Steve Mentz

It’s out in the world! I mean the world that this map maps –

I find it hard to believe, and a little daunting, that this strange fish and passion project poetry book has now embarked on the worldsea, in a beautiful printed package from Fordham University Press.

I hope lots of people will read this (reasonably priced and beautiful paperback) book, and I’m going to do a decent amount of marketing for it, as far as I know how to do that. A podcast with the New Books Network should be forthcoming soon! A reading in South Street Seaport in May! Copies at various places I’m going to talk about various things, from Portland, to Vancouver, to Bremen and Jena in Germany.

Today I want to introduce the amazing, brilliant map that John Wyatt Greenlee of Surprised Eel Mapping made for the book.

The book entangles an Ahab-free version of the voyage of Melville’s whaleship with my own immersive practice as swimmer and writer along the Connecticut Shoreline. I wanted a map to show that enmeshment, but I didn’t know how. I also wanted a sea monster someplace in the image. So I reached out to John, who I knew mainly as purveyor of eel-facts on Twitter.

We went back and forth about the design. Some early versions were messy. I wanted a dotted line showing the voyage of the Pequod from Nantucket to the Sea of Japan. I also wanted all my local swimming haunts, from Whale Rock to Green Island to the Cow and Calf, a pair of tidal rocks about a mile offshore that mark the far edge of my swimming range. How to fit all those things, plus a sea monster?

John’s two genius innovations were, first, inverting the globe, and, second, centering the Cow and Calf.

The inverted globe disorients, and reminds us of how much the convention of “north is up” organizes our view of the world. The continental shapes remain familiar, but updside-down, with Africa and Asia at the center, North America mostly off the page, and the voyage of the Pequod snaking its way through both sides.

The upper half of the map interposes my local coastline of Short Beach, including Johnson’s Beach, to which I walk my dogs every morning, my swimming haunts of Whale Rock and Green Island, plus other local landmarks within Long Island Sound. It’s my local wonderworld, and if you come visit – just a few miles east of New Haven! – I’ll be happy to take you for a swim to any of these places.

The Cow and Calf Rocks occupy the center of the map. They are a pair of rocks that pose some danger to navigation and also, at a mile off shore, represent a good long swim. A few times over the years in late summer we’ve organized a neighborhood swim race there and back, with kayak accompaniment. They are the center of the map and the edge of this world.

If you look closely across the map’s watery core, you’ll see the trace outlines of a vast fish-monster. John modelled this creature from the drawings on an early modern map that Rachel Carson used as the endpapers for the first American edition of The Sea Around Us (1951). (Carson got her images from Robert Dudley’s Dell’Arcano del Mare, an extraordinary atlas made in Florence in 1645-46 by the exiled illegitimate son of the Earl of Leicester.)

So – an inverted map of the world’s lands and seas, a local portrait of my home waters, a ghostly fish floating across the watery center, all tied together by the Cow and Calf.

What I love most about collaboration are the moments in which someone else’s work reveals back to you something you were trying to express but could not quite work out. John’s map unlocks and visualizes one of the key features of Sailing without Ahab, that the waters we swim in and sail on contain both the local and the global, entwined together, reflecting and in tension with each other. I’m so grateful to be able to have the map in the book!

Who rules the world?

Stories about the violent birth of the Roman Empire are always allegories of authority — how to get it, how to use it, and at what cost does it come. That’s how I read Virgil and Ovid, not to mention Shakespeare’s Roman plays. That’s what I saw last night on the Upper West Side in the hours before today’s torrential rainstorm.

At the West End Theatre, a cozy space upstairs at the Church of St. Paul and St. Andrew, I enjoyed a wonderfully triplicate rendition of this story. Courtesy of the brilliant experimental group Bedlam, this intense two hours without intermission mashed together Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, in which the nascent emperor gets murdered by his peers, with Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra, an 1898 play that I’d not seen before that portrays a philosophical and somewhat bloodless Caesar’s earlier encounter with the Egyptian Queen. The third portrayal of authority, however, was the most powerful – the Director of the theater company, who controls all the actors all the time, interrupting speeches and extracting confessions. Who rules the world, really? (I might note here that Bedlam’s Eric Tucker gets credited as having “adapted, directed, and designed” the production.)

Juxtapositions were the heart of the show, and the cross-casting was brilliantly managed. Andrew Rothenberg played Caesar in both storylines as well as the Director, and he was wondrously imperious, bossy, and manipulative. He doled out the egotism of Shakespeare’s proto-emperor, who is happy to remind everyone that “always I am Caesar” (1.2.211). Rothenberg was equally strong playing the more philosophical and strategic vision of control, power, and impassivity that define Shaw’s superman. But there’s no real question that the Final Boss in the play was the Director. He pushed the excellent Rajesh Bose out of the role of Caesar to grab it for himself. (Bose shifted to the Egyptian God Ra, a semi-chorus in Shaw’s play, and acquited himself very well.) The Director bossed around the naive young Cleopatra as played by Shayvawn Webster, cross-cast as an idealistic Brutus. The Director interrupted Mackenzie Moyer as Portia in the middle of her moving speech about her love for Brutus (2.1) and decided on the spot to cut the scene. (The actors protested that it’s the only real moment for a woman character in Shakespeare’s play, which is true.) The Director required confessional moments from his actors, and then belittled them about what they revealed.

I was reminded a bit of the director / casting agent / Iago figure in Keith Hamilton Cobb’s American Moor, who sat among the (mostly white and at least middle-aged) audience when I saw the show at Cherry Lane in Manhattan just before the pandemic. Power comes from positioning, and from all those structures that surround us.

Unlike in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, which in a stroke of fortune I’m going to see on Monday night from the Red Bull Theater, Caesar and Cleopatra didn’t face each other down as competing principles of power in this play. Rather, Shaw’s Caesar educated Cleopatra in the practice of power, teaching her to out-maneuver her brother and rival Ptolemy while Caesar himself defeated his Roman rival Pompey, a mask of whose pickled head in a jar makes a lively appearance in the show, including some time on an audience member’s lap. Shakespeare’s Brutus showed his political naivete, which is exactly what Shaw’s Cleopatra may be learning to outgrow. The double casting provided an interesting take on these two characters, though it also somewhat muted the moral dimensions of Brutus’s struggle.

One of the liveliest figures of the night was Bedlam regular Labod, who played a physical and effusive Cassius as well as Cleopatra’s wonderfully-named Egyptian servant Ftatateeta. (The Director makes fun of this character’s name, of course). Labod’s intensity as Cassius somewhat overwhelmed Volino-Gyetsa’s physically smaller Brutus – but their late scene together fighting and reconciling (4.4) was nicely paced. Stephen Michael Spencer made his Bedlam debut as Mark Antony and Rufio, Caesar’s military aide in the Shaw play. He chewed the scenery into paste in the funeral oration, which was nicely set up. The play opened with Caesar’s dead body already on the floor, with the conspirators getting meta-theatrical – “How many ages hence / Shall this our lofty scene…” 3.1). Spencer’s Antony started to get warmed up in his speech, and just then the Director interrupted to shift the scene to Egypt (and the Shaw play). We finally got back to that speech almost two hours later. But it was worth the wait!

Update: Before I forget I wanted to note the goofiest directoral move of the night, in which the case plays all of 2.2 – the back and forth on whether Caesar will or won’t go to the Forum, including a nice bit of manipulation of the big man’s ego by conspirator Decius Brutus – in over-the-top mafiosi accents, part The Godfather and part The Sopranos. Italians in the New Jersey waste management industry, Italians during the last days of the Roman Republic – the gag seems to have been irresistible. And lots of fun!

Maybe I just have trouble sitting for over two hours, but I might have pulled the curtain at the end of that speech when it came around again, when the lights went out and Mark Antony in darkness intoned “MIschief, thou art afoot” (3.2). But I understand that they wanted to shoehorn in the brutal death of Cinna the Poet, and Portia’s suicide, and the fight between Brutus and Cassius in act 4. The final scene of the night returned to the meta-plot of the Director, whose actors may be just about to rebel. “Go fuck yourself,” muttered Labod, no longer in character as Cassius or Ftatateeta, on his way offstage. Everyone was outraged at his brutality and cold-bloodedness. They were ready to break into open revolt –

But then the curtain closed, and the Director’s job was done, his power secure, for another night.

The Working Group has spoken, and it seems that anyone who bought champagne to toast the Age of Anthropos may have to keep it on ice. According to today’s New York Times

A committee of roughly two dozen scholars has, by a large majority, voted down a proposal to declare the start of the Anthropocene, a newly created epoch of geologic time, according to an internal announcement of the voting results seen by The New York Times.

The article clarifies that this decision was, in the words of Erle Ellis, “a narrow, technical matter for geologists,” and the vote should not be taken as a claim that humans have not disrupted the planetary ecosystem.

Ellis, who resigned in protest from the Anthropocene Working Group last year, advances the claim that the Anthropocene should better be understood as a geological “event” rather than a new (and presumably lasting) “epoch.” Ellis circulated an article by science report Paul Voosen in Science that proclaims, “The Anthropocene is Dead. Long Live the Anthropocene.”

An “event,” according to Ellis and others, can represent a less formal geological term. Its analogy would not be to long-last epochs such as the Pleistocene or even the current Holocene (now almos 12,000 years old, and still running) but rather the Great Oxygenation Event. That event, which happened around 2.5 billion years ago, saw cynanobacteria produce the first oxygen in the Earth’s atmosphere, thus making possible all forms of life that consume or process oxygen. For aerobic life forms, the GOE created a new world. For older, anaerobic life, oxygen seems mostly to have been poisonous.

Of course, the idea of the Anthropocene has long since slipped the hold of geologists, including their deliberate Working Group. I’m hardly the only lit professor who’s written books, in my case Break Up the Anthropocene (2019) with this word in the title – some of my favorites include Jeremy Davies’s The Birth of the Anthropocene (2016), Christophe Bonneuill and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz’s The Shock of the Anthropocene (2016), and Tobias Menely and Jesse Oak Taylor’s collection, Anthropocene Reading (2017).

I like Ellis’s notion of a relatively sudden Event, rather than a sedimented and more stable Epoch. I also like James Scott’s notion, advanced in Against the Grain (2017), of a “thin” Anthropocene that began when early humans started modifying their environment with fire, and later with agriculture, leading to progressively “thick” Anthropocene moments, including early modern globalization in the 16th-17c, the Industrial Revolution in the 19c, and the Great Acceleration that followed WWII in the mid-twentieth century.

Perhaps – is it too much to ask? – the twenty-first century may see some thinning of the Anthropocene event, as we transition from fossil fuels to other forms of energy? In which case the Event may still haunt us, but we won’t have entered the Epoch?

Fiasco Theater is one of my favorite local New York companies. Over the years, I’ve seen their productions of The Knight of the Burning Pestle (April 2023), Measure for Measure (2015), Twelfth Night (2017), and Two Gentlemen of Verona (2015). I missed their much-praised Cymbeline, but basically they are one of the local NYC companies that I’ll buy a ticket for whatever they play – even on a Friday night with a looming snowstorm!

Their show this winter, Pericles, isn’t everybody’s favorite Shakespeare, but it very much is mine – shipwrecks! pirates! crazy plot twists! magic! perhaps the most complex geographic itinerary (Tyre -> Antioch -> Tarsus -> Pentapolis -> more Tarsus -> Mytilene -> Ephesus) in all of Shakespeare! Even the medieval poet Gower gets a speaking part (and, in this production, a guitar). I’ve written about the heroine Marina, born during a tempest in the middle of the play, as the most aquatic and blue humanities-ish of Shakespeare’s characters.

So I was the perfect audience for Fiasco’s Pericles, which I saw at the Classic Stage Company’s home theater on East 13th St downtown. And while I did love it, as I always love the high spirits, musicality, and sheer liveliness of Fiasco’s performance style – well, a couple of things they tried didn’t seem quite to work. Perhaps because their Knight of the Burning Pestle, which I saw with students last spring, was such a triumph, I felt that a couple of things the company was trying got in their own way.

A central gambit was passing the role of Pericles himself around to multiple cast members over the course of the play. The program lists Noah Brody, Paco Tolson, Devin Haqq, and Tatiana Wechsler as playing “Pericles and others.” I usually like that gambit, which I’ve encountered a few times before, above all in Dziecki Theatre’s extraordinary Makbet, which I loved so much when I saw it performed in a shipping container in 2018 that I brought them to our seminar room at St. John’s in 2019. But perhaps because Pericles shifts its scenes and its theatrical modes so often – if we’re in Antioch, it’s classical incest tragedy, in Pentapolis, a medieval tournament, Ephesus has a seedy faux-Elizabethan underworld, &c – the shifting of the actors jarred a bit. I love the performers – perhaps Tatiana Wechshler, cross-cast as the wicked Dionyza who tries to murder Marina, gave her Pericles the most interesting spin, though Devin Haqq’s final Pericles was also stately and powerful.

The other gambit, which by now I think of as a Fiasco trademark since their gloriously sea-shanty-filled Twelfth Night, which rivals Pestle as my favorites of their productions, is music. Since Marina restores her father’s identity through music in the play’s almost-climactic scene (they still have to make one last trip to Ephesus to restore her mother), the company’s emphasis on music seemed a likely fit. Perhaps I caught them on a bad night – Andy Grotelueschen, who made gloriously high-spirited runs as good king Simonides and Bolt the pandar, mentioned to the woman sitting next to me before the show started that the show is just out of previews and they are still “changing some things” – but the music felt a bit off to me. Ben Steinfeld’s guitar-troubadour Gower was fun and a bit goofy, which I think fits the old-fashioned tetrameter Shakespeare wrote for the part. But a few other songs, especially one that converted Marina’s lament on her nurse Lychordia’s grave (4.1) into something like a show tune, didn’t really fit for me. I’m very rarely a fussy professor – by all means change the script, that’s what it’s there for! – but I winced a few times.

Maybe Pericles, especially compared with comic gems like Twelth Night and even the bizarre but structurally coherent Pestle, is just too wayward for the regular Fiasco treatment? Or maybe I was worried about the snowstorm, which didn’t start until after my long drive back to CT anyway, despite not thinking I was?

Fiasco’s Pericles is up in its cozy downtown theater through March 24! Go see it! Tell me what you think!

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

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

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

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

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

Film Review: Aquaman 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

January (7)

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

The Brain’s Way of Healing by Norman Doidge

Aquaman and the War Against Oceans by Ryan Poll

The Value of Ecocriticism by Timothy Clark

Appleseed by Matt Bell

Risingtidefallingstar by Philip Hoare

Pirate Enlightenment by David Graeber

February (8)

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

We Are All Whalers by Michael Moore

Fully Automated Luxury Communism by Aaron Bastani

Storm in a Teacup by Helen Czerski

I Know There Are So Many of You by Allain Badiou

The Wife of Bath: A Biography by Marion Turner

Blue Jeans by Carolyn Purnell

Racism without Racists by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva

March (11)

The Wife of Willesden by Zadie Smith

Mad About Shakespeare by Jonathan Bate

The Lodger by Charles Nicholl

Reading Underwater Wreckage by Killian Quigley

Solarities: Seeking Energy Justice by the After Oil Collective

Radical Wordsworth by Jonathan Bate

Portable Magic by Emma Smith

God Human Animal Machine by Meghan O’Gieblyn

Spare by Prince Harry

Water Nature and Culture by Vernoica Strang

Fly-Fishing by Chris Schaberg

April (10)

Palo Alto by Malcolm Harris

Mushroom by Sara Rich

Hamnet by Maggie Farrell

The Thinking Root by Dan Beachy-Quick

The N. of the Narcissus by Joseph Conrad

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

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

The Environmental Unconscious by Steven Swarbrick

Not Too Late by Rebecca Solnit &c

Hydronarratives: Water, Environmental Justice by Matthew Henry

May (8)

Briny by Mandy Haggith

*a New English Grammar by Jeff Dolven

The Earth Transformed by Peter Frankopan

Paved Paradise by Henry Grabar

Traffic by Ben Smith

William Shakespeare: A Brief Life by Paul Menzer

The Lightkeepers by Abby Geni

Kitchen Music by Lesley Harrison

June (8)

Bright Star, Green Light by Jonathan Bate

Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton

Borges, Between History and Eternity by Hernan Diaz

Fire Weather by John Vaillant

Noah’s Arkive by Jeffrey Cohen and Julian Yates

The Wager by David Grann

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte

July (13)

The Swimmer by Patrick Barkham

How to Be Animal by Melanie Challenger

The Charisma of Animals by Greg Maertz

Hanging Out by Sheila Liming

Running by Lindsay Freedman

The Heat Will Kill You by Jeff Goodell

Grief is the Thing With Feathers by Max Porter

Does the Earth Care? by Mick Smith and Jason Young

Sea Change by Christina Gerhardt

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera

Land Sickness by Nikolaj Schultz

The Deepest Map by Laura Trethewey

Open Book in Ways of Water by Adam Wolfond

August (11)

Dreamscapes and Dark Corners by Melissa Ridley Elmes

Saving Time by Jenny Odell

On Wilder Seas by Nikki Marmery

A Blue New Deal by Chris Armstrong

The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy

Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy

The Great White Bard by Farah Karim-Cooper

A Book of Waves by Stefan Helmreich

The Quickening by Elizabeth Rush

Adventure: An Argument for LImits by Chris Schaberg

The Big Melt by Jeff Goodell

September (16)

The Rigor of Angels by William Eggleston

Angry Weather by Friederike Otto

The Man Who Invented Fiction by William Eggleston

Dayswork by Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel

Naamah by Sarah Blake

Gramsci at Sea by Sharad Chari

Shakespeare in a Divided America by James Shapiro

Reading Pride and Prejudice by Tricia Matthew

Undoing the Grade by Jesse Stommel

Oceaness by Michael Blackstock

The Pole by J.M. Coetzee

Contested Will by James Shapiro

Her Lost Language by Jenny Mitchell

Youth by J.M. Coetzee

Tragedy, the Greeks, and Us by Simon Critchley

Summertime by J.M. Coetzee

October (13)

The Iliad trans Emily Wilson

Our Fragile Moment by Michael Mann

No More Fossils by Dominic Boyer

Anthropocene Blues by John Lane

Black Earth by Osip Mandelshtam

The Maniac by Benjamin Labatut

Venomous Lumpsucker by Ned Beauman

War and the Iliad by Simone Weil and Rachel Bespaloff

Upstream: Selected Essays by Mary Oliver

The Blue Machine by Helen Czerski

Energy at the End of the World by Laura Watts

Aquatopia by May Joseph and Sofina Varino

Sandy Hook by Elizabeth Williamson

November (12)

White Holes by Carlo Rovelli

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

Tides by Jonathan White

Cosmodolphins by Mette Bryld and Nina Lykke

Anaximader and the Birth of Science by Carlo Rovelli

The Bathysphere Book by Brad Fox

Democracy Awakening by Heather Cox Richardson

Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz

Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe

Silent Whale Letters by Ella Finer and Vibeke Mascini

Sand Talk by Tyson Yunkaporta

Helgoland by Carlo Ravelli

December (9)

The Cause of All Nations by Don Doyle

Baumgartner by Paul Auster

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

Ways of Being by James Bridle

Voices in the Ocean by Susan Casey

The Sea: A Philosophical Encounter by David Farrell Krell

Number Go Up by Zeke Faux

AI and Writing by Sid Dobrin

Will to Power : The Great Courses Lectures by Robert Solomon

Total books read in 2023 = 126

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

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

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

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

Ice Falling Down as Ecocollapse

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

Atlantis and the Anthropocene

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

Water Flowing Up

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

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

Orm and Eco-Humor

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

Undersea Witch King of Angmar Means What?

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

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

Black Manta Who?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eleanor Catton, Birnam Wood (FSG, 2023)

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

John Vaillant, Fire Weather (Knopf, 2023)

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

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

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

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