Churbuck.com

I just finished reading The Last of His Kind, David Robert’s biography of Bradford Washburn: the esteemed American mountaineer, founder of the Boston Museum of Science, and accomplished alpine photographer and cartographer. While I’m a fan of maritime adventure writing, I do have a passing interest in mountaineering, driven I suppose by Jon Krakauer‘s Into Thin Air, and a couple of other books, but a fear of heights that emerged in 1968 on a Cub Scouts field trip to a firespotter’s tower in Georgetown, Massachusetts has condemned me to a life of sea-level adventures.

Washburn was the last of a certain breed of Bostonian — Harvard-educated, Brahmin to some extent —  part of  the “greatest”  generation of Boston WASPs that included Tom Winship, the esteemed late editor of the Boston Globe; David Ives, the driving force behind WGBH public television, and many other Yankee names who marked the passing of a certain era in Boston. This was a generation that served in World War II, were progressive in their politics, loyal to their institutions, and quietly accomplished without celebrity.

Washburn’s story is fascinating in that he progressed from a childhood spent roaming New Hampshire’s White Mountains, to learning the ropes of classic Alpine climbing in Chamonix as a teenager, then on to media celebrity as a lecturer and author published by GP Putnam, the National Geographic, and Lif e Magazine — all while attending Harvard as an undergraduate in the 1920s. He never climbed an Asian peak like K2 or Everest — preferring to blaze his trails in the wild mountains of southern Alaska and the Canadian Yukon, notching many “firsts” and making the glaciers of North America his specialty.  His photography is his legacy, detailed aerial studies that are art in their own right. His maps of Mount Washington, Everest, and McKinley are works of art in their own right, projects undertaken long after he hung up his crampons and focused his career on transforming the New England Museum of Natural History from a dusty anachronism into the state of the art Boston Museum of Science.

Roberts  was Washburn’s protege,  and follows in the tradition of Harvard Mountain Club climbers. He wrote a fine biography that interestingly — in the paperback version I read —  omits the tragic events involving Washburn’s son and daughter later in his life, events I only became aware of while Googling the subject and uncovering an earlier, different version of the book archived by Google. I won’t go into the details, but I do respect Roberts’ decision to omit the incidents in later editions, but that decision does force the question of how comprehensive a biography needs to be. My sense is that, in the context of Washburn’s long and esteemed life, that omitting details of his personal life and family is the sort of benign protectionism that the press displayed towards say John F. Kennedy’s sexual escapades, or FDR’s polio, as not being germane to the business at hand.  Emphasizing the salacious and sensational is a regrettable by product of our current celebrity-scandal driven media, but still I am curious about how Roberts, as biographer, first made the decision to include the details and then redacted them.

All that aside, The Last of His Kind, piqued my interest in mountain hiking (note I don’t say climbing) that I was introduced to in Switzerland ten years ago when I spent my bachelor weekends traversing some Swiss weg, or walk, up the likes of Mount Tendre in the Jura (5509 feet) and the Hoher Kasten in Appenzeller (5,886 feet). Something in my rower’s legs makes climbing up steep inclines a semi-enjoyable activity, just as long as I stay away from sheer precipices, ropes, and pitons. With some shame I will admit I have never climbed Mount Washington, the third tallest mountain east of the Mississippi River — tallest in the northeast — and thanks to the book  have ordered a copy of Washburn’s famous map of the 6,288 foot peak as well as the Appalachian Mountain Club’s hiking guides. My good friend and former biking buddy, Marta, has done several Presidential Traverses — a marathon effort to hit the peaks of all the mountains named for presidents in the White Mountains in a single day.  This 20 mile effort is usually undertaken on the Summer solstice to get as much daylight as possible on one’s side in completing the effort. I definitely will need to train a lot more than my typical ergometer work to get in shape at my age for the effort, but the story of Washburn’s herculean exploits traversing the glaciers of the Yukon is providing some inspiration.

I just knocked off Geoffrey Wolff’s biography of Captain Joshua Slocum, the first man to sail alone around the world: The Hard Way Around. Wolff wrote a great memoir, The Duke of Deception, and so, based on Nathaniel Philbrick’s strong review in the Sunday New York Times Book Review I had to download his latest onto the Kindle.

Slocum wrote about his voyage in Sailing Alone Around the World, a familiar book to most fans of nautical writing and a classic in the circumnavigator genre that includes Pidgeon, Moitessier, Chichester, et al.. Wolff connects the rest of Slocum’s life to his great accomplishment, bringing together a complex portrait of one of the last great mariners from the Age of Sail, a man consumed with wanderlust, who lived from ship to ship most of his life, bringing his wife and family with him as he sailed, traded, and survived a life as a bluewater man.

I wrote a novel in college based on Slocum — it was terrible and an embarrassment that taught me that I would never be a novelist — so it was an interesting experience thirty years after that exercise to read about Slocum from his hardscrabble boyhood on Nova Scotia’s Bay of Fundy to his disappearance at the age of 64 in the hand-me-down boat that carried him safely through the adventure of a lifetime, the Spray. Slocum was an extraordinary sailor who rose “through the hawse port” to the command of some great clipper ships in the late 19th century. He was also an accomplished ship’s carpenter, building his own boats on several occasions, including a strange canoe-like craft he sailed from Brazil to New York City with his wife and children aboard after being shipwrecked and stranded.

In his 50s, his career in ruins and with no sailing ships left to sail, Slocum was offered an old oyster boat by a whaling captain he had met in the Okhotsk Sea off of Siberia. He found the sloop, built almost 100 years before, in a meadow in Fairhaven’s Poverty Point, and decided to renovate her as his own.

He then sailed the Spray alone around the world at the age of 52. Talk about mid-life crisis.

Great book, quick read, and essential for anyone who has been captivated in the past by Slocum’s story.

A friend just asked for some maritime reading suggestions following my endorsement of Susan Casey’s The Wave.

Here, in no particular order, are some good ones from my bookshelf.

• Nigger of the Narcissus, Conrad
• Two Years Before the Mast, Dana
• Moby Dick, Melville
• Typee, Melville
• Wanderer, Sterling Hayden
• Voyage, Hayden
• Looking for a Ship, John McPhee
• Steaming to Bamboola, Chris Buckley
• Sailing Alone Around the World, Slocum
• Around the World Singlehanded, Harry Pidgeon
• Voyaging Southwards from the Strait of Magellan, Rockwell Kent
• N by E, Kent
• The White Dawn, James Houston
• The Captain, Jan de Hartog
• The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst, Tomalin and Hall
• anything by Edgar Rowe Snow
• The Long Way, Bernard Moitessier
• The Caine Mutiny, Herman Wouk
• Ice Brothers, Sloan Wilson
• A Night to Remember, Walter Lord
• In the Heart of the Sea, Nathaniel Philbrick
• Down by the Docks, Rory Nugent
• Perfect Storm, Sebastian Junger
• Heavy Weather Sailing, Adlard Coles
• The Venturesome Voyages of Captain Voss, Voss
• A Fighting Chance, Ridgway and Blyth
• Crunch and Des, Philip Wylie

I’ll add others as they come to mind. Suggestions appreciated.

The best thing that can be said about the dead-tree era of publishing that sustained the world for a few centuries was the relative ease-of-use and standardization in operating the delivery mechanism — the book, newspaper, or magazine. Sentences began on the left, went to the right (in the West), eyes moved from to bottom, and when you finished the page you turned it. Need to remember a place? Dog ear the page or use a bookmark of some sort. Need to annotate? Scribble in the margins. Underline the text. Highlight the sentence.

The first digital versions of text tried to ape their paper antecedents. Zinio and other early e-mag technologies were basically smarter PDFs of pages, but they were proprietary, and it wasn’t until HTML provided a common framework and page description language that there was some semblance of standardization on how to read pixels.

Now that we are two years into the dedicated e-reader revolution — starting with the Amazon Kindle and now the notion of iPad apps, all hell is going to break loose on readers with very bad consequences. While others have bemoaned the end of the web as it moves off of standard platforms and onto proprietary ones, my beef is purely based on usability.  Today’s culprit is the vaunted New Yorker’s new iPad version, a “free” app that sticks a $4.99 gun in your ribs as soon as you decide you actually want to read something in it.

Jason Schwartzmann’s cute video instructions aside, the New Yorker is an utter failure as an online reading experience for several reasons.

• Pages are turned by flicking up, not side to side.
• The table of contents is impossible to find
• The standard menu has no option to jack up the font size to make the thing elderly eyes compatible
• It doesn’t remember your place automatically
• It doesn’t appear to have any annotation capabilities
• Getting out of the cute animation of how the cover was drawn was nigh impossible

New Yorker editor David Remnick needs to b-tch-slap his designers and start over. I will not buy an iPad version of the magazine again ($4.99 is a rip off what appears, thanks to the missing table of contents, to be a severely truncated version of the real thing). Whomever coded the thing and made their “enhancements” to the reading experience are the beginning of an ugly trend that is only going to get uglier as formats splinter and digital typographic designers decide to innovate the same way they managed to muck up web design over the years. Amazon enforces a modicum of standardization, so for now my allegiances will lie with the iPad’s Kindle app. But magazines and papers better settle on a defacto standard for tablet/reader publishing or we’re all screwed trying to find out where the table of contents is, the font adjuster and the virtual bookmark. I need to get smarter about these new tablet production tools.

I downloaded Susan Casey’s The Wave onto the iPad yesterday after reading a review in the NYT Sunday Book Review. Definitely a decent book and interestingly, a great multimedia experience if read on an iPad (more on that later).

Casey wrote an account of the great white sharks around California’s Farallon Islands, The Devil’s Teeth, but The Wave is a better book, for me at least, in that sharks are lurid enough of a tired topic that I wasn’t particularly enthralled by an account of them (more of the scientists who spend weeks at a time on the forbidding lumps of rock due west of the Golden Gate). The Wave, for the most part, is a good tale of big wave surfing, an act requiring huge skill, massive cojones, and someone to tow the surfer onto the wave with a jetski. It chases, grail-like, the quest for the 100-foot wave, the monster that hasn’t been ridden, butthe  far more interesting yet scant part of the book is about the effects of oceanic rogue waves on shipping. Apparently a ship or two is lost every week in general — primarily tired bulk carriers that are pressed into service too long by greedy owners and driven in conditions by delay-conscious captains when sane seamanship says its time to heave to.

I would have preferred far more on the type of maritime disaster tales related by Adlard Coles in his classic Heavy Weather Sailing than descriptions of the machismo surfer culture that doubtlessly will make the book more popular to the masses. To her credit, Casey does spend a great deal of time along South Africa’s Wild Coast, describing the terrible toll the monster waves there make on shipping. And her description of the 1,700 foot  mega-tsunami of 1958 in Alaska’s Lituya Bay is enough of a superlative to make all other waves mere pond ripples.

The fun part of reading the book on the iPad was the ability to switch over to YouTube and find the actual video clips of specific surfers surviving specific waves Casey writes about in Tahiti, Maui or Half Moon Bay. The true wonder of the world that I did not know about before reading it, was the description of Cortes Bank, 100 miles west of San Diego where the Pacific abruptly shelves up from thousands of feet to a submerged seamount a scant six feet under the surface. That people cruise out there with the intention of surfing in the great void simply astounds me, and as a terrified sailor, the notion of cruising along and seeing a 120-foot comber breaking in the middle of the empty sea would cause me to void into my underwear.

Good book, read it with YouTube nearby, put up with the constant Laird Hamilton surfing stories, suffer through the scientists opining drearily about the end of the world, global warming, and the coming days of chaos, and you will be entertained.

Sebastian (The Perfect Storm) Junger’s War is destined to become a classic in combat writing. He spent a long time with an infantry company in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley — the nastiest six miles of valley in the world observing some truly amazing acts of perseverance, camaraderie and heroism. Want to put that morass of a nine-year old war into context? Read this book. It may not make you pro-war or anti-war, but it does fill one with complete admiration for those young men who put themselves into harm’s way.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell is the subject of a cover review by Dave Eggers in today’s New York Times Sunday Book Review. A very very very good and erudite novel about Dutch merchants in Japan in 1799.  Mitchell is amazing. This is a great piece of historical fiction.

I settled in for the 14 hour haul with some massive reading and viewing. I never sleep on long hauls — small naps and moments of narcolepsy aside — and so I need tons of mental stimulation.  It all begins with packing:

Hardcopy: this is paper-based reading for those non-electronic device moments the airlines are so fond of dogmatically imposing. Why a Kindle can’t be used during taxiing is beyond me. But I am not going to argue with the Man.

• Sunday New York Times. $6 at the Hudson News in Terminal C. I repeat: SIX DOLLARS.
• Ten back issues of a newsletter from a Club that shall not be named that I am a guest of this summer for a few days
• Saints and Strangers: Being the Lives of the Pilgrim Fathers & Their Families, with Their Friends & Foes; & an Account of Their Posthumous Wanderings in Limbo, Their Final Resurrection & Rise to Glory, & the Strange Pilgrimages of Plymouth Rock, by George Williston, the best account of the Pilgrims I have read yet beyond Bradford, Mourt’s Relation and Nathaniel Philbrick.

Digital: Kindle primarily – working through William Vollman’s excellent World War II novel, Europa; the New Yorker, and a ton of other texts. I downloaded War & Peace for a re-read. Lots of Kindle usage going on in United business class from Chi-to-PEK. Saw one poor soul start off the trip with a new Apple iPad in his hands. He made sure everyone knew he had one. By Siberia the guy had a massive case of arm fatigue and was trying to prop the sucker up against something. I pitied the fool. Spied another iPad in a guy’s dutyfree bag going through immigration at PEK.

Video: loaded up the ThinkPad with some in-flight viewing. The video screens on the plane are super small, but I suffered through a historical costume drama, The Young Victoria then abandoned the in-flight options and went to my own library. Big surprise was The White Ribbon, Michael Haneke’s winner of the Palm D’Or at Cannes in 2009. Amazing, amazing movie set in pre WW-I northern Germany.

After that I started a Kurosawa flick about a bureaucrat with stomach cancer …. but that got old and I dove into the Willison’s excellent history of the Pilgrims, which had my attention all the way into Beijing.

All in all, I love flying only because I can get a ton of reading and viewing in. Sure, out of guilt I do a little work, but for the most part it’s just a lot of reading and watching, about the only such non-interrupted stint I get these days.

My father accidentally introduced me to Barry Hannah in the mid-70s when he bought Hannah’s first novel, the Faulkner award winning Geronimo Rex. For some random reason I read it — we never discussed the book, my father never recommended it or even mentioned it, it just appeared on a shelf in the bookcase and I read it.

It is one of a few books which makes me laugh out loud, a book I push on people to read over and over as one of the most wickedly funny examples of Southern American writing ever penned.  A tale of coming of age in 1960s Mississippi, it actually more like Animal House on paper — a very sophomoric story of three misfits rooming together off campus at Ole Miss.

In 1977 I was accepted into a writing class taught by Gordon Lish, fiction editor at Knopf and short story editor at Esquire. He championed the new wave of post-modern writers like Don DeLillo, Raymond Carver, and Hannah. In one of the first classes he handed out copies of Hannah’s amazing short story anthology, Airships and read out loud the extremely short story, “Coming Close to Donna.” I was captivated.

Barry Hannah never broke out as a best selling author, nor did he go on to achieve great things like others of his generation. But he did write beautifully, crafting his sentences with the precision of a Haiku. He was earthy, his humor was located south of his belt, but he was entertaining as could be. I loved his writing.

The past few weeks has seen my world confined to an armchair, a ThinkPad, and a Blackberry.  Blogging has not been a priority when most of the news is personal, medical, and tedious. However, I have tried to keep up my reading, albeit slowly. Television has been banned, so I listen to the Red Sox via the MLB.com radio stream and keep score on my laptop using a new application called PC Scorebook. Anyway – a limited what-I-am-reading

Books:

The other day I did the pathetically maudlin move of walking up to the Elizabeth Lowell ballpark to stare out at the vacant diamond and feel sad that the Kettleers are gone until June.  The Cape Cod Baseball League was a highlight of this past summer and with it gone I fill the hole with the end of the Red Sox’s regular season the nailbiting wonder of the post-season to come.

I ordered a couple actual books — as opposed to Kindle texts — on the CCBL. The first was The Last Best League by Yankee Magazine editor and former college ball player Jim Collins. (there is a Kindle version). Collins spends the season of 2002 with the Chatham A’s — the team featured in the so-so movie about the Cape League: Summer Catch, and gives an amazing look at the transition of a handful of talented college ball players from sophmore prospects to top professional draft picks.

The second book is a lot less polished but more detailed in the overall history of the league — I am picking my way through it now — Beach Chairs and Baseball Bats, by Steve Weissman.

Getting into the college baseball and world of scouts has driven me to actually pay for a subscription to Baseball America, the bible of amateur ball and prospects.  With a nephew down in Florida lighting up the high school circuit with his pitching, I find myself more and more interested in the system that identifies and tracks talent at a young age. Moneyball and Prophet of the Sandlot got me very interested in the scouting and statistical systems that identifies and tracks talent at an early age. Some of the insights from The Last Best League includes the discovery that some professional teams rely on a personality test called the “Caliper” that was developed to predict success in sales people. It sounds somewhat Myers-Brigg’s like, but to see the degree to which professional baseball discovers, measures, and analyzes talent — from MRIs to personality to box-score statistics is interesting, particularly as I just came off of a rigorous internal human resources process at Lenovo that tracks and identifies up and coming talent.

But I digress …

More to come as my vision improves. Big strides since the weekend as the bubble of inert gas has been absorbed and I am now adapting to my “field” of vision. The left eye is similar to looking through an antique pane of glass — distorted, some fun-house mirror effects — and mid to long distance sight is crossed and hard to bring together with the “good” right eye. I am semi-active — no jump-jacks or back-squats — mowing the lawn and walking, and today see the surgeon for the week-three post-op exam and perhaps an indication of when I can fly again and return to Morrisville and Beijing.

Books:

Steven Johnson: The Invention of Air, the story of the Reverend Joseph Priestly.

World War Z: Max Brooks. The zombie wars, told Stud Terkel style. Recommended by my good buddy T. Soon to be a major motion picture.

Thirteen Moons: Charles Frazier, author of Cold Mountain. Just getting into it. Not sure yet.

J.D. Lasica: Identity in the Age of Cloud Computing. Really good cloud computing primer. I am very into cloud services these days, working on some Amazon Web Services stuff, thinking about business models. Lasica does a great job with a summation of

Movies:

Old Boy: Highly demented Korean revenge flick. Highly demented. Fight scene with a claw hammer is pretty unforgettable.

Songs from the Second Floor: Swedish weirdness. Like a two hour television commercial with very pale people

Star Trek: digging the Spock emphasis, I mean, seriously, when Spock gets the girl, pointy eared paste eaters everywhere got a lift.

Loves of a Blonde: Milos Forman, pretty funny Czech flick about factory workers behind the Iron Curtain looking for men. This bedroom scene was pretty awesome.

Christopher Buckley’s encomium to his parents, socialite Pat Buckley and intellectual conservative author William F. Buckley, Jr., should be mandatory reading for those of us riding the caboose of the baby boom with aging parents in their twilight years. It is, by and large, a book about death; about the deaths of two parents within one year, and one man’s brave passage through their decline and passing with grief and good humor. While the details of their public lives are interesting, Chris spends more time in the sick rooms, the ICUs, and the funeral homes than he does on memory lane recounting the past glories of two lives lived large.

He’s taken heat for this book – the letters to the editor of the Sunday New York Times Magazine, some reviews at Amazon.com … yet I disagree. This memoir doesn’t leverage the fame of two (to leverage the over-leveraged cliché) larger-than-life personas, but it does reveal some details that others might be uncomfortable sharing in public about their own parents. I see courage where others might see exploitation.

The book made me think, a lot, about the passing of my own father my senior year of college in a car accident, and how that surprise left me beached and bereft of words for nearly a decade. I realize, now, as my eldest son is 22, that I have somehow managed to “outlive” my father, and have surpassed his shortened record by a few years, leaving me — in some strange way — without an old man to model and compare myself to as I roll into my days as a future old man. Chris Buckley, as an only son, wishes at one point that he could turn to an older sister and say, “There, it’s your turn now.” But there is no one but him, and he faithfully puts in his time, coming out of the process with nothing less than the best book about parents and their children, life and death, that I have read.

Disclaimer: I am not a political creature, and admired William F. for his nautical non-fiction, teaching myself how to navigate celestially through the pages of Airborne. I interviewed him once for Forbes on something to do with word processing – he was a geek manqué – and knew Chris from my efforts to put ForbesFYI online. From him I developed the courage to wear pink and green argyle socks and owe him for the introduction to my good friend and former colleague Charles Dubow, now at Businessweek.com.

I read a very interesting essay in the recent New Yorker about the repatriation of the Danilov bells from Harvard’s Lowell House belfry to the Russian monastary where they hung and rang for centuries.  Russian bells have been on my mind since December when I watched Andrei Rublev, the 1966 masterwork of Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky. That film has an amazing scene where a young bell-maker is asked to cast a gigantic bell — something he has apprenticed with his late-father, but never done himself. As a depiction of art and craftsmanship, I think it is unequalled.

The New Yorker piece talks about the role of bells in Russian life, the destruction of most of the country’s bells by Stalin, and the preservation of the Danilov bells (a set of 17) by the wealthy benefactor, Charles Crane — the toilet and sink magnate — who was a protean renaissance man with a desire to preserve an amazing collection of bells ranging from 22 pounds to the 26,000 pound “Mother Bell”.

From the Wikipedia entry on Lowell House:

For three-quarters of a century, one of the more distinctive features of Lowell House was the presence of a set of Russian bells in a tower above the House, one of only a handful of complete sets of pre-revolutionary Russian bells left in the world. The set was bought around 1930 by Chicago industrialist Charles R. Crane in order to save the bells from being melted down by Soviet authorities. Crane is reputed to have bought the bells for the price of their bronze content. When Lowell House was built, Crane donated the set of 18 bells to Harvard (only 17 are in the House today; the 18th was thought to be too close in tone to one of the others, and it now hangs in the tower of Harvard Business School‘s Baker Library).

The bells originally came from the Danilov Monastery in Moscow, now the seat of the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, and were installed with the help first of Konstantin Konstantinovich Saradzhev and then that of “a Russian émigré who … claimed to have rung the Danilov bells before the Revolution.”^[2] They range in weight from 22 pounds (10 kg) to 26,700 pounds (12,100 kg) (the largest bell is known as “Mother Earth”). The bells are consecrated, and are of great significance to the Russian Orthodox Church, where bells are regularly rung as part of the liturgy. At Harvard, the bells are rung every Sunday from 1:00 to 1:15 pm, and on certain special occasions, by an interested group of Lowell residents known as the Klappermeisters. The Bells had been rung for generations of students, for instance, following the Harvard-Yale football game, with Harvard’s score rung on the “Mother Earth Bell” and Yale’s rung on the “Bell of Pestilence, Famine, and Despair.” Visitors are welcome. They can also be heard on the Lowell House Virtual Bell Tower.

With the revival of Christianity in Russia and the reopening of the Danilov Monastery, a request had been made for the return of the bells to Moscow. After prolonged negotiations, they were returned in the summer of 2008 and replaced with replicas; the exchange was made possible by the financial and administrative support of the Russian industrialist Victor Vekselberg.^[3]

Here is the bell casting clip from Andrei Rublev. The full scene needs to be seen for full impact.

I can’t blog about work for some reason, writer’s block and spring fever conspire to tie my tongue.

Reading Nigel Calder on Marine Diesel Engines and Peter Compton on Troubleshooting Marine Diesels. I am not a native motorhead but I like the concept of diesel engines, especially the image in my eye of rigging a replacement alternator belt out of a pair of pantyhose (pardon me mam, but can I have your stockings?) and fumbling in the dark in a wicked storm to close the seacock and clean the raw water intake.

I read Steven Johnson’s Ghost Maps after reading his tweet about The Invention of Air – loaded them onto the Kindle and read the former first; an account of the cholera epidemic of 1856 and the empirical proof the disease was transmitted through a corrupted well – and therefore was waterborne, and not, as was maintained by the health authorities, airborne via foul smells. I like medical detective stories and technical/scientific history – Berton Roueche’s Medical Detectives and Dava Sobel’s Longitude
are favorites – and Johnson is spectacularly smart. The epilogue is out of place, but compelling nevertheless, as it makes a case for urbanism as a dense force for progress and attacking the bucolic vision of telecommuting that I was partially guilty of spreading in the pages of Forbes from here on Cape Clam in the early 90s. Johnson makes the point that the filth of London in the middle of the 19^th century was poisoning and killing the very concept of mega-metropolises, but science and technology made the modern hive possible. Interesting thinking on modern squatters, the Slumdogification of the Third World, and how telecommuters make poor terrorist targets because you won’t find 50,000 of them stacked onto an acre in a skyscraper.

The Big One is reviewed below. I started on Ian MacEwan’s Saturday (following a strong New Yorker profile) and have yet to tackle the latest magazines, including the new Atlantic Monthly with a funny Facebook parody.

In the movie department. I still have some movies to finish in the Essential Art House collection. When I finish I’ll think about writing a post on each of the 50, but for now film criticism doesn’t feel like a strong suit. My son Eliot is providing me with Netflix queue advice, so I’m getting deeper into the Italians, having watched Luchino Visconti’s  Rocco and His Brothers yesterday on the plane from Seattle to Boston.

Watching a graphic rape and stabbing in black and white with subtitles while sitting in the aisle seat in row 16 on Delta may not be as heinous a public act as watching porn in the SUV on the Southeast Expressway during bumper to bumper traffic … with kids in the car … but I was horrified myself and had to build a blinder quickly out of the vomit bag and the current issue of Sky Magazine. Stay tuned for more films. Tarr’s Werckmeister Harmonies was a stand out. Yasijuro Ozu’s Floating Reeds was another. Watch this scene from Tarr. The dude is outstanding.

In the sporting department. I took in two actual ballgames whilst in Seattle. One with Mitch Ratcliffe in which the Seattle Mariners lost to the Detroit Tigers and again two nights later with colleagues and my stepbro Jos. Nick when the Mariners beat the Tampa Bay Devil Rays.  I ate sushi at the ball game just to earn the right to say I have eaten sushi at a ballpark. I’d get slapped around and given a wedgie if I tried that in Fenway. I have watched, listened, or downloaded all 15 of the Red Sox games and am happy with their current winning streak. I am not a hockey fan right now — I’m too baseball OCD — but I do like to watch this commercial.

Last winter Mark Alan Lovewell, the fishing beat reporter for the Vineyard Gazette wrote that a new book about the Martha’s Vineyard Striped Bass & Bluefish Derby had been optioned by the Dreamworks studio. Cool, I blogged. I’d pay to see that flick. The author of the optioned book, David Kinney, detected my blog post through the magic of the InterWebs and sent me an email asking if I’d like a copy to review. Sure, I said. Send it along.

I own about six feet of bookshelf space devoted to fishing books. There’s everything from how-to books such as Flounder Fishing and 99 Angling Tips from Lefty Kreh, to big important reference books like Fishes of the Gulf of Maine. In between are the few I pull down every few years and re-read; books like Dick Brown’s authoritative book on bonefish, Thomas McGuane’s 90 Degrees in the Shade, Peter Mathiessen’s Men’s Lives and the late Bob Post’s Reading the Water, the original book about fishing on the Vineyard. Until now, Post’s book has been the one to beat when tackling a subject as steeped in passion as the Derby, one of the oldest and most venerable fishing contests in the world.

It’s not often that a Pulitzer-prize winning reporter (Philadelphia Inquirer) sets his mind to fishing, but David Kinney took the kind of trip most anglers dream about in the fall of 2007; he fished the entire Derby with a fishing rod in one hand and a notebook in the other. In the new tradition set by David DiBenedetto a few years back in On the Run, Kinney inserts himself in the story as the eager student sitting at the knee of the venerable experts. With a big dose of humility and another of humor, Kinney does a great job of explaining the history of the Derby, the culture of the off-season Vineyard (and the on-season celebrity soaked world of waterfront wealth), and the great stories that go with serious fishing. He has pulled off a few feats most angling scribes can’t contemplate, most notably ingratiating himself into a closed secret society that makes the DaVinci Code look like a church bake sale. I can see why Dreamworks took the option on The Big One, there’s enough skull-duggery, intrigue, charges of cheating and lying to drive a dozen plots.

Kinney written a keeper of a fishing book, no mean feat in a genre that tends to get breathless with clichés and pedantic with tips that never seem so smart in actual practice. And spare us from the fishing book that clutters the story with recipes (even, my late mentor John Hersey was recipe-guilty in his Vineyard fishing classic: Blues). This is just a solid story, a great one in parts, thanks to the fortuitous coincidence that Kinney was hanging around with Derby winner and all-around angling ace Lev Wlodyka during “Sinkergate” – the amazing incident where a cow of a striped bass weighed in by Wlodyka was found to contain a pound and half of lead sinkers.

“Instead he reaches all the way into the farthest recesses of the stomach, and as his hand comes out there is a clattering on the dfloor at his feet. It sounds exactly like change falling out of a pants pocket. Martha thinks it is a joke at first, like that time the guy cutting open a leaderboard fish dropped a wrench out of his sleeve as he fumbled around in the stomach. It takes her a moment to see that nobody’s laughing. She looks at Lev and sees his face morph from shock to horror to embarrassment before he speaks.

“What the f#$k?”

“Inside Lev’s fish-of-a-lifetime, D.J. has found a fistful of lead weights.”

That’s a scene just made for Hollywood, indeed, it brings to mind the scene in Jaws when they gut open a shark and out falls a Louisiana license plate.

Kinney infiltrated one of the most close-mouthed, evasive, secretive, mendacious, fraternal secret societies in the world – Martha’s Vineyard fishing fanatics. Steve Amaral, Dick Hathaway, Whit Manter, Kib Bramhall, Nelson Bryant, Ed Jerome, Dave Skok, Chris Windram, Janet Messineo … these are names familiar to saltwater fishing fanatics throughout the eastern seaboard, perhaps the world, and Kinney hitches a ride with them in the fall of 2007, accompanying them and others to the beaches, rips and inlets of the island in search of the Derby winner. Along the way he weaves in sixty-plus years of Derby history, island culture, and current drama. Read this book: if only for the description of the complex culture that exists on the jetties at Menemsha – a place I avoided during that same Derby in 2007, when I used my boat to free myself from the crowd that lives there for 838 hours every fall. There is no better way to greet the spring fishing season in New England than to read a good book that confirms why we stand in the water, up to our knees, hoping against hope and the need for sleep for something to happen out there, in the dark, under the water on the end of our lines.

I leave you with the part that hit home the closest:

“People see Steve [Amaral] bringing in fish and they figure it’s all action for a fisherman like him, but they don’t see him on all those days when he comes home with nothing, all those nights when he’s working the beach and wondering why in the hell he’s out there and not home watching TV in his recliner. “Nothing’s easy in this business. You don’t go to the beach and they jump up on the sand.”

You can buy the book from Amazon.

Color Me Flepia: Fujitsu Launches E-Reader

Thanks to Lisa Sonntag for pointing out Fujitsu’s launch of a color e-book reader. Pretty pricey.

“For those who don’t read Playboy for the articles, Fujitsu has an e-book for you. Dubbed the Flepia, the device is what the company calls the world’s first color e-book — it can display 260,000 colors. Quite a difference from Amazon.com’s Kindle black and white e-book, which retails for $359.

Various documents and images — from books, newspapers, magazines and the Internet — can be seen on an 8-inch touch screen in high definition — 768 x 1,014.

The Flepia goes on sale on April 20 — in Japan only — and will be available through Fujitsu Frontech’s online store. The price tag? A whopping $1,000. Hmm, maybe things don’t look worse in black and white.”

Take the recent announcement of the Kindle 2 by Amazon, last holiday’s shortages of the first generation device following Oprah’s endorsement; mix in Google’s immense effort to digitize the world’s library of copyright-expired books; throw in a ton of OEM interest in eInk and other e-reader screen technologies; blend in a bad economy and the simple math that e-books are half the price of their tree-killing, backpack straining ancestors; add a little something called the iPhone and an Amazon app that makes Kindle format books readable on that hip little device; bless with a patent infringement lawsuit by Discovery Channel over some copy projection system in the Kindle; now see Sony do a deal with Google to make half a million free books available to owners of Sony’s stylish reader ….

I’m not going to write the paper book’s obituary, but it feels like, as one writer put it yesterday, e-readers/e-books/whatever-you-call-em are poised to become the iPod of the literary world very soon.

It feels like a classic format/standards war is about to break out. Sony is the master of dumb moves when it comes to copy protection and file formats. Anyone who bought one of their post-Walkman music players knows they had an approach to DRM that was right out from behind the Iron Curtain – what one would expect from a content company that also makes devices. Amazon, who gets credit in music for pushing DRM-free tunes before Apple did the same, is not a veteran of the format wars. You want someone who has gone to the mat at Microsoft, Adobe, etc. when you arrive at a file-format fight. Google knows formats and open systems better than anybody, so my perfect world would be this:

1. The Kindle file format extends to all new devices with no royalties back to Amazon.
2. Sony ends the division and signs onto the Kindle format as well.
3. Google makes its content device-agnostic (which it should given its waltz with the publishers)
4. Amazon discounts the heck out of the Kindle on a spring promo and gets it down to $100 – I know lots of non-techie people who are NOT early adopters who want a Kindle bad but have no way to justify $350 in this market. Indeed, coupon zealots like me and let us throw the discounts to the people we want to share books with.

I just finished “The Unfinished“, D.T. Max’s piece in the Arts and Letters section of the March 9 New Yorker on the career and suicide of David Foster Wallace.

This is a great piece of writing about writing; a frightening, sad look at the loneliness of a sick genius left to his own thoughts and insecurities and the terror of a blank page. “Feeding my wastebasket,” Wallace wrote to his friends. Sitting in an airconditioned garage in Claremont, California with a 250,000 word manuscript of a novel, The Pale King, about the Internal Revenue Service, an exploration into the topic of boredom by a writer so brilliant that his style demanded a digressive pile of footnotes and endnotes to sustain the intellectual horsepower raging inside of him. Anyone who thinks the life of a writer is glamorous needs to read this tale of mental illness, brilliance, and heavy, grueling, lonely hard labor.

Wallace is significant in American writing in that he helped end the dry spell of spare realism inflicted on American literature in the late 1970s by editors such as Gordon Lish and writers such as Raymond Carver. Heavily influenced by Thomas Pynchon, Wallace took the post-modern reveries of Gravity’s Rainbow, John Barth, John Hawkes and Donald Barthleme and made literature emotional again, instilling in his great wordplay a philosophical intelligence (he wrote a book on infinity) picked up from another of his favorite influences, Don DeLillo. Wallace summed up the role of fiction is to show the world what is was to “be a fucking human being.”

Unfortunately, dead at age 46, he leaves the instruction manual unfinished.

New Bedford is an alien city a mere thirty-miles from where I sit, a place I really don’t know that well, a messy collection of triple-deckers, stone churches, abandoned textile mills and infinite sadness. New Bedford is sad because of its past greatness – it was arguably one of the wealthiest cities in the world in the middle of the 19^th century. I expect most people think of New Bedford through Ishmael’s eyes; Jack Tar rolling down cobble-stoned streets past the Seaman’s Bethel to the Spouter Inn. Few see it as the drug-ridden, tired mess of a fishing port it is today, cut off from the sea by a ugly rampart of stone built to protect what’s left from another hurricane like the ones in 1938 and 1954 that nearly wiped the place off the map forever, ruined by Route 18, an ugly slash of highway some dumb politician pushed through to tie the docks to the interstate. Yes, there’s the Whaling Museum – it’s cute and kind of sad as it tries to revise the bloody history of what the city did to the world’s whale population — and there are parts of the town that ache with memories of past glories, when New Bedford men roamed the globe and fortunes were made on everything from oil to golf balls, rope to coke.

Rory Nugent wrote Down at the Docks
following nearly two decades living in New “Bej” It’s about eight chapters long, each a profile of a different character, all related to the waterfront in one way or another. From the Portuguese-American, former Miss Massachusetts (third runner-up) tending the dockside diner coffee pot, to the unluckiest fisherman, or Jonah, on the docks, the book is about the people – captains and crew, mobsters and fixers, bluebloods and dope addicts. This is not a book about commercial fishing, watch Most Dangerous Catch if you want to get off on guys killing themselves in orange Grundens. This is about fishermen trying to sink old boats for the insurance money, about captains pissed off at the scientists, madmen who snort coke and meth to stay awake during killer blizzards, not because they want to have a party.

This isn’t about my world or my people. I can point at a whaling captain ancestor, but in no way can I claim the kind of bond to New Bedford that Nugent describes in the gallery of washed-up, screwed over miscreants that inhabit Down at the Docks. This is a weird subculture that Kurlansky comes close to describing in his recent tome about Gloucester, The Last Fish Tale, but doesn’t because Nugent just flat out takes a novelist’s liberty and invents his characters into something more real than any diligent reporter could objectively describe. I’m sure he’ll take some heat for fictionalizing, but it doesn’t matter. The details are real. The speech patterns are dead on. This is southeastern Massachusetts long after the circus left town, a broken down, depressed, grey and brown place that got the stuffing kicked out of it by the Great Depression, roused itself for a little while in the 60s, and is now floating face down.

My only bone to pick with the book is one of the last chapters, about the Petticoat Society, where Nugent tries to tell the history of the Quaker whalers through the eyes of a society of women who hold the true power while their men are away at sea. The scrimshaw phallus story is heh-heh, humorous, and not the first time I’ve heard it told (the first being in Forbes FYI in the 90s).

How good of a writer? I’ll buy Nugent’s other stuff. This one was great. Problem with the damn Kindle version is I can’t walk it across the street and make my Cousin Peter, a true student of New Bedford, read it.

I just sent and read my first “private” documents on my Kindle — a bit of a breakthrough as I wondered if I could ever take my “to read” folder off of my desktop and transfer it to my Kindle. Turns out it’s simple.

Every Kindle has its own email address. Send a mail to that address from an approved sender and the attachment will be delivered wirelessly.  Most formats are supported, with PDF in experimental beta. I moved a Jeremiah Owyang’s white paper out of Forrester on social platforms, and aside from some formatting gremlins, it’s quite a convenient way to get reading off of the laptop and onto something better suited.

I’m not ready to go full New York Times or Wall Street Journal on it, but I have started the New Yorker and am quite pleased.

Now if there were a way to make a right-click function that sent docs right to the Kindle address the way I can right click and image and send it right into Flickr via the desktop uploader.

Tim writes in Forbes that unless Amazon adopts open standards, the Kindle is gone in three to five years.

He advocates moving to ePub. I know nothing of e-book standards, but thanks to Tim, now I do.