The Disappointing Case of the Castaway Lego Men: NO REAL/THAN/YOU ARE

Stories about marvelous flotsam tend to drift into my in-box, which can make reading email resemble a sedentary form of beachcombing--not as pleasurable as the extravagant, outdoorsy kind, but fun nonetheless. This morning brings a doozie. According to BoingBoing, an 8-foot tall castaway Lego man recently washed up in Florida. When exactly, the blog post doesn't say. It turns out this is, at least, the second such sighting. An earlier specimen--same size, different color shirt--washed up on a Dutch beach at Zandvoort.

Florida's specimen is marked No. 9, so one wonders if there are 7 other Lego men out there, drifting on the waves. Did a shipload of these dudes tumble overboard? 

Appears not.  The castaways also bear a maker's mark identifying them as the work of a Dutch artists' collective called Ego Leonard. Why do I find this disappointing? What seemed a fabulous accident suddenly has the feel of a guerrilla marketing campaign. 

It is with disappointment that I share the greeting, presumably in the voice of a giant Lego man, posted on the Ego Leonard web site:

I would like to introduce myself:

My name is Ego Leonard and according to you I come from the virtual world. A world that for me represents happiness, solidarity, all green and blossoming, with no rules or limitations. 

Lately however, my world has been flooded with fortune-hunters and people drunk with power. And many new encounters in the virtual world have triggered my curiosity about your way of life.

I am here to discover and learn about your world and thoughts. 

Show me all the beautiful things that are there to admire and experience in your world. Let’s become friends, share your story with me, take me with you on a journey through beautiful meadows, words, sounds and gestures.

Lethem, Dyer: "Absurdly Long Books on One Small Thing"

In BOMB, Jonathan Lethem interviews Geoff Dyer about his essayistic narratives, or novelistic essays, whichever they are, with special attention paid to The Missing of the Somme, newly released in the U.S., high on my wish list. And in passing they touch on Marclay's The Clock, Dickens, Wordsworth's The Prelude, laziness, "deep plumbing of consciousness." Lots of good stuff, but I'll highlight this:

DYER: . . . I like books that are about other books in some way. In terms of well-being or psychological health, certainly I’m extremely happy when I set out, either for an article or a book, to read and learn everything I can about a given person or subject, to completely immerse myself in it. I feel, at that point, that I have a purpose. When it comes to actually writing a book, that excitement and well-being would soon turn to boredom if it didn’t proceed in tandem with the creative challenge of coming up with some kind of form or structure that seems especially appropriate to that subject.

And this:

DYER: . . . I operate at a far lower level of energy and inspiration, but a higher pitch of desperation! Generally, I like the idea of short books on one particular cultural artifact as long as they don’t conform to some kind of series idea or editorial template. The madder the better, in my view. I like the idea of an absurdly long book on one small thing. I think we’d agree that the choice of artifact is sort of irrelevant in terms of its cultural standing: all that matters is what it means to you, the author. 

Captain Tsubasa

Michael Paterniti's account of "The Man Who Sailed His House," which I recommended in an earlier post, is now up online. A favorite passage:

The roof is perhaps twelve feet by six, of corrugated metal nailed to wood beams, your raft at sea. Last night, you and Yuko slept beneath it, and now you perch atop it on the sea, above the goblin sharks and whatever else lurks below. Saltwater laps up the sides, and any sudden movement immediately sets it seesawing. Sit still, in the middle—and as time passes, let the contrite sea bring gifts from the dead. This makes you giddy, the gifts. First it brings a red marker. Then the torn pages of a comic book, a manga, its hero, Captain Tsubasa, kicking a soccer ball with superhuman force. It brings some sort of red container that used to hold paint. It brings a tatami mat woven together with string, a broken radio, and a white hard hat. All of which you fish out of the murk. The hat (To whom did it belong?) immediately goes on your head, the marker in your hand. You imagine the dead offering you these things from underneath the sea. Hunched over the ripped comic, you test the marker on the damp page and write the following words in the margin: On March 11, I was with my wife, Yuko. My name is Hiromitsu. Then you tear the paper, fold it, place it in the red canister, seal it, and with the string from the mat, bandolier it to your body. Resume your pose.

Avi Steinberg, In Search of Lost Worlds

On the web site of The Paris Review, Avi Steinberg has a smart and hauntingly illustrated little essay on the strangeness of the world according to Google Street Views. I especially like his closing thoughts:

One night, you locate a distant childhood intersection. You leave the street map and enter the scene, passing seamlessly from map to territory. But there are no goofy hijinks or bloody corpses there. No sublime horses. Just a bright, sunny street with uneven sidewalks, lined with parked cars—a place that once contained everything that you knew and needed to know, which once held the entire range of possible truths. Then you take a Google-step back, and suddenly it’s a bit less sunny and a bit more populated. You swing around to your left, and now the sky is overcast and foreboding. A step forward and a neighborhood man you once knew, who was pictured sitting on his porch a frame ago, has vanished. Now the sun is out again, but setting. This private territory, with its radically shifting light, its dreamlike angles, and its specters popping in and out of view—that odd combination of detailed recollection and ever-thickening fog—resembles the structure of memory itself. It’s like visiting a lost place. It’s not the grandest idea but, at certain moments in life, it’s the best we’ve got.

The Man Who Sailed His House

In the October issue of GQ, on newsstands now, Michael Paterniti tells the story of Hiromitsu Shinkowa, who drifted into the news last March. Two days after the Japanese tsunami, Shinkowa was discovered nine miles out to sea, alone, on the roof of his house.

Castaway narratives are a venerable sub-genre of nonfiction, even now, in the 21st century, when shipwrecks are far less common than they used to be. What distinguishes Paterniti's story from more conventional disaster narratives is its interiority. He gives us the sublime nightmare of the tsunami, but only to prepare us for the solitary trial—the guilt and regret and heartbreak and fear—that Shinkowa experiences during the two days he spends alone and adrift.

From the sea, Shinkowa fishes what he thinks of as "gifts"—a futon, a tatami mat, a marker, a comic book about superhuman soccer players. With the marker, on paper torn from the comic book, he writes messages to the living, which he scrolls into plastic canisters, also fished from the sea, and lashes to himself with string. Here in the order he wrote them are the words he thought would be his last.

On March 11, I was with my wife, Yuko. My name is Hiromitsu.

I just want to report that I am still alive on the twelfth and was with my wife, Yuko, yesterday. She was born January 12 of Showa 26.

SOS

I am sorry for being unfilial.

I'm in a lot of trouble. Sorry for dying before you. Please forgive me.  

Cushman Time Machine to Old New York

The Daily Mail this week posted a slideshow of color photos of lower Manhattan taken in the early 1940s by Charles Cushman. Cushman's camera was state of art for the time, and the result is a peculiar kind of anachronism: The images look much more recent than they are; what most obviously dates them are the abundance of hats, the abundance of boats in the river, and the abundance of wood (wooden baskets, wooden pushcarts with wooden wagon wheels). Those ephemeral artifacts measure time precisely. Rich material for archeology of the ordinary. (via Brain Pickings)

Julian Barnes's "Shipwreck": Disaster & Art

Last week in Ann Arbor and again today, home in New York, I thought of "Shipwreck," a chapter in Julian Barnes's A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters. I was first introduced to the chapter and the book seven years ago by the writer Eileen Pollack, and I've taught it in nonfiction classes a few times since. Tonight I went back and read "Shipwreck" for the first time in a while.

Barnes published it  in The New Yorker in 1989 as a short story, but it could easily have been called an essay--or a history. Let's call it a story in two parts. The first part artfully but dispassionately narrates the wreck of a French ship, the Medusa, in 1816. A taste:

By misfortune, they had struck the reef at high tide, and, the seas becoming violent, attempts to free the ship failed. The frigate was assuredly lost. Since the boats it carried were not capacious enough to contain the whole personnel, it was decided to build a raft and embark upon it those who could not be put into boats. The raft would then be towed to the shore and all would be saved. This plan was perfectly well laid; but, as two of the company were later to affirm, it was traced upon loose sand, which was dispersed by the breath of egotism.

Before those "two of the company" are rescued from their hellish raft,  a great deal of dying and a fair portion of cannibalism has taken place. It's a masterful, suspenseful bit of narrative history, this first part, but what keeps me returning to "Shipwreck" is the second part of Barnes's story, a sort of making-of documentary about the famous painting, by Géricault, that the wreck of the Medusa inspired.