How To Be An Albatross, An Afternoon with Charles Hood

A book debut event for “Double Hyenas and Lazarus Birds” and 16mm screening of oceanic shorts from Smokehouse films.

Sunday, June 22, 2025 - 2:00pm to 5:00pm

Tickets $15

(Free for VPES Members - active members may email vpes@panoramaonview.org for a complimentary registration code)

A debut celebration for Charles Hood's Double Hyenas and Lazarus Birds: A Sideways Look at the Pacific Ocean and Everything in It, published by Heyday Books. 

 

The event features a screening of several short oceanic 16mm films from the archives of Smokehouse Films, projected by John Cannizzaro.

Charles Hood will be in in conversation with Dr. Rachel Jennings (actor, professor, and expert in literature of travel and Santi Tafarella (Professor Emeritus and steward of the former blog "Prometheus Unbound") with the theme:  "Water as Other, Water as Self."

 The book will be available for purchase.

Double Hyenas and Lazarus Birds: A Sideways Look at the Pacific Ocean and Everything in It

In this book, renowned essayist Charles Hood embarks on an extraordinary voyage across one of the planet’s most mysterious and awe-inspiring landscapes: the Pacific Ocean. Despite his fear of water, or perhaps because of it, Hood takes readers along the Pacific Rim, navigating the vast expanse of the Pacific in search of elusive seabirds, tempestuous weather, and personal revelations. With an eye trained on the skies for petrels, frigate birds, and flying fish, Hood also delves into the ocean’s deep cultural and ecological significance, connecting the natural world to art, history, and the deep wounds—both emotional and ecological—left by World War II. Double Hyenas and Lazarus Birds offers a compelling new entry into the genre of nature writing. With his trademark blend of encyclopedic knowledge and literary flair, Hood is poised to solidify his position as one of the most celebrated nature writers of his generation. Blending travelogue, nature writing, and memoir, Hood sees both the ghosts of the Pacific and all of the wondrous, strange life that calls it home.

Charles Hood

Poet and essayist Charles Hood has been a factory worker, a ski instructor, and a birding guide in Africa. His recent books published by Heyday include Nocturnalia, an appreciation of nature after dark, and the essay collection A Salad Only the Devil Would Eat: The Joys of Ugly Nature. His wildlife studies have taken him around the world, from the high Arctic to the South Pole, and from Tibet to West Africa to the Amazon. Mammal no. 1,000 seen and recorded on his world animal list was a Crossley’s dwarf lemur in Madagascar. (Mammal no. 999 was a Malagasy white-bellied free-tailed bat.) Recently retired and now professor emeritus, Hood lives in the Mojave Desert with two kayaks, two mountain bikes, two dogs, and five thousand books.

Smokehouse Films

The Smokehouse Films archive (founded by John Cannizzaro in 1996) consists of approximately 4000 prints – mostly in the areas of Ethnographic films, stop motion animated films (both foreign and American), and experimental or Avant Garde works.  Many of these films never made the transition to video or DVD, and so constitute a vast area of knowledge and history that needs to be “preserved” for future studies and enjoyment.  To that end, Smokehouse Films has opened its archives over the last few years to multiple screenings and workshops. Although most of them have been in Los Angeles, they have also branched out to screenings as far as San Francisco, Texas, Vermont, and New York.