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The Cargo Cults of USA – Part II

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 […]

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Jayaben Desai

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 […]

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The Cargo Cults of USA – Part I

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 […]

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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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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 Brooklyn Docks

Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront (1954) is often ranked among the greatest films made in the US.  I had seen it when I had been very young but, because of a friend’s suggestion, recently reread the script.  I was rather shocked to find that it is a film that celebrates strike-breaking.  Yup.  Marlon Brando -the hero […]

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Factory Ships

Stories about enslaved fishermen on factory ships occasionally appear on BBC and other news sources.   A recent one tells us about the interdiction of one such ship by Thai police, which then lets the ship go.  Apparently Thai fishing industry is desperate for workers, with the BBC reporting that “by the [Thai] Ministry of […]

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Sailing on dhows and working in the auto industry

  A facebook friend sent me a URL to a blogpost which introduced Sons of Sinbad by Alan Villiers…  What struck me was the contention that the book was “probably the only work of western travel literature that focuses on the seafarers of the Arabian Peninsula.” I bought the book and read it cover to cover on a plane […]

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London comes closer to the sea

Dubai Ports World runs London Gateway which will be competing against Felixstowe and Southampton to be the top container port in the UK.  Like many other DPW concerns, there seems to be an iron (or ham-) fisted determination to not let workers unionise – although protests seem to have stymied this effort for now. I am hoping to visit the […]

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Interconnections

Dead Water by Simon Ings is the most fabulously dystopian novel about shipping, containers, ships, airships, tsunami, shipping, and dastardly deed that can happen when vast numbers of ships are circumnavigating the globes with vast numbers of containers on board.  One of his main characters invents containers: The box does not sway, or ping, or flex, […]

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