Sneaker waves, white male privilege, assumptions, earthquakes. [Mine as well.] The terrible ironies we live with every day.

SNEAKER WAVES. I was working in the Library, a Wednesday when I generally stayed late to provide access to students until the evening. However it was the last day of school, and students were furiously clearing out their lockers, signing yearbooks, and on their way to summer vacation. E stopped to say hey. He had just completed his Sophomore year, so I hadn’t had him in class yet. But we chatted, laughed, and both managed to be clear about looking forward to spending time together in the fall.

My friend was at the coast for a graduate residency. She expressed concern that students warned about sneaker waves seemed to think it was a joke.

I was once assured that every seventh wave would high. It’s not that easy. Visitors are sometimes alarmed by the sound of waves, but a loud noise is the result of an incoming wave smacking up against one already subsiding. Their crash can be so powerful that water lifts several feet into the air. I am fond of that as a visual. Here’s the truth: Sneakers are not predictable; they do not give a warning sound. Sneakers are nearly silent, sweeping in fifty or more than a hundred meters above the previous incoming wave. A sneaker wave will not sound a warning but move onshore faster than you can run. You need a head start. You need to be far enough up shore and to see in coming in time to begin running.

Gary and I can see some sneakers in advance—a leading wave followed by at least one or two or three more, each wave picking up energy from the one beneath. They move faster and faster, slipping over the top and forward. I start moving up shore and at a run. Sometimes while we’re busy getting out of the way of a sneaker wave, another you hadn’t even noticed will come in at an angle. Even when you know what to look for, you can be taken by surprise.

It was still early that summer when my future-student died. It was years ago now. E was a trained lifeguard, he was standing in a few inches of water, it was summer, and before anyone could get to him he was swept out to sea and drowned.

The ocean is cold.

PRIVILEGE. When I graduated from high school in 1970, Yale University had allowed women to attend for an entire year. Hillary Rodham attended Yale rather than Harvard because a Harvard professor was predictably offensive about women when she attended a meet-and-greet. There were offensive profs at Yale then. Now too perhaps. The first use of Title IX to address egregious sexual harassment was at Yale. (Touching, rape, offering grades for sex.) This morning I unsubscribed to notices from Yale University Press. They had sent me a promo of their new publications, ten books and every one by and/or about men. One book concerned an Asian man. The rest were all white. All were male. Because only white men have been writing worthwhile books lately?

This is the way things have been for most of my life. It wears me out. Studies have shown more women read books than men (look it up). If MFA programs are any indication, more women write books too. The do not find publication so often. There’s been a lot of studies of that. Women scientists and social activists are vastly under-represented not only on Wikipedia but in academic studies, which means they are ripe for exploration on the page, and yet…

The only woman-authored text I was ever assigned in school was The Diary of Anne Frank. How sad is that?

ASSUMPTIONS. An academic, a woman academic, has transcribed a tiny, densely written seventeenth century notebook with quotes from Shakespeare’s first folio and concludes: “What’s fascinating is the insight this gives into a reader of Shakespeare. He’s clearly a man because at the back of the book are lecture notes on Aristotle in Latin, and women couldn’t go to university and didn’t tend to be taught Latin. You get a sense of his character. He’s got an ear for words that go together nicely. He likes jokes and references to thunder. It’s a great labour of love.” Many of the lines the writer chose deal with pregnancy and most are not the typical lines quoted today. Clearly a man and unsigned? Not bloody likely, I’d say.

For example, Stern said the notebook’s author overlooked Hamlet’s “to be, or not to be”, preferring a description of kneeling: “‘And crooke the pregnant Hindges of the knee,’ which he rendered ‘Crooke ye pregnant hindges of ye knee’.”

She added: “He likes metaphors and is fascinated by pregnancy, so this really works for him. The image is of a knee getting more and more pregnant – bulging – as one goes down on it.”

—The Guardian

Everything about the tiny notebook is unusual—the tiny writing, the period, the fact that it quotes first folio, the choices of quotations. “The manuscript is so small that it fits into the palm of a hand. Yet its author had crammed 12,500 words into its 48 pages, drawing on hundreds of quotations from Shakespeare’s 36 plays in the first folio, which was published in 1623.” The author, too, might be unusual. Imagine a woman collecting lines from Shakespeare because she has briefly gained access to the first folio. She listens and records notes from a brother’s Latin tutor. She writes small and on both sides of her palm sized notebook, allowing her to keep her record concealed. I would say that “clearly a man” is a silly claim. Very little about the author of this notebook is “clear” to me from this report. Prof Tiffany Stern is guessing. I think she’s guessed wrongly. Or perhaps she has other evidence of authorship?

People take all sorts of things for granted. An academic postulated that people were colorblind three thousand or so years ago because that explained why color was so seldom mentioned in ancient texts. Homer may or may not have authored the Iliad and Odyssey, but he was supposed to have been blind. A nineteenth century scholar first postulated that The Odyssey was written by a woman. I haven’t read that argument, so I don’t know what his reasoning amounted to, but I can say that whoever wrote it, detailed little enough about war and sailing and quite a bit about managing a household and weaving. If I were in my 20s and pursuing a PhD, it might be worth exploring.

EARTHQUAKES. Today, more than 2700 people have died in an earthquake. When I began this post, that number was “over 200” and each time I check, it balloons. In the mean time, we are having a new roof put on our house, and it sounds like someone is tearing the house apart. It’s costing us more than we can afford, of course, but it needs doing, and it will be our last roof. We live on the edge of an ocean. A quake like the one in Turkey, centered off our coast where one is predicted in the Cascadia Fault, would obliterate our home. Quakes are not precisely predictable.

A Black Swan is a dramatic event that is entirely unpredictable but which has a significant impact. It is named for the discovery by Europeans of black swans (Cygnus atratus) on the other side of the world. All the swans a European would have seen or heard of before 1790 were white, therefore “all swans are white.” And then John Latham described a black swan. A Black Swan event is much more impactful than discovering a bird of another color. That is, you can safely assume that something life-altering will occur but not what that event will be, or why, or when, or how its impact will be felt.

The black swan theory or theory of black swan events is a metaphor that describes an event that comes as a surprise, has a major effect, and is often inappropriately rationalized after the fact with the benefit of hindsight.

—Wikipedia

There are all sorts of ironies and coincidences. Surprise.