Steve Mentz

As I gear up to host Karin Coonrod and the Compagnia de’ Colombari at St. John’s for Whitman on Walls! in less than two weeks, I made a quick run down to Cobble Hill on Sunday 10/13 to see the last performance of the company’s staging of the Flannery O’Connor story “Everything That Rises Must Converge” at St. Paul’s Church. As with the other Colombari productions I’ve seen – The Tempest at LaMaMa, Merchant of Venice at the Yale Law School, King Lear last summer – the signature force of the staging comes in a sometimes overwhelming dramatic intensity. In this production, especially, the undersong was a bitter and in some ways complicit comedy – we laugh because we recognize human hypocrisy, and because laughing hides our deeper and uncomfortable connections.

Coonrod writes in the Director’s Note that she, like me, first read O’Connor in a college lit class. She’s been developing theatrical versions of a few of the stories since the first days of Colombari, twenty years ago at the University of Iowa. Conrood calls O’Conner “the American Dante,” and emphasizes the writer’s staying power as we approach the centenary of her birth in 2025.

“Everything That Rises,” the title story of O’Connor’s second (and final) collection of short stories, published posthumously in 1965, narrates a series of encounters on a city bus, in which Julian, a frustrated recent college graduate and aspiring writer, is embarrassed by the racist attitudes and behavior of his mother. The comic byplay between Julian, his mother, and the other riders of the bus, including a Black woman and her child as well as a tall Black man in a suit reading a newspaper, skewers both Julian’s progressive pretensions and his mother’s once-genteel patronizing. When his mother attempts to give the boy a shiny penny and gets slapped by the boy’s irate mother – the two mothers wear the same garish purple hat, in case we miss their symbolic connection as mothers raising sons in a dangerous and changing world – Julian’s mother falls down by the side of the road, presumably having a stroke and certainly retreating into the past that she has long since lost.

The final lines of O’Connor’s story draw Julian back toward his suffering, perhaps dying, mother, despite his revulsion at her racism and blindness to the world. He calls her “Darling, sweetheart” and “Mamma, Mamma!” but fails to catch her attention. At the story’s end, O’Conner brings the two into uneasy communion through failure: “The tide of darkness seemed to sweep him back to her, postponing from moment to moment his entry into the world of guilt and sorrow.”

Like Dante, O’Connor treats the spiritual as more material than the world of physical reality. The title’s imperative – “must converge!” – refers on some level to the social project of racial integration in the American South, which Julian’s mother fears and rejects. “They should rise,” she says, “but on their own side of the fence.” But the “everything that rises” that matters for O’Connor is less about the physical integration of the bus, or Julian’s social and professional prospects, than it is a religious maxim, an inescapable truth. The word “must,” as I read O’Connor’s title, entrains all of us into a human “world of guilt and sorrow.” To rise in this world does not mean to achieve success but to recognize suffering.

Colombari’s staging, which scrupulously followed the requirements of the O’Connor estate in speaking every word of the story, including every the “he said” and “she said,” emphasized the bitter comedy of the mother’s efforts to engage the young boy on the bus, and also Julian’s failure to communicate with the Black businessman. The kicker in O’Connor’s stories, as in Shakespeare’s tragedies, tends to be brutal. As with Colombari’s King Lear this past June, I found something gloriously human in this show’s presentation of hypocrisy, jealousy, small acts of empathy, and an overflowing of pain.

The films Colombari will present of “Song of Myself” won’t hit all these tragic notes. But I am looking forward to something like the same intensity on the St. John’s campus in less than two weeks.

After our first swimming season of Operation Clean Short Beach / Stop Poo-lution, we have some tentative positive results. We are happy to report that there were zero beach closures due to excessive bacteria during the summer swim season. During the weekly testing by East Shore Health Department, only one bacteria count was above the limit, and that number went down below the limit the next day, so the beach stayed open. (Probably that high count came after a substantial rainfall – my personal practice is that I don’t swim for one full high-tide cycle after a heavy rain, to avoid those brief spikes.)

Having no closures is not entirely out of line from past summers; we had zero closures in 2022, compared with two in 2023. But this past year was at least on the better side of normal!

We are planning to do some more detailed testing on the samples we have taken over the summer, and there should be more data to report. But so far, we can say that it’s possible – but not yet scientifically certain – that our campaign is having a modest but meaningful positive impact.

Keep picking up your bags! And tell your neighbors about how we can keep Short Beach Clean!

We are thrilled to announce that the Blue Humanities Book Series, with Bloomsbury Publishing, is now accepting queries and proposals. Send us your watery books!

This project has been in the works for a while now, in collaboration with my amazing co-editor Serpil Oppermann of Cappadocia University and Ben Doyle from Bloomsbury. I think I first broached the topic with Ben at a particularly excellent craft brewery in Portland at ASLE in 2023.

We’re still working on the landing page, but here’s the full description of the series:

The Blue Humanities is a book series about humans and water, in all the forms that both of these assume and create. Re-examining relations between human and watery spaces, the books in this series explore waterscapes in dialogue with landscapes from cultural, social, historical, theoretical, literary, symbolic, aesthetic, and ethical perspectives. These books will engage with the multivalent meanings of salt and freshwaters and the compounded changes that waterscapes are undergoing today. The series will present new research on postmodernist, hydrofeminist, new materialist, posthumanist, postcolonial, and new historiographic approaches to the poetics of water. Since the Blue Humanities is transdisciplinary and methodologically diverse, interacting with marine and freshwater sciences, the series will contribute significantly to the future direction and reorientations of broader discourses in environmental studies.

The Blue Humanities emerged in the early twenty-first century as part of larger efforts to reimagine environmental thinking for the Anthropocene. This book series aims to support many kinds of diversity, from the cultures, methods, and geographies of its authors to the kinds of water each project explores. We encourage proposals that engage non-Western and non-canonical sources, as well as projects that reimagine the familiar in new ways. We particularly encourage creative-critical approaches, including collaborations between academic discourses and the arts, sciences, political activism, public humanities, and other modes of thinking. We are interested in monographs, collaborative books, and essay collections, including reconceived versions of those traditional forms.

Please reach out with queries or proposals to either or both editors (Steve Mentz and Serpil Oppermann) or to our Bloomsbury editor Ben Doyle.

Soon we hope to announce the members of our Editorial Board – stay tuned!

Please reach out with queries or proposals for the series, and circulate this information widely! We are so excited to talk with many of the great people who are thinking about water, humans, worlds, and cultures!

The royal “we” unifies the nation, the land and its people, into the symbolic body of the monarch. This weekend at the University Theater in New Haven, Karin Coonrod’s Compagnia de’ Colombari is staging the most innovative version of Shakespeare’s great tragedy of monarchy that I’ve seen in a long time. See better, Lear, the play commands. But what if everywhere we look we see many things?

The production’s brilliant and generative coup de theatre – ten Kings in ten paper crowns all playing the title role – mounted to a takeover of the entire space of the theater, with actors playing Lear speaking from all three aisles, in front of the stage, and along several rows of blocked-off seats. No King spoke more than two or three lines at the start, so that when Tony Torn open-facedly importuned his daughters, “Which of you shall we say doth love us most?” (1.1), he quickly passed the next lines (“Where nature doth with merit challenge”) to another King, even before we in our seats had time to register the audacity and greed of the question. The King needed something, wanted something, but as his lines ping-ponged around the theater, as we absorbed the selfishness of the love test, we watched that royal “we,” the King as community, voicing itself into disorderly being. It made thrilling theater.

One of the consequences of pluralizing the monumental title role of the play was to slip the King out of our moral grasp. When he’s just one man, even a big star like Ian McKellen or Derek Jacobi, it hard not to blame Lear for cluelessness and cruelty. When he’s all around us and speaking in ten voices, the distributed King becomes both a part of community and trapped by collectivity, locked inside his “fixed purpose laid with iron rails,” to borrow from a maritime monomaniac who is himself modeled on King Lear. All the paper-crowned Lears in this production together produced a collective that each King’s titanic ego could not help being bound into.

As I perhaps over-enthusiastically said after the show to my friend & fellow Shakespearean Mike Shea, the opening scene in King Lear is the best scene in all of English drama – and I don’t think I’ve seen a more exciting performance of that scene than this one.

The “nothing” that the Kings and Cordelia batted back and forth at the opening seemed in this articulation to represent some kind of escape. If Cordelia could hold to her bond – “Love, and be silent” – could she avoid the rhetorical dance of hypocrisy and manipulation, in which it would be in any case impossible to match her ruthless sisters? Seldom has a trip from England to France seemed so good!

All the actors in Colombari’s cast were excellent,and they worked together with generosity and visible pleasure. I was especially appreciative of Tony Torn’s evocative mixture of Oswald and the King, not only because he and his partner, my St. John’s colleague Lee Ann Brown, joined us for dinner before the show. I’ll hear his plaintive “love us the most” whenever I think about this line. Abigail Killeen’s Goneril/Lear absorbed the brutality of her father’s wrath, in which he cursed her “organs of increase” and her future progeny, with heartbreaking silence. Jo Mei’s sharp-edged Regan/Lear digested her husband Cornwall’s part, meaning that she got to extract the “vile jelly” of Gloucester’s eyes in the latter half of the action. Julian Elijah Martinez’s crowd-pleasing Edmund had everyone ready to to take the bastard’s part. Paul Pryce’s wonderfully physical Kent/Lear brought comic and moral force – and like almost everyone I talked with after the show, I was entranced by Luka Papenfusscline’s musical Fool/Lear. Their ethereal voice made the Fool into Lear’s self-reflection and internal choral experiment, a way to think and sing through the crisis of personality that befell the King who misplaced his kingdom.

The spatial takeover, in which the actors occupied the seats and the aisles, climaxed at the play’s raging center, when the Kings walked alone into the storm, and as a chorus intonde together the great speech that I interpret as Shakespeare’s proleptic imagination of what it’s like to live inside the disorderly environment of the Anthropocene:

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d the cocks!
You sulph’rous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Strike flat the thick rotundity o’ th’ world,
Crack Nature’s moulds, all germains spill at once,
That makes ingrateful man! (3.2)

(For more on the storm and the Anthropocene, come to my Ideas Panel with Tara Bradway and David Sterling Brown, on the Green Tuesday June 18 at noon!)

After the storm, the curtain finally opened and the remainder of the play’s action took place on the stage, or, in the case of the mock-trial of Goneril and Regan, on the front apron. There was some great stuff in these later acts, including the blinding of Gloucester and the Dover Cliff meta-theater. In some ways, however, by placing all the actors back on the same horizontal plane, distant from the audience, rather than distributing voices and bodies amongst our seats, the action felt slightly removed. Even the on-stage deaths, each one removing one more Lear from the chorus, were somehow less immediate than the preceding whirligig of immersion. The death of Oswald, slain in combat by knightly Edgar as the true brother began the campaign that would lead to his defeat of his false brother Edmund, provided real pathos, thanks again to Tony Torn’s wonderfully emotive work. But when Oswald slumped down into death, I missed his contributions to the chorus of kings. Torn would get up and lend his voice to the final scene, but as Lear, not Oswald. Part of the genius of Coonrod’s gambit was to suggest that when he and all the other actors had previously voiced Lear’s lines, they did so both as an actor playing Lear and also through their other roles, in Torn’s case as Oswald, the abused child of the kingdom.

I love an intermissionless fast Shakespeare, and I have no complaints about necessary cuts, even though Cornwall and Albany are both interesting figures. But two-plus a bit hours is a long time to sit rapt, and there were moments in the second half when I drifted. I wondered a bit if letting just one Lear – Tom Neils, who also played the King of France – hold center stage for so long dulled the palate just a bit. I was starting to miss the community of kings!

They all reunited for the end, whispering together the painful “howls” and “nevers” which consign Cordelia’s body, “dead as earth,” to rest. The best and most re-orienting moments in this production, which I’m excited to see two more times over its short weekend run, featured all the Kings together, either parceling out lines one to the next (1.1) or chorusing them together (5.3).

Some questions remain too painful to answer. “Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life,” the Kings croon at Cordelia’s lifeless form, “And thou no breath at all?” (5.3)

Get to the University Theater before it closes on Sunday night!

It’s out in the world! I mean the world that this map maps –

I find it hard to believe, and a little daunting, that this strange fish and passion project poetry book has now embarked on the worldsea, in a beautiful printed package from Fordham University Press.

I hope lots of people will read this (reasonably priced and beautiful paperback) book, and I’m going to do a decent amount of marketing for it, as far as I know how to do that. A podcast with the New Books Network should be forthcoming soon! A reading in South Street Seaport in May! Copies at various places I’m going to talk about various things, from Portland, to Vancouver, to Bremen and Jena in Germany.

Today I want to introduce the amazing, brilliant map that John Wyatt Greenlee of Surprised Eel Mapping made for the book.

The book entangles an Ahab-free version of the voyage of Melville’s whaleship with my own immersive practice as swimmer and writer along the Connecticut Shoreline. I wanted a map to show that enmeshment, but I didn’t know how. I also wanted a sea monster someplace in the image. So I reached out to John, who I knew mainly as purveyor of eel-facts on Twitter.

We went back and forth about the design. Some early versions were messy. I wanted a dotted line showing the voyage of the Pequod from Nantucket to the Sea of Japan. I also wanted all my local swimming haunts, from Whale Rock to Green Island to the Cow and Calf, a pair of tidal rocks about a mile offshore that mark the far edge of my swimming range. How to fit all those things, plus a sea monster?

John’s two genius innovations were, first, inverting the globe, and, second, centering the Cow and Calf.

The inverted globe disorients, and reminds us of how much the convention of “north is up” organizes our view of the world. The continental shapes remain familiar, but updside-down, with Africa and Asia at the center, North America mostly off the page, and the voyage of the Pequod snaking its way through both sides.

The upper half of the map interposes my local coastline of Short Beach, including Johnson’s Beach, to which I walk my dogs every morning, my swimming haunts of Whale Rock and Green Island, plus other local landmarks within Long Island Sound. It’s my local wonderworld, and if you come visit – just a few miles east of New Haven! – I’ll be happy to take you for a swim to any of these places.

The Cow and Calf Rocks occupy the center of the map. They are a pair of rocks that pose some danger to navigation and also, at a mile off shore, represent a good long swim. A few times over the years in late summer we’ve organized a neighborhood swim race there and back, with kayak accompaniment. They are the center of the map and the edge of this world.

If you look closely across the map’s watery core, you’ll see the trace outlines of a vast fish-monster. John modelled this creature from the drawings on an early modern map that Rachel Carson used as the endpapers for the first American edition of The Sea Around Us (1951). (Carson got her images from Robert Dudley’s Dell’Arcano del Mare, an extraordinary atlas made in Florence in 1645-46 by the exiled illegitimate son of the Earl of Leicester.)

So – an inverted map of the world’s lands and seas, a local portrait of my home waters, a ghostly fish floating across the watery center, all tied together by the Cow and Calf.

What I love most about collaboration are the moments in which someone else’s work reveals back to you something you were trying to express but could not quite work out. John’s map unlocks and visualizes one of the key features of Sailing without Ahab, that the waters we swim in and sail on contain both the local and the global, entwined together, reflecting and in tension with each other. I’m so grateful to be able to have the map in the book!

Who rules the world?

Stories about the violent birth of the Roman Empire are always allegories of authority — how to get it, how to use it, and at what cost does it come. That’s how I read Virgil and Ovid, not to mention Shakespeare’s Roman plays. That’s what I saw last night on the Upper West Side in the hours before today’s torrential rainstorm.

At the West End Theatre, a cozy space upstairs at the Church of St. Paul and St. Andrew, I enjoyed a wonderfully triplicate rendition of this story. Courtesy of the brilliant experimental group Bedlam, this intense two hours without intermission mashed together Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, in which the nascent emperor gets murdered by his peers, with Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra, an 1898 play that I’d not seen before that portrays a philosophical and somewhat bloodless Caesar’s earlier encounter with the Egyptian Queen. The third portrayal of authority, however, was the most powerful – the Director of the theater company, who controls all the actors all the time, interrupting speeches and extracting confessions. Who rules the world, really? (I might note here that Bedlam’s Eric Tucker gets credited as having “adapted, directed, and designed” the production.)

Juxtapositions were the heart of the show, and the cross-casting was brilliantly managed. Andrew Rothenberg played Caesar in both storylines as well as the Director, and he was wondrously imperious, bossy, and manipulative. He doled out the egotism of Shakespeare’s proto-emperor, who is happy to remind everyone that “always I am Caesar” (1.2.211). Rothenberg was equally strong playing the more philosophical and strategic vision of control, power, and impassivity that define Shaw’s superman. But there’s no real question that the Final Boss in the play was the Director. He pushed the excellent Rajesh Bose out of the role of Caesar to grab it for himself. (Bose shifted to the Egyptian God Ra, a semi-chorus in Shaw’s play, and acquited himself very well.) The Director bossed around the naive young Cleopatra as played by Shayvawn Webster, cross-cast as an idealistic Brutus. The Director interrupted Mackenzie Moyer as Portia in the middle of her moving speech about her love for Brutus (2.1) and decided on the spot to cut the scene. (The actors protested that it’s the only real moment for a woman character in Shakespeare’s play, which is true.) The Director required confessional moments from his actors, and then belittled them about what they revealed.

I was reminded a bit of the director / casting agent / Iago figure in Keith Hamilton Cobb’s American Moor, who sat among the (mostly white and at least middle-aged) audience when I saw the show at Cherry Lane in Manhattan just before the pandemic. Power comes from positioning, and from all those structures that surround us.

Unlike in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, which in a stroke of fortune I’m going to see on Monday night from the Red Bull Theater, Caesar and Cleopatra didn’t face each other down as competing principles of power in this play. Rather, Shaw’s Caesar educated Cleopatra in the practice of power, teaching her to out-maneuver her brother and rival Ptolemy while Caesar himself defeated his Roman rival Pompey, a mask of whose pickled head in a jar makes a lively appearance in the show, including some time on an audience member’s lap. Shakespeare’s Brutus showed his political naivete, which is exactly what Shaw’s Cleopatra may be learning to outgrow. The double casting provided an interesting take on these two characters, though it also somewhat muted the moral dimensions of Brutus’s struggle.

One of the liveliest figures of the night was Bedlam regular Labod, who played a physical and effusive Cassius as well as Cleopatra’s wonderfully-named Egyptian servant Ftatateeta. (The Director makes fun of this character’s name, of course). Labod’s intensity as Cassius somewhat overwhelmed Volino-Gyetsa’s physically smaller Brutus – but their late scene together fighting and reconciling (4.4) was nicely paced. Stephen Michael Spencer made his Bedlam debut as Mark Antony and Rufio, Caesar’s military aide in the Shaw play. He chewed the scenery into paste in the funeral oration, which was nicely set up. The play opened with Caesar’s dead body already on the floor, with the conspirators getting meta-theatrical – “How many ages hence / Shall this our lofty scene…” 3.1). Spencer’s Antony started to get warmed up in his speech, and just then the Director interrupted to shift the scene to Egypt (and the Shaw play). We finally got back to that speech almost two hours later. But it was worth the wait!

Update: Before I forget I wanted to note the goofiest directoral move of the night, in which the case plays all of 2.2 – the back and forth on whether Caesar will or won’t go to the Forum, including a nice bit of manipulation of the big man’s ego by conspirator Decius Brutus – in over-the-top mafiosi accents, part The Godfather and part The Sopranos. Italians in the New Jersey waste management industry, Italians during the last days of the Roman Republic – the gag seems to have been irresistible. And lots of fun!

Maybe I just have trouble sitting for over two hours, but I might have pulled the curtain at the end of that speech when it came around again, when the lights went out and Mark Antony in darkness intoned “MIschief, thou art afoot” (3.2). But I understand that they wanted to shoehorn in the brutal death of Cinna the Poet, and Portia’s suicide, and the fight between Brutus and Cassius in act 4. The final scene of the night returned to the meta-plot of the Director, whose actors may be just about to rebel. “Go fuck yourself,” muttered Labod, no longer in character as Cassius or Ftatateeta, on his way offstage. Everyone was outraged at his brutality and cold-bloodedness. They were ready to break into open revolt –

But then the curtain closed, and the Director’s job was done, his power secure, for another night.

The Working Group has spoken, and it seems that anyone who bought champagne to toast the Age of Anthropos may have to keep it on ice. According to today’s New York Times

A committee of roughly two dozen scholars has, by a large majority, voted down a proposal to declare the start of the Anthropocene, a newly created epoch of geologic time, according to an internal announcement of the voting results seen by The New York Times.

The article clarifies that this decision was, in the words of Erle Ellis, “a narrow, technical matter for geologists,” and the vote should not be taken as a claim that humans have not disrupted the planetary ecosystem.

Ellis, who resigned in protest from the Anthropocene Working Group last year, advances the claim that the Anthropocene should better be understood as a geological “event” rather than a new (and presumably lasting) “epoch.” Ellis circulated an article by science report Paul Voosen in Science that proclaims, “The Anthropocene is Dead. Long Live the Anthropocene.”

An “event,” according to Ellis and others, can represent a less formal geological term. Its analogy would not be to long-last epochs such as the Pleistocene or even the current Holocene (now almos 12,000 years old, and still running) but rather the Great Oxygenation Event. That event, which happened around 2.5 billion years ago, saw cynanobacteria produce the first oxygen in the Earth’s atmosphere, thus making possible all forms of life that consume or process oxygen. For aerobic life forms, the GOE created a new world. For older, anaerobic life, oxygen seems mostly to have been poisonous.

Of course, the idea of the Anthropocene has long since slipped the hold of geologists, including their deliberate Working Group. I’m hardly the only lit professor who’s written books, in my case Break Up the Anthropocene (2019) with this word in the title – some of my favorites include Jeremy Davies’s The Birth of the Anthropocene (2016), Christophe Bonneuill and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz’s The Shock of the Anthropocene (2016), and Tobias Menely and Jesse Oak Taylor’s collection, Anthropocene Reading (2017).

I like Ellis’s notion of a relatively sudden Event, rather than a sedimented and more stable Epoch. I also like James Scott’s notion, advanced in Against the Grain (2017), of a “thin” Anthropocene that began when early humans started modifying their environment with fire, and later with agriculture, leading to progressively “thick” Anthropocene moments, including early modern globalization in the 16th-17c, the Industrial Revolution in the 19c, and the Great Acceleration that followed WWII in the mid-twentieth century.

Perhaps – is it too much to ask? – the twenty-first century may see some thinning of the Anthropocene event, as we transition from fossil fuels to other forms of energy? In which case the Event may still haunt us, but we won’t have entered the Epoch?

Fiasco Theater is one of my favorite local New York companies. Over the years, I’ve seen their productions of The Knight of the Burning Pestle (April 2023), Measure for Measure (2015), Twelfth Night (2017), and Two Gentlemen of Verona (2015). I missed their much-praised Cymbeline, but basically they are one of the local NYC companies that I’ll buy a ticket for whatever they play – even on a Friday night with a looming snowstorm!

Their show this winter, Pericles, isn’t everybody’s favorite Shakespeare, but it very much is mine – shipwrecks! pirates! crazy plot twists! magic! perhaps the most complex geographic itinerary (Tyre -> Antioch -> Tarsus -> Pentapolis -> more Tarsus -> Mytilene -> Ephesus) in all of Shakespeare! Even the medieval poet Gower gets a speaking part (and, in this production, a guitar). I’ve written about the heroine Marina, born during a tempest in the middle of the play, as the most aquatic and blue humanities-ish of Shakespeare’s characters.

So I was the perfect audience for Fiasco’s Pericles, which I saw at the Classic Stage Company’s home theater on East 13th St downtown. And while I did love it, as I always love the high spirits, musicality, and sheer liveliness of Fiasco’s performance style – well, a couple of things they tried didn’t seem quite to work. Perhaps because their Knight of the Burning Pestle, which I saw with students last spring, was such a triumph, I felt that a couple of things the company was trying got in their own way.

A central gambit was passing the role of Pericles himself around to multiple cast members over the course of the play. The program lists Noah Brody, Paco Tolson, Devin Haqq, and Tatiana Wechsler as playing “Pericles and others.” I usually like that gambit, which I’ve encountered a few times before, above all in Dziecki Theatre’s extraordinary Makbet, which I loved so much when I saw it performed in a shipping container in 2018 that I brought them to our seminar room at St. John’s in 2019. But perhaps because Pericles shifts its scenes and its theatrical modes so often – if we’re in Antioch, it’s classical incest tragedy, in Pentapolis, a medieval tournament, Ephesus has a seedy faux-Elizabethan underworld, &c – the shifting of the actors jarred a bit. I love the performers – perhaps Tatiana Wechshler, cross-cast as the wicked Dionyza who tries to murder Marina, gave her Pericles the most interesting spin, though Devin Haqq’s final Pericles was also stately and powerful.

The other gambit, which by now I think of as a Fiasco trademark since their gloriously sea-shanty-filled Twelfth Night, which rivals Pestle as my favorites of their productions, is music. Since Marina restores her father’s identity through music in the play’s almost-climactic scene (they still have to make one last trip to Ephesus to restore her mother), the company’s emphasis on music seemed a likely fit. Perhaps I caught them on a bad night – Andy Grotelueschen, who made gloriously high-spirited runs as good king Simonides and Bolt the pandar, mentioned to the woman sitting next to me before the show started that the show is just out of previews and they are still “changing some things” – but the music felt a bit off to me. Ben Steinfeld’s guitar-troubadour Gower was fun and a bit goofy, which I think fits the old-fashioned tetrameter Shakespeare wrote for the part. But a few other songs, especially one that converted Marina’s lament on her nurse Lychordia’s grave (4.1) into something like a show tune, didn’t really fit for me. I’m very rarely a fussy professor – by all means change the script, that’s what it’s there for! – but I winced a few times.

Maybe Pericles, especially compared with comic gems like Twelth Night and even the bizarre but structurally coherent Pestle, is just too wayward for the regular Fiasco treatment? Or maybe I was worried about the snowstorm, which didn’t start until after my long drive back to CT anyway, despite not thinking I was?

Fiasco’s Pericles is up in its cozy downtown theater through March 24! Go see it! Tell me what you think!

Another year, another Bookfish wrap up. Not too much to report – keeping a blog seems very old-fashioned, but I enjoy blasting a few things out into cyberspace, and I also use this site to keep track of the Coastal Studies Reading Group. Analytics shows about 7k visitors, 11k page views with a big spike on April 2, the day after the Shakespeare Association Conference in Minneapolis. Top posts seem to be Snow in the North Country, a Sailing without Ahab preview, and a Response to the NYer’s Doomcast.

Some totals for the year – ~30 posts, mostly in a few familiar categories.

For next year – maybe a few more book reviews? Maybe some updates from my grad class this coming spring? Definitely more on the Short Beach Water Quality project, which is basically going to become a dog poop patrol thing. Plus some press for the two new books, Water and Cognition in Early Modern English Literature, co-edited with Nic Helms, due from Amsterdam UP in March, and Sailing without Ahab, due from Fordham UP in April!

Book Reviews (3): On Paradox, Noah’s Arkive, and my Four for ’23 favorites

Theater Reviews (7): Endgame, Arden of Faversham, Born with Teeth, Knight of the Burning Pestle, Fat Ham (on Broadway), Macbeth Muet, The Wife of Willesden

Film Review: Aquaman 2

Academic Events (6): Lanhaus Fellowship ’22, Blue Humanities Talk at ASU, Shakespeare and the Sea in Greenwich, SAA in Minneapolis, ASLE in Portland

Short Beach Water Quality Project: An ongoing series, with four posts in 2023 (April, June, and two in December)

Some drafts that I started to write but never finished: Scenes from the RCC, review of Ryan Poll’s Aquaman and the Defnese of the Oceans, review of Killian Quigley’s Reading Underwater Wreckage, response to the latest wreck of the Titanic.

The big event of the year for me came early, when An Introduction to the Blue Humanities came out in July. Midsummer is an odd time for an academic’s book to drop, since everyone is scattered, but I was able to bring a couple of hard copies to the ASLE conference in Portland.

In some ways the Introduction was a culmination of ideas I’ve been thinking about for the past 20-ish years, though in other ways writing a broad introduction, encompassing all seven seas and the full span of literary history, was a strange thing to write as someone trained in early modern English literary studies. I am sure many specialists, even those who enjoy the book, will twinge a bit when I cover such areas as modern Indian Ocean fiction or Indigenous Alaskan poetry. But I do know the Blue Humanities side of things pretty well, and I come to the other material in a spirit of watery community.

The only other book publication in ’23 was the translation into Italian of Oceano: Storie di marina, poesia, e globalizzazione, done by the good people at Wetlands Publishing in Venice from my 2020 Object Lessons book Ocean. I’m looking forward to visiting with them this coming February to do some slightly-late publicity.

In the articles and chapters category, I published “Surfing the Sublime: Tim Winton’s Breath and Eco-Heroism,” in SubStance (160: 52.1 (2023) 75-80), and “What Washes Up on the Beach: Shipwreck, Literary Culture, and Objects of Interpretation” in Sara Rich and Peter Campbell’s book, Contemporary Philosophy for Maritime Archeology: Flat Ontologies, Oceanic Thought, and the Anthropocene (Leiden: Sidestone Press, 2023: 75-86).

I did a podcast with the New Books Network on An Introduction to the Blue Humanities, and a fun Zoom-conversation about the book with the Coastal Studies Reading Group. I also published a prose-poem looking back at my time in Bavaria last year, “Five Ways of Seeing the Steinsee” in the Rachel Carson Center’s online jounral Springs: The Rachel Carson Center Review 3 (2023).

Early ’24 will be busier, with Water and Cognition in Early Modern English Literature , a collection of essays co-edited with Nic Helms, coming out in March, and then Saliing without Ahab: Eco-Poetic Travels in April. More about them in the New Year!