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“no sailor’s card”

Imagine a trans-textual “proletarian” protagonist, one that has travelled the world, gets stuck into adventures aboard ships and on land, and has a laconic easy sarcasm and a way with words.  A kind of working class Marlowe with a better sense of humour and no penchant for imperial condescension.   Imagine, then, that this character […]

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“a city of many rivers”

It is extraordinarily rare to read someone whose work haunts you and then becomes part of your personal canon.  That you wake in the middle of the night wanting to look at the map of his imaginary geography.  The last time this happened to me was with Roberto Bolaño.  But my new discovery, courtesy of […]

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“…for rivers and seas are not to be regarded as disjoining, but as uniting”

From Hegel through Schmitt to Foucault and onwards, there is a way of thinking about sea and land not as inert backdrop but as factors determining politics, history and the transformation of the world. Hegel’s The Philosophy of History is geographically deterministic and intensely racialised.  His reading of Africa and Africans doesn’t even bear thinking about.  And […]

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The Lottery of the Sea

With thanks to Michelle Woordward whose 2007 blogpost on Allan Sekula’s Lottery of the Sea brought me here, it seems that Adam Smith has a wonderful passage about the sea which does the familiar two discursive manoeuvres -speaking of the sea as a place of work and as the romantic sublime- really well: [33] What a common […]

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The ship as the heterotopia par excellence

How wonderful is it that Foucault considers the ship the perfect heterotopia: Brothels and colonies are two extreme types of heterotopia, and if we think, after all, that the boat is a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is […]

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Transport capital

There is a lot to chew on here, but this sentence really struck me: “As for finance, there’s been no tendency for its executives’ pay to outpace that of nonfinancial executives. On the contrary: even during the bubble years of the 2000s, top 0.1% finance executives in public companies saw their pay rise by 52%, while nonfinancial […]

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“war, commerce, and transit”

“Let us have the courage to be crude: let us sweep the spirit of subtlety down the sewer along with the flags and the great warriors.” Paul Nizan Paul Nizan’s star burned bright and brief.  He was a classmate of Jean-Paul Sartre‘s at École Normale Supérieure and a member of the French Communist Party who resigned his membership […]

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The ship

Come end of January 2015, I will be on this ship:

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Edward Said on Cavafy in Alexandria

In his Reflections on Exile, Edward Said has a lovely elegiac essay called Cairo and Alexandria, which is an ode to Cairo and a eulogy for Alexandria.  I love the bits that follow (and especially sympathise with the fear of consulates disappearing): Her loneliness convinced me that Alexandria was in fact over: the city celebrated by […]

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“a seaman in exile from the sea”

Do you remember that haunting Conrad quotation from Heart of Darkness that says “The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.”  It is amazing and powerful, and […]

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