I am attempting to lighten the mood around here a bit with this one. I hope it ends up as escapist in content as I intend it.
Sometimes people ask me why I chose the name "Squid" for myself when I became old enough to know who I am. There are theories that children grow into the names that parents give them, but I always felt (and I know many people who have done this) we should be able to chose our own names as adults. This how I now have two legal names.
At one point while at an entry-level job when I still thought being a member of the feudal structure of corporate America was in my future, I was typing at a computer keyboard, and a coworker asked me, "What are you, a squid?" when she saw my long tentacular fingers spinning prose in ASCII. I decided to capitalize the first letter and make it my penname, and then it became my social nickname, and then it became my online-forum name, and then it became my art name, and then "Squid Bedlam Varilekova" became my second legal name... and so the creative nonfiction storyline goes.
I decided to keep the name for many reasons. Depending on my mood and how friendly you are when you ask me, you might get any one or combination of truthful answers. "It keeps me humble." or "It's a Squid-and-her-ink thing." or even "Have you seen me dance, yet? I look a bit like a sea creature." I doubt that is the correct grammatical sturcture for a line of quotes; I know it is not the correct punctuation; but, I am sure no one will hold it against me. People usually tend to hold the untrue things attributed to me against me.
So, as I usually keep explaining about my name, ever since choosing the name "Squid" for myself that winter/spring of 2000, I keep finding new reasons that the name fits me and who I really am so damn well. To illustrate this point, I now present my first online book review. I hope Richard Ellis will not mind the manner in which my sense of humor and level of self-understanding is about to land upon his 1998 publication "The Search for the Giant Squid."
I intend to do this from front cover to back cover making comments on reandomly chosen passages probably found by my insistence on perusing the pretty pictures. There is one passage I chose on purpose through the use of his handy dandy index at the back of the book, and I will point it out when I get there. Here we go!
Squid B. Varilekova's haphazard review of a book she has not read and only flipped through looking for pretty pictures:
"The Search for the Giant Squid" by Richard Ellis, published in 1998
The cover has a cute little green doe-eyed, glowing orange squid on it. I presume it is based on the Humboldt Squid more than it is scientific projections of what an actual Architeuthis (Giant Squid) would appear like in the wild. That is, the Humboldt Squid, should that one be so small as to fit on the cover of a book instead of being approx 25 ft long, do actually look a lot like this and are very commonly found in the waters off the coast of California. Anywho, the squid is cute to look at, and if I were to judge a book by its cover, so much cuteness would tell me that the contents below the cover promise to be very informative and eloquently written. Yey!
The first plate (Do we call them illustrations, now?) one encounters is a monochromatic representation of a painting by Richard Ellis himself, and it is found opposite the book's title page. The caption reads, "In the most fabled of deepwater encounters, a sperm whale captures a giant squid. Despite stories to the contrary, it is always the whale that initiates the contace, as the whale feeds upon the squid and not vice versa." It is also quite a pretty picture to look at.
After the Table of Contents, I found a very well typeset selection from Melville's "Moby Dick" with the year 1851 quite well and appropriately attached to it. The last few words of the selection read...
' "What was it, Sir?" said Flask.
"The great live squid, which, they say, few whale-ships ever beheld and returned to their ports to tell of it." '
Huh, I have long known that the sperm whale is the only natural enemy of the Giant Squid... which I seem to like puts capital letters on the beginning of for some reason. But I must add, whales are endangered, and squid are not. Perhaps this is due to the naturally ellusive nature of the Giant Squid. Until we can capture one on film in the wild and convince her to sign an image release, we may never know.
On page 33, in the third chapter, the one entitled "The Biology of Squids, Giant or Otherwise," I encountered the second pretty picture that caught my eye. It is an etching of the Vampyroteuthis infernalis a.k.a. the "vampire squid from Hell." This brought me back to a funny and completely autobiographical story. At my best friend (Syniva Whitney) in the universe and beyond's MFA graduation gallery reception at the Sullivan Galleries of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago last May, our mutual friend Annie Terrell told me that she wanted to make me a "vampire squid from Hell" dress much like the famous swan dress worn by Bjork. She said that it would take her a while to work up a pattern, a design, a whatever-else-necessary to make it for me, but that she would want me to wear it my first time I would ever accidently find myself on a red carpet. I thanked her, and then I assured her that it would probably be a very long time before any of my screenwriting activities would ever put me on anyone's red carpet. Wow, huh? I have never claimed to be a psychic for a reason, but sometimes I wonder...
The "vampire squid from Hell" by the way, is not a real squid, nor is it an octopus. It is one of those rare other types of deep-water cephalopod that is active more than it is passive. And, also according to the etching's caption, it is a smaller squid that usually only makes it to 12" in total body length.
In the same chapter on the biology of squid, on page 41, a reader will find the one passage I used the index to locate in this book. "Squids propel themselves--in whatever direction they choose--by a form of 'jet propulsion.' " I want a rocket pack. I don't know if I would ever wear it, but maybe in the spirit of Robert Downy, Jr. movies, I could have my own hard rock soundtrack if I had a rocket pack.
Again in the same chapter and on page 46, is a plate of the Giants Squids WANTED! Dead or Alive! poster created on behalf of the Memmorial University of Newfoundland in 1988. "We just want to make a scientic study of, on, and with the Giant Squid," is not included in the text of the poster. Not to mention, I am sure that the squid pictured in the poster probably had never done anything illegal in her life other than jaywalk or vandalize the occasional park bench or mens' room door.
On the facing page of that plate, there are two adorable little footnotes that caught my eye as well. The first refuted a claim made by a scientist named Beebe who "was dead wrong about the brainlessness of the squid[.]" The second discusses whether or not nature should have given the squid red ink instead of blue as a sort of greater initimidation factor in the wild. According to the footnote, at the depths in which the giant squids live (I have no consistent method of capping or not capping those two words.), all colors turn to black anyway, except for bioluminescence. I wonder how Giant Squid look under a heat camera.
Page 49 is where I happened upon a discussion of squid eyes. Apparently, looking at life through a squid-eye lens is not so bad. Squids, it is presumed, have twice as good of sight as humans. The largest eyes in the animal kingdom, not mention the largest staring eyes since they have no lids, belong to the Architeuthis... a word I seemingly do not italicize with any regularity. At the bottom of the page, a reader also learns that the eyes of digested squids are the parts that deteriorate the fastest.
On pages 56 and 57, the last two pages in the chapter on the biology of squids, Richard Ellis discusses theories on why squid are naturally immune to nerve gas. Did squid evolve this way for some simple life-dependent reason? Or was it a form of prememptive adaptation? Maybe someday we will figure out even that mystery of the Giant Squid.
I skipped the first two chapters and dwelt quite a bit on the chapter on the biology of the squid... I am pretty sure the following chapters will have the previously promised attention due a good skimming.
The fourth chapter in the book is entitled "By What Name Shall We Call The Giant Squid?" At the very end of its first chapter, is a quote from "Annals of the Realm of Denmark" which was written by Arild Hvitfeld and published in 1595. I assume it was also translated at some point into English. The quote says, "In the year 1550 a curious fish was caught in the [O]resund and taken to Copenhagen to the King; it had the head like a man and a tonsure on the head; it had a dress of scarlet like a monk's cloak." I did not read enough context to see if this quote was meant to be about a Giant Squid, but I want to think it was.
In the very last paragraph of the very same chapter, a reader can find the vernacular for the Architeuthis in many sea-faring languages. My favorite was the Norwegian word kjmpeblekksprut which literally translates into "giant ink sprayer" in English. If you follow the footnote at the bottom of the page about the Norwegian word for the Giant Squid, you learn that Richard Ellis consistently missepelled the word in a previous book with an extra syllable making it Kjmpebleblekkspruten. This new word translates literally to "giant diaper ink sprayer." Yey! Languages!
In the chapter entitled "Battle of the Giants", the sixth chapter of the book, you will find a wonderful description of Mellville's "Moby Dick" at the bottom of page 133. It says, "Herman Mellville's massive, mysterious novel is generally considered the consummate acheivement of American literature, the Great American Novel. It has been called an elegy to democracy, a tract on the nature of religion, an investigation of man's relationship to the natural world, a conflict between the eternal forces of good and evil." And goes on to state how, in Ellis's opinion, Melville's fiction may have been better at telling the truth than nonfictions about whaling and the sea. Clearly, Richard Ellis is better at book reviews than I am.
On pages 142 and 143 still in the chapter "Battle of the Giants" which I soon learned was meant to be about the constant battle for survival between the sperm whale and the giant squid (a battle as time-immemorial as the ancient Pirate vs. Ninja rivalry... just underwater), the evidence of sucker marks left on the sides of sperm whales is discussed. Apparently, the mark of a squid fighting for her life can be up to to 5" in diameter. I wonder how whales feel about these sorts of scars appearing on their faces. I can offer sperm whales only this as advice: If you did not attack that Giant Squid in the first place, you would not have to live the rest of your life with the sucker scars of failure all over you.
The next chapter, the seventh chapter, is entitled "The Giant Squid in Literature and Cinema." The chapter starts, as it probably should, with pretty pictures from interpretations of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Following the path of the pretty pictures through the chapter, the reader will find a still from the "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea." Next, is a cover of Ian Fleming's "Doctor No." The references to squids-in-art, squids-of-art, squids-as-art, blah blah blah... keep going. Maybe I was mostly drawn to this chapter by its title.
The next chapter is entitled, "The Models of Architeuthis." The pretty pictures in this chapter are mostly squid-shaped objects posing as or in displays at various natural history museums around the world. On page 238, the final sentence in the chapter reads, "The spirit of Architeuthis may well be uncapturable; at least no museum has even come close to this fabulous creature--the largest living animal that has never been seen alive." Huh...
The ninth chapter is aptly entitled, "Conclusion." The first sentence in the chapter? "Squids are not part of our world, not elements of our consciousness." I disagree with that idea completely, but I am also taking it completely out of the context in which it was intended to be. Did I mention, yet, that I have not actually read this book? If Richard Ellis meant that the mythology and cultural significance of what a squid needs to mean to our society must be something not of this world nor an ELEMENT of things we can mentally conceive, then I might go with it. However, if he means the squids themselves are not of this world... I deeply do not agree. All creatures born in this world are a part of our Earth, and we all affect each other in more ways than we probably realize.
On page 257, begins the extensive list of "Authenticated Giant Squid Sightings and Strandings." After that and before the Index, the reader will find the list of References. It was comforting to see that I am not the only person who likes to quote and reference fiction and nonfiction alike in expert publications. I will leave the surprise of the quotes listed on the back cover to any reader who manages to find the book.
And this will now be posted without ANY proofreading.
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