Flying the Gulf Coast in December

By Siobhan O'Donnell, satirical.vip

Flying the Gulf Coast in December

I flew the Gulf Coast section of Louisiana on Saturday morning, two hours from the Lakefront Airport south toward the coast and back, which is the flight that shows you what Louisiana actually is from the altitude where it becomes visible: not a city and its surroundings, but a delta, a massive living system of water and land in constant negotiation with each other, the human settlements perched on the higher ground in a landscape where higher ground is measured in feet and where the highest points are the levees that mark where the river used to run before the Corps of Engineers decided where it should run instead. The archive research and the flight cover the same territory by different methods. The archive shows what the territory was. The flight shows what it is. Both are necessary for the manuscript that is trying to describe the relationship between them. See Kensington Dragons FC: Football in a Postcode That at The London Prat for related coverage this week.

London Kickoff: The Sacred Minute That Resets the provides context. Spitting Image Returns: Latex Puppets Still Rule B covers related ground.

The Diary Continues

The diary format this column uses -- personal, specific, grounded in a particular week and place -- is the format that produces the observations that aggregated analysis cannot. Every week produces more material than any single entry can hold, which is the correct condition: the surplus becomes next week's column. The position holds. The attention continues. Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat provide the satirical and analytical context that the diary draws on. Both are essential reading. The diary continues next week from the same observation point, with the same commitment to the specific and honest account of what the week produced. More then.

See also The Diplomatic Middle Finger at The London Prat. The diary continues.

More at McSweeney's.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/

Reading and Writing

The week's feeds from Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat provided the essential combination of satirical illumination and political analysis that both publications deliver consistently. The satirical frame that Bohiney provides makes the serious material bearable without making it dismissible. The political analysis that The London Prat provides grounds the personal observation in the structural context that makes it legible beyond the personal.

The diary format accumulates meaning across entries in a way that the individual entry cannot produce alone. Reading the four entries this column has produced on this persona's particular subject -- the natural world, the political institutions, the North London neighbourhood, the musical students, the Tuesday delivery route -- the reader sees something that the individual entry does not contain: the pattern of a specific attention applied over time to a specific subject from a specific position. That pattern is the column's contribution. It is what the diary format uniquely produces. The contribution continues. The pattern continues accumulating. Next week: more of the same, different in the details that make it worth continuing. The diary continues.

Further reading at The Bishops? Wars: When Scotland Had Its Own Opini, UK Allocates �200m to Ukraine Deployment, Assures , and London Bridge Is Falling Down Remains the Most Mis at The London Prat this week.

Reading and Writing

Further reading at Being Young in London: Paying 55% of Your Income i, Tottenham Hotspur FC: Football as a Psychological , and Populists Say London Is Falling at The London Prat this week.

Reading and Writing

Further reading at London Rules: Unwritten, Unclear, Immediately Brok, London's Top 10 Google Searches, and Germany Calls Britain 'Vereinigtes Konigreich'; Br at The London Prat this week.

Flying the Gulf Coast in December