Thoughts on military mobilities, trade and capital accumulation, struggles over labour and citizenship rights in the making of transport infrastructures.
I think I read the Rime of the Ancient Mariner some years ago when i was young, but like a great many great works of literature, it is a poem that is wasted on the youth. Its sense of regret, loss, of cussedness, of deadened lives and of an anxiety so overwhelming that cannot be overcome […]
This beautiful little love story has some extraordinary bits about the Syrian revolution, the subsequent civil war(s), love, families, sectarian sentiments, and the sea: On the second day of Ramadan, I come home from work to find Jesus, Maalik, and Qais sitting on the back steps, vaguely matching in short-sleeved plaid shirts, whiling away the […]
In an extraordinary essay titled “The Smell of Infrastructure,” Bruce Robbins argues that the scaffolding of our lives, the infrastructure that carries shit and coal and lobsters and water and electricity is often made invisible. He has a rousing call to arms: Infrastructure needs to be made visible, of course, in order to see how our […]
In this moving obituary of an extraordinary woman, Jayaben Desai, this passage stood out: Desperate for work, the newly arrived accepted long hours and low wages, though the need to do so, Desai said, “nagged away like a sore on their necks”. When she decided she had had enough, the 4ft10in employee told her 6ft […]
John McPhee has taught David Remnick and Richard Stengel and a few other famous journalists to write, and apparently he is a fixture of The New Yorker, but his work is so much more interesting that those of his proteges, and I don’t ever remember having read his pieces in the New Yorker. I would have remembered […]
This fascinating little research report talks about how historical shipping logbooks can be used to keep track of environmental data. These logbooks include “historical logbooks recorded by explorers, whalers and merchants during epic expeditions between 1750 and 1850, including famous voyages such as Parry’s polar expedition in HMS Hecla and Sir John Franklin’s lost journey […]
Hav is like a nested doll. There is an original fictional travelogue published in 1987 embedded within the arc of a narrative that updates the story originally published in 1987 with “the events”; with the resulting diptych published in 2007. Then this embedded story is itself embedded within the life of the travel-writer/popular historian/fiction-writer, Jan Morris. Jan […]
I have just finished a prize winning Manuel Vázquez Montalbán detective novel with Pepe Carvalho as its central character, The South Seas. I was also a devotee of Andrea Camilleri’s Inspector Montalbano series (who was named in honour of Manuel Vázquez Montalbán). And of course Jean-Claude Izzo has been a revelation. What all the novels have in common are middle […]
Joseph Conrad’s The Shadow Line is an odd novella. A ghost story, a beautifully symmetrical tale, a strange little fable, or a metaphor for the First World War (as Wikipedia seems to say)? A young man is given command of his first ship. He finds that the previous commander of the ship had gone mad and died. […]
