Sitting in the almost-full confines of the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn, watching John Douglas Thompson’s towering performance of Shylock, I felt the thrill of being back in the theatrical moment, feeling actors’ words and director’s vision radiating out across seated bodies. Like Alexis Soloski, who gushed in the New York Times that Thompson is “perhaps the greatest Shakespeare interpreter in contemporary American theater,” I’ve been a fan for years, from his Satchmo at the Waldorf in New Haven to a recent Broadway turn as Kent in King Lear. Maybe his Tamburlaine, which I also saw at Theatre for a New Audience back in 2014, was the high point for me, as I sat in the front row and got stage blood-splattered.

The innovation of director Arin Arbus’s 2022 Merchant casts the play’s Jews with Black actors. As Ishmael Reed notes in the Tfana 360 program, this casting isn’t simply playful or cynical, but rather explores meaningful “parallels between the experiences of Jews in Europe and Blacks in the United States.” Thompson’s Shylock rages and cries and insists on his own centrality in the manner of a tragic hero, and Arbus’s dark and incisive production continues the tradition of playing this supposed comedy through its tragic notes. (Recent productions in this mode include Karin Coonrod’s extraordinary experimental version, first played for the 500th anniversary of the Jewish Ghetto in Venice, which I saw at Yale Law School in 2018, and a shocking production by the all-male troupe Propellor that came to Brooklyn in 2009 and featured Shylock attacking Salarino before the “Hath not a Jew eyes” speech.) It’s hard for the other actors, or the Portia-Bassanio marriage subplot, to compete with the high drama of the fall of Shylock as father, moneylender, Jew, and center of our attention.

For me, the most searing moment in Thompson’s performance came shortly after his famous speech insisting on his humanity, his eyes, his “hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions” (3.1). Eagerly seeking news about his lost daughter from his fellow Jew Tubal, played by Maurice Jones (who also has a wonderful comic turn as the Prince of Morocco), Shylock learns Jessica had given a turquoise ring she stole from his house to a merchant “for a monkey” (3.1). Thompson’s delivery of the story of that ring — “I had it of Leah when I was a bachelor. I would not have given it for a wilderness of monkeys!” — opens up the vast human history behind Shylock’s pride and devotion. I especially loved his emphasis on the word “wilderness,” exposing the brutality of one of Shakespeare’s most insistently urban plays.

Beyond Thompson’s Shylock, the unexpected second star of the production was Danaya Esperanza as Jessica, the Jewish daughter who abandons her father’s house and religion, carrying off his ducats, his ring, and his (symbolic) jewels. Matched to a loutish if good-humored Lorenzo (David Lee Huynh) but more closely connected to the wonderfully goofy and mobile servant Lancelet Gobbo (Nate Miller), Jessica ends up painfully isolated, stuck as all the other married couples are stuck at the play’s end. Her line readings were excellent, but the role came through most strongly in some carefully crafted silences — embracing her father one last time before she elopes from his house (2.5), laughing cozily with Gobbo as they share a pipe in Belmont (3.5), standing pointedly far from Lorenzo during the long final scene (5.1). Her motivations for leaving her father are seldom clear, and Huynh’s Lorenzo seems more party boy than true lover. To make her way in Venice may require her to steal out of Shylock’s isolation, but despite her marriage and incorporation into the party in Belmont, she remains conspicuous, the lone Black body on stage for almost all of 5.1.

The cast of the love plot was lively if unable to match the high drama of Shylock and Jessica. In fact, Jessica’s decision to move from her father’s world to her husband’s might be thought of in generic terms, as an attempt to leave tragic isolation for comic solidarity. If so, the play reminds us that integration has been a culturally fraught process for Jews as for African-Americans. But one other figure who sits astride the two plots, Lancelet Gobbo, might make an interesting bridge. Played with verve and goofy humanity by Nate Miller, Gobbo as Clown moves, like Jessica, between Venice’s Jewish and Christian worlds. This production does not take up the text’s few hints that Gobbo might be Muslim – Shylock calls him one of “Hagar’s offspring” (2.5), and he later gets berated by Lorenzo for impregnating an offstage “Moor” (3.5), who may be Muslim as well as African. But the servant Gobbo clearly connects to Jessica more closely and intimately than does her upper class Christian husband. Gobbo carries letters between her and Lorenzo, and in a slightly strange interpolation he shares a vape with her after she has run away from home (3.5). Lorenzo, whose aggression spills out both in this scene and every more uncomfortably in an interrupted sexual clinch with Jessica in 5.1, recognizes Gobbo as a kind of rival for Jessica’s affections, or at least for her understanding.

Years ago, I wrote about Gobbo as a figure for the economic middle-man, who parodies and challenges the economic theories of exchange, hazard, and abundance that dominate the main plots. I remember writing the first draft of that essay in January 2001, right after my first child was born; my exploration of Gobbo’s critique of Antonio’s mercantile world, Portia’s fantasy of wealth, and Shylock’s financialization came into being amid a noisy and exhausting period of sleeplessness and colic. The essay, which eventually was published in Linda Woodbridge’s collection Money and the Age of Shakespeare in 2003, was one of my first publications on Shakespeare. I still think more could be said about Gobbo, and I was pleased to see Arbus’s production cultivate his peculiar position between and across the social, religious, and racial boundaries of Venice.

For modern productions that emphasize Shylock’s fall, the final scene (5.1) can feel pretty bleak. All three married couples are back in Portia’s opulent Belmont, but the husbands Bassanio and Gratiano have given away their wedding rings, Jessica and Lorenzo can’t stop talking about errant classical lovers, and in this production they pointedly don’t stand near each other for the whole long scene. Portia’s sleight of hand fixes the problems, as her courtroom hyper-literalism saved Antonio from Shylock’s knife, but it’s hard not to see in the solitary progress of the characters offstage a future that’s at least as constrained as the life Jessica had led in Venice.

Except Jessica doesn’t go off stage. She stays, alone, until – in a wonderfully overt intrusion onto Shakespeare’s script — John Douglas Thompson’s Shylock returns. He does not embrace his daughter, and in fact they appear not to see each other. The production does great work throughout with characters refusing to look each other in the face; Antonio avoids Shylock’s gaze and refuses his handshake when they first make their bargain (1.3), and all the Christians avert their eyes as the broken Jew agonizingly packs up his bag and exits the trial scene (4.1). In this final extra-textual moment, Jessica and her father may not see each other but instead they share a Hebrew prayer, the Kol Nidre, which opens Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. The final curtain comes not on Gratiano’s last dirty joke about his wife Nerissa’s ring, or even on the uncertain future of the marriages. Instead, Arbus draws our attention to the separation but perhaps also the lingering connections of father and daughter, he forcibly converted in Venice and she voluntarily in Belmont.

I love modern productions that take risks in order to make visible things that are only hints in Shakespeare’s copious language. In some ways I’m still puzzling this final choice, and thinking also about the difficulty that modern productions have in creating anything like comic closure in the play’s final scene. Does the imagined reunion of Shylock and Jessica serve to re-animate a different kind of comic redemption? Or does it more simply return to a grateful audience the central star who has otherwise been painfully absent during the last long scene?

Things to think about! Go see it in Fort Greene before it closes on March 6!

Thinking back on yesterday’s event in Zoomtopia, I can’t help but reach for all the oceanic superlatives. As the man says —

Delight, top-gallant delight is to him…whom all the waves of the billows of the seas of the boisterous mob can never shake from the sure Keel of Ages.

Ch 9: The Sermon

Melville’s never wrong, but I might say that the special delight of this online event wasn’t so much the fixity of the keel as the variety of the journeys. I’ll add a link to the recording when it’s available, and also to the great & thorough live-tweeting from James Smith via @coastalseminars. In this post I’ll just add a few tiny comments of my own on the presentations.

EDIT: Here’s the recording. Posted 21 Feb 2022.

The opener was a collaboration between artist Louis Netter and cultural theorist Tom Sykes. Their project, called “Coast of Teeth” (great title), explores English seaside towns that have seen better days. The theoretical parts involve conceptualizations of migration and touristic flows via the concept of “edgelands” (Iain Sinclair and Nicole Papadimitriou), among others. These ideas are juxtaposed alongside the gorgeous speed and energy of Netter’s “psychic portraits” and reportage-through-drawing. As a writer and theorist who’s always thrilled to collaborate with visual artists, as with Marina Zurkow in Oceanic New York and Vanessa Daws in Ocean, I was so impressed with the intensity and intimacy of the connections across modes. More like this, please!

The second project was Anna Iltnere’s Sea Library, a magical venue in coastal Latvia that many of us have come to know over the past few years via twitter and Anna’s blog. Anna told the story of the now-three year old Library as a kind of parable, a voyage of discovery into how the sea can change our lives. I’m always struck when reading her posts, or looking at the wonderful Sea Library bookmarks that Anna weaves by hand, by how closely the ideas and texts of the Sea Library engage with the fullness of human experience of the sea. It’s not just about words and ideas, though those are important, but also the physical qualities of the ocean and Anna’s palpable devotion to her family, her library, and their special corner of oceanic and coastal space. Muse is the word! [Here’s a link to her presentation in essay form via her blog.]

The last presentation was by Maggie Bowers, who presented the amazing Portsmouth Literary Map. Navigable on your phone as you walk the streets of Portsmouth today, the map layers rich literary and oceanic histories onto the streets and corners of this historical port town. I’ve never been to Portsmouth, and I didn’t realize how dense its literary history is. When I get there, I’ll be the one wandering around & staring at my phone, following the magic of this map!

I double-clutched in the chatbox trying to ask a question for the entire panel. (Q&A seems to be the hardest thing to manage in Zoomtopia, or maybe that’s just me.) What I wanted to get everyone to think about was how much walking figured in all of the projects. Louis and Tom visit their seaside towns on foot. Anna’s become a swimmer over the past few years, but much of her daily oceanic practice (like mine!) involves walking from her home to the water’s edge. Maggie’s interactive map facilitates a richly-informed, multi-modal way of walking through contemporary, historical, and imaginary Portsmouth.

So — what does walking have to do with it?

There’s lots to say about walking as the pace at which humans see our world, via Rebecca Solnit among others. I also love the story — maybe apocryphal? — that William Wordsworth composed his poems while walking at an even pace over level ground, while his friend Samuel Coleridge wrote while scrambling over fences, up hills, and into streams. Walking sets the pace and maybe also the rhythm of thinking, in many ways.

I also think, and Anna commented on this a bit in her answer to my awkwardly-posed question, that swimming provides a different rhythm that generates different kinds of thinking. But I’m still working on how the terrestrial animal’s gait helps us connect imaginatively to the marine environment. Is the coast the Muse, as this Zoom-seminar proposes? Or is it the water?

In either case – Sing in me, Muse, as the poet says.

Thanks to Melanie Basset and the @coastalseminars gang for organizing this wonderful session!

My favorite thing about Chris Schaberg’s writing, which I’ve been devouring since the early airport books through the more recent Searching for the Anthropocene and the brand-new Pedagogy of the Depressed, is his combination of clarity and unassuming knowledge. He writes like an ideal version of a teacher, and since his latest few books have been very much thinking about the classroom, that voice comes through even more strongly. But he also writes with the low-key erudition that sparkles at the hotel bar during an academic conference, and sometimes also with the philosophical flash of a speculative fisherman, casting his lure into opacity.

The new book’s title riffs on Paulo Freire’s now half-century old Pedagogy of the Oppressed , and Schaberg’s focus is to a large extent on his students, his classes, and the strange overlapping educational crises we are living through in the early 21c, from the surge of smartphone attention-sucking devices in our classrooms, to his growing ambivalence about online education (about which he and I co-wrote a short Inside Higher Ed piece in 2018), and of course the spring 2020 rush into Zoomtopia, which continues to shape higher ed as Omicron rushes over our shores. Schaberg’s deep sympathy for his overworked, distracted, and — well — sometimes self-described depressed students spills out of the pages. His description of his “ungrading” practices, his efforts to celebrate and focus academic conversations whether in a classroom, on a campus lawn, or amid the black boxes of Zoomtopia, his negotiation of the Blackboard to Canvas transition (which my Uni also made during the time of Covid-19), and other of his pedagogical ideas and methods will be very useful for many of the teachers who will read this book.

I’m especially interested in his chapters on “Public Humanities” and “Environmental Humanities,” his debates about whether these two things are or should be the same thing, and his speculations about what either or both have to to with what, in many academic departments including mine, still goes by the intimidating name of “Critical Theory.”

Chris speaks about public humanities as a practitioner, both because he writes accessible (and short!) books and publishes widely in public or para-academic venues from Slate.com to Public Books to Inside Higher Ed, but especially because as co-creator (with Ian Bogost and Bloomsbury Publishing) of the amazing Object Lessons series, he’s been as responsible as anyone for expanding connections among inventive writing, deep knowledge, and more-than-academic audiences. I think a lot about these things, and also about how my own watery corner of speculations and thoughts, the blue humanities, might contribute to the mix.

[Full disclosure: I’ve seldom had as much fun on any book project as when I wrote Ocean for the Object Lessons series. It came out in March 2020, so the publicity was a bit muted and all events were trapped in Zoomtopia – but I love the series & think it’s one of the best things going these days.]

Two chapters in the new book dig into “Environmental Humanities?” and “Public Humanities?”, each chapter title bearing interrogatory punctuation that suggests these terms remain up for definition. That seems right — but the key point that I take from Schaberg is that these terms intersect. All environmental writing, even dense academic research, “takes on an importantly public dimension” (50). While the idea of “the humanities” has been to some extent academicized, and while I don’t think Schaberg wants to criticize academic research (and I certainly don’t), I take his point that “the humanities [are] supposed to be, I don’t know, about ordinary humans” (51). Putting on my academic hat, I suppose I might say that there’s nothing ordinary about being human, either today or historically, and of course the post-human in the post-humanities has been pressing against and restructuring what the human means for quite a long time. But the point that “environmental humanities is environmental disaster humanities, and as such it is public humanities” (53) seems exactly right to me. We need, as Chris’s examples from his classroom shows, to meet our students where they are, as much as we can.

The other key point that I love in Pedagogy of the Depressed is the focus on design as a key term for the public environmental humanities. The hero of this chapter, and one of my favorite stars in the contemporary public humanities landscape, is Alice Marwick, the brilliant book designer who has created the stunning look and feel of around 70 Object Lessons books so far. With typical verve, Chris connects Alice’s designs to Disney+’s The Mandalorian, and also to his collaborations with assorted public and para-academic publications. I’m always impressed with how closely he involves his students with these projects, and the way that he shows them what’s possible in the wide world of the 21c humanities.

So — read Pedagogy of the Depressed! It takes our challenges seriously, but I don’t think it’ll make you feel sad.

There’s lots to like in Joel Coen’s intense and gorgeously abstract film of “The Tragedy of Macbeth,” including charisma and clarity from the two leads, Denzel Washington as the weary and isolated tragic hero and Frances McDormand as his fiery Lady. I always focus on the marriage when I see this play, and while this version of the doomed couple wasn’t the most emotionally vibrant that I’ve seen — that goes to a blazing Cheek by Jowl staging I saw in Brooklyn in 2011 — they played the heart’s core with sympathy and affection. I might have more to say about them later!

But the highlight of the film, without question, was Kathryn Hunter who played a composite of all three Weird Sisters in an eerie, resonant performance that’s still buzzing in my imagination. She even, in a wonderful surprise, tossed in the role of the semi-prophetic Old Man who reports on Duncan’s cannibal horses in 2.4. (The Sisters, we may recall, as only ambiguously female, as Banquo emphasizes: “You should be women / And yet your beards forbid me to interpret / That you are so” (1.3.45-47). The lush tangle of beard that Hunter boasts when she returns as the Old Man makes a witty call-back to this famous line!

I’ve seen Hunter bring her brand of acrobatics and deep vocal resonance to Shakespeare twice before, both times at the Theater for a New Audience’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn. She opened the then-new theater in 2013 by descending from the ceiling on a rope as Puck in Julie Taymor’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, later filmed. More recently, she played a deeply sympathetic Timon of Athens, in one of the last plays I saw pre-Covid. She’s an amazing and unsettling performer.

The Weird Sisters seem an even better vehicle for her talents than Puck or Timon. When she needed to occupy the tragic center of an entire play, the humanity of her Timon somewhat muted the figure’s tragic rage. As Puck, she was a great accompaniment to Taymor’s stagings, but also a bit overshadowed. The Sisters appear in three scenes (1.1, 1.3, 4.1 – Coen cuts the Hecate scene 3.5), to which Hunter adds the Old Man’s brief musings in 2.4. She steals every scene she’s in, and stays mysterious enough that the secret doesn’t get stale.

In the incantations of 1.1 she’s invisible, leaving the viewers to puzzle through the single voice that encompasses “we three” (1.1.1).

In 1.3 she startles at first by showing off the human “pilot’s thumb” (1.3.28) by holding it up between her toes. Her contortions, presented on an expanse of haze and sand, before she meets Macbeth and Banquo remain my favorite moments in the film. Shakespeare’s lines get juggled around a bit, and some lovely bits about my favorite thing, shipwreck, get cut (alas for “Though his bark cannot be lost / Yet it shall be tempest-tossed” 1.3.24-25) – but the intimate camera work and Hunter’s uncanny ability to turn and change make this a wonderfully thrilling few minutes of film. It’s very short — roughly 5:40 – 7:47 in the film — and gets more interesting every time I look back at it.

The interpretation-forbidding beard of the Old Man makes a wonderful joke, and I love that out-take feeling of the presentation of 2.4 (45:40-47:50). Hunter’s Old Man extends the premonition-making of her Sisters, and the wry smile when describing equine cannibalism suggests a pleasure on the far side of order and humanity. “Tis unnatural,” the Old Man intones, “even like the deed that’s done” (2.4.10-11).

The Weird Sisters represent Shakespeare’s complex meditation on fate or other unintelligible supernatural ordering principles. They lead the Macbeths into temptation, but also promise Banquo royal futurity and in their final scene (4.1) present a line of kings leading presumably to Shakespeare’s own monarch James I, who traced his lineage to Banquo’s family. In Shakespeare’s play, Macbeth returns to them at the wild heath, where he seeks, “By the worst means, the worst” (3.4.134). In Coen’s film, Hunter appears in triplicate inside Macbeth’s castle (107:50 – 1:12:00), and the cauldron into which fall finger and liver appears within the King’s home, a kind of supernatural bath or pool. Hunter whispers the deceiving prophecies and Washington’s Macbeth semi-whispers back to her, so their low voices perform an intimate connection. “Seek to know no more” (4.1.102), Hunter’s closes her truncated and final appearance as the Sisters. As usual, the Sister present truncated knowledge.

Hunter does, however, have one last extra-Shakespearean scene as the Old Man. In an oblique echo of the final scene of Polanski’s 1971 film, Coen gives us a glimpse of the conspiracies to come in Scotland. In Coen’s version, Ross — who as played with sinister intensity with Alex Hassell is another treat in the film — presses a coin into the hand of Hunter’s Old Man, who then delivers Fleance, Banquo’s son. Ross pulls him roughly up onto his horse, and they ride into a valley — out of which a dense murder of crows screeches into view, providing a violent play on film’s traditional “fade to black” moment of closure and probably also a color-inverted reference to Hitchcock’s 1963 horror classic “The Birds.” Crows have represented the visual landscape of the Sisters since the opening of the play, and even Banquo’s ghost in the banquet scene appears to exit the castle as a screeching bird.

I may try to get to a theater to see it on a big screen, though I might give Omicron a little more time!

When was the last time I attended a ten-day academic event without wearing any shoes (except for last Friday when I snuck off into the snowy woods and missed a talk)?

Masterfully organized and hosted by Francesca Mackenney and Jeremy Davies at Leeds University in the UK, this ten-day event brought together twenty speakers, arranged in pairs at the same time during each weekday — it was 11 am – 12:30 for me in CT, but most of the British and Irish speakers and audience were talking about tea time — and speaking informally across disciplines. The range of ideas was dazzling and sometimes overwhelming — my head is buzzing with ideas about the movements of plants, ideas about agriculture, canals, walking, property laws, landscape, enclosure, labor, revolution, religion, Romanticism, many other things — even that old bugbear the Anthropocene (about which topic Jeremy Davies has written probably my favorite book) snuck its gnarled toes into the conversation.

My two favorite things about the event were the informality and the cross-currents. Just reading the list of disciplines in which speakers work comprises a wonderful play of differences — most of us are variations on English and History, but we also had landscape geography, historical geography, and rural geography. (I’m about to attend my first-ever AAG, the big geographer’s conference, next month in New York — and I’m feeling excited about geography as a discipline from which I have much to learn these days.)

To keep us informal, we were each tasked with just one page about a current research problem we are working on (here is a link the the 20 individual pages). I’m not sure I can do justice to the eight conversations that I heard, though the last one, this morning, about the relationship between walking and history, seemed to bring out everyone’s enthusiasm in the chat and q&a. Perhaps it was that many of the other people on the Zoominar — the format doesn’t allow us to see each other, unlike some Zooms, but we did introduce ourselves in the chat — were feeling anticipatory nostalgia for the vanishing of these daily sessions? Like many academics, I deeply miss the human and even playful side of academic conferences — alas for the days that Lowell Duckert and I plunged into the freezing waters of Lake Michigan near Kalamazoo! — but if we must be in Zootopia, this particular slice of it was especially congenial.

A few thoughts about what worked Zoomishly — meeting for ninety minutes a day across a ten-day span meant that it was possible to juggle life and work, though perhaps that was also easier for me since it’s still my winter break. The time was workable for UK, Europe, and both coasts of North America, though not, alas, for Australia. Not recording the sessions was clearly a deliberate effort to preserve spontaneity, and I think it worked. (I have some dreamy fantasies about a massive bibliography that like riches may be about to drop upon the head of my email inbox, but perhaps that’s too much to ask. Update: Here’s the Zotero link. With thanks to Cathryn Pearce for directing me to it, and to Jo Taylor for creating it!) Jeremy’s sense of fun and tireless engagement kept the hours moving – I can only imagine how exhausted he must be now, but his and Francesca’s good cheer and mastery of assorted e-systems worked seamlessly.

I’ll talk just a bit about my exchange last Monday 10 Jan with Miles Ogborn, a geographer from Queen Mary University of London. I was thinking about how ships at sea shape collective identities across the global early modern ocean, and Miles was pursuing the influence of landscape on a particular uprising in plantation-era Jamaica, the Baptist War of 1831-32. In some ways our materials were pretty disparate. I talked about ships, logbooks, rosters, a few maritime maps, my usual set of poems and navigational manuals. (Of course I played the old hits — “experience is better than knowledge” &c). Miles showed a lovely pair of paintings of a plantation landscape, one with and one without revolutionary violence. Trying to bring our perspectives together, we talked about the nonhuman forces that shape and influence human collectives. These factors include landscapes and seascapes, histories and the movement of peoples — but also things like literary genres and the conventions of 18c painting. Talking with Miles not only made me want to go back to Jamaica, which was my last international destination before Covid, but it also made me want to work more closely with geographical ideas and frameworks. Fortunately I am going to AAG next month!

These sessions also pushed me far past my usual chronological comfort zones, barelling through the eighteenth into the nineteenth century and thinking directly about things that appear in early modern studies only via the fudge-prefix “proto” — industrialization, Romanticism, global British imperialism, &c. That said, so many of the concepts and ideas, including terms such as “waste,” “enclosure,” the kinds of knowledges that enable the management of lands and peoples (including accounting and agricultural “science”), seemed quite familiar for a 16-17c person such as myself. Perhaps Zoomtopia makes feasible dropping in to an event like this from an adjacent sub-field — which is a reason, perhaps, to keep some aspects of this e-world going even when (if?) the pandemic releases its anxiety-making grip. (As Jeremy noted each day, it’s not just Covid that encourages us to keep our conferences en-screened, but also and unrelentingly carbon emissions and climate change.)

In sum — a midwinter treat! I did need to sneak out of the last session today to respond to the increasingly urgent calls of my pandemic puppy, and I hope I didn’t miss too much. I also hope I’ll cross paths again with some of these lively and brilliant people! In a back-channel email exchange, I expressed the hope that Jeremy’s wizardry would extend to conjuring us all into a cozy and Covid-free pub for a post-conference chat. But since that, alas, wasn’t to be – I hope that comparable opportunities may open up at some point soon. Anyone else going to AAG in New York?

Another strange, dislocated year, with not much organized Bookfish-ing.

Just 17 posts over the year, mostly in a few bursts: three in Jan, mostly about #bluehumanities; four in May, building up to the great Sea Sense web-conference “at” UC Irvine; six in a burst in June including a Creative-Critical event “at” Nottingham Trent U. for which I ran a Zoom workshop and my lone theater review, of Madeline Sayet’s “Where We Belong,” which I watched on Zoom but also heard her do a live interview on the New Haven Green; one in August when Grand Little Things published three of my Covid sonnets; one in November for #shax2022; and my year-end wrap on 12/31/21.

A did have a nice new development in publishing poems — three from Blood & Bourbon in June, three in Grand Little Things, and this blog-sonnet for World Ocean’s Day.

What will I Bookfish about in ’22? I have big plans, which may encounter reality in various ways. A trip to Auburn in March to visit a grad seminar and give a talk about “Geography, Genre, and Elizabethan Fiction”! SAA in Jacksonville in April! A trip to Bern in May to give a workshop and a public lecture! All of it building up the three months (Oct-Dec) at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich at the year’s end.

I hope those will all go, but this past year I ended up skipping out on the amazing Swimming a Long Way Together launch in Dublin, and also Anthropocene Campus Venice in November. So we’ll see what the third year of Covid brings…

For the past two years I’ve been keeping count with the Reading List app. Mostly these are books I read for “pleasure,” though many of these books are or may be important for future research and writing. (What is pleasure for a professor?) My techno-innovation of these pandemic years has been listening to audio books while tromping through New England woods; I’d guess that I “read” roughly half of these books via earbuds rather than pages.

Here are my five favs from 2021 (alphabetically by author)

David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything : A New History of Humanity (Nov 2021)

I gulped down this massive book over many long walks through the unseasonably (climate-changed) warm fall weather. It’s desire to unfold and re-imagine the political possibilities of human culture inspires — even if, as K. Anthony Appiah’s excellent review in the NYRB shows, the price of their utopian range may be fudging some facts. They lean heavily on what they call the “Indigenous Critique,” which in their reading comes back to Europe from Native American cultures between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries. In this case, especially, I felt they underestimated the overlap between Old World philosophical visions of the Golden Age and the news coming back from the Americas – the two are deeply entwined and probably not fully extricable, as I see it. But even if Graeber and Wengrow exaggerate, their vision opens up historical possibilities in inspiring ways. It’s a basic historical truth that we can be something other than what we are now, and this book helps cultivate that perspective.

Philip Hoare, Albert and the Whale: Albrecht Durer and How Art Imagines Our World (May 2021)

Philip Hoare’s twitter feed (@philipwhale) makes the best poetic case I know for the virtues of daily immersion in salt water, but his most recent book isn’t a swim memoir. Instead, it’s a gorgeous, speculative, multi-temporal engagement with the life and art of Albrecht Durer. The cetacean of the book’s title is a beached sperm whale whose body Durer failed to see in early modern Holland. The project of the book – to learn what art enables us to see, and to see the past and present through that art — is stunning. I won’t pick favorites among these five titles, but I’m pretty sure Hoare’s is the one I’ll re-read first.

Riva Lehrer, Golem Girl: A Memoir (Oct 2020)

I found this one via my daughter Olivia’s first-year writing class at Haverford. It’s a riveting and often painful autobiography of a disabled artist. I listened to the audio, read by the author, and but after looking through the hard copy Olivia brought home over break, I think the illustrations, mostly of Lehrer’s paintings and pictures of her family, are just amazing.

Stephen Pyne, The Pyrocene: How We Created an Age of Fire, and What Happens Next (Sept 2021)

I’ve read a few of Pyne’s earlier books and articles, but I was super-pleased to find this short & compelling summa-style book in 2021. In under 200 pages, he traces the long relationship between hominids and fire, which has been central to human evolution as it is crucial to today’s global climate change. It’s another book I’ll go back to!

Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain: A Celebration of the Cairngorm Mountains of Scotland (orig. 1977)

I found this one via Margret Grebowicz’s Mountains and Desire, which I also loved. For the beauty of its prose and open-heartedness of its vision of humans in nature, it’s hard to match Nan Shepherd’s early 20th century memoir. The audio book contains ancillary material from both Robert McFarlane and Jeanette Winterson. A great book to hike with!

Here’s my month-by-month breakdown with numbers and mode:

Jan: 7 books, including Obama’s A Promised Land (audio) and Jeminsin’s Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (print)

Feb: 4 books, including Kolbert’s Under a White Sky and Douthat’s The Decadent Society (both audio)

March: 5 books, including Gooley’s How to Read Water and Scott’s Seeing Like a State (both audio)

April: 5 books, including Thompson’s Blackface (print) and Nestor’s Breath (audio)

May: 5 books, including Hoare’s Albert and the Whale (print) and D’Arcy Wood’s Tambora (audio)

June: 6 books, including Eisendrath’s Gallery of Clouds (print) and Beard’s SPQR (audio)

July: 7 books, including Grebowicz’s Mountains and Desire and Suzman’s Work: A Deep History (both audio)

August: 6 books, including Pyne’s Pyrocene (print) and Shepherd’s The Living Mountain (audio)

September: 11 books, including Rovelli’s The Order of Time (audio) and Nersessian’s Keat’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse (print)

October: 9 books, including Ghosh’s Nutmeg’s Curse (print) and Odell’s How to Do Nothing (audio)

November: 8 books, including Graeber and Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything and Boon’s What the Oceans Remember (both audio)

December: 10 books, including Gabrielle and Perry’s The Bright Ages and Lehrer’s Golem Girl (both audio)

That’s 88 total, or an average of a bit over 7 per month. Most per month was 11 in September, least four in Feb.

Here’s a rough outline of plans for the seminar at #shax2020 in Jacksonville, FL, this coming April 2020.

October: All of the members of the seminar have introduced themselves & their projects to the seminar by email.

1 November: I circulated to the seminar some shared work by our two invited non-Shakespearean guests. From Molly Warsh, Associate Professor of History at Pitt, I circulated the intro and first chapter (on pearl harvesting) from her brilliant book, American Baroque: Pearls and the Nature of Empire, 1492-1700 (UNC Press, 2018). From Sid Dobrin, I circulated his chapter on global fishing, “Protein Economies,” from Blue Ecocriticism and the Oceanic Imperative (Routledge 2021), plus his Jacksonville-centric chapter, “An American Beach,” from the book  Florida. Ed. Jeff Rice. Parlor Press. 2015. 212-229.

late November: Molly, Sid, and I will record a Zoom-conversation about these works and how they might be helpful in shaping our shared conversation at the conference. I’ll record that Zoom, and circulate the recording.

1 December: All seminar paper-writers should submit provisional titles and short (250 word) abstracts to me. These can of course be revised in the New Year, but once they are finalized I will compile them and circulate copies at our seminar for auditors.

14 February: Final Deadline for completed papers (~2500 words). This is a firm SAA deadline so that each of you can be listed in the final SAA program.

1 March: I will divide the eight papers into two groups of four. Each group will have a designated respondent from our two invited respondents, Caro Pirri and Dan Brayton. We will circulate written responses to each paper within each group, as well as designating time during our seminar in April.

1 April: Deadline for written responses (ie, before anyone gets on a plane to FL!). We’ll also try to generate some shared questions for the full seminar by this point.

6-9 April: Our seminar will meet for two hours at a time and place tbd!

Further information about a trip to a clam shack, a 16th-century French fort, and/or a beach will be forthcoming closer to the date.

Here’s the link to these three Corona Sonnets, published on August 7, 2021.

And here are the poems themselves. Thanks to the Sonnet Corona Project for support and inspiration!

April 2020

Not our call, boy. Pronounce your own sentence,
And let its cold raw taste linger, bitter –
A stench of unform’d words and off syntax,
Sour milk fingers just now refresh Twitter.
And what about their words, that last longest?
Dead again today, pinned between covers,
Hot, in quarantine that lasts through August,
Verses of voyages, expiring brothers.
The Friar’s letter never was delivered.
The searchers of the town locked him in.
Slant-rhymes fish-like were silvered,
And burn hot in my throat like old man’s gin.
It is a mad thing to read on a book.
Outside’s a place not to touch but to look.

May 2020 

Is here again and I cannot hold them both --
Or “is” or storm: two choices only. All night 
The surge splatters my house. Third month
Of quarantine splashes disorder tight.
To shore curls a wave, delicate, reveal-
ing wind’s ruffle over ocean’s taut skin.
It traps dry feet on narrow shore, conceal-
ing routes beyond the seas they underpin.
Soliton waves don’t last forever,
Though they outpace horse and rider, pinch high
Through the narrows, vanish behind heather,
A twist in time’s river, bubbling, terrify --
Waves never break without shoreward going.
In my neighbor’s yard an ark is growing.

May 2020

I don't really know, but at least they're home.
That’s what I mouth to hollow pre-dawn air,
In vacant hours of teenage sleep syndrome.
My black coffee, meditation, despair
Hold me still in don’t-wake-them quiet -- nowhere
Or watching a poet’s pot that never boils
Because the burner’s in need of repair
Or the back garden’s full of gargoyles
That lure me to combat – I bring my oils –
With thump and thwack and splash and grab and screech 
Until the monsters’ heads hide ‘neath subsoils.
Conquering Dad-hero my task I preach: 
Hunker down or hightail to the highlands:
I cleave these two from so many thousands --

Steve Mentz is a writer who lives on the Connecticut Shoreline and teaches in Queens. His poems have appeared in the Glasgow Review of Books, Underwater New York, Blood and Bourbon, and in the book Oceanic New York. His most recent book is Ocean, part of Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series.

Every so often a book leaps to your attention like the strike of a fish on the end of your line: a sudden jerk, the hook sets itself, and you’re on for the duration. I’m not sure how the metaphor really works — am I the fish or the fisherman? — but in reading this book, I kept being reminded of the feeling every fisher know, that sudden tug from beneath the water. Yep, I’m hooked.

I first saw a pre-pub notice for the book sometime during the timelessness of 2020. I’m pretty sure I ordered it months in advance. Blue Ecocriticism and the Oceanic Imperative dives into the “ocean deficit” it diagnoses in twenty-first century ecocriticism and cultural studies. Along the way it explores the symbolism of the color blue, the ocean as hyperobject (in Tim Morton’s sense), protein economies, Object-Oriented Ontologies and the new materialism, Ocean as Object, writing studies and ecocomposition, and much more. What Dobrin calls the project of “unearthing ecocriticism” turns out to be a great ride.

Much of the material, for a blue humanities obsessive like me, is somewhat familiar, but the emphasis is sharp and, if I may repurpose one of Dobrin’s phrases about the ocean, compellingly adjacent to my watery work. Dobrin writes wonderfully about contemporary water cultures, including sport fishing in his companion volume Fishing, Gone? His writing on Google Earth (Google Ocean?), about OOO and the theoretical modes that engage with eco-ideas, and about the origins of the idea of a “world ocean” are all insightful.

Dobrin engages with many of my favorite blue humanities thinkers, especially Stacy Alaimo, Melody Jue, and Dan Brayton. He quotes me too, mostly my long-ago thoughts in At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean and “Toward a Blue Cultural Studies,” both of which appeared in 2009. He nudges me a bit on the question of how narrowly to focus on Shakespeare and on literature as such. I very much agree with the wider goals he sets for blue thinking — “Blue ecocriticism requires a more voluminous, heterogeneous trajectory beyond the sea of ink” (25). Exactly!

I’ve been noodling just a bit about whether there is a meaningful distinction to be drawn between the “blue humanities,” which is mostly the term I use these days, and what Dobrin calls “blue ecocriticism.” I’m not sure the differences are that great. Maybe there’s a way that “humanities” carries some all-too-human baggage, which might ask us to follow ecological ideas into post-human directions, or into alliances with nonhuman creatures and environments? I also think one of the values of the “humanities” broadly speaking is its reflexive habit of questioning what “the human” really is. I very much align with and recognize myself in “blue ecocriticism” in Dobrin’s description, perhaps especially because we draw on slightly different archives and methods.

One of the joys of this book, for me, has been finding a blue fellow traveler who also combines oceanic recreations with academic writing. Dobrin’s professional work comes out of the world of composition studies, which I admire and have learned much from but is not my academic home. I wonder, though — maybe time and tide will enable an eco-Shakespearean and an eco-compositionist to grab a beer later this summer, perhaps on a humid August afternoon in Florida when I’m visiting my parents? An afternoon casting for the elusive tarpon or body surfing might be even more fun, but all of us, even blue thinkers, remained bound by circumstances and time. Stay tuned!