Steve Mentz

THE BOOKFISH

THALASSOLOGY, SHAKESPEARE, AND SWIMMING

Water City Bristol!

by

Brunel’s suspension bridge over the Avon

If you don’t fix things in words, they might float away. So, briefly, a skeletal accounting —

  • 3 open-water swims
  • 2 workshops in maritime writing
  • 1 public lecture
  • 1 trip up the canal locks to Saltford
  • 2 days at #MT2018 (Marine Transgressions Conference)
    • 2 keynotes
    • ~ 12 panels
    • 1 Blue Humanities roundtable
    • 2 receptions
    • [a poetry reading that I missed]

And many half-garbled memories, starting in the middle —

Toxicity, the Ocean, and Urban Space (Wed)

I was trying some new things for this public lecture, knowing that the audience would swirl together academics with non-academics, be mostly composed of city-dwellers, and further include mostly those with a particular interest in the sea. Unpicking the knots of writing and thinking I’ve been chasing down in the wake of Oceanic New York, my talk splashed through some recent watery adventures, included images of Thanos the purple God of demonic Malthusianism, strayed into verse in three of my own poems, and — maybe? — crossed wild water to make landfall with hopeful gestures toward Ocean citizenship. How can our Cities and our bodies prepare themselves for and live with rising waters? I’d like to speak that as a not-only tragic story.

Public lecture at the University of Bristol

The Llandoger Trow, where Daniel Defoe met Alexander Selkirk

The Henleaze Swimming Club (Mon)

On Monday afternoon, jet-lagged and still-missing my baggage from the overnight flight in via Dublin, I bought a replacement suit & goggles from the hotel & Uber’d up to Henleaze, a former quarry that’s been a private swimming club since 1919. This gorgeous, narrow, fresh-watered lake now overflows with people, half with swimmers and half fisherfolk. What better anti-jet lag tonic can be?

Underwater Bristol (Tues)

Building on the perpetual inspiration of underwaternewyork.com, I hatched a plot with members of the U of Bristol English faculty to incubate some to-emerge-later responses to Bristol’s waterways. So many glorious things! A sailboat named Svendgar that I spotted a few days later for sale in the harbor. Brown mudflats. The kayaks that were paddled around the Bay by the Inuits kidnapped in Frobisher’s Second Voyage to Newfoundland in 1577. A football pitch next to a Cadbury Chocolate Factory that I’d seen earlier that morning while riding a canal boat up five locks to Saltford. Plastic. Breeding eels. What will they all become?

A secret monastic pool (Wed)

Bristol Harbor on the last night

Having been promised a bit of true English wild swimming on the condition that I not mention the name or location of the waters in which I would plunge, I suppose I was a bit surprised to come around the corner of the quiet country lane to discover maybe sixty students lining the pool’s far bank, sunning themselves in post-exam freedom. The secluded pool, built “in the Middle Ages” to store fish for the Abbey of St. Augustine (founded 1140), now hosts lily pads, a gorgeous 15-foot tall purple rhododendron, supposedly a few tench, and — alas! — some horseflies that enjoyed landing on my bald head. It’s an excellent place for an afternoon’s swim. Thanks to my hosts for taking me there!

Sea-themed creative writing workshop (Wed)

I was deeply impressed by the almost-dozen enthusiastic  Bristol undergrads who submitted maritime poetry and prose works for an post-term bonus workshop. I was joined also by Shakespearean Laurence Publicover and poet David Punter, and we spent a thrilling two hours wrestling with the joys and frustrations of writing with and into oceanic spaces. The student writing was gorgeous and wonderfully ambitious, from a narrative built from fragments of a diary from the S.S. Great Britain to a brilliantly post-Agatha Christie cruise montage, a boat-launching story, several quite lovely lyrics about blue spaces, and a hashing of Pip’s dream of drowning from Moby-Dick that spoke to my Melvillean core.

Clevedon Marine Lake (Fri)

Diving into Clevedon Marine Lake

Located as far upstream as big boats could travel the tidal Avon, Bristol today is water-filled but brackish rather than salt. Much of my time there was semi-marine, from the walks along the harbor to the floating bar the Marine Transgressions Conference decamped to after our final keynote. But though the Avon is tidal for a long distance and boasts (I am reliably assured by tide-guru Owain Jones from the Environmental Humanities department at Bath Spa) the second-highest tides in the world, there’s not a lot of open salt water in the city. I wanted to swim in the Bristol Channel (still known in Wales as the Severn Sea), so the morning of the conference’s last day I met swimographer Vanessa at an early hour that precluded other swimming companions, and we Uber’d out to the Clevedon Marine Lake. I’ve seldom or never seen a more starkly ideal swimscape. The pool is built, framed in by concrete and stone, but at high tide the swell tops the wall and fills the pool with ocean water. The tide was near the ebb when we arrived that morning, and over 100 yards of brown mudflat extended below the “lake,” reflecting the gray sky up toward us. The water was perfect — cool but not cold, salty but not bitter, manageable even thought I’d forgotten my goggles in the hotel, and a generous 250m per lake-length. One of the few other swimmers who was also there on a grey misty morning was a man training for 70km in Lake Geneva. He churned in slow circles around the lake and planned to swim through dinner time. We had panels to rush back to in Bristol, but I was tempted just to keep swimming.

#MT2018 Marine Transgressions Conference (Th & Fri)

In front of Nancy Farmer tiles with Vanessa Daws at Clevedon

My visit to Bristol was fortuitously timed with an interdisciplinary conference on Marine Transgressions — a geologic term of art for moments in which the sea invades the land. Packed in to the last two days of my stay, the conference’s turbulent energy kept me going even when my own energy flagged. From Helen Rozwadowski’s amazing opening keynote on Jacques Cousteau and utopian fantasies of homo aquaticus in the 1950s and ’60s all the way through Tim Dee’s gorgeously lyrical evocation of the human and avian intertwinings of gulls and landfills, #MT2018 was an stirring mixture. I can’t do justice to all the great panels and papers that I heard over the two days, but I was struck by the variety of disciplinary perspectives — lots of poetics, history, and environmental humanities, but also marine law, policy, science, technological remediation, and other things. All these were joined together by a shared passion for the oceanic “blue” — though of course we all know, and we repeated as a kind of refrain over two days, that the ocean is also and meaningfully green, gray, purple, and many other colors — including gold, in the memorable image of the geochemist Kate Hendry describing the glimmer of microscopic diatoms on the salt flats of the Severn estuary at low tide.

Blue Humanities Round Table (Fri)

Foot selfie at secret swimming spot

The best parts of a small conference come from listening to new things, and also from catching an extension of someone’s work over a beer at the floating bar after the day’s sessions. But in addition to many great discoveries, I’ve seldom had more fun at an academic presentation than I did chairing a Blue Humanities Round Table near the end of the second day. The amazing panel of disparate thinkers and makers included Owain Jones, whose hydrocitizenship project connects Bristol’s to its people and its past; Vanessa Daws, swimographer and immersive artist; Kate Hendry, a biogeochemist whose fields work takes her to both the Arctic and Antarctic ice fields; and my friend from the CT Shoreline Helen Rozwadowski, historian of science and founder of the Maritime Studies Program at UConn Avery Point. I started us out with a general question — “What can you do because of your focus on the sea that you could not do otherwise?” — and our conversation waterfalled down through several memorable twists and turns into a fantastic question period. With thanks to Alexandra Campbell and her twitter-agility, here’s a partial reconstruction of the ship we built as we sailed along:

  • The sea is not a metaphor (quoting Hester Blum) — except that sometimes it is, and sometimes its metaphors rub against and into the real salt water.
  • The sea is history (not-quite-remembering to quote Derek Walcott) — and given a few generations of blue humanities historical scholarship it should hopefully become more richly historicized.
  • The sea disorients and distorts, always and relentlessly, even as humans respond partially to that disorientation.
  • Is water alien? Does it come from outer space or from inside the earth’s core? Why might it matter? (in dialogue with Lindy Elkins-Tanton)
  • The sea’s lack of visibility redoubles its its moral challenge, informs the cultural history of its monstrous depths, and increases the force of its alien elements. (I rambled here about the “Creature from the Black Lagoon” poster art on the walls of Catch-22, the fish & chips place where I ate my first Bristol meal.)
  • Does the weakness of human eyesight underwater attenuate our moral connection with sea creatures? (A Levinas-ian question, though we didn’t mention his name)
  • Can science “illuminate” (Kate’s word) the sea in ways that increase its ethical claims on human subjects?
  • What are the politics of the interdisciplinary ocean? How can the sea speak to social justice, especially remembering the twin horrors of the slave trade and transoceanic capitalism (which two things might actually be parts of the same thing)?
  • Can the sea be a space of hope? (Last question, I think? We said yes. But I’m not sure that we’re sure.)

    Selfie with mermaid and Vanessa Daws in Clevedon

“Under the sea everything is moral”

The hardest and most evocative phrase of the conference came when Helen quoted Cousteau or one of his fellow sea-utopians in her opening keynote. What might it mean for “everything” to be “moral” beneath the waves? “It’s all subtle and submarine,” says Walcott, thinking about Atlantic slavery and Caribbean beauty. Owain quite rightly objected that the underwater industriousness for which Cousteau was a booster has fouled our waters. The panel speculated together about the morality that emerges from the shared vulnerability of terrestrial human bodies in deep waters. I thought about, but did not share, a terrifying vision of drowning and struggle from Macbeth —

Doubtful it stood / As two spent swimmers that do cling together / And choke their art (1.2)

There’s another way, it occurs to me now as my big green metal bird arcs past the southern tip of Greenland, in which the undersea might be “moral.” It’s not that all undersea activities are permitted or approved, but that the questions we face — what we talk about when we talk about oceans — become starkly and painfully ethical. As mer-scholars, academic selkies, blue humanists, we swim into hard questions about disorientation, about buoyancy, about living-with alien lives. We face questions of social justice and tragic history, of oceanic dislocation and ongoing violence. Moral urgencies splash into marine lakes in the West Country and haunt overcrowded refugee boats in the Eastern Med.

The sea supports and threatens human life. What moral dilemmas fix us from the cold glaze of a fish’s eyes?

Floating bar

Thanks to all who were there this week, and in particular to my hosts at the University of Bristol, the Perspectives on the Sea cluster run by Laurence Publicover, the Brigstow and Cabot Institutes, and all the people who made Marine Transgressions possible! I’m looking forward to my next visit to Bristol already.

Blue Humanities in Bristol!

by

Image result for bristol water clevedon

  It’s summer in CT and the kids have just finished school, but I’m sneaking in one last academic trip into this sabbatical semester when I fly to Bristol, UK, on Sunday night, to spend a week as a Visiting Fellow at the University of Bristol.

Web page for Underwater Bristol

It’ll be a busy time. Here are some highlights —

I’m planning to swim with the Henleaze Swimming Club on Monday afternoon, also get a few laps in at the pool at U. of Bristol, and maybe splash around in salt water in Clevedon if I can squeeze it in. I’m also joining a group of Earth Sciences students for a trip up the River Avon on Tuesday.

Image result for henleaze lake swimming club

Henleaze Lake

Image result for bristol waterfront

Water City Bristol

Academic events will include

If you’re in or near the west of England next week, please come! 

#shax2018: Conversations & utopias in LA

by

  1. The Hotel Postmodernism

    Her small grey head peaked out of the swell about twenty feet away from us. The curve of her back echoed the small waves rolling in through the slate-green Pacific off Venice Beach. In all the years I’ve been swimming in this little slice of ocean, down the street from where I lived in 1993-1994 right before grad school, I’d never had one of these creatures swim with me before. A selkie totem for #shax2018, the seal’s nearness startled us and calmed our shivering flesh. She swam between where we splashed into the water and where neoprene-armored surfers caught a few small waves. I lost sight of her after I body-surfed one little roller into shore. I don’t have a pic — I was phoneless in the water when we saw her — but that seal is my utopian totem for #shax2018. The benediction of nonhuman presence in the ocean!

  2. The last of four conversation topics in “The SAA, Shakespeare, and Us,” the  seminar I co-lead with Carla Della Gatta, with incisive and generous respondant-ing by Erika Lin, asked the room for possible SAA-utopias. The floodgates of the wonder-world gushed forth: we sought communities of labor, changes in infrastructure and scale, “psychosocial mentoring” (which clarifying term Erika brought to us via Tracy Davis of Northwestern and ASTR) , recurrent seminars, more streamed or recorded sessions, “Half-assed Shakespeare,” the value of allowing ourselves to be wrong, “radical hospitality” (via Becky Fall and the Public Theatre, though I also thought of the glories of the BABEL Working Group), stewardship, service, public-facing events, “conflict is part of community” (paraphrased from Erika). What is “Shakespeare”? Who is “us”? What can and should the SAA become? So many good questions to keep asking!

    Inside the Bonaventure

  3. My core takeaways from the two hours traffic of our seminar swirled around support and especially mentorship, how it happens and what it could be. The topic came up again in the brilliant and necessary “Shakespeare beyond the Research University” session on Saturday, the second iteration of the “Shakespearean Futures” initiative that started with “The Color of Membership” last year in stormy Atlanta. I personally feel deeply fortunate to have been mentored by the SAA, both by many discrete individuals and more diffusely by the organization itself, since I started coming to the conference in the mid-1990s. Drafting this post Sat night as I wait to board a red-eye back to JFK while #shax2018 still dances, I’m abuzz with ideas to extend and support that process in the new & larger 21c SAA. We don’t need to start from zero: RSA and ASTR have ongoing mentorship programs, both among members (I have been in touch this year with two early career mentees via RSA) and at the conference itself (a student of mine was lucky to be matched with my co-seminar leader Carla Della Gatta at ASTR this past fall). We should formalize something, perhaps in time for #shax2019 in DC. #mentorhappyhour (with EANABs = “Equally Attractive Non-Alcoholic Beverages”)?
  4. Thursday afternoon’s NextGenPlen set the bar high for two reasons that I suspect are interwoven: the five early career speakers presented brilliant and innovative projects in queer theory, theater history, race theory, drag, and transgender rhetoric — and all five kept to time and dazzled the room with precise & powerful language. It made me think that ten minute talks are always better than twenty, because the short form prioritizes direct argument. It also made me eager to watch these young scholars develop their work and change our field!
  5. I suspect that few Native American languages have previously been spoken from the plenary stage at SAA. I found the Friday morning session with Scott Stevens, Lehua Yim, Terence Reilly, and James Lujan powerful and moving. The cultural and global dominance of Shakespeare represents, in a troubling way that the panel helped reveal, a global-cultural settler colonialism, in that the Bard goes everywhere and never leaves. There’s a lot of great scholarship on Global Shakespeares today — but I’d not encountered indigenous responses and approaches at the SAA before. During the panel I remembered my post-undergrad summer of 1989, when I was in Windy Bay, Alaska, laboring in the vain clean up of Exxon Valdez oil and sharing a fishing boat with perhaps two dozen members of an Athabascan community, mostly from English Bay. I’m embarrassed to say that I now can’t remember any of the tiny vocabulary I developed in Athabascan that summer.
  6. The first question we asked in our seminar was “What is Shakespeare?” And — importantly, I think — we supplemented that question with “Do we all have to agree about the answer?” The first question was hard to contain, but I think the answer to the second question must be no. Too much agreement is bad for conversation.

    A substantial pageant

  7. Our seminar’s second major exchange took up another key word in our title: “Who is ‘us'”? We had lots to say again, and our discussion balanced honesty and generosity in ways that made me really happy. For me, I think the best possible answers to both “Shax” and “us” emerge from conscious and cultivated differences: we and our symbolic center must be many things, multitudinous things. It’s through allowing differences in all their discomfort, challenge, and surprise that we navigate our seminars, conferences, and oceans. I also recognize that myriad-mindedness has long been a canonical & perhaps even neoimperial cliche, effectively confining while purportedly open. Does it make sense to ask now for different and tangible differences, rather than just the same old infinite variety? That’s a project I’d like to continue exploring, and I hope the members of the seminar will continue to pursue it also.
  8. The 8 am ocean swim on Saturday morning kept me from the “End of Study,” alas, but my adventure with surfers, seal, and maritime companion Lowell Duckert drew me back to my early ’90s haunts in Venice Beach, from which locale I launched myself into graduate school and the professional life I’m living now. In some sense Venice in those days was my last stop before Shakespeare, the moment at which I found a fork in young adulthood and turned. I loved being back there, and I no doubt bored Lowell by showing him my favorite coffee shop (the Rose Cafe), my old apartment building on Westminster Ave, the sandy bike path on which I roller bladed and where musicians, artists, and hippies were setting up in the early morning mist. We ate breakfast at the Sidewalk Cafe, my old local, where I ate with my neighbors during the eerie dawn just after the Northridge MLK Day earthquake of 1994, which had jolted us out of bed. The electricity was out that morning but the gas stoves worked, so the Cafe made us all omelettes that we paid for later. We watched the sun come up behind the beach and hoped the ground would stop shaking. #anothermetaphor?
  9. What should the SAA become? I loved the “Lena Orlena” pageant and Wendy Wall’s multi-genred luncheon speech. No scholarly gathering makes me feel so at home and so eager to engage with people I don’t know yet as well as old friends and colleagues. “Beyond the Research University,” organized by Sharon O’Dair and Deborah Uman, seemed to me to get close to the heart of the matter. The diverse populations of SAA have much to learn from each other. Highlighting the worlds and labors of colleagues teaching at HBCUs, community colleges, and other non-elite places seems to me an essential step forward. Looking back now through the #shax2018 hashtag reveals outflows of generosity, curiosity, and playfulness. More of this, please! Excess of it!

  10. A surfer of Venice

    My only moment of real discomfort all weekend, other than fatigue, came when I considered the symbolism of matching the roundtable on “Beyond the Research University” against a brilliant research panel on “Slavery, Service, and Fictions of Consent” in the Saturday 11 am slot. What does that choice represent for the SAA as a collective: must we choose between research and beyond-research? I have deep regard & affection for the leadership of SAA and recognize the challenge of too many sessions angling for finite time — but I believe it was a mistake not to make the Futures session, which spoke to the experience of the majority of the SAA membership, a Plenary with no competing sessions. For most of our near half-century as an organization, the SAA has imagined the R1 experience as at least aspirationally normative — but as much as I value humanities research, that’s an error we should have the honesty to stop making. One striking moment in the Roundtable called for the demolition of the “myth of academic meritocracy.” We need that demolition so much — and, if we could do it, or even begin to unravel that foundational myth of academia, it could lead, I believe, to better things, even in hard times.

  11. The Futures session was well-attended, including by the incoming Executive Director, though I was sorry that only a small fraction of the Trustees were there. I don’t mean to blame the people who were next door. I’d previously heard a snippet of one project on early modern slavery that was presented in that session, and I think it’s as brilliant as any new project I know in our field. But that’s why I think it was problematic to force that choice on the membership. A session on the careers that the majority of SAA members present and future live “beyond the research university” should not have to compete for its audience with the fruits of research. The SAA can, does, and should support both cutting-edge research and inquiry into state of our profession. We don’t need to put th0se conversations in competition with each other, even implicitly. Or at least that’s what I think.
  12. I’ll wrap up this overlong blog post with another story of nonhuman intervention. This second encounter will provide an alternative allegory for our gathering. As our pomo architectural sage Fredric Jameson didn’t say, #alwaysallegorize! This one erupted during the “Shax and Us” seminar, just before we opened the conversation to the full room of auditors. It wasn’t a seal in the surf but a cockroach on the table: I don’t know if the bug actually crawled out from beneath a pile of seminar papers, or if that image of reading as unearthing the hidden is just the way I like to imagine all seminars. Carla moved fast when she saw it, and I think she swept the roach onto the floor. I jumped out of my chair, but by the time I got to the other side of the long table the beastie had scuttled away & besides what would I have done with or to it?

  13. One afternoon, as our conversation turned toward anxious visions of futurity, #shax2018 woke to discover that while we sat together around the table our collective conversation had been transformed into a monstrous bug.

  14. #shaxfutures #whatwillwebecome? #metamorphoses!

    Post-immersion selfie

  15. It’s our task to love the nonhuman, to welcome interruptions, and to imagine capaciously in the face of challenges. Which creature best represents Shakespeare as settler colonialist and superlative poet? The graceful seal gliding through Pacific waves, or the impervious bug whose resilient carapace will outlast nuclear and ecological catastrophes? Which do we want our bald playwright hero to represent? #sealorbug?
  16. We know what the answer must be.
  17. Both seal and roach, utopia and dystopia. #forward!
  18. See everyone in DC!

Bodysurfing considered as a historical practice

by 1 Comment

What a piece of work is a wave!

Last Wednesday in golden afternoon light, I spent a perfect hour bodysurfing the Jersey shore with my daughter. We’d swim into the curl and plunge down the face into white water that would carry us over the elongated beach of low tide. Sometimes — if we stayed with the wave til its end — we’d be brought up short by a final thump into broken shells and a more steeply slanting beach. We’d laugh, flip ourselves over, and head back out for the next wave.

My father taught me to bodysurf the beaches of Bay Head, NJ, when I was younger than Olivia is now. I’ve been splashing over the same sand since the 1970s, though this past week was my first trip back there since my prophetic parents sold the beach house two years before Hurricane Sandy tore up the shore.

End of the ride

Bodysurfing memories are mostly physical: the vast shudder with which the wave lifts you into itself, a sudden plunge down the face, the pressure on my hands when I hold them together in front of me, knifing through the white water. To keep from scraping my belly, I end each ride by jamming the heels of my hands down into the sand, arching myself up as the last inch of water surges past.

I’m a head-down bodysurfer, in a New Jersey style that almost broke my neck when I tried it at my college room-mate’s home in La Jolla, CA, in 1989.

Heading back out

“You hold your hands together in front of you,” I told Olivia last week, as my Dad told me four decades ago. “Your hands work like the prow of a boat. They hold you in the wave, while the wave pushes you forward. Between the two, you can ride all the way up to the beach.”

I’ve bodysurfed lots of other places. Coogee Beach in Sydney, in the last few months of 1989. Venice and Point Mugu on either side of LA, in the early ’90s. Carpenteria, CA. Jacksonville, FL, where my parents live now. Rhode Island. Portugal. I unlocked peak academic ocean-nerdiness one early morning at Hendry’s Beach in Santa Barbara, when I lured a bunch of professors and grad students into wetsuits for a pre-plenary bodysurfing session at BABEL 2014. One especially memorable afternoon in  July 1996 I bodysurfed the usually too-cold waters of Muir Beach, CA, the day before I got married.

But for me, and to my great good fortune also for Alinor and our two now-teenage kids, there’s no place that combines surf and history quite like the Jersey Shore.

What kind of human histories can waves tell? Stories that overflow with patterns and changes, without solidity, reforming themselves at each tide yet recognizable, familiar, even early in the season when the water is still cold.

On Saturday morning we needed to be out of our rental by 11 am, and two days of ocean breeze had churned up a surf a little bit, so I was the only one of the family to join the many surfers in the morning swell. I didn’t go all the way out for the bigger waves with the board-riders, but I caught a few nice ones.

I must be underwater somewhere

My favorite image — the first one in this post — shows me in the lower left walking slowing back out into the surf, through waist-high chop toward one small swell, a bigger one beyond it, and into currents of grey-green blending with fog and sky. I love the scale and density of this image. As somebody almost said, What a piece of work is a wave!

Photo credits Alinor Sterling 6/17/17

I can’t see my face, but I must be trying to read something.

 

 

A Maiden Knight at Kalamazoo

by Leave a Comment

Mishigami, the "great water"

Mishigami, the “great water”

(Cross-posted at In the Middle)

When you dive into cold water, it pushes the wind out of you. The icy shock holds you still, just for an instant. You slide beneath the waves into water’s slippery grip, and then lurch back up onto unsteady feet. Now everything’s different. The air bites exposed skin, but it isn’t just the cold or even the wind raking the lake into ragged swells. Something else. Your breath comes in near-frantic wrenches, and you can nearly feel some hidden motions inside your body, some awakened fire, constricted now inside loose ropes of cold. The lakewater has encircled your body, taken you whole – that’s what immersion means – but after you stand up it gradually sloughs itself away. Second by second your breathing reasserts its rhythm. You plunge under a second time, and the cold comes back, but nothing like the first shock.

Early Saturday morning, before my first-ever presentation at Kalamazoo, Lowell Duckert and I went swimming in Lake Michigan. As I usually am, I was seeking meaning. Does it make sense to read frigid immersion as allegory, to say that my scant thirty hours at the Medieval Congress, perhaps five of which were spent sleeping, embody the same impulse as plunging into the cold waters of the Third Coast?

A maiden knight arrives

Lowell, post-immersion

Lowell, post-immersion

As an early modernist who’d never been there, I was curious about Kalamazoo. It shouldn’t have been all that exotic – the gap between the periods isn’t that wide, and anyway I’m close to the Sidney and Spenser Kzoo sub-cultures via my first book on romance. Plus the elemental hospitality of the BABEL/ITM/MEMSI/etc flowed through every hour. To paraphrase Jeffrey’s introductory remarks from “The Future We Want,” medievalists and early modernists are better served by seeing each other as alternate sympathies than rival claimants to a pre-modern throne.  He sees a chasm between the sub-fields that needs to be bridged, and I’m also tempted to imagine a border across which sorties can sally and trade flourish, but in any case it seems more fun to be on both sides.

Even so, I felt vaguely alien upon arriving at the Congress. The sense that everyone else knew where they were going was part of it. Navigating the foreign WMU campus Friday afternoon to get to my first session seemed Spenserian and allegorical. (Should I say Dantesque instead? Romain de la Rose-like? Spenser is my go-to allegorical marker, but not the only one.) The ground was charged with meanings. The first living creature I encountered on campus was a goose. Symbol of fun? Or the need to extend our circle of attention beyond human actors? Of seasonal migrations? It was raining, and I hadn’t packed an umbrella or raincoat. The first human I recognized was Jeffrey Cohen, driving his rental car slowly down a campus drive. He rolled down his window, spoke my name, smiled, and drove off, leaving me in the rain. Meaning…what, exactly?

A symbolic object?

A symbolic object?

Because allegories must be interpreted (via Chris Piuma & Jonathan Hsy)

Allegories must be interpreted!
(via Chris Piuma & Jonathan Hsy)

During a busy spring of many conferences, I’ve been thinking a lot about the relationship between individuality and community. The productive tension between the one and the many has been on my mind for a long time, and thinking back on my trip to Michigan, I have the sense that Kzoo might enable a slightly different response to this endless conundrum. Unlike the annual conferences I regularly go to – SAA, MLA, less often RSA – it’s always in the same place. To my fellow conference goers, many of whom happily rattled off their Kzoo numbers – 12 years straight! 13! 5! 20! – it clearly felt like home.

Like a first-time reader of an over-abundant text, Malory or Dante or Chaucer, I searched for ways into the overwhelming numbers & flavors & ideas on diplay. The goose started things off, and then it wasn’t long before I’d spotted a few grad school friends and eased into the familiar pattern of academic conferences: found the registration table, looped a badge around my neck, arbitrarily narrowed my list of four intriguing sessions down to one.

I ended up choosing what felt like the most Kalamazoo-ish panel, La Belle Compagnie’s “How Shall a Man be Armed?” a live demonstration and modeling of English armoring practices during the Hundred Years War. My BABEL-y and theoretical friends wondered if I was poking fun at medievalism by choosing that panel. And perhaps I was a little, as I retold the story at happy hour, but the truth is I love experiential learning and the pressure living bodies put on ancient structures. I really can’t get enough of that stuff – which is one reason I love teaching with live theater and also why I launched my maritime scholarship by learning to climb the rigging and set the sails on the tall ships at Mystic Seaport back in 2006. The Armor panel was wonderfully dense and awash in technical details, including the influence of Italian and French fashions on English armor designs. (I thought it was good evidence for the claim that modern men’s fashions evolved out of armor.) The panel featured, in the four stalwart men gradually being dressed from foot to helm, a full helping of bodily presence, the force of “now” infiltrating historical expertise. Plus some good jokes, intentional or not: one knight’s beaver kept falling down and interrupting the presenter. It showcased the sometimes awkward fit of scholarly technical precision and fan-boy enjoyment. I could only get to one session as a audience member, but it was a good one.

How Shall a Man Be Armed?

How Shall a Man Be Armed?

Fellowship

As at NCS last summer, the communal virtue I wanted to think through at Kzoo was fellowship. I’d done my homework and read a little David Wallace, and I was interested in testing the rough assumption that, compared to my home waters at SAA, Kzoo was more fellowship-full, less hierarchical, more interdisciplinary, and extended across different kinds of intellectual space. That’s a caricature of SAA, but an interesting fantasy about Kzoo.

In many ways, unsurprisingly, the two conferences are more alike than not. I was struck, though here I might be reading from my own private Kzoo, driven by BABEL, MEMSI, etc., by a deep attention to social organization and institutionalization beyond the panels. After seeing men armed, I went from BABEL happy hour -> MEMSI dinner -> BABEL party at Bell’s Brewery. I’ve seldom felt so well taken care of at a conference or so thoroughly awash with fellow-feeling. (At SAA I sometimes consciously shift between different sub-discourses, which I didn’t at all at Kzoo.)

My favorite moments at dinner were watching Jeffrey move from insisting, as drinks were served, that it would be “impossible” to put together another set of MEMSI panels for next year’s Kzoo, because he was out of ideas, to watching him assemble, before dessert, a twenty-speaker mega-panel on “The Impossible.” (My word, supplied by Lowell, is “dry.” Impossible & undesirable, but something we covet and value. Though I now wonder if “memory” has already been taken?)

Bell’s is definitely a place to which I’d like to return. The logistics of the pre-panel swim the next morning trimmed the wind from my sails Fri night, but it’s an excellent spot. 

The Future We Want

The Future We Want

The Cormorant and the Future

The panel I’d come to speak on, “The Future We Want,” dealt out six pairs and a wild card. The 10:00 am time was perfect for a pre-talk lake swim, a quick 60 miles west, before fiddling with flash drives and slideshows.

It was odd that none of the other panelists took up our offer to join us for a dip. Maybe they were waiting in a different hotel lobby at 6 am?

The talks rolled over us like so many cars in a freight train, roaring westbound, peering through fog, monkey at the wheel. I’ll sprint through them in an early modernist spirit of competitive evaluation:

  1. The best presentation came first, Anne Harris and Karen Overby’s gorgeous meditation on optical lushness and the gifts of Art. I craned my neck backward to stare at the slides.
  2. Better than all the rest was Arayne Fradenburg and Eilleen Joy’s rich evocation of institutional freedoms and futures. No one was surprised when they admitted their talks had been ghost written by frozen kobolds held deep underground, where they spend their dark days digging for possibilities.
  3. My favorite was by Alan Mitchell and Will Stockton, who wasn’t really there. They brought the devil to the party and showed what happens when times and modes change.
  4. Lowell Duckert and I may not have had the prettiest pictures, but we were the only ones to sing during our presentation.
  5. None of the talks was better than Chris Piuma and Jonathan Hsy’s brilliant poetic meditation on containers and overflowing meanings.
  6. I could not believe it when Julian Yates and Julie Orlemanski actually came to blows over the dynamic meanings of The Battle of Maldon. There was no way to top that level of commitment, so it’s good that they anchored our relay.

Actually the best part may have been the introductions. Wild-card Jeffrey likened each of us to a different literary genre, then sat in the front row with eyes blazing. Greedy glutton of imagination, lapping it up after lashing us all to the mast!

Cormorant sees the future

Cormorant sees the future

I see now, but didn’t yet realize as I wrote the talk, that the “various” I was celebrating via Milton’s fallen angel-bird was the difference I’d come to Michigan seeking, the fellowship poured into glasses and spread across campus lawns, the screech of newness in my ears. As usual with acts of discovery, what you find is mostly what you bring. But what I like about new conferences is the slight reshuffling of times and voices, the partially off-balance feeling created by available novelty, and the opening up of new ways.

In maritime historical circles, the idea of the Great Lakes as the Third Coast aims to supplement familiar narratives of “Atlantic history” and Pacific globalization with a different American story, one that enters slightly askew, via the St. Lawrence diagonally out of the northeast. This narrative connects the landlocked center of the continent to a distinctively northern maritime economy, trading furs and timber rather than cotton or sugar. This coast even — quelle horreur! — speaks more French than English, or at least it used to. Adding these fresh-water coastlines to our maritime narratives provides new trajectories for waterborne thinking.

That’s also what I like most about an early spring dip in great waters.

103.61 miles

by Leave a Comment

That’s my yearly total in the water, according to my flog (fitness log), courtesy of the US Master’s Swim Program. Probably more than I’ve swum since high school, I think.

Best month was June = 17.65 miles

Worst was September = 3.94

My Progress for Go The Distance 2012

Month Total Distance
Jan 6.45 miles (=11,350 yards, =10,378 meters)
Feb 12.02 miles (=21,150 yards, =19,340 meters)
Mar 6.42 miles (=11,300 yards, =10,333 meters)
Apr 8.75 miles (=15,400 yards, =14,082 meters)
May 15.28 miles (=26,900 yards, =24,597 meters)
Jun 17.65 miles (=31,072 yards, =28,412 meters)
Jul 7.36 miles (=12,950 yards, =11,841 meters)
Sep 3.94 miles (=6,930 yards, =6,337 meters)
Oct 7.90 miles (=13,900 yards, =12,710 meters)
Nov 7.73 miles (=13,600 yards, =12,436 meters)
Dec 10.11 miles (=17,800 yards, =16,276 meters)
Total 103.61 miles (=182,352 yards, =166,743 meters)

Other swimming highlights —

Best swimming hole was in the Peneda National Park in Portugal, courtesy of Luis Barros.

PGNP swimming hold

 

 

Best long-distance swim was 4.4 miles across the Chesapeake Bay in early June.

 

Next year I’m thinking about some of the NYC Swim events, including the Little Red Lighthouse 10 k or maybe the Governor’s Island swim.

Swimmer Poetics

by Leave a Comment

Here’s the opening couple paragraphs of my ecology piece for O-Zone, which thinks eco-literary thoughts while narrating the Great Chesapeake Bay race last June.

Into the warm salt water splashed the six hundred. Not all of us knew we were diving into a theoretical paradigm.

 

We crowded up to the water’s edge like figures in a Robert Frost poem. Or whale-killing philosophers in Battery Park. We were swimmers, come to Chesapeake Bay in June 2012 to race four-point-four miles from western to eastern shore. Covering that distance in the water carves out a nice block of time, a discrete chronology to feel fluid dislocation on an intimate level. I wasn’t there to win. I wanted to think some things through.

 

My hope, then and now, is that swimming can model or inspire a dynamic ecological poetics for our age of crisis. The prolonged experience of immersion, its difficulties and pleasures, parallels how we must learn to live today. Being in the water forces the physical realities of this terraqueous globe onto your skin, adding urgency to the need to move beyond comforting green eco-visions.  The blue world ocean, as literary culture has long taught us, is unstable, dynamic, and inhospitable. But the gray-green silty waters of Chesapeake Bay proved survivable, even pleasurable. Dare I say philosophical?

Scenes from Portugal

by 1 Comment

The view from our villa

I arrived in Lisbon airport around 4 pm on Saturday Aug 11, which gave me an afternoon and evening on my own before Alinor and the kids arrived the next morning. After checking into my airport hotel and making sure the rental car was all set for the next day, I took the slow local bus to the Praça Marquess Pombal near the center of town. I love seeing new cities by public transportation. The bus took me through the empty-feeling outskirts of Lisbon, filled with graffiti and young people walking slowly down broad avenues through the heat. I had the feeling I wasn’t in England any more.

Dinner in the Baixa.

At the statue of the Marquess Pombal, the Prime Minister who rebuilt the city after the 1755 earthquake, producing the first urban grid in the Western world, I switched to the fast new Metro and zipped down to the banks of the Tagus. After buying a pair of sunglasses at a kiosk for 5 Euros, I walked uphill through the steep maze of the Alfama, past the Sé (cathedral) to the Castello San Jorge. I didn’t pay for entrance, but I looked from the castle walls over the city toward the Ponte de 25 April, which looks just like the Golden Gate. First of many visions of northern California on this trip.

Dinner that night in the Baixa, where the long avenue are closed to cars and filled with small tables for the cafes. Sitting down to a glass of vinho verde and a  plate of fish-and-potato, I thought about how much fun it was to start by knowing nothing about Lisbon, just four hours earlier, and suddenly to have a sense of neighborhoods, public transit, the hills and wide river Tagus that dominates and orients the city. The last few days of the family trip we all stayed in Belem, about 6km west down the river, the port from which the great naus sailed to Africa, India, and Brazil, so we barely got back to the Baixa, and made only one trip to the Castello. Lisbon is a city to come back to.

The Roman bridge in Ponte de Lima

After getting Alinor and the kids on Sun morning, we drove our Renault Clio (“the muse of history”) north on the A1, one of Portugal’s great highways, built recently, presumably with EU credit. After almost three hours north to Porto we picked up the coast road that leads north into the Minho region, then turned east up the Lima River valley to the exit for Calheiros, just a few km short of Ponte de Lima and its Roman bridge. Then the fun began: the drive to our villa in upper Calheiros was maybe 5 km from the highway exit, but we drove up and around and up some more. The roads were all paved, but they kept getting smaller and the stone houses and walls closer together. We followed signs – including a great sign for the village of “Portal” with an arrow pointing both ways, the door being always open in Portugal – and drove through one-lane stretches that felt as if they were sunk into small culverts between the ancient stone walls that terraced the hillside for farming.

When we got to the villa we found a traffic jam. Our host Diana was there, the owner of the villa was there, and then we pulled up behind both of them in a narrow alley surrounded by stone houses. The housekeeper had locked gate of the carport, and no one had the key.  Portuguese was spoken, and the key was found.

The villa felt, and was, quite remote – the market to which we could walk was 1.5 km away, but along a paved road & besides it only featured old produce and Portuguese men drinking at all hours of the day or night. But the place itself was gorgeous. A small pool, a bit of flat lawn, an engineering feat on the steep hillside, a large deck, and a view across the Lima valley. The car port had table grapes growing in fat clusters, which we ate. The inside was Euro-new, complete with an electric stovetop that took us days to master, but the building also incorporated much older stonework in its construction.

Festival day in Viana de Castello

3. The first few days were quiet as the kids and Alinor processed jet lag. We drove into Ponte de Lima for the big biweekly market on Monday, but it was huge and crowded and we didn’t stay. I found a supermarket & brought in enough food so that we didn’t have to eat all our meals down the hill. Slowly I mastered the mountain driving, and gradually figured out the lay of the land in and around Ponte de Lima. The story goes that Decimus Brutus’s legions at first refused to cross the river, thinking it was the Lethe & if they crossed they would forget their families and homes. So the commander crossed first and called his own name back to the men, after which they followed him north.

Monday night we met Sonja, a Portuguese women who drove up from Viana de Castello on the coast to cook arroz mariscos for us – a somewhat wetter version of paella with lots of mussels, calamari, pieces of fish, octopus, and huge prawns. We communicated with her mostly in French, which many people spoke more easily than English — it seems that during the depressed 70s a lot of residents of the Minho emigrated to France, and there are lots of connections that remain. We saw lots of EU cars with the letter “F” on the license plate, more than any other foreign country. That meal started a trend in Portuguese food: the seafood was great. We also liked the national pastry, pastel de nata, which are little custard tarts. The best ones are made in a mid-19c bakery in Belem right next to the hotel we stayed a when we were in Lisbon.

Tuesday it poured rain all day and we stayed in the villa, but Wednesday we drove over the mountains to Valença on the Spanish border to see the great fortress. Traffic was bad and the “shopping fortress” was filled with Spanish tourists snapping up Portuguese linens.

Luis and Alinor after our hike in the Sierra de Peneda

4. Thursday was the turning point of the trip: we drove up to Arcos de Valdevez to ride horses at Carlos Orlando’s Quinto do Fijo, which the villa’s office had suggested. Olivia got nervous about riding English saddles up steep mountain trails, but Alinor & Ian rode through the steep alleys and dirt paths, getting a local’s eye view of the network of roads and byways of the hills above Arcos. Olivia & I swam at the river beach on the Vez in town.

But the best of all was being put in touch with Carolos’s friend Luis Barros, who runs AktivaNatura, a kayaking/hiking/biking/etc outfit based in Ponte de Barca who became our guide for two of our remaining four days in the Minho. On Friday we met him near his office in Ponte de Barca & he drove us in his van into the Sierra Peneda, the northern valley of Portugal’s largest National Park. It’s a huge, high, stone-rimmed valley, almost entirely cut off on both sides until the Portuguese government put in a paved road in the 1970s. The driving is slow and sometimes frightening, with sheer drops, endless views, and free-ranging longhorn cattle and wild horses. We were only supposed to hike until around 7pm, according to the plans we’d made via Facebook with Luis, but he ended up giving us the full tour: a trip to the park entrance and its visitor center, to see the espagerras or stone granaries in Soajo, to a fantastic “fresh” (ie, cold) swimming hole just a bit past Soajo, and finally, after hours of driving & Olivia getting a bit carsick, as good a bit of hiking as I’ve ever done, over granite pathways and glacier-carved valleys, past  live oaks and wild horses down to the town of Peneda, with its three-star hotel, famous church, and pilgrimage site. We made it to the hotel restaurant just before the kitchen closed at 9:30 pm. There we had local wine – vinho verde, but the red variety this time, which tasted a bit underaged, which is to say, like grape juice – veal steaks, and the only good chocolate mouse we found in Portugal.

Luis himself was as friendly and interested as you could wish. He runs Aktiva in part b/c of an ecological commitment to nature, as near as I can tell, partly inspired (I think) by his eco-themed reading of science fiction as a boy. We had a great conversation about E.E. “Doc” Smith’s Lensmen series after the sun went down and he was driving us back to Ponte de Barca through dark mountain roads. We made plans to go kayaking with him on Sunday. It was a festival night in Ponte de Barca when we go there, so all the cafes were still full at 12:30 am, but Olivia had been sleeping in the car for hours. A long day for her.

The Hotel de Peneda, last stop on our hike.

Saturday Luis had a big group of kayakers & we went to Braga, the largest city in the Minho and a religious center. Alinor & Olivia went to see an 18c Baroque palace, and Ian and I went to the amazing 16c Sé and the Roman baths. It was a fantastic cathedral, fill of many different styles of art and decoration. Ian lit a candle for Grandpa Charlie & talked eloquently about that strange feeling you get inside sacred places even if you’re not all that religious. Olivia bought cute sandals on the pedestrian avenues, where the two groups at lunch at separate cafes within a few hundred meters of each other. The salada de polvo (octopus) was the best thing any of us ate in Braga.

Sunday Olivia was feeling tired plus didn’t really want to kayak, so Ian & I went with Luis for 6 km of white water on the Vez. We met him in the Aquario, a café overlooking the river beach where Olivia & I had swam on Th. Luis pulled up in his trailer, we dropped his mini-motorbike – only 60 kilos! – so that he could drive back to get the boat trailer after we finished, he outfitted us both in lightweight shorty wetsuits, and away we went. The Vez was low, but not so low we couldn’t get through the 6 sets of rapids. Ian did great; he floated a little higher in the water than I did, so he could bounce off the rocks more easily. Luis also let him work things out for himself if he got a little bit stuck. It was great to see him figure out how to get his kayak pointed the right way in the white water.

I didn’t float quite as high as Ian – too  many pasteles de nata? – and got dumped a couple of times. But the river was good for swimming too, and we all stopped at a rope swim on a calm section. Plus Luis gave us careful instruction in the right way to use a kayak paddle for maximum splashing.

We invited Luis to come back to our villa for dinner that night, and bought the best local vinho verde on his suggestions – Quito Mendalhes, I think was the name? We served a simple meal of pasta and tomato sauce, partly b/c we had not been shopping that day & also b/c that’s what Olivia liked eating. She was not as ready as I was for grilled sardines or fried baby mackerel, which really are the things to eat in Portugal.

Monday was meant to be our last full day in the villa, and we had a lovely slow morning around the pool. Alinor & I took a long walk up the road for about 45 minutes, but could not quite get to the rocky peaks above the village. After lunch, we were feeling restless, so we decided to go to Lisbon a day early. Fortunately our great hotel – Jeronimos 8 in Belem – could take us a day early, so off we went. Highway driving was easy, and though we arrived in Lisbon after dark, we navigated by the monastery and found our hotel without too much trouble. Not many people seem to live in Belem, though it’s flooded with tourists during the day, so street parking was easy.

Lisbon is a very different sort of place: full of people where the Minho was empty, crowded, with better food and more chaos. The next morning we snaked our way through the single-file turret up the Torre de Belem, saw the late 20c fascist monument to the Portuguese descobradores, and walked through the monastery, built with the wealth generated by the careirra de India. The highlight for me was the great maritime museum, one of the best I’ve ever seen.

It’s hard to believe the trip is over! I may have more to say about Pessoa and other matters. Plus for the dedicated who’ve read this far, here’s a link to our almost 400 photos.

 

Swimming the Chesapeake

by 2 Comments

For just a bit under 3 hours yesterday, between the spans of the Bay Bridge, I was Aquaman, Cap’n Metis, and Mr. Nemo. Just me, the water, and about 600 other swimmers.

Like all long swims, it was an attempt, partly successful, to maintain form inside formlessness. Not to impose my form on the moving water — no chance of that — but to insert my form-creating body into the Bay, finding my way through the repetitive churn of stroke after stroke, breathing mostly on the left but also on the right, kicking just enough to keep my body streamlined in the water. When the chop hits you in the mouth, or your stroke misses, it’s hard to return to form, but it’s only through form that you can make your way through the water.

I spent a lot of time thinking about currents. The swim started at 11:15 toward the end of the flood, which means I swam into the tide to get between the shadows of the bridge towers before turning across its current to start swimming east. At the end of the swim, when I ducked outside the bridge for the final 1/3 mile onto the Eastern Shore, the ebb pulled me hard southwards. To get out from under the shadow of the eastbound span, I just floated for 10 seconds and let the tide carry me.

I thought about literature, as I always do. Two lines in particular. First, Shakespeare:

 whilst this machine is to him (Hamlet, 2.2)

That’s what I thought about myself as I noticed how automatic my stroke became, how little my mind seemed to control arms and legs. Breathing was a bit less mechanic; I had to chose to breath left or right, trying to balance in the sometimes choppy water and also judge my position by the bridge towers. “This machine” is the phrase the prince uses for his body in his love-letter to Ophelia; it’s what I felt like in the water.

Also —

mobilis in mobili (Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea)

I thought about Nemo’s motto, moving inside mobility, and its paradoxes, esp late in the swim when I had to fight the current to keep myself inside the bridges. 

Highlights of the course included two deep shipping channels, the larger of which I swam through at slack tide before I was too tired, at about mile two; two anchored paint barges the stuck their sterns into the course so that we had to detour around their anchor chains; and the sickly warmth of the last 500 yards in shallow, sheltered water leading up to the marina: it made me realize how much cleaner the moving water in the center channel had been. Plus by then I just wanted to get out.

Looking up at the bridge spans from the water made me think of Thoreau hearing the railroad whistle from Walden Pond (Ch 4). No separation from made-things even in the water. The Bay is still in many ways like it’s always been, but bridges and boats and hundreds of churning human bodies mark the water, even if the imprints don’t last.

My arms hurt and my back is sunburned — but what a great way to spend a Sunday in June!