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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
How wonderful is it that Foucault considers the ship the perfect heterotopia: Brothels and colonies are two extreme types of heterotopia, and if we think, after all, that the boat is a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is […]
There is a lot to chew on here, but this sentence really struck me: “As for finance, there’s been no tendency for its executives’ pay to outpace that of nonfinancial executives. On the contrary: even during the bubble years of the 2000s, top 0.1% finance executives in public companies saw their pay rise by 52%, while nonfinancial […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
