Gone Fishing

"Because, in order to accomplish the things I must do, I will have to travel a lot in the forthcoming years and face some other adventures. But that can't be helped. I have picked a hellish trade."

--Isaac Babel, in a letter to his sister, December 20, 1926

Bath Toy Lost at Sea Found in Brooklyn?

Artist and serious beachcomber Willis Elkins sends news of a discovery he made on the morning of August 30, along the shoreline of Kingsborough Community College, in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn: A toy frog. And not just any toy frog. There's no doubt about it. That's a Floatee.

Compare for yourself. Here's a package of the toys:

Elkins writes, "I hardly believed it when I saw it, but instantly recognized the angular shapes I had seen in photos." He adds that it's "in fairly good condition, if we were to believe it to be an original from the infamous container spill some 20 years ago. There are no punctures, serious scratches or wear, and color is consistent throughout."

So is the frog an original from the infamous container spill? Or is it just a toy that some kid left behind on a trip to the seashore?  There's no telling. Could easily be the latter, and as Elkin notes, it is in dubiously good condition. We'll have to put more question marks on the map.  A number of correspondents have sent me pictures of stranded toys--for instance, of this duck spotted on Governor's Island (right).

But Elkins's frog is the first documented discovery of a Floatee on a North Atlantic beach I know of. A tantalizing one. I spent many hours beachcombing the New York City waterfront, and I'd given up all hope of ever finding one of the toys, and here one turns up in Brooklyn. 

Mystery of Ocean Currents, BP Spill Edition

A team of oceanographers is releasing 300 drifters in the Gulf of Mexico. The aim:

credit: NOAA

"In the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill it became clear that understanding the various scales of oceanic currents and flows lies at the very heart of being able to improve our understanding and prediction of oil spills," explained Dr. Tamay Ӧzgökmen, University of Miami (UM) Professor and Director of the Consortium for Advanced Research on Transport of Hydrocarbons in the Environment (CARTHE), a project funded by the Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative (GoMRI). "In this case we are like detectives uncovering clues and following the 'trail' to find out exactly where pollutants might go."

Full story here. (Via Craig Pittman.)

Home Remedies for Rabies

Bill Wasik and his veterinarian wife, Monica Murphy, have published a book, Rabid, that I read and blurbed--enthusiastically--and will recommend again here. N+1 has a tasty review. A spoonful:

Wasik and Murphy’s subject might seem like a deliberately strange one, but they exercise nothing but user-friendly restraint when it comes to historical detail and medical explanation. It’s a rare pleasure to read a nonfiction book by authors who research like academics but write like journalists. They have mined centuries’ worth of primary sources and come bearing only the gems. My favorites were the archaic cures, some of which were reasonable (lancing, cauterization), while others were plain perverted. The Sushruta Samhita recommends pouring clarified butter into the infected wound and then drinking it; Pliny the Elder suggests a linen tourniquet soaked with the menstrual fluid of a dog.

Professor Diablo's True Review: The Video

There's now a snazzy video of the performance (music, video, Moby-Duck) that I posted about here last April.

Professor Diablo’s True Revue I: Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea from Center for Documentary Studies on Vimeo.

Good-Bye (For Now) to All That

I've neglected this blog since last April mostly because I learned then that I will be heading to Ann Arbor in September on a Knight-Wallace Journalism fellowship, which will give me eight months to begin work on a second book--a project bearing little resemblance to Moby-Duck, at least so far as subject matter goes. (No more seafaring for me. I've had my seaward peep, and now will be trying to peep both eastward and into the past. More on this later--much later.)

The last few months I've been preoccupied with the logistics of leaving New York. The date of the move swiftly approaches. An Ann Arbor lease has been signed. A truck big as a boat has been reserved. Many boxes have been packed. We've built a ziggurat out of them in the living room. We've been trying to reassure M. & B. about the move by describing the delights awaiting them in their new home. We're in a transition, in other words, and my preoccupations are not the same ones that preoccupied me when I created this blog. They're still fatherly and bookish, but not as watery as they once were.

There are a few items that have collected in my file of things to post about. I'll try to get to them before September 1. Thereafter, the terms of the Knight-Wallace Fellowship (an eight-month sabbatical for journalists) wisely prohibit publication of any sort, including blogging. 

Professor Diablo's True Review

Next week, at the invitation of Duncan Murrell and Duke's Center for Documentary Studies, I head to North Carolina to join forces with the musician Django Haskins and the media artist Marina Zurkow. Details from press release below.

The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University (CDS), in cooperation with the Durham's Casbah, is pleased to announce the launch of Professor Diablo’s True Revue, a collaborative performance of writers, musicians, visual artists, and others who make extensive use of documentary fieldwork and research in the creation of their art. The inaugural evening will begin at 7 p.m. on April 24th at Casbah.  The theme for the first show, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, will feature a writer (Donovan Hohn) whose first book is a story about rubber ducks, plastic, and the mysteries of the ocean; a Guggenheim Fellow and media artist (Marina Zurkow) whose latest work in animation and manga explores the agency of petrochemicals and plastics; and a songwriter (Django Haskins) of exceeding plasticity and range. Future performances of Professor Diablo’s True Revue will explore themes such as love, war, and food, and will feature all new artists, writers, and musicians. “We want to expand the audience’s idea of what a ‘documentary’ work can be,”  said Duncan Murrell, Writer in Residence at CDS. “And we’re going to do this with artists whose work relies on the immersive research and fieldwork that we champion at the Center. Something that’s more than a reading, more than an opening, more than a night of music— a performance that’s unique and unexpected, and yet seems harmonious and inevitable when it’s done.   “We hope that we’re beginning something that will have real longevity and become a valued and complementary addition to the growing literary and arts scenes here in Durham and in the Triangle,” Murrell said. “It’s going to be fun.”

NASA: Animation of Tsunami Debris

Another visualization from the wizards at NASA, this time illustrating the likely drift of the debris unloosed by Japan's 2011 tsunami. (via Julia Whitty's Blue Marble blog)

NASA's Earth Observatory captions:

This animation shows the output of the Surface Currents from Diagnostic (SCUD) model, an attempt to simulate where and how that debris would disperse. Orange and red shaded areas represent parcels of water with a high probably of containing floating debris. The deeper the red color, the higher the likely concentration. The debris field stretches roughly 5,000 kilometers by 2,000 kilometers across the North Pacific.

Perpetual Ocean

Craig Pittman, author and enviro reporter for the Tampa Bay Times, alerts me to this amazing visualization of the ocean currents, brought to you by the wizards at NASA.

On Ebooks and the Economics of Book-Selling in 2012

One of my favorite stops on my recent paperback tour was Porter Square Books in Cambridge, MA. A book-seller there by the name of Josh Cook recently wrote a long blog-post about the economics of book-selling in 2012. I found it illuminating, and I recommend it to readers and authors alike. 

I'll highlight one section. Concerning the costs of e-books, Josh writes:

To be honest, the persistence in the belief that ebooks should cost radically less than books is a little baffling, given that most of the articles that touch on the issue of ebooks point out that ebooks do not cost significantly less to produce than books. I'll read an article mentioning that the material overhead of production represents about 10% a books' overhead and sure enough someone in the comments field will argue that $9.99 ebooks are a publisher wide conspiracy. But what really baffles me about the persistence of this belief is how it also manages to fly directly in the face of conventional business wisdom. 

No matter what a business does or sells the biggest chunk of its overhead is almost always going to be salaries for employees. This is practically a business axiom. And yet people seem to (or want to) believe that this axiom doesn't apply to ebooks. All of the people who produce an ebook are the same people who produce a book. Same staff, same amount of staff hours, same amount of employee overhead. Why should their prices be radically different? The problem is, of course, (I bet you can guess what I'm going to say) is that early in ebooks Amazon sold ebooks at dramatic, one might even say “predatory,” losses in order to encourage sales of their Kindle and “secure” ebooks market share. They created a price expectation completely disconnected from the actual cost of production. . . .

The thing is, the ebook price of a book should be able to come down over time. Once the overhead of the author's advance, editors' salaries, administrative assistants, janitors, publicity and the like, have been made back, the material cost difference becomes meaningful. Older ebooks, backlist ebooks, or even ebook editions of very popular books could end up in the price range people seem to want. And we already accept this idea of falling prices of books. The first hardcover edition of a book is more expensive, not just because of the cost of materials, but because it is the first opportunity for a publisher to make back all that people based overhead. When it comes out in paperback, the price difference (often about $10-12) doesn't just come from cheaper materials, but from having less of the initial overhead to cover. A fair ebook price would start out at 10-15% off the least expensive print edition (and most retailers would probably add an additional discount on top of that, given how little overhead they cost book stores), drop with each new cheaper print edition, and then, once the initial investment has been made up, drop a little bit further. In this model, they won't hit $.99, but this isn't a pack of gum we're talking about. This is the product of thousands and thousands of hours of work, that you can enjoy over and over again. For readers who put price first, it really isn't any different than waiting for the paperback or mass market edition, or, if you're really stingy, waiting for copies to enter the used book market, or, if you're really really stingy (or have run out of room in apartment), getting the book for free out of the library.

Why Read Moby-Dick? Some more answers.

Chad Harbach, interviewed in the New Statesman, fields the question--well.

And then there's Herman Melville. The baseball team in The Art of Fielding is named the Harpooners, an allusion to Moby-Dick.Moby-Dick is a book that I read in college and was astounded by. I think it's the most musical novel in the English language - the rhythms and the prose are incredible. It surpasses anything that anyone has ever done.
It's also a very funny book, which no one ever gives it credit for. Before I read it, I'd always heard it spoken of in these stern and forbidding tones, as if you were being scared away from reading it. But then you read it and you find it's both bold and musical.

An earlier attempt of mine to answer a similar question, in an interview with The New Yorker's Book Bench blog, here. Another one here. And here's a sampling of what I said of the novel in the talk I gave earlier this month at UCSB:

Sometimes when trying to explain my harebrained quest, I simply blame Herman Melville, whose novel I’d read an unhealthy number of times. People think of Moby-Dick as a difficult book, and it does have hard words, and long sentences, and it can at times seem bewildering, or dense. But it’s also funny, raunchy even, and it is full of marvels, and there’s heart-pounding action. All that, and it also contains passages that read like something out of a biblical book of wisdom, like Ecclesiastes, passages like this: “There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness.” That’s like some sort of riddle, isn’t it? Or a Buddhist koan. But turn it around in your head a while.

Dreamy Recollections: The Obliteration Room

I find that with travel the best parts are the beginning and the end, but the best parts arise from what happens in between. You can't have a beginning or an end without a middle. So at the beginning your brain swims with dreamy anticipations. And at the end your brain swims with dreamy recollections. The recollections and the anticipations never match, but the mismatch is delicious and, if you're lucky and a bit reflective about it, educational. During the journey itself your brain simply swims. Such is my experience.

Three and some-odd weeks ago, I flew to London, accompanied by family, to help launch the good ship Moby-Duck in UK waters (number one title in the category of books about the city of Bath!). Night flight. Some sleep. Boys zonked out on armrests and shoulders. Then the abruptly wakeful arrival. London. There it was, glimpsed from the freeway, blurring past. A rental on a street with the almost too-perfect name of Barlby Gardens. A day of rest, and for me, editing. Then a bus ride to Trafalgar Square, red bus, double decker, the boys and me on the upper deck, right up front, all eyes. A grand day in London that culminated perhaps on the ground floor of the Tate Modern with a trip inside Yayoi Kusama's Obliteration Room, pictured above.

Some more dreamy recollections to come, if I can steal the time for them.

La historia de los patitos de goma

Yet another cinematic depiction of the Fable of the Duckies Lost at Sea brought to you by advertisers, this time in Spanish. 

Going on the Whale: Nantucket!

A perfect day for a late-winter ferry ride to Nantucket.

 
     

Nantucket: Take Out Your Map and Look at It

Fanciful map of Nantucket drawn by  a sheriff.

Tomorrow, I get to go to Nantucket for an evening event at the Nantucket Atheneum. I've never been to Nantucket and am kind of stoked. I read somewhere—I think it was in Nantucketer Nathaniel Philbrick's In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex or else in Philip Hoare's The Whale, and in any case it appears to be true—that Melville had not yet been to the island either when he wrote this:

Nantucket! Take out your map and look at it. See what a real corner of the world it occupies; how it stands there, away off shore, more lonely than the Eddystone lighthouse. Look at it -- a mere hillock, and elbow of sand; all beach, without a background. There is more sand there than you would use in twenty years as a substitute for blotting paper. Some gamesome wights will tell you that they have to plant weeds there, they don't grow naturally; that they import Canada thistles; that they have to send beyond seas for a spile to stop a leak in an oil cask; that pieces of wood in Nantucket are carried about like bits of the true cross in Rome; that people there plant toadstools before their houses, to get under the shade in summer time; that one blade of grass makes an oasis, three blades in a day's walk a prairie; that they wear quicksand shoes, something like Laplander snowshoes; that they are so shut up, belted about, every way inclosed, surrounded, and made an utter island of by the ocean, that to their very chairs and tables small clams will sometimes be found adhering, as to the backs of sea turtles. But these extravaganzas only show that Nantucket is no Illinois.

MONSTROUS ... and alive!

A dear friend, also on the road (in my native city by the bay, it so happens), picked up this old book-jacket in post-card form  and posted it my way. She draws my attention to the words "monstrous and alive," but also to those in the lower-right corner, "complete and unabridged." The brain is feeling a bit incomplete and abridged tonight. Also a bit monstrous, as usual. And, yes, alive.

Micro-Excerpt: Our Eyes Alone Are Not Enough

Ralph Waldo Emerson,
as caricatured by Christopher P. Cranch

The  theme of the talk I gave at UCSB tonight—our eyes alone are not enough—came from this passage that appears toward the end of the third chapter of Moby-Duck, pages 136–137. 


You might be inclined to see in the controversy over Gore Point the sort of tempest that invariably brews in provincial teapots, especially in geographically isolated provincial teapots like Homer. Rightly or wrongly, I was inclined to see in it something more: a parable of environmentalism in the information age. All the time, all over the world, in the coal towns of Appalachia and Hunan, in the fishing villages of New England and Indonesia, near landfills in Virginia and the Philippines, near incinerators in Hawaii or the Bronx, on farms in the valleys of the Mississippi and the Amazon, similar debates about our vexed relationship to the natural world are playing out. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me that the fundamental unstated question at the heart of the arguments I heard in Homer was this one: How do you measure the value of a place?

Superguy, the Banana

Something 6 y.o. B. and I made, while in London. The smile was my idea--which I came up with in order to placate 2 y.o. M. with a little puppeteering. The inscription was all B. It reads, "SUPERGUY THE BANANA / WHO BLASTS OFF INTO OUTER / SPACE EVERY MORNING"

The Frogs of Australia: End of Ramble in the Southern Hemisphere

Growling Grass Frog (Litoria raniformis)

Since I'm leaving Australia in a few hours for wintry latitudes, hoping to some day return, I figured this might be a good time to resurrect a few excerpts from the "self-interview" that The Nervous Breakdown asked me to write almost exactly a year ago (you'll see why). I've been asked a few times since arriving down under to explain why it is I love Melville's novel so, and I welcome that question, challenging as it can be to answer quickly, and I swung at it a few different ways. Here's another, slightly longer swing:

... The title. What were you thinking? I mean, Moby-Dick is this epic masterpiece, and you, my friend, whatever you are, are no Herman Melville.
It started as a kind of joke. I chose the title before I wrote a single word, which is unusual. Once I committed to it, I had to take the joke seriously. I knew that my voyage had to be a grand one. I often wished that for my first book I’d chosen a smaller project, a nice little monograph of an essay on oh, I don’t know, the pleasures and perils of bicycling in New York. But I love Moby-Dick, love the so-called informational chapters as well as the action sequences. I think most of all I love the dynamics in Melville’s prose, the swells and troughs, the storms and calms, how it mixes the high and the low, the philosophical and the naughty. I used to tell my students to look out for the fart joke in chapter 1, “Loomings,” (hint, it has to do with the pythagorean maxim). Then, too, Ishmael is an insular Manhatto, like I was, a former schoolteacher as I was. I couldn’t resist. I carried a tattered, annotated copy around with me during my travels and kept it on my desk and sought inspiration in its pages. It sustained as well as daunted me. Frankly, I’d almost prefer to talk about Melville’s book than mine.

And here's the bit that made me think of this now:

There’s much about fatherhood and childhood in the book. One of your two sons even turns up as a kind of recurring character. What does he want to be when he grows up? 

His plans keep changing, of course. Recently, he’s decided to be the host of a televised cooking show. But once he told me that he was going to be a scientist so that he can go to Antarctica and bring things back for me and his mother. Another time, god help him, he said he wanted to be “a papa and a writer.” He even had a great book title picked out. 

What was it? 

The Frogs of Australia.

Duckies Sighted ... in the London Underground

Earlier this week, on my way to Heathrow, where I was to catch a plane to Australia to attend the Perth Writers Festival,  I noticed this ad in a London underground station. The legend lives on.

The multinational flotilla above was brought to you by the same British cell phone company that a couple years ago gave us duckies going cheerfully and fictitiously where explorers had gone disastrously before. (Forgive the product placement, which does not imply endorsement of O2's product, which for all I know is vastly inferior to their adverts, or vastly superior; I'm ignorant of and therefore agnostic on the quality of O2, is all I'm saying.)

There was also a television campaign that began with this:

And continued with this:

And there were other spots, but you get the gist.

To Clarify: Of the Less Erroneous Pictures of Gyres

In news stories about the bath toys lost at sea, or about the so-called garbage patch, one occasionally encounters some confusion about oceanic gyres--altogether understandable confusion because the ocean is a strange place and its currents are complicated, chaotic even. The general as opposed to oceanographic sense of "gyre" is the sense in which Yeats famously used it in "The Second Coming"--

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold...

--a circular or spiraling motion or form. The oceanographic sense of the word "gyre" is narrower. In oceanography, a gyre is a circuit of major currents. Or to be a bit eye-crossingly precise about it, you'd say a gyre is a circuit of major wind-driven surface currents that orbit the ocean basins. The Gulf Stream, for instance, is a major surface current and it describes one arc of a gyre--the North Atlantic Subtropical Gyre, which, simplified by cartographers at NASA, looks like this:

A gyre is not a "garbage patch." Nor is a gyre by definition a current that collects floating debris. That said, there are currents in the five largest gyres--the subtropical gyres, which include the North Atlantic one pictured above--that do have the tendency to collect floating debris. Such currents create what oceanographers call "convergence zones." Convergence zones lie within gyres, but they are not the same thing as gyres. The most famous one is--take a breath--the North Pacific Subtropical Convergence Zone. You can see why people tend to prefer the somewhat misleading yet far catchier term "garbage patch." Here, on the map that appears at the front of Moby-Duck, is the North Pacific Subtropical Convergence Zone:

So it turns out traveling from London to Perth, Australia, is about as miserable as imagined. From London to Dubai, I had the middle seat, from Dubai to Perth I had it again. Dubai to Perth was the long stretch. To my left an Iranian Babushka who needed her armrests, to my right a Pakistani dude who needed his--he fell asleep before the plane took off. And thus over the course of about 20 hours I ate my several tinfoiled cartridges of poached chicken as if conducting dissections, elbows in. And yet, we became friends, we three. The Iranian Babushka who spoke no English made clear via semiotics that she was visiting her son. She also made clear her pride, "P-H-D. University of Sydney. Engineering!"

To London! With Snail and Spit.

Traveling with small children is not easy, especially if one of them--the six year old--has strep. But The One Recovering From Strep is also The One Who Is Beside Himself With Anticipation That He Will Be Traveling to London, England, Tomorrow Night. This is his first trip abroad. He now has a passport. So does the other one--The One Who Is Tonight Excited But Perhaps For Reasons He Does Not, Being Only Two, Understand.

We're going to London to help launch the hardcover UK edition of Moby-Duck, the inaugural title of Union Books. Its cover is pictured here.

For the last few weeks, I've been preparing six-year-old B. and two-year-old M. for their trip to London by resuscitating a bedtime tale that I first began to spin for B. back when he was a two year old. It's the tale of a squirrel named Snail, who lives in a hole in a tree in Washington Square Park. ("That's funny," M. said the other night. "'Snail' is a funny name"--for a squirrel, he meant.) Snail's best friend is a duck named Spit, who almost always goes by his full title, Spit the Bulgarian Wedding Duck.

(Long story, short version: The night the spinning of the tale began, there was a story about a Bulgarian wedding band on the radio. Spit plays the trombone, and any trombone player will therefore guess the provenance of the name Spit.)

Basically, the tale is a highly derivative remix of Milne, Graham, and Henson, but that doesn't make it any less effective as a soporific. Last weekend, Snail and Spit stowed away on a big old jet airliner bound for London. We'll be catching up with them there tomorrow evening.

Time to pack.

This Month, Moby-Duck crosses the Atlantic

This month Moby-Duck comes out in hardcover in both the UK and Spain. Meanwhile, back in the U.S., the paperback is about to appear. I'll be rambling once again all over the northern hemisphere, and I'll be visiting the southern hemisphere, too. The book tour itinerary: London, Perth, Sydney, Chicago, Santa Barbara, Boston, other U.S. cities later in March. No stops in Spain, but there is this spanking new Spanish book trailer, subtitled by the translator, Darío Giménez.

Micro-Excerpt: 20th Anniversary of the Great Toy Spill

Detail of map from Moby-Duck.

It was twenty years ago today that the castaway bath toys went adrift. In honor of the occasion, here with bonus pictures is the opening section of the first chapter of Moby-Duck:


We know where the spill occurred: 44.7°N, 178.1°E, south of the Aleutians, near the international date line, in the stormy latitudes renowned in the age of sail as the Graveyard of the Pacific, just north of what oceanographers, who are, on the whole, less poetic than mariners of the age of sail, call the subarctic front. We know the date—January 10, 1992—but not the hour.

The Ever Laurel

For years the identity of the ship was a well-kept secret, but by consulting old shipping schedules published in the Journal of Commerce and preserved on scratched spools of microfiche in a library basement, I, by process of elimination, solved this particular riddle: the ship was the Evergreen Ever Laurel, owned by a Greek company called Technomar Shipping and operated by the Taiwanese Evergreen Marine Corporation, whose fir-green containers, with the company's curiously sylvan name emblazoned across them in white block letters, can be seen around harbors all over the world. No spools of microfiche have preserved the identities of the officers and crew, however, let alone their memories of what happened that stormy day or night, and if the logbook from the voyage still exists, it has been secreted away to some corporate archive, consigned, for all intents and purposes, to oblivion.

A container spill. Photographer unknown.

We know that the ship departed Hong Kong on January 6, that it arrived in the Port of Tacoma on January 16, a day behind schedule, and that the likely cause for this delay was rough weather. How rough exactly remains unclear. Although it did so on other days, on January 10, the Ever Laurel did not fax a weather report to the National Weather Service in Washington, D.C., but the following day a ship in its vicinity did, describing hurricane-force winds and waves thirty-six feet high. If the Ever Laurel had encountered similarly tempestuous conditions, we can imagine, if only vaguely, what might have transpired: despite its grandeur, rocked by waves as tall as brownstones, the colossal vessel—a floating warehouse weighing 28,904 deadweight tons and powered by a diesel engine the size of a barn—would have rolled and pitched and yawed about like a toy in a Jacuzzi.

Naked Children Wandering Around on the Dinner Table

"Life is full of doomed quests—and then it tosses up the weird happy ending, with naked children wandering around on the dinner table. See for instance Wyatt Mason’s amazing profile of Ai Weiwei, now an e-book from GQ."  —Lorin Stein, The Paris Review

It is an amazing profile, one of the best in recent memory, and the weird happy ending is perhaps the most amazing of its many amazements. Here's how Mason's amazing profile begins:

In late July, I flew to China not knowing what to expect, with one exception: I was sure, regrettably sure, that I wouldn't be able to speak with the person I needed to speak with, a man named Ai Weiwei. Who he is—and there's no shame in your not knowing; I was among the unenlightened until recently, too—it was my ambition to comprehend. And if I failed to meet the man himself, I hoped, at least, to see enough of the world he called his own to make sense of a matter of no small interest: why it is that not a few people of discernment now consider him to be one of the most significant artists working today; and why it is that the People's Republic of China considers Ai Weiwei to be, without question, a very dangerous man. . . .

More for free here. E-book here.