Steve Hely's Blog, page 3

Redondo Beach Submarine Canyon

I noticed this deep canyon on my Raven map of southern California. You can see it on Google maps.

Here’s what to expect when you dive the canyon:

After a short swim you drop down to a 25-30 foot sand bottom and move west. As you reach a depth of about 35 feet, you’ll start down a rather steep slope to about 75-80 feet, which quickly drops to below 100 feet and then to the abyss. This is the Redondo Submarine Canyon.

While the sand leading out to the canyon edge has a lot of marine life, most divers like the deep mud flats. Long before “muck diving” became popular with photographers at some fancy tropical resorts, southern California divers were visiting sand and mud flats at local submarine canyons. Just as with these resort destinations, our muck has much to offer in the critter department.

Look for small creatures like a camouflaged octopus or brightly colored nudibranchs, which can be spotted year-round. In late fall through winter months, lucky night divers can witness market squid mating in massive numbers. It’s been described as a blizzard of frantic activity. After the mating the seafloor will be carpeted in large clusters of white egg cases — and dead or dying adult squid, who kick the bucket shortly after they do the deed.

Whether it is squid season or not, this place is an excellent night dive with a lot of small animals to be seen.

One creature that can be found on nearly every dive, day or night, is the massive sheep crab. Its clumsy motions are comical to observe but watch out for the claws! Their pinch is insanely strong. The sheep crabs here are the biggest you’ll find anywhere along our coast. Some of them measure three feet across!

The city of Redondo Beach has two webcams to soothe in troubled times:

https://www.youtube.com/live/Ni7v-aIa3bw

https://www.youtube.com/live/2kbj3LqB_20

Tender memories of Mom

This was around age eight or nine. Maybe later. Romping in the woods beyond the end of our street, and by the brook, around the pond and the mostly abandoned Girl Scout camp was freely allowed.

I would collect sticks in the woods, sticks that resembled guns or swords or sticks that were good for poking in the mud of the pond. I kept my collection behind a rhododendron bush that was just to the left as you approached our front porch.

Some of the sticks were falling apart, abandoned sticks had accumulated as newer, fresher sticks were gained. The pile of sticks, if you thought about the appearance and presentation of the house, was becoming an issue.

One day Mom came to me in a calm, gentle moment and said, “Stephen,” (she was the only person who called me Stephen) “can we have a conversation about your sticks?”

The way she put it. We made a compromise where I kept the most important sticks. Every time we saw each other I felt like fairly, lovingly, maturely dealt with.

Many times around age seven (dropping off and picking up my sister at a class?) Mom and I walked in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. I was drawn to the giant statue of Mycerinus (who wouldn’t be?) For ever, whenever the MFA came up, sometimes for no reason at all, my mom would summon the magical name of Mycerinus.

(Kind of resentful they’ve made his name Menkaure, way less melodious.)

Sometimes in adulthood I’d tell my mom about sending something off, to a publisher or a studio or something. Several times Mom said something like, “it must be so hard to let something go.”

Only later did it occur to me she might’ve been trying to share something about herself.

(source)

Lays

source

not for all the cars in China

wild stat:

For example, in 1990 there were just half a million cars in China. By 2024 there were 435mn, many of them electric.

from FT on Dan Wang’s new book.

Transmitter

(source)

I lived two and a half years in New York City but I didn’t know much about Greenpoint. A brief visit for a special occasion brought me to this corner of Brooklyn.

Stayed at Franklin Guest House where my first floor room was surprisingly spacious, a narrow mini apartment with a kitchenette. Would recommend although I couldn’t call it charming. ($269 a night or so).

Lunch at Acre:

(this photo I borrow from Kelvin Shum)

Visited Tula House where they gave me some good advice on arid plants

Trip to High Valley Books (appointment only, message them on Instagram)

Chopped cheese at Deli Point.

(this photo from Kristiana Noel)

Best was visiting WYNC Transmitter Park, where you get a view of Manhattan I wasn’t used to.

Cheers to Schofield for identifying this clock tower building:

which Perplexity AI failed to do even with coaching.

It’s the Consolidated Edison Building.

The ornamentation at the tower’s peak included urns and obelisks, which were normally associated with funereal aspects, and was modeled after the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus. These decorations memorialize Con Ed workers killed in World War I. The tower section was topped by a “Tower of Light” designed to look like a miniature temple.

If I’d had the time would’ve liked to see the Monitor monument in McGolrick Park

The USS Monitor was built at Continental Iron Works.

I thought of Greenpoint as being a fairly inexpensive part of north Brooklyn but an apartment’s gonna run you from $885,000 (zero bedroom one bath) to four million dollars or so.

Bill Burr on mid

I like sitting in the crowd. Like when I go to a sporting event, I want to get good seats, but the closer you sit, the quieter it gets and the less fun it gets. It’s the most fucked-up thing. Unless it’s like an NBA game where before they had a DJ play the whole time. I remember I saw the Lakers play the Knicks, and Comedy Central had courtside seats; I sat there, and you could hear the shit they were talking to each other. That was fucking amazing. But everything else, the closer you get, the more money people have, the less fun it gets. So I was always, like, mezzanine level. I don’t want to be up there with binoculars and super-fucking-shit-faced people, but I like the mid — when the alcohol intake, the view, everything looks like mid. Whatever the second-color-row seats are, that’s what I like.

from this Vulture interview.

20th Century Man

from Archibald MacLeish’s tribute poem after he died:

Veteran out of the wars before he was twenty:

Famous at twenty-five: thirty a master –

Whittled a style for his time from a walnut stick

In a carpenter’s loft in a street of that April city.

Ernest Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899. Thus it’s easy to match his life against the century. Whatever year it is, he’s roughly that age.

At 17 he’s a cub reporter for The Kansas City Star, covering police stuff, murders, the morgue:

The clichés in Hemingway’s news stories-under “the glare of the surgeon’s light, he dangles on a little thread of life, while the physicians struggle grimly”-were redeemed by a passage on the forms of violence in a big city: “It’s razor wounds in the African belt and slugging in the wet block. In Little Italy they prefer the sawed-off shotgun. We can almost tell what part of the city a man is from just by seeing how they did him up”

At 18 he’s close up to the Great War:

Hemingway’s experience at Fossalta led him to divide men into those who had been wounded and those who had not. … Though he was never a soldier (Proust spent more time in the army than Hemingway), he had the combatant’s hatred of the safe staff officer and believed you could not judge a man until you had seen him in action

(didn’t Proust spend infinitely more time in the army? Hemingway wasn’t in the army, he was a volunteer with the American Red Cross)

Giovanni Cecchin speculates that despite Gamble’s favorable report of 1918, Hemingway’s heroism was not mentioned in Charles Bakewell’s Story of the American Red Cross in Italy (1920) because the authorities felt he had unnecessarily exposed himself to danger.

He grew up fast:

As Charles Fenton has pointed out, Hemingway was exceptionally precocious in his personal and professional life. He was a reporter and a wounded war hero at nineteen; had an unhappy love affair at twenty; married at twenty-two; became a European correspondent at twentythree; was a father at twenty-four. His first, thin book, Three Stories and Ten Poems-which included the “unprintable” “Up in Michigan,” “My Old Man” and “Out of Season” (all of which had been sent out to editors when Hadley lost the manuscripts)-was dedicated to Hadley and published in August 1923, when he was twenty-four. When he left.Toronto his apprenticeship was over, and he was now a professional if not a widely recognized author.

At 25:

But when Duff told Hemingway that his sexual magnetism tested her self-control, he could scarcely control himself in the wild atmosphere of Pamplona. Hadley stopped talking to Duff, and wept with jealousy and humiliation when Hemingway courted her rival. But Duff, despite her notorious promiscuity and her strong attraction to Hemingway, had her own standards of morality. “We can’t do it,” she told him. “You can’t hurt people.” She would not run off with him, even if she wanted to, because of Hadley and the baby

Here’s Edmund Wilson in The Wound and The Bow:

At 26-27 he set the style in New York and Paris. Around then he became a father and got a divorce.

Hemingway’s adult life was characterized by emotional turmoil, constant travel, frequent illness and accidents. The timid and nearsighted Dos Passos, who often accompanied Hemingway on skiing and fishing trips, observed: “I never knew an athletic vigorous man who spent so much time in bed as Ernest did.” There were both physical and psychological reasons for Hemingway’s numerous accidents. He was a huge, clumsy man with defective vision in one eye and very slow reflexes. He had a bad temper, behaved recklessly and irrationally, drank heavily and was frequently out of control. He deliberately placed himself in risky situations in driving, boxing, skiing, fishing, hunting and war.

By his early 30s he’s moving to Key West, where he could write half the day and fish and hang out the other half. The money from his first hit book went to his ex, but his new wife was very rich. The $8,000 house a wedding gift from her Uncle Gus:

His exaggerations, lies and heroic image were related to the traditions and myths of frontier humor that had inspired his youthful works. But he not only helped to create myths about himself, he also seemed to believe them.

He felt he could write only about what he had actually experienced and his literary credo was to tell it as it was. But he combined scrupulous honesty in his fiction with a tendency to distort and rewrite the story of his life

At 34:

after Hemingway completed Winner Take Nothing he fulfilled his ambition, expressed in The Sun Also Rises, of “going to British East Africa to shoot.” In 1933 Uncle Gus gave him $25,000 to pay for the African safari, and Hemingway asked MacLeish and Strater to be his guests. Both refused the invitation, fearing that Hemingway’s fierce competitiveness would turn the holiday into a daily struggle for superiority. They agreed with Damon Runyon’s remark about Hemingway:

“Few men can stand the strain of relaxing with him over an extended period.”

During the Depression, Jeffrey Meyers tells us, 80% of the people in Key West were on relief and the county itself went bankrupt.

At 35 Hemingway boated a bunch of supplies up to help after the Labor Day Hurricane, which killed maybe 400 plus people, many of them laborers. The dead bodies were a health hazard.

Late 30s, early 40s:

Leicester said that during the late 1930s in Key West, his brother was drinking about seventeen Scotch and sodas a day. Hemingway always made the adolescent association between heavy drinking and masculinity, and boasted in February 1940: “Started out on absinthe, drank a bottle of good red wine with dinner, shifted to vodka in town before the pelota game and then battened it down with whiskeys and sodas until 3 a.m.” While fishing in Cuba, he would take a bottle of champagne to bed and empty it by morning. During World War Two, according to Buck Lanham, he was a “massive drinker. Bottle at bedside, drank all day.

In his late 30s he’s a reporter in the Spanish Civil War, having an affair with the woman that would become wife #3. From his Spanish experience by age 40 he wrote For Whom The Bell Tolls, a book that sold like gangbusters. Before this time, I don’t think he could’ve afforded his lifestyle on his writing alone. Hadley (wife #1) had a trust fund and Pauline (wife #2) was very rich.

He seemed to mature in reverse. Early 40s:

Yet even Durán could not tolerate the boorish behavior that tested the limits of their friendship. … At Durán’s birthday party in Havana, he behaved as Fitzgerald had done at the Murphys’ party in 1926. He got drunk, pushed salad down the back of an embassy nonentity and threw steak across the table (which inspired friends to follow his example).

At 42 he’s avoiding going to the war in Europe, instead he has this plan for his fishing boat:

Hemingway’s idea was that the Pilar, fully manned and heavily armed, but disguised as a fishing boat, would attract the attention of a German submarine. The sub would signal the Pilar to come alongside (as they frequently did in 1942) in order to requisition supplies of fresh water and food. As the sub approached, Hemingway’s men would machine-gun the crew on deck while a jai alai player threw a small bomb into the conning tower. The Marine colonel John Thomason, who had advised Hemingway on his Men at War anthology and was Chief of Naval Intelligence for Central America, realistically objected: “‘Suppose he stands off and blows you and the Pilar out of the water?’

… ‘If he does that,’ replied Ernest, ‘then we’ve had it. But there’s a good chance he won’t shoot. Why should a submarine risk attracting attention when the skipper can send sailors aboard and scuttle us by opening the seacocks? He’ll be curious about fishermen in wartime. He’ll want to know what kind of profiteers are trying to tag a marlin in the Gulf Stream with a war on.”

Hemingway managed to convince Thomason and Braden that this was a serious project and they gave him what he wanted: a radio, a collapsible rubber boat, machine guns, grenades, bombs and Don Saxon, a volunteer Marine master sergeant

finally he did get over to Europe, possibly because wife #3 Martha Gellhorn was outshining him. There the war was like a frolic to him:

Hemingway claimed to have killed a great many Germans and certainly killed a few of them. On August 3, 1944, at Villedieu-les-Poêles in Normandy, he threw grenades down a cellar where Nazi troops were supposed to be hiding, but did not check to see if they were actually there. He may have wanted to take credit for this doubtful enterprise without confronting the fragmented remains of his victims. On November 22, armed with a machine gun, he definitely killed some Germans who attacked Lanham’s headquarters in the Hürtgenwald.

In 1950 he’s bragging to Lillian Ross:

He mentioned a war writer who, he said, was apparently thinking of himself as Tolstoy, but who’d be able to play Tolstoy only on the Bryn Mawr field-hockey team. “He never hears a shot fired in anger, and he sets out to beat who? Tolstoy, an artillery officer who fought at Sevastopol, who knew his stuff, who was a hell of a man anywhere you put him—bed, bar, in an empty room where he had to think. I started out very quiet and I beat Mr. Turgenev. Then I trained hard and I beat Mr. de Maupassant. I’ve fought two draws with Mr. Stendhal, and I think I had an edge in the last one. But nobody’s going to get me in any ring with Mr. Tolstoy unless I’m crazy or I keep getting better.”

Reviewers did not agree:

Across the River was condemned by all serious critics when it first appeared, in September 1950, and is still considered Hemingway’s worst novel. A few writers, like John O’Hara, praised the book out of loyalty to Hemingway or his past reputation; but Cyril Connolly, Morton Dauwen Zabel, Northrop Frye, Joseph Warren Beach, Alfred Kazin, Evelyn Waugh and Isaac Rosenfeld all agreed with Maxwell Geismar’s critique of Hemingway’s ideas and his negative evaluation in the Saturday Review of Literature:

This is an unfortunate novel and unpleasant to review for anyone who respects Hemingway’s talent and achievement. It is not only Hemingway’s worst novel; it is a synthesis of everything that is bad in his previous work and throws a doubtful light on the future

At 52 he has another success, but is it even good?:

In the highly acclaimed Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway either deceived himself about the profundity of his art or expressed his contempt for Life, Scribner’s, the reading public, the critics and religion by writing an ironic and mock-serious fable that gave them exactly what they wanted and expected. The story offered moral uplift, provided a pretense of culture, was admired by everyone-and earned him a fortune. In May 1952

The last really good thing he wrote was a memoir of his youth in Paris that would only be published after his death. It’s full of lies, brags, and gossip about famous writers and artists of the time. This is where he claims Scott Fitzgerald had him check his penis for size. The best parts of it are so good.

He might’ve lived to 1968, seen the moon landing, hippies, LSD. He could’ve made further, into the 70s, even the 80s, he might’ve heard disco music. Seen Ronald Reagan get inaugurated. But that’s not what happened.

Meyers has an appendix that’s a list of Hemingway’s injuries that’s almost comic?

The most chilling part of the excellent Ken Burns documentary might be this clip of Hemingway giving an interview for NBC after he won the Nobel Prize. This is after he used his head to batter open the stuck door of a burning plane in Butiaba in 1954. The second of his two plane crashes that week.

What an artist. After Meyers I read Mary Dearborn’s which is also great.

C’mon this is cool

Zane makes The New York Times.

I don’t care for the word “snub.” from Etymology Online:

Hang Yourself Brave Crillon

From Jeffrey Meyers, Hemingway: A Biography:

Like most people who were drawn by Hemingway’s magnetic personality and valued him more as a companion than as a writer, Lanham found it amusing and exciting to be with him and to be known to have been with him. (The general is remembered today not for his military career but for his friendship with Hem-ingway.) While Hemingway was at the Ritz during the first week of September with Mary, Lanham, echoing Henry IV’s taunt to the Duke of Crillon after a victory at Arques, sent him a provocative message. “Go hang yourself, brave Hemingstein. We have fought at Landrecies and you were not there.”

This was (as Lanham knew) an irresistible challenge, and Hemingway immediately hastened northeast from Paris to Landrecies and Le Cateau (where Dorman-Smith and the British army had retreated after the bad show at Mons in the Great War). “The countryside through which Hemingway travelled in order to reach my command post,” wrote Lanham, who had summoned him there, “was alive with Germans who had been by-passed. All of these people were trying frantically to get back to Germany proper and the Siegfried Line. He was very lucky indeed to have made this trip without being killed.”

Boys will be boys (Hemingway was 44).

Had to look up Henry IV’s taunt to Crillon:

Hang yourself, brave Crillon; we fought at Arques and you were not there

According to Oxford Essential Quotations (4th Ed.) that’s the “traditional form given by Voltaire to [the original] in a letter from Henri to Crillon, 20 September 1597; Henri’s actual words, as given in Lettres missives de Henri IV, Collection des documents inédits de l’histoire de Francevol. 4 (1847) were

My good man, Crillon, hang yourself for not having been at my side last Monday at the greatest event that’s ever been seen and perhaps ever will be seen’

Boldface mine. You can feel the bro-ness, it’s giving Ben Affleck and Adam Driver in The Last Duel.

How did Hemingway and Lanham both know this?

(source). Maybe it was in the boys’ books of the day.

(Frequent readers of this site will recall that Pendu/Pender/PennDu language games&names in French reveal the origin of Cezanne’s House of the Hanged Man.)

All four of Henry IV’s Oxford quotes bang, his most famous might be

Paris is worth a mass

The origin story in that:

On 25 July 1593, with the encouragement of his mistress, Gabrielle d’Estrées, Henry permanently renounced Protestantism and converted to Catholicism to secure his hold on the French crown, thereby earning the resentment of the Huguenots and his ally Elizabeth I of England. He was said to have declared that Paris vaut bien une messe (“Paris is well worth a Mass”), although the attribution is doubtful.

That’s apparently Gabrielle on the left, some interpretation.

Here’s Henri IV at Arques:

Some pretty pictures and intriguing backstory of Arques-la-Bataille on the “Normandy Then and Now” website:

John Henry Twachtman painted the river there in 1885:

That’s in the Met.

Henri’s greatest event that had ever been wasn’t the only battle in the are

Just outside the town is the World War I Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery, designed by J R Truelove, the final resting place of 377 men of the Chinese, West Indies, and South African Native Labour Corps.

As for Landrecies, it’s Wikipedia page doesn’t even mention the Second World War, but notes:

It was the site of a skirmish between the British I Corps under Douglas Haig and the German First Army on 25 August 1914, that resulted in the death of Archer Windsor-Clive, the first first-class cricketer to fall in World War I.

Some day I’d like to do a little road trip through here:

Almost every town here has a famous siege or battle. Finish in Bruges. Or maybe Brussels, see The Royal Museum for Central Africa (they don’t know what to do with that inheritance). Or maybe Ghent. I’d like to see the altarpiece:

At St. Bavo’s Cathedral:

(Source)

Good map of France

At Trois Mec here in LA. 1793 boundaries, you can see that Savoy is still part of Italy here.