Addenda to the Shipping Container – A review of sorts by Stella

As it is our 500th newsletter, we have been casting our eye back over the last ten years of reviews. I was intending to review Tīhema Baker’s excellent new novel, One Day A Taniwha, but I’m still a few pages from the end (you can read my review of Turncoat in the meantime, though). My excuse for the unfinished book: emptying my mother’s house. I’ve been sorting, packing and discarding, and cleaning. While looking back at 10 years of reviews, I came across one of my favourites from the ‘Object Lessons’ series – Shipping Container. I was intrigued by this theme for a number of reasons. Firstly, I live in a city with a port; secondly, I had delivered a Pecha Kucha back in 2008 called ‘Cargo’ about the act of making jewellery and shipping it to Amsterdam for an exhibition; thirdly, if you sell goods, you are aware of the movement of these goods; fourthly, I love history and what it tells you about how we change and adapt; fifthly, containers are a designed object that carries all objects; and sixthly, containers can’t help but be considered in a socio-political context. There are probably quite a few other reasons to be fascinated by the shipping container (e.g. the opening and closing mechanisms — and then I start wondering if I could make these on a jewellery scale…) but back to why I am intrigued all over again. This week is the skip week ( after the sorting, and taking-to-op-shops-and-recycling-centre). Many things in the basement have to go. All those dusty workshop materials that might of been handy and are no longer so, the kitset cupboards that were never quite right and abandoned, the worn-out-but-not-thrown-away-because-there-was-still-some-use-in-them appliances, the tools with blunt ends or sharpened so often they no longer are the objects they started as, the off-cuts, the small pieces of pipe, generally had-it things, well used but now not useful. And as I loaded the skip, and looked back at our reviews, I suddenly saw the shipping container and the skip as sister objects. One bringing in goods, the other sending them away. Our consumption, even of objects well-used over time, a marker of something both personal and universal. And then I started to think about the Gulf and the containers stuck at sea, of the shenanigans of rogue players and what does it mean to control the seas, and who benefits from shortages and interruptions, and who suffers? And then, what’s in all those containers? I hope for useful and/or beautiful objects, but I imagine there is a mulitude of cheap, plastic five minute wonders. But the good news is: books continue to come across the seas, sometimes we wait a while but it’s worth it. And now that we are in the season of publishing there will be a flurry of new arrivals to add to our reading piles.

You can read my original Shipping Container review here. And see the wide range of ‘Object Lessons’ series here. And coming up in October, I’ll be talking about books that feature objects on RNZ.