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'Recently, I found myself longing to reread John Steinbeck’s Log from the Sea of Cortez. I first read it when I was a teenager studying one of his novels at school; anxious for me to succeed, my parents purchased other Steinbeck books in the cheap Pan editions featuring naïve illustrations constrained by circular borders, as if seen through a telescope. The book is the author’s account, a decade after the event, of his travels in 1940 with marine biologist Ed Ricketts, who would become the model for ‘Doc’ in Cannery Row. Under the pretext of a loosely conceived scientific expedition, the men hire and equip a small purse seiner, a fishing boat, and set out from Monterey, in northern California, for the Sea of Cortez (also known as the Gulf of California), between the Baja California Peninsula and Mexico. Over six weeks, they pull creatures from the low coastal waters, to collect specimens for Rickett’s marine biological business, but also for the sheer pleasure of gathering them in their plenitude and seeing how these small animals propel themselves and behave...' (Introduction)
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Works about this Work
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A Change in the Air : Literature, Bombs and Colonial Terror in Climate Literature
2022
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Overland , Winter no. 247 2022; (p. 43-50)'Reflecting on Hiroshima, 6 August 1945, Karen Barad writes :
'Time stopped. The internal mechanisms melted...Time died in a flash. Its demise captured in shadows: silhouettes of people, animals, plants, and objects, its last moment of existence emblazoned on walls. Never before was it possible to kill time, not like this. Atomic clocks. Doomsday clocks. The hands of time indeterminately positioned as creeping toward the midnight of human and more-than-human existence, moving, and no longer moving.' (Introduction)
-
A Change in the Air : Literature, Bombs and Colonial Terror in Climate Literature
2022
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Overland , Winter no. 247 2022; (p. 43-50)'Reflecting on Hiroshima, 6 August 1945, Karen Barad writes :
'Time stopped. The internal mechanisms melted...Time died in a flash. Its demise captured in shadows: silhouettes of people, animals, plants, and objects, its last moment of existence emblazoned on walls. Never before was it possible to kill time, not like this. Atomic clocks. Doomsday clocks. The hands of time indeterminately positioned as creeping toward the midnight of human and more-than-human existence, moving, and no longer moving.' (Introduction)