'this is the world'

“Maybe you think I’m crazy,” he said, and screwed up his face into a canny smile. 

I tried to protest, but he wouldn’t have it. “Listen, don’t worry, McCabe. I’m called crazy a lotta times already. It don’t bother me. My wife says, ‘Leon, you gotta expect it.’ She says, ‘People never understand a man who wants something more outa life than just money.’ And she’s right! She’s right!” 

“No,” I said. “Wait a second, I—” 

“People think you gotta be one of two things: either you’re a shark, or you gotta lay back and let the sharks eatcha alive—this is the world. Me, I’m the kinda guy’s gotta go out and wrestle with the sharks. Why? I dunno why. This is crazy? Okay.”

Richard Yates, "A Wrestler With Sharks." The Paris Review No. 13, Summer 1956.

dagger

18th century Indian dagger with sheath, made with steel, shark skin, jade, gold, ruby, emerald, sapphire and silver. In the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

'beasts of the sea'

There no breeze exists to propel the ship forward;
Deadening is this sluggish sea's still vapor.
Many seaweeds grow in the troughs of the billows,
Slowing the ship like bushes, he says, thus showing
Here to no great depth the sea descends, and
Here the water barely covers the bottom.
Here the beasts of the sea move slowly wandering,
And among the sluggishly creeping vessels
Languidly swim the great monsters.

Himilco, ca. 533-500 B.C., writing of his sea expeditions.

seaweed and shark teeth

Top: A collection of seaweed, ca. 1850s. Courtesy the Natural History Museum, London, via Collector's Weekly.

Bottom: Teeth from a man-eating shark, ca. 1920, via Erie Basin.

sunday tune: france gall - bébé requin

Je suis un bébé requin
Au ventre blanc aux dents nacrées
Dans les eaux chaudes
Je t’entraînerai
Et sans que tu le sache
Avec amour avec douceur
Moi vois-tu bébé requin
Je veux te dévorer le cœur

***

I’m a baby shark,
White-bellied and pearly-toothed,
Into the warm waters I’ll take you
And without you noticing, lovingly and smoothly,
I, pretty baby shark,
Will eat up your heart.

Found via Spoon + Tamago and originally posted 8/5/2009.

'direful secret creature'

There was a week of nature films on the South Bank and I went to see one about sharks. The film was made by a man of apparently unlimited wealth who fitted himself out with a large ship and any amount of special underwater gear for shark photography ... Eventually they found a great white shark which they attracted with whale oil, blood and horsemeat. It was a truly terrifying creature and they very wisely stayed in their cage while the shark took the bars in its teeth and shook it about. The wealthy man said it had been fantastic, incredible, beyond his expectations. His friends congratulated him on the success of the expedition and the film came to an end.

I found myself resenting that man, however unreasonable it might be of me. All the money in the world does not give him the right to muck about with a direful secret creature and shame the mystery of it with words like 'fantastic' and 'incredible'. The divers were not the ultimate challenge for the shark, I'm certain of that. Socially they were out of their class, the shark would not have swum from ocean to ocean seeking them.

Russel Hoban, Turtle Diary

golden fins

Chiriqui shark pendants, 11th to 16th century, Costa Rica or Panama. 

Also: A Shark Story of Great Merit, published in the New York Times, December 4, 1896.

fear of the abyss

Perhaps, if a bold swimmer, you may once venture out a long way—once! Not twice!—even in company. As the water deepens beneath you and you feel those ascending currents of coldness arising which bespeak profundity, you will also begin to feel innumerable touches, as of groping fingers—touches of the bodies of fish, innumerable fish, fleeing toward the shore. The farther you advance, the more thickly you will feel them come, and above above you and around you, to right and left, others will leap and fall so swiftly as to daze the sight, like intercrossing fountain jets fluid silver. The gulls fly lower around you, circling with sinister squeaking cries; perhaps for an instant your feet touch in the deep something heavy, swift, lithe that rushes past with a swirling shock. Then the fear of the sea, the vast and voiceless nightmare of the sea, will come upon you; the silent panic of all those opaline millions that flee glimmering by will enter into you also.

Lafcadio Hearn, Chita.

shiver

"Lemon sharks ... take advantage of safety in numbers and create shivers—the shark version of a flock or pack." They are also friendly but choosy about their social circles, and known to learn from each other.

Andy Ralph: Arrrgghhhh!!, 2008. Toy rubber sharks, super glue, and a basketball hoop. Found at museummuseum.

the jaguar shark

this weekend

I have work to do over the next few days, but I'm still looking out:

• Eliot Porter's beautiful birds
• light and sound in the Park Avenue Tunnel
• roving signs
• the spectacular now

And next week: sharks. Happy weekend.

Max Dupain: Sharks at Blackhead Beach, 1938. Discovered at the white hotel.

'a love cherished by the despairing'

Jules Michelet, The Sea.

dog fish

Intaglio etching by Chartwell Print.

amazing creatures

Sharks are old—they predate dinosaurs by about two hundred million years. But despite this distant past they are related to humans in unusual ways. We owe both the lever system in our jaws and small bones in our ear to our shark ancestors. Sharks have their own “Jesus,” too: in 2001, workers in an Omaha zoo discovered a baby shark that seemed to have appeared overnight in a tank full of young females, an occurrence repeated in other shark tanks across the country. By a last-resort evolutionary adaptation, female sharks, it turns out, are capable of parthenogenesis, or virgin births.

Madeleine Schwartz, from a 6/27/11 New Yorker Page-Turner post on Juliet Eliperin's Demon Fish.

*

The natural history is pretty amazing. Sharks are cartilaginous fishes (they have a skeleton made of cartilage, not bone) of the sub-class elasmobranchii, which also includes rays and skates. There are more than four hundred species, ranging from the dwarf lanternshark (about 15 cm) to the whale shark, the biggest fish in the sea (‘Max: possibly 1700-2100 cm’, according to my Princeton Field Guide to Sharks of the World). They are very, very old: fossilised species that lived 150 million years ago are almost identical to modern sharks. Sharks were swimming the seas before our continents took shape, while the dinosaurs were still around; Homo sapiens’s 200,000 years are, in the shark’s sight, but an evening gone. Until recently, we knew strikingly little about them. We’re still hazy about such basic matters as how long they live, but research has been revolutionised by genetic testing and electronics. Reports of miraculous ‘virgin births’ to female sharks isolated from males in aquariums, for instance, have recently been explained: genetic sampling shows that sharks are capable of parthenogenesis, or asexual reproduction, in cases where sexual reproduction isn’t possible.

Theo Tait, reviewing Eliperin's book for the LRB, vol. 34, no. 15.

My favorite fact cited in both pieces: Americans are 40 times more likely to be hospitalized for an encounter with a Christmas tree ornament than from a shark attack.

life savers

Kahneman uses the phrase “availability bias” to mean a biased judgment based on a memory that happens to be quickly available ... A striking example of availability bias is the fact that sharks save the lives of swimmers. Careful analysis of deaths in the ocean near San Diego shows that on average, the death of each swimmer killed by a shark saves the lives of ten others. Every time a swimmer is killed, the number of deaths by drowning goes down for a few years and then returns to the normal level. The effect occurs because reports of death by shark attack are remembered more vividly than reports of drownings.

From Freeman Dyson's review of Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, in the NYRB 12/22/2011.

Photo of shark teeth by Quercus Design.

'an incessant murdering of sharks'

When in the Southern Fishery a captured Sperm Whale, after long and weary toil, is brought alongside late at night, it is not, as a general thing at least, customary to proceed at once to the business of cutting him in ... But sometimes, especially upon the Line in the Pacific, this plan will not answer at all; because such incalculable hosts of sharks gather round the moored carcase ... to be sure, any man unaccustomed to such sights, to have looked over her side that night, would have almost thought the whole round sea was one huge cheese, and those sharks the maggots in it.

Nevertheless, upon Stubb setting the anchor-watch after his supper was concluded; and when, accordingly Queequeg and a forecastle seaman came on deck, no small excitement was created among the sharks; for immediately suspending the cutting stages over the side, and lowering three lanterns, so that they cast long gleams of light over the turbid sea, these two mariners, darting their long whaling-spades, kept up an incessant murdering of the sharks, by striking the keen steel deep into their skulls, seemingly their only vital part. But in the foamy confusion of their mixed and struggling hosts, the marksmen could not always hit their mark; and this brought about new revelations of the incredible ferocity of the foe. They viciously snapped, not only at each other's disembowelments, but like flexible bows, bent round, and bit their own; till those entrails seemed swallowed over and over again by the same mouth, to be oppositely voided by the gaping wound ... It was unsafe to meddle with the corpses and ghosts of these creatures ... Killed and hoisted on deck for the sake of his skin, one of these sharks almost took poor Queequeg's hand off, when he tried to shut down the dead lid of his murderous jaw.

Herman Melville, Moby Dick.

'cold-blooded rover of the deep'

... a cold-blooded rover of the deep, its huge mouth filled with razor-sharp teeth, swimming ceaselessly night and day in search of anything that might fall into the cavernous maw and stay the gnawing hunger which drives the rapacious fish relentlessly on his way … There is something particularly sinister in a shark’s appearance. The sight of his ugly triangular fin lazily cutting zigzags in the surface of the sea, and then submerging to become a hidden menace, suggests a malevolent spirit. His ogling chinless face, his scimitar-like mouth with its rows of gleaming teeth, the relentless and savage fury with which he attacks, the rage of his thrashing when caught …

Captain William E. Young, Shark! Shark! (Theo Tait describes Young as a 'professional shark-hater and shark-killer.')

Nicolaus Steno: Elementorum myologiae specimen, seu musculi descriptio geometrica. Florence, 1667. Found at book aesthete.

swimmers

this weekend

Looking closely:

• the Quay brothers
• toys
• just kids
• fireflies on the water
• the murder of crows
• a visit to the reading room

Next week: sharks.

Photo by Peter Stackpole for LIFE: Dr. Perry W. Gilbert, shark expert examining mako shark, in special research pens. The Bahamas, April 1960.

this weekend

Big stuff:

• long movies
• long walks
• cults
• epics 

Happy weekend.

Shark cigarette card, early 1900s. Via the NYPL.