Status Updates From I Cover the Waterfront: Sto...

Home by sea.

A run of chapters setting distance between men and women. The whole book is kind of a guy’s book. I tried to read Andie a chapter, but I know it’s not her kind of thing.

apple-fish simile

“my mind’s finally on the skids. too much fishing.”

fish pool inland, like Grandpa Watson’s or koi pond at Manzanar

“never got around to getting married”

wants to meet authors like dorothy parker, not pilots

typewriter in the sky

hidden god, hidden sea, hidden pipe for spring, hidden sex, talk about something else.

the cans in the swordfish story work like the barrels in Jaws.

“manage somehow to talk about other things” might be a definition of poetry; here’s a fishing story about Mello whose mind has been captured

fisherman’s eyesight

Island of the Blue Dolphins, mainland POV

Fish-and-game investigator story reminds me of Grammy’s story about Pa picking up Grampy from La Jolla Cove. I have a vague memory of Grampy reaching for abalone along a rock, but I don’t know if it’s real or something he told me so I’m imagining it.

The sea lion scene reminds me of an encounter Andie and I had on Rosarito Beach. A pup followed us. It was as if he wanted me to pick him up. I felt like I couldn’t protect him and at the same time, he was big enough that a nip would’ve hurt.

What’s all this about elipses?

What is the “mother ship” (68)? What’s been smuggled on Mió Jesus?

“We not in the business of reporting the truth,” my editor Paul Dannison once told me. “We just report the lies other people tell us.” In this way, the source collaborates in the story, as Chris Loch does, apparently attracting many journalists as a source. For Miller’s sake, he relies more on what he sees Loch do than on what he says, making the moment when Loch says he keeps a scrapbook a revelation.

Because all characters are shadowed, no chapter about them can ever be complete.

The paragraph on “honest big men” and “the number of secrets...the number of secrets...they do not want printed, and so we do not print them” is familiar and chilling (22).