Steve Mentz

Green baseball caps in the audience snuck in a little St. Paddy’s Day festive color, but Beckett’s stripped down refusal to look away from darkness soon settled the house into a chastened silence. Endgame‘s semi-chorus sounds echoingly familiar, almost like Beckett parodying Beckett: “You’re on Earth. There’s no cure for that.” So why did I drive home inside a swirl of imagination?

The short answer is that I’ve rarely seen four better performances on one small stage at the same time.

I was there because I’d never seen a production of this tragedy, though I distinctly remember being blown away by it in college in the 1980s. And I was also there to see John Douglas Thompson play the part of Hamm, immobilized patriarch and tyrant, who bellows his bitterness at his parents — his father Nagg, who he calls “fornicator,” and his mother Nell, both famously confined in garbage cans during the entire performance — and especially at his resentful servant Clov. Thompson’s Hamm was magisterial – I’ve been watching him perform for years, including an astonishingly physical Tamburlaine at Theater for a New Audience in 2014, an open-hearted Satchmo in New Haven, and more recently as Shakespeare’s Kent (2019) and Shylock (2022) in NYC. He’s one of the most generously emotional actors I’ve ever seen; he gathers the whole house into his feelings. As embittered, blind, immobile Hamm, who enjoys lashing out at his father and his servant, Thompson’s empathy-machine is restrained but indomitable. The music of his voice, gestures of his hands, his efforts to get Clov to position his chair just exactly at center stage – it’s hard to imagine a more compelling presentation of rage, confinement, and comic aggression. I suspect I’m not the only one who can’t wait to see his King Lear!

Thompson’s Hamm somehow managed to be both overwhelmingly emotional and palpably restrained. His immobility played against the complex physicality of Bill Irwin’s Clov, who resents his master, serves him, and in the end can’t leave but also won’t reveal his lingering presence to unseeing Hamm. It’s hard to describe the movement patterns of Irwin’s Clov – he managed to make his legs appear as both functional and also structural impediments, moving awkwardly across the stage and up the folding later to the two windows Beckett insisted were the only possible set elements. Clov plays in Hamm’s shadow, but with his expressive clown-trained body he works in comic tension with his master urge to dominate. Through Irwin’s Clov, and especially through his frayed but tangible connection to Hamm, the painful comedy of endurance of Beckett’s undersong shows itself. “There’s nothing funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that. Yes, yes, it’s the most comical thing in the world.”

A more nostalgic and sentimental form of comedy comes from the parents-in-garbage-cans, played by the engaging Joe Grifasi and dazzling Patrice Johnson Chevannes. They reminisce about their lives before they were frozen into stage-cans, and before Chevannes’s Nell apparently dies (or at least vanishes inside her can and stops responding) they present a glimpse of light that can’t quite touch the painful duet of Hamm and Clov.

Like Laura Collins-Hughes in the Times, I appreciated the play’s comic touches, even or perhaps especially the bitter ones. But my lasting image of the show features Thompson returning a stained cloth – “old stauncher!” – to his unseeing eyes while Clov, dressed to travel but remaining in place, stares with us as the set fades to black. Might the whole thing be Beckett’s refusal of the advice that Kent gives to his master in act 1: “See better, Lear!” Instead, how about we don’t see at all!

I talked briefly with Irwin and Thompson after the show, since I was also catching up with my friend Ayanna Thompson, who knows everyone. They both mentioned that a hearing aid started buzzing a few times during the performance, and Thompson, who played Hamm’s blindness behind dark goggles that meant he really could not see, got disoriented. Irwin’s Clov tried, successfully as far as we in the audience could tell, to feed the lines that momentarily vanished. There’s something about that stage moment – an actor loses his way, and must rely on his co-star, who of course can’t speak the missing lines, only prompt them – that seems powerfully consonant with Beckett’s unsettling vision of the world as almost-empty stage. What is there to do, as the world doesn’t quite end, but talk, and listen, and help our fellows find the right words?

The website says the show must close on April 16! Get there if you can!

[in which I can’t resist the discourse, after my visit to Tempe synchronized with the latest skyfalling in the national press. With a bonus proposed solution to the butter-beard dilemma, including toast!]

1. The doomstory shows the shape of a slowing river, but we all swim in distinctive little eddies. In the early parts of the decade of decline, enrollments in English at my academic home, St John’s U in New York City, a large Catholic metropolitan uni that doesn’t closely match any of the places described in the article, stayed reasonably solid. Then we ebbed slowly, and only in the past 3 or so years have our numbers taken a dive – which, basically, means we’ve caught up with the flow of the national river, after having resisted for a bit.
2. We need better numbers! I’m not confident in my figures or the precise timing of my local story, and I don’t have an easy way to get better information. I also wonder, both locally and farther away. about two things the NYer glosses over. If the past decade and more has seen a significant rise in “adjacent majors,” new-ish programs like Gender Studies or African-American studies, New Media Studies, Environmental Studies, &c, into which some potential humanities students have been funneling, then a slump in the house of English might not necessarily indicate the decline of the humanities. Have students left for the sciences, or for pre-professional programs, like Business, Education, Pharmacy, or Nursing? The article is slippery in its movement back and forth between “English” and “the Humanities,” and it seems to think that English means only “the study of canonical literature.” Neither of those things is true.
3. The surge in online enrollments that Covid accelerated, also, may be shifting the numbers – ASU’s recent rebound in enrollments appears to include many online students, including non-traditional age students. The Starbucks barista whose tuition is being paid by her corporate overlords makes an appearance! To be clear, I think that’s a very good thing, though I wonder how many universities have the capacity, and the willingness, to expand this way. Maybe we should figure out how to do it! My very rough sense is that both new programs within the humanities and new students supported by online learning may well be significant in shaping the visible decline in old-timey majors like English. Since at most individual institutions we’re really not talking about huge numbers of students overall, we might be misdiagnosing or miscounting, in some cases. Obviously “The End of the English Major” is a prewritten (and oft-repeated) doomstory designed for clicks – but better numbers might lead to a more subtle narrative. (But I am the sort who would want a subtle narrative – I’m an English professor!)
4. Arizona State University, the happiest example of an English department in the NYer, during my short visit felt even happier than the story seems willing to admit. One thing I noticed is that ASU commissioned a marketing firm to help sell its humanities majors. It has used the results of that survey. Those are two good things to do!
5. I don’t believe that students no longer “love” books or stories or made-up things. A love of imaginary objects forms a baseline in human culture, and always has. That love can be a resource for us English profs, but we neither own it nor always know how best to use it. In some ways, a love of books, esp the books we read at an impressionable age, sometimes in the company of charismatic teachers, might be a distraction. (I say this as a Shakespearean, perhaps overly secure in the belief that Big Will will do fine even if he must shed some cultural authority and adapt to new media forms.)
6. The real barriers to the major – leaving aside the question of whether majors and minors are always the best ways to think about college experiences – are fear and money. Those programs are larger than the English department! Some local problems also flow from too much nostalgia, which may not be scary but can certainly feel dull.
7. The folkways through which our profession appears to be responding to this moment, whether critical and diagnostic, as voiced by Columbia’s James Shapiro, or speculative and plaintive, as per Harvard’s Stephen Greenblatt, aren’t going to get the car out of the ditch. I admire the work of both those distinguished figures, but they don’t look good here.
8. Like many of my academic friends, I’ve been mulling the compound adjective “butter-voiced” since I first read the article, which describes ASU’s Dean of Humanities as “butter-voiced, [and] bearded.” What exactly is a buttery voice? Does my old friend Jeffrey Cohen really have a butter voice? What might that succulent and symbolic reference mean? Can we spread his voice on toast? During my visit to Tempe, I did, in fact, eat a deliciously buttered piece of toast at Casa Cohen. Surely all these things can’t be coincidences?
9. Everybody loves to dog-pile the English major, including onetime English majors who now have bylines in The New Yorker. But English is not the humanities, and English is not just great books either. I enjoy great books, old ones and new ones. But books are not the only things we share with our students and communities.
10. The NYer’s tripartite idea of what colleges are – Oxbridge quads or research-focused institutions or glittering multiversities – matches poorly onto the majority of colleges in America, and the world. It’s probably true, though, that most NYer subscribers (including me) went to colleges that fit those models. Much public confusion about higher ed in the US comes from a failure to understand the diversity of institutions we collectively call “college.”
11. Money is always the subtext, whether we’re talking about why students, administrative advisers, and parents worry about English or what the latest fancy building for STEM or the business school looks like. I wonder if we should speak more honestly about money. Plenty of humanities majors do well financially, though as in other areas of the American economy, its helps to start with social and financial capital. The connection between college majors and money might be more oblique that some assume.
12. I admit I’m not sure what to do with our old friends Truth and Beauty, who make an appearance in passing. I like them well enough, but do they really need to hog the limelight?
13. The latest interdisciplinary major at ASU is called “Culture, Technology, and the Environment” – a nice list of terms that could also describe the content of the English courses I’m teaching this semester! What is the value of re-naming? I like culture, I like technology, I like the environment, I like (new and old) media, I like performance…
14. Marketing to new majors can be fraught, since I imagine that many if not most prospective new English majors would come at the expense of our friends down the hall in History and Philosophy, or of bigger majors across campus like Psych or Bio. (The ASU English major who gets the last word in the NYer had started as a Psych major.) At St. John’s, the requirements of the School of Education mean that a significant number of my Shakespeare students who want to be teachers are told they can neither major nor minor in English. Does squabbling over majors really seem like the best thing for profs to do?
15. The best thing about the NYer’s description of ASU was its celebration of the people who comprise English and the Humanities. The students rightly occupied the center of attention, and the long article’s last words were from a newly declared English major at ASU. She “hasn’t told anyone yet” (except the NYer) that she wants to be a novelist. “You never know,” she closes out the final page. “You never know what’s a possibility.” I like “possibility” as the last word on the future of the humanities!
16. I also loved the rich portraits of ASU faculty, including my Shakespearean friends Brandi Adams, whose lively class got portrayed in generous detail, and Ayanna Thompson, who has remade ASU’s Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies as a thriving national hub for #Raceb4Race scholarship and for supporting scholars of color. There’s no livelier or more influential place in early modern studies in America today. One advantage of being big, like ASU, is having space for lots of people, including the ability to hire even in current conditions. Back in Queens, alas, that’s not the way our little world seems to be going. But we are a much smaller place.
17. What’s the moral of the story? Some simple imperatives: Celebrate your people! Market your courses! Invent (or rename) courses, majors, minors! Get help from Deans, or at least figure out ways to smooth out university bureaucracies! Get better numbers, and pay attention to them! Investing in faculty helps too, though perhaps faculty who say so risk seeming self-interested.
18. Those straightforward-sounding things are easier said than done.
19. If butter-voiced means alluring, as I guess it does, maybe the NYer writer was worried that Dean Cohen’s smooth delivery of ASU’s happy story would, if the reporter wasn’t careful, smear up the prewritten story of catastrophe he and his editors have been counting on? Maybe our future can be well-buttered despite it all? Or maybe I just enjoyed visiting friends in the lovely desert last week?

In slightly different world, I’m riding horses, hiking red rock canyons, and visiting old friends and my two year old nephew in the American West this week. In the only world we’ve got, I’m digging out from the only measurable snow we’ve received in the CT shoreline this year, and blogging about the academic part of my Arizona trip. I do love tromping in my local woods in the snow, but…

I spent part of last week at Arizona State University in Tempe, where I traveled to give the inaugural lecture for their new Blue Humanities Institute. I was lucky, when I was there, to overlap with a visit by Erica Fudge, so I got to do a lunchtime conversation with her about the relationships between animal studies and blue humanities, as well as hear her great talk on Hamlet and “being edible” in the Renaissance. Another wonderful treat of spending a few days at ASU was getting to visit, at least briefly, many of the amazing people who are now making, as a current piece in The New Yorker shows, this large public university a vision of possible futures for the humanities. Back now in the chilly East, and having read through the long and overdramatic piece in The New Yorker, with the inevitable click-bait title, “The End of the English Major,” I’m left thinking about how Western ASU feels, in the American sense. The campus teems with new construction, and even its oldest buildings date to the late nineteenth century. It was unseasonably cold and windy when I was there, and we even got a bit of rain, but palm trees, saguaro cacti, and views of rocky peaks combined to make an easterner like me feel the landscape as openness, possibility, and perhaps a little disorientation. I won’t refer back to the NYer article all the way through this blog recap, but the unspoken thesis of the piece showcased Columbia and Harvard as stuck, while ASU appears active and onward-moving, even if all the answers might not yet be clear.

I went out to the Sonora Desert on the invitation of Sir Jonathan Bate, who is heading up the new BH Initiative. I’d not met him before, though his 2000 book Song of the Earth was an inspiration for me, as for many of us who turned toward literary ecocriticism in the 00s. Recent ASU connections (or acquisitions? it’s a bit hard to tell) to research centers in Hawai’i and Bermuda suggest that ASU’s Blue Humanities hub will be well positioned to speak across Atlantic and Pacific contexts. Maybe they need Indian and Southern Ocean toeholds next?

Since ASU, despite its surging novelty and the feeling that changes are being made, teems with Shakespeareans, including Ayanna Thompson who runs the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies as well as the Raceb4Race collective, among many others, I gave a Shakespeare lecture, focusing on the “Coast of Bohemia,” the infamous geographic error at the heart of The Winter’s Tale. In thinking about the play’s combination of fantasy and reality, I opened the discussion with Rachel Carson’s mid-century The Edge of the Sea in dialogue with the Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann’s 1970s lyric, “Bohemia Lies by the Sea.” The point was to introduce Shakespeare through both marine science and poetry. I also asked the sympathetic audience to listen twice to some descriptive phrases that I would apply to both real and imagined coasts:

It’s not a fixed place. There’s no real line in any coastline. Nothing stays still. It’s a jumble, a chaos. Always moving. Everything is re-made, re-imagined, at every instant. Things touch, but not in reliable ways.

That dynamism, alienation, and disorientation captures coasts as physical spaces and imaginative opportunities. I read those words aloud twice, asking everyone to think about the coast of Bohemia as both place and idea. My slide was my local CT coast with Whale Rock. I was so pleased when the playwright Madeline Sayet, who was at the talk, tweeted out that phrase that evening! It’s always fun to speak to a receptive audience.

Coasts of Bohemia are fictive opportunities that shift locations, change shapes, and flow unexpectedly. My local waters, even when forbiddingly cold as they are now, always open spaces for me. The most richly experiential water I found at ASU was in the Mona Plummer Aquatic Complex, where for a glorious half hour I had all the lanes to myself on a brisk Friday morning. I anticipate that the Blue Humanities Initiative will generate many watery insights and connections as it moves forward.

On my last day in AZ, after vacation plans had come undone, I spent a happy afternoon and evening hiking and sipping cocktails with my friend Jeffrey Cohen, who’s been Dean of Humanities at ASU since 2018, and who was described, in that national press article, as “buttery-voiced and bearded.” (Yes, I assume it’ll be on his business cards soon.) He’s one of the speculative engines behind ASU’s growth in the humanities, though he always says that his job is primarily to help other people do the things only they can do. I think of Jeffrey / Dean Butter Beard’s western swing as having grown out from his collaboration with ASU astrophysicist Lindy Elkins-Tanton on the 2017 Object Lessons book Earth. A book co-written by a planetary scientist who is currently leading a research expedition to the metal asteroid Psyche and a medievalist eco-scholar strikes me as exactly the imaginative and generative projects that humanities scholarship, teaching, and even administer-ing needs. Not all moon shots reach their destinations – but it’s exciting to see good things taking shape.

[Cross-posted from the St John’s English blog – 2/23/23]

Sometimes the research and scholarship that we professors do takes us far away from our campus in Queens. I’m back in Queens this semester after spending fall ’22 as a research fellow at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich, Germany. I want to tell my St. John’s community about what happened on the other side of the pond.

A quick note first about the purpose behind this sorts of trips. It’s not that I don’t love teaching SJU students and working with our community in New York. I might note, too, that, through the magic of Zoomtopia, I stayed in contact with several graduate students working on long-term projects while I was overseas. I was part of a remote dissertation defense in October (during my isolation period while not-too-sick with Covid), and I picked up a new McNair undergraduate student mentee while I was away. But the research life of any professor is global in scope, and the insights and networks that I connected with during my time in Europe were massively stimulating, not just for my published research agenda but also for reinvigorating my teaching and community support work here in NYC.

During my leave in F22, I was a residential fellow at the Rachel Carson Center in Germany. I lived in the “Landhaus” in the Bavarian countryside, in an old family farmhouse that has recently been retrofitted to host ten international scholars. We each had our own bedrooms and bathrooms – that was very handy during my Covid isolation! – but we shared a kitchen and often cooked and ate together. The other fellows spanned the globe – Akin from Nigeria, Tamara from Sri Lanka (by way of Cambridge University in the UK), others from India, Hawai’i, California, Wales, different parts of Germany, and elsewhere. There was some friendly tension during the World Cup, especially when the USA beat England 1-1 (a soccer joke), but it was great to have a window into intellectual and academic life around the world. Probably the least concrete but most valuable aspect of this fellowship was seeing how scholars from widely different backgrounds share ideas, methods, and points of view.

The Rachel Carson Center itself, which has its main office in downtown Munich, is the brainchild of Professor Christof Mauch, a German historian who specializes in the environmental history of America. Christof enjoys explaining the name that he chose for the center by saying that most academic organizations in Germany are named for old white German men, and his choice of Rachel Carson, an American woman and public environmentalist hero, distinguishes the kind of work he wants the RCC to support. The center brings together scholars from various places at different career stages, from MA and PhD students to visiting and permanent faculty. Now that I’ve been a residential fellow, I am automatically enrolled as a member of the RCC Society of Fellows, which means that I will stay in contact with the center and possibly participate in and/or help organize future events.

The RCC revolves around a series of weekly events in and near Munich. Each of the fellows gives a public lunchtime lecture on a Thursday. (Here’s a link to mine on the RCC YouTube channel, from November 17.) The center also hosts weekly works-in-progress sessions on Tuesdays. I organized two of those Tuesday events, one on an emerging project of mine about poetry and Moby-Dick in November, and a spontaneous memorial session in October that we shoe-horned into the schedule when we learned of the death, on Oct 9, of the great French environmental philosopher Bruno Latour. Both events brought together different parts of the RCC community to talk about shared ideas, in the case of the Latour session, and about my work in progress, in the November session.

The RCC also hosts public lectures and multiple small events and conferences. In early October, just a few days after I arrived, I attended an amazing day-long conference on the “noosphere,” an environmental concept invented by the French Jesuit philosopher Teilhard de Chardin and elaborated by the Soviet ecologist Vladimir Vernadsky. One of the major speakers at the conference was a Russian environmental historian who had recently, with several of her graduate students, fled Russia in the aftermath of the invasion of Ukraine. In fact, one notable thing about being in Germany during the fall of ’22 was how much closer the Ukrainian conflict felt, from the presence of refugees that made housing for international PhD students hard to find to anxieities about the price of keeping apartments warm during the winter. I remember meeting a very cute corgi dog on the street, and having the owner explain proudly, in really quite good English, that this was a “Ukraine dog,” who had come into exile with her to Germany after the invasion.

The central academic work that I undertook at the RCC was advancing my research agenda, which focuses on the long cultural relationships between humans and water in all its forms. The “blue humanities,” which is what I’ve been calling this academic discourse since the late 2000s, seems alive and thriving in Europe, especially in centers for environmental studies like the RCC. I am happy to report that during my semester in Germany, I published two new articles about the current state of the blue humanities, “A Poetics of Planetary Water,” in the new international Coastal Studies and Society Journal, and “Blue Humanities,” in the massive Palgrave Handbook of Critical Posthumanism, edited by a teach of scholars including Stefan Herbrechter of Heidelberg University.

My primary accomplishment, however, was completing the manuscript of An Introduction to the Blue Humanities, which will appear from Routledge Publishing in July 2023. This book, which will be the first textbook published in this thriving new academic subfield, aims to introduce scholars and students to the features, methods, and benefits of thinking with water across all its forms and histories. Many people I met in Europe this past fall seemed eager to use it in their teaching!

Finally, I was extremly pleased to publish, during my time in Germany, my first-ever purely creative work, the poetry chapbook Swim Poems, published by Ghostbird Press in October. I received the author copies of the poetry book exactly one day before I tested positive for Covid, so I had the company of that lovely little volume during my week of isolation on the farm.

In addition to these publications, I tried to circulate as widely as I could when I was in Europe, sharing my ideas and being in dialogue with faculty and students at environmental humanities centers throughout the continent. This travel was exhausting and exhilarating. I ended up giving six public lectures and multiple workshops in five countries: first in the lovely medieval town of Poitiers, France, in October; twice in Germany, at the RCC in November and at the University. Of Bremen near the Baltic coast in December; a keynote lecture from the tip of a surf-swept peninsula in Peniche, Portugal (just down the coast from Nazare, where they surf the 100-foot waves) on Thanksgiving Day; another public lecture at the Greenhouse in Stavenger, Norway, in early December; and a last lecture at the Environmental Humanities program at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice in mid-December, just before I came home. The Stavanger trip was particularly exciting, not only because I’d never been to Norway, but also because the very active Environmental Humanities program there (“the Greenhouse”) was teaching its first-ever Blue Humanities course to European graduate students, at which I’d been invited to be the inaugural guest professor.

One thing that struck me about how humanities research in Europe differs from United States was the number of multi-year, multi-person projects funded by international or national bodies, often the EU but also various national governments. These projects, like the 4Oceans project that hosted me in Portugal and the Greenhouse in Norway, bring together scholars from all over the world. The connections I made during this semester will shape my research and teaching for the rest of my career.

I’m pleased to be back in the United States and teaching in-person on my beloved Queens campus once again. My time at the Rachel Carson Center has cemented academic and personal relationships that will sustain my research moving forward. I’ve also been given a glimpse into ways of thinking and practicing environmental scholarship that will benefit me, my students, and my colleagues in the future.

It would not have been possible to take up this fellowship without the enthusiastic support of St. John’s University, including my colleagues in the English department and the Deans in St. John’s College of Arts and Sciences. I’m so pleased to have been able to live out SJU’s global mission, and to bring the fruits of those conversations and collaborations, past and future, back to our University.

[In 2023 I’m going to try some public book reviews on the Bookfish, alongside the usual mix of post-conference recaps and theater reviews. I was pretty slow on the blog in ’22. But I like having these early-draft-y ideas collected together, and I am happy to share them.]

Maybe a strange choice for Valentine’s Day reading, but I really enojyed Elizabeth Anker’s new book from Duke UP Of Paradox. She’s in the law and English departments at Cornell, and in a to-me revealing aside late in the book she describes having been driven away “from law and into the arms of the humanities” (264). Her target in this book is capital-T Theory, and in particular the reliance on figures of paradox and contradiction at the center of so many staples of the Theory syllabus. She opens with an engaging reading of Oscar Wilde. We are “all heirs of Wilde,” she suggests, and “an embrace of paradox specifically as a style has united theorists of all inclinations” (2-3, her emphasis).

The core of the book documents how paradox-dependent theoretical writers have been from the late twentieth century into the present. The analysis may not be quite exhaustive, which wouldn’t be possible given the surge of theoretical texts over the past half-century, but it’s certainly exhausting. Part of Anker’s point is to expose what comes to resemble both a widespread stylistic habit and, as the readings accumulate, something like an intellectual event-horizon, a place beyond which no thought travels. Ideas of modernity, the nature of legal rights, aesthetic theory, exclusionary politics, feminism, pedagogy, post-Marxist and psychoanalytic theory, authors from Judith Butler to Gloria Anzaldua to Bhaba, Derrida, Foucault, Jameson, Latour, Said…her bibliography assembles a massive murderer’s row of theoretical luminaries. The case she makes that nearly all of them rely on paradox as style and usually also as method appears, at least to me, overwhelming.

She also notes, in her introduction, that paradox has old roots, some of which she traces in Sir Philip Sidney’s “Defense of Poetry” and Rosalie Colie’s analysis of the “Renaissance tradition of paradox,” as well as examples from literary figures from Wilde to Virginia Woolf. But the assembled evidence that paradoxical thinking provides a through-line for a dominant intellectual tradition of the past half-century seems unawerable.

Thinking about my own writing and my current academic reading, Anker’s book has helped me notice how often I have recourse to paradox as an automatic gesture. Maybe paradoxical thinking is a (the?) dominant microgenre in academic thinking? Anker makes me worry about that automaticity, and think about what other things might be possible.

She takes up the possibility of thinking beyond paradox in a final chapter on “integrative criticism.” Interestingly, her positive models here are in part literary rather than theoretical, Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, with its desire for books that “hold together” (266), and Rankine’s Citizen, which Anker celebrates for its representations of fortitude and “wholeness” (302) even as those sensations contrast with the lived reality of racist microagressions in contemporary America. She also presents a clarifying contrast between the disability theory work of Jasbir Puar, whose The Right to Maim falls into the paradoxical pattern, as opposed to Lennard Davis’s Enabling Acts, which presents a political history of the Americans with Disabilities Act (273-83). These are cogent and clear contrasts, though it’s also interesting that the books she celebrates might not exactly represent the theory genre: A Room of One’s Own might be termed literary nonfiction, Citizen is an experimental poem, partly in prose, and Enabling Acts seems mostly to be a narrative history. Is the point that to escape paradox we need to stray outside of Theory itself?

I’m not sure that’s quite right, since of course Anker’s own book is very much within the theory-mode while also pushing against its paradoxical habits – and surely on some level little seems more typical of Theory than internalized auto-critique. But Anker’s examples, and their cumulative persuasive force, have me thinking about a few perhaps emerging modes of academic and para-academic writing that might, at least indirectly, lead us beyond the cul-du-sac of contradiction.

First, she writes quite a bit about the relationship between law and literary studies. Most of the academic work I’ve done in this topic has come from thinking about The Merchant of Venice or other trial scenes in Renaissance literature. But I’ve lived with lawyers all my life, and there’s something that might be explored about how legal discourse puts a different kind of pressure on the hermeneutic puzzles of language. When faced with an undefinable term – what is “reasonable” “appropriate” “ordinary” – the law responds not with ineffability but with debate and decision. Juries and judges must apply abstract ideas to particular facts, rather than try to solve the interpretive puzzle at scale. I’m not sure that always gets around the problem that there is no fixed meaning of “reasonable” – but certainly it makes interpretive and persuasive discourse work differently in the world.

Second, I was struck by Anker’s celebration of what she calls “modes of experiential immersion, attunement, and harmonization” (271) as alternatives to remaining trapped in the realm of paradox. She doesn’t mean “immersion” in the very literal way that I like to write about it (ie, swimming as ecotheoretical meditation), but I’m also struck that my favorite flavor of 21c Theory, ecotheory, isn’t as well represented in her survey as other modes. Latour is there, but no Haraway, and no Anthropocene either. (Chakrabarty appears, but the postcolonial rather than the environmental work.) I don’t think ecotheory gets a free pass – plenty of paradox-mongering in many of my favs, from Morton to Barad and others – but I wonder if a focus on the nonhuman and the pressure of immersive experience might be in the process of making some kind of response to the highly intellectual loops and dances that have dominated Theory since Derrida’s hey-day.

Last, the focus on Citizen, which is both a great poem and also a text that cites and participates in the discourse of Theory, suggests an interest in creative work as Theory. There’s something of a “creative-critical” boomlet in academic culture in recent years, not just because plenty of academics write both theoretical and creative books but also because of explicit efforts to work across the creative-critical divide. I’m a believer in this kind of work, and in my modest way a practitioner. I wonder what a robust theorization of the creative-critical might look like? I wonder if it could avoid falling in with the familiar patterns of paradox?

In any case – Of Paradox a great book, and everyone should read it! I can’t quite imagine assigning it, even to grad students – it presumes an intimidatingly wide range of reading from the start – but I will certainly be thinking about these ideas moving forward.

Sat 10/1 Arr Mun. S8 > Leuctering > S6 Grafing Bahnhof

Picked up by Moremi & Tina in Noe (red EV)

Sun 10/2 Harvest Market at Herrmannsdorf

Mon 10/3 Oktoberfest last day (with Nye)

Tues 10/4 Christof at Landhaus

Th 10/6 Noosphere conference; first day at RCC

Lunch Katie Ritson

Beers with Nye, Jonathan Palambad, & the Russians

Fri 10/7 Trip to Zugspitze

W 10/12 trip to Poitiers (4:30 am cab > flight to CDG > TGV to Poitiers

Stay in hotel near station 

Th 10/14 Poitiers Conference

Fri 10/14 Poitiers Conference

Sat 10/15 Return to Farm

Th 10/20 Symptomatic. Negative test

Fri 10/20 Feeling better

Sat 10/21 Positive test!

10/21-29 Covid isolation in Bavaria!

Sat 10/29 Fly to Paris; stay in airport hotel

Sun 10/30 Chateau d’Ige

Mon 10/31 Arles

Tues 11/1 Arles

Wed 11/2 Gemenos

Th 11/3 Gemenos – hiking in Calanques + gran menu

Fri 11/4 Gemenos

Sat 11/5 Nice

Sun 11/6 Fly to Munich

Mon 11/7-Th 11/10 Hotel am Markt

Fri 11/11 Train to Venice

Sat – Sun Venice

Mon 11/15 Train to Munich

Tues 11/16 ACS back to USA; SRM back to farm

Th 11/17 RCC Talk (Munich)

Fri 11/18 Lunch with David A. (Munich)

[4 days on farm]

T 11/22 10 am Uwe’s Seminar LMU

stay Novotel Munich airport

W 11/23 Fly Lisbon 6 am; bus to Peniche

Th 11/23 9:45 – 10:45: A Poetics of Planetary Water: Expanding the Blue Humanities

Su 11/27 Return to MUC, arr 23:10

[week on farm]

Finish Blue Humanities book (Mon – Th) 

T 11/29 Christian Schulz 4:30

USA beats Iran 1-0, advances to round of 16

Wed 11/30 Argentina beats Poland 2-0 (Poland advances bc Mexico beats SA by only 1)

Blue Humanities book submitted noon

Th 12/1 Aaron (me introduce)

Germany v Costa Rica (Germany wins 4-2 but is eliminated bc Japan beats Spain)

F 12/2 Poetry event with PhD students at Landhaus

Sat 12/3 Xmas market at Herrmansdorf

stay Novotel Munich airport – no US match on TV! US loses 3-1 to Netherlands

Sun 12/4 Fly Stavanger 7 am Lufthansa

Wed 12/7 Return STA 12:52; MUC 5:10; train / bus to farm

Th 12/8 Nye talk; Katie talk; gluhwein in the kitchen

[4 days on farm]

Fri 12/9 Football! CRO over BRA 1-1 > penalties; ARG over NED  2-2 > penalties

Sat 12/10. Football! FRA 2-1 over ENG (MOR over POR 1-0)

Sun 12/11 Landhaus dinner – only  dinner with everyone there! (I made salad but no one believed it was me)

Mon 12/12 7:27 bus from Westendorf -> 9:18 train to Bremen 

7:27 440 > Grafing Bahnhof 7:44 > RB 54 7:42 > Hauptbahnhof 8:15

14:45 Bremen (But DB dropped me at Hannover at 1500, and I had to wait an hour for a local train to Bremen!)

T 12/13 Talk at Bremen

ARG v CRO 3-0

Wed 12/14 9:15 Bremen > Munich 2:41 pm (back to farm for dinner)

FRA v MOR 2-0

Th 12/15 Tina  talk; RCC Xmas part 5 pm (stayd until 6:30 – really the best part of the RCC, Christof as Santa giving presents to the kids; huge crowd for dinner; no room for the Landhaus though Christof did press 50 Euros on me that I did not use for a cab)

F 12/16 Hotel am Markt overnight

S 12/17 7:34 am train to Venice; arr 2:44 – or actually 2:30 at Venice Mastre, not Santa Lucia – took the local to get there (but only a 5 min wait)

Su 12/18 Argentina over France 3-3 in penalties (4-2)

T 12/20 train back to Munich 8:26, catch 8:43 BRB -> 9:10 bus at Grafing

Train on time until Rosenheim – 20 min delay – caught the S6 at Munchen Ost

Ride from Moremi in Mercedes- I would have caught the 9:10 bus even though I arrived at 9:13, bc the bus was late (but I was happy to have a ride)

[Wed on the farm] Venice blog post, walk early morning to Blue Blaumen & Ark

Noon lunch solo at Wirsthaus

2:30 last coffee with Moremi

3 – 5:30 last walk to Steinsee (pretty dark by the time I got back!)

7 pm last Landhaus dinner – with Aaron, Tamara & Tudor, Mona

Th 12/22 Flight home at 11 am 

7 am taxi – arrived early at 6:53! (I was already waiting outside)

Flight delayed on the ground in Munich ~3 hours; navigation system error

We took off at 2 pm, but had to land in JFK bc pilots were out of time

Could not leave plane bc of customs; sat in JFK for 90 min; flew to ATL

Just barely got the last flight out of ATL to BDL – arrived 12:30 am on 12/23!

Members of the Fall ‘22 Landhaus crew

Top floor: me, Tina Gerhardt, Faisel Mohammed, Nye Merrill-Glover (4)

2nd floor: Akin O., Tamara Fernando, Nandita, Mona Bleiling, Aaron Katzman (5)

Ground floor Moremi Zell (1)

Most of my reading in 2022 was audiobooks on long walks, mostly in Short Beach but also in rural Bavaria, France, Italy, Norway, and the other excellent places this eventful year took me. My grand total, according to Reading List, was 108 book. Most in a month was 13 in August. Least was 6 in April. Average was 9.

Here’s the list, with each month’s fav in bold.

January (9)

Paleofantasy. Marlene Zuk

A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived, Adam Rutherford

Shifting Currents: A World History of Swimming, Karen Carr

The New Silk Roads, Peter Frankopan

Nature’s Mutiny, Phillip Bloom

Theory for the World to Come, Matthew Wolf-Mayer

The Horse, the Wheel, and Language, David Anthony

Pedagogy of the Depressed, Chris Schaberg

The Book of Form and Emptiness, Ruth Ozecki

February (8)

Reality is not What It Seems, Carlo Robelli

Re-Enchanted, Maria Cecire

A Tale for the Time Being, Ruth Ozecki

Children of Prometheus, Greg Maertz

Until the End of Time, Brian Greene

Swim Poems, Joshua Dreser

The Pocket Epicurean, John Sellars

Football, Mark Yakich

March )10)

Footprints, David Farrier

Origin, Jennifer Raff

What is Life, Erwin Schrodinger

Time on Rock, Anna Fleming

The Sea is Not Made of Water, Adam Nicolson

The Red Prince, Timothy Snyder

A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit

The Counterforce, J.M.  Tyne

Exile and Pride, Eli Claire

Shakespeare and the Comedy of Enchantment, Kent Cartwright

April (6)

Thunder Go North, Melissa Darby

The Lieutenant Nun, Catalina de Erauso

Arctic Dreams, Barry Lopez

The Anthropocene Unconscious, Mark Bould

On Tyranny Timothy Snyder (rev ed)

We’re Doomed, Now What, Roy Scranton

May (12)

Joy of the Worm, Drew Daniel

Birds, Beasts and Seas, Jeffrey Yang (ed)

Nonzero, Robert Wright

The Eiger Sanction, Trevanian

The Loo Sanction, Trevanian

Shibumi, Trevanian

History 4 Degrees C, Ian Baucom

Thinking Like an Economist, Elizabeth Berman

The Geography of Risk, Gilbert Gaul

The Wayfinders, Wade Davis

Elite Capture, Olufemi Taiwo

Magdalena, Wade Davis

June (9)

Signs and Wonders, Delia Falconer

Mill Town, Kerri Arsenault

Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World, Barry Lopez

Battling the Big Lie, Dan Pfeiffer

A Portrait of the Scientist as a Young Woman, Lindy Elkins-Tanton

The Three Sustainabilities, Allan Stoekl

The Double Life of Bob Dylan, Clinton Heylin

Welcome to the Universe, Neil deGrasse Tyson

Anthropocene Islands, Jonathan Pugh

July (9)

Bob Dylan How the Songs Work, Timothy Hampton

Why We Did It, Tim miller

The Savage Detectives Reread, David Kurnick

The Displacements, Bruce Holsinger

Ecotone Climate Issue, David Gessner

The Spirit of Science Fiction, Roberto Bolono

Be Always Converting, Rob Sean Wilson

Fantomas v the Multinational Vampires, Julio Cortazar

Polynesia, 900-1600, Madi Williams

August (13)

Avidly Reads Poetry, Jacquelyn Ardam

Sea Room, Adam Nicolson

Round about the Earth, Joyce Chaplin

Hyperboreal, Joan N. Kane

Milk Black Carbon, Joan N. Kane

Gasoline Dreams, Simon Orpana

Quichotte, Salman Rushdie

The Swimmers, Julie Otsuka

Rescue Me, Margret Grebowicz

Gunfight, Ryan Busse

The Draw of the Sea, Wyl Menmuir

Ahab Unbound, Meredith Farmer & Jon Schroeder

Notebook for Seafarers, Alberto Coretti

September (9)

Dockside Reading, Isabel Hofmeyr

The Mermaid of Black Conch, Monique Roffey

Dark Traffic, Joan N Kane

People’s Power, Ashley Dawson

Fossil Capitol, Andreas Malm

Colonialism, Culture, Whales, Graham Huggan

How to Speak Whale, Tom Mustill

My Emily Dickinson, Susan Howe

After Moby-Dick, Elizabeth Shultz

October )8)

Where the Seals Sing, Susan Richardson

Water Always Wins, Erica Gies

Shallows, Tim Winton

Soundings, Doreen Cunningham

Origin Story, David Christian

Empire of Rubber, Gregg Mittman

Swim Poems, Steve Mentz

Water A Biography, Guilio Boccaletti

November (8)

Venice in the Anthropocene, Shaul Bassi

Planet B, Nicolas Bourriaud

The Philosophy of Modern Song, Bob Dylan

The Sea, Philip Hoare

Folk Music, Greil Marcus

City of Quartz, Mike Davis

Wild New World, Dan Flores

Where is My Flying Car? J Storrs Hall

December (7)

Messi v Renaldo, Jonathan Clegg

An Indigenous People’s History of the United States, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

The Doors, Greil Marcus

The Language of the Game, Laurent Dubois

When We Cease to Understand the World, Benjamin Labatut

Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino

The Passion according to G.H. Clarice Lispector

Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths (audio)

The last stop on my Europe ’22 tour brought me back to Venice, where I sang my blue humanities song to the very lively students and community at NiCHE, the New Institute Centre for the Environmental Humanities at Ca’ Foscari University that my fellow Shakespearean Shaul Bassi has been deeply involved with since its founding. It was great to see Shaul again and co-conspire about future watery possibilities. I also loved meeting Francesca Tarocco, the director of the program, as well as a pair of marine biologists from Cal Tech who were there to present their research about symbiosis in a small squid-like creature that lives in the Pacific. (Similar creatures, they assured me, are also present in the Mediterranean.) We all had lunch together at the Ca’ Foscari café, and the conversation reminded me how much I enjoy the company of marine scientists. Lots of people love the water!

Giving my talk, which relies on what feels now like a familiar contrast between green terrestrial ideas and blue watery dynamism, I felt a twinge of uncertainty. What is Venice, after all, but a human environment built on the refusal of the distinction between land and sea? Walking through the city’s narrow alleys and crossing water over its curving bridges, I kept noticing moments of intersection that challenge any simple contrast between the blue and the green. It’s not just that the water of Venice’s canals is itself green, as green is also the color that Shakespeare most often uses to describe the sea. More than that, It’s the portal-like qualities of so many points of access in the city – steps that lead directly down into the canal, or small framed doorways that open from buildings straight onto water. One noticeable opening framed, at this time of year at least, a lovely Christmas tree. ‘Tis the season to be … close to water?

So much has been written about Venice’s paradoxical history, its function as gateway between Europe and the Ottoman Empire and Byzantium, its ongoing struggle with high water, even its modern function as a center of experimental contemporary art. The last time I visited, in November, I saw Anselm Keifer’s overwhelmingly brilliant installation at the Palazzo Ducale. Beyond the genius of the art itself, I was amazed by the willingness of Venice to give over two of the galleries inside its Renaissance palace to a contemporary figure whose aggression and iconoclasm contrast sharply with the allegorical celebrations of the city that populate the palace. But thinking again about it as I wandered the bridges, alleys, and campos of Venice, I wonder if the city’s combination of ancient and modern, which in the Ducal Palace mean combining the gorgeous allegories of Tintoretto and Veronese alongside Keifer’s towering but opaque symbolic register, might indicate a kind of belief in itself. The juxtaposition seems to say – we’ve been doing allegorical art that celebrates a floating city for centuries. The city’s wet feet speak of perpetual evanescence, a way of living in constant contact with dynamism and dissolution. I had not been to Venice in more than 30 years since this fall. Now I’ve been twice in two months. And I can’t wait to go back!

It would take a lifetime, or perhaps generations, to know Venice. I spent my few December days wandering through an idiosyncratic lineup of places, including the soccer stadium on the far end of the island, the Naval Museum, the statue of the Monument to the Partisan Woman that lies prone in the water near the edge of the Biennale Garden, the currently-empty Ocean Space gallery which was formerly the church of San Lorenzo, and the lovely Querini Stampalia, a small museum near my hotel in the Campo Santa Maria Formosa. What has it felt like to live so close to water for so long? What does Venice mean, in time and in tempest?

In addition to a toy gondola for my nephew, I’m taking away the hitideVenice app, which gives me a daily read of the ebbs and floods of the city’s fluid substrate. It’ll be reassuring, as I think about the city from far-away Connecticut or elsewhere, to be able to open the app and see what that water’s up to.

I’m looking forward to my next visit already!

As my Europe ’22 tour winds down, I’m heading back to Munich today after a very quick visit to the North German Hanseatic city of Bremen, where I saw no tourist attractions and didn’t make it to the Baltic coast, just a bit farther north. Instead I visited the University of Bremen, as a guest of Dr. Mohammed Muharram, to speak to his colleagues and the students in his Ocean cultures class. Dr. Muharram, currently an Alexander Humboldt Fellow in the Scholars at Risk program, has been in Germany with his family since 2021; they left war-torn Yemen to come here. All of us #bluehumanities folks on twitter know him from his active feed, where he’s been chronicling recent publications and announcements in this fast-flowing discourse.

I came to Bremen to meet Mohammed, with whom I’ve been corresponding, and with whom I’m planning to collaborate on a future Blue Humanities book project (watch this space!). I also came to meet Mohammed’s mentor at Bremen, Dr. Norbert Sheffeld, who works on Shakespeare adaptations as well as blue-er projects. Prof Dr. Shaffeld – in Germany they use the double honorific, even for me (as my poster shows) – has had a distinguished career as administrator and manager of large research projects. I continue to be fascinated at the different ways that research, especially interdisciplinary and mult-university research, gets funded and organized in Europe.

My talk was pretty similar to the talk I’ve been giving this fall, though I did remember to have a signed copy of Swim Poems on hand so that I could present it to Mohammed in front of his students and colleagues during the lecture. I was impressed with the student questions after the talk, and also with the projects they are undertaking, about video game narration, ocean pollution and robotics, seabed mining, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea; and 2012 and Tsunamis, among other things. I got thoughtful and engaged questions from faculty members Prof. Kerstin Knopf and Dr. Karin Esders who were there, and further discussion with Mohammed and Norbert over a delicious lunch of various kinds of wurst over creamed kale (a local speciality?).

The northbound ICE from Munich on Monday had entangled me despite my best efforts. I booked a reserved seat on a direct train – what could go wrong? – and then watched with amazement as the video monitor, which had been showing the train’s destination as “Bremen Hpf” (ie, Bremen Hauptbahnhof, Central Station Bremen) suddenly showed a line through those words. For reasons never explained, the train terminated in Hannover, about 60 km south of Bremen, where I had to switch to a crowded local. But I got there, made it to my strangely named “Atlantic Hotel” (Bremen is near the North Sea, and closer to the Baltic than the open Atlantic), and was ready to go in the morning.

We’ll see what happens on the same train Munich-bound today!

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!