Word: oiling
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...well, I'll get my day(s) in court soon enough and the cause ((of the oil spill)) will seem pretty mundane and simple after...
...still blue, but the land had caught the shadow, and the sea looked almost dark. Dark shadows blackened the water, and the lights of the harbor were lit and shimmered on the surface of the sea like oil. All the substance began to run from the colors; finally, only the black of the shadows and the white of the lights remained...
...readers of Bass's stories (collected this year in The Watch) can attest, he also knows how to write; and like his oil witchery, this gift is % extravagant and natural. His new book is based on notebook jottings he kept for about three years, 1984-87, chasing a quarry that was "shy here, coy there, blatant elsewhere." His father, another petroleum geologist, complained after reading Oil Notes that he didn't learn much from it about finding oil, but to the uninitiated it richly reveals just what that line of work involves. There is no better conversation, spoken or written...
...Oil Notes has many such phrases, evocative, amusing, but also a little silly. Bass writes that "all geologists are hyperbolic"; he certainly is. At one point he suggests putting a small bottle of oil to the ear, the better to hear the ancient waters. At another he intones, "You can't find oil if you are not honest; I'm not sure I know how to explain this." The rueful part, after the semicolon, redeems the rest. He natters on about his girlfriend, Elizabeth Hughes, whose mild, pleasant drawings accompany the text. Is he happy with her? Without her? Will...
Bass can laugh at himself. His linking of oil with eons-old oceans may be the stuff of poetry, but how about oil and Coke? The author, preoccupied with the earth's dwindling oil reserves, was aghast to learn four years ago that his personal fuel was also in peril. When the Coca-Cola Co. announced a new formula for Coke, he began buying up crates of the old stuff. "The world is so thirsty for oil, uses so, so much. We are down to the last thousand Cokes," he mourned. Of course, Coke got a reprieve. That seems unlikely...