Another year, another Bookfish wrap up. Not too much to report – keeping a blog seems very old-fashioned, but I enjoy blasting a few things out into cyberspace, and I also use this site to keep track of the Coastal Studies Reading Group. Analytics shows about 7k visitors, 11k page views with a big spike on April 2, the day after the Shakespeare Association Conference in Minneapolis. Top posts seem to be Snow in the North Country, a Sailing without Ahab preview, and a Response to the NYer’s Doomcast.

Some totals for the year – ~30 posts, mostly in a few familiar categories.

For next year – maybe a few more book reviews? Maybe some updates from my grad class this coming spring? Definitely more on the Short Beach Water Quality project, which is basically going to become a dog poop patrol thing. Plus some press for the two new books, Water and Cognition in Early Modern English Literature, co-edited with Nic Helms, due from Amsterdam UP in March, and Sailing without Ahab, due from Fordham UP in April!

Book Reviews (3): On Paradox, Noah’s Arkive, and my Four for ’23 favorites

Theater Reviews (7): Endgame, Arden of Faversham, Born with Teeth, Knight of the Burning Pestle, Fat Ham (on Broadway), Macbeth Muet, The Wife of Willesden

Film Review: Aquaman 2

Academic Events (6): Lanhaus Fellowship ’22, Blue Humanities Talk at ASU, Shakespeare and the Sea in Greenwich, SAA in Minneapolis, ASLE in Portland

Short Beach Water Quality Project: An ongoing series, with four posts in 2023 (April, June, and two in December)

Some drafts that I started to write but never finished: Scenes from the RCC, review of Ryan Poll’s Aquaman and the Defnese of the Oceans, review of Killian Quigley’s Reading Underwater Wreckage, response to the latest wreck of the Titanic.

The big event of the year for me came early, when An Introduction to the Blue Humanities came out in July. Midsummer is an odd time for an academic’s book to drop, since everyone is scattered, but I was able to bring a couple of hard copies to the ASLE conference in Portland.

In some ways the Introduction was a culmination of ideas I’ve been thinking about for the past 20-ish years, though in other ways writing a broad introduction, encompassing all seven seas and the full span of literary history, was a strange thing to write as someone trained in early modern English literary studies. I am sure many specialists, even those who enjoy the book, will twinge a bit when I cover such areas as modern Indian Ocean fiction or Indigenous Alaskan poetry. But I do know the Blue Humanities side of things pretty well, and I come to the other material in a spirit of watery community.

The only other book publication in ’23 was the translation into Italian of Oceano: Storie di marina, poesia, e globalizzazione, done by the good people at Wetlands Publishing in Venice from my 2020 Object Lessons book Ocean. I’m looking forward to visiting with them this coming February to do some slightly-late publicity.

In the articles and chapters category, I published “Surfing the Sublime: Tim Winton’s Breath and Eco-Heroism,” in SubStance (160: 52.1 (2023) 75-80), and “What Washes Up on the Beach: Shipwreck, Literary Culture, and Objects of Interpretation” in Sara Rich and Peter Campbell’s book, Contemporary Philosophy for Maritime Archeology: Flat Ontologies, Oceanic Thought, and the Anthropocene (Leiden: Sidestone Press, 2023: 75-86).

I did a podcast with the New Books Network on An Introduction to the Blue Humanities, and a fun Zoom-conversation about the book with the Coastal Studies Reading Group. I also published a prose-poem looking back at my time in Bavaria last year, “Five Ways of Seeing the Steinsee” in the Rachel Carson Center’s online jounral Springs: The Rachel Carson Center Review 3 (2023).

Early ’24 will be busier, with Water and Cognition in Early Modern English Literature , a collection of essays co-edited with Nic Helms, coming out in March, and then Saliing without Ahab: Eco-Poetic Travels in April. More about them in the New Year!

It’s time to move the list from my Reading List app over to the Bookfish. It’s not looking as if I’ll finish A History of Water by Edward Wilson-Lee before the New Year, partly because I’ve been distracted by the stunning new Dylan tome, Mixing Up the Medicine.

Here’s the list, with my special favs in bold.

In a separate post, my four favorites of the year: Energy at the End of the World, Birnam Wood, Fire Weather, and Noah’s Arkive.

January (7)

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

The Brain’s Way of Healing by Norman Doidge

Aquaman and the War Against Oceans by Ryan Poll

The Value of Ecocriticism by Timothy Clark

Appleseed by Matt Bell

Risingtidefallingstar by Philip Hoare

Pirate Enlightenment by David Graeber

February (8)

Data Driven: Truckers, Technology, and the New by Karen Levy

We Are All Whalers by Michael Moore

Fully Automated Luxury Communism by Aaron Bastani

Storm in a Teacup by Helen Czerski

I Know There Are So Many of You by Allain Badiou

The Wife of Bath: A Biography by Marion Turner

Blue Jeans by Carolyn Purnell

Racism without Racists by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva

March (11)

The Wife of Willesden by Zadie Smith

Mad About Shakespeare by Jonathan Bate

The Lodger by Charles Nicholl

Reading Underwater Wreckage by Killian Quigley

Solarities: Seeking Energy Justice by the After Oil Collective

Radical Wordsworth by Jonathan Bate

Portable Magic by Emma Smith

God Human Animal Machine by Meghan O’Gieblyn

Spare by Prince Harry

Water Nature and Culture by Vernoica Strang

Fly-Fishing by Chris Schaberg

April (10)

Palo Alto by Malcolm Harris

Mushroom by Sara Rich

Hamnet by Maggie Farrell

The Thinking Root by Dan Beachy-Quick

The N. of the Narcissus by Joseph Conrad

Shipwrecked: Coastal Disasters and the Making of the American Beach by Jamin Wells

How to Live: Or a Life of Montaigne in One Question… by Sarah Bakewell

The Environmental Unconscious by Steven Swarbrick

Not Too Late by Rebecca Solnit &c

Hydronarratives: Water, Environmental Justice by Matthew Henry

May (8)

Briny by Mandy Haggith

*a New English Grammar by Jeff Dolven

The Earth Transformed by Peter Frankopan

Paved Paradise by Henry Grabar

Traffic by Ben Smith

William Shakespeare: A Brief Life by Paul Menzer

The Lightkeepers by Abby Geni

Kitchen Music by Lesley Harrison

June (8)

Bright Star, Green Light by Jonathan Bate

Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton

Borges, Between History and Eternity by Hernan Diaz

Fire Weather by John Vaillant

Noah’s Arkive by Jeffrey Cohen and Julian Yates

The Wager by David Grann

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte

July (13)

The Swimmer by Patrick Barkham

How to Be Animal by Melanie Challenger

The Charisma of Animals by Greg Maertz

Hanging Out by Sheila Liming

Running by Lindsay Freedman

The Heat Will Kill You by Jeff Goodell

Grief is the Thing With Feathers by Max Porter

Does the Earth Care? by Mick Smith and Jason Young

Sea Change by Christina Gerhardt

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera

Land Sickness by Nikolaj Schultz

The Deepest Map by Laura Trethewey

Open Book in Ways of Water by Adam Wolfond

August (11)

Dreamscapes and Dark Corners by Melissa Ridley Elmes

Saving Time by Jenny Odell

On Wilder Seas by Nikki Marmery

A Blue New Deal by Chris Armstrong

The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy

Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy

The Great White Bard by Farah Karim-Cooper

A Book of Waves by Stefan Helmreich

The Quickening by Elizabeth Rush

Adventure: An Argument for LImits by Chris Schaberg

The Big Melt by Jeff Goodell

September (16)

The Rigor of Angels by William Eggleston

Angry Weather by Friederike Otto

The Man Who Invented Fiction by William Eggleston

Dayswork by Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel

Naamah by Sarah Blake

Gramsci at Sea by Sharad Chari

Shakespeare in a Divided America by James Shapiro

Reading Pride and Prejudice by Tricia Matthew

Undoing the Grade by Jesse Stommel

Oceaness by Michael Blackstock

The Pole by J.M. Coetzee

Contested Will by James Shapiro

Her Lost Language by Jenny Mitchell

Youth by J.M. Coetzee

Tragedy, the Greeks, and Us by Simon Critchley

Summertime by J.M. Coetzee

October (13)

The Iliad trans Emily Wilson

Our Fragile Moment by Michael Mann

No More Fossils by Dominic Boyer

Anthropocene Blues by John Lane

Black Earth by Osip Mandelshtam

The Maniac by Benjamin Labatut

Venomous Lumpsucker by Ned Beauman

War and the Iliad by Simone Weil and Rachel Bespaloff

Upstream: Selected Essays by Mary Oliver

The Blue Machine by Helen Czerski

Energy at the End of the World by Laura Watts

Aquatopia by May Joseph and Sofina Varino

Sandy Hook by Elizabeth Williamson

November (12)

White Holes by Carlo Rovelli

Ecological Poetics, or Wallace Stevens’s Birds by Cary Wolfe

Tides by Jonathan White

Cosmodolphins by Mette Bryld and Nina Lykke

Anaximader and the Birth of Science by Carlo Rovelli

The Bathysphere Book by Brad Fox

Democracy Awakening by Heather Cox Richardson

Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz

Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe

Silent Whale Letters by Ella Finer and Vibeke Mascini

Sand Talk by Tyson Yunkaporta

Helgoland by Carlo Ravelli

December (9)

The Cause of All Nations by Don Doyle

Baumgartner by Paul Auster

How to Be: Life Lessons from the Early Greeks by Adam Nicolson

Ways of Being by James Bridle

Voices in the Ocean by Susan Casey

The Sea: A Philosophical Encounter by David Farrell Krell

Number Go Up by Zeke Faux

AI and Writing by Sid Dobrin

Will to Power : The Great Courses Lectures by Robert Solomon

Total books read in 2023 = 126

In distant pre-pandemic days of 2018, I dragged my family to the first Aquaman movie and was moved to blogging: “Seven Thoughts for the Seven Seas.” To my surprise, I later dilated those thoughts into a 2020 academic article, co-written with the brilliant medievalist and water-scholar James Smith, “Learning an Inclusive Blue Humanities” that used Aquaman and Moana to think about how the Indigenous traditions of Oceania are being translated into global cultures, and how a couple of white academics might ethically approach this material. I’m not a film scholar, but it was fun to write.

So of course I was fired up when it can time to pile the family into the Subaru and see Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom last night.

It wasn’t as good as the first one – sequels are hard – and I’m still confused about how the allegorical backstory works. But it was good fun, and while I don’t know that I’ll get all the way to Seven Thoughts on this one, here are a few spashes –

(I’m hoping that Ryan Poll, author of 2022’s Aquaman and the War Against Oceans, will have more and better-informed things to say!)

Ice Falling Down as Ecocollapse

One of the repeated images director James Wan uses in the movie, starting with the credit sequence and rising to a climax in the final battle beneath the Antarctic ice shelf, is the calving of a glacial wall. Vertical spires of ice break off, fall down, and soon the entire ice-face evaporates. Ice sheet collapse is, as recent books by Elizabeth Rush (The Quickening) and Jeff Goodell (The Big Melt) about the Thwaites glacier have emphasized, among the most-feared prospects in today’s fragile Anthropocene moment. While Aquaman 2 did not dig deeply into sea level rise or glacial structures, and Aquaman himself did not – alas! – seem to have any affinity for frozen water, the gorgeous images of ice falling vertically down provided a kind of visual doomsday refrain.

Atlantis and the Anthropocene

The climate politics of the film aren’t subtle – the big bad, a kind of underwater Lord of the Nazgul who had been buried deep in Atlantis’s past, threatens to emerge with an even faster-warming superfuel to break the world. Aquaman and his family, both on the human and Atlantean sides, stand for a fairly anodyne “we’ll fix the warming by all coming together” gestural eco-politics. But I do still enjoy, as I wrote about in the 2020 article, the movies’ semi-hidden subtext that presents Oceania as font of eco-wisdom. It seems to me that Atlantis might be best understood not just as a home of superhero wisdom figures, but as a collective representation (albeit in some versions a whitewashing) of the most geographically vast human community, the Indigenous peoples of Oceania, whose watery geography encompasses a vast triangle between Hawai’i, New Zealand/Aotearoa, and Easter Island/Rapa Nui. Early family scenes between Jason Mamoa’s Arthur/Aquaman, his father played by the great Maori actor Temuera Morrison, and the infant Arthur Jr., and a closing scene in which Arthur and his father dance the haka, demonstrate that the human side of the royal Atlantean family has roots in the cultures of Oceania. Despite the ghost-white spectral bodies of Patrick White as half-brother Orm and Nicole Kidman as the Queen Mother, I ended up thinking that Atlantis was basically a partly-digested fantasy of Oceania. Makes me want to read more eco-poetry by Craig Santos Perez and other Indigenous poets of Oceania!

Water Flowing Up

In a movie whose eco-politics are both fully conventional (global warming is bad!) and entirely gestural (we can fix it together when Aquaman reveals his hidden undersea kingdom in a press conference in lower Manhattan!), it’s hard to locate a counter-current. But I think a few visual jokes by James Wan suggested that flowing water – as opposed to fracturing ice – represents rebirth and possibility. The two most striking early scenes of warm water flowing up feature the giggling baby Arhtur Jr. peeing up into his father’s open mouth (yuck). The baby, who will later be kidnapped by the big bad, represents a happy future of warm water flowing, which his father more or less embraces. A less-developed reprise of flowing water also appeared later when the cephalopod Topo, a minor character who I wanted to see much more of, spits water on Aquaman as they invade the desert kingdom to rescue half-brother Orm.

(Really I would like an entire movie about Topo.)

Orm and Eco-Humor

Once again Patrick Wilson reprises half-brother Orm, who shifts from being Arthur’s rival and main villain in the first movie to being a brotherly sidekick ripe for redemption in the sequel. Orm had a tough run in the first installment – his basic point, that surface dwellers had fouled the oceans with industry and pollution, seems unarguably right, but empathetic and half-human Arthur wants to unify the land and sea rather than, in Orm’s perhaps more elegant solution, sinking the land. In Part 2, Orm has been imprisoned by the Fish Kingdom’s desert commandos (not sure why they have desert commandos, but whatever). Arthur rescues him, and the banter between them is probably the liveliest part of the movie. To make sure we recognize the intertexual jokes, Arthur at one point calls his half-brother “Loki” and threatens to send him “back to Azkaban.” Visual quotations also show the minions of the big bad as half-Nazgul and half the undead from the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. Redeeming Orm entails bringing him into his brother’s jokes, and eventually feeding him an extra greasy cheeseburger.

Undersea Witch King of Angmar Means What?

Late in the movie, Orm has a vision of an ancient Atlantean splinter-kingdom whose energy is the source of all evil and pollution. The long-thought-dead-but-really-just-frozen King Kordax is to blame! This Underwater Sauron also churns out greenhouse gases and acidifies the ocean, so when Orm and Arthur come together to defeat him, it’s a victory for the planet too. I must say this part confused me. The movie is mostly clear, as Orm especially shows and the Black Manta plot mostly makes clear too, that the cause of global warming is modern industrial capitalism among surface dwellers – ie, it’s us, especially those of us in rich nations who spend lots of money on popcorn and Milk Duds at the movies. But since it’s not really possible to support a war of revenge against the surface by Orm as Ocean Master – the first movie toyed with this idea briefly – the plot offloads all badness onto Undersea Sauron and his shimmering green zombie-spider crew. He apparently split off from Atlantis in distant prehistory, and Black Manta’s rediscovery of his evil Trident kicks off this movie’s plot.

But what does Kordax and his ancient evil represent? Original undersea sin? The Hawaiian god of death and darkness Kaneloa, who opposes the creator god Kane? But if an evil under Antarctica lies at the root of Anthropocene warming, doesn’t that somewhat let industrial emissions off the hook? Or maybe that’s the point, since Hollywood doesn’t want to make us feel too bad?

Black Manta Who?

Some of the film’s bad guy action, and also some of its moral confusion, comes from the supervillain Black Manta, a modern pirate who uses Atlantean tech to make himself an almost-match for Aquaman. But since for most of this movie Black Manta is under the spell of the Undersea Witch King, his own backstory – Aquaman left his father to die in the first movie – gets overwritten by Atlantean prehistory. It’s too bad, because Yayha Abdul-Mateen II is a powerful actor, even when he’s controlled by the big bad. Maybe his final fall into a mysterious under-glacier crevasse does not mean the end of the Manta? (Though online gossip shows no current plans for Aquaman 3…)

Anyway – worth a couple hours if you like this sort of thing!

On Monday 12/11/23, the Civic Association of Short Beach took three direct steps toward addressing the water quality problems in our neighborhood.

The CASB ordered water-tight bin covers for each of the five garbage bins in the neighborhood.

They also ordered a separate bin for each of these five areas that will be dedicated for dog waste only. We will encourage people to make a habit of separating dog waste from the regular trash.

Third, the Association created a public sub-committee on Water Quality. It will include five Board members, Chris Collins, Peg Carpenter, Dave Engler, Brian Funaro, and Francesca Bickel. Three community members – Alison Beaulier, Steve Mentz, and Kurt Johnson – will also be part of the committee.

The committee plans to draft language for a public health campaign that will change our behavior in ways that will improve the water quality. We plan to meet before the end of the month.

If you’re interested in brainstorming, some ideas from another coastal community in Marin County, CA, can be found here (h/t to Gaile Ramey for the link) –

I read a lot of books in 2023, many of them in audio format on long drives down the coast to Queens or long walks through the Connecticut woods. So I thought – in time for holiday shopping! – that I’d select a top four. It’s hard to choose just a few but –

Here they are — books by Laura Watts, Eleanor Catton, John Vaillant, and Jeffrey Cohen & Julian Yates.

Laura Watts, Energy at the End of the World: An Orkney Island Saga (MIT Press, 2018)

I’ve been looking for some time for a way to write about the energy transition that spans multiple modes. I want something that can be informative (because we need to understand how things work), creative (because imagination is an essential resource), and theoretical (because we need to understand systems and histories, not just objects). It’s not easy to find examples of books that hit all these modes – but Energy at the End of the World does them all at a very high level. Based on field work among marine energy projects in Scotland’s remote Orkney Islands, this book’s portrait of the “edge” culture of these islands is technical, speculative, and resonant. The figure of “Electric Nemesis,” who mostly appears to be a sister to the creature animated by Victor Frankenstein but is also the spirit of the Orkneys, becomes a fascinating co-conspirator and inspiration. “The Electric Nemesis,” writes Watts, “can show you the moves” (378). “Write her as fan fiction” she continues, “Write her as argument. Bury her in your garden and see what happens” (379). My current plan is to hook her up to Shakespeare’s The Tempest for my seminar paper for the Shakespeare Association conference next spring.

Eleanor Catton, Birnam Wood (FSG, 2023)

I’m not sure that I knew “eco-thriller” was a commercial sub-genre before I read the publicity around this book, but the category fits. Birnam Wood isn’t quite as richly Macbeth-ish as the other Scottish-play-manipulating novel I read this year, Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, but it’s a lot of fun. The Elon-ish super-villain who sidles up to the eco-warrior heroine, the scorned boyfriend who becomes a pretty clumsy if ultimately destructive radical, a series of other figures who retain a capacity to surprise even in the violent conclusion – really, it was a much narrative fun as I had all year. The bleak vision seems appropriate to the tragic overplot, though Catton does not quite find an equivalent to the line of kings that stretches to the crack of doom. Perhaps even tragic history is hard to project forward in our tenuous environmental present?

John Vaillant, Fire Weather (Knopf, 2023)

There are parts of this narrative about a mega-fire in northern Canada in 2016 that read like a narrowly focused adventure story, following a series of characters through a horrific few hours and days. But Vaillant works hard to supplement his local reporting with a wider view of what Stephen Pyne has suggested we call the Pyrocene or Age of Fire. There were times when I wasn’t sure the transitions from adventure narrative to panhistorial and eco-theoretical analysis were perfectly coherent, and in some ways Jeff Goodell’s The Heat Will Kill You First read more smoothly, if equally horrifyingly. But I give Vaillant the nod here because I was impressed by his effort to bring together multiple perspectives, the close narration of a reporter with the wide-angle lens of eco-history. It probably didn’t hurt that smoke from Canadian wildfires made its way down to my home during the summer of 2023, reminding me again that nothing stays away for long.

Jeffrey J. Cohen and Julian Yates, Noah’s Arkive (University of Minnesota P, 2023)

“Love’s not time’s fool,” somebody sez, but I don’t think I had a stranger temporal experience with any book I read in 2023 than with Noah’s Arkive. This book sits right at the center of my academic and personal wheelhouse, teeming with floodwaters & boats & catastrophes & a long complex story of literary transmutations, and the authors are old friends, collaborators, and co-conspirators in ecomaterialist circles. Reading it brought me through multiple times in multiple ways. I’m not sure how many times or in how many places, including Zoomtopia, I had heard one author or the other give a talk from the work-in-progress before I read the final version. All of those times coexisted as I gobbled down the published volume in June. I’m fairly surely that I heard at least a few talks about this project from *before the pandemic*, if you can imagine such a time. Maybe even before Jeffrey Cohen was sentenced to hard Dean-ly labor in the desert, too! I wrote an individual blog-review of this one when I read it in the spring, so I won’t go into too much detail here, except perhaps to say that what lingers half a year later is the wayward spirit of intellectual community and conviviality, the sense of grappling together toward a stranger but perhaps not only more painful world. That’s what we want books to do for us, right?

There were lots of other great ones this year, all suitable for holiday stockings, including Jeff Goodell’s The Heat Will Kill You First, Cormac McCarthy’s final duology The Passenger and Stella Maris (I liked the second novel slightly more than the first, but probably bc I read the first one first), Matt Bell’s Appleseed, Benjamin Labatut’s The Maniac (which was maybe not quite as stunning as last year’s When We Cease to Understand the World, but still pretty great), Maghan O’Gieblyn’s God Human Animal Machine, and Tyson Yunkaporta’s Sand Talk. But these are my four for ’23!

“The data is crystal clear,” said Michael Pascucilla of East Shore Health Department. “I have rarely seen such a clear signal in the data,” concurred Brown graduate student biologist Sarah Esenther, who has been working on the water quality study.

The primary driver of the elevated bacteria counts that pollute our water is dog waste.

Thanks to the efforts of our own citizen scientist Ann Davis, the East Shore Health Department, Sarah Esenther, other local volunteers, and generous financial support from the Civic Association of Short Beach, we now know what causes the high levels bacterial pollution in our water.

The evidence and scientific data were presented to a standing-room only crowd at Orchard House last night (12/6/2023). Discussion ensued about how to respond.

To prevent bacteria from dog waste from contaminating our water, we as a community need to change our behavior. The Civic Association will take important collective measures, including putting “No Dog Waste” signs on all garbage cans near the water, replacing the open green garbage cans with water-tight containers, and providing signage, palm cards, and other elements of a public information campaign. Residents also expressed interest in storm drain art and in adding bio swales to help capture run-off. People who want to help organize these efforts should attend the next meeting of the Civic Association on Monday December 11 at 7 pm at the Short Beach Union Church.

Those of us who are dog owners can start responding to this problem today. We should stop putting our baggies of dog poop in the green garbage cans that sit directly above Johnson’s Beach and the other local beaches. We should instead put the baggies in our pockets, bring them back to our homes, and store them (outside!) until we can put them out in the big green trash containers that the town takes away each week. If everyone does that, the presence of pollution in our water will decrease.

We should inform our neighbors and encourage everyone to participate in this change of behavior to improve our quality of life.

I’m a dog owner – many of you will recognize our two ridiculous and beloved corgis, Indiana and Blue – and an every day swimmer in the Sound during the warm half of the year. About five years or so ago, I happened to look inside the green garbage can on the corner of Johnson’s Beach, which was full of dog poop bags and water. That’s when I decided to stop adding to the bacterial tea, and started bringing my dogs’ bags up to my house, from where they go out with the town garbage on Monday mornings. It’s not easy to change habits, and not that much fun to carry dog bags in your pocket – but it’s possible. We will need to remind each other, gently educate our neighbors and visitors, and pay attention as we make these changes.

It will be worth it to have cleaner water in our beloved Shoreline.

I started reading the novels of South African writer J.M. Coetzee back in 1986, on the suggestion of my then-prof Paul Auster. I started, I’m pretty sure, with Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), but I quickly devoured all the austere, slim, brilliant novels available. In 1988, I wrote a long undergraduate essay on the five novels from Dusklands (1984) and Foe (1986), in which I argued that Coetzee sought to craft a “middle space” between collaboration with an oppressive regime and active revolution. At the core of this ambitious if somewhat overwrought essay was the title figure of LIfe and Times of Michael K, for which Coetzee won the first of his two Booker prizes in 1983.

Even now, ten more novels and three fiction-ish autobiographies later, I think of Michael K as the core figure of Coetzee’s literary imagination. Arguments could be made for Elizabeth Costello, the Jesus figure in his recent trilogy, and two creepy exemplars of moral failure and complicity, the Magistrate in Waiting for the Barbarians and David Lurie in Disgrace – but I’m on team Michael K.

The postcolonial poet and critic Edouard Glissant celebrates the “right to opacity” for all humans, and I know few more strangely moving monuments to opacity than Michael K. That’s why I was intrigued to see his story staged with the title figure as a half-sized human-shaped puppet, designed by South Africa’s Handspring Puppet Company (famous for War Horse) and manipulated on stage by three puppeteers. Michael K is not the only mechanical figure in the story, which includes a variety of humans as well as puppet-renditions of his mother Anna K and (amazingly) a unlucky goat that Michael K encounters in the karoo in rural South African. But it’s Michael K, with his hare lip and awkward stare, who transfixes.

The novel opens with the hero’s birth, his hare lip, and his mother’s instinctive revulsion at “the mouth that would not close” (3). Video projection close-ups help the audience see this feature on the Handspring puppet. His deformity excludes Michael K from most communities, including a noisy and evocatively-staged failure to breastfeed as a newborn. The awkwardness of the puppet’s motions, and the need for multiple human handlers to operate the figure, perform the hero’s alienation more powerfully, I think, than any human actor could. Michael K is human, but he’s not. He needs connection, but also rejects it. The elaborate stagings of his basic bodily actions – eating, sleeping, walking, climbing a fence to escape a work camp – become a series of trials in physical over-coming, straining into being-in-the-world, just barely finding a way into an environment.

In the program notes, Coetzee describes himself as an “environmentalist” who has also won some literary prizes (two Bookers and a Nobel). The video projections of the area around Prince Albert in the karoo, where Michael K attempts to take his mother, and then later brings her ashes, show an arid and beautiful hardscape. To live in this place, amid the partly-sketched civil war and confining legal structures that are the story’s background, represents Michael K’s challenge and his partial achievement. “Perhaps it is enough,” he says to himself in a passage that the play did not quote, “to be out of the camps, out of all the camps at the same time” (182). Coetzee’s character is notoriously opaque in his racial classification, though at one place in the text he is identified as a CM – presumably “Coloured Male,” in the racial structures of the apartheid state. (The catalogers also get his name wrong, though, so maybe they don’t know everything.) The puppet’s soft brown skin matches this catch-all category, not White nor Black nor Indian. But it’s the movements of this Michael K that represent his refusal to enter into categories, into human orders, into the social world. As a not-entirely-human, Michael K endures to the side of history.

The final passage of the novel contains one of two phrases from Coetzee that float around in my imagination, surfacing at odd times. Unlike the devastatingly bleak final lines of Disgrace, which also circulate in my mind, the end of Life and Times of Michael K voices a minimalist utopian strain, something like what the narrator of In the Heart of the Country (1977) disparagingly calls “sweet closing plangencies” (139). But like the actors on stage last night, I tend to think that Coetzee mostly means it this time. He describes Michael K returning to the damaged well on his mother’s abandoned farm –

He would clear the rubble from the mouth of the shaft, he would bend the handle of the teaspoon in a loop and tie the string to it, he would lower it down the shaft deep into the earth, and when he brought it up there would be water in the bowl of the spoon; and in that way, he would say, one can live.

Life and Times of Michael K (184)

The caveats are all there – the absurdity of drinking-by-spoon, the abstraction of “one,” the repeated counterfactual “woulds” – but the novel ends with the word “live.” Looking at my three-decade-plus old pencil notes on this page, I see that undergrad-me I circled the word “live” – “last word!” my notes read. “At least not die.”

On stage at St. Ann’s, these rousing words were followed by lowering the puppet-body onto a red cloth folding it around him, and holding the motionless Michael K one last time. An amazing, moving, strange moment of theatrical magic.

Get to St Ann’s in Brooklyn before Dec 23 if you can!

Two great events between Long Island and Brooklyn yesterday afternoon. As Friday traffic grew, I drove out to the lovely Heckscher Museum in Huntington to see Courtney Leonard’s mid-career retrospective, Logbook 2004-2023. A few hours and a weissbier later, I saw Annie Dorsen’s Prometheus Firebringer at Theater for a New Audience in Fort Greene. The shared element in both artworks was constraint. Leonard retells the maritime history of the Shinnecock culture and environment mostly through the use of ceramics. Dorsen uses AI, rhymed couplets, and a lecture made entirely of quotations to reimagine Aeschylus’s lost play, in which Prometheus may or may not reconcile with Zeus. In sum – constraints intensify. Two brilliant shows!

Leonard’s Logbook exhibition, which features a restaging of the stunning Breach #2 installation of ceramic sperm whale teeth on a wooden pallet that I’ve previously seen at the Met a few years ago, traces Leonard’s evolution as an artist since her graduation from the Institute for American Indian Arts into her ongoing exploration of her native Shinnecock lands in central Long Island. The retrospective show opens with a call to arms about land alienation:

Can a culture sustain itself when it no longer has access to the environment that fashions that culture?

In addition to Breach #2, the most eye-catching piece in the exhibition is Contact 2, 2023, a map of the Shinnecock lands in what we now call Long Island, composed of ceramic thumbprints that outline the land and sea environment. As Heather Arnet, Director of the Heckscher, describes this work in the published catalog:

Leonard created this expansive map of Long Island by crafting thousands of ceramic thumbprints in the colors of the quahog shell. Each element captures a moment, a memory, a point of contact (4)

Courtney M. Leonard, Logbook 2004-2024

Not all the pieces in this show employ the restraint of ceramic; paintings and other forms of sculpture also appear. A lithograph, Blue Blood 2015, represents horseshoe crabs and their valuable blood, which continues elicit controversy around Long Island Sound today. Leonard links horseshoe crabs, whose blood is used for biomedical research, to the longstanding harvest of whales from Shinnecock waters.

I’ve been amazed by Courtney Leonard’s work since I stumbled across Breach #2 in the Met several years ago. I’m very pleased that Suzanne Conklin Akbari and I will be able to include two images of her Contact 2021, which maps the watershed of the Muhheakunnuk / Hudson river in New York, in the forthcoming Sailing without Ahab.

After a crowded trip down the LIE and a beer with an old friend in Fort Greene, I got to my seat at Prometheus Firebringer just before the show started. That meant I didn’t really have time to look at the online program or think through the complex intellectual architecture of the show. But I think piecing it together on the fly was the best way to experience it.

The pre-opening act was a screen flashing out multiple iterations of possible plots to the lost play Prometheus Firegiver, part of Aeschylus’s Prometheia trilogy about the rebellious Titan who gave fire / technology to humans and was punished by being chained to a rock and having the eagle of Zeus eat his liver daily. This play, third (maybe?) in the trilogy, may describe the reconciliation of the Sky God and the Titan, in the presence of a Chorus made up of human orphans. Or, as the AI-generated scenarios spills it all out, maybe they don’t really reconcile?

The second of three constrained performances in the show was a lecture performed informally by Annie Dorsen, which she admitted was made up entirely of quotations, the sources of which flashed on a screen behind her. After the show, a staff member of Tfana help up a QR code with a link to the lecture and its sources.

The third intertwined performance came from the computerized (or at least inhuman-sounding) voices of the empty masks on stage. One solitary mask speaks for Prometheus, the other half-dozen gathered together for the chorus of orphan children. (Zeus storms, but does not speak.) The oddly moving constraint here is the density of the rhyme, in which almost all statements by the speakers call up answers via a rhymed couplet from the other. Additional internal and half-rhymes aboud. The result sounds awkward, sometimes stilted, but also in places very emotional – even though these speakers are neither controlled by ChatGPT nor by being comprised of quotations. Rhyme is an ancient technology – older than Greek tragedy, to say nothing of generative AI. What can we make inside rhyme’s chains?

There’s just one more week to see Prometheus Firegiver, but Courtney Leonard’s show is up through Nov 12. I might try to drive out to Huntington again to see Leonard’s site-specific installation nearby at Planting Fields Arboretum in Oyster Bay.

I’m so pleased to have a cover to share for my forthcoming book of eco-poetry, Sailing without Ahab, which will appear this coming April from Fordham University Press. Like any parent, I love all my books equally, but this one represents something special, a particular passion project that has been swimming in my imagination for years. I’ll say a little about its history here.

The idea of a version of Moby-Dick that sails with no captain has been niggling my mind for almost a decade. I’ve been thinking about it more and more during my turn toward writing more poetry, which started in the mid-2010s but, like Sailing without Ahab itself, redoubled during the pandemic. For my last appearance at a BABEL conference in Toronto 2015, I put together a tiny chapbook, A Book of Absent Whales, that contains an early smattering of a half-dozen poems. The cover of that lovely little book, designed by then-St. John’s undergrad Idalea Cinquemani, provides the model for the design of the 2024 published book.

Over the next few years, I e-published two excerpts from the project in the Glasgow Review of Books, with the editorial support of the great Tom White. The first in April 2017 introduced the project with three poems, including “The Lee Shore” about shadow-hero Bulkington. The second in May 2018, add two more, including “Great White Evil God,” my meditation on the crucial chapter “The Whiteness of the Whale.”

In 2022, in the wonderful volume Ahab Unbound: Melville and the Materialist Turn, co-edited by Meredith Farmer and Jonathan F.S. Schroeder, I published a prose chapter, “Sailing without Ahab,” that will eventually be the postscript of my volume. That chapter reprinted “The Lee Shore” under its new title, “Bulkington’s Out.”

But the full, global, vastness of Sailing without Ahab, which comprises 138 individual poems, one for each chapter of Moby-Dick plus the Extracts, Etymologies, and Epilogue, will only surface in April 2024.

With thanks to Suzanne Conklin Akbari, another Melville-lover who provides a glittering foreword to the volume, to Courtney Leonard, images of whose stunning ceramic artworks appear in Akbari’s foreword, and to John Wyatt Greenlee of Surprised Eel Mapping, whose intertwining of the Pequod‘s global voyages with my local swimming waters in Short Beach captures exactly what this book attempts. I also appreciate the generous blurb from Craig Santos Perez, the insight and clarity of the reviewers of the manuscript, and the visionary support of Richard Morrison at Fordham University Press.

I’ve published lots of books and articles over the past two decades, but this one will be the most personal, the most poetic, and by far the weirdest thing I’ve published. I hope people enjoy it!