Commissioned by Charles I in 1634, this ship was the terror of the Dutch wars, the first 100-gun ship in the Royal Navy, & the prototype for Lord Nelson’s Victory. The States-General of the Netherlands in 1652 offered 3000 guilders to any ship that could “ruin” the Sovereign.
After a good summer’s run at the Folger, she’s now come to rest on the CT shoreline, above my fireplace. Looks nice.
Last week we talked about the chaotic opening scene of The Tempest as a representation of the educational process. I’ll suggest a different, and perhaps more palatable, image this week. The Mariner’s Mirror was a Dutch atlas translated into English in the late Elizabethan period, in order to advance English navigation and cartography. The Folger copy was hand-colored at some later date —
For some more information on the Mirror, you can look at the entry in the Lost at Sea website
and also listen to my 90-second description of it on the Audio tour
Listening to Lord Jim on audio CD on my way home from Baltimore last night, I noticed a passage about swimming that’s worth making a note of for the thalassologically inclined. The speaker is Marlow’s friend Stein, a German butterfly-collector & Indonesian traveler whose past includes marriage into a family of local nobility on Celebes (Sulawesi), the deaths of his best friend, wife, and daughter, and then a second life as an wandering ent0mologist. It’s Stein who places Jim in Patusan.
The excerpt comes from the end of Chapter 20.
Yes! Very funny this terrible thing is. A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea. If he tries to climb out into the air as inexperienced people endeavour to do, he drowns — nicht wah? …No! I tell you! The way is to the destructive element submit yourself, and with the exertions of your hands and feet in the water make the deep, deep sea keep you up. So if you ask me — how to be?
Again, a little bit later
And yet it is true — it is true. In the destructive element immerse.
The chapter ends with a turn away from this (German, idealist, philosophical) fantasy
Sleep well. And to-morrow we must do something practical — practical…
Stein, however, doesn’t head toward bed at this point, but instead returns “back to his butterflies,” his own obsession.
On my way down to the Maritime Heritage Conference in Baltimore this week, I stopped by my old Atlantic haunts in Bay Head, NJ. My parents bought a house across the street from the beach there around 1980, & that short stretch of beach, with the pilings you see in the picture, were my home waters through high school, college, grad school, & beyond, until they sold the house about five years ago to move to FL.
It’s probably over-sentimental to think I was swimming with ghosts, but there’s a lot of personal history ground into that sand. Plus September is the best swimming month on the Atlantic seaboard.
On Wed morning, little jelly fragments were thick in the water — not stingers, but marble-sized chunks of jellyfish-body, scattered in the water and swirling about. A couple of moon jellies, too, but mostly just bits. You can swim through them pretty easily, pushing your way through the cloud with an extra tactile sense of the ocean as a home for living, strange, inhuman bodies.
Jellyfish are the ocean’s future, scientists tell us. They are the species that will do best in the ocean that’s coming: oxygen-deprived, warm, depleted of fish. It’s a gruesome thought, a violation of our long shared history of ocean aesthetics. But swimming through the jelly-cloud early Wed morning, with a solitary older fisherman just up the beach on a cloudless day, it seemed as if swimmers & jellies could manage. The feel of them between my fingers was foreign, slimy, a little disturbing — but also something I could get used to.
For my grad class for next week’s reading, here are pdf versions of two articles that give you a pretty good idea of my recent work in maritime ecocriticism. When I get back from this conference, I’ll post a little bit more background, but in case you want to get started reading, here they are.
Toward a Blue Cultural Studies
Note: I’m having some trouble with the first link. I’ll try to repair it but might not get to that until tomorrow (Fri). You can also find that article in the journal *Shakespeare*.
Seems to work now! Let me know if you have any problems.
I’m in Baltimore today & tomorrow, giving a talk about the Folger show and chairing a panel on maritime lit. Here’s the view of the Inner Harbor.
This should be a great event at the National Maritime Museum in London in November.
http://www.nmm.ac.uk/researchers/conferences-and-seminars/shipwreck-symposium
Thanks for this photo , taken outside the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, to Regina Corallo. The show closed on Sept 4, 2010.
For other images, see www.folger.edu/lostatsea
Here’s a link to a now-opening production of Macbeth in lower Manhattan. Anyone want to join me & my u/g class sometime before they close at the end of September?
That’s not my title (though I like it) — it’s a new series of lunch-time talks at St. John’s for experiments in technology and teaching. I’ll be first off the mark next Tuesday, Sept 14, to talk about my Blue Humanities Blog (which I’m starting to think should be renamed the Bookfish). All St. Johnnies welcome, though you’ll need to bring your own lunch. Hosted by Jennifer Travis of the English Dept and Elizabeth Alexander of Online Learning & Services.
September 14, 2010 – Bent Hall, Room 277 (12-1pm)
