Man with Catfish
A Shark Inside a Wave
William Willis's raft voyage from Peru to Samoa in 1954:
In the patterns of light around the raft, he once thought he saw an octopus extending enormous tentacles toward him, and he ran for his ax. Lying one afternoon asleep on the deck, he suddenly woke and in a wave looming above him saw a shark that looked ready to attack him. He jumped up to defend himself. The shark fell, and the raft rose on the wave that had contained it. Occasionally at night, the sparks of phosphorescence thrown up by the bow would seem to merge with the sky, and he would feel as if he were sailing among the stars.
Even though he wore sunglasses, the sun eventually blinded him, and he had to remain for hours at a time in the cabin, bathing his eyes with salt water for the pain. The first island where he might have landed was surrounded by reefs and had no shore. No one answered his radio call for help, so he had to sail past it. During a squall he heard a crash in the cabin but was too busy to address it. The cat had toppled the parrot's cage and killed the parrot. Willis sewed its remains in a piece of sail, put them in the cage, and lowered them overboard. After finding finding no way to enter a harbor on a second island, he saw an American ship headed toward him, and they towed him to land. He had been at sea for 112 days.
-- Alec Wilkinson, The Happiest Man in the World: An Account of the Life of Papa Neutrino (New York: Random House, 2007), 68.
A Shark Inside a Wave Read More »
A Small Whale Inside a Wave
I enjoyed the Atlantic crossing an indecent amount. Even when the wind wasn't blowing I liked being there -- I didn't want any noise so I just drifted about until the wind came back. I read books, wrote little computer programs, enjoyed the sea. I didn't want it to be over. I wanted to move slowly across the water and never get anywhere.
One windy day I saw a small whale inside a wave. The waves were steep that day and I saw a grayish object in the blue -- it was a whale swimming along, inside the top of the wave, looking me over. The whale would ride to the top of each new wave and eye my boat, as if in a passing railroad car of water.
A Small Whale Inside a Wave Read More »
Congressional Vote Ratings, 2006
At National Journal: Senators and congresspeople voting liberal or conservative on economic, social, and foreign policy during 2006. Jim Ryun (R-KS) was easily the most illiberal representative.
Congressional Vote Ratings, 2006 Read More »
Tom Swift
No one seemed to realize that any of several Swift inventions would have changed the shape of human history. In Tom Swift and the Cosmic Astronauts, Tom casually invents a gravity concentrator after repairing a kite for some younger kids in an empty lot, and in Tom Swift and His Space Solartron, he implements a gadget that converts solar energy directly to matter in the form of any chosen element or simple compound. . . . The Repelatron alone would have changed the shape of technological society, as hinted but never fully explored in Tom Swift and His Repelatron Skyway.
The author or authors seemed incapable of grasping the implications of what they wrote. In that title, Tom Swift lays "down" a floating superhighway in mid-air, to be supported on Repelatron beams, with a helicopter. Tom's creators didn't seem to hit upon the truth (as we all did, and discussed endlessly on Boy Scout campouts) that Repelatrons made all other forms of flying obsolete. We also realized that if the Space Solartron could convert solar energy to oxygen for breathing, to water for drinking, and even to sugar for eating, it could make gold as well. But Tom never hit on that. I guess he was rich already and wasn't ruled by crass financial motives.
San Francisco Bay Area Cities and Neighborhoods
Wikipedia has articles on around thirty-five East Bay cities, seventy San Francisco neighborhoods, and thirty Oakland neighborhoods. Cameron Marlow has a tableof equivalences between San Francisco neighborhoods and New York City neighborhoods. Alfredo Jacobo Perez Gomez has a guide for visiting, moving to, or living in San Francisco that includes lots of photographs of neighborhoods. Outsidelands.org has lots of history about Sunset, Richmond, and the other neighborhoods of western San Francisco.
San Francisco Bay Area Cities and Neighborhoods Read More »
Beethoven and Haydn
Hoshino . . . returned to his biography. Beethoven, he learned, was a proud man who believed absolutely in his own abilities and never bothered to flatter the nobility. Believing that art itself, and the proper expression of emotions, was the most sublime thing in the world, he thought political power and wealth served only one purpose: to make art possible. When Haydn boarded with a noble family, as he did most of his professional life, he had to eat with the servants. Musicians of Haydn's generation were considered employees. (The unaffected and good-natured Haydn, though, much preferred this arrangement to the stiff and formal meals put on by the nobility.)
Beethoven, in contrast, was enraged by any such contemptuous treatment, on occasion smashing things against the wall of anger. He insisted that as far as meals went he be treated with no less respect than the nobility he ostensibly served. He often flew off the handle, and once angry was hard to calm down. On top of this were radical political ideas that he made no attempt to hide. As his hearing deteriorated, these tendencies became even more pronounced. As he aged his music also became both more expansive and more densely inward looking. Only Beethoven could have balanced these two contrasting tendencies. But the extraordinary effort this required had a progressively deleterious effect on his life, for all humans have physical and emotional limits, and by this time the composer had more than reached his. . . .
"Yeah, I've been reading a biography of Beethoven," Hoshimo replied. "I like it. His life really gives you a lot to think about."
Oshima nodded. "He went through a lot -- to put it mildly."
"He did have a tough time," Hoshino said, "but I think it was mainly his fault. I mean, he was so self-centered and uncooperative. All he thought about was himself and his music, and he didn't mind sacrificing whatever he had to for it. He must've been tough to get along with. Hey, Ludwig, gimme a break! That's what I would have said if I knew him. No wonder his nephew went off his rocker. But I have to admit his music is wonderful. It really gets to you. It's a strange thing."
"Absolutely," Oshima agreed.
"But why did he have to live such a hard, wild life? He would've been better off with a more normal type of life."
Oshima twirled the pencil around in his fingers. "I see your point, but by Beethoven's time people thought it was important to express the ego. Earlier, when there was an absolute monarchy, this would've been considered improper, socially deviant behavior and suppressed quite severely. Once the bourgeoisie came to power in the nineteenth century, however, that suppression came to an end and the individual ego was liberated to express itself. Freedom and the emancipation of the ego were synonymous. And art, music in particular, was at the forefront of all this. Those who came after Beethoven and lived under his shadow, so to speak -- Berlioz, Wagner, Liszt, Schumann -- all lived eccentric, stormy lives. Eccentricity was seen as almost the ideal lifestyle. The age of Romanticism, they called it. Though I'm sure living like that was pretty hard on them at times. So, do you like Beethoven's music?"
-- Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore, tr. Philip Gabriel (New York: Vintage, 2005), 376-8.
Beethoven and Haydn Read More »