Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Totemic





The good-luck duck-fish, with single-fin board: recycled sculpture mix, denim and blue/green glazes; abalone shell; twine; redwood bark; a broken bit from the first sea urchin shell I ever salvaged as a diver (1978). That shell stayed whole for about 25 years, and then I dropped a clay mermaid on it, breaking both. I kept the bits.

Sometimes, it takes courage to be silly.
Other times, it's real easy.

You may be surprised by how much all that enriches my life, though.

Take a dare?

Attempt something silly yourself.

Sunday, August 28, 2011

Seamus Heaney's "Reed Music"


GIFTS OF RAIN

I
Cloudburst and steady downpour now
for days.
Still mammal,
straw-footed on the mud,
he begins to sense weather
by his skin.

A nimble snout of flood
licks over stepping stones
and goes uprooting.
He fords
his life by soundings.
Soundings.


II.
A man wading lost fields
breaks the pane of flood:

a flower of mud-
water blooms up to his reflection

like a cut swaying
its red spoors through a basin.

His hands grub
where the spade has uncastled

sunken drills, an atlantis
he depends on. So

he is hooped to where he planted
and sky and ground

are running naturally among his arms
that grope the cropping land.


III.
When rains were gathering
there would be an all-night
roaring off the ford.
Their world-schooled ear

could monitor the usual
confabulations, the race
slabbering past the gable,
the Moyola harping on

its gravel beds:
all spouts by daylight
brimmed with their own airs
and overflowed each barrel

in long tresses.
I cock my ear
at an absence--
in the shared calling of blood

arrives my need
for antediluvian lore.
Soft voices of the dead
are whispering by the shore

that I would question
(and for my children's sake)
about crops rotted, river mud
glazing the baked clay floor.


IV.
The tawny guttural water
spells itself: Moyola
is its own score and consort,

bedding the locale
in the utterance,
reed music, an old chanter

breathing its mists
through vowels and history.
A swollen river,

a mating call of sound
rises to pleasure me, Dives,
hoarder of common ground.

--Seamus Heaney
from his volume Wintering Out (1972)


Note: I came upon this poem and its music of water, geography, and sensibility by chance last night. I was "reading around," picking up this volume and that, this poetry, that novel, the other bit of non-fiction, and so forth. I was thinking of the storm hitting the East Coast and the friends who live there, even as I was listening to Dougie Maclean's fine voice and compositions (The Essential Dougie Maclean, in this case).

This poem held me, so I typed up part of it. Let the poem linger in my mind overnight. Now, as I sit here, having typed up the whole of it, I'm reminded how often in the past, especially as an undergraduate and then graduate student, I would write out whole poems, type out whole poems, to get the writer's flow into my head. I used to do this with my own essays if I were working from draft to draft, writing out the polished opening paragraphs from that very first word to put me into the voice of the essay, to put me into the flow of thoughts and feelings and verbiage, the foliage of language, for continuity's sake.

I recommend this practice: write it out. Write out--however that makes sense to you--a poem (or short story!) from start to finish. Don't analyze as you write it out. Enter the flow of words as you would a river. Later, you'll be a better navigator of that river. With "Gifts of Rain," for example, only the "writing out" of this poem led me to notice the deliberate variations in versification, the shift in stanza-patterns from portion to portion. There's purposeful composition there, and listening for the music came in part because I allowed myself, made myself, pay attention stanza by stanza, line by line, word by word.

Maybe I should have noticed those things just from reading. Maybe. But I'd rather emphasize how the act of writing out this whole poem led to more and better than to play the blame game. Find a poem that tugs on you just a bit--not a favorite poem, no--and see what happens when you ride that river.

Saturday, August 27, 2011

Reindeer: Still Game

This reindeer has lost his antlers, but not one jot of jauntiness.

It was accidental, but I really like the fairly limited color scheme with the jumble of differing textures, angles, arcs, and lines.

Friday, August 26, 2011

Passages: Daniel Martin's Hyperactive Imagination

John Fowles' Daniel Martin is one of my absolute favorite novels. Here's one moment I like, a moment I recognize in myself, and such recognitions are surely one reason we read literature. I could quote Aristotle here, but I'd rather quote Fowles. Perhaps some of you recognize yourselves in this moment.


The meeting began to loom large. It was not that I couldn't imagine what might happen, be said and felt. As at so many potentially fraught junctures in my life I could invent too many variations, almost as if I lived the event to its full before its limited reality took place. All writing, private and mental, or public and literal, is an attempt to escape from the conditioned past and future. But the hyperactive imagination is as damaging a preparation for reality as it is useful in writing. I knew I wouldn't say the things I was already rehearsing; and couldn't stop rehearsing.

The Man In The Moon

An ornament I made some years back: two views.



As a boy, I was sure of two things: the moon was made of cheese, and I could see the Man in the Moon easily. Other people didn't seem to see the same figure that I did, and their persistent blindness or obstinate refusal to look again, more closely, frustrated me.

Later, I let all that go. The first moon walk was magic, but not the kind that meant the most to me.

I can still see that Man, you know.

Tuesday, August 23, 2011

Mollusk Shots

Nothing fancy. Just wish I were diving. (I have a sore throat from talking too much in class, but that's my job. Later, I can encourage the students to do a lot of the talking, but the first weeks are mine to set the tone and show the way.)



Abalone diving a couple of weeks ago. Just a bit outside and then south of Gerstle Cove, Salt Point State Park, CA.

Visibility was fair in general and occasionally fine, as my photos suggest.

Maybe this coming weekend, I'll go again. Or the next.

Time to crack open Homer's Odyssey once again and prep for class.

Saturday, August 20, 2011

When I Start That Band

"Chuckling Ducks" just might be its name.

Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Playing With Clay: Duck-Fish and Company






The duck-fish.


"Mateo" is out of the kiln, but he's not finished. I need to reglaze . . . or take him up north and place him in a tide pool for Poseidon.


More pieces glazed, but waiting for the kiln.


Monday, August 15, 2011

Reading By The Crate: Fall 2011

Or, what my students will be reading this term:


A closer view, if that helps:

Oh, the titles of the books you can't quite see in the crate: The American Heritage Dictionary (marked with "Duck #3", a crucial tool), Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Tales, and the eighth edition of Silverman, Hughes, & Roberts Wienbroer's Rules of Thumb: A Guide For Writers.

The last is optional; that is, the students may substitute another standard composition handbook, if they already have one. I aim at affordability as well as at appropriateness, interest, and ambitiousness.

P.S. A nod to FL for the idea of exhibiting the term's reading via "the box."

Also, I don't know about you or about your teachers, but I'll be rereading all of those books this semester, even the ones I've taught before. I have an excellent memory for what I've read, but that doesn't mean I can coast on a past reading; notes alone won't do it either. I need to re-experience each book, especially as I prefer to emphasize that reading experience chapter by chapter, paragraph by paragraph, and even sentence by sentence. If I don't reread, I lose the freshness and can't quite recall all the details and the sweep or the strategies that I'd prefer to.

I don't know how to do it any other way.

P.P.S. I've also left the Course Reader for Eng 46B out of the photo. I'd misplaced it for a while. Imagine another slim, but very full book . . . .

Sunday, August 14, 2011

"The Carpet-Bag": Sentence #1

"I stuffed a shirt or two into my old carpet-bag, tucked it under my arm, and started for Cape Horn and the Pacific."

--Melville's Ishmael.

Classic chapter opener; such an easy, sweeping sentence.

Melville does this again and again, but in a big book like Moby Dick, you've got to stop and just look, every so often, sentence by sentence, to feel the poise and power.

Passage: "Trader" and Paying Attention

My own oracular devices: stones and shells.


Actually, I keep the bits of shell and stone in an old spice jar to shake out the rhythms for the songs on the radio in my truck as I drive; yes, I'm that guy. The abalone pendant I wear fairly often; I found the piece of shell under a rock on the bottom of a favorite cove. Both the maraca-jar and the necklace help me to focus.

The passage I keep thinking about from Charles de Lint's fine urban fantasy novel Trader:


"I guess it all depends on how you look at it," Bones says. "Now me, I figure all oracular devices are just a way for us to focus on what we already know but can't quite grab on to. It works the same as a ritual does in a church -- you get enough people focused on something, things happen. The way I see it is, it doesn't much matter what the device is. It's just got to be interesting enough so that your attention doesn't stray. Fellow reading the fortune, fellow having it read --same difference. They've both got to be paying attention.

"What you get's not the future so much as what's inside a person, which," he adds, "is pretty much the real reason they come to you. They're trying to sort through all this conversation that's running through their heads, but they get distracted. Me, what I'm doing with my hands, with the bones, it forces them to pay strict attention to me. The noise in their heads quiets down a little and they can hear themselves for a change. It's my voice, but they're doing the talking."

"So will you read my fortune?" I ask.

Bones looks regretful, but shakes his head.

"Why not? Let me tell you, I could use someone to make a little sense out of what's going through my head."

"You don't believe."

"But you just told me that it's just a matter of paying attention. I can do that."

"It's not the same."

Saturday, August 13, 2011

Kirk Russell's "Dead Game": Read It!


Coffee break after the photo session. What do you expect from merfolk, anyway?

Kirk Russell's Dead Game, the book pictured above, is one of the best crime novels I know. It's about sturgeon poaching in California, but it's a real novel, so it's also about a lot more than that. Great qualities: major characters, minor characters, landscape, plot, and pacing. This is the third of Russell's John Marquez crime novels, and while I love all of them (with a particular appreciation for the first, Shell Games, about abalone poaching), Dead Game shows Russell at his best.

This novel moves, my friends; it has momentum, a quiet momentum that builds continually and surprisingly. The novel carried me along, and yet caught me off guard too. It's thorough and thoughtful, yet in an energetic, constantly pressing way. It has Russian gangsters, sure, but it's not a "Russian gangster thriller." It's better than that. Russell is better than easy generalizations or formulas. So many crime novels bluster, but this one doesn't. I'm not sure how to put the best effects into words, but I've been rereading this novel once or twice a year since it was published in 2005. The great American novelist Richard Ford is on record how he learned much about narrative transitions, about getting from scene to scene, from F. Scott Fitzgerald in his The Great Gatsby; anyone can learn about narrative economy from Kirk Russell.

My copy happens to be autographed by the author. (I am happy that I've been able to tell him personally that I admire and appreciate his work. Others would care more about that John Hancock enhancing the market value of a first edition; I read and wear out worthy books, first edition or not.)

Dead Game opens with the murder of a fish, though you may not realize that's what he's giving us. Eventually, you have to see the crime. The book also opens with the apparent abduction or murder of an informant into the sturgeon poaching and illegal caviar processing . . . so there's plenty of action from the start. Russell's main character John Marquez, the leader of a Fish and Game undercover team, rewards your attention as we watch how he handles both the criminal investigations and his personal relationships with his wife and stepdaughter. Marquez's character enables Russell to explore the themes of integrity, commitment, and friendship.

Kirk Russell understands the evil and the frailty as well as the courage and strength in humanity. He also understands the vitality of life beyond the human sphere, and yet the human responsibility towards such life, those creatures. Aren't those qualities you want in a novelist?

Dead Game: check it out. Check out his other novels as well. Learn more here.

P.S. I'm looking forward to his non-fiction writing too.

"The Two Orchard Thieves"

Again, I always go to sea as a sailor, because they make a point of paying me for my trouble, whereas they never pay passengers a single penny that I ever heard of. On the contrary, passengers themselves must pay. And there is all the difference in the world between paying and being paid. The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us. But being paid, --what will compare with it? The urbane activity with which a man received money is really marvellous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition.

--Melville's Ismael, Moby Dick: Chapter 1 Loomings.

Adam and Eve?

The hair on the figure to the right made that connection for me.

That's my Mateo on the left, waiting for the next round in the kiln.

Cora: Another Mermaid Sighting





Cora: sculpture mix; copper carbonate oxide; thin coat of clear glaze.

Back in Summer or Fall 2009, I sculpted Cora during a live model gestural session (40 minutes?), and I put the coat of oxide on her then. Just a week ago, I decided to add the clear glazing for a more shiny effect suitable for a creature of the sea.

Working with an actual model is ideal, though it's been a long time since I've practiced my skills that way. I like the urgency inherent in a quick gestural session with the model with her (or his) real curves and lines, with her (or his) comfort and discomfort on the line. Works on me, anyway, and I work hard to catch the pose as quickly as possible.

Maybe in a new class this coming semester.

Thursday, August 11, 2011

A Mellow Mollusk


This particular lovely scene may be found just off the Sonoma County coast. Swim or paddle out from the Gerstle Cove landing in Salt Point State Park, head out beyond the cove itself, turn left and move south about a hundred yards at the far side of the current first really thick stand of kelp, and then dive on down. Look around. Repeat.

If my directions prove unhelpful, I'm sure you'll find plenty to please yourself with here, whether hunting or just taking photos.

Enjoy.

P.S. The abalone above is a very relaxed mollusk with the mantle so fully exposed, feeling with those frills for food. I think this one was a thick clicker, meaning barely legal at 7" diameter, but I was hunting with camera in hand, not my ab-iron.

Why I Dive

The Salt Point August 2011 version, anyway. I was using my other amphibious camera, the Olympus that I found in 25 feet or so of Hawaiian water . . . .







Wednesday, August 10, 2011

Steamer Lane

August 8: mellow, flattish day.

That otter I featured the last two days had been hanging out in the foreground, unconcerned with any of the actions of the few surfers or of the faint swell. I don't think he's visible in this shot, however.

The Usual Suspects: Gerstle Cove

Here are some photos from a recent free dive in Gerstle Cove, the protected cove at Salt Point State Park in Sonoma County. These shots are simple and meant merely to document what you can see down there. I took these pictures with a Canon PowerShot D10 amphibious camera.














P.S. Here's a shot of my dive partner napping on the rocks with his weight belt still cinched around his waist. While he sacked out for an hour, I swam around the cove taking these shots. Earlier in the day, we'd kayaked out of the cove and to the south a bit looking for abalone. (I planned to take photos; my partner, to harvest shellfish for dinner.)

The surge was particularly energetic while we were there, tossing us up and down in the way that I rather like, though others find it somewhat disturbing to their peace of mind or their innards. (I look forward, in such conditions, to the residual rocking to sleep at night as my body remembers the sea's motions.) Here, that energetic surge called for definite efforts paddling and free diving. After we returned to shore, the swell--and my dive partner--both took naps.
(My apologies for water on the lens here. GM is fine, just napping, but we'll see if he really checks my blog or not . . . .)