Awesome. Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. Should be required reading.
Reminds me of the day I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in one sitting, or actually lying on my couch. The wife (now ex many years past) kept doing some really weird things to get my attention. Maybe somebody should write a book titled Zen and the Art of Surfboard Maintenance.
Maybe Ill gather info and print off posts from swaylocks, put into PDF format and make available to everyone here… like in resources, but everyones idea of maintainance, not just one way. It could be more of a humerous book, I could even put in story lines to it. Sound like a fun idea?
Hey, amigo -
Haven’t read it, but thanks for the suggestion. Dearly enjoyed the Ender and Bean stuff he’s done.
You know - we are not so sadly limited as to be ‘just surfers’ - far, far more than that. What somebody reads, enjoys and reccommends is a small window into who they truly are.
And, by Huey, yer a pretty good bunch -
Best regards and thanks
doc…
Ok i have been reading over that last few posts and find that everybody here, with the few exceptions (no names included) has an open mind. I, having surfing in my life to find myself, have decided that along with this great pastime should open my mind to further instruction from others. This includes the thoughts and opinions of you guys from the site and the books and readings that you have read that has influenced you in some way.
I being that natural scholar i am have tried many different things in my life (short lived compared to the authors people i have encountered) to find that place inside of me that i can find refuge and advice in times when everything is obscured. The readings i have encountered up until now have allowed me to enter the mind of another and see how he reacted to a particular situation may it be real or non-fiction.
Finally, I just wanted to say thank you to all who have posted because of the thoughts and books that have influenced you, and because of you ability to suggest, may well influence another to be even more inspired to do the next big thing.
Inspiration to all,
Ty
i’m not sure if someone mentioned this yet, but try “The Big Drop” it is a collection of classic big wave surfing stories.
Great attitude Formula1. A friend and advisor from my distant past (see you in some other life, Bill) wrote, in the last correspondence he sent to me before illness took him: “So, in closing, BE OPEN.”
Ditto, Doc.
Thank you
for surf related try any book by kem nunn.the jeff hackman story and greg noll’s life over the edge are fun, if not interesting to read.for ocean related, radical survival stuff: endurance, the shakelton legacy, the hungry ocean(think perfect storm) the last run(alaskan based story).da vinci code and angels and demons for a religious tweak.steinbeck, vonnegut and abbey are always fun, entertaining works to read.the list could go on and on…
Man that really takes me back. Endurance was the first major novel I read in Junior High School.
Great thread even if it isn’t surfboard design related. So much of what I read ends up being drivel. It’s nice to have input from people who’s opinion I’ve come to respect.
Anyone read any of John McPhee’s stuff? Doc? Great writer - non fiction. Coming into the Country, Survival of the Bark Canoe, and of course “Oranges” - an entire book about oranges - a lot more interesting than you would think. I think this guy could write a good book about anything.
Hey, jong -
haven’t seen Oranges, but I liked his ‘Looking for a Ship’ and a number of others- fact is there’s nothing he’s done ( that I’ve read so far ) that I haven’t liked.
Oranges…hmmmmmm
Thanks
doc…
How about A Clockwork (variety of) Orange. The concept definitely relates to some of the issues that have been discussed in this forum, such as how much tech vs how much soul and how do we give each it’s due without being nuts either way.
Haven’t seen Ambrose chime in here, but he has some really bitchin’ surf history books. Maybe he would be so kind as to name a few. 10-4 come back.
Or, my little droogs, Tracy Kidder’s the soul of a new machine - incredibly dated in some ways and in some others quite current.
His House aggravates me - too much sympathy for the $#@^ architect.
Now- I hate to say it, but for such a self-professedly soulful activity, surfing has produced few ( if any - and I lean strongly towards ‘if any’ ) writers whose skills went much beyond high school composition. Jack London wrote about it, but only peripherally, as did many others, Eugene Burdick ( The Ninth Wave) and more. Kemp Aaberg’s Big Wednesday caught me hard, but I lived that kind of time and that kind of life- a stranger to surfing would blow right by it.
Duane, all the others people talk about - sorry, I have read 'em and I think very little of the writing. Niche books, surfers will buy them but as literature they don’t come even faintly close to making it.
London’s true sea stories were far better, as were the other writings ( Burdick’s Blue of Capricorn ferinstance) …so why hasn’t a truly great writer done something with it? Or why haven’t we produced a truly great writer, who stirs the soul of somebody who has never done much with it?
Curious about this…
doc… sometime hack writer…
Quote:
Now- I hate to say it, but for such a self-professedly soulful activity, surfing has produced few ( if any - and I lean strongly towards 'if any' ) writers whose skills went much beyond high school composition. Jack London wrote about it, but only peripherally, as did many others, Eugene Burdick ( The Ninth Wave) and more. Kemp Aaberg's Big Wednesday caught me hard, but I lived that kind of time and that kind of life- a stranger to surfing would blow right by it.Duane, all the others people talk about - sorry, I have read 'em and I think very little of the writing. Niche books, surfers will buy them but as literature they don’t come even faintly close to making it.
London’s true sea stories were far better, as were the other writings ( Burdick’s Blue of Capricorn ferinstance) …so why hasn’t a truly great writer done something with it? Or why haven’t we produced a truly great writer, who stirs the soul of somebody who has never done much with it?
Curious about this…
doc… sometime hack writer…
I totally concur. I’ve been trying to write surf yarns worthy of the term “literature” for about 5 years now and can’t say I’ve succeeded. I’ll keep working. But I really don’t think anyone else has done it yet either. This might seem kind of snooty but there it is.
My Dad was a Long Beach lifeguard in the 50s/early 60s. He had the same notion–there were so many nuances and intimacies which revealed the larger human condition that he was convinced that the beach milieu should be a literary vehicle. He wrote some wonderful stuff, but he also concluded that his efforts fell short of greatness. 30 years later and along came “Baywatch.” Dang it! I coulda been a rich kid!
Edit: I surfed a bit with William Finnegan, and had a chance to discuss writing with him, and IMHO he’s written the best prose about the surfing life that I’ve ever read–which gives me hope that he’ll come up with something even better. If anyone can do it, he can.
Eric Newby, The last grain race.
This book is the author’s memoir of sailing from Britain to Australia and back again in 1938-9. He was on a big four-masted barque called the Moshulu as an Ordinary Seaman, having decided that his office job in London was stultifying and a dead-end. By this time, the number of commercially active sailing ships was very small, but a few still sailed to Australia and back to pick up South Australian grain for European consumption. Apparently some aspect of the docking procedure or conditions meant that self-powered boats didn’t want to do this route.
The ship that Newby joined was mainly crewed by Swedish speaking Finns, which meant that in addition to learning how to climb ratlines and shrouds and to haul sails in the appropriate manner, he also had to learn the Swedish terminology for all these activities so that he could understand what he was being told to do.
I definitely enjoyed this book. Newby writes well, with the scenes and personalities (the other seamen) he describes coming across vividly. He also sees and conveys the humour in many situations. There are a couple of short sections early on, which he flags, that are heavily “technical”, being about rigging and sails and masts, but not understanding or skipping these two shouldn’t be a problem. I read them, but I don’t think I grasped them in their entirety, and the rest of the book was still very enjoyable.
The edition I read included some very nice B/W photos that Newby took while on the voyage. These were taken from his book Learning the ropes, which consists entirely of these photos.
Thanks once again-
You see, I have what you might call a fortunate situation: http://www.easthamlibrary.org/index.htm - my local library, is perhaps a three minute leisurely walk away.
And the local libraries have http://www.clamsnet.org/ - a setup that allows me to do a request via interlibrary loan 24 hours a day, given my library card number ( one of the few things on earth I have memorised ) and access. Searchable, it’s taken the place of the card catalogs. And just now I got dangerous with the works of Eric Newby.
For what it’s worth, these online request setups are all over the place - chances are there’s one handy for everybody, one way or another.
Now - why haven’t there been great surf writers? Thinking about it, the easy explanations (for instance that there are too few of us? nah- consider aviation’s St. Extupery - The Little Prince and Sand, Moon and Stars or Ernest K. Gann , both of whom were professional pilots before 1940) don’t work.
I have to say I’m baffled - seamen, sailors, merchant seamen and others around the ocean have done some truly fine writing, for instance the merchant seaman and ship’s officer Joseph Conrad who managed to write mighty well in a language he acquired late.
And even good books by people who happen to surf don’t revolve around surfing. Everybody from Terry Pratchett to Jack London mentions surfing somewhere but it sure doesn’t revolve around it.
Dunno - could it be that there’s a paralell with the ever more repetitive, ever more tedious surf videos? Damned if I can figure it out…
doc…
Wow, you were right again Doc. I checked out http://library.clamsnet.org/search/Xeric+newby&SORT=A&searchscope=1/Xeric+newby&SORT=A&searchscope=1/13%2C22%2C22%2CB/browse and bingo! I had forgotten about " A short walk through the Hindu Kush".
http://www.pilothousecharts.com/capehorn.htm
to gain a little perspective on early californio history Dana’s two years before the mast is a must read.