I missed this one earlier in the year, but it seems The Jewel of Oman, a replica 9th century Arab dhow, sailed this fall across the Indian Ocean from Oman to Singapore, along a well-traveled route of medieval Arab traders. She was built without nails, the timbers bound together by coconut fibers and sealed with goat fat. There’s a pretty good website with lots of videos too.
A strong La Nina in the Pacific in December 2010 may mean good fishing for Peru in the New Year. Also flooding in Asia and the Land of Oz. “The ocean rules the weather.”
The Phoenix Islands in the South Pacific are utterly isolated, unsettled, and only recently studied. When scientists arrived there around the turn of the millennium, they were amazed to find a nearly intact & undamaged coral reef system. At the time, the Micronesian nation of Kiribati, which controls the territory, leased the reef and islands to Japanese fishermen, but some clever fund-raising and negotiating ended up declaring the entire area (roughly the size of California) a World Heritage Site and off-limits to fishing.
Despite that, the coral was nearly wiped out by the hotter-than-usual El Nino of 2002-03, which raised the ocean temp by nearly a full degree Centigrade for six months. 
The great news — really the best oceanic news I’ve heard in some time — is that the coral has come back. Usually dead coral gets smothered by green algae, but the Phoenix islands’ dense population of Pacific steelhead parrot fish ate the new algae, enabling new pink coralline to form a substrate for coral regeneration.
It’s all about the fish…
I’d heard about it already, so I took my grad students to Taymor’s Tempest last night with low expectations. Lots of overly sweet stuff was already baked into the cake — the Harry Potter sound-and-light show, the distracting CGI versions of Ariel, the utter failure of the universal geometry she subbed in for the masque. Plus I’ve never seen a really good Miranda, & I wonder if that version of innocence simply isn’t playable today. Felicity Jones did not change my mind.
The good things were also mostly expected — the clowns were great fun, esp Alfred Molina’s drunken sea chantey, Russell Brand’s Trinculo was manic, and the island set was stunning. I’m somewhat on the fence about Djimon Hounsou’s Caliban. Cvered in earth & moonshine, he was visually overdone, but he projected real energy & physical charisma. The conspiracy scene was impressively dramatic. I liked watching the sailors go overboard in the shipwreck scene.
But what I didn’t expect was seeing Helen Mirren, a wonderful actor, fail so miserably.
It’s a play about power, & she didn’t project it. She had the wand, raised the storm, drew the flaming circle, stage-managed the lovers, bossed around the spirit, but she didn’t wield power. It’s pedantic to carp overmuch about cuts — any film has to cut some of Shakespeare’s language — but when she faced off with Caliban at the end, it seemed meaningful that he did not speak h is final line about needing to “seek for grace.” He just turned his back on her and left. She had nothing he wanted.
It doesn’t make sense that Prospera should be weak because she’s a woman, though Taymor’s film seems, according to her interviews anyway, to be bound up in cultural fantasies about motherhood. But mothers, as Shakespeare certainly knew, are plenty authoritative and plenty scary: remember Gertrude and Volumnia. Taymor ‘s film defanged her magician, minimizing her political delinquency in Milan and downplaying her aggression toward Ferdinand & her other dependents. The camera also shot Mirren mostly from above, making her seem frail. (Caliban, by contrast, was shot mostly from below.)
I like the idea of a female Prospero. But I’ve never seen a version of The Tempest before where the bits without the wizard were always best.
Here’s the website for anyone else who likes this image.
He was probably in his mid-fifties, ramrod thin, with a flash of gray in his dark hair. His mouth sometimes pulled down to one side, as if caught between a smile and a frown. He wore the same black bathing suit every time I saw him come to the pool. I never learned his name.
He told me a little bit of his story one day. He’d had an accident in the water when he was a boy, about the same age as my kids, who were at the pool that summer to take swimming lessons of their own. “I almost drowned,” he said, with that pulled-down grimace of a smile. “And since then I’ve been terrified of the water.” Now, as an adult, he’d signed up for a summer of private lessons.
We watched him, trying not to stare. His body froze underwater, muscles clenching & straining & grabbing at nothing. He wore a full set of water wings & floaties, and his arms and legs churned aimlessly.
He got better, slowly. At the end of the summer — during which time Olivia learned to put her face in the water & Ian learned rotary breathing for his crawl stroke — he could support himself w/o floaties. Eventually he swam, by himself, across the deep end of the pool, maybe 15 feet or so, in 12′ deep water. I’ve seldom seem anyone so triumphant, or so scared.
I think of this story a lot at the end of the semester. Learning is painful, risky, and dangerous — sometimes we teachers forget that. You have to put yourself in an untenable position — in the destructive element immerse, to borrow Conrad’s language — to make real education possible.
…For us the Continent of the sea, not the nuptial land with its perfume of fenugreek; for us the free space of the sea, not this earthly side of man, blinded by domestic stars.
Selected Poems, ed. Mary Ann Caws
(Train reading on the way home from the TemFest…)
No rain right now, but a fantastic gale off the Sound. 
The sound and smell of the wind is amazing. It’s warm air for November, hurling and tumbling itself onto shore. A half-dozen seagulls hover stationary above the beach, held in place by the onrushing wind. While I was watching, one dipped into the seaweed below — it’s about half-tide and ebbing, with mounds of fresh seaweed piled up from earlier this morning — to snatch a quick bite.
Conrad knows about this sort of thing:
If you would know the age of the earth, look upon the sea in a storm. The grayness of the whole immense surface, the wind furrows upon the faces of the waves, the great masses of foam, tossed about and waving, like matted white locks, give to the sea in a gale an appearance of hoary age, lustreless, dull, without gleams, as though it had been created before light itself.
A less happy story about flooding in Norfolk, VA. Te state attorney general is trying to prove that global warming is a hoax while town residents watch the tides before they park each night. Perhaps each, in its way, is reacting to climate change?
Thinking back on a great weekend in the van de Velde room, I’m going to report a version of my westbound flight ruminations and espirit d’avion. Trying to process the whole range of shipwreck representations we looked at, from early Buddhist images to post-modern narratives and contemporary art, I want to hazard a theory about two discursive modes in presenting shipwreck, the wet and the dry.
Wet narratives present disorder, disorientation, rupture, chaotic and variable experiences in which the usual ways of doing things get broken or fragmented. I think of the sailors in “The Wreck of the Amsterdam,” especially those in the water, and Emma’s “potentiality of failure” in her readings of Ader and Dean. Also a haunting sentence in Sarah’s talk on Buddhist narratives that I don’t have a good source for: “we don’t know the fruits of our deeds.” The lines from Verne that Stephen quoted, which I also have to track down, describe a “wet” revision of the old story of looking at a wreck. I also might add the instants of immersion in the early modern stories Joe & I each explored.
Against these immersion tales, we also heard about a powerful generic infrastructure of “dry narration,” which attempts to make sense and meaning out of shipwreck. Lucretius’s “shipwreck with spectator” paradigm, as several of us noted via Blumenberg, uses shipwreck to emphasize the stabilty created by watching (reading, viewing) wrecks. In Blumenberg’s words, which mesh nicely with my reading of Pet and Thacher, “shipwreck is a didactic drama staged by Providence.” Beyond the religious frames, Christian for the early modern panel & Buddhist for Sarah, this “drying out” of shipwreck and deriving of lasting meanings from it assumes a variety of other forms: literary canon-formation (Ranja), imperial or popular identities (Carl, Kirsty), American masculinity (Robin), Cold War nationalism (submarines), etc.
My take-away from this perhaps too schematic summary might be that the wet-dry tension works as continuum rather than binary, that even the most doctrinaire sermonized version of a shipwreck narrative has at its core the “wet’ experience of radical disorientation and exclusion, even if temporarily, from dry earth. I suppose that’s what I meant by thinking about shipwreck as a response to and representation of radical cultural change. Perhaps also we can trace a historical shift from narratives that cling to “dry” visions like so many spars, in the religious narratives that we explored, and those that revel in the wet for its own sake, like Ader’s conceptual art or perhaps some of the paintings (which have a different attitude toward narrative progress than stories do). Though I’d also say that even an avowed explorer of the fragmentary and incomplete like Ader (or Life of Pi, perhaps) still posits, at least on the imaginary or unreachable level, a “dry” or “miraculous” counterforce, a hoped-for order glimpsed through and also beyond immersion. And the more overtly religious narratives, even Herbert, also invoke the frisson of inhuman chaos.
I might have more to say about Life of Pi, since I like it more than Michael does (though this side of idolatry, still). I certainly take his point about the hash Martel makes out of his many acknowledged and unacknowledged sources. But I wonder — surely one challenge for any shipwreck writer in the past few millennia is that these tales are so thoroughly already-written? The Booker committee may have praised Pi, foolishly, for originality, but surely we needn’t judge by such criteria? I wonder if the awkward but emphatically open structure of the novel’s ending(s), for me the weakest parts of the book, might be attempts to keep the novel inside the “wet” world of shipwreck, rather than succumb to the drying out of narrative closure?
