Jan. 19 overheads

As promised, here are the overhead writing examples I projected last night:

From Jonathan Raban's Passage to Juneau, a stunning paragraph that incorporates interesting rhythms, onomatopoeia, irony, and a fine simile:

I am afraid of the sea. I fear the brushfire crackle of the breaking wave as it topples into foam; the inward suck of the tidal whirlpool; the loom of a big ocean swell, sinister and dark, in windless calm; the rip, the eddy, the race; the sheer abyssal depth of the water, as one floats like a trustful beetle on the surface tension. Rationalism deserts me at sea. I’ve seen the scowl of enmity and contempt on the face of a wave that broke from the pack and swerved to strike at my boat. I have twice promised God that I would never again put out to sea, if only He would, just this once, let me reach harbor. I’m not a natural sailor, but a timid, weedy, cerebral type, never more out of my element than when I’m at sea.

The following is an example of varied texture from my book The Year of the Boat:

This seems counterintuitive, but small sailboats are generally slower than large ones. This is the only morsel of serious sailboat physics you’re going to get between these covers, but it’s fundamental to boat design and the transcendentalism of sailing, so listen: The top speed (in knots) of a displacement-hull boat—meaning one that has to push the water out of its way rather than planing over the surface—is equal to the square root of the waterline (in feet) times 1.34. My Zephyr’s waterline is only 12½ feet long. So no matter how much wind might be blowing, water resistance would limit this boat to:

√12.5 x 1.34 = 4.74 knots

Or, in dry-land numbers, 5 1/3 miles an hour. That’s it. Slower than Patty’s kayak, Sea Major. Slower than a pathetic-class weekend jogger. More evidence that what was painstakingly evolving under my sandpaper truly would be a toy, not a device useful for any practical or explicable function. But I recall paddling in the San Juans on a calm morning—the wind couldn’t have been more than a five-knot whisper—and overtaking a solo sailor lazing on the deck of a little sloop.

“Great day, isn’t it,” he called out as I passed.

“Great for paddling,” I replied. “Maybe not so much for sailing.”

“Why do you say that?”

“You’re not going to go anywhere fast.”

“Why would I want to go anywhere fast?”

And three examples of inversion of expectations, a vital tool in your box:

...Lisa had been voted “Most Likely to Succeed,” so it confused her to be ringing up gallon jugs of hearty burgundy.

—David Sedaris, “Repeat After Me”

A hermit crab lives in my house. Here in the desert he’s hiding out from local animal ordinances, at minimum, and maybe even the international laws of native-species transport. For sure, he’s an outlaw against nature. So be it.

—Barbara Kingsolver, “High Tide in Tucson”

Weekend campouts at Camp XXX were a cross between Animal House and Lord of the Flies. The fathers would hole up in a small cabin and drink and smoke. We Scouts would hole up in our tents and drink and smoke. We'd go for days without visible adult supervision. So when I was supposed to be learning how to read a compass or tie knots, I was in fact learning skills that would be useful if I were joining the Viet Cong.

—Knute Berger, “What I Learned as a Boy Scout”

Colorful description of a person

This week's New Yorker has a short (1000-word) profile of Phyllis Diller at age 92. I'm posting just the lead here because it's a delightfully vivid, colorful, and intense introduction to the character. (Ignore the New Yorker's fussy and old-fashioned artifice of using "a visitor" instead of the straightforward first-person "I"):

When a visitor was shown into Phyllis Diller's mansion in Brentwood the other evening, Diller rose carefully from a settee. "Have a Martini," she said. "You have to look at the art, and it helps." She was wearing one of her trademark yellow fright wigs, and her right hand sported a large yellow ring that somewhat resembled a snail. "Do you like my ring? I call it 'the golden turd.'" Her laugh is a raucous Ha!, as if an "H" and an "A" had collided in midair.

—Tad Friend

Participating, then writing

I mentioned a couple of my own pieces in class last night, which I'll link here. The "first solo sail" piece ran in the Thursday outdoors/travel section of the Post-Intelligencer in 2006.

The New York Times piece last Sunday was on boatbuilding as character building, and was focused not on the adventure itself, but about the larger picture of lessons in life. (At least that's what I intended.)

The New York Times piece received a wonderfully gratifying response. I've had about 40 e-mails from around the country, including an invitation to speak at a business school, of all things, at a college in Virginia. After the solo sail piece, people just thought I was a doofus, which was not incorrect.

Future of the book

Here's another smart and interesting commentary on the future of the printed book by my friend and Crosscut.com colleague Knute Berger. It was in today's Crosscut.com—ironically a web-only publication.

What's happening with writing and reading?

Tonight in class I'm going to refer to some articles and websites that you may want to investigate further. Since I need practice in posting on this blog format anyway, I'm going to try planting the links here (Wish me luck):

In the Atlantic, a provocative essay on how the web is changing the way we read: "Is Google making us stupid?"

On Barnes & Noble's website, of all places, an essay by the former editor-in-chief of Random House on the state of book publishing today. Warning: it's gloomy.

But to counter that, here's Oregon outdoors writer Bill Sullivan, who's figured out how to vertically integrate his research/writing/publishing/marketing into a business that works.

Lots of interesting stuff here.

Michael directs us to Hemingway's non-fiction

Ernest Hemingway (left) is a name that doesn’t come up often in any discussion of non-fiction.

That’s a shame.

His writing for various newspapers and magazines in the early part of the twentieth century is full of eyewitness accounts to some of the most exciting events during that period. He witnessed war and its aftermath. He saw Paris during the wild years between the world wars. He palled around with many of the era’s most interesting characters. And he wrote about it all.

Much of this early writing is gathered together in the volume "By-Line Ernest Hemingway: Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades" from Charles Scribner’s Sons Publishing. It’s a great example of just how creative newspaper journalism can be. (There are even some good first person articles for those of us who enjoy that kind of thing!)

Another title worth reading is "Hemingway on Writing" compiled by Larry W. Phillips, also from Scribner’s. Although Hemingway maintained that it was bad luck for a writer to talk about writing, he spent a lot of time and energy doing just that.

-- Michael Rowe

Rathnakar finds good advice on science writing

In last Tuesday's class we had a good discussion around scientific writing and there were lot of good suggestions.

After the class I started browsing the net to find out who are the pros at scientific writing. It looks as though there are many, but one writer who grabbed my attention was Thomas Henry Huxley (left). I think the quote below from his essay "On the Study of Zoology" sums up the gist of scientific rhetoric:

"Therefore, the great business of the scientific teacher is, to imprint the fundamental, irrefragable facts of his science, not only by words upon the mind, but by sensible impressions upon the eye, and ear, and touch of the student, in so complete a manner, that every term used, or law enunciated, should afterwards call up vivid images of the particular structural, or other, facts which furnished the demonstration of the law, or the illustration of the term."

-- Rathnakar Shetty