Steve Mentz

THE BOOKFISH

THALASSOLOGY, SHAKESPEARE, AND SWIMMING

Blue Ecocriticism (2 of 4)

by Leave a Comment

I’ve been through this one before.  Blue ecocrit positions itself against green visions of pastoral stasis.  Instead it writes a surging, unstable, chaotic version of nature, a way of being in the world that isn’t quite sure it can really manage to be in this salty world.  Or, in the 5-point play with which I concluded At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean —

This World in Not Our Home.

Ecology Won’t Keep Us Dry

The Ocean Rules the Weather.

Our Only Inexhaustable Resource in Langauge.

Shakespeare Isn’t Dead.  He Isn’t Even Past.

The turn in the last two of those points toward a literary recovery, or an understanding through Shakespeare, flow from my sense, or my hope, that literary culture’s ability to make sense of radical change, to make us love change, crave it, and sometimes even survive it, makes a literary blue ecology possible.

I’m reading a book on water policy right now, The Big Thirst, that might have some things to add to this as well.  The earth’s water, itself unliving but essential for all life, represents a closed system; every drop of water on earth has been here for millions of years.  That’s true of organic matter too, of course, but unlike carbon compounds, water just doesn’t change that much: fresh to salt, ice to mist, dirty to clean it’s almost always available, or almost available, to us.  More to come on this…

Wet Globalism (1 of 4)

by 1 Comment

I’ve been mulling recently about wet globalism, as I get ready to draft an intro for an essay collection drawing on the Hungry Ocean conference.  I’m hoping to use an oceanic focus to get our increasingly central ideas about global culture wetter, to bring them down into the watery element, splash them around, and see what happens to some of our grand illusions.

Partly here I’m thinking about Ursula Heise’s shrewd observation that in the works of theorists like Appadurai, Beck, Giddens, et al, globalism has become the term of choice, to some extent replacing postmodernism while also doing some of the same work as that more theoretical / philosophical term.  That’s a useful move, and it could liberate some aspects of postmodern thinking from its “end of history” habits.  But I can’t help thinking that 20/21c visions of the global fly in airplanes, when they should, even today, be ploughing the waves.

To shift from an airy or plane’s-eye vision to a wetter, bluer globalism would require a sharper focus on the difficulties and disorientations of the sea, an element, after all, in which we’d each drown if left too long.  It’s a hard place for humans to be, even today.  I was thinking again about the sea’s inhumanity as I went for my afternoon swim and had to fight just about a foot of gentle, rolling, implacable swell, there to greet me and threaten me every time I turned my head to breathe.

What might a wet globalism do?  Put a focus back on seamanship, on errancy, disorientation, shipwreck as the price of culture?  Re-figure humanity in the world in less pastoral and more dire terms? Emphasize that Heise’s “deterritorialization” has already been the condition of the tiny maritime slice of humans?  Ask us to re-read Moby-Dick in the global terms that Wai-Chi Dimock has already asked for (and that I’ve not yet read)?

As usual, Glissant is already there, using slightly different words —

For centuries ‘generalization,’ as operated by the West, brought different community tempos into an equivalency in which it attempted to give a hierarchical order to the times they flowered.  Now that the panorama has been determined and equidistances described, is it not, perhaps, time to return to a no less necessary ‘degeneralization”? Not to a replenished outrageous excess of specificities but to a total (dreamed-of) freedom of the connections among them, cleared out of the very chaos of their confrontations. (Poetics of Relation, 62)

This chaos and connection, a return to degeneralized freedom from generalization, is what Glissant calls Relation.  I’d like wet globalism to work something like this, plus a turn toward the historically specific and physically connecting.  Swimming in the blue ocean models this impossibility —

If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,
then briny, then surely burn your tongue.
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.
(Elizabeth Bishop, “At the Fishhouses”)

2-Mile Island

by Leave a Comment

Yesterday morning at 8:30 I joined 90 other swimmers at Island Beach just off Greenwich, CT, for the annual 2-mile open water race.  The water was warm but the first mile was into a strong headwind and 2′ of chop.  The return mile was a much easier swim, but also into the sun so I had some trouble sighting the 8 buoys that marked the course.  Things to learn about open water swimming.

I came in at 1:05, middle of the pack.  Two twins who swim for Colgate placed 1st and 2nd, around 41 minutes.

The Sea: A Cultural History

by Leave a Comment

I read this one pre-Prague, and as I think about reading it now, it’s a three-stage process that I think says as much about academic books in general as this book in particular.

First, eager anticipation: the blurb on the back from Barry Cunliffe — “this is the book that I have been waiting for” — got the hook in me pretty good.  I’ve been waiting for a broad-brush exploration of the cultural meanings of the sea, with the sort of comparative and wide-ranging focus that I know I won’t write myself.  John Mack teaches World Art History at East Anglia & he seems like just the person for the job.

Second, impatience.  Sometimes I worry that there’s so much defensive writing in academic prose, so much base-covering and literature summarizing that even a book with a great salt heart doesn’t let itself sing.  Mack’s early chapters are wonderfully comprehensive and would make a great introduction to maritime studies for a grad student in any number of humanities fields.  But despite a couple of compelling focalizing images — Sutton Hoo and Madagascar — and a very careful, professional, reliable-seeming survey of assorted fields, I started to get impatient after the first 100 pages.  It didn’t help that the brief references to Shakespeare were misled by relying too much on Jonathan Raban’s Oxford Book of the Sea.

Then I came to chapter 3, “Navigation and the Arts of Performance,” and I figured out what Cunliffe was praising.  Working through two non-Western navigators, Ibn Majid and Tupaia, he unpacks a dynamic understanding of how sailors locate themselves that relies less on determanistic ideas like plotting or fixed location and more on poetic forms — Ibn Majid wrote his navigational works in verse — and in-the-moment laboring entanglement in the multiple changing seascape —

There is a sense in which the conditions confronted from moment to moment require a continuous creative engagement between navigator and the conditions of nature encountered at sea.  (115)

Indeed it an be argued that translating indigenous practice into graphic form is potentially flawed for the experience of the sea is not fundamentally about the measurement of objective space but the sense of movement within it. (119)

Navigation is a complete, embodied, synaesthetic activity. (129)

After drawing this vision of seamanlike metis from classical Arabic and 18c Polynesian sources, he turns at last to Conrad and his vison of seamanship as  moral beauty, an example of “the aesthetics of working in combination” (134), and a conception of “navigation as an art of performance” (135).  It’s not quite the poetry-as-metis analogy that I’m working on right now for my book on shipwreck, but it’s pretty close, and very helpful.

The rest of the book didn’t, for me, return to the heights of this navigation chapter, though the section of shipboard societies (“Arguably ships are the first truly cosmopolitan spaces” 137), on the beach (“an ambiguous place, a in-between place” 165), and on the vision of the sea from the land (with a nice excursus on our fascination with sailor talk from Dana to O’Brian).  Finally he returns to Sutton Hoo to rethink the sea-land split: “less a terrestrial appropriation of the sea than an offering of the things of the sea to the land” (216).

All good and useful stuff — but the chapter on navigation is the one that roils my waters.

Leopards in the Temple

by Leave a Comment

On my long flight home from Prague, I thought about Multitudinous Seas, about a research network that would connect London to Providence to Cape Town to Calcutta, about how I’ll deal with the heat wave I’ve flown back into, and about the weird surging liveliness of a gorgeous ancient city overrun by touristas.

I also spend many transatlantic hours reading and thinking about Kafka.

Leopards break into the temple and drink the sacrificial temples dry; this is repeated over and over again; finally it can be calculated in advance and it becomes part of the ceremony.

In years of mulling this astounding aphorism, I’ve usually thought it was about literary history, change, and continuity.  For a while I even thought I’d use it as an epigram for my dissertation, as a way to explain what I was working out about genre theory and early modern narrative romance.  Now I think it’s got an eco-angle too, since it’s a great, compact example of what literary culture does best and what we need to do in relation to ideas of ecology, namely come to terms with radical change.

After spending a week between Kafka’s house and the Hard Rock Cafe in Prague,  I now think it’s also about Prague as a historical artifact, with its layering and mixing, its many languages and eras and communities.  Old cities create such amazing chrono-mixes.

I suppose it’s also possible that Kafka was thinking of this very famous pub, the drinking home base of the great Prague poet Bohumil Hrabal, where Vaclav Havel once brought Bill Clinton for a symbolic beer.  We tried to get in last Thursday night, but they don’t really serve tourists, esp not close to closing time.

 

At the Sign of the Hippo

by Leave a Comment

In case you’re wondering where the best Pilsner is the world is brewed and served, it’s right here under the sign of the Hippo, U Hrocha, Thunovská 10, partway up the hill to the Castle on the other side of the river from Old Town Square.  They make tourists stew a bit before serving them, but it’s worth it.

Oceanic Deterritorialization

by 1 Comment

While in the belly of the biggest bird in the world over the Atlantic on Sunday night, I read Ursula Heise’s quite wonderful book Sense of Place, Sense of Planet, and was very struck by what she had to say about “deterritorialization,” a term she gets from recent theorists of the global (Giddens, Beck, Appadurai, theorists of the cognate term “cosmopolitanism” inc Appiah, Nussbaum, etc).  She also derives some of her thinking from DeLilo, esp Underworld, though she writes, quite interestingly, about White Noise.

No time to think through these things before breakfast in Prague, but I found on the Times website today this op-ed about a more literal form of deterritorialization, which is about to affect island nations in the Pacific as sea levels rise.  It’s an interesting reminder that some of the hybrid or decentered values that are dear to intellectuals can also be uncomfortable, impractical, and also painfully real.