"...lazy, derivative, and two years too late!"
Yesterday, or maybe the day before, William Finnegan’s masterful 12,000 word feature on the meaning, value and future of Kelly Slater’s Surf Ranch was released to almost as much fanfare as his Pulitzer Prize winning memoir Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life.
Praise poured in from all surf corners.
Stab magazine, even swallowing bitterness at not being mentioned, wrote: “How fortunate are surfers to have someone as sharp as Bill Finnegan speaking to The Elites on our behalf?” The Inertia added, “…particularly poetic.”
Surfer magazine’s Justin Housman took a different path, though, writing on Twitter: “Meh. The New Yorker article was fine I guess, but also a bit lazy, derivative, and two years too late. Didn’t raise any interesting questions or cover any new ground.”
Whoa.
A certifiable literary blood feud not seen ’round these parts since Joel Tudor went after Noa Deane for penning a three-eye’d smiley face.
And whose side are you on?
Do you think that William Finnegan gets heaped with flowery praise by sycophants too enamored to be honest or that Justin Housman is blinded by possible jealousies?
Are you Team Surfer or Team New Yorker?
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i love barbarian days more than most other things. but i didn’t find much in this recent article. “fine, i guess” is fairly accurate.
my 2 cents about the article.
cent 1: we (surfers/just in-house man) are not the audience, not for the new yorker article or the biography
cent 2: the new yorker, as i understand it, is a voice for interesting things happening in the world that you wouldn’t necessarily find in other publications (with the exception of current US politics, but what are they meant to do, not report on it?!?). if you’re an expert or seriously engaged with an article topics it’s likely you’ll learn little and probably be irritated a number of times.
as someone interested in trivialities i enjoy reading roughly 50% of the new yorker each week. as an aussie i feel obliged to say fark all yous cunts
now i’ve given you my 2 cents i’m broke
one that doesn’t go for a surf with means of recording the session I guess. Does a wave break in 2018 without vid posts , Instagram, facebook and an edit?
not a fair fight. surf mag writer who’s peaked, vs. legit surfer and pulitzer prize winning author.
write on surfer dude.
NOT a fair fight. a surf ‘writer’ who peaked at surf mag, vs a legitimate surfer and pulitzer prize winning writer.
Write on dude ………
Nigga moved to Hollywood yo.
He wanted to stay objective…. till he got the tap and went in the water. He was hating it till then. The exclusivity factor. What is he wrote the same peice without getting in the water? He said he wasn’t going to… but caved.
Funny. Cheap. Character revealing.
A captain will say anything to save a sinking ship……
Let’s rather talk about Tanner H and MRod
🙁
haha I love adjectives in front of ‘surfer what a game it is!
Dammit Chas.
You keep writing “jealousy” when you mean “envious” and it’s driving me nuts.
Hahahah! Who ain’t jealous of Finn? I mean envious.
Me.
Yeah me neither. He lives in cunting NY and probably has to spend a lot of time on small talk and corporate BS. And he writes about politics.
I wouldn’t swap.
I will never be envious of somebody who lives in NYC.
When critiquing, you will get your parallelism-ograms right, dammit: jealous: envious; jealousy: envy.
fuck 12,000 words.. it did feel like it went on for a long time.
Chas’ initial 8000 word estimate was some timely suggestive trickeration.
I listened to the audio version while I was stuck in heavy traffic, so I was grateful for the almost hour-long soothing upper-crust tones. I think I may have felt a bit cheated of my time if I’d taken the time to read it.
who read it? Finn? that would be fucked, submitting 12000 words and then having to read them into a mic. fuck that.
that said, i wouldn’t say no to that here. haha. or maybe give QS surfers exposure by getting them to read them. a phone recording would be appropriate.
“bill so glad you called me, 4:08 or 6:08 to ride kellys wave?” sal
I read about a quarter of it, I hate reading long form articles off a computer screen, and thought about buying the magazine! But of the bit I did read I didn’t learn anything particularly new or interesting! We have been kept quiet up to date here on beach grit in regards to wave pools!
Michael Rodrigues just got beat up live on YouTube by a Hawaiian .
Wot? Literally beat up?
El slappo?
Linky ! Vol, Krill ?
https://stabmag.com/stabcin…
Link~ie is from 1 of the boyz on Thee Surfer Forum:
https://stabmag.com/stabcin…
Cheers. Thanks for that.
Interesting read below the vid.
Fkn classic. Nice to see his boys flee like school girls.. brazzo machismo at its finest..
Geez – that’s what passes for a fight these days?
So this was the opening card?
I thought Barbarian Days was an incredible book, but at the same time that Finnegan seems a difficult, snobby ass. And he more or less admits as much which I give him a lot of credit for! Someone who has devoted a career to fighting bullies (as he put’s it) but also very clearly a bully himself. As is often the case. Still, we are lucky to have him.
I’ve been waiting for this discussion about Finnegan.
Everybody blows smoke up his arse but I actually didn’t think Barbarian Days was that great. As with the New Yorker article it was meandering and superfluous, and didn’t really add anything new to the conversation for those already well versed.
What annoys me most about all mainstream surf writing like his is this incessant need to justify why we surf. Writers spend the whole time raving on about how magical and spiritual a communion surfing is and use fucked up ‘relatable’ analogies to describe the experience, but in the end just serve to cheapen the whole thing. It’d be like saying CSI: Miami is a true representation of what it’s like to be a detective. Wake me up when somebody does surfing’s version of The Wire.
And like anyone gives a fuck what the New Yorker crowd think about surfing.
I downloaded the sample of Barbarian Days to my kindle. I’ve spent the last few days making Pros and Cons lists about buying the rest of the book. It’s a time of such inner turmoil and soul searching the Anderson household.
Save your Hannukah gelt and download a classic for free. Anything written with a quill.
Yep . Why buy Babarian Days when you can download the complete work of Jack London for a slightly earlier view on the subject ?
I enjoyed the first half.
ty Justin. I am so proud of you.
tbh you do always take stuff on. one of the few who i enjoy reading.
sign my t-shirt please
the book is fucking awesome, i devoured it in a couple of days.deserves every penny.
I really had a problem with all the self-aware navel gazing at the end in Madeira and it seemed like an entire chapter was about trying to psych himself up to go surf some wave….and then HE DOES IT. That whole back end could have been shortened considerably.
Isn’t that WTPNGTH? – the Wire?
True! Don’t know if it’s broken mainstream yet, though…
I’ll tell you! It hasn’t!
lol yeah like you’d be here if it had
When does, will you let Disney have the film rights for an animated feature?
Think of the great songs!!!
What about The New York Times crowd? Fashion update from Byron Bay today:
“There are so many female surfers here, it is a female-dominated line up now, hence why I think fashion and surfing is popular here. The waves are relaxed and mellow, everyone is happy to share. Party waves!”
https://www.nytimes.com/201…
🙁
“I like to be expressive. We both have long hair, it’s a surfer look. Girls like it. The long hair looks like the ‘I don’t care’ look but you really hand to put more effort into maintaining it … I like to take it chilled, not make plans.”
man buns. ugh.
Nothing wrong with them if they’re presented properly.
https://uploads.disquscdn.c…
I kept hunting down this list of vacuous fuckwits for:
Steve Shearer, 74, bus driver
“Fuck off.”
Holy fuckballs.
You should mark that NSFW in an anger-making way.
I haven’t felt the urge to punch a computer screen so hard in a long time.
umm….Natalie Grono the photog is a Lennox surfer who is gnarly as hell and my wife got a pay day helping her out for that assignment…….so it’s all good by me!
I liked the book enough to not care too much about the man. He has spent quite some time being a purist surfer and documented it very well. Its very hard to write about a surfing life without some self aggrandisement.
I loved the book but when I saw him live at a writer festival he did come across as a pompous, ill-humoured self-important prick.
I thought he came across like that in the book. Was hoping he’d be a good guy in real life.
he won me on not finding cloudbreak. or caring. he won me on the personal battles involved in getting a great wave when often the effort overcomes the reward.
Well he seemed like a really nice bloke at the Pool thing. I dunno, it’s hard to be a really nice person all the time, especially if you’re trying to be a good writer, the combination of close observation and introspectiveness causes you to be wary, spiky, and generally difficult to like
I didn’t find came he came across as pompous in the book.
It appears that some people find studious and introspective as pompous.
introspective people often come across as arrogant, pompous….Ill humoured? not taking a bait? Perhaps tempered to personal and other politics therefore coming across as aloof. Did you go hey mate I’m long tom, I’m a legend? we should talk? Love your work long tom. Love his too. Maybe he is embarrassed to have won his Pulitzer writing about surfing.
Can I be McNulty? I’m already an alcoholic!
Of course you can !
This is the internet !
Only if I’m Bunk!
oh yes surfads! poetically putted. you have earned 5one blow job credit. let me know when you want to cash it in.
Warning: I do have a man bun
The Wire? I reckon anything that remotely represents real-life surfing would be more in the mold of Arrested Development?
Couldn’t agree more. It was an ok read, mostly if you didn’t surf.
And none of it matched the promise of Playing Doc’s Games. The great thing about that piece was the vulnerability and honesty conveyed through the character study of Renneker. It felt like a truism of surfing nearly always absent from surf writing – the fact that most of us spend most of the time feeling inadequate, justifiably or not.
As a New Yorker fanboy and paid mag subscriber, I thought the same as Surfer mag guy (will not be bothered to scroll up to review his name): Finnegan pretty lazy on this one. Sad.
Chas, you’re just stoked you got a couple mentions, as you should be.
Warsaw had the most insightful, McLuhanesque (huh?) take, for my money–that new tech will not let our little past time alone, that we cannot have both (ocean surfing and amoeba water surfing, side by side), and that it’s an all around bummer, etc.
A+ for mcluhan mention. although he was wrong. as Friedrich littler argues technology is not an extension of man we are extensions of technology! creepy.
the pool is Slater. Slater is the pool!
My brother-in-law’s brother has surfed it about 8 times (he’s a buyer for a big store and Outerknown hosts them). He said he is addicted to the pool and only wants to surf the pool. He is becoming pool.