Endless Summer: Summer Reading

Back from a lovely weekend on the Narragansett shoreline. Over-worked and under-motivated, it's that endless summer time of year. I'm lazy, so go outside and play. Or read these:

- New Yorker review of a book on whaling, a must read for all New Englanders. Key graf below, once and for all settling the rightful pecking order of Rhode Islanders, Cape Codders, and Nantucketers, Melville be damned. And Vineyarders, well, not worth a mention:

Serious money was at stake. When two shallops of Rhode Islanders towed home a right whale in 1662, a contemporary commented that “they had earned more than a whole farm would bring us in an entire year.” Besides oil, right whales contained baleen, a fibrous and feathery tissue in their mouths, which is probably responsible for the “strange, grassy, cutting sound” that Ishmael hears as he watches them feed. Flexible when heated, baleen, also known as whalebone, kept whatever shape it was cooled into, like plastic. It was used primarily in corsets, fashionable from the sixteenth century to the dawn of the twentieth, but it could be molded into items as various as umbrella ribs, fishing rods, and shoehorns.

The island of Nantucket happened into the business a few years later, when a skinny whale strayed into one of their harbors and wandered there for three days, long enough for the Nantucketers to forge a harpoon, paddle out, and stick it. The island upgraded its whaling in 1690 with the expertise of a Cape Codder named Ichabod Paddock, who was said to have been swallowed by a whale in whose belly he found the Devil and a mermaid playing cards for his soul. No less fabulously, around 1712 a Nantucket captain cruising for right whales near shore was supposedly blown out to the broad Atlantic in his small boat, where he made the most of his predicament by killing a sperm whale, which swims only in deep waters. The logistics of a small boat tugging a sperm whale in from the high seas are doubtful, Dolin points out, but, whatever its origins, offshore whaling was dominated by Nantucket until the early nineteenth century.

- Visit David Lynch's website. Why wouldn't you?

- RM sends a Clive James review of Robert Hughes memoir, which is one of those occasionally surfacing artifacts that makes you curse God that you weren't born another man (specifically, Robert Hughes).

- The PK interview, first in a series, in case you missed it.

- Worthwhile Pitchfork interview of Daryl Hall (of Hall & Oates). My favorite point:

Pitchfork: Have you ever wondered if your career would have gone differently if you were black?

DH: I don't know. I mean, that's a weird question. What I do isn't black music, it's just my music. It's music that I grew up with. It's my music as much as any black person's music. It was the music I heard when I was a kid. I don't know. If you're African American, you are forced into making different choices, in a lot of cases, than you are as a white person. However, I have had my kicks in the butt in the same direction as a lot of black musicians have. That may sound patronizing, but I understand what it's like to be a black musician in a white world.

Pitchfork: Because you were singing soul--

DH: Because of reverse racism, yeah, and people trying to label me, and trying to say, "Why is this white guy singing black?" and "What are you doing, what is this music you do?" You know, it's a funny thing with the rock canon, if you're a white guy, and you sing the blues, you're Mick Jagger. You're Eric Clapton. And if you're a white guy and you sing soul, you're a freak. But it's the same thing. There's no difference.

- Book lovers and web2.0 fans check out Shelfari...

- Photos from a Flickr search for 'Endless Summer'

- Get better, Owen Wilson!