The Gamming » the sublime

This one is for my friends Rachel Shabi and Waleed Hazbun, who might recognise something of the pathos of our common paternal utopias in it… 11 February 2015 “Hyperbole is the main stock in t...

https://thegamming.org/2015/03/02/machineries-of-joy-wrestling-with-the-technological-sublime/

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. Shal...

https://thegamming.org/2015/02/03/nothing-was-what-they-said-not-safety-not-the-sea/

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 imagina...

https://thegamming.org/2014/06/08/a-city-of-many-rivers/

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”...

https://thegamming.org/2014/03/21/truth-uncompromisingly-told-will-always-have-its-ragged-edges/

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 l...

https://thegamming.org/2014/03/20/the-prose-and-poetry-of-toiling-inon-transport/

When I started my maritime-and-ports novel-reading adventure, three people suggested Hans Henny Jahnn’s The Ship to me.  One of the three is an author I hold in awe, so I ordered the book (pr...

https://thegamming.org/2014/03/18/terror-is-stronger-in-us-than-delight/

My sleep last night was bookended by two sublime mysteries – the shipping forecast with its peculiar poetry which maps a kind of mysterious geography with gale warnings and low visibility Vikin...

https://thegamming.org/2014/03/18/mysteries/

Before starting any project, I like to self-saturate with novels about a subject.   It is one of the greatest pleasures of learning something entirely new, and it is a way to get a sense of the ...

https://thegamming.org/2014/03/17/it-is-not-down-in-any-map-true-places-never-are/