L.J. Moore's Blog, page 9
October 21, 2012
lj moore performing “wrecked” at quiet lightning litquake show
San Francisco, California
October 19, 2012
236 days until Arctic Circle journey
On October 8, 2012 I was given the honor of performing “wrecked,” a piece from digital gothic, my book in progress, at the Quiet Lightning Litquake show inside the conservatory of flowers alongside an amazing group of readers. Please check out the video, and if you’d like to read along, here is the text.
If you don’t know about Quiet Lightning, now is my chance to tell you about a literary rennaissance that is taking place in San Francisco. Quiet Lightning is a monthly reading series with an uncommon format: submission is free, entries are always judged blind (meaning new writers and estabished writers all have equal opportunity to be accepted, because the judging is based on the merit of the work and not the name on it), and here’s the amazing part: all of the accepted work for each month’s show is published in a book, Sparkle & Blink, featuring cover art by a local artist. These books are available at the corresponding show, so the writers get published, and the audience can read along and take home a copy of the amazingness they have just experienced.
If that weren’t enough, the format of the reading is also unique: each reader gets 5 minutes. No banter and no introductions are allowed. It is a literary “mix tape” where the focus is not on the writers, but on the writing itself. Judging by the growing popularity and dedicated base of returning fans of this reading series, this format works.
Quiet Lightning is driven by volunteers, and brings new voices and new visions to the ears of new audiences. For new writers, getting your work seen and heard is nearly impossible (and expensive!). The norm in literary publishing today is contest and fee-based. Very few magazines can afford the staff to fairly evaluate submissions, so unless they are tied to a university, are helmed by a trust-fund heir, many have resorted to only accepting submissions when they offer a contest, which usually costs $15 to $25 to enter. Most literary journals are also extremely specialized, so matching your work their described aesthetic can feel like throwing spaghetti at the ceiling.
Getting your work heard can be equally intimidating and demoralizing: many reading series are based on a “featured” reader format with an open mic afterward. People come to see the headliner, and then either leave, or stay to chat while the open mic readers try to make themselves heard. It’s hard enough to get up there in front of everyone, but when it feels like no one gives a shit… well that’s just shitty.
Quiet Lightning’s answer to this has been a genius idea straight from the heart: offer a fair judging process, publish the writers, and give them a chance to be heard in person. And do this every month. The generosity of everyone involved is mind-blowing. And so is the work you are going to hear when you check it out for yourself.
And if you can’t come in person? Every show is recorded and shared FREE online. So if you live in Svalbard, or Oakland, or Detroit, or Amsterdam, or wherever you hail from, come hang out in San Francisco and hear what we’re writing about.
October 19, 2012
magical thinking in unmagical spaces
San Francisco, California
October 19, 2012
238 days until Arctic Circle journey
There is a patch of ground I cross on my way to work every morning about four blocks from work. It’s a triangular patch, with some scraggly pines and twisted, leaning eucalyptus trees, at the edge of Kezar Stadium. In an aesthetic sense it’s ugly: an irregular patch with a dirt path bounding one side, a crumbling dead-end road on the other, and a bike path completing the third arm of the triangle. A loud, dirty, and very heavily-traveled thoroughfare runs next to the bike path: this is where Lincoln Avenue snakes through the panhandle and becomes Oak Street.
This little stretch of brown is usually scattered with garbage. The fall of pine needles and eucalyptus leaves, along with the permanent shade beneath, stifles the growth of anything but foxglove, nasturtium, and a few weeds. It’s an urban transitory space. Like a semi-colon in a sentence, it’s a place you pass on the way to somewhere else, not a conclusion in and of itself.
But almost every day something out of the ordinary, sometimes even magical, happens to me in the five seconds it takes me to pass through this area. Two weeks ago, I was walking along the dirt path and noticed a movement out in the dead leaves. It was a thin, tall weed, and it was shivering, and then jerking back and forth. When I stopped walking, it stopped. When I started walking again, it started again. So I walked really, really, slow, not taking my eyes off it. Over the course of about 45 seconds, the weed got shorter and shorter, and finally retracted into the ground and disappeared. I didn’t have time to get my phone out and film it, I just had to watch. And when it was over, I had this swelling sensation in my chest and jumped up and down and felt a totally unexpected flood of joy.
Yes, yes, I know… a pocket gopher was eating it from beneath the ground, or turning it into an origami chandelier. The magic is not in the fact that I didn’t know what was causing it. The magic is that I knew what was happening in front of me, and it was happening… in front of me! This is something I have difficulty explaining, but that I feel is so inherent to discussions of how we seem to treat things with less significance when we think we’ve got them figured out.
Let me give you another example: today as I walked through the patch, I saw a bunch of leaves flying inexplicably into the air, but only a few inches above the ground. Then I realized that a sparrow was perfectly camouflaged there, flipping dried eucalyptus leaves into the air, looking for seeds, or insects, or leprechauns, or governmental micro-drones. And also taking a dust bath. When I stopped to stare, the bird stopped to stare at me. When I started walking again, it started flinging leaves and scratching the dirt. When I stopped, it stopped. So I walked really, really slow, and it flipped leaves really, really slow, and we did that until we couldn’t see each other any more.
When we figure out how things work, why is it that we think that cheapens them? If I am a complex array of genetics, and biochemical signals, does that make me a “mere” complex array of genetics and biochemical signals? Why do we believe that naming something is taming it?
I do acknowledge that my definition of magic is not one you’d find in the wiktionary. But it’s a poet’s sense of magic: things are not creepy and wonderful and beautiful and arresting because I don’t understand them. They give me the heebie-jeebies and make me jump up and down because I do understand, because I see, and for a terribly short moment, I am part of them.
If I am sitting out on the roof, which I was last weekend, and two ravens fly over my head and catch an updraft and hang there, and then roll and put their feet together and lock claws and barrel roll down the wind together, and someone tells me, “oh that’s just this behavior or that behavior.” Why is the word “just” involved? Do people really believe, (or want to) that knowing what something is, or why it happens, means we own it?
Maybe it’s that a thing that becomes familiar gets taken for granted. But the most familiar thing in the world could be this ugly little patch of ground I pass through every day. And it isn’t me that makes it come alive… it was already alive. The trees make all kinds of noise when I’m not there to listen.
October 14, 2012
how to drive around with a tiger in your car
San Francisco
October 13, 2012
244 days until the Arctic Circle expedition
It was my intention from the start to write every day in the days before the journey to the Arctic Circle, and yet I should have known I would fail at that from the get-go. I’ve never been a good journal-keeper: I’ve tried numerous times, but I have this perverse rebellion against approaching things as chores. If I tell myself I have to do something, I instantly don’t want to do it. In the world of obligations, I simply override that rebellion with an act of will: I have to go to work, and sometimes I don’t want to go, but I go anyway. Sometimes I don’t want to go for a run, or to the gym, but I go anyway.
But creativity, for me, is only partly harnessed through discipline. Strike that, it is never harnessed… it’s not the kind of animal that can stand to live in a cage. Take a cat for example. A cat in a cage is simply a bad idea: while some animals might recognize a cage as a home, like we recognize a large wood and plaster box as an apartment, a cat sees a cage for what it is: an act of hubris toward it’s nature so unforgivable, you may as well have declared an outright war.
A cat is only ever pretending to be controlled. Really, what it is doing is tricking you into believing it does what you want it to. This is how it gets what it wants. This is creativity. You must love it, feed it, show up every day after work and even though you are exhausted and just want to drink a glass of wine and read a book or play Halo 4, you must pet the cat first, until it is done with you. The cat will crawl up and sit in the middle of your book. It will head butt your controller and make you screw up and die in your game just when you were about to get past a level you have been trying to get past for months. And when you give in and put everything down and finally give it the attention it demands, it will still bite you, show you it’s ass, or hide under a bed and growl if you come anywhere near it. Sometimes it will run away and pretend to be someone else’s cat for awhile. This is creativity.
But don’t despair. I have an idea for you that has saved me in the past few years. It came from a Roger Miller song. It is a song about what you cannot do:
1. You can’t rollerskate in a buffalo herd.
2. You can’t go fishing in a baseball pool.
3. You can’t change film with a kid on your back
4. You can’t drive around with a tiger in your car.
It is because of listening to this song, I had a revelation about the nature of cats, (which are just slightly less deadly versions of tigers) and of my own relationship to the untameable nature of creativity.
I first started writing when I was too young to know that it would later become an identity, a calling, a vocation, a curse, a “thing” as opposed to an action like crying or running or breathing. When I was a kid, I wrote because I saw things in my head and I was able to capture them before they disappeared by writing them down. When I would lay on the floor and close my eyes and listen to music: the Dance of the Sugarplum Fairies, or Ride of the Valkyries, I saw birds chasing each other through underground tunnels, jellyfish sailing through the night sky like illuminated lanterns, whole stories of death and shapeshifting and rebirth and flight and pursuit. Yes, I was a trippy kid, but looking back at it, there were examples that led me. The early Merry Melodies cartoons, which were often fantastical depictions of nature set to classical music. I remember one that was a bunch of workmen (dogs in hardhats with a bulldog as the boss), building a skyscraper, and all the action was dictated by the very industrial composition of the music.
The point of all this, is that the roots of creativity: it was never meant to be about controlling, taming, harnessing. It was not about dictating, it was about transcribing. It was about receiving and repeating. It was about closing your eyes and listening, and doing your damnedest to bring back to the open-eyed world, the things you saw in that other place.
How in the hell is this like driving around with a tiger in your car?
It’s like this: a tiger sitting in the passenger seat of your car, (or maybe stretched out in the back seat, because it’s my understanding that full-grown tigers are pretty big) would be, if it happened, a visitation upon you of the unexpected, the magical, the potentially dangerous, if not fatal. Being told that you cannot do it is an invitation to try, or to at least entertain the idea that yes, that could happen.
That, is creativity. It is an act of conscious rebellion, of daring, but most of all, of listening, and being receptive. You don’t make the tiger get in your car. That would be disappointing, and not magical at all. That’s like trying to make someone love you.
What you can do, is wait for it… wait for it… wait for it, and when you close your eyes and see the tiger waiting for you to get in and drive…. get in and drive.
October 12, 2012
announcing the release of Shadowed: Unheard Voices, found photographs and poetry
After several years in the making, I am excited to announce the release of a beautiful book curated and edited by Joell Hallowell and Meg Withers. I was one of the 28 poets who contributed writing and found photographs to this collection, available in hard cover and as an ebook.
On a personal note, there is a story from my childhood that sometimes gets repeated in my family. I used to save up my allowance to buy candy or toys from yard sales in our neighborhood. One weekend I went to a yard sale down the block, and came back with a photo album. The entire album was filled with black and white photos from the 1940′s and early 1950′s, but it was clear in paging through the album that it was not focused on the people in the photographs, but the dog in the photographs: a boxer. There were no notes in the album, other than names and dates on the backs of the photos, which were affixed to the heavy black paper with cloth tape. In the beginning photos: a day at the beach, playing on the front lawn, posing with various children, asleep on the porch in the sun- the dog was young. By mid-way through the album, the dog, along with the children, had grown older, and finally, one of the last photos was of a gray-muzzled dog with milky eyes, with a young boxer puppy sitting next to her. I remember the look on my stepmother’s face when I brought that album home-: I didn’t understand then why it struck her that of all the things I could choose to buy, that is what I wanted. The book has been lost, physically, since– but it has become a template within me that I carry everywhere. I still feel compelled to collect the photographs of strangers. Especially those of people and animals who are most certainly dead now. This is not a morbid fascination in any way: it’s not about death at all. It’s about life.
The photos I contributed to this book were of strangers. I found these photos in various locations throughout San Francisco: second-hand stores, antique shops, even forgotten between the pages of used books.
A tribute to unknown women, “Shadowed: Unheard Voices” is an anthology of 146 prose poems and 50 compelling photographs. 28 women poets were invited to respond to an eclectic assortment of images from the late 1800s to the 1940s. Delving into the nature of memory and loss, the poets wondered, invented, and conjured the lives of unknown women—those who left no legacy, only a fading image from which to speculate. The resulting book is a collection of imaginative prose poems from contemporary writers under the influence of the mystery and magnetic force of photography.
List of contributors:
Ellen Bass, Rita Flores Bogaert, Aurora Brackett, Gina Maria Caruso, Maxine Chernoff, Chella Courington, Rachelle Escamilla, Rae Freudenberger, Joell Hallowell, Gabriela Jauregui, Tsipi Keller, Susanna Kittredge, Ali Lawrence, Genny Lim, Tanuja Mehrotra, Toni Mirosevich, Gail Mitchell, L.J. Moore, Tiare Picard, Jennifer Reimer, Susan M. Schultz, Deema K. Shehabi, Jennifer Sweeney, Yolanda Valenzuela, Mary Michael Wagner, Deborah Wood, Meg Withers, Aileen Yoo
September 18, 2012
digigoth: a spellbook for the new sorcerer (new work 7)
This book is winging through the ethers in search of an illustrator and a publisher. If you are interested, please drop me a line.
Read previous pieces here
How to read the pieces from this book:
1. Click on the embedded link to the [music] in the title of the poem.
2. Listen on repeat while reading.
_____________________________________________________
Fig. 24a: The Dangling Yarn. Playlist: [(Playlist: Glitch Mob, A Dream Within a Dream)]
tell the day we’re nowhere bound
by way of what was lost between
cross-threaded time like some machine
that eats its end to grow its tale;
with one last day to chase that sound
to gaze behind the weary night
to feel my wings like phantom sight
to fly to die to flash to sail;
tell the night we’re winding down
on one last shore a wreck to find;
tell the wind we’re lost behind
the warp the woof the weft the veil
and breathed it in and screamed it out
and burst apart and still you cling
and so you rise and now you sky
and sea and light
and turn and flap
and flick and fly
and cry and bite
and gasp
and twist and thrash with claws and beak
what prize is this, what drowning gift
I’ve hooked upon our sounding line
and rescued from the nick of death
or has it baited us to call us back
to arid dreams themselves a sea
this bird as birdlike as our sailless hulk
was once upon a breeze a ship
a young-old man with blazing hair
cradles the snarl of rope and flesh
fixes in his fog-smoke eye
the two dark answers blinking back
a nearly drowned and naked bird
with ragged holes where wings should be?
what sorry work was made of thee
what crude and grim interpretation
of subtler songs as shift and slip
just as gruff voice and grizzled beard
mismatch his freckled young man’s face
itself at odds with the scar that winds
a white territory-border that divides
a blinded eye from one that sees
and stares and glares
and squints and swears
and hears the poet’s
murdering gears! authoress!
he barks
t’was you who nearly killed the bird
that made the breeze to blow
who stripped our sails and stopped the wind
who chewed off wings and swallowed word
and snuffed the growing of the world
his words carry, bell-like bending
round the mast
and aether-dragging
downward through the knotholed decks
a cry dopplering to groan and all that’s massy
with his dropping pitch
yields up its phase
gone see-through while
the things of sound and air
exchange their ghostly lightness
for a standing wave
which slaps and rolls into the lungs and hearts
of all the dreamers within reach
and rattles guts and tuning forks their bones
and draws us up up to answer
by scruff, or snout, or belly
whether live or dead
dreamt or dreamer
both and neither
including me
dragged full-bodied
from the cubbyhole of never never mind
to feel the hot-nosed press against my legs
hooves and toes callus-padded claws
trampling my feet
awash in the crowded waft
of badger mean
and mousy meek and
mutty cringe and
mantis strange and all of equal brute and wit
until the woodwork sags beneath
a brindled crew of dark and light
all staring up into my face
all half-starved for
naught but an age of
phantom cat’s paws batting at
our stays while we drift unmoored
asleep
the deep end of dream
that’s where I am
she thinks
she thinks
wait wait
yes the point of view has changed
the lines no longer yours
to weave and splice .
no no I’ve seen the spiders
spinning meaning as they go
I just report
I just
read from left to right or up to down
cast spells borrow others’ works
steal the sun and claim to have invented light?
no no
follow the dream
follow the birds that showed me the gate
birds. birds? there were two
yes
one was blind and made of song
a black flame
the other
she followed the lure
no girl no
you
called thought and memory from their fog
then let them fly apart
we would not be speaking now
if you hadn’t stolen through the wall
told time a new dream
unanchored death from his wreck
stripped thought of flight
and put the flame of memory out
hang no albatross around my neck!
how can I kill immortal birds?
these are merely words and
I tell waking time by
looking where she points her hands
like any other mortal who keeps watch
but in dream
we are merely open sails
that catch and ride and so reveal
her movement
which neither starts nor ends
but is with storm with cloud
with force
of salve or speed in breeze or gale
in draft or squall lingers or appears
punishes by tempest or devastates
with endless calm
or mutters dry leaves in not-quite-words
then shrieks in the eaves
and you eavesdrop
thief
stories insist
as does sleep hell, I’m dreaming now!
your voice is just another tale demanding
listen! translate!
botched. garbled
only partly heard through shifting walls!
those muffled gifts
in astral language
so crystalline in the grasp of dream
common into mud in the grip of word
and what makes it back into the wake
must still survive a silent roar
electric thoughts connected
fingertip to fingertip mind to mind
voices pass
through tables walls my bones
a pseudonoise that circumscribes
a maelstrom of sameness
one shrieking pitch that equalizes
decapitation hunger sex lost babies
I cannot find my bearings
in a wind that blows all pitches at once
from all directions
my sail is ink
where I invent nothing and sail nowhere
when anyone can tap
a glowing word on a screen
and transport to another world
awake without a dream
dream is nothing
symbols in a book
at worst
a simple cipher for the little darknesses we fear
a puppet stage on which we practice dying
or at best
fly escape forget become unreal
so tell me
how can I steal anything of value
from a lie
girl, girl when will you learn
there is no practice only life
and dream is not escape or lie
have you ever tried to stay awake?
until delirium removes the sense
and dream invades it is true death is real
you will die
the only thing immortal is the tale
and tale is wind
you are the sail the bird
and word is all the wind is
cast the nets!
he shouts
stumbling aft toward the hatch
to the watching crew he says
find her!
and presses flat against the helm
as nose and tooth dive madly in a ball of fur
through scupperholes into the bilge
or labor sloth-by-sloth into the yards
while one dog, overwhelmed
goes dervishing around the deck
the ship goes quiet as all the rest
answer and depart to crawl and trawl
and home and scent and sense and search
all but a hawk that lights upon the starboard rail
and a soft gray toad emerging from the binnacle
will you also help?
he asks
but the hawk has already plunged
into the greening waves
and the toad climbs skyward into secret crevices
that vein the air in silver fire
cradling the weightless bird
he locks his damaged eye on mine
you, poet…
come below
September 8, 2012
the sound of Svalbard, and the purpose of mystery
San Francisco
September 8, 2012
278 days until the Arctic Circle expedition
Svalbard. This is where the journey aboard the barquentine begins. To my English-centric poet’s ears, the name sounds like water running over ice. Like something silvery and fluid. It slides like headlights over a white wall, or like an otter buoyed by its playful nature. At the same time, it has teeth, this otter, and this word: Svalbard.
I find I can’t look down when I say “Svalbard.” It is a word inherently long-sighted, and makes me look up and outward.
All place-names have their inherent music: consider, for example, Snohomish, which sounds to my ears like walking through a bog, or slushy snow. Or what about Oropollo, which I heard someone say in the hallway the other day, and seems to be a surname and not a town. But Oropollo… it sounds like a rooster crowing through a beak full of honey, and doesn’t it translate roughly to something like “chicken of gold?”
And what about Affpuddle, Anton’s Gout, Barton in the Beans, Eccup, Droop and Fogo? Or Scragglethorpe, Scratchy Bottom, Vobster, or Titty Ho? All in Britain! Britain wins. Except maybe for Toad Suck, Arkansas, which my family has attempted to find numerous times after seeing the sign on the Interstate for “Toad Suck Park.” I mean, who could not go there, given the opportunity?
So Svalbard… I wonder to the Norwegian ear, does it have the same soft ring, or does it fall on native ears the way, say “Duarte” or “Placentia” or “Fontana” falls on mine?
Mystery is all about what you don’t know. Mystery is all about how something sounds, or seems.. .not what it actually is.
Or maybe not. Maybe mystery grows… maybe it’s impossible to completely resolve certain states or experiences… places we can’t replicate, or predict, or dissect: like love, or hope, or epiphany. Or what about experiences we share but can’t possibly report back from or explain… like death, or the fashion sense of the 1970′s?
Is it really possible to know all there is of something? Absolutely and completely crawl inside it and solve it for zero? I don’t think so. I think the more we invent new ways to see, the more there will be. Think about telescopes: first our world was the center of the universe, with heaven hung like a chandelier above it, and a big pit underneath full of flames… now we are riding an expanding bubble full of whirling suns into a what or where without a name. There’s a mystery to wrap your head around. Orthe invention of microscopes, which revealed smaller and smaller structures until they stop being matter and are just vibrating forces.. and even then we detect, behind that, the shadows of those forces. Or what about chess?
Is all this still about Svalbard? Yes. It’s about the music of names. It’s about naming mystery… about looking closer and deeper. Of adventuring. Of being happy, ecstatic at how the mystery of things keeps refilling itself to keep pace with our relentless curiosity. That’s the point, I think– or if not the point, it is the grand prize. Not to know, but to keep wanting to find out.
Svalbard… for now it is a name, and a chain of islands near the top of the world. On a map I can walk easily across the oceans with my eyes to it- a place that almost everything on Earth is south of. And soon, I’ll know a little more.
September 7, 2012
i dreamt i was a polar bear burrito
San Francisco
September 6, 2012
279 days until the Arctic Circle expedition
I dreamt I was a polar bear burrito.
As in, I was seeing the world from the perspective of a polar bear. I was very hungry and there was a delicious smell, a hot, living, promising smell. I followed the smell to a smallish, bluish lump, which I then ate. Then, as often happens in my dreams, I was both the bear and the bluish lump, which was in fact a person asleep in a sleeping bag, and i was that person. I was both the polar bear and me asleep in the sleeping bag, inside the bear. These are the impossible insights of dreams.
When I woke up, I started to think about polar bears. What is my polar bear gestalt?
There is the polar bear of the Coca Cola advertisements of the 1990′s, the affable, rotund cartoon swilling sugary liquid alongside cavorting penguins at an idyllic pole where it is always Christmas. The idealism is sickly-sweet and hard to take, and it’s difficult to forgive the basic geographical impossibility of penguins (Antarctic) being anywhere near polar bears (Arctic) except perhaps in a zoo. Or in dreams. Or in a fantasy where a natural predator has become a slothful, sentimental tool.
The next image that popped into my head was that of Iorek Byrnison.
He is one of the heroes of Philip Pullman’s Golden Compass trilogy. This is him in his battle gear. He’s both savage and kindhearted, and like most characters in books, he is not an actual polar bear, but a Polar Bear: a cipher constructed of fears and wishes. He’s indomitable strength, tempered by a human sense of honor and chivalry. He’s more powerful than pain, as he can’t not fight to the death. he’s a dream bear, and a story bear. He is how we bear (oh yes, pun intended) to deal with how merciless actual survival can be. That’s the beauty of characters in stories- they can force the world to be a place where things make sense, and where fairness and safety can be won, and even sustained.
With that alarming synchronicity that often accompanies dreams, I saw this article today on the BBC: Arctic ice melting at ‘amazing’ speed, scientists find
In it, the Director of the Norwegian Polar Institute (NPI) says:
“…we must adjust our understanding of the system and we must adjust our science and we must adjust our feelings for the nature around us.”
This is the moment where the dream and the day collide: if an animal, a real animal in danger of becoming extinct within the next 50 years is dreamt of as this:
but actually looks like this:
then it is time for the dream to change.
September 5, 2012
you can have a boat on your ship, but you can’t have a ship on your boat
San Francisco
September 5, 2012
281 days until the Arctic Circle expedition
So yesterday I promised to help us all avoid future humiliation when hanging out with sailors: what to call his or her vessel, or more importantly, what not to call it.
So the first distinction: boat or ship? Though there is argument about the particulars, there seem to be two main determinants: size and range. Ships are larger: hence, you can carry a boat on your ship, but you can’t carry a ship on your boat, well, unless you have one of those ships in a bottle in your boat, but come on, this is very serious. Ships are bigger than boats, which is not a comment about power, I mean a tugboat can push/pull a cargo ship out of the harbor. This is not a size contest, ok? Sheesh. Which is where the second determinant comes in: range. Boats are designed to stay near land, while ships are built to cross oceans.
But of course it’s not that simple. Now add masts and sails, and you have a whole new world of ships, barques, barkentines, brigs, brigantines, and sloops, oh and yawls, ketches, schooners, cutters and snows, caravels and something called a freedom. When I first saw this chart, I thought, “Hooray!” But I was also that kid who liked to spend saturday morning watching cartoons and memorizing cat and horse breeds from one of those encylopaedic books. So I fully understand that “Hooray!” is not going to be the typical response to this chart. So, because I like you and want you to continue on this journey with me, I’ve provided crib notes below.
In the realm of tall ships, the word “ship” is very specific. Did you study the very simple chart I gave you yesterday? Here it is again:
How to tell what a tall ship is called in three simple steps:
1. Count the masts.
2. What types of sails is it rigged with? (Square*, fore-and-aft**, or both?***)
3. If it has both types of sails, how many masts are square-rigged?****
*square sails hang on yards that are perpendicular to the mast, and are rigged perpendicular to the keel of the vessel.
** fore-and-aft sails are triangular, and are rigged parallel to the keel of the vessel.
**the long, triangular sails (jibs) hung on the bow do not count, only sails on the masts.
****although sometimes, with a topsail schooner, just the upper part of the foremast is square-rigged.
Don’t give up! Ships are like the English language: there seem to be more complications and exceptions than rules. There is always that silent e that makes the vowels go long, but seriously the music of language and the music of ships is totally worth getting it wrong.
So because I am feeling confident enough to offer some very basic rules about naming tall ships, and because I’m about to be late for work, I’m gonna break it down:
Three (or more) masts
1. A true “ship” has three or more masts, and they are all square-rigged. (#1 above).
2. If it has three or more masts, all square-rigged, except the last mast is rigged fore-and aft, you have a barque/bark). (#2 above).
3. If it has three or more masts, but only the first mast is square rigged, and the rest are fore-and-aft, you have a barquentine (barkentine). This is what we’re sailing the Arctic Circle on! (#3 above).
Two masts:
1. If you have two masts, both square-rigged, you have a brig. (#4 above)
2. If you have two masts, and only the foremast is square-rigged, you have a brigantine. (#5 above)
3. If you have two or more masts, and all are fore-and-aft rigged, you have a schooner. (#7, 8, 9, 10 and more above.)
One mast:
1. If you have one mast that is square rigged, you have a disaster.
2. If you have one mast that is fore-and-aft rigged, you have a sloop. (#16 above).
I fully expect (and deserve) to now be schooled by you die-hard sailors out there.
September 3, 2012
every ship is a vessel, but not every vessel is a ship
San Francisco
September 3, 2012
282 days until the Arctic Circle expedition
Yesterday I got to thinking about the barkentine (alternately: barquentine) I will be sailing on during the arctic trip, and this got me thinking about seagoing vessels in general. People generally refer to anything with a hull as a boat, and anything larger than, say, a city bus, is a ship. To be honest, I used to call everything a boat or a ship myself, until an educational and humiliating moment two years ago at the San Francisco Maritime Library.
The maritime library is housed at Fort Mason, just west of the aquatic park, where you can check out the Balclutha if you’d like to see a fully-functional three-masted ship (yes, in this case, it really is a “ship” which I’ll explain later). The aquatic park also has a Junk, two or three paddle steamers, and and assortment of other restored vessels. The best part of all is that the office for the people who work out on the pier is made from an old tugboat cabin. Seriously. There are no depths to my jealousy about that.
Okay, so back to the whole ship versus boat thing. About five years ago now, I first discovered Ron Filion’s map of buried ships beneath San Francisco, and my life was changed forever. Many of the vessels on his map have incomplete identification, and I spotted an older version of this map that hangs on the wall of the Old Ship Saloon (Pacific @ Battery). Both maps are compiled from the verbal accounts of “old-timer 49ers” who were still alive and had personal memories of the names and locations where gold rush vessels had last been beached, moored, or broken up. Ironically, in the 1870s, San Francisco had largely already forgotten that it had once been compared to the Italian city of Venice, because a large part of it had been dominated by the scores of vessels left behind during the gold rush. Many of those hulks were “discovered” multiple times- Niantic, for example, whose bones lie beneath the southeast corner of the Transamerica building, has been stumbled upon at least three times (1872, 1907, and 1978) as cellars and sub-cellars and elevator shafts have all been dug in the area. But what interested me about Ron’s map was not the known vessels, but the unknowns. If over 600 had once crowded the wharves East of First Street, which was then underwater, and 250 or so had avoided the shipbreaking yard (near where the Hills Brothers building now stands), what were the names of those that were sunk in situ for landfill? For some reason, those unknown vessels haunted me. Everywhere I walked I thought of those almond shapes of the hulls sailing through the earth below, throwing back wakes of broken bottles and beetles and sand, and the refuse piles of 150 years ago.
I had the extremely ambitious idea that I would spend my weekends doing research at the maritime library, finding out the names of those lost ships. There was a log after all– every vessel that entered or exited the bay was accounted for by the harbormaster, so why would I be able to use those old maps, along with the ship’s lists, to put names to the missing? Grand schemes like this are common for me– when I was in sixth or seventh grade, I saw a show about the lost Titanic, and decided that if I spent enough time in the library searching the records, I’d be able to pinpoint where it might be found. I think that was the summer I also learned about the Bermuda Triangle, and read about the ghost ship, Mary Celeste– found cruising at full sail but with no crew. That summer all the world became full of mystery and lost treasure, and I’ve thankfully, never really recovered from that.
At any rate, I finally did show up at the maritime museum about two years ago when my research on San Francisco’s Gold Rush Fleet began in earnest, for the Armada of Golden Dreams, the audio tour I directed with Invisible City Audio Tours. I remember showing up on a sleepy weekend afternoon armed with sheaves of papers and lists of ships and asking one of the volunteer librarians for help. We got to talking for awhile about my project, and to his credit, he did not try to discourage me, but after about ten minutes of conversation he stopped me and said, “Look, I’m going to do you a favor and tell you something that no one else will tell you. No one will take you seriously if you keep calling everything a boat or a ship. The correct term is vessel. Every ship is a vessel, but not every vessel is a ship.”
And he handed me a chart with the silhouettes of sailing vessels on it.
“If you want to be taken seriously by anyone when you are talking about your project, and you don’t want to embarrass yourself, you better memorize this.”
Here’s the chart.
Tomorrow I’ll explain what it means. And just so you know that my tendency to spin yarns has a point, I’m going to come back around to where I began. The vessel I’ll we’ll be aboard in the arctic is a barkentine. I’ll show you in tomorrow’s post how to look at any sailing vessel and be able to tell what the proper name for it is, just in case you need to make a positive nautical impression anytime soon.
September 2, 2012
sail the arctic circle with me on a tall ship!!
Sometimes dreams actually come true.
Today I am officially announcing that I will be sailing the arctic circle on an icebreaking tall ship in Summer 2013 as part of an arts and science residency with The Arctic Circle.
The Arctic Circle is a unique, incubator program where artists, scientists, and environmental activists get together to work on individual projects and cross-pollinate ideas, all while sailing on a barkentine around the arctic circle in the International Territory of Svalbard.
Believe me, if this sounds like an ecstatic, wonderful dream to you, impossible, amazing, once-in-a-lifetime, I feel the same way! I keep waking up in the morning thinking… okay, I dreamt that this was going to happen, right? It’s not really true. But it is!!
I will be taking part in the first summer expedition in July 2013, when it will be light 24-hours a day. For my project, I’ll be recording and documenting the experience, with a particular focus on the effect that the isolation, and the intensity of the arctic environment will have on the work of those on board. I will be journaling, writing poems, and collecting audio recordings of the ship, the sounds of the sea and ice, and talking with other participants about the impact of the voyage on their creative process.
My documentation of this voyage officially begins now, because though it may be months before I actually get on a plane to go, the expedition has already begun. Over the next few months, I will learn as much as I can about the region I’ll be entering, the arctic environment, the vessel we’ll be sailing on, and the history of arctic exploration, as well as delving into the tradition of the poetic journey. I’ll be documenting this process in the form of letters, a longstanding custom of maritime history.
Each day I’ll be writing you a letter about my research, my thoughts, or whatever new aspect of the voyage presents itself. It is my way of taking you with me. So please stop by and check out the new posts each day, and feel free to suggest ideas or ask questions. Come explore the arctic circle with me!
-LJ Moore
San Francisco
September 2, 2012
