Steve Mentz

[Cross-posted from the St John’s English blog – 2/23/23]

Sometimes the research and scholarship that we professors do takes us far away from our campus in Queens. I’m back in Queens this semester after spending fall ’22 as a research fellow at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich, Germany. I want to tell my St. John’s community about what happened on the other side of the pond.

A quick note first about the purpose behind this sorts of trips. It’s not that I don’t love teaching SJU students and working with our community in New York. I might note, too, that, through the magic of Zoomtopia, I stayed in contact with several graduate students working on long-term projects while I was overseas. I was part of a remote dissertation defense in October (during my isolation period while not-too-sick with Covid), and I picked up a new McNair undergraduate student mentee while I was away. But the research life of any professor is global in scope, and the insights and networks that I connected with during my time in Europe were massively stimulating, not just for my published research agenda but also for reinvigorating my teaching and community support work here in NYC.

During my leave in F22, I was a residential fellow at the Rachel Carson Center in Germany. I lived in the “Landhaus” in the Bavarian countryside, in an old family farmhouse that has recently been retrofitted to host ten international scholars. We each had our own bedrooms and bathrooms – that was very handy during my Covid isolation! – but we shared a kitchen and often cooked and ate together. The other fellows spanned the globe – Akin from Nigeria, Tamara from Sri Lanka (by way of Cambridge University in the UK), others from India, Hawai’i, California, Wales, different parts of Germany, and elsewhere. There was some friendly tension during the World Cup, especially when the USA beat England 1-1 (a soccer joke), but it was great to have a window into intellectual and academic life around the world. Probably the least concrete but most valuable aspect of this fellowship was seeing how scholars from widely different backgrounds share ideas, methods, and points of view.

The Rachel Carson Center itself, which has its main office in downtown Munich, is the brainchild of Professor Christof Mauch, a German historian who specializes in the environmental history of America. Christof enjoys explaining the name that he chose for the center by saying that most academic organizations in Germany are named for old white German men, and his choice of Rachel Carson, an American woman and public environmentalist hero, distinguishes the kind of work he wants the RCC to support. The center brings together scholars from various places at different career stages, from MA and PhD students to visiting and permanent faculty. Now that I’ve been a residential fellow, I am automatically enrolled as a member of the RCC Society of Fellows, which means that I will stay in contact with the center and possibly participate in and/or help organize future events.

The RCC revolves around a series of weekly events in and near Munich. Each of the fellows gives a public lunchtime lecture on a Thursday. (Here’s a link to mine on the RCC YouTube channel, from November 17.) The center also hosts weekly works-in-progress sessions on Tuesdays. I organized two of those Tuesday events, one on an emerging project of mine about poetry and Moby-Dick in November, and a spontaneous memorial session in October that we shoe-horned into the schedule when we learned of the death, on Oct 9, of the great French environmental philosopher Bruno Latour. Both events brought together different parts of the RCC community to talk about shared ideas, in the case of the Latour session, and about my work in progress, in the November session.

The RCC also hosts public lectures and multiple small events and conferences. In early October, just a few days after I arrived, I attended an amazing day-long conference on the “noosphere,” an environmental concept invented by the French Jesuit philosopher Teilhard de Chardin and elaborated by the Soviet ecologist Vladimir Vernadsky. One of the major speakers at the conference was a Russian environmental historian who had recently, with several of her graduate students, fled Russia in the aftermath of the invasion of Ukraine. In fact, one notable thing about being in Germany during the fall of ’22 was how much closer the Ukrainian conflict felt, from the presence of refugees that made housing for international PhD students hard to find to anxieities about the price of keeping apartments warm during the winter. I remember meeting a very cute corgi dog on the street, and having the owner explain proudly, in really quite good English, that this was a “Ukraine dog,” who had come into exile with her to Germany after the invasion.

The central academic work that I undertook at the RCC was advancing my research agenda, which focuses on the long cultural relationships between humans and water in all its forms. The “blue humanities,” which is what I’ve been calling this academic discourse since the late 2000s, seems alive and thriving in Europe, especially in centers for environmental studies like the RCC. I am happy to report that during my semester in Germany, I published two new articles about the current state of the blue humanities, “A Poetics of Planetary Water,” in the new international Coastal Studies and Society Journal, and “Blue Humanities,” in the massive Palgrave Handbook of Critical Posthumanism, edited by a teach of scholars including Stefan Herbrechter of Heidelberg University.

My primary accomplishment, however, was completing the manuscript of An Introduction to the Blue Humanities, which will appear from Routledge Publishing in July 2023. This book, which will be the first textbook published in this thriving new academic subfield, aims to introduce scholars and students to the features, methods, and benefits of thinking with water across all its forms and histories. Many people I met in Europe this past fall seemed eager to use it in their teaching!

Finally, I was extremly pleased to publish, during my time in Germany, my first-ever purely creative work, the poetry chapbook Swim Poems, published by Ghostbird Press in October. I received the author copies of the poetry book exactly one day before I tested positive for Covid, so I had the company of that lovely little volume during my week of isolation on the farm.

In addition to these publications, I tried to circulate as widely as I could when I was in Europe, sharing my ideas and being in dialogue with faculty and students at environmental humanities centers throughout the continent. This travel was exhausting and exhilarating. I ended up giving six public lectures and multiple workshops in five countries: first in the lovely medieval town of Poitiers, France, in October; twice in Germany, at the RCC in November and at the University. Of Bremen near the Baltic coast in December; a keynote lecture from the tip of a surf-swept peninsula in Peniche, Portugal (just down the coast from Nazare, where they surf the 100-foot waves) on Thanksgiving Day; another public lecture at the Greenhouse in Stavenger, Norway, in early December; and a last lecture at the Environmental Humanities program at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice in mid-December, just before I came home. The Stavanger trip was particularly exciting, not only because I’d never been to Norway, but also because the very active Environmental Humanities program there (“the Greenhouse”) was teaching its first-ever Blue Humanities course to European graduate students, at which I’d been invited to be the inaugural guest professor.

One thing that struck me about how humanities research in Europe differs from United States was the number of multi-year, multi-person projects funded by international or national bodies, often the EU but also various national governments. These projects, like the 4Oceans project that hosted me in Portugal and the Greenhouse in Norway, bring together scholars from all over the world. The connections I made during this semester will shape my research and teaching for the rest of my career.

I’m pleased to be back in the United States and teaching in-person on my beloved Queens campus once again. My time at the Rachel Carson Center has cemented academic and personal relationships that will sustain my research moving forward. I’ve also been given a glimpse into ways of thinking and practicing environmental scholarship that will benefit me, my students, and my colleagues in the future.

It would not have been possible to take up this fellowship without the enthusiastic support of St. John’s University, including my colleagues in the English department and the Deans in St. John’s College of Arts and Sciences. I’m so pleased to have been able to live out SJU’s global mission, and to bring the fruits of those conversations and collaborations, past and future, back to our University.

[In 2023 I’m going to try some public book reviews on the Bookfish, alongside the usual mix of post-conference recaps and theater reviews. I was pretty slow on the blog in ’22. But I like having these early-draft-y ideas collected together, and I am happy to share them.]

Maybe a strange choice for Valentine’s Day reading, but I really enojyed Elizabeth Anker’s new book from Duke UP Of Paradox. She’s in the law and English departments at Cornell, and in a to-me revealing aside late in the book she describes having been driven away “from law and into the arms of the humanities” (264). Her target in this book is capital-T Theory, and in particular the reliance on figures of paradox and contradiction at the center of so many staples of the Theory syllabus. She opens with an engaging reading of Oscar Wilde. We are “all heirs of Wilde,” she suggests, and “an embrace of paradox specifically as a style has united theorists of all inclinations” (2-3, her emphasis).

The core of the book documents how paradox-dependent theoretical writers have been from the late twentieth century into the present. The analysis may not be quite exhaustive, which wouldn’t be possible given the surge of theoretical texts over the past half-century, but it’s certainly exhausting. Part of Anker’s point is to expose what comes to resemble both a widespread stylistic habit and, as the readings accumulate, something like an intellectual event-horizon, a place beyond which no thought travels. Ideas of modernity, the nature of legal rights, aesthetic theory, exclusionary politics, feminism, pedagogy, post-Marxist and psychoanalytic theory, authors from Judith Butler to Gloria Anzaldua to Bhaba, Derrida, Foucault, Jameson, Latour, Said…her bibliography assembles a massive murderer’s row of theoretical luminaries. The case she makes that nearly all of them rely on paradox as style and usually also as method appears, at least to me, overwhelming.

She also notes, in her introduction, that paradox has old roots, some of which she traces in Sir Philip Sidney’s “Defense of Poetry” and Rosalie Colie’s analysis of the “Renaissance tradition of paradox,” as well as examples from literary figures from Wilde to Virginia Woolf. But the assembled evidence that paradoxical thinking provides a through-line for a dominant intellectual tradition of the past half-century seems unawerable.

Thinking about my own writing and my current academic reading, Anker’s book has helped me notice how often I have recourse to paradox as an automatic gesture. Maybe paradoxical thinking is a (the?) dominant microgenre in academic thinking? Anker makes me worry about that automaticity, and think about what other things might be possible.

She takes up the possibility of thinking beyond paradox in a final chapter on “integrative criticism.” Interestingly, her positive models here are in part literary rather than theoretical, Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, with its desire for books that “hold together” (266), and Rankine’s Citizen, which Anker celebrates for its representations of fortitude and “wholeness” (302) even as those sensations contrast with the lived reality of racist microagressions in contemporary America. She also presents a clarifying contrast between the disability theory work of Jasbir Puar, whose The Right to Maim falls into the paradoxical pattern, as opposed to Lennard Davis’s Enabling Acts, which presents a political history of the Americans with Disabilities Act (273-83). These are cogent and clear contrasts, though it’s also interesting that the books she celebrates might not exactly represent the theory genre: A Room of One’s Own might be termed literary nonfiction, Citizen is an experimental poem, partly in prose, and Enabling Acts seems mostly to be a narrative history. Is the point that to escape paradox we need to stray outside of Theory itself?

I’m not sure that’s quite right, since of course Anker’s own book is very much within the theory-mode while also pushing against its paradoxical habits – and surely on some level little seems more typical of Theory than internalized auto-critique. But Anker’s examples, and their cumulative persuasive force, have me thinking about a few perhaps emerging modes of academic and para-academic writing that might, at least indirectly, lead us beyond the cul-du-sac of contradiction.

First, she writes quite a bit about the relationship between law and literary studies. Most of the academic work I’ve done in this topic has come from thinking about The Merchant of Venice or other trial scenes in Renaissance literature. But I’ve lived with lawyers all my life, and there’s something that might be explored about how legal discourse puts a different kind of pressure on the hermeneutic puzzles of language. When faced with an undefinable term – what is “reasonable” “appropriate” “ordinary” – the law responds not with ineffability but with debate and decision. Juries and judges must apply abstract ideas to particular facts, rather than try to solve the interpretive puzzle at scale. I’m not sure that always gets around the problem that there is no fixed meaning of “reasonable” – but certainly it makes interpretive and persuasive discourse work differently in the world.

Second, I was struck by Anker’s celebration of what she calls “modes of experiential immersion, attunement, and harmonization” (271) as alternatives to remaining trapped in the realm of paradox. She doesn’t mean “immersion” in the very literal way that I like to write about it (ie, swimming as ecotheoretical meditation), but I’m also struck that my favorite flavor of 21c Theory, ecotheory, isn’t as well represented in her survey as other modes. Latour is there, but no Haraway, and no Anthropocene either. (Chakrabarty appears, but the postcolonial rather than the environmental work.) I don’t think ecotheory gets a free pass – plenty of paradox-mongering in many of my favs, from Morton to Barad and others – but I wonder if a focus on the nonhuman and the pressure of immersive experience might be in the process of making some kind of response to the highly intellectual loops and dances that have dominated Theory since Derrida’s hey-day.

Last, the focus on Citizen, which is both a great poem and also a text that cites and participates in the discourse of Theory, suggests an interest in creative work as Theory. There’s something of a “creative-critical” boomlet in academic culture in recent years, not just because plenty of academics write both theoretical and creative books but also because of explicit efforts to work across the creative-critical divide. I’m a believer in this kind of work, and in my modest way a practitioner. I wonder what a robust theorization of the creative-critical might look like? I wonder if it could avoid falling in with the familiar patterns of paradox?

In any case – Of Paradox a great book, and everyone should read it! I can’t quite imagine assigning it, even to grad students – it presumes an intimidatingly wide range of reading from the start – but I will certainly be thinking about these ideas moving forward.

Sat 10/1 Arr Mun. S8 > Leuctering > S6 Grafing Bahnhof

Picked up by Moremi & Tina in Noe (red EV)

Sun 10/2 Harvest Market at Herrmannsdorf

Mon 10/3 Oktoberfest last day (with Nye)

Tues 10/4 Christof at Landhaus

Th 10/6 Noosphere conference; first day at RCC

Lunch Katie Ritson

Beers with Nye, Jonathan Palambad, & the Russians

Fri 10/7 Trip to Zugspitze

W 10/12 trip to Poitiers (4:30 am cab > flight to CDG > TGV to Poitiers

Stay in hotel near station 

Th 10/14 Poitiers Conference

Fri 10/14 Poitiers Conference

Sat 10/15 Return to Farm

Th 10/20 Symptomatic. Negative test

Fri 10/20 Feeling better

Sat 10/21 Positive test!

10/21-29 Covid isolation in Bavaria!

Sat 10/29 Fly to Paris; stay in airport hotel

Sun 10/30 Chateau d’Ige

Mon 10/31 Arles

Tues 11/1 Arles

Wed 11/2 Gemenos

Th 11/3 Gemenos – hiking in Calanques + gran menu

Fri 11/4 Gemenos

Sat 11/5 Nice

Sun 11/6 Fly to Munich

Mon 11/7-Th 11/10 Hotel am Markt

Fri 11/11 Train to Venice

Sat – Sun Venice

Mon 11/15 Train to Munich

Tues 11/16 ACS back to USA; SRM back to farm

Th 11/17 RCC Talk (Munich)

Fri 11/18 Lunch with David A. (Munich)

[4 days on farm]

T 11/22 10 am Uwe’s Seminar LMU

stay Novotel Munich airport

W 11/23 Fly Lisbon 6 am; bus to Peniche

Th 11/23 9:45 – 10:45: A Poetics of Planetary Water: Expanding the Blue Humanities

Su 11/27 Return to MUC, arr 23:10

[week on farm]

Finish Blue Humanities book (Mon – Th) 

T 11/29 Christian Schulz 4:30

USA beats Iran 1-0, advances to round of 16

Wed 11/30 Argentina beats Poland 2-0 (Poland advances bc Mexico beats SA by only 1)

Blue Humanities book submitted noon

Th 12/1 Aaron (me introduce)

Germany v Costa Rica (Germany wins 4-2 but is eliminated bc Japan beats Spain)

F 12/2 Poetry event with PhD students at Landhaus

Sat 12/3 Xmas market at Herrmansdorf

stay Novotel Munich airport – no US match on TV! US loses 3-1 to Netherlands

Sun 12/4 Fly Stavanger 7 am Lufthansa

Wed 12/7 Return STA 12:52; MUC 5:10; train / bus to farm

Th 12/8 Nye talk; Katie talk; gluhwein in the kitchen

[4 days on farm]

Fri 12/9 Football! CRO over BRA 1-1 > penalties; ARG over NED  2-2 > penalties

Sat 12/10. Football! FRA 2-1 over ENG (MOR over POR 1-0)

Sun 12/11 Landhaus dinner – only  dinner with everyone there! (I made salad but no one believed it was me)

Mon 12/12 7:27 bus from Westendorf -> 9:18 train to Bremen 

7:27 440 > Grafing Bahnhof 7:44 > RB 54 7:42 > Hauptbahnhof 8:15

14:45 Bremen (But DB dropped me at Hannover at 1500, and I had to wait an hour for a local train to Bremen!)

T 12/13 Talk at Bremen

ARG v CRO 3-0

Wed 12/14 9:15 Bremen > Munich 2:41 pm (back to farm for dinner)

FRA v MOR 2-0

Th 12/15 Tina  talk; RCC Xmas part 5 pm (stayd until 6:30 – really the best part of the RCC, Christof as Santa giving presents to the kids; huge crowd for dinner; no room for the Landhaus though Christof did press 50 Euros on me that I did not use for a cab)

F 12/16 Hotel am Markt overnight

S 12/17 7:34 am train to Venice; arr 2:44 – or actually 2:30 at Venice Mastre, not Santa Lucia – took the local to get there (but only a 5 min wait)

Su 12/18 Argentina over France 3-3 in penalties (4-2)

T 12/20 train back to Munich 8:26, catch 8:43 BRB -> 9:10 bus at Grafing

Train on time until Rosenheim – 20 min delay – caught the S6 at Munchen Ost

Ride from Moremi in Mercedes- I would have caught the 9:10 bus even though I arrived at 9:13, bc the bus was late (but I was happy to have a ride)

[Wed on the farm] Venice blog post, walk early morning to Blue Blaumen & Ark

Noon lunch solo at Wirsthaus

2:30 last coffee with Moremi

3 – 5:30 last walk to Steinsee (pretty dark by the time I got back!)

7 pm last Landhaus dinner – with Aaron, Tamara & Tudor, Mona

Th 12/22 Flight home at 11 am 

7 am taxi – arrived early at 6:53! (I was already waiting outside)

Flight delayed on the ground in Munich ~3 hours; navigation system error

We took off at 2 pm, but had to land in JFK bc pilots were out of time

Could not leave plane bc of customs; sat in JFK for 90 min; flew to ATL

Just barely got the last flight out of ATL to BDL – arrived 12:30 am on 12/23!

Members of the Fall ‘22 Landhaus crew

Top floor: me, Tina Gerhardt, Faisel Mohammed, Nye Merrill-Glover (4)

2nd floor: Akin O., Tamara Fernando, Nandita, Mona Bleiling, Aaron Katzman (5)

Ground floor Moremi Zell (1)

Most of my reading in 2022 was audiobooks on long walks, mostly in Short Beach but also in rural Bavaria, France, Italy, Norway, and the other excellent places this eventful year took me. My grand total, according to Reading List, was 108 book. Most in a month was 13 in August. Least was 6 in April. Average was 9.

Here’s the list, with each month’s fav in bold.

January (9)

Paleofantasy. Marlene Zuk

A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived, Adam Rutherford

Shifting Currents: A World History of Swimming, Karen Carr

The New Silk Roads, Peter Frankopan

Nature’s Mutiny, Phillip Bloom

Theory for the World to Come, Matthew Wolf-Mayer

The Horse, the Wheel, and Language, David Anthony

Pedagogy of the Depressed, Chris Schaberg

The Book of Form and Emptiness, Ruth Ozecki

February (8)

Reality is not What It Seems, Carlo Robelli

Re-Enchanted, Maria Cecire

A Tale for the Time Being, Ruth Ozecki

Children of Prometheus, Greg Maertz

Until the End of Time, Brian Greene

Swim Poems, Joshua Dreser

The Pocket Epicurean, John Sellars

Football, Mark Yakich

March )10)

Footprints, David Farrier

Origin, Jennifer Raff

What is Life, Erwin Schrodinger

Time on Rock, Anna Fleming

The Sea is Not Made of Water, Adam Nicolson

The Red Prince, Timothy Snyder

A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit

The Counterforce, J.M.  Tyne

Exile and Pride, Eli Claire

Shakespeare and the Comedy of Enchantment, Kent Cartwright

April (6)

Thunder Go North, Melissa Darby

The Lieutenant Nun, Catalina de Erauso

Arctic Dreams, Barry Lopez

The Anthropocene Unconscious, Mark Bould

On Tyranny Timothy Snyder (rev ed)

We’re Doomed, Now What, Roy Scranton

May (12)

Joy of the Worm, Drew Daniel

Birds, Beasts and Seas, Jeffrey Yang (ed)

Nonzero, Robert Wright

The Eiger Sanction, Trevanian

The Loo Sanction, Trevanian

Shibumi, Trevanian

History 4 Degrees C, Ian Baucom

Thinking Like an Economist, Elizabeth Berman

The Geography of Risk, Gilbert Gaul

The Wayfinders, Wade Davis

Elite Capture, Olufemi Taiwo

Magdalena, Wade Davis

June (9)

Signs and Wonders, Delia Falconer

Mill Town, Kerri Arsenault

Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World, Barry Lopez

Battling the Big Lie, Dan Pfeiffer

A Portrait of the Scientist as a Young Woman, Lindy Elkins-Tanton

The Three Sustainabilities, Allan Stoekl

The Double Life of Bob Dylan, Clinton Heylin

Welcome to the Universe, Neil deGrasse Tyson

Anthropocene Islands, Jonathan Pugh

July (9)

Bob Dylan How the Songs Work, Timothy Hampton

Why We Did It, Tim miller

The Savage Detectives Reread, David Kurnick

The Displacements, Bruce Holsinger

Ecotone Climate Issue, David Gessner

The Spirit of Science Fiction, Roberto Bolono

Be Always Converting, Rob Sean Wilson

Fantomas v the Multinational Vampires, Julio Cortazar

Polynesia, 900-1600, Madi Williams

August (13)

Avidly Reads Poetry, Jacquelyn Ardam

Sea Room, Adam Nicolson

Round about the Earth, Joyce Chaplin

Hyperboreal, Joan N. Kane

Milk Black Carbon, Joan N. Kane

Gasoline Dreams, Simon Orpana

Quichotte, Salman Rushdie

The Swimmers, Julie Otsuka

Rescue Me, Margret Grebowicz

Gunfight, Ryan Busse

The Draw of the Sea, Wyl Menmuir

Ahab Unbound, Meredith Farmer & Jon Schroeder

Notebook for Seafarers, Alberto Coretti

September (9)

Dockside Reading, Isabel Hofmeyr

The Mermaid of Black Conch, Monique Roffey

Dark Traffic, Joan N Kane

People’s Power, Ashley Dawson

Fossil Capitol, Andreas Malm

Colonialism, Culture, Whales, Graham Huggan

How to Speak Whale, Tom Mustill

My Emily Dickinson, Susan Howe

After Moby-Dick, Elizabeth Shultz

October )8)

Where the Seals Sing, Susan Richardson

Water Always Wins, Erica Gies

Shallows, Tim Winton

Soundings, Doreen Cunningham

Origin Story, David Christian

Empire of Rubber, Gregg Mittman

Swim Poems, Steve Mentz

Water A Biography, Guilio Boccaletti

November (8)

Venice in the Anthropocene, Shaul Bassi

Planet B, Nicolas Bourriaud

The Philosophy of Modern Song, Bob Dylan

The Sea, Philip Hoare

Folk Music, Greil Marcus

City of Quartz, Mike Davis

Wild New World, Dan Flores

Where is My Flying Car? J Storrs Hall

December (7)

Messi v Renaldo, Jonathan Clegg

An Indigenous People’s History of the United States, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

The Doors, Greil Marcus

The Language of the Game, Laurent Dubois

When We Cease to Understand the World, Benjamin Labatut

Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino

The Passion according to G.H. Clarice Lispector

Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths (audio)

The last stop on my Europe ’22 tour brought me back to Venice, where I sang my blue humanities song to the very lively students and community at NiCHE, the New Institute Centre for the Environmental Humanities at Ca’ Foscari University that my fellow Shakespearean Shaul Bassi has been deeply involved with since its founding. It was great to see Shaul again and co-conspire about future watery possibilities. I also loved meeting Francesca Tarocco, the director of the program, as well as a pair of marine biologists from Cal Tech who were there to present their research about symbiosis in a small squid-like creature that lives in the Pacific. (Similar creatures, they assured me, are also present in the Mediterranean.) We all had lunch together at the Ca’ Foscari café, and the conversation reminded me how much I enjoy the company of marine scientists. Lots of people love the water!

Giving my talk, which relies on what feels now like a familiar contrast between green terrestrial ideas and blue watery dynamism, I felt a twinge of uncertainty. What is Venice, after all, but a human environment built on the refusal of the distinction between land and sea? Walking through the city’s narrow alleys and crossing water over its curving bridges, I kept noticing moments of intersection that challenge any simple contrast between the blue and the green. It’s not just that the water of Venice’s canals is itself green, as green is also the color that Shakespeare most often uses to describe the sea. More than that, It’s the portal-like qualities of so many points of access in the city – steps that lead directly down into the canal, or small framed doorways that open from buildings straight onto water. One noticeable opening framed, at this time of year at least, a lovely Christmas tree. ‘Tis the season to be … close to water?

So much has been written about Venice’s paradoxical history, its function as gateway between Europe and the Ottoman Empire and Byzantium, its ongoing struggle with high water, even its modern function as a center of experimental contemporary art. The last time I visited, in November, I saw Anselm Keifer’s overwhelmingly brilliant installation at the Palazzo Ducale. Beyond the genius of the art itself, I was amazed by the willingness of Venice to give over two of the galleries inside its Renaissance palace to a contemporary figure whose aggression and iconoclasm contrast sharply with the allegorical celebrations of the city that populate the palace. But thinking again about it as I wandered the bridges, alleys, and campos of Venice, I wonder if the city’s combination of ancient and modern, which in the Ducal Palace mean combining the gorgeous allegories of Tintoretto and Veronese alongside Keifer’s towering but opaque symbolic register, might indicate a kind of belief in itself. The juxtaposition seems to say – we’ve been doing allegorical art that celebrates a floating city for centuries. The city’s wet feet speak of perpetual evanescence, a way of living in constant contact with dynamism and dissolution. I had not been to Venice in more than 30 years since this fall. Now I’ve been twice in two months. And I can’t wait to go back!

It would take a lifetime, or perhaps generations, to know Venice. I spent my few December days wandering through an idiosyncratic lineup of places, including the soccer stadium on the far end of the island, the Naval Museum, the statue of the Monument to the Partisan Woman that lies prone in the water near the edge of the Biennale Garden, the currently-empty Ocean Space gallery which was formerly the church of San Lorenzo, and the lovely Querini Stampalia, a small museum near my hotel in the Campo Santa Maria Formosa. What has it felt like to live so close to water for so long? What does Venice mean, in time and in tempest?

In addition to a toy gondola for my nephew, I’m taking away the hitideVenice app, which gives me a daily read of the ebbs and floods of the city’s fluid substrate. It’ll be reassuring, as I think about the city from far-away Connecticut or elsewhere, to be able to open the app and see what that water’s up to.

I’m looking forward to my next visit already!

As my Europe ’22 tour winds down, I’m heading back to Munich today after a very quick visit to the North German Hanseatic city of Bremen, where I saw no tourist attractions and didn’t make it to the Baltic coast, just a bit farther north. Instead I visited the University of Bremen, as a guest of Dr. Mohammed Muharram, to speak to his colleagues and the students in his Ocean cultures class. Dr. Muharram, currently an Alexander Humboldt Fellow in the Scholars at Risk program, has been in Germany with his family since 2021; they left war-torn Yemen to come here. All of us #bluehumanities folks on twitter know him from his active feed, where he’s been chronicling recent publications and announcements in this fast-flowing discourse.

I came to Bremen to meet Mohammed, with whom I’ve been corresponding, and with whom I’m planning to collaborate on a future Blue Humanities book project (watch this space!). I also came to meet Mohammed’s mentor at Bremen, Dr. Norbert Sheffeld, who works on Shakespeare adaptations as well as blue-er projects. Prof Dr. Shaffeld – in Germany they use the double honorific, even for me (as my poster shows) – has had a distinguished career as administrator and manager of large research projects. I continue to be fascinated at the different ways that research, especially interdisciplinary and mult-university research, gets funded and organized in Europe.

My talk was pretty similar to the talk I’ve been giving this fall, though I did remember to have a signed copy of Swim Poems on hand so that I could present it to Mohammed in front of his students and colleagues during the lecture. I was impressed with the student questions after the talk, and also with the projects they are undertaking, about video game narration, ocean pollution and robotics, seabed mining, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea; and 2012 and Tsunamis, among other things. I got thoughtful and engaged questions from faculty members Prof. Kerstin Knopf and Dr. Karin Esders who were there, and further discussion with Mohammed and Norbert over a delicious lunch of various kinds of wurst over creamed kale (a local speciality?).

The northbound ICE from Munich on Monday had entangled me despite my best efforts. I booked a reserved seat on a direct train – what could go wrong? – and then watched with amazement as the video monitor, which had been showing the train’s destination as “Bremen Hpf” (ie, Bremen Hauptbahnhof, Central Station Bremen) suddenly showed a line through those words. For reasons never explained, the train terminated in Hannover, about 60 km south of Bremen, where I had to switch to a crowded local. But I got there, made it to my strangely named “Atlantic Hotel” (Bremen is near the North Sea, and closer to the Baltic than the open Atlantic), and was ready to go in the morning.

We’ll see what happens on the same train Munich-bound today!

For years I’ve been hearing about the Environmental Humanities Research School (NoRS-EH) at Stavanger, Norway, so it was a treat to get to spend a few days there to help teach a weeklong Blue Humanities PhD course with Ellen Arnold, a medieval river historian who’s also my colleague on the editorial board of the Environmental Humanities in Premodern Culture book series. (Send us your EH manuscripts!)

Part of the fun of spending this fall in Europe has been slowly coming to understand the ways that European universities run graduate education and research funding. The weeklong course I helped launch in Stavanger was organized by Ellen and the Greenhouse / NoRS-Eh team, with help from a pair of guest instructors, namely me and Aike Peter Rots, who is the leader of an ERC project on whales in maritime East Asia. The students come from institutions across Europe, from the UK (Goldsmith’s and Queen Mary) to several in Norway to the Netherlands and Germany. Their project are wonderfully diverse and creative – whale eco-tourism! Icelandic sagas! jellyfish as/and media! maritime expertise and the Norman invasion! sci fi narratives of/beyond sustainability! interspecies colonialism! fishing for sardines in Senegal! So many amazing things in progress here; it makes me feel very optimistic about the future of blue humanities scholarship.

The students are a lively and perceptive bunch, and I greatly enjoyed spending a few days with them. On day 1, beyond introductions, we discussed forms of the blue humanities through my just-published “Poetics of Planetary Water” article and John Gillis’s 2013 Blue Humanities open-source essay. We also spent a couple hours digging slowly into one of the central originating works in this thought-stream, Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us (1951). It was fun to wrestle with Carson’s metaphors and her powerful drive to humanize the features and forces of the inhuman sea. I came away, as I always do when I return to Carson, thinking that the richness of her approach still has much to generate in the present – though reading this mid-20c text alongside scholars of the 21c also showed me some ways that her writing remains of its time.

In the afternoon we played the role of live studio audience for a Greenhouse Zoom Book Talk for Charne Lavery’s Writing Ocean Worlds: Indian Ocean Fiction in English (2021). She talked engagingly about how the particular history and geography of the Indian Ocean world shaped its modern fictions, with attention to Amitav Ghosh and  Abdulrazak Gurnah, as well as glancing notes on Joseph Conrad’s Indian Ocean novels. We in the room were invited to ask questions, but I thought I would hang back to let the students speak. Then, to our collective amusement, Charne said something about my writing about maritime metaphors, so I popped out of my chair and to show my face on camera. A strange moment, perhaps, since she would have had no idea I was in Norway! But we had a nice chat about Ghosh and Conrad, a relationship that I suspect we’d both like to give some more thought to in the future.

The combination of Carson’s lyrical scientism and Lavary’s vision of the Indian Ocean made a perfect lead up to the intellectually grueling evening event of day 1, in which we struggled with the brain-breaking puzzle of Pisces,a commercial fishing / conservation / fisheries management board game that even the website boardgamegeek.com admits is a bit hard to understand. I agree with Ellen that the bait pieces, though present in a little bag with the rest of the game, appear not to have any function that the directions clarify. An allegory of industrial fishing? Four of us baffled ourselves thoroughly as we faced the game’s byzantine complexity, though with each turn we attempted we tried to add another element. Each turn has eight elements. Clearly it’s a game designed by fisheries scientists! Perhaps the moral is that we need Rachel Carson’s lyric deftness to trace a path through all this complexity? Or perhaps it’s just really hard to make a living as a conservation-minded fisherman?

The morning of day 2 brought us back together with two wonderfully disparate literary texts that explored different models of water-intimacy. First we looked at early medieval Latin poems about Romano-Christian Gaul (I may be using the wrong historical terms, but I think that’s pretty close – Christian Latinate culture from the 5-9th centuries?) about waterscapes and human engineering. We had all read Ellen’s resonant Ecozona article about how premodern Latin literary culture engaged with French rivers as fluvial borders, cultural markers, and flexible symbols. Looking closely at these poems was a great shift from the sometimes overbroad “what is the blue humanities” discourse that we’d been wrestling with the day before. One particular close and intricate poetic portrait of a flooded riverscape seemed to present naturecultural disruption in an especially gorgeous way that recalled for me Titania’s speech about natural disorder in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Excellent stuff!

Next we turned the research of Greenhouse fellow Susanne Ferwerda, who teaches now at Utretcht University in her native Netherlands but not that long ago completed her PhD at the University of Tasmania. She shared with us the speculative futurist short story “Water” by the Aboriginal (Mununjali) writer Ellen van Neerven. The story is a brilliant riff on a transpecies love story mixed up with a political resistance narrative and a satire of the Aboriginal art scene in Australia. Van Neerven’s echoes and inversions of Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis books as well as Nnedi Okorofor’s Lagoon made it a rich text with which to talk about blue questions, especially the symbolic contrasts between fresh and salt water that are so crucial in the coastal areas of northern New South Wales where the story is set. I want to look up van Neerven’s poetry too!

After a group lunch in the UiS cafeteria and a head-clearing walk up to the tower to watch the sun already going down, at 2:15 I gave a public talk on Blue Humanities pasts and futures. It was great to give the talk to an audience with a core of committed PhD students, most of whom had travelled all the way to Stavanger for a course on the Blue Humanities. I also loved the wide ranging q&a featuring questions from Dolly and Finn Arne Jorgenson, who co-run the Greenhouse / NoRS-EH and have made it such an important fixture of European and global environmental humanities thinking. We talked about how my own trajectories, from oceans to other forms of water, and my personal practice as a sea swimmer, contrast with the river valley and flood plains histories that impact the lives of so many people, both today and in the past. We also talked about how academic practices produce messy collectives, and why polyvocal communities are the best ones.

That was the end of my official contributions to this week long course, which continues with a museum day on Wednesday and a closer look at East Asia during the last few days. But it wasn’t quite my final event with the enthusiastic PhD students. They led me on a long and labyrinthine walk down toward the water’s edge, past the football stadium, through an open construction site, past a massive structure used to repair oil rigs, until we finally arrived a a small, basically hidden barge, tied up to a dock in full late afternoon darkness. On the barge was a small wooden sauna hut with a wood stove burning inside. There were also two ladders leading down to the imposingly cold waters of the bay. (The water temperature was, I think, around 8 degrees C, or 46 F, which seems about right – but the air was a bit colder than that!). I enjoyed popping in and out of the cold water while warming up with everyone in the sauna. I left earlier than the students. The walk back to the bus stop through the maze of construction was tricky, and I did get on the bus heading the wrong way – but I made it back to to the cozy Yladir hotel eventually.

Such a pleasure to visit the Greenhouse and NoRS-EH! It’s been, over the past few years for people like me who follow environmental humanities scholarship online, something of a legendary place. The Book Talk e-archive that Dolly and Finn Arne have compiled since the early days of Covid moved so many things online is an amazing resource. Even though daylight was in short supply – the sun didn’t come up until after 9 am, and it set before 4 pm – I enjoyed some great walks around campus. But the fjord hikes will have to wait for a future visit!

In between sessions at the HNE III conference (Histories of Nature and Environments, 3rd meeting), I would sneak outside of the Escola Superior de Turismo e Tecnologia do Mar where we were meeting, walk about 30 meters to the edge of a cliff, and stare down at the waves. Located on the point of a peninsula that until maybe a millennium ago had been an island, Peniche angles out into the Atlantic surge. The surf isn’t quite as fierce as nearby Nazare, but it was plenty awesome for me.

I also spent a few hours splashing around in the surf the day before I gave my conference-opening keynote. Nothing better than an afternoon of bodysurfing and a nicely grilled fish to get read to talk about the blue humanities!

The conference, organized by Ana Roque and Cristina Brito of NOVA University of Lisbon, with support from the 4Oceans Project that Cristina leads, brought together environmental and oceans scholars from four continents and many methodologies. I won’t be able to do justice to the range of individual paper sessions, which ranged from the densely empirical to the floridly theoretical. I might mention briefly Cristina Brito’s presentation, which was the last in the conference except for the fourth keynote. She presented her ongoing research on manatees, the massive marine mammals found both in West Africa and the West Indies. the sightings of which underlie many legends of mermaids and human-fish hybrids. Her presentation gave a glimpse of the range and curiosity that drives this project, as well as the many other projects that 4Oceans supports.

I will give very short comments on each of the four keynotes. I feel deeply honored to be in such company!

Blue Humanities Opener

I won’t say much about my own presentation, except that I used a slide of a painting by the great Vanessa Daws as well as the poem I wrote for her Swimming a Long Way Together project to introduce the human-ocean relationship in poetic terms. I also talked about my local waters in Short Beach, and the overstuffed structure of my forthcoming book, An Introduction to the Blue Humanities (look for it in ’23!). Also – I loved the place, the audience, the generous introduction and lively q&a. I don’t know if I could really hear the rumble of the surf behind me, but it felt as if I could!

South African Vistas

Jane Carruthers, coming to Portugal from Johannesburg, South Africa, gave a wondrously wide-ranging talk on the Sashe-Limpopo valley, a fairly remote part of southern Africa at the confluence of two rivers, the Sashe and the Limpopo, and three countries, Botswana, Zimbabwe, and South Africa. The site was home to an ancient civilization, now called the Mapungubwe people and the site of a National Park and nascent tourist industry. Jane talked about the efforts to cultivate the heritage of the 11th century Mapungubwe people, and also about how that legacy was being used for 21st century nationalist ends. It was a resonant and sobering story, which for me also had the consequence of reminding me how much I love South African literature and culture. J.M. Coetzee has been a favorite of mine since I discovered him in college (in the 1980s), but I also thought about Ezekial Mphalele, Mazisi Kunene, Bessie Head, Olive Schreiner, and others. It’s a rich literature, and not as well known in the northern hemisphere as it should be.

Whale Cultures

The third keynote, the morning of day 2, featured Hal Whitehead, from Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia. Hal is famous in ocean studies as co-author with Luke Rendell of The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins (2014), a book whose argument, contained in its title, still blows my mind. In an endearingly understated and transparently clear presentation, Whitehead took us through the cultural markers created through whalesong, with special attention to sperm whales in the Pacific and the Caribbean. One of the most striking images was a pair of slides, presenting research from one of Whitehead’s former students I think, that showed the vast areas dominated by single song-cultures of Pacific whales, contrasted with the tiny, basically island-shaped areas that featured a common song in the Caribbean. Why, I asked after the talk, did Pacific whalesongs span such vast oceanic spaces, when Caribbean song-communities were so small? He wasn’t sure – but he said that he thinks it might have something to do with local environmental differences. I love the idea of sperm whale cultures in the Pacific spanning hundreds of miles, and I wonder also about how the smaller, more confined waterways of the Caribbean shape their different cultures. (My just-finished book uses different oceans, from Pacific to Arctic, to frame human culture, so I was very interested to consider how whale cultures may also be shaped by waterscapes.)

Urban Wildlife of Brazil

Regina Horta Duarte, from the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil, rounded out the speakers by talking about nonhuman life in one of the planet’s largest mega-cities. The greater metro area of Sao Paolo, Brazil, boasts over 22 million human inhabitants, and the number of birds, beasts, and insects are basically uncountable. Horta Duarte’s talk explored the edges of the city’s major park, and also talked about how birds and other animals engage with human infrastructure, especially glass windows and convenient-seeming paved roads. I caught up with her after her talk and spoke for a bit about how to distinguish among the different needs of different animals – some need conservation, while others can co-habitate with humans to some extent. The trick, always, is knowing which is which!

Whalebone Archeology

We spent our last half-day in a deconsecrated church that was being transformed into a museum in the village of Autouguia de Baleia, just a bit inland from the peninsula of Peniche. Not that long ago – just a bit over a thousand years ago – Peniche had been an island, and Autouguia was the local port. The channel had sedimented in sometime before the medieval period; the oldest fortifications of Peniche date to around the 14th century. As its second name Baleia (“baleen”) suggests, Autouguia was a whaling town. Among the artifacts recently recovered and being prepared for display are whalebones. A mock-up display even shows how old stone houses may have used fossilized whale bones as part of rock walls.

The artifacts of humans and cetaceans from the Roman, medieval, and early modern periods provided a rich historical context for our days in Peniche. I could not help thinking about Hal’s ideas about the song-cultures of whales as I handled the fossil baleen and spinal bones. What is the full story, the entire song, of whales and humans, perhaps the two smartest mammals to have evolved in the past few million years on our blue planet? Not long ago it seemed as if the small, greedy primates would wipe out the massive cetaceans. Now – well, it’s hard to know what will happen in the Anthropocene, though many populations of whales are coming back.

Hal told a story about speaking with the historian Bathsheba Demuth, who by coincidence I had met in Tutzing, Germany, just the month before. Her research on Native Alaskan whaling cultures had lead him to think that whales might learn and transmit information as humans do, via cultures – which sent him back to his scientific data. I love that story’s narrative of exchange, in which a humanist empirical historian tells a story to a data-driven scientist, who uses that story to reassess his own work. And later that work finds its way to a poetically-minded humanist like me, to light up my imagination.

Exchanges like that are why cross-disciplinary exchanges are worth pursuing, even in this age of Covid and climate change. That’s what we sought, and what we found, a few weeks ago in Peniche.

I look forward to seeing all these wonderful people again soon!

I’m excited to announce the publication of my first chapbook of poems! Swim Poems came out in late October, when I was sick with Covid and isolating on a farmhouse in rural Bavaria.

It’s available to order from Ghostbird Press.

With thanks to Peter Vanderberg for editorial magic, and to James and Thomas Vanderberg for gorgeous artwork.

The idea swam up from the depths maybe a half-dozen years ago – what if the Pequod set sail without her Captain? Do we really need that bad old man, dismasted and enraged, at the helm? Might freedom, in fact, be something else entirely?

The notion crept into my imagination and wouldn’t go away. So I niggled around with it a bit. I published two smalls sets of poems with the Glasgow Review of Books. The first in April 2017, included a title poem for the project, “Sailing without Ahab.” The second, in May 2018, included “Great White Evil God,” which thrashes around with the whiteness of the whale. By this time I had found the shape, a mad swimalong quest that would follow the crew from Etymology to Epilogue, Loomings to the third day’s Chase. A poem for every chapter, none of them boasting any Captain. It was a lot of poems. My voyage was slow.

Many things shattered into new shapes in spring 2020, and as I adapted to being shut in, I found in writing poetry my pandemic sourdough. The dam burst right around the time we brought a new puppy into our home, the irrepressible Blue, whose company gave me lots of pre-dawn walks to the water and quiet time in the house, even after Covid restrictions boomeranged my son back into our basement. I suppose it was around this time that I started my daily waterpic Insta practice, too, for anyone who’s keeping score.

The poetic rhythms that clicked into place in 2020 have since led me to start sending poems out to literary magazines, and I’ve published a half-dozen or so in these semi-post-pandemic years. Sailing without Ahab also came out of that burst of creativity, and I’m so pleased to be working with the great Richard Morrison and Fordham UP for this project.

The book will have lots of parts – a mad sailalong with the crew of the Pequod, an experiment in creative-critical writing, a form of maniacal close reading, an oblique extension of blue humanities ideas and practices. But at its center is a surging, wallowing, breeching mass of poems, one hundred and thirty-eight in total, one for each chapter of Melville’s oceanic epic, including the Etymology, Abstracts, and Epilogue.

I hope you’ll join me for the voyage in spring 2024!