Steve Mentz

Our deadline is today, and the trickle of papers for the #shax2020 seminar that Nic Helms and I are leading this spring in Denver started a few days ago. Our idea in “Watery Thinking” is to ask our esteemed seminar members to bring together two of our favorite things, the ecopoetics of water and the structures of human cognition. We’re both interested in both of these things, even though I come to the seminar flying my blue flag and Nic has recently published an excellent book on Shakespeare and cognitive theory, Cognition, Mindreading, and Shakespeare’s Characters.

Over the next few months, as an extended pre-game rollout before the seminar in April, Nic and I and some of our seminar members will be blogging about these topics, including new discoveries and ideas we find as we wade into the seminar’s collective work.

As we wait to read the contributions of the seminar members, I thought I’d offer a few quick ideas, drawn partly from my own work but even more from thoughts sparked by reading abstracts and the bibliographies the group has been sharing.

1. Mindreading: Nic’s book uses theories of cognition to explore what he calls “mindreading” as a way to reconsider the Shakespearean figures. Of particular interest in a watery context is his reading of the Jailor’s Daughter’s incoherent speech in Two Noble Kinsmen, which includes a vision of maritime crisis. When she displays her madness through the metaphor of a ship at sea — “Out with the mainsail! — Where’s your whistle, masters?” (4.1.148) — she presents herself through a form of symbolic disorder that Nic powerfully links to Hamlet and Cordelia, among others. The explosive gap of “nothing” in the opening of King Lear may gesture toward the flooded landscapes of act 4 (that’s my watery reading of the play) but Nic’s focus on fractured cognition suggests that linguistic coherence flows both toward salty metaphors and into dramatic structures that represent thought.
2. Theatrics of Water: I’m looking forward to reading lots of papers on stage practices. There was a time, it seems to me, when every modern stage featured a water hazard. I think I first remember this sort of thing in a stage version of Ovid’s Metamorphoses that I saw in New York around the late ’90s (?), and I remember a production of Much Ado in London in which the ingenious Benedick, played by Simon Russell Beale, jumped into the pool when he needed a place to hide. At a certain point it seemed a bit gimmicky, though the recently-revived splash-tastic Tempest by Synetic Theatre in DC was pure genius. But I wonder — might these 20-21c tricks have something to say to the staging of water in the early modern period? Water is a resistant, resilient element: it gets everywhere (as a young padawan famously said about a dryer substance), and can’t easily be contained. What’s the place of water’s movement within (or on top of?) the carefully controlled movements of a stage play? Does water represent the limits of acting, a nonhuman collaborator who, perhaps like the dog in Two Gents, always threatens to steal every scene?
3. Fluid Metaphors: “The sea is not a metaphor,” cries Hester Blum in PMLA in one of the most influential critical statements in the development of the blue humanities. Her salutary focus on the material reality of the ocean, from the mast-head to the polar regions, has greatly influenced my thinking about oceanic cultures and literatures. But I also wonder, especially in an early modern context in which many of our writers were, unlike Melville or Conrad, not themselves sailors, about reversing her rallying-cry. The sea is always partly a metaphor, as in Shakespeare’s “hungry ocean” (Sonnet 64) or Spenser’s about-to-be-erased strand (Amoretti 75). For me, the overlap between metaphor and materiality gets at the heart of things. How much real salt is in that sonnet? How much poetry in the salt-stained journal of that young midshipman? What are the formal features of an ocean wave?
4. Thinking with Things: Though I worry that the pdf I shared with the seminar was hard to read, one of the most influential texts for the overlap between water and cognition that I’ve run across is Edwin Hutchins’s great 1995 book Cognition in the Wild, which treats the human and nonhuman assemblages working together in a U.S. Navy ship. Hutchins’s portrait of the ship responding to crisis emphasizes plural forms working on concert: “No single individual on the bridge acting alone — neither the captain nor the navigator nor the quartermaster chief supervising the navigation crews — could have kept control of the ship and brought it safely to anchor. Many kinds of thinking were required to perform this task” (5). The multiple humans and machines of the Navy ship may, in some ways, resemble the multiple humans and machines that make theaters work.

So many ideas! I can’t wait to see the seminar papers! More in a few weeks as we start to read and think about the papers.

I walked into the empty room just before the apocalypse.

I’ve never fully shaken the foreboding time-feeling of MLA, an anticipatory anxiety that lingers from my can-I-stay-in-this-profession early years in the ’90s (when, I know, things were much less dire for me than they are now for the current academic generation). The feeling of disaster about to burst also echoes today’s environmental bubbling-over, as bushfires and floods light up our screens large and small, even if we are lucky enough to be far from these catastrophes at least some of the time. I got to room 604 of the Washington State Convention Center early Sunday morning, wanting to set the scene for the beastly glories of session #666, lurking in the hangover slot to close out my MLA. The room was empty. I moved some chairs and appropriated a red “1 Minute” sign that, as it turned out, I would not need. The half-dozen demon-sharp speakers who would comprise the “Spenser, Ecology, and the Dream of a Legible Environment” panel filed in on time, with their brilliant talks that would take us from bleeding forests and courtrooms all the way to New Jerusalems and Silicon Valley’s posthuman paradises. Our session was marked by the beast’s number and haunted by visions of exhausted and “uninhabitable” earths. The panel didn’t proffer facile optimism but did show us ways, to adapt Alex McAdams’s great eco-analysis of the Legend of Temperance, to walk out “while weather serves, and wind” (Faerie Queene 2.12.88.9).

The panel’s pattern of looming catastrophe confronted if perhaps not averted parallels my sense of this year’s deeply engaging and mostly heartening MLA. The big conference provides snapshots of the states of our fields and subfields. There was much excellence on display. More than any MLA I’ve ever attended, the conversations I followed this year seemed driven by access and in particular a focus on new voices and methodologies. The continuing tide of eco-humanities was strongly present, and eco-trends have begun productively to engage with Critical Race Theory, feminism, globalization studies, and, to an extent that I hope will increase in time, Indigenous Studies. (I note also that this was the first MLA at which I heard, and delivered, land acknowledgments to the indigenous peoples of Coast Salish– though not at every session.)

As an early modernist, I felt some of most influential voices at #mla2020 were a pair of women who were not there, Kim Hall and Ayanna Thompson, whose years of work, insight, and field-shaping advocacy shaped not only the three connected #racebeforerace panels sponsored by the 17c English forum but also many other panels and presentations, including a collaborative panel organized jointly by 16c English and the Global Arab and Arab-American forums, and Dyani Johns Taff’s great talk on my own Eco-Spenser panel about the raced and sexed nonhuman bodies of Scylla and Charybdis. It was great to witness the groundswell of CRT-inflected early modern material being presented, driven and connected by the #racebeforerace and #Shakerace hashtags.

Thinking about the many panels I heard at the conference, the brilliance of early-career scholars and graduate students stands out. At this point, I can’t claim to be surprised to hear incisive and tightly-crafted analyses by Ambereen Dadabhoy, but I feel fortunate to have listened to her speak twice in two days. Insightful thinking from Will Rhodes on Spenser’s colonial ecologies, Connie Scozzaro on love drugs in Midsummer Night’s Dream, Alex McAdams on time and ecology in Spenser, Katherine Cox on climate change in Paradise Lost, and Mira Kafantaris on the racial symbology of Spenser’s Duessa confirms that we’re in the middle of a surge of great new scholarship in early modern literary culture.

The old shadow-MLA of hotel room interviews wasn’t as much in evidence this year, at least not for an old guy like me, but I can’t help thinking there was a different ghost conference in Seattle this year. Sessions that addressed the state and emerging futures of the profession – the form of our scholarly lives, rather than the content of our analyses – were markedly less sanguine than those that dove into new analyses of literary texts. I believe deeply in the work we are doing collectively, in the values of words and stories to counter climate apocalypse and resurgent racism and misogyny – but it’s hard to feel optimistic on the professional front. It’s hard to be optimistic on many fronts, actually, though I also think one of the lessons of ecocriticism in the face of increasingly dire climate news is that too-simple optimism, visions of transformation or “discovery,” tend to conceal violence and dispossession. We need to learn to live and work toward justice inside climate dynamism, not ascend to a catastrophe-free and morally purified future.

A notable session organized by Drew Daniel on “No Fear Shakespeare” represented a telling mixture of stirring content and dispiriting awareness of the cultural challenges alongside which we profess our profession. The pivot paper by Stephen Guy-Bray on what the No Fear paraphrases of the sonnets exclude was delicious and dazzling, a testament to Stephen’s wit, insight, and abiding commitment to poetic beauty. Great as the talk was, however, I left wondering if he’d followed the easier path. The opening and closing papers by Ann Christensen and Christine Hoffmann turned from texts to classrooms and into the wilds of web culture to propose strategies for pre-emptive annotation (Christensen) or for sympathetic engagement with making Shakespeare less frightening in our interwebbed world (Hoffmann). Their presentations addressed, with difficulty and sometimes a sense of not being able to clarify or salvage everything, the mixed and messy cultural experiences that spill into our classrooms, not to mention our lives. I love the intricacy of poetic gems as much as Stephen does – or almost as much, maybe – but I also valued the effort in this panel to marry pedagogy, formal analysis, and web-inflected cultural breadth of vision. Can we do all these things at once? Let’s hope so! But I think we can also expect not always to get everything right all the time.

MLA 2020 marks the end of my five-year run on the 16c English Forum board, which means I’ll shift to a not-every-year MLA schedule and won’t be conspiring on a pair of guaranteed sessions after next year. It’ll be nice to be released from mandatory attendance, but I’m proud of the work the 16c English Forum has done over the years, bringing new people into presentations and board membership and sponsoring lively discussions on such always-fascinating topics as Tyranny, Flattery, and Radical Hope. (Not every one of these panels doubled as a how-to class, I’m happy to say.)

Chairing my final session for the 16c English forum about Spenser makes me want to find a suitable allegorical moment to enclose in transparent glass. What was the crystalline heart of #mla2020? I’m tempted to nominate the welcome choice of Jonathan Eburne’s Outsider Theory as the James Russell Lowell prize-winning book. This book’s focus on the strange and its possibilities shines light on the work of the University of Minnesota Press in supporting experimental, speculative, and inspiring scholarship, through the editorial leadership of Doug Armato and many other excellent people, past and present, at the Press. (Full disclosure: UMP published Shipwreck Modernity and most recently Break Up the Anthropocene, and I love working with them.)

But I can’t helping thinking about a more enigmatic, and, alas, somewhat less hopeful, scene. Guided by Seattle native Lowell Duckert, a group of us found our way through rain and steep sidewalks into the enticing open glen of a local brewery the name of which is now lost to time. Surrounded by gleaming vats and hand-written signs on the wall. we sought to decipher the many IPAs on the chalkboard. Too soon, we realized that our cross-town dinner reservation was a full fifteen minutes away. Sadly beerless, we piled into cars & arrived just in time for a tasty and festive meal, though, more’s the pity, at a spot that served cider instead of beer.

The moment in that allegorical cave when I lost my taste of Seattle’s local brews to time accents the way that MLA always feels like a battle against temporal limits. There’s just not enough time! As ecocritic Tobias Menely emphasized in his wide-ranging analysis of Paradise Lost and climate change, time remains our hardest and most urgent challenge in thinking ecologically, as well as in thinking about literary culture and perhaps also about the trials of the 21c professoriate. Shakespeare’s sonnets, like ecological analysis, engage the paradoxes of multiple overlapping time spans, including the lives of poet, poem, beloved, and our ruined and ruinous earth. What do the riches of the beer unpoured promise, even as the door closes (forever?) on that secret taproom?

I know what I want from MLA and the future of our profession. I saw it in the work and imagination of so many colleagues, including the six demonic Spenser-lovers who found in the “dream of a legible environment” visions of possibility amid destructive change. I saw things to admire in the work of the brilliant alums of the new PhD program in English I have helped shepherd into being over the past decade at my home university of St. John’s, including Dan Dissinger’s expansive sense of writing studies, John Misak’s gamified Hamlet, and Laura Lisabeth’s ethical commitments to pedagogy and writing studies. I’ll also shout out one more not-yet-graduate of SJU who I spotted amid the MLA press, Tina Iemma, for her #bigger6 work within and beyond Romanticism.

I’d like a profession welcoming enough to welcome them, and the other brilliant voices whose work I heard and learned from in Seattle this weekend, and over the past many years of MLA.

That’s not too much to ask, is it?

I started this blog as a teaching-adjacent project for a study abroad course in London in 2008 that never happened. In 2009 it became an e-sideline and theater suggestions for a grad seminar. Starting around 2010 it slowly morphed into its current flow of theater reviews, academic conference commentary, and the occasional snippet from works-in-progress. I don’t post as many weather pictures as I used to, but I still chronicle my travels, most of the time.

The Bookfish now archives over 550 posts in the decade since Jan 2010, though as the posts have gotten more substantial over the years I’ve slowed down the volume. Forty-odd posts appeared in 2019, from Eco-Thoughts from Oaxaca to a series of comments about the Creating Nature conference at the Fogler to a triplet about my watery travels in the land of Oz this past October. A total of 13k pages views this past year, peaking in April (SAA-season). (I can’t tally total page views for the decade because my analytics seems to have reset itself in early 2018.) Posting has fallen off a bit this fall — I have unfinished draft posts about my trip to Liverpool in September, and to Delaware in November that I still hope to put into the e-world — but now that a couple large-ish projects have migrated off my desk, I may have a little more time for Bookfish-ing.

A few highlights from 2019:

Theater Posts

Heroes of the Fourth Turning (Nov, NYC)

Mayakovsky and Stalin (NYC)

King Lear (Broadway)

Julius Caesar (Theatre for a New Audience, NYC)

Twelfth Night (Yale Rep) and White Devil (Red Bull)

Makbet (St. John’s)

Academic Event Posts

ASLE 2019 (Davis, CA)

Creating Nature (roundup post)

#shax2019 (DC)

Revaluing the Ocean (Utah)

#mla19 (Chicago)

The swimming year has included some fantastic southern hemisphere immersion in and around Sydney, my first-ever dip in the North Sea (on the not-yet-blogged trip to Bristol in September), and less time in the pool than I might have wished, for assorted trivial reasons. More water miles in 2020!

The four talkers paced the backyard on a cold Wyoming night, seething.

Justin’s hand trembled as he prepared to disembowel a newly-shot deer. Teresa joyously proclaimed her readiness for the coming “war.” Emily ached with unlocated pain. Kevin gazed up at the stars and railed at his addition to the internet.

Will Arbery’s great new play, “Heroes of the Fourth Turning,” has under a week to go at the Playwright’s Horizon on Broadway’s edge. Many of the reviews that have made it one of the hot plays of the season have emphasized its ability to make urban liberals feel the feelings of rural Christians. But it’s better than that, and harder. The play, via the figure of Teresa, played with fire and charisma by Zoe Winters, scoffs at those of us who are “addicted to empathy.” That’s too simple an answer, too squishy and shareable. The truths this play’s after are less easy to assimilate.

Arbery comes by his knowledge of the play’s world biographically; his parents teach at Wyoming Catholic College and the character Gina, who arrives late to the party after having been named the new President of the College, appears to be based on his mother, Ginny. (The conservative author Rod Dreher, author of a brief for Christian separatism called The Benedict Option, which the play references, could not get to New York to see the production, but he’s written a compelling response to the screenplay based on his longtime relationship with the family.) Like many New Yorkers in the full house on Tuesday night, I was an outsider to the particulars of this world, but responded viscerally to the emotional force of the play. Theater is emotion concentrated, and that’s what we got last night on 42nd Street.

Teresa quote-evangelized paranoid theories of history – the “Fourth Turning” describes the coming generation of heroes, like the Civil War and World War II — she gleaned from Steve Bannon. Kevin vomited on stage, just a couple feet in front of my seat. Emily lovingly described her friend Olivia, who worked for Planned Parenthood. Justin quoted Latin poetry, Aristotle, and Plato.

Some of the chatter about the play has connected it to other “sympathy for Trump voters” efforts such as J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy. But unlike Vance, whose memoir I found to be thin and self-serving, Arbery writes with an artist’s aggression and restlessness. We don’t need to like these characters. They aren’t charming. They’re feeling pain. They play asks us to take that pain seriously, whether we empathize or not.

Kevin declaimed Wordsworth’s “The world is too much with us, late and soon” in full. Emily got embarrassed when her mom showed up drunk to the party. Justin carried Emily since it was too painful for her to walk. Teresa developed a cocaine habit while living in Brooklyn.

The notion that the cultural war might devolve into real combat shadows the evening’s conversation, from Teresa’s ecstatic and Bannon-sourced prediction that “war is coming” to the pistol Justin carried in his back pocket to the recurrent references to electoral politics. All four of the talkers distrust Trump but voted for him. All four resist and resent mainstream American culture. All share a sense of solidarity through cultural resistance, of being a select but imperiled group. “There’s more of them than us,” Justin says mournfully, deliberately overlooking the current levers of power owned by the American right.

Emily howled forth the pain of a desperate and angry Chicago woman she counseled at a pro-life center. Justin played guitar and sang about the comforts of “nothing.” Teresa asked her former professor to blurb her forthcoming book of Breitbart-esque vitriol. Kevin craved a “big conversation.” Also a girlfriend.

In several moments, the play interrogated but also simply presented Catholic orthodoxy to view. John Zdrojeski’s manic Kevin gushed a graphic, description of the Eucharist. Along with Jeb Kraeger’s powerful Justin, he and Tesera voiced a collective rosary. July McDermott’s Emily appealed to the person I imagine to be Arbery’s ideal writer, “Flannery O.” These materials together assumed a powerful strangeness in performance. I’m a standard-issue academic lefty and seldom a churchgoer, though working for more than a dozen years at a Catholic University has given me a window onto the richness of Catholic social thought, its uncompromising resistance to certain aspects of modernity — Justin, who often serves as a moral compass in the play, rejects LBGTQ people unambiguously — and its deep attachment to classical and Biblical texts. The dissonance of “Heroes” felt a little familiar to me.

A painful screech scoured the stage several times during the performance. Justin said it was a malfunctioning generator, but then later admitted he had been lying about that. The struggle of a soul in agony? It never quite became clear.

Gina — Emily’s mother, former professor of Teresa, Justin, and Kevin, and newly elected President of Transfiguration College — arrived late to the party. She denounced Teresa, suggested she may hire Kevin as a new Director of Admissions, rejected Justin’s idea to add marksmanship to the College curriculum, and — heartbreakingly — appeared not quite to believe in her daughter Emily’s pain. Pain functioned as the basic currency of this world, and Gina’s inability to see her daughter felt to me unforgivable.

Motherhood, symbolic and literal, occupies at the play’s red-hot core. Gina’s triumphant claim to Christian sacrifice, which she pounded into Teresa during an argumentative climax, built itself atop the physical risk and suffering of eight C-sections and eight babies. Kevin opened his “big conversation” with Teresa wondering why he had to venerate the Virgin Mary. Emily did tell Justin at one point that she thinks he’d make a great Dad, but fatherhood stayed off stage. Mothers are the mystery, the flesh, the suffering. Gina genuflected to her academic husband’s “brilliance,” but admitted that she was glad that she was the one chosen to be the next College President. Abortion politics, raw and uncompromisable, shadowed everything. (By coincidence, I came across my one-time colleague Caitlin Flanagan’s visceral entry into the abortion debate just a half-hour before the show, which seemed appropriate. Flanagan ends up seeing the debate as unsolvable. I wonder what she’d make of this play?)

Not much time left, but if you can, get to West 42nd St to see one of the last shows! And put Will Arbery on the list of names to watch.

I’ll gather together here my three overflowing posts in response to my trip to Australia in Oct 2019, as a guest of the History of Emotions Centre and U. New England in Armidale, and then the Sydney Environment Institute at the University of Sydney.

Oceanic Sydney

Sydney Swim Diary (2 of 3)

Compassion and Drought in Armidale, NSW (3 of 3)

On my last day in rural northern New South Wales, while I was bush-walking down a dusty path scattered with anthills in the slightly smoke-flavored air, I walked by a red-bellied blacksnake curled along the side of the path. I was the second walker in our group, which put me in the at-risk position: the first walker wakes the snake, the second gets him agitated. But I passed in silent oblivion, thinking about bush fires and the Myall Creek Massacre and the brilliant papers and panels at the University of New England conference on “Compassion: a Timely Feeling,” which had take place over the previous two days. Was the invisible-to-me red-belly an allegory? A symbol of something? Just, as we say, another snake in the grass?

It’s hard to parse what the snake means, but I had a great whirlwind visit to Armidale.

I came straight from the plane to the first keynote, a rich exploration of the intellectual genealogy of compassion in Britain from the late Middle Ages through the eighteenth-century. Katie Barclay, who teaches at the University of Adelaide in South Australia but whose vowels reveal her Scottish heritage, spoke about “neighborly love” before and during the Enlightenment, with special attention to what she calls “emotion management” as a key task for individuals and social bodies. She’s a longtime employee of the “History of Emotions” Centre of Excellence in Australia, and the depth of her knowledge and thinking on this important subject was on display.

I can’t gather together all of the nine panels and 3 keynotes, especially not while wanting also to talk also about our bus tour of the Australian bush on Saturday. So my blog-recap will skate between talks and tours, moving now from Katie’s deep archival research to first stop on our drive, the living archive of a Chinese emporium in Tingha, NSW, which has been converted into a museum after the family closed the business. The shop thrived during the tin boom in the nineteenth century. When the family finally abandoned the shop in the 1990s, the town had not quite ghosted but was just a whisp of its boom. The emporium turned museum was filled with old and new items, including whatever goods had not sold in the last years of operation still on their shelves. It was a slightly eerie look at social change and the human history of extraction in Australia.

In between Th afternoon and Friday at the conference, we heard a dazzling array of transdisciplinary responses to compassion, from David Holmes’s description of his Centre’s work in Climate Change Communication to Renee Mickelburgh’s “everyday environmentalism” of garden narratives, Deb Anderson on the “wet tropics” of rural Queensland, and other papers on the speculative reach of cli fi utopias, surfing and “care of the soul,” and a series of talks about climate activism, much of which described Australian contexts that were largely new to me.

A highlight of our long drive into the bush on Saturday was visiting the Myall Creek Massacre memorial. We walked a short self-guided loop with plaques explaining the Aboriginal heritage of the site as well as the massacre of 1838. The Myall Creek event was just one point in the wave of anti-indigenous criminal violence that accompanied the colonial settlement of Australia (as well as, of course, the settlement of the Americas). It’s a powerful feeling to be a descendent of colonizers standing in front of a memorial that protests the crimes of white Europeans. I could not help but think that the bush flies, dive-bombing incessantly inside my sunglasses as I walked along the path, were somehow spirits of the land, reminding me of my own alien-ness and complicity. I’m glad to have seen this place, and to have honored, in the resonant phrase that I heard at almost every talk in Australia, “Elders past, present, and emerging.”

My own talk on Friday morning at UNE was about (what else?) the oceanic feeling. I offered basically two ideas. First, I suggested that compassion, much as we love it, can also be an oppressive social demand; my example was one of English lit’s most horrid mother-monsters, Mrs Bennett from Pride and Prejudice. “Have you no compassion on my nerves?” she bullies her husband in the first chapter. Second, I hazarded the idea that re-routing compassion in nonhuman and oceanic directions might open up new ways to live amongst rising Anthropocene seas. I had a variety of examples for this second move, from Allan Sekula to Chris Connery to Luce Irigary, but the jumping-off image was Don Quixote looking at the ocean for the first time, upon arriving in Barcelona late in Part II. Compassion, it seems, makes me think of novels.

The pregame breakfast before the bush tour on Saturday was Jennifer Mae Hamilton’s “Community Weathering Station,” a pop-up water activism and theorizing site that she’s been curating in dialogue with the painful drought around Armindale. She’s asking everyone, including herself, to reflect on how this dry community feels about water, and about the town’s dependence on the weather. It’s a great, engaging, humanizing project that I hope to hear more about. I’ve known Jen’s brilliant work for several years, and it was a treat to meet her in person at last.

Delia Falconer’s closing plenary at the conference took up the question she also addressed in a lovely essay, “Signs and Wonders,” in the Sydney Review of Books. She explored how creative writers might be able to respond to our newly dynamic climate. In the talk she responded to James Wood’s hand-wringing about fiction writers’ supposedly failed responses to 9/11. I very much agree with where she ended up — that the fictional imagination needs to confront environmental strangeness both directly and obliquely, and that stories can teach us things we don’t know that we need to know.

The shock of Armidale’s dry heat struck me all the more palpably when I arrived on Sunday to Sydney’s humidity and abundant swimming locations. Rural New South Wales isn’t obviously amenable to my water-research in the same way that Sydney is. But I’m very pleased to have had the opportunity to see it for myself and not be confined only to urban Australia.

Thanks to Diana Barnes for the invitation, and everyone in Armidale for their hospitality!

With apologies to San Diego and Miami, and not having been to Rio or Cape Town, I am wondering — is it possible that any city in the world is a better swimming city than Sydney?

Here’s my list of my swims during my week in the city at the end of October, with pictures from most of the spots —

Sunday afternoon: Prince Alfred Park Pool. I swam in two of the three 50m outdoor public pools in the heart of the city, missing only the pool located in the Royal Botanic Gardens near Circular Quay. These pools were large and sunny, in use but not overcrowded, the water cool but not cold. My hotel was a 10 min walk to Prince Albert Pool and maybe 5 min to Victoria Park Pool. It’s the sort of local convenience I could get used to! I swam first in Victoria Park around 3 pm on Sunday, after flying down from Armidale at noon.

Monday morning: Victoria Park Pool. My first morning in Sydney I leveraged residual jet lag to get to the pool by 7 am and churn out 1500m under early morning slant light. The pool was a bit crowded, but inviting. Like my fellow swimmers, I got through my morning workout pretty fast to get on with the day.

Monday afternoon: Clovelly Inlet. After a lovely and wine-filled lunch with my hosts at the Sydney Environment Instittue, I took off in the afternoon for the Eastern suburbs, the Bondi-to-Coogee cliff walk, and a ghostly encounter with my twenty-two year old self, who had lived up the hill from Coogee for three-plus months at the end of 1989 and into 1990. The cliff walk is stunning, with glittering rock pools, and subtle gradations of brown in the sandstone. During the first half of the walk, we snaked through the public art displayed by the Sculpture by the Sea exhibition. But I was there to see and to swim, and on Killian’s advice we spent a while in Clovelly Inlet, a narrow, almost pool-shaped ocean inlet, bounded by the roar of surf at one end and a narrow beach on the other. We saw a wide assortment of fish in the calm waters. Highlights included a very not-shy blue groper, named “Bluey” in the Wild Swimming guidebook, and a sting ray with sand on its back. I also enjoyed swimming right up into the edge of the surf, into washing-machine-like conditions, and then letting the swell ease my back to the calm center.

Monday afternoon: Coogee Beach. At the end of the cliff walk was the crescent-shaped bay of Coogee Beach, where I’d last swum on Christmas Day 1989, drinking green and red cans of Victoria Bitter. I remember the surf being a little bigger back then, but the water felt just the same.

Tuesday morning: In advance of my big talk at 4 pm, I made sure to get a good 7 am swim at the Victoria Park Pool.

Tuesday mid-day: Killing some time before my public lecture, I wandered around the Circular Quay and gawked at the Opera House in the morning. Then I took a ferry to Watson’s Bay, near the South Headland. There I ate fish & chips and swam at The Baths, a netted swimming area in the oldest fishing village in Sydney.

Wed morning: It was a full day of Workshopping on Wednesday, so no time but 7 am for swimming. I did get my 1500m in at my now-habitual Victoria Park Pool.

Th morning: I had expected to go back to Victoria Park on my last day in town, but Astrida Neimanis helped gather together a group excursion to Karloo Pool, in the Royal National Park. (The second-oldest National Park in the world, after Yellowstone, I was told.) We met up on the 6 am train from downtwon and made it out to Heathcote Station a little after 7. We tramped down a steep trail through gum tree forest to the pool, where we took a refreshing 20 min dip in clear, cool water. Then we busted back up by way of a sweaty hike that was just in time to get everyone to their academic jobs that morning. And also time to get me on time to go catch the ferry across the harbor to Manly, for the swimming trifecta that ended my week.

Th mid-day: We had planned to snorkel in the ocean marine reserve in Manly, on the northeast corner of the Harbor, but the guy who I rented my mask and gear from said with the wind the way it was, the visibility would be better in the harbor at Fairlight Beach. We took his advice. The kelp beds were full of fish, tiny bits of iridescent coral, and more sea urchins than I’ve ever seen anywhere. The highlight of the swim — which I describe in detail in my Oceanic Sydney post — was an encounter with a giant Australian cuttlefish, one of the strangest and most intriguing critters I’ve seen in the sea. I won’t soon forget him!

Th mid-afternoon: Josh had to catch a ferry back to teach in the afternoon, so I tramped around to the ocean side and the Shelly Beach Marine Reserve on my own. The north wind had churned up the sand a bit, but I did see lots of fish above the kelp bed.

Th late afternoon: My last dip of the trip was in the surf of Manly Beach, where, tired as I was, I frolicked a bit with the kids on floatie toys and tried to keep my distance from the board surfers. It’s a gorgeous beach, and reminds of an outsized version of my home waters down at the Jersey Shore. Manly has become more touristic over the decades since I’ve last been there — it sported the only Starbucks I saw on my entire trip, though Sydney is full of fantastic coffee bars — but it’s a place I’d love to bring my family.

That’s eleven swims in five days, which is pretty good considering that I also fit in two professional events, meals with many of my hosts, drinks and coffee with others, and an excursion to the Sydney Fish Market. No museums, alas. Next time?

I’m not yet halfway back across the Pacific as I draft this post, and I’m already starting to scheme about future trips.

On the afternoon of my last day in Sydney, I was snorkeling in the Harbor near Fairlight Beach in Manly, when something caught my eye. It was below me in the water, nearly two feet long, swimming above the kelp bed. It didn’t move like any fish I’d ever seen. It had no fins, and I could not see any tentacles. It moved evenly through the water. The outside fringe of its baguette-shaped body subtly undulated and propelled itself forward, with a slightly spooky Halloween-appropriate wriggle. As I followed above it, the creature kept a calm pace just ahead of me. Then it slowed to a stop, but rather than making a turn with its head, it backed itself away to the left. Instead of flipping its body, it simply re-oriented itself so that its old tail was now its head. It swam off after that, and in not too long lost itself in the kelp. It was the giant Australian cuttlefish, a strange creature unlike anything I’ve ever seen before in the sea.

Flying home now above the South Pacific, I’m thinking about the cuttlefish. He didn’t put on the color-changing display that these amazing beasties sometimes perform, but his alien swimming entranced me. The soft, fluid movements of the creature’s body, its eerie floating pace, and its K-turn style of redirection — these were things I’ve never seen before in a lifetime of immersion. Giant cuttlefish are shy, retiring critters; my host, who’s been snorkeling in and beyond Sydney all his life, had never seen one before. But there the creature was, in the middle of the afternoon, showing itself to su as if wanting to remind me of how little I know, really, about the waters that I love. I followed the creature for a few timeless minutes, before he shook me off.

The cuttlefish swims in my mind’s eye now as emblem of my trip to Australia, which showed me many things I’ve not seen before and reminded me of how much I still want to learn. My week in Sydney as a guest of the Sydney Environment Institute swims into the past under the sign of the cuttlefish. What a flood it was! I’ll blog separately about the Armidale / University of New England part of the trip, and also post the salty details of my swim diary for the past week for anyone interested — but right now I want to get at least some glowing embers of the Sydney trip corralled into words.

The main event was a public lecture on Tuesday night at (what everyone calls) Sydney Uni, “Swimming into the Blue Humanities.” (Audio available via the link.) The talk brought together a few strains of what I’ve been calling “swimmer poetics” for a little while. My main effort was to combine an analysis of Everard Digby’s 1587 De arte natandi, the first how-to-swim manual published in England, with a half-dozen contemporary swim-writer-theorists, from the blazing individualism of Charles Sprawson’s Haunts of the Black Masseur to the subtler touches of Lynne Shapton and Philip Hoare, the heroic endurance of Lynne Cox, and the communal artistry of Vanessa Daws. I’m not sure I realized it until the moment I was delivering the talk, but the undertext of my talk traced a path from Sprawson’s mad solitude, painfully underscored by his current illness and dementia, into the communal practices exemplified by Vanessa Daw’s Psychoswimography in Santa Barbara. To make swimming into an Anthropocene meditation requires, I think, this movement beyond the self in solitary sensory deprivation to a collaboration of fellow swimmers and thinkers in our era of rising seas.

That’s the insight I arrived at while giving the talk, but the audience and workshop participants gave me much more.

A lively set of questions that evening, as well as the stunning water-acoustics of the group Baptism at the wine reception after, pushed me toward new watery ideas. I loved the comments-not-questions reminiscences about the legendary local swimming star Murray Rose, who I’d quoted (via Sprawson) in the paper and who a member of the audience had seen in a long distance race in Bondi. Other helpful questioners pushed on the “poetics” part of my formulation ,and wondered whether there was a difference between “swimming” (and its laboring, mobile poetics) as opposed to “floating” (which might produce a speculative ontology instead). I got great, engaging questions from Astrida Neimanis, who would take me on a splendid fresh-water adventure the next morning at Karloo Pools, and from Killian Quigley and Liam Semler, who had walked the Bondi-Coogee path with me the day before, including staring into the fishy eye of a blue groper underwater in Clovelly Inlet and frolicking in the surf at Coogee. I felt lucky to be there, and to have so many people giving me the gift of their critical attention.

The overflow continued the next day at the “Ocean Thinking Workshop,” hosted again by SEI. They gave me an hour to show some images of my favorite toxic or inviting beaches from New York to California to Liverpool, and to speculate about what it might mean to consider beaches as arguments, ways of bringing humans and oceans together. That part was fun, but the collection of interdisciplinary topics was just amazing. Before I forget all the best bits —

• Felicity Picken on “disorganized thinking” via Latour and the oceans
• Mariko Smith on the bark canoes and water culture of the indigenous peoples of New South Wales
• Kate Fullagar and Tanya Evans on the history of Sydney’s Split Swimming Club
• Astrida Neimanis on her new book, “the feeling of water,” including a generous and critical reconsideration of Adrienne Rich’s “Diving into the Wreck” that has re-oriented that great poem for me
• Iain McCalman, who was a generous and imaginative presence all week, on the shared meanings of “pleasure” in watery contexts, including the ways in which “pleasure tourism” might both damage and also possibly preserve the Great Barrier Reef
• Ann Elias on “how a man standing in water looks to a fish,” by way of science and surrealism in the 1910s
• Marine biologists Will Figueria and Brigette Somer on complexity in 3D reef modeling and how climate change is migrating corals beyond the tropics
• Josh Wodak (later my cuttlefish snorkeling companion) on volcanos and “no analogue states”
• Claire Britton on Sydney’s Cooks River, which reminds me a bit of my beloved Newtown Creek in Brooklyn
• Anita Calloway on the faeries at the bottom of Sydney Harbor
• Killian Quigley on “harbor poetics” and the bones that may lie beneath the Brooklyn Bridge
• Lea Vuong on the hidden second river of Paris, La Bievre,
• Robyn Backen closed us out with a tour de force of watery installations, from Sydney to Cologne among other places

The long, exhilarating, exhausting day took us from the pleasures of swimming to the post-industrial melancholy of fouled urban rivers and what we might call the “poetics of pollution.” I was dazzled by the methods on display, from marine biology to anthropology, art history, and heritage studies as well as my more familiar home-discourses of literature and history. Other attendees also spoke about projects in shipwreck archeology and surf studies. I left feeling that the blue humanities are in very good hands and that I’ll never be able to keep track of all the directions we’ll go. Which is the best thing about any intellectual upwelling!

I let slip at some point during the question periods that I’m in the market for a successor discourse to the sublime, a way to interpret nonhuman vastness and power that does not require the egoistic ju-jitsu we know from Romanticism. We talked about that for a while, but I’m not sure anyone was ready to nominate a discourse — unless, perhaps, it might emerge in dialogue with Glissant’s post-colonial idea of Relation.

What do I take home with me, besides flygskam and a faint hope that the carbon offsets I bought before I left home will support some mitigating projects? I’m hoping for a blue humanities that imitates the cuttlefish: using all the edges of our bodies to propel ourselves forward in one direction, then suddenly re-directing so that what appeared in front is now to one side. There’s so much still to be discovered!

The absurd abundance of Sydney’s waters — for more on which see my swim-diary post — came home again to me in my last hours in the land of Oz. I walked down King Street in Newtown, enjoying the Halloween festive vibe in a hipster neighborhood. I managed to pick up a copy of Delia Falconer’s book Sydney, at the last of four bookstores I tried while I was in town. (Delia had been another speaker in the Armindale part of my trip, and she helpfully guided me onto the Sydney rail system so I wasn’t stuck with cabs.) I ended up meeting a friend from my Shakespeare circles, who was himself meeting a mate from Sydney — who it turned out is a distinguished scholar of mermaids, oysters, New York harbor, and many other things I love very much. He’d not known about any of my events in Sydney, and I did not until last night know about his awesome open-access island studies journal Shima. We chattered about oceans & islands & mer-critters & Queequeg & many other things besides. Does every Victorian pub in Sydney come with its own dazzling blue humanities scholars?

That’s a question I may not be able to answer soon. This latest academic adventure wasn’t my first trip to Sydney, but it was the first since I arrived there in 1989, fresh from working to clean up the Exxon Valdez’s oil from Alaskan beaches and powerfully motivated to defer adulthood’s responsibilities. Walking through Sydney this week, I returned to many of the haunts of my younger self’s four-month stay, especially the cotton-candy surf of Coogee and Manly beaches, the dazzling sunlight on the Opera House, and the ferries that sketch their wake-lines across the vast intimacy of the Harbor. I kept feeling as if the young man I had once been was there alongside me on this trip, just a bit out of sight or splashing underwater, wondering what his future might be like.

What would that twenty-two year old make of me returning to Sydney in 2019, the father of teenagers, one of whom has started college this fall, working as a professor (I knew no professors as a child), thinking and writing about the feeling of ocean on skin?

At least the last of those things would feel familiar to him, I think. In some ways I’ve had a long road over the past three decades. But in others, I’m where I’ve always been.

What would it feel like to rule the world? To believe that your own ordinary embodied body lay atop of history’s moving current, guiding the flow of revolution, so that everything that happens, happens to you, because of you, through you, in relation to you? What if you believed you were the apex of every pyramid?

It can’t be easy to keep the vast swirl of history flattened inside one single faraway gaze, one commanding posture, and one pair of slightly inward-turned boots. Maury Sterling’s performance of Stalin, on stage for the next month in the gorgeous Cherry Lane Theatre in the West Village, wears glacial white and speaks about the revolution, as Max Faugno’s Chorus tells us, as a “sincere intellectual.” What struck me most forcefully from this performance of one of the last century’s greatest monsters was Stalin’s calm solidity, his eerie stability in speech and in silence. No extra movement from the Man of Steel. In Murry Mednick‘s play about the Communist dictator and the revolutionary poet Mayakovsky, who Stalin never met but whose reputation received the dictator’s posthumous benediction, Stalin commands everyone — except his wife Nadya, played with coiled-spring energy by Jennifer Cannon, who eludes him finally through suicide.

The play features twinned suicides, of Nadya in 1932 and of Mayakovsky in 1930, which loosely connect the two plots of political and poetic revolution. The play bounces the paired narratives off each other, contrasting Stalin’s mastery with Mayakovsky’s somewhat floppy enthusiasm, his declamatory poetry, and his “bad teeth.”

What does the revolutionary poet who died young say to the dictator who bent Eurasia to his will? Mednick’s play makes explicit connections between the fervor of revolutionary Russia and his own ferment in the American 1960s, when he collaborated with Sam Shepherd and Ed Harris. I also wondered about the resonance of the Brik family, who embraced Mayakovsky and his revolution, but whose wiser sister Elsa, played with precise energy by Alexis Sterling, left the Soviet Union for a distinguished literary career in France, where she was also part of the Resistance.

Mayakovsky and Stalin is complex, verbally dense theater. For my fellow Shakespeareans, I caught echoes of the second half of Macbeth in the fractured post-triumph marriage of Stalin and Nadya. I also enjoyed the explicit Lear allusions in the language of “nothing” and in Mayakovsky’s fart jokes. “Blow, winds,” &c.

I spend a decent amount of my time sitting in the front row of intense, demanding plays like this one. In fact, a month ago I was in almost the same seat for Keith Hamilton Cobb’s brilliant American Moor, also at Cherry Lane. Mayakovsky and Stalin wasn’t my usual Shakespeare or Shakespeare-adjacent fare, though I’d gotten a revolutionary Soviet art warm-up through Peter Brook’s Why? at Tfana, which also touched on Maykovsky. But for me the added strangeness and wonder of this show was that two of the eight actors, Maury and Alexis Sterling, are my brother- and sister-in-law. Instead of flying solo to the play as I often do, I sat last Saturday on opening night surrounded by family. A noisy party of grandparents, cousins, and in-laws from both coasts of America and both sides of the Atlantic gathered together after the show for Georgian food (not the American Georgia but the European nation in which Stalin was born) down the street.

It’s a treat to be part of a family that makes great art, and great gatherings. I’m going to go back before the run is over on Nov 10 — and you should too!

[Cross-posted from the U MN Press blog]

A few weeks ago in late July, a tropical rainstorm cascaded onto my home in Connecticut. During high summer in the northeastern United States, violent thunderstorms often roll through after steamy afternoons. But we weren’t prepared for the speed and volume of water that fell in a few short hours during the evening of July 22, 2019. After we spotted rising water in the basement, spreading into my teenage son’s underground lair, we frantically filled 32-gallon garbage cans and hauled them up the hill from the flooded garage. We weren’t quite successful in keeping all the water out of his room – but we did save the Xbox, not to mention his bed.

Welcome, I didn’t say to him as we each strained to pull more than one hundred pounds of sloshing water up the steep driveway, to the Anthropocene. 

According to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Programme, July 2019 was the hottest recorded month in human history. The year 2019 also saw record-breaking heat in April, May, and June. Our planet is cooking, and since warm air holds more water vapor, storms are getting wetter. The downpour we experienced might not have been unusual for the tropics. But our cozy New England home wasn’t designed to handle that much water that fast. My flood situation seems pretty tame compared to the prospects facing residents of the Maldives or Marshall Islands, but the Anthropocene touches each one of us, unevenly, unexpectedly, and sometimes painfully.

As the lived experience of climate change becomes more tangible with each storm, flood, and heat wave, we need to activate our imaginations. It’s not easy to make sense of how it feels to live through dynamic ecological change. The buzzword “Anthropocene,” coined in 2000 by Nobel Prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen, has been spreading its tentacles beyond climate science to the humanities, arts, and other public discourses, but it’s not clear what the term asks of us in response. We know that climate change has a human cause and that we are living through an “Age of Man” in a basic physical sense. We also know the abstract Anthropos that drives up carbon levels in the atmosphere is not the same as the individual Humans who suffer the most drastic effects. Industrial capitalism lights the fires, but people feel the waters rise.

I wrote Break Up the Anthropocene to add more imagination to our responses to climate change. I wanted to synthesize the many ways cultural theorists and eco-philosophers are describing our moment. I also wanted – to cite my argument-by-hashtag – to #pluralizetheanthropocene. That means transforming the ominous and monolithic rise of global temperature into varied, surprising, and radical possibilities. I wanted to exchange the global paradigms of 1.5 or 2 or 3 degrees Celsius with multiple responses to plural lived experiences of catastrophic ecological changes.

I needed help, and I got lots of it. The inspiration started with a gorgeous watercolor painting that swim-artist Vanessa Daws made for me in June 2018, when I was giving a #pluralizetheanthropocene lecture in Lausanne. The image, which balances a Ship of Fools alongside a mostly-hidden sea monster and an ocean full of plastic trash, launched this book with color and turbulence. I’ve tried to stay true to that spirit as the project has moved and turned.

The book’s seven chapters comprise forays into plural perspectives. A chapter called “Six Human Postures” treats Old Man Anthropos as a physical allegory, so that various eco-theoretical approaches involve asking the Old Man’s tired body to assume new positions. Yoga for the Anthropocene! Other chapters include investigations of anachronism as positive method, a Borges-meets-Shakespeare engagement with “now, now, very now” as the time of climate change, and a reading of errancy as central to natural systems. A glossary-chapter, “The Neologismcene,” catalogs two dozen proposed names for our warming age, from “Agnotocene” to “Trumpocene.” We need them all, and more besides. A concluding encounter with the whale-swallowed prophet Jonah suggests that the climate change stories we need today include both the human perspective that counsels repentance, change, and survival, and the posthuman vision that promises shock, disorientation, and new possibilities.

When I was writing this little book, I didn’t think that I’d feel one of its conclusions in my aching back. I need a better system for keeping stormwater out of my house. We need to stop pumping carbon into the atmosphere. But living in the Anthropocene means finding floods where you don’t expect them and hadn’t encountered them before.

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