Postcard: The Element of Surmise

Octo is looking at you. What's the thought behind the action?

I had aimed at flow and at relief, but I can't quite say I've matched what I have achieved with what I had intended. The colors are off too, though there's something there I like.

Rough draft for future projects.

Fall 2009: Sculpture mix; glazes? Stormy blue, sea foam, t-brown, clear.

Flipping the Doubloon

I've been thinking of Coyote and Raven and Puck. Captain Puck at the helm of a swift ship with black sails.

I've been navigating the mytho-historical shoals of Sir Francis Drake, Sir Henry Morgan, and Captain Jack Sparrow, all on behalf of one of those novels I don't expect to write. Such plodding and plotting lead naturally, for me, to Beowulf, Brecca, and Unferth; to Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser; and to Corum, Elric, and the Eternal Champion. The Green Knight, Gawain, and Arthur the Bear join the crew of my mind's flagship; Shelley, Keats, and Byron, stepping lively, limping lively, as well.

Never far from thought: Theseus and the bull-leapers. Archilochos, Euripides, and Sappho crowd onto the deck. Would there be room for Medea, Ariadne, and Dido? How not?

And what about the Colossus of Rhodes? Are his feet of clay?

I could never really be a trickster or a pirate, but what's the enduring, recurring appeal then? Appeal? Fascination and yearning, more like, belike. Still, it's not that simple, never that simple.

Frankly, I'm more Law than Chaos (Thank you, Michael Moorcock), and I recoil from James Joyce's stubborn "non serviam" (being a steady student of Virgil and my father's son), and yet, and yet, and yet, and yet, and yet, and yet . . . .

What are those famous lines of St. Augustine?

Why do I see him at the helm of a swift ship with black sails?

Is that Robin Hood beside him or just Errol Flynn?

Postcard: Up The Creek

The Drowned Man; sculpture mix, cobalt carbonate oxide & satin white glaze.

Strawberry Creek, UC Berkeley.

Passages: 92 in the Shade

Panama is the Thomas McGuane novel that speaks most acutely these days (to my chagrin, perhaps), but The Sporting Club, Nobody's Angel, and 92 in the Shade have all had their hold at some point in this life of mine. Here's a passage from that latter novel that still seems to matter.

"What about biology? Your old teachers told me you were gifted."

"They said that? Huh. Well, yes, I was good at it. But it needn't have taken me that many years of school to see I just liked salt water, you know, at some really simple phenomenological level. I like fishing better than ichthyology because it's all pointless and intuitive. I mean, there is no value equivalent in biology for the particular combination of noise and sight of blackfin tuna working bait in the Gulf Stream."

Passages: Tattoo You

He finally wound up down by the tattoo parlor on the Coast Highway and a brilliant idea came to him. He suddenly realized why certain people had tattooes all over them. It was because they were fuckups and they knew they were fuckups. He could suddenly see how guys in jails could get into sitting around carving on themselves. They knew they were assholes and they defaced themselves for it. It made perfect sense. He might have gotten into that himself, a little ink, a penknife, but then he figured he probably wouldn't have the guts to go through with it and it would be disastrous to try and fail. No, he would get one from the shop. He would climb into that chair and it would be all over except for the buzzing of the needle. He'd seen how it worked. You just picked the one you wanted and gave the man your money. He checked his pockets to see how much he had. It would be nice to get a large one, preferably a very stupid one to boot, the larger and stupider, the better. A member of the fuckup club for life and there would be no hiding it.

--from Kem Nunn's Tapping the Source, a favorite surfer mystery and coming-of-age story that I have been rereading about once every year or two since it was published in 1984. By the way, Nunn's character Ike Tucker is awfully drunk when the passage starts, and he has been bitterly disappointed in love and friendship, mostly through his own immature actions.

Note, however, how Nunn's passage catches part of the history of tattooing and tattoos that many younger people today just don't know about: the stigma that has accompanied inkwork from the earliest days of Polynesian discovery to bad biker or rocker stereotypes of yesteryear, even to today (and into tomorrow). On a literary note, eventually I'll script an entry regarding Herman Melville's use of tattooing in his novels, drawing upon Prof. Mitch Breitwieser's lectures back in '82 or '83 about Typee (in which marking skin is a sign of the exotic Other, of deformation to a New Englander) and Moby Dick (in which marking skin is a sign of the exotic Other, but also of Mystery, resonant symbolism, and even of Yankee practicality), supplemented by my own favorite passages involving Queequeg, Ishmael, and epic ink. I wonder what Joseph Conrad has done with tattooing in his tales of the South Seas.

Nunn's tale of Ike Tucker and the mystery of his sister's disappearance, his first novel incidentally, and his other novels are well worth reading and rereading. The Dogs of Winter may be my favorite, but then I reread Ike's story, and I'm drawn right back in. I even taught Tapping the Source in a Reading & Comp class ten years ago. (I had to warn the class on day one about two graphic scenes, both "integral to the story," as directors usually say when attempting to persuade actresses to display skin for the cameras. These scenes really are integral, I swear.)

I don't hold with Ike's attitude about tattoos and the "fuckup club," for I have three tattoos, each a significant personal symbol, though I understand the psychology and history. Tattooed on my left arm is my favorite word--garsecg--from the Old English Beowulf, a kenning or poetic riddle-word for the sea: "the spear-man." I am marked; it's integral to my story, just as it is to Ike's.

(As a side note, in Emilio Estevez's directing debut Wisdom, his hapless main character is reading Tapping the Source just before he falls asleep and has the horrible dream which makes up the entire movie. I've been waiting a long time to share that trivial piece of film history.)

Passages: Post-Homeric Echo

Broker's concentration failed, and he actually laughed because he was remembering the first line in his favorite book when he was a child: "Odysseus was never at a loss." He'd tried to live his personal Odyssey that way. Now here he was chained and helpless, and the subject was all about loss.

--from Chuck Logan's Vapor Trail, the fourth of the Broker novels.

Passages: True or False?

1. "All we want is to get to the point where the past can explain nothing about us and we can get on with life." Richard Ford, The Sportswriter

2. "To judge prematurely is often to cripple. To refrain from judging is sometimes to impoverish." M.R. Richards, Centering: In Pottery, Poetry and the Person

3. "If we marvel at the artist who has written a great book, we must marvel more at those people whose lives are works of art and who don't even know it, who wouldn't even believe it if they were told. However hard work good writing may be, it is easier than good living." Katherine Paterson, quoted in Terri Windling's The Wood Wife

True or false?

I hold my past dear, though I understand the psychological burden quite well.

I wonder if shifting "history" for "past" wouldn't be possibly medicable and not mere shuffling.

(In a particular context, Lord Byron used "immedicable" to describe the "world", and I've always found that a short step to despair, as he meant it.)

I'm not sure my life would make much sense
without the past and its explanations, without that vortex
to keep me moving forward,
even if such movement includes a broad reach or a brutal jibe.

I offer the first quotation in part to prompt thoughts
about how much any part of the past
matters to you, to your sense of self.

What did O'Neill say? "The past is the present, isn't it?
 It's the future too."

True or false?

Postcard: Time-Travel

The Goof Squad, sun-struck, 1968.

Tomorrow, I am going to get the same haircut I'm sporting in the picture. Of course, what was blond then is brown and gray and white now. I still have the same smile though, at least when the sun is in my face.

Postcard: Hey Dad

Wish you were here.

Literary Junkie and Yet . . . Into the Blue

I'm a rather bookish fellow. I'll admit that to anyone. You can see it or read it--I'm fairly certain--in my face and demeanor, even in my photo below despite the surf-shirt and kayak paddle.

I know and have known a few people who have read more widely or more deeply than I, but I'm fairly sure I've taken more literature courses at the graduate and undergraduate levels than anyone I know. I've read far beyond mere courses (and I recommend the same) in an attempt to be fully versed in the literary traditions of the British Isles, the United States, medieval Europe, and ancient Greece and Rome. (Not finishing the dissertation was partially due to my reading too much, reading too hard for thought, as R. L. Stevenson warns in his "Apology for Idlers.") I'm quite attached to the poetry of Lord Byron, Seamus Heaney, and Pablo Neruda. I have probably a dozen books in my truck just in case I'm stuck somewhere sometime; there's a dozen to meet a range of moods, the verbal equivalent of a soundtrack, that I can choose from, as needed. Cannery Row, Beowulf, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, Daniel Martin, Treasure Island, Don Juan, Braided Creek, The Heat Islands, and The Odyssey, among others.

I confess. I'm a lifelong bookworm, glasses and all, and yet at the end of a rough day or week, like this one, what do I turn to?

Now, I am a water-word-addict, as anyone who pays attention to this blog already knows. So, the jump from reading surfer mysteries to watching Jaws or The Deep or Into the Blue isn't so great. (And, if you check that shelf in the photo, I recommend Kem Nunn's Tapping the Source.) After a hard day, why not relax with some eye-candy, and I'm not necessarily talking about the girl in the blue bikini; I'm talking about eye-of-the-mind-candy: about the Bahamas, about blue skies and blue blue water, about swimming with sharks in search of lost pirate ships, about the vital dreams of youth and age.


I like to pour that glass of rum, grab that copy of Melville or the current Surfer or The Surfer's Journal, and pop in that DVD of Into the Blue. Watch a little, read a little: that's the plan. I can never recall the director's name, but I like watching the video with his commentary for two reasons. 1. I already know the main tale pretty well. 2. I love the intricacies of story-telling, whether in prose, in poetry, or in motion pictures. John Stockwell, the director (now I remember), walks us through the film, commenting on the non-professional acting of the dog to issues of lighting, local highlights, and the real dangers of using actual sharks as part of the cast. (I recommend the director's commentary to Dark Blue too, by the way, though a different director.) Multiple angles; nuts and bolts. Also, watching the visuals without the usual dialogue and soundtrack is a way of noticing what the visuals are, how they work and combine, and how the director and editor really earn their pay, really share their vision.

Now, watching the director's commentary-version of Into the Blue doesn't mean I've given up on literary quality, not at all. But after a hard day or week, I want the water, the diving, the treasure hunting, and the beautiful seascapes. I want to relax and imagine myself in warm, blue water. I want those visuals and, sometimes, the story-telling perspective of that director's cut. Maybe watching that film once again will inspire me to get out the kayak or to make the drive and dive to and in Monterey Bay. Or, maybe just the relaxing and the imagining will be enough to get me working on homework, the way I should, this weekend. It's all good.

Don't judge me, but pass the rum.

Next week, I'll be neck-deep in Jane Austen and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I promise.