Results tagged “theworsthardtime”

THIS MONTH we've been talking about Seattle author Timothy Egan's The Worst Hard Time. We went over the big plow-up of the prairie, the hard-scrabble living, and Egan's decision to tell the story novelistically, rather than textbookily.

To recap our past few weeks spent with Timothy Egan's The Worst Hard Time: the initial disaster set-up was working for us (collect all the characters, watch as they fail to heed dire warnings, shake heads as rain stops coming and wheat stops growing), but Seattlest Michael questioned whether people could really relate to the days of mud-houses and not eating and all that.

Off to the right there is our dad's family. It's 1934, Kansas. They've been beaten by the dust storms. They're all packed up and headed to Arkansas, where they'll last two weeks. They'll stop on the White River, contract malaria from mosquitoes, and trek back to Kansas. They'll only survive because our grandfather will get $1 a day from the government for grading the dust dunes left after storms into elevated roads.

Somehow, we don't expect many people to be reading Seattlest this afternoon (and honestly, if you are right now, please stop and run outside while you can). We'll use the gorgeous weather as a touchpoint for our brief initial comments on Timothy Egan's The Worst Hard Time: Thank god we don't live in the Midwest. That aside, so far we're enthralled with Egan's ability to craft historical figures into living, breathing characters with better depth than we find in a great deal of fiction. He's working a small bit of Lost magic on us, introducing a range of characters all drawn into small-town Dalhart--a once unpopulated stretch of the Texas-Oklahoma panhandle that experienced a sudden boom thanks to deceit and false promises from greedy land developers and a federal government desperate to settle what had been known forever as "No Man's Land."

Seattlest has been through our fair share of earthquakes, and while Jonathan Raban's book Surveillance gave us a quivering reminder of the Nisqually quake, we understood the optimism inherent in his ending. Seattle is still there; shaken, likely forever changed, but still there. We know quakes can be insanely devastating, but they don't scare us nearly as much as what we discovered in grad school in central Illinois: tornadoes and wind storms. The first time we set foot in the plains outside Champaign-Urbana, we were gripped with a paralyzing terror that we would simply float up off the planet, untethered by mountains, water...hell, even a small hill would have helped. Our brain would conjure far-off mountain ranges from cloud formations, and we would engage in the explicit delusion that they were indeed there, comforting us with their solidity, mass, and means of escaping the never ending flatness. We lasted a mere three and a half years there, and ran screaming back to the West Coast.

We're going to spoil the end of Jonathan Raban's Surveillance. If you haven't read it yet and don't want to know, stop reading now.

Here at Seattlest HQ, also known as "Library Dorks R Us," we've laid bare our woes of overburdened library hold queues (and overdue quotas) in the past. When 5 books, many over 300 pages, come due at the same time, what is an SPL whore to do? Well, it looks like we're in for another beating; here's what is in our queue, in order of likelihood to arrive:

The Seattle Public Library hosted 'A Salute to Tim Egan' last night at the inconvenient hour of 5:30 PM.

>>>Hugo House, 7:30pm. Screenwriters Salon: Geoff Miller and Mark Handley invite you to bring your questions about format, technique, structure, dialogue, writing characters, and how to use your catering gig to hand your script to celebs. $5 general/$2 students. Free to members.