Coral and coralations with Melody Jue and Ann Elias
In many places that drilling had been attempted, there were these large reefs of I came across a reference that said like this one reef of Lophelia Pertusa, we named it after an oil pipeline.
Ann Elias:What are the implications of correlating corals with the tropics? What's been marginalized? What's been overlooked in that process?
Melody Jue:Hi. My name is Melody Jue. I'm associate professor of English at UC Santa Barbara. I'm a scholar in the ocean humanities and the author of Wild Blue Media, Thinking Through Seawater, as well as the co editor with Rafiko Vries of Saturation and Elemental Politics. I'll briefly introduce how correlations got started.
Melody Jue:This began with an invitation to develop a three day short lecture course for a graduate seminar at, summer school in Bologna in collaboration with Duke University. And I was racking my mind for what scale of material I had that would suit three days. And I noticed that a number of books had been accumulating on my bookshelf around the topic of coral, coral empire being one of these, by Ana Elias. As I sat with the material, I began to think about how media and mediation emerged in each of these texts, as well as what the texts didn't address, which were the weird corals, so soft corals, deep water corals, any corals outside the sphere of the tropics or outside the materiality of the stony. And this led me to think about the significance of non normative corals in certain ways and became the chapters that turned into the book correlations.
Melody Jue:The title could have been uncorrelating or uncorrelated, but correlations seem simple enough to to stick with and echoes other iterations by Iris Braverman, Nicholas Mangan, and others who've also been attracted to playing with the pun of choral and relation or choral and correlation. I'll leave it there and welcome questions from Analyas today.
Ann Elias:Thank you Melody and it's so good to meet you here today. It's lovely. I'm Professor Emeritus of Visual Culture at the University of Sydney. I've lived half my life in Auckland, New Zealand but my life as an academic has been in Sydney, Australia. I've published books on camouflage in art, war, and nature, on flowers in natural history and art, and on the underwater aesthetics of tropical seas.
Ann Elias:My last book, Coral Empire, which you mentioned, Melody, was published in 2019, and it discusses the adventures of early photographers in tropical waters at The Bahamas and also the Australian Great Barrier Reef. My more recent work investigates early theories of underwater optics and subaquatic animals, including fish and scallops. Looking particularly at an English naturalist, Francis Ward, I'm always first and foremost interested in visualizations of the underwater, and this takes me into areas of illustration, photography and filmmaking, and sometimes painting. I'm completing a new book on the cultural history of the underwater regions of Sydney Harbour, and it continues an inquiry into human entanglements with oceans. And here, I think, is the crossover with Melody's research.
Ann Elias:So, Melody, you do such interesting work on oceans, and thank you for referring to my book Coral Empire in your book Correlations.
Melody Jue:It was such a huge influence. I found it so useful to build on your insights about the optical medium of seawater and the way it was extending, the lens of the camera through its clarity in the in the situation of the tropics. And that really helped me think through what was going on differently in, spaces where coral couldn't be sensed in that same way, such as in the deep ocean where a lot of acoustics were used to sense corals and where they were, instead. There's just so much, I think, to imagine then with that that one insight about the extension of the lens through seawater, such as what other what other extensions are there in the ocean or through the sensory capacities of sea creatures. So I really tuned into when you said scallops, which, you know, where, where you're taking, the visuality of the scallop, which has those lovely, almost blue pearl like eyes that are light sensitive.
Ann Elias:One of the interesting things I found about scallops, and and and I came at them through an image. I learned that a scallop has up to 200 eyes across the mantle of its shells, and that intrigued me to start with. And then I learned that Henri Bergson was interested in scallops and how he developed his philosophy of the convergence of human and mollusk evolution from the scallop. It all corresponded with some research I was doing on a marine scientist, Australian, William Dakin. So it all kind of tied in.
Ann Elias:So I'm not surprised you're interested in that particular mollusk. But I really feel like there are some synergies between correlations, as you say, and coral empire that do relate to that mediation of a very clear tropical sea that photographers figured drew them because there was some correspondence between the idea of developing a photograph and the idea of the coral organism developing too in these warm waters. So I thought that was great. But also I think there are some synergies with my new book, The Under Harbour. And I think the two areas I would pick up on here are diving and corals.
Ann Elias:I wondered if we could start with your previous work, Wild Blue Media, and the subject of diving. My last two books, Coral Empire, the one I'm writing now on the Under Harbor, foreground the practice of diving, that is like diving suits and submersibles and how they opened up the undersea to art, science, and popular culture at the turn of the twentieth century, and kind of revealed it as a wondrous but also frightening environment, and an environment readily exploitable for industry and profit. So for me, diving is a discursive inquiry. I I use a wide range of historical sources from newspapers to diaries. But for you, it's an embodied and effective inquiry.
Ann Elias:You submerge to think in and through seawater, as you put it. And Wild Blue Media is a milieu specific analysis of the sea written as a scuba diver and academic, which I love. And you talk about thinking about what it means to immerse in the ocean and to quote you, the conditions of perception. So I'm really keen to hear more about the things that scuba diving has taught you as a humanities scholar, either about knowledge or a philosophy of care or as you put it, acculturated habits of thinking. And whether you are continuing to learn about oceans and culture with your successive dives.
Melody Jue:That was such a lovely framing, and I'm so happy to talk about diving. As I've revisited the work in Wild Blue Media, I started thinking more about the quality interpretation or the way that diving affords certain possibilities of underwater interpretation and what that could mean. That has everything to do with differences in the visuality of the world underwater and whether or not you bring a flashlight and also how your own movement and being moved by the ocean affects the possibilities of interpretation for a given site. So access is constrained or enabled by how the ocean itself is moving. In correlations, I actually talk about a different iteration of this by briefly reflecting on some diving I was doing in Fiji in 2020, just just before the pandemic.
Melody Jue:And there's this one drift dive, which is where the boat drops you off on one end of the current and you drift, you descend and then drift along a wall, and then the boat will pick you up at another location. So sometimes these dives take a bit of coordination because of how you need to be mindful of where the where the pickup point is so you don't get carried off. On this one wall, there were a number of, purple soft corals. There was a couple times where we were drifting along and I wanted to pause to look at the coral, but the current was so strong that I couldn't do this in the same way. So, the possibility of even taking a photograph was made difficult by the conditions of even observing the corals in the first place.
Melody Jue:And yet that current was so important for the purple soft corals themselves, which would bloom, or inflate and feed on the particles of water drifting by when the current was active. And so the strength of the current had everything to do with the timing of when these purple soft corals were blooming. So being able to see them in that state was also the same condition of possibility that delimited stain put to to, to see and to observe what they looked like a little closer, not wanting to touch them, obviously, but wanting to come a little bit closer to the wall. Given my background in science and technology studies and thinking a whole lot about Donna Haraway's situated knowledges, you know, I got to the point where I was began to care about what the conditions of possibility for visiting, seen, interpreting underwater places really were. Now, one thing that's changed in my life since writing Wild Blue Media, where I was thinking a lot about normative habits of embodiment as a new diver and getting used to what other scuba divers consider to be normative habits, like making sure you're streamlined, horizontal, tucking in all your your, regulator and the other hoses hanging off you so that they didn't hit anything, that sort of thing.
Melody Jue:I have a 1.5 year old daughter and this has presented conditions where I haven't been able to get in the water for almost three years now. So I was thinking that this is a bit like a voluntary selkie story condition, the selkie story being part of this northern European mythology where these seal women would emerge on lands, put their skins aside. It was, you know, thefted by some man who was holding it, and then they were compelled to be at home. My version of that is not not quite so patriarchal. This is all voluntary, but I think a lot about how my scuba tank has become a doorstop recently and how my wet suit has also been sitting on the hangar.
Melody Jue:And these are things to which I will return, I know one day soon. But the selfie story keeps returning to me because of Lauren Buke's, amazing short story, Her Seal Skin Coat, which imagines the vicarious experience of of being with a seal through this futuristic technology called a seal skin that would allow you to go into a sensory immersion tank and re, experience the transmitted sensory experiences of a wettle seal as it was coursing through the Antarctic. So more recently I have not been in the water but I'm thinking about it.
Ann Elias:Yeah, for sure because certainly having a child does change life but you also turn that into a kind of philosophical question, which is typical of your kind of thinking. But I was really interested in how you were talking there about noticing the more than human as a diver and how the ocean moves and moving with the ocean and going with the flow, you know, noticing the purple soft corals and enjoying the strong currents. And I'll tell you why that interests me. I've been looking at diving from an earlier era, and that is the turn of the twentieth century. And the kinds of divers who speak about their experiences as divers were often industrial and professional hard hat divers, trades people that worked underwater.
Ann Elias:Their pre Anthropocene, if you like, perspective on the undersea was that it was a place to battle, a place to have a fight, a fight with the tides, to go against the flow, and I guess this is your point, that you're involved with the politics of noticing, and eco politics that the early twentieth century didn't share. There was really no ethics of care that you talk about in 1900 among the kinds of divers that I've been researching, they certainly didn't nurture that kind of ecological care for the underwater. You talk about diving engendering a distinct kind of subject position, I'm just quoting you here, involving temporary alienation from the land that perhaps provides the preconditions of an ethics of care. I think that's a lovely quote. In fact, I've put it in my new book.
Ann Elias:But the divers who I've been researching, Melody, and who worked underwater in the Port Of Sydney Harbor saw themselves in combat with the tides and rocks and mud, and their engagement with the underwater was sensory, but it didn't lead to feelings of connectedness rather opposition. Since then, of course, we've had climate change and you are a product in a sense, not a product, that's a bad word, but you are a philosophical emergence of so much political discussion about the need for an ethics of care that is contemporary. But you do have this really interesting context which is those early divers. And I was thinking maybe the scientific divers. Are you interested in people like William Beebe?
Ann Elias:Oh, Cousteau, obviously. Sylvia Earle?
Melody Jue:Yeah. Sylvia Earle, I think, has care to start with. And, you know, maybe, Cousteau is a good sort of hinge figure between the military attitude that I'm going to sort of war against the sea or win against this fish I'm trying to spear or embody some kind of confrontational struggle as opposed to sort of swimming with because Cousteau has that whole change where he he becomes environmentalist after he sees more about how the oceans are changing compared to his first documentary, The Silent World, that contemporary environmentalists would see and go, like, you use dynamite to blow up underwater and then bring all these fish to the surface. He makes a change from that. His book, The Silent World, I found so useful for thinking about the phenomenology of diving because it was there that he was really reflecting on a lot of the more pleasurable sensory qualities of swimming underwater.
Melody Jue:But at the time, like, those two were co present for him. I want to go back to maybe something you said too about these confrontational attitudes towards the ocean that are undergirded by a lot of military figurative language or metaphors. And I just, taught this book California Against the Sea, which is by the LA Times, journalist Rosanna Shah. And that against in the title ended up being so important for some of the, detrimental attitudes towards sea level rise adaptation she was talking about. Like a lot of people don't know that sea seawalls, erecting these seawalls always causes erosion later down the beach.
Melody Jue:So to make one and protect one property implies erosion later. And, of course, these are favored by entities in The United States where I'm based by the Army Corps of Engineers. And through interviews, Xia talks about how no one likes the words managed retreat because it implies losing somehow. So she and others have given a lot of thought to what a more efficacious rhetoric is for describing relation between communities and sea level rise that doesn't draw on the language of military invigorations, like war, combat, or even the prepositions like against. I also wanted to mention one other thought regarding the divers and how they think of themselves.
Melody Jue:I think for for your new work, that seems like such a productive question just to pause and understand that, you know, not all divers over time and also by community have thought of themselves in in the same way. So in Santa Barbara, there's a whole diving community I have not communicated with that, trains in industrial diving. And I imagine, you know, would have a different relation to their time underwater. But something I've observed with recreational divers, many people pride themselves on the ability to use their air tank well. So this means maximizing their bottom time, not exerting themselves so much through chasing something, through doing the kind of, hard swimming that would raise your heartbeat a lot.
Melody Jue:They see the mark of an accomplished diver as maximizing your air. And to do that, you actually really have to relax a whole lot. The more you can relax and, just sip your air as opposed to guzzle your air, the longer you can spend underwater. And there's, one who's like, oh yeah, I used to hang out and at 90 feet with my friend for like the whole time and everyone else had already gone up and their technique was just sipping on the air and, achieving this, this state of very meditative relaxation. And I can't think of anything that is so, you know, different from the kind of tension or, wall like rigidity of a military attitude.
Ann Elias:Yeah. For sure. I mean, that idea of meditation and relaxation certainly didn't come into the divers who I'm thinking about who use dynamite to remove rocks and obstructions. They they dredged the sand. They reshaped the shoreline.
Ann Elias:They built the seawalls, all the things that you mentioned before. One of the questions one of the crossovers I think that's interesting for me with your work is that well, first of all, I became interested the undersea through surrealism and the influence of surrealism as an art movement, where artists took interest in the undersea to find unsettling images that were alien to everyday rational experience. And they wanted to encourage others audiences to imagine the world differently through the undersea as a fluid shape shifting realm like a dream. But you're interested in the idea of the alien ocean through the perspective of science fiction, and I thought you could just talk about that for a few minutes if you don't mind.
Melody Jue:You know, I actually have a surrealism connection too, and it's the documentaries of Jean Paul Levet. When I was in graduate school, they had been recently, released by Criterion Collection. There's a book in a booklet that went with this by the title Science is Fiction, which is sort of a fun inversion on science fiction, but science as fiction, which is a little bit delivered with a wink and a nod perhaps. Palmolive, who James Leo Cahill has, written about much, much more extensively in his excellent book on Palmolive. Palmolive was trained as a scientist, but was also going to the cinema in Paris in the 20s and 30s, very regularly, and had this interest in sea creatures.
Melody Jue:And so even though Wild Bloomida doesn't have a chapter on him, as I was developing the book, like, was thinking about Pompeo, quite a bit, including about including connections that are well known in between science and surrealism, like the automaticity of the camera and automatic writing or sort of this automatic viewing and the fantastical shapes of the sea creatures. And, the one about the seahorse, that Pon Levet filmed also had some interesting connections with sort of the, musing on the upright posture of the seahorse and like, oh, maybe we identify with the seahorse a little bit more because we too are vertical beings that have an upright posture. And I'm not quoting him directly there, but there is there is something on the on the verticality. And so, so his profiles on sea creatures and invitation to take the science seriously, but also think about how it's assembled, how it's ordered, and the music that goes with it too, I think was useful for denaturalizing what we think a nature documentary is or should be when we look at it from the distance of an era that has a whole lot of high budget blue planet, or, other, our oceans, other other series that naturalize reactions to the ocean.
Melody Jue:Whereas, Paul LeVeil was using surrealist techniques to produce, I think, the audience a certain sense of estrangement, but also wonder at the same time. And so, when I was coming to, you know, to think about these sea creatures and also reading Stefan Helmrich's highly influential book, Alien Ocean, which is not, saying the ocean is alien, but rather saying like, look, this trope of the alien ocean comes up all over the place and we can see it in, the discourse of marine microbiology and also in, documentaries that portray the deep sea as a space of alien creatures. Like, it's it's important to be on the watch for this. And I think to a certain degree, there's been so much alien ocean that in a way the ocean is alien, doesn't have as much capacity to surprise us. So something I share with surrealism is thinking about strategies to make it new or to make things surprising again.
Melody Jue:So I would try to recommend Paul Levy when ocean scientists ask for recommendations because I think he's someone that is just so instructive to turn to, today.
Ann Elias:Absolutely. He yes, James Carl's book is excellent on Paul Levey. And the way the well, Levey is an artist, scientist, surrealist who opens people's eyes to the wonder of marine animals. And an ethics of care about marine animals too, the seahorse and also the octopus. So that sense of estrangement and wonder comes through so clearly, as you say, from Pahlavi's work, which was often filmed using an aquarium.
Ann Elias:But he also devised that camera, yeah, to go underwater as well. But it was so much easier to use an aquarium. You could control the spatial dimensions in which you filmed. There were the many advantages of aquariums. And as a scientist, it was common practice in the early 1920s when he was working to use an aquarium.
Ann Elias:But he did both. He also was a diver as you know, so that's of interest. Melody, you've talked a little bit about how you transitioned from wild blue media to correlations. Just turning to correlations a bit more now. You start the book with that Pantone advertisement, and most of my writing really starts with a visual image too.
Ann Elias:So I was happy to see that. That living coral, that Pantone twenty nineteen coral of the year. Can you just take us through that advertisement and why you found it a useful launching point for the chapters that then follow in your book?
Melody Jue:Oh, thank you for that question. Yeah. Once I found this, I I knew this was this was the start. This was going to this is gonna go at the at the at the front. So this this advertisement from Pantone, every year, Pantone, which is this color company, for advertising, names its sort of new color and then, advertises sort of a suite of, design ideas around the color.
Melody Jue:The one I found for the year, coral, was so noticeable because it was occurring simultaneously as all this coral bleaching. And so it I I looked at that and I'm going, the advertisement for coral says like, oh, coral color. It's this sort of pinkish orangish hue and it's buoyant and it's uplifting and full of life. And I couldn't help but also think of the ways that, that stood in such stark contrast to coral bleaching, the sort of whiteness of coral bleaching. And, later found out that there was this campaign to nudge Pantone to be a little bit more environmentally conscious by saying like, oh, look, before coral bleaches, it also turns a series of these fluorescent cues.
Melody Jue:So sort of purples and yellows, that are noticeable. And so there was an, a group that worked with Pantone to, suggest suggest these. And then as I looked into it more, I like, well, the color coral, this also oddly in a way is anchored to one very particular coral organism, the red coral in Mediterranean, Coralis rubrum, which can be anywhere from sort of a light pinkish to like sort of a stronger, stronger red color or pink. And that seemed curious to me too. Why develop the icon, the color icon for coral based on this one particular coral, which seemed to center, Europe and the Mediterranean at the at its at its core, but also to obscure all these other corals.
Melody Jue:And so I I looked at this as a useful window for pointing out that the conditions of mediation underwater, needed to change depending on which coral was the focus. Not just iconic red coral, but potentially all these other corals. So I brought up purple soft corals earlier and, in the book, there's a chapter on thinking through the conditions of mediation for soft corals and why it might be difficult to use some of the same analogies to, books like coral as growing all these layers of a skeleton that can be read over time like tree rings, or like a book of climate history. Those analogies to coral being valuable as a record don't hold up when the coral is soft bodied. And so I wanted to suggest that, like, if you're going to think about conservation messages for the soft corals, these corals that essentially melt underwater, then you need different media analogies and the book is not just it's just not gonna cut it and nor is the, rhetoric of inscription, which is speaking more to a media theory audience that, really wants to hold on to that term.
Ann Elias:One of the interesting things about maybe correspondences between us is that with Coral Empire, I wrote a book about the development or the evolution or construction of the iconic image of tropical corals, stony corals, reef building corals. But you've written a book that critiques the iconic image of coral. And I was wondering then, you've started to talk about this. What are the implications of correlating corals with the tropics? What's been marginalized?
Ann Elias:What's been overlooked in that process? You mentioned soft corals. What happens when we shift our attention to soft corals or deep sea corals or cold water corals? I like the example you gave of the corals that grow on the oil rigs. Do you like to talk about them?
Melody Jue:Yeah. And, I should mention like I see this work as absolutely building on the insights of coral empire about the iconicity of the tropical corals because that's what queued me into thinking, well, how did they come to be icons in this way? Or just simply what if they weren't the icons? What if a different coral was the model for imagining coral iconicity? Through, a different invitation with a project on the media sees of the High North Atlantic, with a group of Norwegian scholars, I'd been asked to write a longer chapter on, something related to the, what they're calling the High North Atlantic and that, through sort of, many twists and turns led me to, look into these amazing, deep sea corals, Lophelia pertussis.
Melody Jue:Although that name is sort of under revision at the moment, it's the one that was historically used for a long time. And Lophelia pertussa are these deep water corals and they can live for thousands of years. And notably, they tend to correlate, in their geographic location with sites of oil extraction. So I looked to a couple science textbooks to learn more about them. And I came to these science textbooks as an English professor, which, for me means paying attention to, how are how are these textbooks, telling the you know, telling a certain story about the corals?
Melody Jue:What what figurative language are they using? What examples? And one of the examples I came across had to do with, this one engineer who, had worked with the company Statoil and he, noticed an anomaly in the sonar. The boat went to go check it out. They lowered, sort of their, they lowered their equipment down to take a sample and then brought it back up again.
Melody Jue:And they were surprised to find that this large cone shaped anomaly sensed by sonar, was in fact a, Lophelia, this huge reef of Lophelia. And, in many places that drilling, had been attempted, there were these large reefs of, Lophelia. And I was so struck that, again, in one of these science textbooks, I came across a reference that said like this one reef of Lophelia Pertusa, we named it after an oil pipeline. So it was called Halton Pipe Reef Cluster. That got me thinking about, oh, well, you never think of tropical stony corals next to sites of oil extraction.
Melody Jue:So isn't this interesting that all of a sudden corals spatially correlate with this process, all the human created infrastructure that goes into it, whether this means pipelines or, rigs or the boats, that are doing surveys, for for the oil companies. And I think that that's that's a story that hasn't been circulated, enough. Whereas, the situation of coral bleaching, in places that, as you in your book, Coral Empire, have, you know, pointed out often get conflated as kind of the same place in a lot of photographic representation.
Ann Elias:Yes. I I think your book is really important for those alternative stories about corals, ones that don't often get heard. And it certainly got me doing a bit more research and finding that, in fact, there are corals at the bottom of Sydney Harbor that a lot of people wouldn't know about and that also undergo bleaching and have done recently with ocean walling. But these are stories, as you say, that are not circulated to the extent of the very emotional subject of bone white, bleached, stony corals that have become this ubiquitous symbol of the oceanic Anthropocene. We've, as you say, learned to correlate coral with living tropical corals, and that exotic orientalism of beautiful, rich colors shimmering under clear, sparkling surfaces of water and so on.
Ann Elias:Why do you think that tropical coral reefs have come to symbolize the human guilt of planetary crisis rather than say those soft corals that have bleached at the bottom of Sydney Harbor, for example.
Melody Jue:I kind of wonder about this too, and maybe it goes back to what the stony corals leave behind, which, for a lot of reasons, you know, going back to the at this point, almost over quoted Shakespeare passage in The Tempest about Full Fathom Five, his father lies there, his bones are coral made. Those are pearls that were his eyes. And I may have missed a word or two here, but the image of human bones and the echo with the stark bleach white image of corals, it's it's sort of, I think, powerful because it's undeniable that change has happened and the literal taking away of color, in in these sites just, know, can't help but make an impact, on on viewers, you know, quite viscerally and immediately. Whereas documentaries that, do talk about the soft corals, do so in relation to stony corals too. So I'm thinking here of in chasing coral, there is some interesting attention to soft corals.
Melody Jue:But when the protagonist of that documentary handles them, they absolutely disintegrate in his hands. So I was really struck by the difference between how soft corals, leave such less, tangible of a trace, something that is sort of slimy and, viscerally compelling in its disintegration for the witness that's personally there. But the so many corals leave behind an image and I think that may be why it continues to be so powerful.
Ann Elias:Yes. That signification of bone or skeleton seems to really resonate with the public imagination. Maybe the question of your book's title could come up now, correlations. Are you interested in correlations between corals and human activities? Do you mean by correlations acculturated habits connected with corals, such as what we've been talking about here, the link between a stony coral and an idea of cultural significance.
Ann Elias:Could you just talk us a little bit through your title?
Melody Jue:Sure. Took me a while to sort of land on this one. And when I when I did, then I did a whole bunch of background research and discovered, oh, there there have been people who took up this title before as well. So I think I mentioned Iris Braverman in this really eloquent four page essay and, also the artist Nicholas Mangan. And then there was even an environmental group in the nineties, that named itself correlations, through a kind of acronym strategy.
Melody Jue:And each of these was interested in the correlations between coral and climate, so in tracing correlations. And my book, tries to think of that as a first step. So what are the correlations that we, as in a sort of broad environmentally, educated public have been have been making with corals, whether this is with corals and human values, corals and, different cultural touchstones like corals and Medusa, corals and bones, or whether or not some of these correlations should be rethought to open reopen the category of the iconic to let other, other corals in, and then imagine alternative correlations, that maybe had been submerged, that had been, not traced or told. And, I mean, as we spoke about earlier, one of the major ones I hit upon was the correlation between deep sea corals and oil, which came into the news somewhat during the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. But I'm not sure it has come into the kind of representational consciousness that we we study in visual culture quite quite as effectively.
Melody Jue:So that seems to me like a place to push a little bit more.
Ann Elias:Well, I think you have done that very well with the the book. Congratulations on that. Just wondering where you're going from here.
Melody Jue:You know, interestingly, I've been writing about seaweeds for a long time. So the correlations project really was a pause that I took in the seaweed writing to, to sit down and complete, what for me was was is a short because this is with the Minnesota Forerunner series, a short and doable book. So, because I could see I could see the end, I I sat down I sat down and wrote it. So at this point, I think I'm I'm gonna be turning back to some of the, material on seaweeds and mediation, and also thinking about this, this trope of seaweeds as messianic figures for addressing climate change and the way they're, imagined as being kind of a future of aquaculture, to sequester carbon, able to substitute for petroleum based plastics, and see where this goes. But I'm not sure yet what genre or shape that's going to take quite yet.
Melody Jue:But the title of this in some form will be Holding Sway.
Ann Elias:Oh that's lovely. I very much like those pressed seaweeds which are so much part of women's culture in the nineteenth century. Visiting the seaside and the culture that went with visiting the seaside, pressing seaweeds. There's some beautiful collections and libraries of pressed seaweeds. For myself, I'm heading in the direction of mollusks, mollusk shells.
Ann Elias:Yeah, scientific illustrations, I think. I've come across some alluring scientific illustrations of mollusk shells by a scientist called Charles Headley, who lived in New Zealand. I think he lived in The United States at some point, but also in Australia. And a kind of underrepresented scientist, and I thought I'd start with his illustrations. But again, I'm not quite sure what direction I'm going in with that.
Ann Elias:Melody, it's been so great talking with you. Thanks for having me as a guest today. I'd just like to say how exciting it has been to read both your books.
Melody Jue:Thank you for being such an amazing oceanic interlocutor for this conversation. And I very much look forward to reading your work on the Sydney Harbor as it's coming out. And it's been a pleasure to speak about diving in all things oceanic with correlations. So, thank you for making the time to speak today.
Ann Elias:Thank you.
Narrator:This has been a University of Minnesota Press production. The book Correlations by Melody Chu is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.