I am currently researching a part time PhD in Surf Travel Writing with the Performance Writing Research Group at University College Falmouth.
Surf travel educates acute sensitivity to coastscape (Ford and Brown 2006), the cultural Other (Lingis 1995, Kapuscinski 2008, Taussig 2009), to location (Lippard 1997), and, importantly, to movement. The rhythmic engagement with coastscape, elegantly implied by the poet St-John Perse (1970) as the cycle of anabasis (moving from coast to interior) and katabasis (interior to coast), is central to the performance of surf travel. Can this potentially imperialist movement be ‘de-territorialised’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2006) through what Hiss (2010) calls ‘deep travel’?
Surfing has been described as ‘dance’ (Booth 1999). Perceptive surfers quickly establish rhythm with ocean conditions, and improvise. But surfers are not all at sea, returning to shore and engaging in acts of dialogue with local coastscape. Surfing can be seen as a form of jazz, and surf travel an improvised art finding expression in writing. This practice of poesis demands a stage, and here the stage – as coastscape – shapes the performance and the performer’s identity.
To network the relationship between thinking, space, and identity Massey (2006) posits a ‘geographical imagination’. This privileges space and location over time and movement, but as Deleuze (2006, p1) suggests: ‘movement is distinct from the space covered. Space covered is past, movement is present, the act of covering’. Can this ‘act of covering’ through extreme travel be translated into a form of intermodal writing, just as surfing ‘covers’ the wave’s face as a form of jazz dance?
Surf travel writing (Moser 2008) offers no published work that networks travel, coastscapes and modern jazz. Lewis (1998, p55) suggests that ‘texts of surfing have been largely neglected in serious cultural commentary.’ Such texts mainly offer travelogues aimed at entertainment, employing a metaphorically violent language of mastery (‘ripping’, ‘shredding’, ‘tearing’) (Ormrod 2007). Surfing as lifestyle has now attracted some ‘serious cultural commentary’ (Nendel 2009, Ford and Brown 2006), and surfing appears as a theme in contemporary literature (Winton 2008). But surfing as a theme in literature is not the same as surfing as literature. Surfing is already a mode of inscribing as performance, embodied in timing, footwork and flow. Can writing that follows surfing – and related travel – capture its fluidity and surprise?
Jazz has been used to describe both the outsider (black, addict) and the insider (hip, cool) (Dyer 1997). Modern jazz offers a set of tropes – phrasing, flattened ‘blue’ notes, syncopation – through which surf travel can be better appreciated as performance and expressive ‘writing out’. These tropes can therefore function as a ‘means of writing with jazz’ in mind (Jarrett 1994). Thelonious Monk’s 1956 album Brilliant Corners is the archetype for an angular and dislocated music, offering a model for surfing and writing as mixtures of planned and improvised forms – an ‘act of covering’. Monk saw ‘corners’ not as dark spaces, but as angles of intent. This is the kind of challenge that the wild, unfurling ocean presents to surfers, who have to improvise in ways that utilise the sea’s surprises. Can this be re-inscribed as both discursive and poetic writing?
Actor-Network Theory (ANT) will provide the main methodological and theoretical framework to bring the three key networks in this study – surf travel, coastscapes, and modern jazz – into productive conversation. ANT (Latour 2007) describes how persons and objects establish networks that, through interaction with other networks, may expand, contract or become open to creative leaps. ANT facilitates the exploration of network negotiations, translations and crossings. The three networks focus around a notion of ‘coastscape as other’ to generate an intermodal writing – a complicated conversation between discursive and experimental writing.
Auto-Ethnography (Lingis 1995, Taussig 2009) offers a hybrid of postmodern ethnography and fiction to demystify the exotic and challenge the imperial. Such writing is grounded in sense-based observational skills and informed by reflexive accounting via feminist ecocriticism (Glotflety 1996). Externalism (Rowlands 2003) and ‘ecological perception’ (Gibson 1979) suggest that the environment shapes the way that we observe through ‘affordance’ of features, rather than us acting on the environment. ‘Auto’ ethnography then becomes an aesthetic and ethical method of self-fashioning through respect for the ‘other’. Suspension of the imperialistic ‘I’ allows the character of ‘coastscape’ to become the subject of the sentence.
Intermodal Writing (Vollman 2009) involves katabasis (Perse 1970), through which writing becomes fecund and productive in re-visiting/revising; dialogue with locale (Lippard 1997); and sensitivity to Other (Kapuscinski 2008), where writing is a means though which difference is celebrated culturally and textually. Modern jazz offers a lens (Dyer 1997) and a set of tropes (Jarrett 1994) – such as ambiguities, cross-rhythms, triple time, aporias, puns, inversions, subversions and absences – to experiment with more minimalist or complex writing forms. This serves to understand surf exploration as both ‘dance’ (Booth1999) and ‘deep travel’ (Hiss 2010), and to appreciate and develop the writing-out of ‘other’ coastscapes. Importantly, the project aims to translate and capture the poesis of surf travel, reveal surfing as performance, and potentially offer a new wave of travel writing.
Main Study List and Indicative Bibliography
Booth D. (1999). ‘Surfing: The cultural and technological determinants of a dance’. Sport in Society 2: 36-55.
Deleuze G, Guattari F. (2005). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press.
Dyer G. (1997). But Beautiful: A Book about Jazz. New York: North Point Press.
Ford N, Brown D. (2006). Surfing and Social Theory: Experience, Embodiment and the Narrative of the Dream Glide. London: Routledge.
Gibson J. (1979). The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Glotflety C. (Ed). (1996). The Ecocriticism Reader. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
Hill LH, Abbott JA. (2009). ‘Surfacing Tension: Toward a Political Ecological Critique of Surfing Representations.’ Geography Compass 3: 275–296.
Hiss T. (2010). The Experience of Travel. New York: Alfred Knopf.
Jarrett M. (1994). ‘Four Choruses on the Tropes of Jazz Writing’. Journal of American Literary History 6: 336-353.
Kapuscinski R. (2008). The Other. London: Verso.
Latour B. (2007). Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lewis J. (1998) ‘Between the lines: Surf texts, prosthetics, and everyday theory’. Social Semiotics 8: 55-70.
Lingis A. (1995). Abuses. Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Lippard L. (1997). The Lure of the Local. New York: The New Press.
Massey D. (2005). For Space. London: Sage.
Moser P. (Ed). (2008). Pacific Passages: An Anthology of Surf Writing. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
Nendel J. (2009). ‘Surfing in Early Twentieth-Century Hawaii: The Appropriation of a Transcendent Experience to Competitive American Sport’. International Journal of the History of Sport 26: 2432-2446.
Ormrod J. (2007). ‘Surf Rhetoric in American and British Surfing Magazines Between 1965 and 1976’. Sport in History 27: 88-109.
Perse St-J. (1970). Anabasis. New York: Mariner Books.
Rowlands M. (2003). Externalism: Putting Mind and World Back Together Again. Chesham: Acumen.
Taussig M. (2009). What Colour is the Sacred? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Vollman WT. (2009). Imperial. Richmond: Alma Books.
Winton T. (2008). Breath. London: Picador.
