monday october 08
I don't know why, but as far back as I can remember I've had a passion for scuba diving. There's something about entering a completely different environment surrounded by a strangely organic and colorful world that is just mind-bending. In Stephen Harrigan's book
Water and Light: A Diver's Journey To a Coral Reef, he asks the question about his own passion for diving and where it originates
. In an attempt to answer this question, he sets out to spend several months diving off
Grand Turk Island. He explores the quiet, exquisite, and powerful beauty of coral reefs along dozens of sites around the island.
Continue Reading…
wednesday september 05
I like baseball, but not nearly as much as the protagonist of Robert Coover's novel The Univeral Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. The character's name is Henry Waugh, and he is not just a typical rabid Major League Baseball fan. He has taken baseball fanaticism to new heights. In fact, real life Major League Baseball isn't what he is concerned with, but a completely imagined league that is played as a game with dice. And if even this doesn't sound too out of the ordinary, Henry's game is fabricated to such a degree that a whole universe has been created around every possible aspect of the experience. For example, entire generations of players and seasons have already taken place and are established in his mind and all players past and present have fully realized personalities and histories that come to bear on the game itself.
Continue Reading…
friday may 25
If you have never heard of Lord Buckley before, it's kind of hard to describe what he did and who he was in any succinct way. Fortunately for me, Oliver Trager, author of
Dig Infinity! The Life and Art of Lord Buckley has done just that in the opening pages of his biography. Here is his summarized take on Mr. Buckley: "Lord Buckley: the white, six-and-a-half-foot-tall, ex-lumberjack cat who invoked both the manners of the English aristocracy and the street language of black America...Lord Buckley: the picaresque pill-popping darling of Al Capone...Lord Buckley the jazz philosopher who jammed with Charlie Parker...Lord Buckley: the original viper, the Hall of Fame Hipster, the baddest Beatnik, the first flower child, the premier rapper...best known for his 'hipsemantic' retellings of Bible stories, Shakespeare soliloquies, and modern poetry in the 1950s." So, while not exactly a comedian (as he's often described), he could better be described as a performance artist who experimented with language and storytelling for comic effect.
Continue Reading…
thursday may 10
Several years ago I read an amazing novel titled Water Music by T.C. Boyle. It's a rich, darkly comic story which focuses on a character named Mungo Park and his expedition of the Niger River during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries . The novel is full of energetic, hilarious, and often bawdy prose. I was about halfway through the book when I learned (somehow or another) that Mungo Park was an actual historical figure.
Since then, I've been interested in finding a more factual account of Mungo Park and his exploits in Africa. So, I was happy to find the book The Cruelest Journey: 600 miles to Timbuktu by Kira Salak. On this solo journey, the author traversed the Niger by kayak and modeled her course after Mungo Park's own journey there over 200 years ago.
Continue Reading…
friday april 13
As a kid I loved Kung Fu movies. So, naturally I was drawn to a book titled Lost in Place: Growing up Absurd in Suburbia by Mark Salzman. This memoir, through many hilarious scenes, evokes all of those wild ambitions most of us had as teenagers and our obsession to do whatever it took to make them a reality. Salzman recounts his adolescent fascination with Kung Fu and his quest to become a Zen master.
He quickly sought out the only Kung Fu school in his town and formally enrolled in a class. Only 14 years old at the time, he managed to convince the martial arts instructor to allow him to study and practice with the adult class. Not only was this a little dangerous, but the instructor was a bit of a loose cannon, leading his pupils through a series of reckless and ill-advised exercises. Needless to say, he got a little banged up during these weekly sessions and in the process was introduced to the adult world in a pretty skewed way.
Continue Reading…
