Beaches are places that give and take, bringing unexpected surprises to society, and pulling essentials away from it. Through monsters, we confront our tiny time between catastrophes and develop a recognition of Otherness by which an ethical understanding of difference becomes possible. Learning to read the monster’s environmental signs often helps humans determine the scope of the monster’s place in the eco/cosmic timeline and defeat it—until the epic cycle inevitably repeats; monsters live and live and live. Even so; when humans identify and confront monsters we do so at the risk of exposing our own monstrosity. When a massive creature is pushed into human proximity by the ocean’s wide shoulders, the waves deposit and erode human assumptions about itself and its environment; words, sounds, breath, water, wind, flesh, blood, and bones wash in and out. Chance encounters reveal us to ourselves anew. When we look into the inky backs of whales, or deep into vortices, what do we see?
In October 2014, the BABEL Working Group headed to the beach. The 3rd Biennial Meeting of the BABEL Working Group was held at The University of California, Santa Barbara, where the Pacific Ocean laid her face against the sand and experienced the conference panels exploring, examining, and exalting the margins of sea and shore, of earth and water. This volume of essays represents MEARCSTAPA’s panel, entitled, “The Nature of the Beast/Beasts of Nature: Monstrous Environments.” These essays explore what the environment reveals via monster theory, what monsters—here, whales and whirlpools—make visible or accessible to humanity and what they draw away from it.
Things from the Sea is a queer companion to Walk on the Beach, which emerged from another session at the same conference.
TABLE OF CONTENTS //
Introduction: Lines in the SandThea Tomaini
Ocean is the New EastAlan Montroso
Interlude I: Great Fishes and Monstrous Men (Shoreline)Megan E. Palmer
On the Backs of WhalesHaylie Swenson
Interlude II: Great Fishes and Monstrous Men (Undertow)Megan E. Palmer
Quickening SandsErin Vander Wall
Interlude III: Great Fishes and Monstrous Men (Tide Line)Megan E. Palmer
Conclusion: Sink or Plunge?Asa Simon Mittman
Asa Simon Mittman is Professor and Chair of the Department of Art & Art History at California State University, Chico, where he teaches courses on ancient and medieval art, monsters, and film. He has written
Maps and Monsters in Medieval England (Routledge, 2006), co-written with Susan Kim Inconceivable Beasts: The Wonders of the East in the Beowulf Manuscript (ACMRS, 2013, winner of a Millard Meiss Publication Grant from the College Art Association and an Best Book Prize from the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists), and a number of articles on the subject of monstrosity and marginality in the Middle Ages. He coedited with Peter Dendle a Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous (Ashgate/Routledge, 2012), and is the president of MEARCSTAPA (Monsters: the Experimental Association for the Research of Cryptozoology through Scholarly Theory And Practical Application). He is co-director of Virtual Mappa, with Martin Foys. He is now at work on the Franks Casket and images of Jews on medieval world maps. He is also an active (and founding) member of the Material Collective, and a regular contributor to the MC group blog. He was born and raised in New York, the son and grandson of artists, a family of writers of one sort and another. Thea Tomaini is Associate Professor of English (Teaching) at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Sworn Bond in Tudor England (McFarland Press, 2011) and of The Corpse as Text: Disinterment and Antiquarian Enquiry 1700–1900 (forthcoming from Boydell). She has published articles on ghost legends and death fascination in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and she is on the executive board of MEARCSTAPA (Monsters: The Experimental Association for the Research of Cryptozoology Through Scholarly Theory and Practical Application). She is a Co-Editor of Preternature, an academic journal dedicated to the study of the uncanny and supernatural. Professor Tomaini has also published poems in various poetry journals. She has yet to see a ghost.
