Steve Mentz

THE BOOKFISH

THALASSOLOGY, SHAKESPEARE, AND SWIMMING

  • Home
  • Steve Mentz
  • Humanities Commons
  • Public Writing
  • The sea! the sea!
  • The Bookfish
  • St. Johns

BABEL 2014: On the Beach

August 18, 2014 by Steve Mentz Leave a Comment

coverI’ve been dipping my toes into the disorienting and brilliant program for BABEL 2014 all weekend. The conference promises to be oceanic in scale, beachy in feel, coastal in location, and changeable in form. Just my sort of thing!

My salty eyes being perhaps bigger than my oceanic stomach, I’ve slotted myself to speak five (5!) times during the three-day event. That means either I’ll have more fun than anyone else or I’ll dissolve into a sandy puddle before I fly home. Or both.

The opening event will be the conference’s first Plenary session on Th 10/16 at 9:30 am. In collaboration with my glacier-hiking buddy Lowell Duckert, who’ll be talking about lagoons and lacunae, I’ll discuss “Bodysurfing” as a theoretical, physical, and ecological practice. Here’s the abstract from the conference program:

Bodysurfing (Mentz)

Treating Jane Bennet’s notion of “strategic anthropomorphism” as an enabling provocation transforms the sport of wave-riding into a physical and intellectual engagement with the substance of the ocean. Dispensing with surfboards entirely, this talk and the immersive practicum that precedes it [see below] examines three key moments in a bodysurfer’s ride: swimming into the wave, the instant of “the catch,” and many possible white-water aftermaths. Treating this three-part cycle as symbolic template and physical experience, the talk imagines the knowledge a wave-rider gains through immersion: swimming creates antithetical movements, the catch temporarily unifies those forces, and disorderly aftermaths cast them up on shore. Bodysurfing becomes, in a repeatable instant, a form of physical and intellectual sympathy with a post-equilibrium environment.

*Steve will take 12-18 persons bodysurfing with him at Hendry’s Beach [Arroyo Burro Beach Park] at 8:00am on the morning before this Plenary I session; wetsuits are optional but more than decent swimming expertise is a must. If you are interested in joining Steve for this venture, contact him at: mentzs@stjohns.edu. 

We won't be using boards

We won’t be using boards

Please contact me if you want to come out early on Th morning to the beach! Cold Pacific surf is really the ideal way to start BABEL-ing.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

About Steve

Steve Mentz
Professor of English
St. John’s University
Read Bio

Twitter Feed

Steve Mentz Follow

Shakespearean. Ecocritic. Swimmer. New book Ocean #objectsobjects Professor at St. John's in NYC. #bluehumanities #pluralizetheanthropocene

stevermentz
stevermentz Steve Mentz @stevermentz ·
20 Jan

Send us your book proposals!

Reply on Twitter 1616466877257220096 Retweet on Twitter 1616466877257220096 Like on Twitter 1616466877257220096 7 Twitter 1616466877257220096
stevermentz Steve Mentz @stevermentz ·
31 Dec

Much to remember in '22, including a fantastic fall in Germany at the @CarsonCenter. But especially one day in late October, while isolating with Covid in a rural farmhouse in Bavaria, when I saw my first all-creative publication, these little poems --

http://www.ghostbirdpress.org/2022/10/swim-poems-by-steve-mentz.html

Reply on Twitter 1609321380100669440 Retweet on Twitter 1609321380100669440 1 Like on Twitter 1609321380100669440 14 Twitter 1609321380100669440
Load More

Pages

  • #shax2022 s31: Rethinking the Early Modern Literary Caribbbean
  • OCEAN Publicity
  • #SAA 2020: Watery Thinking
  • Creating Nature: May 2019 at the Folger
  • Audio and Video Recordings
  • Oceanic New York
  • Public Writing
  • Published Work
  • #pluralizetheanthropocene

Recent Posts

  • RCC Calendar Oct – Dec 2022
  • Books of ’22!
  • The Blue Humanities Goes to Venice!
  • Blue Humanities in Bremen
  • Blue Humanities at the Greenhouse (Stavanger)

Copyright © 2023 · News Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in