Steve Mentz

I’ve been mulling Hobbit 2: The Excessiveness of Smaug since we drove through a snowstorm to see it on Dec 14 and found we were almost the only people in the theater. Last Friday we made a second-breakfast return trip. I liked it much better on round two, perhaps because we did not let ourselves be ruled by schedules and arrived in medias Mirkwood, maybe thirty minutes in. So much better to skip the horror they made of Beorn!

I pretty well agree with, and appreciate, the whipsmart snark of Chris Orr and Sibilent Fricative: the movie’s a CGI-fueled mess. But I’ve been thinking: how did Jackson remake the happy circular structure of “There and Back Again” into an epic whitewater serpent?

Turns out that I’m not the only one who worries about this material’s suitability for epic. It seems that JRRT saw an advance cut of the film back in the last century and included this oblique cautionary preview in The Hobbit, chapter XII:

There is is: dwarves are not heroes, but calculating folk with a great idea of the value of money; some are tricky and treacherous and pretty bad lots; some are not, but are decent enough people like Thorin and Company, if you don’t expect too much (192).

To put it differently, the Hobbit isn’t epic. We’re not to expect too much.

But Peter Jackson and his machinery will not be denied, and Hobbit 2: Chiefest and Greatest of Calamities walks, quacks, and breathes fire like an epic. How does he do it? What can epic make of a furry-footed hero and his vertically-challenged if facially hirsute comrades?

It seems that Jackson had so much fun with the LoTR trilogy that he wants to make the same movies over again, scene by scene. The opening scene of Hobbit 2: Dwarves Wandering and Angry shows us a familiar sight: a ranger dwarf king-in-exile from the north sized up by suspicious-looking characters one rainy afternoon at The Prancing Pony. Not long enough legs to be named Strider, but…

It’s also clear, as Brantley Bryant shows in a very smart forthcoming postmedeival article about the LoTR films, that the desire to ascend to epic heights entails squashing comedy underfoot, so that most of the happy, silly, six-meals-a-day halfling banter must be replaced by steely eyes and Sting. This development, I suppose, has some support in Tolkien, though much more in Jackson’s filmography.

But for me the key to Hobbit 2: Bilbo Learns To Fight comes with the whitewater. If “There and Back Again” proposes a circular voyage, albeit one that involves transformation – no more cozy tea with the Sackville-Bagginses for Bilbo after his return — epic has a linear structure and no return. The stakes are higher, the evils darker, the conflicts harsher, the sacrifices more painful, and the dragon not simply a literalization of dwarfish greed but a creature marked, in his CGI-gorgeous eyes, by Sauron. 

In short: remaking Tolkien’s comic tale as high melodrama means splashing into the river of Epic History, floating there in open-ended barrels, smiting a few orcs along the way, admiring Elvish archery, tossing axes from hand to hand, even finding an extra barrel for Bombur after he turns his into a spinning, orc-bashing, axe-wielding tornado. The river scene is a theme park ride in waiting, but it’s also the heart of the matter, the raging force and forward drive of Hobbit 2: The Need for Speed. In a few weeks, all I’ll remember of this movie, with perhaps the exception of the dragon’s glittering eyes, will be flowing water, flashing weapons, and falling orcs.

Rivers are epic creatures, sinuous and incessant, whose visual stability masks internal difference: they never show the same water twice. They structure national and literary histories. Achilles sets the tone by wrestling the Scamander: the river-god marks the far limits of godlike rage. River epics consolidate national identity, as in the marriage of Thames and Medway in Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1596) and the river-choreographies of Drayton’s Poly-Olbion (1612). Assimilating human endeavors to the thrust of the river – forward, onward, tumbling and surging, rivers only go one way – becomes a generic imperative in nationalist epic. Once you enter a river’s flow, you can’t escape it; it takes you where it’s going. Even Huck and Jim, floating lazy down the muddy river, find their way into History.

After finding the River at the heart of Hobbit 2: From Ring-Finding to Big Battle, I was struck by how often the film used images of relentless flow. Orcs sliding down rooftops in Laketown. Legolas riding a goblin-skateboard. Barrels rolling down a trap door. Enwebbed dwarves and hobbits bouncing down through branches. Most of all, and most beautifully, the flowing rivers of Smaug’s hoard, cascading and tumbling in tiny gold-falls, flows and surges that threaten to drown Bilbo and his buddies. Dragon me a river: Jackson’s cameras transform even the halls of Erebor into inexorable flow.

Perhaps the clearest, if goofiest, visual example of the primacy of flow in Hobbit 2: Never Ignore a Live Dragon comes with our dwarfish hero Little Strides and his elaborate attempt to defeat the worm. The dwarves, with admirable dispatch, use Smaug’s fire to re-light their ancient forges, melt a large amount of gold along with some shiny powders that they’ve presumably carried with them for decades, funnel the whole molten mass into a handy giant-sized mold shaped like the Dwarf Kings of Old (or the statues of Argonath on the River Anduin). When they pull the mold away, a golden dwarf confronts Smaug on roughly his own scale. But the dwarf-on-dragon grudge match never gets going, because the statue no sooner appears than it melts into golden rivers, dousing Smaug’s fire (temporarily) and, for reasons I’m still not fully clear about, not inundating Bilbo and the dwarves. Perhaps they learned during the whitewater scenes how to stay afloat? Everything flows: is Jackson’s real Muse Heraclitus?

Hobbit 2: Fire-Breathing and Hoard-Protecting has lots of problems, and none of the repeated elements — the athelas healing, the elven archers, the spiders, the lidless Eye, the faux-Wormtongue who attends the Master of Laketown — rise to LoTR levels. But the visual force of the river, raging out of Thranduil’s palace into the placid waters beneath the Lonely Mountain, does what this movie needs. It’s not a “There and Back Again” story. By the time the dragon flaps off toward innocent Laketown, where Bard of the Sideburns waits with techno-enhanced black arrows, the way forward has narrowed and intensified: Just Get There.

I look forward, next winter, to Hobbit 3: War Makes Everything Epic-er. 

I’ve just finished Tim Morton’s Hyperobjects, a great, creative, and stimulating book, and it’s got me thinking (again!) about my favorite thing. I wonder if a longer history of the massively distributed, viscous, mind-bending things Tim calls hyperobjects might include my salty old friend Ocean?

In general it seems to me that the many excellent new responses to the global we find in contemporary theory — Sloterdijk’s spherologie, Spivak’s “planetarity,” Nancy’s “mondialisation,” Heise’s “sense of planet,” &c — could stand to splash around a little more in the salt-water element that covers most of the surface of our globe. Morton’s “hyperobjects” seems especially well suited for an oceanic dip. It’s not that I want to drag everybody’s theory into the water with me — though there’s plenty of room! — but the ideas of ocean that have for a long time been central to literary culture — the “genius of the sea” that sings from Homer to Wallace Stevens and beyond — speak so clearly to the conceptual and physical vastness that Morton and others are theorizing.

What happens if we get Hyperobjects wet and salty?

Here are a few quick ideas, keyed off of the book’s organizing terms and relying mostly on premodern literary sources:

Viscosity: Water thickens most dramatically into ice, as in the gorgeous iceberg on the cover of Morton’s book. Salt water especially exerts global force through its thickness, its capacity as a massive heat-sink, and its slow, surging erosion. We feel its power all around our histories and bodies; it (to borrow a term) “sticks” (1).

Nonlocality: This seems the easiest  of the bunch. What is less local than the ocean? When I dip my foot into the cold waters of Long Island Sound while walking the dogs, it’s the same World Ocean that bathes sunburnt bodies in Sydney, benthic fish in the deep Atlantic, and fisherman in Indonesia. Not to mention Aeneas, Admiral Nelson, and Diana Nyad.

Temporal Undulation: I think of solitary Ishmael on the coffin, washed and expelled by the whirlpool, bobbing back into history, “and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.” Or of Odysseus, stranded with lovely Calypso, waiting for the age of epic to end. No space on our planet is more in and out of history.

Phasing: If “hyperobjects are big enough relative to us that they cause us to be aware of the rupture” (78) in space and time, what Morton also calls “the Rift,” isn’t seeing the ocean as close as most of us come to this insight? Listen to a few of Shakespeare’s coinages: “boundless as the sea” “the vasty deep” “the wild and wasteful ocean” “multitudinous seas.” Big enough to get out of phase.

Interobjectivity: Here’s Beowulf getting interobjective in the surf, courtesy of Thomas Meyer: “You swam, / sea’s form wreathed your arms, / your hands / thrashed their way along the sea’s roads as / Ocean’s fork / tossed you into sea’s boiling floods & / winter’s waves crashed upon sea’s streams. Water / held your body” (74).

Hypocrisy: “Inside the ocean we are always in the wrong” (Morton 136, h/t Kierkegaard).

Weakness: “Say you can swim,” laments Queen Margaret, “alas, ’tis but a while” (3Henry6 5.4.29). No one swims forever!

Lameness: Might the “saving lameness of the Rift” (196) be a description of the uncanny homelessness of floating? Of being a mostly-landed creature immersed in a mostly-watery planet?

“Ecology is about intimacy” (139). Sounds like Swimmer Poetics to me! (Better link forthcoming)

“We need to get out of the persuasion business and start getting into the magic business” (181), sez Tim. I’m splashing right along with him.

Thinking the ocean as hyperobject has me re-thinking my idea for an Object Lessons essay about the Ocean, though right now I don’t have time to get to it.

 

When I started reading Bleeding Edge (2013) within a few hours of amazon’s delivery in September, nostalgia for paranoia hit me hard:

It seemed to him obvious that the human life runs through the varieties of mental disorder…–the solipsism of infancy, the sexual hysterias of adolescence and entry-level adulthood, the paranoia of middle age, the dementia of late life…all working up to death, which at last turns out to be “sanity” (2).

My shock of recognition wasn’t about this faux-Freudian rewrite of Shakespeare’s Seven Ages of Man but about me personally, about how much my life has been filtered through Pynchon’s strange books. I felt personally implicated in his new NYC summer-before-9/11 novel, as if there was some secret me inside these weird sentences, their rhythms, half-steps, mad excesses, violent rages, and schmaltzy sentiment.

What if I were to tell my autobiography through quotations from Thomas Pynchon?

I started with Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) in high school, when I’m pretty sure I didn’t understand it.

A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare to it now (3).

Read V. (1963) during my freshman year in college.

V.’s is a country of coincidence, ruled by a ministry of myth. Whose emissaries haunt this century’s streets. Porcepic, Mondaugen, Stencil pere, this Maijistral, Stencil fils. Could any of them create a coincidence? Only Providence creates. If the coincidences are real, then Stencil has never encountered history at all, but something far more appalling (450).

Read The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) when I was a sophomore in college, shifting my major from math to English.

But how long, Oedipa thought, could it go on before collisions became a serious hindrance? There would have to be collisions. The only alternative was some unthinkable order of music, many rhythms, all keys at once, a choreography in which each couple meshed easy, predestined. Something they all heard with an extra sense atrophied in herself. She followed her partner’s lead, limp in the young mute’s clasp, waiting for the collisions to begin. But none came. She was danced for half an hour before, by mysterious consensus, everybody took a break, without having felt any touch but the touch of her partner (131).

Re-read Gravity’s Rainbow during the spring of my junior year to write a big academic paper mashing it together with the War in Heaven in Book 6 of Paradise Lost. You know, the sublimity of cartoonish violence.

Well, if the Counterforce knew better what those categories concealed, they might be in a better position to disarm, de-penis and dismantle the Man. But they don’t. Actually they do, but they don’t admit it. Sad but true. They are as schizoid, as double-minded in the massive presence of money, as any of the rest of us, and that’s a hard fact. The Man has a branch office in each of our brains, his corporate emblem is a white albatross, each local rep has a cover known as the Ego, and their mission in this world is Bad Shit. We do know what’s going on, and we let it go on (712-13).

Must have read Slow Learner (1984) sometime around then too. I still love these lines from his introduction to his earlier work.

The two impulses have given way to one of those episodes of middle-aged tranquility, in which I now pretend to have reached a level of clarity about the young writer I was back then. I mean I can’t very well just 86 this guy from my life. On the other hand, if through some as yet undeveloped technology I were to run into him today, how comfortable would I feel about lending him money, or for that matter even stepping down the street to have a beer and talk over old times? (3).

Read Vineland (1990) when I was traveling in Australia. I had some trouble coming to grips with this new, post-tragic Pynchon.

So, over time, Hell became a storied place of sin and penitence, and we forgot that its original promise was never punishment but reunion, with the true, long-forgotten metropolis of Earth Unredeemed (383).

Read Mason & Dixon (1997) during what was certainly the best summer of grad school.

Newcomers to the Ley-borne Life are advis’d not to look up, lest, seiz’d by its proper Vertigo, they fall into the Sky. — For ‘t has happen’d more than once, — drover and Army officers swear to it, — as if Gravity along the Visto, is becoming locally less important than Rapture (651).

Read The Collected Letters of Wanda Tinasky (1996) that same summer,  after I’d been through Mason & Dixon twice, because I couldn’t stop. The letters seemed pretty clearly not-Pynchon, though I didn’t know the tragedy surrounding their presumed author until I looked it up today.

[no quotation]

Read Against the Day (2006) several months — maybe as many as three? — after it was published, mostly standing on the London Underground when I was in Greenwich as a fellow at the Maritime Museum, starting work on the shipwreck book I’m finishing now.

As if the Straits of Gibraltar acted as some metaphysical junction point between the worlds. In those days to pass through that narrow aperture into the vast, uncertain field of Ocean was to leave behind the known world, and perhaps its conventions about being in only one place at a time… Once passed through, did the ship take two tacks at once? Did the wind blow two ways? Or was it the giant fish that possessed the power of bilocation? Two fishes, two Jonahs, two Agadirs? (521-22)

Read Inherent Vice (2009) in late summer, right when it came out.

Doc wondered how many people he knew had been caught out tonight in this fog, and how many were indoors fogbound in front of the tube or in bed just falling asleep. Someday — he figured Sparky would confirm it — there’d be phones as standard equipment in every car, maybe even dashboard computers. People could exchange names and addresses and life stories and form alumni associations to gather once a year at some bar off a different freeway exit each time, to remember the night they set up a temporary commune to help each other home through the fog. (368)

Finishing Bleeding Edge (2013) just now, & getting ready to teach it tomorrow night.

Time travel, it turns out, is not for civilian tourists, you don’t just climb into a machine, you have to do it from inside out, with your mind and body, and navigating Time is an unforgiving discipline. It requires years of pain, hard labor, and loss, and there is no redemption — of, or from, anything (242-43).

Years ago, I remember reading a little note or prose-poem by Charles Simic (I think), suggesting a compilation of menus for every meal as an alternative autobiography. The quantified self movement promises something along these lines, and probably google can write a similar story for our online avatars.

But still, I like this Pynchon-flavored self. If I did bump into him in some techno-utopian poly-chronic downtown, I’d be happy to buy him a beer. Probably just one, since I figure he’s driving.

For the past week or two, I’ve been walking around with an imperial epic in my pocket. Gorgeous and hand-sewn, with an antlered stag leaning gracefully down on its linen cover, David Hadbawnik’s new translation of eight fragments from the first two books of Virgil’s Aeneid has been with me every day, walking the streets, teaching class, picking up the kids from school, even while I was attending and speaking at the fantastic Contact Ecologies symposium in DC. It fits nicely in my pocket. A little bigger than my iphone, but lighter and more flexible. More powerful, ultimately?

Is this the poem, Muse!, that launched a thousand empires?

I love Homer more, see more of Ovid in Shakespeare, and might well judge Dante  the greater artist, but let’s not kid ourselves: Virgil’s the poet who made our world. Think about what’s hidden in my pocket right now: the poem of empire. All those imperial virtues and imperatives, piety, endurance, sacrifice, hard work and determination, the epic that turned the flames of Troy into the possibilities of Rome. In the slices translated here, our hero Aeneas wanders into Africa, fails to recognize his goddess-mother, shies away from heroic combat, eschews revenge on treacherous Helen, rescues his aging father but forgets his own wife. All for what? Italy! The future! Empire!

Reading Virgil always makes me feel split in half, divided between desire and duty, knowing that I should love Rome – think about everything that’s Rome’s done for me, for you, for all of us! – but not always managing to feel it. David Hadbawnik’s translation, and the fantastic chapbook-art object he’s co-made with the help of little red leaves textile series and the artist Carrie Kaser, brings that ambivalence home. Hadbawnik, a scholar of medieval literature, poet, and editor of two modern translations of Beowulf into experimental verse (by Thomas Meyer and Jack Spicer), engages the Aeneid with some of the time-shifting energy of Christopher Logue’s celebrated War Music, which slices up Homer’s Iliad with contemporary irreverence – Ares wears Nikes – and theological intensity – Logue calls Zeus “God,” as if his Homer were channeling Milton.

But in contrast with Logue’s raging semi-contemporary Homer, and perhaps also Meyer’s world-grappling Beowulf, Hadbawnik’s Virgil steps carefully, delicately, beginning by describing a precisely structured place of respite:

There’s a long inlet

where reefs strike out forming a harbor

waves break on either side of

huge crags that threaten the sky

but inside the sea, protected, lies still

so that

from high above it looks like the topmost

layer of trees gently waving in wind.

Lover of shipwreckful things that I am, I missed Virgil’s stormier opening, but I love the slow care of these lines of refuge, their on-high perspective, the “topmost” view that could only be that of Aeneas’s divine backers, and also perhaps of we happy readers. The tone is gentle like the tree-tops, “protected,” creating a safe space for Aeneas and for epic. Like the italicized Latin head-note quotations that preface each of the eight sections – “aequora tuta silent” opens the first one – these lines fashion a refuge for Virgil in modern verse. The language gets rougher – when Phyrrus finds Priam he “fucked him bent over the alter in front of / his wife and kids who ran slipping on the gore” – but my sense is that Hadbawnik’s crafting something like that poetic harbor for his modern Virgil. He’s not always throwing epic violence in our face in Logue’s manner but instead showing us how Virgil’s structures and values already live in our modern ways of looking at the world. Even when we want to resist them, these values are in our hearts, which is to say – in our pockets. Right there with this beautiful book.

The loss of Creusa, Aeneas’s Trojan wife, is one of the most painful moments in the poem. After turning away from heroic death in the ruins of Troy in order to save his family and household gods, Aeneas rushes back into the flames to seek his lost wife. He finds only her shade, who tells him – as all supernatural entities tell him – to get back to work, find Italy, found Rome. The future needs Rome! When I teach this moment, I  talk about Aeneas’s slide into patriarchy, his choice of the male line of father and son over his wife. Hadbawnik’s translation, sitting here in my pocket right now, hits me with the tenderness of Creusa sending the widower back to work:

Sweet husband, why wait around grieving stupidly?

The gods made all this happen

Jupiter himself snatched me away in the bargain –

as for you, you’ll endure exile

plow the waves long and deep with your ships

till you reach Italy where rich fields

feed strong men and the Tiber flows through.

There you’ll find joy in a new realm and royal wife

So quit crying over Creusa, however much

You loved me….

RUN

and take care of our own little boy.

The burden of imperial destiny and the pain of exile, punctuated here by the all-caps line “RUN,” a fragment that shows up seven times in the five slices translated from Virgil’s Troy-burning Book 2, send Aeneas off toward Italy as a hollowed man, set upon a thankless task. The heartbreaking humility of Creusa’s “our own boy,” after she has just released him to faceless royal Lavinia, reaches for an emotional counter-space, a private human world for Aeneas the wanderer, who will go on to lose his fleet and need his mother to take care of him in Libya. “[Q]uit crying,” she tells our hero. Time for work.

The mother shows up briefly, Venus in hunting clothes, “O dea certe.” He doesn’t recognize her. We seldom recognize the goddess. “I’m one of the good guys,” Aeneas tells her, recounting his troubles. Venus doesn’t want to hear it: “Whoever you /are, the gods can’t hate you all that much. You’re / still breathing.” Is that divine petulance what Creusa burned for in Troy?

I love walking around with this epic fragment in my pocket. I like to read little bits of it when I’m on the train.

It’s the perfect holiday gift for all lovers of poetry and ambivalent creatures of empire.

Think of our life in nature —

daily to be shown matter,

to come in contact with it —

rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks!

the solid earth! the actual world!

the common sense! —

Contact! Contact!

Who are we? where are we?

Thoreau on  Katahdin (thanks to Lowell Duckert)

 

What happens when things come together? On this lovely fall Saturday, the last day of soccer season, back home now in CT after an amazing two days in DC, I can think of a few things. Low on sleep I offer fragments —

Bristles that stick: Tim Morton’s keynote yesterday afternoon scratched us with “bristles” — sticky, burr-y things, pointing out from bodies and entangling with other bristly things — as a kind of reconfiguration or recapitulation of his OOO conceptions of withdrawal and entanglement. It made a bumpy, tactile way of entangling human and nonhuman bodies. It was great to hear how much of his analysis flows out of classical paradoxes in logic — the liar sentence, the Sirotes paradox, Cantor sets, etc. Tim also was wonderfully generous in the Q&A & dinner/bar chat also — really terrific to meet him in person.

An archive of skin: One of Bruce Holsinger’s exciting forthcoming publications is A Burnable Book, his novel about Chaucer and Gower novel, but his talk was about a different book on the parchment archive. He helped us see whole, or at least imagine, the massively dispersed fragments of animal hides that have been scraped, tanned, marked, and preserved. He talked about geneticists who are using this archive to code the genome of pre-industrial sheep and cattle in Europe. We all talked about a probably apocryphal story about the Vatican archives, full of parchment, smelling like a stable. I’ve been mulling all day what Kellie Robertson quipped as Big Sheep — a digital archive, searchable and sliceable, of the skin archive of parchment. Is it just that when we see the skin-pieces we want some way to make them whole bodies?

William’s “nothing”: The best new poem I heard yesterday was William of Acquitaine’s troubadour lyric about the pleasures of absence:

I’ll write a verse about nothing at all,
it isn’t about me or about anybody else,
it isn’t about love nor about youth,
nor about anything else,
because, in the first place, it was conceived while sleeping
on a horse

Anne Harris’s great, resonant, echo-filled meditation on Ovid, Michel Serres, William of Acquitaine, and the imaginative project of seeking a silence prior to or untroubled by language, a noise without signal which cannot be read (or misread), followed Bruce’s skin-ful call to move from words to feelings.

First he was a bat: One of the real pleasures of Contact Ecologies for me was the chance to present in a two-paper mini-panel with a friend from grad school, Kellie Robertson. She was a few years ahead of me in the program, and had left for midwestern pastures by the time I finished. In the intervening decade-plus we’ve seen each other a few times at MLA or the Folger, but not often have had time to visit, and never before to work together. Her talked started with a controversial new book by Thomas Nagel, who once speculated about what it would be like to be a bat, attacking the neo-Darwinian materialist consensus. Via her recent work on medieval Aristotelianism, she helped us imagine an alternative history of science, in which teleology and form might not be forbidden words, and chance not a supreme value. It’s hard to imagine this path — which is her point — but wonderfully challenging to think along it. She started with an oddly matter-of-fact poem by Walter de Maria about loving natural disasters and then talked about his lightning field installation in New Mexico. Kellie didn’t quite argue for a new Aristotelian turn, but she did persuasively suggest that the blinders of centuries of post-Cartesian anti-Aristotelianism might be worth pulling off, to see what else is out there.

My ‘cene-salad and Mandelshtam’s “Horseshoe”: I posted short versions of my talk on Facebook before heading south on Thursday. In four words: Anthropocene? Homogenocene! Thalassocene? Naufragocene! Two words: theft? composture! In one: turbulence!

There was a bit more to it, and maybe I’ll post a little of it here later, but one fun part was swapping out a clear-sounding name for four overlapping terms. At least some of the problems I tend to have with too-narrow terminology might be avoided — or such is my gamble — by multiplying terms, so that rather than marking single imperial claims, each name and every historical meta-narrative gets composted along side another.

Another fun part was introducing a few lines from one of my favorite modern sea poems, Osip Mandelshtam’s “Whoever finds a horseshoe.” I used Mandelshtam’s poem to introduce wily Ulysses, hero of the Naufragocene, Age of Shipwrecks —

But breathing the smell

Of resinous tears oozing through planks

Admiring the boards of bulkheads riveted

Not by the peaceful Bethlehem carpenters but by that other —

Father of journeys, friend of seafarers —

It’s not only a sea poem but a lament about the human shipwreck of Soviet history and a lyric dream of absolute form. “Time pares me down like a coin,” it ends, “And there is no longer enough of me for myself.” I love the James Greene translations that Alinor gave me before we got married — in fact one of his other great maritime poems, “Sleeplessness. Homer. Taut sails” was part of our wedding in Sausalito in 1996. I’m really pleased that in this talk, and eventually in my book on shipwreck, I’ll introduce Odysseus, a figure who saturates the book and my thinking, via Mandelshtam.

Public Joy: Thursday afternoon a slightly different configuration of us took in Eileen Joy’s utopian torrent of invention and possibility. Faced with a crisis in scholarly publishing and finding adequate publics for our work, she insists that we invent them. Time wears down all things (like coins, and sometimes because of what coins represent), but it’s hard not to be a little bit optimistic about the future of the humanities when you’re in the middle of events like these.

Contact Ecologies was the latest in a series of MEMSI fantasias that I’ve joined, as participant or audience member or lurking twitterbot. Eileen’s talk especially but really the whole event drove home to me a key reason why we need these events. They are themselves acts of publishing, of making public and publics and communities.

Tim Morton has already said over on his blog pretty much what I think about Jeffrey Cohen’s wizardly hosting. It’s such a pleasure to play with such smart people in their messy, constructive, play-ful, vibrant sandbox.

 

 

Here I was on Tuesday night 10/29/13, the one-year anniversary of Sandy’s rude arrival in New York, sounding out the sea poetry in a reading organized by Underwater New York and the Silent Beaches show. 

After an intro by the three ingenitors of Underwater NY, the event started with an “Ode to Far Rockway” read by Nicole Cirino to mark the day. Then Bob Fanuzzi spun a gorgeous tall-tale about his family’s history in Staten Island and its waters, including the deep-sea exploits of Uncle Ed, who joined us at the reading that evening. I read a poem about a doll’s leg that had been discovered on Dead Horse Beach, and another about my coastal Connecticut Sandy adventures. (Both those poems are now published on the Underwater NY site, with links on a new page on this blog.) I also read a prose piece that I’ll share a bit later.

Gabe Brownstein read a funny & moving story about growing up near the 125th St. sewage treatment plant, improvements to which made possible my fairly-clean-water swim up the Hudson in September. Lee Ann Brown read an amazing Whitman poem about trickles and drops as well as several of her own pieces and some mermaid poems she’d collaborated on with her students. Nelly Reifler closed us out with a brilliant, dark, enticing story about a formica table, a family, and the lure of violence.

Such a pleasure to share the event with so many distinguished writers, and to have a lively crowd out at St. John’s on a Tuesday night!

 

This evening I’ll be doing something I’ve not done in maybe 15 years: reading a poem of mine in public. The poetry reading at the Silent Beaches exhibition is co-sponsored by Underwater New York, a digital poetry journal and collective. On the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Sandy’s landfall, we’ll be reading poetry about maritime New York.

My contribution is about a doll’s leg found at Dead Horse Beach. It’s titled
“Asymmetrical Kicking,” and written in the voice of the leg during its Jamaica Bay odyssey: from beach to sea to beach again. 

Enjoy!

I knew she’d miss me.

Points of fingers digging slightly,

Varying pressure across my unfeeling thigh,

Holding whatever was around us.

Touch binds emotion to dead things.

It skates along filaments to sinews,

Plastic to skin to salt.

She brought me to the beach, into the surf, out here:

That was her mistake.

Beneath the surface flows another world.

Sideways I kick inside it,

Detached,

Solitary.

Lashing out, I move

Asymmetrically.

No longer attached to body or world or girl,

I swim alone.

The salt burns and trickles inside me,

Filling me up.

A dark motion holds me for a long time.

Returning is another leaving.

Never stepping twice onto the same sand,

Out of the same salt water, alongside the same

Dead things.

Air feels empty after so much water.

Now when I kick nothing moves.

In the middle of a crisis of democratic legitimacy is really the perfect time to see Julius Caesar. Especially in Phyllida Lloyd’s smart and powerful all-female production, now at St. Ann’s in Brooklyn by way of London’s Donmar Warehouse. Politics, crisis, and broken systems were buzzing in my head during my espirit d’interstate drive home.

Like Ben Brantley in the Times, I loved this show’s intensity, its close, confined prison-house aesthetic, and the verve and swagger of the actors. The prison setting was something I’ve seen before, notably in Propeller’s all-male Merchant at BAM a few years back, but this version of the frame-play was more fun, as when Cinna the Poet told his fellow prisoner-players to fuck off when they would not back down in the mistaken identity episode in 3.3. (I wonder about the rage for playing inside institutions – the prisons, the Macbeth-in-mental-asylum I saw on Broadway last spring. Anxieties about performing inside the hyper-canon of Shakespeare?)

It’s a play about power and competition, and that’s what’s been roiling me since Tuesday night. Frances Barber’s Caesar was as charismatic a stage performance as I’ve seen in a long time: loose-limbed, physical, active, totally in control of the stage and the audience. Like many of these drag king performances (I owe that useful term to post-show conversation with Alison Kinney), she (pronouns will be a problem in this review! maybe I’ll just mix them) projected an authority based, as near as I can figure it, on love. Fear and power, too, but mostly love and shared identity. Caesar’s followers loved him and sought to be close to him. A series of faux-fascist gestures — a bent-elbow salute, masks with Caesar’s image on them – emphasized the cult of personality, but I was also struck  by Caesar’s physical attentiveness, her horseplay and embracing of each Roman on stage (including those we know to be conspirators), and her stage-filling presence. In the case of Cassius, whose “lean and hungry look” Caesar parsed shrewdly, she practiced domination by doughnut: holding him by the neck, forcing a pastry Antony has brought onstage into his mouth, smiling at his dismay. Like a mother feeding a recalcitrant child?

Despite Caesar’s claims for singularity, she wasn’t the only star in the firmament. Jenny Jules’s angry Cassius was probably my favorite performance: fiery, contained, smart, deeply connected to her fellow Romans/prisoners. Why should Caesar rule? What if against her hands-on masculinity, her among-the-boys grabbing and wrestling, we  oppose a harder, colder, more strategic conspiracy? Cassius got most of his good lines early, while seducing Brutus into the plot, and in her resistance to Caesar’s welding of the prison-company into one corporate body we see a plea for separation, individuality, for leaving just a little of him to herself. What if he didn’t want to eat Caesar’s doughnut? Why shouldn’t one man be just a man (or a woman, as the case may be)?

The most enigmatic performance for me was Cush Jumbo’s Mark Antony. Playing the femme to Caesar’s butch, her role in inciting the mob after the murder unfolded slowly, quietly, as a mirror image of Caesar’s bravado. At first I wasn’t convinced by the performance — I’m still under the spell of Toneelgroep’s incandescent raging last year — but, partly through listening to Alison Kinney’s very smart commentary, I’m coming around to this Antony. If all the drag king parts involve impersonating different versions of masculinity — which surely is part of what Julius Caesar is about — Antony’s inversion of Caesar follows a route to masculine power through feminine seduction. This Antony may have his problems with Octavius down the road — was the cast thinking of Antony’s later woman troubles when they double-cast Portia as Octavius? Or about Antony’s cross-dressing episodes in the next play with Cleopatra? — but her seductive politics snuck up on the dogs of war before letting ’em slip.

The staging of the assassination involved displacing one front-row audience member, putting her seat on the stage, and plopping Caesar into the vacated space. With her face video-projected in close-up on the back of the stage, she growled out iron singularity: “I do know but one / That unassailable holds on his rank, / Unshak’d of motion, and that I am he” (3.2). While the conspirators stab her, she’s sitting in an audience-member’s seat, a force for corporate identity partaking in community for the last time.

How can I write about this show without talking about the noblest Roman of them all? Harriet Walter’s Brutus was lean, angular, tall, oblique. A bit distant and patrician, it seemed to me – resistant to Cassius’s love, to the conspirators’ desire for unity, to Caesar’s gruff embrace. The great idealist in a play of realpolitik, Brutus in this performance seemed oddly detached from the struggle. When she spoke his short prose oration defending her role in Caesar’s murder, the balaclava-wearing crowd onstage ran around in circles, ignoring him.

Some of the air went out of the balloon after Caesar’s body was cleared away, but the last few acts had some lively things, including an Eddie van Halen guitar and heavy-metal garage band. A final costume change revealed Caesar to be one of the guards, rather than a prisoner like the rest of the actors. Too simple a political allegory? O Julius Caesar, thou art mighty yet!

One last highlight was Clare Dunne’s Irish-accented Portia, who raged at Brutus’s close-lipped plotting while dominating the stage with her pregnant body. She was double-cast as Octavius Caesar, in which part the force that had failed to move noble Brutus showed itself clearly ready to take over the world.

Get down to St. Ann’s in DUMBO before the show ends on Nov 3!

The ebb started mid-afternoon last Thursday, which means that while I was fussing with chairs and helping tape down microphone cords in preparation for Oceanic New York, the ocean itself was retreating from the city. That’s the way of performances: no sooner here but gone. I miss Oceanic New York already. What a tide it was!

A sea of things

These events are driven by humans but float along with a crowded sea of things. Setting up meant assembling an intricate chain of supporting objects. Chairs, screens, and microphones. Tables and a podium. Gallery space and abstract renderings of Hudson River water peeking out from behind the slideshow. An image of kayaks, boats, and bodies in the current. Dinner reservations. Taxis and the F-train. Institutions helped also: St. John’s, the Yeh Gallery, SwimNYC (for the picture).

A sea of voices

It still seems amazing that it all came together. A full house inside Sun Yat Sen Memorial Hall in the middle of campus on a Thursday night. Everyone got there, mostly on time, ready for action. Each presenter with a personal ocean, which will serve in this post as an extra middle name.

Picture-seas

A short list of images projected or vistas imagined:

• Glass on Dead Horse Beach, from Jamie Big Thompson River Bianco
• Glacial ice covering Manhattan, from Jeffrey Maine Coast Cohen
• An erratic boulder in Central Park, from Lowell Puget Sound Duckert
• The Statue of Liberty drowning, from Eileen Cape May Joy
• Miss Newtown Creek, from G. Newtown Creek Ganter
• The incoming tide in the Hudson, from Steve Hudson River Mentz
• Homer’s poetic seas, from Allan Semiahmoo Bay Mitchell
• Citizen Bridge, from Nancy Buttermilk Channel Nowacek
• Oysters, from Karl Constant Grey Mist Steel
• Soft edges, from Marina Atlantic Ocean Zurkow

Talking-seas

Ten rapid-fire talks surged forward in under an hour, bringing with them more salt water than one brain can assimilate. Where can I put all the flotsam? Matter in decay / the geopoetry of a “sea machine” / “errant” New York / making art out of the mess we live in / rough industrial poetry / “passion for the real” (or is it the Real?) / “measures of sea” / Citizen Bridge / living rocks / soft edges.

We followed the talks with an initial round of intra-panel discussion, talking about human and nonhuman scales, how oysters can build bridges or at least bays, how different kinds of media, from poetry to video, catch different sea flavors.

And the questions after! Beach culture! Flotsam, jetsam, derelicts, the Law of the Sea! Nihilism and Utilitarianism! Social Justice! “Improving lived experience”! Letting go of permanence!

Oceanic futures

One of the comments that lingers was Nancy Nowacek’s direct statement that we must live in more than one temporal register at the same time. As her Citizen Bridge project struggles with NYC bureaucracy and the changing coastline, she’s working across many chronologies: local and human, environmental and planetary, political and administrative. Oceanic New York, like most events, caught that multiplicity: surely it’s a delicious irony that the thing I forgot to arrange for this salt-water symposium was fresh drinking water for the speakers?

Where does all the water go now? In the Hudson estuary, it circulates: up past the Tappen Zee pushing all the way to Albany, then back out to the open sea, every six hours. I’m hoping to catch a little of that salt-wash in readable form, a monument and dynamic response to that night’s engagements.

Which is to say: look for Oceanic New York to appear from Punctum Books, in not all that long. With shorts essays and two-handed exchanges from the ten presenters, plus an assortment of responses and provocations from the audience.

My own alter-ego on a night in which I spoke about swimming under the George Washington Bridge and revealed the gory details of the surgery I’ll need on my ear canal next month was Melville’s Ishmael. Schoolteacher turned whaleman and mast-head Platonist, Ishmael clogged my heels from the event itself to dinner on Hillside Ave to a bar in mid-town where the party ended. He should get the last word here, I think:

And thus, though surrounded by circle upon circle of consternations and affrights, did these inscrutable creatures at the centre freely and fearlessly indulge in all peaceful concernments; yea, serenely revelled in dalliance and delight. But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm; and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy.

Thanks to all who made to St John’s last Thursday, and to all virtual Oceanic New York-ers as well!

At exactly 4:04 am on Saturday morning, at the southern tip of Manhattan, the tide turned. An instant of stillness – though nothing remains still in the water – and then the flood started, rolling from the vast Atlantic up the Hudson. By high tide at 10:09 am, the water level at the Battery was 5.7 feet higher than it had been six hours before.

But by that time I was upriver, flotsam in the current, swimming with the flood.

Along with 218 other finishers I swam the 10.2 km Little Red Lighthouse swim up the Hudson that morning. We started just after 7:30 am at the 79th St. Boat Basin, swam the first five miles or so aiming for the Manhattan stanchion of the George Washington Bridge and the Little Red Lighthouse in its shadow, and then finished up by swimming 1.2 miles past the bridge to the marina at Dyckman St. near the northern tip of the island. I finished in 2:14:10. The winning time was 1:38.

Long distance swims are solitary events, spent mostly with your face underwater. I went out in the second wave and, feeling good in my new sleeveless wetsuit, soon caught many swimmers from the first wave. There may have been a moment, say around 8:30 when I caught a glimpse of what I think was the tower of St John the Divine  at 112th St actually Riverside Church at 121st (thanks Jenny Davidson!), when I may have been near the front of the race – before a bunch of fast swimmers who started behind me surged ahead at the bridge and I finished in a crowd. But I wasn’t there to win.

I’ve never done a long swim in that kind of current before. The flood was behind me, which was better than the alternative but meant that the ocean was crawling up my back all morning. I can’t find a good figure on the web today for Tidal flow in the Hudson estuary, perhaps because it varies too much , but if we estimate a high-ish figure for the Narrows off Manhattan in the middle of the flood of 200,000 cubic feet / second, that means roughly 1.5 million gallons of water / second heading north. Going the same way were me, 217 other swimmers, maybe 30 kayaks, 10-15 larger boats, maybe 20 NYPD zodiacs, and a dozen or so blue-capped “Swim Angels” who joined the race to help anyone in trouble. That’s a lot of flotsam.

All that fast-moving water and debris meant constant if minor turbulence. The wind wasn’t a problem, mostly out of the SSE. But even so I swam through lots of movement: little waves passing upriver, or eddies forming, or wakes from powerboats which left us tasting gasoline. Maybe half-way through, with the Bridge  not looking much closer, I started to feel just a little seasick.

That’s happened to me before on a long swim – my crawl stroke has a fair amount of lateral movement, and even in calm water it has a sway to it – but it felt different in the flood. As with last time, I swam my way through disorientation and felt strong by the end – probably could have gone another couple miles up to the Tappen Zee, though pretty soon the tide would have turned against me.

Longs swims combine exertion with meditation. Diana Nyad calls swimming the “ultimate form of sensory deprivation,” and what I remember best is that wordless feeling of flowing with flowing water. Mobilis in mobile, Captain Nemo calls it. For a little while on Saturday I was part of the biggest moving thing in New York. Inside what Tim Morton calls “the mesh,” surrounded by a moving environment that buoys you up but is ultimately hostile to your terrestrial body, swimming seems part fool’s errand and part deep-down encounter with reality. Humans don’t swim like fish or even dolphins; our immersion starts awkwardly, and all our tactics and tools don’t make us aquatic.

But when you’re in the big river, heading upstream with the flood and against the current, and for at least a little while your arms and legs move automatically, machine-like, and you’re progressing upriver with the City on your right and the Palisades on your left, you feel in your slightly disoriented body why “flow” is a good thing to be in.

Nothing last forever — but that was a great swim on the last day of summer 2013!