Thursday, April 19, 2007

From Melville to Frost, the greats thrive on Outer Banks: Dr. Elliot McGucken in The Outer Banks Sentinel

From Melville to Frost, the greats thrive on Outer Banks
1998 THE OUTER BANKS SENTINEL by Hart Mathews
Sentinel Staff
http://jollyroger.com/beaconway/reviews.html

Have the Outer Banks left you in a literary wasteland? Do you get the cold shoulder when you try to talk Aristotle with the local bartender? Do you stride the beaches flinging verse at the sea because there's no one else to listen?

Although this area teems with writers and artists, their company can sometimes be hard to find.

But if you have access to the Internet, there's a link you should try out: killdevilhill.com.

As municipal as the name might sound, this web site is really one of 10 different Internet sites that offer literary discussions, chats, classic book sales and merchandise to thousands of visitors a day. And the Kill Devil Hill site (headlined "Conserving Great Literature and the Great Outdoors") isn't the only one that borrows the name of a local landmark. Dr. Elliot McGucken, the site's creator, has nine other Internet domains, including jollyroger.com ("The World's Largest Literary Cafe") and hatteraslight.com ("Live Literary Lighthouse Chats").

"The same sublime romanticism which is found in so much great literature also resounds through names like 'Kill Devil Hill,'" says McGucken, "and the same majestic sentiments expressed in so many classic books can be felt all up and down the Outer Banks. From the country's tallest lighthouses, to the legends and lore of pirates and shipwrecks, to the world's first powered flight, the ribbon of sand off the coast of North Carolina has always spurred my imagination."

The Kill Devil Hill site is not a place for nihilists or wimps. McGucken and his partners, Drake Raft and Becket Knottingham, favor writings as hearty as the barrier island climate and shun overcivilized postmodernism.

Visitors can sample John Locke, John Masefield, Thomas Jefferson, Herman Melville, Robert Frost, Albert Einstein and, of course, the men who made Kill Devil Hill famous, Orville and Wilbur Wright. They can sign up to receive a variety of poems by email, including the Kill Devil Hill Poem of the Day, Drake Raft's Sonnet of the Day, the Seafaring Poem of the Week and the Shakespeare Sonnet of the Day.

Sister sites offer the Shakespeare Poetry Port, the Classical Poety Port and the Great Books Reading Club, and shoppers can buy T-shirts and Shakespeare greeting cards at the Jolly Roger page. The Hatteras Light server hosts a discussion that includes posts on "The Great Gatsby," "Cold Mountain," "Moll Flanders," "Beowulf" and "A Separate Peace."

All three of the site's creators seem to have some connection to the sea. Raft is described as "captain and poet"; Knottingham, who often speaks in pirate lingo, is "writer and ranger." These two are somewhat mysterious characters.

McGucken, the most accessible, is dubbed "scientist and sailor" and does, in fact, sail the waters of the Outer Banks -- specifically, Canadian Hole in Avon, where he visits regularly with his windsurfing gear.

Perhaps surprisingly, McGucken is, in fact, a scientist. He graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill this year with a doctorate in physics and now teaches at a small liberal arts college in Noprth Carolina.

"Physics and poetry have a lot of similarities," says McGucken, "in that they both attempt to describe reality. And they're both inspired by a sense of the mysterious, which Einstein credited as the root of all profound science and art."

McGucken was born in Akron, Ohio, and earned his undergraduate degree at Princeton. Although his family had vacationed in Nags Head and Avon during his childhood, it wasn't until he spent the autumn of 1991 in Chapel Hill that McGucken really fell in love with North Carolina.

He came back to the Outer Banks as a graduate student and began to connect to a place he loved with the writing he loved.

Several years later, McGucken would start his first web site, jollyroger.com, with Raft and Knottingham, whom he introduced to the barrier islands. Their enterprise has now expanded to include killdevilhill.com, hatteraslight.com, nantuckets.com, nantucketnavy.com, classics.com, federalistnavy.com, westerncanon.com, starbuck.com and the incipient carolinanavy.com. There is no physics site yet, although McGucken talks of starting one called windsurfingphysics.com.

Defying the baby-boomers who have tried to pigeonhole them, the trio has dubbed their venture the "Generation-X Renaissance."

"Generation-X was supposed to be a collection of slackers, a group of aimless, cynical, culturally valueless consumers, incapable of thought, higher aesthetics, profound belief or traditional ideals," says McGucken.

Knottingham finishes that thought: "What so many boomers and 'experts' perceive as barren ground, I see as a fertile field where the seeds are just being planted."

The group is on a mission to spread those seeds, to bring back the classics they feel have been neglected. They don't savage contemporary authors or issue literary judgments (although they can't pass up a jab at "vehement and vitriolic deconstructions"). But they do express a strong preference for writers whose greatness is undisputed.

"I've always preferred those poets who went for it all," says Raft, "the rhyme, the meter and the meaning. Or at least those who went for the meaning. Shakespeare was a philosopher who rhymed, while Plato and Aristotle were poets who didn't."

The T-shirts available at The Jolly Roger feature a skull and crossbones and the legend, "Oak planks of reason, riveted with rhyme, designed to voyage across all of time."

All three seem to favor Shakespeare above the others; McGucken reads the letters of America's founding fathers and his favorite American writer is Melville; judging by his choices for poem of the day, Knottingham is a devotee of Frost, Cummings, Dickinson and Masefield; Raft adds the Old Testament prophets to his preference for Shakespeare.

Although it's really a sideline, the work has turned out profitable for the classical threesome. On a busy day, the sites see as many as 20,000 visitors. More than 25,000 have registered with The Jolly Roger. The eight sites which are currently operational post a combined total of 1.2 million advertising banners each month.

The free poems of the day go out to 4,000 subscribers.

"As it's always been a labor of love," says Knottingham, "I would have to say the sites have been profitable from the day they went up. But it's also a great thing to be getting paid for following one's passions."

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