Steve Mentz

THE BOOKFISH

THALASSOLOGY, SHAKESPEARE, AND SWIMMING

BABEL 2012

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My piratical conference badge

What happens when you rip open a supposedly “open system”?  That’s the question  I find myself asking in the aftermath of BABEL, my head spinning & imagination charged. Hard to think of an academic event that contains and produces so much joy (pun intended). I’m more and more interested in performance and pleasure as essential academic virtues, which means that clearly I was in the right place.

I arrived mid-day Thursday & caught the first set of panels before that night’s plenary and reception. Started off with “Getting Medieval,” a round-table that featured the journalist and role-playing fantasy game participant Ethan Gilsdorf, author of Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks, who wanted to know if we’d see the Hobbit trailor. Not yet — it only came out the day before. His insider enthusiasm was an odd fit among the professors, since his love and commitment overshadowed the fairly thin critique of industry or modernity he finds in the worlds Tolkien wrought. Thinking back on that first panel, Gilsdorf, with his almost-wizardly name, might unfairly be cast as an Uninterpretive Dragon at the gates of an imagined caricature anti-BABEL, a monster of sloppy affection and enthusiasm unattached to academic habits of analysis, pressure, or rhetorical gloss. The point, as I understand it, is to let ourselves play inside and across our academic fields and enjoy that playing — but also to find or create meanings in play itself.

My handout for my first paper.

But it’s  not  fair to pick on non-academics for not playing like academics, all the more so since the breadth of participants is one of BABEL’s real strengths.  Gilsdorf also showed an interesting slide of a map he drew in the early 1980s as part of a D&D game, which he started to read as a coded representation of his earlier self. I wanted more of that — maybe b/c I too sketched such maps in those years.

A strong “Going Postal” panel about networks, anonymity, the death of a thousand cuts, Derrida, and Milton — alas no Crying of Lot 49, my favorite work on postal systems — brought us to the first set of plenaries, with talks by earth scientist Lindy Eakins-Tanton from the Carnegie Institute in DC and Jeffrey Cohen of GUW. Lindy opening with a dazzling drawing  out of geologic time, the 4.568 billions of years since the earth formed. Using this video she provided a time line for the age of the earth, which she then broke down into the scales of human lifetimes, then larger, larger again, and eventually all the way up to the full frame. Catastrophic events — Lindy works on the Permian Extinction, possibly caused by a massive meteor strike in Siberia over 250 million years ago — interrupt our lives, but viewed toward the geologic scale they assume regular patterns, even aesthetic forms. Seeing the structure of our lives as “between catastrophes” challenges our imaginations — this is the way earth science is like poetry — to at least provisionally span multiple time scales, human and nonhuman, realms of stone and flesh. Exhilarating stuff.

(When I think of the age of the earth I’m usually with Joseph Conrad —

If you would know the age of the earth, look upon the sea in a storm.

but I like this method too.)

Jeffrey Cohen began with flesh, some Polynesian, naked, and painted by Gaugin, and also his own historical body, which, he tells us, used to sit in front of this great paintingat the Musuem of Fine Arts when he was a graduate student & contemplate big questions. His typically elegant talk traced the human stories activated by stone, including a geologically young rock that he brought back from Iceland, got the audience to pass from hand to hand, and then, after explaining each of our hands had undergone a physical exchange with that rock, leaving real traces on itshard surface, he presented the hand-out to Eileen as a keepsake. The first, but not the only bit of emotional stagecraft of the weekend.

My second handout

Jeffrey concluded with a rhetorical flourish that highlighted BABEL itself as living community and mobile “now” in a world that is “not for us” but which we inhabit nonetheless, and then he and Lindy sat down for a fascinating exchange that was a model for how conversations between humanists and scientists can really happen. Hard questions were asked — “What are the big questions of your research?”, asked Lindy to an uncharacteristically & only momentarily silent Jeffrey, and “What is the role of beauty in science?” passed the other direction. I was vastly impressed by the willingness to engage that was on display; Lindy’s courage to brave the pre-modernists in their den made my own occasional forays into historical, maritime, or Chaucerian circles seem timid. Jeffrey’s curiosity  helped the discussion become a real exchange, in which things appeared that no one expected.

These plenaries activated for me what was the central unspoken backbone of the conference, which is to trust the intellectual and human encounter, the moments that different things come together, to reveal things you didn’t know  before. It wasn’t just the factual information in the two talks, much of which I knew or had heard in a not-very exact sort of way, but the bringing together of voices & disciplines, human beings and planetary and subatomic time scales.

The Sovereign of the Seas, 1637

The next morning was about Intellectual Crimes, a panel I put together about the ways in which we never own our ideas, even when we use them as professional currency. I talking about stealing from old sailors and colleagues with the help of a stray bit of marlin twine, Craig Dionne laid out the fine art of punking with the precision of an old hand at cony-catching games, Sharon O’Dair put envy and ressentiment on the table as the seldom-spoken masks of class in the academy, and Adam Zucker told a wonderfully multifacted narrative of a fateful footnote and the relationship between mentor and graduate student. We were all, in different ways, thinking about how to bypass excessive claims about originality and ownership, and to re-imagine vexed relationships through which knowledge and professional status circulate. No reform plans were articulated, but it was nice to pull back the veil a little.

The mid-day panel was a BABEL highlight, “Impure Collaborations”, which featured six pairs, one solo respondent, and so much energy I thought my pencil would burst into flames. To summarize in the bedlam rush that I experienced it all: two sisters talking about the famous/notorious Indian girls who’d been raised by wolves, maybe, and their own interdisciplinary practices; a staged debate between   “Eddie” and “Princess” about anthropological field work and post-colonial ethics; a husband-wife pair talking about how his work in game design and theory infiltrated hers in 14c French musical forms; a feminist re-wiring of sexual practice through overlaid reading of Nashe and Cavendish; a discussion of the “we” in collaboration by two collaborating scholars; a deeply felt evocation of dedication, love, and community by Anna Klosowska & Eileen Joy, and Michael O’Rourke’s response in monologue. Taken whole, washing over the audience, it was a show-stopper. If Gilsdorf was an uninterpreting dragon, and Eakins-Tomlon and Cohen curious interdisciplinary rovers, this panel was about self-articulation, the joy (sic) of performing in space and in public.

There are risks along with the rewards of such an approach, and Eileen’s reading of a cautionary email from a senior colleague articulated some of them. I also wondered, perhaps because one of my own hobby-horses, Thomas Nashe, received rather abrupt treatment, about the tension between intellectual force and performative display. I always want both, but academic culture thinks it only values the former, so it’s important for events like BABEL to be overt about performance and the positive values of mobility. The best bits for me, always, are places where the spark lands on just the right tinder, so that things start burning before you know it. At the risk, of course, of the whole place going all Fight at Finnsburg on us.

Next was the Ecomateralisms project  which assembled for this occasion an elemental mix of fire (Cohen + Stephanie Trigg), water (Sharon O’Dair), air (me), abyss (Karl Steel), and glacier (Lowell Duckert). I’d read everything before except Lowell’s new meditation of glacial dreaming, but it was great to hear it all together, and a pleasure to be surrounded by such great writing. We talked a bit about the elements as human-scaled, neither too small (quantum physics would be part of that night’s plenary) nor too vast (the age of the earth), which also reflected back on Lindy’s plenary. We were all working, in our different ways, on elemental intimacies, ways that nonhuman forces and objects touch & shape our minds & bodies. I do wonder, though, about the lure of time scales beyond the human, which infiltrated all or most of our talks. Makes me think that the typically human response to scales, temporal or physical, is to want at least two of them.

Jane Bennet’s plenary that night  re-purposed Paracelsus’s ideas about universal sympathy via a lively reading of Walt Whitman’s presentation of human posture. That slight tilt of the head, the incantation of “I, too –“, helped her imagine democracy also as driven by a process that moves from below consciousness into consciousness. Agency at a distance in this model seems as much poetic as alchemical, and I’m curious to see how this model develops. David Kaiser of MIT gave the paired keynote, “How the Hippies Saved Physics,” about quantum theories alternative culture from Berkeley to Big Sur. It was a wonderful, & professional presentation, though not as speculative as I really like. I did perk up when Werner Erhard turned up as quantum physics’s sugar daddy, largely b/c of the stories my in-laws love to tell about Werner coming to dinner in their house in Sausalito in the 60s  & the crazy world he brought with him. I suspect there’s a larger story of the artistic imagination’s entanglement with science that could also be spun out of Kaiser’s research.

I missed much of theBeowulf reading, alas, and I wasn’t among those who closed down the bar at 3 am, but I did make a reasonable showing for an old early modernist. If the longboats headed out for waters north of Boston, however, I’m afraid I missed them.

Sat morning morning I had to cut short my personal BABEL, with assorted soccer games calling from CT, but I did get to an intense  panel on Synaesthesia which featured not only very smart talks about multiple modes of perception but also some juicy quotations about liquidity from The Faerie Queene, than which little is more pleasing to the ear after long days and nights among medievalists. The final panel on “Parts and Wholes” featured some interested philosophical and biological puzzles, from slime molds to the biotic flora that inhabit each of our bodies.

Hard to get a single sum from that maze of ideas, performances, and engagements, and in the spirit of plurality maybe it’s best not to try. BABEL’s both a utopian vision and an intervention in the existing structure of scholarly practice, and its plurality never works alone. I like Chris Piuma’s pithy summation of one of its strands: More creation. Less critique.

I still like critique a little bit, but there’s no doubt that creation the real thing.

Swimmer Poetics

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Here’s the opening couple paragraphs of my ecology piece for O-Zone, which thinks eco-literary thoughts while narrating the Great Chesapeake Bay race last June.

Into the warm salt water splashed the six hundred. Not all of us knew we were diving into a theoretical paradigm.

 

We crowded up to the water’s edge like figures in a Robert Frost poem. Or whale-killing philosophers in Battery Park. We were swimmers, come to Chesapeake Bay in June 2012 to race four-point-four miles from western to eastern shore. Covering that distance in the water carves out a nice block of time, a discrete chronology to feel fluid dislocation on an intimate level. I wasn’t there to win. I wanted to think some things through.

 

My hope, then and now, is that swimming can model or inspire a dynamic ecological poetics for our age of crisis. The prolonged experience of immersion, its difficulties and pleasures, parallels how we must learn to live today. Being in the water forces the physical realities of this terraqueous globe onto your skin, adding urgency to the need to move beyond comforting green eco-visions.  The blue world ocean, as literary culture has long taught us, is unstable, dynamic, and inhospitable. But the gray-green silty waters of Chesapeake Bay proved survivable, even pleasurable. Dare I say philosophical?

Dylan’s Tempest

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Listening to the just-released soundtrack to my shipwreck book —

The ship was going under,

The universe had opened wide…

 The watchman he lay dreaming,

Of all things that can be.

He dreamed the Titanic was sinking

Into the deep blue sea.

 

Heroism, Marine Ecology, and Literary Culture

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Here’s a few bits from an essay that will introduce a section of the forthcoming volume, Fluid Frontiers: New Currents in Marine Environmental History.  The book originated in this great conference, about which I blogged here. I’m introducing a cluster of essays on Steinbeck, Hemingway, and American Maritime Revivalism.

What makes an ecological hero? Can heroic self-assertion ever be compatible with ecological interconnectedness? These three essays on maritime literature and historical ecology suggest ways to bring the special insights of literary culture to bear on these questions. In a broad sense, the problem of the hero is the problem of human-centered thinking. All human heroes, by virtue of being human, exacerbate the problem of anthropocentrism. To the extent that humans want to see examples of ecological heroism in people like us, we resist the full force of the ecological thought that de-centers the merely human.  But literature, to a degree, may be flexible enough to respond to this dilemma. Literary works both reflect and modify existing ideas about what human beings are and how we interact with large-scale natural systems. The massive surge of ecocritical readings of literature since the 1990s suggests that the human-nature relationship has become an essential topic of literary interest in the present. Literary culture may help unravel, or at least illuminate, the conflict between the cultural force of anthropocentric narratives and the counter-pressure of ecosystemic thinking.

The problem of the hero remains potent for all strains of ecological thinking, but perhaps especially so in the blue oceans of maritime ecocriticism. While the green world of traditional environmental studies has always had room for the humans who till the soil and tend pastures, the oceanic world is less hospitable and, in human terms at least, less sustainable. The ocean is not really a home for people. But despite or perhaps because of the difficulties of living in or near the great waters, the sea has always been one of the most fecund sites of literary invention. To explore blue voyages instead of green kingdoms requires imagining ways for humans to endure hostile, changeable ecologies. The heroes we need, as I have argued elsewhere, are swimmers and sailors, not warriors or conquerors. These oceanic heroes, who exert themselves in intimate and dangerous contact with the fluid element, may provide models for surviving the present era of ecological crisis and disruption. Humans crave both heroes and ecological order, and it may be that we cannot have both, at least not in either’s current form. This cluster of essays suggests new currents of maritime ecological thinking that can do justice to the mind-challenging world ocean and find ways for humans to thrive in contact with salt water.

As both scientists and literary scholars know, ecology represents a system of relations in which no single part takes precedence over the inter-relating whole. To embrace ecological thinking entails refusing singularity, attempting insofar as it is possible to think outside solitary human perspectives. Heroism works in the opposite way. The hero, the example of human greatness, invites attention and focus, so that the heroic body itself becomes a vessel for transcendent values. The history of art provides probably our clearest examples of how heroism becomes embodied. Michelangelo’s famous sixteenth-century sculpture of  David, poised nude just before his combat with Goliath, visually presents the singularity and physical force of human heroism. The hero, the shepherd boy about to slay the Philistine giant, stands out from the crowd. Rather than being defined by relations, the hero exceeds them. Imagining this figure as just a participant in an all-encompassing network seems difficult, and perhaps undesirable. The tension between the human desire for exemplary heroism and an opposed but also strong penchant for harmonious exchange marks the field of ecological literary criticism. Literary scholars have no easy answer for this dilemma – we want both sides of this coin also – but literary culture contains a host of figures who try, and at times do not entirely fail, to combine these value systems.

It is tempting to answer these questions with some names from recent ecological activism: Rachel Carson. Bill McKibbon. Aldo Leopold. Sylvia Earle. Al Gore.  These and others combine in different ways human heroism and ecological insight. But the search for heroic models, for exemplary humans, on a basic level works in tension with ecological ideas that de-center human primacy and advance inter-relation rather than solitary exemplarity. To be heroic, to stand out from and dominate a crowd, on some fundamental level is a non-ecological act. Heroism, the human desire for power and display, may be part of what got our watery planet into its current ecological mess. Herman Melville’s novel Moby-Dick, in an ecological light, tells a story of human ambition in doomed conflict with the boundless sea. At the close of Melville’s novel, the waters close over Ahab and his whaleship and “the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.” A collective body drowns heroes. Only the philosophical Ishmael, who represents a different kind of heroism, poetic and speculative rather than epic and violent, survives to tell the tale. In Melville’s literary model, oceanic forces frustrate or reshape human ambitions. But in our age of climate change and ocean acidification, it no longer seems clear that the sea itself can remain what it has been.

Scenes from Portugal

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The view from our villa

I arrived in Lisbon airport around 4 pm on Saturday Aug 11, which gave me an afternoon and evening on my own before Alinor and the kids arrived the next morning. After checking into my airport hotel and making sure the rental car was all set for the next day, I took the slow local bus to the Praça Marquess Pombal near the center of town. I love seeing new cities by public transportation. The bus took me through the empty-feeling outskirts of Lisbon, filled with graffiti and young people walking slowly down broad avenues through the heat. I had the feeling I wasn’t in England any more.

Dinner in the Baixa.

At the statue of the Marquess Pombal, the Prime Minister who rebuilt the city after the 1755 earthquake, producing the first urban grid in the Western world, I switched to the fast new Metro and zipped down to the banks of the Tagus. After buying a pair of sunglasses at a kiosk for 5 Euros, I walked uphill through the steep maze of the Alfama, past the Sé (cathedral) to the Castello San Jorge. I didn’t pay for entrance, but I looked from the castle walls over the city toward the Ponte de 25 April, which looks just like the Golden Gate. First of many visions of northern California on this trip.

Dinner that night in the Baixa, where the long avenue are closed to cars and filled with small tables for the cafes. Sitting down to a glass of vinho verde and a  plate of fish-and-potato, I thought about how much fun it was to start by knowing nothing about Lisbon, just four hours earlier, and suddenly to have a sense of neighborhoods, public transit, the hills and wide river Tagus that dominates and orients the city. The last few days of the family trip we all stayed in Belem, about 6km west down the river, the port from which the great naus sailed to Africa, India, and Brazil, so we barely got back to the Baixa, and made only one trip to the Castello. Lisbon is a city to come back to.

The Roman bridge in Ponte de Lima

After getting Alinor and the kids on Sun morning, we drove our Renault Clio (“the muse of history”) north on the A1, one of Portugal’s great highways, built recently, presumably with EU credit. After almost three hours north to Porto we picked up the coast road that leads north into the Minho region, then turned east up the Lima River valley to the exit for Calheiros, just a few km short of Ponte de Lima and its Roman bridge. Then the fun began: the drive to our villa in upper Calheiros was maybe 5 km from the highway exit, but we drove up and around and up some more. The roads were all paved, but they kept getting smaller and the stone houses and walls closer together. We followed signs – including a great sign for the village of “Portal” with an arrow pointing both ways, the door being always open in Portugal – and drove through one-lane stretches that felt as if they were sunk into small culverts between the ancient stone walls that terraced the hillside for farming.

When we got to the villa we found a traffic jam. Our host Diana was there, the owner of the villa was there, and then we pulled up behind both of them in a narrow alley surrounded by stone houses. The housekeeper had locked gate of the carport, and no one had the key.  Portuguese was spoken, and the key was found.

The villa felt, and was, quite remote – the market to which we could walk was 1.5 km away, but along a paved road & besides it only featured old produce and Portuguese men drinking at all hours of the day or night. But the place itself was gorgeous. A small pool, a bit of flat lawn, an engineering feat on the steep hillside, a large deck, and a view across the Lima valley. The car port had table grapes growing in fat clusters, which we ate. The inside was Euro-new, complete with an electric stovetop that took us days to master, but the building also incorporated much older stonework in its construction.

Festival day in Viana de Castello

3. The first few days were quiet as the kids and Alinor processed jet lag. We drove into Ponte de Lima for the big biweekly market on Monday, but it was huge and crowded and we didn’t stay. I found a supermarket & brought in enough food so that we didn’t have to eat all our meals down the hill. Slowly I mastered the mountain driving, and gradually figured out the lay of the land in and around Ponte de Lima. The story goes that Decimus Brutus’s legions at first refused to cross the river, thinking it was the Lethe & if they crossed they would forget their families and homes. So the commander crossed first and called his own name back to the men, after which they followed him north.

Monday night we met Sonja, a Portuguese women who drove up from Viana de Castello on the coast to cook arroz mariscos for us – a somewhat wetter version of paella with lots of mussels, calamari, pieces of fish, octopus, and huge prawns. We communicated with her mostly in French, which many people spoke more easily than English — it seems that during the depressed 70s a lot of residents of the Minho emigrated to France, and there are lots of connections that remain. We saw lots of EU cars with the letter “F” on the license plate, more than any other foreign country. That meal started a trend in Portuguese food: the seafood was great. We also liked the national pastry, pastel de nata, which are little custard tarts. The best ones are made in a mid-19c bakery in Belem right next to the hotel we stayed a when we were in Lisbon.

Tuesday it poured rain all day and we stayed in the villa, but Wednesday we drove over the mountains to Valença on the Spanish border to see the great fortress. Traffic was bad and the “shopping fortress” was filled with Spanish tourists snapping up Portuguese linens.

Luis and Alinor after our hike in the Sierra de Peneda

4. Thursday was the turning point of the trip: we drove up to Arcos de Valdevez to ride horses at Carlos Orlando’s Quinto do Fijo, which the villa’s office had suggested. Olivia got nervous about riding English saddles up steep mountain trails, but Alinor & Ian rode through the steep alleys and dirt paths, getting a local’s eye view of the network of roads and byways of the hills above Arcos. Olivia & I swam at the river beach on the Vez in town.

But the best of all was being put in touch with Carolos’s friend Luis Barros, who runs AktivaNatura, a kayaking/hiking/biking/etc outfit based in Ponte de Barca who became our guide for two of our remaining four days in the Minho. On Friday we met him near his office in Ponte de Barca & he drove us in his van into the Sierra Peneda, the northern valley of Portugal’s largest National Park. It’s a huge, high, stone-rimmed valley, almost entirely cut off on both sides until the Portuguese government put in a paved road in the 1970s. The driving is slow and sometimes frightening, with sheer drops, endless views, and free-ranging longhorn cattle and wild horses. We were only supposed to hike until around 7pm, according to the plans we’d made via Facebook with Luis, but he ended up giving us the full tour: a trip to the park entrance and its visitor center, to see the espagerras or stone granaries in Soajo, to a fantastic “fresh” (ie, cold) swimming hole just a bit past Soajo, and finally, after hours of driving & Olivia getting a bit carsick, as good a bit of hiking as I’ve ever done, over granite pathways and glacier-carved valleys, past  live oaks and wild horses down to the town of Peneda, with its three-star hotel, famous church, and pilgrimage site. We made it to the hotel restaurant just before the kitchen closed at 9:30 pm. There we had local wine – vinho verde, but the red variety this time, which tasted a bit underaged, which is to say, like grape juice – veal steaks, and the only good chocolate mouse we found in Portugal.

Luis himself was as friendly and interested as you could wish. He runs Aktiva in part b/c of an ecological commitment to nature, as near as I can tell, partly inspired (I think) by his eco-themed reading of science fiction as a boy. We had a great conversation about E.E. “Doc” Smith’s Lensmen series after the sun went down and he was driving us back to Ponte de Barca through dark mountain roads. We made plans to go kayaking with him on Sunday. It was a festival night in Ponte de Barca when we go there, so all the cafes were still full at 12:30 am, but Olivia had been sleeping in the car for hours. A long day for her.

The Hotel de Peneda, last stop on our hike.

Saturday Luis had a big group of kayakers & we went to Braga, the largest city in the Minho and a religious center. Alinor & Olivia went to see an 18c Baroque palace, and Ian and I went to the amazing 16c Sé and the Roman baths. It was a fantastic cathedral, fill of many different styles of art and decoration. Ian lit a candle for Grandpa Charlie & talked eloquently about that strange feeling you get inside sacred places even if you’re not all that religious. Olivia bought cute sandals on the pedestrian avenues, where the two groups at lunch at separate cafes within a few hundred meters of each other. The salada de polvo (octopus) was the best thing any of us ate in Braga.

Sunday Olivia was feeling tired plus didn’t really want to kayak, so Ian & I went with Luis for 6 km of white water on the Vez. We met him in the Aquario, a café overlooking the river beach where Olivia & I had swam on Th. Luis pulled up in his trailer, we dropped his mini-motorbike – only 60 kilos! – so that he could drive back to get the boat trailer after we finished, he outfitted us both in lightweight shorty wetsuits, and away we went. The Vez was low, but not so low we couldn’t get through the 6 sets of rapids. Ian did great; he floated a little higher in the water than I did, so he could bounce off the rocks more easily. Luis also let him work things out for himself if he got a little bit stuck. It was great to see him figure out how to get his kayak pointed the right way in the white water.

I didn’t float quite as high as Ian – too  many pasteles de nata? – and got dumped a couple of times. But the river was good for swimming too, and we all stopped at a rope swim on a calm section. Plus Luis gave us careful instruction in the right way to use a kayak paddle for maximum splashing.

We invited Luis to come back to our villa for dinner that night, and bought the best local vinho verde on his suggestions – Quito Mendalhes, I think was the name? We served a simple meal of pasta and tomato sauce, partly b/c we had not been shopping that day & also b/c that’s what Olivia liked eating. She was not as ready as I was for grilled sardines or fried baby mackerel, which really are the things to eat in Portugal.

Monday was meant to be our last full day in the villa, and we had a lovely slow morning around the pool. Alinor & I took a long walk up the road for about 45 minutes, but could not quite get to the rocky peaks above the village. After lunch, we were feeling restless, so we decided to go to Lisbon a day early. Fortunately our great hotel – Jeronimos 8 in Belem – could take us a day early, so off we went. Highway driving was easy, and though we arrived in Lisbon after dark, we navigated by the monastery and found our hotel without too much trouble. Not many people seem to live in Belem, though it’s flooded with tourists during the day, so street parking was easy.

Lisbon is a very different sort of place: full of people where the Minho was empty, crowded, with better food and more chaos. The next morning we snaked our way through the single-file turret up the Torre de Belem, saw the late 20c fascist monument to the Portuguese descobradores, and walked through the monastery, built with the wealth generated by the careirra de India. The highlight for me was the great maritime museum, one of the best I’ve ever seen.

It’s hard to believe the trip is over! I may have more to say about Pessoa and other matters. Plus for the dedicated who’ve read this far, here’s a link to our almost 400 photos.

 

Three Plays in Stratford

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I may have more to say about my first International Shakespeare Conference at Stratford this past week: it’s a fascinating socio-cultural-academic event, bringing together a thoroughly global group of scholars and two separate academic institutions, the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and the Shakespeare Institute, in a setting that weirdly combines authenticity – the house where Shakespeare was born! – with Euro-Disney. But first I’m going to think through the plays.

We saw three shows in the three main Stratford theatres. Part of the 2012 World Shakespeare Festival, they each open differently onto the global nature of current Shakespearean performance practices.

So, here was my week:

Wednesday night: RSC Much Ado at the Courtyard

Opening night was a high-spirited Bollywood Much Ado, featuring Anglo-Indian star Meera Syal as a Beatrice who stole the show even more than this character usually does. Syal has wonderful physical comic force, and she clearly loves the spotlight. Much of what I’ll remember about the performance is her smiling mischief and charisma: singing “Hey nonny nonny” after the interval, toying with Benedick in 1.1, raging against Claudio after the broken marriage. Benedick, as played by Paul Bhattacharjee, never stood a chance. I kept hoping, somehow, that Simon Russell Beale, who I saw play a wonderfully big-bodied Benedick at the National Theatre a few years back, could have transported himself to the stage for a battle of the titans.  Certainly nobody on the stage last week could match Syal.  (Beale, alas, was busy playing Timon in London, in what by all reports is a great production, perhaps overshadowed by the Olympics.)

The richly Indian staging was fun – bicycles in the lobby, bright colors, elaborate clothes of carefully varied degrees of Eastern- and Western-ness. Especially in the second half, in the two wedding scenes, the spectacle was good to the eyes. But there was an odd sense of the over-ripe also. Most of the actors, including Syal, are not Indian-born, but native to the UK. Their Bollywood accents, most noticeable in act 1, were assumed, and then, especially in Benedick’s case, slowly sloughed off as the play continued. A parable of assimilation? A way of poking fun at non-Anglophone Indians? Or maybe my ear just got trained to their accents? It was hard to shake a slight feeling of excess, both the sweet excess of Bollywood itself and, possibly, a less comforting kind of cultural friction through appropriation. The show was fun; easy to watch and listen to, a perfectly enjoyable evening, but perhaps it missed an opportunity to explore the relation between the UK and subcontinental Anglophone Indian communities? Though of course not every play need reach for high political resonance.

Not everything in the show captivated as much as Beatrice. Dogberry in particular was a dud, funnier in fact when garbling pre-show instructions to be sure to talk loudly on your cell phones during the performance. Borrachio was more fun and outrageous, including when he urinated on his long-suffering buddy Conrad before being nabbed by the idiot watch. Don Pedro’s proposal to Beatrice was played seriously, and given how much this Beatrice overshadowed everyone else we could understand his choice. Beatrice’s choice of Benedick was harder to explain.

Wooster Group/RSC Troilus at the Swan

This was the one that divided the Shakespeareans, with most of the gang of professors not enjoying what I thought was the best production of this play I’ve ever seen. Notoriously, at least in the hothouse gossip of the ISC, both Stanley Wells and Paul Edmondson of the Birthplace Trust walked out at the interval, and they certainly weren’t the only ones. (It ran 3.5 hours, which was perhaps a factor.) But mainly I think people did not want to play the Wooster game, which I think is one of the strange triumphs of 21c theater. Billington’s cranky review in the Guardian didn’t even try to make sense of it.

The name of that game is mediation, and the short version is that they rehearse for an absurdly long time – 18 months for this production, I think – in order to cue every physical motion they make on stage to a series of film clips that they play during the show. In fact, rather than looking at each other for much of the time on stage, they look up at the 4 video monitors placed around the stage, which were playing clips from three films:

(Update: this cinematic knowledge reached me via Tom Cartelli)

Sherman Alexie’s Smoke Signals, a 2002 self-aware parody that imitates the look of American Indians in classic Hollywood Westerns, The Fast Runner, a 1998 film that resembles a documentary about Inuit life, and the very young and gorgeous Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood in a 1961 black and white classic of doomed love, Splendor in the Grass. The Wooster Group played the Trojans, with the RSC taking the Greek parts in a very different manner. By slowing down their voices and making them artificial, almost mechanical – Marin Ireland’s Cressida in a sometimes robotic sing-song, Scott Shepherd’s Troilus with monotonal flatness – the Woosters forced us to watch and listen through two media at once. Film and live theater: not fighting each other but supermposed.

It’s not easy to watch, though one of the things I love about this practice is how it makes you hyper-conscious of where your attention goes on the stage. With the actors looking variously at the video screens and very seldom at each other, viewers need to choose, and to parcel out their attention across the complex set, filled with red Indian kitsch. (The program mentions Karl May, a 19c German author of Wild West Indian stories, massively popular in Europe, who wrote his dime-store novels without going to American at all. They are full of obvious errors – but the Indian chief on the high plains is a mythic figure, after all, especially in Europe.) Watching live theater is fundamentally about apportioning attention, and the Wooster method emphasizes that in a way that no other company I know does.

The RSC’s Greeks was more predictable and colonial: a heavy-metal Ajax who practiced WWF moves on enemies and friends and also danced the haka like New Zealand’s All Blacks; a Crocodile Dundee-esque Diomed, who got a bit under the skin of some of the Ozzies at the conference; a brilliant and abrasive Thersites who stripped down to his skin in the second act. (The family with two little girls sitting near me had wisely departed by then.) Achilles played almost the whole play with a towel around his waist and no shirt, except for one scene in a red dress; he was alternately needy, childish, ferocious, and, when asking his Myrmidons to help kill the unarmed Hector, suitably ignoble. The whole RSC cast was solid, though the somewhat dull Ulysses seemed to substitute eyeglasses for intelligence. But all the action was on the Trojan/Wooster side, at least for me.

They played the Trojans as Red Indians, an interesting contrast with the Bollywood India of the night before. In their strange way, they presented both a caricature of the image of the American Indian we know from old movies and an affecting portrait of a culture that, even more than most past cultures, we only know through the imagination. Modern Stratford is widely different than the town that William Shakespeare grew up in, but the continuity between 16c and 21c England is greater than the worlds of the Lakota and the Inuit over that span. These worlds were  largely wiped out by European germs and other pressures. In a sense, the choice to play Trojans as Indians makes Pandarus’s final line about bequeathing “my diseases” into a painful world-historical truth. Like Troy itself, I found myself thinking, American Indians are one of our great shared myths of a doomed culture, a people whose glories burned bright but are gone forever. I thought about Kafka’s Red Indian, and I found – this is what happened to me at the Wooster Group Hamlet also – that the stilted dialogue and staging became more, not less, emotionally affecting.

I winced at the pub & conference table the next few days when people sneered at the show. Taste is a variable thing, of course, and it’s fine with me if people like what they like. But there’s nothing on stage quite like Wooster Group, and I hope they keep doing Shakespeare. I also wonder if they’ll bring this strange hybrid Troilus to New York sometime.

Russian Midsummer at the RSC Theatre

The cherry on top was a delightful, experimental Midsummer done by Dimitry Krymov and a Russian Chekov company with fifteen-foot tall marionettes, a very large cast including a dozen of so people in evening dress playing the audience – they only did the Mechanicals’ play, insofar as they followed the text at all – and a Jack Russell terrier who was on stage for the whole hour and 45 minutes. Pure weird pleasure – not intellectual and divisive like Troilus, but simply the sort of thing that you don’t expect to see and that makes you happy. We happened to see it on its premiere in Stratford, so no one had any idea what to expect. (There’s a little summary on the website now, but I don’t think it was there before the first show.)

The title said the play was also, sort of, As You Like It, but unless that referred to a kind of pre-play in which the mechanicals – about a dozen or so – manhandled a 20-foot tall fake tree through the seats and onto the stage, turned it around a few times, then took it out the back of the stage, I don’t know what it means. There wasn’t a lot of Midsummer there either, though the giant marionettes were clearly Pyramus and Thisbe.

Some great inventive stage moments: a symphony of funny noises, maybe 8 people strong at its height; a man doing a handstand on another man’s head (!); the dog leaping up and onto his trainer, who wasn’t much in evidence for the first hour or so, during which time it seemed as if the dog was doing his own thing; a strange scene in which the Thisbe-giant urinated into a large tub; four ballerinas who appeared just before the epilogue; and some witty absurdist banter between the lead mechanical – Bottom or Peter Quince? – and the aristocratic audience. Also a great face off between fake lion and real dog.

This was the crowd pleaser of the week, certainly. It ended fairly early, at 9 pm, sending us off to the Dirty Duck for a few pints and happy discussions. I had to leave early-ish, with a 6 am cab to the airport waiting for me the next day. But it was nice to have good & fairly unified vibes as we left the theater.

Twelve Things I Learned at NCS in Portland

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1. Listening to poetry in Middle English is pure pleasure, though I’m a bit shy about performing it in public myself. Enjoying the slightly-different syllables as they wash over you is a particular joy of the culture of medieval studies.

2. The state of eco-play in medieval criticism is vibrant, and its green owes much to the forest otherworld of romance and also of pre-Christian mythologies. Not nearly as much pastoral as on my home turf. That’s a nice reminder for me.

3. The innovation of threaded panels snaking through the conference — the two I followed most were “Oceans” and “Ecology,” but there were several others including “Neighbors” of which I wished I could have heard more — created a wonderfully connected but variable labyrinth through the days’ events. A very well-executed idea that at some point I’ll want to steal.

4. Inspired perhaps by Portland’s shockingly good micro-brews, the circum-conference festivities felt like we were Olympic swimmers plunging in for a sprint. Exhausting but exhilarating, though I confess I wasn’t really ready for the karaoke. The night before my panel I had to duck out of the bar before the apotheosis of Eileen Joy, but I have no doubt it went off as planned. Or maybe better than that.

5. Someone I don’t know at one of Thursday’s (?) panels said that the essential virtue of The Canterbury Tales was “fellowship” — or maybe I’ve garbled that slightly, but in any case I was amazed by the good fellowship on display everywhere, and the willingness to welcome an interloping early modernists into both the intellectual and festive parts of the week. As Jeffrey Cohen noted in his post-conference blog, the mood was “future-oriented, not nostalgic,” and strikingly optimistic, which I like.

6. Too many great papers to name, but I was fascinated by Anne Harris’s talk on the making of stained glass in Allan Mitchell’s “Animate Objects and Ecologies” panel and also by George Edmondson on King Horn as sea-creature in Jeffrey Cohen and Patricia Ingham’s “Oceans/Neighbors” session. Anne also wrote a lovely meditation on the conference on her Medieval meets world blog.

7. It was a pleasure to meet Geoffrey Chaucer himself, and to locate his blog, which featured in the plenary talk.

8. I had wondered what sorts of fluid bodies medieval oceans might be, and whether the relatively local, Med and Channel and North Sea confines of English voyaging would change the way literary scholars read the sea. I’m not sure; my own talk was about maritime orientation across the medieval / early modern divide, via astrolabes, lead lines, ports, and poetry. I heard some great stuff on the multilingual English Channel from Jonathan Hsy, literal and spiritual turbulance by James Smith, and the “Man of Law’s Tale” by Ingrid Nelson. Bodies of salt water always exert disorienting pressure, whether of literally global size or not. Plus it’s all the same water, anyway, slowly circulating.

9. Portland is a great place for a conference: great beer, good food, plus  poetry readings at Mother Foucault’s and of course Powell’s. I especially loved the food trucks at which we ate lunch everyday, banh mi to pad thai to assorted mexican and other places. Any time NYC wants to license food trucks, I’m ready.

10. Hearing a bunch of conference delegates read their own original poetry was a real treat. Organized by Chris Piuma, who read an elaborate connecting poem about bananas, the reading brought together a few local poets — Chris used to live in Portland and knows the local scene — with intense and heartfelt poems by Eileen Joy, Dan Reiman, and a medievalist from SUNY Buffalo named David whose last name I don’t remember but who read great walking-around poems from his days in San Francisco. Sometimes academic conferences can play too close to the vest, but original poetry has a way of bringing the real stuff out.

11. Some great swimming in Oregon, too: I only got one early-morning workout at a nice local community pool (I blame it on the beer, or perhaps the good fellowship), but an icy dip in Crater Lake on the way north plus two swims in the cold Pacific, one without and one with a wetsuit, were as cleansing as could be.

12. Some might think that the highlight of my conference was throwing Jeffrey Cohen into the Pacific on Friday afternoon at Cannon Beach. It was memorable — plus, since I joined forces to corral Jeffrey with fellow early modernist Lowell Duckert, this event brought to a head the running Shakespeare-v-Chaucer gags that punctuated the week. (Btw: we made sure Jeffrey put his iPhone down before immersion. Really it was all very civilized, if wet.)

I loved the whole post-NCS coastal excursion with Jeffrey, Lowell, Dan, and Marcus: nothing like making one’s academic subject personal. The Pacific is cold in Oregon — for body-surfing the next day I used a wetsuit. But Friday night with the post-NCS crowd it was perfect: cold, frothy, clear, like a perfectly lucid thought that’s too sharp to be forced into words. I’m sure Jeffrey realizes now that it was worth going in.

Will I return to this biannual Chaucerpalooza? I hope so, time and travel budgets willing. But if  salt-water immersion is a necessary capstone, perhaps I should give Iceland 2014 a pass? Or is that a perfect opportunity for a maritime Beowulf panel?

To Portland, with “The Seafarer”

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Here’s a few lines that I retranslated from the great Old English elegy, “The Seafarer.” They are part of my paper for a conference I’ve not been to before, the New Chaucer Society, in Portland next week. Yes, I do also talk about Chaucer…

And now my heart turns

Out of my spirit-locker,

My mind goes

Out onto the sea-flood.

Over the whale’s road

It flies widely

Across the surfaces of the globe.

Then it returns to me

Ravenous and greedy (58-62a).

I also used this poem for the first line of At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean.