Hello. You can find out about my books – including the new one, Photo, Phyto, Proto, Nitro – and other work (radio series, articles) at the books page. There’s upcoming events etc. at currents. And other short posts via the sharks, surfers, and optics sections, depending on your mood. Come in and browse; the water’s lovely.

The historian Alvin M Josephy (in The Indian Heritage of America, 1968) offers the term Ha yeak, which, in Tlingit, a language of the North-west Pacific coast, means “the hollow left in shallow water by a swiftly swimming shark”. An elegant, ominous concept, which is just about right for how I think of the object occupying the vehicle / shark space: there’s something there, just near the surface, that we can’t see directly. Ha yeak is a site of turbulence or interplay between absence and presence – a body was here and made a not-thing, a gap – and it’s a concept that summons the passage of time into the situation: we now see and understand the place where something no longer is. We read the shark’s proximity from the hollow; we know it was here, but it’s gone. But it’s still near, lurking; some things won’t go away.

– from my article Sharks; Circling, from Full Stop Magazine, March, 2000.