[Untitled] By Octavio Paz, Trans. Muriel Rukeyser At daybreak go looking for your newborn name Over the thrones of sleep glittering the light Gallops across all mountains to the sea The sun with his spurs on is entering the waves Stony attack breaking the clarities The sea resists rearing to the horizon Confusion of […]
Children, the Sandbar, That Summer By Muriel Rukeyser Sunlight the tall women may never have seen. Men, perhaps, going headfirst into the breakers, but certainly the children at the sandbar. Shallow glints in the wave suspended we knew at the breaker line, running that shore at low tide, when it was safe. The grasses whipped […]
There is very little that is original in this post, but I want to put it down anyway, because the affects of this moment are lovely; something that I want to remember when I think about so much that is functional, or dry, or frustrating, or riven with anger, power asymmetries and exploitation. What strikes […]
Confidence By Marsden Hartley (1877-1943) ‘We’ll have the sun now,’ the quaking sea gulls said ‘We’ve run the gamut of the thundering sea, one by one one by one, and though the wave is full of bread a wing is often tendon-weary of a thing so varied-vast; we do our geodetic surveillance, for herring are […]
Stand-Up Beer Hall Walter Benjamin Sailors seldom come ashore ; service on the high seas is a holiday by comparison with the labour in harbours, where loading and unloading must often be done day and night. When a gang is then given a few hours’ shore-leave it is already dark. At best the cathedral looms like a dark promontory […]
At Melville’s Tomb By Hart Crane Often beneath the wave, wide from this ledge The dice of drowned men’s bones he saw bequeath An embassy. Their numbers as he watched, Beat on the dusty shore and were obscured. And wrecks passed without sound of bells, The calyx of death’s bounty giving back A scattered chapter, […]
Just check out this incredibly fabulous painting of Hayreddin Barbarossa and Sinan Reis, 16th century pirates extraordinaire… (thanks Orit).
The British Library Map Collection includes this amazing map: They explain the controversy around this map: … in the 1970s in Britain, suffering from the Middle East oil embargo, with economic malaise and high unemployment, it was argued as such. There is a deep blue area on the map which curved around Norway on the map, […]
Given the centrality of the sea to the work of colonisation and empire, I love this Turkish graffito my friend Pascal photographed in Istanbul: Update: Pascal’s friend says this Deniz is Deniz Gezmiz… Good pun, in that case!
A truly beautiful book, Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea is full of quiet insight about leaving home, about families, about illegal immigration, and about malice. It has a brilliant humour. Here is a bit about a madrasa, a chuoni on the island of Zanzibar: Chuoni, that was where we went to learn the aliph-be-te so we […]
