Steve Mentz

THE BOOKFISH

THALASSOLOGY, SHAKESPEARE, AND SWIMMING

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

Tar for Mortar by Jonathan Basile (Punctum)

April 16, 2018 by Steve Mentz

The visible work of this book is easily and briefly enumerated:

The most compact way I know to express Jorge Luis Borges’s brain-bending irony slides in between the second and third words of the title of his essay, “A New Refutation of Time.” The title creates a compact version of the self-canceling liar paradox  credited to the ancient philosopher Epimenides: if the essay’s argument is “new,” time has not been refuted, but if the “refutation” does what it claims and deconstructs time, the modifying word “new” becomes meaningless. So far, so self-consuming. Borges’s essay, like many of his fictions, dances across the edges of veracity and what Jonathan Basile, in Tar for Mortar, his brilliant new open-source reading of Borges, calls “the dream of totality.”

Basile, the creator of the amazing libraryofbabel.info website that digitally replicates the conditions of Borges’s famous story, “The Library of Babel,” brings to this book multiple strengths: razor-sharp analytical skills, precise writing, and a web-master’s experience of wrestling with a digital instantiation of Borges’s thought experiment. He’s written a brilliant book about Borges — that would be enough of a great thing for me — which also has important things to say about intellectual ambition, irony, language, and the things that the Digital Humanities can and cannot reveal.

… An examination of the essential metric laws of French prose, illustrated with examples taken from Saint-Simon (Revue des langues romanes, Montpellier, October 1909)

What Basile terms the “dream of totality” turns out, as he cogently shows, to be quixotic in a very precise way: the fantasy never corresponds to reality, but the act of dreaming changes the world in which the dreamer lives. “Totality itself,” Basile observes, “is essentially incomplete” (17). This lack of wholeness redounds upon the dreamer. “In all its forms,” he continues, “the library should lead us to think differently about the possibility of originality or novelty” (17). The limits of both Borges’s Library and language itself — the fact that “even the most unpredicted or unpredictable event is intelligible to us only by means of conforming to pre-existing concepts and forms of experience” (18) — bounds our thinkable universe. The world spreads itself before us, in physical space and also inside the slim & somewhat broken copy of Borges’s Labyrinths that I have sitting on my desk right now. The fragile New Directions paperback is the second of several copies that I have owned, but the oldest still in my possession. My notes in spidery pencil marked the pages in the mid-1980s, when I treated myself to an undergrad course on Borges and Latin American fiction with James Irby, who translated most of the material in this volume. Around that same time that I changed tracks from my plans to major in theoretical mathematics and turned instead to literature, where I remain today.

… A reply to Luc Durtain (who had denied the existence of such laws), illustrated with examples from Luc Durtain (Revue des langues romanes, Montpellier, December 1909)

“I no longer long for a solution” (18), Basile writes after a wonderfully thorough analysis of the possible and impossible structures of “The Library of Babel.” He comes to think that “Borges has an imagination that surpasses lucidity to its dark hinter-side, the mind of what I would prefer to call an anarchitect, whose great vision was an ability to lead us into blindness” (18). At the far end of the paradox lies “Borges’s irony” (18) and his habit of breaking open all conceptions of totality even as he dreams them in their fiercest and most capacious forms. At the end of Basile’s gorgeous investigation and careful parsing of “The Library of Babel,” he arrives at Borges’s auto-ironic not-quite-nihilism: “there is no universe in the organic, unifying sense of that ambiguous word” (64). In an odd moment of vertigo that I associate with a lifetime of reading Borges, I noticed when I first read that quoted sentence — at the hinge of Basile’s book — that the passage was one I’d also quoted myself, at the conclusion of the “Brown” chapter I wrote for Jeffrey Cohen’s Prismatic Ecology in 2013 — a chapter and book that also marked a redoubling or intensifying of my own ecomaterialist turn.

The broken spine of my undergrad copy of Labyrinths

… almost infinitely richer …

Repetition looks different under a Borgesian lens. It’s not very strange that Basile and I, two American Borgistas, would quote the same resonant phrase. In its playful doubling of universal meaning, the phrase perfectly captures Basile’s argument about irony and totality; I used it to make a similar point about environmental identity and excess. But the echo worked on my imagination as I turned into the second chapter of Tar for Mortar, which moved from an explication of the experience of creating libraryofbabel.info and a comparative reading of “self-contradiction” in Borges and Nietzsche regarding the Eternal Return. Now I started to get suspicious, and I opened the title page of my mid-’80s copy of Labyrinths to the notes for what would become my final paper in that course: “the Eternal Return / see last pp. of ‘Garden.'” I didn’t know much about Nietzsche at that time — I would have benefited greatly from Basile’s cogent explication in this book! — but I foisted on James Irby at the end of that long-ago semester many pages of undergraduate Borgesiana, circling around Eternal Returns and paradoxes of space and time. I’ve long since lost the paper itself, but my memory is that he thought I should maybe read more Nietzsche, but he appreciated my enthusiasm for Borges.

There is no exercise of the intellect which is not, in the final analysis, useless.

Basile finds in Nietzsche and Borges examples of “text[s] at odds with [themselves]” (82). The ironic, self-negating core of both authors, and their common sources in the atomist tradition in philosophy, require what Basile wonderfully terms “a sly self-assurance when expressing themselves by means of contradiction” (86). In Nietzsche, the characteristic mode is aggressive “affirmation” (86) in the face of impossibility. For Borges, the characteristic turn exits pure philosophy for aesthetics and fiction: his muse-mouthpieces are not the prophet Zarathustra, but more literary figures, Don Quixote, or his not-translator Pierre Menard. Or perhaps his abiding figure occupies the ironic separation the Argentine author described between himself and “the other one, the one called Borges, … the one things happen to” (“Borges y yo” Irby trans. 246).

Fame is a form of incomprehension, perhaps the worst.

The third and shortest chapter of Basile’s book takes up a question, “In Which It Is Argued, Despite Popular Opinion to the Contrary, that Borges Did Not Invent the Internet.” It’s a smart, witty reply to misreadings of Borges as prophet of digital utopia. Basile makes a compelling case that Borges’s works display “the deferral of presence across several virtualities” (87) rather than an anticipation of digital mediation in multiple modes. He instead argues that the central idea in Borges reveals “the rupture of a ceaseless differing-from-self” (91). In wonderfully compact prose, Basile concludes with an image of Borges as exploring “the lack of totality, the finitude and uncertainty that plague even the grandest project of any cognition shuttling between uniqueness and iterability” (92). But the lingering image with which the book closes is not this conceptual split but “the corner of the smile that recognizes in this finitude the possibility of all play” (92.)

Notes from the 1980s

Every man should be capable of all ideas, and I understand that in the future this will be the case.

There are a few writers I loved obsessively as a boy — maybe it’s just Borges and Thomas Pynchon for whom I feel this level of intensity — to whom I return eagerly and also apprehensively, with the awareness that what I found in these authors indelibly marked my younger self. I read Borges today with teenage Steve on my shoulder, wondering what he made of these texts then and how they changed him. I wonder how that reading and thinking translated me from a long-ago New Jersey suburb to where I am now. (Actually, I live now in a Connecticut suburb, so maybe I’m not that far away, though the decades and detours feel immense and labyrinthine.) I’m grateful to Jonathan Basile for his rich and brilliant investigation of this writer who means so much to me. All Borgistas, or really anyone who cares about literature, language, and speculative thinking, should read this open-access book. And support punctum books!

[All quotations in bold from James E. Irby’s translation of “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”]

The final “elegant hope” of the narrator of “The Library of Babel” imagines some eternal traveler making infinite peregrinations through the Library who would in inhuman time “see the same volumes were repeated in the same disorder (which, thus repeated, would be an order: the Order” (Irby 58). An universal and cyclical library would suture the paradoxical combination of maximum iterability in linguistic signs, “a number which, although extremely vast, is not infinite” (54), and extension in physical space. Like Basile and like Borges’s narrator, I’ve been turning that possibility over in my head for a long time. I’m so pleased to have revisited it in the good company of Tar for Mortar.

Filed Under: Books

Heathen Earth by Kyle McGee (Punctum 2017)

February 4, 2018 by Steve Mentz

Another gorgeous book by Punctum!

[A copy-edited revision of this book review will appear in the journal Law and Literature]

Kyle McGee, Heathen Earth: Trumpism and Political Ecology. Earth: Punctum, 2017

During the bleak anticipatory interim between November 9, 2016, and January 21, 2017, Kyle McGee faced a “severest necessity” that suddenly “imposed” on him the composition of this short and resonant book. “This is not,” he notes in his Acknowledgments, “a book I wanted to write” (xiii) – nor, we might concur, a future in which we wanted to live. But a year into the Trumpocene, it’s good to have some guidance.

While we braced for the Inauguration, McGee, a writer, legal practitioner, and author of books on Latour and Delueze, shaped Heathen Earth as a stone to hurl into our present void. His angry opening salvo insists that Trump represents less aberration than the logical and horrific extension of elements of our present era that we fail to look at directly. At the “intersection of two vertigos” he identifies these symptoms as the “placelessness” imposed by globalization and the “landlessness” eroded by global warming. Rip away place and dissolve earth without building adequate responses to these dislocations, and you get – well, we know what we’ve got. Or at least we can feel it.

A broken system slouches into view in the wake of neoliberalism. Like many commentators, McGee treats Trump and Sanders as twin exposers of neoliberalism’s tired technofantasies. Trump’s retrograde response to globalized vertigo “sanctifies natus, birth, above all else” (59). Playing on the common compliment paid the leader by his fans, McGee reads being “down to earth” as “an unmistakeable reinscription of certainty into a world…that has become increasingly ambiguous” (60). In this reading, sovereignty emerges less from the Schmittian Decider than through a logic of exceptionalism and tribal / racial supremacy: “sovereign is that which divides the exception from the common” (62). To be included in the exception – to be white, male, rich, powerful, or to believe in the cultural myth of an orange-headed reality TV star who embodies those magic powers – allows uncertainty to be kept at bay, at least temporarily.

So far, so familiar: reading Trump as the ogre that ate the neoliberal consensus seems convincing but hardly shocking. But McGee pulls us one step past twitter radicalism by connecting Trump’s longstanding climate denialism with the collective agenda of both the man and his corporate allies. The project, McGee insists, is geocide, the destruction of Earth systems. Global warming in this view is not an accidental waste project of industrialization but a political gun to the head: “By way of geoengineered global warming, the climate itself can become the principal American weapon in the endless war on terror” (91). Or, put in different narrative terms, “the real Death Star is already here, in our abundant fossil fuel extraction” (98). What else does it mean to have a former Exxon CEO as Secretary of State? Geocide in the Trumpocene mobilizes the state to intensify global ecological crisis because “global warming [is] an unqualified capitalist good” (102). This soiled earth is “heathen” because in its “state of godlessness” it rejects all prior claims to mitigation or shared solace.

But there’s a twist: as Trumpian geocide breaks the world, it cracks open a window for quasi-Leibneizian geodicy. For McGee this vindication of “collective obligation” can only operate through “a pluralism of modes of experience and a multiplicity of arts of sensing and connecting” (104). He shows some sympathy for the non-technocrats demeaned by neoliberalism. “Climate and earth systems sciences,” McGree writes, “need non-scientific allies in literature and the arts, in law and politics, in economics and business, in journalism and media” (113). The total conceptual revolution he anticipates, however, suggests that an adequate response to the forces of Orange must include much more than new allies and new modes of thinking. “Be realistic,” he quips, “demand the impossible” (110).

We’ve heard calls for this sort of “new polity outside of the … state” (144) before, though McGee’s insistence that the right adjective for the state is “geocidal” raises the ecological stakes. The Fortescue-ean proposal that our legal structures be understood as analogous to the ligatures of a human body (124) underlines the fundamental reimagining of the duties of the state that McGee proposes. Alongside a recast politics he seeks a “radical rethinking of the Law of Nature” (125). His radicalism in places broadly parallels the more measured wishes of Jedidiah Purdy, whose After Nature (2015) asks for an “Anthropocene democracy” whose duties and pleasures would embrace humans and nonhumans while also redressing past exclusions. The “necessary couplings between legality and ecology,” McGee insists, “are still yet to be drawn” (127). He gestures toward Bruno Latour’s hopes, as stated in his Facing Gaia lectures (2015), for an international democratic order and an environmental commons to redress the placelessness and landlessness that birthed the Trumpocene. At the inchoate core of McGee’s “democratic weapons” are forces of community: “alliance, assembly, occupation, strike, protest, march, demonstration, above all appearance” (144).

He’s written a smart, angry, insightful, and provocative book to take with us to the barricades.

 

 

 

 

 

Filed Under: Books

Caroline Bergvall’s Drift

June 2, 2014 by Steve Mentz 2 Comments

DriftThe first story in this amazing book is one I always love: an old sailor on icy seas, looking for home but not finding it because “seafaring is seafodder heart / humbling” (26).

I can make my sorry tale right soggy truth. (25)

Blow wind / blow, anon am I. (25)

The second story is the true history of the “Left-to-Die Boat,” packed full of Algerian refugees, seen but not rescued by assorted NATO vessels in March 2011.

Show me the wind. (46)

Caroline Bergvall’s Drift was my first post-grading book of the summer. It was so good that I stayed up late to finish it, then re-read it twice more the next two nights. Gorgeous, intricate, impassioned writing. Bits of it may figure in my NCS talk in July, which is also about the Seafarer — but for now I want to luxuriate in its rawness, its ambition, and its willingness to engage.

Let the tides shake your life. (110)

There’s so much to love in this mash-up of of twenty-first century tragedy and Anglo-Saxon lament. Bergvall mines the medieval poem “The Seafarer” for the core experience of oceanic disorientation, the bitter flavor of that “salt of the mind” (159), the partial recompense of the “ship of song” (144),

Page 6

Page 6

For a minute there I lose myself. (42)

She starts with some line drawings before the poem begins.

One of the places she takes us is “hafville.” “Did not know where I was going hafville. Had fear wildering hafville” (42). We are not alone there:

Major Tom hafville

Li Bai hafville

Rimbaud hafville

Shelley hafville

Amelia Aerhart hafville

Jeff Buckley hafville

Spalding Gray hafville…

Later on, in the Log section, she tells us what hafville is: “sea wilderness, sea wildering” (153).

To north oneself. To come to song. (156)

B. readingShe paints my favorite picture, the image of shipwreck, with words. The word-wreck starts with a few lost letters:

We mbarkt and sailed but a fog so th but a fog so

th but a fog so th th th th thik k overed us that we could scarcely see

the poop or the prow of the boa t (37)

A few pages later everything’s lost (40-41).

Pages 40-41

Shipwreck (Pages 40-41)

And eventually found again:

For a minute there I lost myself Totally at sea lost myway tossed misted

lost mywill in the fog hafville my love (42)

I also love the long set of Navigation instructions (140, 142, 146, 158 (x2), 160). They range from the practical

Stay calm (14)

to the historical, in her last entry, “Medieval navigation” (160), which finishes with

No NATO Naval and Aeriel monitoring

no coffee

no cocoa

All together, it’s the best new sea-poem I’ve read this year.

Let me come in from the cold cold way, Seafarer (166)

BergvallRead it! And go see the performance if you’re in London in July.

 

Filed Under: Blue Humanities, Books, Shipwreck, Uncategorized

The Weather, Kayak Morning, and Bataille’s Peak

January 11, 2013 by Steve Mentz Leave a Comment

Being sick in the early days of 2013 has me behind in January’s writing, syllabus-making, and other chores — but before it gets too late I wanted to put some notes in on a few of the good books I read in the second half of 2012.

Lisa Robertson, The Weather

The Weather

A book of experimental poetry that I bought at Powell’s in Portland on the suggestion of Dan Remein (I think), this is a smart & unsettled look at how the weather gets under our skin and into our consciousness. A few notable lines —

Lurid conditions are facts (6)

My purpose here is to advance into / the sense of the weather, the lesson of / the weather (24)

Every surface is ambitious; we excavate a non-existent era of the human (30)

The word double is written on our forehead (39)

It is too late to be simple (76).

Roger Rosenblatt, Kayak Morning: Reflections on Love, Grief, and Small Boats

A very different feel comes from Rosenblatt’s memoir about kayaking near his home in Quogue and thinking about the recent death of his 38-year old daughter. This formless memoir has some very deft moments, esp when he’s paddling and thinking about water, culture, family, mortality. Sometimes he says things I very much agree with, like this: “Too much is made of the value of plumbing the depths. The nice thing about kayaking is that you ride the surface” (55). Also: “words mixed with water lose their bite” (54).
Kayak morning

I found this one via my friend John Gillis, author of The Human Shore, a great new maritime history that I’ll blog about soon. He suggest it to me after reading Rosenblatt’s comments about water and the English language:

So many references. A loose cannon. A drifter. Sea legs. The English language, it seems, is water based. Other languages too, I guess. The world talks to itself from the sea, ship to shore. I recently learned that ‘rival’ comes from rivers, or streams, meaning someone on the opposite side of the same stream. (71)

In places this book seems oddly willing to traffic in its own intimacy, to sell its insights in a way that perhaps lessons their value. But in places the writing rests happy with the spaces left open, in between —

Water is groundless. It has no basis, like art. It is the answer to no one’s question. I love the feel of it. (104)

Allan Stoekl, Bataille’s Peak: Energy, Religion, and Postsustainability

 I found this one too late to sneak a reference into my PMLA essay, “After Sustainability,” but it’s a smart & lively excursus into what might come after “fossil fuel humanism” (xiv). Bataille’s counter-proposal is an ethics of excess, for which the central problem isn’t hoarding energy but dissipating its excess: “so too in the future we can posit sustainability as an unintended afteraffect of a politics of giving” (142). “Ecoreligion,” in Bataille’s terms, requires a “sacrificial relation between humans, animals, plans — the ecosystem,” as well as “the recognition of the relatively minor position of  humanity, finally, in the concentration and expenditure of the energy of the universe” 178). Or, to put it more starkly: “The human community’s physical survival (through sacrificial consumption) in this model is the fundamentally unplanned aftereffect of a sacred ‘communication’ with the animal (179). Bataille's Peak

Some parts of this seem unnecessarily abstract, though the contrast between the automobile as figure of modernity — “In the car we do not need a body” (184) — and the bicycle as post-modern challenge to that system — “The cyclists body is little more than an open wound” (192) — brings the focus directly back to the visible world. What Stoekl calls “a regime of eroticized recycling and bicycling” (193) seems very much worth thinking and rethinking.

Filed Under: Books, Uncategorized

Owls Head by Rosamond Purcell

May 1, 2012 by Steve Mentz Leave a Comment

This is the best book on objects I’ve read in a long time.  I’m not deeply read in Object-Oriented Ontology (yet), but I think this gorgeous book on garbage has something we all need to listen to.  Here’s Rosamond Purcell on books that have decayed almost — but not quite! — past recognition:

 

There must be some evidence of narrative inside these books.  I get to work.  The pages are delicate, sealed in clumps, with the hollows between webbed with chitinous shrouds.  There is no way to penetrate the pages without destroying them.  Inside is a story of organic processes unintended by any author.  I peer into these transitional hollows where the elements have been traded — type for ash — and wherever such a translation occurs I search for some visible resolution of decay.  I am examining this fulcrum of decrepitude as if it were a thing.  Inside these small-scale caves I observe a process of dissolution that is going on, all the time, in the cosmos everywhere — from words to worms to stars.  (185)

Owls Head tells the story of Rosamond Purcell’s twenty-year friendship with the junk dealer and eccentric William Buckminster through a series of explorations into Buckminster’s property near Rockland, Maine.  The above description takes place in Purcell’s studio, where she’s prying into a shelf full of old books that had been left out in the rain for decades and which became, weathered and slumped together on the shelf, a post-textual artifact.  But this kind of object — like all objects, in time? — is always temporary, always in the process not just of becoming some new thing, but also not-becoming — ceasing to be — the thing that it is.

I love the way this book makes us look at discarded things.  “Who knew how Roman trash can be?” (116).  Sometimes she uses lists, other times photographs in place of footnotes.  She tries to give an order to the “bounty” she brings back from Buckminster’s land to her studio outside Boston —

I consider some of the museums that might appear in this room:

Museum of Obsolete Tools

Museum of Wires

Museum of the Croquet and Musket Ball

Museum of Natural Disasters

Museum of Ruined Landscapes

Museum of Failed Attempts

Museum of Filthy MailMuseum of Bisected Objects

Museum of Corrosion  (142)

It’s hard sometimes to know what to make of this collection of brilliance and waste.  The reader sometimes feels like Purcells’s friend Margary, invited up to Owls Head for some weekend antiquing, in the hope that she will “find something she might like.”

“Wonderful array of frying pans,” she said politely on the first floor of the barn, as I shone a flashlight into the rafters; “terrifying chaos,” she said on the drive home. (122)

 

Filed Under: Books, Shipwreck

The Starboard Sea

April 2, 2012 by Steve Mentz Leave a Comment

When I saw the cover-page review in the Times Book Review, this seemed an obvious novel to read just before “Oceanic Shakespeares.”  It’s a sailing and prep-school story, and while I don’t always love the latter, the sailing-language in this book is fresh and precise:

You never sail with one wind.  Always with three.  The true, the created, and the apparent wind: the father, son, and Holy Ghost.  The true wind is the one that can’t be trusted.  The true wind comes in strong from one direction, but then the boat cuts through the air and creates her own headwind in turn.  (39)

The plot, in a way that may be so familiar it goes unremarked in in the two reviews I’ve read, limns The Tempest.  Our hero is Jason Prosper, master-sailor, wind-seer, and young man with a dark past.  His sailing partner & best friend Cal — surely we don’t need to spell out the remaining syllables? — has committed suicide, which leads Prosper to a new school, where he finds Aidan — the name means fire, not air, but it seems close enough — a magical California spirit.  A familiar trio.

The best parts press hard against the metaphorics of sailing.  Jason almost drowns his prospective new partner on the first practice of the season, quits the team for the fall, then returns in spring.  That plot seems rote enough, but the book’s more interested in connections —

Knots are a form of control.  The halyards, sheets, painter, and lines all run because of knots…. ‘The funny thin about a knot,’ [Jason] said, ‘is that it actually weakens the rope.’ (168).

When I read the Times review I wanted to play the etymology game that the author made me wait til almost the very end of the book to find:

We’d see who could come up with the most common words, sayings, and cliches that came from sailing.  ” Batten down the hatches,” “give a wide berth,” taken aback,” “above-board,” “true blue,” “high and dry,” “hand over fist,” “know the ropes,” three sheets to the wind,” “walk the plank,” “catch my drift,” “on an even keel,” “loose cannon,” “miss the boat,” “chew the fat,” “let the cat out of the bag,” “no room to swing a cat,” “beat a dead horse,” “shake  a leg,” “slush fund,” “cut and run,” “close quarters,” “deep six,” “scuttlebutt,” “chockablock,” “the cut of your jib”…  (273)

The title comes from a term Cal invents to fill out this list —

…it means the right sea, the true sea, or like finding the best path in life.  It’s deep.  I’m telling you, it’s going to catch on.  By this time next year, everyone will be using it. (274)

As that last quotation shows, this debut novel risks sentimentality, in the way that writing about near-children sometimes lets you get away with.  (It reminds me a bit of The Hunger Games, another first-person teen novel that really has caught on.)  Or is it writing about sailing that enables sentimentality?  That deep sea of feeling?

Filed Under: Books, SAA 2012

We the Drowned, Apollo’s Eye, and Aquatic Apes

March 4, 2012 by Steve Mentz Leave a Comment

Books piling up on my desk must be shelved now that spring break is over!  Here are mini-reviews of three I especially liked —

A gorgeous multi-generational novel about the Danish island of Marstall from the mid-nineteenth century through the end of WWII, We the Drowned won the big Danish prizes before being translated into English in 2010 and appearing in the US last year.  A big fat sea epic that’s worth its weight, this one comes with the usual allusions to Conrad and Melville, but unusually it’s not the big whale but Whitejacket that’s on the author’s mind.  The men of Marstall are fishermen but also maritime warriors, and the progenitor of the novel, Laurids Madsen, seems to have sailed with Melville on board the Neversink.
A few quotations highlight the novel’s vast, powerful sweep —

The future that lay ahead of us consisted of more thrashings and death by drowning, and yet we longed for the sea.  What did childhood mean to us? (90).

He learned a song that he sang to us for many years.  He said it was the truest song every written about the sea:

Shave him and bash him,

Duck him and splash him,

Torture him and smash him,

And don’t let him go! (97; song also returns on 674)

Perhaps the most intriguing character is Klara Friis, a sea widow who inherits a shipbuilding business and then plans to save the population of the island by bankrupting its fleet.  Writing to her son, who has (of course) run away to sea —

What does…a man do when he is held underwater?  Does he fight to get up?  No, his pride lies in his ability to hold his breath (609)

Great seafaring stuff.  Worth teaching, perhaps, if it were not so long.

Next, Denis Cosgrove’s Apollo’s Eye, a wonderfully illustrated and brilliant survey of images of the globe from the classical period through today. Empire, he reminds us, is a “cartographic enterprise” (19).  “To imagine the earth as a globe is essentially a visual act” (15).  I’ll be dipping back into this one for years.

Third, and strangest, Elaine Morgan’s The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis, which argues that the particular evolutionary path taken by the first humans must have involved a prolonged period of semi-aquatic living, rather than only forest or savanna.  She speculates that various features of modern humans, from a layer of fat under our skin to our relative hairlessness to bipedalism to our habit of breathing through our mouths as well as our noses, appear to connect humans to marine mammals as much as terrestrial primates.  I don’t know how much credit she has in scientific circles — she writes like a semi-outlaw, without an academic byline — but it’s intriguing and almost persuasive.

Of course it’s not all that hard to convince me of a special connections between humans and seas.

Filed Under: Books

Waterlog

February 9, 2012 by Steve Mentz 2 Comments

Roger Deakin’s engaging Waterlog narrates his travels around the United Kingdom in search of “wild swimming.”  It’s become a cult classic among environmentalists and swimmers in the UK, and has spawned various clubs and  a strand of do-it-yourself travel guides.

Deakin begins with ocean swimming in the Scillies, but the heart of the book is about poaching fresh water spots in rivers and harbors that have been forgotten or browned-over by industry.

In the water, including the moat around his Suffolk, Deakin reconnects to the lived experience of England’s land-and-sea history, from the “contingent” (193) coast around East Anglia to assorted trips to rivers, fens, mountain streams, and coasts.  He loves the cold water, and seeks it out as a psychological cure-all:

There is no anti-depressent quite like sea-swimming….I leave my devils on the waves.  (74)

It’s mostly a nature book, full of lush descriptions and lively water-folk, but Deakin also engages some larger claims about water and humans.  Quoting D. H. Lawrence (on Typee), Normon O. Brown, and Elaine Morgan’s writings on the aquatic ape hypothesis, he strains for solutions in the water:

Perhaps we are simply more at home in or around water than on dry land.  Perhaps dry land is our problem.  (149)

As a swimmer, I’m struck by Deakin’s persistent choice of stroke: the breaststroke.  He swims with his head up, immersed but able to see ahead of him.  To some extent, Deakin’s breaststroking reflects the way English men were taught to swim through mid-century — he observes that when he’s breaststroking in Australia, the other men there are shocked, because, “In Australia swimming strokes are deeply gendered” (313).

I’m a front crawl guy myself, with my face down in the water and a pretty small range of vision, though for long open-water swims I raise my head every 5 strokes or so, to see where I’m headed.  Deakin givens a nice picture of the arrival of the six-beat crawl stroke to Cambridge swim racing in the 1920s, as well as the previous history of the “trudgen crawl,” with a sidestroke kick, earlier than that (41-2).

What a difference the choice of stroke makes! Deakin’s in the water and the landscape, looking around him while paddling through old English fantasies about the land.  I can’t seen far when I’m swimming, only a few feet into the water below and ahead of me.  The line on the bottom of the pool, or a sandy bottom if I’m lucky and in shallow water.  But I’m the one, I think, who’s really in the water, all the way.

 

Filed Under: Books

The Way of a Ship

February 6, 2012 by Steve Mentz Leave a Comment

One of my favorite Christmas gifts this year was a copy of John Hattendorf’s new edition of Lawrence Wroth’s The Way of a Ship, first published in 1937.  It’s a wonderfully-written, smooth and generous outline of the history of navigation in the West.  Its old-fashioned and in spots probably out of date — but it’s a great introduction and review of material that’s close to my heart.  If I’d had it when I was putting Lost at Sea together, it might have saved me some time.

 But no matter what national preferences may have been between cross staff and astrolabe, English and Latins alike were agreed that the astrolabe was, to meet certain conditions, an essential part of the ship’s equipment.  In its use it was not necessary, except in hazy weather, to gaze directly upon the sun; it was held by its ring upon the thumb and its revolving arm was manipulated until a beam of the sun passed through the slits in the vanes at either end of the arm.  There remained but to read the figure on the scale, found in the outer edge of the instrument.  (39)

Filed Under: Blue Humanities, Books, Lost at Sea

Cruise Ship by Conrad

January 18, 2012 by Steve Mentz Leave a Comment

The story of the Costa Concordia‘s  wreck off the Italian coast grows more Conradian by the day.  The Coast Guard officer yells at the stupefied Captain to get back on the ship and direct the rescue.  The captain claims he hadn’t meant to get into the lifeboat but tripped and fell in.

Lord Jim knows what really happened:

When your ship fails you, your whole world seems to fail you; the world that made you, restrained you, has taken care of you.  It is as if the souls of men floating on an abyss and in touch with immensity had been set free for any excess of heroism, absurdity, or abomination.

The Times also has the story.

Filed Under: Blue Humanities, Books

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • Next Page »

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 ·
24 Mar

Day-after thoughts on Red Bull's Arden, up through April 1! https://stevementz.com/red-bulls-arden-of-faversham/

Reply on Twitter 1639266501109727235 Retweet on Twitter 1639266501109727235 Like on Twitter 1639266501109727235 2 Twitter 1639266501109727235
stevermentz Steve Mentz @stevermentz ·
21 Mar

I bought my ticket to this play a day before @SAAupdates secured this discount - but you should take advantage of it now!

Reply on Twitter 1638264709878099970 Retweet on Twitter 1638264709878099970 Like on Twitter 1638264709878099970 6 Twitter 1638264709878099970
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

  • Red Bull’s Arden of Faversham
  • Endgame at Irish Rep (NYC)
  • Responses to the NYer’s Doomcast
  • Water in the Desert
  • F22 at the Landhaus!

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