Here’s a great trailer for a film-in-progress about wooden sloops in the West Indies. Thanks to Dan Brayton for finding this one.
Whirlpools
I’m thinking about whirlpools.
Specifically the Maelstrom off the coast of Norway but also whirlpools in general. These fairly regular features of the supposedly featureless ocean arise from the interactions of powerful tidal currents around narrow channels. They’re a bit like tidal bores, which show up in rivers and estuaries and feature in a wonderful scene in Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies.
Here’s an early modern image of the Maelstrom 
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I’m wondering if this oceanic feature can partially displace the beach as our primary physical symbol for land-sea interaction?
Whirlpools, like beaches, get formed when the sea & land come crashing towards each other. Both are structured by tide and time, both are fairly predictable, but mathematically complex. Neither was well understood in the early modern period. The downward force of maelstroms, as Poe reminds us, asks us to think of them as descents into the ocean rather than movements towards land. Homer’s whirlpool has a monster inside it.
Thinking of whirlpools or maelstroms as oceanic forms, features that are in their way as typical of land-sea interaction as the beach or other contact zones helps shift us imaginatively off-shore without entirely forsaking land for deep water. The whirlpool is an inhuman and inhospitable place, but it’s still created by land, at least in part. It’s not a human contact zone like a beach or a ship, but it’s a site of interaction.
Despite Poe and Jules Verne, coastal maelstroms aren’t strong enough to suck down ships or submarines. But what if we think of them as windows into the ocean?
These thoughts are all leading up to the Oceanic Shakespeares SAA seminar early next month, where all such questions will be resolved.
Oceanic Shakespeares
We’re only three weeks away from SAA, and I’ve been happily swimming through the flood of papers for my Oceanic Shakespeares seminar. In the next few days I’ll be responding to the authors individually, but I also want to explore a few larger questions and structures that the papers point toward as a whole.
The single largest question the seminar raises for me is the relation between the two terms in its title: what might it mean to connect the vast world ocean to the works, diverse and poly-appropriated though they are, of a single author? I’m hoping that this seminar can help us move past Will-centricity, not only by opening up the vast array of other materials available to salty scholars of this period, from Camoens to Haywood to Joost Von den Vondel and many others, but also by pushing literary culture up against what Whitman calls the “crooked inviting fingers” of the surf. We’ll talk in Boston about how this might happen.
But first, some short introductions / questions for each of the three groups of papers.
Wet Globalism:
These papers have me returning to questions of the sea as cultural contact zone, a space both “free” in Grotius’s sense and also endlessly connected. They also make me wonder about nationalism and inter-European rivalries, remembering that Grotius’s Mare Liberum was itself part of the Dutch struggle against Spain; free seas are not apolitical spaces.
I also recently ran into a few lines from everyone’s favorite Nazi jurist, Carl Schmitt, that captures an Anglophilic vision of the oceanic globe that we Shakespeareans are perhaps more familiar with from John of Gaunt —
The case of England is in itself unique. Its specificity, its incomparable character, has to do with the fact that England underwent the elemental metamorphosis at a moment in history that was altogether unlike any other, and also in a way shared by none of the earlier maritime powers. She truly turned her collective existence seawards and centered it on the sea element. That enabled her to win not only countless wars and naval battles but also something else, and in fact, infinitely more—a revolution. A revolution of sweeping scope, of planetary dimensions. (Schmitt, Land and Sea, Simona Draghici trans.)
I don’t think we need to believe all or even any of that in order to use it to consider the legacy of oceanic English globalism from Shakespeare to Conrad and beyond. But I think it’s worth talking about.
Salty Aesthetics and Theatricality:
This is my sub-section as respondent — Joe Blackmore has Wet Globalism, and Jeffrey Cohen Fresh Water Ecologies — and it’s leading me to my favorite salt-water theorist, Eduoard Glissant, who writes about the sea as a place of “rupture and connection,” and also a “variable continuum” (Poetics of Relation, 151). His vision is also historical; he talks about the slave trade as the defining core of “creolization in the West…the most completely known confrontation between the powers of the written word and the impulses of orality” (6). To live in the post-Columbian West, for Glissant, means inhabiting and traversing oceanic space.
The pressure of maritime exchange and metaphor on aesthetic forms makes up the common subtext of this sub-set of papers. Water proves slippery; it’s hard to pin wetness down, on the Shakespearean stage or in anti-theatrical discourse. I wonder if these papers, and the seminar as a whole, might want to push toward some specific suggestions about the aesthetic force of the oceanic: it’s an agent of change, flowing and shifting, a threat to fixity or rigid conceptions of form, but also — and here I think there’s an interesting counter-current in these papers — something that’s mostly not-quite present, at least not fully. Aesthetic forms dive into the ocean but also surface and leave it. We see wet bodies on stage but not the ocean itself.
Fresh Water Ecologies:
The third group wonderfully focuses our attention back to dramatic particularities — two of the three essays are on Hamlet, which I’m currently teaching — and on the function of fluid spaces in eco-political demarcations. The sea and rivers in these essays comprise ecological and political challenges, with the pirate’s legacy looming large in Denmark. Reading several figures from Shakespeare as deeply watery or maritime — Hamlet, Ophelia, Hotspur — these papers connect watery spaces to human experiences. They make me think, as several other papers do also, about plot and principles of narrative connection. Northrop Frye once joked that in Greek romance, shipwreck was the “primary means of transportation.” What happens when we historicize the plot-ocean of classical romance so that it becomes, very literally, the stage of history?
The oceanic structure of the vortex or coastal whirlpool figures in both of the Hamlet papers, though somewhat differently. I wonder if this recurrent feature, produced by the encounter between mobile ocean and steadfast land, might serve as a metaphor for the disruptive but aesthetically patterned consequences of bringing land and sea together. We often think of this encounter in terms of the beach, which Greg Dening has done so much to turn into a rich metaphor for cultural encounters. Vortices have a different, less friendly aesthetic; they are less human places. We might be able to do something with them.
Twenty Shadows
Nonhumans in Michigan!
Great things are happening in Ypsilanti next week! I’ll be in Queens, but wish I could be at Eastern Michigan U for this —
Here’s what Craig Dionne, the host, has to say about it:
“Nonhumans: Ecology, Ethics, Objects.” EMU’s Journal of Narrative Theory (JNT) will sponsor an annual guest lecture focusing on themes currently shaping the humanities, Thursday, March 15, 5-6:30 p.m., Room 310A, Student Center.
This year’s JNT dialogue will focus on posthumanism, specifically its philosophical roots in what is termed the new school of “speculative realism” or “object-oriented ontology.” This is a challenging new paradigm of philosophy in the humanities that defines a generation of ecological theory and practice. Guest speakers include Timothy Morton, professor of English at the University of California-Davis and Jeffrey Cohen, professor of English and the director of the Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute at the George Washington University. Eileen Joy, associate professor of English at Southern Illinois University, will moderate.
Audio for Poetics of Nothing
I’ve started a page on the blog where I’ll archive audio recordings of my lectures, starting with “A Poetics of Nothing” from last Friday. You can find it under the Pages link on the right hand side of the homepage, or follow the link above.
Kevin Spacey as Richard III
This is the way the Bridge Project ends: with a star chewing the scenery, not an international ensemble. While past productions in this bi-national Atlantic-spanning series of productions have almost seemed allegories of American and British acting styles, here the big man of stage and screen carried all before him. 
He really was great fun to watch. He twisted his body like a ruined athlete, making this a Richard whose martial prowess and physical threat seemed plenty convincing. When crowing to himself alone onstage or working his way through a crowded council table, Spacey was in complete control. The performance wasn’t dazzling, like McKellan’s Lear, or intensely moving, like Jacobi’s. Maybe it’s the impending Super Bowl this weekend — I’m trying to figure out a way to root against both the Giants & the Pats — but I kept thinking I was watching a superstar athlete, someone who makes it look so easy. He was faster, better, stronger than anyone else.
The play doesn’t give much room for co-stars, and with the possible exception of some brief flashes from resisting women — Annabel Scholey’s fiery Anne, Gemma Jones’s wandering Margaret, and later Haydn Gwynne’s Elizabeth (all Brits, btw) — nobody could really play with Richard on this stage. Chuk Iwuji’s Buckingham had a nice turn as a political crowd-pleaser / revival tent speaker when convincing the people to make Richard king, while Spacey’s face was projected onto a large screen on the back of the stage. The close-up of Richard’s expressive face recalled the greater physical intimacy of the camera, and the formal tension between Buckingham’s frantic play downstage and Richard’s subtle, measured acceptance on power on the screen provided a glimpse into what it must be like to work across different media. When Richard came back to the stage, Buckingham lost his ability to match him.
The early scenes, esp the first soliloquy and wooing of Lady Anne, were the highlights, and Howard Overshown’s rendition of Clarence’s dream of drowning had real grandeur and was certainly the best Spacey-less scene. But the production lagged just a bit, and the split-stage rendition of the Richmond / Richard parallel experiences of the night before the battle were a bit predictable. I loved watching Richard wrestle with himself to the very end — “Richard loves Richard, that is, I am I” — and that famous line about the horse allowed Spacey to amp up the volume one last time.
I’ve had some good nights with the Bridge Project since 2009, particularly in their uneven but fun Winter’s Tale with Simon Russell Beale and Rebecca Hall and Stephen Dillane’s brilliant Prospero. I’m not sure I always buy Sam Mendes’s direction, but I’m sorry to see this series of plays past. What’s coming to BAM next winter?
Google analytics for 2011
The New Year spirit, plus I must admit a desire to avoid finishing my spring syllabi, led me to my Google Analytics page, and some 2011 Bookfish totals.
It only starts in September 2011, which I guess was when I figured out how to start Google Analytics. But I’m still surprised.
I think I’ve only halfway into web 2.0, since I still think of this space as semi-solitary, a place to collect thoughts & images that I like, so that I can find them again. I’ve also used it as a communication platform with my grad students, the Hungry Ocean conference, and a few other academic groups. But it’s interesting to think that quite a few folks have found their ways to me, one way or another.
Maybe the next trick is to figure out Twitter.
Woody’s New Years Rulin’s
Humanities Research and “Impact”
My old grad school buddy John Staines sent me to this Chronicle article via Facebook. The very short summary is that, at least according to Google Scholar and some other quickly-formed citational studies, not all of our humanities articles and books are widely read, cited, or otherwise influential in ongoing scholarship or the wider public. Surprised, are we?
There are lots of problems with this study: Google Scholar does not really do what this author wants it to do; the ten-year window might be too short to get a good read on impact, given the glacial publication cycle is in the humanities; and the breakthrough rate observed — maybe 1 book out of 10 showed a sizable spike in citations? — does not seem all that bad, esp when compared with comparable industries like commercial book publishing, in which 10% of the titles generate 100% of the profit, or film & TV, which I think operate under a similar model.
I also doubt the core claim: that pressure to publish quickly and abundantly makes us all “worse teachers and colleagues.” The article provides no real evidence on this point, just suggestions that junior faculty suffer under “publish or perish” and anecdotes about shutting the office door in a curious student’s face because the professor needs to keep working on the book. I don’t question the anxiety, but I doubt the bleakness of this scenario. Do most assistant professors seem to their students or colleagues to be “nervous, isolated beings who end up regarding an inquisitive student in office hours as an infringement”? Not in my department. It seems just as likely that publishing makes all of us better teachers and colleagues: better writers, more ambitious thinkers, and more widely knowledgeable in our own and cognate fields.
But even as I don’t think this article has its facts or interpretations right, I do think there’s a problem lurking in those weeds. We humanities scholars work very hard creating the products of our research, which mostly means writing articles and books, and in some cases also building web-interfaces or curating exhibitions or similar things. But when the thing is in print we mostly stop working on it. We mostly don’t think it’s our jobs to make sure that the work gets into wider circulation: we off-shore that job to journals and presses, which mostly don’t have strong publicity departments anymore, even if they once did. Maybe what we need isn’t less scholarship, or even better scholarship, but better press.
(Parenthetically, I also wonder if this article is adapting the “impact” requirement in the UK’s Research Assessment Exercise, which especially values notices of scholarly work in the popular press or other non-scholarly media.)
So my question is — what would happen if we decided to take on more explicitly this job of publicity and outreach? What if we valued it and rewarded it, so that our intellectual task is not done when the book appears in print, but continues, and getting its core ideas or findings to different audiences is part of the program? What if, rather than outsourcing publicity to the shrinking staff of University Presses, we started to think of it as something we do ourselves, through partnerships internal and external to university cultures?
To some extent we already do this, by giving talks at conferences and academic events big and small, by sharing bibliographies, by formal and informal intellectual exchanges. The growth of Facebook and academic blogs has presumably expanded the reach of this practice: I wonder how hard it would be to prove that FB sharing increases academic book sales or future citations? Not very hard, I imagine.
One model for my thinking about this sort of thing is the medievalist conglomerates that circle around the In the Middle blog and the BABEL Working group — Eileen Joy, Jeffrey Cohen, Karl Steel, lots of others. Plus a few other academics whose work I’ve encountered mainly via the web: Graham Harman, Tim Morton, Sarah Werner, a few others. I’d bet — though I’m not sure how I’d go about proving it — that all these people’s work has more “impact” b/c of their web outreach. Self-promotion, I suppose — oh, the horror! — but it’s promotion in the form of engagement and intellectual exchange, which is more fun than just mailing flyers or postcards.
Eileen, a co-founder of BABEL & co-editor of two open sources publishing projects, punctum books and O-Zone, is really visionary in this area. What I like most about her thinking on this topic is that she does not assume that open source means cost-free; she asks us to build private and public associations with various institutions — not just universities, but also libraries, museums, civic groups, etc — interested in and willing to pay at least something to support ideas and exchange. See her bracing set of comments about open access publishing back in October.
As she says —
We’re smart, creative people. We can do this. We can look at and even grasp and remold the bigger picture, and we do it not just for ourselves, but in order to create the spaces and breathing-room and necessary *outlets* for the greatest amount of production possible of the greatest number of ideas. There is no more virtuous work in my mind in the academy at present, and it isn’t free.
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