Steve Mentz

Makbet and the Art of Compression

February 28, 2019 by Steve Mentz

At the close of a gloriously fast and emotionally powerful ninety minute performance of Makbet-in-the-seminar room yesterday on the St. John’s campus, all five of Dzieci Theatre‘s actors took hands in a circle. “Peace,” each said to the next. “Peace,” to the students and me gathered closely around. “Peace.” The props that had carried the story — Makbet’s hat, Macduff’s scarf, the grey coat of monarchy, Banquo’s beret — descended one by one into the gleaming steel pot.

Then — smash! — the lid crashed suddenly down. “The charm’s wound up!” And reality flooded the room, with the flick of incandescent lights. What a show!

That last gesture of clamping down tight on the symbols that had carried the roles during performance captured for me the heart of the Makbet experience. The show’s core overflows with sudden surprises and emotional compression. We didn’t expect it, even though we knew the end was near — and then the smash locked everything into place. I felt that gripping force often during the performance — as the battle scene rattled the bookshelves and shook the door, during the musical refrains, partly inspired, I learned later, by the amazing Song of the Goat company from Poland that I saw in New Haven a few years ago. The wrench of emotional compression slid around the room as the parts and props switched hands. Having seen the show once before, I looked for the spaces between the roles, trying to spot how kings and ladies and murderers and thanes came to be who they were.

The Dziecis very generously talked with us for twenty minutes after, and I could not have been more proud of how the students’ questions got at the heart of the matter, into the forces and pressures of the event.

The question I bit my tongue before asking — since my rule for any guest speakers on campus is that profs should not speak if students are willing to — was about a missing line from early in the play. It’s one of my favorites, an image of human struggle in a hostile environment:

Doubtful it stood
As two spent swimmers, that do cling together
And choke their art (1.2)

I see so much of Shakespeare’s play in that image, from the painful intimacy of the marriage to the windpipe-stifling competition of violent masculinity. The image also fixes the play’s blue or oceanic register, the alien depths it sometimes plumbs.

But in truth, as is almost always the cast with stripped-down Shakespeare productions, I don’t miss any words if the feelings are there. And I’ve rarely if ever seen a more feeling-ful Macbeth than the one the Dziecis create through their urgent, shared game of risk and community. I’m already wondering when I can see them perform the show again!

The company’s next production is an Easter passion, performed in several locations in the New York area from Palm Sunday through Easter. I’m not sure I can make it — my Easter will split itself between the Shakespeare Association Conference in DC and being home in my little beach neighborhood in CT — but I’d like to. They are a group worth keeping an eye on.

Such a treat to have Makbet fill up our little seminar room and transform it into regicide, poetry, magic, and reaching for things you can’t quite grasp!

Revaluing the Ocean (Salt Lake City, Feb 2019)

February 18, 2019 by Steve Mentz

When Jeff McCarthy, Director of the University of Utah’s Environmental Humanities Program and one of our hosts for this great Ocean conference at Salt Lake City, brought us home Friday afternoon with a discussion of “storm ethics” in Conrad’s Typhoon, I realized that what I’d been feeling for the past two days was the buzz of recognition. Here I was in the high desert, watching a storm roll over the Wasatch Range behind our conference room at the Law School, with a group of researchers, writers, and teachers dedicated to thinking with, about, and often in the ocean. My people!

It was a glorious, over-abundant event, spilling over its borders the way the ocean does. Heading home on the overnight flight to JFK Sat night after a day frolicking on the frozen water I had watched darken the plains, I’m tried to fit everything into an orderly pattern. I wonder what will happen if I let go of the program and hash it out as something like a story?

Reality: We started on Valentine’s Day evening above the dinosaur skeletons in the Utah Museum of Natural History with distinguished oceanographer and coral reef scientist Jeremy Jackson‘s opening keynote. He hit us with the hard facts about the Anthropocene ocean and the anthropogenic destruction of the marine ecosystems. The first half of the talk was grim, but then he shifted to a proposed solution in which all the World Ocean outside the Exclusive Economic Zones of each nation would be a Marine Preserve. Allowing oceanic space free from the pressure of industrial fishing would enable fish stocks to recover, so that taking so much away from the fishing industry would not starve the people who rely on protein from the ocean. In some ways it would be a return to the “freedom of the seas” — which made me want to dive into Hugo Grotius and the geopolitics of early modern oceans. The enthusiastic audience was glad to know that I refrained from dragging the Q&A seventeenth-century-ward.

It was a lively, energetic talk, and meeting Jeremy Jackson was a highlight of the trip to Utah. He’s a New Yorker who spent his career in exotic places: underwater on a coral reef in Jamaica, teaching at Scripps in San Diego, and working for the Smithsonian in Panama. Now in emeritus mode, he’s splitting time between coastal Maine and Central Park West. It turns out he and I go to many of the same New York plays. I wonder if he’d enjoy my underwater reading of King Lear before Glenda Jackson in the title role arrives on Broadway this spring?

But Jackson’s doom-rich charts weren’t the only doses of reality laid down from the Revaluing podium. Several experts in Indigenous culture, including Josh Reid, Thomas Swenson, and Holukani Aikau, asked us to think about the long history of colonial violence against land, ocean, and First Nations people. Indigenous conceptions of the relationship between humanity and the nonhuman environment, they argued, have special value as we reconsider the human-ocean relationship in the Anthropocene. I was especially taken by Swenson’s depiction of clashes between colonial and Native fishing practices on the Karluck River on Kodiak Island in the mid-twentieth century — partly because I was remembering my own float and fishing trip down that river in early summer 1995, when my father and I were guests of the Koniag Native Corporation.

Theory Entwined around the hard trunks of reality snake the intricate tresses of theory. After Jeremy’s flood of facts, I started a turn toward theory first thing Friday morning by hazarding a dualist Ocean that combines Alien and Core, Other and Us. In the same panel, Margaret Cohen’s analysis of underwater film showed how humans use aesthetic techniques to make the alien environment at least partly legible. Both of us were trying to show how thinking with the ocean can shift our understanding of how humans engage the watery part of the world.

Justice Other presenters challenged us to think about justice for the ocean and for humans. Chris Finlayson, a former Minister from the New Zealand government, and Robin Craig, water-rights lawyer from the University of Utah and one of our co-hosts, showed how legal systems grapple with watery geography and the bi-cultural state of New Zealand. Maxine Burkett, who spoke to us remotely from Hawaii, spoke about her research about emigration from the Marshall Islands to the US, which may perhaps be producing climate refugees already, though many of the individuals in question would refuse that term.

Pedagogy Many presentations emphasized teaching and the ways the ocean can be reshaped into its own best ambassador. Tierney Thys, a film-maker for National Geographic, Brenda Bowman, the head of the University of Utah’s Sustainability Program, and Kate Davis, a scholar of geography recently relocated to Utah from New Zealand, all showed how to teach with Oceans, beaches, garbage, and even computer games. I was struck, as I’m often struck, by how much humans love the ocean, even in its unfathomable and opaque qualities. I want to circulate a version of Kate’s coastal resource planning online game for my coastal CT neighbors!

Solutions? Jeremy Jackson suggested toward the end of the day on Friday that in the sciences you need to point toward solutions, not just open up questions. We laughed in response, because that’s not how the humanities always works. But Jeremy’s vision of the deep ocean as a fishing-free Marine Preserve — an area of maybe 80% or more of the 360 millions square kilometers that Ocean covers — was grand, inspiring, and bracingly nonhuman. “We have to leave most of it alone,” he noted about the ocean on an early slide in his lecture. I wondered about that: I love the Marine Preserve, but I’m less eager to avert my eyes and imagination. In thinking about the economics and ecology of the ocean today, Jackson often demonstrated that the value of, for example, sharks as attractors of tourism dollars produce more income than their price as ingredients in soup. But scuba-driven access to the undersea is a new thing, emerging only in the twentieth century. Seeing the glories of the underwater world is a bit older — Margaret Cohen showed us an image from the late 19c — but that aesthetic access still remains quite recent. I suspect we’re still learning how spending time underwater will change humans.

Stories? At the end of the trip, after a sleepless Sat night flight into predawn JFK, I was wondering about different kinds of stories. It’s a literature prof’s sort of thing to always be returning to questions of genre, but the difference between tragic visions of what Jeremy calls “Ocean Apocalypse” and a tragicomic/redemptive plan to renew reefs and seas is essentially, from my point of view, a genre question. A fishless and plactic-overflowing ocean is tragedy; a deep ocean global Marine Preserve snatches tragicomic redemption from contaminated jaws. The pedagogic and activist work of many of our speakers attempts to graft a comic or tragicomic turn onto darkening global and local narratives.

One of my favorite ideas in a rich weekend of imaginative speculation came from Holukani’s notion that a research product could be a lexicon, in her case combining Native Hawaiian words for earth and water with scientific terms and processes. Lexicons are hybrid critters, built to translate, clarify, and connect. I wonder what sort of lexicon this group might have developed given a little more time.

Hearing such a variety of perspectives sends me back into plurality in the waters, including new ways of thinking about which I know little. The project of “Revaluing the Ocean” mixes currents and splashes around in foreign waters. I’ve got a lot to think about, which is what I most love about events of this sort.

Draft title page of my Ocean book, which I edited on the flight to SLC

The salty fingers of Ocean touch every coast and rocky promontory, and to some extent the academic’s desire for clarity and unity can’t fit itself all the way around our chosen subject. But story-telling remains among humanity’s most capacious inventions. We’ve been telling sea stories for a long time, from Noah and Odysseus to Jacques Cousteau and Aquaman. The stories of Pacific Islanders and First Nations peoples remain new to me. I’m pleased to have wet my toes on a few unfamiliar beaches in Utah this past weekend.

After #mla19: Generosity, Imagination, Rage

January 28, 2019 by Steve Mentz

[I started writing this post with the MLA embers still hot, but then got swept away from it in the maelstrom and deep freeze of early Jan. Not all of what I wanted to say is recoverable — but some of it is here.]

Home again! In post-MLA afterglow, in which I have lots of work to do before the spring semester launches, but it’s also clearly a day to take the puppy on a long walk into the salt marsh, to make dinner for the family, and maybe to sketch out a blog post. Catch those sparks before they fade!

The older I get the less traumatic MLA becomes, which almost certainly says more about my own obliviousness than about the conference itself. The MLA conference feels to be in a kind of transition, at least to me — the rise of Skype interviews is somewhat displacing its former centrality, for the better certainly. Last year when the MLA was in tornado-snowed New York, lots of our SJU grad students were around, and we even hosted the only MLA cash bar my University has ever (and will ever, I’m sure) paid for. My past weekend in Chicago was mostly the oldsters, except for one great blue humanities panel in early American studies chaired by Marty Rojas.

Flying Delta’s steel birds home via Detroit back to CT I wolfed down two morsels that I’d picked up at the Book Exhibit: Toni Morrison’s The Origin of Others, and Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s Generous Thinking. They concentrated my mind, as books do, and I’m going to use them to think through #mla19.

Fitzpatrick’s book, subtitled A Radical Approach to Saving the University, argues that a turn away from competition for prestige and into more generous kinds of “conversational practice” (56) can strengthen the humanities in our time of struggle. I like her suggestions and mantras, from support for open-access publishing to the somewhat more radical open peer review. I also like the ideas of “working in public” (135) and “giving it away” (152), which basically amount to a conception of academic labor that’s not about hoarding precious knowledge but managing flows of information. She writes well about the contrast between inquiry (good!) and mastery (not always good!), about conversation as a scholarly value, and — in my favorite part of the book — about Simone Weil’s more or less theological understanding of attention as the “rarest and purest form of generosity” (46):

Attention requires letting go of the self, relinquishing will, and finding instead a position of radical receptivity that creates the ground for learning, for connection. (76)

There are things about attention, perhaps especially in the context of MLA, that feel more aggressive that Fitzpatrick’s Weil-inflected description. But attention’s insistent tug also defined the best parts of #mla19 for me. Maybe attention is both what we give each other and what we give texts — attention as a pressure and receptivity that re-contextualizes, brings something forward into new view, that startles and reimagines.

Like her brilliant and searing short New Yorker piece in the aftermath of the November 2016 election, Origin combines insight, anger, and ice-eyed clarity.

Morrison’s Origin of Others, drawn from her 2015 Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard, commands the attention her brilliant career has earned. Reading it brought me back to the one time I’ve heard her speak in public, in an overcrowded lecture hall in Princeton around 1988, when she dazzled us by exfoliating the opening lines of each of her novels. Her Norton lectures explore the perverse imaginative leaps required by slavery and Other-creation. It made me want to re-read the novels, starting again not with my favorite (Song of Solomon) but with Paradise, which I’m not sure I fully grasped when I read it back in 1998.

[That’s as far as I got on the other end of this month. With more time I might have more to say about Fitzpatrick’s inspiring book, and Morrison’s gorgeous and troubling vision. But I think I’ll post now, with what I have: the generosity that Fitzpatrick conjures, the rage Morrison projects, the imagination that links both to the best parts of academic life.]

Next, I’ll probably have some things to say about the spring 2019 semester!

Eco-Thoughts from Oaxaca to Chicago

January 4, 2019 by Steve Mentz

In between Christmas in snowy Short Beach and MLA in chilly Chicago, I snuck away with family from both the east and west coasts to spend a glorious few days in the mountains of Oaxaca, Mexico. The full tale of food, Zapotec ruins, hiking, wood carving, mezcal, mole, tacos, fiestas, and other wonders would be long to tell.

A welcome and unplanned part of our almost-week at the Casa Colonial on the outskirts of downtown was visiting with the other guests. Breakfast and dinner each day at the Casa was a kind of pop-up salon, featuring an amazing group of people, including an Australian expert in Indonesian textiles who works at the Fowler Museum in LA, a master guitar craftsman from Chelsea & Woodstock, a painter from Manhattan and Brooklyn, a Methodist minister from Chapel Hill, and – to my particular interest and pleasure – a climate change activist named Larry Gussin. Larry’s a co-founder of Nest, one of the first companies to use computer technology to increase energy efficiency. After Google bought Nest, he has become since 2012 a full-time activist working in support of carbon pricing initiatives, mostly, and managing a donor advised fund at the Sierra Club Foundation .

After we met, I sent Larry a link to my website. To my great pleasure, he came to the New Year’s Day Fiesta armed with a great question I’m still mulling: “Is shipwreck” [in my eco-theory sense] “an elaboration of technological incrementalism in the face of environmental hostility, or is it part of the ‘burn it all down’ radicalism” that Larry in his own work been struggling against in recent years? He describes himself as a leftist who in recent years has been mostly fighting with the left, because he supports market- and technology-based mitigations. I believe he was a supporter of the failed carbon pricing initiative in Washington State this past fall.

Update: I garbled that last point a bit. Larry emailed to clarify his stance on the WA carbon pricing initiatives. He writes: “I supported the 2018 WA carbon tax effort in 2014-15 with $45,000 in seed $ and volunteering, but opposed the proposal from 2016 on as I thought it was being written to only appeal to the left in a purple state. In the end 1 in 4 of the voters for the reelection of liberal senator Maria Cantwell voted against the carbon tax: I was right.”

He’d read my manifesto-ish PMLA article “After Sustainability,” and we talked about what counts or does not count as a “pastoral” or a vision of stasis in environmental thinking. We also talked about what counts as radical or revolutionary, and whether climate change activism can avoid the vortex of partisanship in our Trumpy present. I suspect it can’t over the next two years of highly polarized political conflict in the US – but in a post-orange menace medium term, I agree with Larry that we need a climate solution that isn’t only partisan. I don’t believe that in the US it’s possible to have the left “win” in a permanent or decisive way – though I certainly think the current version of the right deserves to lose.

I didn’t quite figure it out enough to say it over mezcal & grilled cactus on New Year’s Day, but Larry’s technological and carbon-pricing-based vision might be better thought of as georgic rather than pastoral. He presents a vision of skilled human labor – the sort of skill that built Nest and Google – engaging technically and carefully with our dynamic environmental conditions. There are things not to love about the georgic tradition, including the settler colonialism legacies that flow from both its Virgilian / Roman sources and from its early American rearticulations. But a solar and renewable georgic might be just the thing in 2019. (On my MLA panel yesterday, Jesse Oak Taylor & I were talking about Jedidiah Purdy’s After Nature, which also makes a quasi-georgic argument about American history.)

Larry has been jousting recently with what he calls the “burn it all down” anti-capitalist left, which for him seems represented in part by Naomi Klein, and perhaps also by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and at least some maximalist versions of the “Green New Deal.” I didn’t let on that, though I’m ambivalent about Klein’s melodramatic view of history, I kinda love AOC, and have some hopes for what she’s bringing to Washington. Leftist radicalism seems to him both politically impossible and perhaps also environmentally counterproductive, because it rejects the expertise and techno-precision that he believes in. Given that I’m mostly immersed in leftier-than-me academic culture, it was an interesting perspective.

So — to answer Larry’s question — where do my ideas about shipwreck and swimmer poetics fall in the spectrum between burn it all down and tecno-incrementalism? I guess a bit on both sides: shipwreck stories attract through their implicit radicalism, in which great ships go down and human hopes are dashed. But the survival narrative, which includes the story of shipwrecked swimmers and the sailors who cling to broken spars, relies on expertise, labor, patience, and perhaps a bit of luck. The break-plus-recovery narrative that I wrestled with in my book Shipwreck Modernity has feelers in both technical and radical discourses.

It was a great afternoon of food, drink, and eco-conversation. We talked about Odysseus, who goes home to stay in Homer, but who is later goaded out into the open sea by Dante and Kazantzakis. What is it about home that resists narrative? Why can’t we let heroes rest? Why are human stories so impatient?

We also talked, with contributions from all the generations of the family, about Tolkien’s hobbits and the Shire as eco-vision: a precious spot, a place that does not know its own peril, and a community worth sacrificing oneself to preserve. The Shire remains a bit green for my blue/oceanic tastes, especially in the films, but that short glimpse of the Scouring of the Shire that Sam sees in the Mirror of Galadriel (films only) might represent a painful near-future today. I wonder also about the sea that cradles Middle Earth and the brief hints of oceanic voyages in Tolkien’s mythology.

We talked about the “Creating Nature” symposium I’m organizing for May 2019 at the Folger, and my hopes to foster dialogue between eco-literary types and scientists, legal scholars, philosophers, and other interested parties. The entanglement between what we call “human” and what we call “Nature” has a long and complex history; part of my project as historicist and Shakespearean ecocritic seeks to surface premodern ways of understanding the relationship between humans and our nonhuman environment in ways that speak to today’s shifts and changes.

After the New Year’s Fiesta came 18+ hours of travel out of Mexico on Wednesday and a very full day at MLA yesterday. With the conversation at the Casa very much on my mind, I spoke yesterday on a great panel, “Climate Humanism and the Inhuman Turn,” organized by eco-Gandalf Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. I started writing this post amid chaos and bad wifi at the Mexico City airport, thinking about the talk I was about to give in Chicago and about the past few days of conversations in Oaxaca. It turns out family vacation makes a great prelude to academic conferencing!

I’ll close with the ending of yesterday’s talk, which I am starting to think of as a way to imagine the oceanic encounter as break-and-continuity, a way to preserve some aspects of the “human” while recognizing the inhuman vastness and dynamism of the climate in which we live. I was talking mostly about Jonah, and about what his story means today. But I wonder if there are political and strategic implications for eco-activists and their fellow travelers.

Here’s the last bit –

We must combine our human need to reform the great city with our awareness of the nonhuman plurality that environs our bodies.

The human in the prophet preaches repentance, change, and survival. (Good eco-georgic values! Good swimming virtues! The technology of human endurance!)
The nonhuman into which the prophet dives promises shock, disorientation, and possibilities we cannot contain. (The revolutionary urge! The lure of change and difference!)

We need both.

I wonder if Larry would agree with me?

Seven Thoughts on the Seven Seas (Aquaman: The Movie)

December 23, 2018 by Steve Mentz

Plenty to laugh about in the car home from Branford Regal Theaters last night after a family trip to see “Aquaman.” But my sea-fever makes me susceptible even to the underwater glimmer of the DC logo in the opening credits. So I’m going list the things I enjoyed about this $200 billion dollar and two-and-a-half hour romp.

The first spoken words, in voice-over from Jason Mamoa, were “Jules Verne,” and then the quotation, “Put two ships in the open sea, without wind or tide, and at last they will come together.” The phrase glosses the Atlantan queen-lighthouse keeper romance of Aquaman’s parents, but I was happy just to get Verne’s name up front where it belongs.
Pollution: The bad brother / Ocean Master Orm, played by Patrick Wilson, wants to attack the surface in revenge for centuries of pollution. At one point he causes the sea to vomit up plastic and sunken warships on all the world’s beaches. He’s not the good guy, but it’s not a bad idea.
The movie opens on a remote lighthouse on the Maine Coast, and a running vision imagines this place as a maritime edge, jutting out into the rocky coastline. Maybe my favorite CGI spectacle moment saw a massive wave surge over this coast, with our guy Aquaman trying to drive his father’s pickup truck ahead of the storm, with his sleeping-it-off father snoozing in the passanger seat. Spoiler alert: they don’t make it, but Dad ends up OK.
Among many A-list actors in what doesn’t always feel like an A-list movie was Nicole Kidman as Queen Atlanta, undersea royalty who flees from an arranged marriage, falls in love with the lighthouse keeper, has a half-human son, and then returns when she realizes she can only keep her human family safe by going back to Atlantis. Why she leaves her son on land is never clear — but in the end she comes back to the lighthouse keeper, which makes a nice twist on the siren/selkie stories of feminine sea-creatures who lure sailors to their doom.
Jason Mamoa’s a fun actor and physical specimen, though I’ve always seen him as a bit too musclebound to be a swimmer. They kept his comic side mostly reined in by melodrama and action scenes, though I did enjoy a goofy moment where what looked to be a developing bar fight became instead a series of selfie poses with burly locals and the “Fish-man.” But mostly I loved Mamoa’s tattoos, which make me think of my favorite maritime Pacific islander, Queequeg. As the Captain says when looking at the body art, “Oh, devilish tantalization of the gods!”
It’s hard not to love the giant crab-god Karathen, voiced by Julie Andrews, who joins up with the good guys after Aquaman secures the ancestral Trident. I admit I wanted the ocean-liner sized beastie to burst out into the crab-song from Moana, “Shiny,” and in fact at various points I started thinking that a Moana-Aquaman mashup might really be an excellent thing. “I was a drab little crab once…”
King Arthur of Atlantis! The plotline was basically sword from the stone-familiar, which maybe supports longstanding fantasies about the sea being the “English national chemical” (Ezra Pound) or England having some special connection to the ocean (Joseph Conrad). Or maybe they could not think of a more original plot? But in any case — what’s not to like?

There was some discussion in the car home about whether this costume counts as shirtless or not

Maybe I’m just in the holiday spirit, but I’m tempted to go see it again.

Happy watery holidays to all!

Head over Heels

December 7, 2018 by Steve Mentz

Arcadia’s got the beat. “Habemvs Percvssio,” the inscribed arch proclaims in the opening number of Broadway’s only current musical based on an Elizabethan prose romance. The show starts with the most famous of the many Go-Go’s numbers that make up the musical backstory. “We Got the Beat,” the cast self-celebrates in the opening number Why not?

I was probably the only person watching “Head over Heels” in the admittedly not quite full Hudson Theater on Tuesday night who was wondering how well the 1980s pop rhythm matches the Renaissance fixation with Arcadia as ideal place. In Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, the brilliant & intricate Elizabethan prose narrative that was the primary source for the musical & that I wrote my dissertation about in the early 1990s, the region is known “partly for the sweetness of the air and other benefits” but even more for “the moderate and well tempered minds of the people.” That ideal temperance, of course, gets remixed in the sixteenth-century story, as in the twenty-first century musical.

Maybe having “the beat” isn’t a bad way to think about Arcadian pastoral? It doesn’t mean you have all the secrets or have built full utopia — it’s just that songs are brighter, the weather fresher, life a bit tastier, in Arcadia. Or on Broadway.

Peppermint the Oracle

The modern version, written by Jeff Whitty and recently revised by James Magruder, is now on Broadway after earlier turns in San Francisco and, originally, at Ashland, OR. Its Arcadia presents a paradise of sexual plurality. The most rousing applause of the night was for trans actor and alumna of Ru Paul’s Drag Race Peppermint’s performance of the Pythian Oracle. The show’s narrative makes pretty messy hash of Sidney’s more balanced and more complex symmetries, including cross-dressed Amazon, a pair of contrasting princesses, and a royal pair who each fall in love with the visiting Amazon, the Queen because she realizes he’s a man under his armor and the King because he does not. (That final twist, along with the Oracle describing it, comes directly from Sidney, though other parts of the plot depart from both of the Renaissance versions of the narrative.)

The show was infectious and fun — and in some ways its sex-positive and erotically plural message almost fits the Elizabethan original, in mood if not words. Back in 2003, I wrote one of my first published articles on the cross-dressed Amazon figure, who I took as representing both gender uncertainty and generic multiplicity. Drawing gender and genre together via the Latine generare, I explored how Sidney’s multiply-revised text asks for plurality in both sexual presentation and literary genealogy.

The Broadway musical, like Elizabethan prose fiction, is a wonderfully flexible genre that loves to trot out its typical figures: Basilius the vain king, Gynecia the smart and cynical Queen, Dametas the fond father, Pamela the bossy older sister, Philoclea the “plain” (not really) younger sibling. I mostly enjoyed the Broadway-fication of the Arcadian tropes, and it was hard not to be swept away by the singing and showmanship, especially of Bonnie Milligan as Pamela, making her Broadway debut.

I wasn’t thinking of the big stage when I wrote my chapter on the Arcadian Amazon around the turn of the last century, but after seeing “Head over Heels” I could not resist looking back at my argument this week, many years since I’ve last re-read any of the versions of Sidney’s Arcadia. The article is “The Thigh and the Sword: Gender, Genre, and Sexy Dressing Sidney’s Arcadia,” in Constance Relihan and Goran Stanivukovic’s collection, Prose Fiction and Early Modern Sexualities in England, 1570-1640 (Palgrave, 2003). I was surprised to find that at least some of my claims for Elizabethan fiction also work somewhat for Broadway musicals — or am I just giving myself an Arcadian benefit of the doubt?

I suggested that Sidney’s cross-dressed Amazon, who in his version in the young prince Pyrocles (in the Broadway version he’s the shepherd Musidorus), celebrateshybridity in both gender — as in the stage version, she (Sidney uses both gendered pronouns in different contexts) seems happy to be both — and in genre. Here’s a resonant proto-feminist line, spoken by the Amazon as she/he/they do battle against the mono-masculine knight Anaxius:

I seem to have taken a picture of the wrong billboard on 44th St

‘Thou dost well indeed,’ said Zelmane, ‘to impute thy case to the heavenly providence, which will have thy pride find itself, even in that whereof thou art most proud, punished by the weak sex which thou most contemnest’

The Amazon on stage last night, who went by Sidney’s alternate name Cleophila, never voiced such Latinate periods. But I couldn’t help feeling that the show’s rage for plurality, for more love in more forms, wasn’t that far from Sidney’s “idle work,” even if the Elizabethan courtier himself, who would die heroically in battle not long after putting aside the unfinished Arcadia, might not have wanted to admit it.

Go see it before January 6, if you’re in New York!

Creating Nature: Draft program and title

November 14, 2018 by Steve Mentz

“Boring the Moon.” Photograph by Rosamund Purcell

The full draft program for Creating Nature: Premodern Climate and the Environmental Humanities, is now online at Folgerpedia.

I’m excited to be co-organizing this event with Owen Williams of the Folger Institute. We’re asking how the premodern environmental humanities can speak to the eco-disorders of our past and present. The event will also work to expanding our cross-disciplinary capacities: the plenary will be co-delivered by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, a medieval literature scholar who’s recently crossed over to the Dean side, and Lindy Elkins-Tanton, the Principal Investigator for NASA’s planned mission to the asteroid Psyche. These two, who recently co-wrote the Object Lessons book Earth, will speak to a group that includes not only scholars working actively in early modern and medieval eco-studies but also practitioners of paleoclimatology, legal studies, philosophy, and anthropology.

Here’s the description of the event from the Folger site:

In the premodern past, weather was never just weather. Storms expressed the rage of gods, drought punished human sinfulness, and fires provided revelations straight from divine mouths. To suffer in hostile environments meant encountering more-than-human forces with merely human flesh. The inhuman power Shakespeare calls “great creating Nature” touches and sustains human bodies, but opaquely, and sometimes painfully. Nature is creator and created, force and object, destroyer and home.

This conference will bring together premodern environmental humanities scholars to explore the long and varied history of how humans have conceptualized their environment. Its invited speakers will explore historical and cultural forms in which humans have come to terms with their love for, dependence on, and need to manipulate the nonhuman world.

The distinguished speakers will cluster their conversations around four environmental keywords: “storms,” “sustenance,” “shelter,” and “spirits and science.” Together with the conference-goers welcomed into conversation, “Creating Nature” will provide insights into premodern ideas about human entanglement with the nature they knew themselves to be creating and the nature that created them.

Over the six months remaining before we convene in Washington in May, I’ll intermittently blog about the conference. I’ll also link to related subjects, including the amazing eco-talk by Bruno Latour I saw in mid-town just before Halloween. Eventually I’ll gather the posts together on a Creating Nature webpage.

My opening post investigates the conference title.

It’s at the Folger and I’m co-organizing it, so it’ll surprise few people that the title comes from Shakespeare. But after however many years as card-carrying Shakespearean, I still find the phrase “great creating nature” hard to parse. I’ve been wrestling with the lines and the dynamic idea of Nature they imagine since grad-school in the ’90s. Back in 2015 I was fortunate to explore the exchange with the help of brilliant actors and directors at Loyola University of Chicago’s McElroy Shakespeare Celebration. After that talk-and-performance, I remember feeling “unsettled” about the “creating nature” exchange. I wanted to dig more into it — and I’m eager to do so with another amazing group of collaborators in DC this coming May.

In the sheep-sheering festival scene in The Winter’s Tale (4.4), King Polixenes debates Art and Nature with not-really-shepherdess Perdita. The King wonders why the foundling we know to be a princess refuses to plant streaked carnations, a popular hybrid species, in her garden. Perdita rejects them because

There is an art which in their piedness shares

With great creating Nature (4.4.87-88)

In an argument that has engaged and baffled literary critics for centuries, Polixenes counters Perdita’s anti-hybrid position with the claim that “the art itself is Nature” (4.4.97). Perdita’s desire to prohibit “Nature’s bastards” (4.4.83) from her garden seems an error of exclusion, and perhaps also an aesthetic narrowing. She craves simplicity while Polixenes champions complexity. Both believe they speak for natural truth, even though both arrive on the scene with their identities hidden. But neither regal authority nor youthful promise accurately maps the sinuous path creation takes in the redemptive second half of this play. At the heart of the exchange lies the unfathomable creative pressures of nonhuman Nature, the powers that make flowers and words, gardens and kingdoms. What happens when we can’t separate creators from created?

Our conference takes Shakespeare’s “creating nature” to limn the core paradox of environmentalism: that the ecosphere in which we live creates us while we re-create it. The shock of anthropogenic climate change in the present sometimes obscures the long cultural and physical histories in which humans have imagined, not always mistakenly, that climate responds to human actions, sinful or hubristic or fortunate. The ecological devastation of tropical island paradises from the Canaries to Easter Island provides a historical view onto today’s global environmental crisis. Weather emerges on the borders of understanding and experience. Systemic visions of climate from Aristotle to the Weather Channel posit structural forces that govern daily fluctuations. These changes carve themselves into human experience through the rawness of exposed skin in a storm, or the softness of a spring breeze.

We hope you’ll join us to explore how “Creating Nature” can help us understand the changes we are witnessing in our creating and created environments.

More soon!

Tempest at the Queens Theater

November 3, 2018 by Steve Mentz

When I left the theater around 10 pm, the rain fell heavy and thick, splashing hard onto my bald head. I darted beneath trees but was pretty wet by the time I got to my car. I missed my exit for the Whitestone Bridge and had to navigate a few treacherous puddles as I made a U-turn around the LaGuardia exits. Allegories abound in wet places: was I replaying the show, or extending it, or asking for a slight variation?

The Unisphere

The skies hadn’t been clear when I got to the Queens Theater a little before 7 pm to meet my students, but my Dark Sky app thought the storm might hold until midnight. I did arrive to an amazing water-show: the fountains surrounding the Unisphere, the 140′ high globe constructed for the 1964 World’s Fair in Queens, were switched on. I’d never seen them flowing before. I walked partway around the massive orb — the downwind side was torrential — and it was an amazing site. The massive sphere was dedicated in 1964 to “Man’s Achievements on a Shrinking Globe in an Expanding Universe” — which, come to think of it, makes an interesting comment on the ideological fantasies under examination in The Tempest. The jets of water shooting maybe 75 feet into the air resembled so many wet Ariels, performing the best pleasures of the wizards who built the Unisphere.

I heard a great World’s Fair story last night too: it turns out that a retired man who’s been auditing my Shakespeare classes off and on for the past few years, via a St. John’s community outreach program, had worked as a waiter in the Indonesian pavilion when he was a high school student in the summer of 1964. He described taking a motorized scooter home each night from the Fairgrounds to Forest Hills weighed down with change from tips, which would eventually overflow his sock drawer at home. He wore his marathon entrant’s cap last night, as he was getting ready to run his twenty-fifth consecutive (!) New York City marathon this Sunday.

Astrida Neimanis at Whale Creek

Unisphere motto = “Man’s Achievements on a Shrinking Globe in an Expanding Universe”

The highlight of Titan Theatre’s Tempest was Devri Chism’s compellingly nonhuman Ariel. She opened the show by dancing the storm into shipwreck, and throughout the night she repeatedly controlled the audience’s attention. Perhaps her most memorable trick was a subtle practice of holding her face at an oblique angle to the other actors on stage, emphasizing the intensity and partial incomprehension of her gaze. While many of the other performances were open and accessible — I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a more innocent rendition of Miranda than Ann Flanigan’s — Chism’s Ariel was the one performance who kept us asking for just a little bit more.

About the enter the Nature Walk

I came to the stormy show after an afternoon in post-Nature, walking my favorite toxic pathway on the borderlands between Greenpoint and Long Island City on the Newtown Creek Nature Walk. I’ve not been back for a while, but all my favorites were there: the epochal steps, the sludge barge, the hidden oil mayonnaise deep below. I was lucky to have been able to convince one of my most-admired blue humanities scholars Astrida Neimanis to join me for the walk. She’s a brilliant and inspiring eco-hydro-feminist based in Sydney, Australia who I just learned a few days ago was in New York for a talk on Thursday at the Pratt Institute. I’d got the news too late to get to Pratt, but it was fantastic to finally meet her in person. We talked about Newtown Creek, about post-Nature and the sublime, about an amazing-sounding project she’d put together last summer with Cate Sandilands in Canada. It’s hard to catch up with our fellow environmental humanists who live so far away, and I felt lucky to have managed it. Plus Newtown Creek is where I want to bring all my academic friends — I actually had a plan to drag an MLA panel out to it last winter, but sub-zero temps trapped us in midtown.

Driving home through the storm, I tried to salvage Terry Layman’s Prospero. As a student suggested to me after the show, he looked right — tall, white-bearded, Gandalf-ish. He garbled some lines and stepped on enough of his fellow actors’ cues that I wondered if it was intentional, a way of signaling the bully-Dad’s desire to control his human and nonhuman children. But they played his love for Miranda conventionally, and even Caliban got forgiven in the end. I wasn’t fully convinced: Prospero is a tough part to play well in these ambivalently post-imperial and I-wish-we-could-be-post-patriarchal days. I’m still waiting for someone to hit it just right.

Steps under water at Newtown Creek

The show is up for another week, and very much worth a trip to Corona Park! Go early to walk around the World’s Fair grounds and think a little about the “Shrinking Globe in an Expanding Universe” — it’ll put you in the right mood!

Near Newtown Creek

Bruno Latour “Inside” (plus French Natures!)

October 29, 2018 by Steve Mentz

In the final phrase of his dazzling “anti-TED talk” “Inside,” which I saw at the Linney Courtyard Theater on West 42nd St Friday night, Bruno Latour named his vision for the future as something that might “merit the term Renaissance.” I was surprised enough that I had to ask the person next to me, an eco-modernist from City College, if I’d heard the R-word correctly. Has the man who denied modernity gone over to the side of Rebirth?

An image from Inside

After joining everyone on my twitterfeed in reading an engaging profile of Latour in this week’s Times, I was excited for the “lecture-performance.” Latour’s part of the show was mostly lecture, but in front of him on the stage electronic images and graphics designed by Frédérique Ait-Touati superimposed themselves. The pictures started with a vision of the polar ice caps, which Latour said spoke to him on a flight from France to Calgary, and ended with a four-way image of the polarities of modern politics. One axis angled from the local to the global; its partner crossed between an empty circle that Latour associated with the current US President, matched against his hopes for what he calls “terrestrialism,” a way of living that engages with our shared planetary system in its era of stress. At its odd angle, terrestrialism represents Latour’s off-kilter optimism, his belief that ways of imagining our world — what he called “representations” throughout the lecture — can change political reality. Like his earlier notion of a “Parliament of Things,” his utopian future hinges on a radical expansion of representative democracy.

Much of “Inside” critiques traditional ways of thinking that Latour wants us to move beyond. Whatever his reservations about critique as a methodology, he ran through a litany of ideas he believes have distorted Western thinking. Here’s a partial list of Things Latour Doesn’t Like:

Plato’s Cave, which insists that true reality lies Outside, rather than before our eyes on the surface of the planet where humans and “everything we have ever cared about” live.
The desire to escape, which he suggests comes from, among other things, Plato’s cave. His hope throughout the lecture was to re-value being “inside,” rather than wanting to escape to an idealized or imaginary “outside.”
The sublime as a way to relating to nonhuman nature, which he associates with imperialism and global conquest. He’s not wrong about intellectual history, but his comments on the sublime made me think that an important project for the environmental humanities might be to conceive a non-imperial, non-racist, non-sexist sublime. That project means recognizing and refusing the imperial dreams of mountain peaks and storms at sea, but maybe also salvaging something of the sublime’s open-ness to nonhuman experience. My money is on swimming, not rock climbing.
Stratigraphy
The blue marble image of the planet seen from orbit, which Latour associates both with NASA’s drive to escape our terrestrial “inside” and with the global view, which he, in a moment of uncomfortable agreement with nefarious forces in our current politics, wishes to reject. He reads the globe the way Peter Sloterdijk does, as Western culture’s dominant image of totality, abstraction, and global conquest. He seeks a different model to understand our planetary home.
Stratigraphy, which in a moment that surprised me he read as a problem, a lure into inhuman “deep time” which distracts and disorients human attention away from the terrestrial engagement at hand.

These elements all share a fundamental disorientation that historicist thinkers from Petrarch to Burckhardt to Foucault have associated with the sense of being “modern” that Latour has famously claimed we “have never been.” Disorientation, as I understood his lecture, emerges from the desire to escape from “inside” into a vastness and perspective from which we can see either the globe as a marble or human history as one more layer in the rock. He asked for a different response to disorientation, a burrowing into rather than escaping from the bounded experience of living on our planet. Trying out the thought experiment, I thought — as I often do — of a line from one of my favorite novels: “this is not a disentanglement from, but a progressive knotting into –”

A diagram of the local and the global

There are some things that can help. In its second half, “Inside” turned toward politics and also toward hope. Latour asked us to re-imagine being “inside” as a place of connection. The physical space he asked us to imagine was neither the globe as blue marble when viewed from orbit nor the deep layers of rock leading down toward the planetary core. Instead, he asked that we focus on what scientists call the “critical zone,” the narrow splash of “biofilm” that spreads across the earth’s surface and extends just “a few kilometers” above and below. Only on this thin, permeable layer, Latour reminded us, does life exist. It’s the space where living and nonliving things and systems interact. It’s where our bodies are, and where our attention should be.

He mentioned the word “Anthropocene” only one or two times in the lecture– he’s previously suggested that he doesn’t like the term — but when he talked about the Critical Zone I could not help thinking that he was asking Old Man Anthropos to look around his aging and broken body and remember that he’s only been in one place all this time. In a cave, on a thin membrane, inside the atmosphere, standing on rock, with wet toes on the edge of the sea — these are all the same place, from a certain point of view. Have we always and only been Inside?

By chance — we were two among 4+ million riders the subway last Friday — I bumped into my sister in the West 4th St station when I was moving between NYU and Latour’s lecture. She lives in Florida and I live in Connecticut. Coincidences happen!

I wondered if it matters, from the point of view of Inside-theory, that roughly 70% of the Critical Zone is covered by salt water.

I also wondered if Latour’s vision of science as a technique for re-enchantment, for revealing the nearly infinite richness of the limited and in a cosmic sense tiny world Inside, might prove useful in re-structuring an eco-sublime for our broken world. He spent some time, when talking about the science of measuring the Critical Zone, engaging with Thoreau’s Walden. (He also got some comedy out of pronouncing the American writer’s name in several different ways in his French accent.) I wondered not only about the canonical pond in Massachusetts, but also about Thoreau’s wilder and less settled spaces, from the shipwreck beaches of Cape Cod to his failed attempt to scale Mount Katahdin in Maine. The mountain that repulsed him generated some ecstatic language:

Man was not to be associated with it. It was Matter, vast, terrific…rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact!

The mountain-top sublime bears many too-familiar Romantic and imperialist flaws, including a worship of masculine power and solidity, a rejection of social and feminine spaces down below, and the belief in a super-reality — “Matter” — that exists only in solitary splendor at the uttermost edge of things. But I wonder, too, if the matter-of-fact-ness of Thoreau’s matter, its “rocks, trees, wind” and “solid earth,” might lend itself to reconceptualization via Latour’s networks and actants and desire to find all the imaginable riches Inside. Is there a salvageable sublime still to be found? Might that project be what Latour enigmatically called a “Renaissance”?

Bruno Latour

It was a stunning lecture, and a pleasure to attend with many of the amazing people from the French Natures “conference-festival” (shouldn’t all conferences also be festivals? an excellent idea!) that I caught a bit of at NYU earlier on Friday. Thanks to Phillip Usher, Frédérique Aït-Touati, and the other organizers, and also to Hannah Freed-Thali for a lively blue humanities-flavored talk about the modernist beach in French literary culture.

I’m looking forward to the English translation of Latour’s new book, Down to Earth, which should expand on many of these ideas!

Cheek by Jowl & Pushkin Theatre’s Measure for Measure (BAM)

October 17, 2018 by Steve Mentz

Isabella and her brother Claudio

The last dance hit the hardest. After a dizzying, painful, intense intermissionless two hours, she followed his lead. At first, when Isabella received the now-undisguised Duke’s marital offer, she seemed, as in some other recent productions I’ve seen, nonplussed and not interested. Anna Vardevanian, who gave a strong and sometimes enraged performance as the wanna-be nun, seemed a bit stunned. But I knew it was a bad sign when she let her long black hair down out of the nun’s habit she’d worn throughout the play. In the final tableau, she awkwardly folded herself into dance position. The Duke embraced her with the same creepy paternalism that Angelo had cooed when he assaulted her in the second interview scene (2.4). The music carried their bodies together. They skipped around the stage in the same arcs that Juliet and Claudio and Marianna and Angelo had just traced. Everything was in order. No freedom in Vienna, or in the contemporary Russia that it represents in this brilliant production.

One from inside the program

The only one to get away might have been Barnadine, the drunk convict played brilliantly by Igor Teplov. Despite his small role, Teplov got lots of stage time, since the full thirteen cast members spent most of the evening all on stage together, with anyone not speaking in a given scene watching on one side, or zooming about in a group to mark scene changes. When the group was together, Teplov, tall and striking, often stood at the head, in a kind of implicit leadership position. When he refused execution (4.3) and again when he was pardoned by the Duke (5.1), Barnadine staged the direct resistance no one else could quite manage. He struck the Duke-as-friar in the prison scene, and then he was the only one who could escape off-stage in the middle of the Duke’s re-assertion of political control (5.1). It was good to see him get loose, but I wished he’d taken Isabella with him.

Last year, during the #metoo fall of 2017, I saw Measure for Measure twice, in an experimental production by Elevator Repair Service at the Public Theater. The first time was three days before the first Weinstein story broke in the Times, and my blog review was mostly about the experiments. I went back a few weeks later on a cold, wet Election Day night & all I could think about was consent.

The production I saw this past Tuesday night, at BAM for only a week, restaged the legendary collaboration between Cheek by Jowl, one of my favorite London-based companies, with Moscow’s Pushkin Theatre. The Russian-language production debuted in Moscow in 2013, played London in 2015, and ~~is in the US for the first time this year~~ [Correction: it played Chicago in 2016, and in Brooklyn only this week] in our second year of #metoo. Watching it, I wondered if, in these raw post-Kavanaugh & pre-mid-term days in the US, it’s possible to stomach this tale of hypocrisy, power, and women who suffer. It’s not the kind of show that leaves you happy.

Isabella inside the program

Before the show started I was thinking about Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, with her right hand raised, swearing to tell the truth. I thought of her quite a bit over the course of the evening.

The men hogged center stage, as usual.

Andrei Kuzichev performed a well-dressed Angelo as a slowly thawing ice cube, pleasingly short, vain about his appearance, at first soothing and then shockingly brutal when he tried to shush Isabella in 2.4 as he began to undress her. When confronted with his long-lost Marianna in act 5, he turned opaque and quiet, as if receding in importance now that the Duke had openly returned to the city.

Alexander Arsentyev’s Duke began the play as the first member of the cast to separate himself from the group, who were at this point all gathered together. In a production that took its politics seriously, the Duke opened by attempting to control over his on-stage companions, with only partial success. The night ended with the Duke organizing a quasi-fascist rally in the final scene, with canned applause responding to all his cues. In between, he presented an odd mix of bully and goofball. He seemed especially foolish when he accidentally showed several people in the prison his hidden identity, but given that the Duke represents authority — an authority that, in this production’s Moscow context, has a particular sinister cast — I didn’t trust my own occasional sympathy for him. When he waltzed Isabella into submission he seemed quite horrid, but as with his political opposite, Barnadine, I wondered at how much this figure kept the spotlight on himself, rather than on the women at the drama’s center.

In the category of men-bef0re-Isabella, I can’t resist one brief mention of Petr Rykov’s Claudio, who when he returned from his supposed execution in the final scene (5.1), refused the open embrace of the sister who had herself refused to sacrifice her virtue for his life earlier. He rejected his sister and turned instead to Juliet and their baby. Isabella’s isolation at that moment was painful. It made her easier pickings for the smiling Duke and his dancing feet.

Isabella herself was the supreme athlete of virtue that Angelo imagined himself to be before he failed his own test. In their first scene together, the impassioned Isabella grabbed Angelo by his starched collar and accused him of what she did not yet know he was guilty of:

Go to your bosom / Knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know / That’s like my brother’s fault (2.2)

The panic on Angelo’s face would later bleed into cruelty and desire. Isabella’s power showed itself in a few other moments, including her public introduction of Marianna and her initial turn away from the proposing Duke in the final scene, but unlike Barnadine she couldn’t get away.

It’s hard to watch this play, though it’s clearly the play that speaks most directly and painfully to #metoo and what I desperately hope is a last gasp of visible misogyny in our public culture.

In October 2016, when I didn’t yet know that the world was about to end, I took a group of students to see a stage play based on The Rape of Lucrece a few days after we all heard the Access Hollywood tape in which our future leader bragged about committing sexual assault. I was worried about it all being too much, but the show, the students, and maybe even the deep artistic bones of Shakespeare rose to the challenge. Something similar happened last night at BAM. Art speaks to power, misogyny, and violence. It hasn’t managed to stamp out those things yet, but I suppose that’s our job.

The Pushkin/CbJ Measure is only at BAM for one week. Get to the Harvey Theater!

Inside the lobby at the Harvey Theater

THE BOOKFISH

THALASSOLOGY, SHAKESPEARE, AND SWIMMING