Steve Mentz

Thinking about last week’s class & the very detailed, section-by-section oral report makes me want to make a suggestion: as graduate students, you should read a little more self-interestedly.  The idea isn’t necessarily to record or remember everything a given author writes (even if the author is your professor).  The idea is to find things you can use in your own work.

To make this suggestion a little more concrete, I’ll ask all future presenters (starting with Rich next week, on Josiah Blackmore) to focus less on summarizing facts or even analyses and more on the big picture.  That means three things: 1) methodologies (ie, how does the author approach his or her material, what sorts of questions get asked and answered),  2)  conclusions (ie, what’s the next step that the book asks to be taken?), and 3) bibliography (what great new stuff can you find through this book?).

The fastest way to find these things is to look first in the introduction (esp for methodology), second in the conclusion (for the next possible step), and third in the notes.  (Grad students often read back to front, or up from the small print on the bottom of the page.)  Not to pile on Christianne, but she didn’t talk very much about either of those parts of my book — and for grad students those are usually the most important parts.

To clarify quickly in regard to my book, here’s what I mean

1.  Methodology: As I show in the short intro (and also in the article), I’m interested in engaging and combining ecological studies, post-colonial studies, global studies, and technology studies.  For graduate students who might be interested in one (or more) of those, that’s the most important gambit of my book.  (You have to decide for yourselves if I pull off that combo.)

2.  Conclusions: I emphasize a critical stance with regard to certain kinds of ecocrit (in the conclusion) and I also want to correct the tendency I see in both New Historicist first contact narratives and “Atlantic History” of rushing over the sea to focus only on the New World.  Again, you can assess the results as you like — but it’s worth recognizing what the project tries to do.

3.  Bibliography: All the books and articles for this class are in the book’s biblio (plus lost of others), and I characterize them variously as “the new thallossology” (a borrowed term), “blue cultural studies,” and “the new maritime humanities.”

I don’t want to oversell my own book (though I hope you like it), but I do want to tweak the way that you all read.  Graduate students aren’t in it for the details of the readings or even the pleasures of the texts so much as for the intellectual structures that they can use.

See you on Thursday.

Some good news about Theatre for a New Audience’s spring 2010 season: a new production of Measure for Measure, which will fit into the course on Shakespeare and Religious Culture I want to teach, and also a Peter Brooks adaptation of some of the Sonnets, which I think will just be great fun.  Things to look forward to…

Good news from amazon: the new Pynchon novel is on its way to me overnight.  Haven’t looked forward to reading a new novel this much since…1990, reading Vineland after getting back from my post-college Asian wanderings, or 1998 reading Mason & Dixon in grad school, or lugging Against the Day around London in 2007… We’ll see what the next one (another good title) has to offer.

My favorite painting in the world is in Massachusetts at the Peabody Essex Musuem until Sept 7, and it’s also in today’s New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/31/arts/design/31seascapes.html?_r=1

All these 17c seascapes come from the National Maritime Museum’s collection, in Greenwich (London), where I was a fellow in 2007-8.  As the article notes, seeing all these paintings together reminds you that these are generic works, fairly similar each to each.  But as documents of the increasing fascination with the maritime world that was transforming European culture in the 17c, it’s hard to find anything more visually striking.

I remember the first time I saw “The Wreck of the Amsterdam,” the anonymous Flemish painting that’s the lead image in the Times review.  It’s a huge canvas, and I came upon it in an exhibition at the Queen’s House in Greenwich (built in 1605 by Inigo Jones) , and the thing almost knocked me over.  It’s beautiful, powerful, and just overwhelming.  You see the huge ship heeled over almost horizontally by the waves, being driven onto a rocky coast, with an already-wrecked ship on one side and a flaming shipped manned by devils on the other.  A lone sailor clings to the mast.  An allegorical portrait of life at sea?

I’ve been shopping for a play to take my students to this fall, and I think I’ll go with ShakespeareNYC’s Lear, which will play Oct 9 -31.  They’ve done some good shows for us before.

Williamson’s bio reminds me that Borges died in June 1986 in Geneva, where he went with his wife with the intent never to return to Argentina.  Borges had lived in Geneva as a young man, and also seems to have imagined the Swiss ideal — independent neutrality — as a possible model for his troubled nation.  So much of his work seems to be about creating an imaginative space of separation and distance from the pressures of reality, and also about the impossibility of doing so.  Interesting that he may have envisioned Switzerland (which I always think of as a fairly dull place) as part of that project.

I also remember hearing of Borges’s death when I was in college, and thinking, as I almost never think when famous writers die, that I’d lost a chance to see him in person.  A classmate of mine had heard him speak at Andover, I think, and my freshman lit prof had somewhat pompously described his “lunch with Borges” during class that spring.  I can think of very few 20c writers who I’d rather have heard speak.

Just finished Edwin Williamson’s massive bio, Borges: A LIfe (Viking, 2004), which charts the master’s production story by story against his surprisingly stormy love life, which saw him engaged (or nearly so) several times during his adult life, and then finally married twice, the first time disastrously and the second time to a longtime student and assistant who was several decades his junior (and who Williamson interviewed for the biography).    Williamson also makes large claims for the controlling power of Borges’s mother (with whom he lived in a small apartment for most of his adult life until she died in her 90s in 1975) and the failed example of his father, who never succeeded as a novelist.

Most of the reviews took Williamson to task for his over-analytic readings of Borges’s work, but more than anything what struck me was a line from Pierre Menard about the author’s habit of sometimes writing exactly the opposite of what he believed.  Maybe Borges never really wanted to marry?  Williamson takes on faith that Borges idolized each of the women with whom he was connected romantically, and that he imagined each as the “new Beatrice” who would make possible his final literary triumph.  But it’s hard to imagine a more triumphant literary career than Borges’s — and it’s worth remembering that Dante never married his Beatrice.  Might it be just as possible that Borges’s first loyalty was to his work and his imagination, and that the various women and visions of a new domestic life never managed to crowd that out? His mother was a kind of literary secretary for him for much of his adult life, and then his second wife filled that voidfor his final decade.)

I think of Picasso’s remark that everything he did in life, including his various marriages and affairs, was a rehearsal for what happened when he stood in front of the canvas with a brush in his hand.  Borges, too, has always seemed to me an absolute artist, uncompromising and dedicated.  I certainly can imagine why so many women would not, finally, have wanted to marry him.

Went yesterday to the Amsterdam/New Amsterdam: The Worlds of Henry Hudson show at the Museum of the City of New York (5th ave at 103rd st).  Some really fantastic stuff, mostly from the Maritime Museum in Amsterdam.  There’s a model’s of Hudson’s ship, the Half-Moon, some great atlas & other books, a canon recovered from underwater, clothing, one sword and part of another…

The exhibition used a lot of reproductions and also projected images from maps on the wall, so that they could show more material.  There were several audio clips, one of a Dutch sea-chantey.  Navigational tools included a log line, magnetic and geometric compasses, and a gorgeous pair of 17c globes.

But probably the most interesting part of the show was the explicit connection between the 70-foot long space of the exhibition hall and the 70-foot long ship on which Hudson sailed upriver.  Two “sails” flew overhead, and the center of the gallery space was framed in with dark wood panels so that you felt you were on a (small) ocean-going ship.  A great way to bring the material into the lives of the audience.

Though the truth is that my daughter loved the 19c dollhouses upstairs more than even the 17c tiles that showed Dutch children at play.

It’s a slight, slim volume, but a fun read, esp for Borges nostalgists like me.  My favorite snippet comes when JLB admits he never felt compelled to finish any book (including Finnegans Wake, on which he would subsequently lecture).  “I am a pleasure-seeking reader,” he said.  “I’ve never allowed my sense of duty to have a hand in such a personal matter as that of buying books.”

I’m also reminded of how Borges help R.L. Stevenson (who I mostly think of as a boy’s novelist, much as I love *Treasure Island*, which my son & I listened to on tape last year) and Kipling, among a more usual list of suspects (Whitman, Joyce, Wilde, Carroll, Twain, the Norse and Anglo-Saxon epics, Virgil, etc).

Among modern authors who cite Borges, Manguel mentions Foucault, Umberto Eco (in *The Name of the Rose*), Goddard’s film Alphaville, George Steiner’s After Babel, and Bruce Chatwin, who calls him the Wise Old Man of Buenos Aires in his great travel memoir In Patagonia.