Steve Mentz

THE BOOKFISH

THALASSOLOGY, SHAKESPEARE, AND SWIMMING

Far Tortuga

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Lots of time to read in between swims at Jost van Dyke, & one highlight was returning after many years — the late 1980s? — to Peter Matthiessen’s turtling epic Far Tortuga.  Just great stuff, with an island lilt that I also almost heard in taxis & around the island.

He a wind coptin, dass de trouble.  He a sailin mon, and he used to de old-time way.  All his life he been ziggin and zaggin, he don’t know how to go straight. (121)

There’s a modern Moby-Dick in the story of Copm Raib’s rag-tag crew of failed turtle fishers rousting about the southwest Caribbean, from home on Grand Cayman to the coasts of Honduras & Nicaragua to “Misteriosa Cay,” the legendary Far Tortuga.

The climactic scene, in which Raib sails the Lillias Eden, a former schooner now fitted out with deisels but still flying canvas from stumps of masts, out through the reefs at night to escape a murderous band of Jamaican cut-throats, is thrilling & gorgeous.  He’s up in the rigging, stearing by moonlight, Speedy’s at “the blind helm” (360), they make it most of the way through “white wraiths of reef” (361), & “the Captain flings his free arm wide, exalted.  SHE CLEAR, SHE CLEAR! WE IN DE CLEAR! (361).

The ship strikes.

Only one, of course, is left to tell the tale.  As Speedy has already said

Wind is de enemy of mon.  Learn dat from school days (220).

Jost van Dyke

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Either lots or nothing at all to say about a great 10 days on Jost.  I think right now I’ll just post a few images.  The kids are on the tire swing at Great Harbor.

 

Next is the view from our Hideway Villa at Sandy Ground Estates, accessible only by boat or goat path.

 

Last one of the many wild goats we saw around the island.

The swimming was great too, but my phone camera did not go with me in the water!

Errors and Play

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Went to see Propeller’s latest last night, a Mexicali-themed Comedy of Errors at BAM.  The troupe was all on stage playing various instruments with the house lights up as we filed into the upper balcony — when I’m not reviewing, I buy the cheap seats — & while it wasn’t their best by any stretch, they brought great verve and play to the show.  What I like most about Propeller is how much fun they seem to be having at their high points, which here came toward the middle of the play, in the scene between Antipholus of Syracuse and Luciana, a wonderful game of overdone wooing, and also in the two Syracusans enthusiastic descriptions of Nell, the “spherical” kitchen wench in whom Dromio can find out whole Americas and Indies.  (Shakespeare’s only use of the word America, btw.)

That said, the show did not have as much life as it might have.  The physical comedy was exhausting & violent, & my favorite scene in the play, Egeon’s long description of his shipwreck and separation from his family, was static & frankly hard to understand, even for someone like me who’s got most of the lines by heart.  His efforts to “speak my griefs unspeakable” sounded pretty dull — I know it’s only plot machinery, but that scene should, I think, ratchet up the emotional intensity in a play that soon becomes pure fooling.  It should prime the pump for oceanic lines like Antipholus of Syracuse’s “I to the world am like a drop of water” and Adriana’s similar plea for a salt-infused self.  Without that full force of immersion — “Nothing works like immersion,” somebody says — the violent farce lacks, well, depth.  Propeller is always fun, but this production lacked urgency.

Which, perhaps, is why I was happy to leave at halftime & return for dessert to the Stonehome Wine Bar, which is always an excellent place.

Jost van Dyke

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The Bookfish will be pretty quiet for the next few weeks, as I’m off for vacation to the island of Jost van Dyke in the British Virgin Islands.  It’s near the upper left of the island chain on this map.  Important research on the rum trade plus training for upcoming open water swims may squeeze out blogging — and I’m not really sure how internet-y things will be down there.  If I have to walk over the hill to Foxy’s to check email, that might not happen every day.

Jost was visited by Columbus in 1493, and its euro-name comes from Jost (or Joost) van Dyke, a Dutch pirate who had a base in nearby Tortola by 1615, then fled Spanish forces to the island that bears his name in 1625.  Working under Peter Stuyvesant, then director of the Dutch West India Company, he privateered a series of Dutch ventures around these islands, including a copper mine on Virgin Gorda.  But the islands remained economically marginal, and several were sold off to private investors and integrated into the growing the slave plantation economy before the British took over after 1672.

Should be a nice oceanic vacation!

Hungry Ocean Keynotes

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Just in case anyone needs more reasons to go to the Hungry Ocean conference in April, I’ll introduce our lineup of keynote speakers.

First up with be Margaret Cohen, who will talk on “The Imaginary Geography of the Sea.”  Professor Cohen’s great new book, The Novel and the Sea, which I blogged about a little while ago, has just been published, and we’re all eager to hear her further thoughts on maritime craft, the international sea-novel, and other matters.

Later that day, Bernhard Klein will give a talk on early modern maritime studies, with the great title, “Fish Walking on Land.”  Professor Klein has written widely on early modern maritime matters and has also edited two wonderful essays collections, Fictions of the Sea, and Sea-Changes: Historicizing the Ocean.

Rounding things out on Saturday evening will be Patsy Yeager, whose talk, “Oceanic Ecocriticism$” will expand upon some of her comments in the recent PMLA cluster she edited last spring.  I’m wondering if her talk will also connect to her recent work on the “apotheosis of trash” and perils of tossing our waste into the world ocean.

Many things to look forward to.

“Pacific”

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Grim oceanic news out of the Pacific early this morning.  8.9 is a horrifying number, & the images out of Japan are on an absurd, inhuman scale, like something out of an old movie.  We called cousin Lucy in Hawaii at 3 am her time, and were relieved to hear they’d moved to higher ground.  Deep rumblings crossing the deep Pacific today…

Everything, even horrible things, makes me think of books, and this morning it’s Kimberly Patton’s excellent The Sea Can Wash Away All Evils, a study of “Modern Marine Pollution and the Ancient Cathartic Ocean” (2007).  She’s a professor at the Harvard Divinity School, & she’s looking here at a tradition of an all-cleansing ocean she locates in Euripides, in Inuit mythology, and in ancient Hindu texts.  She also works closely with responses to the 2004 tsunami that hit Indonesia and Sri Lanka.

It’s a smart, resonant book that explores ancient ideas of pollution and cleansing and argues that they have real policy implications in the present, in our global unwillingness to come to terms with marine pollution and its consequences.  Her suggestion that “environmental science — and environmental advocay — ignores the history of religion at a case” (xii) certainly convinces me.   She also has interesting things to say about the Greek distinction between the salt sea, Pontus, on which Odysseus struggles, and the encircling fresh-water Okeanos, which is “full of eschatological peril” (63).

“The sea demands a reckoning” (123) she writes while exploring ancient Hindu texts.   A grim lesson on a day like today.  Sometimes it’s hard to separate moral and practical responses to our oceanic world.

“Earth-centric truths”

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Just read the cluster on “Ecocriticism and Theory” in the Autumn 2010 ISLE, the journal of the ecocritical society ASLE.   Some lively stuff, as usual, including a rising interest in “ecoaesthetics” that’s apparently coming from China, with some help from Scott Slovic and the European journal ecozona.  It’s quite exciting to see new eco-trends emerge from the confines of nature writing, American studies, and Romanticist studies into a global space.

Many of the contributions to the theory cluster explore perceived tensions between green politics and theory, activism and intellectual inquiry.  I’m very interested to see space being made for a more theoretical, more literary, and, in Greg Gerrard’s phrase “a great deal more difficult” ecocriticism.  The global / postcolonial move promises to change eco-studies in fascinating ways.

But I worry a little about those “Earth-centric truths” that are the “undeniable heart” of the “green agenda.”  It’s not that I don’t want more ecological knowledge, a wider range of interest in and responsibility toward the nonhuman environment.  It’s that I don’t see the word “ocean” anywhere in this cluster.  And ocean is mostly what the so-called “earth” really is.

Maybe this little conference next fall at the Island Institute in Maine, which will attempt to fill the “blue hole in environmental history,” can help on that front.  Abstracts are due to John Gillis by the end of March.  The Rachel Carson Center will pay all travel & lodging expenses.  I’m involved in the session on literature and the arts.

 

The Atlantic System

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We all know the water’s cold in New England, but here’s a nice pair of images that shows why that matters.  Here’s the pattern of chlorophyll concentrations off the east coat last August

And here’s the corresponding ocean temperatures at the same time, the end of last summer.  The question is, will warming change this pattern, which has produced an upswell of nutrients and some of the richest fishing grounds on the planet?  This area, from the Mid-Atlantic Bight to Georges Bank, is also a major carbon sink, so even if the fish aren’t as plentiful as they once were, there’s a lot to like about this stretch of ocean.

Bermuda 2011

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I registered this morning for Round the Sound, a 10km open water swim in Harrington Bay, Bermuda, on October 16, 2011.  We’ll stay here, at the Grotto Bay Resort.  Should be a nice trip.

The wreck of the Sea-Venture is mostly in a museum on the island now, but 2011 does mark the 400th anniversary of a certain play that seems to draw upon accounts of that Atlantic hurricane of July 1609.  The disaster ended up, in a convoluted way, to the rescuing of Jamestown, a permanent British settlement on Bermuda, and this map.

I suppose I should promise not to give long lectures about Shakespeare and oceanic culture to my fellow swimmers.  Besides, it might make them swim faster…