SON OF THE WILDERNESS: THE LIFE OF JOHN MUIR

Let's reflect on the halcyon days of July, when we had a lovely outdoor meeting at Deuce's "home place." The patio reflected the festive season, with star spangled banners and red, white, and blue tablecloths. The food was delicious, the wine was refreshing, and the Novel Spirits gathered to fellowship and discuss the biography of Mr. John Muir.

As the conversation turned from old and new business (see Baron's previous post wittily discussing same), things took a turn to the more confrontational nature that lies just beneath the surface of the jovial Novel Spirits. Cat, who submitted the book that was the topic of discussion, very thoughtfully emailed a crossword puzzle about John Muir's life in advance of the meeting. A brief awkward moment passed as the Spirits confessed one by one that each had not completed the assigned task. Fortunately, the tension was broken as Cat herself confessed that she, too, had not completed the crossword puzzle. (JB gets a gold star because I believe he was the only one to complete the puzzle. Cat also gets a gold star for thinking outside the box for a book discussion tool!)

The next note I have is "hated sheep (hoofed locusts)." It looks like Diesel had been taking note-taking lessons from me. If I recall correctly this comment refers to John Muir's hatred of sheep because of the damage they do to the land.

JB and Cat shared some photos of visiting John Muir's childhood home in Scotland. This led the discussion to how harsh John Muir's father was because he forced his children to work the farm and went through phases of barely feeding them. Luckily, John had his sister, Margaret, who was his best friend and who helped him pursue his interests. JB and Cat also visited John Muir's Wisconsin homestead, and in 2012 they visited his Northern California home.

Speaking of his Northern California home, we discussed how John Muir married rich, but wasn't comfortable managing his father in law's orchard business, even though he was very successful at it. Instead, he brought in his brothers to help with the business. Today a trail, a mountain, and a forest are named after him. Chief also shared with the group that John Muir appears on the California quarter.

From an early age, John Muir did not like being indoors. Some of his earliest encounters with nature were walks with his grandfather in Scotland when he was 2 years old. John's grandfather was much gentler and more tolerant that John's father.

We discussed many of John's early inventions - clocks, thermometers, and the bed that was displayed at the fair. An important turning point in John's life occurred when he feared he might lose his eyesight due to an accident that occurred while he was working at a sawmill. This led to John's most notable contributions, which were arguably his explorations of uncharted wilderness. He was an integral part of Yosemite becoming a National Park, and he was the first person to discover that Yosemite was formed by glaciers. John wrote about many of his discoveries and explorations, but, interestingly, writing did not come naturally to John, and he struggled to perfect his writings.  A rift formed between John and one of his once close friends (whose name I have now forgotten, about the role of National Parks and how best to preserve the land. The other guy was in favor of preserving the land, but using it to benefit the people, by allowing animals to graze or by harvesting the timber, while John believed it should be preserved in its natural state without interference from mankind.

Somehow, over the past two months, I have misplaced the star rating that the spirits gave, but I think we all agreed that it was an interesting book about and interesting man. There was a bit of discussion about some of the criticisms that have been leveled at the biography, namely that the biographer was influenced by John Muir's family to write the biography in a flattering way and that she relied upon oral accounts with no corroboration. In my opinion, the book did seem a bit heavy on hero worship, but was an interesting read nonetheless.

JULY MEETING NOTES

Howdy Spirits,

It seems like I have to apologize for "this late post" every single post so in order to avoid more of the same verbose, repetitive, wordy, excessive, useless, superfluous, tautologous redundancy, I just won't apologize this time. I spoil you. Note: I had to refer to a thesaurus for all those fancy words. The business portion of this meeting was short, therefore this post will be short as well. Just one more gift for you from the generous benefactor Baron.

Old Business:

Club President, and local business judge Deuce came in with her verdict of the shirt printer dude which has been giving us grief. The verdict: GUILTY!! No second chance for him! Reasons she gave for coming to her decision included: poor service (i.e. did not ever fulfill the order and just gave excuses for several weeks) and no offer of a discount after the poor service. He apologized and asked her for her business again. But IMHO, that's not nearly enough. He sent a message that our little club and little shirt order wasn't important enough for him to get to like all the other more important groups with more important money. So an apology must come with a discount and promise not to disrespect us in the future. So in the end he lost our business. Our unworthy money will go to another business, along with all our future plans like bags, trophies, gold watches, iPhone cases, hats, beer labels, wine labels etc. But after all the stress and heartache Deuce endured up to this point, it was best that Archimedes and I were given the task of getting the shirts done (at a different location of course. Of course). There was my movie quote from National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. And I'm 73% sure I've used that one already. Oops. Duece may not have tolerated anymore stress from the shirts. More on the shirts in the August post FYI.

The Pinterest Recipe board is up and running. Everyone please continue to post the recipes that you made for each meeting, with one big exception: spinach cheese dip. There seems to be a pattern forming of failed spinach cheese dip recipes. Although, Indy's wasn't bad IMO. She will say it was too dry but at least it still looked and tasted like a proper cheese dip. That sad creation I made at the August meeting was more like a mixture of a mulched grass omelet and those crispy rice cake things. I'm not even sure if it is supposed to be a cheese dip or more like a quiche. And I have no desire to ever find out. That is something that would be a colossal waste of my not very important time. I would even read a T.C. Boyle book or make a phone call into my bank's call center before I try that recipe again, if that gives you any perspective. But now I'm wondering if one of us should try a new spinach cheese dip each meeting now until we find a winner. It's almost on the verge of joke status. Will we ever find the right one? But anyway, back to the original point, we have our Pinterest recipe board and we can continue to pin our recipes to it.

We also created another Novel Spirits Pinterest board, this one for pictures. It is private board to be shared only with members since it has pictures of our actual identities and faces. "Keep it secret, keep it safe." That was Diesel's quote, I don't want to try to steal credit for her stuff. So maybe she is getting in on the book/movie quotes too. Well done Diesel.  I just had an idea regarding our secret identities etc: wouldn't it be funny if we were a group of super heroes in a comic series? We could be like the Avengers or Justice League or Watchmen except we would be hilarious. We'd have super powers and still save the day and all but we'd just take a very round-about, totally unnecesary, crazy and funny way to get there. I'm sure hilarity would ensue.

Deuce changed her second book submission to The Curious Charms of Arthur Pepper by Phaedra Patrick. As of July, we are down to four books until we all resubmit again. And I have a special surprise bit of news for you all but it will have to wait until the August post. But I'll give you a hint, it is related to the new theme I changed the blog into. Suspense!

New Business:

None. Well dag.

By the way, the club is all out of money now. Take care now, bye bye then

Baron