Steve Mentz

THE BOOKFISH

THALASSOLOGY, SHAKESPEARE, AND SWIMMING

Fog and other Maritime Distortions

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Driving home from the Hungry Ocean on Sat night, I ran into dense fog that got me thinking.  At the Folger last summer and then again at MLA in Jan, I described the basic features of the ocean as being opaque, being hungry, and being transformative.  The fog, which Margaret Cohen’s talk reminded us is an ocean also, reveals a slightly different maritime property: distortion.

You cannot see out far, you cannot see in deep (to butcher Robert Frost’s great poem), and when you’re inside fog you lose perspective.  Everything is up close, soon lost, shifting.  It’s a great metaphor for post-conference speculative swirling.  Good thing I had lines to follow on the pavement.

Might the sea’s first property be a distorting lens rather than a cultural mirror?  So that oceanic attraction builds through the lure of difference and change?  What might this do to any utopian glosses we’re tempted to give to the sea?  If it’s distortion all the way down…

Fog is different from ocean in that it’s a mixture of water and air, and it’s, in most places, the exception, not the rule.

It makes me think of the foggy conclusion of Thomas Pynchon’s latest, Inherent Vice.  Doc’s heading south on the Santa Monica Freeway when the fog “began its nightly roll inland.”  It insinuates him out of LA into a Pynchonist vision —

At first the fog blew in separate sheets, but soon everything grew thick and uniform till all Doc could see were his headlight beams, like eyestalks of an extraterrestrial, aimed into the hushed whiteness ahead, and the lights on his dashboard, where the speedometer was the only way to tell how fast he was going.

In the “hushed whiteness” Doc and his I-405 buddies form a “temporary commune” on his way south toward Gordita Beach.  The ending amounts to an understated plea for oceanic transformation, when, perhaps, all that’s on offer is distortion —

Doc figured if he missed the Gordita Beach exit he’d take the first one whose sign he could read and work his way back on surface streets.  He knew that at Rosecrans the freeway began to dogleg east, and at some point, Hawthorne Boulevard or Artesia, he’d lost the fog, unless it was spreading tonight, and settled in regionwide.  Maybe then it would stay this way for days, maybe he’d have to keep driving, down past Long Beach, down through Orange County, and San Diego, and across a border where nobody could tell anymore in the fog who was Mexican, who was Anglo, who was anybody.  Then again, he might run out of gas before that happened, and have to leave the caravan, and pull over on the shoulder, and wait…. For the CHP to come by and choose not to hassle him.  For a restless blonde in a Stingray to stop and offer him a ride.  For the fog to burn away, and for something else this time, somehow, to be there instead.

Is Pynchon asking for more ocean here?  Or less?

What Can You Do With a Maritime Atlas?

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A map from Dudley's Arcano

I was wondering until the last minute if we’d have enough students to justify this “undergraduate seminar” featuring the JCB’s collection of maritime atlases, but it turns out I should not have worried.  We pulled in about 10 eager Brown students, mostly from Jean Feerick’s Shakespeare class, and one intrepid voyager from U Conn Avery Point, who came with his professor, Mary K Bercaw-Edwards.  We also drew in a few other Oceaners who had arrived early, the JCB’s rare books curator, and all in all the room was pretty full.  Atlases are big!

Susan Danforth, the brilliant and deeply knowledgable maps curator, led a tour that started with a hand-colored 1480s Ptolomy, then quickly showed the shock of discovery in a gorgeous 1511 Italian Portolan chart, that showed how old Mediterranean cartographic habits struggled to make sense out of the strange new vistas of Africa and the West Indies. 

This is not the portolan we saw

A few of my favorites were on display — Dudley’s Arcano del Mare, which some call the most beautiful of all 17c atlases, and the less opulent Altas Maritimus & Commercialis, which was purportedly ghost-written by Daniel Defoe and about which I built a web-interactive site for the Folger show last summer.

A map from the Altas Maritime & Commercialis, 1728

These huge, ungainly books show the technical challenge posed by the maritime: the ocean and its coastlines are simply too big and complex to represent simply.  I take these atlases to diplay on a very literal level the shock of the transoceanic turn, and the effort of early modern cartographers, sailors, and others to transform watery disorder into something legible, usuable, and even marketable. 

A good way to start!

Blue Hole

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That’s a picture of a freediver in Dean’s Blue Hole, a 660-foot deep vertical cavern in the Bahamas.  Yesterday’s Times Sports section has a story about Vertical Blue 2011, the world championship, for which the winning dive was 121 meters (nearly 400 feet) at a time of 4:13 underwater without oxygen.  Some amazing stories of nitrogen narcosis, fear, and the limits of what the body can force itself to do.

I am thinking two thoughts about blue holes.

First, freedivers, amazing as they are, remind us how poorly human bodies manage in the ocean.  Four hundred feet is a long way down, but the average depth of the world ocean is around 12,000 feet.  The opening description of the story, in which a crowd urges a just-returned diver to “Breathe, breathe, breathe!” so that his body could recover from his minutes submerged shows what a shock these immersions are to our systems.

Second, the picture above also reminds us that, no matter how deadly the blue is, we love it — or perhaps we love these deep holes because of their  deathly  quiet and nonhuman embrace.  Are freedivers explorers of a post-sustainable future?  Do they provide images of how to live in an uncompromisingly inhospitable natural world?

Here’s a gorgeous YouTube video of former world champion Guillaume Nery doing a free dive in Blue Hole, filmed in one over-four minute breath.   Might be worth writing about someday.

Cheek by Jowl Macbeth

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I liked this production a lot more than Charles Isherwood does in the Times.  I’m much closer to feeling the way Michael Billington does in the Guardian, when he calls it “an archetypal Cheek By Jowl production: spare, disciplined, purged of gore and gratuitous spectacle.”  But more than anything I was fascinated by the two lead players.  Billington complains, rightly, that it was hard in this production to tell Banquo from Macduff from anyone else, as they were all smothered in bland black.  But I didn’t care much, because all the action was in the marriage.

Will-Keen-as-Macbeth-and--001I mostly don’t like Harold Bloom’s pontifications on Shakespeare, but this production reminded me of his joke about the Macbeths being “the only happy marriage in Shakespeare.”  The tension and chemistry between Will Keen’s diminutive Macbeth and his tall, blond, physically expressive wife, played by Anastasia Hille, drove this spare production.  I left thinking that it would be a great challenge to put the show on with just two actors, him and her.
Part of that intensity was created by what the production left out: no visible witches or daggers or blood.  The staging was abstract but also fast, with the next scene starting often with the last scene still on stage, which made for some great juxtapositions, including having a silent Lady Macbeth still on stage for the “cry of women” that announces her death.

These two performances made this Macbeth a rather brutal explosion of a marriage that can’t heal itself.  Will Keen’s contained fury and trembling hands grasped eagerly for his wife during their first scene together, which featured more kissing that you might expect of an assassination plot.  Keen’s soliloquies were often inventive — including an odd but resonant pause before “quickly” in “If ’twere done…” — but the best scenes, always, were between the couple, who always acted, even during public events such as the banquet scene, as if no on else mattered.

Some of the things left out you miss — the Weird Sisters, the dagger, more distinctive roles for Duncan and Banquo and the Macduffs.  But the manic focus of this production revealed something about the play, about Cheek by Jowl, and about Keen and Hille.  They need this murder, but Lady Macbeth is talking about more than just that —

Nor time, nor place

Did then adhere,   and yet you would make both…

I won’t speculate about children or anything else.  But it was fascinating to see a show that really takes the relationship between these two as the play’s heart.  Shakespeare’s play mostly separates husband and wife after act 3, but this production insisted on keeping them together, right up until Macbeth’s “She should have died hereafter…”

The dead couple, in a slightly sentimental touch, lie together at the play’s end, toward the front of the stage, in front of the newly assembled Earls of Scotland.  (No decapitated head gets shown off in this production.)  An interesting touch.

Two Pyms

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Pym, process.inddJust read Mat Johnson’s new satiric novel Pym, which riffs off Poe and more modern trends in Antarctic exploration.  The big fish in this sea, as we might expect, is “whiteness,” and “recently canned” lit professor Chris Jaynes heads south to find it.  Along the way he finds the skeleton of Dirk Peters and the still-living Arthur Gordon Pym himself, as well as the Yeti-smelling “snow honkies” of Tekeli-li.

It’s a lively, fast-paced novel that wants to be more than it is.  The ex-professorly voice is fun, esp when the narrator assumes a pan-academic vision & re-contextualizes, esp at the opening of many chapters –“I am bored with the topic of Atlantic slavery” (160); “I have always loved quitting jobs” (216); “Always thought if I didn’t get tenure I would shoot myself or strap a bomb to my chest and walk into the faculty cafeteria…” (7).

Johnson wants to do what Toni Morrison says is a fundamental task for the study of American literature — figure out what whiteness is.  Sometimes the cartoonishness of the characters and the narrative — snow monsters! apocalypse! reclusive artists! inter-species sex! — gets away from him.  I must say, though, he writes a nice final paragraph, when the sole survivors of the southern expedition (and perhaps of the civilized world) arrive on the shores of Poe’s all-black island —

Rising up in our pathway was a man.  He was naked except for a cloth that covered his loins.  He was of normal proportions, and he was shaking his hand in the air, waving it, and we, relieved, waved ours back at him.  Past him, minutes later, we saw that he was joined in welcoming us by others, women, more men, and the offspring both had managed.  Whether this was Tsalal or not, however, Garth and I could make no judgments.  On the shore all I could discern was a collection of brown people, and this, of course, is a planet on which such are the majority. (222)

As the rhythm of those sentences suggest, Johnson’s at his best when he’s channeling Poe, and the faux-lit crit passages early in the novel are great fun.  I do think, though, that it may have been a mistake on my part to re-read The Narrative itself before embarking on Pym.  Johnson does a find job summarizing Poe, but it’s hard to match EAP’s combination of foreboding and claustrophobia.  Many of Poe’s scenes, of imprisonment, cannibalism, madness, get re-configured here.

There’s a future syllabus here, too — Poe to Life of Pi to Pym.  Lots of Richard Parkers to chew on.

Arctic Sea Ice

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Another nice image of Arctic ice.  Plus the news that after this weekend, these NASA-provided photos will fall victim to the government shutdown.  It’s not an essential service, but…

Astrolabe Glacier Calving

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This is something to worry about, in terms of sea level rise, but it’s also quite beautiful.  This glacier, in eastern Antarctica, has been calving regularly for years, & this process is not usual for the region, though the past two decades have seen much more calving in Antarctica and Greenland.