Category: Sea of Intimacy

H is for Hawk

During the breaks at the ALTA conference in Tucson at the beginning of November, I found myself often answering questions about my Sea of Intimacy. This makes a lot of sense, as it was at the ALTA in Tucson in, I want to say 2021, that I first spoke about it with friends there, sitting… Continue reading H is for Hawk

My Roman History: A Review

Alizah Holstein’s 2024 book My Roman History: A Memoir (published by Viking Penguin) takes a long view of the author’s journey to a failed academic career as a historian of medieval Roman history. The journey is the main story, the drive and wonder behind it especially, including what otherwise might be esoteric questions of power,… Continue reading My Roman History: A Review

Propp at last

This only took us a little more than a decade. The image is linked to the publisher website (click on it to see more). And here’s the publisher’s description: Nearly seven decades after the English translation of Morphology of the Folktale, one of the most influential scholarly books on folklore, its sequel is finally available in… Continue reading Propp at last

Writing Above

Which is a way of translating “epigraph,” one of the genres I’ve been exploring as I write my Sea of Intimacy. In the process, I’ve come up with some rules to give myself some productive constraints. The constraints, I’m feeling, are needed because they — epigraphs, that is — are a little too fun to… Continue reading Writing Above

Teaching the Sea of Intimacy

Because I was already thinking in such terms, when a new “sustainability literacy” requirement was created at my institution last year, I created a new course, Sustainability in the Adriatic: Human–Nature In the Sea of Intimacy (SLAV-S365) and requested and received the designation to allow the course to count for the new requirement. It also… Continue reading Teaching the Sea of Intimacy

A Boost and Patience

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… Continue reading A Boost and Patience

Where Donkeys Go

Sea of Intimacy keeps surprising me. Sometimes it seems to be about more than what I thought. Other times, it zeros in on something narrow, specific, which then turns out to be more than what I thought. For instance, donkeys. I discovered the names of islands derived from donkeys in the Adriatic last summer while… Continue reading Where Donkeys Go

Adriatic book

The title has shifted here just a bit, but not the main one, which is still Sea of Intimacy, still from the same Predrag Matvejević line in his (I think more and more exquisite) Mediterranean Breviary: “The Atlantic and Pacific are seas of distance, the Mediterranean a sea of propinquity, the Adriatic a sea of… Continue reading Adriatic book

Words and the World

[This post also available as a podcast.] I’m always a bit more secure on the territory of words and their transfer across the supposed boundaries among languages. Maybe this is inevitable, given my expertise and how I have spent most of my time in the world. So in reading two books recommended to me as… Continue reading Words and the World