“Worldview: I don’t know. . . I live in a much too sheltered environment to know how screwed up the world really is, and I am way to0 criticizable to criticize others.”
–Surfer Ryan Burch, age 20, Cadiff-by-the-Sea, California, interviewed in the November 2009 issue of Surfer
1. From Wikipedia: Compared to ordinary face-to-face situations, a hyperpersonal message sender has a greater ability to strategically develop and edit self-presentation, enabling a selective and optimized presentation of oneself to others.
2. Material Transparency: an ethic for writers based on full disclosure of material connections between the writer and subject.
3. Linguistically, material transparency is in itself an application of hyperpersonal communication . It distinguishes itself by subverting the appearance of a ‘strategically develop[ed] and edit[ed] self-presentation’. This is done via explicit acknowledgment of the writer’s material connections to the subject as well as his or her influences, intentions, motivations, and audience.
Joshy told me he needed a flow overhaul, a flowverhaul. He told me he needed a trip. DJ told me he was taking a class in ‘rapid visualization’. Yohanna told me about the novel she was editing.
I told Yohanna I wrote a manifesto on material transparency. I told DJ we’ve been getting small windswell here, a few surfs. I told Joshy all he needed was a trip and a gimmick [like making a blog called TheSickestBreakdotcom where you went around Brazil or wherever filming street drummers, later remixing into futuristic drumbreaks and then posting everything as this contest where people could vote on who had the sickest breaks] and he was ‘in’.
- me and lau, 2001. note ‘sand free’ kitchen and crossed sticks on either side of fire pit.
Feels like another ‘chapter’ is closing and damn if it can’t come fast enough and yet still feels like it’s all too fast. Yesterday was 2001 and Lau and I had just met. She thought I was from Albania or something. Saw me just after I’d gotten out of the water from 4 hour surf. I was shivering. She said I looked like I’d ‘suffered.’ I explained to her later that even though the water was warm you actually got cold when you were out long enough. Later I brought her back to this secret camp in Cerritos and cooked arroz y frijoles with garlic and onions and a little bit of saltwater. We built fires, got better at keeping sand out of food, decided to keep going. Whenever I came back from surfing she’d always have camp tightened.
Last week Julie Schwietert sent me a quote she’d dug up from I’d given in an interview I gave a couple years ago.
“Thinking back on it, the root of our marriage was the desire to make a life out of just what we had – which was very little…traveling together, finding our way.”
Small news section will follow recent publications, notes on writing, writers, music, maybe river levels, swell reports, and other laminar flow.