Tide Wrack and Sand

Abstract

This essay is both tide wrack and sand. The individual parts—short, discreet chunks—flash fictions or flash non-fictions or flash memoirs or flash criticisms—are in tangential contact and form an open network that is as three dimensional as the page will allow (as sand is). “Tide wrack” is marine debris—natural and manmade—that washes up daily onto the beach. Baudelaire compared the poet to the chiffonier or ragpicker picking up the city’s refuse. The content or subject matter is tide wrack—by which I mean, whatever rubbish or detritus or unexpectedly cast up treasure strikes me, makes me curious, and pleases me. (Topics include: trips to Blackpool with my family, sandworms and other beach monsters, the Burning Man festival, the Tremors film franchise.) The essay will say something kaleidoscopic and impressionistic about sand and rubbish, but also other landscapes of discomfort, writing and thinking.