Steve Mentz

After a week’s extra winter quiet, the Spring 2021 semester at St. John’s starts today — but this year I’m not worried about driving down to Queens in pre-dawn darkness and possible snow. Instead, my commute remains just four steps from bedroom to home office and my worries are about the reliability of my internet and how much my dog will bark during class.

Like many, I’m hanging by my fingernails as this pandemic year grinds on. I’ve learned some things about online teaching that I think will help — more YouTube lectures and clips, fewer Discussion boards, more shared Google docs! But I don’t have any illusion that Zoomin’ — or I guess WebEx-ing, since that’s the platform St. John’s uses — can capture the human engagement of the classroom. Online teaching can do some things pretty well, I have long believed in using online tools for all my classes, and some of the e-tricks I’ve employed this past year will likely migrate to my future classes even when we re-occupy classrooms. But this year has reminded me that the most powerful technologies we have in education are human voices and shared presence, the calls to attention that people make by being in shared spaces. I miss that, and I look forward to getting back to it.

But — not this semester! Instead I’ve got three fun classes that I’ll quickly preview here. Two are synchronous online, meaning that I’ve got scheduled “live” Zoom classes for the whole crew each week. One is asynchronous, meaning that everything happens remotely, at whatever times students choose to engage.

English 2210: British Fantasy from Beowulf to Harry Potter

My asynchronous class, which should I hope draw in some non-majors, takes the opportunity created by Maria Dhavana Headley’s great new feminist and slang-y translation of Beowulf — “Bro! Tell me we still know how to speak of kings!” — to investigate the medieval roots of the British fantasy novels with which so many of us have grown up. For me that means Tolkien, and for many of my students, as well as my own kids, that means Rowling’s Harry Potter books. Without entirely breaking the spells this books have cast on us as young readers, we’ll look into questions of racism and sexism in fantasy, think about what heroes & monsters & wizards & witches can say to the twenty-first century, and consider how books like these are changing as they continue to be written today.

English 3140: Shakespeare: What Should We Do with Othello?

This spring’s iteration of my regular Shakespeare class, which usually draws both English and Education majors, focuses mostly on a single play, Othello, which is both a work of canonical genius and a play whose racism continues to unsettle audiences, readers, and performers. By reading the play in dialogue with contemporary creative responses by Toni Morrison, Tracy Chevalier, Djanet Sears, and Keith Hamilton Cobb, as well as Shakespeare’s sources, contemporary critical essays, and a couple of other Shakespeare plays, we’ll dig into what makes Othello so powerful, so disturbing, and so meaningful in 2021.

English 140: Black and Blue: Oceans and Migrations in the African Diaspora, 50,000 BCE to the Present

My spring grad seminar will combine two of my favorite intellectual threads. Bringing together the discourses of the blue, or “oceanic,” humanities with the history of race and Critical Race Theory, this course asks how oceans and race have shaped and continue to shape human culture. Readings in history and critical theory from the Francophone Caribbean writer Edouard Glissant to British historian Paul Gilroy to “human geographer” Kathyrn Yussof, among many others, will entwine themselves around the greatest American novel of whiteness and the ocean, Moby-Dick, plus a series of sea poems from Shakespeare to Emily Dickinson to Derek Walcott. I wish we could all go to the beach together, as I’ve done sometimes in the past with ocean-themed grad seminars, but I’m looking forward to this one even in the Zoom-world!

Coming into this New Year, I’m thinking about the blue humanities. That’s not unusual, I suppose, since I’ve been thinking about little else for the past decade, but my plan is to concentrate in 2021.

As a treat and indulgence, at the end of last year I asked a local Short Beach graphic designer to help me create this Blue Humanities logo. What will I use it for? It’s hard to say. Will there be t-shirts, coffee mugs, or swim caps? Maybe I’ll put together a conference? A cocktail party? An open-water swim? Those things will be possible again someday, right?

The process of putting the design together has led me to a few thoughts, which I’ll share in these early days of the year.

The Pacific is the center of the world.

The easiest part of the design was choosing a perspectival view of our blue planet. If the image does nothing beyond reminding anyone who sees it of the size of the Pacific Ocean, it will do what I want it to do. The Pacific occupies roughly one-third of the planet’s total surface area, more than all the land masses combined, When I look at that vast blue space framed by the tentative fingers of Asia, Australia, and the Americas, my personal Anglo-American and Atlantic background put me in a difficult position to make sense of a global blue humanities. I want this Pacific-forward image to remind and challenge me to think beyond what I know.

It’s hard to be both global and anti-imperial.

Earlier drafts of the image had the two words sprawled out across the oceanic blue, showing in their letterforms just a hint of the planet’s curving surface. In the end I thought writing on the water looked too imperialist, too much a reminder of fantasies of “conquering the oceans” that I want to move past. I don’t have any illusions about the ocean’s histories of conquest, slavery, piracy, and other forms of violence. But I am hoping to encourage ideas about plurality, fluid motion, circulation, and exchange. “Wet globalization” contains many stories, and I hope it can create new ones also.

Words fit awkwardly onto watery spaces.

That said, the design I ended up with, with the phrase “blue humanities” encircling the watery globe, still carries a whiff of domination that makes me uneasy. I don’t want the blue humanities to be a language of conquest! I’d also rather not create too much uniformity — but I didn’t think I could pull off a design that also flashed out alternative phrases like “hydrocriticism,” “ocean studies,” or “thallassography”!

“Meditation and water are wedded for ever.”

What I enjoy about this logo, and what I hope I’ll keep enjoying as I play with and deploy it, is its spur to the imagination. I’m a language-focused thinker. I don’t draw or play music, and in truth I don’t even watch movies or Netflix very much. My thinking is mostly about and with and in words, sometimes as academic arguments with footnotes and bibliographies, sometimes as dashed-off blog posts or tweets, increasingly in this year of pandemic isolation as short poems. What I want from this image of the world’s water is a new object to help me think about our oceanic planet. I’m looking at it now and thinking about what it shows and also what it excludes — the swirling water vapor in the atmosphere, the water inside living bodies, the massive subterranean caches beneath the planet’s crust. There’s a lot of water in this image, and a lot of water that’s not represented.

More blue humanities posts to come in 2021!

What a strange year!

No in-person academic events, no live theater or face to face teaching since March, no seeing family or friends or anyone who doesn’t live in cozy Short Beach, not to mention overall shut-in-ness, Zoom overload, and Covid-malaise. Among many other things, it’s been a slow blogging year. The Bookfish swam slowly, even intermittently, but finally ended up with 28 posts. Top marks go to February, when the theaters were still open and I posted 7 times, including play-reviews of Timon of Athens, The African Company Presents Richard III, Girl from the North Country, Hamlet, and Tumacho — those were the days! Months without any posts at all include June, August, and September. October has just one.

Theater in (parts of) 2020

Timon at Theatre for a New Audience (Feb)

The African Company Presents Richard III at Queens Theater (Feb)

Girl from the North Country on Broadway (Feb)

Hamlet at St. Ann’s (Feb)

Tumacho at Clubbed Thumb (Feb)

Richard II Radio Play via the Public Theater (Oct)

In place of my usual play and academic conference reviews, I smuggled in a half-dozen of book reviews, including Covid-themed classics Love in a Time of Cholera and The Plague, David Gange’s great kayaking history The Frayed Atlantic Edge, Alice Oswald’s Nobody, her gorgeous response to Homer’s Odyssey, Craig Santos Perez’s latest book of poems, Habitat Threshold, and most recently Peter Coviello’s gorgeous and enthusiastic Vineland Reread.

Books of 2020

Love in a Time of Cholera (March)

Habitat Threshold (April)

The Frayed Atlantic Edge (May)

Nobody (July)

The Plague (July)

Vineland Reread (December)

I wrote a half-dozen posts around the Shakespeare Association seminar that I co-lead (on Zoom) with Nic Helms in April. Several of these posts were in dialogue with, or substantially written by, Nic and our cluster-leaders, Lyn Tribble, Doug Clark, and Lowell Duckert.

Watery Thinking Posts

Watery Thinking 1: What does water want? (Feb)

Watery Thinking 2: Submersive tendencies (Feb) with Lyn Tribble

Watery Thinking 3: Fluid cognition (March) with Doug Clark

e-Watery Thinking 4: Forms of water (April) with Lowell Duckert

e-Watery Thinking: Outline and Schedule (April) with Nic Helms

e-#Shax2020: Watery Thoughts from a Distance (April)

There were a few other stray posts during the year, on #mla2020 in Seattle, Marina Zurkow’s gallery show “Wet Logic” in Manhattan, a Zoomposium hosted by the Urban Soils Institue, a roundtable celebrating with work of John Gillis, and even a response to a pair of music videos (only in 2020 would I be writing about music videos!) by Robbie Robertson and Bob Dylan.

#mla2020 (Jan)

Wet Logic at bitforms gallery (Feb)

Two Songs (March)

Urban Soils (November)

The Sea by Borges (November)

Gillis Roundtable (December)

Plus a few wrap-up posts in the waning days of a bad year!

Reads of 2020

Writing in 2020

Rolling into the end of this disorienting & disruptive year, I find that I’ve published quite a bit — a slim single-author book, a big fat edited collection, two academic articles, nine web-articles, and a pair of podcasts! Strange not to have circulated with some or all of these at academic or para-academic events, though I did do a bunch of Zoom-publicity book chats. Hoping to see more people in 2021!

A little book about a big Object

Ocean, which came out in March from Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series, was my publishing highlight of 2020. I love writing without footnotes; I love the beautiful little books in this series with their genius covers by Alice Marwick; I love the original illustrations for my book by swim-artist Vanessa Daws. And I love that the back cover features Lynne Cox — the best-cold water ocean swimmer in the history of the world — calling it a “wondrous read”!

A big book with lots of co-authors and editors

Another arrival during pandemic spring was this doorstop-sized collection of twenty-five essays on the early modern sea. The product of years of collaboration with my two amazing co-editors, Claire Jowitt and Craig Lambert, this book’s chapters range from ship design to regionalism in the Ottoman Med, from sea music to ships’ instruments. My own contribution places historical and literary shipwrecks in global perspective. Our overall aim, part of a larger movement in ocean studies, was to rewrite old-fashioned Euro-centric and “great man”-ish schools of maritime historiography. I learned so much working with the contributors and co-editors — if only we could all meet dockside somewhere for a beer!

Two academic journal articles

My essay, “Is Compassion an Oceanic Feeling?” was published in the Australian journal Emotions: History, Culture, Society (4:1 2020: 109-27). Ranging from Freud to Jane Austen to Cervantes, from contemporary poetry to blue humanities theory, it emerged from a generous invitation to speak at a conference on Compassion at the University of New England is Amindale, New South Wales, in October 2019. Back when people went places!

A co-authored essay, “Learning an Inclusive Blue Humanities: Oceania and Academia through the Lens of Cinema,” which I wrote with medievalist James Smith, was great fun to put together. Venturing out of our depths, we started this project by speculating about the symbolic role of the sea in the big-budget American films “Aquaman” and “Moana,” and ending up trying to educate ourselves about Oceania, non-Western conceptions of the ocean, and the ethics of academic writing. At times this essay felt like dipping an alien toe into unknown waters — I’m not an expert on either film or Pacific studies — but I learned so much from writing it. It’ll help me be a better critic and teacher moving forward.

Two podcast interviews

In late May, looking a bit fuzzy behind what would prove to be a dying laptop camera in this season of Zoom, I enjoyed speaking with Nicholas Allen of the University of Georgia’s Wilson Center in one of their “Coastal Conversations.” It was great to e-meet Valerie Babb of Emory University and Ryan Emmanuel of North Carolina State U, and also to re-connect with Alexandra Campbell, who I’d met at an Oceans even in Bristol in 2018, and Nicholas himself, who I lured out for a riverside breakfast at the great Kitchen Little in Mystic, also in 2018. This conversation was one of many great events the Wilson Center Zoomed out to the world during Covid-time. I can’t wait to see what they cook up when the world allows other things again!

In dialogue with co-editor Craig Lambert, I podcast-chatted with Chase Smith on his Global History Podcast in early August. We were sorry Claire Jowitt couldn’t join us, but we had a great conversation about the forms and developments of maritime history, the project of our big book, and our hopes for new ways of conceiving and exploring the watery part of the world.

Nine Shorter Pieces, mostly on the web

I’ll run through these quickly, more or less in reverse chronological order. With a few exceptions, most of these were Ocean-related, since I’d hoped to put together something like a mini-book tour when that book appeared in March. That didn’t happen, but we did do a few fun Zoom events “at” Skylight Books in LA, the Harvard Bookstore, Greenlight Books in Brooklyn, and my local fav R. J. Julia in Madison, CT. It was great fun to get to know some of my fellow spring 2020 objects, including Dinah Lenney (COFFEE), Steve Jones (CELL TOWER), Erik Anderson (BIRD), Rolf Halden (ENVIRONMENT), and Ken Rosen (BULLETPROOF VEST)!

“Swimming in the Anthropocene” came out in December from Public Books. Written in response to swim-books by Bonnie Tsui (Why We Swim) and Eric Chaline (Strokes of Genius), the essay also captures a summer of everyday swimming in Long Island Sound and my hopes for this “embodied meditation” in our unsettled Anthropocene time.

My swim-autobio appeared on the Australian web-journal Swim People in November. It was great fun to splash down memory lane for this one!

The first chapter of OCEAN appeared on the Rachel Carson Center’s Environment and Society Portal.

An interview I did with Nathan Strohmeyer for the Los Angeles Review of Books, entitled “Our Blue Future,” talked about OCEAN and much more.

In July, when Covid mortality in the USA had just topped 100,000, I published a piece in Stanford’s Arcade that made the case for Thomas Nashe’s great “Elegy in Time of Plague” as the Elizabethan masterpiece for our times. Today we are over 330,000 deaths, rising at a rate of 2,000 per day. Lord, have mercy on us!

In May, I was pleased to be invited by U Penn grad student Aylin Malcolm to contribute to her Blue Notes blog series hosted by the Penn Program in the Environmental Humanities. My post, “Wet Globalization in Viral Times,” placed a chapter from OCEAN in 2020 context.

In April, the good people at the Glasgow Review of Books excerpted a chapter from OCEAN that contrasted the viewpoints of Rachel Carson and Aldo Leopold, “The Sea and the Mountain: Two Histories of Environmental Thinking.”

A bunch of the spring-time Objects wrote a many-handed blog post for Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons blog in early May. “A Conversation Among Objects” featured Steve Jones (CELL TOWER), Erik Anderson (BIRD), me (OCEAN), and ROLF Halden (ENVIRONMENT).

A beautifully-produced story about OCEAN and my #bluehumanities work appeared, in Italian and English, in the magazine SIRENE in Autumn 2020, written by the Italian journalist Rossella Venturi, who’s been stranded in Sydney since Covid started. No link to the article — but you can order the journal issue!

Public Lectures

It hasn’t been a year for my favorite kind of event, a public lecture when I drop into a community for a few days, talk about things I love, and get to learn from amazing people doing incredible things. 2019 was a high-water mark for this sort of thing for me, with talks in Sydney (twice), Amindale, Liverpool, Harvard, Columbia, Washington DC, Salt Lake City, and Wilmington, Delaware. Nothing like that in 2020!

But I did sneak in a great local “Early Modern Oceans” event at the CUNY Grad Center in midtown Manhattan, in February before everything closed. Sharing a seminar table with my blue humanities buddy Lowell Duckert of the University of Delaware is always fun, and it was also great to meet Maurya Wickstrom, who works on water and performance at the Grad Center.

I did one other mini-keynote this past October, in which I Zoom-delivered “Soiling the World: The Poetics of Compost from Ovid to the Anthropocene” to the annual symposium of the Urban Soils Institute in New York. Hoping to meet those excellent people in person next year!

Coming attractions?

A decent amount of my 2021 writing will be devoted to a new project, An Introduction to the Blue Humanities, which is under contract with Routledge Publishing. I’m likely to e-publish a few more short pieces, as occasions serve, and an academic article or two may emerge from the pipeline. I’m giving a keynote at a spring conference on “Sea Sense,” hosted virtually (alas!) at U. California Irvine. Maybe the deferred “Swimposium” in Dublin that got shifted away from its 2020 time will be reconstituted?

I’m looking forward to seeing new people and new places, when that becomes possible again!

My Reading List app tells me I’ve read 60 books during this pandemic year, starting with Monique Roffey’s Archipelago in early January through Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return and Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future more recently. I’ll may well knock another couple off before the year finally turns, but I thought I’d highlight my half-dozen-plus favs. 2020 was such a bad year in so many ways — but a good year for reading!

Roughly in the order in which I read them —

Craig Santos Perez, Habitat Threshold — I eagerly devoured this book of wise & witty eco-poems early in pandemic-time, and ended up sending a copy as a gift to my then-newborn nephew who I’ve still not seen outside Zoom-topia. Baby Ford Sterling won’t be able to read these poems for years, but I also shared them with my Global Lit students this past fall. They loved Perez’s voice from Oceania, and I got some great writing in response to these poems.

Dinah Lenney, Coffee — It was a strange year to have a book come out, but having my Ocean in a cluster of new Object Lessons with Dinah Lenney’s Coffee, Erik Anderson’s Bird ,and a few others made the Zoom publicity events lively and fun. Coffee is a wonderful romp, half a memoir plus a moving hymn to the ways this bitter morning brew shapes global history and family feeling. It was one of about a half-dozen books of 2020 that I downed in one sitting’s gulp!

David Gange, The Frayed Atlantic Edge: A Historian’s Journey from Shetland to the Channel — I’m always on the lookout for experiments in academic writing that make our connections to the past more visceral, but David Gange’s gambit — writing a history of the Atlantic facing coast of Scotland, Ireland, and England by narrating a solo kayaking trip through every cove and inlet — was extreme even by my standards. I blog-reviewed it back in May, thinking about “kayak Romanticism” and the possibilities of an Anthropocene sublime.

Bathsheba Demuth, Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait — The other brilliant work of narrative environmental history that I loved this year was this account of the ecology of the Bering Sea. The book artfully weaves together human stories from the USA and USSR with the nonhuman lives of whales, caribou, and walruses, among other environment-shaping actors. The genius of this account frames all its actors, from humans to animals to the ocean currents and seasonal advance and retreat of sea ice, as contributors to energy flows, shaping and shaped by global climate change. I’ve not been back to Alaska since the 1990s, though I spent a fair amount of time up there in those years, including working on the cleanup of the Exxon Valdez oil spill in the summer of 1989, right after I finished college. Demuth’s lyrical academic prose — that need not be an oxymoron! — reminds me of what I love about northern extremes.

Jennifer Edgecombe, The Grief of the Sea — I read, and also wrote, more poetry during this year of lockdown than probably any other year of my life. One of the strange pleasures of the pandemic was joining the Sonnet Corona Project on Facebook and contributing to a dozen coronas, which are “crowns” of fourteen connected sonnets. I also started digging into more new poetry, including, as you might expect, sea poetry. Jennifer Edgecombe’s gorgeously lyrical chapbook of shipwreck poems is one of the ones that has stuck with me. “The dark is the sea,” she opens the volume, “that has soaked through, / dripping into buckets already full –“

Claudia Rankine, Just Us: An American Conversation — The first poem I assigned to all of my classes this past fall was Claudia Rankine’s “Weather,” published in the New York Times in June in the immediate wake of the Black Lives Matter protests that rocked the USA this spring. My students were dazzled, and inspired, by her combination of artistry and close attention to the materials of everyday life. It’s like we’re living in a poem, one said! I carried that familiarity with me to her most recent book of experimental essays and prose poems about white privilege, the pressures of racism in daily life, and the transformative power of art. She’s one of the great poetic witnesses to our days.

Rebecca Giggs, Fathoms: The World in the Whale — I sipped from this gorgeous, dense volume for what must have been months, spacing deep dives into these chapters about whales in and beyond history in between my magpie reading practices. Giggs writes with beautiful intensity and precision, and the opening depiction of a stranded whale in Perth remains alive and pungent in my imagination. She’s a voice to listen to!

Those are my more-than-a-half-dozen favs for 2020. So many other great books this year, including Bonnie Tsui’s Why We Swim, about which I wrote in Public Books, the latest strange parable-novel by J.M. Coetzee, my own deeper dives into the poetry of Alice Oswald and W.S. Graham…

We’re all hoping for a 2021 with more people, more travel, and more open-ness. But I hope still with lots of great books!

I slurped this one down in one go last night, sneaking in a personal treat at the start of winter break. Peter Coviello’s Vineland Reread, his entry in Columbia UP’s Rereadings series, ranges across a series of encounters with Pynchon’s relatively unloved “middle” novel, which Coviello contextualizes as occupying a near mid-point in the writer’s career, having appeared in 1990 after the long hiatus post-Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) and before the more consistent run of subsequent novels, Mason & Dixon (1997), Against the Day (2006), Inherent Vice (2009), and Bleeding Edge (2013). Like me, Coviello hopes that the now 82-year-old Pynchon might still have a novel or three still up his sleeve; like me, he also suspects that the epics GR and M&D will punctuate the career. But if Vineland sometimes gets judged as middle in quality as well as chronology, Coviello makes a convincing case for the novel’s prescience, its subtlety, its loss-haunted history of America, and — above all, and most powerfully in this smart, funny, inventive passionate book — its syntactic joys. It’s hinge-Pynchon, connecting the tragic early brilliance to the ramshackle later works. It’s also just plain brilliant. Maybe the non-epic novels give an even clearer view of the distinctive flavors and energies of Pynchon?

There’s nothing quite like the swoops and dives, elaborate curls and dead-ends, the ambition and profligacy of the Pynchon sentence. Like many Pynchon-stans, my baseline response to my favorite sentences is how’d-he-do-that wonder, even if, as is often the case, the dog being chased through many clauses and elaborations turns out very much of the shaggy variety. Coviello strikes a finely calibrated balance between explaining the complexities of Pynchon’s style and also wallowing in its abundance, goofiness, and high-wire-act displays. I read a lot of academic prose, and it’s always a temptation to skip block quotations, especially since the quoted texts are often things I’ve read before — but part of the joy of this book for a confirmed Pynchonophile is anticipating where Coviello will lard in the juiciest bits. I guessed that he’d last-word his book with the rousing Emersonianism of the Becker-Traverse family reunion — “It is impossible to tilt the beam” &c (122) — but he snuck in early the Star Wars-inflected confrontation between Prairie and her dark father nemesis (46-47). Like Coviello, I am “a child of the seventies and eighties” (47), so I was already there for Brock Vond as Darth Vader. But since I’m mostly a Shakespearean and only read Pynchon criticism in a recreational capacity, I’d not previously worked out how thoroughly this sort of intertext works. For my teaching, next time, if/when I reanimate the Pynchon’s California course! (I have been thinking about Pynchon’s New York, but I’d have to figure out how to teach V.…)

The lasting feeling I take from my chug-a-lug of this delicious little book is its hymns to readerly joy, the riotous pleasures of these sentences and novels. Coviello knows he can’t really capture all of that lightning-in-a-bottle sensation, but he also captures it pretty well. Reading Pynchon is “filled with an anarchic sense of possibility expanding in dizzying breadth from the page” (5). Talking with fellow obsessive readers forms private utopias that “out of the sheer abundance of their enthusiasm find themselves fabulating these semiprivate codes and idiolects” (27). Sharing this writer produces not the self-shattering of jouissance but “a momentary inflooding sense of abundance, a richness of pleasure that amplifies itself in its sharing” (35). Yep, that’s it.

Darkness and history loom and shadow, and Coviello unpacks in Vineland‘s Reagan-centric vision unsettling anticipations of the twenty-first century systems unsatisfactorily collected under the term “neoliberalism.” But if “every We-system is also a They-system,” as the paranoid genius of Gravity’s Rainbow proclaimed, the more empathetic spark of Pynchon’s post-1990s vision recognizes liberal complicity — arch-villain Brock Vond’s “genius was to have seen in the sixties left not threats to order but unacknowledged desires for it” (Vineland 269) — with which the less-trusting-than-thou novelist participates with varying levels of reluctance and eagerness.

It’s a backward-nesting faux-irony, a kind of humanized empathetic counter-challenge against and complicity with the rage and fire of the Rocket-world, that I most love about post-90s Pynchon. Since like Coviello I can’t really resist, I’ll close with two favs. First, from Mason & Dixon, which like Coviello I read as the masterpiece toward which Vineland lays the path. This passage describes carving the Line through America, and also reading-as-life-practice:

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

Mason & Dixon (651)

In its side-eye glance at the V-2’s destructive descent in Gravity’s Rainbow, its anxiety about its own fall, or should we (always) say Fall in its Miltonic sense, its pastiche of eighteenth-century punctuation, and its allegorization of interpretive practices from the surveyors to the drovers to we readers, I take immoderate joy in this sentence.

But right now through Coviello I’m rethinking Vineland, which isn’t just a warm-up to M&D. My closer quote comes courtesy of one of Pynchon’s nonhuman characters, following one of a few threads Vineland Reread mostly doesn’t pull but which might gesture toward some partial freedom from human self-delusions, the last-page return of Desmond the dog, licking Prairie’s face and providing the first clearly, overtly, even excessively optimistic ending in Pynchon’s career:

It was Desmond, none other…roughened by the miles, face full of blue-jay feathers, smiling out of his eyes, wagging his tail, thinking he must be home.

Vineland 385

Home as dog-imagined maybe gives us enough wiggle to import some human(e) skepticism also, and the munched blue jays reprise and revenge the birds who woke Zoyd up on the first page of the novel, as well as gesturing to the “boys in blue” who raid NoCal utopias and the oft-mentioned blue eyes of both Prairie and her mother Frenesi. Does this blue-cycle connect to my own blue water obsessions? I’ve toyed with a reading of surfer allegory in an essay on Inherent Vice in tandem with Spenser’s Faerie Queene (in the 2017 collection Veer Ecology), and more might be said about Pynchon’s oceanic moods. But that’s for another, or never, time.

Thanks for this book, Peter Coviello! Any chance you’ve got a sequel in the works about Inherent Vice?

Here are the brief remarks I made to the Zoom-sea at an event celebrating the works and legacy of John Gillis.

[And here’s the full 90 min Zoom, featuring many fabulous people!]

I presented four quick snapshots about what John’s work means to me –

1. I first met John through Islands of the Mind, which I must have read around 2006 or so, as I was making an oceanic turn in my own literary scholarship. John’s introduction of islands as a “third place” between settled land and chaotic sea, and his presentation of “islomania” as recurring cultural dream have stayed with me. But my favorite thing in this great book is the historian’s gesture toward the poetic imagination. The book’s subtitle, “How the Human Imagination Created the Atlantic World,” set up descriptions of the entanglements among real islands, from Iceland to Bermuda to Tahiti, and fictional ones, from St. Brendan’s isle to the island of California to Utopia. Beyond its erudition and range, what I cherish most about this book is its generosity. Like the sailors it chronicles, the book invents as it explores – half create[s] and perceives, to adapt Wordsworth’s formulation. I love its open-ness.
2. My second snapshot takes me and my then 10 year old son Ian to visit John and Tina at Great Gott Island, Maine, in 2011. I’d met John through the Fluid Frontiers conference, and he kindly invited us out to their private paradise. “Islands are not utopias,” he cautioned us as we tromped through mossy paths around the island. (Here’s a picture of Ian and John, heading into the woods.) It was a charmed day, with a special fisherman’s magic: I caught a juvenile mackerel on my first cast from the “apron” of granite that surrounds the island, and Ian caught another on his last cast of the day, as we were about the leave the dock that Tina calls the heart of the island, the place through which people come and go. I can still feel the thrill of accessing secret knowledge and oceanic experience in that summer’s day off the coast.
3. Back to scholarship – I’ve probably never been so touched at having been cited by another scholar than when I read John’s web-essay “The Blue Humanities,” which appeared in the NEH journal Humanities in 2013. At that point I wasn’t myself sure what the blue humanities was, though I’d been using the phrase for a few years. John showed me. His essay reflected back to me what happens when you let the waters in, to stain and suffuse scholarship. As it happens, during this hell-year of 2020 I’ve just last month signed a contract with Routledge to write a book called, “An Introduction to the Blue Humanities.” It’s a labor of love for me that has crystallized through John’s hearing and reimagining that phrase back in 2013.
4. My last snapshot features me in a sleeping bag, surrounded by my family, on the living room floor of our house on the CT shoreline. We’re huddled together in the dark waiting for Hurricane Sandy to descend upon the coast. I’ve got a headlamp on, and I’m eagerly reading The Human Shore. I like to read Gillis books during hurricanes. I had read Tina’s great book Writing on Stone during the blackout after Hurricane Irene one year earlier. What do the Gillises have to do with global storm systems that rotate counterclockwise in the northern hemisphere? It’s not that their work and legacy resembles a hurricane’s violent disruption. Although…if we think Superstorm Gillis as an organizing principle, a system whose structures have global reach, oceanic origins, and planet-sized scale…well, I don’t know. It might not be the worst symbol of this great scholar’s work and influence!

Plus some bonus bibliography:

John Gillis, Islands of the Mind: How the Human Imagination Created the Atlantic World (Routledge 2004)

Christina Gillis, Writing on Stone: Scenes from a Maine Island Life (2008)

• I read this one during a blackout after Hurricane Irene (August 2011)

John Gillis, The Human Shore: Seacoasts in History (2012)

• I read this one during the blackout after Hurricane Sandy (Oct 2012)

“The Blue Humanities” Humanities 34:3 2013

John Gillis and Franziska Torma, eds., Fluid Frontiers: New Currents in Marine Environmental History (2015)

In the middle of the disorienting fall term of 2020, I signed a contract for a new book project that will keep me occupied for the next many months. I’m very excited about this book, as the term “blue humanities” seems to be splashing around so many discourses and practices in so many places. I’ll have more to say about the project here at the Bookfish, and other places, but I wanted to announce the project first, and also ask a small favor of the #bluehumanities gang.

As I get started on the book, I am hoping to reach out to some #bluehumanities people around the world to see what they think, write, create, teach, and do with the term.

Here’s a link to my Blue Humanities Survey.

I’m hoping to be suprised by some of the things I hear back!

[With thanks to Anna Intere and the Sea Library I ran across this sea-poem by Borges this morning, right after I took this sea-picture. John Updike’s translation, in Borges’s Selected Poems (2004), is very good. But I thought I’d do an early November translation myself too.]

Before the dream, or the terror, it interweaves

Mythologies and cosmographies.

Before the time unweaves itself into days —

The sea, always, the always-sea, it was and was.

Who is the sea? Who is the violent

Ancient creature that chews earth’s sandy pillars,

One and many sea-mouths gnawing,

And abyss and splendor and chance and wind?

Who sees it sees it for the first time

Always. With elemental wonders drawn out, sad evenings,

Bright moon, cooled embers from last night’s bonfire on the beach.

Who is the sea? Who am I? I will not know it until

After the last succeeding wave-days and pain.

“El Mar” from El otro, el mismo (1964)

In the gorgeous short film that closed out a long, varied, and stimulating Zoomafternoon with the Urban Soils Symposium, the puppet artist Olmstead — half of the puppet theater-reconceived as film-makers duo Alex & Olmstead — offered an eco-koan. “Life exists,” she voice-overed, “because there are six inches of topsoil, and it sometimes rains.”

It made me think of Bruno Latour’s recent book Down to Earth, in which he emphasizes the thin-ness of life on our planet, all of which exists, and always has existed, confined inside the “critical zone,” a narrow 1-2 km thick band of “biofilm” above and below the planet’s surface. In a lecture-performance in New York in 2018 — back when people went places and sat next to people we don’t know! — Latour introduced his notion of “terrestrialism,” which asks us to train our attention away from both the heavens and the planetary core. The world we need to understand is at our feet. It’s soil.

At the Zoomposium on Friday, I presented some ideas toward a “poetics of compost” about what we talk about when we talking about soil-creation, drawing mainly on Shakespeare and Ovid. My title, “Soiling the World,” asks us to think about how soil soils — what actions and processes happen in the living earth, how we understand and fear and depend upon these processes, and how poets and scientists should explore these long histories. Soil includes death and decay, and the renewal that emerges through soil requires a closer engagement with mortal vulnerability that is often comfortable. That’s where we need poets alongside soil scientists.

The baker’s dozen of presenters who spoke together via Zoom yesterday spanned a wide range of approaches, expertise, and modes of presentation. The event was one of favorite kinds of academic/para-academic events, the kinds that toss people together who don’t normally encounter each other — let’s say engineers who design “technosols,” an activist who leads an urban garden in Pittsburgh, puppeteers-turned-filmmakers, textile artists, investment managers… Actually, I think I should make a list. Let’s start at the beginning —

Early Afternoon Sessions

• Maha Deeb started us off a great & detailed presentation about the physical properties of various urban soils, and the projects required to amend them.
• Vlacheslav Vasenev Zoomed in from Moscow to describe a soil research project about how to create “technosols” for the widely different climates in different parts of Russia.
• Moreen Willaredt & Thomas Nels brought the “earthworm engineers” to the party in a slick video presentation of their research into soil manufacturing and productivity. Thomas Nels then joined live to make a great comment about how a productive manufactured soil can be disassociated from land ownership, thus bringing the benefits of soil to an increasingly urban (and non-landowning) population. Given how much of the brutal legacy of settler colonialism structures itself through land ownership, it’s an inspiring vision.
• Raqueeb Bey pivoted us toward political activism with a powerful presentation about BUGS — Black Urban Gardeners Society of Pittsburgh – and their efforts to use soil to advance social and racial justice.
• I rounded out the morning session with differents versions of making-compost, from what will happen my own body after my death to Timon’s cosmic vision to Apollo’s assault of Daphne. H/t to two great new feminist translations of / responses to Ovid by Jane Alison and Nina MacLaughlin!

We had a half-hour of Q&A after these five talks. The exchange was great, and it also reminded me of how challenging it is to get people to speak across disciplines. The Urban Soils hosts did a great job bringing us together, but the first 20-ish minutes were largely dominated by shop talk among the scientists, who all knew each other from the soil world. I posted a question in the chat about politics as a potential connecting discourse to bring the five talks together, but it got passed over. Eventually I figured out how to raise my hand on Zoom (small triumphs!) & was able to use the question of politics to make the hand-off to Raqueeb, who spoke eloquently about how to get political figures to listen when you have a good idea. The time closed before we really got to speak across the humanities / science divide, though I hope later follow-ups will manage that, to an extent.

The truth is — it’s super-hard to germinate those conversations, and we need to have them. To dig into the metaphor, we need to cultivate the rich soil that can grow them from seedlings. One of the most successful such conversations I can remember was between the planetary scientist Lindy Elkins-Tanton and medieval literature scholar Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, hosted by the Folger Shakespeare Library at the Creating Nature event I organized in May 2019, and to some extent I think I just got lucky. The Urban Soils Symposium clearly supports these kinds of conversations. I had to drop off before the afternoon Q&A, and the afternoon session featured a wider range of speakers, so they’ve probably got more great things recorded by now already!

Later Afternoon Sessions

• Kate Douglas guided us into a coffee break with a five-minute “Meditation on Rot – Maybe Dead is Just a Word People Say When They’re Scared.” The virtual coffee break for me included a quick trip down to the beach with the dog.

• The first session after the break featured Heather McMordie’s artistic project “Marsh Senses,” a textile and performance piece created in relation with the threatened salt marshes in her Rhode Island home. A creature of salt marshes myself in coastal CT, I found this piece beautiful and mesmerizing. I want to see / smell / feel more!
• Wendy Aringa, a landscape architect from Brooklyn, spoek about the Gowanus Canal, a post-natural space that people like me who are obsessed with the watery landscapes of New York City love in the complicated ways that one loves toxic and polluted places. I thought of my St. John’s colleague the painter Elizabeth Albert, and her ongoing illustrated project Gowanus Muskrat!
• Microbiologist and designer Paige Whitehead gave a brilliant talk that asks us to think about the violence done to nonhuman environments by road-building. She included a vision of the Indigenous networks of communication and connection that preceded the pavement, and that might be possible again if the tarmac were lifted. Such a great talk!
• Steve Godeke added financial discourses to the mix with an excellent presentation about green investment strategies. It’s good to have money people at the table!
• The puppet duo Alex & Olmstead closed us out with the film I mentioned at the top of this overlong blog post. Another great vision of earthworms as collaborators, and a different way to engage with soil

The fun continues this Halloween afternoon at 2 pm, but in truth my Zoom fatigue will likely send me toward pumpkin-carving and maybe a nice long walk into the salt marsh along the old trolley tracks. I’m very pleased to have connected with this ambitious and omnivorous group — and I look forward to future collaborations, especially once people can be in places together again!