. They're prominent site markers for where various officers had their headquarters. The one shown commemorates the battlefield headquarters of brigadier general Thomas Sweeny, an Irish immigrant and Union officer. 

There's a sizable collection of other monuments, too. most dating from the 1920s. The one for Tennessee shows up on postcards, magnets, and other park memorabilia. It is, as such things go, not a bad looking monument. The scale is reasonable and the design isn't weird. It pays tribute to fallen soldiers with an obviously dead guy still gripping the stars and bars. It also makes sense that it would be a prominent memorial; the battlefield is in Tennessee and Mississippi so of course Tennessee is going to want something nice. Mississippi also has a decent monument, nothing too over the top but definitely memorializing their troops. (Photo is from a site that provides tips on planning visits to national parks.) 

Shiloh was interesting. I was glad we took the time to check it out. I did not know that it was the very first Civil War battlefield to be proclaimed a national battlefield. That happened early enough that Civil War veterans, both Union and CSA, were able to actively push for the commemoration and to attend ceremonies at the battlefield. As usual, the Park has a decent visitor center with nicely designed exhibits with historic artifacts and bits of trivia to flesh out the basic narrative (two day battle that CSA officers thought they were winning after the first day but then Union reinforcements arrived and Grant, Sherman, et al. pushed the CSA troops into retreating). The visitor center video describing the battle was good as it used the perspectives of ordinary troops on both sides. Decent casting for the re-enactments, too, which was a bonus. 

As far as I could tell, based on my admittedly thin knowledge of the war and the various officers involved on both sides, the most consequential effect of the battle was the death of General Albert Sidney Johnston. Johnston bled out from what he thought was a minor wound to the back of his leg. It took several hours for the blood loss to hit. By the time it sank in that he was seriously wounded, he'd lost too much blood and could not be saved. One of the most effective officers the CSA had, Johnston's death was a major blow to the Confederacy. Jefferson Davis notably said "[W]hen Sidney Johnston fell, it was the turning-point of our fate; for we had no other hand to take up his work in the West." Given that both armies had an over-abundance of incompetent, lazy, or generally useless officers I'm not sure that's true. 

One of my co-workers in Omaha actually worked at Shiloh when the author Tony Horowitz visited as part of researching the book that became Confederates in the Attic. He always claimed Horowitz quoted him in the book, but if he did it wasn't obvious when I read it. The co-worker's favorite fantasy was to somehow get back to Shiloh as Superintendent. I have no idea if the dude succeeded. It always struck me as a weird ambition, but who knows? Maybe he was originally from that part of Mississippi or Tennessee so it wasn't so much the park attracting him as it was him just wanting to get back home. I've mentioned before the penchant of some superintendents to snag their dream retirement location as a duty station for their final high three with the agency. 

Strange addictions

I have never been a fan of "reality" shows, have never felt any desire to watch any of the "Real Housewives" variations, Kardashians, or similar programming. There is one exception: cooking shows, sort of. Stuff like Gordon Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmares, Robert Irvine's Restaurant Impossible, and John Taffer's Bar Rescue. 

I have a definite addiction to Bar Rescue. Since I discovered it's possible to  stream Paramount Network through a Google tv box, I have been known to plop myself in a recliner, knitting or other handwork in my sweaty little hands, and binge watch Bar Rescue. I am so thoroughly addicted to the show that it doesn't matter how many times I've seen some episodes, I'm like a little kid with a favorite picture book. I don't do a blasé "oh, seen it before so I'll watch something else" for repeat episodes. Nope. I'm more like yelling to the S.O. that he needs to come see it because "this is the one with the raccoon in the ceiling" or "holy wah, there's a lot of mold in that ice machine!" 

I'm not sure what the attraction is. The Younger Daughter and I were talking about shows like Restaurant Impossible and Bar Rescue not long ago and mutually agreed it's moderately amazing we're still willing to eat in restaurants or bar and grill type places after seeing show after show with, as noted above, raccoons in the ceiling or mold in the ice machines. Not to mention the kitchens. The kitchens are always unreal. It's like just how drunk are the customers if they're willing to eat (or attempt to eat) the crap coming out of the incredibly filthy kitchens? Of course, given that these shows are always about places that are losing money while noticing fewer and fewer "guests" willing to sit on a bar stool maybe most of that crap food falls into the "tried it once; never going back" category. The last episode of Bar Rescue I watched featured multiple dead mice in a unbelievably filthy kitchen. Health departments obviously are not doing surprise inspections the way they should. 

It's not just crap food, naturally. It's also shit drinks inspiring "never again" reactions. A classic Taffer test is for consistency: if you have multiple bartenders, are they all following the same recipes? Are all the margaritas made the same way or is one bartender seriously overpouring the tequila while the other bartenders aren't pouring enough? And do they know how to make popular drinks, i.e., if someone asks for an incredibly common drink like a tequila sunrise or an old fashioned can the bartender make it without having to get out their phone and google it? In a recent episode (recent as in I watched it this week, not as in recent from the new season) two bartenders were totally clueless when asked to make a paloma. Palomas are apparently a popular alternative to margaritas. Margaritas are basically tequila, lime juice, and orange-flavored liqueur (triple sec); a paloma is tequila, lime juice, and grapefruit soda (Squirt) or actual grapefruit juice. It's a nice simple drink, no weird ingredients and can look good with the right garnish. You know, it's another drink that has people who see it thinking they'd like to try one, too. A bartender drawing a blank when asked to make a paloma isn't actually a bartender -- he or she is a person who knows how to remove the cap before handing the Bud Lite bottle to a customer.  

In any case, Bar Rescue always features people ordering a drink, taking one sip, and doing the classic "Christ on a crutch, this is bad. I need to spit it out fast" expression while clearly wondering if they can get away with spewing it on to the floor. How do bar owners not notice that customers think their bar's offerings are garbage?

Answer: easily. One thing that is consistent across multiple seasons is just how ignorant/naive/clueless bar owners can be. Lots of episodes with owners who think all they have to do is walk around the bar occasionally without doing any actual work (checking for cleanliness, for example). Of course, if your only exposure to a bar or a restaurant is as a customer, you most likely don't notice all the work that goes into a good drinking or dining experience: trained staff, consistency, a safe atmosphere. If you invest in a bar and just assume anyone calling themselves a bartender or a server knows what they're doing you're pretty much guaranteed to find yourself drowning in debt. If you own a business of any type no one with more than two brain cells to rub together should be hands-off and assume everything will take care of itself unless you're deliberately aiming for bankruptcy court.

Of course, you also have bar owners who bought a bar because they wanted a place to party, just kind of hang out with "friends" while watching their money go down the drain while they give away shots. Taffer has dealt with a lot of drunks who were more focused on having fun than on safeguarding their income. Sometimes he performs a minor miracle and gets them to realize they've been fucking up; sometimes you know that the drunk is going to go back to being a drunk as soon as the cameras stop rolling. Which is no doubt one reason there are sites that track the show and how the rescued bars do long term. A site called "Bar Rescue Update" includes a list of all the bars the show has visited and how many are still in business. I do find myself wondering whatever happened to the bar with the raccoon in the ceiling. Maybe I should figure out just what the name of that bar was and find out if the raccoon ever became a friend of Bill W. 

Pulitzer Project: Interpreter of Maladies

After I finished The Hours the Younger Daughter decided to read it, too, before returning it to the library. After all, the book was pretty light weight, both in size and content. I breezed through it quickly. So did she. And then she asked the usual question: What makes a work of fiction good enough to merit a Pulitzer? By then I had started reading Interpreter of Maladies so I had two recent examples to think about. So what does make a work of fiction Pulitzer worthy? I have no clue. Some past winners have been total dreck, literally unreadable, and others were amazing: beautifully written, a joy to read.

As for the most recent, it falls somewhere into the middle of the pack. Not bad, not great, just quietly announcing, yes, these are typical New Yorker short stories. Not great literature, not bad, just sort of there. The author is Indian American, sort of. According to Wikipedia, Lahiri was born in England and came to the United States at the age of 3 when her father was hired to work at a university library in Rhode Island. 

Her parents were Bengali and placed a lot of emphasis on remembering Bengali culture. The family made frequent trips to India and no doubt provided much of the material Lahiri drew on for her fiction. Her work is described as "autobiographical" but it's a bit of a stretch to call fiction autobiographical when the work is set years, even decades, before Lahiri was born. She may be channeling her parents' and other relatives' stories, but she didn't live any of it herself. 

The book is a collection of short stories, some longer than others. "Interpreter of Maladies" might be the longest. It's an odd narrative about a man who has two jobs: he works as an interpreter for a medical doctor translating patients' descriptions of symptoms and relaying the doctor's advice to the patients. India is a land of many languages and dialects, and the doctor has a sizable number of patients who speak a language the doctor doesn't know. The man's other job is as a tour guide, and it is through his conversations with American tourists that we learn about him being an interpreter of maladies. This is the story that won a prize from The New Yorker and again I'm not sure why. Maybe for being the penultimate New Yorker type of story? Exotic setting, intriguing cultural references, a faint hint of erotica in the tour guide's extremely G-rated thoughts about the female American tourist. Totally typical New Yorker, absolutely nothing out of the ordinary for that magazine other than the story being set in India instead of on a Caribbean island. 

The other stories in the book vary in setting and protagonists. Some are set in India, some in the U.S. One of the oddest stories for me involved a young married couple who moved into a new (to them) house and kept finding Christian tchotchkes: a snow globe with a Nativity scene, a garish poster, and even a large concrete Our Lady of Perpetual Cleanliness hiding in a clump of bushes in the yard -- why Mary wasn't in the usual old bathtub is a mystery. The house is apparently salted with tacky religious memorabilia. They keep finding stuff in odd places: tucked behind a radiator, for example. The wife is fascinated and wants to keep it all; her husband keeps reminding her that they're Hindu. I found myself thinking several kind of related thoughts: the tchotchkes collection is a guaranteed way to get nailed for the sin of cultural appropriation (something that no one was thinking much about back in the 1990s), non-Christians do get a little weird about religious memorabilia and holidays (lots of people celebrate Christmas or Easter with zero thought about the religious meaning of the holidays), and is it wrong of me to want a large statue of Ganesha for my garden? I have an old bathtub I could put him in. 

So how is the book in general? Well, it's competently written, i.e., it's definitely readable. Lahiri can write, which is good considering that her academic career seems to have consisted of teaching other people how to write. Would I recommend it to other readers? Yes. I mean, it doesn't suck. Or, to damn with truly faint praise, I've read worse. It's another middle of the pack book. Not great, not bad, just sort of there. 

Next up on the list? Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. The Garland County Public Library on-line catalog says they have a copy on the shelves so I may get it read in the next week or so. Assuming, of course, that the library does have it. Here's hoping they do because this is one book I'm actually looking forward to reading. I liked Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union: A Novel. I also know he was the head writer for Star Trek: Picard, but I'm not sure if that's a positive or not. In any case, after ignoring the Pulitzers for two years, I may cross three off the list in one month.