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“…We’re all exiles”

It’s at moments of misfortune that we remember we are all exiles (Total Chaos, p. 98) I first read about Marseilles when I was around 10 years old and someone gave me the Persian translation of The Count of Monte Cristo.  Although Chateau d’If has become a tourist attraction on the strength of its prominence in […]

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LA/LB

There is an amazing bit in Alan Sekula‘s magisterial Forgotten Space where Angelenos of Latino origin sit at an outdoor space drinking beers and watching enormous container ships glide towards the unloading docks and cranes.  Ever since watching that, I really wanted to go visit the ports and on my trip to Los Angeles I did. LA/LB […]

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Piracy and Counter-piracy

There is a kind of romance around piracy.  It is the romance of anti-authority figures and of a life lived not just in the margins but outside the boundaries.   Just think about the masses of novels and films about piracy and the scholarship (and I will eventually write about Marcus Rediker’s extraordinary work).  Or think […]

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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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Value in motion

“The more developed the capital, therefore, the more extensive the market over which it circulates, which forms the spatial orbit of its circulation, the more does it strive simultaneously for an even greater extension of the market and for greater annihilation of space by time. Only in so far as the direct product can be realized […]

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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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