Confidence By Marsden Hartley (1877-1943) ‘We’ll have the sun now,’ the quaking sea gulls said ‘We’ve run the gamut of the thundering sea, one by one one by one, and though the wave is full of bread a wing is often tendon-weary of a thing so varied-vast; we do our geodetic surveillance, for herring are […]
At Melville’s Tomb By Hart Crane Often beneath the wave, wide from this ledge The dice of drowned men’s bones he saw bequeath An embassy. Their numbers as he watched, Beat on the dusty shore and were obscured. And wrecks passed without sound of bells, The calyx of death’s bounty giving back A scattered chapter, […]
In the last two weeks, two ships filled to the brim with hundreds of Syrian refugees have been brought in to Italian ports. The ships seem to have left Eastern Mediterranean, and sailed parallel to the Turkish coast, picking up most passengers from Mersin or other ports in Turkey, and arriving in Greek waters, heading […]
This book is neither about ports and the labour of dockers nor about shipping and transport. But I have to write about it because it is one of the most stunning books I have stumbled into during my obsessive reading of books about ships and ports and transport. I picked up Mutiny because of its […]
I am reading two books simultaneously through both of which trains rattle and whistle and snake… But which in some ways are as different as they can be. Bill Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis is a panoramic history of the making of Chicago in the 19th century; it is a work of virtuoso research and of historical imagination. It is […]
I grew up with a number of Persian-language classic novels on the bookshelves of our house. Throughout my childhood (I was a precocious reader) and teenage years, I tended towards Sadeq Hedayat and Simin Daneshvar and Jalal Al-e-Ahmad. A bit predictable really. My father was from the south; Jahrom, specifically. He had a soft spot for a number […]
They are EVERYWHERE! Here is Michael Dirda writing about campy pirates: Many [film pirates] are also distinctly camp. The first pirate most of us encounter is Captain Hook, who, as played by Cyril Ritchard in the Mary Martin version of Peter Pan, glories in the mincing affectation and extravagance of a boisterous drag queen (there were, […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
