Steve Mentz

The day before I descended the #shax2019 maelstrom in DC, I took my ecotheory grad students on a trip to the ecofuture. We stood together on green grass atop a windy hill in Staten Island, looking northeast at the Manhattan skyline, and spying just a glimpse of green promise in the lady’s torch on the watery horizon. The grass we stood on itself stood on top of roughly 200 feet of twentieth-century household garbage, the refuse of Freshkills, once the largest landfill in the world, which will soon be the largest park developed in New York City in 100 years. The finished park’s 2200 acres will cover nearly three times as much space as Central Park. A plan that includes tours, outdoor activities, and art installations will reintegrate and make accessible to the public this damaged land. We stood together amid methane straws and funnels designed to leach liquid waste out from the bottom of the decomposing landfill. Is there a happier metaphor for our ecological future? A better image of things getting better in a messy world?

I kept returning in my mind to the #trashpastoral of Freshkills during my whirlwind half-week among the Shakespeareans. The comparison isn’t fair to a conference that has supported me since my grad student days almost a quarter-century ago, but the making-new and making-better parts seemed to fit what’s happening in the SAA today. Things are changing, both things we can see and below ground where we can’t. There are plenty of toxins around, in our academic and wider cultures. I’m proud to be part of an organization that’s making things better.

Triumphs of Time

[being a partial list of things the SAA is bringing toward happy fruition]

1. The Wed afternoon Town Hall, which I got to a bit late, is opening up a once-secretive organization. It was great to see and hear both veteran and novice SAA-ers talk about the organization we want to be. I was particularly struck by the aplomb of our new Executive Director Karen Raber, who appears to have solved, at least prospectively, the long-running SAA conflict between religious holidays and the conference. #SAAmiracles?
2. In addition to moving the SAA off the Easter/Passover cycle, the Town Hall provided the announcement of a great initiative, SAAllies, spear-headed by a quintet of inspiring scholars who want to make our organization more diverse, welcoming, and accessible. I was happy to wear the electric green lanyard, and to take part in supporting our too too SAAllied flesh as we navigate the conference spaces and beyond.
3. A less visible but I hope also lasting initiative began also this year, starting via google docs and morphing into a hashtag, #shaxgrads. This group will become, in the fullness of time, a Grad Student Caucus to support and advise early career entrants into SAA’s sometimes mysterious culture. My advisee Lisa Robinson rode point on this initiative, and I feel fortunate to have been able to nudge things forward by making a dinner reservation for eight volunteers and offering stray bits of advice. I was blown away by the energy and clearness of vision of the students gathered around the table at Cuba Libre! on Th night! I look forward to great things from them.
4. I’m not sure how many years the NextGenPlen has been going — maybe a half-dozen now? — but it continues to dazzle. I was blown away not just by the archival and imaginative richness of the five presentations, but also by the stage presence and authority on display. I had a brief moment of embarrassment on behalf of old bald white men during a question from the floor — but the response was so deft and thoughtful that I am now trying to convince myself the question was an intentional set up, enabling the brilliant riposte. I don’t think that’s really true — I think it was a cranky question — but the presenters handled everything brilliantly.
5. I had to skip much of Friday for the happy task of taking my son to Accepted Students Day at George Washington U, so I missed Ayanna’s lunchtime talk and about half of the #ShakeRace Plenary session. I caught most of David Sterling Brown’s gorgeous and persuasive discussion of “white hands” in and beyond Antony and Cleopatra. I also heard Kim Hall’s moving and formally inventive excavation of the human suffering encoded in archival records. I’ve heard a few of her talks out of her current project on Shakespeare and African-American culture, and they have been revelatory work. We are lucky to be watching this material come together.

In mine own person

[being a more personal list of some of my conference highlights]

1. Speaking on the Ecofeminism panel Sat morning with one of my grad school comrades, the chair of my own very first SAA seminar (in 1996!), and two other collaborators and colleagues was a personal highlight for me. I greatly enjoyed our discussion of collaboration and community, both in eco- and feminist contexts. I also appreciated moments in which we differ, or in which we take different directions. Difficult questions are also a form of collaboration!
2. I didn’t know Christy Desmet well, but I knew her enough to miss her, and I was happy to be able to toast her memory at the Blue Bar on Friday night.
3. During the before-dinner rush, I also got a phone call that made me very happy: the news that a junior member of our profession has received an offer of a tenure-track job! The scholar in question was not my student, but is someone whose work I admire and support, for whom I’ve written letters, etc. In these stormy times, good news shines a little light.
4. I dragged the Ecofem gang out to the Lebanese Taverna in Woodley Park, a now-thriving eatery that was a hole in the wall when my family moved into the neighborhood in 1985, when I was just starting my undergrad days & had no glimmerings of an academic career. It’s nice to go back to old places!

And yet..

I don’t like to complain, and I am sensitive to the competing demands of time and space. But the #shaxfutures initiative is too important to have been shunted into in a Sat afternoon dual-booked slot. [Note: In the earlier language I did not mean to accuse SAA’s schedulers. I really do recognize how hard it is to schedule competing interests. It’s not an easy task, and we are trying to be better.] I had to run after the talks but before the q&a in order to catch my train, which makes me also complicit in not placing the discourse of a Living Wage at the center of my SAA. But I caught enough to know that this work needs to move into the light.

Amanda Bailey organized a great panel featuring a pair of past and present non-tt faculty from her home Uni of Maryland. Maggie Ellen Ray spoke powerfully about who gets to be a “Shakespearean,” which reminded me that I use that term to address all my students when I send them group emails, and the appellation sometimes makes them feel self-conscious. Sabrina Baron, who I’ve known since a Folger seminar on print culture we took together in the late 1990s, used Francis Bacon’s theses on bias and error to explore why we avoid facing the adjunctification crisis squarely. Amanda Bailey introduced the term “humane-ities” and provided some concrete thoughts about how be better academics, departments, and members of an academic community.

As Amanda talked about Judith Butler’s idea of up-against-ness, for which I don’t have a good citation, I kept thinking about the forces that guided this particular session in the Sat afternoon slot — near the end of the conference, in the middle of a late lunch hour, hard to get to for people (including me!) who were heading to trains & planes on Saturday afternoon, and even those who were just drawn to the gorgeous DC springtime weather.

The first time the SAA presented a #shaxfutures session was in Atlanta in 2017. That session had no concurrent session against it, and it was scheduled back-to with the conference plenary itself. (I mashed up the two sessions in my blog-recap.) This year, and also last year in LA, #shaxfutures was scheduled against a second great session and wasn’t located at the heart of things. I’m a little worried about where we locate our future.

What does it mean that we can so powerfully and collectively celebrate the moment of excruciating empathy that Kim Hall dazzled us with in her encounter with a child’s life in the archive, but don’t face the stunted careers of people who walk our campus hallways every day?

I wonder if we need to address our abiding affection for meritocracy, even when we know that’s not how the so-called “job market” works. So many the terms of praise in #shax2019 and academic culture more broadly are terms of distinction: brilliance, imagination, originality. I love those things too, but I worry about the implicit sheering-off that insists on only so many places on stage, so many “good jobs,” so many markers of value. We celebrate the stars on stage, but need also to make time & space for the majority of SAA-goers. Maybe a Melancholies of Meritocracy panel in some possible #shaxfutures?

I do love excellence in what we do, and I saw great work in the hour-ish of the #shaxfutures panel I was able to attend yesterday. But we as a community can do better to consider who gets left off our various stages.

Right around the time I had to scoot toward Union Station, Amanda introduced, I think via Butler again, the emotional challenge of adjacency, that it can be harder to feel deeply for the things near to us, as opposed to things more distant. That’s not an adequate explanation of the split of our attention at #shax2019 (and was not intended to be), and I certainly don’t think that racism or sexism or other forms of toxic behavior are in any way “distant” in our profession. But I’d like the questions of #shaxfutures, and also the questions of how the SAA can best serve its most precarious members, to occupy more of our time and our labor.

I don’t say that in any way to accuse our wonderful SAA leadership or to exculpate my own complicity. In fact, the #shaxfutures panel this week reminds me painfully of what I owe to non-tt faculty and how little I have repaid that debt. To be specific and personal: Sabrina Baron, the brilliant print historian on this year’s Futures panel, is a longtime “lecturer” at UMD (or I guess the local term is “professional track faculty”?). Sometime in the early ’00s, she helped start the Washington Area Group for Print Culture Studies, in the wake of a seminar at the Folger that we both attended. She invited me at some point later to give a talk to the group. I talked about celestial navigation and maritime orientation in Spenser, in one of the very first public talks I did as part of what has become my career-defining oceanic turn.

Because of Sabrina’s invitation, the talk caught the eye, or I guess the ear, of a then-librarian at the Folger, who asked me afterwards if I thought the Folger would “have enough of that kind of stuff” to do a maritime exhibition. I said I thought it would — and several years later that conversation translated itself into Lost at Sea: The Ocean in the English Imagination, 1550-1750, an exhibition which remains a highlight of my academic life and opened the blue door into the ocean studies wonder-world that’s defined my professional life over the past decade.

Would I have been able to launch my watery work without Sabrina’s timely invitation? Maybe, I guess — I mean, I probably would have written some of that stuff. But all of our successes, professional and otherwise, are (to borrow a term from academic labor) contingent. I benefitted greatly from Sabrina’s labor on my behalf, and I’ve never been able to pay her back. I wish that I had found some way.

Last encounters

I’ll close this blog-rumination, drafted on the northbound Amtrak while the #shax2019 twitterfeed chirps to me that the conference keeps rolling along, with one final encounter, driven by the green SAAllies lanyard. No names for this one!

In the hour before the #shaxfutures event Sat afteroon, I was tired and smalltalk-exhausted. I ate fried tofu in Chinatown and sat on a semi-secluded couch in the hotel lobby, watching the flow of roller-bags and the human billiard-collisions of Shakespeareans. A senior Shakespearean sat down next to me, and we started chatting, in a slightly tired and over-stimulated sort of way.

Then, to our surprise and pleasure, a first-time SAA-goer grad student who’d seen ourgreen lanyards on sat down with her sandwich, saying, “I don’t want to each lunch alone, can I join you?” She had noticed my nametag because I’d been part of her recent comps list. The three of us had a fantastic chat, talking about her work-in-progress on Spanish-language early modern texts set in the Americas, Ben Jonson, the conference, and how the academic world looks to newcomers. She reminded me of the #shaxgrads I’d had dinner with on Th, and I suggested she connect with them via the hashtag. I also thought about the dazzling NextGenPlen-ers. Many things are bad about the state of our profession — but the people are great.

As we, like the Freshkills Park engineers, labor to transform the toxins in our history into the green pastures of a shared future, we need to keep the people foremost in mind.

See everyone in Denver next year!

What do we want when we go to the theater?

Coincidences of April, the most compressed and hyper-busy month of the academic calendar, put me in front of two gloriously dissimilar shows in the past week: Yale Rep’s Afro-futurist romp of Twelfth Night on Saturday, and Red Bull’s brutal and violent production of John Webster’s gory revenge tragedy The White Devil on Tuesday. I loved both, but hard to image they were the same sort of thing, written for the same small theatrical community, maybe a decade or so apart. So why not try to blog-review them together?

Directed by Carl Cofield, Associate Director of the Classical Theater of Harlem, Twelfth Night showcases the talents of the Yale School of Drama’s 3rd-year acting class, as their spring Shakespeares generally do. I’ve been going to these productions since I arrived in New Haven as a grad student in the mid-90s, and long experience has moderated my expectations. But I’m not sure if I’ve seen a more rousing show in the University Theater than this funkdadelic, electro-futuristic Twelfth Night. Cofield’s set, vision, and pacing was pure Wakanda: an Afro-utopia that strutted but didn’t fret its fast two hours across the stage. I’ve seen lots of great, high-spirited Sir Tobys who convinced willing audience that the singers and drinkers have the better argument. But I’ve seldom seen a play that enlists not just Toby but also Orsino and even Olivia and Viola, into the spirit of misrule.

The White Devil, based on a lurid ripped-from-the-headlines story about adultery, murder, and intrigue in sixteenth-century Italy, didn’t quite go down as smoothly. Webster’s poetry is angry and intricate, but also gorgeous and inventive:

Sum up my faults, I pray, and you shall find,

That beauty and gay clothes, a merry heart,

And a good stomach to feast, are all,

All the poor crimes that you can charge me with.

In faith, my lord, you might go pistol flies,

The sport would be more noble.

The doomed love affair of Vittoria and Duke Brachiano, orchestrated by her brother Flamenio, spits in the face of propriety as it condemns to death their spouses and numerous bystanders. It’s sometimes hard to tell if Webster wants us to hate his villains or the pious aristocrats more. My sense is that we semi-admire the baddies for their nerve.

The star of Twelfth Night, beyond the director and the music, may have probably the veteran actor Allen Gilmore as Malvolio. As counterweight to the festive utopians, Malvolio showed just enough of the hypocrisy in ambition (and vice versa) to energize the production. Among my favorite moments of the night came at the end, when he stalked on stage during the dance-off that subbed in for a curtain call, stared everyone down, and then vogue’d his way into his own round of applause.

To facilitate the turns and twists in the violent plot of The White Devil, director Louisa Proske made repeated use of a large video screen, on which the occasional soliloquy or murder appeared. As is generally true with Red Bull’s efforts to revivify the bloody non-Shakespeare works of the early 17c, the production was well-served by strong actors and powerful momentum. Daniel Oreskes’s Brachianno may have been the most charismatic of the bunch, but Tommy Shrider’s slinky Flamenio caught my eye whenever he was on stage.

When the Yale Rep actors transformed Orsino’s famous if a bit sappy “If music be the food of love” opening speech into a nightclub dance-number, I knew we were in good hands. Music spilled out from sources both expected — Erron Crawford’s Feste as hip hop artist, Chivas Michael’s Toby as fez-topped night-club maestro — and less predictable, including Ilia Isorelys Paulino playing a joyful Maria who occasionally would belt out her lines in song because she just could not help herself. I also loved Tiffany Denise Hobbs’s Olivia, who hid in the early acts behind a hat that may as well have been a gladiatorial shield before breaking into love and movement once fetching cross-dressed Cesario catches her eye.

The question of Vittoria, the poor but proud heroine played by Lisa Birnbaum whose affair with Brachiano and defiance of patriarchal norms stirs the plot stew in Webster’s tragedy, remains vexed. Does she, like Malvolio, desire to better her station? Might she, like Viola and Sebastian, have played her hand less aggressively and made her way into elite society? That’s not Webster’s kind of play, and not his vision of the world, either in decadent Rome or the Jacobean London that’s probably his real target.

I had hoped that tonight, when I’m blogging these thoughts from home, that I’d be adding to the mix Glenda Jackson’s big Broadway Lear, though that plan foundered on the shores of a sick child. Could I have made division of myself and made it to the theater? Not hardly — which may be as much of a response to King Lear as I’ll manage tonight.

In between Christmas in snowy Short Beach and MLA in chilly Chicago, I snuck away with family from both the east and west coasts to spend a glorious few days in the mountains of Oaxaca, Mexico. The full tale of food, Zapotec ruins, hiking, wood carving, mezcal, mole, tacos, fiestas, and other wonders would be long to tell.

A welcome and unplanned part of our almost-week at the Casa Colonial on the outskirts of downtown was visiting with the other guests. Breakfast and dinner each day at the Casa was a kind of pop-up salon, featuring an amazing group of people, including an Australian expert in Indonesian textiles who works at the Fowler Museum in LA, a master guitar craftsman from Chelsea & Woodstock, a painter from Manhattan and Brooklyn, a Methodist minister from Chapel Hill, and – to my particular interest and pleasure – a climate change activist named Larry Gussin. Larry’s a co-founder of Nest, one of the first companies to use computer technology to increase energy efficiency. After Google bought Nest, he has become since 2012 a full-time activist working in support of carbon pricing initiatives, mostly, and managing a donor advised fund at the Sierra Club Foundation .

After we met, I sent Larry a link to my website. To my great pleasure, he came to the New Year’s Day Fiesta armed with a great question I’m still mulling: “Is shipwreck” [in my eco-theory sense] “an elaboration of technological incrementalism in the face of environmental hostility, or is it part of the ‘burn it all down’ radicalism” that Larry in his own work been struggling against in recent years? He describes himself as a leftist who in recent years has been mostly fighting with the left, because he supports market- and technology-based mitigations. I believe he was a supporter of the failed carbon pricing initiative in Washington State this past fall.

Update: I garbled that last point a bit. Larry emailed to clarify his stance on the WA carbon pricing initiatives. He writes: “I supported the 2018 WA carbon tax effort in 2014-15 with $45,000 in seed $ and volunteering, but opposed the proposal from 2016 on as I thought it was being written to only appeal to the left in a purple state. In the end 1 in 4 of the voters for the reelection of liberal senator Maria Cantwell voted against the carbon tax: I was right.”

He’d read my manifesto-ish PMLA article “After Sustainability,” and we talked about what counts or does not count as a “pastoral” or a vision of stasis in environmental thinking. We also talked about what counts as radical or revolutionary, and whether climate change activism can avoid the vortex of partisanship in our Trumpy present. I suspect it can’t over the next two years of highly polarized political conflict in the US – but in a post-orange menace medium term, I agree with Larry that we need a climate solution that isn’t only partisan. I don’t believe that in the US it’s possible to have the left “win” in a permanent or decisive way – though I certainly think the current version of the right deserves to lose.

I didn’t quite figure it out enough to say it over mezcal & grilled cactus on New Year’s Day, but Larry’s technological and carbon-pricing-based vision might be better thought of as georgic rather than pastoral. He presents a vision of skilled human labor – the sort of skill that built Nest and Google – engaging technically and carefully with our dynamic environmental conditions. There are things not to love about the georgic tradition, including the settler colonialism legacies that flow from both its Virgilian / Roman sources and from its early American rearticulations. But a solar and renewable georgic might be just the thing in 2019. (On my MLA panel yesterday, Jesse Oak Taylor & I were talking about Jedidiah Purdy’s After Nature, which also makes a quasi-georgic argument about American history.)

Larry has been jousting recently with what he calls the “burn it all down” anti-capitalist left, which for him seems represented in part by Naomi Klein, and perhaps also by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and at least some maximalist versions of the “Green New Deal.” I didn’t let on that, though I’m ambivalent about Klein’s melodramatic view of history, I kinda love AOC, and have some hopes for what she’s bringing to Washington. Leftist radicalism seems to him both politically impossible and perhaps also environmentally counterproductive, because it rejects the expertise and techno-precision that he believes in. Given that I’m mostly immersed in leftier-than-me academic culture, it was an interesting perspective.

So — to answer Larry’s question — where do my ideas about shipwreck and swimmer poetics fall in the spectrum between burn it all down and tecno-incrementalism? I guess a bit on both sides: shipwreck stories attract through their implicit radicalism, in which great ships go down and human hopes are dashed. But the survival narrative, which includes the story of shipwrecked swimmers and the sailors who cling to broken spars, relies on expertise, labor, patience, and perhaps a bit of luck. The break-plus-recovery narrative that I wrestled with in my book Shipwreck Modernity has feelers in both technical and radical discourses.

It was a great afternoon of food, drink, and eco-conversation. We talked about Odysseus, who goes home to stay in Homer, but who is later goaded out into the open sea by Dante and Kazantzakis. What is it about home that resists narrative? Why can’t we let heroes rest? Why are human stories so impatient?

We also talked, with contributions from all the generations of the family, about Tolkien’s hobbits and the Shire as eco-vision: a precious spot, a place that does not know its own peril, and a community worth sacrificing oneself to preserve. The Shire remains a bit green for my blue/oceanic tastes, especially in the films, but that short glimpse of the Scouring of the Shire that Sam sees in the Mirror of Galadriel (films only) might represent a painful near-future today. I wonder also about the sea that cradles Middle Earth and the brief hints of oceanic voyages in Tolkien’s mythology.

We talked about the “Creating Nature” symposium I’m organizing for May 2019 at the Folger, and my hopes to foster dialogue between eco-literary types and scientists, legal scholars, philosophers, and other interested parties. The entanglement between what we call “human” and what we call “Nature” has a long and complex history; part of my project as historicist and Shakespearean ecocritic seeks to surface premodern ways of understanding the relationship between humans and our nonhuman environment in ways that speak to today’s shifts and changes.

After the New Year’s Fiesta came 18+ hours of travel out of Mexico on Wednesday and a very full day at MLA yesterday. With the conversation at the Casa very much on my mind, I spoke yesterday on a great panel, “Climate Humanism and the Inhuman Turn,” organized by eco-Gandalf Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. I started writing this post amid chaos and bad wifi at the Mexico City airport, thinking about the talk I was about to give in Chicago and about the past few days of conversations in Oaxaca. It turns out family vacation makes a great prelude to academic conferencing!

I’ll close with the ending of yesterday’s talk, which I am starting to think of as a way to imagine the oceanic encounter as break-and-continuity, a way to preserve some aspects of the “human” while recognizing the inhuman vastness and dynamism of the climate in which we live. I was talking mostly about Jonah, and about what his story means today. But I wonder if there are political and strategic implications for eco-activists and their fellow travelers.

Here’s the last bit  –

We must combine our human need to reform the great city with our awareness of the nonhuman plurality that environs our bodies.

The human in the prophet preaches repentance, change, and survival. (Good eco-georgic values! Good swimming virtues! The technology of human endurance!)

The nonhuman into which the prophet dives promises shock, disorientation, and possibilities we cannot contain. (The revolutionary urge! The lure of change and difference!)

We need both.

I wonder if Larry would agree with me?

Plenty to laugh about in the car home from Branford Regal Theaters last night after a family trip to see “Aquaman.” But my sea-fever makes me susceptible even to the underwater glimmer of the DC logo in the opening credits. So I’m going list the things I enjoyed about this $200 billion dollar and two-and-a-half hour romp.

1. The first spoken words, in voice-over from Jason Mamoa, were “Jules Verne,” and then the quotation, “Put two ships in the open sea, without wind or tide, and at last they will come together.” The phrase glosses the Atlantan queen-lighthouse keeper romance of Aquaman’s parents, but I was happy just to get Verne’s name up front where it belongs.
2. Pollution: The bad brother / Ocean Master Orm, played by Patrick Wilson, wants to attack the surface in revenge for centuries of pollution. At one point he causes the sea to vomit up plastic and sunken warships on all the world’s beaches. He’s not the good guy, but it’s not a bad idea.
3. The movie opens on a remote lighthouse on the Maine Coast, and a running vision imagines this place as a maritime edge, jutting out into the rocky coastline. Maybe my favorite CGI spectacle moment saw a massive wave surge over this coast, with our guy Aquaman trying to drive his father’s pickup truck ahead of the storm, with his sleeping-it-off father snoozing in the passanger seat. Spoiler alert: they don’t make it, but Dad ends up OK.
4. Among many A-list actors in what doesn’t always feel like an A-list movie was Nicole Kidman as Queen Atlanta, undersea royalty who flees from an arranged marriage, falls in love with the lighthouse keeper, has a half-human son, and then returns when she realizes she can only keep her human family safe by going back to Atlantis. Why she leaves her son on land is never clear — but in the end she comes back to the lighthouse keeper, which makes a nice twist on the siren/selkie stories of feminine sea-creatures who lure sailors to their doom.
5. Jason Mamoa’s a fun actor and physical specimen, though I’ve always seen him as a bit too musclebound to be a swimmer. They kept his comic side mostly reined in by melodrama and action scenes, though I did enjoy a goofy moment where what looked to be a developing bar fight became instead a series of selfie poses with burly locals and the “Fish-man.” But mostly I loved Mamoa’s tattoos, which make me think of my favorite maritime Pacific islander, Queequeg. As the Captain says when looking at the body art, “Oh, devilish tantalization of the gods!”
6. It’s hard not to love the giant crab-god Karathen, voiced by Julie Andrews, who joins up with the good guys after Aquaman secures the ancestral Trident. I admit I wanted the ocean-liner sized beastie to burst out into the crab-song from Moana, “Shiny,” and in fact at various points I started thinking that a Moana-Aquaman mashup might really be an excellent thing. “I was a drab little crab once…”
7. King Arthur of Atlantis! The plotline was basically sword from the stone-familiar, which maybe supports longstanding fantasies about the sea being the “English national chemical” (Ezra Pound) or England having some special connection to the ocean (Joseph Conrad). Or maybe they could not think of a more original plot? But in any case — what’s not to like?

Maybe I’m just in the holiday spirit, but I’m tempted to go see it again.

Happy watery holidays to all!