The Log From The Sea Of Cortez (2001) - Plot & Excerpts
Do you ever catch yourself smiling like an idiot when you're reading something pleasurable? Well, my smile muscles hurt. The log begins with an introduction Steinbeck wrote, "About Ed Ricketts," after his travel companion from the journey chronicled here died. It's gorgeous! What an fascinating man he was!! I had just read Cannery Row, and Ricketts inspired the character of Doc, so I was happy to learn about him, or at least what could be related to me in 50 pages or so. Steinbeck mentions that after his death, the people of Cannery Row tried to define him. Of those he heard, half-Christ and half-goat was the description that he liked best. There really needs to be a movie about Steinbeck and Ricketts. Someone do that. It would be so lushly beautiful, whether they're communing over (many) beers in Doc's laboratory in Monterey, or sailing into shallow wade pools along the Gulf of Mexico or having one of their four-day long parties, where nobody went to bed except for "romantic purposes." I know that there is a movie version of Cannery Row, but it wouldn't have John Steinbeck in it. And it wouldn't have this trip in it! No, Steinbeck says in the introduction that Ricketts was his closest friend for eighteen years. I want to watch them being friends. An essential scene would be when they were allowed onto a large commercial Japanese shrimping dredge in Mexico that, to Steinbeck and Ricketts' horror, simply scraped the ocean floor of absolutely every speck of life, then dumped everything that wasn't shrimp, now lifeless, back into the bay. Ricketts and Steinbeck stared at vast collection of fish, sharks, anemones, rays, corals and seahorses being tossed back into the sea for the gulls. All that knowledge, all that food, wasted! An entire ecosystem wiped out. And, in true form to the way Steinbeck honors even the most miserable lech in his fiction, he loved these men working on the Japanese shrimping dredge! Loved them! He said, "they were good men, but they were caught in a large, destructive machine, good men doing a bad thing." He promised to send them a fine volume of crustacean biology when he returned to Monterey. The missing star is only absent because, after reading the introduction, I expected the same intimate, personal style to be woven into the log, throughout, and it wasn't really so. It was still a narrative, and many of their adventures and conversations and struggles were described, but just not in the same casual manner. I know this wasn't that sort of book, but god, it could have been! Okay, I already feel guilty being (just a titch) fussy about this, because what this book is is just great. I'll stop being a whiner. I just wanted more Doc. In the intro I learned that Ricketts had such an affection for marine worms that he called girls he liked (and there were many), "wormy" as a term of endearment. So you can see why I wanted more. Now, you like Steinbeck, but are still unsure if you want to read this nonfiction account of tide pool specimen-gathering? Here is how you will know for sure that it is for you. Do you love lists of captivating and beautiful and sexy-as-hell, sciency words? Do you smile like an drooling moron when reading them? I sure did. Here is just one of the many lists describing some of their catches to help you decide: "One huge, magnificent murex snail...so camouflaged with little plants, corallines, and other algae that it could not be told from the reef itself...rock oysters were there, and oysters; limpets and sponges; corals of two types; peanut worms; sea-cucumbers, and many crabs, particularly some disguised in dresses of growing algae...many worms, including our enemy Eurythoe, which stings so badly. The coral clusters were violently inhabited by snapping shrimps, red smooth crabs and little fuzzy black and white spider crabs." And don't think that it's all lists and clinical talk! He had a way of finishing off each chapter with a lucid and dreamy bit of philosophy or reflection: "This little trip of ours was becoming a thing and a dual thing, with collecting and eating and sleeping merging with the thinking-speculating activity. Quality of sunlight, blueness and smoothness of water, boat engines, and ourselves were all parts of a larger whole and we could begin to feel its nature but not its size." Another chapter ends with his defense of drunkenness, another with a defense of laziness and another with a cry about the depletion of our natural resources and another with the beauty of scooping fish while you sail and dropping them directly into a pan of hot oil, eating hundred of the delicious and salty things with friends in the moonlight. This book is just so pretty. If you don't watch out, Steinbeck will make you love the world.Sarah Montambo Powell
Yes, it meanders some, and yes, I felt as if I was ODing on testosterone from time to time (he edited his wife out of the text, though she was supposedly actually there on the trip), but there is so much gorgeous writing, I didn't care.We felt rather as God would feel when, after all the preparation of Paradise, all the plannings for eternities of joy, all the making and tuning of harps, the street-paving with gold, and the writing of hosannas, at last He let in the bleacher customers and they looked at the heavenly city and wished to be again in BrooklynAnd now the wind grew stronger and the windows of houses along the shore flashed in the declining sun. The forward guy-wire of our mast began to sing under the wind, a deep and yet penetrating tone like the lowest string of an incredible bull-fiddleThe moment...of leave-taking is one of the pleasantest times in human experience, for it has in it a warm sadness without loss. People who don't ordinarily like you very well are overcome with affection...It would be good to live in a perpetual state of leave-taking, never to go nor to stay, but to remain suspended in that golden emotion of love and longing....It's all so vivid and smart and wry and lovely. It's humbling if you're any sort of writer to read this level of writing and yet you can't help but love it, and the love overwhelms your despair and shame and jealousy and it's all right in the end, because it's just so wonderful, and you'd rather live in a world that had Steinbeck than one that never did.Probably a great book to listen to on audio.
What do You think about The Log From The Sea Of Cortez (2001)?
I thank the streets of Brooklyn for my discarded copy of "The Log of the Sea of Cortez" which enthralled me with John Steinbeck's homespun wisdom, his deep love of humanity, and his trust in the balance of things, even as he sees so much of what's wrong with the world. Not quite memoir, not quite scientific journal, Steinbeck's recounting of an expedition to collect samples of sea life in Mexico is rich with philosophy while the appendix must be one of the most bromantic eulogies in American letters.
—Drew
I rate this book a 3.3 on a scale of 1 to 5 with 5 being best.I read this book prior to a scientific expedition to the area as a way of comparing the present day biology of the region to what Steinbeck encountered. I came away feeling that the biodiversity of the region had certainly suffered in the intervening years.Here are a few meaty quotes: MEN REALLY NEED SEAMONSTERS IN THEIR PERSONAL OCEANS. 27FOR THE OCEAN, DEEP AND BLACK IN THE DEPTHS, IS LIKE THE LOW DARK LEVELS OF OUR MINDS IN WHICH THE DREAM SYMBOLS INCUBATE AND SOMETIMES RISE UP TO SIGHT LIKE THE OLD MAN OF THE SEA. 28THE HARVEST OF SYMBOLS IN OUR MINDS SEEMS TO HAVE BEN PLANTED IN THE SOFT RICH SOILS OF OUR PREHUMANITY. 30
—Adam Cherson
"There is a strange duality in the human which makes for an ethical paradox. We have definitions of good qualities and of bad; not changing things, but generally considered good and bad throughout the ages and throughout the species. Of the good, we think always of wisdom, tolerance, kindliness, generosity, humility; and the qualities of cruelty, greed, self-interest, graspingness, and rapacity are universally considered undesirable. And yet in our structure of society, the so-called and considered good qualities are invariable concomitants of failure, while the bad ones are the cornerstones of success. A man --a viewing-point man-- while he will love the abstract good qualities and detest the abstract bad, will nevertheless envy and admire the person who through possessing the bad qualities has succeeded economically and socially, and will hold in contempt that person whose good qualities have caused failure."
—Joe1207
