Steve Mentz

THE BOOKFISH

THALASSOLOGY, SHAKESPEARE, AND SWIMMING

Strange Landscapes in Queens

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I knew it was going to be a good day when I found street parking right across from Penn Station on 31st St.  It wasn’t legal — there can’t possibly be any legal parking around there — but it was just the right size, nestled in between an unmarked TSA van and a traffic control Prius.  A good, free, safe place to leave the car for 45 minutes before I picked up my first visitor, Rosamond Purcell.

The weekend before, I’d stopped through Rosamond’s studio in Somerville, MA, where we’d packed up framed prints of nine gorgeous images to hang in the Institute for Writing Studies at St. John’s.  On Friday, Rosamond and her collaborator Michael Witmore were coming to campus to talk about how a visual artist and a Shakespeare scholar work together, and produce such strangely beautiful things.

We picked up Mike, who’s recently become the Director of the Folger Shakespeare Library, on the Upper East Side.  By coincidence, we were near a store named “Tender Buttons,” which shares that name with the poetry press co-founded by my St. John’s colleague Lee Ann Brown.  Both derive from the same Gertrude Stein book of poetry.  Another good sign.

We had about 30 – 40 people at the talk, not bad for a Friday afternoon.  We got a real treat in terms of hearing about the shared commitment to this unusual collaboration.  Rosamond took the pictures in a meadow in northern New Hampshire in the summertime, bouncing light off old, slightly dented, irregularly-colored antique double-mirrored bottles once used to store light-sensitive dyes.  “Light tight,” she said was how they were described. Mike then looked at the images until a line or moment from Shakespeare came into his mind.  He said it usually took about 10 seconds to get a fix on it — and when it didn’t come to him, he moved on to the next picture.

What we were really talking about, as I’d hoped when I first imagined this course, was the interface between the visual and the textual in Shakespeare, and in our imaginations more generally.  It’s not always possible to put into words what these images show, though we all see things there, sometimes even the same things.  As one of my students said — and their questions to our distinguished guests made their professor proud — the images-with-text were themselves like performances, dramatic responses to the play.  Unlike a stage performance or a film that unfurls in time, these images juxtapose poetic form and visual intensity in a simultaneous frozen instant.

Or, as Shakespeare says, these images are

Like perspectives, which rightly gazed upon / Show nothing but confusion, eyed awry / Distinguish form (Richard II, 2.2)

The evening continued with some great post-talk chat and questions from undergraduate and grad students, and then a tasty dinner in Astoria at the Kebab Cafe on Steinway St., a favorite haunt of several St. John’s professors and Queens foodies.  When I was scooping out the cheeks of the roasted whole fish we shared for dinner — Long Island Sound porgy, a little bigger than the ones my son catches off the dock down the street from my house — I thought about how good it is to share strange things.

O, the most piteous cry of the poor souls!  Sometimes to see ’em, and not to see ’em; now the ship boring the moon with her mainmast, and anon swallowed with yeast and froth, as you’d thrust a cork into a hogshead.

(The Winter’s Tale, 3.3)

Are you not my mother?: Taymor’s Tempest

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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.

Tuesday in Soho

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To English 110-ers

As we almost figured out yesterday, our final meeting next week will take place at the Angelika Film Center at 18 West Houston Street in Manhattan, at the 7:45 pm showing of Taymor’s Tempest.  Tickets are available online if you want to get them that way.  $13 for adults plus whatever fees the web shakes out of you. 

The best subway stop is probably the F at Broadway-Lafayette, if you’re coming from STJ.

Since our class officially starts at 6:55, that gives us time for a pre-film chat over coffee.  Two possible suggestions —

Aroma Espresso Bar at 145 Greene St

Fanelli Cafe at 94 Prince St

Please indicate preferences, and negotiate carpools and other logistics, in comments.  I’ll be driving over from campus in the afternoon, but then I’ll head straight north to CT after the show, so I’m perhaps not an ideal ride.

Learning to Swim

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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.

Questions and Futures

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As I wait all day for your set of questions and your speculative look-backs on your not-yet-completed academic careers, I’ll pose a few questions of my own, plus answer the question that Dr Ahmad dodged a few weeks ago.

Questions inside of STJ:

1.  Should all students have a blog? I’ve found, this semester, that keeping a blog has been great for me, in terms of creating a forum for my own academic memoir-ing and notes.  I do wonder, though, if rather than having you all read & comment on my blog, if I should not have had you each create your own & keep them throughout your graduate career here (and after, perhaps).  I know some of you are already doing this, but I’d like to have your thoughts about making it a requirement for this course.

2.  Who’s is and who’s out? This course, right now, is a requirement for all DA students & more or less off-limits for MA & BA/MA students, though Dane & Gavin managed to sneak in.  What are your thoughts about this division of our student populations?  Do you like it this way?  How would you feel about opening the course up to all MA students?

Outside STJ:

1.  Scholarly organizations: I’m a member, or have been, of the Modern Language Association, the Shakespeare Association of America, the Renaissance Society of America, the Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies, the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publication, the Society for the Study of Science, Literature, and the Arts, the Maritime Historical Society, and I’m sure a few more.  How many of you know what scholarly orgs are in your sub-fields, and how many are already members?  Should we spend time on this in class?  These organizations are your intellectual conduit for the world beyond STJ.

2.  STJ alums: One of the liveliest recent stories about a STJ MA  alum is Paul Devlin’s recent writing in slate.com, among other places, in response to a new book on rap lyrics, which Paul claims have been mistranscribed.  Paul’s a PhD candidate at Stony Brook now.  How much use would it be to you to have some contact with recent grads of our program?

My 30-year legacy:  It’s a tough question, and I don’t really blame Dr Ahmad for ducking it a few weeks ago, but I think that 30 years down the road I’d like people to remember my contributions to early modern studies in terms of reaching toward a  more flexible notion of style in the writing of literary criticism, and also a more capacious sense of public outreach for literary critical work.  I’m somewhat optimistic that we’re moving toward a more open form of of diachronic historicism in literary studies, and I’d like to be a part of that.  My meaningful outreach will likely be in ecological and maritime circles, but one of the great things about being a career teacher is that I hope to touch any number of other sub-fields through my students as time passes.

Graduate Study for the 21st Century

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Too late for this year’s syllabus, but perhaps in time for your holiday shopping, I found Gregory Colon Semenza’s wonderful book on how to thrive as a grad student in these difficult times.   It came out in 2005, so before the current economic crisis, but it’s a very useful guide to some of the unspoken rules and norms of the profession, esp in terms of what you need to do when choosing an advisor, writing a seminar paper, going to conferences, and publishing articles.  Not to mention things like teaching and service.  It’s thorough, sane, and full of excellent insider information.

You may find Semenza’s standards high — he advises publishing at least two articles before finishing your doctoral degree, and establishing a daily routine of working at least 10 hours each weekday plus some extra hours on the weekends.  He doesn’t seem to have to work toward rent or food while a grad student, perhaps because he lived in State College, not NYC.  But I strongly recommend it for anyone uncertain about what professional goals grad students should be setting for their academic work.

I would think about assigning this book the next time I teach this class.

Two exercises for E. 110 students

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I’d like each of you to do two quick things before class tomorrow night.

First, choose a book from among Peter Greenaway’s fantasia of Prospero’s two dozen volumes.  Write two or three sentences that show how this particular book unlocks some hidden truth or logic within Shakespeare’s play.

Second, choose any other text from this week’s assignment in “Rewritings and Appropriations.”  Write two or three sentences showing how that creative work speaks to your own seminar project.

Please be prepared to share these with the class tomorrow night.

Carmen Kynard for 11/16

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Here are two articles by Dr. Carmen Kynard. who will be our seminar guest one week from tomorrow, on Nov 16.

The first article, from Harvard Educational Review, is Dr. Kynard’s most recent publication.  It’s part of a new book prospectus currently under review.

The second article is an African American rhetorical analysis of student texts in a freshman comp class for an international journal.  It provides an example of what student who imagine doing work in “comp-rhet” should be able to do.


Kynard.HER

Kynard.ETPC


Dissolution

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I could say that I spent last week on the coastline of southern Louisiana, but being down there reminds me that there’s no line on that coast.  Instead, we’ve got a watery borderlands into which everything solid slowly oozes.  I don’t think of Auden as a poet of the American South, but his lines were rolling around in my head all week —

…the silent dissolution of the sea

Which misuses nothing because it values nothing.

The human struggle down there is all about “use” and “value” — the conflicting needs of the Mississippi, which wants to jump its banks & shift its mouth over to the Atchafalaya River Delta; the needs of the oil & gas industries, who service their off-shore rigs through Port Furchon, which will soon be an island; the needs of fisherman both commercial & sport; the needs of people whose land is slowly reverting to open water.  It’s a landscape that looks like a seascape. 

More to come…