When I was in college, I had to skip class if I wanted to do anything related to surfing, from paddling out to reading a surf mag.
Oh, how the times have changed.
Flagler College has introduced a "Surf Literature" course taught by Assistant Professor Samuel McMillan that covers the full gamut of surf literature, from William Finnegan's Barbarian Days to Daniel Duane’s Caught Inside and more.
The best part? Professor McMillan teaches his students half in the classroom, and half on the beach in St. Augustine — with the option to surf before or after.
"The idea here is that you cannot truly understand surfing and its appeal if all you do is read about it," Professor McMillan says. "Such firsthand experience allows students to connect with the readings on a deeper level while also providing them with material that they might use to craft compelling stories and arguments."
We spoke with Professor McMillan about the genesis of the class, the curriculum itself, and what he hopes students get out of the course. — Cash Lambert
Photo courtesy Flagler University
What’s the genesis behind your Surf Literature course?
The course is part of Flagler College’s Adventure Literature Series, a curriculum that merges classroom instruction with intense outdoor experiences. Adventure Literature is something that had been developed by one of my mentors, Bob Burkholder, back at the Pennsylvania State University. There, much of the focus had been on wilderness—secluded forests, desolate mountains, that sort of thing—which made sense given Penn State’s location.
Unfortunately, Saint Augustine, Florida, where Flagler’s located, is not exactly known for its topography or ruggedness. What it does have, though, is surf. Flagler is routinely voted one of the best colleges for surfing in the country.
Transitioning from a course on wilderness to a course on surfing ultimately proved fairly easy, because, as Margaret Norton writes in a great article titled “Surfing my Way Back to the Past,” surfing makes us “always aware of the vastness of the sea and the eternal wild it represents.”
Surf writing, in the end, is wilderness writing. Kem Nunn, Daniel Duane, William Finnegan—there’s not a lot separating these authors from the likes of Henry David Thoreau, Terry Tempest Williams, or Edward Abbey.
What is the curriculum?
The curriculum builds from what scholars around the world unanimously consider the finest work of art since Hamlet or the Sistine Chapel—Kathryn Bigelow’s Point Break.
In that magnum opus, Patrick Swayze’s character Bodhi, the bank-robbing surfer guru, turns to Keanu Reeves’s Johnny Utah, former Ohio State quarterback and now undercover FBI agent, and poetically sums up the philosophy of surfers everywhere: “They only live to get radical.”
Over the semester the class investigates the implications of that simple yet surprisingly deep statement. “Radical,” after all, has a rather complex etymology. Derived from the Latin radix, which means “root” or “branch,” “radical” in its most literal sense means to be connected to the earth. Since the 1960s, however, the term has taken on more counter-cultural valences to more commonly refer to something like “living at the edge” or “going against the grain.”
So, to be a surfer, according to Bodhi, one must be both a part and apart. What this means in practice is something that we explore over the course of a semester devoted to the history, culture, literature, and experience of the surf world.
What’s unique about the class is that it has two classrooms—one in the halls of Flagler and another a few blocks away out on the open water. That is to say, each week we spend a class period surfing in hopes of experiencing firsthand the topics discussed in our texts. The idea here is that you cannot truly understand surfing and its appeal if all you do is read about it.
Such firsthand experience allows students to connect with the readings on a deeper level while also providing them with material that they might use to craft compelling stories and arguments.
What textbooks/sources do you use for the class?
For this class, I like to assign the heavy-hitters of the surf canon—force students to experience the greatest surf writers from cover-to-cover. It’s an experience most of us sadly don’t get much anymore, and one, I hope, that allows my students to slow down a moment and begin developing a form of concentration that works equally well for trying to digest complicated literary works as it does for appreciating the calm between sets.
We start with Daniel Duane’s Caught Inside, which appeals to the professorial side of me. Duane apes Thoreau’s Walden by spending a season taking in the California Coast just as Thoreau spent a season living deliberately in the Massachusetts woods.
Duane gives a solid overview of surfing—its science, history, and philosophy—and makes a strong case that surfing really isn’t much a sport at all. Instead, it’s a mode of understanding, or, as Duane writes, “a pleasure principle that turns knowing your home into passionate scholarship.”
From there, we move on to a newer work, A.J. Dungo’s In Waves, a graphic novel that pairs the stories of surf-pioneers Tom Blake and Duke Kahanamoku with Dungo’s own tale of coming to terms with the loss of a girlfriend to cancer. Where Duane saw surfing as philosophy, Dungo sees it almost as a form of therapy. His loss of connection on land is soothed by his connection to the water.
Next, we land on William Finnegan’s Barbarian Days, essentially the Ulysses of surf writing. Finnegan shows us the epicness of surfing, an activity many outsiders can take as little more than a frivolous humdrum pastime.
After travelling around the globe, being among the first to surf some of the world’s most famous breaks, Finnegan arrives at the conclusion that surfing is more than philosophy, more than therapy, that it’s a form of religion or spirituality.
Surfing demands devotion and through that devotion you come to take part in something more, something higher.
Finally, we close up with Kem Nunn’s Tapping the Source. I originally assigned this because I thought it would give us a good excuse to watch Point Break, which finds its source material in this novel. Knowing that the book provides the genesis for Johnny Utah, students are usually surprised to find that this dude, Nunn, can actually write.
I mean the novel was nominated for the National Book Award, one of the highest honors an American author can receive. The book might not be as fun as the film, but its descriptions of surfing as psychedelic, almost a drug, are hard to beat: “There was a cyclical quality in all of this, in the play of light, in the movement of the swell. It was an incredible moment and he felt suddenly that he was plugged into all, was part of it in some organic way.”
What’s one surprising thing that students learn in the class?
That Jeff Spicoli from Fast Times at Ridgemont High was right. Not only about hiring Van Halen to play his birthday party—that’s a given—but about surfing too.
For the longest time, Sean Penn’s character in this film was the embodiment of what surfing meant in popular culture. Here was the surfer as surf-bum. When Spicoli said that all he needed were some “tasty waves” and “a cool buzz” it was easy to laugh at him, to sneer, label him “loser,” “burnout,” or “waste.”
So, after introducing Spicoli in class, I have students examine some of the earliest written accounts of surfing alongside some writings by medieval monks. In doing so, students come to realize that this California surf-bum actually has a lot in common with the ancient Hawaiians who would drop all responsibilities on land and come together on the water at the first signs of an oncoming swell, with the sailors on Captain Cook’s vessels who gazed upon those early surf-riders with intense envy and awe, with the monks of the Middle Ages who abandoned economic pursuits, shutting themselves off in areas of great natural beauty to contemplate, brew beer, and connect with a higher power.
Photo courtesy Flagler University
What do you hope students get out of the course?
I’m an English professor so one of the main goals of all my classes is to teach students how to see something in a text—or really in their world—that they wouldn’t have seen before had they not done a close reading. I think that having surfing act as that central topic here is especially productive. This is something that most people view at best as a sport, at worst as a means of getting out of work.
Steve Pezman, one of the founders of the Surfer’s Journal, has this great line at the end of Dana Brown’s Step Into Liquid where he criticizes “all the BS we hang on surfing,” indicating that it’s really just about riding waves and nothing else. After having my students watch this, I always get a little worried, because that’s pretty much what this class is doing.
But if you look closely at what Pezman is saying, if you undertake that method of reading I’m trying to teach across the semester, then you see that even surfing just being about surfing is big statement in itself. Surfing makes you forget about anything other than surfing—you lose yourself in a liquid medium.
Photo courtesy Flagler University
What future plans do you have with the course? Do you plan on continue doing it, evolving it, etc.?
This is probably my favorite class to teach, so I’ll keep doing it until Time’s Winged Chariot finally comes for my knees or shoulders and takes me out of the water permanently. So, I’m hoping I’ve got another couple of years maybe. With that time my plan is to begin adding greater travel components to the curriculum.
Flagler’s got this cool program called FlagSHIP, which is a high-impact sophomore experience that takes students around the globe to introduce them to new cultures and ways of thinking. Surf culture is itself so diverse that I think a course devoted to it in its global varieties would fit in well with what the FlagSHIP program is trying to accomplish.
My first thought there would be to set something up on Hawaii’s North Shore—partly because it’s the Surf Mecca and partly because I worked a few summers out near Ka’ena Point in a life before academia and have some passing familiarity with the area. This would give students a chance to get back to the source of it all, to see where surfing came from and how it’s changed—from colonialism, crowds, and consumerism.
My main worry there—besides setting a bunch of East Coast college students loose on some of the gnarliest and most heavily localized breaks in the world—would be that it’s too obvious. Of course a course on surfing would end up in Hawaii. So, another idea I had would be to take to colder northern waters, maybe recreate Kem Nunn’s Dogs of Winter in the Pacific Northwest, only with less murder and mayhem and blood magic.