Oceanic New York: The Book

During this busy fall, one of my favorite tasks has been assembling the many wonderful essays I’ve received for Oceanic New York into a book. It’s hard to imagine capturing the energy and waywardness of that memorable night in Queens last September, but I think the collection we’ve got will do it justice, and extend some of the things we started that night.

Not everything is fully put together yet, but we’re close enough that I can reveal a probably-final table of contents. Look for these frothy pages sometime next year!

Oceanic New York

Table of Contents

 

Instructions: How to Use this Book

Poem: “Asymmetrical Kicking”

Essays: Salt-Water City

1. Elizabeth Albert, “Silent Beaches”
2. Granville Ganter, “Miss Newtown Creek”
3. Lowell Duckert, “Arctic-Oceanic New York”
4. Jamie Skye Bianco, “#bottlesnbones: tales of oceanic remains”
5. Alison Kinney, “Groundswell”
6. Bailey Robertson, “City in the Sea”
7. Karl Steel, “Insensate Oysters and Nonconsensual Existence”
8. Matt Zazzarino, “Super Ocean 64”
9. Nancy Nowacek and Lowell Duckert, “A Short History of the Hudsonian Ice Age”
10. Steve Mentz, “Wages of Water

Poem: “Two Sublimes”

Essays: The Water is Rising

1. Steve Mentz and Marina Zurkow, “Instructions II: In Case of Immersion”
2. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “The Sea is a Conveyance Machine”
3. Allan Mitchell, “Soundings”
4. Dean Kritikos, “New York, Oceanic City”
5. Anne Harris, “Oceanic Valuation”
6. Julie Orlemanski, “Tourism and the Phenomenology of Knowledge”
7. Jonathan Hsy, “Watery Metaphor”
8. Nancy Nowacek, “Citizen Bridge”
9. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Allan Mitchell, “Oceanic Dispatches”

Four Swim Poems and a Picture

 

I’ll also add a little taste of my countdown intro. It’s thirteen paragraphs long, but I’ll just post the first two here:

Instructions: How to Use this Book

 13. I don’t imagine you need any rudimentary teaching in how to use a technology like the one in your hands right now. Books are familiar, whether they comprise sheets of paper bound and glued or pixels on a screen. But I’m going to ask you to operate this one differently. I want you, with this object in your hands, to imagine that these pages contain the Ocean and New York City. That makes it a three-fold artifact, Ocean and City and Book.

 12. If this Book were Ocean, how would it feel between your fingers? Wet and slippery, just a bit warmer or colder than the air around it, since the Ocean is our planet’s greatest reservoir of heat, a sloshing insulator and incubator girdling our globe. Oceans splash alongside Cities and continents. Perhaps you think that a Book can’t be an Ocean because the property of the first thing is that we can read it, and the property of the second is that it is too vast for comprehension. But I’m asking that we try. There must be a way to read the Ocean!