Steve Mentz

UPDATE: Here’s a link to a video recording.

There’s a soap bubble velocity to Zoomlandia. For three days you’re down deep, inside a small but intense mini-conference, hearing words and parsing images, making connections and imagining futures. Then — pop! — the Zoom ends. Now it’s just another chilly spring day on the Connecticut Shoreline, and the dogs need to go out.

Sea Sense is done, but so many treasures are still sloshing about in my watery brain. I’ll try to get a few things into words before it all dries up.

I’d been looking forward to this event for some time. Part of a series of collaborations between different campuses of the University of California, the Oecologies network, and the Earth, Sea, Sky group, among others, it was great an opportunity to hear new eco-work across different disciplines. I was particularly eager for the opening roundtable about Kevin Dawson’s amazing book Undercurrents of Power, which I discovered only recently. The historians on the panel, of course, had known this work on early modern African aquatic cultures since a precursor article had appeared a decade ago, but it was new to me when I found it last year. Dawson’s book has opened up the way I’m thinking about the connections among blue humanities, Black Atlantic, and contemporary Critical Race Studies. Dawson’s book, along with my longtime favs Edouard Glissant, Paul Gilroy, Herman Melville, Olaudah Equiano, and many others (including Shakespeare!), formed the backbone of the grad seminar I taught this spring under the title “Black and Blue Theory.” It’s been a fun ride, and I look forward to reading what my students give me next week.

My Thursday night talk, “Swimming out of Africa, 50,000 BCE to The Tempest,” gave me a chance to return to Shakespeare’s most famous maritime play, which was central to the start of my watery turn in At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean (2009). (In fact, I first pitched that project to the Shakespeare Now! series as an entire book about the storm scene that opens the play. Fortunately good editors convinced me to write about other plays also!) I stretched my Zoom skills and range of source material in this talk in order to imagine swimming as expansion, diffusion, and engagement with watery spaces. My favorites parts to present may have been about Drexciya, since I don’t often get to play techno or hip hop music during talks. But I also tried to dive deep in time, by engaging with scholarship on the marine foraging habits of homo sapiens when the species first left the African savannah around 50,000 years ago. A vision of the Kelp Highway — the coastal routes that early human communities followed out of Africa to every continent except Antarctica — undergirded my talk about Shakespeare’s multiple categories of swimmers, including Caliban the tide pool poet, Ferdinand the muscle-bound water fighter, Trinculo the duck, Stephano the (bad) sailor, and Ariel the flyer-diver-flamer.

I also did a new thing for me, which was to expand upon the usual practice of a land acknowledgment and use this form as an opportunity to think harder and at greater length about the history of my own coastline. I ended up digging into the story of Little Liberia, a thriving 19c multiracial community in Bridgeport, CT. The talk ended up having a lot of moving parts, but I hope that too speaks to the experience of swimming, which overloads some senses, especially feeling and taste, while disorienting others such as sight.

But enough about me! Kevin Dawson’s wonderful round-table revealed his personal story of coming to be a water historian, after growing up as a Black surfer and free diver in Southern California. I was struck, as I would be again a few times over the three days of the conference, at how often water scholars talk about our own water biographies and ongoing practices — Melody Jue’s and Stacy Alaimo’s scuba, Dan Brayton’s sailing, my swimming, &c. This work aims to use academic methods and habits of thought to capture sensations and feelings that are visceral, physical, and hard to catch. I was struck too, at how almost the last comment of the conference, by the artist Kathie Foley-Mayer, described her sense of the inability of words to capture ideas about history and Ocean Memory. To write in this mode surfaces human weakness and vulnerability, whatever academic culture wishes us to perform in terms of rigor or mastery. There is no human mastery or dominion in the sea, which idea I was reminded of again by Kevin Dawson’s comments about swimming as a means toward freedom for transported Africans. I’m very excited to learn that he’s doing a project now on maritime maroon communities!

The second day began with the visual opulence of Conchophilia, a not-yet-published multi-authored book of Art History that explores shell collecting and decorating in early modern Europe. I always love hearing Art Historians speak intently about visual structures and patterns to which I’m not trained to attend. I especially love the sense that the images of shells and shell-made artifacts indicated what I might call a sea-thinking, an effort to salvage and trace human and nonhuman connections to oceanic space. I’m very excited for this book, with contributions by the four speakers I heard this weekend, Claudia Swan, Marisa Bass, Henneke Grootenboer, and Anne Goldgar.

I always love hearing my friends and admired colleagues Jeffrey Cohen and Julian Yates talk about their Ark Project, and really the only disappointing thing about their co-presentation on Friday night was that it could not be followed by Dark n Stormies & extended philosophical conversation at some likely dockside dive. I’ve heard them speak about and read bits in process of this project for several years. What struck me most intensely this time was the generative quality of their thinking and writing. Every time an interpretive fork or question of meaning arose in their discussion of multiple images and ideas about Noah’s ark, they framed their responses in the most open, dynamic, and plurality-making ways. (On how this mode might require choosing the Ark’s raven over the dove, see this great recent essay of theirs in Emergence Magazine.) I’ve long thought of these two writers, separately and together, as representing some of the best work in eco-minded premodern studies. I especially responded this weekend, after these long months of isolation, to their generosity toward their readers, their material, and everyone who grapples with questions of refuge and safety.

The last day of the conference gave space for the graduate students of UC Irvine and UCLA to showcase new work that engages with blue humanities paradigms. As has been happening often recently, I was dazzled by the variety, brilliance, and acute insights with which an emerging generation of scholars approaches these materials and methods. I hope my admiration for this work came through in my Zoom-questions, as I was again reminded this weekend that however well Zoom manages primary presentations, its video boxes support less well the less structured aspects of conference engagement, from Q&A (which Zoom manages OK) to post-talk chit-chat (which it doesn’t manage well) to happy hour philosophizing (alas). But suffice it to say that I loved these talks. Nicolyna Enriquez’s deft analysis of ship graffiti on inland churches in Byzantine Crete spoke to the sea as connection and possibly fantasy. Margaret Oakley’s great reading of early microscopic images of complex life in Thames water suggested how watery knowledge can be socialized, marketed, and yet remain strange. Abigale Berry discussed Bosch’s “Ship of Fools” and quarantine lazarettos as spaces in which water serves to alienate and isolate, sometimes successfully and sometimes not. Gregory Sattler’s analysis of 9-10c Chinese mercantile connections provided a dense view into the premodern networks of maritime Asia, as he also showed how recent discoveries in underwater archeology are rewriting what we know about Chinese maritime history. Lastly, and inspiringly, Kathie Foley-Meyer discussed the underwater art of Jason deCaires Taylor and other artistic efforts to capture Ocean Memory. She also mentioned Drexciya, which wrapped the conversation back to the opening day. I appreciate that while my analogies between Drexciya and Shakespeare’s The Tempest were in part about the capacity of sea poets to grasp something about the sea, Foley-Meyer’s artistic examples were reminders of what lies beyond words.

Such a flood it was! Thanks to all who joined in Zoomlandia, and especially to the brilliant and generous organizational work by Bronwen Wilson, Lyle Massey, and Julia Lupton. Plus seamless behind the scenes work by Ryan Gurney, among many others!

Very much hoping to see all these wonderful people, including all the Zoomers, at a likely beach sometime in a post-pandemic world!

I closed out of the dazzling #NextGenPlen while standing at my sink washing dishes.

I listened to the experimental genius of “Becoming Undisciplined,” the Eco-Race crossover panel organized by Hillary Eklund and Debapriya Sarkar, featuring Jennifer Park, Ayanna Thompson, and Kim Hall as chair, while tromping squishy paths through the woods in coastal Connecticut’s mud season.

I caught (most of) many other sessions, including the inspiring “Walk the Talk” pedagogy session, Keith Hamilton Cobb’s roundtable on American Moor, and the quite moving three-headed talks by our Pandemic Presidents, with lots of help from my household’s four-legged friends, including Blue, a 9 week old puppy who needs to go outside pretty much all the time, and Indi, a 2-year old big dog who doesn’t want Blue hogging all the attention. (Among other things, I figured out exactly where in my yard the home wifi cuts out!)

I was more responsible in my roles in the two sessions I had speaking parts in. I did sneak Blue onto the Zoom-screen for a (requested) cameo during the generous and generative Workshop in Poetics and Pedagogy organized by Joanne Diaz, which was my primary contribution in #shax2021. When I chaired the “Shakespeare’s Witness to Catastrophe” panel, organized by Erin Kelly & featuring great talks by Julian Yates, Craig Dionne, and Sharon O’Dair, I was as professional as Zoom enables — neither puppies nor hiking boots! (No shoes at all, actually.)

There’s a strange and distinctive mental exhaustion that follows SAA each year, one that I usually process while on a late-night or red eye flight, often nursing a multi-day hangover that I was better at ignoring during the former century. This year’s Zoomlandia edition of #shax20201 made me miss the chance encounters, over-long Starbucks lines, and early morning walks in unfamiliar cities. I especially missed Austin, both its breakfast tacos and the cool waters of Barton Springs. But I wonder — are there things to value, to preserve, even to love about Zoom-SAA?

Two utopian visions swirled around my imagination as I listened to extraordinary academic talks while walking the dogs —

1. This year’s program, which its emphases on pedagogy and social justice, created more perhaps than any previous conference an SAA that’s about the worlds in which most of us teach — worlds that are brilliant and also compromised, rewarding and also confining. Perhaps because the Zoom-verse is the only place I’ve been teaching for the past 12 months, inhabiting the Hollywood Squares with my SAA buddies felt more closely connected to my teaching self than it sometimes does. And not only bc it turns out that SAA-ers, like my students, often mute their videos so I’m standing in my house talking at a sea of empty boxes!
2. Secondly, this year’s SAA was the only one I’ve gone to, in an SAA history of regular attendance since the mid-1990s, in which I caught a decent amount of the SAA experience without ditching my family care duties on Easter weekend. I won’t say I wasn’t sometimes distracted, washing dishes with Shax-brilliance in my earbuds. But I wasn’t absent — and too often in the past I have been.

I’m pretty sure in the end neither of these visions will lead me to future Zoom-tastic events, at least not for SAA, my personal mothership of academic conferences. But there are, I think, some things we can learn from our shipwreck onto the Island of Zoom.

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One event that I missed because of family duties was the Town Hall, since I couldn’t manage jamboard + BreakOutRoom while chasing the puppy and cooking dinner. I don’t have deeply-considered thoughts about the Luncheon (which I usually go to) or the Dance (which I’ve never attended, probably bc I’m too dorky and/or self-conscious). But I do have some thoughts about how to help the SAA adapt to the 21st century, which I’ll drop quickly here —

1. The Board of Trustees should double or maybe even triple in size, with dedicated spots reserved for grad students, Early Career Researchers, and NTT faculty. Maybe also there should be closer attention to geographical equity. The extra capacity on the Board might focus at least in part on increasing transparency and communication with the membership. I love all the recent initiatives and collaborations too, esp with teachers and performers.
2. The current two-phase review of the Program, in which the Program Committee spends months and hours recruiting panels and seminars, a significant percentage of which are later rejected by the Board, should be streamlined. There’s no reason not to trust the Program Committee to finish the job itself. Maybe more Board members could work on the Program Committee, but I’d trust the Committee to create the Program.

To be clear, I don’t mean in either of these suggestions to criticize Boards or Programs past or present; all current and past Board members are Shakespeareans whom I admire and respect. I’m trying to think about how to enable the SAA to best deal with the increasing size and professional diversity of our community. I think we can be more representative than we currently are, especially of members without research-intensive faculty positions. I also think we’ve been moving in that direction recently in visible and productive ways.

But those are just my thoughts, which no one needs to listen to!

The things I most loved about this year’s program were the visible efforts to engage with pedagogies of social justice, and also to bring together discourses in our research that are too often separate. At our best, I think we managed to do those two things at the same time, but I’ll think about them one at a time.

First, pedagogy – this year was my first (and so far only, I must admit) year that my main event was a Workshop on pedagogy, organized by Joanne Diaz. I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect. I knew fewer of the participants than I am used to in SAA sessions, since I mostly attend eco-seminars populated by the usual eco-suspects, most of whom I have known for years. Joanne gave our group pretty open prompts to write about how we teach close reading in today’s classrooms, and the dozen of us circulated a wide and stimulating array of tricks, tropes, and techniques that will influence my classroom practice starting — well probably starting tomorrow, actually. But what was especially moving about this workshop-seminar was the sense of shared endeavor, of mutual support and exchange. I’ve never before had a spontaneous Google Doc appear during an SAA session, so that we could share ideas and notes beyond the session. I was also touched by how eager everyone was to stay after the two hours traffic of our session to continue exchanging ideas. It’s a Zoom-cliche to encourage our pets to gate-crash our screens, I suppose, but I enjoyed bringing my little Blue to the session, as well as seeing many other kitties. Alas for the after-conversation at the hotel bar or over Austin’s famous tacos! I hope this group can re-assemble in Jacksonville for an in-person visit.

Second, on the subject of bringing Shax discourses together, I’ve rarely been so inspired by any SAA presentation as by the “Becoming Undisciplined” panel that entangled ecocriticism and Premodern Critical Race Theory. I’ve been hoping to see more of that kind of overlap since the double plenary panels at #shakeass2017 that mashed up Queer Ecocrit with the Color of Membership. That memorable morning in shakenado-distressed Atlanta the eco panel was the warm-up act to the PCRS headliner. This year in e-Austin the two discourses merged, as all four presentations combined into a single flowing exchange of ideas, hopes, and imagined futures.

My strongest impression from this year’s “Becoming Undisciplined” panel was its emphasis on “unlearning” as well as learning, on entering into unfamiliar discourses with humility and generosity, and advocating a collective rejection of the will-to-mastery that structures both the white settler colonialism of American history and, more narrowly, the academic discourse of Shakespeare studies. None of us can do it all ourselves, each of us will likely make mistakes, but in collaboration new things can happen. To be a sympathetic, albeit dispersed Zoom-audience at this great panel, as at the blazing Whiteness panel or the Witness to Catastrophe eco-panel that I chaired on the first day of SAA, was, from afar and in strangely mediated solitude, to imagine collectively, to enter into the project of learning and unlearning with which Hillary Eklund, Debapriya Sarkar, and Jennifer Park approached this discursive crossing, and also to follow the visionary leadership of Ayanna Thompson and Kim Hall. At the risk of sounding too Shax-normie (which I am), it reminded me of those epilogue moments, when Puck, Rosalind, Prospero, or King Henry’s Chorus enjoins us to give our hands. “Let your indulgence,” says the bad man, “set me free.” I have no illusion that the joining of hands and indulgences can redeem the colonialism and racism that my white flesh is heir to, nor that my engagement with the work of my colleagues gets me out of doing the hard work myself. But there are collective moments in collective events at which glimpses of better worlds appear. I caught a few of them this year, on Zoom.

There’s much more I could say about #shax2021, about the moving and speculative eco-session I chaired on the first day and the lively still-going conversations it generated, about the fire and inspiration of the “White World-Making” panel organized by Arthur Little, about the SAA-closing (for non-dancers like me) genius of the #NextGenPlen, with its brilliant tiny papers and expansive, generous conversation. So much to overfill my e-cup!

As spring springs slowly in the chilly Northeastern USA, and my own pandemic practices begin to thaw as well (I’m #teamModerna, so I have to wait an extra week for my second dose), I’ve been thinking about what practices and habits I’d like to keep as quarantine ends. I’m hopeful about short daily meditations and black coffee at dawn, which the new puppy’s enthusiasm has disrupted but not entirely derailed. I want to keep thinking about access, both for students and conference goers, though I also very much hope to go places in person sometime fairly soon. In a way the enforced e-discourse, which has made it as easy to communicate with colleagues in Europe and Australia as New York and Massachusetts, has opened my horizons, including beyond early modern studies. But for my #shaxbudies I am greatly looking forward to celebrating 50 years of SAA in Florida next spring.

After the vax, Shax in Jax! (To borrow a triplet from LIza Blake on Facebook this morning.)

A pleasiure to e-see those few of you who I managed to e-connect with — and for everyone else, I’ll see you at the hotel bar, local beaches, fishing boats, or riverwalk cafes next year!

Back at the end of 2020, I circulated a survey, with the hope that some #bluehumanities people would have time and inclination to share their thoughts with me as I get ready to write An Introduction to the Blue Humanities for Routledge. I was so pleased the range, insight and brilliance that flowed onto my Google doc! I won’t reveal any names, but I wanted to share some of the ideas these generous people have been helping me think.

The most surprising and pleasing thing about the thirty-eight responses was the wide range of disciplines represented. Like most academics, I’ve spent a substantial part of my career, and all of my training, inside a somewhat narrow disciplinary community, in my case English literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I’m simply dazzled by the wide range of specialties that respond to the call of the blue humanities, from scholars who work in Environmental History to Media Studies to Archeology, Religious Studies, artistic practice-led research, and many other things. To the extent that I’m thinking of the group who responded to the survey as a kind of volunteer first audience for the book I’m writing, I’m humbled by all the things that these people know that I don’t, and I’m thinking about how to write a book that might be interesting and useful for all of them.

With that in mind, I come away from the roughly 9,000 words of survey responses with two somewhat opposed ideas bubbling around in my imagination. The first idea, which mostly dominates my water-thinking all the time, considers water as dynamism and pleasure, through such things as the famous “oceanic feeling,” the biological connection between water and life, and also the way water functions as respite from the dry isolation of terrestrial habits. But it’s also true that water, especially salt water, represents an alien space into which human bodies enter only tentatively, at some risk, and for a short time. In the first sense, the blue promises ecstatic immersion. In the second, it threatens human bodies with drowning. Love and strife, as the philosopher says.

My sense is that these entwined and opposed sensations, blue promise and blue threat, float together throughout water stories and waterscapes. I’m hoping my book can draw out the tension between these ideas of water-human relationships by sketching some broad tendencies through which different kinds of water, in different places and times, have become entangled with human ideas, practices, histories, and forms of art and culture. I’m hoping to have something to say about how that has come about, with attention to environmental and social justice and access. I appreciate how much the survey has given me ideas, directions, and suggested readings for how to get started on this task.

Lastly, I’ll point to a thought from the survey that will serve as a caution on my shoulder over the next eighteen or so months before my deadline with the press – the suggestion not to overly romanticize the wild blue. That’s a good thought, and a welcome corrective against my personal tendencies to get Romantic when faced with clear or cold or frothy waters. Romanticism, and especially the imperial egotism of the Romantic sublime, seems a particular lure and trap for water-writers, or at least I feel it to be so for me. I hope to avoid its rocks and gyres, while also saying something about its alluring songs!

I very much wish 2021 was shaping up to be the sort of year in which I could plan to buy drinks for each person who contributed to the survey, in New York or Connecticut or some far-off shore. I’d love to be able to plan long or short conversations with anyone else who’s interested in the #bluehumanities. Maybe some of those things will still be possible, in the summer or fall, or at least on Zoom. Here’s hoping!

After a week’s extra winter quiet, the Spring 2021 semester at St. John’s starts today — but this year I’m not worried about driving down to Queens in pre-dawn darkness and possible snow. Instead, my commute remains just four steps from bedroom to home office and my worries are about the reliability of my internet and how much my dog will bark during class.

Like many, I’m hanging by my fingernails as this pandemic year grinds on. I’ve learned some things about online teaching that I think will help — more YouTube lectures and clips, fewer Discussion boards, more shared Google docs! But I don’t have any illusion that Zoomin’ — or I guess WebEx-ing, since that’s the platform St. John’s uses — can capture the human engagement of the classroom. Online teaching can do some things pretty well, I have long believed in using online tools for all my classes, and some of the e-tricks I’ve employed this past year will likely migrate to my future classes even when we re-occupy classrooms. But this year has reminded me that the most powerful technologies we have in education are human voices and shared presence, the calls to attention that people make by being in shared spaces. I miss that, and I look forward to getting back to it.

But — not this semester! Instead I’ve got three fun classes that I’ll quickly preview here. Two are synchronous online, meaning that I’ve got scheduled “live” Zoom classes for the whole crew each week. One is asynchronous, meaning that everything happens remotely, at whatever times students choose to engage.

English 2210: British Fantasy from Beowulf to Harry Potter

My asynchronous class, which should I hope draw in some non-majors, takes the opportunity created by Maria Dhavana Headley’s great new feminist and slang-y translation of Beowulf — “Bro! Tell me we still know how to speak of kings!” — to investigate the medieval roots of the British fantasy novels with which so many of us have grown up. For me that means Tolkien, and for many of my students, as well as my own kids, that means Rowling’s Harry Potter books. Without entirely breaking the spells this books have cast on us as young readers, we’ll look into questions of racism and sexism in fantasy, think about what heroes & monsters & wizards & witches can say to the twenty-first century, and consider how books like these are changing as they continue to be written today.

English 3140: Shakespeare: What Should We Do with Othello?

This spring’s iteration of my regular Shakespeare class, which usually draws both English and Education majors, focuses mostly on a single play, Othello, which is both a work of canonical genius and a play whose racism continues to unsettle audiences, readers, and performers. By reading the play in dialogue with contemporary creative responses by Toni Morrison, Tracy Chevalier, Djanet Sears, and Keith Hamilton Cobb, as well as Shakespeare’s sources, contemporary critical essays, and a couple of other Shakespeare plays, we’ll dig into what makes Othello so powerful, so disturbing, and so meaningful in 2021.

English 140: Black and Blue: Oceans and Migrations in the African Diaspora, 50,000 BCE to the Present

My spring grad seminar will combine two of my favorite intellectual threads. Bringing together the discourses of the blue, or “oceanic,” humanities with the history of race and Critical Race Theory, this course asks how oceans and race have shaped and continue to shape human culture. Readings in history and critical theory from the Francophone Caribbean writer Edouard Glissant to British historian Paul Gilroy to “human geographer” Kathyrn Yussof, among many others, will entwine themselves around the greatest American novel of whiteness and the ocean, Moby-Dick, plus a series of sea poems from Shakespeare to Emily Dickinson to Derek Walcott. I wish we could all go to the beach together, as I’ve done sometimes in the past with ocean-themed grad seminars, but I’m looking forward to this one even in the Zoom-world!

Coming into this New Year, I’m thinking about the blue humanities. That’s not unusual, I suppose, since I’ve been thinking about little else for the past decade, but my plan is to concentrate in 2021.

As a treat and indulgence, at the end of last year I asked a local Short Beach graphic designer to help me create this Blue Humanities logo. What will I use it for? It’s hard to say. Will there be t-shirts, coffee mugs, or swim caps? Maybe I’ll put together a conference? A cocktail party? An open-water swim? Those things will be possible again someday, right?

The process of putting the design together has led me to a few thoughts, which I’ll share in these early days of the year.

The Pacific is the center of the world.

The easiest part of the design was choosing a perspectival view of our blue planet. If the image does nothing beyond reminding anyone who sees it of the size of the Pacific Ocean, it will do what I want it to do. The Pacific occupies roughly one-third of the planet’s total surface area, more than all the land masses combined, When I look at that vast blue space framed by the tentative fingers of Asia, Australia, and the Americas, my personal Anglo-American and Atlantic background put me in a difficult position to make sense of a global blue humanities. I want this Pacific-forward image to remind and challenge me to think beyond what I know.

It’s hard to be both global and anti-imperial.

Earlier drafts of the image had the two words sprawled out across the oceanic blue, showing in their letterforms just a hint of the planet’s curving surface. In the end I thought writing on the water looked too imperialist, too much a reminder of fantasies of “conquering the oceans” that I want to move past. I don’t have any illusions about the ocean’s histories of conquest, slavery, piracy, and other forms of violence. But I am hoping to encourage ideas about plurality, fluid motion, circulation, and exchange. “Wet globalization” contains many stories, and I hope it can create new ones also.

Words fit awkwardly onto watery spaces.

That said, the design I ended up with, with the phrase “blue humanities” encircling the watery globe, still carries a whiff of domination that makes me uneasy. I don’t want the blue humanities to be a language of conquest! I’d also rather not create too much uniformity — but I didn’t think I could pull off a design that also flashed out alternative phrases like “hydrocriticism,” “ocean studies,” or “thallassography”!

“Meditation and water are wedded for ever.”

What I enjoy about this logo, and what I hope I’ll keep enjoying as I play with and deploy it, is its spur to the imagination. I’m a language-focused thinker. I don’t draw or play music, and in truth I don’t even watch movies or Netflix very much. My thinking is mostly about and with and in words, sometimes as academic arguments with footnotes and bibliographies, sometimes as dashed-off blog posts or tweets, increasingly in this year of pandemic isolation as short poems. What I want from this image of the world’s water is a new object to help me think about our oceanic planet. I’m looking at it now and thinking about what it shows and also what it excludes — the swirling water vapor in the atmosphere, the water inside living bodies, the massive subterranean caches beneath the planet’s crust. There’s a lot of water in this image, and a lot of water that’s not represented.

More blue humanities posts to come in 2021!

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)