Charles D'Ambrosio was sitting at the Hideout, trying to put some details in order: David Lynch's Blue Velvet, the Pacific Ocean, World War II, the cultural critic Greil Marcus's biological father, a navy ship, a typhoon, a near mutiny, calamity, hundreds of men devoured by sharks. The bar was loud and fun, everyone had had a couple of drinks, but the story was all coldness and panic. It was an essay Greil Marcus had read at Richard Hugo House an hour earlier, on the first night of two days of commissioned readings on the topic of childhood, and D'Ambrosio was preoccupied by it. He retold it in a haphazard bar-conversation way, with stuff missing: some details, the sentences, the tone. I regretted not being at the reading.
Happily, the essay is now online, as of last week, at www.hugohouse.org/newwork. Missing details, the problems of retelling, not being there: Turns out these are all themes of Marcus's essay. It's about Marcus learning, via other people's memories and over many years, about his father, Greil Gerstley, "who was lost in a typhoon in the Pacific when his destroyer [the Hull] went down" six months and a day before the author was born. "I was left with a name, which became, for me, a talisman and a mystery. In 1948 my mother remarried, to Gerald Marcus, and he adopted me, and my name was changed. I don't remember myself as Greil Gerstley, but Greil was an unescapable name—I always had to explain it, but I really had nothing to tell. The story of the Hull was not told in my family. There were no pictures of my father, Greil Gerstley, in my house."
He didn't know anything about what had happened to his real father until he watched a documentary about the Hull on the Weather Channel. "I watched it, alone; when my wife came home, I said, 'I just saw my father die.'" Then a writer working on a book about the Hull told him more: that Marcus's father had been second in command of the Hull, and its captain, new to the ship, was a "vain and incompetent" martinet, who, instead of cutting the engine and waiting the storm out (what you're supposed to do), insisted they charge through the typhoon. Marcus's father considered leading a mutiny, but "in the history of the navy there had never been such a mutiny," and he decided not to. There were hundreds of deaths, including men who "had nothing of themselves left below the waist—countless men eaten by sharks."
I would keep quoting it if I had room, or explain the Blue Velvet component (it has to do with the idea of a "common memory" that the personal memory is dependent upon), but you should just go read it. Hugo House's website, weirdly, has never been used to publish anything except event calendars, etc. Under the leadership of Lyall Bush, who commissioned the Marcus essay, it might become something more like a virtual magazine. 
