Steve Mentz

For years I’ve been hearing about the Environmental Humanities Research School (NoRS-EH) at Stavanger, Norway, so it was a treat to get to spend a few days there to help teach a weeklong Blue Humanities PhD course with Ellen Arnold, a medieval river historian who’s also my colleague on the editorial board of the Environmental Humanities in Premodern Culture book series. (Send us your EH manuscripts!)

Part of the fun of spending this fall in Europe has been slowly coming to understand the ways that European universities run graduate education and research funding. The weeklong course I helped launch in Stavanger was organized by Ellen and the Greenhouse / NoRS-Eh team, with help from a pair of guest instructors, namely me and Aike Peter Rots, who is the leader of an ERC project on whales in maritime East Asia. The students come from institutions across Europe, from the UK (Goldsmith’s and Queen Mary) to several in Norway to the Netherlands and Germany. Their project are wonderfully diverse and creative – whale eco-tourism! Icelandic sagas! jellyfish as/and media! maritime expertise and the Norman invasion! sci fi narratives of/beyond sustainability! interspecies colonialism! fishing for sardines in Senegal! So many amazing things in progress here; it makes me feel very optimistic about the future of blue humanities scholarship.

The students are a lively and perceptive bunch, and I greatly enjoyed spending a few days with them. On day 1, beyond introductions, we discussed forms of the blue humanities through my just-published “Poetics of Planetary Water” article and John Gillis’s 2013 Blue Humanities open-source essay. We also spent a couple hours digging slowly into one of the central originating works in this thought-stream, Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us (1951). It was fun to wrestle with Carson’s metaphors and her powerful drive to humanize the features and forces of the inhuman sea. I came away, as I always do when I return to Carson, thinking that the richness of her approach still has much to generate in the present – though reading this mid-20c text alongside scholars of the 21c also showed me some ways that her writing remains of its time.

In the afternoon we played the role of live studio audience for a Greenhouse Zoom Book Talk for Charne Lavery’s Writing Ocean Worlds: Indian Ocean Fiction in English (2021). She talked engagingly about how the particular history and geography of the Indian Ocean world shaped its modern fictions, with attention to Amitav Ghosh and  Abdulrazak Gurnah, as well as glancing notes on Joseph Conrad’s Indian Ocean novels. We in the room were invited to ask questions, but I thought I would hang back to let the students speak. Then, to our collective amusement, Charne said something about my writing about maritime metaphors, so I popped out of my chair and to show my face on camera. A strange moment, perhaps, since she would have had no idea I was in Norway! But we had a nice chat about Ghosh and Conrad, a relationship that I suspect we’d both like to give some more thought to in the future.

The combination of Carson’s lyrical scientism and Lavary’s vision of the Indian Ocean made a perfect lead up to the intellectually grueling evening event of day 1, in which we struggled with the brain-breaking puzzle of Pisces,a commercial fishing / conservation / fisheries management board game that even the website boardgamegeek.com admits is a bit hard to understand. I agree with Ellen that the bait pieces, though present in a little bag with the rest of the game, appear not to have any function that the directions clarify. An allegory of industrial fishing? Four of us baffled ourselves thoroughly as we faced the game’s byzantine complexity, though with each turn we attempted we tried to add another element. Each turn has eight elements. Clearly it’s a game designed by fisheries scientists! Perhaps the moral is that we need Rachel Carson’s lyric deftness to trace a path through all this complexity? Or perhaps it’s just really hard to make a living as a conservation-minded fisherman?

The morning of day 2 brought us back together with two wonderfully disparate literary texts that explored different models of water-intimacy. First we looked at early medieval Latin poems about Romano-Christian Gaul (I may be using the wrong historical terms, but I think that’s pretty close – Christian Latinate culture from the 5-9th centuries?) about waterscapes and human engineering. We had all read Ellen’s resonant Ecozona article about how premodern Latin literary culture engaged with French rivers as fluvial borders, cultural markers, and flexible symbols. Looking closely at these poems was a great shift from the sometimes overbroad “what is the blue humanities” discourse that we’d been wrestling with the day before. One particular close and intricate poetic portrait of a flooded riverscape seemed to present naturecultural disruption in an especially gorgeous way that recalled for me Titania’s speech about natural disorder in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Excellent stuff!

Next we turned the research of Greenhouse fellow Susanne Ferwerda, who teaches now at Utretcht University in her native Netherlands but not that long ago completed her PhD at the University of Tasmania. She shared with us the speculative futurist short story “Water” by the Aboriginal (Mununjali) writer Ellen van Neerven. The story is a brilliant riff on a transpecies love story mixed up with a political resistance narrative and a satire of the Aboriginal art scene in Australia. Van Neerven’s echoes and inversions of Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis books as well as Nnedi Okorofor’s Lagoon made it a rich text with which to talk about blue questions, especially the symbolic contrasts between fresh and salt water that are so crucial in the coastal areas of northern New South Wales where the story is set. I want to look up van Neerven’s poetry too!

After a group lunch in the UiS cafeteria and a head-clearing walk up to the tower to watch the sun already going down, at 2:15 I gave a public talk on Blue Humanities pasts and futures. It was great to give the talk to an audience with a core of committed PhD students, most of whom had travelled all the way to Stavanger for a course on the Blue Humanities. I also loved the wide ranging q&a featuring questions from Dolly and Finn Arne Jorgenson, who co-run the Greenhouse / NoRS-EH and have made it such an important fixture of European and global environmental humanities thinking. We talked about how my own trajectories, from oceans to other forms of water, and my personal practice as a sea swimmer, contrast with the river valley and flood plains histories that impact the lives of so many people, both today and in the past. We also talked about how academic practices produce messy collectives, and why polyvocal communities are the best ones.

That was the end of my official contributions to this week long course, which continues with a museum day on Wednesday and a closer look at East Asia during the last few days. But it wasn’t quite my final event with the enthusiastic PhD students. They led me on a long and labyrinthine walk down toward the water’s edge, past the football stadium, through an open construction site, past a massive structure used to repair oil rigs, until we finally arrived a a small, basically hidden barge, tied up to a dock in full late afternoon darkness. On the barge was a small wooden sauna hut with a wood stove burning inside. There were also two ladders leading down to the imposingly cold waters of the bay. (The water temperature was, I think, around 8 degrees C, or 46 F, which seems about right – but the air was a bit colder than that!). I enjoyed popping in and out of the cold water while warming up with everyone in the sauna. I left earlier than the students. The walk back to the bus stop through the maze of construction was tricky, and I did get on the bus heading the wrong way – but I made it back to to the cozy Yladir hotel eventually.

Such a pleasure to visit the Greenhouse and NoRS-EH! It’s been, over the past few years for people like me who follow environmental humanities scholarship online, something of a legendary place. The Book Talk e-archive that Dolly and Finn Arne have compiled since the early days of Covid moved so many things online is an amazing resource. Even though daylight was in short supply – the sun didn’t come up until after 9 am, and it set before 4 pm – I enjoyed some great walks around campus. But the fjord hikes will have to wait for a future visit!

In between sessions at the HNE III conference (Histories of Nature and Environments, 3rd meeting), I would sneak outside of the Escola Superior de Turismo e Tecnologia do Mar where we were meeting, walk about 30 meters to the edge of a cliff, and stare down at the waves. Located on the point of a peninsula that until maybe a millennium ago had been an island, Peniche angles out into the Atlantic surge. The surf isn’t quite as fierce as nearby Nazare, but it was plenty awesome for me.

I also spent a few hours splashing around in the surf the day before I gave my conference-opening keynote. Nothing better than an afternoon of bodysurfing and a nicely grilled fish to get read to talk about the blue humanities!

The conference, organized by Ana Roque and Cristina Brito of NOVA University of Lisbon, with support from the 4Oceans Project that Cristina leads, brought together environmental and oceans scholars from four continents and many methodologies. I won’t be able to do justice to the range of individual paper sessions, which ranged from the densely empirical to the floridly theoretical. I might mention briefly Cristina Brito’s presentation, which was the last in the conference except for the fourth keynote. She presented her ongoing research on manatees, the massive marine mammals found both in West Africa and the West Indies. the sightings of which underlie many legends of mermaids and human-fish hybrids. Her presentation gave a glimpse of the range and curiosity that drives this project, as well as the many other projects that 4Oceans supports.

I will give very short comments on each of the four keynotes. I feel deeply honored to be in such company!

Blue Humanities Opener

I won’t say much about my own presentation, except that I used a slide of a painting by the great Vanessa Daws as well as the poem I wrote for her Swimming a Long Way Together project to introduce the human-ocean relationship in poetic terms. I also talked about my local waters in Short Beach, and the overstuffed structure of my forthcoming book, An Introduction to the Blue Humanities (look for it in ’23!). Also – I loved the place, the audience, the generous introduction and lively q&a. I don’t know if I could really hear the rumble of the surf behind me, but it felt as if I could!

South African Vistas

Jane Carruthers, coming to Portugal from Johannesburg, South Africa, gave a wondrously wide-ranging talk on the Sashe-Limpopo valley, a fairly remote part of southern Africa at the confluence of two rivers, the Sashe and the Limpopo, and three countries, Botswana, Zimbabwe, and South Africa. The site was home to an ancient civilization, now called the Mapungubwe people and the site of a National Park and nascent tourist industry. Jane talked about the efforts to cultivate the heritage of the 11th century Mapungubwe people, and also about how that legacy was being used for 21st century nationalist ends. It was a resonant and sobering story, which for me also had the consequence of reminding me how much I love South African literature and culture. J.M. Coetzee has been a favorite of mine since I discovered him in college (in the 1980s), but I also thought about Ezekial Mphalele, Mazisi Kunene, Bessie Head, Olive Schreiner, and others. It’s a rich literature, and not as well known in the northern hemisphere as it should be.

Whale Cultures

The third keynote, the morning of day 2, featured Hal Whitehead, from Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia. Hal is famous in ocean studies as co-author with Luke Rendell of The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins (2014), a book whose argument, contained in its title, still blows my mind. In an endearingly understated and transparently clear presentation, Whitehead took us through the cultural markers created through whalesong, with special attention to sperm whales in the Pacific and the Caribbean. One of the most striking images was a pair of slides, presenting research from one of Whitehead’s former students I think, that showed the vast areas dominated by single song-cultures of Pacific whales, contrasted with the tiny, basically island-shaped areas that featured a common song in the Caribbean. Why, I asked after the talk, did Pacific whalesongs span such vast oceanic spaces, when Caribbean song-communities were so small? He wasn’t sure – but he said that he thinks it might have something to do with local environmental differences. I love the idea of sperm whale cultures in the Pacific spanning hundreds of miles, and I wonder also about how the smaller, more confined waterways of the Caribbean shape their different cultures. (My just-finished book uses different oceans, from Pacific to Arctic, to frame human culture, so I was very interested to consider how whale cultures may also be shaped by waterscapes.)

Urban Wildlife of Brazil

Regina Horta Duarte, from the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil, rounded out the speakers by talking about nonhuman life in one of the planet’s largest mega-cities. The greater metro area of Sao Paolo, Brazil, boasts over 22 million human inhabitants, and the number of birds, beasts, and insects are basically uncountable. Horta Duarte’s talk explored the edges of the city’s major park, and also talked about how birds and other animals engage with human infrastructure, especially glass windows and convenient-seeming paved roads. I caught up with her after her talk and spoke for a bit about how to distinguish among the different needs of different animals – some need conservation, while others can co-habitate with humans to some extent. The trick, always, is knowing which is which!

Whalebone Archeology

We spent our last half-day in a deconsecrated church that was being transformed into a museum in the village of Autouguia de Baleia, just a bit inland from the peninsula of Peniche. Not that long ago – just a bit over a thousand years ago – Peniche had been an island, and Autouguia was the local port. The channel had sedimented in sometime before the medieval period; the oldest fortifications of Peniche date to around the 14th century. As its second name Baleia (“baleen”) suggests, Autouguia was a whaling town. Among the artifacts recently recovered and being prepared for display are whalebones. A mock-up display even shows how old stone houses may have used fossilized whale bones as part of rock walls.

The artifacts of humans and cetaceans from the Roman, medieval, and early modern periods provided a rich historical context for our days in Peniche. I could not help thinking about Hal’s ideas about the song-cultures of whales as I handled the fossil baleen and spinal bones. What is the full story, the entire song, of whales and humans, perhaps the two smartest mammals to have evolved in the past few million years on our blue planet? Not long ago it seemed as if the small, greedy primates would wipe out the massive cetaceans. Now – well, it’s hard to know what will happen in the Anthropocene, though many populations of whales are coming back.

Hal told a story about speaking with the historian Bathsheba Demuth, who by coincidence I had met in Tutzing, Germany, just the month before. Her research on Native Alaskan whaling cultures had lead him to think that whales might learn and transmit information as humans do, via cultures – which sent him back to his scientific data. I love that story’s narrative of exchange, in which a humanist empirical historian tells a story to a data-driven scientist, who uses that story to reassess his own work. And later that work finds its way to a poetically-minded humanist like me, to light up my imagination.

Exchanges like that are why cross-disciplinary exchanges are worth pursuing, even in this age of Covid and climate change. That’s what we sought, and what we found, a few weeks ago in Peniche.

I look forward to seeing all these wonderful people again soon!

I’m excited to announce the publication of my first chapbook of poems! Swim Poems came out in late October, when I was sick with Covid and isolating on a farmhouse in rural Bavaria.

It’s available to order from Ghostbird Press.

With thanks to Peter Vanderberg for editorial magic, and to James and Thomas Vanderberg for gorgeous artwork.

The idea swam up from the depths maybe a half-dozen years ago – what if the Pequod set sail without her Captain? Do we really need that bad old man, dismasted and enraged, at the helm? Might freedom, in fact, be something else entirely?

The notion crept into my imagination and wouldn’t go away. So I niggled around with it a bit. I published two smalls sets of poems with the Glasgow Review of Books. The first in April 2017, included a title poem for the project, “Sailing without Ahab.” The second, in May 2018, included “Great White Evil God,” which thrashes around with the whiteness of the whale. By this time I had found the shape, a mad swimalong quest that would follow the crew from Etymology to Epilogue, Loomings to the third day’s Chase. A poem for every chapter, none of them boasting any Captain. It was a lot of poems. My voyage was slow.

Many things shattered into new shapes in spring 2020, and as I adapted to being shut in, I found in writing poetry my pandemic sourdough. The dam burst right around the time we brought a new puppy into our home, the irrepressible Blue, whose company gave me lots of pre-dawn walks to the water and quiet time in the house, even after Covid restrictions boomeranged my son back into our basement. I suppose it was around this time that I started my daily waterpic Insta practice, too, for anyone who’s keeping score.

The poetic rhythms that clicked into place in 2020 have since led me to start sending poems out to literary magazines, and I’ve published a half-dozen or so in these semi-post-pandemic years. Sailing without Ahab also came out of that burst of creativity, and I’m so pleased to be working with the great Richard Morrison and Fordham UP for this project.

The book will have lots of parts – a mad sailalong with the crew of the Pequod, an experiment in creative-critical writing, a form of maniacal close reading, an oblique extension of blue humanities ideas and practices. But at its center is a surging, wallowing, breeching mass of poems, one hundred and thirty-eight in total, one for each chapter of Melville’s oceanic epic, including the Etymology, Abstracts, and Epilogue.

I hope you’ll join me for the voyage in spring 2024!

Like many blue humanities people, I was excited to see Karen Eva Carr’s new book, Shifting Currents: A World History of Swimming appear from Reaktion earlier this summer. I was lucky to read the book in manuscript, though my excessive praise didn’t all fit onto the back jacket. Here’s the full version –

All humans can swim, but not everyone makes the effort to learn. Out of the cultural asymmetry between swimming and non-swimming cultures, Karen Eva Carr’s expansive and engaging volume traces a complex narrative about the ‘art’ of swimming in world history since the last Ice Age. Carr shows how different cultures organized themselves against each other in relation to swimming practices, from the skilled exploits of Indigenous and African swimmers to the radical immersions of avant-garde Europeans like Byron and Shelley to modern cultural battles over access to watery spaces from California to Australia to Japan. She demonstrates the recurrence of fundamental cultural anxieties about the water – that it is too sacred to be polluted by humans, that it encourages sexual licentiousness, that it is dangerous, and that it promotes racial and class mixing – and shows how these ancient patterns continue in our ambivalently water-focused present. As seas rise in the twenty-first century, we should heed the lessons of this rich history.

I met Karen during the timeless haze of the later pandemic on the always-gorgeous grounds of Mystic Seaport in Connecticut , and we talked about trying to do an event and discussion for the book’s launch. She’s back on the West Coast now, so we have moved to an online discussion.

The recurrence of cultural ideas about swimming, which include the notions that immersion is sacred, that it is licentious, that it is dangerous, and that it promotes the mixing of races and classes, seem a great place to start. 

Why does swimming mean what it means?

KC – Thank you for the kind introduction! I’m so glad you were willing to read my book before publication and lend it your support. It was great to meet you at Mystic Seaport last year (too bad we didn’t record *that* conversation to share!) and I’m sorry that my itinerant life and covid combined to impede the in-person event we had hoped for. But I’m loving being back in Portland, where despite our reputation for rain, we actually have lovely sunny summers that are perfect for swimming outside. And from Portland, I’m excited that this conversation will be a good opportunity to explore some of the ways in which our ideas overlap and can feed each other.

I’m going to take your questions one at a time. Why does swimming mean what it means? I think swimming has taken on this strong cultural significance because it’s a great shibboleth. As in the Bible story (Judges 12), where the Jews identified their enemies by their inability to pronounce the word ‘shibboleth’ correctly, swimming is a skill that is difficult to learn and impossible to fake. Nobody, no matter how motivated, can simply jump in deep water and swim without learning how. In places where not everyone learns to swim, swimming presents insiders with a simple and foolproof method for uncovering outsiders who are presenting false credentials. I think we see this in Plato’s proverb that ignorant people can ‘neither read nor swim’: reading, like swimming, is a skill that is difficult to learn and impossible to fake, so it, too, is a good way to uncover would-be social climbers.

SM: That’s an interesting way to frame swimming as a cultural marker. Swimming, like reading, becomes a marker of identity? That also seems important to the story your book tells about swimming cultures, in Africa, the Americas, and other warm/tropical areas, in contrast with non-swimming cultures, mostly from colder places in the north.

KC: Right! In swimming cultures, in the south, this wouldn’t work as a social marker, because everyone learns to swim as a baby. But in northern cultures, even where some people learned to swim, it was mostly the most cosmopolitan, privileged people who learned, and that’s where swimming became a way to discern social status – which it still is today for many people.

SM: That makes me think about recent American history, in which many public pools were closed during the Civil Rights Era, when they would have otherwise been forced to integrate. As a result, swimming and swimming clubs became markers of status and often of race. Jeff Wiltse’s great book Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America (2010) provides a detailed history. 

KC: I love Jeff Wiltse’s book on this! There’s also Andrew Kahrl, The Land Was Ours: How Black Beaches Became White Wealth in the Coastal South (2012), and Gilbert Mason’s Beaches, Blood, and Ballots: A Black Doctor’s Civil Rights Struggle (2000), which tells the story from a Black man’s point of view. But I’d put it the other way around: swimming had been a marker of status for Europeans since the early Iron Age, when Odysseus knew how to swim but his crew members didn’t. And swimming had been a marker of race at least since the 1400s, when European slave-traders in Africa justified their monstrous business by claiming that African people’s knowledge of swimming showed that they were practically animals. It was because swimming was already a strong cultural marker that White people refused to desegregate the pools, even as they did desegregate other public spaces like libraries and restaurants. 

Different Strokes

SM: After reading the excerpt of your book on Slate, I’m thinking about the different swimming strokes. Why is it that Europeans love the breaststroke?

KC: Our earliest definite evidence for swimming shows a clear overhand stroke, alternating arms with a straight-legged flutter kick: that’s how we see swimming on an Egyptian hieroglyph from the Old Kingdom, about 5000 years ago. As far as we can tell, that’s how everybody swam from then until the Late Middle Ages, around 1200 CE. That’s true not only throughout Africa, but also in Asia and in Europe in the time of the Greeks and Romans, and in the Americas: everyone swims with an overhand, alternating stroke. It’s faster, of course, than anything else we know of. Maybe it’s also more natural, in the sense of being more like crawling, and more the way dogs and other animals swim, than the breaststroke is. Interestingly, we don’t see much in the way of backstroke in early images of swimming. That, too, seems to wait for the Late Middle Ages. So I think that for most swimmers all over the world, swimming just meant the ‘crawl’ stroke; that was what swimming was.

SM: The early modern English academic Everard Digby talks about swimming like a frog, and shows some pictures of it in De arte natandi (1587). (I wrote a short piece about Digby as swimming teacher here.) That also makes me wonder about whether ancient peoples swam with their faces down in the water. That’s more efficient, but hard to see, and uncomfortable in salt water before goggles. 

KC: I’ve actually always hated swim goggles, so I’m used to swimming with my face in the water. I guess in the ocean I just don’t open my eyes under the water; I don’t think I’ve ever tried that. I just look when I take a breath. But in lakes and rivers, I do open my eyes. I don’t know of any discussion of this question, either from southern swimming cultures or among northerners, about whether people opened their eyes underwater. I do suspect that most northerners didn’t put their faces in the water at all if they could help it.

SM: I’d love to read a history of underwater looking! Margaret Cohen has a brand-new study of underwater photography and film, The Underwater Eye: How the Movie Camera Opened the Depths and Unleashed New Realms of Fantasy (2022) – but I’ve not yet received my copy! I think the modern popularizer of swimming goggles was a WWI fighter pilot, Guy Gilpatric, who modified his flight goggles. 

KC: Oh, that’s very interesting! I never thought about where swimming goggles came from, but that does seem likely! It’s always dangerous to argue from silence, but I think the silence of our sources on this subject probably indicates that most Europeans swam with their faces out of the water. Byron and his friends, however, are said to have dived to retrieve thimbles from the bottom of the river, so I imagine they must have opened their eyes for that!

How does breaststroke become the dominant stroke of European swimmers?

KC: Well, there is one exception to the general rule that breaststroke is mostly a European innovation, from Central America. About 400-100 BC, images of Maya swimmers show them with their hands together and legs bent, in what could be the breaststroke with a frog kick, but might just be a representation of diving. Otherwise, the big change comes in the Late Middle Ages, as I said. In the 1260s, an illustration of swimming from Frederick II’s On the Art of Hunting with Birds might show the breaststroke; another image from fourteenth-century Iran may show breaststroke with frog kick. The first definite illustration of the breaststroke is in the Très riches heures du duc de Berry, from about 1415, and involves peasants swimming in a pond, but after that everyone in Europe uses the breaststroke exclusively, until the 1800s. Even today, most Europeans learn only the breaststroke, unless they are very good swimmers. The change seems to be connected to a very ancient fear of disturbing the water by splashing. This goes back at least three thousand years: in the early Iron Age, Hesiod warns against crossing rivers without praying first. Zoroastrian Avestas from Iran are concerned about ‘the defilement of still water.’ The Biblical prophet Ezekiel criticizes Egypt’s Pharaoh: ‘you trouble the waters with your feet.’ The Roman philosopher Seneca reviles ‘the enthusiast who plunges into the swimming-tank with unconscionable noise and splashing.’ Around 1000 AD, the Uzbek doctor Ibn Sina also recommended bathing calmly and quietly. And the same sentiment appears in the 1840s, when The Times in London rejected a demonstration of the ‘crawl’ stroke by two Native Americans as ‘grotesque’ because the swimmers ‘lashed the water violently with their arms…and beat downward with their feet.’ People sought ‘a minimum of splashing.’ And it’s still true today. In the 2000s, British ‘wild swimmers’ still value ‘meditative’ swimming, ‘without kicking or thrashing around.’ 

This fear of splashing isn’t a problem anywhere else: in the Americas, in Africa, in Southeast Asia and Japan, people kept right on using a ‘crawl’ stroke into modern times. There’s no concern about splashing. In the United States today, most children learn the ‘crawl’ stroke first, and only later the breaststroke as a minor alternative. I’m not sure whether that’s because United States swimmers were more influenced by Native American swimmers (especially the Hawaiian Duke Kahanamoku, who won Olympic medals in the 1920s), or because United States swim teachers (mostly outside of school) place more emphasis on competition swimming, whereas European swim teachers (mostly in a school context) emphasize water safety. 

SM: I wonder also if it’s generational – I learned crawl stroke in the early 1970s in a system that sent me right through to the swim team. But I’m pretty sure my parents, who learned in the 1950s, also in New Jersey, started with a version of breast stroke. My Dad taught me an irregular breaststroke, which involved putting my head all the way under the water and pulling my arms all the way to my side, sort of like elementary backstroke on the belly. My teachers, who wanted me to learn regulation breaststroke so I could race, were appalled!

KC: Oh, that’s very interesting! I definitely learned crawl first. I only really learned breaststroke when I was in school in France, where they learned breaststroke first and only the best swimmers (the Dolphin group) learned freestyle. My mother says she learned crawl from her mother, and only learned breaststroke when she took a synchronized swimming class in college, wanting to be like Esther Williams! She says as far as she knows her mother knew only the crawl, which she learned at summer camp. My father thinks his mother swam breaststroke, though I know I saw her swim sidestroke too as an older woman. 

SM: My kids – who learned to swim through the YMCA at a town pool in Branford CT in the early 2000s – started with crawl. 

KC: Mine also learned crawl first, and breaststroke later, at the public pools in Portland, OR in the early 2000s.

SM: Shall we talk about Roger Deacon’s Waterlog here? I was shocked when I read that book & realized he was a breastroker. But I do think it’s a great book.

KC: He’s an excellent example of the meditative swimmer. I’m interested in his imagination of his own swimming as both natural and rebellious. There’s a whole movement in the 1800s where British swimmers see their own swimming as scientific and civilized, like the Greeks and Romans, and they contrast that with the ‘natural’ and ‘savage’ swimming of Indigenous Americans, Africans, and Australians. The breaststroke, then, was the scientific stroke, unlike the ‘savage’s’ crawl stroke. So you’re right, it’s very interesting that even though he’s all about ‘natural’ swimming, he still uses the breaststroke….

SM: Deakin is often described as the initiator of the “wild swimming” craze in Europe. Though I’m not sure how “wild” it always is – mostly he swims in rivers and harbors!

KC: LOL, I think ‘wild’ swimmers often just mean they’re not in a chlorinated swimming pool? I’m sure you read the New Yorker story about them? (although now that I google it, apparently the New Yorker does a version of this story every five years or so; stories about wild swimming must be very reliably popular!)

SM: Wild swimming, in whatever fashion, is definitely a fun topic. Another incidental history-of-breaststroke story – a  neighbor of mine who knows my obsessions stopped me on the street when I was walking my dogs last night to say that they swam a breaststroke-ish stroke in the movie “The Northman,” which I’ve not seen. 

KC: That’s probably not right! I don’t know of any evidence for the breaststroke as early as the 800s AD, when that film is set. Beowulf swims ‘hugging the ocean currents with your arms, gliding over the sea’ (notice the emphasis on not-splashing!) and we might see that hugging image as indicating the breaststroke. But in the saga of Cormac, from Iceland in the 900s CE, Bersi’s ‘manner of swimming was to breast the waves and strike out with all his might.’ Wouldn’t you have to be using your arms alternately to ‘strike out’ like that? 

On behalf of the Early Medievalist Mary Rambaran-Olm, and also for myself, I have to add also that The Northman is the latest in a long line of Viking movies to push the false idea that all ‘real’ Europeans are pale, blond, and blue-eyed: white supremacy at work. That wasn’t true in the Stone Age, and it has never been true at any time since then either.

SM: I very much agree with MRO’s critique of “The Northman,” and with her and many other medievalists’ important pushback against the fantasies of an all-white Middle Ages. That’s not true, and it’s deeply pernicious in the present day.

How does the contrast between overarm swimming, which is faster but also provides less above the water visibility, and breaststroke, map onto the book’s larger argument about swimming cultures?

KC: Part of the issue may be that Europeans and Central Asians didn’t like to put their faces in the water to swim; this is still an issue for many people. Illustrations of Greek and Roman swimmers may indicate that their heads are out of the water; some descriptions of ancient swimming also seem to assume that people tried to keep their hair dry. You can swim the breaststroke without putting your face in the water. 

SM: That’s what I see too, even today. I wonder also if the practice is, or at least was until recently, somewhat gendered, with head-dry breastroke being more ladylike. Or maybe that’s just my own sexist childhood culture speaking?

KC: I don’t know of any discussion along those lines, either from antiquity or from the 19th c., where people recommend keeping the hair dry especially for women. Ovid, in describing Leander’s swimming, seems to assume that Leander’s trying to keep his face dry: ‘the swollen water opposed my boyish attempt, and, swimming against the waves, my mouth was submerged.’ The late antique poet Nonnus also describes Semele swimming: ‘she kept her head dry, stretched well above the stream by her practiced skill, under water only just to the hairline, pushing her chest through the stream and pressing the water back with alternating feet.’ Digby’s swimming manual’s illustrations also show the male swimmers with their heads out of the water. 

As late as 1906, an American swim coach dismissed the practice of side breathing on the grounds that ‘it is very exhausting, owing principally to the fact that the breath must be held, excepting at intervals when the head is raised forward or at one side for breathing purposes. In addition the swimmer finds it difficult to keep a straight course.’

I have found generally that we tend to assume that there was a lot of gendering in swimming and that the historical evidence doesn’t support it. Both in the south and in the north, there’s no reason to think women didn’t swim as much as men in all periods, except insofar as women were legally barred from the pool in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Maybe girls were less free to go wander to the nearest pond, but our sources don’t discuss it.

Neither of my grandfathers really knew how to swim, and my father doesn’t really either: just barely enough crawl to pass the college swim test. So that’s only anecdote, but in my own family, 20th c. women swam much better than men. More recently, all my brothers and sisters swim pretty well. 

Where do you like to swim?

KC: I grew up in upstate New York, where I had two very different swimming experiences that paralleled each other. On the one hand, my mother took us nearly every day in summer to a private swim club (not a country club, but not so far off one either), with a good-sized pool and diving board, where we were in and out of the water all day long. We had swim lessons there, and played pool games like Marco Polo and hunts for bracelets thrown down to the bottom of the pool; I remember trying over and over again to stand on a kickboard pushed under the water. My mother liked us to swim there; she didn’t like us to swim in unsupervised rivers and ponds, but we did anyway. We often skinny-dipped in the city reservoir, which was totally not allowed; you could climb the rocks and jump off, and swim under waterfalls. If you held your clothes over your head, swimming across the reservoir was also a shortcut from our house to our friends’.

When I was a teenager, we spent summers in France, where my father was working, and we used to swim at the university pool near our house, which was open to the public. It was an enormous Olympic pool, with a separate diving pool. My brother jumped from the ten meter platform, but I never got higher than the five meter platform. For a few francs (about a dollar) you could rent a large inner tube, about six feet across. But as soon as you put it in the water, piratical teens would board your craft and push you off. Then your gang spent the rest of the afternoon trying to seize someone else’s inner tube, because you couldn’t leave the pool without returning a tube. There were lifeguards, but they refused to get involved in this daily war. That was great fun!  

Kelley Point Park, where the Willamette meets the Columbia river (John Wachunas at Spinlister)

In Oregon, as in New York, we sometimes swim in public swimming pools, and sometimes in the Sandy or the Willamette river. I like both swimming pools and rivers, but adults in American swimming pools are expected basically to swim laps, so I really would rather swim in rivers, where you can play games and socialize in the water, and there aren’t so many rules. A new friend just told me about some swimming holes on the Washougal, a smaller river, that I am looking forward to trying out! 

SM: These days I mostly swim in the salt water of Long Island Sound, or down the shore in New Jersey on family vacation – but I also did a fun swim auto bio for an Australian blog a couple years ago.

KC: Love this! I feel like I’ve gotten to know you a lot better by reading it. I was never a sports team person myself: my swimming has nearly all been with young kids in tow, as a form of child care, so not solitary at all! I’ve done a lot of my swimming with a child lying on my back, holding on loosely around my neck. I can swim breaststroke that way until the child is about five or six, and then they’re too heavy for me to get my head up and catch my breath, and they have to learn to swim on their own… I was super amused to see this image of a Taino or Arawak woman swimming in the same way half a millennium ago: 

SM: I have also spent lots of time swimming with kids on my back or shoulders, though not so much since they’ve grown up. I swim mostly now from the beach down the street from my house, in Branford CT. It’s very much the social hub of the neighborhood, especially in summer – kids and some senior citizens in floaties, the occasional dog, paddle boarders, kayaks, and sailboats all sharing space with open-water swimmers like me. Plus we share the bay with cormorants, osprey, and an increasing population of menhaden (“bunker” or “pogies”), which have had their populations rebound since we moved here twenty-five years ago. I love seeing a cormorant come up from a dive with a fish in its mouth bigger than its own head! 

I had a dip in the Willamette a few years ago – maybe 2019? pre-Covid, anyway – and it seems like a great place to swim!

KC: It really is: not too cold in the summer, calm and placid, and (now that it has been cleaned up) clean! We’re fortunate to have it so close. You’re very fortunate to live within a short walk of the beach, though, and to have social swimming so easily available! 

Let’s start with some spicy bites to get the taste in your mouth —

• One highlight was Nikki Crawford’s Tedra (Gertrude) in her short shorts and skimpy top getting a bit too close to Dave & Steph Hershinow, who were sitting in the front row. Tedra insisted that “you look down on me, don’t you?” The lady protested just the right amount.
• Of the several shout-outs to Big Will, I think my favorite was the moment when Billy Eugene Jones’s Rev (Claudius) rushed out to present a huge tray of BBQ, shouting in triumph, “It’s all in the rub!” Not to be out-done, Marcel Spears’s Juicy (Hamlet) quipped bitterly from the side-stage, “Ay, there’s the rub.”
• Maybe I’m just missing ribs after a half-dozen years as a vegetarian, but at the end of the night I kept repeating in my mind one of Hamlet’s snide remarks about his mother’s remarriage, in which he tells Horatio that “the funeral baked meats / Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables” (1.2.179-80). I especially love the adverb “coldly,” which describes the physical state of the leftovers while also voicing moral disapproval. But in Fat Ham, the meat is always hot, tender, dripping off the bone.

It’s a spicy, sweet play down at the Public Theater on Lafayette Street through July 15. I drove home thinking about smoked pork ribs as metaphors and material. The family business in James Ijames’s Pulitzer Prize winning play is barbeque, not Denmark. Killing swine to slow-smoke the meat and serve it in a tasty sauce makes a complex symbol for man’s work, but in Jones’s first moments on stage playing the ghost of Pap (Old Hamlet) he insists that it’s all about how you use the knife. He wants Juicy to butcher his uncle like a hog, “the way I showed you.” (Jones played both brothers, the dead Pap and the living Rev, in a nice casting touch that confused Juicy and titillated Tedra.) But if violence was Pap’s command to Juicy, Rev’s cooking and his dedication to making the meat succulent (did he ever say the meat was “juicy”? I’m not sure, but that’s the idea) suggested that violence isn’t the only way to make flesh tender. In Shakespeare’s play, Claudius is a Machiavellian mastermind. In Ijames’s, Rev is a good cook. Two different ways to modify the flesh around you!

According to both the dead father and the live uncle, the problem with Juicy, is that he’s “soft.” But the truth is, everyone in the play wants bites of tender flesh. Especially Juicy’s! (A note I found the next day in the Playbill, from the playwright: “This play is offering tenderness next to softness as a practice of living.” Soft and tender does it…)

[The spoilers start here, so if you’re planning to get downtown by July 15, maybe wait to read more…]

We all know Hamlet operates through hidden trauma – the prince’s inner curse may arise from ghostly visitation, existential insight, or blood-deep melancholy, but the lure of some hidden knowledge is the thing that centuries of actors and audiences have tried to dig into. In Ijames’s brilliant generational twist on Shakespeare’s paradigmatic structure, Juicy’s secret is queerness. But it turns out that everyone knows about it already — “You like boys, right?” says his straight-talking Mom, about mid-way through the action — and besides all the second-generation figures in this story are queer. Adrianna Mitchell’s Opal (Ophelia) and Juicy love each other, but they’re not looking for any cis-het action. Calvin Leon Smith’s Larry (Laertes) starts deep in the closet, in military uniform, while stoned Tio (Horatio), performed when I saw the show by the brilliant understudy Marquis D. Gibson, is so liberated that he debates a career in online porn before his show-stopping performance of an erotic encounter with a video game. In a world where the adult men are murderers, hog butcherers, and overly dramatic cooks, the queer generation rejects the drives and ambitions that Pap and Rev represent. Nobody wants to inherit this BBQ!

Plays are systems and characters aren’t people, so I don’t have favorite characters in Hamlet. But if I did they would be Gertrude and Polonius, played here as a pair of knowing, show-stopping women. Tedra (Gertrude) in shorts and a halter-top pranced about the stage, while Benja Kay Thomas as Rabby (Polonius) was resplendent in a purple dress and o’er-spreading hat. The two women formed an excessively hetero-sexed bridge between the killing and cooking older men and the queer kids. I loved seeing these two play as a team.

Juicy holds a kitchen knife a few times, and he fake-boxes with Rev, but he’s not the killer that Shakespeare’s hero perhaps reluctantly becomes. Juicy repents his one supreme moment of cruelty, outing Larry to his family, but at the play’s end it turns out that having one’s true self exposed isn’t destructive — in fact it enables a cross-dressed Larry to capture center stage for the final dance number. In Ijames’s dramatic world, you don’t have to kill or cook to survive. Playing is the thing, and also singing.

The bad old Rev still to go, and in a delicious pun he chokes on his own delectable pork rib. Juicy attempts a Heimlich, since he seems to be the only one who knows how to do it (perhaps because of his few semesters in Human Relations online at the University of Phoenix?), but Rev pushes him away in a bout of homophobia that, quite rightly, prevents his future breathing. Once the old man is down, the assembled cast seems ready to follow well-read Juicy’s instructions about how the story ends: “we’ll all kill each other.” Opal, who had always wanted to be a marine like her brother Larry, seems quite keen on some bloodshed. But then Juicy, in a glorious moment of intertextual revelation and discovery, realized that the group didn’t have to follow the old tragic story anymore. Why not live, instead?

Before the play, I had dinner with my friend and one-time teacher, Susanne Wofford, whose class on Shakespeare in the summer of 1994 changed my life and set me down the professional path I’m on now. She mentioned that she felt that Hamlet has become, in recent years, the most omnipresent of Shakespeare’s plays. She wasn’t sure why. There’s a way, it seems to me, that plays like King Lear and The Tempest may speak more directly to the looming ecological catastrophe of the present day. But after watching Fat Ham, I drove home to the utopia of coastal Connecticut thinking that Hamlet, perhaps more than any other tragedy, represents a vision of politics and succession as a prison, a locked box from which there is no escape. That no-future world feels perilously close today. The innovation of this brilliant, funny, exuberant response to Shakespeare was to unlock the box, to imagine a future of queer possibilities, to give into excess, and to laugh.

It’s not always clear to me, as we limp through pandemics, heat waves, and sclerotic politics, that we can follow Juicy’s turn into a happier generation. But I’d like to think so!

What a show!

I spent my second-breakfast visit to see Macbeth on Broadway in the company of a childhood friend who I don’t see nearly enough these days. After the show I was thinking about community, comedy, and a little about Terry Eagleton. In Eagleton’s famous (to Shax profs) reading of the play back in the 1980s, the witches are the heroines of the story, marginalized women who subvert established power structures with their riddling speech and multiple ambiguities. I often bring up this interpretation in class, in part to emphasize that the witches’ prophecies connect to British history, particularly in act 4, when they show Macbeth a line of kings stretching out to the crack of doom, perhaps reaching all the way to Shakespeare’s witch-obsessed king James I. I like to suggest to my students that the witches, in narrative past of the play’s sources, imagined the future of Stuart rule in England during which the play was first staged. The witches’ world, for Shakespeare and his audience, both reached deep into a mythic past, and also very much was happening right now.

Many of my students resist my efforts to rehabilitate the “secret, black, and midnight hags.” (The Broadway version, with its race-conscious casting influenced by the brilliant Ayanna Thompson’s dramaturgy, cut the word “black” in Macbeth’s line, at least last night. Most, but not all, the witches’ parts were played by Black actors.) It’s not easy to rehabilitate the eldritch forces of prophecy, either in Eagleton’s Marxist version or in the more communitarian vein that I sometimes try to suggest. But watching Macbeth last night at the Longacre Theatre on Broadway, I kept glimpsing hints in which the witches represent community, or perhaps even something close to comedy in the generic sense – not so much jokes, though there were more laugh lines in this production than in most versions of the Scottish play that I’ve seen, but instead as social cohesion in the face of disorder. Comic unity, I came to think as I weaved through crowded crosstown sidewalks after the show, was at the heart of Sam Gold’s typically inventive show.

It helped that I’d seen the production before, in previews on Big Will’s birthday in April. That meant I was prepared for the final tableau, in which after the good Mac[duff] kills the bad Mac[beth], the whole cast slumped against the back stage wall where they shared bowls of soup and listened to Bobbi Mackenzie’s lovely acapella singing of Gaelynn Lea’s folk song “Perfect,” the chorus of which provides a healing balm for the preceding bloodshed. “It’s not perfect,” she sings, presumably referring to all the tragic events but possibly also to the performance itself. It’s not perfect, the assembled cast seemed to say through their collective presence, but we’ve built it together.

The soup in the bowls, which even from the second row of the orchestra last night I couldn’t get a good look at, came from the witches kitchen. In that strange post-play moment, the shared food staged community, as the witches had in many of their scenes. The playbill lists five actors playing the “Coven” of witches, which expands the Three Sisters of Shakespeare’s text in what I took to be a very deliberate choice: the witch family comprised one of the biggest clans in the kingdom. When all the actors sat and supped together at the play’s end, the cast itself became integrated into the witches’ group. The play’s final unity was inside the world of the Weird Sisters. Notably, the final political pronouncement of the new King Malcolm, in which the Scottish thanes get promoted, or re-named, as (English? British?) earls, was omitted in this production. The happy performative family was the family of the imperfect speakers, the cooks, the future-knowers, the bubbles of earth and air.

Thinking about that moment of theatrical union as a fundamentally comic, in some bizarre way a Scottish version of the quadruple marriage and divine visitation that ends As You Like It, helped me make sense of the presence of comedy in the central action. Paul Lazar’s Duncan, as I noted in my April review, was more comic than I’ve ever seen the about to be murdered king. His shift from playing the role of dead Duncan to living Porter was artfully staged, and it reminded me of how cleverly Gold had maneuvered the body of Polonius in the Hamlet he directed with Oscar Isaac at the Public Theater in 2017. A more sinister aspect of Lazar’s comic King that I hadn’t noticed last time was his leering attitude toward the in-this-cast female Banquo, played by Amber Grey. It made me think that this staging entertained the idea of a different, and more immediate, way to make the children of Banquo kings. That sexual narrative remained implicit only, mainly through Lazar’s king being handsy and crude, but it suggested another way in which the Macbeth narrative, driven by the urge toward sudden violence, contrasted with the larger worlds of erotic and political possibilities suggested by Duncan and Malcolm, perhaps also by Banquo and the Macduffs, and above all, in this production, the witches.

The other major comic figure in the production was the brilliant Michael Patrick Thornton, who played Lennox, one of the Murderers, and also performed an oddly compelling stand-up routine at the start of the play, in order to make sure the Broadway audience knew about the superstitions about naming the Scottish play and also about King James’s witch obsession. Thinking about it now, beyond Thornton’s easy charisma and generous stage presence – I want to see him play all the parts! — I’m struck that, like the post-action song and soup ensemble, his opening monologue provided the other half of the pair of comic jaws inside which Gold placed Shakespeare’s tragedy.

Is that emphasis on meta-comedy enclosing the tragic core the “right” way to play Macbeth? Beats me. It’s not the usual way. My basic position is that all Shakespeare’s tragedies contain comic threads, as all the comedies have tragic movements, and the romances and histories walk across sides of the street. I love the idea of building and celebrating a comic superstructure that surround the uber-violent ambition of the central couple in Macbeth. I wonder a bit about whether someone who doesn’t know the play well, or who is seeing it for the first time, would react to Gold’s semi-arcane machinations. But I enjoyed trying to puzzle it out!

The main reason to get to the Longacre between now and the end of the play’s run in early July is Ruth Negga’s incandescence, especially in her solo scenes, when she unsexes herself in act 1 and sleepwalks in act 5. I also thought Daniel Craig’s performance had mellowed slightly from the preview I saw in April – he leaned into the intimacy that we who have spent years with his James Bond feel. Even in his moments of rage – “Full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife,” he shouted red-faced at his Lady in act 3 — Craig connected to the crowd, sometimes through a comic aside or gesture. At the end of the performance he slumped against the stage wall, visibly exhausted, happy, surrounded by his community.

Building that kind of community in the face of a violent world is not a bad way to think about what live theater does. I’m not sure this Macbeth is perfect, but I’m glad to have seen it twice.

Man thinks, ’cause he rules the earth, he can do with it as he please,

And if things don’t change soon, he will

Bob Dylan, “License to Kill” (1983)

Who gets a license to kill? To which individuals do we extend permission to commit violence, in the name of the state or of justice, or sometimes just to please an eager audience? What does our apparently endless capacity to consume images and representations of violence say about ourselves?

These were the questions on my mind as I squeezed into a balcony seat at the Longacre Theater on Broadway last Saturday afternoon to see one of the final preview performances of Sam Gold’s new production of Macbeth. This production, full of Gold’s usual creativity, was dominated by its stars, Daniel Craig as Macbeth and Ruth Negga as Lady Macbeth. Craig’s presence on stage presented three different ways to think about the license to kill – through the figure of Macbeth the ambitious regicide, through Agent 007 the state-sponsored assassin, and through Bob Dylan’s 1983 song. The truth of the show, as I had expected, was that Ruth Negga’s performance generated the theatrical high point. But Craig’s brooding presence, his familiar physicality, provided a visual, tactile symbol of how our culture thinks about masculinity, violence, and sex appeal. Much as I might want to refuse to grant the license, it’s hard to deny it in performance.

Dylan’s song “License to Kill” appeared in 1983 on the Infidels album that represented one of many come-back moments in the long career of America’s only living Nobel laureate in literature. Better known now as Dylan’s return to secular music after three evangelical albums, I remember Infidels as the sound track to my junior year in high school. The song “License to Kill” doesn’t overtly refer to the British secret service agent invented by Ian Fleming and popularized on the big screen since the early 1960s, but I find it hard to imagine Dylan, magpie repurposer of pop culture, wasn’t thinking about James Bond. The song attacks the killer-hero who “worships at an altar of a stagnant pool, / and when he sees his reflection, is fulfilled.” Narcissism seems a vice common to both 007 and Macbeth. Dylan’s penultimate stanza extends the accusation: “Oh, man is opposed to fair play / He wants it all and he wants it his way.” The license to kill includes ambition, a will to power, and a capacity for violence. These are the things that rule and ruin the world.

At least in the preview I saw, it took Craig a few scenes to warm up to that level of force and menace. He seemed a tad confused by the Weird Sisters, who were presented casually, three folks in hoodies dicing up vegetables for a stew, unlike many other versions of them that I’ve seen on stage or screen. But when Craig stood downstage for the soliloquy in which Macbeth debates the murder he and his wife had planned, he came into his own. His compact posture, coiled-spring poise, and visible capacity for violence devoured our attention:

If ’twere done, when ’tis done, ’twere well

It were done quickly…

1.7.1-2

I don’t always love seeing movie stars gobble up all the big Shakespeare roles on stage, but it was impossible to read that moment outside of Craig’s five films and fifteen years as Agent 007. Our eyes have been trained to read him through his capacity for sudden murder. The urgency of Macbeth’s language, his desperate need to “jump the life to come” (1.7.7), surrender to “vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself / And falls on th’other” (1.7.27-28), operated in that moment through the long cultural shadow of James Bond.

Shakespeare’s play, among other things, clearly intends to explore how the world appears to a man of violence. Even before we see him onstage, we’re told that Macbeth has “unseamed [his foe] from the knave to the chops” (1.2.22). He has a particular intimacy with killing, as the name “Bellona’s bridegroom” (1.2.55) suggests. For millions of movie theater-goers who don’t shell out Broadway prices for Shakespeare, the name “James Bond” conjures comparable feelings of power, sexuality, and ruthlessness.

Both killers are also lovers, though the new-partner-in-every-film progress that Bond has made over the decades contrasts sharply with Macbeth’s marriage. I always feel, watching this play, that the gradual separation of the married couple after the banquet scene (3.4) represents the emotional cost that both lovers will later pay in blood. Their early intimacy is horrific and gruesome, but I always miss it. (Probably my favorite of many good productions I’ve seen over the years was by the English troupe Cheek by Jowl; they hit the love plot hard.)

Ruth Negga, who played one of the most vibrant Hamlet’s I’ve seen just before Covid closed the theaters, was brilliant as Lady Macbeth. While I wasn’t certain that she and Craig matched themselves perfectly with each other in the early scenes between them, she equalled, or maybe exceeded, his intensity of focus. Her show-stopper, and the most emotionally powerful moment in the show for me, was the “Out, damned spot” speech in 5.1. Early on in Covid I read someplace that this speech takes about 20 seconds to recite, which meant that for many long months after March 2020, I washed my hands slowly to its awkward rhythms —

Out, damned spot: out, I say. One, two. When then tis time to do’t. Hell is murky. Fie, my lord, fie, a soldier, and afeared? What need we fear? Who knows it when none can call our power to account? Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?

5.1.35-40

Negga’s sleepwalking performance of these well-known lines brought out their disjunction and physicality. While the doctor and nurse watched, gasping at the crime she revealed, Lady Macbeth’s isolation controlled the stage. She wasn’t as fast-moving as she had been while in antic mode as Hamlet, but if anything the sleepy compression made the emotional force stronger. I hope she gets a lot more big roles, both male and female parts!

Thinking about Ruth Negga’s brilliance brings me back to Dylan’s song, which alternates between attacks on the man with the license to kill and appeals to the “woman, on my block” who laments his violence. As with some other songs on Infidels, the conservative gender roles – man the killer, woman the healer – feel crude. But the juxtaposition of play and song also recalled for me a scene from Daniel Craig’s first Bond film, Casino Royale (2006), which explicitly framed Bond as one-upping Macbeth. After a bloody shootout with some bad guys, Bond’s love interest, Vesper, sits disconsolate in the shower, trying in vain to scrub blood off her fingers. The secret agent joins her, as Macbeth never joins his mad wife. Bond kisses the blood from each finger, as Macbeth never even tries to do. Vesper will die at the end of the film, after ambiguously betraying Bond, and the closing line that the film cribs from Fleming’s original 1953 novel – “The job is done, and the bitch is dead” — rings hollow in the face of the hero’s emotional devastation, a despair still visible in the opening scenes of Craig’s final Bond performance, No Time to Die (2021). In this movie, and perhaps throughout the five Daniel Craig Bond films, 007 became a Macbeth with at least some kind of moral center, as well as some kind of allegiance to queen and country. Or at least that was part of the story.

The last few things I’ll mention in this short & impressionistic review, which I’m sketching out on the day after the performance but won’t post until the play officially opens on 4/28, is the powerfully performed sense of community among the cast. That solidarity pushed back in interesting ways against the solitude of the two stars. From my vantage on the balcony I could glimpse backstage to watch the actors hugging in preparation for the opening curtain. In the liminal time just before the show started, the witches wandered back and forth with kitchen knives and vegetables; more exotic ingredients would come later. The production, directed by Gold in consultation with two brilliant dramaturgs, Ayanna Thompson and Michael Sexton, present the cast as a fluid unity, distinctly diverse, and not just in race and gender – Asia Kate Dillon, who played Malcolm, is non-binary, and Michael Patrick Thornton, who played Lennox, is disabled and uses a wheelchair. The original music, including a haunting final song, was composed by the disabled violinist and folk singer Gaelynn Lea. In an informal prelude that was also part birthday celebration – I saw the play on Big Will’s 458th birthday – Thornton wheeled himself to center stage to tell stories about King James’s love for witches, and also about our love for Shakespeare. Playing the part of Lennox, and also gobbling up some of Ross’s part, Thornton maintained a special intimacy with the audience.

[Some staging spoilers follow!]

There were not quite as many of the aggressive stage coups I’ve come to associate with Gold’s directing — I’ve seen his great Hamlet and his a bit less great Lear in the past half-dozen years — but probably the most striking moment saw Paul Lazar’s King Duncan, just after being murdered, slough off his bloody belly-pillow and slouch forward to perform the part of the Porter. It was a great surprise and bit of meta-theater, and it made me think about the way in which Lazar’s King had all along been playing for more laughs that I would expect from the part. Is there something comic about the good King who the Tyrant murders? I suspect so – I’ve got a blue humanities reading of the play in which Duncan, and to some extent his son Malcolm, represent a green ecology of agriculture and growth, against which the Macbeths represent blue oceanic violence, velocity, and tyranny. By making Duncan not just the planter of seeds but a cracker of jokes, Gold opened up that reading – perhaps wider than I want it open?

The final moment of the play calls for the tyrant’s bloody head to be displayed to the audience. Perhaps knowing that the fans don’t want to see that happen to the movie star we’ve paid to see, Gold closed out his production with a nod toward Craig’s head and a gorgeous communal folk song shared by the entire cast, sitting together onstage. It was a strange, compelling, counter-intuitive moment. There’s a way in which performances of Macbeth can feel like iterations of a ritual. Several film versions, including Roman Polanski’s in 1971 and Joel Coen’s in 2021, end with hints that the cycle could start again soon. Gaelynn Lea’s folk song, the chorus of which I think went, “It’s not perfect” (or maybe “I’m not perfect”?) brought the shattered kingdom together. The meta-theatrical emphasis on continuity and community fit together the reconstituted kingdom. The long-term prophecy that Banquo’s heirs will rule Scotland points to Shakespeare’s own monarch, King James, ruler of both Scotland and England. But in the present of the play, Malcolm – not an ancestor of James Stuart – reigns, the “butcher and his fiend-like queen” (5.9.35) are dead, and “the time is free” (5.9.21). Is that complex mixture of fictional and historical pasts, presents, and futures what “it’s not perfect” is meant to recall?

It was great to be back in the theater! Still some (expensive) tickets available through July 10.

A piece of it snapped into place on Saturday morning when I had snuck away from the Hyatt, quite far from the conference panels. As the merry shaxsters professed and queried, my little bark was bouncing into the white-capped mouth of the St. John’s river, heading back into a sharp west wind after a chilly morning’s offshore fishing with my Dad. That’s when I figured out how to make sense of the ghostly sensations of #shax2022. We shax-ers are used to being the melancholy prince, the one who knows the secrets and critiques the actors, who interrogates audiences, plays with pirates, torments innocent young women, and doesn’t understand his mother. The star among stars, that piece of work, machine, vehicle, corpse.

But what if we’re not that one, nor were meant to be? I think that one of our absent colleagues got the story right in a tweet from Irish post-RSA Covid-jail – this year especially, we’re the Ghost. Remember me? What if the revenant’s plea is more desperate hope than paternal order? Remember the SAA? The way it used to be? The way we maybe kinda want it to be again?

Well, here’s the truth, at least as I feel it from home the next day – my beloved conference, the one I grew up in as an academic, isn’t the same thing, anymore – but it’s still a pretty good thing. Change disrupts us all, but, even though neither of the boys Hammie ever manage to figure it out, change isn’t only for the worse. The spectral feeling of #shax2022, with ghosts tweeting in from Dublin, Buffalo, LA, Wittenberg, Atlanta, and other places – all these things might yet resolve themselves into a trajectory that’s more sea coast of Bohemia than dreary old Elsinore. Or at least that what I’m hoping, as I tap out this blogdraft on my laptop homeward bound at the airport while the rest of the conference gets ready for the 50th anniversary dance.

Mulling my usual bloggy recap reminds me that, after two years chock-full of Zoomtopian adventures, in-person conferencing feels exhausting and overflowing. I loved the panels and seminars that I was able to catch, I was energized and pleased by how well the seminar I organized and chaired, #s31 “Rethinking the Early Modern Literary Caribbean” went on Friday morning, and I’ll say some things about all these more or less official bits of content in due course. But by far the best parts were the unpredictable joys of in-person ness, the Brownian motion (named for the botanist Robert Brown, but I know we’re all thinking Urn Burial) of the assorted receptions, the chromatic cornucopia of even this year’s smaller than usual book exhibit – that’s the stuff that’s hard to get on the small screen. I was happy to be back in it.

I don’t want to minimize the risks of having this kind of event during a global pandemic, and although I was happy to mask up indoors, I don’t think we should be under any illusions that we weren’t engaging in some virus-supporting behaviors. I lost a seminar participant to the RSA variant, and although I tried to Zoom him into the room at SAA, it didn’t work. Hybrid conferencing is hard, expensive, and perhaps in the current reality not fully operative – but I also hope that we can keep speculating our way toward more accessible and inclusive events, even if it’s not clear how all those things can be balanced equitably and practically.

[A parenthetical note – I know many people were upset bc Thursday’s reception was moved inside, an objectively riskier setting. The violent thunderstorm that soaked the outdoor venue around 4:30 was pretty much as predicted, but the truth is – as the staff at the Hyatt knows well – those sorts of storms punctuate spring and summer afternoons in north Florida, which my seminar would include inside an extended Caribbean region. I would have preferred to be outside too, and I regret excluding those who weren’t comfortable with indoor wine chats. But even in our Anthropocene context in which even the weather is “our fault” on some level, I’m not sure we can pin this one on the SAA-powers that be. So foul and fair a day, &c.]

I had a typically ornate triple-barreled intro to my seminar on Friday morning, and I’ll re-purpose it here as a “lessons from #Shax2020” frame before chatting about things I learned from my brilliant colleagues throughout my days at the conference. I started my seminar with three quick contexts for my seminar and maybe the whole gathering —

1. I opened by calling attention to the Indigenous Timucuan people, who stewarded these lands and waters for many generations. While lacking knowledge or expertise myself, despite having family living in greater Jacksonville, and while also aware that the super-fast “land acknowledgement” can be pretty thin beer – I wanted to pronounce (or maybe mispronounce) the word “Timucuan,” as a prompt to memory, and as something that deserves more of our time and attention.
2. I also opened my seminar by talking about the weather – to emphasize the Caribbean context of the unsettled, violent, and sudden storms we saw on Friday, and also the sudden drop in temperature on Saturday. We talked a fair amount about the long reach of the Caribbean in the seminar – New Orleans and Jax are definitely Caribbean locales, but what about Virginia? Bermuda? An octopus-armed region started to take shape in our conversations…
3. I also recalled the early modern colonial settler history of the Jacksonville area, including Fort Caroline, the 16c French Huguenot settlement that I brought a few of my early-arriving seminar members to the site of on Wednesday afternoon, and also, about 40 miles to the south, the city of St. Augustine, settled by the Spanish in 1565, which proudly proclaims itself the oldest European settlement in the United States. As one of my seminar participants recalled in the context of Puerto Rico, the long history of Anglo colonization of this region isn’t only in the past.

Also one more thing about my seminar – I was so amazed by and grateful for the contributions of my two non-Shakespeare invited participants, early modern historian Molly Warsh and blue ecologist Sid Dobrin. Having their breadth of expertise and alternative perspectives in the room challenged us to think beyond literary narrowness – plus I felt so lucky to share their company and good humor throughout the conference.

More non-Shax guests at SAA, please!

And if you’ve not read Molly’s amazing study of the 16c pearl industry in the Americas, American Baroque: Pearls and the Nature of Empire, or Sid’s Blue Ecocriticism and the Oceanic Imperative — read them, soon! I hope you learn as much from them as I have.

So — enough about my seminar! What about everyone else’s presentations?

I loved the hybrid seminar that Hillary Eklund and Debapriya Sarkar (with help in absentia from Ayanna Thompson) ran, which explored how we might meaningfully connect recent work on premodern critical race studies and ecocriticism. This seminar ran in parallel with an online seminar on Wed that I missed, and both were also, in a sense, sequels of the stunning Zoom panel that Hillary, Debapriya, Ayanna, and Kim Hall ran in 2021. I’m not sure anything can top the “Becoming Undisciplined” linked presentations in 2021 for imagination and style, and in some ways it was perfectly appropriate, if incongruous, that I listened to that session in my earbuds while tromping the squishy woods of Connecticut in mud season. Some parts of that strangeness fell away this year in the Hyatt’s conference room. The 2022 in-person seminar was brilliant, and featured the work of many people I admire greatly and others who I’m looking forward to learning more about. Ayanna’s remote response asked how “elastic” a category we want race to be. I wondered the same thing about “ecology,” which can often be deployed as metaphor without much matter. Maybe the Venn diagram overlap of these two expandable methodological terms is not the thing we need to find? Maybe instead we might seek the value of shifting across and between race and eco-thinking? It also occured to me as I listened to this seminar’s patient explorations that identities and communities always shape how each of us as individual scholars and humans can (or should) explore ideas. I can’t think about premodern critical race studies without being a white suburban ecotheorist who loves water and wild places, even as I at least try to recognize how access to the watery practices that I love and that have shaped me have themselves been so distorted by racist histories in modern America and elsewhere.

The conversation got pretty meta in the prcs/eco seminar, and it was a jolt to dive next into the technical waters of the panel on Shakespeare’s Editors, organized by Claire Bourne and Molly Yarn. In the seminar there had been some perfectly justified grumbling about excesses of Shax-centrism, and some wondering if we had to drag old bald Will with us everywhere we go. The turn from the broad political urgencies of environmentalism and racial justice to the close-in labors of, to take the first paper, female textual editors who published Malone Society editions between the wars in England, could have felt like a narrowing. But – and maybe this was the moment that I remembered that I am, for better or not, very deeply a Shakespearean – by going through those editorial technicalities with this panel, digging into those Malone Society manuscripts, John Milton’s (!) copy of Shakespeare, and, in a final paper that I found deeply moving, the very 1964 Signet Classics edition of Shakespeare’s sonnets that I read in high school around 1980, the panel ended up with some powerful conclusions about the legacies of misogyny and homophobia both inside and beyond academic culture. The political edge of these papers came somewhat indirectly – a key, and utterly devastating, point in the final paper asked us to read the absence of notes to one of the young man sonnets as evidence of things that could not be said during the Lavender Scare years – but not the less powerful because of their indirection.

The panel that to a substantial extent married the political ambition of the prcs/eco seminar and the literary precision of the panel on editing was the Plenary, which featured Ruben Espinosa, Lisa Barksdale-Shaw, and incoming SAA president Ian Smith speaking about the past fifty years of critical race studies in Shakespeare. Ruben opened with a moving and personal evocation of how he came to Shakespeare and how the Anglo- and Shax-worlds present both borders and bridges. Lisa followed with a complex entanglement of trauma theory, Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, and current neurological understandings of how trauma changes the brain. But the barn-burner, delivered without slides and from a calm, seated posture, was Ian’s extraordinary argument that “rugged Pyrrhus, he whose sabled arms / Black as his purpose, did the Night resemble” (Hamlet 2.2) might in fact be…Black. For an audience that has collectively been learning to see race in Shakespeare, not least from Kim Hall, Ayanna Thompson, Margo Hendricks, and the other #raceb4race luminaries whose names and arguments were often cited in this panel and elsewhere, Ian’s talk was an amazing display of asking us to read carefully the thing we’ve not seen that has been under our noses all this time. What is Blackness in Hamlet? Not just the prince’s “customary suits of solemn black” (1.3)!

What struck me most powerfully from Ian’s resonant talk was its close, patient, formal (even formalist?) insistence on attending to things in our most famous text that we’ve been reluctant (or unable, or unwilling) to recognize. For the son of Achilles, dripping with blood and hot for revenge, to be Black reanimates the color-language of this hyper-canonical play, and perhaps that reanimation might also extend to some larger questions surrounding western Europe’s legacies from the Eastern world of Homer’s Troy. Perhaps because it followed Ruben’s personal honesty and Lisa’s ambitious synthesis, Ian’s talk engaged politics through that most traditional and fundamental act of literary practice – just read the text, and follow where it leads. I’m always stunned, and elated, by how endlessly generative this most basic act of literary analysis can still be.

Which is why, I guess, even though I was a plane during the dance, missed the Saturday morning talks to go fishing, wasn’t there for the 50th anniversary toast, and even skipped the terrific early Friday line-up for a pre-seminar swim — I still find my ghostly self in my community at SAA. Even old Will may have some kicks left in him. He’s got lots of problems and contains corrupts legacies, as of course I also do myself. It’s our job to surface these truths. But there are still multitudes, more than dreamt in our philosophies.

It might be a bit chilly in Minneapolis in 2023, in the cruel month of April. But I can’t imagine I’ll be able to stay away!

Thanks to everyone who I saw, the many more who I missed, and people following remotely. It was great to conference with you again!

I’m just back from a fantastic short visit to the English department of Auburn University, where I gave a talk on Elizabethan fiction and genre theory, and also joined a grad seminar to talk more broadly about literary studies in the twenty-first century. It was a pleasure to return to some of the topics and authors of my earlier academic work, including the dissertation I wrote in the ’90s and the books and articles that grew out of it, before the oceanic turn that I made sometime around the late ’00s.

But since I very seldom can avoid talking about the things that I’m thinking about right now, the talk finished up discussing how the two metaphors I had used for different ideas of generic plurality — clouds and oceans — also relate to the blue humanities project that’s on my plate for the rest of ’22. Here, for anyone interested, are the couple of paragraphs that’ll get reworked someplace in the Blue Humanities book I’m writing:

The sixteenth-century humanist and scientist Evangelista Torricelli, inventor of the barometer, once remarked that humans live “at the bottom of a vast sea of air.” Torricelli accurately described the surface of our planet as covered by two fluid bodies, a heavy and liquid one above which humans usually float or stand, and a lighter gaseous one to the bottom of which we generally sink. This two-part image of two phases of planetary water provides a suggestive way to draw together Nashe’s cloud-pluralism and Lodge’s oceanic rupture. Thinking on a large scale, the ocean represents the principle of narrative fecundity that Salman Rushdie has described as the “sea of stories.” This ocean, which Rushdie constructs as an allegory for literary history and literary culture, divides Lodge’s two symbolic kingdoms, but it also, as Margarita’s long walk shows, enables them to touch each other. Above the ocean, clouds circulate as ephemeral narrative-fragments. Mobile water-in-air structures present all form with no substance, no clear lines of descent or connection but a tantalizing possibility of partial repetition over time. The critic’s task is to assimilate fleeting clouds to the more durable forms of oceanic currents.

I’ll hazard as my final point that these two forms of planetary water, clouds and oceans, might together be integrated into what I’m coming to call an inclusive blue humanities.In this scheme, multiple forms of water shape human bodies, and human histories become legible through our depictions of liquid water, gaseous vapor, and solid ice.The globe-embracing ocean of stories contains and constrains the circulation of literary narratives, texts, cultures, and traditions. Above the great waters, invisible but also circulating, the translucent sea of air overflows with ephemeral story-fragments, forms without substance, lacking clear lines of descent but hanging heavy in the air like humidity in an Alabama summer. To reconcile these two forms of circulation into a single theory of planetary water as subject and driver of human culture remains an unfinished task of twenty-first century ecocritical literary studies

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To complete the trio, I’ll want to describe solid ice alongside liquid and gaseous water. But the idea of a “poetics of planetary water” is something I’ll keep thinking about.

With thanks to Deborah Soloman and the English Department at Auburn for inviting me, and to everyone who came to the talk! And also to Alexis Sterling and friends for local suggestions about food and hiking!