Fathers Day

I.
Alex left for his annual two weeks of camp in West Virginia this morning. The call that he'd safely arrived came in the early afternoon, but I missed it while emptying a shed to be demolished tomorrow. As I removed a scooter and a Ripstick that he'd outgrown and passed along to his sister, I was thinking about how he has also outgrown much of what he once needed from me: a hand to steady his bike, someone to catch or to pitch, a companion for nature walks. On Friday he and I hiked the Billy Goat trail with a friend. Am I reading too much into the day when I note that for much of the outing he was far ahead and urging us to catch up?

II.
Katherine needs her parents, but not as Alex once did. His night terrors began at two. She's had only one nightmare, more from a sense of obligation (I sometimes think) than because she worries. He had bravura; she possesses quiet confidence. When at dinner I told her of the memory that I am about to write in part III, she asked me to step outside the house with her, hugged me, and surprised me with a nuzzle and a lick. "Always remember that," she laughed. I will.

III.
On Father's Day I inevitably think about an ordinary hour I spent with my father. He asked me to accompany him on some errands -- unusual, because I come from a large family, and errands were his escape from domestic chaos. We went to the hardware store to buy nails. Afterwards he bought me a cupcake at the bakery. We sat in the car together as I ate it. I was seven. I don't remember that he said anything to me (he was a quiet man), but it seemed like the best day of my youth.

IV.
I phoned my dad this morning and he spoke of the steak he was going to enjoy and the restful day he will spend. Just before the end of the call he mentioned the special bond we share because I am his oldest son. He has made this statement a few times in the past, and it is touching, but it doesn't seem true. My father has always been inscrutable to me. I have often felt that I inhabit a world unknown. That distance is not bad, even if it has been painful; I would not be myself without that space.

V.
The love I have for my children is vast beyond expression; I have no words for it. But I wonder about what bonds unite, the distance or closeness that is there, the chasms that open so slowly that you don't see them until your child is a teenager a mile ahead of you, the phone call or video call I will have with them in some future year when I will reminisce about the past we shared and they will lie to me and say that yes, we have always been so close.

lulls and funks

by J J Cohen

If you read my comment on Karl's recent post on behalf of Brantley Bryant, Request for the Saturnine, you'll see I've listed the many ITM posts I've composed under the influence of a low mood. Although a funk might catch me at any time, I seem to be especially susceptible during transitions, especially as the hectic pace of the semester yields to the quiet of winter break or summer. Because of the fellowship support I have for next year, followed by a likely semester of sabbatical leave, I'm looking at 18 months of teaching and administrative release -- an amazing gift, and one for which I'm profoundly grateful, but this time without structure scares me a bit as well. That's one reason I've decided to remain director of MEMSI during at least some of this time.

Strangely, though, this year the summer funk has yet to capture me, at least for very long. Partly I think that's because I've been busy. I have commitments to make good on, including numerous essays. I also had an idea for an edited volume that went from a small seed to a sturdy sapling in the course of a very few weeks. Prismatic Ecologies: Ecotheory Beyond Green now has a twelve person table of contents (and what a ToC it is!), with two more commitments likely. I'm enamored of the project so that has been energizing. I hope to post more about the book within the next two weeks or so.

There have also been some important family events. Alex graduated middle school and is getting ready to depart for two weeks of camp in West Virginia. Katherine completed first grade, and also injured her knee badly, so that she has required some extra care and doctors' visits.

And we have a dog in the house. We've been watching our friends' mutt Cooper. It didn't take him long to become attached to us. He stays by my side as I write just as Scooby once did. He's the only one in the house who can stand to listen to me practice guitar. He helps me to feel like I'm not alone even when I'm solo. It will be difficult to give him back to his family next week. In fact -- as I posted on Facebook -- I am sabotaging that transition by teaching him to bite the ankle of the nearest person whenever he hears "brave Hund!" (his family speaks German). He will soon know that if anyone should declare "Prost!" he must leap for their beverage and knock it from their hand. Finally, should anyone say "Schadenfreude," I will teach him to bite their ankle and smile at their pain.

So, screw Saturn, god of morose academics. I'm too busy re-training a good dog to go bad.

Join the ongoing discussion at Fractured Politics

by KARL STEEL

If you're longing for more ITM, and especially for more Eileen (whose comments are always so explosively cool), go to Kris Coffield's Fractured Politics. There's much great discussion after Jeffrey's interview (with a comment by Eileen, here) and after my interview too.

There, Coffield writes:

In a sense, that's what Karl Steel is attempting to produce - de-essentialized subjectivities that deploy interspecies relations in the imagining of alternative political and aesthetic sensibilities. Stepping outside of one's own skin is a difficult task, however, when it involves not only a discursive injunction, but a voluntary dehumanization. To get to the materialism of 'the human', where transformative political work can begin, we must first realize that in articulating (or interrogating) claims from an anthropocentric perspective, we perform 'humanity' itself, the normative historicity (Butler's "chains of iteration") that grant discourse the power to enact what it names. 'Human' is more than just a species indicator, it is also a fundamental identity marker, a promise to universality and solidarity that catalyzes political action. How else could governments speak of "species emergencies" and be narratively recognized? Critiques of any identity, then, including 'human', reveal the failure of identity formation to fulfill that promise.

A paradigm shift may be helpful in unraveling the failed promise of 'the human' and the political functions it has birthed - human nature, human rights, human beingness. For example, instead of asking how diseased animals were dealt with historically, we might ask how 'life' was constituted such that certain animals appeared as 'sick' or certain conditions were labeled 'illness'. Instead of asking how animals are imbricated within putatively human technospheres, we might ask how technospheres penetrate animal spaces.

I don't think Julian Reid would necessarily object to such lines of flight, as they deliberately subvert the martial ordering of biopolitics under liberal regimes by prompting a self-conscious shedding of logistical accounts of life. Logisiticization inheres homogenization of life, and life's capacity for proliferation, along the informational lines Reid elegantly elucidated; what counts as life is that which can be disciplined to respond to the permanent crisis always immanent to the (il)liberal life. Absolutely, animal lives are also disciplined within neoliberal regimes, but control of animal populations is not the objective of these regimes, so long as the animal/human binary is maintained - is it any wonder that lifeforms resistant to liberal accounts are described in terms typically reserved for animals and, indeed, are treated in the same manner as animals, a la Guantanamo Bay (the human zoo)? After all, animals signify the nonnarratizable, instinctual, traumatic.

Blurring these boundaries highlights a suppressed materiality that challenges informationalized biopower, along with its genealogical heritage. To that end, medieval deterritorializations of animal identity might be extremely helpful.

For this, I can only say thanks! Although if you want more of me, see here and following for a GIANT (Eileen worthy?) set of responses.

(picture of me at Sean Landers 'Around the World Alone' at Friedrich Petzel gallary)

Brantley Bryant: Request for the Saturnine

by KARL STEEL

Here's a request from Brantley Bryant worth sharing with you all:

I would like to enlist your help in a somewhat unusual project. I'm writing an essay for the forthcoming punctum books collection Dark Chaucer,* and I'm trying on something that departs from the usual format of a scholarly article --it's a bit of an experiment.

If you're a student, teacher, or lover of Chaucer (and/or medieval literature in general) and you've struggled with depression, anxiety, or mental illness ("officially" diagnosed or otherwise), I hope that you might be in touch and consider contributing anonymously to this essay. I would like to interweave a discussion of Saturn's role in the *Knight's Tale* with stories of contemporary medievalists' experiences with Saturnian melancholy. It's hard to tell which direction this project will take, but I hope it might also serve as a way of further opening up the discussion of the way mental illness is handled in academic life.

If this sounds interesting to you, or you'd like more information, please email me at brantley.bryant@sonoma.edu

Very best wishes, -Brantley

If you're curious: I'm also writing for this project. I will engage with Custance begging to be killed (MLT, II.515-17), Emelye's rejected request not to be married off (KT I.2296-362), and Virginia begging her father to think of some other remedy than killing her (PhyT VI.235-6): three instances of three women who know what it means to be a character in a man's textual world. One seeks death; the other tries to exempt herself from the comic/political reconciliation; the other wants not to be only a creature of her father and of the exemplum. None gets what she wants: one forced to live; one to love; one to die, all of them given just enough awareness of being in their stories to know that they want out.

And now Kris Coffield interviews me

by J J Cohen

Karl got his chance to blather. Now it's mine.

Briefly Noted: Kris Coffield interviews me

by KARL STEEL

Over at Fractured Politics, Kris Coffield interviews me. I talk about anthropophagy, carrion, pets, objects, regimes of life, and so on. Maybe you'll want to join the already lively discussion?

Nothing But Flowers: On Chaucer's 'Former Age'

by KARL STEEL

Over the past week, I've been working on a piece on Chaucer's "The Former Age" (Middle English; translation), primitivism, and pigs. I need 5000 words by July 20th for an anthology on Chaucer and animals.'But wait!' some of you will say a few months from now, 'Didn't you already do that in your book?'

Well, yes. Sort of. But this is my chance to do it right. To slow it down. To spread it out.

Most of 'The Former Age' comes from somewhere else; not this line though:

They [the people of that age] eten mast hawes & swych pownage

"But wait!" you say, because you're kind of a pedant: "aren't references to vegetarian nut-eaters, like, everywhere in the classical and medieval tradition of the Golden Age?" You start to quote Petrarch at me, and, being a pedant myself, I cut you off: "...and Ovid; and Cicero; and Jean de Meun; and Chaucer himself. I get it. The question isn't the nuts. The question's how we get from Chaucer's own translation of Consolation II.v, "they were wont lyghtly to slaken hir hungir at even [at evening: this is from Nicholas Trevet's commentary] with accornes of ookes," to "the people of the Former Age ate like pigs."'

And now you're silent, not because I silenced you, but because I'm sick of this conceit.

My key point: for Christians, pigs are only for eating. To say that the people of this age eat in the woods like pigs is to say they "eete nat half ynough" (don't eat half enough), like any number of distressed knights (Orfeo, Partenopeu, etc.) who go about on hands and knees grobbing for what they can; it is also to say that they are like beasts, and especially like the beasts meant only for our eating. We're a long way from praising these people for their asceticism, and we're a lot closer to pity or contempt (h/t Andy Galloway for this reference).

And see elsewhere in Chaucer, where Griselda's water-drinking (CT IV.215), a topos of medieval primitivism, opens her to Walter's exploitation; and the poor widow of the Nun's Priest's Tale, whose ascetic diet (VII 2836-46) incites our (clerical) admiration even as it leaves her lodged in nature, nearly voiceless and animalized (VII 4570-80).

In February, I asked my undergrads whether the people of The Former Age really had no wealth for conquerors, whether we should believe that "tyraunts [would not] putte hem gladly nat in pres / No wildnesse ne no busshes for to winne"?

The students got it right away. The people had no gold, no wealth, no cities, no linen, no delicacies; but, one said, they had their bodies. And for some tyrants, that's enough.

So: for now, I plan to go at this via four lines:

1. other 14th-century English works where humans who refuse to eat pigs get treated like pigs. By this I mean stories like this one (lines 361-96) or this one (lines 487-530), where the child Jesus turns transforms a bunch of Jewish children (in the latter version, hiding in an oven!) into pigs;
2. the manuscript context. 'The Former Age' survives in two manuscripts, one of which also includes Lydgate's "Churl and the Bird" and The Debate of the Horse, Goose, and Sheep: what are the animal networks of this manuscript as a whole?;
3. the exploitation and animalization of the people of the Golden Age, especially in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. I'm inspired by Isidore of Seville's Etymologies XIV.vi.8, on the Fortunate Isles, mistaken for Paradise by the pagans. Isidore seems to mean the Canary Islands ("situated in the Ocean, against the left side of Mauretania," trans. from here), which were exploited in earnest, as I understand it, beginning in the early fourteenth century. Did Christian Europe's characterization of the Guanches have anything to do with the Golden Age tradition? How were these encounters received in England? Or perhaps by Chaucer, during his Iberian travels?;
4. and finally, perhaps most ambitiously, the encounter of Alexander and Dindimus, King of the Brahmans, (see also: here and many, many other places), the Middle Age's most well-known vegetarian, paradisical people, whom Alexander repeatedly calls beasts. He says to the Gymnosophists that if everyone were equal, then we would be like animals; see also lines 858 and 892, and 904. Basically: the Brahmans have abandoned their responsibility to the human, and this pisses Alexander off. I intend to argue that the poetic gaze of 'The Former Age' looks on these people like Alexander looking on the Brahmans, that this gaze has stumbled into another, less anthropocentric way of being in and with the world, and that it doesn't quite know what to do with it.

My work on animals has largely, deliberately avoided discourses of the animalization and colonialism. Here I think of Cary Wolfe's "so long as it is institutionally taken for granted that it all right to systematically exploit and kill nonhuman animals simply because of their species, then the humanist discourse of species will always be available for use by some humans against other humans as well" (Animal Rites 8). This essay means to repair that fault by examining a text and a textual tradition that at once participates in discourses of animalization and offers a posthuman critique of animalization's violence.

There's work to be done, and any suggestions will be cheerfully, gratefully received.

(image from Bodley 264, a manuscript containing a French Alexander romance and, beginning at f. 209v, the sole exemplar of the Middle English alliterative Alexander and Dindimus, whose illustrations (209v; 210r; 211r; 212r; 213r; 213v; 214v; 215r; 215v) could use further study, especially in the ecocritical mode as exemplars of "green men" or "wodwose": for more, and for a kind of presiding spirit for this project, see Lorraine K. Stock))

(blog post title from here)

coffee, prisms, music

by J J Cohen

My objective for this week was to have my "Abecedarium for the Elements" complete in draft. FAIL. The piece is in better shape than previously, mainly because of the revelation I had while composing this post. I'm not trying to squeeze the thoughts of June into rubrics developed last September. But the essay isn't quite cohering, and I regret my ambition in thinking I could pull this thing off. I'll get there, I suppose, and I thank all of you who commented for helping me along the way.

Today, though, I'm tired. The proof is the cup of coffee you can see in the picture of my desk to your right. I never drink coffee in the afternoon, mainly because if I do it too often I become tired on the afternoons when I do not. I don't like a pleasure becoming a necessity. It's been an intense few weeks. I have been working on the postmedieval issue and attempting to keep the email monster from growing (it feeds upon inattention, and can double in size if you look away). I've also seen my Prismatic Ecologies: Ecocriticism Beyond Green volume go from an inkling that would not leave me in peace to an enfleshed idea that I've pitched to a press I'm eager to work with again. The table of contents now includes Will Stockton (pink), Vin Nardizzi  (greener), Steve Mentz (brown), Jen Hill (grey), Julian Yates (orange), Eileen Joy (blue), Levi Bryant (black), Stacy Alaimo (yellow), and Graham Harman (gold). More coming, too.

My tiredness may also derive from my late bedtime and early rising. I went to a concert last night. Mumford and Sons played an outdoor venue just north of the city in Columbia, MD. Since everyone in my family likes their album, I'm fairly intimate with their songs. I knew they would be good live, but was taken by surprise at just how good they are. Not only do each of the four band members play almost every stringed instrument imaginable (and the lead singer is quite a drummer as well), they reinvented their music as often as they straightforwardly performed it. My favorite was "Thistle and Weeds," a song that is OK (maybe a little boring, really), but last night became a prog rock piece straight out of 1970s Genesis, with a lush soundscape that weirdly echoed the massive storms moving through the area. Perfect. Last night left me refreshed, not only for the unremitting good cheer the performers brought to the songs, but their joy in tampering with their own compositions, and their dedication to making the concert feel intimate. No one plays bluegrass inflected folk like the English ... and hey, I can write the event off as a scholarly trip since the opening line of the concert's first song, the resonant and beautiful "Sigh No More," is stolen from Much Ado About Nothing ("Serve God love me and mend," quoth Benedick).

failure, audience, swimming

by J J Cohen

Related to this post, working on the New Critical Modes issue of postmedieval brought me back to an ancient ITM conversation. Here are some words I wrote two years ago (in the comments) that make me realize that I'm either a broken record or keep encountering the same tangle of professional and personal challenges:

I sometimes write to no specific interlocutor or for an audience that cannot be imagined fully in advance. I write -- in a way -- to the works themselves. I love what I do, and feel fortunate indeed to have a life that gives me easy access to paper and pens or a laptop and the internet.

I need to write as much as I need to read and to eat.

So sometimes that futurity we've been talking about -- the new critical mode that "we do not yet know how to read" -- begins in relative solitude, in a study, or by one of the Finger Lakes, or by the sea. Unless what is being composed is a diary, writing never stays in place very long: even if the first audience is oneself, every text also has an inbuilt community (and therein an inbuilt futurity). It's just that some texts are inherently open, welcoming: they yearn for capacious interaction. Others are more difficult, even diffident: they demand more of those who want to embrace them, be changed by them. We all know, too, that it is often the texts at which we labor hardest to which we bond most intensely. Difficulty has affective power.

I believe in risking heartbreak and failure. I wouldn't want a life without those companions, and I believe that if some of the writing we attempt isn't completely miscalculated and a big embarrassing flop, we did something wrong, we played too safely. Nicola cited that great passage from Don Qixote: sometimes you leap into the mud and find an Other World on the far side. Sometimes you just get kind of messy and have to go home and shower it off.

Or take a swim in an ocean, one of the Finger Lakes, a salt bed, the Gravelly Sea.

Rediscovering that comment and the conversation in which it participated has been especially auspicious today. Somehow I've moved out of the Slough of Despond that my latest writing project was miring me within. The comments on my last post have also assisted me in approaching my abecedarium for the elements (why the hell am I writing an abecedarium?) with fresh energy. It's not such an albatross any more, because I realize that it -- like the elements it details -- requires the freedom to live, breathe, and change. I don't know who I'm writing it for, but that uncertainty brings with it a liberty.

And now on to T ....

failure and fear of failure

by J J Cohen

My pedagogical credo includes a line about the classroom as a laboratory where we experiment and risk fucking up. No creative, theoretical, or scholarly project is sufficiently ambitious if it doesn't chance spectacular failure.

Embracing that risk, unfortunately, doesn't lessen failure's sting. I've been thinking about foundering a great deal today for several reasons: some problems I've run into as a mentor of graduate students; writer's block when it comes to completing my abecedarium for the elements (I've spent the morning agonizing over the thing; it fills me with dread); and a painful episode yesterday that tested my ability to be an adequate father.

My son and daughter study piano with the same teacher, and twice a year take part in a recital that demonstrates their mastery of a few short songs or one long one. The recitals include children as young as six (who are cute as they bang out their tunes) to seniors in high school (who are so impressive in their skill we sit in awe). Most of the performers are somewhere in between, and while small mistakes are plentiful, few dramatic failures occur. Unfortunately one of those involved my son Alex yesterday as he attempted to perform a rather complicated jazz piece. The drummer supposed to accompany him hadn't learn his portion, so was suddenly missing; Alex himself had not practiced enough, and was told by his teacher to omit a middle portion of the piece that seemed iffy.

He nervously texted me several times before his turn came, messages like "I am going to die" and "Do NOT video this w yr phone." His nervousness on stage was palpable. I could see him become increasingly agitated as the dropped portion of the song neared. When he reached its change of key, he froze, lost his place, attempted to find it, froze again, then brought the piece to a quick conclusion. I couldn't watch. I knew what he must be feeling. As he left the stage I tried to catch his eye, but he was trying to hold himself together and looked away.

Alex did a brave job of holding on at the reception following the recital, though I could tell he was close to tears. His teacher patted him on the shoulder and told him to let it go, that it happens to everyone. I could see that Alex didn't want to talk about it; it was too raw. So I didn't say anything. But later that evening, after we'd had dinner with another family and put some distance between us and the events of the day, I came into his room and shut the door. I asked him if we could talk about the recital. I was curious how he felt: did he think that we should just forget about what happened, or was there a lesson to learn, something useful to carry to the future? To his credit, Alex knew that there was at least one: that he'd waited too long to master the song, and so had gone into the recital not as well prepared as he should have. I suggested another: that at age 14 he is old enough to assert himself as a performer. If his teacher tells him to cut the middle of a piece just before a performance, and if he knows that cut will cause him to do a worse job, he has an obligation to tell the teacher that he knows what he is capable of, and that the segment needs to remain. Alex seemed cheered by this thought, that he could take more control of the situation than he suspected, that the world is more his to make than he realized, that he has grown up a bit more than he has given himself credit for.

I'm hoping that last night was a turning point.

With yesterday's recital in mind I turn back to my abecedarium. I suspect the reason I'm having such trouble with the piece -- besides the fact that it is a crazy task to have set myself -- is that I'm trying to fit my current thoughts into verses that I wrote almost a year ago, mostly while in Berlin. They don't speak to me any more, and much of what seemed fun about them then now seems gimicky. I'm thinking a few of the couplets will remain as a reminder of the genre, but others will yield to bare and unpoetic statements about what letter stands for what concept. I wrote recently about sending a gift to your future self by accomplishing work early, but in this case I seem to have special deliveried an albatross. Or maybe that is the gift: that I have enough time, still, to see the potential tyranny in the form I've adopted, to let go of fidelity, invent a little ... and maybe fail. But not, I hope, freeze, at least not without taking the clarity and bravery of my own child to heart.

Flash review: Ecocritical Shakespeare

by J J Cohen

Anyone interested in premodern ecocritical approaches to literature and culture will want to read this thoughtful and varied book.

Ecocritical Shakespeare, ed. Lynne Bruckner and Dan Brayton (Ashgate 2011) suggests that early modern scholars are far ahead of medievalists when it comes to serious engagement with ecocriticism. The Middle Ages possesses one avowedly green book, Gillian Rudd's under-appreciated Greenery; the occasional green essay (e.g., Sarah Stanbury's "EcoChaucer"); a great deal of work in animal studies that sometimes reveals an ecological bent; and one major eco-theoretical intervention, Alf Siewers' much lauded Strange Beauty. (Much more is on the horizon, but what am I missing? Please comment on this post with bibliography: surely there is more).

In fact, Ecocritical Shakespeare shows that environmentally conscious approaches to literature and culture have been Bard-loving for so long that a major shift is underway in the field (and I say "Bard loving" on purpose: having read this book and Shakesqueer recently, all I can say is that I am happy no similar author looms so large over medieval studies; it can get claustrophobic inside that repertoire of plays!). The collection of essays betrays a recurring tension, perhaps even a fault line. On the one hand are critics who can invoke with zest capacious, harmonized and homeostatic überframes like Gaia and Tillyard's The Elizabethan World View (yes, with that 1946 classic remaining unpluralized). They agonize over the question of activism in its relation to writing and teaching as if feminists and queer theorists hadn't published quite a bit on that subject (and in ways that might assist ecocritics in reframing their own conversation: where are the allies?). They speak of ecocritical readings and applying ecocriticism to texts (where is the mutuality, where are the middle spaces?). Then there are others who argue forcefully for more complicated, even catastrophic versions of environmental systems where imbalance is perennial; the pastoral is a dangerous lure; ecocriticism comes out of the peaceful forests to meet darker ecologies; where early moderns themselves were ecocritics who might add something to contemporary theorization; where ecocriticism loses some of its anxiety about not being down to earth, embraces some invigorating currents in contemporary philosophy, and unabashedly imagines ecotheory.

Greg Garrard's "Foreword" makes that divide amply visible, with cavalier dismissals of postmodernism that set nature up as the the grounded, the commonsensical, the simple, and the necessary. What of an ecotheory, though, that examines the ethereal, the counter-intuitive, the difficult, and the exorbitant? This divide is evident in many of the essays, and yet often quietly breached in surprising places. The essay that gave me most pause as I began to read it -- Gabriel Egan's, linking Gaia and Tillyard -- is also full of great asides on spontaneous generation, unanticipated emergence, the inhuman, and the small pieces that may or may not be portions of a larger system. These asides potentially work against the closing movement describing the Earth as a system/organism with emergent self-regulation (69), rather like the Great Chain of Being as envisioned by the Elizabethans. How different that ending would be had Egan thought a little about the flat ontology described by speculative realism, or the autocatalytic chains described by Manuel De Landa.

Karen Raber gets closer to such inhuman possibility when she invokes Michel Serres on the parasite and white noise to understand the mixed and verminous ecologies of Denmark and Verona. Robert N. Watson offers an "orgy of life" ecology of Midsummer Night's Dream that follows interpenetrations and the release of the self from the prison of its own autonomy. Edward J. Geisweidt provides an excellent analysis of the life of excrement ("a natural, material conglomeration of life, death, and loss") without anchoring it back into a green reading (waste is read as its own ecosystem rather than a fertilizer for a bucolic one). J. A. Shea and Paul Yachin find the shrew (the literal animal) in Petruchio, making him an animal-human hybrid of sorts; Vin Nardizzi, in a more-than-green vegetal reading, finds the wood inside Falstaff.  Jennifer Munroe and Rebecca Laroche likewise excavate the life and potential agency of plants, but not in ways that seem quite so posthuman.

Sharon O'Dair combines a meditation on activism with an exposé of historicism's fear of "powerful" and "dazzling" writing as it embraces the New Boredom, retreating to the safety of the archive. Her essay at once condemns scholarly bustle, and provides a closing anecdote about how academic travel (which causes her some guilt: here as elsewhere O'Dair argues that we need to slow down in our writing and in our world wandering) actually brings her to a moment of unexpected activism and a realization that we cannot remain field-bound. This activist bent is also found in two practical essays about teaching, "An Ecocritic's Macbeth" (Richard Kerridge), about inculcating a green sensibility in the classroom; and "Teaching Shakespeare in the Ecotone" (Lynn Bruckner), which charts the development of an ecoconscious and incredibly creative Shakespeare course that doesn't necessarily teach living in harmony with nature, but does stress how culture mediates the nature we can know.

Beginning with the obvious yet profound observation that "Ecocritical scholarship to date has been almost entirely terrestrial in outlook" (174) -- a landlocked, green bias -- Dan Brayton in "Shakespeare and the Global Ocean" vividly imagines what Steve Mentz calls a blue cultural studies. Like Mentz, Brayton focuses on what is potentially uncomfortable about such a color shift: the ocean as a realm of death and the supernatural, not a place at which to be at home. Speaking of Mentz, my favorite essay in the volume is his "Tongues in the Storm: Shakespeare, Ecological Crisis, and The Resources of Genre." With its emphasis upon catastrophe and imbalance over homeostasis and harmony, the piece looks to Shakespeare's Lear and As You Like It not for early modern confirmations of values we'd like to hold about nature, not to perform a green reading, but to discover tools (in this case, generic tools) adequate to the articulation of the crisis ecology in which we have always perhaps dwelled. In Shakespeare's "polygeneric drama" Mentz finds an early modern version of a story that now can be told between the work of Bruno Latour and Timothy Morton ("options, not solutions").

An Afterword by Simon C. Estok worries about ecocriticism becoming a "thriving business of diminutive proportions" and "a new niche for professionalism," with the example of someone entering the field for no other reason than to increase his chances of getting a job some day. I personally dislike these kinds of stories and could offer many told way back when about queer theory or disability studies; they have always seemed to me like the urban legend of the rich attorney who dresses as a homeless man at night and makes a fortune by begging for money (though Estok does name the person). Can we not for once doubt the passion of those who undertake the work? How about trust over suspicion? How about an end to "applying ecocriticism to Shakespeare" (246) and the offering of an open and nonexclusive invitation to all scholars and anyone else who is interested to engage in a collaborative project of rethinking what nature, ecology, environment, identity and place mean, in ways that challenge us to see present and past differently? Let's not apply anything to anything else, but instead as vulnerable humans as well as intellectuals form queer, experimental and ethical alliances with whatever materials, early or modern, invite us to bring about better worlds. That's the best kind of ecocriticism that emerges from this book, and one I can get behind.

deadlines, and deadlines

by J J Cohen

This morning I watched my son as he frantically attempted to master the complicated jazz piece he is playing at tomorrow's recital. Despite the admonitions of his piano teacher, he doesn't yet have it memorized. The performance Sunday at 4 PM is an absolute deadline. I've often talked to him about how he can send a gift to his future self by mastering early what he needs to know by a certain deadline -- whether a musical piece or the formation of the subjunctive for French verbs. He's 14, so he seldom listens. (His sister, on the other hand, is ready to go with her simplified "Für Elise" and a song she composed herself, "The Music Box." She is just as eager to bow theatrically at the recital as she is to play the songs.)

I try to live the philosophy of gifting your future self as much as you can. Something you may have noticed about yesterday's post (beside the fact that misidentified an indifferent heron for a lucky crane): none of the essays I completed in draft are actually due immediately. For me, the best way to be productive is to resist being deadline-driven. If I organize my work schedule around when essays or talks are absolutely due, then I am likely to fill in the intervening time with "working" on the project. Those "scare quotes" are meant to indicate that the amount of labor will expand and thin. If I know I have an essay due in a month, I am likely to spend that month on the essay. Work will spread itself to fill all available time.

When this expansion happens I end up not practicing what I preach to my students: revising my writing with the benefit of some distance. Over the years I've learned to set and abide by self-imposed deadlines so that I'll have time to put the project away for a while, and return to it fresh. I manage what is due via a work schedule I keep on Google Calendar and Tasks (a system I developed over the past few years as the number of my commitments proliferated beyond my ability to remember them). Don't get me wrong: this system doesn't always work. I do break promises to myself, and I am capable of inflicting the worst predicaments upon future Jeffrey. Deadlines before deadlines are an ideal rather than a consistently practicable reality.

But sometimes the system works. The Race essay is not due until the end of this month, the queer inorganic piece in August, and the giants entry on Sept. 1. Of course, that doesn't mean that next week is nothing but late rising and poolside mojitos: I have a special issue of postmedieval that needs a great deal of attention, and two talks to write, especially because I'll be traveling from the end of July right through August (Australia and Maine).

Which is not to say that at some point today I won't go to the neighborhood pool, and afterwards enjoy ... well, maybe not a mojito, but a summer drink of bourbon, ginger ale and fresh mint. Meanwhile, I'm keeping my fingers crossed for my son. Tomorrow is going to be quite a day for him.

more chuntering

squint to see the ginormous crane

by J J Cohen

[post title steals an infectious term from Stephanie Trigg]

More things that have helped me get work done: crisp mornings that make running a pleasure. Birds, because their energy and song are omnipresent right now. (They just sing for no reason, right? It's not a mating thing is it? Because that would sully the role of chorus that I've assigned them -- they are supposed to exist to help me get work done, not for any primal reasons of their own). A huge and out of place bluish crane I passed as it fished from Little Falls brook, which has brought me luck. A porch that we added to our house last year that has become my favorite place to write. Engagement with what I've been undertaking; nothing ruins writing like making a chore of it.

As this abbreviated week comes to its end I find myself in a surprising position. I've completed the drafts of three essays (only the shortest of which was written from scratch). Welcome into inchoate being "Race" (for Blackwell's Critical Theory Handbook to Middle English) "Queering the Inorganic" (for the collection Queer Futures: Reconsidering Normativity, Activism and the Political) and "Giants" (Ashgate Encyclopedia of Literary and Cinematic Monsters). Whew!

I've also managed to put together a possible table of contents for a new edited collection that has me energized. Its point of departure is this blog post, but I don't want to jinx it other than to say orange, greener, pink, blue, brown, possibly grey or white, with others on the way. Very preliminary, I know, but I will post more in the not too distant future.

quote of the day: "Esthétique du Mal"

by J J Cohen

Today's work is to compose an entry on giants for the forthcoming Ashgate Encyclopedia of Literary and Cinematic Monsters. The volume is edited by my former PhD student, Jeffrey Weinstock (little known fact: anyone who completes a thesis under my supervision must legally change his first name to my own). Composing the piece has offered a good excuse to re-open my own dissertation, an ancient work bound in human skin that seems to have had its title translated from the German (The Tradition of the Giant in Early England: A Study of the Monstrous in Folklore, Theology, History and Literature).

I was struck by the epigraph I chose for my thesis. It brought me immediately back to my graduate school enamorment of the poets Wallace Stevens and Charles Baudelaire. (Yes I know: who would have thought.) Here's the quotation I chose from Stevens' Baudelairian poem "Esthétique du Mal," about the impoverishment that arrives when you believe that you know enough:

To lose sensibility, to see what one sees,
As if sight had not its own miraculous thrift,
To hear only what one hears, one meaning alone,
As if the paradise of meaning ceased
To be paradise, it is this to be destitute.

Sitting on this porch, listening to the wind on an unexpectedly crisp day, thinking about the writing I've lost myself within lately, all I can say is: Words to live by.

work

I practice this recent fortune via dried greens and fermented tea.

by J J Cohen

Aiding me in getting work done:

1. Blog posts. That essay on race would not have come together without incorporating two ancient posts on the topic: they were the clearest articulation I've been able to achieve of the subject. I also lifted a portion of a book review I once posted of Lee Edelman's No Future in order to help convert an essay on queer stones into a piece suitable for a collection where it is slotted into a section on the anti-social thesis and ethics.
2. Preexisting writing. If all goes well I will have a draft of an essay today, my second almost-completed essay in a week and half. I'm cheating, though, in that both these pieces include chunks of conference keynotes and portions from other publications. Still, neither existed as it does today not that long ago.
3. A soundtrack. Right now it is a heavy rotation of Diego Garcia, Fleet Foxes, and Great Lakes Swimmers, with some Mountain Goats and Decemberists thrown in. Quiet stuff.
4. Dreaming up a new edited collection. I can't stop thinking about this idea and am developing it (I hope) into something important and fun. But I don't want to jinx it, other than to say I am thinking it'll be a chance to work with a press where I did much of my early work, and that's exciting.
5. Sudden changes of scenery. I was so weary of editing my "Queering the Inorganic" essay today that I packed my computer and walked through the blazing 95 degree heat to the Whole Foods in Friendship Heights. I'd convinced myself that I needed to buy kale chips and kombucha, though in fact lack of neither would prove fatal. The 45 minutes I spent in the café there have been the most productive of the day: the essay is now at the required 6000 words.
6. Facebook. Briefly checking in on social media can enable me return to my tasks refreshed. It's a good venue to vent, gripe, joke, and purge.
7. Quiet. I'm working at home, undisturbed. The kids come home from school a little past 3. It's amazing how motivating that is.

Impeding my getting work done:

1. Soundtrack. Having music with words can easily distract me.
2. Dreaming other projects. What better escape from the work at hand than to imagine the more exciting work to be done?
3. Facebook and Twitter. Too easy to spend more time there than I intend, especially when friends are being amusing. Damn those amusing friends. I need to surround myself with bores.
4. Dark edges. I don't want to slip into a small summer funk, though it's likely inevitable, given my relative isolation at the moment.
5. Looking at my Google Tasks list. To keep on top of the To Dos, I must compose a short essay from scratch by the end of Friday. By June 30 I also need to have those two draft essays in final form; complete a long overdue book review; and get the "New Critical Modes" issue of postmedieval off to press. Did I mention I have FOUR different conference keynotes to compose for the next season ... the first of which is in Melbourne? We depart for Australia July 23. Gulp.
6. Blog posts. Enough said.