The Missing Tooth #1: Naming whales and DJs
Good morning,
Here it is: the first Missing Tooth. Thank you to everyone who subscribed without knowing exactly what they were signing up for. To be honest, I wasn’t 100% sure myself.
I won’t send these out on any specific timeline but instead wait until I’ve written a thousand words worth sharing.
This issue explores Moby Dick’s real life namesake, speech act theory, synth-pop, productivity, and a touching poem about motherhood I can’t stop returning to.
If you enjoy reading this, I highly recommend The Whippet by Mckinley Valentine, which was the inspiration for this newsletter.
All best,
N.
The true story of Mocha Dick
Before he was a metaphor for God, obsession, or unrequited gay love, Moby Dick was a real-life albino sperm whale who terrorised whalers in the South Pacific Ocean in the early 19th century.
Sailors named him Mocha Dick after first encountering the whale near Isla Mocha, a small island off the coast of Chile that was a popular destination for pirates, explorers and, (according to the Mapuche people) the souls of the dead. (While the word ‘mocha’ also referred to coffee, it didn’t come to mean ‘brown’ for another sixty years so calling a white whale Mocha wasn’t incongruous.)
Despite his reputation, Mocha Dick was a friendly and confident creature who would often swim alongside whaler’s ships. When attacked he would breach, throwing himself on boats in self-defence. He destroyed 20 ships and escape 30 more, gaining a mythological reputation among whalers.
He was finally killed while coming to the assistance of a distressed cow whose calf had been slain. It took 19 harpoons to kill him. Mocha Dick—along with Melville’s own experiences as a whaler—provided the inspiration for Melville’s most famous novel.
Two hundred years later, Moby Dick inspired a naming of his own when the parents of Melville’s great-great-great-grandnephew nicknamed their infant son ‘Moby’. When he grew up, he used the epithet as his DJ name.
Best Case Life
‘Best Case Life’ is the debut album from Gemini Rising, a synth-pop group made up of Australian singer/composer Fiora, producer Lester Mendez and DJ Marco Niemerski.
I grew up listening to Alphaville, Roxette, and Julee Cruise so the album’s synthesisers, drum machines, and sequencers sparked nostalgia for my rats-tailed youth.
Fiora’s whole back catalogue, from operatic arrangements for Judith Wright poems to trance collaborations, is worth out checking out.
Productively unproductive
I have no idea how much time I have wasted over the years on productivity.
It is easy for someone with a brain like mine to disappear down internet rabbit holes or jump from task to task, starting twenty but finishing none. I need systems. I need accountability. I need efficiency.
My browser is packed with a dozen chrome extensions designed to block unwanted content and redirect me from time sucks. I have smartwatch alarms, sticky notes and iPhone apps all designed to keep me honest and on track. My habits are atomic, my joy is sparked and my timers are tomatoes.”
I’ve even factored in the value of stopping to smell the roses, to express gratitude and savour life: I have an app that tracks my various rose-smelling activities and their effect on my emotional wellbeing. I am objectively happier and more fulfilled when I have structure and routine.
Even so, as I become slowly more productive, I have to ask myself: If productivity is about good systems, is there a point at which I become just another cog in a machine of my own design? A machine that I’m now endlessly tweaking like Charlie Chapin tightening bolts in Modern Times?
And more importantly, if I’m happy, does that really matter?
My Daughter Brings Home Bones
and piles them on the driveway: femur, rib, jawbone with a few
flat teeth attached, dozens of thin arced parts. This one for me—40
today. My birthday sent her to the woods and back. Chloe leans
in on her knees, arranges the bones along a concrete seam that
leads out to the street. In this next decade, she'll go: head off like
today, take into her arms all she's curious about. Her line of bones
makes an arrow; sun lights them like a sign. She'll go: undeniable
as these bones, baffling as what animal they'd make. She's on all
fours. The way I labored: some wild thing. She lays out arms and
legs; the bones in line make a spine. My height. On the driveway
lies my body—when it held her—inside out. The way she came:
like bones. Gleaming, after living in my dark. Gleaming. So I can
always find her.
Speech act theory
When I was in Year 8, Nancy Morgan slipped me a folded up note in sociology that read “YOU’RE DUMPED.”
The note both informed me that I was now single while also performing the action that would bring about my new relationship status.
Like the world’s most depressing magic words, the note didn’t just inform me; it transformed me from happily dating to miserably single in two short words.
Words are not just communication; they are actions.
In his book "How to Do Things with Words" philosopher J.L. Austin explains that language can be understood on three levels.
Locutionary: The literal meaning of the words spoken. (“You’re dumped.”)
Illocutionary: What the speaker is doing by speaking. (Dumping me.)
Perlocutionary: What the speaker has achieved as a result of speaking. (My new found single status.)
If the speaker and the listener agree on the meaning of an utterance on all three levels, communication is smooth and frictionless.
For example, when Edie stomps in the room and shouts "I'M HUNGRY!", the locutionary act is that she is experiencing hunger.
The illocutionary act is a demand for me to get her a yoghurt despite the fact she had a muesli bar five minutes ago.
The perlocutionary act is me actually getting up, going to the fridge and getting one.
When I reply "Hi Hungry, I'm Dad!" I’m denying her speech act on all three levels. And that’s why there’s a three-year-old screaming on the floor next to me as I write.
So, when face with an inscrutable comment or enigmatic remark, rather than asking ourselves “what did they mean by that?” we’re far better off asking “what are they doing when they say that?”
What I’m Reading
Atomic Habits by James Clear
The Code of the Woosters by P.G. Wodehouse
Deal Souls by Gogol
Good-natured comments and corrections—particularly of my spelling and grammar—are always welcome.