THE OTHER CAPTAIN: AMASA DELANO

There is a book that I hope to acquire soon—The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World by Greg Grandin, a professor of history at New York University. Grandin's book examines the historical event that is also the basis of Herman Melville's novel Benito Cereno, the latter of which I recently read again this summer while on vacation.

Grandin has been writing companion pieces in various newspapers and magazines, which is keeping his book on my horizon, as well as building interest for me (and hopefully others).

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"Ahab is certainly one face of American power. In the course of writing a book on the history that inspired Benito Cereno, I’ve come to think of it as not the most frightening—or even the most destructive of American faces. Consider Amasa."
—Greg Grandin

Read "The Two Faces of Empire: Melville Knew Them, We Still Live With Them" at billmoyers.com

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"Barack Obama may have avoided the fate of the protagonist of “Invisible Man,” but he hasn’t been able to escape the shadow of Babo. He is Babo, or at least he is to a significant part of the American population—including many of the white rank and file of the Republican Party and the Tea Party politicians they help elect."
—Greg Grandin

Read "Obama, Melville and the Tea Party" at nytimes.com

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Order Grandin's book from Powell's City of Books.

SELFIES

The Melvilleans, clockwise from upper left: "Captain," "Shadows," "Loomings" (photograph by the Child), and "Lamp."

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A friend and fellow writer described a selfie I took at the ocean as"Melvillian." I took that as a challenge, with my preferred spelling of "Melvillean" and began another piece of my ongoing "Cutting In" project, playing with the current fascination of photographic self-portraiture.

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selfie noun, informal (also selfy; plural selfies) was named "Word of the Year 2013" by Oxford Dictionaries. Oxford defines selfie as "a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website.

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So, I suppose that none of the four photographs posted above are technically selfies in the truest sense of the definition. Three of the four were taken with a camera on a tripod and a portable light, while the fourth was taken by another person.

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But what is the fascination with taking photographs of our selves? Self exploration? Narcissism? Sharing of our selves with one another? Fighting against existential dread and impending negation? All of the above?

In a series in The New York Times that it is appropriately called "The Disrupters," actor and director James Franco contemplates "The Meanings of the Selfie" as "The Attention Getter."

His core observation, in my opinion, is that "Attention is power. And if you are someone people are interested in, then the selfie provides something very powerful, from the most privileged perspective possible."

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But all is not power, or, at least not just power for power's sake. Hopefully, there are also rather thoughtful and provocative self-portraits such as those of Chino Otsuka. She has manipulated photographs of herself as a child to include her current self. The new photographs are intriguing and inviting, a conversation with one's self. As she describes the photos and the process: "The digital process becomes a tool, almost like a time machine as I'm embarking on the journey to where I once belonged and at the same time becoming a tourist in my own history."

You need to see them to experience the power that they generate from within. View pictures from Chino Otsuka's Imagine Finding Me HERE.

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And we continue to explore who we are—individually and collectively.

NEWS NOWADAYS

"Then the item vanished from the press completely, as tends to happen with all news nowadays: people don't want to know why something happened, only what happened, and to know that the world is full of reckless acts, or dangers, threats and bad luck that only brush past us, but touch and kill our careless fellow human beings, or perhaps they were simply not among the chosen. We live quite happily with a thousand unresolved mysteries that occupy our minds for ten minutes in the morning and are then forgotten without leaving so much as a tremor of grief, not a trace. We don't want to go too deeply into anything or linger too long over any event or story, we need to have our attention shifted from one thing to another, to be given a constantly renewed supply of other people's misfortunes, as if, after each one, we thought: 'How dreadful. But what's next? What other horrors have we avoided? We need to feel that we, by contrast, are survivors, immortals, so feed us some new atrocities, we've won out yesterday's already.'"

—pages 34-35, The Infatuations by Javier Marías.

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I imagine the long, sinuous, languorous, ever-shifting oxbow sentences of Marías, as presented by his English translator Maria Jull Costa, to be as rich and challenging in their original Spanish. They remind me of Melville. They take time to arrive somewhere, but the places they go are oh so spectacular and rewarding.

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Marías asks us to play along with his characters. His works explore the realms of observation, perception, memory, and recall. We (along with the characters) become witnesses to what we sense; and each of us will notice different things.

THE DOG AT OCEAN SHORES

The Dog at Ocean Shores.

CHRISTMAS

"He stood there. He felt with his thumb in the painted wood of the mantle the pinholes from tacks that had held stockings forty years ago. This is where we used to have Christmas when I was a boy. He turned and looked out at the waste of the yard. A tangle of dead lilac. The shape of a hedge. On cold winter nights when the electricity was out in a storm we would sit at the fire here, me and my sisters, doing our homework. The boy watched him. Watched shapes claiming him he could not see. We should go, Papa, he said. Yes, the man said. But he didn't."

—page 22, The Road by Cormac McCarthy.

SNOWING

"It's snowing, the boy said. He looked at the sky. A single gray flake sifting down. He caught it in his hand and watched it expire there like the last host of christendom."

—page 13, The Road by Cormac McCarthy.

LONGEST NIGHT

Sunset on the North Hill of Puyallup.

The longest night has me in its clutches. It is on the back side of two nights of insomnia. I am worn thin—physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually.

The darkness of the season strips me. Soon, I am only wounded flesh, aching bones.

The cold of the snow that came and went in a few hours still lingers. I feel it in my body. I feel it in my mind, it being conjured up in my recent reading of Peter Verhelt's Tonguecat at the recent Post Defiance Winter Reading, as well as it reaching for me from this night in 2007. I feel it in the anger that it is quick to surface as people crowd around me (and from this night in 2012). I feel it in my soul as the loneliness of Advent waiting shifts from anticipation to apathy. I feel the need to hibernate.

I just want to curl up with a pint of winter warmer and a good book. I want to take a few sips and read a few pages and drift into a nap, short or long. But I want to rest, to sleep, to dream.

WINTER READING

Tonight, I attended the second annual Winter Reading of Post Defiance, an online magazine based in the real world of Tacoma (physically, figuratively, thematically).

It was a time to sit together in someone's living room and snack on food and drink beer and wine and read winter- and Christmas-themed poems and essays and stories to one another. The readings included many animals under the canopy of the "winter" tent. Some were traditional—a poem by Robert Frost and a short story by Pearl Buck. Some were humorous—a chapter from The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance by Elna Baker, chapters from two different Augusten Burroughs books, an excerpt from The Rebel Angels by Robertson Davies, and a poem by E.B. White. Some were apocalyptic—excerpts from World War Z by Max Brooks and Tonguecat by Peter Verhelst (the latter read by me). Some were horror-laden—"The Festival" by H.P. Lovecraft. Some were written for children, although we enjoyed them as adults—a (first printing) picture book (from the 1960s) of A Charlie Brown Christmas by Charles Schulz and Part 3 of a story being serialized* on Post Defiance, the latter read by its author. And there were a few more.

It was great to find a group of other people for whom literature is serious business, both as writers and (perhaps even more importantly) as readers, and to sit in their midst and to hear their voices and to hear the stories that they selected to share. It was a bit of winter magic in the midst of the dark and damp of the Pacific Northwest in December. It was beautiful.

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*
Read The Holly and the Ivy, Part 1 by Timothy Thomas McNealy.
Read The Holly and the Ivy, Part 2 by Timothy Thomas McNealy.
(Part 3 will be released at Post Defiance on Monday 16 December 2013.)

DECEMBER'S BARENESS

How like a winter hath my absence been
From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!
What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen!
What old December’s bareness everywhere!

—from "Sonnet 97" by William Shakespeare.

NUTCRACKER

Detail of a "gingerbread house" nutcracker friend that TWT made at The Child's school event.