LADY-FAME; or, The Fluke: A Sea Story

In the bitter cold, black, predawn of Christmas Eve 1972, the commercial fishing vessel LADY-FAME was struck and capsized by a forty-foot rogue wave while crossing the Humboldt Bay bar. Contemporary artist Peter Santino, her first mate, wrote fifty thousand words during the months immediately following while drifting through the Amazonian jungle on a river boat, describing every thought and action that occurred during that sinking near-death experience. Steering clear of embellishment and trickery, constraining himself in an attempt to create a record of absolute Truth. Now, forty years later and after revisiting Melville’s Moby-Dick, Captain Ahab’s declaration – “Truth hath no confines” – guides the rebirth of the original manuscript, now with full-bore embellishment and clever tricks of the author’s trade! Worry over Sicilian curses; fear the Klabautermann; laugh with Groovy Daddy, Charles Motherthanker III and all the other prankster, outsider artists who lived with Santino in a raw Eureka warehouse. Slip through pungent, dirty dock life and salty sex scenes; thrill at mountaineering feats and high seas puking. Illuminated by rants on the failures of Politics, LSD and Art, during that most critical moment of the 20th Century – the death of The 60s and the birth of... The Whatever. And then there’s the soundtrack... LADY-FAME; or, The Fluke.