I applied for and received an IU Presidential Arts and Humanities Fellowship for my Sea of Intimacy for the coming year. These are year-long awards with monthly meetings of the small group of awardees and the Associate VP in charge of the program (in the coming year there are eight of us), a week’s worth of writing and discussion time at IU’s Eastman House, and $50K in funding to do things like pay a graduate assistant, travel to archives, and receive a limited amount of summer salary (IU faculty are generally on 10-month contracts).
As what I’m writing is in the category of general non-fiction, meaning not just for specialists, this is the perfect kind of award to help me balance the nerdy disciplinary details and the things that are more likely to maintain the interest of readers who, unlike me, don’t see every little thing as fascinating. They haven’t put up the new cohort yet, but last year’s and the one before that (the program is in its third year) give a sense of what these groups are like.
I have a tendency to get impatient and want to show things, including potential publishers, what I’ve got before it’s really ready. This will, I hope, let me pace myself with a bit more of that all-important virtue of patience.
In the meantime, the words keep coming (80-90K of them at the moment, about half of which are the right ones), and the organization seems to be settling into something like this.
Prologue
Chapter One: 1999—Me Bastard, You Bastard
The Leaf Oba-chan
Mixture and Purity
Notes for an Ethnography I
The Melted Pot
Newcomers
Notes for an Ethnography II
Styling by Sofja
Chapter Two: Places Real and Imagined
Open Sea
The Nostalgia of Water
Nostalgia for Land
Where Donkeys Go to Die
Sailing with Paul
Na buzaru
U kulfu
Taking the Traghetto to the Ghetto
The Naked and the Bald
Shame and Silence
Two Islands
Where the Sun Sets
Chapter Three: Borders in the Water
Mixture and Intimacy
The One in the Many
Nearness as Space and Sense
Crossings
Sea to Gulf
Water Meets People Meet Water
Chapter Four: Venice or Trieste—An Essay in the Old Criticism
Chapter Five: Sangue Morlacco
The Luxardos of Zara
The Scourge of Irredentism
Morlachs
Chapter Six: Kin
Family Springs
Nostos
Searching for Skavatìl
Adriatic Nostalgias
Chapter Seven: Beings Real and Imagined
Man Scraping Himself
The Triestine
Anastasia
Medea
Slav(e)
Winged Lion
Calypso
Tracking Thomas
Diomedes’ Birds
Serpents, Dragons, and their Slayers
Eros and Psyche
Homo Adriaticus
Nicholas, Protector of Sailors
There’s another chapter after this, or it might be an epilogue, then probably a chronology, and maybe a glossary of terms. Still trying to figure out how to do the notes (at this point there are almost none), and what sorts of drawings, images, and maps to include.
Some of this may change, but the feeling as I reread the first three chapters, which are the most polished at this point, seems right. One careful reader friend has agreed. I’ll be asking a few more to have a look soon (for which, my friends, thank you in advance).
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Russell Scott Valentino 