Reading List! Books, Videos, and Websites to re/visit accumulated during my travels....

Whew! I just poured through three notebooks and ten books of crazy annotations (some more slapdash than others...) to compile my re/visit literature/videos/website list! While this will definitely serve as a meaningful reminder of materials I personally need to spend some time with, hopefully some of you can benefit from this compilation as well... whether you are a teacher, student, or merely an avid reader, I think there is some amazing material here (in no particular order... sorry!):

BOOKS/SHORT STORIES/PLAYS I NEED TO RE/VISIT:

Steinbeck's Reading (Robert DeMott)
Steinbeck's Typewriter (Robert DeMott)
Moby Dick (Herman Melville) 
Uncle Tom's Cabin (Stowe) 
The Tortilla Curtain (TC Boyle) 
My Antonia (Cather)
China Men (Kingston)
Yonnonido: From the Thirties (Olsen)
America is in the Heart (Carlos Buloson)
Nightland (Louis Owens)
The Cariboo Cafe (Helena Viramontes)
Under the Feet of Jesus (Helena Viramontes)
Y No Se Trago La Tierra (Tomas Rivera)
Monstress (Lysley Tenorio)
The Spiritual Life of Children (Robert Coles)
Joe Turner's Come and Gone (August Wilson)
A Thousand Acres (Jane Smiley)
People of Plenty (David Potter)
The Organization Man (William Whyte)
The Suburban Myth (Bennett Berger)
The Feminine Mystique (Betty Frieden)
The American Dream (Jim Cullen)
Between Pacific Tides (E.F. Ricketts)
Titus Tidewater (Children's Book - Suzy Verrier)
The Age of Wonder (Richard Holmes)
Robinson Crusoe (Daniel DeFoe)
Treasure Island (Stevenson)
Swiss Family Robinson (Wyss)
A Pirate of Exquisite Mind (Michael Preston)
A Sand County Almanac (Aldo Leopold)
On the Sale of my Farm (poem - Robert Frost)
Little Scarlet (Walter Mosely)
Shanghai Girls (Lisa See)
Big Sur (Kerouac)
Sonny's Blues (Baldwin)
The Big Sleep (Chandler)
A Lesson Before Dying (Ernest J. Gaines)
Song of Solomon (Toni Morrison)
A Slow Walk of Trees: As Grandmother Would Say (NY Times: Toni Morrison)
Hidden Persuaders (Vance Packard)
Status Seekers (Vance Packard)
Waste Makers (Vance Packard)
Studs Lonigan (Farrell)
Harvest Gypsies (Steinbeck Center Publication)
Let the Great World Spin (Colum McCann)
We Are Not Ourselves (Colum McCann) - not yet released? Damn it, Bill. 
Peter Kuper's Graphic Novel rendition of Kafka's The Metamorphosis
Perma Red (Debra Magpie Earling)
Norwegian Wood (Haruki Murakami)
The White Tiger (Aravind Adiga)
How to Write About Series (Harold Bloom)
Incident (poem) by Countee Cullen
The Art of Fielding (Chad Harbach)
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime (Mark Haddon)

MUSIC TO RE/VISIT

Dvorak's #9
Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake
Bach's Art of the Fugue
Monteverde
Scarlatti
Buxtehude
Collected work of Mozart 
Bill Frisell
Joe Hill (The Preacher and the Slave, The Tramp, There is Power in a Union, The Rebel Girl, Casey Jones--Union Scab)
Woody Guthrie
Californication - Red Hot Chili Peppers
Sleep Now in the Fire - Rage Against the Machine
The Ghost of Tom Joad - Springsteen / RATM
Dave Matthews Band - The Murder (need to verify the title on this one...)

VIDEOS TO RE/VISIT

The Plow that Broke the Plains (Pare Lorenz)
The River (Pare Lorenz)
Charles Kuralt's Steinbeck Video
Cesar Chavez: The Fight in the Fields (PBS)
The Bling Ring
Little Miss Sunshine & Crash (paired with Grapes of Wrath)
McDonalds ad (manipulation of ads - YouTube)
Cheerios interracial ad (YouTube)
Dave Chappele and Maya Angelou: Iconoclasts (YouTube)
Race is the Place (YouTube)
Kung Fooled (YouTube)
The Greatest Speech Ever Made (YouTube)
Keep Race Out of It (YouTube)

WEBSITES TO RE/VISIT

dbacon.igc.org (immigration photography)
calitexperience.com (P. Barraza's California Lit class materials)
apstation.com (P. Barraza's AP class website)
WeeGee

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I will continue to update this as I find more items! If any other participants have good stuff to add here, please email me and I will add it on!

For your viewing pleasure: the discovery of a Sea Hare during our intertidal zone exploration:

 I should have my lesson plan materials and a few more videos (song links!) up on the blog in the next week or so... stay tuned!

The NEH needs your help! Links to pictures, too...

Monterey at night as seen from Stanford University's Hopkins Marine Station

Now safely back home (my wife and daughter flew to Monterey after the institute wrapped up on  August 2nd and spent a week in Central and Northern California with me before we jointly headed home) in Virginia and anxiously anticipating the kickoff of yet another year, I'm compiling notes, and starting the inevitable process of sharing stories, songs, and photos from the 2013 Steinbeck Institute with parents, friends, and colleagues.

Returning for a moment to what initially brought me to the program (beyond my amazing wife's support and motivational tactics...), I really am indebted to a good friend who spotted the program posting on the NEH summer scholar program boards... without the "heads up," I most certainly would have never applied to the program, simply because I did not know it existed (so thanks, Sarah!). For those of you who are high school teachers or college professors, the NEH has fabulous summer educational programs available for those who apply and are selected. Click HERE to visit the NEH's website with a listing of this past year's programs.

Sadly, the NEH, for those of you who do not know, is now being threatened by a massive 49% funding cutback by the House of Representatives Appropriations Committee ($71 million dollars) which would surely devastate funding for these valuable programs... the reduction was up for vote in early August and the cut was debated but ultimately the committee adjourned for recess until the September session for a final determination. A pittance (approx 3%) of the fiscal budget is allocated to education as is...

I implore all of you to visit this site (National Humanities Alliance) and write your local representatives (the website extrapolates your location and representative data and even drafts a generic "don't cut" email to be sent... although you do have the option of revising the content and tailoring it to your liking): CLICK HERE TO HELP THE NEH!!!

....

The Steinbeck Institute was a game-changer for me in many ways... this was an excerpt from the letter I sent to Senators Warner and Kaine in support of maintaining the NEH funding:

As a high school teacher in a small Northern Virginia city system, I am faced daily with students from extremely diverse cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds who challenge me to make English literature both meaningful and relevant to their 21st century lives as Americans. While I have had great success teaching Steinbeck's shorter works (Of Mice and Men, The Red Pony, The Pearl) in the past, I have long grappled with the notion of teaching Steinbeck's more challenging (and ultimately more meaningful) books to my diverse student body in a general education context. Throughout the course of the NEH-funded institute I attended, I was equipped with the pedagogical skills needed to approach Steinbeck's greater and more complex works (The Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden, the Sea of Cortez, and Cannery Row) with confidence, clarity, and meaningfulness as a teacher. The opportunity to have round table brainstorming, activities, and trips to locations throughout "Steinbeck country" with the penultimate Steinbeck scholars in the literary scene today was beyond inspiring. I have been absolutely galvanized by this experience and I am ready, willing, and able to tackle these powerful and life altering works of great American literature with my students in the upcoming school year. I am ready to change lives with the help of Steinbeck...

How many of you have been inspired or challenged to become a better person by a teacher? The NEH's programs are designed to keep churning out THAT sort of pedagogue... show your support and write to your representative!!!

FINALLY, I have uploaded the pictures from our trip to a photobucket site... you should be able to view these as a slide show or download any/all of them for your classes, lectures, or personal use. Enjoy! Stay tuned for a few videos and my "book list" accumulated from discussions with other scholars and professors... 

Click Here: Dan's Steinbeck Institute Photobucket Site

Deep thoughts at the Hopkins Marine Station Fisher Building...

Big Sur... another moment of sublimity...

Our last day (after lecture) in the Steinbeck Institute took us south to (through) Big Sur for a fabulously photogenic tour of the southern coast accessible from the scenic CA Rt. 1. The photo above depicts a bridge apparently utilized in many automotive advertisements (think fast cars whipping around hairpin turns at 80mph with the surf, sand, and trees blowing incessantly and majestically in the background) and it is immediately obvious why the admen/adwomen would choose such a locale... it is simply hard to believe a place this beautiful exists, much less in the continental United States.

While the drive south to the town of Big Sur and our final destination of Pheiffer Beach was absolutely beautiful, it is hard (even for a moment) to not feel like you are on the verge of teetering over the edge of these curvy roads to oblivion... mere millimeters, it seems, from absolute obliteration on the rocks. As we hurried south, this imminent sense of natural power and dormant violence became more apparent... From the sheer elevation of the cliffs to the powerful wind and waves, it was easy to feel insignificant in the presence of such natural beauty.

The state of California has done an amazing job maintaining the natural authenticity of this coastline... very few homes and "McMansions" mar the coastal vistas you see below:

After taking several "pull out for photo" stops along the way, we stopped to grab snacks in the little township of Big Sur... quite an idyllic scene... in an effort to combat my infamous "low blood sugar blues", I consumed what must have been about 3,000 calories of yogurt covered pretzels... mmmm....

Our final destination in the Big Sur region was Pheiffer Beach... which was, in the words of one of our counterparts, tantamount to visiting "one of the wonders of the world...." The wind on this particular day was extremely intense... so much so that I feared for my camera's lens... so the pictures I took are primarily from the sides of the cliff faces as opposed to out in the open. The purple-hued sands can pack a punch when mother nature wants to smack you in the face! In spite of the winds, this was a wonderful natural experience (I thought) to "go out" on... bringing one final and interesting fusion of the land and sea elements so closely examined in our Steinbeck country endeavor. Big Sur was something special... something with a hint of secrecy and power that I don't think I'll ever forget... but don't take it from me--check it out for yourself...

Tomorrow, I plan to start my final retrospective on my experience in the 2013 NEH Steinbeck Institute... clearly, this was an experience that will stay with me for the rest of my life... and one I am beyond proud to have been affiliated with. I'll miss all of my Steinbeck buddies!

A marine expedition through the Monterey Bay...

Pelican on the move... from our chartered whale watching vessel... 

An early morning expedition on a whale watching vessel marked the symbolic closure of our explorations of Steinbeck's bay/sea-centric literature (Cannery Row, Sweet Thursday, Tortilla Flat, The Sea of Cortez). While Steinbeck would always maintain some proximity to the ocean for the rest of his life (when he relocated to New York City with his third wife Elaine he purchased a seaside property up the long island sound in Sag Harbor), I wonder how much of his fascination/need for the great deep blue stemmed from his associations with his counterpart Ed Ricketts, to whom the ocean was beyond necessity. In America and Americans, the collected works of Steinbeck's nonfiction, there is an extremely brief piece titled "...like captured butterflies" in which Steinbeck recounts a conversation with his son about attending school--namely, how to survive it, and how to cope with its seemingly unending nature:

"It is customary for adults to forget how hard and dull and long school is. The learning by memory and all the basic things one must know is the most incredible and unending effort...School is not easy and it is not for the most part very much fun, but then, if you are very lucky, you may find a teacher. Three real teachers in a lifetime is the very best of luck. My first was a science and math teacher in high school, my second a professor of writing at Stanford, and my third was my friend and partner, Ed Ricketts..." (America and Americans, 142).

As we toured the deep blue Monterey Bay, I found myself drifting to thoughts of Steinbeck and Ricketts... especially as we passed the backside of Doc's laboratory, now sandwiched painfully between the terminus of the Aquarium and a series of luxury hotels and tchotchke store fronts:

Doc's  lab is back there somewhere...

How much of Steinbeck's association and obsession with the water was purely nostalgia? The friend-brother-teacher-partner-in-crime dynamic is a hard thing to find...

As far as the day of aquatic sightseeing was concerned, we had (generally) a great four hour outing. A few folks came down with an acute case of "vomitus maximus" (seasickness...) which definitely affected their enjoyment... funny how different a diesel powered fishing vessel "feels" from other boats... I've been out on sailboats from 20'-60' several times and never really experienced any nausea... but this time, I did feel a bit queasy...for a while... I wonder how much of it was a physical reaction and how much of it was a psychosomatic reaction to all of the "don't forget to take your dramamine or you are going to blow chunks" talk that was rampant the day of the trip... hmm...

The whales, while plentiful, maintained about the same distance from the boat (with one or two humpback exceptions) as our encounter with them off the coast of Hopkins... which was a little disappointing... I really wanted to get some hi-def shots of their faces with pock-marked barnacles all over!!! Dang! We did see quite a few jellyfish, Rizzo dolphins, sunfish (the largest bony fish in the sea!), and we did have a few blue whale sightings... unfortunately, the blues don't seem (or didn't this day) to put on the exhibition that their smaller humpbacked counterparts do...

After the initial voyage was over, a few of us headed back out to sea with Gilly to attempt to snare some squid... Gilly (Bill Gilly, our Stanford University co-director of the institute) is a true squid aficionado. We were lucky enough to have a few classroom lectures centered on squid and their extremely fascinating chromatophore cells (the pigment altering organelles that allow cephalopods to quickly modulate from one skin color schema to another), behavior, and communication abilities...  the "squid cam" videos taken on expeditions to Baja were incredible...  but I digress... back to the 'bay critters:

Sea lions! Notice their large stature and the little earflaps... these distinguish them from the smaller  harbor seals

Large and in-charge!

Humpback whale-tale!

Another humpback

The elusive blue-whale-tail (top center)

Humpback and baby part I

Humpback and baby part II

Now THAT is some crucial whale-tale... (humpback)

Rizzo Dolphins 

Lily with a water bottle full of micro jellyfish... never using that again...

Hopkins Marine Station's Fisher building from the boat....

Gilly and the Sea... fishing for squid...

Whales! Thar she blows! I need to spend some time with Ahab...

Humpback off the course of Hopkins...

Thar she blows! During one of our final outdoor discussions at Stanford's Hopkins Marine Station, we enjoyed our lunch while a mother humpback whale and her calf did acrobatics off shore... most of these shots (unless noted otherwise) were taken from the shore with my Nikon D80 DSLR camera through a Tamron 18/200mm zoom lens on a high speed shutter setting. Just as the allure and mystique of snapping photos of the chubby harbor seals, otters, and sea lions had started to wear off, these two pulled a 30 minute exercise session within plain view of our picnic tables... First you see the spout of water (no photos of the spout unfortunately) and then the whales break the surface! The pair were particularly playful on this day (not sure if it was the weather, time of day, temperature of water or what...). Even our dedicated whale watching expedition (on a chartered fishing boat) did not render nearly as many photo ops (insofar as the whales were concerned at least...). Check it out:

While the whale watching was absolutely entertaining from a "National Geographic" perspective, it really inspired me to pick up another copy of Moby Dick for a much-needed re-reading. It has (I'm embarrassed to say) been many years since I have read Melville beyond the normal anthology selections (Bartleby the Scrivener, Benito Cereno). Susan Shillinglaw, our Steinbeck Institute English Lit director, teaches a course with both Grapes of Wrath and Moby Dick - both books alternate from a "general" to a "specific" chapter... a stylistic choice that Steinbeck likely "borrowed" from Melville (as he was apparently reading Moby Dick while composing Grapes of Wrath. Several of the other English teachers (obviously an AP text) taught Moby Dick and through some great discussions with them I am really interested to not only get back into Melville but to perhaps use the text in my own classroom at some point in the not-too-distant future (paired with Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath... naturally... I beg, borrow, and steal all my good material... the "white whale" will certainly take on a multi-dimensional significance!). I actually read Moby Dick for the first time in a team-taught interdisciplinary AP Language / AP US History course when I was in high school and it was phenomenal... which reminds me... I need to reach out to my social studies dept. cohorts when I get back...

Anyway, the whales were a hoot to see "live and in person." This experience, coupled with our fabulous tidal zone / tidepool discovery session with Gilly and the marine biologist staff at Hopkins has certainly warped my perspective (in a good way) on viewing these animals in captivity... the aquarium is awesome--don't get me wrong--but seeing these creatures alive in their own natural habitats is just another experience altogether... one I hope everyone will have a chance to experience on some level at some point in their lives!

Tomorrow, I'll upload some of our awesome shots from our chartered boat tour... while the whales were not nearly as active (frisky!), there were many more in attendance (and much closer to the camera). Dolphins, Malo Malo, Jellies, and other animals were there, too... Stay tuned!

Naval Postgraduate School - Monterey, CA

Facade of the Naval Postgraduate School Administration Building, built in 1926

If one were to run, bike, walk, or drive north from Cannery Row on the seaside pathways or roads of Monterey, the Naval Postgraduate School would eventually become visible to your right (east of the ocean). While the hotel was originally erected in 1880, a series of major fires and natural disasters (the first structure burned in 1887, was rebuilt and then badly damaged in the infamous 1906 California earthquake, and then the hotel burned again in 1924) would reduce the structure to rubble. Famous guests included Theodore and Eleanor Roosevelt, Charlie Chaplin, Ernest Hemingway, Salvador Dali (who threw a massive party in the ballroom...), Clark Gable, Walt Disney, Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, and Charles Lindbergh (among others). In short, at the time, the Hotel Del Monte was the "place to be."

The recently restored "Roman Bath" in front of the main building

In 1942, the Department of Navy leased the hotel and remaining grounds (the original property was around 20,000 acres, including the famous 17 mile drive and what is now the Pebble Beach golf course) to rehouse its burgeoning Postgraduate school and aviator pre-flight school (originally located on the Naval Academy grounds in Annapolis, MD). Today, the facility continues to serve as the only Postgraduate (awarding Masters and Doctoral degrees) facility for the United States Military - all branches of service (Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, Coast Guard) in addition to other Dept. of Homeland Security forces (State Dept., FBI, CIA, etc.) are in attendance as well as foreign diplomatic military students studying engineering, aerospace, mathematics, physics, and other such STEM fields.

Ballroom...

View of the Bay from the roof...

Our tour guide John Sanders is the Special Collections Manager (archivist) for the property (the Dudley Knox Library) and he really brought a passion and intensity to his presentations that transmitted his love and pride for the property... I hope I can continue to bring his level of enthusiasm to my own classrooms for years to come...

A fantastic photo of Jon blinking. Nice. 

The Del /monte Hotel Cookbook Steinbeck connection!:

The beautiful and the sublime... Robinson Jeffers

The beautiful Tor House in Carmel, stones quarried by hand by Jeffers...

This past Monday, the group loaded into the vans and headed to Carmel-by-the-Sea, California (south of Monterey) for an in depth look into the life of the revered California poet Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962). Jeffers, an academic child prodigy (by his teens he could read and speak German, French, Hebrew, Latin, and Greek) was the son of a doctoral degree-holding Presbyterian minister who taught Biblical studies extensively at colleges in antebellum America. Jeffers' mother Annie was a direct descendant of Jonathan Edwards, famed Calvinist and Puritan reformer.

In spite of his rigid academic and stringent religious upbringing, Robin found himself at odds with his father's religion and ultimately adopted (although he seems to portray it more as "accepted" or "understood") a personal religion of "Calvinist pantheistic inhumanism" ("inhumanism" being an intentional distinction by Jeffers from the transcendentalist notion of humanism seen throughout the work and philosophies of Emerson and Whitman). Jeffers saw humanity's collective sense of consciousness as the intangible thing that allowed for our unique experience of "beauty and the sublime" while also distancing us hopelessly and terminally from our "true" and more fundamentally animal nature. The hawks soaring overhead his Tor House or the granite rocks on the Carmel cliff shore had, for Jeffers, a closer association with God or oneness or eternity and more to do with truthfulness and authenticity than the other major philosophical schools of thought championed by others in his time.

Jeffers' notion of the holistic ecological framework (pantheism...) of life put him in close touch with the beauty and significance of everything around him. For quite a while, I have grappled with the notion of distinguishing the "beautiful" from the "sublime" (thinking back to my lit crit classes as an undergrad) and I think Jeffers (and the killer Jeffers anthology of poetry I purchased from the Tor House bookstore!) and his Hawk Tower (and a recent excursion to Big Sur) have finally created a palpable image in my head that helps to distinguish one from the other as well as clarifying the importance of "the experience of the sublime" in life. I'm paraphrasing in a major way from the Jeffers anthology:

Beauty: think "maternal"--warmth, sunshine, security, with a profound sense of serenity... e.g. where Wordsworth's "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" from Lyrical Ballads might take place:

freakin' beautiful, right?

Another type of beauty... HOME...

Part 2:

Sublimity: think "paternal"--steely, robust, powerful, and a profound sense of what Steinbeck called "a violence just below the surface..." In other words, something breathtaking but also terrifying.

The waves of Big Sur are gorgeous, but they will kill you... 

Jeffers would applaud this family (front center)... you do need to experience the sublime... just at safe distance...

Jeffers seemed to celebrate the idea of living perpetually on the verge of the sublime... so much so that he built his Tor House and Hawk Tower on the edge of a rocky precipice (that leads down to the Carmel seaside). Literally and figuratively, Jeffers "lived on the edge."

By maintaining some proximity to scenes of sublimity, we are reminded of how insignificant we are... an experience which can, in Jeffers' own terminology, unhumanize (lead us away from our individual sense of importance, our ego) us to a degree. 

Much like buddhist monks might reject all material belongings in an attempt to ready themselves for higher states of enlightenment, Jeffers seems to ask us to contemplate and appreciate the smallness of "the self" and the importance of situating ourselves within the world (the "I" to the "we"?). The birds (hawks!) have it right... no contemplation of mortality or meaning, just experience and acceptance.

Jeffers and his poetry were (in spite of early celebration of his work and a front page feature in Time magazine) ultimately eschewed by canon scholars due to his controversial rejection of American military involvement and open criticism of the U.S. in World War II. In addition to his political vociferousness, much of Jeffers' work is dark, brooding, and melancholy (depending how you view his perspective) and it seems likely that because of these "issues" he has been widely ignored outside of California's literary scene (with a few exceptions, of course).

Jeffers' tribute to his wife, quarried all by hand, and a major feat of stonemasonry, is his "Hawk Tower," a massive stone structure (massive when you realize it is hand built!) that is a sublime experience in  itself... from the exterior, it seems almost menacing and powerful in its medieval grandiosity... and once up on the balcony and finally at the nadir of the structure on the roof, it is simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying... a perfect (at least for a city dwelling land-lubber like me) lesson in sublimity.

From the beauty of his family home (Tor House) to the sublimity of Hawk Tower, the property is a must-see for literary folk of any ilk... prior to this institute, I had never been exposed to Jeffers and I'm quite glad I did....

While the Steinbeck connection is arguably tenuous (the two men never physically met to my knowledge an they do not really seem to share much in the way of literary structure) in a way, Jeffers was the Steinbeck of Carmel (even though he was not raised in California) and the two men did share a penchant for pantheistic philosophy. As a man steeped in the land (quite literally, having moved tons of granite boulders in his day) Jeffers said that the Carmel coast reminded him of Homer's Ithaca... A fitting scene for a rather epic life. I wonder what Jeffers would say about Carmel today--strolling from expensive boutique to art gallery to upscale restaurant--and what he would have to say about the transformations it has undergone. I imagine he would avert his gaze seaward, out toward oblivion.

The sublime Hawk Tower... 

Quarried by hand from the beach below....

A premature retrospective, part 1

This will have to be something of a post-mortem Steinbeck Institute entry (or series of entries)--I caught a bit of the Steinbeck journaling ennui (as seen in Journal of a Novel and Working Days from time to time) with my writing--but I still have a few days of pictures, information, songs, and (hopefully) insights to share.

As I reflect on the past three weeks with my colleagues and the fabulous proctors of the institute, I'm sure more tidbits of things I've forgotten will begin to surface... so I'll make a point to jot them down here. I do, perhaps most importantly, intend to publish a "required reading list," or some sort of compilation of the amazing book recommendations I have amassed while here (invariably the byproduct of being around a group of English, history, and science academics...). 

First, for all of you in the throes of deep nostalgia for Monterey, perhaps this photo will send you reeling back to our memorable mornings together:

Best enjoyed listening to the "Best Western Inn" song by Jim and Dan

I plan to publish entries detailing our visit to Robinson Jeffers' Tor House in Carmel, our stop at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, the sea voyage whale watching in the Monterey Bay, and an epic group excursion down to Phieffer Beach in Big Sur.

Also on the list--loading up a photobucket/flickr site with all of my pictures for those that would like to download them... so many of us nabbed fantastic shots here, I fully plan to beg, borrow, and steal as much as I possibly can manage. 

"Jim and Dan in the Can," the debut album (recorded right here in Monterey!) from my nefarious roommate and I, will be made available via YouTube over the next few days... so stay tuned!

Thanks again to all of the participants and proctors of the institute for the mountain of memories that will last a lifetime! 

More to come...

Big Sur!!!!

The Sea of Cortez

Humpback whales sighted off the shore of Hopkins today...

Week three continues to deliver the rigor! On monday, Susan and Gilly coaxed us into the philosophically inviting waters of The Log from the Sea of Cortez, a collection of journalistic musings kept by John Steinbeck and his comrade-in-arms, Edward F. Ricketts (Doc from Cannery Row) that narrated, to a certain extent, their epic six-week marine animal collecting expedition down the Baja peninsula and into the Sea of Cortez. In the originally published format (The Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research), Steinbeck's Log was followed by Ricketts' extensively annotated catalog of marine specimens. For our purposes, the narrative content provided more than enough material for debate, discussion, and dissection. The format of The Sea of Cortez can be daunting; from chapter to chapter, shifts in voice, perspective, and content occur, which (to put it plainly) can drive many readers absolutely crazy. It should be noted that Steinbeck goes so far as to alert his readers to the narrative differences of this work:

"The design of a book is the pattern of a reality controlled and shaped by the mind of the writer. This is completely understood about poetry or fiction, but it is too seldom realized about books of fact. And yet the impulse which drives a man to poetry will send another man into the tide pools and force him to try to report what he finds there...We have a book to write about the Gulf of California. We could do one of several things about its design. But we have decided to let it form itself: its boundaries a boat and sea; its duration a six weeks' charter time; its subject everything we could see and think and even imagine; its limits--our own without reservation" (Sea of Cortez, page 1).

There you have it... he warned you--life will "form itself...."

In 1945, Steinbeck would publish Cannery Row, and with it an invocation that resonates with the above passage:

"How can the poem and the stink and the grating noise--the quality of light, the tone, the habit and the dream--be set down alive? When you collect marine animals there are certain flat worms so delicate that they are almost impossible to capture whole, for they break and tatter under the touch. You must let them ooze and crawl of their own will onto a knife blade and then lift them gently into your bottle of sea water. And perhaps that might be the way to write this book--to open the page and to let the stories crawl in by themselves" (Cannery Row, pages 3-4). 

Again, life will form/fix itself organically...

What Sea of Cortez lacks in traditional structural integrity it more than makes up for with its engaging philosophical content. Throughout the book, little "nuggets" of epistemological goodness pop up and force some seriously deep thoughts (by Jack Handey!) to the surface:

"The safety-valve of all speculation is: 'it might be so'. And so long as that remains, a variable deeply understood, then speculation does not easily become dogma, but remains the fluid creative thing it might be. Thus, a valid painter, letting color and one, observe, sift into his eyes, up the nerve trunks, and mix well with his experience before it flows down his hand to the canvas, has made his painting say, 'it might be so'... Perhaps his critic, being not so honest and not so wise, will say, 'it is NOT so. The picture is damned.' If this critic could say, 'it is not so with ME,' but that might be because my mind and experience are not identical with those of the painter,' that critic would be the better critic for it, just as that painter is a better painter for knowing he himself is in the pigment" (Sea of Cortez, page 219). 

I read this as an interesting Steinbeck-Ricketts discussion that might very well be some degree of a prototype for future intellectual explorations into what Steinbeck's East of Eden calls "timshel"--thou mayest. It might be so... 

As a work of creative non-fiction, memoir, philosophy, marine biology, or whatever else you want to call it, Sea of Cortez offers an incredible abundance of personal anecdotes and insights into who Steinbeck and Ricketts were (and perhaps more importantly) as men and to what extent they played supporting roles in each others' creative growth. The loneliness, alienation, and melancholia imbedded in many of Steinbeck's books might be best articulated through his description of Ricketts from About Ed Ricketts, a biographical essay on his friend that would be included in the editions of The Sea of Cortez after Ricketts' tragic death:

But for all of Ed's pleasures and honesties there was a transcendent sadness in his love--something he missed or wanted, a searching that sometimes approached panic. I don't know what it was he wanted that was not there, but I know he always looked for it and never found it. He sought for it and listened for it and looked for it and smelled for it ad listened for it in love. I think he found some of it in music. It was like a deep and endless nostalgia--a thirst and passion for "going home" (from About Ed Ricketts). 

This desperate grasping for something beyond comprehension seems to be an identifiably universal human theme, but Steinbeck's consistent visitation of it (nostalgia for the home) throughout his works establishes it as a touchstone of his, and obviously Ricketts', personal experience. It makes me happy to imagine, as existentially isolated as they must have felt at times, Steinbeck and Ricketts together, musing, writing, exploring, and sharing their philosophical truths with one another over a cold can of Acme beer. Even misfit toys have an island to share!

As our time here in Monterey winds down, I find myself revisiting a certain quote (that many others (Bill!) have already pointed out) that seems to be one of the more powerful observations within the text. Jim, my roommate, mentioned that it would "really be unfortunate to forget this place..."

Ephemeral as it may be on one level, I'm certain I (we!) will remember this experience--through shared memories and our own records, it will persist, and it will be passed down through future generations of Steinbeck aficionados, teachers, and students.

Leave-taking (parting is such sweet sorrow!) may very well be the fixative agent needed to properly preserve what we have experienced here:

The moment or hour of leave-taking is one of the pleasantest times in human experience, for it has in it a warm sadness without loss. People who don't ordinarily like you very well are overcome with affection at leave-taking. We said good-by again and again and still could not bring ourselves to cast off the lines and start the engines. It would be good to live in a perpetual state of leave-taking, never to go nor to stay, but to remain suspended in that golden emotion of love and longing; to be missed without being gone; to be loved without satiety. How beautiful one is and how desirable; for in a few moments one will have ceased to exist..." (Sea of Cortez, page 25). 

A fortune found on the grounds of the Naval Post Grad facility today...