Travis McGee Deserves A Statue

Salvage expert.
Formative influence:
Thank you, John D. McDonald.

Tools of the Trade

Shelf-love.

Pillars of Atlantis

The names and geography of the adventure tales of my childhood are never that far away from me.

Dumas' The Three Musketeers (novel and films)

My favorite version--after reading Alexandre Dumas' classic novel The Three Musketeers--to watch: Richard Lester's version (scripted by the author of the Flashman novels!)--

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-LfUtHnEBY

But then you'll also need to watch Richard Lester's sequel (though part of the original French novel):
The Four Musketeers--

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMhwGUGNuxI

M & J's Foggy Rockfishing Jaunt

Throckmorton's "The Lost Ships"

Boyhood reading revisited.

Recommended for the Literary Reader

Recommended Reading: Nicola Griffith's "Hild"

A new and quite fine historical novel about 7th-century England and a very remarkable character.

Julia Whitty, Diving, and Manysidedness: Highly Recommended

The current reading in my English 1As.

Check out Julia Whitty's blog at http://deepbluehome.blogspot.com/

Pony Up!

Sculpture mix.  Ready for the kiln.

Portrait of the Artist as an Old Dogfish

Felt good though.

Self-Portrait #52:
Kealakekua Bay, Big Island, Hawaii.
8/4/13.

Clayfish: Out And About

Clayfish (Olympic Hopeful): Sculpture mix; denim, stormy blue, and matte white glazing.

"An Empty Boat . . ."

An empty boat
will volunteer for anything.

--Jim Harrison and Ted Kooser,
from their collection Braided Creek.

Of course, one can appreciate the literal quality, the image of an actual boat just waiting, that call to adventure, or one can move metaphorically, the sense of the self as an empty vessel just available, that potential call to misadventure.  Or both.

(I love that small book: Braided Creek.)

Come On!

Marching Orders

William Shakespeare's Macbeth;
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein;
Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest;
Guy de Maupassant's The Necklace and Other Short Stories;
Mark Strand and Eavan Boland's The Making of a Poem;
E. Annie Proulx's The Shipping News;
assorted stories and poems via handouts;
and some appropriate film clips.

English 1B: Spring 2013

John Buchan: "A Barndoor Fowl"?

Here are two paragraphs from the very end of the first chapter --"Lost Gods"-- of John Buchan's The Island of Sheep, published in 1936, that I'm finding resonant.  Richard Hannay, of The Thirty-Nine Steps, is our narrator, and he's reached his fifties . . . .


I continued my journey -- I was going down t the Solent to see about laying up my boat, for I had lately taken to a mild sort of yachting -- in an odd frame of mind.  I experienced what was rare with me -- a considerable dissatisfaction with life.  Lombard had been absorbed into the great, solid, complacent middle class which he had once despised, and was apparently happy with it.  The man whom I had thought of as a young eagle was content to be a barndoor fowl.  Well, if he was satisfied, it was no business of mine, but I had a dreary sense of the fragility of hopes and dreams.

It was about myself that I felt most dismally.  Lombard's youth had gone, but so had my own.  Lombard was settled like Moab on his lees, but so was I.  We all make pictures of ourselves that we try to live up to, and mine had always been of somebody hard and taut who could preserve to the last day of life a decent vigour of spirit.  Well, I had kept my body in fair training by exercise, but I realized that my soul was in danger of fatty degeneration.  I was too comfortable.  I had all the blessings a man can have, but I wasn't earning them.  I tried to tell myself that I deserved a little peace and quiet, but I got no good from that reflection, for it meant that I had accepted old age.  What were my hobbies and my easy days but the consolations of senility?  I looked at my face in the mirror in the carriage back, and it disgusted me, for it reminded me of my recent companions who had pattered about golf.  Then I became angry with myself.  'You are a fool,' I said.  'You are becoming soft and elderly, which is the law of life, and you haven't the grit to grow old cheerfully.'  That put a stopper on my complaints, but it left me dejected and only half convinced.

--John Buchan, The Island of Sheep

Graves: "A Pinch of Salt"

A Pinch of Salt

When a dream is born in you

With a sudden clamorous pain,

When you know the dream is true

And lovely, with no flaw nor stain,

O then, be careful, or with sudden clutch

You'll hurt the delicate thing you prize so much.

Dreams are like a bird that mocks,

Flirting the feathers of his tail.

When you seize at the salt-box,

Over the hedge you'll see him sail.

Old birds are neither caught with salt nor chaff:

They watch you from the apple bough and laugh.

Poet, never chase the dream.

Laugh yourself, and turn away.

Mask your hunger; let it seem

Small matter if he come or stay;

But when he nestles in your hand at last,

Close up your fingers tight and hold him fast. 

--Robert Graves

Hermes/Puck: sculpture mix; raku fired.  

"My Aim Is True": Novel Navigation?

Or, By Bluff and Blunder?
Or, Compassion As Compass?
Or, Pin The Tale On The Donkey?

I'll stop with the subtitles, the alternative guides, and move to my central concern.  Here are three quotations that I've probably offered before, but the last few days I've found them resonating alongside a certain ambition to craft a full-length narrative of mystery and adventure.

1.  "But I had learned long ago that resolution by itself is not enough; we are what we do, not what we think and feel."
--James Lee Burke, "Heaven's Prisoners"

Here I am quoting from memory, but this is a quotation that sticks with me, that offers a rather pitiless ideal, which draws me in even as I want to bring or find more compassion than those words offer. "Resolution" in the first part of the sentence definitely means "completion" or "finishing," not merely "deciding upon" or "resolving to do." I think this quotation will help me to set up the conflicts in the "novel" I'm attempting to outline/frame.

2.  Let's listen to my second-favorite ancient Greek poet:


I over-reached
And another
Bears the bother.

--Archilochos
trans. Davenport

I take that short poetic fragment with ruefulness, with regret in the tone, not triumph, though I can see the psychology that would exult in that way. I can see such, but save me and all of us from such, I say.


3.  And the last of the triad, for now:

“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
--Maya Angelou

Fourth?  Frankly, on reflection, I can see how all three of the quotations above spiral around each other, twining thematically into one threefold strand, and so further sayings may be called for.  Somehow, the supposed opening line of my absolute favorite ancient Greek poet's lost comic-epic also horns in . . . .

"He knew many things, and all of them badly."
Homer, from his lost Margites . . . .


I'm quoting from memory again here, but I think you can see I don't plan to tell a tale overburdened by seriousness.  And a fallible, flawed, but well-meaning character?  Who wouldn't like a bit of that?  I mean, aren't we constructed in that way ourselves, however we may aspire and resolve to do better?

And, that fourth selection just may be another way to say "Pin the tale on the donkey."

Hardcore Waterman; Irreverent, Generous, Genuine Soul

MICKEY MUNOZ

My favorite book right now: Mickey Munoz is amazing.
He's a wonderful model for living life to the fullest and keeping your sense of humor.
The title really says it: "No Bad Waves."

I'll have more to say and samples to share once I finish the work of the semester.

Mickey Munoz,  
No Bad Waves: Talking Story with Mickey Munoz, 
Patagonia Books: Ventura, CA,
2011

"Giving What I Have" : Peter Green, Translating the Argonautika, and the Enjoyment of Reading

Classicist Peter Green is an inspiring scholar, translator, and novelist.  I've quoted from his excellent The Laughter of Aphrodite: A Novel About Sappho of Lesbos here, and now I'm returning to his translation of Apollonius of Rhodes' epic poem of Jason and the Argonauts.  I picked up this book eleven years ago for my 40th birthday, and as my 51st approaches, it feels right to revisit a favorite tale of adventure and desire.  

I'd like to quote Green on translating this epic poem as a "labor of love" and on formative experiences regarding scholarship and, more importantly, reading for enjoyment.  I'm in Green's camp, quite obviously, and I have a deep attachment to tales of the heroic Greeks as well.  

In his "Preface and Acknowledgements," Peter Green writes:

Working on the Argonautika has been for me very much a labor of love.  At the age of seven I first encountered, and was fascinated by, the quest for the Golden Fleece in that brilliant volume by Andrew Lang, Tales of Troy and Greece, never yet surpassed as a retelling of ancient myth for young people.*  Years later, reading Boswell's Life of Johnson, I came across this passage:

"And yet, (said I) people go through the world very well, and carry on the business of life to good advantage, without learning."  Johnson: "Why, Sir, that may be true in cases where learning cannot possibly be of any use; for instance, this boy rows us as well without learning, as if he could sing the song of Orpheus to the Argonauts, who were the first sailors."  He then called to the boy, "What would you give, my lad, to know about the Argonauts?"  "Sir, (said the boy) I would give what I have."

The boy's words, then and even today, struck an emotional chord that hit me directly and physically, just as a certain high-frequency note drawn from a violin will shatter a wineglass.   In one sense I have been giving what I have in pursuit of those bright, elusive, infinitely rewarding Sirens ever since.  The anecdote seems to me the best justification ever put forward for a truly humane education.

This is, I know, quite hopelessly old-fashioned and romantic.  Robert Graves somewhere recalls his dismay at the reply he got from an earnest student of English literature when he asked her what she enjoyed about Shakespeare's (I think) work.  "I don't read to enjoy," she said, in withering reproof, "I read to evaluate."  The absence of genuine pleasure is what makes too much literary criticism today an aridly sterile desert.  Despite this I still retain my deep instinctive responses to great art and literature, though a quarter of a century's exposure to American academic critical trends has come as near to killing such reactions in me as anything could do.  In that sense the present work may count as an act of calculated defiance, as well as an invitation to relish one of the Hellenic world's oldest and most deeply resonant myths, told by a master of his craft, who loved the sea, and ships, and the complexities of human nature, and let that passion irradiate everything he wrote.

--from The Argonautika: The Story of Jason and the Quest for the Golden Fleece by Apollonios Rhodios, Translated, with Introduction and Glossary By Peter Green,

University of California Press: Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, 1997: pages xii-xiii.

I'd almost forgotten Green's footnote to the passage above.  Here it is:


*Lang, together with The Heroes of Asgard and several other highly formative texts, was put into my hands during the three years, form six to eight, that I spent at an English P.N.E.U. (Parents' National Educational Union) school, before being transferred to the less congenial rigors of prep and boarding schools.  Most of the serious permanent passions of my later life (including the study of classics as a profession, and the absorption of world literature and music for the sheer fun of it) had their roots in my P.N.E.U. days.  I did not get any remotely comparable stimulation and excitement until I returned to Cambridge after World War II as an elderly (I thought) I was twenty-three) ex-service undergraduate.