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Messages 1 - 37 of total 37 in this topic |
Mark Rodell
Trad climber
Bangkok
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Topic Author's Original Post - May 15, 2016 - 08:35pm PT
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I read this book by William Finnegen and found it a strong work. It is an adventure tale but written so well that it didn't matter that I no next to nothing about the sport. Anyone else read it?
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Contractor
Boulder climber
CA
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May 15, 2016 - 09:45pm PT
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The Autobiography won a Pulitzer.
I generally don't go for anything that attempts to capture surfing culture, for obvious reasons, but I've had a buddie tell me it's a great read.
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ontheedgeandscaredtodeath
Social climber
SLO, Ca
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May 15, 2016 - 09:49pm PT
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Finnegan is good- track down his New Yorker article on surfing OB in San Francisco as a sampler.
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Gregory Crouch
Social climber
Walnut Creek, California
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May 16, 2016 - 09:16am PT
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By far the best thing ever written about surfing. I couldn't put it down.
Made me absolutely seasick green with envy, on two fronts.
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Bldrjac
Ice climber
Boulder
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May 16, 2016 - 04:45pm PT
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It was great....very engaging! Most "surf literature" is pretty poor. This is a solid memoir. Read it!!! :-)
Pam
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David Knopp
Trad climber
CA
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May 16, 2016 - 05:33pm PT
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i read it-and i don't surf at all. I read it on the strength of Finnegan's non fiction on war zones, etc. I thought the strongest part was the reporting about relationship-especially on his friendship with Mark Renneker.
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dfinnecy
Social climber
'stralia
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May 16, 2016 - 07:06pm PT
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The New Yorker article by Finnegan is here:
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1992/08/24/playing-docs-games-part-one
A long read in two parts (30,000 words?), a great primer on true surf culture. The personalities profiled will be familiar to climbers, as will the themes of obsession, risk, and ambivalent dedication to questionable pursuits.
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drljefe
climber
El Presidio San Augustin del Tucson
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May 16, 2016 - 08:56pm PT
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Thanks for the rec.
Maybe in a totally different category but I liked
"Welcome To Paradise, Now Go To Hell" by Chas Smith
And actually pretty old now-
"The Search for Captain Zero" by. Allan Weisbecker
Kem Nunn has some excellent ones as well - surf noir.
Check out "Dogs of Winter"
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Peter Haan
Trad climber
Santa Cruz, CA
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May 17, 2016 - 06:11am PT
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Great read; Finnegan went to UCSC for awhile btw. He is an important New Yorker contributor and quite political. I recommend this Pulitzer Prize winning book to even non-surfers.
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matlinb
Trad climber
Fort Collins, CO
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May 17, 2016 - 07:17am PT
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Started reading this last night, can't put it down. What would be equivalents in the climbing world. For example a "Conquistadors of the useless", written in the modern era?
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skcreidc
Social climber
SD, CA
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May 17, 2016 - 07:55am PT
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If Gregory Crouch and Peter Haan (no offense to anyone else here) recommend it, I guess I will have to pick up a copy. I personally found surf writing to usually be boring and not well written (not that I could do better). Although, there are some real gems (short stories) in "The Surfers Journal", and I did like "welcome to paradise, now go to hell" (lol). There are some great short stories out there about surf culture, like what happened to Rick James'(the shaper) thumb, and the tale of Woody Brown and Dickie Cross. A collection of these little vignette's would give a pretty full picture of surf culture and where peoples heads were at during the different periods.
as will the themes of obsession, risk, and ambivalent dedication to questionable pursuits.
Hmmm. Ambivalent. I don't see any ambivalence at all personally. The exact opposite actually. A dedication bordering on the psychotic maybe, but ambivalence never had anything to do with my, or any of the others I hung out with, drive to surf various waves. Shoot, your from 'strailia; Bra Boys anyone?
OK, sorry for that digression...and thanks for the book recommendation.
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Gregory Crouch
Social climber
Walnut Creek, California
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May 17, 2016 - 08:15am PT
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Surfing Tavarua for three months with just your traveling partner when you are two of the nine people on earth who know about that wave would be like being an excellent climber and discovering Patagonia with just your partner when nobody else in the world had ever seen the place.
And then having a repeat performance at Lagundri Bay on Nias.
Envy does not even begin to cover it.
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skcreidc
Social climber
SD, CA
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May 17, 2016 - 09:14am PT
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Oh shoot, it's THAT Finnegan. NOW I gotta get the book. He's one of the doods to inspire me to go "feral" that first time. After that I was hooked on surf travel.
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le_bruce
climber
Oakland, CA
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May 17, 2016 - 12:23pm PT
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Since these guys were not, I knew, San Francisco surfers, of whom there were only a few dozen...
Just imagine if that were true today.
Now you can find "a few dozen" SF surfers within 10 sq ft of Bolinas or Pacifica water on any given weekend
Edit to add: Holy smokes is this amazing writing. Thank you very much for sharing it.
The first wave snapped my ankle leash—a ten-foot length of polyurethane, strong enough to pull a car uphill—as if it were a piece of string. I swam underneath that wave and then kept swimming, toward the open ocean. The second wave looked like a three-story building. It, like the first wave, was preparing to break a few yards in front of me. I dived deep and swam hard. The lip of the wave hitting the surface above me sounded like a bolt of lightning exploding at very close range, and it filled the water with shock waves. I managed to stay underneath the turbulence, but when I surfaced I saw that the third wave of the set belonged to another order of being. It was bigger, thicker, and drawing much more heavily off the bottom than the others. My arms felt rubbery, and I started hyperventilating. I dived very early and very deep. The deeper I swam, the colder and darker the water got. The noise as the wave broke was preternaturally low, a basso profundo of utter violence, and the force pulling me backward and upward felt like some nightmare inversion of gravity. Again, I managed to escape, and when I finally surfaced I was far outside. There were no more waves, which was fortunate, since I was sure that one more would have finished me. Mark was there, though, perhaps ten yards to my right. He had been duck-diving and escaping the unimaginable just as narrowly as I had. His leash had not broken, however; he was reeling in his board. As he did so, he turned to me, with a manic look in his eyes, and yelled, “This is great!” It could have been worse. He could have yelled, “This is interesting!”
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Gregory Crouch
Social climber
Walnut Creek, California
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May 17, 2016 - 02:29pm PT
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Although crowds are certainly worse in recent years, I strongly suspect that Finnegan wouldn't consider either Bolinas or Pacifica to be "San Francisco surfing."
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Gunkie
Trad climber
Valles Marineris
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May 17, 2016 - 02:46pm PT
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For $12 on Amazon Prime and these ST reviews, I'm getting a copy.
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le_bruce
climber
Oakland, CA
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May 18, 2016 - 12:05pm PT
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Yes I think you're probably right about what constitutes a San Francisco spot. OB or GTFO (plus a few by the bridge). Since I am always too intimidated by OB, spots like Marin and Pacifica are my only reference haha.
Still loving this read, spread over a few days. First Sierra snows generally mean the end of our climbing season in the higher range, but the beginning of good days for the OB surfer.
There are great days in the fall, when the first north and west swells of the season meet the first offshore winds. Offshores—winds that blow from land to sea—are the wonder drug of surfing. Because they cross so little water before they reach the waves, they create no troublesome chop, and because they strike the waves from the front they don’t force the waves to topple prematurely and haphazardly, the way onshores do, but instead delay their breaking, letting the power of a wave rise, gather, and concentrate in the crest before it can overcome the wind’s resistance. Offshores thus make waves hollower (more concave) and cleaner (more regular) and faster. And yet the sum effect of offshore winds is greater than any of its parts. On a good day, their sculptor’s blade, meticulous and invisible, seems to drench whole coastlines in grace. In San Francisco, the winter offshores start to blow after the first snowfall in the High Sierras. Fall surf benefits in the local estimation from the inevitable comparison with the months of fogbound, onshore slop that an Ocean Beach summer entails. And the first large swells of the season actually do arrive in November, often before the sandbars are ready to turn them into ridable surf. In December and January, though, the combination of huge winter storm swells and local beach and weather conditions frequently produces waves that beggar description.
Thanks again for the share, never would have found it otherwise.
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skcreidc
Social climber
SD, CA
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May 18, 2016 - 12:31pm PT
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OB (not the one in San Diego) IS intimidating. My first time at the spot was during my first sojourn up to just below Vancouver Island in 1977 or 78 in late December/early January. A few years earlier I had punched a hole in my skull with an early leash someone had talked me into trying. The one that I had was like a 7 foot bungee cord; not the best idea. So I showed up with my 2 buddies with a 7'6" round pin and no leash. I remember it being up to over double overhead and kind of shifty looking. It was a tough cold paddle out wearing long johns and a beavertail jacket. I was trying to pace myself energy wise while fighting off this ice cream headache when something large loomed ahead of me. I hit the gas and paddled my ass off to get under it and ended up right under the lip as I tried to duck dive my board last second. The lip exploded right on my shoulders and slammed my face into my deck, but I held on with a death grip (and wrapping my legs around the board too) that left major finger marks on the bottom next to the rail. I came up bleeding from my lips and nose, but had to stay focused on the next 3 or 4 waves as I somehow had not been drug back very far. Not wanting to go back in immediately (after my buds told me I didn't look too bad), I had a somewhat subdued session where I caught only 2 or 3 waves that were maybe double overhead. Had a much better session, albeit in overhead surf, on the trip back down. Definitely surfing that spot helped raise my comfort level in larger surf.
edit. Actually, those early trips to Nor Cal, Oregon, and Washington had some scary good surf. Cold and heavy is the surf up there.
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David Knopp
Trad climber
CA
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May 18, 2016 - 12:36pm PT
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Wanted to second Jefe's recommendation of Kem Nunn-both of Dogs of Winter and Tapping the source capture some of the weirdness around CA surfing.
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Rick A
climber
Boulder, Colorado
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May 18, 2016 - 12:58pm PT
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It is a really excellent book and one of my most enjoyable reads I’ve had in quite a while.
I can’t find it now, but there is a wonderful passage where Finnegan describes surfing somewhere where the water is so transparent and the waves so perfect that he almost loses touch with reality.
Also memorable is a passage where he and his girlfriend spend the summer working through, and admiring the writing in, a stack of old New Yorkers someone left in the house they are staying in. To later end up writing for the New Yorker shows that dreams do come true.
However, I guess nobody, even a New Yorker writer with a Pulitzer Prize, is perfect. How this climbing metaphor evaded an editor’s pencil, I’ll never know.
I even let him [Mark Renneker] preside over primordial moments, his Mephistophelian cackle providing a lifeline from the yawning space of my fear in big waves to some rock face where the psychic crampons held.
Made me wince like the sound of crampons on rock :)
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Gregory Crouch
Social climber
Walnut Creek, California
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May 18, 2016 - 03:39pm PT
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I remember that one, too, RickA... that was painful.
Whenever I'm talking about Ocean Beach with Leavitt, I always make sure to add the caveat, "yeah, you know, the real Ocean Beach." I really hadn't heard much about it when I moved up here in 2002. Rude awakening, it was. Having grown up surfing in Ventura, Santa Barbara, and Goleta, it completely reset my frame of reference for consistent and big. And scary. I figure I'll stay up here until I'm too old to make the paddle out, then move back down south for the twilight years.
I'll third the Kem Nunn books. Enjoyed them, although nowhere near as much as Barbarian Days.
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StahlBro
Trad climber
San Diego, CA
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May 18, 2016 - 03:47pm PT
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Definitely going to check this out.
Went to school at UCSB. I remember a couple of trips to Jalama when freight trains were pouring in one after another, just as sun was setting and it was getting dark. They were some of the best and scariest moments of surfing ever. The sound they made as they peeled toward you was otherworldly.
I surfed at Pigeon Point a few times. In the fog it was really weird. After I saw the picture of an abalone diver's wetsuit bitten in half on the news (the day after we were there), I lost my nerve.
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dfinnecy
Social climber
'stralia
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May 18, 2016 - 11:21pm PT
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Drljefe, thanks for those recommendations. Dogs of Winter sounds great, I hadn't heard of it before. Captain Zero and Now Go To Hell have been on my list for awhile and I'll have to actually get into them now.
This excellent excerpt from Captain Zero was what originally brought it to my attention:
http://www.outerknown.com/journey/an-excerpt-from-a-weisbecker
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hobo_dan
Social climber
Minnesota
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May 28, 2016 - 04:11pm PT
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Just finished it. Heavy with honesty- very great sense of presenting what it feels like to just be out on the hang.
I liked as he got older and the world changed, his reflections on it all.
I'd recommend it for sure. My favorite was the south pacific stuff
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KristenB
Social climber
Jefferson City, MO
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Jun 26, 2016 - 07:07am PT
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I was in the airport on the way to City of Rocks for the Get together and found myself in front of the book section at the news stand. I scanned the shelves and saw Barbarian Days and remembered Greg's recommendation of it. What is better than a book about surfing to read on a vacation rock climbing in the desert?
There are parallels between climbing and surfing and although I am a marginal climber and have never surfed-I don't think boogy boarding once in San Diego counts as surfing -I enjoyed the book very much.
There could have been a diagram of a wave on the inside cover- unobtrusive and decorative but very helpful to those of us who are unfamiliar with the jargon.
Thanks for another worthwhile recommendation Greg!
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Contractor
Boulder climber
CA
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Jul 13, 2016 - 12:55pm PT
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Half way through and loving it- yes the parallels to surfing/climbing are stark.
Pursuits, in personal context, (I can't bring myself to call sports) that tend to, if not weed out, at least expose frauds when applied with vigor and integrity.
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micronut
Trad climber
Fresno/Clovis, ca
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Jul 13, 2016 - 01:36pm PT
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Headed to Idaho for a vacation with my kids rafting the Salmon river for a week.....looking for a good book for the lazy mornings with coffee on the river. Headed to Amazon to click "buy it now!" as we speak. Thanks for the recommendation.
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BooDawg
Social climber
Butterfly Town
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Jul 20, 2016 - 09:05pm PT
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I just finished the book and, never having been a surfer, I have been struck by the parallels between climbing and surfing. Yvon had it right in so many ways (and waves). More to come...
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Darwin
Trad climber
Seattle, WA
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Nov 15, 2016 - 06:32pm PT
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Just a bump for the book. I'm about 80% through it and just love it. I should shut up until I finish, but for now the book works spectacularly on many levels. I see: a perfect narrative of *THE BEST SURFING SAFARI EVER* (no shit); to criticism/commentary on the range of culture and privilege; and a really interesting, understated and honest(? so far) reflection on how male surf bums interact with females(mostly mates).
Ok, I'm extrapolating there.
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Fuzzywuzzy
climber
suspendedhappynation
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Nov 15, 2016 - 10:35pm PT
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Great read.
Best renderings of water I've read in a long while.
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Gunkie
Trad climber
Valles Marineris
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Nov 16, 2016 - 06:58am PT
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I thought it was a good read that was worth the time and effort, not a great read IMO. Maybe it was jealousy setting in that culled my love of the book?
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le_bruce
climber
Oakland, CA
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Nov 16, 2016 - 10:18am PT
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Best renderings of water I've read in a long while.
Hell yes. The way he writes on both the mechanics and the poetics of the sea and on the energies and idiosyncrasies of waves/breaks: irresistible. We don't have a writer in climbing with those chops (imo + that I'm aware of). His writing (on water, not necessarily true about the whole book imo) is lean as a knife, uses no crutches.
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crusher
climber
Santa Monica, CA
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Nov 28, 2016 - 02:00pm PT
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I read the excerpt that was in The New Yorker before the book came out and meant to get it as soon as it was published. Fast forward, I saw this thread and remembered just how much the part in The New Yorker moved me; I bought the book this last weekend while traveling and haven't been able to put it down.
It's written beautifully and takes me right back to my own experiences of many years spent in Southern California's ocean and sometimes in Hawaii's and Mexico's...swimming, body surfing, windsurfing...that often transcendent state as well as moments of pure terror and awe.
I can tell I'll be bummed when the book is finished!
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COT
climber
Door Number 3
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Feb 24, 2017 - 10:53am PT
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Loved the book. Toward the end some of the surfing description fell on my deaf non surfing ears, but didn't diminish my overall experience.
The parallels to climbing especially to alpine climbing were very striking to me. Unlike rock climbing where you can become very proficient in climbing gyms,alpine climbing proficiency require time outside with the actual medium.
I could relate to the danger, challenging environmental conditions, suffering, fickle nature of the medium, secrecy of special places, the dedication of time and effort, the excitement in the search for new flows/waves, the unique language the camaraderie the ebb and flow of a lifelong pursuit and the mortality of it and life in general.
Awesome
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Gunkie
Trad climber
Valles Marineris
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Feb 24, 2017 - 11:18am PT
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'Barbarian Days: A Sufing Life' is so much better than the drivel I'm working through right now, "For a Few Perfect Waves: The Audacious Life and Legend of Rebel Surfer MIKI DORA"
Bleh...
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