Conversations with William Finnegan at Lennox

Does the $30 include coffee and finger sandwiches?

Free, just a thought- would you be inclined to pen a little piece on how the talk was for those of unable to attend?

The New Yorker style is seamless and unobtrusive. Looks easy but it's almost impossible to achieve consistently.

Wow! Seems like a few people have been to Madeira. I haven't been back post-wall.

Island Bay & Turkey, you ever surf the right point further towards the capital that got buggered by building quite a bit before Jardim? It had a horrible backwash through it when I was there. Apparently, it barrelled off its proverbial pre-build and was a jewel of the crown?

As for writing style, I'm struggling with the term 'seamless'. Is it the same as 'effortless'? I find 'voice' in writers, like 'style' in surfing, is enjoyable to experience when its unique and yes, effortless, in expressing that uniqueness. When it is not forced but seems natural to the individual and thus flows accordingly.

Context is important. Kong free-surfing at Sunset rather than in competition at Huntington.

Then there's Curren!

Speaking of Hem, I always thought F Scott Fitzgerald was an effortless, flowing read...when he was on.

Don't writhe and struggle to much, Shats. Compare Willy to, say, Tom Wolfe or HST, both major stylists, who if you accidentally came across their work you'd identify it without delay. Their styles are singular, defining, unique.

It's probably Willy's journalism background that he drops any pretense to a 'voice' lest it betray his subjectivity, and hence an identifiable style. What's left is a deft writer who types in a clear seamless prose.

Funny you mention those two 'new journalism' pretenders (that may be a tad harsh). Reminds me of the Seppo daddy pushing the boundaries at the time, one Norman Mailer. Also a Pullitzer prize winner (twice). His first winner: The Armies of the Night. Check it.
Also with Ali's recent passing, check Mailer's The Fight. It's about the 'rumble in the jungle'. It's also art. I dunno if Finnegan can approach that. I'd like surfing to have something like that.

Oh yeah, that wave was rooted when I was there too Shatnerd. Now they're all rooted. Waste of time. Sad but true.

Both HST and Wolfe can write rings around Mailer, who was interesting and had a great mind but very pedestrian prose stylist.

Did someone say Hemingway had a no style style?
He has the most recognisable style of all....those clipped sentences and hyper masculine pov.

I'd put Chekhov up there as one of the very great stylists. Now, that is a style that looks simple but is so deceptively complex.

I'd have to say a book by Steve Shearer , with his unique take on the world and his writing style , very individual!

With that comment Freeride, I've got to ask what Mailer you've read. I mean if you just consider his two Pullitzer prize winners, the styles and voices are so different as to be unrecognisable as the same author. And yes, very far from pedestrian. In fact, Mailer's horses for courses stylistic voices could be a more valid writerly criticism. Read Why Are We In Vietnam? There's more bizarre voice and style experiments in that one slim novel than in Wolfe's entire body of whatever. HST had two, maybe three good books. The well ran dry pretty quick.

Agree about Chekhov. A master. Read Raymond Carver? It's like Anton meeting Ernest...in rehab...in the mid-west of nowheresville.

I'll also chuck Kafka out there. And Orwell in journalese.

Went along to see Bill and Sean last night, very entertaining. Bill has a quiet, unassuming demeanour yet he transformed seemingly simple questions into fascinating short stories.

To be honest I would have liked to have heard a little more about his experiences reporting from conflict regions around the world - and a little more on the current US political landscape (Trump was briefly mentioned) - but it felt like the conversation was intended for the surfing audience. Which is understandable I guess.

Thoroughly enjoyable night though, stoked I went along. Seemed to be a pretty decent sized crowd for this kind of thing too.

it was about 2/3 full, maybe 200 hundred people, which at $30 bucks a pop plus bar isn't a bad night for the festival.

It was obvious from the start that 13 months into the book tour Bill is a bit jaded and a bit weary of talking about this book. Doherty struggled to get much out of him in the opening exchanges, with his blokey kind of banter falling a bit flat and failing to really get Bill to open up. That really was the theme of the night: Doherty keeping it pretty light and frothy and Bill sort of skimming the surface, which was a shame because as was shown by some better questions from the audience at the end, he was open to and in fact seemed keen to go deeper and really explore some of the meatier issues raised by his book.

Perhaps the biggest and most pertinent was the fact that organised and competitive surfing is "antithetical to the majority of surfers" according to Bill. This question came from the audience in relation to the Olympics inclusion and Bill made it clear that he was aghast at it. Doherty didn't touch it with a ten foot pole and that is not surprising. Being on the Board of Surfing Australia and the press agent for Parko he is the epitome of Organised/competitive surfing.

That was a real missed opportunity to really delve into something which most recreational surfers find of great interest and also tremendously frustrating. Bill mentioned it a couple of times in passing through the night: the fact that his was the first real book about surfing that didn't come from that organised/competitive perspective. That really should have been the main hook that the conversation could have been hung on. But as someone said to me outside: Doherty is a Tracks guy, what do you expect.

He didn't do a bad job and it was entertaining enough, but for 30 bucks I really would have liked something more than a hour long skim of the book. Bill was on auto-pilot for most of the hour and Doherty never pushed him into examining or explaining any of his positions.I wanted something much more deep and expansive. And Bill was up for that too, I believe, judging by the way he responded to questions from the audience.

Wally answers your surfing questions.
Q. What's a free surfer?
A. Someone who doesn't surf good enough to be offered money.

Thanks for the feedback Free.

"Bill started to answer this question but was interrupted by another lady in the crowd who stated that her kids had surfed for the last 560 days straight and were wonderful people."

Ha ha ha...surfing can, like, totally fix the world!

That exchange sounds like it was worth the price of admission alone.

yeah, that was definitely the highlight of the night, when things went off piste and he got challenged from the audience.

He did bristle and he also produced the best and most illuminating dialogue of the evening when he defended surfing on the grounds of Keats "truth is beauty and beauty is truth" but still maintained surfing as an essentially selfish and meaningless pursuit.

I would have loved to have seen him challenged a bit more on that. That would have been really interesting. But just as it started, Doherty wrapped it up.

200 would be a great turn up for Lennox. From the chats above, it seems that Bill and Doherty delivered what the audience wanted. They probably sensed that it was not the place to talk about 'surfing and Syria'.
From Bills era surfing was a 'selfish and meaningless pursuit'. But from what we know today, quite the reverse.

The Swellnet podcasts! Now there's an idea. Let's see how does Audacity work again?

tonybarber writes...

"From Bills era surfing was a 'selfish and meaningless pursuit'. But from what we know today, quite the reverse."

Really? Id still call the majority of surfers selfish, how many surfers that you know like sharing waves, disclosing places to surf, or enjoy sitting out there alone and are happy when a group of guys paddle out and sit next to you.

Curious about that one too, TB.

When did surfing become altruistic?

Bill certainly seemed knackered… it was the only explanation for a couple of my best dad jokes flying past him straight through to the keeper. Like when he started talking about his interest in failed states and I mentioned he'd visited queensland yesterday and got nothing back... I had to tap the microphone to see if it was still on.

Lennox was his last gig after a year on the road – he was driving up the coast today for a holiday with his daughter – and you sensed he’d had his fun and was ready to escape his surfing life again and go back to something more relaxing, like writing about dysfunctional South American states with too much oil and not enough food.

It was interesting to note though that I’d interviewed him for an hour over the phone from Santa Cruz a year ago, when the book first dropped, and while he had the enthusiasm of a Labrador with a tennis ball, a lot of his responses weren’t dissimilar to last night. In fact many overlapped perfectly. It’s the nature of the beast I suppose, not only with someone referencing their own memoir, but even someone referencing their own life in an interview context… especially full time for a year. Occ was due to be there last night (he forgot he was actually in Japan) but I’ve interviewed him in the past and he’s actually used his own book as a reference while we interviewed, and I got the sense that’s been the case for Bill for the past year. The book creates a feedback loop. The book becomes you, and I’m sure Bill is very ready to put the book down for a while and just get on with it.

I coulda sensed that I suppose and got him riffing more about his real life, the one outside the book that is, but I assumed the crowd would wanna hear about the Pulitzer story more than anything else. Anyway, on the whole, even on the last leg of a world stadium tour Bill was an interesting cat and I'm glad he dropped by.

I'm so out of touch, I thought being a surfer was a selfish past time (ask your wife) and had learnt to live with this quite comfortably.
So if we aren't a bunch of self centred pricks anymore, what are we??

GF and Stu, the 'selfish' and the term 'dereliction' as used by Bill was aimed at the surfer himself.
Agree, I am still intrigued by the term 'secret' but in Bills context being 'selfish' is used in how surfing can consume ones own life. Bill did not want to be 'derelict' in his other thoughts and passions. He wanted to follow his other passions, as in South Africa and elsewhere.
GF, sure we don't want crowds but if there is a bunch of blokes and everyone is getting a bit then that's what matters.
It has only been recent (5 years or so) that we have been able to understand why 'surfing' has the effect it has. Slater is keenly interested in this and how going for a surf has such an impact. And you don't need much to feel 'satisfied'. It is apparent that this due to 'alpha' and 'beta' waves that the brain generates when you are out there paddling, riding and getting into it.
It s used now for PTSD treatment, even though the ex servicemen can't surf.
Have you ever thought why we all run down the beach, even though the scene won't change in those few seconds you might save. Once you have made the decision to get out there, it can't be quick enough.

I suspect Mr Finnegan would much rather be remembered for a book on a meatier subject, which I hope he goes on to write. That said, he has done us a great favour by writing a memoir that reflects surfing culture so accurately. Perhaps the most important thing is that it reflects the truth of most surfers' lives. We were never just surfers. The vast majority of us, for all the time we spent surfing, had careers, had families and had other interests.
This is the answer to the question posed about it being selfish and meaningless. Surfing, like just about everything in life, is just as selfish and meaningless as you choose to make it. I suppose many of us have had periods like that, particularly when we were younger, but the vast majority did not suffer too much of a developmental delay. We did eventually grow up not too far behind our peers. And we still find meaning in surfing, in the physical challenges, in the immersion in a natural environment, in the friendships we have made, in our memories, in thinking about design etc etc etc. We find our own meanings in life. Go look.

As for the selfish and meaningless, yes, it is a selfish pursuit, but that's ok. If you don't have anything that you want to do when you aren't getting the life sucked out of you by everyone and everything, then you do have a problem. We all need something.

As for meaningless, well, maybe for you, maybe for a majority of surfers, but that does not describe me. It isn't the centre of my being, but it definitely feeds that centre. It couldn't be further from meaningless for me. I'm a better person to the people around me because of the effect of surfing. There's a shitload of destructive behaviours I don't have to indulge because of what surfing gives me.

To each his own.

"But as someone said to me outside: Doherty is a Tracks guy, what do you expect."

Harsh words and I don't agree. If Sean Doherty ended his career at Tracks he'd be up there next to Kev 'Gabby' Ironmonger in the surf journos hall of fame but he's done a lot of good work since then. Great work even. Bit of a BC and AD dichotomy in Sean's work

true story

edit: response to BB post.

Thank you all for your accounts of the event. Very sad to have missed it, but the skiing in NZ was good.

As I wasn't there, it's hard to pick up on the tone of the conversation - and Bill's mood - but he does generally have a low key, if intense, demeanour.

Shatner - yes, that point was very special. Lugar de Baixo, just up the coast from Ponta do Sol, used to be a very good barreling right point, and still can be if you get the tides/swell/direction etc just right. On blown out days with a lot of W in the swell you'd be guaranteed fast barrels - though not always an exit.

The triangular rock outside the lineup created a soft whitewater roll-in, letting you get to your feet in a leisurely fashion before the bottom dropped out.

The bar on the point used to be a lot rougher (in a friendly way), and having a bica (espresso) in the dark before a morning surf, while truckers downed wine and brandy, was pretty special.

It was one of the jewels, and one of the only places that worked at high head, but Jardim, Pequena and Paul do Mar rate just as high in my book.

Weird fact: across the road is a narrow street leading up the hill. It is so steep, that there are steps in the middle to allow walking. Madeira is a radical place.

Mate, with Finnegan's book out there, ya reckon more crew will start poking round there?

I reckon I can hear the surf industry revving up for a trip this season as we, and Bill, speak.

I hope it doesn't break for 60 days straight again when they're there!

TTurkey, that's what I thought 20 years ago. There are now quite a few local surfers, and travelling surfers keep trickling through, but it just isn't for everybody.

I haven't been for 5 years or so, and might eat my words on the next visit. Hoping not.