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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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“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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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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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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“Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges…”

From Melville’s Billy Budd: …war contractors, whose gains, honest or otherwise, are in every land an anticipated portion of the harvest of death…. And he is the inventor of “fog of war” too: Forty years after a battle it is easy for a noncombatant to reason about how it ought to have been fought.  It […]

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On the interweaving of fiction and reality

I hate to use the formally inventive and affectively brilliant Cities of Salt (by Abdulrahman Munif) as a sociological text or a total mirror of reality, which is what so many people do probably because until America’s Kingdom came along very few texts actually gave us something so powerful about the texture of racialisation in Aramco’s labour camps […]

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The Grey Man

On second thought, it is not just the atmosphere of terror in the ship that makes Jahnn’s book so interesting – it is also George Lauffer.  He is what Jahnn fabulously calls “the supercargo” alongside his sealed coffin-shaped secret cargo of many crates, which the seamen imagine may be filled with living or dead female […]

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“Terror is stronger in us than delight”

When I started my maritime-and-ports novel-reading adventure, three people suggested Hans Henny Jahnn’s The Ship to me.  One of the three is an author I hold in awe, so I ordered the book (printed on demand by Amazon) – surprised that I couldn’t find the book in any form anywhere and that there was very little […]

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“It is not down in any map; true places never are.”

Before starting any project, I like to self-saturate with novels about a subject.   It is one of the greatest pleasures of learning something entirely new, and it is a way to get a sense of the texture and richness of a place or a subject in ways that scholarly writing very rarely can convey. […]

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