What a strange year!

No in-person academic events, no live theater or face to face teaching since March, no seeing family or friends or anyone who doesn’t live in cozy Short Beach, not to mention overall shut-in-ness, Zoom overload, and Covid-malaise. Among many other things, it’s been a slow blogging year. The Bookfish swam slowly, even intermittently, but finally ended up with 28 posts. Top marks go to February, when the theaters were still open and I posted 7 times, including play-reviews of Timon of Athens, The African Company Presents Richard III, Girl from the North Country, Hamlet, and Tumacho — those were the days! Months without any posts at all include June, August, and September. October has just one.

Theater in (parts of) 2020

Timon at Theatre for a New Audience (Feb)

The African Company Presents Richard III at Queens Theater (Feb)

Girl from the North Country on Broadway (Feb)

Hamlet at St. Ann’s (Feb)

Tumacho at Clubbed Thumb (Feb)

Richard II Radio Play via the Public Theater (Oct)

In place of my usual play and academic conference reviews, I smuggled in a half-dozen of book reviews, including Covid-themed classics Love in a Time of Cholera and The Plague, David Gange’s great kayaking history The Frayed Atlantic Edge, Alice Oswald’s Nobody, her gorgeous response to Homer’s Odyssey, Craig Santos Perez’s latest book of poems, Habitat Threshold, and most recently Peter Coviello’s gorgeous and enthusiastic Vineland Reread.

Books of 2020

Love in a Time of Cholera (March)

Habitat Threshold (April)

The Frayed Atlantic Edge (May)

Nobody (July)

The Plague (July)

Vineland Reread (December)

I wrote a half-dozen posts around the Shakespeare Association seminar that I co-lead (on Zoom) with Nic Helms in April. Several of these posts were in dialogue with, or substantially written by, Nic and our cluster-leaders, Lyn Tribble, Doug Clark, and Lowell Duckert.

Watery Thinking Posts

Watery Thinking 1: What does water want? (Feb)

Watery Thinking 2: Submersive tendencies (Feb) with Lyn Tribble

Watery Thinking 3: Fluid cognition (March) with Doug Clark

e-Watery Thinking 4: Forms of water (April) with Lowell Duckert

e-Watery Thinking: Outline and Schedule (April) with Nic Helms

e-#Shax2020: Watery Thoughts from a Distance (April)

There were a few other stray posts during the year, on #mla2020 in Seattle, Marina Zurkow’s gallery show “Wet Logic” in Manhattan, a Zoomposium hosted by the Urban Soils Institue, a roundtable celebrating with work of John Gillis, and even a response to a pair of music videos (only in 2020 would I be writing about music videos!) by Robbie Robertson and Bob Dylan.

#mla2020 (Jan)

Wet Logic at bitforms gallery (Feb)

Two Songs (March)

Urban Soils (November)

The Sea by Borges (November)

Gillis Roundtable (December)

Plus a few wrap-up posts in the waning days of a bad year!

Reads of 2020

Writing in 2020

Rolling into the end of this disorienting & disruptive year, I find that I’ve published quite a bit — a slim single-author book, a big fat edited collection, two academic articles, nine web-articles, and a pair of podcasts! Strange not to have circulated with some or all of these at academic or para-academic events, though I did do a bunch of Zoom-publicity book chats. Hoping to see more people in 2021!

A little book about a big Object

Ocean, which came out in March from Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series, was my publishing highlight of 2020. I love writing without footnotes; I love the beautiful little books in this series with their genius covers by Alice Marwick; I love the original illustrations for my book by swim-artist Vanessa Daws. And I love that the back cover features Lynne Cox — the best-cold water ocean swimmer in the history of the world — calling it a “wondrous read”!

A big book with lots of co-authors and editors

Another arrival during pandemic spring was this doorstop-sized collection of twenty-five essays on the early modern sea. The product of years of collaboration with my two amazing co-editors, Claire Jowitt and Craig Lambert, this book’s chapters range from ship design to regionalism in the Ottoman Med, from sea music to ships’ instruments. My own contribution places historical and literary shipwrecks in global perspective. Our overall aim, part of a larger movement in ocean studies, was to rewrite old-fashioned Euro-centric and “great man”-ish schools of maritime historiography. I learned so much working with the contributors and co-editors — if only we could all meet dockside somewhere for a beer!

Two academic journal articles

My essay, “Is Compassion an Oceanic Feeling?” was published in the Australian journal Emotions: History, Culture, Society (4:1 2020: 109-27). Ranging from Freud to Jane Austen to Cervantes, from contemporary poetry to blue humanities theory, it emerged from a generous invitation to speak at a conference on Compassion at the University of New England is Amindale, New South Wales, in October 2019. Back when people went places!

A co-authored essay, “Learning an Inclusive Blue Humanities: Oceania and Academia through the Lens of Cinema,” which I wrote with medievalist James Smith, was great fun to put together. Venturing out of our depths, we started this project by speculating about the symbolic role of the sea in the big-budget American films “Aquaman” and “Moana,” and ending up trying to educate ourselves about Oceania, non-Western conceptions of the ocean, and the ethics of academic writing. At times this essay felt like dipping an alien toe into unknown waters — I’m not an expert on either film or Pacific studies — but I learned so much from writing it. It’ll help me be a better critic and teacher moving forward.

Two podcast interviews

In late May, looking a bit fuzzy behind what would prove to be a dying laptop camera in this season of Zoom, I enjoyed speaking with Nicholas Allen of the University of Georgia’s Wilson Center in one of their “Coastal Conversations.” It was great to e-meet Valerie Babb of Emory University and Ryan Emmanuel of North Carolina State U, and also to re-connect with Alexandra Campbell, who I’d met at an Oceans even in Bristol in 2018, and Nicholas himself, who I lured out for a riverside breakfast at the great Kitchen Little in Mystic, also in 2018. This conversation was one of many great events the Wilson Center Zoomed out to the world during Covid-time. I can’t wait to see what they cook up when the world allows other things again!

In dialogue with co-editor Craig Lambert, I podcast-chatted with Chase Smith on his Global History Podcast in early August. We were sorry Claire Jowitt couldn’t join us, but we had a great conversation about the forms and developments of maritime history, the project of our big book, and our hopes for new ways of conceiving and exploring the watery part of the world.

Nine Shorter Pieces, mostly on the web

I’ll run through these quickly, more or less in reverse chronological order. With a few exceptions, most of these were Ocean-related, since I’d hoped to put together something like a mini-book tour when that book appeared in March. That didn’t happen, but we did do a few fun Zoom events “at” Skylight Books in LA, the Harvard Bookstore, Greenlight Books in Brooklyn, and my local fav R. J. Julia in Madison, CT. It was great fun to get to know some of my fellow spring 2020 objects, including Dinah Lenney (COFFEE), Steve Jones (CELL TOWER), Erik Anderson (BIRD), Rolf Halden (ENVIRONMENT), and Ken Rosen (BULLETPROOF VEST)!

“Swimming in the Anthropocene” came out in December from Public Books. Written in response to swim-books by Bonnie Tsui (Why We Swim) and Eric Chaline (Strokes of Genius), the essay also captures a summer of everyday swimming in Long Island Sound and my hopes for this “embodied meditation” in our unsettled Anthropocene time.

My swim-autobio appeared on the Australian web-journal Swim People in November. It was great fun to splash down memory lane for this one!

The first chapter of OCEAN appeared on the Rachel Carson Center’s Environment and Society Portal.

An interview I did with Nathan Strohmeyer for the Los Angeles Review of Books, entitled “Our Blue Future,” talked about OCEAN and much more.

In July, when Covid mortality in the USA had just topped 100,000, I published a piece in Stanford’s Arcade that made the case for Thomas Nashe’s great “Elegy in Time of Plague” as the Elizabethan masterpiece for our times. Today we are over 330,000 deaths, rising at a rate of 2,000 per day. Lord, have mercy on us!

In May, I was pleased to be invited by U Penn grad student Aylin Malcolm to contribute to her Blue Notes blog series hosted by the Penn Program in the Environmental Humanities. My post, “Wet Globalization in Viral Times,” placed a chapter from OCEAN in 2020 context.

In April, the good people at the Glasgow Review of Books excerpted a chapter from OCEAN that contrasted the viewpoints of Rachel Carson and Aldo Leopold, “The Sea and the Mountain: Two Histories of Environmental Thinking.”

A bunch of the spring-time Objects wrote a many-handed blog post for Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons blog in early May. “A Conversation Among Objects” featured Steve Jones (CELL TOWER), Erik Anderson (BIRD), me (OCEAN), and ROLF Halden (ENVIRONMENT).

A beautifully-produced story about OCEAN and my #bluehumanities work appeared, in Italian and English, in the magazine SIRENE in Autumn 2020, written by the Italian journalist Rossella Venturi, who’s been stranded in Sydney since Covid started. No link to the article — but you can order the journal issue!

Public Lectures

It hasn’t been a year for my favorite kind of event, a public lecture when I drop into a community for a few days, talk about things I love, and get to learn from amazing people doing incredible things. 2019 was a high-water mark for this sort of thing for me, with talks in Sydney (twice), Amindale, Liverpool, Harvard, Columbia, Washington DC, Salt Lake City, and Wilmington, Delaware. Nothing like that in 2020!

But I did sneak in a great local “Early Modern Oceans” event at the CUNY Grad Center in midtown Manhattan, in February before everything closed. Sharing a seminar table with my blue humanities buddy Lowell Duckert of the University of Delaware is always fun, and it was also great to meet Maurya Wickstrom, who works on water and performance at the Grad Center.

I did one other mini-keynote this past October, in which I Zoom-delivered “Soiling the World: The Poetics of Compost from Ovid to the Anthropocene” to the annual symposium of the Urban Soils Institute in New York. Hoping to meet those excellent people in person next year!

Coming attractions?

A decent amount of my 2021 writing will be devoted to a new project, An Introduction to the Blue Humanities, which is under contract with Routledge Publishing. I’m likely to e-publish a few more short pieces, as occasions serve, and an academic article or two may emerge from the pipeline. I’m giving a keynote at a spring conference on “Sea Sense,” hosted virtually (alas!) at U. California Irvine. Maybe the deferred “Swimposium” in Dublin that got shifted away from its 2020 time will be reconstituted?

I’m looking forward to seeing new people and new places, when that becomes possible again!

My Reading List app tells me I’ve read 60 books during this pandemic year, starting with Monique Roffey’s Archipelago in early January through Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return and Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future more recently. I’ll may well knock another couple off before the year finally turns, but I thought I’d highlight my half-dozen-plus favs. 2020 was such a bad year in so many ways — but a good year for reading!

Roughly in the order in which I read them —

Craig Santos Perez, Habitat Threshold — I eagerly devoured this book of wise & witty eco-poems early in pandemic-time, and ended up sending a copy as a gift to my then-newborn nephew who I’ve still not seen outside Zoom-topia. Baby Ford Sterling won’t be able to read these poems for years, but I also shared them with my Global Lit students this past fall. They loved Perez’s voice from Oceania, and I got some great writing in response to these poems.

Dinah Lenney, Coffee — It was a strange year to have a book come out, but having my Ocean in a cluster of new Object Lessons with Dinah Lenney’s Coffee, Erik Anderson’s Bird ,and a few others made the Zoom publicity events lively and fun. Coffee is a wonderful romp, half a memoir plus a moving hymn to the ways this bitter morning brew shapes global history and family feeling. It was one of about a half-dozen books of 2020 that I downed in one sitting’s gulp!

David Gange, The Frayed Atlantic Edge: A Historian’s Journey from Shetland to the Channel — I’m always on the lookout for experiments in academic writing that make our connections to the past more visceral, but David Gange’s gambit — writing a history of the Atlantic facing coast of Scotland, Ireland, and England by narrating a solo kayaking trip through every cove and inlet — was extreme even by my standards. I blog-reviewed it back in May, thinking about “kayak Romanticism” and the possibilities of an Anthropocene sublime.

Bathsheba Demuth, Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait — The other brilliant work of narrative environmental history that I loved this year was this account of the ecology of the Bering Sea. The book artfully weaves together human stories from the USA and USSR with the nonhuman lives of whales, caribou, and walruses, among other environment-shaping actors. The genius of this account frames all its actors, from humans to animals to the ocean currents and seasonal advance and retreat of sea ice, as contributors to energy flows, shaping and shaped by global climate change. I’ve not been back to Alaska since the 1990s, though I spent a fair amount of time up there in those years, including working on the cleanup of the Exxon Valdez oil spill in the summer of 1989, right after I finished college. Demuth’s lyrical academic prose — that need not be an oxymoron! — reminds me of what I love about northern extremes.

Jennifer Edgecombe, The Grief of the Sea — I read, and also wrote, more poetry during this year of lockdown than probably any other year of my life. One of the strange pleasures of the pandemic was joining the Sonnet Corona Project on Facebook and contributing to a dozen coronas, which are “crowns” of fourteen connected sonnets. I also started digging into more new poetry, including, as you might expect, sea poetry. Jennifer Edgecombe’s gorgeously lyrical chapbook of shipwreck poems is one of the ones that has stuck with me. “The dark is the sea,” she opens the volume, “that has soaked through, / dripping into buckets already full –“

Claudia Rankine, Just Us: An American Conversation — The first poem I assigned to all of my classes this past fall was Claudia Rankine’s “Weather,” published in the New York Times in June in the immediate wake of the Black Lives Matter protests that rocked the USA this spring. My students were dazzled, and inspired, by her combination of artistry and close attention to the materials of everyday life. It’s like we’re living in a poem, one said! I carried that familiarity with me to her most recent book of experimental essays and prose poems about white privilege, the pressures of racism in daily life, and the transformative power of art. She’s one of the great poetic witnesses to our days.

Rebecca Giggs, Fathoms: The World in the Whale — I sipped from this gorgeous, dense volume for what must have been months, spacing deep dives into these chapters about whales in and beyond history in between my magpie reading practices. Giggs writes with beautiful intensity and precision, and the opening depiction of a stranded whale in Perth remains alive and pungent in my imagination. She’s a voice to listen to!

Those are my more-than-a-half-dozen favs for 2020. So many other great books this year, including Bonnie Tsui’s Why We Swim, about which I wrote in Public Books, the latest strange parable-novel by J.M. Coetzee, my own deeper dives into the poetry of Alice Oswald and W.S. Graham…

We’re all hoping for a 2021 with more people, more travel, and more open-ness. But I hope still with lots of great books!

I slurped this one down in one go last night, sneaking in a personal treat at the start of winter break. Peter Coviello’s Vineland Reread, his entry in Columbia UP’s Rereadings series, ranges across a series of encounters with Pynchon’s relatively unloved “middle” novel, which Coviello contextualizes as occupying a near mid-point in the writer’s career, having appeared in 1990 after the long hiatus post-Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) and before the more consistent run of subsequent novels, Mason & Dixon (1997), Against the Day (2006), Inherent Vice (2009), and Bleeding Edge (2013). Like me, Coviello hopes that the now 82-year-old Pynchon might still have a novel or three still up his sleeve; like me, he also suspects that the epics GR and M&D will punctuate the career. But if Vineland sometimes gets judged as middle in quality as well as chronology, Coviello makes a convincing case for the novel’s prescience, its subtlety, its loss-haunted history of America, and — above all, and most powerfully in this smart, funny, inventive passionate book — its syntactic joys. It’s hinge-Pynchon, connecting the tragic early brilliance to the ramshackle later works. It’s also just plain brilliant. Maybe the non-epic novels give an even clearer view of the distinctive flavors and energies of Pynchon?

There’s nothing quite like the swoops and dives, elaborate curls and dead-ends, the ambition and profligacy of the Pynchon sentence. Like many Pynchon-stans, my baseline response to my favorite sentences is how’d-he-do-that wonder, even if, as is often the case, the dog being chased through many clauses and elaborations turns out very much of the shaggy variety. Coviello strikes a finely calibrated balance between explaining the complexities of Pynchon’s style and also wallowing in its abundance, goofiness, and high-wire-act displays. I read a lot of academic prose, and it’s always a temptation to skip block quotations, especially since the quoted texts are often things I’ve read before — but part of the joy of this book for a confirmed Pynchonophile is anticipating where Coviello will lard in the juiciest bits. I guessed that he’d last-word his book with the rousing Emersonianism of the Becker-Traverse family reunion — “It is impossible to tilt the beam” &c (122) — but he snuck in early the Star Wars-inflected confrontation between Prairie and her dark father nemesis (46-47). Like Coviello, I am “a child of the seventies and eighties” (47), so I was already there for Brock Vond as Darth Vader. But since I’m mostly a Shakespearean and only read Pynchon criticism in a recreational capacity, I’d not previously worked out how thoroughly this sort of intertext works. For my teaching, next time, if/when I reanimate the Pynchon’s California course! (I have been thinking about Pynchon’s New York, but I’d have to figure out how to teach V.…)

The lasting feeling I take from my chug-a-lug of this delicious little book is its hymns to readerly joy, the riotous pleasures of these sentences and novels. Coviello knows he can’t really capture all of that lightning-in-a-bottle sensation, but he also captures it pretty well. Reading Pynchon is “filled with an anarchic sense of possibility expanding in dizzying breadth from the page” (5). Talking with fellow obsessive readers forms private utopias that “out of the sheer abundance of their enthusiasm find themselves fabulating these semiprivate codes and idiolects” (27). Sharing this writer produces not the self-shattering of jouissance but “a momentary inflooding sense of abundance, a richness of pleasure that amplifies itself in its sharing” (35). Yep, that’s it.

Darkness and history loom and shadow, and Coviello unpacks in Vineland‘s Reagan-centric vision unsettling anticipations of the twenty-first century systems unsatisfactorily collected under the term “neoliberalism.” But if “every We-system is also a They-system,” as the paranoid genius of Gravity’s Rainbow proclaimed, the more empathetic spark of Pynchon’s post-1990s vision recognizes liberal complicity — arch-villain Brock Vond’s “genius was to have seen in the sixties left not threats to order but unacknowledged desires for it” (Vineland 269) — with which the less-trusting-than-thou novelist participates with varying levels of reluctance and eagerness.

It’s a backward-nesting faux-irony, a kind of humanized empathetic counter-challenge against and complicity with the rage and fire of the Rocket-world, that I most love about post-90s Pynchon. Since like Coviello I can’t really resist, I’ll close with two favs. First, from Mason & Dixon, which like Coviello I read as the masterpiece toward which Vineland lays the path. This passage describes carving the Line through America, and also reading-as-life-practice:

Newcomers to the Ley-born Life are advis’d not to look up, lest, seiz’d by its proper Vertigo, they fall into the Sky.–For ‘t has happen’d more than once,– drovers and Army officers swear to it,– as if Gravity along the Visto, is become locally less important than Rapture.

Mason & Dixon (651)

In its side-eye glance at the V-2’s destructive descent in Gravity’s Rainbow, its anxiety about its own fall, or should we (always) say Fall in its Miltonic sense, its pastiche of eighteenth-century punctuation, and its allegorization of interpretive practices from the surveyors to the drovers to we readers, I take immoderate joy in this sentence.

But right now through Coviello I’m rethinking Vineland, which isn’t just a warm-up to M&D. My closer quote comes courtesy of one of Pynchon’s nonhuman characters, following one of a few threads Vineland Reread mostly doesn’t pull but which might gesture toward some partial freedom from human self-delusions, the last-page return of Desmond the dog, licking Prairie’s face and providing the first clearly, overtly, even excessively optimistic ending in Pynchon’s career:

It was Desmond, none other…roughened by the miles, face full of blue-jay feathers, smiling out of his eyes, wagging his tail, thinking he must be home.

Vineland 385

Home as dog-imagined maybe gives us enough wiggle to import some human(e) skepticism also, and the munched blue jays reprise and revenge the birds who woke Zoyd up on the first page of the novel, as well as gesturing to the “boys in blue” who raid NoCal utopias and the oft-mentioned blue eyes of both Prairie and her mother Frenesi. Does this blue-cycle connect to my own blue water obsessions? I’ve toyed with a reading of surfer allegory in an essay on Inherent Vice in tandem with Spenser’s Faerie Queene (in the 2017 collection Veer Ecology), and more might be said about Pynchon’s oceanic moods. But that’s for another, or never, time.

Thanks for this book, Peter Coviello! Any chance you’ve got a sequel in the works about Inherent Vice?

Here are the brief remarks I made to the Zoom-sea at an event celebrating the works and legacy of John Gillis.

[And here’s the full 90 min Zoom, featuring many fabulous people!]

I presented four quick snapshots about what John’s work means to me –

1. I first met John through Islands of the Mind, which I must have read around 2006 or so, as I was making an oceanic turn in my own literary scholarship. John’s introduction of islands as a “third place” between settled land and chaotic sea, and his presentation of “islomania” as recurring cultural dream have stayed with me. But my favorite thing in this great book is the historian’s gesture toward the poetic imagination. The book’s subtitle, “How the Human Imagination Created the Atlantic World,” set up descriptions of the entanglements among real islands, from Iceland to Bermuda to Tahiti, and fictional ones, from St. Brendan’s isle to the island of California to Utopia. Beyond its erudition and range, what I cherish most about this book is its generosity. Like the sailors it chronicles, the book invents as it explores – half create[s] and perceives, to adapt Wordsworth’s formulation. I love its open-ness.
2. My second snapshot takes me and my then 10 year old son Ian to visit John and Tina at Great Gott Island, Maine, in 2011. I’d met John through the Fluid Frontiers conference, and he kindly invited us out to their private paradise. “Islands are not utopias,” he cautioned us as we tromped through mossy paths around the island. (Here’s a picture of Ian and John, heading into the woods.) It was a charmed day, with a special fisherman’s magic: I caught a juvenile mackerel on my first cast from the “apron” of granite that surrounds the island, and Ian caught another on his last cast of the day, as we were about the leave the dock that Tina calls the heart of the island, the place through which people come and go. I can still feel the thrill of accessing secret knowledge and oceanic experience in that summer’s day off the coast.
3. Back to scholarship – I’ve probably never been so touched at having been cited by another scholar than when I read John’s web-essay “The Blue Humanities,” which appeared in the NEH journal Humanities in 2013. At that point I wasn’t myself sure what the blue humanities was, though I’d been using the phrase for a few years. John showed me. His essay reflected back to me what happens when you let the waters in, to stain and suffuse scholarship. As it happens, during this hell-year of 2020 I’ve just last month signed a contract with Routledge to write a book called, “An Introduction to the Blue Humanities.” It’s a labor of love for me that has crystallized through John’s hearing and reimagining that phrase back in 2013.
4. My last snapshot features me in a sleeping bag, surrounded by my family, on the living room floor of our house on the CT shoreline. We’re huddled together in the dark waiting for Hurricane Sandy to descend upon the coast. I’ve got a headlamp on, and I’m eagerly reading The Human Shore. I like to read Gillis books during hurricanes. I had read Tina’s great book Writing on Stone during the blackout after Hurricane Irene one year earlier. What do the Gillises have to do with global storm systems that rotate counterclockwise in the northern hemisphere? It’s not that their work and legacy resembles a hurricane’s violent disruption. Although…if we think Superstorm Gillis as an organizing principle, a system whose structures have global reach, oceanic origins, and planet-sized scale…well, I don’t know. It might not be the worst symbol of this great scholar’s work and influence!

Plus some bonus bibliography:

John Gillis, Islands of the Mind: How the Human Imagination Created the Atlantic World (Routledge 2004)

Christina Gillis, Writing on Stone: Scenes from a Maine Island Life (2008)

• I read this one during a blackout after Hurricane Irene (August 2011)

John Gillis, The Human Shore: Seacoasts in History (2012)

• I read this one during the blackout after Hurricane Sandy (Oct 2012)

“The Blue Humanities” Humanities 34:3 2013

John Gillis and Franziska Torma, eds., Fluid Frontiers: New Currents in Marine Environmental History (2015)

In the middle of the disorienting fall term of 2020, I signed a contract for a new book project that will keep me occupied for the next many months. I’m very excited about this book, as the term “blue humanities” seems to be splashing around so many discourses and practices in so many places. I’ll have more to say about the project here at the Bookfish, and other places, but I wanted to announce the project first, and also ask a small favor of the #bluehumanities gang.

As I get started on the book, I am hoping to reach out to some #bluehumanities people around the world to see what they think, write, create, teach, and do with the term.

Here’s a link to my Blue Humanities Survey.

I’m hoping to be suprised by some of the things I hear back!

[With thanks to Anna Intere and the Sea Library I ran across this sea-poem by Borges this morning, right after I took this sea-picture. John Updike’s translation, in Borges’s Selected Poems (2004), is very good. But I thought I’d do an early November translation myself too.]

Before the dream, or the terror, it interweaves

Mythologies and cosmographies.

Before the time unweaves itself into days —

The sea, always, the always-sea, it was and was.

Who is the sea? Who is the violent

Ancient creature that chews earth’s sandy pillars,

One and many sea-mouths gnawing,

And abyss and splendor and chance and wind?

Who sees it sees it for the first time

Always. With elemental wonders drawn out, sad evenings,

Bright moon, cooled embers from last night’s bonfire on the beach.

Who is the sea? Who am I? I will not know it until

After the last succeeding wave-days and pain.

“El Mar” from El otro, el mismo (1964)

In the gorgeous short film that closed out a long, varied, and stimulating Zoomafternoon with the Urban Soils Symposium, the puppet artist Olmstead — half of the puppet theater-reconceived as film-makers duo Alex & Olmstead — offered an eco-koan. “Life exists,” she voice-overed, “because there are six inches of topsoil, and it sometimes rains.”

It made me think of Bruno Latour’s recent book Down to Earth, in which he emphasizes the thin-ness of life on our planet, all of which exists, and always has existed, confined inside the “critical zone,” a narrow 1-2 km thick band of “biofilm” above and below the planet’s surface. In a lecture-performance in New York in 2018 — back when people went places and sat next to people we don’t know! — Latour introduced his notion of “terrestrialism,” which asks us to train our attention away from both the heavens and the planetary core. The world we need to understand is at our feet. It’s soil.

At the Zoomposium on Friday, I presented some ideas toward a “poetics of compost” about what we talk about when we talking about soil-creation, drawing mainly on Shakespeare and Ovid. My title, “Soiling the World,” asks us to think about how soil soils — what actions and processes happen in the living earth, how we understand and fear and depend upon these processes, and how poets and scientists should explore these long histories. Soil includes death and decay, and the renewal that emerges through soil requires a closer engagement with mortal vulnerability that is often comfortable. That’s where we need poets alongside soil scientists.

The baker’s dozen of presenters who spoke together via Zoom yesterday spanned a wide range of approaches, expertise, and modes of presentation. The event was one of favorite kinds of academic/para-academic events, the kinds that toss people together who don’t normally encounter each other — let’s say engineers who design “technosols,” an activist who leads an urban garden in Pittsburgh, puppeteers-turned-filmmakers, textile artists, investment managers… Actually, I think I should make a list. Let’s start at the beginning —

Early Afternoon Sessions

• Maha Deeb started us off a great & detailed presentation about the physical properties of various urban soils, and the projects required to amend them.
• Vlacheslav Vasenev Zoomed in from Moscow to describe a soil research project about how to create “technosols” for the widely different climates in different parts of Russia.
• Moreen Willaredt & Thomas Nels brought the “earthworm engineers” to the party in a slick video presentation of their research into soil manufacturing and productivity. Thomas Nels then joined live to make a great comment about how a productive manufactured soil can be disassociated from land ownership, thus bringing the benefits of soil to an increasingly urban (and non-landowning) population. Given how much of the brutal legacy of settler colonialism structures itself through land ownership, it’s an inspiring vision.
• Raqueeb Bey pivoted us toward political activism with a powerful presentation about BUGS — Black Urban Gardeners Society of Pittsburgh – and their efforts to use soil to advance social and racial justice.
• I rounded out the morning session with differents versions of making-compost, from what will happen my own body after my death to Timon’s cosmic vision to Apollo’s assault of Daphne. H/t to two great new feminist translations of / responses to Ovid by Jane Alison and Nina MacLaughlin!

We had a half-hour of Q&A after these five talks. The exchange was great, and it also reminded me of how challenging it is to get people to speak across disciplines. The Urban Soils hosts did a great job bringing us together, but the first 20-ish minutes were largely dominated by shop talk among the scientists, who all knew each other from the soil world. I posted a question in the chat about politics as a potential connecting discourse to bring the five talks together, but it got passed over. Eventually I figured out how to raise my hand on Zoom (small triumphs!) & was able to use the question of politics to make the hand-off to Raqueeb, who spoke eloquently about how to get political figures to listen when you have a good idea. The time closed before we really got to speak across the humanities / science divide, though I hope later follow-ups will manage that, to an extent.

The truth is — it’s super-hard to germinate those conversations, and we need to have them. To dig into the metaphor, we need to cultivate the rich soil that can grow them from seedlings. One of the most successful such conversations I can remember was between the planetary scientist Lindy Elkins-Tanton and medieval literature scholar Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, hosted by the Folger Shakespeare Library at the Creating Nature event I organized in May 2019, and to some extent I think I just got lucky. The Urban Soils Symposium clearly supports these kinds of conversations. I had to drop off before the afternoon Q&A, and the afternoon session featured a wider range of speakers, so they’ve probably got more great things recorded by now already!

Later Afternoon Sessions

• Kate Douglas guided us into a coffee break with a five-minute “Meditation on Rot – Maybe Dead is Just a Word People Say When They’re Scared.” The virtual coffee break for me included a quick trip down to the beach with the dog.

• The first session after the break featured Heather McMordie’s artistic project “Marsh Senses,” a textile and performance piece created in relation with the threatened salt marshes in her Rhode Island home. A creature of salt marshes myself in coastal CT, I found this piece beautiful and mesmerizing. I want to see / smell / feel more!
• Wendy Aringa, a landscape architect from Brooklyn, spoek about the Gowanus Canal, a post-natural space that people like me who are obsessed with the watery landscapes of New York City love in the complicated ways that one loves toxic and polluted places. I thought of my St. John’s colleague the painter Elizabeth Albert, and her ongoing illustrated project Gowanus Muskrat!
• Microbiologist and designer Paige Whitehead gave a brilliant talk that asks us to think about the violence done to nonhuman environments by road-building. She included a vision of the Indigenous networks of communication and connection that preceded the pavement, and that might be possible again if the tarmac were lifted. Such a great talk!
• Steve Godeke added financial discourses to the mix with an excellent presentation about green investment strategies. It’s good to have money people at the table!
• The puppet duo Alex & Olmstead closed us out with the film I mentioned at the top of this overlong blog post. Another great vision of earthworms as collaborators, and a different way to engage with soil

The fun continues this Halloween afternoon at 2 pm, but in truth my Zoom fatigue will likely send me toward pumpkin-carving and maybe a nice long walk into the salt marsh along the old trolley tracks. I’m very pleased to have connected with this ambitious and omnivorous group — and I look forward to future collaborations, especially once people can be in places together again!

It’s hard to get away from the news these days. During a week that started with “a hot mess, inside a dumpster fire, inside a train wreck” of a debate and ended up with the most powerful man in the world hospitalized, I found myself wanting a break. But it turns out that spending time with the Public Theater’s radio play of Richard II, which is what I’m teaching right now, was less a break than a lens. Shakespeare’s play about a hostile transfer of power makes a powerful, painful response to my regular doomscrolling of news updates. The scene in the middle of the play after Richard returns from Ireland (3.2) felt like a spotlight shined onto today’s news.. One moral of Richard’s reversal of fortune, that power doesn’t last, seems too simple to feel profound. But later in the scene, Richard reveals the human pain of suddenly-visible mortality. That’s the moment that might give us a glimpse into our infected President in this uncertain time.

To be clear, I don’t want to connect the President to Shakespeare’s bad king in order to criticize. We don’t need Shakespeare for that. It is true that many of the things of which Shakespeare’s King Richard appears guilty — manipulation of his peers, abuse of power, dishonesty, an eye for personal gain — will ring familiar to consumers of American political news in fall 2020. The moments I’m thinking of now, however, happen when Shakespeare’s portrait of a king reveals “God’s substitute” (1.2.37) to be a man who encounters his own human limits, perhaps for the first time. That’s the moment that makes me wonder what kind of thinking has been going on inside Walter Reed Hospital this weekend.

We obviously can’t know what to expect from any single case out of the over seven million Covid-19 infections we have seen since in the US since this past spring. We have good reasons to hope and expect that expert medical care and early detection will lead to the President’s recovery. But it’s hard not to think of the risks, and it’s impossible not to think that he, himself, might be feeling the cold breath of mortality. He may not want to tell us what he’s experiencing — but maybe Shakespeare already has?

National leaders don’t extemporize in iambic pentameter these days, but I wonder how many of Richard’s thoughts might be running through his mind.

When Richard arrives back on English soil and hears that a rival has taken the field against him, he first claims to trusts the mystical power of his own authority:

Not all the water in the rough rude sea

Can wash the balm off from an anointed king.

3.2.54-55

So far, so confident. Richard, like other leaders we might hink of, likes to interrupt when others try to speak, as we’ve seen in the first two acts. He’s in control, so far. Or at least he thinks he is.

But the king’s forces melt away. His Welsh allies head home (2.4). His powerful uncle York, whose ambivalence when caught between his king and his nephew Bolingbroke carries the whiff of political cowardice, shifts to the side of the rising Bolingbroke. “I do remain as neuter” (2.3.159), pleads York at first, before effectively casting his lot with Bolingbroke. These betrayals push Richard to self-dramatized misery:

Of comfort no man speak!

3.2.144

At this moment Richard voices an anxiety and self-doubt that no political leader wishes to reveal. I can’t help hearing these lines, as performed by the charismatic Andre Holland, as a kind of secret human history of our virus-stricken President, the words he won’t — can’t — utter, perhaps not even to himself:

Throw away respect,

Tradition, form and ceremonius duty,

For you have but mistook me all this while.

I live with bread like you, feel want,

Taste grief, need friends. Subjected thus.

How can you say to me I am a king?

3.2.172077

“Subjected thus” — what does it mean when a ruler who feels himself invincible suddenly becomes vulnerable? The depth of feeling seeps out from Andre Holland’s gorgeous American voice. These lines speak what we have not been allowed to hear this past weekend. We know it must be true: he must live with bread, feel want, taste grief, needs friends. But will he show it?

My students and I have been listening all week to this spring’s brilliant and searing production of Richard II, dedicated to Black Lives Matter and featuring a mostly non-white cast. Director Saheem Ali frames his production as an interrogation of Shakespeare and the place of theater in American culture during the hinge of 2020. The podcast episodes feature interviews with the actors and with Shakespeare experts including the amazing Ayanna Thompson, among others. Might the play make a better way to think about current events than refreshing Twitter?

So far, my students haven’t missed much about how topical this play feels. We spent some time last week interpreting the thoughts of Miriam Hyman, the Philadelphia-based actor and rapper who plays Bolingbroke, about the moment in which the rebel-who-will-become-king dedicates himself to “Mine innocence and St George” (1.1.84). She describes hearing this line during rehearsal and then imagining Bolingbroke the “exile” as a spokesperson for George Floyd and the BLM protestors. In her searing, powerful performance, she makes this four century-old play speak to 2020 urgencies. Miriam Hyman’s Bolingbroke is here for the same storm that my class started the semester with, in Claudia Rankine’s poem “Weather,” written while the protests were happening this spring. “We are here for the storm / that’s storming,” Rankine writes. Richard’s personal corruption, his glee at the passing of John of Gaunt (a Duke, not a Supreme Court Justice, but it seems close enough…), his manipulation of his subjects: it all seems a bit too on the nose.

So, how to you resist the king? “Vote him out,” one student said, an anachronistic if understandable response. “Peaceful protests?” wondered another. Miriam Hyman performs Bolingbroke’s version of the #resistance as a powerfully direct, in the streets response that reminds me, somewhat, of a more conclusive version of the Women’s March of January 2018.

Just who exactly is writing the script for 2020?

In the hot days of mid-July, at long last I slipped into the phase of quarantine that includes re-reading Camus’s The Plague. Early on, when everything seemed new, I listened to an audio version of Boccaccio when I drove to DC to extract my son from his college dorm. In the confusion that followed , I skimmed Defoe, and turned through some fragments of Dekker’s Wonderfull Yeare. I indulged myself by blogging about Love in the Time of Cholera in late March.

But until now I’ve been avoiding Camus. It’s a book I remember falling deeply into when I read it during my junior year of high school. I still have that 37-year old copy, slightly worn, with not always decipherable notes. Even then, I seem to have figured out that the “most imp. line in [the] book” came early: “Stupidity has a knack of getting its way” (36). Yes, it does.

[My teenage self in the ’80s surely could never have imagined that virtually any quotation of The Plague right now reads like a subtweet of the USA in 2020. Not that anyone knew what a subtweet was in 1983!]

Much of what I remember of the novel I found again, as lucid as before: Camus’s moral urgency, his compassion for a wide range of (mostly male, as I don’t think we discussed in class back then) characters, and his patient, slow unfurling of the progress of plague through the town of Oran. I remember the novel’s insistence on clear understanding as the key to moral living: “The soul of the murderer is blind, and there can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clear-sightedness” (124). A bit of a know-it-all as a teenager, I liked the idea of values built on knowledge.

But though the worship of “comprehension” and semi-scientific clarity remains, in particular via the doctor-hero Rieux, a second thread through the novel seems more striking to me now. The additional cardinal virtue besides individual knowledge is social obligation: “It’s a matter of common decency. That’s an idea which may make some people smile, but the only means of fighting a plague is — common decency” (154). Or, as the narrator describes the sick city a bit later, “This business is everybody’s business” (194). The implications for America in 2020, divided against ourselves by the very leadership whose job is to unite us, seem too obvious to detail.

Living during our own plague-time now, I feel these two imperatives — to know, and to be decent — as rival twins. The urge to be clear-sighted has me, like many of us, swallowing down huge gulps of information: statistics, epidemiology, public health theories, and other technical fields in which I’m not competent to form a reliable opinion. But at the same time, behind the numbers that I scan daily from Florida, Texas, Arizona, California — a few months ago the numbers were from New York, Boston, New Haven, and before that Italy, Wuhan, Tehran — I feel an enormous urge toward compassion and decency, though I can’t always tell how to put those feelings into action. What does it mean to act decently toward someone who’s lost their parent, their business, their life’s work? How does decency interact with comprehension? Is wearing a mask an act of comprehension — because we know now how the virus spreads — or of decency — because it shows a collective care for our neighbors? Can everything be both of these things, always?

In re-reading The Plague I also remembered what seemed to teenage me, and to some extent still to old guy me, a central conflict in the novel, between the Jesuit Father Paneloux’s desperate faith in divine order and Dr. Rieux’s refusal to moralize. “Perhaps we should love what we cannot understand,” urges Paneloux, to which Rieux responds with his own articulation of absolute truth: “I shall refuse to love a scheme of things in which children are put to torture” (203). What seems most admirable to me now about Rieux is his modesty, his acceptance that he might not be able to find any “scheme” at all, once he casts off traditional structures such as the Church and the law. Decency might be better than any scheme.

There are a lot of figures in Camus’s novel who present mini-arguments for how to endure the pandemic: Grand the clerk and failed artist, Tarrou the intellectual, the journalist Rambert, the petty criminal Cottard, and others. I remember that I tried, back in ’83, to lay out a sort of “which one’s plan works best” reading of the novel. But this time through, I don’t know — there was something a bit schematic about each of the figures, even the most intellectually complex such as Tarrou and Rieux. Their stories are engaging, meaningful, diverting, varied. All the usual things a novelist makes us feel, we feel. But the core driving force of the novel isn’t human at all. “What’s natural is the microbe,” Camus emphasizes. “All the rest — health, integrity, purity (if you like) — is a product of the human will, of a vigilance that must never falter. The good man, the man who infects hardly anyone, is the man who has the fewest lapses of attention” (235-36). Another subtweet of 2020, this time not to governmental stupidity but instead a challenge to our own tired, almost-six months in spans of attention? How often does your attention lapse these days? How long can our attention stay sharp?

Who in Camus’s novel is that “good man,” who infects almost no one? The doctor interacts with his patients and even brings sick people into the apartment he shares with his mother. Tarrou volunteers to organize a sanitation crew whose work does not sound very “socially distant.” None of the citizens of Oran appears to be isolating as a matter of course, though one heart-wrenching scene divides a sick child from his family. (The child dies in the hospital with Rieux; the father, a magistrate, ends up wanting to volunteer at the isolation camp rather than return to his government job.) Crowds pile into church to hear Father Paneloux’s sermons, and a stranded-by-quarantine opera company even performs “Orpheus and Eurydice” to packed houses once a week. All the cafes are open. The pervading horror of 2020 — that we know how to “stop the spread,” and yet are failing as a collective body to do it — isn’t quite the sickness the novel describes.

I mostly agree with critics who say that it’s too simple to think of The Plague as an allegory for fascism, or even for the four-year suffering of France under Nazi occupation. But the mysterious fading away of the illness, which in the famous final words of the novel, may yet “rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city” (287), clearly has a political flavor. Perhaps, yet again, the jab is applicable to the USA in 2020 as well as Camus’s France in 1947? Vigilance, “attention,” and a clear eye for rats seem essential tools to maintain decency in the body politic.

One new discovery of the 2020 reading was a salt-water interlude. The moment comes just before Grand’s recovery marks the start of the city’s turn away from plague — and also shortly before the one-after-the-other deaths of Tarrou and Dr. Rieux’s wife conclusively isolate our hero. The two friends, Tarrou and Rieux, talk their way past the lockdown guards and go for a sea-swim by the empty pier. It’s an understated, faintly homoerotic, deeply resonant moment of physical escape: “For some minutes they swam side by side, with the same zest, in the same rhythm, isolated from the world, at last free of the town and of the plague” (239). In a novel with few consolations, except Grand’s unexplained recovery and the at-least-temporary withdrawal of the disease, the night-swim, which is almost the novel’s only moment outside the city walls, marks a dive away from infections and an imaginary engagement with another environment.

The water in Long Island Sound was too cold for me when corona-time started in March, but since late May I’ve been swimming every day. I follow the tide around its circuit, since it’s nicer here to swim within an hour of so of the high-water mark. Today the 9:35 am tide put me in the water around 10, in between a few rain squalls, loving the bouncy disjunction of being in slightly rough water. I sneak away each day into the grey-green flood, not so much to be apart from the pandemic, because of course I don’t forget the world when I swim, but because the act of immersion, of clogging my eyes and ears and nose to everything around me but salt water, works like a tiny meditative practice.

Today when I swam through choppy swells I was thinking with Rieux and Tarrou. About comprehension, and how hard it is to live up to that pitiless goal. And about decency, and how much I hope our world can find it again.