Hav is like a nested doll. There is an original fictional travelogue published in 1987 embedded within the arc of a narrative that updates the story originally published in 1987 with “the events”; with the resulting diptych published in 2007. Then this embedded story is itself embedded within the life of the travel-writer/popular historian/fiction-writer, Jan Morris. Jan […]
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 […]
“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 […]
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 […]
Pirate Utopias is a strange little book – at once a bit disappointing and a portal to further discovery. The concept behind it is fabulous enough (about which more below) and the blurbs on the back -by Christopher Hill, Marcus Rediker, and Peter Linebaugh- give one whiplash until you read them closely and they all hold […]
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 […]
Sitting on a rooftop overlooking container ships leaving the port of Beirut and sailing into the haze of the Mediterranean and other container ships powering towards the port from the west makes me VERY VERY happy I am going to be spending the next few years of my life working on ships, ports, and shipping. […]
Turner, South Shields, 1823 My friend Isabelle mentioned the Yemeni community of South Shields to me (she also sent me that amazing Turner posted above). Significant numbers of Yemeni seafarers, who used to work on British merchant vessels, settled in various coastal towns in Britain and established seafaring diasporas. The Yemenis of Britain […]
Regimes of land tenure and ownership must form significant elements in the development of ports. How quickly do these regimes change? What are the processes by which title deeds are issued, exchanged, bought, and sold? Are there demonstrable differences between the land tenure regimes in the different countries of the Middle East? And differences […]
