|
From Our Resident Feature Writer...
Winter Salt
In my absence from Florida the elements have been at work on the ocean at my doorstep. A departure in mid-November left behind the signs of autumn at play on sand, sky and water. There was a crispness about the scene that identified the season in ways akin to, but unlike the November foliage of New England—a note in the air that said, “This is autumn.” At the halfway mark of November’s passage, the seasonal earmarks were obvious to any walker on the beach.
All that has been replaced. More correctly, all that along Florida’s central east coast has been replaced, or redesigned. On December 1st I look eastward out my windows and see the start of winter. A walk on the beach displays a different palette defined by the change in weather patterns. There is a new and somber hue to the morning sky that announces something will now be different about the light under this blue dome. Tides have shifted, shaped the sand into an unfamiliar hardness. The movement of feet and legs across its impeccable surface sounds a note not felt two weeks ago. In the roll and foam of surf its constancy is unchanged, but these days it comes from a body of water darker in color, showing less range in its cycle of blues, greens and browns. Staring for a few minutes through binoculars, I see nothing in its vastness but cold dark blue. Walking on the beach, for a moment I wonder if a gull there in the wash of surf has cold feet.
 A few people continue to walk in shorts, but long sleeves are needed to blunt the steady north wind. An early morning low under 40° discouraged all but one or two sunrise walkers, while most of us—some in jeans and a hoodie—wait until it gets a few notches higher later in the morning. Best part is, hot or cold, August or December, the myriad facets of this environment promise each day a new or different appreciation.
December 2, 2010
William Leet
Ocean Baggies
Apart from windswept sand with a scattering of birds, and cold blue Atlantic with its beard of white ruffles, the eye finds no small focus on a December beach. Scale is grand and stretches in long diminishing perspectives with barely any interruption. Once the hour advances past mid-mor ning and the tide subsides, there is little to suggest that the beach is other than a flat sandy highway running empty in both directions. But natural settings are never quite that empty, and somewhere along this bounding space the line of sight is broken by an appearance of fish, bird or object. For me today, the break came in the form of a blue plastic bag, air-filled and snagged in the flatness of sand. Or so I thought upon approach.
A sight very familiar to Australia and New Zealand, but one also visible in other parts of the world, including Florida is the blue bottle jellyfish. It’s the Physalia physalis, commonly called a Portuguese man-o-war, a name borrowed from the 16th century sailing ship of English (rather than Portuguese) design. Australians have given the smaller jellyfish with one long, blue tentacle washing up on their beaches in large numbers the name blue bottle, from its form and color—on the land it has a bottle-like form and a blue color.
 Weird science for sure, but the blue bottle is not a single animal but rather a colony of four kinds of individuals known as polyps, each with its own function. One is the float, another captures food, another digests the food, and another is responsible for reproduction. Though it certainly looks in part like a blob of jelly, this type of animal is not a true jellyfish but something called a siphonophore. Some danger involved, because the blue bottle can deliver a painful sting if touched—either in the water or when washed up on the beach. Advisable never to touch one with bare skin. Blue bottle stings can be extremely painful and can cause a fiery rash which lasts an hour or more. The venom filled tentacles also protect the animal from large predators. Toxins in the venom are strong enough to paralyze large fish, if not kill it, enabling the blue bottle to ‘sail’ safely away.
In appearance, the pear-shaped float (bottle) is a translucent blue, with a wrinkled top that looks very much as though it were sewn together with red or pinkish thread. It has one main, long tentacle and many shorter tentacles, all of them blue and hanging from the float. The float is anywhere from 2-15 centimeters long and the main tentacle about a meter in length, but sometimes much longer. The blue float acts as a sail and the jellyfish is blown along by the wind. Depending upon a left or right lean of the float, direction will change. Wind will sometimes blow individuals onto a coast, washing them up on beaches. Blue bottles are more common on exposed ocean beaches after strong onshore winds, and rarely found in sheltered waters. Their diet includes small fish, crustaceans, plankton, and other small marine animals. Special tentacles catch and paralyze prey, while other tentacles digest the food. Reproduction is a complex process, with special tentacles on the jellyfish having both male and female parts. In its simplest form, eggs are fertilized, grow into larvae and eventually develop into adult blue bottles.
Beyond all the complex biology, sight of one of these odd-looking creatures is enough to slow the pace of anyone walking the beach. The average person will stare down at a grounded blue bottle with its pink stitched bag-sail bobbing in the wind, and face stretched into a grimace murmur, “What the blue blazing hell is that?” The bottom photograph shows what looks like a creepy invasion of blue bottles on a beach in Australia, but here in Florida they aren’t so numerous. Only seven or eight of them over a three-mile stretch of beach today.
December 8, 2010
William Leet
A Big Scoop
A lot of visitors to the beach this week, New Year and all. Certainly a few
have been attracted by the spurt of unseasonably warm weather and are here to bask in the 70° temperatures. A few even splash briefly in the ocean, but quickly discover the water is uncomfortably cold and a world apart from the sun washed beach. Along with warmer temperatures has come a lessening of the hard-blowing north wind, and the invitation to shed jackets and sweaters. Walking in jeans and T-shirt is just about right under these year-end conditions.
 The past two days have offered a sky of perfect cerulean blue made even more exhilarating by the clarity of light and air. Apart from the unfortunate catfish that still battle cold water and end up as bird food, the sand too has a fresh, clean look. The birds are back in large numbers and fortunately for them food in excess lies waiting. Still, there is less animal, shell and plant life about now, and for long stretches of walking the runnels, drifts and pockets of sand offer up little variety.
But there has been an infrequent avian visitor to this sweep of beach in the past two days, though if we are to judge by today’s roll call, it was just a brief stopover or rest stop. I was brought to a sudden halt yesterday by the sight of an altogether unfamiliar bird hobnobbing with the gulls. Very shy, they quickly move away at the approach of people, uncomfortable even with a stationary figure hovering inside of twenty feet. The bird has a striking appearance, and looks like a prince beside the less colorful gulls. By the time my path turned for home I was curious about what the bird book would say about this new member of the local community.
With markings so pronounced, finding a picture in my American bird book was easy, and I learned it is a tern called a black skimmer. This name explains the bird’s unusual beak, describing how it feeds by skimming fish from the surface of the water. Sounds almost impossible, but the black skimmer skims the water’s surface with its mouth open and the lower half of its bill beneath the water level. When it makes contact with a fish the bill snaps shut and the bird takes off. The catch is consumed either in flight or once it has landed.
In appearance the tern has a large but narrow body and a long red bill with a black tip. The lower bill is longer, with a scoop-like shape. The top of the head and wings are black, with a white collar in winter; face and underparts are white. Legs and feet are red. The black skimmer is the only bird species in America that has a bill larger on the bottom than the top. At the time of hatching the upper and lower halves are equal in length, but at four weeks the bottom is nearly a centimeter longer than the top mandible.
 The bird breeds along Atlantic and Gulf coasts from Massachusetts to Florida and Texas, and spends winters in a range from southern California to Virginia, and also central and South America. Despite photos and descriptions of the black skimmer in Florida, yesterday was my first sighting of the bird on the central east coast of Florida, along which I walk each and every day. Odd, since this is not a bird one is likely to overlook. Interesting note about number: A group of skimmers is not a flock, but is instead referred to as either a ‘conspiracy’ or an ‘embezzlement’ of birds.
As Wednesday was my first sighting of this splendid looking tern, it prompts me to think the fifteen or twenty I spotted were resting, but on their way to parts farther afield.
December 31, 2010
William Leet
Atlantic Center presents free, public readings
Joan James Harris Theater, Atlantic Center for the Arts
1414 Art Center Avenue, New Smyrna Beach
www.atlanticcenterforthearts.org
Acclaimed poet MARK DOTY
Jan 10, 2011 7:30 pm
MARK DOTY will be reading as part of a week-long series of free, public readings by acclaimed writers in conjunction with the 2nd Annual Blue Flower Arts Winter Writers' Conference hosted by Atlantic Center for the Arts.
Mark Doty, the only American poet to have won Great Britain's T. S. Eliot Prize, is the author of six books of poems. The first, Turtle, Swan, appeared in 1987. His third collection, My Alexandria (1993), received both the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Since then he has published Atlantis (1995); Sweet Machine (1998); Source (2001); and the critically acclaimed volume of poems, School of the Arts (2005), HarperCollins. In 2008, Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems was published, and won the National Book Award for 2008. He is the author of three memoirs: Heaven's Coast (1996), Firebird (1999), and Dog Years (2007). His interest in the visual arts is evident not only in his poems but also in his book-length essay "Still Life with Oysters and Lemon" (2001). "A new book of poems-or of anything-by Mark Doty is good news in a dark time. The precision, daring, scope, elegance of his compassion and of the language in which he embodies it are a reassuring pleasure." -W. S. Merwin
Award-winning Novelist & Story writer, MARY GAITSKILL
Jan 11, 2011 7:30 pm
MARY GAITSKILL will be reading as part of a week-long series of free, public readings by acclaimed writers in conjunction with the 2nd Annual Blue Flower Arts Winter Writers' Conference hosted by Atlantic Center for the Arts.
Awarding-winning author Mary Gaitskill is best known for delivering powerful stories of dislocation, longing, and desire with prose that "glides lightly over unsoundable depths" [Village Voice]. She is the author of the novels Two Girls, Fat and Thin, and Veronica, which was nominated for the 2005 National Book Award, National Critic's Circle Award, and L.A. Times Book Award. She is the author of the story collections Bad Behavior and Because They Wanted To, which was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner in 1998. Bad Behavior, now a classic, made critical waves when it was first published, heralding Gaitskill's arrival on the literary scene and established her as one of the sharpest, erotically charged, and audaciously funny writing talents of contemporary literature. Her newest collection of stories is titled Don't Cry (2009): "Written with her distinctive, uncanny combination of bluntness and high lyricism, Don't Cry takes its place among artworks of great moral seriousness" --Bomb Magazine. The New York Times Book Review said, "[Gaitskill's] palpable talent puts her among the most eloquent and perceptive contemporary fiction writers."
Fiction writer & memoirist PAUL LISICKY, 7:30pm
PAUL LISICKY will be reading as part of a week-long series of free, public readings by acclaimed writers in conjunction with the 2nd Annual Blue Flower Arts Winter Writers' Conference hosted by Atlantic Center for the Arts.
Paul Lisicky is the author of Lawnboy and Famous Builder, both published by Graywolf Press, and the forthcoming novel, The Burning House (Etruscan Press, 2011) and a set of short prose pieces, Unbuilt Projects (Four Way Books, 2012). He recently completed a new novel, Lumina Avenue. Recent work appears in Five Points, Conjunctions, Gulf Coast, Subtropics, The Seattle Review, The Pinch, and in the anthologies Truth in Nonfiction and Naming the World. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, his awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the James Michener/Copernicus Society, the Henfield Foundation, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where he was twice a Winter Fellow. He has taught in the graduate writing programs at Cornell University, Sarah Lawrence College, and Antioch University Los Angeles. He currently teaches at NYU and in the low residency MFA program at Fairfield University. Of his work, Elizabeth McCracken, said, "Nobody writes about hilarious longing the way Paul Lisicky does. Some writers manage to be funny and sad in turn; in Lawnboy, Lisicky manages to be both at the same time. His characters are lovable and fallible; his prose is gorgeous."
Acclaimed poet and memoirist NICK FLYNN
Jan 13, 2011 7:30pm
NICK FLYNN'S Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (Norton, 2004), won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir, and has been translated into thirteen languages. He is also the author of two books of poetry, Some Ether (Graywolf, 2000), which won the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, and Blind Huber (Graywolf, 2002). Due out from Graywolf in 2011 is Flynn's third book of poetry, The Captain Asks For a Show of Hands. His newest memoir, The Ticking is the Bomb, was recently released by Norton. He has been awarded fellowships from The Guggenheim Foundation, The Library of Congress, The Amy Lowell Trust, and The Fine Arts Work Center. Some of the venues his poems, essays and non-fiction have appeared in include The New Yorker, the Paris Review, National Public Radio's "This American Life," and The New York Times Book Review. He worked as a "field poet" and as an artistic collaborator on the film Darwin's Nightmare, which was nominated for an Academy Award for best feature documentary in 2006. One semester a year, he teaches at the University of Houston and spends the rest of the year elsewhere.On The Ticking is the Bomb: "A disquieting masterpiece...Flynn elegantly weaves his turbulent personal biography with the myths and realities of our recent imperial adventures" -Los Angeles Times.
|
