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Bookfish 2014

January 2, 2015 by Steve Mentz Leave a Comment

Two days into 2015 and I haven’t done my 2014-in-review post! I’m behind already.

In swimming as in blogging, 2014 was a year of constancy. No long swims, and several months with no water-miles logged — in Jan I was recovering from ear surgery, and in May I guess I got caught between pool and open water seasons — but a respectable total of 103.37 miles. On the blog, 12,500 page views, roughly the same as last year, and about 7k visitors to the site.

Month Total Distance
Feb 13.01 miles (=22,900 yards, =20,940 meters)
Mar 11.25 miles (=19,800 yards, =18,105 meters)
Apr 5.26 miles (=9,250 yards, =8,458 meters)
Jun 11.96 miles (=21,050 yards, =19,248 meters)
Jul 9.24 miles (=16,260 yards, =14,869 meters)
Aug 17.88 miles (=31,471 yards, =28,777 meters)
Sep 6.16 miles (=10,850 yards, =9,921 meters)
Oct 3.35 miles (=5,900 yards, =5,395 meters)
Nov 14.80 miles (=26,050 yards, =23,820 meters)
Dec 10.45 miles (=18,400 yards, =16,825 meters)
Total 103.37 miles (=181,931 yards, =166,358 meters)

 

Of my 55 blog posts — which I think may be a new high number for me —  19 were theater or film reviews. Here’s the list starting in January, an autobio in spectating:

1. Twelfth Night with Mark Rylance (1/17)

2. Cry, Trojans by the Wooster Group (1/31)

3. Twelfth Night by Pig Iron (2/21)

4. Antony & Cleopatra at the Public (3/13)

5. Red Velvet at St Ann’s (4/4)

6. Lear at Tfana (4/23)

7. Rumstick Road by the Wooster Group (5/2)

8. Macbeth with Kenneth Branagh (6/6)

9. Antony & Cleopatra at the Globe (6/28)

10. Two Gents and The White Devil in Stratford (8/7)

11. 2 Henry IV and Roaring Girl in Stratford (8/9)

12. Gaia Global Circus (by Bruno Latour) 9/28

13. Tempest 1 at LaMaMa (10/6)

14. The Master and Margarita at Yale Drama (10/26)

15. Tempest 2 at LaMaMa (11/22)

16. Pericles at the Public (11/26)

17. Tamburlaine at Tfana (12/7)

18. Inherent Vice (12/15)

19. Tempest 3 at LaMaMa (12/20)

Most blog posts in a month was 5, in June, October, and December; least was 1 in May (what was going on in May?), followed by 2 in July and September.

I estimate those 19 reviews amount to something over 15k words that I wrote about performances in 2014. Almost all of them were only published on this blog. I have promised an article-sized version of my response to “Cry, Trojans” to Shakespeare Survey next year, after the Woosters do a final full production in St. Ann’s this coming March. Other than that, though, I haven’t published any of these reviews, though I may still combine the three Tempests at LaMaMa this past fall into something larger. (I think my last published review was on the Julie Taymor *Midsummer Night’s Dream” that opened the new theater space for Tfana in Fort Greene in fall 2013; it appeared in Shakespeare Bulletin 32:2 [Summer 2014] 307-310. But I never blogged that one.)

This coming spring semester I’m going to mine this archive as well as recent issues of Shakespeare Bulletin, and maybe a few other early modernist blogs (like Holger Syme’s Dispositio) to think about how we respond critically and rhetorically to modern performances of early modern plays. There are a bunch of great upcoming shows in NYC this spring, as I’ve noted already, and I should be able to get almost all of my students to at least a couple of them. I’ve been wanting to shake up the writing that I assign in my Shakespeare class without reducing the intense focus on close analysis, and this might be a good way to do it.

I’m toying with a couple of other 2015-ish resolutions, but those will have to wait for a later post.

 

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Steve Mentz
Professor of English
St. John’s University
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Another great essay by @pakhimie about parenting & teaching. Every as the pandemic (please!) fades, we should heed what it’s taught us about teaching, community, and our essential labor as parents as well as profs

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"There is no long-term survival plan for humans in the ocean." @stevermentz on the loneliness of the long-distance swimmer: http://hypocritereader.com/61/swimming-lessons

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