Category: Sea of Intimacy

Racializing Travel Narrative

Continuing my reading “around” the Adriatic, I picked up Jan Morris’s 1980 book The Venetian Empire: A Sea Voyage and read the parts that focus most on the Adriatic, skimming the other parts. The Venetian Empire in the period she’s interested in exploring included Cyprus, Crete, Constantinople for a brief moment in the 13th century,… Continue reading Racializing Travel Narrative

Two Islands

A colleague in Dalmatia, whom I have written about before here, mentioned a pair of islands in the Kvarner Gulf, the idea of which has fascinated me since last summer. A couple of weeks ago I finally got there. The islands are paired in a distinctive sense: one, which is called Sveti Petar has the… Continue reading Two Islands

Prospero in the Adriatic

I’ve been reading “around” the Adriatic as a way of imagining it, or rather seeing how it has been imagined. In this spirit, I picked up Lawrence Durrell’s 1945 book Prospero’s Cell. Durrell does not refer much to the Adriatic in his account. His Corfu, or rather Corcyra — he begins using the Latin name… Continue reading Prospero in the Adriatic

Murina

The Indiana Slavic department is co-sponsoring a series of films with the Ryder and our colleagues at REEI over the next several weeks. Yesterday was the 2021 film Murina, which we have on our list as a Croatian film though it is really an international co-production (executive produced by Martin Scorsese) with a good deal… Continue reading Murina

World in a Word

My friend Nikola, who hails from Sveti Filip i Jakov, to the south of Zadar, Croatia, tells me that in his local Dalmatian dialect there is a word for “open sea” that only applies to the Adriatic: kùlaf. When I first heard him pronounce it and looked at the spelling he provided, I thought it… Continue reading World in a Word

Kaplan’s Adriatic

I’m about 60 pages into Robert D. Kaplan’s Adriatic: A Concert of Civilizations at the End of the Modern Era and am still uncertain about it. With such a big sounding title, in such a nice new cloth bound edition from Random House, it seems it should be more substantial than it is so far.… Continue reading Kaplan’s Adriatic

From Non-Space to Landscape

I am struck by the notion of the absence of space in Vladimir Propp’s account of the wondertale. This is similar to Mikhail Bakhtin’s observation about the absence of the effects of time on the hero and heroine of romance, where they have adventure after adventure but, in the end, don’t seem to have aged… Continue reading From Non-Space to Landscape

Bringhurst on Translation

I just read Robert Bringhurst’s “The Polyhistorical Mind” lecture, which is the first chapter in his 2006 book The Tree of Meaning: Language, Mind and Ecology, and was struck by this observation: “Few people earn a degree in European Studies or Asian Studies without acquiring some rudimentary knowledge of a European or Asian language. Students… Continue reading Bringhurst on Translation

Balancing Memoir with the Rest

I’m finding that balancing the various aspects that I have set myself the task of writing can be one of the most interesting and fulfilling aspects of Sea of Intimacy. Memoir and travel can push things along but also become somewhat less substantial, while the more research-focused aspects of the book, such as cultural history… Continue reading Balancing Memoir with the Rest

More on Nature Writing

I found another, quite different, book that has added to my writing options, Where the Sea Breaks its Back, by Corey Ford. This is a much older book (first published in 1966), and though the prose has a somewhat dated quality at times, it uses some techniques that I am attracted to. The subtitle, “The… Continue reading More on Nature Writing