• MaoTheLawn [any, any]
    ·
    1 year ago

    David Foster Wallace has a great piece of writing about cruise ships. Very funny:

    https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/HarpersMagazine-1996-01-0007859.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwiWyITorIWAAxVB_7sIHRYhCHMQFnoECA4QAQ&usg=AOvVaw0IJhBZxa242O0XhWNZutYo

    • Cassandras_Beers [des/pair]
      ·
      1 year ago

      An article full of incredible lines.

      just a really funny footnote from within the article that stand alone well enough:

      4 I'll admit that on the very first night of the TNC 1 asked the staff of the Nadir's Five-Star Caravelle Restaurant whether Icould maybe have a spare bucket of au jus drippings from supper so that I could try chumming for sharks off the back rail of the top deck, and that this request struck everybody from the maitre d' on down as disturbing and maybe even disturbed, and that it turned out to be a serious journalistic faux pas, because I'm almost positive the maitre d' passed this disturbing tidbit on to Mr. Dermatitis and that it was a big reason why Iwas denied access to places like the ship's galley, thereby impoverishing the sensuous scope of this article. It also revealed how little I understood the Nadir's sheer size: twelve decks up is 150 feet, and the au jus drippings would have dispersed into a vague red cologne by the time they hit the water, with concentrations of blood inadequate to attract or excite a serious shark, whose fin would have probably looked like a pushpin from that height anyway

      • Cassandras_Beers [des/pair]
        ·
        1 year ago

        We saw some real horrors in port, local boats that looked as if they had been dipped in a mixture of acid <and shit, scabbed with rust and goo, ravaged by <what they float in. <Not so the Megalines' ships. It's no accident they're so white and clean, for they're clearly meant to represent the Calvinist triumph of capital and industry over the primal decayaction of the sea.