An underwater volcanic eruption near the Canary Islands
Some Pictures from Passing Strange
About to start with Rosamond Purcell and Michael Witmore |
The images in the book, and on the IWS walls, are reflections bounced off these bottles |
Rosamond Purcell in front of the “war machine” |
Michael Witmore examines “Twenty Shadows” |
A portrait of the collaborators |
SAA 2012: Meet the Respondents
One of the atypical things about this SAA seminar will be having two respondents who are not (gasp!) Shakespeareans — though I hasten to assure everyone that they aren’t double agents or marketers for Hollywood films. Instead they work in cognate disciplines, and I’ve asked them aboard to try to stretch our Shakespearean and oceanic thinking.
Josiah Blackmore is Professor of Portuguese and Spanish Studies at the U of Toronto. A specialist in early modern Iberian literatures, he has written two great books with maritime resonances: Manifest Perdition: Shipwreck Narrative and the Disruption of Empire (Minnesota, 2002), and Moorings: Portuguese Expansion and the Writing of Africa (Minnesota, 2009). I met Joe first through reading Manifest Perdition, and then later we both presented at a wonderfully intense small conference on shipwreck in London in 2010. There I heard a snippet of his new work, on Portuguese poetry, maritime expansion, and innovations of “depth.”
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen is Professor of English and Director of the Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute (MEMSI) at George Washington U. He’s written too many books and articles to list here, though Monster Theory (Minnesota, 1996), Of Giants (Minnesota 1999), and Medieval Identity Machines (Minnesota, 2003) will provide a good sense of the work. More recent snippets can be found on his group blog, In the Middle. I’m pretty sure I first met Jeffrey via his e-avatar(s), which produce a lively discursive flow, though I also recently found him hanging around New York City.
The directions that I’m hoping Joe and Jeffrey will stretch us should be fairly obvious; we can perhaps escape the twin prisons of chronological early modernity and Anglophone monolingualism by attending to their work and responsive voices. Less directly, I also hope that their presence with us will make our engagements less “in group” and more expansive.
I’m looking forward to reading our shared bibliography by Dec 1. Please limit yourself to 2 or 3 items you think might be useful for other seminar members, remembering that none of us has time for dozens of new sources. What are the select few things that you think everyone working on oceanic matters should read?
I’ve not pruned my list yet, but I’m thinking about Chris Connery, Edouard Glissant, and Charles Olson. Fiction, poetry, and non-early modern works are all welcome in our great salt sea.
Snowtober 2011
Strange Landscapes in Queens
I knew it was going to be a good day when I found street parking right across from Penn Station on 31st St. It wasn’t legal — there can’t possibly be any legal parking around there — but it was just the right size, nestled in between an unmarked TSA van and a traffic control Prius. A good, free, safe place to leave the car for 45 minutes before I picked up my first visitor, Rosamond Purcell.
The weekend before, I’d stopped through Rosamond’s studio in Somerville, MA, where we’d packed up framed prints of nine gorgeous images to hang in the Institute for Writing Studies at St. John’s. On Friday, Rosamond and her collaborator Michael Witmore were coming to campus to talk about how a visual artist and a Shakespeare scholar work together, and produce such strangely beautiful things.
We picked up Mike, who’s recently become the Director of the Folger Shakespeare Library, on the Upper East Side. By coincidence, we were near a store named “Tender Buttons,” which shares that name with the poetry press co-founded by my St. John’s colleague Lee Ann Brown. Both derive from the same Gertrude Stein book of poetry. Another good sign.
We had about 30 – 40 people at the talk, not bad for a Friday afternoon. We got a real treat in terms of hearing about the shared commitment to this unusual collaboration. Rosamond took the pictures in a meadow in northern New Hampshire in the summertime, bouncing light off old, slightly dented, irregularly-colored antique double-mirrored bottles once used to store light-sensitive dyes. “Light tight,” she said was how they were described. Mike then looked at the images until a line or moment from Shakespeare came into his mind. He said it usually took about 10 seconds to get a fix on it — and when it didn’t come to him, he moved on to the next picture.
What we were really talking about, as I’d hoped when I first imagined this course, was the interface between the visual and the textual in Shakespeare, and in our imaginations more generally. It’s not always possible to put into words what these images show, though we all see things there, sometimes even the same things. As one of my students said — and their questions to our distinguished guests made their professor proud — the images-with-text were themselves like performances, dramatic responses to the play. Unlike a stage performance or a film that unfurls in time, these images juxtapose poetic form and visual intensity in a simultaneous frozen instant.
Or, as Shakespeare says, these images are
Like perspectives, which rightly gazed upon / Show nothing but confusion, eyed awry / Distinguish form (Richard II, 2.2)
The evening continued with some great post-talk chat and questions from undergraduate and grad students, and then a tasty dinner in Astoria at the Kebab Cafe on Steinway St., a favorite haunt of several St. John’s professors and Queens foodies. When I was scooping out the cheeks of the roasted whole fish we shared for dinner — Long Island Sound porgy, a little bigger than the ones my son catches off the dock down the street from my house — I thought about how good it is to share strange things.
O, the most piteous cry of the poor souls! Sometimes to see ’em, and not to see ’em; now the ship boring the moon with her mainmast, and anon swallowed with yeast and froth, as you’d thrust a cork into a hogshead.
(The Winter’s Tale, 3.3)
More thoughts on Final Frontiers
1. We talked a lot about fishing in contrast with agriculture — but is it really true that, over the long duree of human history, fishing has been more destructive? It’s true that a farmer plants seeds for next year, this cultivating both soil and, its etymological congnate “culture,” but if we think about the widespread alteration of the land through agriculture, starting millenia ago, I wonder if farming still looks innocent.
I suspect the whole biosphere-into-nutrition spectrum — fishing / hunting / mining / farming / gathering — could use some analytical pressure. All these things deplete ecosystems, all of them have long and complex histories, all of them have different political valences in a modern environmental context. Not sure what to do with this right now, but perhaps it can shift fishing conversations out beyond fish, some of the time.
2. Circling back to the question of heroism and ecology, I’d like to state more directly the paradox I was trying to elaborate in response to Senayon’s paper. It’s a pretty simple double bind: humans can’t do without heroes, but heroic striving for distinction is not, on a basic level, compatible with ecological inter-connectedness. That’s not a problem to be solved, I think, but a condition with which to struggle.
I might emphasize, in this context, a post-modern (and post-Hemingway) resistance to the hero as such, in writers such as Thomas Pynchon, whose characters sometimes fragment into unintelligibly, in a work like Akmatova’s “Poem without a Hero” (a Russian reference for Ryan), or in various other modern / post-modern literary texts. Against the heroic drive to distinguish the one from the many, some recent writers have been working on a way to de-ego-ize heroism, sometimes with an ecological end in mind.
Eco-heroes from Rachel Carson to John Steinbeck, Al Gore, Bill McKibben: how might these figures fit on the heroic continuum?
Thanks again everyone for a stimulating conferences, and I hope our rivers flow together again sometime soon.
Salty Language
For my epsirit d’interstate after a great weekend at Final Frontiers, a conference on maritime environmental history at the Island Institute in Rockland, Maine, I was thinking about Michael Pearson’s challenge to the group to eschew terrestrial language and its metaphors. Not an easy thing to do, but —
Current (formerly field): If we re-divide or re-describe ourselves through scholarly / intellectual currents, perhaps we’ll be able to avoid defensive postures and emphasize movement and connection between differences — or perhaps through differences. I want to write about the Gulf Stream as poetic and historical agent.
Water (formerly ground): Thinking not only about ground / land / earth as metaphors of solidity and stability, but also about the tenor-vehicle relationship itself as the “ground” of a working metaphor. What if metaphors float on water, rather than resting on ground? Nothing stays on the surface forever.
Flow (formerly progress): Rethinking movement as flows and circuits, rather than progress or retreat, might make some ideas about intellectual shifts richer. It is likely to make them more confusing, and less familiar. Both good things.
Ship (formerly state): We know ships are heterotopias and polyglot fantasies, but what would happen if we started thinking politics through ship-to-ship contacts, rather than the very different metaphorics of the state?
Seascape (formerly landscape): Is the “scape” still a problem?
Distortion (formerly clarity): As I’ve been thinking about for a while, a basic feature of aqueous environments, at least in visual terms, is distortion. But of course air bends light also, producing rainbows and pretty sunsets, and the earth flows, especially when heated. So perhaps distortion of various types is a baseline condition? Is “baseline” a terrestrial or aqueous metaphor? Water’s tri-dimensionality sometimes orients us on the buoyant top as well as irresistible bottom.
Horizon (formerly horizon): We spent some time thinking about oceanic horizons, sea-marks and landmarks, and elevation in places like Tenerife. Is horizon one of the metaphor-concepts that’s already present in both green and blue worlds? Not as a sight of struggle or transition, like beaches of coastlines (“line” is a problematic metaphor there), but as a merging of perspectives. Horizons of ocean, currents and horizons. Places from which new things are visible…
More thoughts to come, I hope.
10 kilometers around Harrington Sound
Here I am 3 hours and 34 minutes later, having made my way all the way around Harrington Sound in Bermuda last Sunday. I was down there for the Race Around the Sound, which gathered together over 150 off-island swimmers plus 75 or so Bermudians to swim a variety of distances: 800m, 2km, 4km, 7.25km, and my race, the full 10km (6.2 miles).
When I started swimming again with a Master’s group in Branford this past January, I hadn’t done any serious swimming since finishing high school in ’85. I swam a few shorter races this summer, 1 and 2 miles, but this was the longest by far.
We started at the Aquarium, which the kids later told me was really great, treading water behind a lane line while the outgoing tide pulled us back slightly. There’s only one entrance to the Sound, so other than at the very start there wasn’t any current.
Most of the race was close to shore, in a few places in shallow water above coral, though at the start and again at about the 6km mark we cut across deep bays. The water was clear and gorgeous. Lots of fish.
I felt good going out, but it was a very fast field — mostly former or current college swimmers, and quite a few people who compete in US National Master’s meets. I did not stay with the front of the pack.
For the first couple hours, I thought a lot about bouyancy and what swimmers call “feel for the water.” Things were feeling pretty good until after the second stop, at 4km to go. I took an awkward route to get into that check point, because I wasn’t quite sure where to go — it’s hard to see from down in the water — and the wind picked up a bit. I should have been feeling great — over half-done — but as I started the 4km – 2km leg, going from point to point on the south shore of the Sound, I felt sluggish in the water. The wind had come up and waves splashed my face whenever I breathed to the right. I didn’t have any doubt that I would finish the race — I wasn’t going to sink — but for a half-hour or so, I wasn’t cleaving the water as I’d have liked.
But the funny thing was, I got back into my rhythm. After the final check point at 2km, I felt strong, fast, fluid again. My shoulders ached, and my mouth was salt-dry, but I could turn over my stroke a bit quicker and got back some of my feel for moving through the water. It was a long haul up the west side of the sound, past houses and docks, but it was great to finish strong.
Unlike the NYC marathon, which I ran a couple days after my 40th birthday in 2006, I was tired but not broken after. (This picture, though, is before the start.)
Soon I’ll be ready for another race. Maybe just a little bit shorter? Or I hear the Little Red Lighthouse swim in NYC is a 10km but with a current assist…
New Page: SAA 2012, Oceanic Shakespeares
The Old Man and the Sea
Just re-read this one for a panel I’ll be moderating about marine environmental literature at Final Frontiers: Exploring Oceans, Islands, and Coastal Environments, a weekend conference at the Island Institute in coastal Maine in mid-October. Haven’t been through it since ninth grade, when I found it frankly a bit dull. Hemingway’s combination of high modernist style and old-fashioned masculinism has grown on me somewhat, or perhaps I’m just a more sympathetic reader now.
As an imagination of the limits and fantasies of human bodies in an oceanic world, it’s quite a rich little prose-poem, and a very promising text for blue cultural studies. The moment that grabbed me, though, was the old man’s brief vision of an airy rather than oceanic globalism:
It must be very strange in an airplane, he thought. I wonder what the sea looks like from that height? They should be able to see the fish well if they do not fly too high. I would like to fly very slowly at two hundred fathoms high and see the fish from above. In
the turtle boats I was in the cross-trees of the mast-head and even at that height I saw much. The dolphin look greener from there and you can see their stripes and their purple spots and you can see all of the school as they swim. Why is it that all the fast-moving fish of the dark current have purple backs and usually purple stripes or spots? The dolphin looks green of course because he is really golden. But when he comes to feed, truly hungry, purple stripes show on his sides as on a marlin. Can it be anger, or the greater speed he makes that brings them out? (71-2)
Hemingway’s a hinge figure in so many ways, but here he reaches forward, from wet to airy globalism. If you follow the logic of this passage, it starts by a fantasy of altitude — the view from above — and then dives into color-distorting salt water. Looks green but really golden: the dolphin fish surely allegorizes something.
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