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Obres de Susan Harlan

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The Bitter Southerner Reader Vol 1 (2017) — Col·laborador — 7 exemplars

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Sometimes it is difficult to distinguish between a traveler and his or her luggage. We become our things.


This is a longish monograph about luggage: some history, but mainly a quite unedited barrage into what luggage has been throughout the ages, what constitutes luggage, some anecdotes about luggage, how people treat it, worship it, forget it, have it plundered, words on the evolution it it, et cetera.

At the best of times it's introspective and funny, like this:

And the boring black suitcases cause confusion. Excuse me, but I think that one is mine. No, I’m pretty sure this one is mine—let me check the tag. Oh, I’m so sorry—it looks just like mine. This is the baggage carousel dance. Trying to reclaim our property. Trying to identify it. Some people monogram their luggage. This is practical—a monogram helps you to pick out you suitcase— but it is also tied to identity in deeper ways. A monogram is the textual distillation of your identity and a declaration of ownership. This is mine. It becomes another brand: your brand alongside the brand of the suitcase; a mark the self, endlessly reproducible and immediately recognizable.


At its worst it's filler and seemingly just advertising, as with the favorable mentions of Louis Vuitton.

There's quite some matter-of-factly stand-ins:

Commercial airlines now estimate 190 pounds per passenger, including his or her carry-ons, and 30 pounds per checked bag. Four hundred passengers and their luggage, or approximately 75,000 pounds, makes up only 10 percent of the total weight of a fully loaded 747. (Fuel often accounts for a third or more of a plane’s total bulk.) But you can still travel on Cunard’s Queen Mary with unlimited luggage.


Still, as a whole, paragraphs can be interesting:

Disasters leave luggage behind. Genocide leaves luggage behind. In David Foster Wallace’s 1995 essay for Harper’s about the absurdities of luxury cruises “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” the invisible handling of baggage brings to mind the Holocaust: “A second Celebrity crowdcontrol lady has a megaphone and repeats over and over not to worry about our luggage, that it will follow us later, which I am apparently alone in finding chilling in its unwitting echo of the Auschwitz-embarkation scene in Schindler’s List.”


All in all, if you are a fan of luggage and factiods, I do recommend this book.
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pivic | Hi ha 2 ressenyes més | Mar 21, 2020 |
Luggage by Susan Harlan is one of the newest releases from Bloomsbury Press Academic. The series are object lessons about simple things in life that are often overlooked in our daily lives. Harlan is Associate Professor of English at Wake Forest University. She is the author of Memories of War in Early Modern England.

Traveling has changed quite a bit even in the last two decades. Gone are the days of two big bags and a carry on with your flight. I used to pack up my entire life in two seabags and a carry-on and move to a new military base. It was simple. Now you get one carry on and, of course, you can be randomly selected for extra Secondary Security Screening Selection. Live simple and you can live out of a carry on for a week. Need more, AmTrak allows four bags per passenger.

Luggage was a status symbol and one traveled with as much as they could. Steamer trunks and bags for things that are today much more portable or disposable. The more you (had) carried the richer you were perceived. Ship and train travel made plenty of room for bags and trunks. Although luggage makes up only 10% of a commercial aircraft weight the price rate is at a premium. Although traveling has gotten easier and the travel times shorter, taking one's luggage has gotten expensive.

Harlan gives a history of luggage while she packs and travels to Alabama's Unclaimed Baggage Center. If the reader ever wondered what happens to unclaimed baggage, Harlan takes the reader into the Unclaimed Baggage Center in Scottsdale. Luggage is purchased sight unseen, opened, cleaned, and sold to the public at discounted prices. Overall, it is an interesting look at what we use to carry our stuff in. From steamer trunks, to American Tourister's 1971 commercial of their suitcase versus a gorilla, to the invention roller bags luggage, has come a long way.
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evil_cyclist | Hi ha 2 ressenyes més | Mar 16, 2020 |
The first pages of this book are comprised of laudatory blurbs about the Object Lesson series from Bloomsbury Academic, of which this book "Luggage" is number 42. It seems that the previous books were magical. This book isn't magical, it is awful.

I love personal essays and I travel extensively and I thought "Luggage" sounded like a good read. All the whys and wherefores of those bags I obsess over trying to find the perfect one, designed by someone who travel packs just as I do. There is a bit about suitcases and their history here, but mostly it is about Susan Harlan and her dog traveling around by car with a backpack. We have descriptions of her car, her motel, the dog, the fake Bavarian town where they stop for the night. I gagged and quit reading.

I received a review copy of "Luggage" by Susan Harlan (Bloomsbury Academic) through NetGalley.com.
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Dokfintong | Hi ha 2 ressenyes més | Mar 10, 2018 |

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Estadístiques

Obres
4
També de
1
Membres
57
Popularitat
#287,973
Valoració
3.2
Ressenyes
3
ISBN
8

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