beardly updates

As many of you may know, I'm trying to grow a beard. I grew a paltry, thin one last spring when the cherry blossoms were blooming (why should they have all the fun?) but shaved it off shortly thereafter. I sculpted the remains into a Van Dyke, which has sustained me ever since.

But with the approach of No-Shave November this year, I decided I wanted more. A month without shaving would be the perfect chance. That scraggly thing I'd had on my face in spring wouldn't suffice to knock "grow a beard" off my bucket list. I'm aiming for a real beard this time around. Something that would make a mountain man proud, or at least refrain from calling me "pilgrim."

But first, a confession: I have been a bit unfair. I quit shaving halfway through October, and it's halfway through December now, so my nascent beard is obviously a bit longer than it should be. My facial hair grows really slowly, you see. Dang genetics. None of the Post men can grow beards. I suppose my Germanic/Viking ancestors were like cats: they got to the warm, sunny New World and started shedding. The big, bushy, manly beards must've been the first things to go. Accordingly, I had to hedge my bets a little. So I started earlier than everybody else.

This is what I've got now:

These were taken, incidentally, under the Gwangjin Bridge, on the eastern shore of the Han River, during a lovely December day. That's my new Stanwell pipe clenched between my teeth.

I'm going to let nature run its course through Yuletide, January, and the ensuing February. After I get back from Hokkaido on February 9, I'll do another post and show you all what my new-and-improved beard looks like. I've come to terms with the fact that it'll never equal the thick, woolly thing Robert Redford had stuck on his face all through the film Jeremiah Johnson, but I think I've found a suitable middle ground: Jürgen Prochnow from Das Boot.

Minus the weary, haunted look of utter despair. 

I frickin' love that movie, not just for the drama, the splendid acting and the gritty realism, but for the epic beards that the crew sprout over the course of the film. Submarines and submariners have always fascinated me: the camaraderie they necessarily had to have, the insensate dangers they faced on a daily basis, the physical hardships of life in a metal tube, and their downright slovenliness (sanctioned under the circumstances). There was an enthralling article called "Sweat and Rum" in the BBC News Magazine a couple of days ago. It centered around the crew of the HMS Ocelot and other British submarines of the 1960s. "The Queen's Pirates" they were called. Feckin' awesome.

Anyway, Prochnow—who is one of my favorite actors on the basis of Das Boot alone—and I have a lot in common in the facial hair department. His beard runs along his jawline and flows down to his neck, steering clear of his cheeks. Mine does the exact same thing. So that manly chinwig you see in the picture above? That's what I'm going for. Sans blood and sinking submarines, of course.

See you in February... 

recommended reading

• THE BOOK: The Reivers, written by William Faulkner and published in 1962.
• THE PLACE: Jefferson, Mississippi.
• THE TIME: 1905, when Civil War veterans were still alive, when automobiles were still a novelty (and were still hand-cranked), when it still took several days to travel anywhere and back.
• THE CHARACTERS: Boon Hogganbeck, the big, brawny, juvenile carriage-driver, one-eighth Indian, a boozer, a womanizer, and a terrible shot. Ned, the giggling, fractious, black retainer with a rebellious mind and a keen eye. Lucius Priest, the eleven-year-old son of a freight company director (Boon and Ned's boss), hovering somewhere between heaven and hell.
• THE TRICK: How to get these three guys and one stolen car from Jefferson, Mississippi to Memphis, Tennessee, raise as much hell as possible, and get back before the boss returns from the funeral in Louisiana.

This is William Faulkner's last novel, and my first taste of the man's writing, which, by all accounts, was uniformly superb. Everybody calls this guy one of the world's greatest writers, a giant in the world of scripture. I never understood why. I thought I'd already read some pretty good stuff. My first impression when I opened up The Reivers (pronounced like "reavers," meaning people who steal by force or stealth) was one of disbelief. He seemed to be committing, unapologetically, all of the venial mechanical sins which I've been attempting to forcibly train myself out of since I first began writing: extremely long sentences, excessive use of parentheticals, a lot of needless words and phrases. I was flabbergasted.

I said to myself, "How can this guy be considered one of the best there ever was? This is nothing but a single, rambling, pretentious, pointless description. I could write a better novel than this in a storm at sea with both hands tied behind my back."

Well, to be truthful, that last sentence has been embellished. What I actually thought was "This guy's about as good a writer as I am. I could write a novel about this good, and probably am."

As far as first impressions of Faulkner go, mine were anything but auspicious. But I kept reading. I stuck to it. I was determined to see it out. Because, as critical as I was of Faulkner's style, I was rather enjoying the story. I liked this corner of the world he'd set up for my mind to play in. The characters (see above) were absolutely scintillating as well as believable; and in general, the style of the thing was agreeable to me, an immediately recognizable rogue's tale in an unfamiliar guise. I appreciated not only the way that Faulkner was telling this story, but the way he approached it. I don't mean to put on airs, but Faulkner seemed, with this book at least, to be coming at it from the same angle I might've come from: dip the audience immediately into a colorful place, filled with light and life and memorable people, and extract from them a laugh or a gasp or a head-scratch or two. Faulkner and I, perhaps, liked to read (and write) the same kinds of stories, and we went about it the same way.

Irritated by style but fascinated by story, I forged ahead. I got halfway through Chapter 3 when it finally hit me. William Faulkner was a transcendent genius. He is, indeed, an inimitable, masterful writer. He makes it look not only easy, but natural. As I read, I gradually got the feeling that Faulkner was telling this story with almost careless facility, that the whole of it had just popped into his head one day and he'd merely sat down at his typewriter and banged it out. An absurd notion, of course. That's not how the writing process works. It's agony, raw and unattenuated torture. The flow of words stops and starts like a broken water main; any leftover initiative, inspiration and determination are squeezed out of the writer's soul by the gristmill of revision. But Faulkner, apparently, was a good enough writer (and editor) to make it seem as if he just slapped the whole thing down on a Saturday afternoon. But beyond this (and what struck me the hardest) is that Faulkner had powers of perception beyond the scope of my and most other writers' wildest aspirations. He saw and heard and felt, and translated his experiences onto the page completely intact. Whereas I have a tin ear for dialogue, no penchant for vivid character, and only the most rudimentary grasp of description and setting, Faulkner sweeps the board in all. In three short chapters we have scene, character, conflict, advancement, emotion, invocation, investment, power, and (as a result) the last and highest peak of the pyramid: story. And I am enjoying that story immensely. I am amazed, at every turn of the page, by the depth with which Faulkner explores his characters' motivations, their fears, their doubts, their emotions, their wants; his impudent use of run-on sentences and parentheses; the sheer amount of thought, observation, and characterization that went into this book; and the staggering range of Faulkner's (and his protagonist's) perceptions. This book is humanity on parade, an intimate exploration of people, morals, virtues—and their attractive antitheses. It is also just a rompingly fun story about three guys swiping a car and going to a cathouse in Memphis. Read it and you'll see what I mean.

• THE (SECOND) BOOK: Blind Man's Bluff: The untold story of American submarine espionage, by Sherry Sontag and Christopher Drew, published 1998.
• THE PLACE: the world's oceans.
• THE TIME: the Cold War, 1947-1991, when the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. jockeyed for political and military supremacy in an undeclared war of intimidation, subterfuge, and arms races.
• THE CHARACTERS: American spy submarines and their crews.
• THE TRICK: How to build submarines capable of remaining hidden from the sophisticated senses of the Soviets; fill 'em with spies and able-bodied seamen; and get 'em close enough to Russia to scope out the Commies without being spotted, killed, or used to provoke a nuclear war.

For my next new conquest, I decided to delve once again into nonfiction, pursuant to a rather curious obsession that's been asserting itself over my mind recently: nuclear submarines. Lately I have become obsessed with nuclear submarines. Subs in general, really. The reason baffles me. Maybe it was because I was mentally going over possible novel plots (or, in comic book lingo, story arcs) the other day and, seeing as how my novel series is an allegorical history of the world, the Cold War crossed my mind. And with the Cold War came thoughts of spies, atomic secrets, spy planes, and...submarines.

Then I caught a documentary on the Military Channel about famous American subs. It wasn't particularly good—it didn't go over much of anything in detail—but it got the wheels turning, if you know what I mean. Soon I was on the Internet, looking up some of the Gato-class submarines which served in the Pacific during World War II, and the nuke subs that came after. These last all came with captivating names like Scorpion, Thresher, and Seawolf.
Come on, now. How could any self-respecting young man not be fascinated by the mere concept of submarine warfare, particularly in the cloak-and-dagger context of the Cold War? A cigar-shaped submersible, run on the principles of atomic fission, a cylinder of fragile black steel holding off the unforgiving ocean, crammed full of top-secret specialists and their high-tech listening devices, shepherded through the troubled water by a courageous crew and a devil-may-care captain, trained to ignore Soviet boundaries and push deep into enemy turf, as far as they dare, in constant peril of their lives?

And so I opened Blind Man's Bluff. It was one of the first books to address the then-still-mostly-classified and highly touchy subject of the "Silent Service." But that didn't stop Sontag and Drew. They interviewed as many sailors and commanders as they could (their interviewees often received stern reminders from Navy brass about their secrecy contracts). They combed through old newspaper reports and records, American and Soviet archives. And then they wrote a book. But this book isn't a drab, humdrum collection of accounts and data, nor of the governmental grandstanding and policy-making, the hallmark of the era. No. This is a story about submarines, and the people who crewed and commanded them. Blind Man's Bluff reads like an adventure serial, with stories of close shaves and disasters and incidents told in real-time, third-person narration. When my dad first gave it to me a few years ago (jeez, when I was like, nine, and way too young for that sort of thing) I thought it was a Tom Clancy novel.

I'm hooked. In the first chapter, "A Deadly Beginning," we learn of the diesel submarine Cochino, one of the very first spy subs, which in 1949 conducted surveillance operations near the port of Murmansk, on Russia's northwest coast. This was before anybody even believed that submarines could be used for spying instead of sinking enemy ships. Enter Harris "Red" Austin, a radioman descended of a long line of redhead Scottish warriors, who transferred from surface ships to submarines to being a "spook," all in search of adventure. Together with Commander Rafael C. Benitez, Austin conducted a series of daring sweeps of Soviet radio waves and communications, trying to divine whether the Russians were readying a nuclear onslaught. Just like the breaking of the sound barrier which had occurred barely two years before, submarine spy operations were a ticklish business. Submarines in World War II weren't submarines in the strictest sense; they were merely submersible boats, designed to run primarily on the surface and dive briefly into combat. GUPPY-class diesel submarines like the Cochino were the same kind of deal, but they were retrofitted for spy duty with some rather daring modifications: namely, adding a snorkel and an exhaust vent to allow the sub to stay submerged longer, and drilling holes through the pressure hull, the crew's only shield against the millions of gallons of seawater outside the sub, to accommodate the antennas of Austin's spy gear.

The mission went well until an explosion in the Cochino's battery compartment knocked out power and sent massive doses of toxic gas spewing through the sub. Cochino's sister sub, Tusk, was nearby, but a massive storm complicated matters. Things rapidly went from bad to worse. Men wounded by the explosion were cut off in the aft part of the sub by the fire in the battery compartment. The seas were so heavy that Tusk drifted out of sight. Further explosions destroyed what little chance Cochino had of recovering and limping away under her own power. And the toxic gases kept building up. As they waited for Tusk to pull side-on to evacuate them, the crew of the Cochino were faced with an agonizing choice: stay below and be poisoned, or go out onto the slippery, heaving deck in subzero temperatures. It wasn't long before half the men were groggy or unconscious, and half were hypothermic. The executive officer, Wright, was horribly scalded attempting to force open the door to the battery compartment. Six men were swept off the Tusk into the sea as it pulled alongside Cochino, and were drowned. In the end, Tusk managed to effect a rescue. A long plank was run between the two submarines. The seas tossed and rolled. The men had to wait for the precious few seconds when the plank was level to scurry across, else they would fall and be crushed between their submarines' hulls as they ground together. Everyone made it. Wright—in terrible agony, the entire front of his body burned—somehow managed to stand up, climb a ladder, cross the heaving deck, and get over the plank. Six sailors from the Tusk and a civilian engineer from Cochino were lost, and Cochino itself sank.

It was a disaster. But the surveillance had worked. Though he hadn't discovered any Soviet plots to blow up the United States, Austin had managed to tap the Russian lines of communication, convincing skeptical naval commanders that submarines were a viable platform for subterfuge and special reconnaissance operations. And that was just the beginning.

Can you see why I'm hooked? Mind you, not every story in Blind Man's Bluff is like this. The second chapter, "Whiskey A-Go-Go," details the adventures of another snorkel-equipped diesel sub, the U.S.S. Gudgeon, the first submarine caught red-handed in Soviet waters. Already low on air and battery power, the Gudgeon accidentally let its antennas and sail break the surface, and was spotted by Russian observers. The sub was consequently hounded for 48 hours by Russian ships, dodging one way, ducking the other, trying to evade the clouds of small-sized depth charges raining down from above, desperately seeking a temperature layer (a mass of cold water) to hide in, oxygen levels sinking and carbon monoxide and dioxide building up. Eventually, Commander Bessac was forced to quit on the business. In danger of losing his men to suffocation, horrifically low on power and unable to send out a call for help, the Gudgeon surfaced. A Russian ship took a sideswipe at the American sub, forcing it to dive again, only a gulp of fresh air in the snorkel. The Americans held out for another few hours, then surfaced again. The Russian ships dropped back. The Gudgeon spat out the bad air and sucked in some fresh. The diesel engines fired up, recharging the batteries. And a much-delayed call for assistance was sent out. The Russians didn't press the attack. They sent the Gudgeon a message, asking for identification. "USN, returning to Japan," the sub replied. "Thanks for the anti-submarine warfare practice," the Russians quipped, and disappeared.

Did I mention that I'm hooked on this book?

In ensuing chapters, I'm going to read about John P. Craven and some of the nutty ideas he came up with to advance undersea warfare; the death of the U.S.S. Scorpion, which something I've been burning to find out more about ever since this obsession with submarines set in; and a few tips and tricks about fighting underneath the Arctic ice cap, which plays merry hob with sonar. Don't worry, I'll keep you posted.

Day Seven: Jeju

And on the seventh day, Andy decreed a day of rest. And so he did rest, laundry, submarines, waterfalls and souvenir shops notwithstanding. Okay, yeah, I said I'd take it easy today, but everything I've done has been within a mile or so of my hotel, okay? I consider that effortless. First on the docket: sleep in. This I did, until about 8:30, half an hour later than usual. (My body doesn't take a hint. I tried going to the bathroom, swigging some water, closing the shades, every trick I knew, but I couldn't get back to sleep.) Anyway, recognizing defeat, I got up and asked Kevin, the Hiking Inn's proprietor, where the laundry was. He told me to bring it down and pile it by the office door and his wife would do it. Trying to exude an aura of extreme gratefulness, I did so. Kevin said it'd be ready in the afternoon. That little bit of housekeeping now taken care of (how easy!), I was now left to my own devices. I figured since I didn't have time to take the submarine tour up in Seongsan the other day, I'd do it today, especially since there was another submarine company just down the road at Seogwipo Harbor. Seogwipo Submarine is its imaginative name. (The Korean word for "submarine" is jamsuham, in case you're interested.) For 45,000 won you can get a 40-minute ride around coral formations and enough gaily-hued fish to choke a whale. I strolled down to the docks, then turned around a caught a cab back to my hotel. I'd left my bank book in a pocket of my new galot jacket. Not that I don't trust Kevin, but living near Los Angeles for seven years has bred in me an innate suspiciousness. Then I strolled back down to the docks again, entered the crowded waiting room and purchased a ticket. In ten minutes (well, it's good I had to go back for something after all; it reduced the waiting time) we were boarding a launch for the submarine station. As if riding a submarine wasn't cool enough, we didn't do nearly anything so pedestrian as actually board the submarine at the harbor. The sub was docked at Mundo Island, about a half a kilometer offshore. We had to take a twelve-ton launch out of the bay and to the floating boarding barge moored just off Mundo's sheer, rocky coast. As we pulled up, the submarine, about thirty feet long and painted white, emerged dramatically from the depths, throwing a gout of water into the air like a breaching whale. Oohs and aahs abounded. Within fifteen minutes, passengers from the launch had been transferred from the sub (and vice-versa; the previous run had to take the launch back to the harbor); we'd all had our obligatory, individual photo op in front of the sub (the Jiah by name); and we'd descended a ladder down the narrow hatch and taken our seats on the hardened rubber benches in the cabin. It was wild in there, nothing but huge glass portholes running down either side of the compartment, giving crystal-clear views of the rolling green waters outside. In another moment we were descending. For the first phase of the ride (viewing the shallow-water fish that flock throughout these waters), all of us on the starboard side had to shift down to even smaller rubberized seats, while those folks on the port side rose to take their places the benches we'd vacated. This was so everybody could see out the starboard portholes. Then the show began. Divers from a small ship nearby (itself monitoring our progress and ready to aid in case of emergency) swam by our portholes, within touching distance, it seemed. They were surreptitiously sprinkling fish food into the water, and thereby enticing a whole gang of the promised brightly-colored fish to swim after them...right by our portholes. The result was a veritable icthyoid rainbow, a whole parade of tiny fish flocking in droves past the portholes, wowing us passengers. As they passed, a crewman aboard the sub went up and down to each porthole and took pictures of each of us. Prints would later be made available after we'd landed back at the harbor. It was a pretty neat sight, unlike anything I'd ever seen before at sea or an aquarium. All too soon the fishfest was over, and the Jiah descended deeper into the green, murky depths. It was a pity it was so murky. The first I saw of the shipwreck was when the rust- and barnacle-encrusted bow loomed up out of the silt like the snout of some shovel-nosed leviathan. It was a small craft, probably some fishing boat (or perhaps just some junker sunk by the Seogwipo Submarine Company for the effect)...but still, it was an impressive and sobering moment, this rusted hulk sitting on the bottom of the sea, picked at by fish, lost and forgotten. Even if that spectacle was only one-millionth the power that the sight of the Titanic must've been to the crew of the submersible team that discovered it, it was one of the most amazing things I've ever witnessed. I strongly recommend the ride...the shipwreck alone is worth the price of admission. But the ride wasn't over. After sliding silently and somberly by this decaying remnant, the Jiah came to rest up against a rock formation covered in coral and seaweed. Leafy fronds and lacy growths waved gently in the current, a dramatic sight in itself, but even more so when they hit the orange lights and the whole scene was lit from below with a red-gold glow. The sub moved itself slowly across the surface of this rock face, making love to it, so close that we could easily have reached out and grasped what we saw, had there not been thick glass in between. It was the final win of the hat trick in that short undersea journey. I really envied the submarine drivers in their job. And so we emerged from the depths. I watched the sub break the surface with the aid of a small television monitor in the cabin, connected to a camera overlooking the top deck. We transferred to the launch once again and disembarked at the harbor. Our free publicity shots (taken in front of the sub as we'd boarded) were waiting for us, and for a small fee (4,000 for card size, 8,000 for 8.5" x 11" prints) we could pick up the photos taken inside the sub as well. I did this...one can never have too many mementos of a submarine ride. It was a subtle thing. It didn't seem so amazing at the time, but then again, my mind was in a million places at once today. It's my last day and tomorrow I'm checking out, going up to Jeju City and catching the ferry for Mokpo in Jeollanam-do. After the fact, however, the thrill of the experience and the absolute beauty of the spectacle got to work on my imagination. I'll sum all of it up in one word: Wow. There remains little to tell. I revisited Cheonjiyeon Pokpo, now far more beautiful in the light of day than it had been when I'd arrived in the overcast, as expected. Then I picked up some gifts for my friends back in Gohyeon (again, I won't say what, in case they're reading this). I came back here, picked up my laundry, and have just been relaxing during the heat of the day (which has remained clear despite predictions to the contrary). I watched Under Siege 2: Dark Territory...one of the better Steven Seagal movies, but that's not saying much. When it cools down a little in the late afternoon I plan on going out again, seeking out a damn good dinner (maybe heukdwaeji bulgogi again) and some more gifts. Then I'll return here, pack up, grab a good night's sleep, and be raring for the road again come Monday morning. Signing off...