Leaked transcripts of their heated exchange have dominated the news coverage here, some of which has cast the final moments of the shipwreck as a clash of good and evil.
The few lyrics are nearly inaudible and sound like excerpts from short stories: a boy takes a girl on a roller coaster; a man leaves a party, thinking about what he should have said; and, on "Good Morning, Captain," the album's final cut, a sailor awakes after a shipwreck and is confronted by a small child looking for help.
Looniest of all is "Somehow Lengthened" (1932), by Alice Cobbett, which finds room for shipwrecks and smugglers, and, on its final page, marries Charlotte off to a naval officer of whom we have never heard.
The narrator's crabwalking style encourages him to scuttle away from the big issue of crime, guilt and expiation, to which he never devotes quite as much attention as he lavishes on his fetish, the shipwreck, a point implicit in his son's final gesture -- he destroys a toy model of the Gustloff.
His last novel, Haiene (1974; The Sharks: The History of a Crew and a Shipwreck), an allegorical sea novel about a ship's final voyage, is considered to be one of his strongest works.
If any good comes of this shipwreck of a nominating process, it may be the final demise of the politics of resentment as it has been played in the last half-century.
For the final month, head overland to Durban through the Drakensberg mountains, then rumble along the Shipwreck Coast to Cape Town, where the townships are juxtaposed with swanky wharf-side developments and the paintbox-coloured houses of Bo Kaap.
It has been suggested that Shakespeare's lifelong concern with themes of exile and separation, from the shipwreck that splits open The Comedy of Errors to the relentless journeying that propels the final romances, is a sign of his remarkable powers of empathy, even, as the critic Northrop Frye repeatedly argued, a mythic image of our voyage through life.
