Whose Life is it anyway

[Trev]

calm down pol pot. I wasn't judging your precious fascist arse. I was just replying to Beanpole's post, So joe Stalin i'd appreciate it if you didn't call me names you fascist woolly.

OK.









Doofus.

[Beanpole]

The idea that paying out the Herald's Literary Editor was a good idea may be proven wrong. Don't know who the ghost writer was for Simon's Bio but a few of Knox's remarks in his review had a certain familiar ring to them-lazy, poorly researched, etc.

[Shane Peel]

How yer going Peely? Good to see you still plying your craft.

Come on. The only thing Peely is plying is his ivory handled riding crop over the sun burnt backs of the coterie of pre teen (I'm a goose) carrying his sedan chair.

I thought you were banned???

[Nick Carroll]

The idea that paying out the Herald's Literary Editor was a good idea may be proven wrong. Don't know who the ghost writer was for Simon's Bio but a few of Knox's remarks in his review had a certain familiar ring to them-lazy, poorly researched, etc.

Tim Baker.

I feel for Tim, it's never nice to get a harsh review, but he's done plenty of good work over the years and will again. I think it's good if surf writing is held to new standards by Malcolm or by anyone else with some serious writing qualifications for that matter.

[Nick Carroll]

Oh yeah, Teahupo'o is sorta pumping.

[Malcolm Knox]

The idea that paying out the Herald's Literary Editor was a good idea may be proven wrong. Don't know who the ghost writer was for Simon's Bio but a few of Knox's remarks in his review had a certain familiar ring to them-lazy, poorly researched, etc.

Tim Baker.

I feel for Tim, it's never nice to get a harsh review, but he's done plenty of good work over the years and will again. I think it's good if surf writing is held to new standards by Malcolm or by anyone else with some serious writing qualifications for that matter.

I haven't seen this review but it's nothing to do with me and I haven't been the Herald's Literary Editor since 2006. Possibly the reviewer is David Knox? - no relation, never met him - or maybe a rip-off merchant trying to cash in on my huge fame.

[Nick Carroll]

See you never know where a Knox will pop up eh.

[Beanpole]

Yes it was David Knox who wrote the review, Malcolm. After I checked that I assumed it was an evil plot by some close relative of yours to overthrow the surfing establishment. Anyhow, I enjoyed your book; as former grommet on the gold coast at that time it had a bit of resonance.

[Malcolm Knox]

Yes it was David Knox who wrote the review, Malcolm. After I checked that I assumed it was an evil plot by some close relative of yours to overthrow the surfing establishment. Anyhow, I enjoyed your book; as former grommet on the gold coast at that time it had a bit of resonance.

Thanks Beanpole, glad to have passed your BS-detector.
David (DK???) must be out there working as a guerilla Knox.

If you're worried about it, I don't think I'll be turfed off the Gold Coast by MP or Joan. She came up to me at Byron Bay the other week and said she enjoyed the book a lot, found it very funny, and had been reading passages aloud to Michael. She got me to sign a copy 'To DK and Mo' and said she'd tell Michael's mates to read it.
Nick's reporting of her one-word review - 'Crap' - had been correct at the time he wrote his article. Initially she'd taken a look, and (like a lot of readers) couldn't make head or tail of the bad spelling and weird grammar and had chucked it in the garage. She'd only started reading it again more recently.
So she was a different quality of person from Mo in the book, which was lucky because I was half expecting to get a handbag to the side of the head.

Ron - thanks for msg - this forum doesn't authorise me to reply yet.

[daryl]

can sympathize with the crap response, I too expect a better response when some harsh critics re-read my last attempt at writing an epic

[Nick Carroll]

^^ yeah they don't even fcuken drink coffee.

Isn't that the whole point of Newport shops.

[daisy]

coming late to this - and kind of surprised no one has mentioned the old quote attributed to Einstein: "The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources."

maybe the whole thing would be less questionable if Mr. (M.) Knox had drawn on other real characters to create more of a fictional composite. i'll probably get a copy of the book (and Summerland) when I'm next in Australia but just based on NC's review and comments here the parts that seem most controversial are the obvious fictional elements about DK's mother, etc. when the rest seems to be closely modelled clearly on a real character.

i think the whole surf journalizm/gonzo/corporate discussion has been worked over endlessly in other threads. but i'm interested by the implication that literature has little place in the, uh, demi-monde of gold coast surfing. or in surfing more generally. and about the apparent underrepresentation of surfing in literature. I've read Breath by Winton, and Tapping the Source from the US (Lucky Al put me onto that one and lent me his copy). They are both decent enough books (Winton obviously more than decent as a writer) although they have their limits. I'm curious to know about other examples of surfing in literature...???

[Nick Carroll]

^^daisy you've been sucked in by yet another hoax Einstein quote

The internet is full of 'em, probably because the people in need of support for their half cocked folk wisdom quotes can only think of one genius, and that happens to be a theoretical physicist with little background in the humanities or arts or philosophy...but what does that matter when ya want to tag a quote.

Anyway yeah there is a small but fairly amusing surf fiction canon out there, ranging from "Gidget" (by FAR the most successful btw) to all sorts of crazy nonsense in the "surfploitation" mould, including Australia's first attempts: "Surfie", by Roger Carr, and "Surfari Highway" by Ray Slattery (both 1966), and a really epic silly series including "The Girl In The Telltale Bikini", "Cute And Deadly Surf Twins", and "Death Cab Surfside", published in the USA between 1969 and 1972. Quentin Tarantino missed a goldmine there.

Heaps of epic cheese in fact, leavened by a very small number of grown up surf fictional efforts. Surfing and cheese lit seem to go together uncomfortably well in fact.

[Nick Carroll]

ah what the hell at the risk of borng youse all here's an article I wrote for those fun filled characters at Kurungabbaa on the subject. This was before Malcolm wrote The Life btw


A critic at large

DOOMED TO THE DEPT OF CHEESE?
Tim Winton’s “Breath” sticks out like a ten-foot set on a two-foot day. Nick Carroll asks what chance is there for surf fiction?

Recently, while engaged in a series of on-camera interviews with various Australian surfing luminaries for yet another of my wacky journalistic projects, I heard one say something I’d been unconsciously waiting to hear since the interviews had begun, several weeks beforehand.
My victim at the time was David “The Mexican” Sumpter, and in the midst of explaining on camera just how he’d managed to conduct a live commentary to his classic 1970s surf flick On Any Morning, while the audience hurled Jaffas at each other, the screen, and anything else that moved, the Mex had paused.
“Look,” he said, “surfers, to tell the truth … surfers, they’re pretty good in the water, doing their shuusss-shussss-shusss-thing,” and here he wiggled one hand from side to side like a surfboard cutting through the water, “but…”
The Mex leaned forward conspiratorially. “…They’re a bit thick.”
A bit thick! He’s right: by and large, we’re really no good at explaining ourselves. And as I drove away quietly pissing myself with laughter, a rather odd thought occurred to me: Had he struck upon the key to why surfing has yet to make any real literary sense?
In the broader context, fictional takes on surfing are fairly rare, understandable enough given modern Literature’s natural homes: the desert borders and wastelands of Cormac McCarthy’s America, the crowded cityscapes and streets of Don Delillo’s New York and Zadie Smith’s immigrant England, the bleak metaphysical old age of J.M. Coetzee. Not a whole lot of room there for frothing over a six-second pit…or for water of any kind, really.
Yet the oeuvre has recently been shoved into the public eye by Australian writer Tim Winton’s publication of a novel, Breath, that relies deeply on its peculiarly Australian vision of surfing as a male rite of passage – a ritual of place, yes, but also of togetherness, and of risk.
Breath is an extraordinary piece of work. One gets the sense that Winton, a highly intelligent and sensitive bloke, is writing his way past a classic mid-life crisis. We meet his protagonist, Bruce Pike, as a weary, divorced 50-year-old father of two bright girls, feeling truly alive only when his job as a paramedic brings him into contact with other people’s crises. Then for almost the rest of the novel, Pike, “Pikelet”, the narrator, describes his 14th year, led at the mercy of the ocean, the surf, a feral mate nicknamed Loonie, and two older, deeply corrupted half-strangers – a hardcore, super skilled surfer named Sando, and his angry, broken wife Eva.
The book is strangely paced, awkward like its narrator, almost afraid of itself and its ideas at times, yet always going there, just as Pikelet keeps going out in surf that scares the living shit out of him, lured by the idea of living up to Sando, who – as Winton subtly makes clearer throughout – isn’t someone even remotely worth worshipping. Its heartbreak isn’t in the dramatic surf sequences or in Pikelet’s destructive sexual initiation by Eva; they’re in the brief quiet way Winton describes Pikelet’s parents, his vague sense of dislocation from them, their disappointment and fear as they watch their son slipping away from them into places they’ll never go. (For good reason, by the way – I personally wouldn’t advise strangle-fcuking a crazy mid-20s ex-freestyle skier American chick while she chokes herself with a plastic bag … but maybe that’s because I’ve already had my mid-life crisis. Just as well Tim got to write about it instead.)
Yet for long stretches Breath is as much about place as anything else, in this case the wild coast of southern south-west Australia, where cold fronts pass before the arrival of swells that cause the ground to shake miles inland, and there’s hardly anyone around except a rag-tag local crew who might or might not give a grommie a lift back to town. And yeah, while the novel’s big issues concern risk, reward, darkness, survival, and fighting to grow up whatever way you can, it also really dead set is about surfing. It’s not just some lame metaphor, and it’s not feel-good romance. In just being willing to truly describe the sensations of a full-on surf session, Winton goes closer than anyone else so far in making the connection between spirit and the physical world that haunts so many long-term surfers, and which frankly evades pretty much every other attempt at surf fiction yet published.
Where does they begin, these attempts? A couple of early Aussie surf novels can be found by the assiduous in the NSW State Library: “Surfie”, by Roger Carr, and “Surfari Highway”, by Ray Slattery, both published in 1966. You can guess by the titles, can’t you – these are part of the first wave of what we might term “surfploitation” novels, cashing in on that wacky new teenage fad we all know and love.
This was followed by a pile of “juvenile fiction” – terrific description! – mostly published in the USA, and including such gems as The Boy With The Golden Surfboard, several Surfer Girls, and about five separate Wipeouts, one of which is part of the famed Hardy Boys kiddie adventure canon. And that’s not even counting The Natural: Adventures of a Surfing Superstud, by British author Bez Newton, which features the witty semi-porn adventures of Nigel the Cornish international surf god. Or Paumalu by Rus Calisch, a frankly bizarre re-writing of Hawaiian oral history with distinctly homoerotic undertones. Or the all-time surf novel publication record-holder, Patrick Morgan, who turned out nine titles between 1969 and 1972, including (and I kid you not) The Girl In The Telltale Bikini, Cute And Deadly Surf Twins, and Death Car Surfside. Fark! Unappreciated genius, I say.
In recent years there’s been a positive swathe of more dignified attempts, including Fiona Capp’s Night Surfing and New Yorker Allan Weisbecker’s melodramatic In Search of Captain Zero, both lost-boy sagas of differing merits. But comparing these efforts to Breath is a bit like chucking a Brewer pintail in the back of your car with a Coolite. When it comes to serious goddam surf literature, apart from Tim Winton there’s only one other player: the American Kem Nunn, author among other titles of Tapping The Source, The Dogs Of Winter, and Tijuana Straits. Nunn’s darkly comic skill as a writer, and his selection of a subject background alien to many Americans, makes him almost as unusual as Winton, and almost as bold. Yet it has not freed him from relentless servitude to the great American Fictional Narrative: the Lone Ranger, the Pale Rider, Captain Ahab raging against his inevitable destruction at the hands of the Elements. In a Kem Nunn version of Breath, you’ve got to imagine Sando woulda been the hero, not the false god; Pikelet’s parents woulda been rich and boringly dismissive; and Eva, well, she probably wouldn’t even have shown up. I’m a big fan of attempts to compress the modern male experience into narrative – after all, when it comes to today’s psycho-cultural battleground, the average bloke’s hardly winning the war – but the great A.F.N. has the deadly weakness of being pretty much entirely free of half the human race, and guess what, Kem, men need women these days. There’s a reason why Moby-Dick was boring as hell – it’s because there were no chicks allowed.
Which makes it ironic that probably the single best known piece of surf fiction in history is about a chick. Gidget and its follow-up publications were penned by screenwriter Larry Zuckerman as a thinly fictionalised account of his daughter Kathy’s adventures at Malibu, in the late 1950s. This was the book that drove Mickey Dora mad, and a re-read (or actually a first read, for those of us unfortunate enough to have missed it thus far) will swiftly explain to the reader the cause of Dora’s madness: it is epic cheese. Colossal super-cheese. Surfploitation’s finest hour. Girl meets cutely-named boys … learns to do their thing … gets cute name too (she’s a “girl midget”!)… accidentally starts worldwide craze.
Fucked up as it may seem to admit, though, there’s something lively about Gidget, something tweakily happy that makes it a less dire experience than most surf novels, and that undoubtedly made it such a success back in the day, both in print and on screen. Cheese has its place, and oddly enough it’s the same place where surf fiction seems to have made its natural home – in the movies.
And God no, I am not talking about Morning Of The Earth, or Five Summer Stories, or whatever. Surf movies may indeed be fiction, but only by accident. I’m talking about two of Hollywood’s B-Grade epics, two movies who’ve earned back way more than their gross and will no doubt continue to churn through DVD-World for many years to come. One is the unintentionally hilarious Big Wednesday: I defy anyone to watch the scene late in the movie – as the Bear, a broken-down former surf millionaire now grovelling in a back room on the pier, has his foreboding of the great swell to come – and not to laugh out loud. “It’s just the lemon next to the pie,” indeed. There’s more one-liners in Big Wednesday than in a whole season of Seinfeld.
The other? Do I need to tell ya? Chick surfer, terrified of big waves, bones football star and rises above herself (well, himself – Noah Johnson did the tuberiding finale sequence) to win her heat at Pipe? Yeah, Blue Crush. Cheesy it may be, but by God, just like Gidget, it hit the spot.
The whole thing makes you wonder: Is surfing just a B-Grade natural – doomed to a fictional life, down there in the Dept of Cheese with the Girl in the Telltale Bikini? I suspect the jury will be out for a while on that one. Maybe Winton hits the nail on the head with the last sentence of Breath, where he makes a sharp clear case for his vision of surfing – kind of a quiet blessing for his worn-down middle-aged Pikelet, “completely pointless and beautiful”, and not in need of further explanation. And Mex was right: a lot of surfers do come across as a bit thick. But so do a lot of fishermen, which hardly stopped Ernest Hemingway. And there is something unavoidably poignant in surfing, something which has nothing to do with male rites of passage or the American obsession with the individual…something to do with its origins, in a culture now all but destroyed by the encroachment of the modern world.
We’ve been surfing for 100 years, but the Polynesians surfed for a thousand years before that. What has happened to the Polynesians? What on earth are we doing, fumbling around with this thin strand of a culture we barely understand? Fictionalise that, and we might get somewhere.

[Skipper]

As far as non fiction goes, my favourite is Steven Kotler's "West of Jesus- Surfing Science and the Origins of Belief". I've mentioned it before on RS.

But more importantly, may as well take this opp to qualify my initial remarks about the esteemed mista Knox, now that he's amongst us.
I still think it's a gut reaction to snarl and dismiss an older newbie's newfound passion for surfing as a response borne of a surfer's instinctive feeling of possessiveness and resentment of other surfers. Let alone older newbies, but to any that encroach on their turf so to speak. The dreaded localism is the one prime manifestation of this. It's not a pretty tendency, Its churlish and unnecessary, and one, that to be fair and honest, I don't really practice in real life. There's a bunch of blokes I've known overth years who at various stages have been the recipients of the same such gift as a surf lesson that Malcolm got and I've been more than encouraging and even gone out with a couple of them to show them some basics. As if one can be possessive about a metro beach like Bondi f'fcuksake!
As I said it's a resentment borne of a sense of exclusivity to something I think most surfers feel, which is that if you started young, you can't help but feel precious about it and sneer at those who come late to it.
So a kind of backpeddle and apology is what this is.
As far as the book goes, still haven't read it, but hope to soon enough.

[offshore1]

Nice work Nick. you've inspired me to get the book. Sounds like a fantastic read.


one problem though, where can i get a copy of "The Girl In The Telltale Bikini" in this day and age..

[Malcolm Knox]

Just wondering if The Life has any connection to the northern beaches? As a overly self entitled spoiled resident of the insular peninsula I'm concerned I wont be able to relate in any way with the story or its characters if there is not some mention of the area between Narrabeen and Palm Beach.

PS. Whats your thoughts on the redevelopment of the Newport shopping precinct? Are you as concerned as Nick Carroll and I am about the proliferation of darkies wearing safety vests, driving tip trucks and generally wandering about using non apple smart phones and possibly plotting Brixton type riots?

Hey Reginald - DK gets driven up Barrenjoey Rd, pulls over in every car park up to N.Palm Beach, gets driven back down again, pulls over in every car park, ends up surfing at N.Narrabeen. That just about covers it for the northern beaches.

I'm sure Nick would be more worried about Newport if he could pull his nose out of 'The Girl in the Telltale Bikini' - isn't that by Stieg Larssen?

Skipper - you're a big man, no offence taken. When you surf like I do, you spend too much time getting chewed out by 12yo toughs, and getting really upset about it, to be worried by much else. btw Nick's right about Kem Nunn, essential reading imo.

[sliver]

Hey Reginald - DK gets driven up Barrenjoey Rd, pulls over in every car park up to N.Palm Beach, gets driven back down again, pulls over in every car park, ends up surfing at N.Narrabeen. That just about covers it for the northern beaches.

I loved the part where they drive down Mona Vale Rd and see the Ocean first after a long trip...I know I'm home when I turn that bend and see the blue down the hill.

BTW I really enjoyed the book regardless of the controversy.