Steve Mentz

“The data is crystal clear,” said Michael Pascucilla of East Shore Health Department. “I have rarely seen such a clear signal in the data,” concurred Brown graduate student biologist Sarah Esenther, who has been working on the water quality study.

The primary driver of the elevated bacteria counts that pollute our water is dog waste.

Thanks to the efforts of our own citizen scientist Ann Davis, the East Shore Health Department, Sarah Esenther, other local volunteers, and generous financial support from the Civic Association of Short Beach, we now know what causes the high levels bacterial pollution in our water.

The evidence and scientific data were presented to a standing-room only crowd at Orchard House last night (12/6/2023). Discussion ensued about how to respond.

To prevent bacteria from dog waste from contaminating our water, we as a community need to change our behavior. The Civic Association will take important collective measures, including putting “No Dog Waste” signs on all garbage cans near the water, replacing the open green garbage cans with water-tight containers, and providing signage, palm cards, and other elements of a public information campaign. Residents also expressed interest in storm drain art and in adding bio swales to help capture run-off. People who want to help organize these efforts should attend the next meeting of the Civic Association on Monday December 11 at 7 pm at the Short Beach Union Church.

Those of us who are dog owners can start responding to this problem today. We should stop putting our baggies of dog poop in the green garbage cans that sit directly above Johnson’s Beach and the other local beaches. We should instead put the baggies in our pockets, bring them back to our homes, and store them (outside!) until we can put them out in the big green trash containers that the town takes away each week. If everyone does that, the presence of pollution in our water will decrease.

We should inform our neighbors and encourage everyone to participate in this change of behavior to improve our quality of life.

I’m a dog owner – many of you will recognize our two ridiculous and beloved corgis, Indiana and Blue – and an every day swimmer in the Sound during the warm half of the year. About five years or so ago, I happened to look inside the green garbage can on the corner of Johnson’s Beach, which was full of dog poop bags and water. That’s when I decided to stop adding to the bacterial tea, and started bringing my dogs’ bags up to my house, from where they go out with the town garbage on Monday mornings. It’s not easy to change habits, and not that much fun to carry dog bags in your pocket – but it’s possible. We will need to remind each other, gently educate our neighbors and visitors, and pay attention as we make these changes.

It will be worth it to have cleaner water in our beloved Shoreline.

I started reading the novels of South African writer J.M. Coetzee back in 1986, on the suggestion of my then-prof Paul Auster. I started, I’m pretty sure, with Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), but I quickly devoured all the austere, slim, brilliant novels available. In 1988, I wrote a long undergraduate essay on the five novels from Dusklands (1984) and Foe (1986), in which I argued that Coetzee sought to craft a “middle space” between collaboration with an oppressive regime and active revolution. At the core of this ambitious if somewhat overwrought essay was the title figure of LIfe and Times of Michael K, for which Coetzee won the first of his two Booker prizes in 1983.

Even now, ten more novels and three fiction-ish autobiographies later, I think of Michael K as the core figure of Coetzee’s literary imagination. Arguments could be made for Elizabeth Costello, the Jesus figure in his recent trilogy, and two creepy exemplars of moral failure and complicity, the Magistrate in Waiting for the Barbarians and David Lurie in Disgrace – but I’m on team Michael K.

The postcolonial poet and critic Edouard Glissant celebrates the “right to opacity” for all humans, and I know few more strangely moving monuments to opacity than Michael K. That’s why I was intrigued to see his story staged with the title figure as a half-sized human-shaped puppet, designed by South Africa’s Handspring Puppet Company (famous for War Horse) and manipulated on stage by three puppeteers. Michael K is not the only mechanical figure in the story, which includes a variety of humans as well as puppet-renditions of his mother Anna K and (amazingly) a unlucky goat that Michael K encounters in the karoo in rural South African. But it’s Michael K, with his hare lip and awkward stare, who transfixes.

The novel opens with the hero’s birth, his hare lip, and his mother’s instinctive revulsion at “the mouth that would not close” (3). Video projection close-ups help the audience see this feature on the Handspring puppet. His deformity excludes Michael K from most communities, including a noisy and evocatively-staged failure to breastfeed as a newborn. The awkwardness of the puppet’s motions, and the need for multiple human handlers to operate the figure, perform the hero’s alienation more powerfully, I think, than any human actor could. Michael K is human, but he’s not. He needs connection, but also rejects it. The elaborate stagings of his basic bodily actions – eating, sleeping, walking, climbing a fence to escape a work camp – become a series of trials in physical over-coming, straining into being-in-the-world, just barely finding a way into an environment.

In the program notes, Coetzee describes himself as an “environmentalist” who has also won some literary prizes (two Bookers and a Nobel). The video projections of the area around Prince Albert in the karoo, where Michael K attempts to take his mother, and then later brings her ashes, show an arid and beautiful hardscape. To live in this place, amid the partly-sketched civil war and confining legal structures that are the story’s background, represents Michael K’s challenge and his partial achievement. “Perhaps it is enough,” he says to himself in a passage that the play did not quote, “to be out of the camps, out of all the camps at the same time” (182). Coetzee’s character is notoriously opaque in his racial classification, though at one place in the text he is identified as a CM – presumably “Coloured Male,” in the racial structures of the apartheid state. (The catalogers also get his name wrong, though, so maybe they don’t know everything.) The puppet’s soft brown skin matches this catch-all category, not White nor Black nor Indian. But it’s the movements of this Michael K that represent his refusal to enter into categories, into human orders, into the social world. As a not-entirely-human, Michael K endures to the side of history.

The final passage of the novel contains one of two phrases from Coetzee that float around in my imagination, surfacing at odd times. Unlike the devastatingly bleak final lines of Disgrace, which also circulate in my mind, the end of Life and Times of Michael K voices a minimalist utopian strain, something like what the narrator of In the Heart of the Country (1977) disparagingly calls “sweet closing plangencies” (139). But like the actors on stage last night, I tend to think that Coetzee mostly means it this time. He describes Michael K returning to the damaged well on his mother’s abandoned farm –

He would clear the rubble from the mouth of the shaft, he would bend the handle of the teaspoon in a loop and tie the string to it, he would lower it down the shaft deep into the earth, and when he brought it up there would be water in the bowl of the spoon; and in that way, he would say, one can live.

Life and Times of Michael K (184)

The caveats are all there – the absurdity of drinking-by-spoon, the abstraction of “one,” the repeated counterfactual “woulds” – but the novel ends with the word “live.” Looking at my three-decade-plus old pencil notes on this page, I see that undergrad-me I circled the word “live” – “last word!” my notes read. “At least not die.”

On stage at St. Ann’s, these rousing words were followed by lowering the puppet-body onto a red cloth folding it around him, and holding the motionless Michael K one last time. An amazing, moving, strange moment of theatrical magic.

Get to St Ann’s in Brooklyn before Dec 23 if you can!

Two great events between Long Island and Brooklyn yesterday afternoon. As Friday traffic grew, I drove out to the lovely Heckscher Museum in Huntington to see Courtney Leonard’s mid-career retrospective, Logbook 2004-2023. A few hours and a weissbier later, I saw Annie Dorsen’s Prometheus Firebringer at Theater for a New Audience in Fort Greene. The shared element in both artworks was constraint. Leonard retells the maritime history of the Shinnecock culture and environment mostly through the use of ceramics. Dorsen uses AI, rhymed couplets, and a lecture made entirely of quotations to reimagine Aeschylus’s lost play, in which Prometheus may or may not reconcile with Zeus. In sum – constraints intensify. Two brilliant shows!

Leonard’s Logbook exhibition, which features a restaging of the stunning Breach #2 installation of ceramic sperm whale teeth on a wooden pallet that I’ve previously seen at the Met a few years ago, traces Leonard’s evolution as an artist since her graduation from the Institute for American Indian Arts into her ongoing exploration of her native Shinnecock lands in central Long Island. The retrospective show opens with a call to arms about land alienation:

Can a culture sustain itself when it no longer has access to the environment that fashions that culture?

In addition to Breach #2, the most eye-catching piece in the exhibition is Contact 2, 2023, a map of the Shinnecock lands in what we now call Long Island, composed of ceramic thumbprints that outline the land and sea environment. As Heather Arnet, Director of the Heckscher, describes this work in the published catalog:

Leonard created this expansive map of Long Island by crafting thousands of ceramic thumbprints in the colors of the quahog shell. Each element captures a moment, a memory, a point of contact (4)

Courtney M. Leonard, Logbook 2004-2024

Not all the pieces in this show employ the restraint of ceramic; paintings and other forms of sculpture also appear. A lithograph, Blue Blood 2015, represents horseshoe crabs and their valuable blood, which continues elicit controversy around Long Island Sound today. Leonard links horseshoe crabs, whose blood is used for biomedical research, to the longstanding harvest of whales from Shinnecock waters.

I’ve been amazed by Courtney Leonard’s work since I stumbled across Breach #2 in the Met several years ago. I’m very pleased that Suzanne Conklin Akbari and I will be able to include two images of her Contact 2021, which maps the watershed of the Muhheakunnuk / Hudson river in New York, in the forthcoming Sailing without Ahab.

After a crowded trip down the LIE and a beer with an old friend in Fort Greene, I got to my seat at Prometheus Firebringer just before the show started. That meant I didn’t really have time to look at the online program or think through the complex intellectual architecture of the show. But I think piecing it together on the fly was the best way to experience it.

The pre-opening act was a screen flashing out multiple iterations of possible plots to the lost play Prometheus Firegiver, part of Aeschylus’s Prometheia trilogy about the rebellious Titan who gave fire / technology to humans and was punished by being chained to a rock and having the eagle of Zeus eat his liver daily. This play, third (maybe?) in the trilogy, may describe the reconciliation of the Sky God and the Titan, in the presence of a Chorus made up of human orphans. Or, as the AI-generated scenarios spills it all out, maybe they don’t really reconcile?

The second of three constrained performances in the show was a lecture performed informally by Annie Dorsen, which she admitted was made up entirely of quotations, the sources of which flashed on a screen behind her. After the show, a staff member of Tfana help up a QR code with a link to the lecture and its sources.

The third intertwined performance came from the computerized (or at least inhuman-sounding) voices of the empty masks on stage. One solitary mask speaks for Prometheus, the other half-dozen gathered together for the chorus of orphan children. (Zeus storms, but does not speak.) The oddly moving constraint here is the density of the rhyme, in which almost all statements by the speakers call up answers via a rhymed couplet from the other. Additional internal and half-rhymes aboud. The result sounds awkward, sometimes stilted, but also in places very emotional – even though these speakers are neither controlled by ChatGPT nor by being comprised of quotations. Rhyme is an ancient technology – older than Greek tragedy, to say nothing of generative AI. What can we make inside rhyme’s chains?

There’s just one more week to see Prometheus Firegiver, but Courtney Leonard’s show is up through Nov 12. I might try to drive out to Huntington again to see Leonard’s site-specific installation nearby at Planting Fields Arboretum in Oyster Bay.

I’m so pleased to have a cover to share for my forthcoming book of eco-poetry, Sailing without Ahab, which will appear this coming April from Fordham University Press. Like any parent, I love all my books equally, but this one represents something special, a particular passion project that has been swimming in my imagination for years. I’ll say a little about its history here.

The idea of a version of Moby-Dick that sails with no captain has been niggling my mind for almost a decade. I’ve been thinking about it more and more during my turn toward writing more poetry, which started in the mid-2010s but, like Sailing without Ahab itself, redoubled during the pandemic. For my last appearance at a BABEL conference in Toronto 2015, I put together a tiny chapbook, A Book of Absent Whales, that contains an early smattering of a half-dozen poems. The cover of that lovely little book, designed by then-St. John’s undergrad Idalea Cinquemani, provides the model for the design of the 2024 published book.

Over the next few years, I e-published two excerpts from the project in the Glasgow Review of Books, with the editorial support of the great Tom White. The first in April 2017 introduced the project with three poems, including “The Lee Shore” about shadow-hero Bulkington. The second in May 2018, add two more, including “Great White Evil God,” my meditation on the crucial chapter “The Whiteness of the Whale.”

In 2022, in the wonderful volume Ahab Unbound: Melville and the Materialist Turn, co-edited by Meredith Farmer and Jonathan F.S. Schroeder, I published a prose chapter, “Sailing without Ahab,” that will eventually be the postscript of my volume. That chapter reprinted “The Lee Shore” under its new title, “Bulkington’s Out.”

But the full, global, vastness of Sailing without Ahab, which comprises 138 individual poems, one for each chapter of Moby-Dick plus the Extracts, Etymologies, and Epilogue, will only surface in April 2024.

With thanks to Suzanne Conklin Akbari, another Melville-lover who provides a glittering foreword to the volume, to Courtney Leonard, images of whose stunning ceramic artworks appear in Akbari’s foreword, and to John Wyatt Greenlee of Surprised Eel Mapping, whose intertwining of the Pequod‘s global voyages with my local swimming waters in Short Beach captures exactly what this book attempts. I also appreciate the generous blurb from Craig Santos Perez, the insight and clarity of the reviewers of the manuscript, and the visionary support of Richard Morrison at Fordham University Press.

I’ve published lots of books and articles over the past two decades, but this one will be the most personal, the most poetic, and by far the weirdest thing I’ve published. I hope people enjoy it!

My first trip to Greenwich was in May 2007, when I was a greenhorn oceans scholar and nobody was yet talking about #bluehumanities. When I arrived in London that spring, the Cutty Sark, that glorious historical remnant of the clipper trade, had been damaged by arson the night before. “Shipwreck!” barked the headline on the free daily as I emerged bleary-eyed from the DLR. I was starting a book on shipwreck, and I took it as an omen. I was glad to see the ship looking good this year.

Some 16 years later – suspiciously matching the gap of time in The Winter’s Tale! – I was back this past weekend for a conference on two of my favorite things. Shakespeare and the Sea was organized by Laurence Publicover (Bristol), Anjna Chouhan (formerly of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, now Warwickshire Libraries), and the National Maritime Museum. It brought together a varied group of (mostly) in-person and (some) remote speakers, including not just academics but also theater makers, public outreach professionals, and students from several different stages in the educational journey. We had a half-dozen panels, keynote talks from me (Fri) and Emma Smith (Sat), a round-table, a dinner, a tour of the interesting history of Dulwich College’s imperfect First Folio, and quite a few other things. I saw old friends and made new ones, learned from every paper I heard, and doubtless bothered everyone with my over-enthusiastic questions at pretty much every session.

The Shakespearean strain of #bluehumanities represents a point of origin for me. Many of the things I love about oceanic and watery thinking, which I started discovering around that early summer in Greenwich, overflowed again during these past few days. Rather than try to summarize each of the papers, I’m going to try a recap-by-overview, an effort to see in the papers and presentations a set of seaways to move this kind of scholarship forward. The most exciting thing about the weekend was hearing all sorts of brilliant and energetic work from new voices. I have all kinds of personal, and more recently professional, reasons for engaging with these ideas – but it was thrilling to learn how other people approach similar and often very different questions. I was deeply heartened by the creativity shown in the presentations, and the efforts that people are making to develop new ways of understanding, communicating, and sharing ideas.

So – here’s my attempt at a thematic reading of the surging waters of this intense weekend —

The sea as physical and symbolic matrix

A large number of presentations engaged with the sea through its overlapping physical and metaphorical forms. One of my favorite lines from Melville, and an epigraph in Ocean (2020), describes the wisdom of the great waters as a “two-stranded lesson.” That multiplicity was repeatedly on display this past weekend. Kirsten Sandrock’s reading of “Lear’s Hurricane” linked the play’s inner world to storms like the massive rotating beast Hurricane Lee, which is, right now, churning its way toward me in the mid-Atlantic. (At the moment, the storm seems as if it’ll pass over Bermuda toward the end of the week – but who knows where the cone of probability will turn?) Erich Freiberger, a philosopher who teaches at Jacksonville University who was paired with Sandrock on the opening panel, offered a reading of Plato’s Ship of Fools as an allegory of the political plot of Hamlet. Someday I’d like to dig deeper into the maritime poetics of that play, including its enigmatic pirates – and I’ll certainly engage with Freiberger’s speculative and structural reading.

Two-thirds of the second panel – Tamsin Badcoe’s gorgeous reading of “drowned revenants” in The Tempest, Albumazar, and The Sea Voyage, and Theodora Loos’s survey of maritime images in Shakespeare’s Sonnets – continued to explore the sea as both real and ideal. The “star to every wandering bark” (Sonnet 116, which I’m sure I’m not the only person to have read aloud as part of a friend’s marriage ceremony) describes both how early modern sailors took celestial heights to calculate latitude at sea, and also represents emotional stability in chaotic conditions: “Love is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds / Or bends with the remover to remove.” Badcoe’s reading of Albumazar, a 1615 play I don’t know, contained the glorious line, “the sea hath taken order” – if I heard it right (?) – that she connects to the play’s overt focus on astrology and her longstanding interest in imaginative systems for ordering the disorderly spaces of the ocean.

Waterborne labor

A subsurface current over the weekend was the running conversation between a focus on new materialism and the micro-engagement of human bodies and watery spaces, which have long been central for me, and more direct forms of political engagement with the urgencies of Anthropocene / Capitolocene devastation in the present. For some time, I’ve been having this conversation with Dan Vitkus, a brilliant oceanic Shakespearean from the University at California at San Diego. Just a day or two before heading off to London, I read his latest published chapter, which contains a refreshingly direct attack on me and my new materialist eco-buddies (“Red-Green Intersectionality Beyond the New Materialism: An Eco-Socialist Approach to Shakespeare’s The Tempest“, just out in the new collection Intersectionalities of Class in Early Modern Drama, eds R. Arab and L. Ellinghausen). His critique does a great job putting pressure on the political challenges of the “entangled” eco-modes that I continue to profess, and that I extended in my talk in Greenwich. But I am happy to report that after a couple pints at the Plume of Feathers in very hot English weather after the first day of the conference, all differences were resolved into a red-blue-green haze of happy concord.

The panel with Dan’s sharply argued paper on the contrasting labor of merchants and sailors in Shakespeare combined with two other glimpses into premodern labor in and around the sea. Mollie Carlye’s project on sea shanties and songs, with special focus on the legacy of Stan Hugill, was fascinating, and I especially appreciated the musical clips. I was happy to learn that Mollie, who is based in Aberdeen, has already been in touch with the sea music folks I know down the shoreline at Mystic, CT – but I was also saddened to learn, from googling his name so I could give it to her after the panel, that the great Don Sineti, whose enormous baritone voice could make the least well-trained sailor (ie, me) jump to it, passed away this past January 2023. Michael Davies, a historian working with dramatic sources, explored the complex structures of the East India company shipyard at Blackwall.

Migration in the 16th and 21st centuries

One of the most important and heartbreaking oceanic stories today involves the hazards of migration by sea, especially efforts to enter Europe via the Mediterranean. Scholars who are enthralled by the sublime aesthetic joys of the sea – in which group I very much include myself – often do not do justice to the suffering and cruelty the waves conceal. My favorite part of Emma Smith’s erudite and imaginative keynote, which closed out the conference on Saturday, was the directness with which she juxtaposed the cruel “Stop the Boats” policy of the current UK government with the experiences of the shipwrecked twins in Twelfth Night. Shakespeare’s twins, as she carefully shows, can be connected to modern migrants in many ways, not least of which being their final solidification of their stay in Illyria through marrying into local elites. Her careful parsing of source texts and geohistorical contexts transformed this romantic comedy into something richer, a play that asks empathy for experiences that it mostly does not directly show. I often teach this play in dialogue with the experience of immigration, asking my students in the great borough of Queens, NY, to reflect on their family’s global trajectories in relation to Shakespeare and the 21c Med. I can’t wait to have Smith’s new edition of Twelfth Night to advance this reading even more in a few years!

Before this keynote, the poet Jenny Mitchell read a powerful Middle Passage poem, “Lost Child,” which set the emotional stakes for the lecture, and also for the conference as a whole. It reminded me of the amazing image that Edouard Glissant relates about New World and Old European oceans – the Med, Glissant writes (in Poetics of Relation), is an inner sea that concentrates, but the Caribbean “explodes the scattered lands into an arc.” Looming Atlantic and global pressures echoed in Mitchell’s poem and informed not just the reading of Twelfth Night but also the larger projects of oceanic studies.

Water as connection

Another powerful circulating current flowing through the weekend was the connecting force of oceans and watery movements. Alys Daroy, Zooming in from Perth in Western Australia, explored the “Blue Eden” conjured by Shakespeare’s maritime poetics and the ways theater-makers can produce comparable experiences. Liz Oakley-Brown, who I’d not met outside the twittersphere before this weekend, treated seaweed as connection, surface, and perhaps even media form. Chloe Preedy from the University of Exeter gave voice to the forces included in “Shakespeare’s Unruly Seas.” The final panel that I attended on Saturday featured a pair of new voices – Jiamiao Chen, a grad student at the University of Bristol and Annabelle Higgins, a high school student about to face her A levels – speaking powerfully about religion in Pericles (Chen) and the sea as boundary space for Shakespeare’s younger characters (Higgins). I was particularly happy to have heard this panel, and to think about how these new voices may reshape our understandings of the poetics of Shakespeare’s seas.

Water, performance, and pedagogy

Doug Clark’s typically brilliant and engaging talk about “Sea Green Shakespeare” was both a clever jab at me, in my Professor Blue mode, and also a subtle evocation of how water assumes different colors and meanings. My now somewhat mouldy argument about the “blue” of oceanic studies providing a counter-challenge to the “green” of 2000s-era ecostudies feels as if it might need some updating! More water colors, please!

I’ll also mention briefly two other people whose work I did not hear presented, but who I chatted with over dinner for a wonderfully long time Friday night. Morgan Daniels, who teaches at Arcadia University’s London Center, spoke eloquently about teaching while walking through the streets of London, which can mean either engaging with “psychogeography” or just “walking around.” I am not sure exactly what his “Radio Ariel” talk was about, but I would like to know at some point! I also had an extended chat about public humanities and outreach with conference co-organizer Anjna Chouhan, whose upcoming project, A First Folio for Children, sounds deeply fascinating. I also loved her idea of working with the “narrow boats” culture of canal hobbyists in the greater UK!

I missed a few talks – the wages of simultaneous sessions – but I was happy to have met so many new people as well as re-connecting with old friends such as Francesco Borge, from the University of Oviedo, and Jemima Matthews, now at King’s College London.

Ocean as resistance

My own talk explored muddy waters in Antony and Cleopatra, with a final turn toward Julietta Singh’s notion of “unthinking mastery.” One great question that I got immediately after the talk was from Erich Freiberger, who wondered how I square my focus on unmastery and human vulnerability with the Anthropocene’s evidence of humanity’s destructive power and the need for political and ecological redress. That’s exactly the right question, and it’s the question that Dan Vitkus has been posing, and also what Elizabeth DeLoughrey poses in her recent critique of the blue humanities. It’s a good question, because both sides of the discourse carry value. The tension between a post-human ecostudies that refuses anthropocentrism and rejects fictions of mastery, on the one hand, and the urgent need to redress the scars left by centuries of capitalism and human cruelty on the other, requires saying yes to both. The trick, of course, is that it’s hard to do two things at once.

On my ways in and out of Greenwich, I transferred from the Underground to the DLR at Canary Wharf, and twice I spied people swimming a race course around floating cones in the canals. Canary Wharf has long since sprouted glass-glittering high-rises, and in some ways the greenish water there resembled an enclosed pool more than an open river or sea – but it also looked good, given the heat! No time to swim on this short trip, alas, despite having found a good indoor pool in Greenwich on previous excursions and also hearing, via my visiting Australian colleague Rebecca Olive, who I met for a drink after seeing Macbeth at the Globe on Thursday, about the glories of the Hampstead Heath Ponds, where I’ve not yet been. Another time!

Water always overspills the categories we distinguish as “literal” and “figurative,” as if this dynamic substance – sometimes-fluid, sometimes-solid, occasionally vaporous – underwrites our basic human experiences of and ideas about change. I’m still buzzing from this flowing, surging, splashing conference – looking forward to see what mighty rivers flow out from all these ideas in the fullness of time!

The end of summer 2023 coincides with the e-publication of two public pieces courtesy of the good people at the Folger Shakespeare Library, that hub of scholarship and all things Shakespearean across the street from the Supreme Court in Washington, DC.

The first is a podcast interview, for their “Shakespeare Unlimited” podcast: “Shakespeare and the Ocean, with Steve Mentz.”

The second, a companion piece, is an entry for the “Shakespeare and Beyond” blog, “Five Shakespeare Quotes about the Sea.”

Like most Shakespeareans, I’ve missed the community of the Folger during its extensive renovation, and I’ve walked by the construction sight several times when I’ve been in DC since the library shut its doors in 2020. It’s been great to collaborate with them on these public pieces, and I can’t wait to get into the new Reading Room in 2024!

The panels and conversations were still swirling near the confluence of the Columbia and Willamette rivers on Wednesday, but I snuck out early to squeeze myself into in a big metal tube bound for Connecticut. Shall I confess that I like leaving conferences just a bit early? I love ASLE, and I greatly value the press of ideas and faces, the dynamism of familiar and new people. Though I don’t close down the hotel bar anymore, I hurl myself into the maelstrom eagerly each time. But also – especially in summer – Short Beach calls me home.

This year’s ASLE circled around ideas of the commons, as an environmental, intellectual, and human prospect. At many sessions, I was struck by how capaciously that frame allowed many different kinds of academic and public work to shelter beneath its big tent. I heard many watery and oceanic papers – those were the discursive currents I followed – and also great work about Thanos, the super-antihero of Malthusian ecoscarcity, a brilliant analysis of eco-fascism as CREEP-ing tide and danger to left as well as right politics, and a series of wonderfully generous public humanities projects. I caught up with many friends, including some from my time at the RCC in Munich last fall, as well as an old buddy who lit out from NYC to parts West several decades ago & who took me for a pre-conference swim in the Willamette.

Some particular things stick in my over-stimulated 30,000 foot mind. The conference was the public debut of my book An Introduction to the Blue Humanities, the first copies of which arrived at my door day before the conference started. It’s always exciting to have something physical to show for one’s ideas, and I am grateful that the Scholar’s Choice table let me display the copy I brought, even though it hadn’t been arranged beforehand. My two traveling copies are going home with the excellent blue humanities scholar Serpil Opperman and with Ben Doyle, a Bloomsbury editor with whom I am conspiring future watery adventures. Publication always stirs up a social media flurry, for which I am grateful, but it’s also nice to have physical books to hand about, and to see people beyond Zoomtopia.

A few hours before Tuesday’s “Aquatic Commons” panel, which I helped organize, I was dazzled by an early-morning session featuring watery work by a quintet of early career scholars – Kevin Chow on what he evocatively calls “upended mastery” in maritime film, Anna Aldritch on the beach as interspecies commons in Albee’s Seascapes, George Hegarty on the idea of “drift” as a model for non-linear human-ocean engagement, and Alison Maas on “uncentering” the Pacific coastline in mid-20c California poetry. Plus a bonus recorded talk by Alison Glassie that I’ve not yet had time to hear! The session was lively, speculative, and generously collective in spirit. I’m so pleased to see so much great blue eco-thinking swelling up into the world!

My own panel opened with another example of great new work, with Bri Reddick’s reading of “Beasts of the Southern Wild” in the context of swamp and Black feminist eco-theory. Those muddy land- and water-scapes are wonderfully generative, and I’m sure I’ll be thinking about Bri’s talk when I write about swampy mixtures in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra for my next academic event, in London at the National Maritime Museum in September. I followed with a slightly disjointed extension of my thinking about swimming, which – I now realize – has been kind of a shadow partner (a “secret sharer,” somebody would say) of my scholarly work. “Swimmer poetics” has appeared in traditional venues – its debut may even have been in PMLA in 2012- but much of my swim-thinking has shown up in para-academic publications, in poems, or in public talks. What is the right venue and right form for this work? I’m not entirely sure – maybe it needs to stay close to water?

The second half of our panel featured Serpil Opperman, who has her own Blue Humanities book out this summer too, speaking movingly about fresh water and fate of a particular Turkish lake in the Anthropocene. The inspiring Greta Gaard brought the panel home with a generous queering of the blue humanities that opened many watery portals.

I was struck, in that full conference room on a gorgeous West coast summer afternoon, by the ASLE paradox that used to be (and maybe still is?) captured in the unofficial motto, “I’d rather be hiking.” (For me, probably swimming, but the idea is the same.) There is a simple, but still potent, irony in sitting inside in our conference clothes theorizing our contact with the nonhuman that’s just outside the doors. A doubled-body-ness haunts so much academic ecocriticism – I love our work and gatherings such as ALSE, but still…

How do we respond? It’s a familiar question for any politically-motivated school of academic analysis, and we blue humanities types aren’t experiencing anything that generations of feminists, Marxists, Critical Race Theorists, disability theorists, and many others have not been long grappling with.

My tendency is to think about conflicting imperatives and audiences through the lens of generic multiplicity. So many of the big “Humanity and Nature” stories slot themselves into generic alternatives, in which the abiding cultural authority of the tragic hero – old Man Anthropos, as I sometimes mockingly call him – takes up too much room. A hybridizer, and scholar of literary romances, at heart, I’m always looking for combinations that create new spaces. A few ideas recurred at this ASLE —

Outreach programs: Some of the most inspiring projects I learned about at the conference were collaborative and extra-academic – Eric Gidal taking student-artists to visit fourth generation Iowa farmers, Weston Twardowski’s description of how the Rice Environmental Humanities program networks eco-advocacy in Houston, Ella Mershon’s public theater program about the long history of coal around Newcastle, Brenda Coutinho’s description of a utopian college founded by (or in honor of?) Tagore in India.

These acts of what I might describe as remediative collaboration don’t always fit easily into the traditional outputs of a scholarly career, at least not in the US model that prioritizes individual academic scholarship. But surely we need to rethink scholarship in the face of what’s coming down the environmental highway?

Another form of collaboration appeared in the Salmon Commons Plenary, which I had been especially looking forward to. Photographer Carol Craig and Yakima tribal leader JoDe Goudy described First Nations Indigenous understandings of land as common resource in relation to the the mercantile corporatism of settler states. It made me think about the summer I spent, long ago in 1989, cleaning Exxon’s tar off Alaskan beaches in the company of local Athabascan Natives and temporarily out-of-work commercial fishermen. I’m long out of touch with both groups, but I wish I wasn’t!

I wasn’t able to hear very much of the joint plenary featuring Elizabeth DeLoughrey and Alejandro Frid, but their slides promised an invocation of “two-eyed seeing,” a guiding principle developed by Mi’kmaw Elder Albert Marshall as a way to integrate Indigenous and modern perspectives. I don’t know very much about this concept, though it sounds intriguing. So many new things to learn about! I look forward to ASLE’s next ride!

The way in to the old story requires that you inhabit it uncomfortably, all elbows and knees, pushing up on its sides and spilling over the edges. Few stories are more familiar, more urgent in our era of rising seas, or – in the end – more confining. Wearing it from the inside includes shaping this ancient garment to fit, or to not-fit, but differently. Ark-making and boundary-policing – who’s on, who’s off, who gets what resources on the voyage – can be a brutal business. The genius of this book’s re-population of our archive of ark-stories comes through its range and deftness, its ear for aphorism and eye for detail. Once you’ve read Noah’s Arkive you’ll never look at that Playmobil Ark the same way again.

“Perhaps the worst thing you can do,” Cohen and Yates remind us repeatedly, for the last time near the text’s end, “is to think you are not on an ark.” The exclusionary choices, patriarchal structures, and resonant figures such as Noah’s wife, the dove, and the raven, contain us, even if we’d like to think that in the Post-Flood we have escaped them. Ark-stories, including the core narrative in Genesis, novelistic retellings from Tim Findlay to Jeanette Winterson and many others, a gorgeous tumult of images from medieval manuscripts and paintings to modern stories and sci fi novels, encircle our ideas about crafting a refuge in a hostile environment. Maybe we’d like to get off the boat – but where can we set our feet in a flooded world?

Many of us in the world of premodern ecotheory have been listening to stories of the ark from these two writers for years, so that visits to the Ark Encounter in Kentucky and the Ark of Safety in Maryland, presented early in the book, have a nostalgic, pre-pandemic feel. Cohen and Yates are among our most engaging spinners of eco-theoretical narratives, and I suspect I won’t be the only reader who will wonder which of these two distinctive voices is peaking through at which section. I think they’ve successfully achieved a real blend of voices in this collaboration, though I hear more of Yates’s voice in the discussion of Garret Serviss’s The Second Deluge (1911) and its King Lear subtext, and a final distinctly Cohen-flavored excursus into Chaucer punctuates the final pages – though perhaps they will tell me these are the wrong identifications.

The book’s chapter titles comprise an out-of-order poetics that asks us to jumble up and make messy our ark-thinking. We are first instructed in “How to think like an Ark,” then cautioned not to lose ourselves in fantasy because there are “No more rainbows.” We splash around “Outside the Ark,” measure cramped spaces “Inside the Ark,” and consider “Stow Aways” from the Devil to unicorns and woodworms. Perhaps my favorite chapter considers “Ravens and Doves” as, among many other things, models of reading and modes of ending – it’s hard not to value the freedom of the raven who never returns to Noah’s hand, though the allegorical imperatives of the dove seem so deeply ingrained that I wonder how possible it is to choose just one bird. Should we “Abandon Ark?” Or is “Landfalling” the only possible goal, as the last chapter suggests?

My messy notes contain an incomplete list of aphorisms that suggest a line of t-shirts and coffee mugs in these busy critics’ futures. “Every ark is a recommencement.” “The arks yokes refuge and violence together.” “All containers are cruel” (with a lovely excursus here into Peter Sloterdijk’s speherology). “We live between catastrophes.” “Every ark is a broken frame.” “Every ark sails the crosscurrents of its days.” An ark is a “technology for stranding and desertion.” “Stories of landfall are all clockwork tales.” These fragments are incomplete, out of order, and unpaginated – my apologies – but narrative order, and citation practices, too, are arks of confinement against which some partial freedoms can be asserted. Plus this is an informal bloggy sort of thing, written just after I finished the book!

I closed the end of of Noah’s Arkive last night, knowing that this is a book that many of us will return to, in and beyond the classroom, with two somewhat conflicting thoughts. The first is about how this book calls together a dispersed community of scholars, writers, artists, and fellow travelers whose ideas, stories, and insights populate these pages. The main text returns to a few dozen primary reworkings of the Noah story, especially Timothy Findlay’s Not Wanted on the Voyage (1984), Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora (2015), Jeanette Winterson’s Boating for Beginners (1985), Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones (2011), Sarah Blake’s Naamh (2019), and many others – but for academic readers like me the volume’s generous end notes represent, like the kitchen in a house party, a place where all sorts of fun people gather. Though I know that it’s hard to print long books these days, and Noah’s Arkive weighs in at a chunky 406 pp, I would have welcomed a bibliography of primary sources, full lists of images, and maybe even a “Suggestions for further Ark-Reading” section.

The second lingering thought, which is less fully-formed than is the sheer pleasure of having being in the company of so many excellent, smart, and perceptive people as I rationed myself to one chapter per day over the past week, is to wonder what kinds of new futures that old patriarch Noah might have. The seas, we know, are rising, again. Another book I’ve enjoyed recently, Birnam Wood by the New Zealand novelist Eleanor Catton, contains an extended post-apocalyptic bunker subplot that has a very Ark-like flavor. Her fictional American billionaire has ulterior motives for his New Zealand hideaway – but plenty of similarly gated communities are mushrooming up all around the globe. Will we learn a better way than Noah’s to preserve human communities and nonhuman diversity? What would a better way look like?

If Cohen and Yates’s wonderfully erudite, digressive, and imaginative journey does not quite answer that question, it may be because it’s not quite answerable, at least not yet. The kaleidoscope of ark-stories this brilliant book leaves us with is less sleek ship of a survival than an expansive, encrusted, not quite seaworthy tub, filled with stowaways, riven by strife, bound by love, about to founder but perhaps able to keep some creatures afloat. Until the next time the waters rise…

Shakespeare without words may be an acquired taste, but I loved this compression of Macbeth into sixty minutes of funny, moving, mostly-silent and richly tactile performance. The post-show talk-back with the two performers was great fun too!

La Fille Du Laitier (in English, The Milkman’s Daughter) is a Francophone theater company based in Montreal. They first developed Macbeth Muet (Mute Macbeth) out of a five-minute silent performance. Now, about 150 performances later, it has grown to fast hour long. A slightly varied cast – the original production was created by Marie-Hélène Bélanger Dumas and Jon Lachlan Stewart, last night’s was performed by Marie-Hélène and Jérémie Francoeur – has developed a great combination of puppetry, mime, and call-backs to the techniques and melodrama of silent film.

In the talk-back, Marie-Hélène and Jérémie admitted to reading Shakespeare in French in high school, but said that they wanted to get to the emotional core of each scene. In perhaps the most intense moment of the show, Jérémie dramatized the murder of Lady Macduff by whacking a silver oven mitt, which represented Lady Macduff, repeatedly on the table. Jérémie emphasized that they had tried many different actions to represent this brutal murder, and that some – he did not say what they were – had been too emotionally visceral to perform.

Both Jérémie and Marie-Hélène, who played all the parts but mainly the violent power couple, were amazingly versatile and moving. But in some ways I thought the star players were a couple of dozen eggs. Building off a line in 4.2, in which a murderer calls Macduff’s son, “You egg,” before killing him, Macbeth Muet uses a few cartons of eggs to represent children. In the first of three flashbacks, the Macbeths’ efforts to have children of their own crack and spatter in their fingers. In the second, Banquo loses his wife but saves one egg. In the third, the carefully-nested eggs of the Macduff family get brutally squashed. Raw eggs, it turns out, are immensely evocative props – fragile when whole, sticky when broken, familiar yet mysterious. In her madness Lady Macbeth fingers and then breaks a hollow blown eggshell. It’s the last straw. I’m not sure I’ve seen a more powerful evocation of lost children in this lineage-obsessed and child-killing play.

I’ll mention one other moment in which the play almost-touched Shakespeare’s text. For audience members like me, following along scene by scene and often line by line, it was clear how closely the action mirrored the play. One of the sharpest of these moments came after Lady Macbeth died. As Macbeth stood in grief, the pacing of the offstage beeps – electronic “beeps” were used throughout as cues to move on to the next action – started to speed up. Macbeth looked up toward the back of the auditorium where the lighting and cues were coming from. More beeps. Faster. He shrugged, looked around. What do you want from me?

That muteness seemed, to me at least, to stand in for some of Shakespeare’s most gloriously excessive poetry, in which he makes despair into beauty –

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Sometimes when I see Macbeth I worry that whatever star playing the title role won’t be able to reach the full heights of these lines. One of the most distinctive versions of it I can remember was Kenneth Branaugh, in a 2014 production at the Park Avenue Armory, appearing to intentionally fracture the rhythm, as if he were working against Shakespeare’s iambic orchestra. Something like that happened last night at the Iseman Theater in New Haven – a small actorly defiance, a turning-against the history of those famous lines, and finding in them something new.

It’s on for one more night tonight, courtesy of the Festival of Arts and Ideas! Tickets available! Go see it!

The first poem Jorge Luis Borges published, written in Majorca in 1919, was “Hymn to the Sea.” He would later repudiate its Whitman-esque excess. For World Oceans Day this year, when I am trapped inside my house all day because of wildfire smoke that has blown down from Canada, I’ve translated the third (of four) verses.

Hymn to the Sea (fragment)

The sea my brother sings its fullness to me.

I’ve wandered for a long time the wandering streets in sacred midnight —

Your waters weave garlands of foam-kisses,

Offered to me in solemn silence with fleshy blooms.

Today the winds steal all these things, all past things,

All things – so that you only, sea, exist for me.

Powerful, bare, wind and waves, and the blue that is not-blue —

The miracle of the blue.

(I dream a hymn to the sea with panting waves and rhythms.)

Now I make you a poem:

Following the adamic cadence of your waves

The salt primacy of your breath,

The thunder of sound anchored in the North

Drunk with light and leprosy,

With undersea voices, with lights and echoes,

Abysms and cracks

Where your monk’s hand constantly caresses the sunken dead.

A hymn –

Images of redness, of light, of constellations.