Wednesday, January 23, 2013

Welcome Aboard, Mind the Battery


My essay on the Boeing Dreamliner has been published over at The New Inquiry

 

I set out to write about the Dreamliner because I was intrigued by its innovative features and near utopian promises, details and visions hailed as the airliner merged into general commercial service around the globe. On one of their dreamy spreads for the new plane, Boeing marketed it as such:
Imagine inspiring views wherever you sit. Imagine arriving refreshed, with new technologies that actually invigorate. Imagine a plane with a smoother ride, where bumps are softened so you can rest easy. We did. And then we built one. The Boeing 787 Dreamliner. It's more than a dream. It's Boeing. Welcome Aboard.
If the airliner's reception was lukewarm (and in some cases probably not even noticed), this just made the case more interesting. As I was connecting through Houston earlier this month, I raced around the clamorous concourses in an attempt to see a United Dreamliner that was preparing to depart. When I got to the gate and stared out the window at the new plane, I was both captivated and a little let down: it's just another plane, another flight, ground-crew rearranging the baggage carts and cones, preparing for the next arrival. The Dreamliner's engines revved a vaguely alien hum as it prepared to roll toward the taxiway. 



When I first began to write about the Dreamliner, I thought I'd take a round-trip flight on the new plane and write about it while flying and between the flights. (I might still do that at some point, for a different kind of essay.) But then I started to read about about the reactions of people who had now flown on the plane (e.g., "Oh my God, the toilet is amazing!"..."The windows are a tiny bit bigger!"), and I started to think that another way to approach the object of the airliner would be from a discursive distance, as it were—as a new piece of technology provoking surprisingly underwhelming reactions & responses, attitudes and affects that reflect the current comportments of air travel. 

Then as I combed through the various reports and accounts of the new airliner, and as as I ruminated on the rather flaccid romance of commercial air travel as it has come to emerge in 2012, I found myself looking back at earlier airliners—two in particular developed in the 1960s, the DC-9 and the Boeing 737, two planes with very different lives and fates. Thinking about these planes, constellated historically and contemporaneously in relation to the Dreamliner, gave the essay a new shape and trajectory. 

As the Dreamliner experienced electrical fires and was eventually grounded around the world, the essay took on yet another dimension, one having to do with the lithium-ion batteries that nestle in our pockets and threaten the new airliners. It's curious that we can cognitively separate a battery from an airplane, but to isolate a mere wing or window as problematic would seem nonsensical: it's the plane, stupid.

For now the Dreamliner remains grounded, its future uncertain. This is a good time to think about the airliner, while we can't yet fly on it.





Tuesday, January 22, 2013

New Book Cover

I'm really pleased to show off the slightly modified cover for the paperback edition of my book, which will be out in a month or so!


The book has been re-branded by Bloomsbury, at I'm very happy with how they tweaked the cover for their imprint. (It's the little things.) And on the back, books-within-books, mise en abyme for curious readers...

And if your library has access to Oxford journals, you can access a new book review of The Textual Life of Airports forthcoming in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature & Environment.  I was very glad to see this review, as it acknowledges one of the trickiest and most subtle aspects of my project, namely how I am trying to understand the environmental qualities of airports.

Wednesday, January 16, 2013

Two Ways of looking at Emergency Slides

This gem just arrived in the mail:


An Air France A380 emergency briefing card, and some airport haiku, from my awesome & inspiring architect cousin, Emily White!

One haiku reads:
Passenger parade
Mysterious upper deck
Who is sitting there?
In other news, a 787 Dreamliner made an emergency landing at Takamatsu airport in Japan after an apparent electrical fire, and the slides were deployed:


To modify slightly the words of Jacques Derrida: the airliner is the site of a great affair, truly. For me, the airliner is a church in which secret rendez-vous are given. When I seen an airliner with emergency slides popped I tremble as if in a sacred place, full of refused, promised, threatening pleasures.

Tuesday, January 15, 2013

Deconstructing Brad Pitt cover concepts


Look at these lovely cover concepts for the Brad Pitt book!



These concepts are by the brilliant Nancy Bernardo, who also designed the award winning cover of the now rare Checking In / Checking Out.

My partner remarked on the 'architectural' feel of these covers, and this is exactly one of the valences that the title term 'deconstructing' is meant to play off of.

Seeing these covers makes me eager to dive back into the book and finish it.  I'm in the process of editing the chapters, which come from a range of scholars and fields; and then this summer I've got to buckle down and write my own chapter & an introduction to the book.  I'd also like to include an interview with Mr. Pitt himself; we'll see if I can swing that.

As the book comes together over this spring and into the summer, I'll post more about it here.