Steve Mentz

One truth of these late-Covid days, around 18 months since the arrival of the pandemic to American shores, is that I’m really looking forward to the return of live theater. But in the meantime I loved streaming this one-woman show by Mohegan playwright and performer Madeline Sayet. And I did catch a snippet of her speaking live, in conversation on the New Haven Green, courtesy of the International Festival of Arts & Ideas, my local favorite Arts festival that is soldiering on through partial quarentine conditions.

Her autobiographical play, Where We Belong, carries Sayet from her roots in Eastern Connecticut as the daughter of Mohegans to England where, as she explains a few different times to UK customs officials at the border, she travels to study the works of William Shakespeare. The play explores the tensions between Sayet’s Mohegan identity and Shakespeare’s imperial reach. In conversation last night, she said the play combines three stories:

• Her own journey from wolf (which is what the word mohegan means) to bird (which is what her own Mohegan names means)
• The intellectual and spiritual journey of an Indigenous woman to England, the home of the colonizers who decimated her people during First Contact, which was not incidentally close in time to Shakespeare’s own day.
• The relationship between Shakespeare’s plays and colonialism/imperialism, which was the subject of her academic work in England

To me, the most compelling moments came in her lyrical meditations on flight and identity, the way repeated air travel loosened her felt connection with the earth of her people, at least temporarily, and the way Shakespeare studies, in its self-conscious efforts to become “global,” amounts to a view from the stratosphere that fails to know the land.

Her observation, repeated in last night’s public talk in New Haven, that Shakespeare’s writing, now cherished by so many people all around the world, was composed when the Mohegan people “still had all our words” was striking and powerful. The loss of native speakers of Mohegan and many other Indigenous languages is one of many horrors of conquest and settler colonialism, and it’s compelling to emphasize the contrast between words an English playwright invented and the words that a Native American people lost.

The Shakespearean refrain of her performance comes from Caliban: “You taught me language, and my profit on’t / Is, I know how to curse” (Tempest 1.2). My sense is that she has backed slightly off of her early claim that Shakespeare is an “anti-colonial” artist — I agree with her that the truth is more ambiguous, though certainly there can be and are many anti-colonial responses to Shakespeare — but she does an excellent job show how the poet’s language raises and complicates questions of identity and geography.

Since like Sayet, I own The Tempest as my “favorite play,” despite its patriarchal and imperialist baggage, I couldn’t help but think about the difference between quick airborne connections between North America and England, like those made by Sayet in the play and by me during non-pandemic years, and the longer and more uncertain sea voyages made by the Mohegan ambassadors whose grave markers she visited in Southwark and the colonizers who arrived in North America from Europe in the early modern period. What has the shift from sea travel as the primary driver of early modern “wet globalization” to the faster and less environmentally-connected practice of airline flights done to human geographical experience? Have airplanes broken something?

That’s a question I’ll keep puzzling, including through engaging with past and future work by Madeline Sayet!

Enjoy the live-stream of the play, which is available through July 11!

Would you rather steer a technological assemblage across alien seas? Or plunge your body into salt water, using repeated movements of your arms and legs to keep you up and propel you forward?

That’s the question I’ll be posing very early local time next Monday, as I lead a Critical-Creative workshop for registered students of NTU’s weeklong Creative-Critical Summer School. The program, hosted by the International Critical Poetics Research Group, will last from 25 June – 3 July, with a mix of public (free via YouTube) and private events. It’s an amazing line-up, and I am looking forward to catching as many of the public events as time zones allow.

My workshop will fit itself in between a “breakfast” poetry reading (9 am in the UK is 4 am locally for me, and I think the night before in Hawai’i) by Craig Santos Perez and a public talk on cetaceans and stranding by Astrida Neimanis. Our shared title for the day’s triple-header is “Care in the Anthropocene.” We’re all thinking about how climate change is changing everything.

Here’s my description of the workshop:

Living in the Anthropocene means immersing oneself in a hostile environment. In our era of rising seas and temperatures, are you a sailor or a swimmer? All participants will choose a team for the two hours traffic of our workshop. Sailors use technological prosthetics to engage their environments. Wooden sailboats are the icons, but the technologies could include anything from the alphabet to a MacBook. Swimmers, by contrast, use only their own bodies and formal patterns of movement as resources for survival. We will write as sailors or swimmers and discuss our writing both within our teams and in dialogue with a member of the opposite group. We will discuss what these two modes represent and how operate historically and today. Suggested readings include a poem by Craig Santos Perez and short essays by Astrida Neimanis (with collaborators) and Steve Mentz.

And here are the the three short suggested readings that I hope the group will have a chance to read:

• Susanne Pratt, Camila Marambio, Killian Quigley, Sarah Hamylton, Leah Gibbs, Adrianna Vergés, Michael Adams, Ruth Barcan, and Astrida Neimanis, “Fathom,” Environmental Humanities 12:1 (May 2020) 173-78.
• Craig Santos Perez, “Praise Song for Oceania” Habitat Threshold (Oakland: Omnidawn Publishing 2020) 66-72.
  • If you prefer the video for Craig’s poem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6fmeBerLZc
• Steve Mentz, “Swimming in the Anthropocene,” Public Books (December 2020): http://www.publicbooks.org/swimming-in-the-anthropocene/#_=_.

Looking forward to this event, including Astrida’s public lecture later at 1900 UK time Monday!

Some time during pandemic winter, it’s hard to remember exactly when, I was on Zoom listening to some St. John’s students reading their original poetry. One student, whose name I didn’t recognize because he started the PhD program during the year of social distancing & hadn’t taken a class with me yet, said that he had a book of poems coming out in 2021, and that he normally writes about the ocean, fatherhood, and ideas of orientation in a maritime context.

I thought for a minute he was introducing me. I don’t have a book of poems coming out, but — oceans, fatherhood, orientation? Really? I mean, I’ve heard of people who are interested in such things. I see their faces every morning in the bathroom mirror.

Earlier this week I received a copy of Celestial Navigation, Peter’s new book from Finishing Line Press. A few differences helped clarify the question of identity — he has four kids while I only have two, he served in the US Navy from 1999-2003 when I was finishing grad school, he lives on the southern side of Long Island Sound while I live on the north. He has an MFA; I have an MA and a PhD. He’s a bit free-er than I am with line length and positioning, but that may also be that I’ve been writing dozens upon dozens of pretty regular sonnets during these pandemic months. Blessed rage for order, as somebody says.

My favorite poem in this lovely little book is “Scattered White Horses,” a sixteen-line mini-epic about fathers and sons and the sea and a “proof of mythology” that gets passed down, or maybe doesn’t, or doesn’t need to be, because the objects that assume meanings cohere by themselves —

The strange thing is that mythology requires such few proofs

seagulls crying over my father’s house

my grandfather’s bent finger, a knife in my pocket —

& that these made the other side of the world less strange to me

There are gorgeous partly-found poems built out of Navy documents and manuals, moving poems about families and distance, poems about sea storms and breezes — the “scattered white horses” show up in another poem as whitecaps on the water — and on war and the Beaufort Wind Scale.

A lovely and moving book of poems that everyone should read!

Where’s the world, I murmur as cold water

Clasps pale thighs. It’s true, I’m no Achilles,

But the sloppy ancient sea’s my author

And guide, enfolds me wet, smells like lilies –

The festering kind, you know the ones. Worse

Than multitudes. And now in, in, endless

And still now, around me, cold, the world’s hearse,

Earth’s caul and blanket, silent and friendless –

For who dares friend the sea’s hungry limbs?

Like an old man’s weak arms around the knees

Of the sea-goddess’ boy death-child I swim.

I splash multitudes, the past, the faint breeze

That is history soaking flesh. Wet now

I embark. Tales of power to unknow.

My sourdough has been writing poems. Over the 400+ days of pandemic mostly-isolation out of which we’re just now emerging, I’ve neither learned to bake bread nor, despite downloading an app, to identify the songs of my local birds. But I have written somewhere north of 200 new poems.

This week I’ve had the a trio of those poems published in the Toronto-based literary magazine Blood & Bourbon. I’m especially pleased because when I submitted I didn’t mention my half-shelf of academic and para-academic books, but instead described myself as a writer who lives on the Connecticut Shoreline. Will I develop a new literary persona as coastal poet? Hard to say – the poems are about swimming, living with the nonhuman, and environmental connections. I’m not sure it’s all that different from my other writing! Fewer footnotes, I suppose.

But it’s fun to have a new creative outlet and to practice something creative on an almost-daily basis. I hope, over time, try to publish some more of these many poems, or maybe new ones, or maybe I’ll figure out a new way to cross-involve my critical and poetic voices.

Thanks to Raya Morrison, the editor of Blood & Bourbon, and to the members of the Sonnet Corona group on Facebook, especially Shannon Garner , Art Zilleruelo, and Maureen Daniels, for the encouragement.

The three poems in the current issue of Blood & Bourbon are “Of Thirteen Minds,” about swimming past a flght of cormorants sunning themselves on Whale Rock last summer; “Sea Music,” about an especially noisy corner of the surf in Negril, Jamaica; and “Soiled Poem,” which is mostly about the garden and my back yard. Here’s a image of the last one. You should buy a copy of the issue!

A busy day in Zoomlandia on 27 May. From Sheffield to Seoul, all from my office in Short Beach!

I plugged in around sunrise and caught the last few words of Killian Quigley’s presentation on the first of two sessions on Blue Extinction, hosted by ASLE UK and the Sheffield Animal Studies Research Centre. Hats off to the organizers, Veronica Fibisan and Rachel Murray for excellent hosting! It’s entirely my own fault that, a few hours later, I failed to share my images via Blackboard Connect, so the assembled Zoomies were forced just to look at my face as I talked about whales, extinction, empathy, violence, Melville, beach strandings, and at the close a crazy-intense description of imaginative incorporation in whaleflesh in Caroline Bergvall’s Drift. ‘Twas a wild ride!

One of the best things about this event was variety of modes across the six presentations (OK, only five that I heard) in the two sessions. My own archive was my usual literary / historical / experiential poetics sort of thing, with generous helpings from Moby-Dick and a chance encounter I had with a stranded whale’s body in an Oregon beach in 1985. In the morning session, Tom Bristow of James Cook U in Queensland, Australia, presented via a short film, of which I heard most of the audio and only interrupted snatches of the video, as I shuffled through early morning puppy care and coffee prep. Third of the morning group was Maria Beger‘s exploration of “tropicalisation,” a process through which coral and fish from tropical warm water reefs are moving into higher latitudes with ocean warming — i.e., they’re moving away from the existing geographical tropics, south in Australia and north in Japan. Perhaps it’s better to say that the tropics are expanding.

The afternoon session opened with me failing to share my slides properly, but I plowed through different visions of whales and humans, vai Alexis Pauline Gumbs, a 1658 pamphlet about a whale that swam up the Thames to Greenwich (where it was horrifically murdered), Melville, Philip Hoare, and eventually Bergvall. Next was a great paper by Dolly Jorgensen about the Caribbean monk seal, which was declared extinct in the twentieth century, but of which a few taxidermied specimens exist in modern museums. The question of what research does to its subjects and how the act of learning a about a thing might change or even injure that thing was powerfully present, especially since one of the images Dolly presented included a dead seal being dragged out of the surf by scientists. Last of our trio was Tom Webb, a biologist at Sheffield, who gave an overview of documented extinctions in land and sea. I was especially struck by his comment about animal species that are not extinct but whose populations have been massively reduced, including oysters, north Atlantic codfish, and many species of cetaceans. At massively depleted levels, these animals no longer perform the same ecosystemic functions they did before anthropogenic reductions, mostly in the 19-20c. I wonder — is extinction the thing we need to understand, or is it depletion? How do those things relate?

A lively Q&A followed, which featured our Australian panelists Killian and Tom B. hanging in late at night to ask searching questions about how we try to know things we can’t really know about marine life. I was left thinking about that urge all of us, scientists and humanists, have to understand, to categorize, and to manage — in many cases that urge can be a good thing, and I very much concur with Tom W.’s ambivalently hopeful prognosis about the viability of managed fisheries (if we can successfully manage them). But I can’t help coming back to knowing-through-violence, as with Dolly’s monk seals or Melville’s whales. Does knowing about an alien thing require or invite a kind of violence on it? Can we unlearn that kind of knowledge acquisition? Or to some extent disavow it?

Update: The quick circulation of a recording enabled me to listen to Killian’s talk out of order but on the same day. (Thanks, Vera!) As I expected, it was a wonderfully generative talk, exploring visions of a future ocean dominated by slime and jellyfish, as described by marine biologists such as Daniel Pauly and Jeremy Jackson, and considering these dystopias through an aesthetic lens. The slime ocean, Killian notes, echoes the “radically unaesthetic” vistas of the pre-modern sea described by Alain Corbin in The Lure of the Sea, a book about the transformation of Western ideas of the maritime that was deeply influential on me when I first read it in the 2000s. Killian didn’t push the point too hard, but I wondered if premodern ideas about the ugly or disorderly sea might have something to say about the jellyfish aesthetic in which we may all be swimming soon. Corbin, like others including W.H. Auden, overstaes the extent to which the seaside gets “discovered” by modernity. But the idea that the less pleasing and more abrasive seas of pre-modernity might be returning seems very interesting, especially to a pre-modernist like me!

Just after listening to Killian’s talk I took my first open water swim of the season, on a gorgeous spring day in water that has just nipped over 60 degrees F (15 C). It’s still a bit chilly for me, so I wore my shortie wetsuit, but it was glorious to be back offshore, watching sea birds from a wave’s eye view, and bobbing up and down with the standing waves that reflect off the sea wall at high tide. After Killian’s talk, I was thinking about jellyfish, but fortunately didn’t encounter any — though they are there in my local waters, usually more common when everything warms up in midsummer. Ever year I plunge my unseeing arm through a few jelly colonies. It’s not my favorite thing about sea-swimming, but I wonder — is there a jellyfish aesthetic waiting to be discovered? To be imagined? To be engaged?

The last stop on the Zoom-train started at 9 pm local time, which was10 am Friday morning in Seoul. I gave an introduction to the blue humanities talk to John Eperjesi students at Kyung Hee University in South Korea, which also gave me a chance to think through my own sense of the changes of the discourse for the dozen or so years the terms has been in circulation.

In the last few Zoom-talks I’ve given, I’ve been fingered as the “coiner” (a strange, oddly state-power-ish term) or once the “dean” (an administrative term?) of the blue humanities. It’s flattering to think that people value my work, and I do remember — as I told the group in Seoul — dreaming up the phrase while walking my dog back in the summer of 2008. But I also, as I said last night, on a core level don’t like claims of ownership or mastery. Lots of people all over the world use the term “blue humanities” these days. It’s in special issues of journals, conference titles, twitter hashtags, even a “lab”-style classroom in Australia. Some of those people connect to my work, but many don’t, and many see other people as key figures in the discourse. That’s all just as it should be. No ownership of ideas on the high seas!

The frame of the Zoom-talk to Kyung Hee traced the pathways of blue humanities scholarship from my earlier work on Shakespeare and early modern English literature, esp in the article “Toward a Blue Cultural Studies” (2009) and the book At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean (2009), to my current interest in global and Pacific literatures, as represented by the poem “Praise Song for Oceania” by Craig Santos Perez. It wasn’t a cage match, and I am happy to report that both The Tempest and “Praise Song” came out undestroyed. But it was fun to think through the paths my work and the blue humanities have taken since the end of the 2000s. As a special treat, which was a surprise, Craig himself Zoomed in from Hawaii for the talk — which was fun for me, and for the students, who had read “Praise Song” earlier this semester.

A few terms from the talk —

• “Offshore Capacity” — thinking through Perez and Shakespeare about oceanic vectors and dynamism
• “Beyond My Atlantic” — tracing my personal history from the New Jersey Shores out toward all the world’s oceans
• “Trajectories of the Blue Humanities” — “wet globalization” “salt aesthetics” “blue ecocriticism” “shipwreck modernity”
• “Shakespeare as Crisis and Limit” — maybe here I am mostly thinking about my own work?
• “Blue Humanities as Collaboration / Conversation / Immersion / Connection” — trying here to foreground the creative and public impulses of this scholarship, the way it sometimes gather academics together in wetsuits in the surf, as well as behind lecterns and Zoom screens

The students from Kyung Hee had great questions and thoughts that were only sometimes inhibited by troubles with my wifi. I hope I answered all the questions — though I also think that the best questions are the ones that we can’t answer, and instead have to sit with, or work toward. How should we save and serve and preserve the ocean and our relationships with it? That’s a tough one!

Final thoughts on this long transoceanic day had me imagining the Ocean as collaborator and co-creator. It doesn’t speak or make requests. It’s not (just) a symbol or source of all the best metaphors. But it’s out there, moved by moon and winds, holding heat and structuring history. We’re writing to it and with it, as best we can.

The rhymester hits eighty years today, still growling out truths and fantasies, still crooning a soundtrack to American madness. The pandemic album, Rough and Rowdy Ways, came out last June. It’s searing, brilliant, whimsical stuff. To celebrate 80 years I’ve sketched out some thoughts about My Own Version of You, the Frankenstein-remash that was my first favorite song when the album came out last spring. More recently I’ve also been loving Key West and Goodbye Jimmy Reed — both those are for another birthday, maybe.

Here’s me on My Own Version —

It’s about creation, not originality. That’s the secret. It’s about the making of new life, not the particulars of its design. Sometimes there’s a plan, your plan or someone else’s, but that’s not the main thing. “My Own Version of You,” from the 2020 album, Rough and Rowdy Ways, shows what Bob’s looking for:

I’ll bring someone to life…

It’s not hard to spot the model he’s copying. He’s along for the ride with Mary Shelley’s famous monster story, dreamed into life during a summer when the young bride shared a villa on Lake Geneva with her husband the poet and the notorious Lord Byron. Poets and creatures and imagination, all together during bad weather:

All through the summers, into January
I’ve been visiting mosques and monasteries
Looking for the necessary body parts
Limbs and livers and brains and hearts…

When our boy Bob sings the summer in January, it’s a clue that we’re with Mary, Percy, and Byron back in 1816, “the year without a summer,” when skies all over the world were darkened by ash released by the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia, the most powerful volcanic activity in over a millennium. That’s the weather that surrounds us as we’re getting the materials together. That was Frankenstein weather. It was Covid-19 and wildfire weather in 2020, too.

Limbs are for moving, brains for speculation, hearts supply all the love – and livers, well, they’re for living, obviously, and also, in Galenic medicine, they make the blood move as the “the principle instrument of sanguification.” Blood and bile, toxins and time: that’s where all these things go, that’s what takes them away.

“I wanna do things for the benefit of all mankind,” croon-warbles Bob. What benefits burst out from inside “the creature that I create”? We’re used to how his songs hodge-podge everything together, all piled up in lists and swerves and sharp turns. Is Bob the monster-king Richard III, in “the winter of my discontent”? Is he really a scholar of Sanskrit and Arabic? St. Peter or Jerome? Liberace? Maybe he’s sad-boy Hamlet, who asks “to be or not to be,” or maybe the antic Dane who “stick[s] in the knife” by accident into the old man hiding in his mother’s closet? “You know what I mean,” he says. We don’t, really. Not all the time. “You know exactly what I mean.”

But maybe the whole thing is not a jigsaw puzzle. Maybe we should follow the movement, not chase down the names. Creation: that’s what it’s about. Four times the word creature or creation appears in the song. The first one introduces the title: “I wanna create my own version of you.” The next two times he uses the word, he loop-enlists the creature into his own rescue, “saved by the creature that I create.” It’s hard to separate the maker from the making, and that’s the point. The word comes back one last time at the end, “Gonna jump-start my creation to life.” It’s the making, the eruption into being, not the order. It’s not about meanings or fixes. Always be creating!

Here and elsewhere in Rough and Rowdy Ways, I find myself thinking about plagiarism, about what Bob takes and what he gives. What is he creating, and what is he just grabbing? For a while in the career, his magpie practice seemed oblique enough that he might have been trying to conceal his borrowings. But the practice has become more obvious in the twenty-first century. He swiped some lyrics from the Confederate poet Henry Timrod in Modern Times in 2006. He pinched some lines from Junichi Saga’s Japanese gangster memoir Confessions of a Yakuza in Chronicles, Vol 1 in 2004. A closer look inside Chronicles shows it to be chock-full of stolen nuggets from places as varied as Time magazine and Jack London’s White Fang. But when Bob cribbed the SparkNotes plot summary of Moby-Dick in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech (!) in 2017, the jig seemed up.

Does he do it on purpose? Is he a premeditated plagiarist? I was in the audience for a Father’s Day show in June 2017, a few days after the public kerfluffle over the SparkNotes revelation in the Nobel Prize acceptance speech. The first song of the night was, “[I used to care but] Things Have Changed.” Second song: “It Ain’t Me, Babe.” He knows what he knows. I don’t think he cares.

In “My Own Version of You,” I spy an oblique semi-resolution to the plagiarism fight, in this latest “version.” The word version, like its cognate verses, flows out of the Latin word vertere, to turn. When Bob creates something new, he turns it, takes it, re-directs, assembles, and re-makes it. Turning is creation. It’s not making something from nothing – remember, this is the guy who fingers God as murderer in “Highway 61 Revisited” – but creation instead is a sideways practice that turns old things new, while still showing their age. That’s his own version, of you, of me, of himself and American music.

The animating spirit of these turning versions isn’t the sleek propagandist and order-maker Augustus, under whose reign the time of universal peace arrives. Instead, Bob’s Caesar splits open old unities, finding partial meanings somewhere “between a-one and two,” as he’s asking himself, “What would Julius Caesar do?” With his version and creation, he crosses the Rubicon into fragments that only partially cohere.

In Shelley’s Frankenstein, the creature discovers his own violent power when he strangles a young boy. “I too can create desolation,” the creature laments over the murdered corpse. Creation in the monster-myth includes destruction. Shelley like Dylan glosses the world of Julius Caesar the world-breaker, rather than pale nephew Augustus the order-maker. That’s the version Bob’s after – not an imperial unity but an assemblage of parts, soldered together by “one strike of lightning” and a sufferer’s feel for history and change.

“I’m gon’ bring somone to life,” he insists. “Someone I’ve never seen.”

You know exactly what he means.

Here are the lyrics, highlighted to match the lines I’ve been wrestling with —

All through the summers and into January
I’ve been visiting morgues and monasteries
Looking for the necessary body parts
Limbs and livers and brains and hearts

I want to bring someone to life – is what I want to do
I want to create my own version of you

It must be the winter of my discontent
I wish you’d taken me with you wherever you went
They talk all night – they talk all day
Not for a second do I believe what they say

I want to bring someone to life – someone I’ve never seen
You know what I mean – you know exactly what I mean

I’ll take Scarface Pacino and the Godfather Brando

Mix ‘em up in a tank and get a robot commando
If I do it upright and put the head on straight
I’ll be saved by the creature that I create
I get blood from a cactus – make gunpowder from ice
I don’t gamble with cards and I don’t shoot no dice
Can you look in my face with your sightless eye
Can you cross your heart and hope to die

I’ll bring someone to life – someone for real
Someone who feels the way that I feel

I study Sanskrit and Arabic to improve my mind
I want to do things for the benefit of all mankind
I say to the willow tree – don’t weep for me
I’m saying the hell with all things that used to be
I get into trouble and I hit the wall
No place to turn – no place at all
I pick a number between one and two
And I ask myself what would Julius Caesar do

I’ll bring someone to life – in more ways than one
Don’t matter how long it takes – it’ll be done when it’s done

I’m gonna make you play the piano like Leon Russell
Like Liberace – like St. John the Apostle
Play every number that I can play
I’ll see you baby on Judgement Day
After midnight if you still want to meet
I’ll be at the Black Horse Tavern on Armageddon Street
Two doors down not that far to walk
I’ll hear your footsteps – you won’t have to knock

I’ll bring someone to life – balance the scales
I’m not gonna get involved in any insignificant details

You can bring it to St. Peter – you can bring it to Jerome
You can move it on over – bring it all the way home
Bring it to the corner where the children play
You can bring it to me on a silver tray

I’ll bring someone to life – spare no expense
Do it with decency and common sense

Can you tell me what it means to be or not to be
You won’t get away with fooling me
Can you help me walk that moonlight mile
Can you give me the blessings of your smile

I want to bring someone to life – use all my powers
Do it in the dark in the wee small hours

I can see the history of the whole human race
It’s all right there – its carved into your face
Should I break it all down – should I fall on my knees
Is there light at the end of the tunnel – can you tell me please
Stand over there by the Cypress tree
Where the Trojan women and children were sold into slavery
Long ago before the First Crusade
Way back before England or America were made
Step right into the burning hell
Where some of the best known enemies of mankind dwell
Mister Freud with his dreams and Mister Marx with his axe
See the raw hide lash rip the skin off their backs
You got the right spirit – you can feel it you can hear it
You got what they call the immortal spirit
You can feel it all night you can feel it in the morn
Creeps into your body the day you are born
One strike of lightning is all that I need
And a blast of ‘lectricity that runs at top speed
Show me your ribs – I’ll stick in the knife
I’m gonna jump start my creation to life

I want to bring someone to life – turn back the years
Do it with laughter – do it with tears

Happy birthday, Bob!

Zoomlandia may be going to way of all flesh — at least I hope most of my academic events will take place in the flesh in not very long — but I’ve got at least one more day of timelessness and placelessness on my spring calendar.

On Th 27 May, I’ll start the morning Zoomin’ into the UK, as part of a Blue Extinction panel hosted by ASLE UK [registration via that link] and the Sheffield Animal Studies Research Centre (ShARC). If I’m feeling good I’ll be up at 5 am for the early panel, featuring a pair coming in overnight from Australian, Killian Quigley and Tom Bristow, as well as Maria Beger from Leeds. A few hours later I’ll be on a panel on my own, with Dolly Jørgensen and Tom Webb. I can’t wait to hear what all these brilliant people have to say!

I’ll be talking about whales, which gives me a chance to keep thinking with Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s astounding book Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals, which I also wove into my Sea Sense presentation last month. I’m going to use Gumbs to think about encounters with whales both modern and early modern, as well as Philip Hoare’s astounding book Albert and the Whale, and a few different scenes of encounters with stranded whale bodies on beaches. It’s new work, and in many ways still unsettled. But I’m looking forward to sharing it!

I’ll have a few hours to walk the dogs and maybe sneak in an early season swim in cold water before my evening event.

It’ll be 10 am on Friday in Seoul but 9 pm Th night in Short Beach, CT, where I’ll talk my “Blue Humanities: An Offshore View” talk to my computer and an audience 6800 miles to the west. I’ll be mashing together Shakespeare with Craig Santos Perez’s “Praise Song for Oceania.” It should be lots of fun.

From my house to Sheffield is about 3400 miles east. Home to Seoul is 6800 miles to the west, so that’s a total of 10,200 miles. At around 41 degrees north, which is roughly where I am, the circumference of the globe seems to be roughly 19,000 miles. So — I’ll be Zoomin’ more than halfway around the northern half of the planet, passing over both the Atlantic and Pacific basins, with a few thousand miles to span North America thrown in?

Strange days in Zoomlandia. I wonder how much of this sort of thing will stick around in the post-pandemic future. I’m ambivalent — of course I’d rather go both to Sheffield and to Seoul, but I can’t go everywhere all the time. Maybe some of this global stream-talking will be worth keeping?

UPDATE: Here’s a link to a video recording.

There’s a soap bubble velocity to Zoomlandia. For three days you’re down deep, inside a small but intense mini-conference, hearing words and parsing images, making connections and imagining futures. Then — pop! — the Zoom ends. Now it’s just another chilly spring day on the Connecticut Shoreline, and the dogs need to go out.

Sea Sense is done, but so many treasures are still sloshing about in my watery brain. I’ll try to get a few things into words before it all dries up.

I’d been looking forward to this event for some time. Part of a series of collaborations between different campuses of the University of California, the Oecologies network, and the Earth, Sea, Sky group, among others, it was great an opportunity to hear new eco-work across different disciplines. I was particularly eager for the opening roundtable about Kevin Dawson’s amazing book Undercurrents of Power, which I discovered only recently. The historians on the panel, of course, had known this work on early modern African aquatic cultures since a precursor article had appeared a decade ago, but it was new to me when I found it last year. Dawson’s book has opened up the way I’m thinking about the connections among blue humanities, Black Atlantic, and contemporary Critical Race Studies. Dawson’s book, along with my longtime favs Edouard Glissant, Paul Gilroy, Herman Melville, Olaudah Equiano, and many others (including Shakespeare!), formed the backbone of the grad seminar I taught this spring under the title “Black and Blue Theory.” It’s been a fun ride, and I look forward to reading what my students give me next week.

My Thursday night talk, “Swimming out of Africa, 50,000 BCE to The Tempest,” gave me a chance to return to Shakespeare’s most famous maritime play, which was central to the start of my watery turn in At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean (2009). (In fact, I first pitched that project to the Shakespeare Now! series as an entire book about the storm scene that opens the play. Fortunately good editors convinced me to write about other plays also!) I stretched my Zoom skills and range of source material in this talk in order to imagine swimming as expansion, diffusion, and engagement with watery spaces. My favorites parts to present may have been about Drexciya, since I don’t often get to play techno or hip hop music during talks. But I also tried to dive deep in time, by engaging with scholarship on the marine foraging habits of homo sapiens when the species first left the African savannah around 50,000 years ago. A vision of the Kelp Highway — the coastal routes that early human communities followed out of Africa to every continent except Antarctica — undergirded my talk about Shakespeare’s multiple categories of swimmers, including Caliban the tide pool poet, Ferdinand the muscle-bound water fighter, Trinculo the duck, Stephano the (bad) sailor, and Ariel the flyer-diver-flamer.

I also did a new thing for me, which was to expand upon the usual practice of a land acknowledgment and use this form as an opportunity to think harder and at greater length about the history of my own coastline. I ended up digging into the story of Little Liberia, a thriving 19c multiracial community in Bridgeport, CT. The talk ended up having a lot of moving parts, but I hope that too speaks to the experience of swimming, which overloads some senses, especially feeling and taste, while disorienting others such as sight.

But enough about me! Kevin Dawson’s wonderful round-table revealed his personal story of coming to be a water historian, after growing up as a Black surfer and free diver in Southern California. I was struck, as I would be again a few times over the three days of the conference, at how often water scholars talk about our own water biographies and ongoing practices — Melody Jue’s and Stacy Alaimo’s scuba, Dan Brayton’s sailing, my swimming, &c. This work aims to use academic methods and habits of thought to capture sensations and feelings that are visceral, physical, and hard to catch. I was struck too, at how almost the last comment of the conference, by the artist Kathie Foley-Mayer, described her sense of the inability of words to capture ideas about history and Ocean Memory. To write in this mode surfaces human weakness and vulnerability, whatever academic culture wishes us to perform in terms of rigor or mastery. There is no human mastery or dominion in the sea, which idea I was reminded of again by Kevin Dawson’s comments about swimming as a means toward freedom for transported Africans. I’m very excited to learn that he’s doing a project now on maritime maroon communities!

The second day began with the visual opulence of Conchophilia, a not-yet-published multi-authored book of Art History that explores shell collecting and decorating in early modern Europe. I always love hearing Art Historians speak intently about visual structures and patterns to which I’m not trained to attend. I especially love the sense that the images of shells and shell-made artifacts indicated what I might call a sea-thinking, an effort to salvage and trace human and nonhuman connections to oceanic space. I’m very excited for this book, with contributions by the four speakers I heard this weekend, Claudia Swan, Marisa Bass, Henneke Grootenboer, and Anne Goldgar.

I always love hearing my friends and admired colleagues Jeffrey Cohen and Julian Yates talk about their Ark Project, and really the only disappointing thing about their co-presentation on Friday night was that it could not be followed by Dark n Stormies & extended philosophical conversation at some likely dockside dive. I’ve heard them speak about and read bits in process of this project for several years. What struck me most intensely this time was the generative quality of their thinking and writing. Every time an interpretive fork or question of meaning arose in their discussion of multiple images and ideas about Noah’s ark, they framed their responses in the most open, dynamic, and plurality-making ways. (On how this mode might require choosing the Ark’s raven over the dove, see this great recent essay of theirs in Emergence Magazine.) I’ve long thought of these two writers, separately and together, as representing some of the best work in eco-minded premodern studies. I especially responded this weekend, after these long months of isolation, to their generosity toward their readers, their material, and everyone who grapples with questions of refuge and safety.

The last day of the conference gave space for the graduate students of UC Irvine and UCLA to showcase new work that engages with blue humanities paradigms. As has been happening often recently, I was dazzled by the variety, brilliance, and acute insights with which an emerging generation of scholars approaches these materials and methods. I hope my admiration for this work came through in my Zoom-questions, as I was again reminded this weekend that however well Zoom manages primary presentations, its video boxes support less well the less structured aspects of conference engagement, from Q&A (which Zoom manages OK) to post-talk chit-chat (which it doesn’t manage well) to happy hour philosophizing (alas). But suffice it to say that I loved these talks. Nicolyna Enriquez’s deft analysis of ship graffiti on inland churches in Byzantine Crete spoke to the sea as connection and possibly fantasy. Margaret Oakley’s great reading of early microscopic images of complex life in Thames water suggested how watery knowledge can be socialized, marketed, and yet remain strange. Abigale Berry discussed Bosch’s “Ship of Fools” and quarantine lazarettos as spaces in which water serves to alienate and isolate, sometimes successfully and sometimes not. Gregory Sattler’s analysis of 9-10c Chinese mercantile connections provided a dense view into the premodern networks of maritime Asia, as he also showed how recent discoveries in underwater archeology are rewriting what we know about Chinese maritime history. Lastly, and inspiringly, Kathie Foley-Meyer discussed the underwater art of Jason deCaires Taylor and other artistic efforts to capture Ocean Memory. She also mentioned Drexciya, which wrapped the conversation back to the opening day. I appreciate that while my analogies between Drexciya and Shakespeare’s The Tempest were in part about the capacity of sea poets to grasp something about the sea, Foley-Meyer’s artistic examples were reminders of what lies beyond words.

Such a flood it was! Thanks to all who joined in Zoomlandia, and especially to the brilliant and generous organizational work by Bronwen Wilson, Lyle Massey, and Julia Lupton. Plus seamless behind the scenes work by Ryan Gurney, among many others!

Very much hoping to see all these wonderful people, including all the Zoomers, at a likely beach sometime in a post-pandemic world!

I closed out of the dazzling #NextGenPlen while standing at my sink washing dishes.

I listened to the experimental genius of “Becoming Undisciplined,” the Eco-Race crossover panel organized by Hillary Eklund and Debapriya Sarkar, featuring Jennifer Park, Ayanna Thompson, and Kim Hall as chair, while tromping squishy paths through the woods in coastal Connecticut’s mud season.

I caught (most of) many other sessions, including the inspiring “Walk the Talk” pedagogy session, Keith Hamilton Cobb’s roundtable on American Moor, and the quite moving three-headed talks by our Pandemic Presidents, with lots of help from my household’s four-legged friends, including Blue, a 9 week old puppy who needs to go outside pretty much all the time, and Indi, a 2-year old big dog who doesn’t want Blue hogging all the attention. (Among other things, I figured out exactly where in my yard the home wifi cuts out!)

I was more responsible in my roles in the two sessions I had speaking parts in. I did sneak Blue onto the Zoom-screen for a (requested) cameo during the generous and generative Workshop in Poetics and Pedagogy organized by Joanne Diaz, which was my primary contribution in #shax2021. When I chaired the “Shakespeare’s Witness to Catastrophe” panel, organized by Erin Kelly & featuring great talks by Julian Yates, Craig Dionne, and Sharon O’Dair, I was as professional as Zoom enables — neither puppies nor hiking boots! (No shoes at all, actually.)

There’s a strange and distinctive mental exhaustion that follows SAA each year, one that I usually process while on a late-night or red eye flight, often nursing a multi-day hangover that I was better at ignoring during the former century. This year’s Zoomlandia edition of #shax20201 made me miss the chance encounters, over-long Starbucks lines, and early morning walks in unfamiliar cities. I especially missed Austin, both its breakfast tacos and the cool waters of Barton Springs. But I wonder — are there things to value, to preserve, even to love about Zoom-SAA?

Two utopian visions swirled around my imagination as I listened to extraordinary academic talks while walking the dogs —

1. This year’s program, which its emphases on pedagogy and social justice, created more perhaps than any previous conference an SAA that’s about the worlds in which most of us teach — worlds that are brilliant and also compromised, rewarding and also confining. Perhaps because the Zoom-verse is the only place I’ve been teaching for the past 12 months, inhabiting the Hollywood Squares with my SAA buddies felt more closely connected to my teaching self than it sometimes does. And not only bc it turns out that SAA-ers, like my students, often mute their videos so I’m standing in my house talking at a sea of empty boxes!
2. Secondly, this year’s SAA was the only one I’ve gone to, in an SAA history of regular attendance since the mid-1990s, in which I caught a decent amount of the SAA experience without ditching my family care duties on Easter weekend. I won’t say I wasn’t sometimes distracted, washing dishes with Shax-brilliance in my earbuds. But I wasn’t absent — and too often in the past I have been.

I’m pretty sure in the end neither of these visions will lead me to future Zoom-tastic events, at least not for SAA, my personal mothership of academic conferences. But there are, I think, some things we can learn from our shipwreck onto the Island of Zoom.

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One event that I missed because of family duties was the Town Hall, since I couldn’t manage jamboard + BreakOutRoom while chasing the puppy and cooking dinner. I don’t have deeply-considered thoughts about the Luncheon (which I usually go to) or the Dance (which I’ve never attended, probably bc I’m too dorky and/or self-conscious). But I do have some thoughts about how to help the SAA adapt to the 21st century, which I’ll drop quickly here —

1. The Board of Trustees should double or maybe even triple in size, with dedicated spots reserved for grad students, Early Career Researchers, and NTT faculty. Maybe also there should be closer attention to geographical equity. The extra capacity on the Board might focus at least in part on increasing transparency and communication with the membership. I love all the recent initiatives and collaborations too, esp with teachers and performers.
2. The current two-phase review of the Program, in which the Program Committee spends months and hours recruiting panels and seminars, a significant percentage of which are later rejected by the Board, should be streamlined. There’s no reason not to trust the Program Committee to finish the job itself. Maybe more Board members could work on the Program Committee, but I’d trust the Committee to create the Program.

To be clear, I don’t mean in either of these suggestions to criticize Boards or Programs past or present; all current and past Board members are Shakespeareans whom I admire and respect. I’m trying to think about how to enable the SAA to best deal with the increasing size and professional diversity of our community. I think we can be more representative than we currently are, especially of members without research-intensive faculty positions. I also think we’ve been moving in that direction recently in visible and productive ways.

But those are just my thoughts, which no one needs to listen to!

The things I most loved about this year’s program were the visible efforts to engage with pedagogies of social justice, and also to bring together discourses in our research that are too often separate. At our best, I think we managed to do those two things at the same time, but I’ll think about them one at a time.

First, pedagogy – this year was my first (and so far only, I must admit) year that my main event was a Workshop on pedagogy, organized by Joanne Diaz. I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect. I knew fewer of the participants than I am used to in SAA sessions, since I mostly attend eco-seminars populated by the usual eco-suspects, most of whom I have known for years. Joanne gave our group pretty open prompts to write about how we teach close reading in today’s classrooms, and the dozen of us circulated a wide and stimulating array of tricks, tropes, and techniques that will influence my classroom practice starting — well probably starting tomorrow, actually. But what was especially moving about this workshop-seminar was the sense of shared endeavor, of mutual support and exchange. I’ve never before had a spontaneous Google Doc appear during an SAA session, so that we could share ideas and notes beyond the session. I was also touched by how eager everyone was to stay after the two hours traffic of our session to continue exchanging ideas. It’s a Zoom-cliche to encourage our pets to gate-crash our screens, I suppose, but I enjoyed bringing my little Blue to the session, as well as seeing many other kitties. Alas for the after-conversation at the hotel bar or over Austin’s famous tacos! I hope this group can re-assemble in Jacksonville for an in-person visit.

Second, on the subject of bringing Shax discourses together, I’ve rarely been so inspired by any SAA presentation as by the “Becoming Undisciplined” panel that entangled ecocriticism and Premodern Critical Race Theory. I’ve been hoping to see more of that kind of overlap since the double plenary panels at #shakeass2017 that mashed up Queer Ecocrit with the Color of Membership. That memorable morning in shakenado-distressed Atlanta the eco panel was the warm-up act to the PCRS headliner. This year in e-Austin the two discourses merged, as all four presentations combined into a single flowing exchange of ideas, hopes, and imagined futures.

My strongest impression from this year’s “Becoming Undisciplined” panel was its emphasis on “unlearning” as well as learning, on entering into unfamiliar discourses with humility and generosity, and advocating a collective rejection of the will-to-mastery that structures both the white settler colonialism of American history and, more narrowly, the academic discourse of Shakespeare studies. None of us can do it all ourselves, each of us will likely make mistakes, but in collaboration new things can happen. To be a sympathetic, albeit dispersed Zoom-audience at this great panel, as at the blazing Whiteness panel or the Witness to Catastrophe eco-panel that I chaired on the first day of SAA, was, from afar and in strangely mediated solitude, to imagine collectively, to enter into the project of learning and unlearning with which Hillary Eklund, Debapriya Sarkar, and Jennifer Park approached this discursive crossing, and also to follow the visionary leadership of Ayanna Thompson and Kim Hall. At the risk of sounding too Shax-normie (which I am), it reminded me of those epilogue moments, when Puck, Rosalind, Prospero, or King Henry’s Chorus enjoins us to give our hands. “Let your indulgence,” says the bad man, “set me free.” I have no illusion that the joining of hands and indulgences can redeem the colonialism and racism that my white flesh is heir to, nor that my engagement with the work of my colleagues gets me out of doing the hard work myself. But there are collective moments in collective events at which glimpses of better worlds appear. I caught a few of them this year, on Zoom.

There’s much more I could say about #shax2021, about the moving and speculative eco-session I chaired on the first day and the lively still-going conversations it generated, about the fire and inspiration of the “White World-Making” panel organized by Arthur Little, about the SAA-closing (for non-dancers like me) genius of the #NextGenPlen, with its brilliant tiny papers and expansive, generous conversation. So much to overfill my e-cup!

As spring springs slowly in the chilly Northeastern USA, and my own pandemic practices begin to thaw as well (I’m #teamModerna, so I have to wait an extra week for my second dose), I’ve been thinking about what practices and habits I’d like to keep as quarantine ends. I’m hopeful about short daily meditations and black coffee at dawn, which the new puppy’s enthusiasm has disrupted but not entirely derailed. I want to keep thinking about access, both for students and conference goers, though I also very much hope to go places in person sometime fairly soon. In a way the enforced e-discourse, which has made it as easy to communicate with colleagues in Europe and Australia as New York and Massachusetts, has opened my horizons, including beyond early modern studies. But for my #shaxbudies I am greatly looking forward to celebrating 50 years of SAA in Florida next spring.

After the vax, Shax in Jax! (To borrow a triplet from LIza Blake on Facebook this morning.)

A pleasiure to e-see those few of you who I managed to e-connect with — and for everyone else, I’ll see you at the hotel bar, local beaches, fishing boats, or riverwalk cafes next year!