history of the kaleidoscope

Book review: The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean

Es what swims under it, if there are enough fish and people hungry for fish). It is the drama of people going somewhere else, often riskily, often hopefully, what they find and the chances they take and how it changes them: the world in exhilarating and sometimes horrifying motion. For a while we can see the world without the usual cage of frontiers and categories. David Abulafia is writing about the Mediterranean over a stupefying timescale, 435,000 years, since he starts with an early human hunting camp found near modern Rome and ends with the reek of chips and sun oil on this summer's beaches. True, he marks out six different periods, six different Mediterraneans, but inside each of those is a kind of kaleidoscope - cultures, cities, peoples, islands all meeting, killing, trading and shifting allegiances and each with its own private logic. There's barely time, in 700 pages, to meet a dozen or so persons and hear fragments of their stories before we sail off to a different battle, deal or revelation. Whole cultures - the Iberians, to name one - get dismissed with an adjective; Iberians, it seems, were hairy. The Mediterranean also skews to the East, to Biblical stories we all know and not the ones we need to learn to balance the picture. It's wonderful how Abulafia never quite seems breathless - even though he's covering 2.5 million square kilometers, civilisations from Troy to Tel Aviv at a rate of six years to the page (he gets serious around 2,500BC). It's the reader, dazzled and a bit resentful, who finishes each page wanting to know much more. And the detail masks his one general point: a celebration of the rich and constructive muddle of language, culture, belief on the quaysides of the great ports.

Guest Post by David K. Wheeler: An Exhaustive History of the ...

In my undergrad at Western, I heard from each of my professors that titles are a finishing touch. From a writer’s standpoint, titling a piece is more akin to giving away in marriage than christening a new car. Raised and reared and ready for life on its own, a book, a poem, et al., practically chooses its own name. Sure, there’s the phase when Mandy only answers to Tiffany My years as a bookseller have ruined me. With lust for another’s hard-earned title, I work on a new poem or story with the cart put firmly in front of the horse, as though it were as simple as picking the book from the shelf and reading page one. Sometimes it pans out for me, usually only after accessing something of substance, deeper than the word c artography last month. Modest, articulate, and delightfully enticing. Authored by Saul Bellow (a stunner of a name itself), the novella is a meditation on first love—realistic, not like in a greeting card. Here are friends who have been in love for decades but because of their separate marriages, trysts, and infidelities, have failed to realize and admit it until death and divorce proceedings cross their mutual paths yet again. On a single shelf, I might be enticed by titles aplenty; and, I wonder how many are read differently among us. Do we access such a spare economy of words in as varied the ways we access the book’s content? I’d imagine so, considering how differently I relate to covers of books I’ve read. For instance: What you might expect as an informational guide to innocuous textiles and their uses might more deeply resemble a series of lessons about a man and his family, as its members and circumstance test the overall durability of the whole over time.