7/24/2013: Day 29: A Shark Miscellany

by in Activism, Environment, Literature, Pop Culture, Shark Charities and tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Things I would blog about if I wasn’t overwhelmed with fatigue:

1. The shark attack in Brazil captured on video

2. Reflections on a shark’s mouth being a gateway to another world (with much credit and admiration given to Joseph Campbell).

3. The complex emotions aroused in me by a shark attack

4.This line from Neil Shubin’s book “Your Inner Fish”: “Basically, we’re all modified sharks.”

5. How Shubin explains that divergent forms of the bones that support the upper and lower jaws in sharks, help us swallow and hear. The muscles and nerves that we use to talk and swallow move the gills in sharks and other fish.

6. The otherness and fear evoked by a shark attack juxtaposed with the fact that way back deep in the mystery of all things, sharks and people were sort of one

7. How a great white hijacked a whale watching expedition and how much I wish I had been onboard.

8. My action today: 8 signatures on the epic Shark Defenders petition.

Day 28: 7/23/2013: Sharks: Feel The Poetry

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Today I bought some shark educational materials for the Fall semester. I wanted to memorize which shark belongs to which family. Instead of studying, I became swept up in the beauty of names–all these sharks I’d never heard of:

the blind shark, the tasselled wobbegong, the false, the graceful, the grinning, ghost, honeycomb and lollipop cat sharks

and among the requiems: the blackspot, the dagger nose, the milk shark, the nervous shark, the night shark, the pondicherry, the hardnose, the big nose, the spinner

not to mention the sawback, hidden, ornate and angular angelsharks or the unforgettable dusky, sharpnose, sharp fin, whiskery, western spotted gummy, the flapnose, and humpback hound sharks

Did you know the smallest shark is the dwarf lantern (6.7 inches)?

Or that hound sharks hunt in packs or

that a school of hammerheads is also called a shoal or a shiver?

Wobbegongs are excellent ambushers

and once someone found

a doll inside a tiger shark

Day 27: 7/22/2013: Sharkitecture

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Today, I welcomed a new class of International students at Sci-Arc, an architecture school where I teach ESL in the summer. As an icebreaker, I had them ask each other a series of questions including a gem I stole from my own writing teacher:

“If faced with your potential end, would you rather confront a bear or a shark?”

These answers reveal how deeply weird our relationship to other creatures can be. Students who chose death by bear over shark gave these reasons:

1. “The bear is cuter.”

2. “The bear is more like a person.”

3. “Getting killed by a shark is all salty and it hurts.”

A few people had enough confidence in themselves as swimmers to believe:

1. “I might be able to swim faster than a shark.”

Others reasoned that death by shark would be quicker and more merciful than being scalped by a bear:

2. “The shark will just bite my head off and it will be over.”

To make sure the conversation didn’t get too sensational, I informed that students that human beings kill about 100 million sharks a year and sharks kill, oh I don’t know…a half dozen people or something.

I wish I had studied anthrozoology and could compile data like this for a living.

After class, I did get five friends to sign my slowly evolving Shark Defenders petition.

Day 26: July 21, 2013: Dirty, Sexy “Jaws”

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famous poster

I’m writing a blog entry for Sharksavers about the Jaws charity event.

My original copy of “Jaws” is so old and well-loved, the spine is nearly demolished. I keep trying to locate key moments like Alex Kintner being yanked off his raft, but the ravaged paperback, as if possessed by an X-rated daemon flips open to a lurid sex passage.

On page 104, Benchley gives a description of Ellen Brody’s nipple-revealing “diaphanous nightgown” and tells us that her husband (Roy Scheider in the movie) returns from the bathroom “tumescent.” Ellen, however has taken a sleeping pill. She drifts off as Brody grumbles “I’m not very big on screwing corpses.” The rather poetic “tumescence” (the “tomb” sound underscoring Brody’s doomed chances) becomes a frank and embarrassing “dwindling erection.”

When I read this book as a pre-adolescent kid, (at least a dozen times between 1975 and 1976)  the sex scenes were as disturbing to me as the shark attacks.  Sometimes as with Brody’s “screwing corpses” comment, the two themes merged.  A memorable and lengthy description of Brody urinating recalled the shark “spewing foam and blood and phosphorescence in a gaudy shower,” as he chomped on poor Chrissie in the opening chapter.

Castro saw “Jaws” as a critique of capitalism, but maybe the novel with all its adultery and frustration, is an even better allegory for all-consuming desire, and the awkwardness of bodily love, gross fluids and all.

Day 25: 7/20/2013: Cast a Vote for Sharks

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I have to admit, the nominees for Oceana’s Ocean Hero awards make my efforts feel more than a little bit hodge-podge and patchwork!  All of them–adults and children alike– are doing important work for the ocean, but here is a roundup of my new shark gurus:

Yale grad student Leah Meth helped win protections for sharks and rays at CITES with her creative and incredibly successful Shark Stanley Project.

Dr. Neil  Hammerschlag’s shark tagging program at the University of Miami gives at-risk high school students an opportunity to experience “full immersion” shark research.

8-year-old shark lover Sean Lesniak helped create a bill in the Massachusetts state legislature that would impose stiffer penalties on shark finning.

You can vote for candidates in both the junior and adult categories here.

The deadline is July 26.

Day 24: 7/19/2013: See BLACKFISH

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English: Tilikum during a ' performance at .

Tilikum during a ‘ performance at . (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I loved chatting with Sharksavers about the upcoming JAWS benefit, but what really defined my day was seeing  “Blackfish” the documentary about orcas in captivity.  When I left the Arclight theatre I remembered something an activist once said about elephants in the circus. He’d been detailing the tedium experienced by these intelligent creatures that are chained for 20-some odd hours a day: “I still can’t figure out how they conceive of time.”

What of  Tilikum, the killer whale featured prominently in “Blackfish”, an emotionally damaged animal who has killed three people, but who still performs for the delighted crowds in SeaWorld Orlando?  While my days unfold with routine, but also stimulation, freedom, possibility, Tilikum with his defeated, collapsed dorsal fin performs humiliating tricks, swims in circles in a swimming pool, and listens to the  delighted shrieks of school children through the glass.  I imagine the only pleasurable moment in this whale’s life is when SeaWorld employees collect his sperm  to produce more calves that will also be wrenched from their mothers if the price is right.

Torn from his mother at age three, does Tilikum ever dream of the brief time he knew limitless seas? Beyond frustration and despair, could these murders he committed be a subconscious wish for the ultimate punishment/freedom– his own death?

I feel haunted. And I should. Susan Sontag once said “Let the images of atrocity haunt us.”  Sontag argued that we shouldn’t turn away from pictures of war or death–all the images that remind us of what men do to other men. Nor should we ignore the evidence of what human beings do to non-human creatures. See “Blackfish.”

Day 23: 7/18/2013: Dreaming of Sharks in the Desert

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Today I went for a trail ride/riding lesson out near Sunland. My awesome teacher Keri and I rode in this interesting desert oasis where the sounds of the freeway grew distant. As we crossed small brooks and negotiated narrow pathways between cacti, Keri told me about her experience deep sea diving. Sharks and horses are my favorite animals, and I felt the particular geeky thrill that happens when obsessions collide—riding a horse through the desert and talking of the ocean.

My biggest nerd-fusion fantasy is to ride horses in the sea–a desire born during repeated adolescent matinees of Coppola’s “The Black Stallion.” Keri mentioned that some horses become mesmerized by the motion of the water and a bit startled by the white caps. Understandable. We ask horses to do a lot. They have a right to be daunted by the vast might of the ocean. Keri and I talked of the natural awe and respect one should have for sharks, for the power of the ocean and for the strength, mass and decidedly independent nature of horses.

Action: Yesterday I posted about helping the great white gain protected status via a three-prong approach of phone calls, e-mails and letters. I confess in the tumult of the day, I only conquered “one prong,” so today I am calling and writing the folks at California Fish and Wildlife Department to tell them to give California’s great whites endangered status.