Cabin Window Research Articles

Pétur Olivia Clare (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Ash fell from the wind. She began to take long walks. Before breakfast, after lunch, she walked the weed-pocked path to the lake. White ash turned the lake’s surface to desert and the tops of fjalls invisible. By the third morning, ash from Eyjafjallajökull coated the porch, the porch rail, the seats of the porch chairs, and the rented station wagon. The hrossagaukur had disappeared, and the cabin’s weathervane creak had stopped. Laura told Adam, again, she was going out. He was her son. She tied a gauze scarf around her nose and mouth. “I look like a robber,” she said. “No one will see you.” He opened the door for her into the otherworldly weather. She was garish in the ash in her flannel green coat. At the cabin window, he watched her diminish, and like a little boric flame a quarter mile out, her back rose on the path, then shrank and went out. [End Page 63] This dale in Iceland had a permanent population of eighty-six. They had seen almost no one … once or twice, until nine or ten at night, they’d heard shouting children. Icebabies, Laura called them. You can’t ever see them, of course. They’re made only of sound. Adam was a data systems analyst. He was thirty-six. He lived in a onebedroom apartment in Palo Alto. Laura also lived in Palo Alto, in a house she’d once shared with Adam’s father on the other side of town. Iceland for two weeks had been her idea for her birthday. She’d just turned sixty-one, and she’d told Adam she didn’t believe it, and he shouldn’t, either. You look in the mirror and acknowledge you’re as old as you like, she'd said. She felt nineteen, mostly. She looked fifty. She returned from her walk late enough that Adam had made soup. The cabin had five rooms, floors of dull old wood, a kitchen and dining area adjoining the living room. There was a woodstove, a coffee table with a fan of women’s fashion magazines, an expensive guitar on its stand, a box of black rocks and cockles from the lake and elsewhere, a striped sofa, a cushion ripped, all owned by the family they rented from. “On the news they’re saying don’t go out at all,” he said. “But no one’s said anything like that to me.” She untied her scarf. Bits of ash stuck to the silvering blonde roots of her hair. She was tall, too slim. She wore blue jeans and tall boots. “On TV, Mother.” He put a roll and a bowl in front of her, soup with halibut and celery from the store in town. “Well, people are out there,” she said. “I talked to some people.” “Who’s out there? Rangers?” “I think it’s coming down most at the lake,” she said. “Right now it’s like the moon. It’s not dangerous on the moon.” She put her scarf on the small dining room table. “Come with me, come to the lake. There isn’t much ash.” “It’s unhealthy.” She picked up a chunk of fish in her spoon. “What does anti-matter mean?” “What?” “What’s anti-matter?” “Anti-matter?” Adam wiped his mouth with his napkin. He liked when she asked questions he could answer. “Sure, it’s like a mirror image, a negative image of matter, like matter’s twin. And there are anti-protons. Anti-electrons—” “What happened to all the fish?” she said. “In the lake? All dead, from the ash.” “I don’t think they feel anything.” [End Page 64] She walked in, waking Adam from a Nap in a chair beside the fire in the woodstove. It had been two days. Her scarf was tangled around her neck. Her green coat off, a rip in her shirt at the elbow. She held her arm to her chest: a bright red cut was visible within the rip. She went into the bathroom with a sleepwalker’s involuntary smile and...

Atlantic Modernity and the Wreckage of History Andrew Opitz (bio) Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History by Ian BaucomDuke University Press, 2005. The British Slave Trade and Public Memory by Elizabeth Kowaleski WallaceColumbia University Press, 2006. In September 1781, the British slaver Zong set sail from the western coast of Africa en route to the busy slave markets of Jamaica. In addition to its captain, Luke Collingwood, and a distinguished passenger named Robert Stubbs, the retiring governor of a coastal slave fort, the ship had a crew of seventeen sailors and a cargo of 440 Africans bound for sale and slave labor in the colonies. Disease and insufficient provisions made the transatlantic crossing particularly hellish and, as the Zong approached Jamaica, Captain Collingwood determined that he could best serve the interests of the voyage's investors by throwing the feeblest slaves overboard. Since the Zong was protected by a marine insurance contract, the owners could then seek compensation for their lost "property." Captain Collingwood's financial calculations led to a mass killing that would one day be called the Zong Massacre. Over the course of three days, the slavers forced 133 shackled human beings into the ocean. The ship's sole passenger, Governor Stubbs, passively watched the atrocity unfold from belowdecks as body after body plunged into the sea beneath his cabin window. Stubbs would later be called to testify at a trial in Liverpool, but the horrifying events [End Page 251] he witnessed were viewed by the court as potential insurance fraud rather than cold-blooded murder. When the Zong incident became publicly known, it helped to create a transatlantic abolition movement that would eventually close down the Middle Passage. Because of this, the Zong massacre is sometimes said by historians to mark the beginning of the end of transatlantic slavery. I mention the Zong here, however, because it is directly connected to two stimulating new pieces of scholarship that claim that the Atlantic slave trade is not merely our past but also our present—that the economic logic that produced the Zong tragedy continues to shape the twenty-first-century world in which we live. The Zong massacre and its aftermath are at the heart of Ian Baucom's ambitious new book Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History. Asserting that "time does not pass, it accumulates" (24), Baucom follows Walter Benjamin in suggesting that the past can be seen as series of catastrophes that exist in constellation with our present historical predicament. This connection becomes apparent at certain times and places especially weighted with the wreckage of history. For Benjamin, for example, the arcades of nineteenth-century Paris are "centers of commerce in luxury items" in constellation with twentieth-century manifestations of commodity capitalism (The Arcades Project, [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999], 15). Ian Baucom argues that something similar can be said about the blood-stained Zong and its home port of Liverpool, one of the chief financial capitals of the eighteenth-century slave trade. Noting that the transatlantic operations of the slave trade helped to popularize now-familiar institutions like the insurance industry and the credit financing of speculative ventures, Baucom sees the Zong incident as an early embodiment of "finance capitalism," a culture of frenzied speculation that sociologist Giovanni Arrighi associates with transitional oscillations in the history of capitalism. This leads Baucom to identify the moment of the Zong massacre as one with which our "time" is noncontemporaneously contemporary, to read it as a moment in which a globalizing finance capital begins to develop those stock, bond, and paper money networks, those circuits of debt and credit financing . . . which inaugurate an Atlantic cycle of capital accumulation, whose nineteenth-century midpoint enshrines commodity capitalism but whose [End Page 252] late-eighteenth and late-twentieth-century moments of beginning and end . . . operate under the signs of finance capitalism. (150) The Zong massacre is thus not simply a past act of violence but an event that encapsulates a wider capitalist logic that has only been perfected and intensified in our present historical moment. Baucom's book goes on to observe that the contemporary relevance of the...

Cabin Window Research Articles

Articles published on Cabin Window

Climate system design methodology for a new family of unified combine harvesters

Relationship between mechano-bactericidal activity and nanoblades density on chemically strengthened glass

Study on the Solar Radiation and Heat Transfer of Cabin Fabric Using the Finite Volume Method

Assessment of fatigue damage of fluoroorganic aircraft glass using digital holography methods

Violence in the Gilded Ages, Then and Now

Hi-tech windows in the aircraft cabin: The impact of display latencies on passengers‘ comfort

A Bright Nowhere

Vibro-acoustics response of a simplified glass window excited by the turbulent wake of a quarter-spherocylinder body.

Vibro-acoustic model of an active aircraft cabin window

Last Stand

PHITS simulations of the Protective curtain experiment onboard the Service module of ISS: Comparison with absorbed doses measured with TLDs

Comparison of noise level of tractors with cab and without in different gears on driver ear and bystander

Pétur

Atlantic Modernity and the Wreckage of History

Case Study: Predicted Effect of Station Design Changes on High Speed Train Noise

The KidSat project flight system

Out of Hardware to Open Systems in Record Time

Effectiveness of accommodative aids in reducing empty field myopia in visual search.

The Darkening Green

Glass heat screens for control cabin windows

Lead the way for us

Editage

Paperpal

R Discovery

Mind the Graph

Cabin Window Research Articles

Articles published on Cabin Window

Climate system design methodology for a new family of unified combine harvesters

Relationship between mechano-bactericidal activity and nanoblades density on chemically strengthened glass

Study on the Solar Radiation and Heat Transfer of Cabin Fabric Using the Finite Volume Method

Assessment of fatigue damage of fluoroorganic aircraft glass using digital holography methods

Violence in the Gilded Ages, Then and Now

Hi-tech windows in the aircraft cabin: The impact of display latencies on passengers‘ comfort

A Bright Nowhere

Vibro-acoustics response of a simplified glass window excited by the turbulent wake of a quarter-spherocylinder body.

Vibro-acoustic model of an active aircraft cabin window

Last Stand

PHITS simulations of the Protective curtain experiment onboard the Service module of ISS: Comparison with absorbed doses measured with TLDs

Comparison of noise level of tractors with cab and without in different gears on driver ear and bystander

Pétur

Atlantic Modernity and the Wreckage of History

Case Study: Predicted Effect of Station Design Changes on High Speed Train Noise

The KidSat project flight system

Out of Hardware to Open Systems in Record Time

Effectiveness of accommodative aids in reducing empty field myopia in visual search.

The Darkening Green

Glass heat screens for control cabin windows