When you enter the water you enter the food chain

June 12, 2020 8:44 AM

Sharks, Death, Surfers: An Illustrated Companion (Bookforum): Sharks, Death, Surfers is a beautiful art object, petite and strange, replete with artist renderings of sharks that span the ages, from 750 BCE to the cover of Jaws. It is more a brief philosophical exploration of the intersection described in the title than anything else, unique in its take on the topics at hand but at times scattered and abstract. McCarthy is the chief obituary reviewer of the International Necronautical Society, a twenty-year-old organization whose goal is to “bring death out into the world.” It was in this role that she began to study obituaries of surfers, and thus the lives of sharks.

Sharks, Death, Surfers: An Illustrated Companion (Sternberg Press):

Steering her analysis from the newspaper obituary through literature and past cinema, Melissa McCarthy investigates a fundamental aspect of the human condition: our state of being between life and death, always in precarious and watery balance. Sharks, Death, Surfers observes how sharks have been depicted over centuries and across cultures, then flips the lens (and dissects the cornea) to consider what sharks see when they look back. These refracted lines of inquiry—optical, philosophical, historical—converge at the focal point where we can fix the image of the surfer and the shark. This is the picture McCarthy frames: the cartilaginous companions gliding together in a perfect model of how to read, navigate, and exist.

Sharks, Death, Surfers: An Illustrated Companion (McNally Jackson):

Her disparate narratives are connected by the themes and feelings central to surfing: balance, slippage, misdirection. Thus, she disorients us, lulls us. Reading this book feels just like being at sea, the unknown lurking below our sight, epithany always accompanied by the threat of calamity. Or, in a direct quote from the book, “We all realize that the chances of being taken by a shark are exceedingly remote, but it is the horror of having chunks bitten from one’s body while still alive which evokes fear out of all proportion to the actual danger.”

posted by not_the_water (9 comments total)

posted by not_the_water

Eponysterical.
posted by chavenet at 9:25 AM on June 12, 2020 [5 favorites]

This looks like an interesting and somewhat oddball read; entirely appropriate to the topic. The relationship between surfers and other oceangoers and sharks is similarly weird and complex; alongside fear is macho posturing, excitement and interest, grief and acceptance. The sharks and the mountain lions are always a reminder in my corner of the world that humans aren't the only thing going.
posted by q*ben at 10:06 AM on June 12, 2020 [2 favorites]

Sometimes a title is all I need to read in order adjust my worldview about a topic.

A hole in one, not_the_water!
posted by rhizome at 12:05 PM on June 12, 2020

Sharks, yeah, of all varieties are always there. Spinners jumping, blacktips just outside the reef, and bull sharks anywhere, even well up the river. Where I surf, they’re always around and you see them almost every session, particularly on the reefs and near the inlet. When diving, they get a bit closer when you’ve got a nice fat mutton snapper on your spear.

It’s not macho posturing, I think, but denial and rationalization. Shark attacks are uncommon and even more rarely fatal ... they say. Ponce Inlet is the worst in FL, but there’s one or two here every year, including a fatal one in 2018 (the victim was a kite-surfer, though, and quite a ways from shore)

Yet, the only times I have ever been driven out of the water (aside from the occasional man o’war invasion during periods of prevailing SE winds) was due to crocs. Big -ass crocodiles - like the ones you see sunning themselves on the banks as you cross the puente on the Rio Tarcoles on the way to Playa Hermosa. The Rio Camronal is also full of them. When you see a 16 footer cruising outside the break, you prone it right in to the shore. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard of a croc attack on a surfer but those Planet Earth documentaries of gazelles crossing the river tend to stick in the mind.
posted by sudogeek at 12:27 PM on June 12, 2020 [4 favorites]

It's time for shark party.
posted by dominik at 1:51 PM on June 12, 2020 [1 favorite]

The title of this post just explained a lifelong unease with water below a certain depth to me.
posted by lucidium at 3:59 PM on June 12, 2020 [1 favorite]

This was no boating accident!
posted by valkane at 4:41 PM on June 12, 2020 [3 favorites]

Love this. Used to fish for sharks for itchyology, so the sharks' eye view is a welcome topic. We used to wear white crocs to surf fish, as the white crocs look like dead fish from far away, bringing the animals in, but up close, the sharks see the full human in the crocs, and swim away
posted by eustatic at 7:45 AM on June 13, 2020 [1 favorite]

I love sharks, and people are way too terrified of them. But you know that line about how more people are killed by dogs each year than are killed by sharks? What a crock of shit. Most people spend most of their time on land. If you're swimming in an ocean I'm gonna go out on a limb (possibly literally) and say you should be more worried about sharks than you are about dogs.
posted by brundlefly at 2:48 PM on June 13, 2020