What a strange year!
No in-person academic events, no live theater or face to face teaching since March, no seeing family or friends or anyone who doesn’t live in cozy Short Beach, not to mention overall shut-in-ness, Zoom overload, and Covid-malaise. Among many other things, it’s been a slow blogging year. The Bookfish swam slowly, even intermittently, but finally ended up with 28 posts. Top marks go to February, when the theaters were still open and I posted 7 times, including play-reviews of Timon of Athens, The African Company Presents Richard III, Girl from the North Country, Hamlet, and Tumacho — those were the days! Months without any posts at all include June, August, and September. October has just one.
Theater in (parts of) 2020
Timon at Theatre for a New Audience (Feb)
The African Company Presents Richard III at Queens Theater (Feb)
Girl from the North Country on Broadway (Feb)
Hamlet at St. Ann’s (Feb)
Tumacho at Clubbed Thumb (Feb)
Richard II Radio Play via the Public Theater (Oct)
In place of my usual play and academic conference reviews, I smuggled in a half-dozen of book reviews, including Covid-themed classics Love in a Time of Cholera and The Plague, David Gange’s great kayaking history The Frayed Atlantic Edge, Alice Oswald’s Nobody, her gorgeous response to Homer’s Odyssey, Craig Santos Perez’s latest book of poems, Habitat Threshold, and most recently Peter Coviello’s gorgeous and enthusiastic Vineland Reread.
Books of 2020
Love in a Time of Cholera (March)
Habitat Threshold (April)
The Frayed Atlantic Edge (May)
Nobody (July)
The Plague (July)
Vineland Reread (December)
I wrote a half-dozen posts around the Shakespeare Association seminar that I co-lead (on Zoom) with Nic Helms in April. Several of these posts were in dialogue with, or substantially written by, Nic and our cluster-leaders, Lyn Tribble, Doug Clark, and Lowell Duckert.
Watery Thinking Posts
Watery Thinking 1: What does water want? (Feb)
Watery Thinking 2: Submersive tendencies (Feb) with Lyn Tribble
Watery Thinking 3: Fluid cognition (March) with Doug Clark
e-Watery Thinking 4: Forms of water (April) with Lowell Duckert
e-Watery Thinking: Outline and Schedule (April) with Nic Helms
e-#Shax2020: Watery Thoughts from a Distance (April)
There were a few other stray posts during the year, on #mla2020 in Seattle, Marina Zurkow’s gallery show “Wet Logic” in Manhattan, a Zoomposium hosted by the Urban Soils Institue, a roundtable celebrating with work of John Gillis, and even a response to a pair of music videos (only in 2020 would I be writing about music videos!) by Robbie Robertson and Bob Dylan.
#mla2020 (Jan)
Wet Logic at bitforms gallery (Feb)
Two Songs (March)
Urban Soils (November)
The Sea by Borges (November)
Gillis Roundtable (December)
Plus a few wrap-up posts in the waning days of a bad year!
