The Textual Life Of Airports

From the earliest airfields to the post-9/11 turn, this book investigates how airports figure in the American cultural imagination. >

If air travel was once the bold future, it has now settled into a mundane, on-going present. We no longer expect romantic experiences or sublime views, but just hope that we get from here to there with minimal hassle. In The End of Airports, Christopher Schaberg suggests that even as the epoch of flight approaches a threshold of banality, there are still mysteries to be unraveled around our aircraft and airfields. Drawing from his own experiences working at an airport, as well as interpreting these spaces from the perspective of a cultural critic, Schaberg explores the secret lives of jet bridges, seating areas, concourses, and tarmac vehicles, showing how the ordinary objects of flight call for wonder and inquiry. The End of Airports is not an obituary-it's more like an ode to terminals in the digital age.

Airportness takes the reader on a single day's journey through all the routines and stages of an ordinary flight. From curbside to baggage, and pondering the minutes and hours of sitting in between, Christopher Schaberg contemplates the mundane world of commercial aviation to discover "the nature of flight.†? For Schaberg this means hearing planes in the sky, recognizing airline symbols in unlikely places, and navigating the various zones of transit from sliding doors, to jet bridge, to lavatory. It is an ongoing, swarming ecosystem that unfolds each day as we fly, get stranded, and arrive at our destinations. Airportness turns out to be more than just architecture and design elements-rather, it is all the rumble and buzz of flight, the tedium of travel as well as the feelings of uplift.

In Airplane Reading, Christopher Schaberg and Mark Yakich bring together a range of essays about air travel. Discerning and full of wonder, this prismatic collection features perspectives from a variety of writers, airline workers, and everyday travelers. At turns irreverent, philosophical, and earnest, each essay is a veritable journey in and of itself. And together, they illuminate the at once strange and ordinary world of flight. Contributors: Lisa Kay Adam • Sarah Allison • Jane Armstrong • Thomas Beller • Ian Bogost • Alicia Catt • Laura Cayouette • Kim Chinquee • Lucy Corin • Douglas R. Dechow • Nicoletta-Laura Dobrescu • Tony D’Souza • Jeani Elbaum • Pia Z. Ehrhardt • Roxane Gay • Thomas Gibbs • Aaron Gilbreath • Anne Gisleson • Anya Groner • Julian Hanna • Rebecca Renee Hess • Susan Hodara • Pam Houston • Harold Jaffe • Chelsey Johnson • Nina Katchadourian • Alethea Kehas • Greg Keeler • Alison Kinney • Anna Leahy • Allyson Goldin Loomis • Jason Harrington • Kevin Haworth • Randy Malamud • Dustin Michael • Ander Monson • Timothy Morton • Peter Olson • Christiana Z. Peppard • Amanda Pleva • Arthur Plotnik • Neal Pollack • Connie Porter • Stephen Rea • Hugo Reinert • Jack Saux • Roger Sedarat • Nicole Sheets • Stewart Sinclair • Hal Sirowitz • Jess Stoner • Anca L. Szilágyi • Priscila Uppal • Matthew Vollmer • Joanna Walsh • Tarn Wilson

If air travel was once the bold future, it has now settled into a mundane, on-going present. We no longer expect romantic experiences or sublime views, but just hope that we get from here to there with minimal hassle. In The End of Airports, Christopher Schaberg suggests that even as the epoch of flight approaches a threshold of banality, there are still mysteries to be unraveled around our aircraft and airfields. Drawing from his own experiences working at an airport, as well as interpreting these spaces from the perspective of a cultural critic, Schaberg explores the secret lives of jet bridges, seating areas, concourses, and tarmac vehicles, showing how the ordinary objects of flight call for wonder and inquiry. The End of Airports is not an obituary-it's more like an ode to terminals in the digital age.

A pathbreaking exploration of the international and intercultural connections within Oceanian performance

What is the meaning of “adventure” as we enter the third decade of the 21st century, after a global pandemic, social and geopolitical calamities, and accelerating environmental catastrophes? What stories are humans telling about wilderness, remote destinations, and the most difficult thoughts thinkable? Adventure is a pinball assortment of unexpected encounters. Each chapter entertains a specific project, fantasy, or activity that dabbles with adventure – and runs into limits. Subjects range from Mars exploration, commercial space tourism, and adventure consumerism, to the day-to-day experiences of living in a world increasingly impacted by climate change and environmental disasters. Taking a wide-angle view – at times personal, at others theoretical – Schaberg explores our ideas about adventure and their narrative, cultural, and philosophical underpinnings.

The bestselling author of The Architecture of Happiness and The Art of Travel spends a week at an airport in a wittily intriguing meditation on the "non-place" that he believes is the centre of our civilization. In the summer of 2009, Alain de Botton was invited by the owners of Heathrow airport to become their first ever writer-in-residence. Given unprecedented, unrestricted access to wander around one of the world's busiest airports, he met travellers from all over the globe, and spoke with everyone from baggage handlers to pilots, and senior executives to the airport chaplain. Based on these conversations he has produced this extraordinary meditation on the nature of travel, work, relationships, and our daily lives. Working with the renowned documentary photographer Richard Baker, he explores the magical and the mundane, and the interactions of travellers and workers all over this familiar but mysterious "non-place," which by definition we are eager to leave. Taking the reader through departures, "air-side," and the arrivals hall, de Botton shows with his usual combination of wit and wisdom that spending time in an airport can be more revealing than we might think.