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 […]
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 […]
From Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into the Night (thank you Anya!) EDMUND: You’ve just told me some high spots in your memories. Want to hear mine? They’re all connected with the sea. Here’s one. When I was on the Squarehead square rigger, bound for Buenos Aires. Full moon in the trades. The old hooker driving fourteen […]
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 […]
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 […]
The poem has a whiff (or more than a whiff) of orientalism about it – but I love the last verse: ‘Cargoes’ Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir, Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine, With a cargo of ivory, And apes and peacocks, Sandalwood, cedarwood, and sweet white wine. Stately Spanish galleon coming from […]
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, […]
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 […]
I am ashamed to admit that I was a latecomer to the magic of Allan Sekula. Far too much of a latecomer. I discovered his stunning work on shipping and transport, last year; he died in August last year. His amazing film Forgotten Spaces stays with you, flashes of sound, slivers of images, whole stories, the mood […]
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 […]
