Jack London - An Inspiring Example for Adventure

[Steadman Uhlich]

Originally Posted by topmast

Having read the books ,enjoyed cruising around Dyer and Skagway.Put two vessels on trailers (42' and a50' and dragged them up the White Pass to Whitehorse and on to Tuktoyaktuk . Went past Lake Labarge ,Sam Mcgee waved us on. The Dempster had just opened and I was first vessel over the top of North America.My own gold rush.

Sounds interesting.

[topmast]

Lying in the sun in Monterey,head on a rail track surrounded by derelict warehouses and canneries I had the pleasure of reading John Steinbec Doesn't get better than that for flavour. If he hadn't been killed in an car accident he would have written about our west coast of Vancouver Island . But not to be.

[SaltyMonkey]

Originally Posted by topmast

Lying in the sun in Monterey,head on a rail track surrounded by derelict warehouses and canneries I had the pleasure of reading John Steinbec Doesn't get better than that for flavour. If he hadn't been killed in an car accident he would have written about our west coast of Vancouver Island . But not to be.

Except Steinbeck is the greatest lying one sided journalist who ever lived, a real POS in the sun, and I'm sure his ol Vancouver picture would have spilled all sorts of sentimental propaganda to get tourons to worship...well, Steinbeck of course.

Don't be fooled by some tricky biblical prose and politics.

[topmast]

hospucks, I read the bible too. Doesn't mean I believe or worship. It's called entertainment,One look at the latest politics below the 49th shows how widespread is guibility and rare is discerning. Politics?? Comes to mind story by Kornbluth about a real estate dealer who trys to take over the world "The Marching Morons ' Hardly cerebral litituature but.

[SaltyMonkey]

Ok, here's the thing. I was a sucker once too. Read all that so called great machismo writer crap. The usual barf bag short list. Also appox 500 sailing macho stories while trapped eating beans for three years saving for my first boat. Thought it great prose, great story, great whatever. Then I realised something. After about a week, I didn't give a flyin' F about the characters, their problems, their lives. Hell, I couldn't remember anything about them or what I read that was so interesting or why I read them to begin with. It was like eating a plate of kettle corn. You eat and chomp and clean your teeth with a piece of thread and sing "BOy that was such a damng good Kettle Corn" and fart large sugar clouds with a mix of bananana aftertones, but you are still hungry, and have gained nothing in nutrition. Sure they perform that classic Greek Godlike macho quest thing on and on with the external world blabla. Sure it is literatainment. But, are we ever moved? Do we ever get inside? Does it change our lives? Is there every any REAL sympathy or identification or EMPATHY?

Hell no. Can't. Tough guy prose thing. External world thing. Great for, you know, the child man arm chair sitter who never grew beyond reading Hardy boy redux. Boyo to Mano.

But zip up your flies for a second. I'll tell you a secret that those machismo keeperz of the publishing industry have always known and fear. The greatest writers of adventure and any literature has always been Women. Yup, you heard straight. Women. Sure there are some straggler male types hangin' about, but the greatest writers in history actually have been of the female variety. Don't believe me? Shop around. Be amazed by the incredible, moving lit out there and squeam and drag yourself across the floor to the scotch bottle when you realise you WRITE LIKE ****.

Anyway, to close my point, I'm gonna go swing down some trees to that Jack London Square, zip down my shorts and pee all over that statue.

[topmast]

Unfortunate that retention can be so fleeting .The literary spiel that had me fooled for a bit was'On the Road' Route 66 was big in my ken and Jack hit a nerve. This was before ganga and we only had alcohol but I hit the road .Drive, a way cars, thumbing, girls galore. the whole 9 yards .Then I found that Jack's mother had sent him bus tickets and he was a helpless and useless hanger on. Found that run on ,train of thought literature ,so popular for a while, probably indicated confusion. Disappointed, I recovered by going across some oceans

[SaltyMonkey]

hoo yeah @topmast. I hear ya. Hemingggwayh - another mama-boy trust fund baby. It's a rude awakening. What passes for gusto in reality is revealed as male insecurity + alcoholism.

Our Dharma bum turns out to actually have an editor, btw. So much for that jazz-zen thing. Reality is much more intelligent and just than our narcissistic abstract interpretations.

It all gets so tiring...

[Simonsays]

Originally Posted by SaltyMonkey

But zip up your flies for a second. I'll tell you a secret that those machismo keeperz of the publishing industry have always known and fear. The greatest writers of adventure and any literature has always been Women. Yup, you heard straight. Women. Sure there are some straggler male types hangin' about, but the greatest writers in history actually have been of the female variety. Don't believe me? Shop around. Be amazed by the incredible, moving lit out there and squeam and drag yourself across the floor to the scotch bottle when you realise you WRITE LIKE ****.

you mean like Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings from Greenbridge, Essex?

[Dougtiff]

Being a Shipwright by trade, it was sad to see London taken advantage of with the building of the Snark, by the time she was built, she was starting to rot and had to be rebuilt, all this taking place on the shores of San Francisco bay.

[SaltyMonkey]

Originally Posted by Simonsays

you mean like Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings from Greenbridge, Essex?

HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!

Except Paula was really Paul

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...ilne_Johnstone

The dead swans lay in the stagnant pool.
They lay. They rotted. They turned
Around occasionally.
Bits of flesh dropped off them from
Time to time.
And sank into the pool's mire.
They also smelt a great deal.

[picklesandjesse]

Then there's all the sea tales from Tristan Jones. Good reading though.

[TrentePieds]

Speaking of the Chilcoot, the "Bard o' the North", Robert Service gave us this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sax1JekPQMg

Revered as Johny Cash and Hank Snow may be by Americans, their renderings of Sam McGee just don't cut it. Sam McGee may have been "from Tennessee" as the poem has it, but Robert Service sure wasn't. He was born in Lancashire and educated in Scotland, and he would have spoken with that distinctive Canadian accent that was common still when I came here, and carried so much of Scotland in it.

Service was Kipling's junior by some ten years and was, not unnaturally, affected by Kipling's work given that the both reached the height of their productivity before it was realized, popularly, that the grandeur of the Victorian Age, the splendor of the Raj, and the "full spectrum dominance" of the time, residing in the RN were all in their death throes.

For all the protestations of the professional sages in the CanLit crowd, and their opposite numbers in AmLit, that neither Kipling nor Service "wrote poetry", both of them reflected the sentiments of the "common man" of their time and place, and gave voice to those sentiments in a form that thrilled the "common man" - and still thrills me :-)

TrentePieds

[thericksster]

Try reading "A Pacific Story, The Adventures of Duran, Episode VII" by none other than
Rick E.Gerg

[Jdege]

Originally Posted by TrentePieds

Speaking of the Chilcoot, the "Bard o' the North", Robert Service gave us this:

Then, of course, there's the NSFW version: The Ballad of Eskimo Nell.

[woodguy]

Originally Posted by Cap Erict3

The Sea Wolf was my favorite.

Mine too. I remember the line he wrote to describe the lowlifes of the East End (of London) "... the scum and slime of the human pit." Wow.
As to the voyage of the Snark, one of the crew was Martin Johnson who, with his wife Osa, later had many adventures of their own making 'travel films' in East Africa and Borneo. He was the cameraman and she was the huntress... a dead shot. Their movies were shown on early TV in the '50s.
I remember one scene where they were charged by a big bull elephant with Osa in front of the camera. One shot and she dropped that Bull, almost within touching distance. She wrote a great book, I Married Adventure. It's a great read.