Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
<comber> has talked about surfing in Ireland. I had no idea!
  

    
Hah, thanks. Japan made it hard not to write about food. And the Irish
by now are really proud of their waves.
  

    
One of the things that will probably surprise a lot of people is the
revelation that surfing isn't always done in the ocean. I wasn't as
surprised as I might have been because I'd already discovered the
bizarre (to me) scene at the Eisbach because it's on a main street by
the big art museums, one of which I was headed to. This is a stretch in
a stream which is mostly underground in downtown Munich which is,
apparently, a good test of skills. Then there was the Severn Bore in
England. Any more famous river-surfing spots out there? 
  

    
The wave in Munich really is tough, because it feels backwards: You
fight to stay in one place, not move forward. It's like a treadmill.
And the wave happens to be fast.

But the Severn Bore, which is a tidal surge up the Severn River that
becomes a rideable wave several times a year, competes with a few other
tidal bores around the world for the boast of "longest wave ever
ridden." That's another reason I wrote about the UK. These guys who
surf it, the bore chasers, are basically a lot of eccentric Englishmen
who get in the water and ride the wave until they fall, then swim out
to their cars and drive upriver to a spot where they can catch the wave
again. It's loads of fun.

There are bores up plenty of other rivers, particularly in France. But
the one on the Amazon is strong and attracts good South American
surfers who swap endurance records with the Brits. The Qiantang River
in China supposedly has the biggest tidal bore in the world, but the
authorities will arrest you for surfing it.

The Colorado River used to get a surge up from the Gulf of Mexico, but
not since the Hoover Dam. Back in the day it was called the "burro"
and it was the bane of riverboats. I'm fairly confident no one ever
surfed it, though.
  

    
This past Saturday morning, I swear I saw a copy of the Reno-Gazette
with a front page photo of somebody riding the Truckee River!
Unfortunately, I can't find it now in their on-line edition/archive.
And, I'm still having a hard time getting around the concept.
But having read your book, I wonder if someone came over from Munich
and brought the idea to the Truckee, where nature provides plenty of
"waves" when the water is running strong over huge boulders.
Anyway, your book is going to be in Australia. I'm sending my copy off
to one of my "brothers" in Adelaide, to the fellow who let me use the
board he'd shaped there, at home, in '64. Actually, I think he was
quite glad to palm off the long, heavy board he'd made to his new,
exchange student, "brother" and use the lighter one he'd bought.
I never did manage to stand up on the beast; and after it nearly
knocked me unconscious a couple of times during my first experience in
6-8' waves, I switched to body surfing.
But, enough of my personal experience.
I've really enjoyed your writing style - it is an excellent example of
how well New Journalism can work - and I'm sure my "brother" will
enjoy it too. 
  

    

Old buddy of mine surfed Uluwatu incessantly in the early 70's. We met at a
martial arts school where we both were doing some long, long courses of
early morning breathing exercises - so, of course, there were some talks
about spiritual this and that. He repeated a few times, as I recall, that
there was something about riding in the tube that he had not experienced
since, until doing lots of breathing meditation over a long period.

I'm going to send him your book,  Michael. He's surfing the Bay of Biscay
these days, and I know he'll enjoy it.
  

    
Here's a little aside -- dog owner culture is getting more intense and
indulgent in California, but one of the results is that dogs are
getting good at new non-hunting sports.  (Yes, dogs were bred for sport
hunting and racing long ago, of course.)   

Canine surfing does not seem to favor a specific breed, so far...

This is great fun:
<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/family/pets/8557722/Dogs-take-to-the-waves-for-Cali
fornian-surfing-competition.html>

 
  

    
I'll tell you one thing that Sweetness and Blood did for me, it
re-interested me in the Israeli-Palestinian thing. I'd stopped reading
about it long ago -- my reaction to theocracy anywhere, I guess -- and
whether it was reading an early version of that chapter or your talking
about it after you got back from that trip, it made me realize how
pettily the Israelis exercised their advantage in the situation. Then I
started reading more NYRB essays and it's back on my radar. 

Have things improved any on the surf side since you wrote that
chapter? 
  

    
Thanks for all the comments. I really do hope the book is good travel
writing or first-person journalism, not just good surf writing. And I'm
entirely in favor of surfing dogs.

The Gazans who surf are still at it, and the Israeli group Surfing 4
Peace has finally managed to deliver a load of surfboards. Now they're
trying to bring Muslim surfing attire over for a handful of young
women. That's a part of the story I didn't see. A few girls in Gaza
have learned to surf. The problem is that as soon as they reach a
certain age -- fourteen or so -- it's a matter of honor for them *not*
to be seen in the water with men. The burqinis will help, but not
entirely.

Israeli officials were petty to me, but I happen to love Israel as an
idea and a place. One Israeli reader said I'd shown the good aspects of
Israel just by describing its surfers. I tried to do the same thing
with my own country. The idea for the book came to me during the worst
phase of the Iraq war, when I realized that surfing had already
accomplished a number of the war's stated goals in subtler ways in
other parts of the world. Americans don't realize it, but surfing has
brought a notion of independence and freedom to some really remote
countries without the need for aircraft carriers or Chinooks.

@Craig: It's not macho to say this, but surfing's very similar to
meditation. It requires absolute presence of mind. Otherwise you'd
fall.
  

    

Thanks, Michael. I've heard that another similarity is that one needs to
achieve a good stance, without being fixed. Or something like that.
  

    
That's true, you have to find the right stance but then be ready for
anything.

I was just in California to read from the book, and I surfed with a
bunch of young vets from the Los Angeles VA. A group in my hometown is
giving them "surf therapy" to fight PTSD. The results are instant,
because in the water you can't think about thirteen different kinds of
threat from the enemy. It brings you right into the moment. Some guys
who can't sleep without drugs go home from their first surf session and
sleep a solid 6 hours.
  

    

That is damn great.
  

    
Obviously you had to do a great deal of research and took down a great
deal of memos and data for the book as you travelled around. How much
of thee whole amount would you say actually went into the book ? My
secondary question would therefore be, would there ever be a type of
follow up to fill in some of the gaps in the book that you didn't have
time to cover perhaps ?

My next question is, "From all the places you have visited so far,
what 3 phrases or things that people said to you stick out in your mind
(without looking at notes or quoting from the book) ?"

Lastly, "How do you view your role in terms of the book itself and the
narrative therein ? Your style seems to be a mixture of several styles
- journalistic raconteur, objective, subjective, narrative, historical
nuances and so on."

Will you be pursuing that multi-styled of writing in the future - a
kind of fusion, if you will, or will you concentrate on specific styles
?"

Greetings from the boys and girls in Japan Mike :) Peter Daniels was
just here and said to say hi - we were back at the pool bar where we
played and hooked up when you were here.
  

    <scribbled by julieswn Sat 18 Jun 11 09:51>
  

    
The above comment that <captward> posted was from one of our off-WELL
readers: wavehuntersjapan@gmail.com
  

    
As indicated in the pseud...
  

    
Hah, it's clear to me who that comment was from. Only a fraction of my
travel journal went into the book, but I find that early,
first-impression stuff from the spiral-bound to be absolutely vital for
travel writing. It has to be mixed with a large amount of research,
but I knew the early notes would be important so the effort, in every
place, was to get every detail down.
  

    
That mixed form of nonfiction feels really comfortable for me, so I'll
probably do it again. In fact I don't even think of it as mixed. To me
it's just a question of getting the story down.
  

    
Three most memorable quotes --

"Is there river surfing in California?" from a Munich river surfer (a
question that stumped me).

"Do you have any whiskey?" not quoted in the book, but asked by a
fisherman in Morocco who found me dripping after a surf on a remote
beach at the base of a cliff. He'd gathered that I was American.

(On why surfing is like work) "Paddle padde, and sometimes -- big wave
come!" Taro Takahashi, on the beach,near Rob's house in Chiba.
  

    
@Rob -- Say hi to Peter and beat him at pool for me. 
  

    
Right, while we're doing the fiction/nonfiction thing, why not say a
few words about your novel, Too Much of Nothing, which I'm afraid is 
obscure to most of the folks reading this, and yet might be something
they'd run off and buy if they knew about it. 
  

    
Well, it's a ghost story. A half-Jewish kid in Southern California is
still hanging around his beach town, as a ghost, because a onetime
friend killed him in mysterious circumstances. The friend was an unruly
punk in the 80s who fell into selling coke on his high school campus.
But he inadvertently gets close to the source of the cocaine, which in
those days in greater Los Angeles had an unexpected political
background (namely the Contra-CIA connection uncovered by Gary Webb). I
started writing it in the late 90s when the Webb's version of the
story was still taboo in some newspapers, like the LA Times.
  

    
It sounds a bit stark, but it's told satirically. For me fiction is a
fine art of exaggeration.
  

    
That's a nicely concise way of putting it. And, so, non-fiction would
be..?
  

    
A fine art of *not* exaggerating. That can be tough sometimes.