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🦋 Burial at Sea
When you considered the dead man's tirade in detail, you thought it vulgar... He had implied that poverty reduced everything to mere stark need, abrogating all but the coarsest emotions. ...You will remember that the dead fisherman (even then puffing through your lungs and coursing in your blood) had not had it entirely his way. Before he faded, you had got a word in, sharp with the triumphalism of the living. ...You informed him that you would use him entirely as you saw fit, together with his compatriots, the scenery, diverting cosmogonies, smells, sounds and words.
There are two books in Seven-Tenths -- the main body of the text is a mix of science writing and memoir, some oceanography and ethnography mixed in with stories of how Hamilton-Paterson came to find out what he's writing about, and some ecological advocacy mixed in with fatalism and worry. There's a lot to it, a lot to think about and some really engaging writing. Set around this -- pretty separate, not really blending in to the main body of the text at all -- is a narrative of a swimmer lost at sea, unable to locate the boat he dived from after the line that was connecting him to it separates. This second narrative was not really grabbing me as I read the book, I couldn't really relate it to the rest of the book. Well at the end of the main text is a note explaining that the swimmer was him -- so clearly he did make it back to the boat -- and talking broadly about what has been lost in the past century. And then, he writes a 60-page essay in the second person about a fantasy of sailing with lobster poachers and discovering a dead body at sea, intertwined with the narrative of a historical (or fictional? I cannot find any reference online that attests to his existence independent of this book) shipwrecked sailor named Giusto Forbici... I am getting impatient, unable to see what all this is adding to the rest of the book. But, well, the final two sections of this essay sort of manage to wrap everything together, to make explicit and foreground some questions and conflicts about Hamilton-Peterson's role as author that have been hinted at throughout the text.
posted evening of Wednesday, June 10th, 2009
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I am getting really excited about reading this. I know I need to be able to devote some time to it!
posted evening of June 14th, 2009 by Jeanne
Great! I'd love to hear what you think about it. I passed my copy along to my friend Monique, who was visiting this week pursuant to attending the Venus 3 show. Thanks again!
posted evening of June 14th, 2009 by Jeremy
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