Steve Mentz

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THALASSOLOGY, SHAKESPEARE, AND SWIMMING

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Audiences, Oceans, Avery Point

February 8, 2012 by Steve Mentz 1 Comment

It was a great evening under a full moon last night at Avery Point, talking “Swimmer Poetics.”  I always enjoy speaking to a mixed audience; Avery Point is a maritime studies campus, with an emphasis on marine science and public policy as well as a growing but still modest humanities presence.  I was introduced by my old friend Mary K. Bercaw-Edwads, a blue-water sailor and Melville scholar, but there weren’t many other literary types around.

What everyone shared, though, was a deep personal commitment to the ocean.  One of the really great questions I got after the talk was about how differently a less-ocean focused audience might reaction to the idea that swimming and poetry are essentially ecological practices and ideas.  It’s a question I might revisit at SAA, though my Oceanic Shakespeares seminar will be filled with dual-focus types like me, interested in poetry and the sea, wanting to use the one to get at or into the other.

Early in the talk I rehearsed something that I wrote in the first few pages of At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean, the claim that the sea is receding from our cultural imagination.  I still basically believe this, having taken the point in part from Robert Foulke, but I also think it needs refining.  The sailor and the sailing ship have been receding in our imagination since Conrad, whose novels comprise a kind of requiem.  Perhaps maritime shipping and the ship as such are as well, with the exception of the cruse ship.    But the beach is our public property, and ocean swimming has, almost certainly, become much more common in the past few generations than ever before.

The distinction between sailors and swimmers, between being “on it” or “in it,” was the refrain of my gallery talk at the Folger back in June 2010, and I wonder now if I should go back to that frame as a way of separating out two different versions of the human-sea relationship.

The other great question I got after the talk, asked by a former competitive swimmer who’s recently started coaching a high school swim team, was about the morality of swimming.  As I was thinking through it during my answer, I tried to lay out a distinction between the ship, which has been an emblem for social bonds and political order since antiquity — Plato’s Republic uses it, and I think Antigone also — and the solitary swimmer, head down underwater, who, to paraphrase Frost, cannot see out far and cannot see in deep.  I’m pretty focused on the wisdom of the swimmer, the knowledge that comes from living in an inhuman and untenable environment — but what’s the social politics associated with this practice?  What’s the morality?

The best thing about bringing new work somewhere is getting unexpected feedback.  The shipwreck book, which is nearly done — I’ll be able to use some of the material about Donne’s “The Storm” that I talked about last night in the chapter on the lyric, and an expanded version of the Crusoe in the surf bit also in the “Castaways” chapter, and those are the last two that I need to write — is feeling more and more like a hinge book, a way into the water where I’ll be swimming for a while.

Swimmer Poetics isn’t a bad book title, I suppose.  I’m going to use it for a short talk at a Maritime conference in Cape Cod in April, and also for an eco-theory piece for O-Zone.  Unless I decide I need to save that phrase.

Filed Under: Blue Humanities, Swimming

Swimmer Poetics

February 7, 2012 by Steve Mentz 2 Comments

A couple paragraphs out of the talk I’m giving tonight at U Conn Avery Point, as part of the Coastal Perspectives lectures series —

It happens in three stages.  First, immersion.  The sudden shock of getting into the water.  It’s a phase change, really, a transition from being in the air, which, depending on location and temperature, contains quite a bit of water vapor, into heavier, viscous liquid water.  You’re out, then you’re in. Nothing quite like it.  After that, buoyancy.  Our bodies need just a little help to pop up to the surface.  We can relax and float, for a little while.  This is the hopeful moment.  Last, exertion.  Moving our arms and legs in practiced patterns, we stay at the surface, even move around from place to place.  Nothing lasts forever, but there is short-term stability and pleasure, for a while.

And a little later —

Swimming matters because humans can learn how to do it, even do it very well, but it’s always dangerous.  Eventually you need to get out of deep water.  A minor character in Conrad’s Lord Jim emphasizes that swimming is, at bottom, futile:

Very funny this terrible thing is.  A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea.  If he tries to climb out into the air as inexperienced people endeavor to do, he drowns….No!  I tell you!  The way is to the destructive element submit yourself, and with the exertions of your hands and feet in the water make the deep, deep, sea keep you up.

 

The “exertions of your hands and feet” provide a bleak a vision of human insufficiency, but it puts off drowning.  Conrad’s character is a native German speaker, and his jumbled syntax parallels the awkwardness of human swimming itself.  As Conrad knows, as all swimmers and sailors know, there is no long-term survival plan for swimmers in the deep ocean.  But the immersive experience, being in the “destructive element,” is precisely what poetry helps us understand.  Poetry is good at imagining radical change, and good at making readers enjoy it.  Literary criticism has a name for this technique: the poetic sublime, which I’ll explain shortly.  My focus tonight is on the way that poetic forms provide models for enduring inside a hostile environment.  The world after global warming is not the future – it’s the present – and making sense of that present requires a poetic, oceanic imagination.

Filed Under: Blue Humanities, Swimming

Three Rulin’s for 2012

January 2, 2012 by Steve Mentz Leave a Comment

Abbreviating the spirit of Woody, I’ve got three things this year: write, cook, and swim.

The first — “Work more and better” — wants a renewed focus on prose style.  When I wrote At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean in 2009, playing with my  academic style meant no footnotes, prose-poem interludes, a half-dozen different ways of interpolating modern writers from Melville to Walcott to Glissant, and working through sentences every day in the warm waters of Long Island Sound.  In 2010, writing case labels and brochures and website text for “Lost at Sea: The Ocean in the English Imagination, 1550 – 1750” meant writing for a new audience: clear, brief, lucid prose, plus more imaginative moments in two talks in the theatre.  This past year had me writing for various outlets — a couple journals, introductions for two essay collections, the still-looming shipwreck book — and trying to figure out how much of the churn and froth of Shakespeare’s Ocean I can keep as I return to footnote-landia.  In 2012, the answer will be: all of it, and more.  It’ll be fun.

Second — “Eat good — fruit — vegetables” –digs into cooking and eating.  No farmer’s markets here in CT during the winter, but replacing Stop’n’Shop with Bishop’s Orchard helps a lot.  Though I think our wine won’t come from CT…

Last — “Keep hoping machine running” — I want to build on 2011’s rediscovery of swim racing, which took me to Bermuda for a 10km open water race in October.  It’s great to have an athletic focus that doesn’t pound my lower body — though I’d also like to keep running on days I can’t get to the pool.  Not sure what the long swims will be in 2012: I’m waiting to hear about the Chesapeake Bay Swim, the lottery for which gets decided in a few days.  There are also a few fun NYC swims, including two in the Hudson and two in the Bay.  The Little Red Lighthouse is a current-assisted 10km in September that looks like fun.  The Hellespont looms, but not in 2012.

I’m also considering some races in the pool, for the first time since the mid-80s.

A good line-up of academic events too, including chairing seminars at the SAA in Boston and the ISA in Stratford, giving a “Coastal Perspectives” Lecture at UConn Avery Point and a talk at CUNY, plus heading west and slightly out of field for the New Chaucer Society in Portland in July.  The big family trip to Europe will follow the Stratford conference, though we’re still working out the details.  France or Greece?

 

Filed Under: Blue Humanities, Swimming

10 kilometers around Harrington Sound

October 19, 2011 by Steve Mentz 3 Comments

Here I am 3 hours and 34 minutes later, having made my way all the way around Harrington Sound in Bermuda last Sunday.  I was down there for the Race Around the Sound, which gathered together over 150 off-island swimmers plus 75 or so Bermudians to swim a variety of distances: 800m, 2km, 4km, 7.25km, and my race, the full 10km (6.2 miles).

When I started swimming again with a Master’s group in Branford this past January, I hadn’t done any serious swimming since finishing high school in ’85.  I swam a few shorter races this summer, 1 and 2 miles, but this was the longest by far. 

We started at the Aquarium, which the kids later told me was really great, treading water behind a lane line while the outgoing tide pulled us back slightly.  There’s only one entrance to the Sound, so other than at the very start there wasn’t any current.

 

Most of the race was close to shore, in a few places in shallow water above coral, though at the start and again at about the 6km mark we cut across deep bays.  The water was clear and gorgeous.  Lots of fish.

I felt good going out, but it was a very fast field — mostly former or current college swimmers, and quite a few people who compete in US National Master’s meets.  I did not stay with the front of the pack.

For the first couple hours, I thought a lot about bouyancy and what swimmers call “feel for the water.”  Things were feeling pretty good until after the second stop, at 4km to go.  I took an awkward route to get into that check point, because I wasn’t quite sure where to go — it’s hard to see from down in the water — and the wind picked up a bit.  I should have been feeling great — over half-done — but as I started the 4km – 2km leg, going from point to point on the south shore of the Sound, I felt sluggish in the water.  The wind had come up and waves splashed my face whenever I breathed to the right.  I didn’t have any doubt that I would finish the race — I wasn’t going to sink — but for a half-hour or so, I wasn’t cleaving the water as I’d have liked.

But the funny thing was, I got back into my rhythm.  After the final check point at 2km, I felt strong, fast, fluid again.  My shoulders ached, and my mouth was salt-dry, but I could turn over my stroke a bit quicker and got back some of my feel for moving through the water.  It was a long haul up the west side of the sound, past houses and docks, but it was great to finish strong.

Unlike the NYC marathon, which I ran a couple days after my 40th birthday in 2006, I was tired but not broken after.  (This picture, though, is before the start.)

Soon I’ll be ready for another race.  Maybe just a little bit shorter?  Or I hear the Little Red Lighthouse swim in NYC is a 10km but with a current assist…

Filed Under: Bermuda, Swimming

Breathing

August 25, 2011 by Steve Mentz Leave a Comment

Coach Frank told me this morning, during a fairly awkward 3500-yd workout in the pool after my 10 days in Maine, that my freestyle breathing was a little off.  He wants me to angle my head farther forward, exhale sooner while my face is underwater, and breathe forward, while reaching down and out with my right arm.  Right now I’m a bit cock-eyed, with my left arm plunging ahead and my right never quite catching up.

He also said that, as I sit just under 8 weeks out from the Bermuda swim, that improving my breathing is the biggest change I can make in my swimming before the race.

Breathing in the water is the key point, the thing we mammals can’t really do that well, the thing that reminds us we’re not well-suited to the water.  Turning my head, and following it with the trunk of my body, every stroke or three impedes my forward thrust.  When it’s working, I get a decent side to side action along the keels of each side of my ribs.  But it doesn’t always work, esp when I’ve been out of the pool for a week or so.

Thinking hard about breathing while swimming reminds me of a great Ozzie novel, Tim Winton’s Breath (2008), set in the wild surf country of Western Australia.  It’s a rich, moving, intense story of physical danger and the lure of the ocean, following two friends, Picklet and Loonie, who compete at holding their breath underwater and then end up surfing remote breaks with sharks and a mysterious American surf-loner.  It takes an odd but moving turn toward other kinds of asphyxiation in its second half, in sexual games and, eventually, in Picklet’s adult career as an emergency medic.  An exhausted, deeply felt melancholy broods over the second half of the novel.

But at its center is a hymn to surfing as a way of being-in the world ocean that’s as gorgeous as any I’ve read —

I will always remember my first wave that morning.  The smells of paraffin wax and brine and peppy scrub.  The way the swell rose beneath me like a body drawing in air.  How the wave drew me forward and I sprang to my feet, skating with the wind of momentum in my ears.  I leant across the wall of upstanding waters and the board came with me as though it was part of my body and mind.  The blur of spray.  The billion shards of light.  I remember the solitary watching figure on the beach and the flash of Loonie’s smile as I flew by; I was intoxicated.  And though I’ve lived to be an old man with my own share of happiness for all the mess I made, I still judge every joyous moment, every victory and revelation against those few seconds of living.  (35)

Losing and not-quite recovering that youthful joy structures the novel, for Picklet and Loonie and for the American couple Sando and Eva.  The final image of the novel returns to Picklet as a 50-year old divorced surfer with slightly opaque relationships with his two daughters and his former self, but still aesthetically connected to moving salt water —

 My favourite time is when we’re all at the Point, because when they see me out on the water I don’t have to be cautious and I’m never ashamed.  Out there I’m free.  I don’t require management.  They probably don’t understand this, but it’s important for me to show them that their father is a man who dances — who saves lives and carries the wounded, yes, but who also does something completely pointless and beautiful, and in this at least he should need no explanation.  (218)

It’s the sort of thing that makes an old swimmer like me want to take up surfing.

Filed Under: Blue Humanities, Books, Swimming

2-Mile Island

July 31, 2011 by Steve Mentz Leave a Comment

Yesterday morning at 8:30 I joined 90 other swimmers at Island Beach just off Greenwich, CT, for the annual 2-mile open water race.  The water was warm but the first mile was into a strong headwind and 2′ of chop.  The return mile was a much easier swim, but also into the sun so I had some trouble sighting the 8 buoys that marked the course.  Things to learn about open water swimming.

I came in at 1:05, middle of the pack.  Two twins who swim for Colgate placed 1st and 2nd, around 41 minutes.

Filed Under: Swimming

Evening Tides

July 12, 2011 by Steve Mentz Leave a Comment

Last week was as perfect a week for Short Beach swimming as you can imagine — high tides rolling in mid- to late-afternoon, the water just cool enough to wash the humidity off your skin.  But the lunar calendar cycles on, and this week we haven’t wanted to brave the oyster shells and silt of low tide for afternoon swimming.  Instead, we’ve had great evening and after dinner swims by twilight.  Coming soon — Friday’s full moon and midnight high tide.  Hmmm…

Filed Under: Swimming

Greenwich Point Mile Swim

July 9, 2011 by Steve Mentz Leave a Comment

On this beautiful summer morning, I joined about 200 other swimmers for the Greenwich Point Mile Swim.  Finished at 24:46.

Filed Under: Swimming

Swimming to Gull Island

July 6, 2011 by Steve Mentz Leave a Comment

Here’s a google map of my summer high tide swim.  I start at Johnson’s beach, the cover at the center-left of the image.  I swim along the shore roughly eastward until I get to the point where the poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox used to live in the 19c, then strike out for the uninhabited Gull Island, which you can see in the center-right of the image.

I imagine it’s about 1 – 1.5 miles round trip.  About 30 minutes swimming time.  As the water gets warmer, I might try some longer swims in and around Branford.

 

Filed Under: Swimming

Avery Aquatic Center

July 1, 2011 by Steve Mentz Leave a Comment

One highlight of the West Coast swing that’s been keeping the Bookfish quiet was a swim last Wed at Stanford’s Avery Aquatic Center with the Master’s Swim Program there.  I swam in the 10-lane, long course, deep water practice pool with about 25 other folks in the 1 pm practice, one of three held that day.  I’ve never swum in an Olympic-caliber facility before, & it’s pretty amazing.

Coach Tim, who very kindly let me join the group as a visitor since I don’t yet have a US Masters card, ran us through a bunch of drills I’ve never done before.  “Vertical flutter kick” is what it sounds like, and also combined with spins from the hips every 3 seconds to work on the long stomach muscles that cant the torso from side to side.  Also a 15m “forward arm travel” kicking on my side after each turn on a 300m set.

Swimming long course — 50m rather than 25 yards — puts you in a much better rhythm, much more concentration on how you move through the water.  I wonder if there’s such a pool anywhere in CT?  Maybe at UConn — though part of the fun was also being outside, which of course we aren’t likely to have for east coast training.

Something else to put on my West Coast itinerary for next year, and all the years to come.

 

Filed Under: Swimming, Uncategorized

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About Steve

Steve Mentz
Professor of English
St. John’s University
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