Caption Contest-Doc Rickett's Lab

This seems perfect for a Friday. It already has one caption, but don't you wonder what?

Cannery Row and Writing Skills

We spent a half hour this morning discussing the first sentence of Cannery Row. Once, when Susan was lecturing to nursing home residents in Florida, someone told her that Steinbeck was a bad writer. She used this sentence as an example. Susan (and our group) disagrees, but it's more interesting to delve into why we disagree. Here's the sentence.

"Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and and flophouses. Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, ‘whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches,’ by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, "Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,’ and he would have meant the same thing."

I can share our thoughts, but I'm curious to read yours.

(The former Wing Chong grocery store on Cannery Row. Note the subsequent development.)

This afternoon was a tour of Cannery Row, ending with a small party in Doc Rickett's lab while listening to an audio recording of Steinbeck reading The Snake.

(Listening to The Snake in the front room of Doc Rickett's lab)

(Back of Doc Rickett's house. You can see the cement holding tanks in the foreground.And the Intercontinental hotel on the right.)

Tonight is the Cannery Row movie, a 1982 adaptation billed as 'the best love story of the year.' (Did they read the book?) It stars Nick Nolte and Debra Winger. I plan to be entertained.

(Example of the size of an average Monterey sardine.)

Photos of the Past Two Days-Library and Seals

I'll keep this short and sweet since I left for Hopkins Marine Station around 8:30 this morning. We had sessions from 9-11:15, 1-4:30, and 7-10:15. That's a long day by most standards, but especially when you're engaged in challenging conversations. So, short and sweet, exhausted and amazed! I love Monterey, Steinbeck, and the other teachers here.

Possibly the best classroom overlook out there.


Until I saw the view from the Reading Room in Hopkins (Stanford University) library. (It's dark because I couldn't use a flash and didn't know how to set it up against the natural light.) Yes, that's a telescope for seal viewing in the center.


I took this photo for all the students who don't believe the crazy journal titles on JSTOR. Scholars are definitely into journals with quite specified topics.



For library geeks, here are the library stacks. Not too shabby. They also have examples of baleen (with the appropriate paperwork) and a nice wooden library catalog stand.


The bottom left corner of this photo shows seals. The top right shows the edge of the library that overlooks the seals. I know it's not a great photo, but it gives a sense of perspective.


And finally, I can visualize a poem I've heard since my youth. Guess who?

The fog comes
on little cat feet

it sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.

Cannery Row

We're staying a few blocks from Cannery Row, and oh how times have changed in the past 100 years. Here's how Steinbeck begins Cannery Row.

"Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light... a nostalgia, a dream."

The place smelled of 14 sardine canneries. Workers were poor. It was a working town. That said, on a road trip with friends a few summers ago, I still wanted to stop by Cannery Row. It was a short visit however. I hadn't been back until dinner this evening. The restaurant looked out to the shore on one side and Bubba Gump Shrimp on the other. Yet another place overtaken by tourism and and homogenous chains. But it seems there's been a longer march towards this than I originally realized. Interesting reading for this institute shows Steinbeck's wry take on the matter back in the 1950s, when several canneries were still operating.

A number of these buildings still stand. The purchases might keep them as national monuments. Their tendency to rust could be halted by spraying them with plastics. Maintenance of this reminder of our historic past would, however, require that the rocks and beaches be stocked with artificial fish guts and scales. Reproducing the billions of flies that once added beauty to the scene would be difficult and costly. But with strides in chemistry and with wind machines, the odor of rotting fish and the indescribable smell of fish meal could wafted over the town on feast days. Perhaps this era should kept as a monument to American know-how. For it was this forward-looking intelligence which killed all the fish, cut all of the timber, thereby lowering the rainfall.

And if you've never found Steinbeck humorous before, now's the time to check out some of his nonfiction. Possibly for fun, not just for English class.