Annotations: Chowdhury & Clark

Chowdhury, Bernie. The Last Dive: A Father and Son's Fatal Descent into the Ocean's Depths. New York: Harper Collins, 2000.

A detailed document of a tragedy, psychological profiling, and clear-eyed descriptions of diving, salvaging, and aquatic adventure . . . and yet I can never keep the specific details of the book in my mind. Perhaps the father/son issues are too close to home for me, though I don't think so. I'm glad I read the book, and yet I guess I need to reread it.

Clark, Eleanor. The Oysters of Locmariaquer. New York: Harper, 2006.

I love this book, and I even learned to love oysters after reading it. While I prefer more localized books for this project, I enjoyed learning the French history and processes of oyster-farming. Clark writes lyrically at times, and her more everyday paragraphs still sing. I love reading practical material, but I really love practical material in a clear, individual style, with a voice that sounds like itself, not like anyone else, and yet that uniqueness is an invitation, not a barrier, to go deeper and further into the subject. Am I gushing too much?

Annotations: Patagonia's Chouinard

Chouinard, Yvon. Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman. New York: Penguin, 2005.

Chouinard is the founder and CEO of Patagonia, the climbing/sports-equipment/clothing company that specializes in good relations between management and employees, between consumers and what's consumed, between humanity and the Earth. Here, Chouinard provides the history of the company from the first climbs and the first ironmongery offered for sale, even as he clarifies the philosophy, radical as it is, that a capable, competitive company and happiness really may go hand in hand in (corporate) America. A blueprint of sorts, a philosophical treatise, certainly: I've used sections of this book with students in the past. Chouinard tells stories well, and he has the stories well worth sharing.

A real adventure narrative, and yet all business, too, in the best sense.

Postcard: Rocky Points at Random

1. At Rodeo Beach today, the surf was churning enough that I kept getting pebbles dropped into my snorkel. The first time, I swallowed one or two rocks, but managed not to choke. (Frankly, I was laughing hard enough to endanger myself.) After that, I kept to proper snorkel etiquette, not relying on the blast-at-the-surface method, but purging while returning to the surface, using physics, expanding air bubbles, and a vertical tube to clear the debris! Rocks in my snorkel! (I'm still amused.)

2.I went to bed with some ambition and a Monterey plan, but I ended up sleeping in and going to Rodeo Beach in Marin to practice beach landings and rough water-work with the kayak. It was near high tide and rough enough that I swam instead. I put on mask and fins and swam for about 40 minutes, and then decided to try with the kayak. While I was getting ready, the swell subsided and I could have launched. Then, the swell picked back up, the kayak launching seemed too unwieldy, and so I swam instead. Repeat again. Surf-cycle.

3. Yesterday: beachcombed Drake's Bay and McClure's Beach in Point Reyes. The offshore wind kept me from kayaking; I didn't want to fight the wind getting back to base or fail and drift off into the Pacific. Lunch in Bolinas. Scrimshaw at the Pub; late swim workout at the pool. Laundry. Full day, all told.

4. Drake's Bay yesterday morning: closeouts with feathery whitecaps. Only one line of surf at a time just up and dumping at about one foot of depth. Pretty, but not rideable. Not even a whitewater rush for a boogie boarder. McClure's Beach was a cauldron; I wanted to play with my kayak out there, but it looked a little scary and the portage from the parking lot was too demanding. Lots of energy in the water, but not much length to the rides. I should have swam, otter-style!

5. Drake's Bay can be weird because the steep bluffs block the wind on most of the beach, but once you move out beyond the shelter of the bluffs, then you are at the whim of the wind. Looking back to this morning, there weren't many whitecaps out beyond the surfzone, so maybe the funnel effect of this break in the bluffs fooled me into thinking it was too fierce a wind for paddling. Maybe. At the other stops, the wind helped me into a jacket . . . and Sofia, my Ocean Kayak Scrambler 11, is built for diving and rough water, not for cutting or cruising. I was tempted, nonetheless.

6. The photo illustration? Actually, that's Monterey Bay, further south, and I'm in the kayak, though today and yesterday off Marin, I never quite ended up in the kayak out on the water. Tomorrow I will pick up the film I shot this past week, so perhaps there will be a more fitting photo.

Green Dreams: Monterey Bay Beckoning

Harpoon Shopping

I love titles. I love the specific flavors, the promises, the mysteries. I must drive my friends and students crazy sometimes going over the titles of the pieces we read or listen to. As a boy, I remember trying to figure out the meaning of Neil Young's "Cowgirl in the Sand," a title I found so attractive, so racy, so compelling and evocative of who-knows-what. I knew I wanted to know her, that cowgirl, and have the same desiring-yet-dismissive attitude that I heard in Neil's voice. (That mood seemed so worldly then.) Eventually, listening to the song over and over, I settled on a rich-girl-in-Malibu-caught-playing-games image, and I still hold to that.

I love titles, sometimes more than I love the book, the album, song, whatever, that each belongs to. When I see a book title that triggers my horde of . . . what? synapses? hobgoblins & sprites? . . . up in that cauldron-of-plenty I call my skull, I don't want to open that book at all. I keep the cover closed and let myself just roam through the field of possibilities. I want to consider the story I might write if I had that title to guide me. Eventually, I'll open the dust jacket, read the blurbs, check out the bio, and read a few pages at the beginning and in the middle to see what I'd be getting into, to see if that writer rises to my expectations for that title. Pretty dodgy? What gall, since I've never written a book, and yet I'm expecting the published authors to match or surpass my bare imaginings. I'm a very appreciative and generous reader, but when we're talking about the imagination, I don't respect too many boundaries . . . at least in the privacy of my own head. (I wouldn't stoop to plagiarism, of course, because such theft is obviously wrong and an admission of creative bankruptcy. I may sin creatively as a procrastinator, a would-be perfectionist, and a shameless ham, but I'm no deadbeat cheat-thief.)

Notice: just thinking about titles and their suggestive powers has me pounding the drum, even if the music turns out cacophonic. Rein in the metaphors? I'd rather let the contact high of a good title spur me to produce even bad prose; I can always revise and refine later. Let the floodgates open. Yes, I am mixing my metaphors. I'm no Pablo Neruda, but the best lesson he teaches is to allow--even to court--exuberance and possibly incoherent or puzzling associations and juxtapositions. (Neruda will also teach you to reflect and revise, reflect and revise, but that's the subject of another blog.) In other words, when the Muse nudges, sing as best you can.

"Harpoon Shopping": I haven't even addressed my title for this blog-entry yet.

A friend of mine, a fellow aficionado of Melville and hands-on literary responses, was trying to get me to visit Back East with a special trip to Nantucket. I had to decline, reluctantly, and in the back & forth of our correspondence he lamented that he'd been planning to take me "harpoon shopping," much in the spirit of Ishmael and Queequeg, of Melville and Hawthorne, his muse at the time. The potential homosocial implications are obvious, but so what? We'd quest through Nantucket and New Bedford seeking some old iron implement of destruction, possible corkscrewed by use and abuse, probably fake and overpriced. Still, we'd be able to hold the proper tool to accompany Ahab's pursuit of the white whale, for wouldn't the story come alive just that much more if we could heft such a harpoon in our own hands? When my friend insisted that he'd take his wife instead on that shopping trip, she declined vehemently, and something in that moment, the triangulation of characters and cross-purposes, demands a story from me. Not the actual events, not non-fiction, but something fictional, something made-up to catch some emotional resonance in a net of words. Her tone (which I did overhear while on the phone) and the phrase itself have sparked some sort of story-idea that I haven't yet written or fully realized.

And that's fine. I love having unwritten stories in my head. And yet . . . right? I have written very little of all that I've a mind to, so I really ought to take that title and fish that appropriate story out of that cauldron-of-plenty in my skull. Instead, I'm writing a blog about a story I'll probably never write. I should be harder on myself? I should just laugh at myself, with compassion? Am I squandering my creative resources? Again, who cares? I'm having fun thinking about and yakking about all of the above. Good enough for now. (But not good enough forever.)

"Harpoon Shopping" also reminds me of a rock song I wrote back in my early 20's during the mid-80's: frustrated desire in 4/4 time, painfully obvious unconscious imagery. I mean, "a harpoon in the cellar / Lying underneath a tarp"? What was I thinking I was thinking? Was I describing a murder-mystery or sewing a full-length Freudian slip? I can't even recall the melody now, though I still sing these lyrics to any tune that seems appropriate at the time. Good, bad, and ugly--here's that old, aging, definitely dated chunk of song:

BETTER AT BREAKFAST

I left the harpoon in the cellar

Lying underneath a tarp

You would never be a suspect

Without this pin-up of your heart

Found in the trunk up in the attic

That you never used to lock

If you always ring the bellboy

There's room enough for talk

Things can be seen as simple as that

A round of applause against the crack of a bat

Was this love gone wrong pawned from the start?

Why would you want to leave me with a broken heart?

Why would you want to leave me with a broken heart?

But the friend of a friend once said

I'll bet she's better at breakfast than bed . . . .

[Repeat Everything.]

I'll confess: I'm not even sure what that last line means, really. I do think it's concretely suggestive with the contrast of "breakfast" and "bed," with the bitterness of tone, and so I think there's a focused and fairly limited set of meanings possible. And that's not the same as not having any meaning at all; I wasn't writing nonsense, but I wasn't writing an essay either. Rather, the meaning is a little loose, a little more suggestive than asserted, and so dependent upon the reader or listener to work out the meaning for herself or himself in the context of the whole song, the whole story. That's how any story, any poem, any piece of art--good or bad--works, right? That's how it all works for me.

The three words surfaced one day in my head--"Better at Breakfast"--and the alliteration and suggestiveness held them there, front and center, until I wrote the song to fit them. There were more lyrics, but they've sunk into the morass of memory. I'd written this song and a collection of others without any formal musical training, I'll confess, but with the absolute need to match lyrics to the distinct tunes in my head; I called the whole thing, an album's worth, "B-Side," which says it all. Too many tales of fickle women; too much self-destruction and anger. I was in my early 20's, so go figure. Here are some of the titles from that imagined, unrealized album: B-Side, Better at Breakfast, I Have a Girl, How Can You Tell, Maximum Security, This Must Be the Place, Not Wanted, The Perfect Crime, Permanent Press, Rome Fell, Shotgun Wedding, and Woke Up Knowing. I never did finish the lyrics or tune to these lines that--perhaps too well--stand in for all those lost songs: "Mexicali Rose / By any other name . . . / You mix the drinks / But they taste the same." I never quit my day-job. Give me some credit for that.

Note: I originally posted a version of "Harpoon Shopping" on a myspace page back in September, 2007.

Annotations: Castro, Charton & Tietjen, & Chase

Castro, Peter, and Michael E. Huber.  Marine Biology.  7th ed.  Boston: McGraw Hill, 2007.

This is the text assigned by Dr. Bibit Traut and Dr. Dean Lauritzen for the Fall 2008 Bio 32: Marine Biology, the class I took during my sabbatical.  These two instructors team-taught the course, and they are lively, worthy lecturers.

I own the first edition of Marine Biology, and I can attest that this 7th edition is a wonderful improvement over a solid original text.  Castro and Huber write clearly, and their textbook offers appropriate illustrations and organization.    As a student somewhat familiar with the subject, but still new to many aspects of this complex field of exploration and discovery, I was very pleased by this text.  

Charlton, Barbara, and John Tietjen.  The Facts on File Dictionary of Marine Science.  New York: Facts on File, 1988.

When I wanted to check specific terms of marine science and I didn't have access to the internet, this is the book that I turned to.  Often, I have needed fuller explanations, but to get the basics quickly, this has been a handy reference.  I was glad I had the book, though I don't know whether I would recommend it.

Chase, Owen.  Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whaleship Essex.  New York: Lyons, 1999.

A classic presentation, especially for anyone interested in whales, whaling, or Melville's Moby Dick.   I picked up this book on all three accounts, but also because the 19th century is yet another fascinating century for study.  (Aren't they all?)  Yes, here we have evidence that a whale really did sink a whaleship.  Chase's account, written in 1821, is readable and gripping, a nice antidote to the poisonous claim that everything written in previous centuries is unnecessarily long-winded and lacking grip.

Touchstone: Neruda, Once Again

I want to quote Neruda, if only because this woman he describes, he evokes, he invokes, is such a riddle to me.  An enticing, arousing, provoking riddle: the best kind.   I want to know her, my version of Neruda's her.  Is that such an inappropriate desire?

I offer the translation from Stephen Tapscott.  The original is readily available: Eris Hija Del Mar Y Prima Del Oregano.

You are the daughter of the sea, oregano's first cousin.

Swimmer, your body is pure as the water;

cook, your blood is quick as the soil.

Everything you do is full of flowers, rich with the earth.

Your eyes go out toward the water, and the waves rise;

your hands go out to the earth, and the seeds swell;

you know the deep essence of water and the earth,

conjoined in you like a formula for clay.

Naiad: cut your body into turquoise pieces,

they will bloom resurrected in the kitchen.

This is how you become everything that lives.

And so, at last, you sleep, in the circle of my arms

that push back the shadows so that you can rest--

vegetables, seaweed, herbs: the foam of your dreams.

Neruda, Pablo.  100 Love Sonnets.  Trans. Stephen Tapscott.  Austin, TX: U of T Press, 2004.