Ken's Kindle Arrives

This afternoon we went, as usual, to Jerry Story's C-1 workshop, and as usual had a lot of fun dancing with our friends. When we got home, Ken's Kindle had been delivered by UPS. He had a couple of hours to get started with it before we went out again.

This evening we decided to try attending Joe's C-1 dance. We had been told early on that it is a high level dance and that the C-2 and C-3 dancers attend, so we were a bit uncertain how things would go. I had talked to Joe on Tuesday, and he had encouraged us to try.

We hitched a ride with Hardy and Judy, so at least for the first time we'd be with someone who knew the way. There were eight squares at one point, but then someone had to leave, so we had seven squares and three couples out. We were lucky to get in squares with experienced dancers who graciously helped us out. Our squares danced well, so we're feeling reasonably confident about going back.

After the dance we stopped at the DQ, along with John and Sandy and Tom and Marsha. This time we decided to get small vanilla cones, but next time we'll go back to the fudge bars. We hadn't realized that the DQ does not have chocolate soft serve. When you order chocolate cones, they just dip the vanilla in chocolate coating.

I finished reading Matterhorn tonight. It's the kind of book that sticks with you. The subject is the Vietnam War, but it's really about life and death, love and loss, and creating meaning in the face of an indifferent universe.
Here's a review of Matterhorn from Amazon:

Mark Bowden is the bestselling author of Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War, as well as The Best Game Ever, Bringing the Heat, Killing Pablo, and Guests of the Ayatollah. He reported at The Philadelphia Inquirer for twenty years and now writes for Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, and other magazines. He lives in Oxford, Pennsylvania.

Matterhorn is a great novel. There have been some very good novels about the Vietnam War, but this is the first great one, and I doubt it will ever be surpassed. Karl Marlantes overlooks no part of the experience, large or small, from a terrified soldier pondering the nature of good and evil, to the feel and smell of wet earth against scorched skin as a man tries to press himself into the ground to escape withering fire. Here is story-telling so authentic, so moving and so intense, so relentlessly dramatic, that there were times I wasn’t sure I could stand to turn the page. As with the best fiction, I was sad to reach the end.
The wrenching combat in Matterhorn is ultimately pointless; the marines know they are fighting a losing battle in the long run. Bravo Company carves out a fortress on the top of the hill so named, one of countless low, jungle-coated mountains near the border of Laos, only to be ordered to abandon it when they are done. After the enemy claims the hill’s deep bunkers and carefully constructed fields of fire, the company is ordered to take it back, to assault their own fortifications. They do so with devastating consequences, only to be ordered in the end to abandon Matterhorn once again.
Against this backdrop of murderous futility, Marlantes’ memorable collection of marines is pushed to its limits and beyond. As the deaths and casualties mount, the men display bravery and cowardice, ferocity and timidity, conviction and doubt, hatred and love, intelligence and stupidity. Often these opposites are contained in the same person, especially in the book’s compelling main character, Second Lt. Waino Mellas. As Mellas and his men struggle to overcome impossible barriers of landscape, they struggle to overcome similarly impossible barriers between each other, barriers of race and class and rank. Survival forces them to cling to each other and trust each other and ultimately love each other. There has never been a more realistic portrait or eloquent tribute to the nobility of men under fire, and never a more damning portrait of a war that ground them cruelly underfoot for no good reason.
Marlantes brilliantly captures the way combat morphs into clean abstraction as fateful decisions move up the chain of command, further and further away from the actual killing and dying. But he is too good a novelist to paint easy villains. His commanders make brave decisions and stupid ones. High and low there is the same mix of cowardice and bravery, ambition and selflessness, ineptitude and competence.
There are passages in this book that are as good as anything I have ever read. This one comes late in the story, when the main character, Mellas, has endured much, has killed and also confronted the immediate likelihood of his own death, and has digested the absurdity of his mission: "He asked for nothing now, nor did he wonder if he had been good or bad. Such concepts were all part of the joke he’d just discovered. He cursed God directly for the savage joke that had been played on him. And in that cursing Mellas for the first time really talked with his God. Then he cried, tears and snot mixing together as they streamed down his face, but his cries were the rage and hurt of a newborn child, at last, however roughly, being taken from the womb."
Vladimir Nabokov once said that the greatest books are those you read not just with your heart or your mind, but with your spine. This is one for the spine. --Mark Bowden

Mark stopped by to tell us that he hadn't forgotten us. He'll probably be over tomorrow or the next day to get started on the broken step.