Steve Mentz

It may be that the warm glow I felt in the Belasco Theatre listening to “Idiot Wind” transformed into a love ballad, “Duquesne Whistle” as a show tune, and “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere” as chorus-backed hootenanny comes from my own many years of confirmed Dylan-o-mania, or maybe from knowing all the songs, or perhaps even from my eagerness to welcome the gorgeous new voices that subbed in for Bob’s old man growl. But really — it was just lovely to hear.

Written and directed by Conor McPherson, the musical “Girl from the North Country” drafts twenty-one songs out of the Dylan catalog, from “Like a Rolling Stone” (1965), re-sung as a dirge, to “Duquesne Whistle” (2012). The selection is heavier from 70s-Bob than one might expect: it opens with two slow numbers from 1970’s New Morning, “Sign on the Window” and “Went to See the Gypsy,” and includes both the title number from Slow Train Coming (1979) and, somewhat oddly, three from 1978’s Street Legal: “True Love Tends to Forget,” which was an absolute show-stopper and maybe the most unexpectedly wrenching song of the night, “Is Your Love in Vain,” and “Senor (Tales of Yankee Power).”

The songs graft themselves onto an overflow of stories set in a 1930s boarding house whose owners, as well as its residents, present the full Dylan carnival: a slippery-tongued preacher, boxing ex-con, family with a damaged adult son with a secret, wise old town doctor, &c. Many stories circulate and overlap, but most of the night’s pleasure was watching how each riff would set up another song. Mostly the turns were unexpected, which was nice.

Top singing marks go to Broadway veteran Jeanette Bayardelle, who also belted out “Pressing On” as an encore, though the whole cast was excellent. The most compelling character in the story was Elizabeth Laine, played by Mare Winningham, the owner’s wife whose long standing mental instability represents just one of many crises in the boardinghouse while also making possible a lively, random, surprising performance, including the throw-away unsung non sequitur, “God said to Abraham, kill me a son.”

I’m not sure the story will stay with me. But if you, like me, have been living with and loving these songs for a long time, it’s worth paying Broadway prices to sit in a happy dark room and let them wash over you in new voices and arrangements.

Still in previews, which means it should be belting out gospel Bob and crooning the love songs through the summer!

One of our four paper-groups for “Watery Thinking” will explore the perils and possibilities of staging immersion. Lyn Tribble’s essay provides a helpful overview of the “dramaturgy of immersion”:

In Shipwreck Modernity, Steve Mentz writes that “wet representations emphasize the shock of immersion and its threat to human understanding and survival.” On the early modern stage, the  dramaturgy of immersion is complex because it cannot usually be directly staged. Thomas Heywood, naturally, is one of the few exceptions to this general rule; in The Brazen Age, he stages Hercules fording a river to save a nymph from the centaur Nessus. More often, immersion is either narrated by a character or a chorus or is represented through an off-stage on-stage transaction, an exchange between spaces, or as Lowell Duckert has noted,  ‘a before and after’ (5).  Many wet plays draw from the romance tradition, marked by a narrated or implied offstage shipwreck and subsequent rescue or rescues. Heywood’s The Four Prentices of London presents no less than four such moments in the aftermath of a shipwreck of the brothers:  their boats “split on strange rockes, and they enforc’t to swim to  /  Save their desperate lives.”  The brothers are each rescued at  “seueral corners of the world.”  Godfrey enters “as newly landed and half naked” in Bologne and helps to deliver the city from the Spaniards.  Guy attracts the attention of the King of France and his daughter, who watch him come ashore on a raft and realize that although he is “basely clad” he has “sparks of honor in his eye.” The stage direction reads “Enter the King of France, and his daughter walking: to them Guy all wet. The Lady entreateth her father for his entertainement: which is granted; and rich cloathes are put about him: & so Exeunt.Charles enters “all wet with his sword” and becomes the captain of a group of Italian banditti, while Eustace fetches up on the shore of Ireland. Eastward Hoe parodies such a scene, when Slitgut narrates from ‘above’ the fortunes of a set of drunken characters who struggle to shore off the Thames after their boats are capsized. The dynamic of a ‘wet’ character rescued on land and afforded with clothing is also featured in Pericles, in which the titular character enters wet and is furnished with a cloak by passing fishermen (who shortly fish up his armour in a net).  So the romance dynamic of staged wetness involves the entry of a victim, ‘naked,’ half-naked or ‘basely clad,’ and a rescue that takes the character out of the watery margins and affords him with dry clothes or a cloak that reintegrates him into the dry world of the stage.

But immersion is not only a feature of the romance tradition; some characters are submerged in the everyday wetscapes of early modern England. Dunking is inherent comic and inherently humiliating. If being shipwrecked in the ocean in romantic, falling into a ditch or a pond or a lake — or ditch running by the Thames near Windsor — is a form of comic retribution.  Such a fate befalls Cuddy in The Witch of Edmonton, who is lured by an evil spirit into a dark watery landscape and nearly drowns, as the title page of the play shows:

Cuddy’s misadventure is a reminder of the grim statistics around drowning in early modern England. Drowning was one of the chief hazards of everyday life, accounting for up to half of all accidental deaths. Some drowned at sea or while pursuing occupations on the river, but many more died in more quotidian landscapes. Water was everywhere: water pits for household use, ditches, streams, standing water from rain, rivers. In Accidents and Violent Death in Early Modern London, Craig Spence argues that despite the prevalence of drowning, “little attention was paid to those who suffered such a fate on an individual basis . . . .Perhaps a more difficult issue for early modern mentalities, and one that may go some way to explain this omission of cultural recognition, was the character of drowning as at once irreversible but also unavoidable.”

Conversation around this group of papers will help us explore what Tribble describes as the “physiology of immersion” and the “nexus of imagination, physiology, skill and affect” in the waterscapes of early modern England. 

For more fun with watery dramaturgy, here’s a great blog post about back-stage possibilities for the opening scene of The Tempest, from Hester Lees-Jeffries.

Marina Zurkow’s art explores the oceanic pressures and distortions that have become tangible in our age of climate disruption and global capitalism. She draws on the ideas many of the same scholars and thinkers that I do, including Phil Steinberg and Kimberly Peters’ great essay “Wet Ontologies” and the works of Stacy Alaimo, Una Chaudhuri, Stefan Helmreich, and many others. I contributed to Marina’s More & More project in 2016, and she contributed to my Oceanic New York in 2015.

For all those reasons I was especially excited to see her new gallery show, Wet Logic, produced in collaboration with Sarah Rothberg, at bitforms gallery on the Lower East Side Thursday. It was stranger and more lingering that I had thought it would be. I’m still processing it, and I’m hoping to go back. How can we live in this world of broken and overflowing oceans? I glimpsed some parts of some answers that afternoon.

One of my favorite things about this show is how little it relies on language. I’m word-obsessed and mostly live inside phrases, syntax, and other linguistic genre-systems. A visual show like this one can be difficult for me to access or engage with — but that’s the fun part. It’s helpful to be pushed away from the tools I usually use.

The first element of the show is Zurkow’s Accretions, reprised from 2016. These silk-screens on cardboard boxes represent, =”propositions for sculptural masses,” or perhaps resonant objects from our present or future. Each cardboard square has one or several four-digit codes stamped onto it, which refer to the Harmonized System of the More & More project.

Toilet Joke 1, a collaboration between Zurkow and Rothberg in 2020, shows a toilet overflowing with plastic pellets in which float a cracked iphone, playing a video of the surf: “the ocean virtualized.” Invitation to a slow-moving future?

I wasn’t able to fit the virtual reality goggles onto my too-big cranium, so I can’t describe Sarah Rothberg’s Water without Wet — but maybe some commentary will be forthcoming.

The heart of the exhibition features six screens of different sizes cycling through Zurkow’s Oceans Like Us animations. Overflowing with shapes and figures that include humans, mermaids, jellyfish, kelp, dancing otters, “nervous squiggles” and many more, these video animations — Zurkow titles them “Love Me,” “Milkcrate Plastisphere” and “Bow Null” — present an alien, enticing, startling, and deeply disorienting ocean. Sitting amid the screens feels like swimming in the ocean, in that it overloads the senses, pushes against the imagination, and leaves you unknowing but inspired.

I spent my time immersed in the screens thinking many different things, often about water’s polarity and its capacity to serve as “universal solvent,” the fluid that renders all things into their pieces. Oil and plastic appeared to displace the fishes and humans from their spaces at the centers of the ocean-screen. Mechanical images cross-hatched coral and plant life. Can the ocean be big enough — harmonized enough — to contain all these things? (In the front room of the gallery, the clogged and overflowing toilet joke kept its unmoving answer.)

The last piece in the show, Study for Toilet Joke II, also produced jointly by Zurkow and Rothberg, features a whirlpool eddy “suspended in an infinite flush,” inside a goldfish bowl. Its wet motion frames the plastic stillness and virtuality of Toilet Joke I on the other side of the gallery. Which future is our future? The neverending flush or the plastic stasis? Both, maybe?

I’m hoping to get back for more immersion in the screen-oceans. You should too! Get down to Allen St before it closes on March 15!

What is Shakespeare for?

The question rattled around in my imagination last week as I was teaching for the first time Carlyle Brown’s 1989 play, “The African Company Presents Richard III.” Watching the play with students on Friday night at the Queens Theater intensified the conundrum. What is Shakespeare anyway?

In class in the morning, we’d talked about two competing but perhaps not contraditory ideas in Brown’s play:

• that Shakespeare’s plays can be performed and embraced from many perspectives besides the one in which they were first written
• that many other kinds of literature besides Shakespeare have claims on our attention, our stages, and our ideas of what literature has been or should be

Those two ideas swirled through Titan Theatre Company’s forceful and compelling production in a tiny theater near the World’s Fair site in Queens. I loved the show, and I kept trying to reconcile those two strains in it: the evident love of Shakespeare, and the equally strong — or perhaps stronger? — desire to write an independent history for African-American theater.

The play re-stages the history of the African Company, founded by Billy Brown in 1820s New York. The story explores a night when their “Black Richard” was attempted to be played opposite Stephen Price’s Park Theater production of Richard III, starring distinguished English actor Junius Brutus Booth. (That famous actor was also, although this detail goes unmentioned in the play, the father of John Wilkes Booth, another Shakespearean actor who was also Abraham Lincoln’s assassin. The three Booth brothers, John Wilkes, Edwin, and Junius Brutus, Jr., famously appeared in a production of Julius Caesar in Central Park in 1864, playing the roles of Mark Antony, Brutus, and Cassius respectively. A year later John Wilkes shot President Lincoln. Shakespeare and white supremacist violence are often much closer to each other than we who earn our paychecks teaching the plays might wish.)

The modern play features a love story between Jimmy Hewlett, who plays Richard, and Ann, who plays Lady Anne. Darius Aushay presents a charismatic and compelling Jimmy-Richard, sliding in and out of the King’s character with a hunch of his shoulder. But Psacoya Guinn’s Ann was the scene stealer: composed, powerful, and with a keen stage presence, she performed her struggle with the part of Lady Ann — “I cannot be such a slack woman as this Lady Ann,” she tells Jimmy — in a way that undergirded the play’s larger struggle with the Shakespearean overplot. Why should she have to submit to the evil, manipulative King? Jimmy explains that everyone play-acts, that “This Ann, she ain’t no different from Lady Ann” — but partly through Guinn’s powerful performance, I could not help but feel that she had the better argument.

Another key character who jumped off the page to the stage was Papa Shakespeare, a formerly enslaved African who’d also live in the islands before he traveled to New York with Billy Brown in somewhat unclear circumstances. Papa Shakespeare, played with Falstaffian gusto by Anthony Michael Stokes, carries a drum and interweaves his own Afro-Caribbean musicality with his roles on stage (he plays Catesby in Richard III) and his sense of what Shakespeare means. He knows that his master in the islands “call me Shakespeare so to mock me,” but he also asserts that “If Shakespeare was a black man, he would be a Griot,” a traveling poet-performing in West African cultures.

Papa Shakespeare loves Shakespeare but also transforms him. Billy Brown’s intentions aren’t always clear. Jimmy insists that Billy wants to co-opt Shakespeare and Jimmy’s performance as Richard III for his “great Negro revolt.” Jimmy’s not sure what he wants. “I get to be loved and to be accepted,” he says to Billy Brown — but he’s also playing an evil king, even if it is one one of Shakespeare’s iconic roles. It’s not always clear what Jimmy’s Black Richard represents: rebellion against artistic limitations? an effort to connect with classical theater from the perspective of a formerly enslaved person? the more personal drama and exchange between Jimmy and Ann? All those things at once?

The African Company’s production of Richard III ends up with the five actors in the Eldridge Street jail, but the modern play finds a new role for Jimmy. “The Drama of King Shotaway” is a now-lost play written by Billy Brown about an Afro-Carib revolution on St. Vincent in the 1790s, possibly witnessed by the historical Billy Brown, staged by the African Company in the 1820s. The play closes with Jimmy finding in these lines an even more regal voice than he’d had when performing Shakespeare:

Restore yourselves, your wives and your children to the inheritance of your ancestors, who inspire your fury and who show you the way. These marvelous, struggling spirits who suffered to you the air you breath; who knit time for you to walk on; who give you stars to cover your body.

Next week in class we’ll go back to Shakespeare, finishing up Timon of Athens before turning to King Richard III. I can’t teach King Shotaway because there’s no extant copy. But I look forward to talking with my students about the ways that the plays we have can imagine themselves into conversation with plays we’ve lost, and those we do not know we’ve lost.

“The African Company Presents Richard III” has a short run and closes Sun Feb 9. Get there if you can!

I went to see Timon of Athens in Brooklyn last night, as my phone chirped to me about the United Kingdom’s Brexit out of the European Union and the United States Senate’s willful refusal to perform its constitutional duty of hearing evidence about an out of control executive. Misanthropy and rage seemed like good ideas.

The play teems with anger, and I would have happily joined in bringing the wrath. Watching rich folks fiddle while the world burns feels pretty on point. The headline-quip from the Times review, that Simon Godwin’s production, currently in Brooklyn after a run in Stratford-upon-Avon, is “Shakespeare for the Occupy era” feels right. Elia Monte-Brown’s Alcibiades led her army against Athens bearing signs attacking the rich and support for the “dispossessed.” It’s necessary, I think, to re-imagine this play’s combination of generosity and despair as a comment for our own age, in which catastrophic income inequality makes our political collective unable to respond to so many challenges. Rewriting Alcibiades as revolutionary required added some lines, and cutting some scenes, but overall I liked the Occupy-thread of this somewhat disjointed play. I’d like to see Monte-Brown play Henry V next!

Going into the play, I worried that the city scenes might be a bit dull. Many of them probably written by (the brilliant) Thomas Middleton, who collaborated with Shakespeare on the play. They are more spectacle than story, driven less by emotional connection than by Middleton’s customary satiric bite. To my surprise, I loved the scenes that featured the full ensemble of actors, variously cast as artists, senators, dinner guests, soldiers in Alcibiades’s army, and, memorably near the close, a trio of thieves ultimately converted away from the bad life by Timon’s saintly example. TImon fixed them through a gorgeous rendition of one of my favorite speeches in Shakespeare:

I’ll example you with thievery:

The sun’s a thief, and with his great attraction

Robs the vast sea; the moon’s an arrant thief

And her pale fire she snatches from the sun;

The sea’s a thief whose liquid surge resolves

The moon into salt tears; the earth’s a thief

That feeds and breeds by a composture stol’n

From general excrement. Each thing’s a thief. (4.3.430-37)

I’ve wrestled with those lines as a vision of destructive ecological connection, but last night I heard them more intensely in narrative context, as the disillusioned Timon’s way to discourage petty theft. It was a good reminder of how such quotable poetry, which Nabokov used to create his novel Pale Fire, also has a purely local resonance.

The cast also performed gorgeously during the early scenes of Timon’s opulence, including lively accompaniment by a three-piece band, and two musical renditions of Sonnet 53, performed in English in the first banquet and later in an abbreviated Greek version. The feeling of social play and cohesion, especially between the scam-artists Poet and Painter, who just want to get money from Timon, were strangely appealing. Even when they followed Timon into the woods in the second half, having heard a (true) rumor that he’d discovered more gold, they seemed excessive rather than rapacious. It was hard to hate them, even though they were parasites.

The play’s core remains rage, but not at these hangers-on so much as the treacherous aristocrats, in particular at the Senators who won’t loan Timon money, but more comprehensively at the human condition writ large. Kathryn Hunter gave a physically dazzling performance as Lady Timon, dancing on the table in the first scene, splashing bowls of blood in the middle, and heaving great shovels of dirt onto the stage toward the close. She’s a powerfully generous actor, intent on connecting with other players on stage, as well as engaging the audience. At one point she handed me a pine cone and suggested that I feast with her in the woods. I was tempted to try a bite.

Did she reach the incandescent heights of Lear in the storm? At times I thought she played so generously that she couldn’t quite get all the way to full misanthropy. Last spring I saw Glenda Jackson, another diminutive woman, play Lear on Broadway. I’m not sure if Hunter quite matched her. Hunter’s Timon was more emotionally open than Jackson’s Lear — but perhaps in these regal rage-beasts we in the audience need to feel that something isn’t available to us, that we need to clutch and peer into a human darkness that isn’t entirely open to be seen.

Timon’s closest confidant in the play is the cynic Apemantus, played by Arnie Burton with a bounce in his step that echoed his turn as Autolycus in Tfana’s Winter’s Tale in 2018. When Apemantus got into a dirt-smearing fight with reclusive Timon in the woods, the production follows the play’s insult-comedy patter — “Beast!” cries Apemantus; “Slave!” retorts Timon; “Toad!” “Rogue, rogue, rogue!” (4.3.369-70) — but the sentimental embrace between the two that ended this scene was the director’s idea, not Shakespeare’s or Middleton’s.

It’s hard to grudge solitary and doomed Timon a little affection. Though when I left the theater and walked out in damp drizzly Brooklyn in January, I could not help but feel that my intense disgust at this day of Brexit and impeachment hadn’t quite been matched by this production. Maybe that’s a tribute to the production’s efforts to humanize the angry old aristocrat?

Get to Brooklyn before Feb 9 if you can!

Our deadline is today, and the trickle of papers for the #shax2020 seminar that Nic Helms and I are leading this spring in Denver started a few days ago. Our idea in “Watery Thinking” is to ask our esteemed seminar members to bring together two of our favorite things, the ecopoetics of water and the structures of human cognition. We’re both interested in both of these things, even though I come to the seminar flying my blue flag and Nic has recently published an excellent book on Shakespeare and cognitive theory, Cognition, Mindreading, and Shakespeare’s Characters.

Over the next few months, as an extended pre-game rollout before the seminar in April, Nic and I and some of our seminar members will be blogging about these topics, including new discoveries and ideas we find as we wade into the seminar’s collective work.

As we wait to read the contributions of the seminar members, I thought I’d offer a few quick ideas, drawn partly from my own work but even more from thoughts sparked by reading abstracts and the bibliographies the group has been sharing.

1. Mindreading: Nic’s book uses theories of cognition to explore what he calls “mindreading” as a way to reconsider the Shakespearean figures. Of particular interest in a watery context is his reading of the Jailor’s Daughter’s incoherent speech in Two Noble Kinsmen, which includes a vision of maritime crisis. When she displays her madness through the metaphor of a ship at sea — “Out with the mainsail! — Where’s your whistle, masters?” (4.1.148) — she presents herself through a form of symbolic disorder that Nic powerfully links to Hamlet and Cordelia, among others. The explosive gap of “nothing” in the opening of King Lear may gesture toward the flooded landscapes of act 4 (that’s my watery reading of the play) but Nic’s focus on fractured cognition suggests that linguistic coherence flows both toward salty metaphors and into dramatic structures that represent thought.
2. Theatrics of Water: I’m looking forward to reading lots of papers on stage practices. There was a time, it seems to me, when every modern stage featured a water hazard. I think I first remember this sort of thing in a stage version of Ovid’s Metamorphoses that I saw in New York around the late ’90s (?), and I remember a production of Much Ado in London in which the ingenious Benedick, played by Simon Russell Beale, jumped into the pool when he needed a place to hide. At a certain point it seemed a bit gimmicky, though the recently-revived splash-tastic Tempest by Synetic Theatre in DC was pure genius. But I wonder — might these 20-21c tricks have something to say to the staging of water in the early modern period? Water is a resistant, resilient element: it gets everywhere (as a young padawan famously said about a dryer substance), and can’t easily be contained. What’s the place of water’s movement within (or on top of?) the carefully controlled movements of a stage play? Does water represent the limits of acting, a nonhuman collaborator who, perhaps like the dog in Two Gents, always threatens to steal every scene?
3. Fluid Metaphors: “The sea is not a metaphor,” cries Hester Blum in PMLA in one of the most influential critical statements in the development of the blue humanities. Her salutary focus on the material reality of the ocean, from the mast-head to the polar regions, has greatly influenced my thinking about oceanic cultures and literatures. But I also wonder, especially in an early modern context in which many of our writers were, unlike Melville or Conrad, not themselves sailors, about reversing her rallying-cry. The sea is always partly a metaphor, as in Shakespeare’s “hungry ocean” (Sonnet 64) or Spenser’s about-to-be-erased strand (Amoretti 75). For me, the overlap between metaphor and materiality gets at the heart of things. How much real salt is in that sonnet? How much poetry in the salt-stained journal of that young midshipman? What are the formal features of an ocean wave?
4. Thinking with Things: Though I worry that the pdf I shared with the seminar was hard to read, one of the most influential texts for the overlap between water and cognition that I’ve run across is Edwin Hutchins’s great 1995 book Cognition in the Wild, which treats the human and nonhuman assemblages working together in a U.S. Navy ship. Hutchins’s portrait of the ship responding to crisis emphasizes plural forms working on concert: “No single individual on the bridge acting alone — neither the captain nor the navigator nor the quartermaster chief supervising the navigation crews — could have kept control of the ship and brought it safely to anchor. Many kinds of thinking were required to perform this task” (5). The multiple humans and machines of the Navy ship may, in some ways, resemble the multiple humans and machines that make theaters work.

So many ideas! I can’t wait to see the seminar papers! More in a few weeks as we start to read and think about the papers.

I walked into the empty room just before the apocalypse.

I’ve never fully shaken the foreboding time-feeling of MLA, an anticipatory anxiety that lingers from my can-I-stay-in-this-profession early years in the ’90s (when, I know, things were much less dire for me than they are now for the current academic generation). The feeling of disaster about to burst also echoes today’s environmental bubbling-over, as bushfires and floods light up our screens large and small, even if we are lucky enough to be far from these catastrophes at least some of the time. I got to room 604 of the Washington State Convention Center early Sunday morning, wanting to set the scene for the beastly glories of session #666, lurking in the hangover slot to close out my MLA. The room was empty. I moved some chairs and appropriated a red “1 Minute” sign that, as it turned out, I would not need. The half-dozen demon-sharp speakers who would comprise the “Spenser, Ecology, and the Dream of a Legible Environment” panel filed in on time, with their brilliant talks that would take us from bleeding forests and courtrooms all the way to New Jerusalems and Silicon Valley’s posthuman paradises. Our session was marked by the beast’s number and haunted by visions of exhausted and “uninhabitable” earths. The panel didn’t proffer facile optimism but did show us ways, to adapt Alex McAdams’s great eco-analysis of the Legend of Temperance, to walk out “while weather serves, and wind” (Faerie Queene 2.12.88.9).

The panel’s pattern of looming catastrophe confronted if perhaps not averted parallels my sense of this year’s deeply engaging and mostly heartening MLA. The big conference provides snapshots of the states of our fields and subfields. There was much excellence on display. More than any MLA I’ve ever attended, the conversations I followed this year seemed driven by access and in particular a focus on new voices and methodologies. The continuing tide of eco-humanities was strongly present, and eco-trends have begun productively to engage with Critical Race Theory, feminism, globalization studies, and, to an extent that I hope will increase in time, Indigenous Studies. (I note also that this was the first MLA at which I heard, and delivered, land acknowledgments to the indigenous peoples of Coast Salish– though not at every session.)

As an early modernist, I felt some of most influential voices at #mla2020 were a pair of women who were not there, Kim Hall and Ayanna Thompson, whose years of work, insight, and field-shaping advocacy shaped not only the three connected #racebeforerace panels sponsored by the 17c English forum but also many other panels and presentations, including a collaborative panel organized jointly by 16c English and the Global Arab and Arab-American forums, and Dyani Johns Taff’s great talk on my own Eco-Spenser panel about the raced and sexed nonhuman bodies of Scylla and Charybdis. It was great to witness the groundswell of CRT-inflected early modern material being presented, driven and connected by the #racebeforerace and #Shakerace hashtags.

Thinking about the many panels I heard at the conference, the brilliance of early-career scholars and graduate students stands out. At this point, I can’t claim to be surprised to hear incisive and tightly-crafted analyses by Ambereen Dadabhoy, but I feel fortunate to have listened to her speak twice in two days. Insightful thinking from Will Rhodes on Spenser’s colonial ecologies, Connie Scozzaro on love drugs in Midsummer Night’s Dream, Alex McAdams on time and ecology in Spenser, Katherine Cox on climate change in Paradise Lost, and Mira Kafantaris on the racial symbology of Spenser’s Duessa confirms that we’re in the middle of a surge of great new scholarship in early modern literary culture.

The old shadow-MLA of hotel room interviews wasn’t as much in evidence this year, at least not for an old guy like me, but I can’t help thinking there was a different ghost conference in Seattle this year. Sessions that addressed the state and emerging futures of the profession – the form of our scholarly lives, rather than the content of our analyses – were markedly less sanguine than those that dove into new analyses of literary texts. I believe deeply in the work we are doing collectively, in the values of words and stories to counter climate apocalypse and resurgent racism and misogyny – but it’s hard to feel optimistic on the professional front. It’s hard to be optimistic on many fronts, actually, though I also think one of the lessons of ecocriticism in the face of increasingly dire climate news is that too-simple optimism, visions of transformation or “discovery,” tend to conceal violence and dispossession. We need to learn to live and work toward justice inside climate dynamism, not ascend to a catastrophe-free and morally purified future.

A notable session organized by Drew Daniel on “No Fear Shakespeare” represented a telling mixture of stirring content and dispiriting awareness of the cultural challenges alongside which we profess our profession. The pivot paper by Stephen Guy-Bray on what the No Fear paraphrases of the sonnets exclude was delicious and dazzling, a testament to Stephen’s wit, insight, and abiding commitment to poetic beauty. Great as the talk was, however, I left wondering if he’d followed the easier path. The opening and closing papers by Ann Christensen and Christine Hoffmann turned from texts to classrooms and into the wilds of web culture to propose strategies for pre-emptive annotation (Christensen) or for sympathetic engagement with making Shakespeare less frightening in our interwebbed world (Hoffmann). Their presentations addressed, with difficulty and sometimes a sense of not being able to clarify or salvage everything, the mixed and messy cultural experiences that spill into our classrooms, not to mention our lives. I love the intricacy of poetic gems as much as Stephen does – or almost as much, maybe – but I also valued the effort in this panel to marry pedagogy, formal analysis, and web-inflected cultural breadth of vision. Can we do all these things at once? Let’s hope so! But I think we can also expect not always to get everything right all the time.

MLA 2020 marks the end of my five-year run on the 16c English Forum board, which means I’ll shift to a not-every-year MLA schedule and won’t be conspiring on a pair of guaranteed sessions after next year. It’ll be nice to be released from mandatory attendance, but I’m proud of the work the 16c English Forum has done over the years, bringing new people into presentations and board membership and sponsoring lively discussions on such always-fascinating topics as Tyranny, Flattery, and Radical Hope. (Not every one of these panels doubled as a how-to class, I’m happy to say.)

Chairing my final session for the 16c English forum about Spenser makes me want to find a suitable allegorical moment to enclose in transparent glass. What was the crystalline heart of #mla2020? I’m tempted to nominate the welcome choice of Jonathan Eburne’s Outsider Theory as the James Russell Lowell prize-winning book. This book’s focus on the strange and its possibilities shines light on the work of the University of Minnesota Press in supporting experimental, speculative, and inspiring scholarship, through the editorial leadership of Doug Armato and many other excellent people, past and present, at the Press. (Full disclosure: UMP published Shipwreck Modernity and most recently Break Up the Anthropocene, and I love working with them.)

But I can’t helping thinking about a more enigmatic, and, alas, somewhat less hopeful, scene. Guided by Seattle native Lowell Duckert, a group of us found our way through rain and steep sidewalks into the enticing open glen of a local brewery the name of which is now lost to time. Surrounded by gleaming vats and hand-written signs on the wall. we sought to decipher the many IPAs on the chalkboard. Too soon, we realized that our cross-town dinner reservation was a full fifteen minutes away. Sadly beerless, we piled into cars & arrived just in time for a tasty and festive meal, though, more’s the pity, at a spot that served cider instead of beer.

The moment in that allegorical cave when I lost my taste of Seattle’s local brews to time accents the way that MLA always feels like a battle against temporal limits. There’s just not enough time! As ecocritic Tobias Menely emphasized in his wide-ranging analysis of Paradise Lost and climate change, time remains our hardest and most urgent challenge in thinking ecologically, as well as in thinking about literary culture and perhaps also about the trials of the 21c professoriate. Shakespeare’s sonnets, like ecological analysis, engage the paradoxes of multiple overlapping time spans, including the lives of poet, poem, beloved, and our ruined and ruinous earth. What do the riches of the beer unpoured promise, even as the door closes (forever?) on that secret taproom?

I know what I want from MLA and the future of our profession. I saw it in the work and imagination of so many colleagues, including the six demonic Spenser-lovers who found in the “dream of a legible environment” visions of possibility amid destructive change. I saw things to admire in the work of the brilliant alums of the new PhD program in English I have helped shepherd into being over the past decade at my home university of St. John’s, including Dan Dissinger’s expansive sense of writing studies, John Misak’s gamified Hamlet, and Laura Lisabeth’s ethical commitments to pedagogy and writing studies. I’ll also shout out one more not-yet-graduate of SJU who I spotted amid the MLA press, Tina Iemma, for her #bigger6 work within and beyond Romanticism.

I’d like a profession welcoming enough to welcome them, and the other brilliant voices whose work I heard and learned from in Seattle this weekend, and over the past many years of MLA.

That’s not too much to ask, is it?

I started this blog as a teaching-adjacent project for a study abroad course in London in 2008 that never happened. In 2009 it became an e-sideline and theater suggestions for a grad seminar. Starting around 2010 it slowly morphed into its current flow of theater reviews, academic conference commentary, and the occasional snippet from works-in-progress. I don’t post as many weather pictures as I used to, but I still chronicle my travels, most of the time.

The Bookfish now archives over 550 posts in the decade since Jan 2010, though as the posts have gotten more substantial over the years I’ve slowed down the volume. Forty-odd posts appeared in 2019, from Eco-Thoughts from Oaxaca to a series of comments about the Creating Nature conference at the Fogler to a triplet about my watery travels in the land of Oz this past October. A total of 13k pages views this past year, peaking in April (SAA-season). (I can’t tally total page views for the decade because my analytics seems to have reset itself in early 2018.) Posting has fallen off a bit this fall — I have unfinished draft posts about my trip to Liverpool in September, and to Delaware in November that I still hope to put into the e-world — but now that a couple large-ish projects have migrated off my desk, I may have a little more time for Bookfish-ing.

A few highlights from 2019:

Theater Posts

Heroes of the Fourth Turning (Nov, NYC)

Mayakovsky and Stalin (NYC)

King Lear (Broadway)

Julius Caesar (Theatre for a New Audience, NYC)

Twelfth Night (Yale Rep) and White Devil (Red Bull)

Makbet (St. John’s)

Academic Event Posts

ASLE 2019 (Davis, CA)

Creating Nature (roundup post)

#shax2019 (DC)

Revaluing the Ocean (Utah)

#mla19 (Chicago)

The swimming year has included some fantastic southern hemisphere immersion in and around Sydney, my first-ever dip in the North Sea (on the not-yet-blogged trip to Bristol in September), and less time in the pool than I might have wished, for assorted trivial reasons. More water miles in 2020!

The four talkers paced the backyard on a cold Wyoming night, seething.

Justin’s hand trembled as he prepared to disembowel a newly-shot deer. Teresa joyously proclaimed her readiness for the coming “war.” Emily ached with unlocated pain. Kevin gazed up at the stars and railed at his addition to the internet.

Will Arbery’s great new play, “Heroes of the Fourth Turning,” has under a week to go at the Playwright’s Horizon on Broadway’s edge. Many of the reviews that have made it one of the hot plays of the season have emphasized its ability to make urban liberals feel the feelings of rural Christians. But it’s better than that, and harder. The play, via the figure of Teresa, played with fire and charisma by Zoe Winters, scoffs at those of us who are “addicted to empathy.” That’s too simple an answer, too squishy and shareable. The truths this play’s after are less easy to assimilate.

Arbery comes by his knowledge of the play’s world biographically; his parents teach at Wyoming Catholic College and the character Gina, who arrives late to the party after having been named the new President of the College, appears to be based on his mother, Ginny. (The conservative author Rod Dreher, author of a brief for Christian separatism called The Benedict Option, which the play references, could not get to New York to see the production, but he’s written a compelling response to the screenplay based on his longtime relationship with the family.) Like many New Yorkers in the full house on Tuesday night, I was an outsider to the particulars of this world, but responded viscerally to the emotional force of the play. Theater is emotion concentrated, and that’s what we got last night on 42nd Street.

Teresa quote-evangelized paranoid theories of history – the “Fourth Turning” describes the coming generation of heroes, like the Civil War and World War II — she gleaned from Steve Bannon. Kevin vomited on stage, just a couple feet in front of my seat. Emily lovingly described her friend Olivia, who worked for Planned Parenthood. Justin quoted Latin poetry, Aristotle, and Plato.

Some of the chatter about the play has connected it to other “sympathy for Trump voters” efforts such as J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy. But unlike Vance, whose memoir I found to be thin and self-serving, Arbery writes with an artist’s aggression and restlessness. We don’t need to like these characters. They aren’t charming. They’re feeling pain. They play asks us to take that pain seriously, whether we empathize or not.

Kevin declaimed Wordsworth’s “The world is too much with us, late and soon” in full. Emily got embarrassed when her mom showed up drunk to the party. Justin carried Emily since it was too painful for her to walk. Teresa developed a cocaine habit while living in Brooklyn.

The notion that the cultural war might devolve into real combat shadows the evening’s conversation, from Teresa’s ecstatic and Bannon-sourced prediction that “war is coming” to the pistol Justin carried in his back pocket to the recurrent references to electoral politics. All four of the talkers distrust Trump but voted for him. All four resist and resent mainstream American culture. All share a sense of solidarity through cultural resistance, of being a select but imperiled group. “There’s more of them than us,” Justin says mournfully, deliberately overlooking the current levers of power owned by the American right.

Emily howled forth the pain of a desperate and angry Chicago woman she counseled at a pro-life center. Justin played guitar and sang about the comforts of “nothing.” Teresa asked her former professor to blurb her forthcoming book of Breitbart-esque vitriol. Kevin craved a “big conversation.” Also a girlfriend.

In several moments, the play interrogated but also simply presented Catholic orthodoxy to view. John Zdrojeski’s manic Kevin gushed a graphic, description of the Eucharist. Along with Jeb Kraeger’s powerful Justin, he and Tesera voiced a collective rosary. July McDermott’s Emily appealed to the person I imagine to be Arbery’s ideal writer, “Flannery O.” These materials together assumed a powerful strangeness in performance. I’m a standard-issue academic lefty and seldom a churchgoer, though working for more than a dozen years at a Catholic University has given me a window onto the richness of Catholic social thought, its uncompromising resistance to certain aspects of modernity — Justin, who often serves as a moral compass in the play, rejects LBGTQ people unambiguously — and its deep attachment to classical and Biblical texts. The dissonance of “Heroes” felt a little familiar to me.

A painful screech scoured the stage several times during the performance. Justin said it was a malfunctioning generator, but then later admitted he had been lying about that. The struggle of a soul in agony? It never quite became clear.

Gina — Emily’s mother, former professor of Teresa, Justin, and Kevin, and newly elected President of Transfiguration College — arrived late to the party. She denounced Teresa, suggested she may hire Kevin as a new Director of Admissions, rejected Justin’s idea to add marksmanship to the College curriculum, and — heartbreakingly — appeared not quite to believe in her daughter Emily’s pain. Pain functioned as the basic currency of this world, and Gina’s inability to see her daughter felt to me unforgivable.

Motherhood, symbolic and literal, occupies at the play’s red-hot core. Gina’s triumphant claim to Christian sacrifice, which she pounded into Teresa during an argumentative climax, built itself atop the physical risk and suffering of eight C-sections and eight babies. Kevin opened his “big conversation” with Teresa wondering why he had to venerate the Virgin Mary. Emily did tell Justin at one point that she thinks he’d make a great Dad, but fatherhood stayed off stage. Mothers are the mystery, the flesh, the suffering. Gina genuflected to her academic husband’s “brilliance,” but admitted that she was glad that she was the one chosen to be the next College President. Abortion politics, raw and uncompromisable, shadowed everything. (By coincidence, I came across my one-time colleague Caitlin Flanagan’s visceral entry into the abortion debate just a half-hour before the show, which seemed appropriate. Flanagan ends up seeing the debate as unsolvable. I wonder what she’d make of this play?)

Not much time left, but if you can, get to West 42nd St to see one of the last shows! And put Will Arbery on the list of names to watch.

I’ll gather together here my three overflowing posts in response to my trip to Australia in Oct 2019, as a guest of the History of Emotions Centre and U. New England in Armidale, and then the Sydney Environment Institute at the University of Sydney.

Oceanic Sydney

Sydney Swim Diary (2 of 3)

Compassion and Drought in Armidale, NSW (3 of 3)