Steve Mentz

THE BOOKFISH

THALASSOLOGY, SHAKESPEARE, AND SWIMMING

Auden’s “silent dissolution”

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Where I go, words carry no weight: it is best,

Then, I surrender their fascinating cousel

To the silent dissolution of the sea

Which misuses nothing because it values nothing

Whereas man overvalues everything…

Auden’s great poetic commentary & meditation on The Tempest, which is also very much a poem of a European fleeing Europe during WWII, operates throughout between the dissolving opacity of the sea and the artistic fantasy of the mirror.  It’s a strange and gorgeous poem, though I’m not always sure in re-reading it whether it’s a hymn to the power of art or a lament about human failure.

I suppose that I see the same deep ambivalence in The Tempest as well.

We won’t have too much time at the NYPL on Tuesday to talk about Auden, so let’s bring him online for the next few days.  It’s a poem to chew on.

October Twilight

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Got back from the rock-wall climbing birthday party after the second soccer game just as the sun was starting to go down.  A quick three-mile jog to warm up as the evening star poked her seductive head over Killam’s Point in the east.  The tide was just coming up to full, a wide, still pool of a flood.  In the last flashes of sunlight out on the Sound I could see white sails, round-bellied but still.

The water’s cooler now, & it takes me about 50 yards of fly and 50 free to get my body comfortable.  As soon as I stop my skin starts to tingle.  I turn to look back at the houses of Short Beach, every third one lit from inside.  No one else is visible on the bay.  Even the seaweed is silent, floating in stolid clumps.  I float on my back and watch the sky.

Timing is everything.

Robinson Crusoe

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I’ve been thinking over the past few days about Robinson Crusoe, Mariner.  We’ll be busy next week with the NY Public Library & Dr. Lubey’s work, but esp. since she’s one of our resident Defoe experts, we might want to expand this conversation.

Matt P., our roving seminar member who’s spent the last two weeks in China, has started his project by thinking about the similarities between Prospero’s exile and Crusoe’s: both Europeans on isolated islands who survive, enslave non-Europeans, and appear, perhaps in slightly different ways, to represent fantasies about the colonial experience.

There’s lots to chew on in that parallel, but I also thought I’d share some recent material on Defoe that I put together this summer at the Folger.  Here are links to a web site based on his comprehensive world history, the Atlas Maritimus of 1728, to a map of his maritime travels that was published in Part II of his story, and to two audio clips.  (The first is recorded by my brother-in-law, Maury Sterling, last seen in the cast of “The A-Team” this summer.)

Defoe’s Atlas Maritimus

Map of Robinson Crusoe’s Travels

Crusoe’s Shipwreck

Alexander Selkirk

Enjoy!

Surfing Short Beach

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Lat Thursday afternoon, Olivia poked her head into my office while I was hard at work writing an article on “Popular Fiction” for the Cambridge World Shakespeare Encyclopedia.  “Daddy,” she said, “the waves are huge!  Will you take me swimming?”

The good thing about popular fiction is that it’s always there — that’s what popular means, after all — so it seemed like a pretty good idea.  It had been blowing hard for a day or so, with another day of high winds and rain to come.  The tide was high, and Short Beach was, for a change, a roaring shore.

Olivia suited up and put on a life jacket, & we even recruited Alinor to join us.  The water isn’t cold yet, but it was pretty rough: when the swell smacks into the sea-wall, it creates a standing wave that is (as high school physics tells us) twice as high as the first wave coming in.

The rare waves brought everybody out — our neighbor Joe Piscatelli the surfer was in the middle of the bay on his board, trying (with little success, alas) to ride the swell.  Dave & Gay Peterson, our most indefatigable swimmers, headed straight out along the sheltered western shore of the bay.  Plus a second surfer I didn’t know and a pair of Short Beach matrons were just getting in when we finally left.

Olivia likes to float in the surf & look out as each new wave floats her up and over.  We swam out pretty far, maybe 50 yards or so, so that we could float in the bigger waves.  We could feel the power of the destructive element, but it also buoyed us up.

Three by Dr. Lubey

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Here, for your reading pleasure, are three articles by Dr. Kathleen Lubey, one of our department’s specialists in 18th-century literature.  Please read at least two — or if if you’d prefer.  The article on pornography, which emerged directly out of a grad seminar, might be particularly interesting & accessible to those who are not deep in 18c waters.

Lubey on pornography

Lubey on Haywood

Lubey on Addison

“Let us spurn earthly things”

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We’ll likely spend most of our time tomorrow night on 20c responses to The Tempest, esp Cesaire’s and some of the other modern critics.  (Lamming seems to have aroused some interest already.)  But I wanted to put a word in early for the little snippets of source text that precede those essays, inc Pico’s “Oration,” from which the title of this post comes.

These snippets are hard to read (esp the shorter ones), and sometimes hard to follow (esp when excerpted), but they repay the effort.  Pico’s phrase might help us think about the philosophical basis for Prospero’s treatment of Caliban (whom he calls “thou earth” in 1.2), and more broadly about intellectual aspiration and what it does in this play.

For any who are wanting to work on post-colonial readings, too, I strongly suggest looking closely at Samuel Purchas (93-5), who gives a succinct summary of the reasons Englishmen felt justified in colonizing the New World.

Wetsuit weather!

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Olivia was the first in the family to make the leap to fall swimwear.  Any weekend with three salt-water swims — Fri, Sat, & Sun — is a good weekend.

Especially today, you can feel the change of seasons on your skin.

Maritime Quarters

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Guam (found at Starbuck’s in the Baltimore Hyatt during the Maritime Heritage Conference last week) went to Olivia.  Northern Marianas Islands (found this morning at St. John’s) to Ian.

The wages of coffee…

A Man from Clam Island

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Alinor told me about a 67-year old man who was found dead yesterday  in Long Island Sound about a mile along the shoreline from where we swim.  He lived on Clam Island, one of the low, bare bits of rock on which people have been perching houses since the late 19c.

He was fully dressed, so it doesn’t seem to have been a case of swimming gone wrong, though it’s not clear how or why he got into the water.   What is clear is that however he got in — falling, tripping, a stroke — he wasn’t able to support himself in what Conrad calls “the destructive element.”

I went on my afternoon swim anyway — it won’t be gorgeous September swimming weather much longer — but not as far as I usually go.  The wind blew hard out of the southwest, and the waves were choppy.

Shakespeare and Slavery

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A few sources for Danielle’s project on the Atlantic slave trade in the early modern period, which may be of interest to the rest of you.

Herbert Klein, The Atlantic Slave Trade (Cambridge, 1999)

Equiano, The Interesting Narrative (any number of editions of the well-known & influential abolitionist autobiography)

Vincent Carretta, Equiano, the African (Penguin, 2005) (a controversial & well-regarded biography that provides evidence that Equiano may have been born in North Carolina)

Nick Hazelwood, The Queen’s Slave Trader (2004) a good popular bio of John Hawkins

I’ll also see if I can find a copy of vol 10 of Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations, which has Hawkins’s most substantial voyage to Africa in it.  If I can’t find it, the NY Public Library is your best best.

I’ll also bring in an interesting short article in the journal Sea History that discusses the American anti-slavery squadron in the early 19c, & their use of African small boat handlers to negotiate the dangerous surf along the West African coast.  Interactions between Europeans & Africans were quite complex during the slave trade, with lots of individuals and groups on both sides of the various transactions.