Heading off today for a week in Prague with the World Shakespeare Congress, for which Bernhard Klein and I will run a seminar on “Multitudinous Seas: The Ocean in the Age of Shakespeare” on Tuesday afternoon. Any and all questions regarding the sea-coast of Bohemia seem likely to be solved then, but perhaps Bookfishing will be a bit quiet.
Rupert Goold’s Romeo & Juliet (via the Times)
Lacking world enough and time, I won’t get to see any of the RSC productions in New York this summer. But I just read Charles Isherwood’s review in today’s Times, and I can’t resist commenting on the sentimental vision of the play that the paper provides.
I know that the Times reviews dream of a mass audience, not just snarky intellectuals or Bardo-o-philes or even well-heeled Lincoln Center regulars. But surely we can do better than bromides about Juliet’s “fundamental innocence” or the arrival of “something deeper and purer in her soul”? Isn’t Juliet more radical, more urgent, more human than familiar platitudes about “transcendent love”?
I’m not a big Rupert Goold fan, and Isherwood’s descriptions suggest a production that shares some of the distractions of his Macbeth, with Patrick Stewart. I did like Goold’s Arctic Tempest, also with Stewart as the lead, though that one sadly never made it to NYC. Sometimes the high concept direction preempts strong performances.
If we take Isherwood to represent the Times market, a mass educated audience, I wonder if it’s a failure of modern theater productions or of contemporary Shakespeare culture that he’s stuck in such a Hallmark card-ish view of this play. He should listen to Juliet commanding darkness and the stars on her wedding night —
Come, night, come Romeo, come thou day in night,
For thou wilt lie upon the wings of night
Whiter than new snow upon a raven’s back.
Come, gentle night, come loving, black-brow’d night
Give me my Romeo, and when I shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun.
Transcendence, perhaps, but not much purity or innocence. Shakespeare’s plays always seems less sentimental than his reviewers.
Evening Tides
Last week was as perfect a week for Short Beach swimming as you can imagine — high tides rolling in mid- to late-afternoon, the water just cool enough to wash the humidity off your skin. But the lunar calendar cycles on, and this week we haven’t wanted to brave the oyster shells and silt of low tide for afternoon swimming. Instead, we’ve had great evening and after dinner swims by twilight. Coming soon — Friday’s full moon and midnight high tide. Hmmm…
Oh-for-two on free Shakespeare
It was supposed to be a play-filled weekend. Friday night I was meeting my summer grad class for a production of “Much Ado” by Shakespeare on the Sound. The rain came & washed us out. I think one of my students made it Saturday night.
But I was in Manhattan with the family on Sat night, hoping to catch the ferry to Agincourt with New York Classical Theater’s roving production of Henry V. The web blurb said get to Battery Park between 5 and 6:30 to get free ferry tickets, but it seems the radio publicity drove some crowds to them.
At 6 when we got there, after fighting through a closed southbound 1 train that would not get us to South Ferry, there were not seats on the boat. Not really what I wanted to tell my hot, frazzled kids — though we salvaged with a long taxi ride and another great visit to the Met.
We’re back home now, looking forward to a swim at the evening high tide.
Greenwich Point Mile Swim
On this beautiful summer morning, I joined about 200 other swimmers for the Greenwich
Point Mile Swim. Finished at 24:46. 
Salty Orientation
While swimming yesterday to Gull Island during the late afternoon flood, I thought about orientation. Much of my recent scholarly work has focused on the challenge of orientation at sea in the early modern period, when the problem of landlessness caused many ships to arrive at places they’d never intended, including the bottom of the sea. The sun and stars helped, except on cloudy days, but mainly for latitude only, at least until the invention of Harrison’s marine chronometer in the 18c.
Being in the water rather than on it changed the kinds of data I could use to find my way across warm, slightly choppy waters to and from the island. I did use the sun’s glare, visible beneath the surface, by steering into it on my way back. But I also timed my swim through the gradual increase in the height of the swell, as I got farther away from the shelter of Kelsey Island, and also a dramatic change in water temperature. Once I finally cleared the wind shadow of the island — the wind was a bit west of south yesterday — the cooler water from out in the Sound blew in, and all of a sudden the temp dropped at least two degrees. It felt good, actually, to swim the last 300 yards or so in cooler, faster-feeling water, even though the swell was up too.
It made me think about things like color and salinity and depth and temperature, all roughly measurable by early modern mariners. Even if they didn’t have good thermometers yet — Robert Fludd may have built one in the 1630s, and Galileo at least knew how in theory, but I’m not sure when they first appeared on boats — one thing I proved to myself yesterday is that human flesh is a decent enough rough temperature gauge. There are all sorts of physical properties of water that can help place humans in the watery element.
Which makes the human body itself a kind of oceanic orientation device, an awkward and inefficient one, perhaps, but really we’re not very good at measuring or locating ourselves on land either.
Books about sailors’ craft, early modern and more recent, talk about “feel” and a mariner’s intuition. Maybe we need to take this sort of seamanlike feel more literally?
Swimming to Gull Island
Here’s a google map of my summer high tide swim. I start at Johnson’s beach, the cover at the center-left of the image. I swim along the shore roughly eastward until I get to the point where the poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox used to live in the 19c, then strike out for the uninhabited Gull Island, which you can see in the center-right of the image.
I imagine it’s about 1 – 1.5 miles round trip. About 30 minutes swimming time. As the water gets warmer, I might try some longer swims in and around Branford.
The Gulf Stream
Here’s an image of Ben Franklin’s map of the Gulf Stream, the ocean current Matthew Fontaine Maury famously called “a river in the ocean.”
It moves roughly 500 times as much water as the Amazon, and when it cools in the North Sea, its sinking brings nutrient-rich colder water up to the surface. (The Gulf Stream’s waters, like most tropical waters, are nutrient-poor and therefore clear.)
I’m reading an interesting book of popular science right now, The Gulf Stream by Stan Ulanski of JMU. Eventually I’ll write an article on the cultural poetics of this ocean current and its massive impact on early modern relations between Europe, Africa, and the Americas. More later.
“No two people can understand each other”
Says Nina to her father Almayer at the turning point of Conrad’s first novel, which I listened to the audio of while driving from SF to LAX last week. She’s about to abandon him to a lonely existence on a bend of a Bornean river — probably northeastern Borneo, Kal-Tim, on the Mahakam River, it appears — so that she can flee with her Balinese prince. Almayer’s great hope was to make one last financial strike, perhaps find Rajah Laut’s gold mine, and then present Nina to Europe. She’d rather go to Bali.
In many ways the plot reads like a rehearsal for the second half of Lord Jim, with the addition of Almayer himself and a happy ending for the multi-ethnic couple. (Jim, I suppose, is his own Almayer as well as Prince Dain.) A young novelist in 1895, Conrad balances his dark visions of human insufficiency with the storylines of romance.
Conrad wrote a trilogy about Rajah Laut and Indonesia — Laut, a fictional white rajah along the lines of James Brooke of Sarawak, was Almayer’s patron, and he figures in the other novels as well — The Outcast of the Islands (1896) and The Rescue (1920).
Avery Aquatic Center
One highlight of the West Coast swing that’s been keeping the Bookfish quiet was a swim last Wed at Stanford’s Avery Aquatic Center with the Master’s Swim Program there. I swam in the 10-lane, long course, deep water practice pool with about 25 other folks in the 1 pm practice, one of three held that day. I’ve never swum in an Olympic-caliber facility before, & it’s pretty amazing.
Coach Tim, who very kindly let me join the group as a visitor since I don’t yet have a US Masters card, ran us through a bunch of drills I’ve never done before. “Vertical flutter kick” is what it sounds like, and also combined with spins from the hips every 3 seconds to work on the long stomach muscles that cant the torso from side to side. Also a 15m “forward arm travel” kicking on my side after each turn on a 300m set.
Swimming long course — 50m rather than 25 yards — puts you in a much better rhythm, much more concentration on how you move through the water. I wonder if there’s such a pool anywhere in CT? Maybe at UConn — though part of the fun was also being outside, which of course we aren’t likely to have for east coast training.
Something else to put on my West Coast itinerary for next year, and all the years to come.
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