Steve Mentz

THE BOOKFISH

THALASSOLOGY, SHAKESPEARE, AND SWIMMING

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Columbus the Aquaman

October 11, 2010 by Steve Mentz Leave a Comment

In Short Beach, Columbus Day is the semi-official end of the swimming season.  When it’s chilly but clear, like this weekend, it’s not all that easy to get in the water.  I ended up making the shift to wetsuits on Friday afternoon.

What did Columbus discover?  Certainly not America: he thought it was China, it had been visited many times before by Northern Europeans since the time of Erik the Red, and he had no interest in new places.  The thing he found that was new — or at least new-ish, for the part of Europe that had been formerly oriented toward the Mediterranean — was the deep sea.  “Admiral of the Ocean Sea” was what the Spanish called him.  He wasn’t really a land creature.

Today Olivia & I pulled on our 2mm Body Glove suits & walked past the fall colors to the beach.  A few teenagers were diving off the Yale boathouse docks & then shrieking as they rushed to get out.  The wet suits make it a little easier to get in, though it’s still a shock.  The real payoff is that as soon as that film of water gets warmed up, you feel ready to stay.

How many more swimming days are left in 2010?

Not enough.

Filed Under: Blue Humanities, Swimming

Auden on the Subway

October 7, 2010 by Steve Mentz 1 Comment

He was a New York poet, after all…

Thanks to Nicole for the photo.

Filed Under: E. 110 Fall 2010

Julie Taymor’s Tempest

October 6, 2010 by Steve Mentz 5 Comments

The trailer for Taymor’s forthcoming sound-and-lights extravaganza Tempest is now on YouTube:

Tempest Trailer

It’s supposed to open Dec 10.  Maybe the class should all go together on our last night, 12/14?

Thanks to Tara for the link.

Update: Watched it again today & it looks fun, if perhaps a bit over-the-top.  Sorcery. Passion. Stupidity.  Treachery. Revenge — so go the subtitles.  An interesting summary, I suppose?

We certainly should go on 12/14.  Anybody know a movie theater close to campus?

Filed Under: E. 110 Fall 2010, The Tempest

All is need and change

October 4, 2010 by Steve Mentz Leave a Comment

Caliban’s long speech in Chapter III of The Sea and the Mirror (channeling Henry James, as Ashbery’s blurb has it) is a bizarrely counter-intuitive performance of the “natural” in Tempest-ville.  It’s also deeply, subtly, a meditation on the dramatic Muse, explicitly so in the italicized part at the start.  There’s also some hard-to-follow movement of the pronoun “He,” which seems to stand for Ariel, Caliban, and Prospero at different time.  Perhaps our friends at Cutting Ball, currently rehearsing a Tempest w/o either Ariel or Caliban, want to weight in on that slippage?

My favorite passage isn’t the “restored relation” at the end, but the passing hymn to radical difference & change that comes on p47: “the wish for freedom to transcend any condition,” which may be a kind of “nightmare” or also “a state of perpetual emergency and everlasting improvisation where all is need and change.”

Recent times, and political theorists from Schmitt to Agamben, have suggested a political reading of that state of emergency as well.

Filed Under: E. 110 Fall 2010

“Creation’s O”

October 4, 2010 by Steve Mentz 3 Comments

For me, the shockingly brilliant insight and innovation of The Sea and the Mirror is how Auden asks us to think about Antonio.  He tends to be an afterthought for many readings of The Tempest — an Old World Machiavel who’s easily forgiven & forgotten — but Auden (perhaps writing with 1930s Europe in mind) gives him the choral role in Chapter II, with each lyric ending up as part of Antonio’s “alone.”  Auden’s Antionio ‘s a deeply skeptical, deeply individual poetic creation.  He mocks Prospero’s magic: “What a lot a little music can do.”  He doubts that mercy and book-drowning will have lasting consequences: “they will soon reappear, / Not even damaged.”

Against P’s show-and-tell, Antonio places individual will.  “Your all is partial,” he argues against his brother, “I am I, Antonio / By choice myself alone.”

He gets the last word each time: “choice for himself, burning in the dark for Ferdinand, toasting with Stephano, talking with Gonzalo, playing in his head with Adrian and Francisco, wearing a diadem with Alonso, sailing with the Master and Boatswain, fighting the white bull with Sebastian, laughing with Trinculo, dancing with Miranda.

As “Creation’s O” he is beyond his brother.  Outside of his control.

Filed Under: E. 110 Fall 2010

Auden’s “silent dissolution”

October 3, 2010 by Steve Mentz Leave a Comment

Where I go, words carry no weight: it is best,

Then, I surrender their fascinating cousel

To the silent dissolution of the sea

Which misuses nothing because it values nothing

Whereas man overvalues everything…

Auden’s great poetic commentary & meditation on The Tempest, which is also very much a poem of a European fleeing Europe during WWII, operates throughout between the dissolving opacity of the sea and the artistic fantasy of the mirror.  It’s a strange and gorgeous poem, though I’m not always sure in re-reading it whether it’s a hymn to the power of art or a lament about human failure.

I suppose that I see the same deep ambivalence in The Tempest as well.

We won’t have too much time at the NYPL on Tuesday to talk about Auden, so let’s bring him online for the next few days.  It’s a poem to chew on.

Filed Under: E. 110 Fall 2010

October Twilight

October 2, 2010 by Steve Mentz Leave a Comment

Got back from the rock-wall climbing birthday party after the second soccer game just as the sun was starting to go down.  A quick three-mile jog to warm up as the evening star poked her seductive head over Killam’s Point in the east.  The tide was just coming up to full, a wide, still pool of a flood.  In the last flashes of sunlight out on the Sound I could see white sails, round-bellied but still.

The water’s cooler now, & it takes me about 50 yards of fly and 50 free to get my body comfortable.  As soon as I stop my skin starts to tingle.  I turn to look back at the houses of Short Beach, every third one lit from inside.  No one else is visible on the bay.  Even the seaweed is silent, floating in stolid clumps.  I float on my back and watch the sky.

Timing is everything.

Filed Under: Blue Humanities, Swimming

Robinson Crusoe

October 2, 2010 by Steve Mentz 2 Comments

I’ve been thinking over the past few days about Robinson Crusoe, Mariner.  We’ll be busy next week with the NY Public Library & Dr. Lubey’s work, but esp. since she’s one of our resident Defoe experts, we might want to expand this conversation.

Matt P., our roving seminar member who’s spent the last two weeks in China, has started his project by thinking about the similarities between Prospero’s exile and Crusoe’s: both Europeans on isolated islands who survive, enslave non-Europeans, and appear, perhaps in slightly different ways, to represent fantasies about the colonial experience.

There’s lots to chew on in that parallel, but I also thought I’d share some recent material on Defoe that I put together this summer at the Folger.  Here are links to a web site based on his comprehensive world history, the Atlas Maritimus of 1728, to a map of his maritime travels that was published in Part II of his story, and to two audio clips.  (The first is recorded by my brother-in-law, Maury Sterling, last seen in the cast of “The A-Team” this summer.)

Defoe’s Atlas Maritimus

Map of Robinson Crusoe’s Travels

Crusoe’s Shipwreck

Alexander Selkirk

Enjoy!

Filed Under: Blue Humanities, E. 110 Fall 2010

Surfing Short Beach

October 2, 2010 by Steve Mentz 5 Comments

Lat Thursday afternoon, Olivia poked her head into my office while I was hard at work writing an article on “Popular Fiction” for the Cambridge World Shakespeare Encyclopedia.  “Daddy,” she said, “the waves are huge!  Will you take me swimming?”

The good thing about popular fiction is that it’s always there — that’s what popular means, after all — so it seemed like a pretty good idea.  It had been blowing hard for a day or so, with another day of high winds and rain to come.  The tide was high, and Short Beach was, for a change, a roaring shore.

Olivia suited up and put on a life jacket, & we even recruited Alinor to join us.  The water isn’t cold yet, but it was pretty rough: when the swell smacks into the sea-wall, it creates a standing wave that is (as high school physics tells us) twice as high as the first wave coming in.

The rare waves brought everybody out — our neighbor Joe Piscatelli the surfer was in the middle of the bay on his board, trying (with little success, alas) to ride the swell.  Dave & Gay Peterson, our most indefatigable swimmers, headed straight out along the sheltered western shore of the bay.  Plus a second surfer I didn’t know and a pair of Short Beach matrons were just getting in when we finally left.

Olivia likes to float in the surf & look out as each new wave floats her up and over.  We swam out pretty far, maybe 50 yards or so, so that we could float in the bigger waves.  We could feel the power of the destructive element, but it also buoyed us up.

Filed Under: Blue Humanities, Swimming

Three by Dr. Lubey

September 30, 2010 by Steve Mentz 15 Comments

Here, for your reading pleasure, are three articles by Dr. Kathleen Lubey, one of our department’s specialists in 18th-century literature.  Please read at least two — or if if you’d prefer.  The article on pornography, which emerged directly out of a grad seminar, might be particularly interesting & accessible to those who are not deep in 18c waters.

Lubey on pornography

Lubey on Haywood

Lubey on Addison

Filed Under: E. 110 Fall 2010

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About Steve

Steve Mentz
Professor of English
St. John’s University
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