atlas(t)

lordy rodriguez

i'm away from home and a library this week so my next street naming post will come later. Right now: via an email tip from my good friend Maw Shein Win, I came to regret the fact that I won't be around the Bay Area in June and July for this fabulous show at the Hosfelt Gallery, featuring (Russell Crotty and) Lordy Rodriguez.

Here's some text on Rodriguez:

Lordy Rodriguez was born in the Philippines, raised in Louisiana and Texas, and currently lives in Los Angeles. For several years he has been working on a series of ink drawings that reinterpret the United States of America as delineated by geographic, civic and state boundaries. These handmade maps, drawn in fine Technicolor detail, represent his take on the ideal reconfiguration of our country.

Using the precise language of mapmaking, which is defined by borders, limits, and 'reality,' Rodriguez creates places that defy existing boundaries and rules. Washington State, for instance, is situated on the East rather than West Coast and is surrounded by Oklahoma, Maine, and Hollywood, which is itself a state. The playful aspects of these works, however, belie a deeper sense of displacement. Being of Chinese, Filipino, Spanish, and French descent, and having moved throughout his life, Rodriguez has never been able to claim any homeland as truly his own. Larger issues of 21st century navigation—of different cultures, the information super highway, the latest technology or software program—are brought to bear in the artist's invented worlds.

Eventually, Rodriguez intends to remap the entire United States, adding 5 new states of his own creation (Territory State—which includes parts of the Philippines, Samoa, and Puerto Rico; Disney World; Hollywood; The Internet and Monopoly), to bring the total to 55, the national speed limit at the start of the project. An apt metaphor for our car-centered culture, where urban planning revolves around the automobile, and navigation as we know it wouldn't exist without the highway.

That was two years ago. Here's one of the maps the text was talking about:

The new show is somewhat different:

Using the language of cartography, [Rodriguez] makes drawings that go beyond map-making into abstracted, imaginary terrain.

The Geological series is a new body of work that pushes the iconography of mapmaking further into abstraction. These works omit the text that is so crucial to cartography. Without text, the map loses its utility, and the void is filled by the viewer’s own biases and experiences.

In previous bodies of work, including the Abstracted series and the America series, symbols and colors typical of road maps—such as highways, urban sprawls, and park versus city land — contributed to a certain recognition and sense of familiarity. With the Geological series, all that remains is the landscape — magnified, fragmented, and devoid of context. Dislocation, a constant theme through his work, operates here on an even deeper level.

Rodriguez is only 30 years old. It's exciting to see an artist so young (and clearly cool enough to be caught in the snares of hipster conceptualism) already progressing steadily towards a meaningful, self-defined practice. Observe:

See, this is what we need artists for. (Not to mention curators. Can I just give a shout out here for a clearly and intelligently written project statement?) All of our late orgasming over the new GIS apps is about labeling the traditional maps: how to label them, how to tweak the way we use maps so that they don't just tell us place names or elevations, but community connections and locations of things. The contours remain the same. The lines mean the same thing each time, just with new overlays.

It takes an artist to recreate the map to reflect not geographical reality, but perception ... or wishful thinking. It takes an artist to remove the text and leave us with less meaning -- and greater beauty.

I wish I could see this show in the flesh. Maybe some other time. But you all in the Yay Area, getcher asses down to Hosfelt in San Francisco for the opening on Saturday, June 17, 3-5 pm. Do it for me.

n.e.w. y.o.r.c.k.

discovering the stupid "Neu York" piece last weekend got my panties in a bunch, so I'm starting a spate (a very spate!) of street renaming posts. (There will be at least three.)

Here's an example of simple, but smart: a temporary street renaming project with entirely political purposes. Last summer the activist group "Gruppe N.E.W. Y.O.R.C.K." in Berlin renamed major streets in every Berlin district to "Yorckstrasse", in solidarity with the evicted tenants of Yorckstrasse 59. (Here are more images of the renamed streets.)

Yorckstrasse 59, or 59 Yorck street was previously home to an "alternative living project", which included a number of lefty residents and families, as well as a number of lefty type organizations. The tenants had occupied the building for 16 years when the current owners doubled their rent. They refused to pay and the eviction notice came down. The eviction itself became quite a circus, with the police so afraid of actions from sympathizers that they closed off the entire area around the building the night before the eviction.

Street renaming in Berlin has a long and intense history. Because of the number of constitutional changes in the area that is now Germany in the past 150 years (unification, Weimar republic, Nazi Germany, West Germany/East Germany, reunification), Berlin has been through six sets, and many, many waves, of systematic geographic renaming. The streets, squares, monuments and memorials, graveyards, waterways, parks and major buildings have been renamed each time to reflect the new political system, or else retooled for the same purpose.

This temporary renaming action draws on the recent, decade-long renaming of Berlin streets to reflect a new pantheon of political values created by the melding of East and West Germany. Berliners are, as a result of the street renamings in the 90's, supremely aware of the meanings behind the names of streets. Yorck, if I remember correctly, was some sort of aristocrat. Not someone who represents left-leanings or communal values. But the layering of street name meanings has already set in. Yorck himself is not important here anymore, but rather what has been happening for the past 16 years on Yorck street. Yorck street has now taken on the meaning of the squat at number 59.

Although from the outside this action, and how seriously everyone takes it, seems a little silly -- the lefty tenants of "besetzte Häuser" or political squats in Berlin are mostly educated punkalicious middle class types, and the "bulls" (pigs) they hate on are all working class -- this is the sort of event that defines lives and politics.

The eviction photos of Yorckstrasse 59 look like color versions of the eviction photos of the International Hotel on Kearny Street in San Francisco.

The International Hotel on San Francisco's Kearny Street, from the 20's onward a single-room occupancy hotel for mostly Filipino migrant workers and the center of San Francisco's Manilatown, was, by the 60's, hot real estate sitting right next door to the high-rent financial district. It was also, as a home to the now elderly immigrant community, a mecca for young baby-boomer Asian Americans raised in disappearing post-war ethnic enclaves, who were activated by the civil rights and free speech movements to form an Asian American Movement. The low-rent storefronts and basement of the I-Hotel were the perfect spaces for nascent Asian American organizing around social services, and self expression in the arts.

In the late 60's the I-Hotel was sold and the tenants -- both residents and organizations -- served with eviction notices. the next ten years saw a protest against the eviction eventually take over all left-leaning segments of the city's population. By the time the sheriff was ordered to evict in 1977, the issue was so hot that the sheriff chose to refuse to evict (symbolically), and spent three days in jail for contempt of court. The eviction went through, and the building was torn down, but the political infighting was such that the I-Hotel site remained an empty hole in the ground for nearly a quarter of a century afterward. (Good news: the I-Hotel has been rebuilt on the same site as SROs for the elderly, with a Filipino community center on the street level.)

The eviction was devastating to the community. One young man, who had spent years organizing against the eviction, even suffered a nervous breakdown. One of the evicted organizations, an arts collective called Kearny Street Workshop, even after becoming nomadic in the increasingly expensive real estate market of San Francisco, held onto the name "Kearny Street" as it became more and more a meaning divorced from the street, or the geographical location of the I-Hotel. Young Asian American spoken word artists all over the country, born after the eviction, still reference "the I-Hotel" and "Kearny Street" as symbols of "revolution" and Asian American resistance to "the man" (whoever he is).

When I was working at Kearny Street Workshop in 2001 and did research for a symbolic, temporary street renaming project, I looked up "Kearny". The street was named after Stephen Watts Kearny, an army officer, the first military governor of California (at the expense of a major and embarrassing feud with the commander of the navy in California), and a military governor of Mexico City (also at the expense of the same feud.) Not the best name for such a street, but, again, the street name now transcends that. Its meaning has become another meaning.

neu york

can someone work hard, almost obsessively, and be lazy at the same time? In a word: yes.

For a perfect example, take a gander at the map of "Neu York" (a portion of which is depicted above). "Neu York" is intended to be an alternate history map of New York if the US had been conquered by the Nazis during World War II. Artist Melissa Gould meticulously recreated a map of Manhattan from period maps, taking care to eliminate post-war buildings, synagogues, and any streets named after Jewish figures.

In her project description, Gould displays a perfect command of artspeak, a language often employed to cover up the poverty of a work of art. "Cautionary meditation", "exploration of psychological transport, place, displacement and memory", "reimagining", "moving beyond the architecture of individual structures towards a fantastical psycho-geographical projection of environmental and urban planning", blah, blah, blah. The upshot of it all is that Gould wanted to create a period-looking map that would shock the attentive viewer by its lack of Jewishness and excess of Germanness. It's easy to want.

Problem is, the way she did it was to transpose Berlin geographical names onto New York. Yep. That's it. That's all folks. Boy howdy.

She renamed the squares after Berliner Plätze, the train stations after Berliner Bahnhöfe, the lakes after Berliner Seen, and even museums and playgrounds after those in Berlin. Major streets are named after major streets in Berlin. Where she necessarily departs from a strictly Berliner schema is in the numbered streets and avenues where she:

1. names a series of streets after kings and emperors (realistic)
2. names another series of streets after birds, wildflowers, plants, grains, herbs, trees, and wild animals (why? The Nazis didn't do this. This is an American convention. Doesn't she know that?)
3. names streets south of the future Lincoln Center (hello? Why cast into a future that will never be?) after German (non-Jewish) composers, opera names, and Teutonic women's names.
4. names a small section after foreign cities and countries (but with no discernible pattern, some are places Germany had a historic/colonial/imperial interest in. Some not. Are these names that appear in Berlin streets? Huh?)

She also tries out a few "puns" as she calls them, and associations, a few of which display her ignorance of street naming history. For example, she renames Maiden Lane to Klosterstrasse (convent street), either setting up a very wicked opposite association (but I don't believe it) or completely misunderstanding that "Maiden Lane" has been commonly used to name traditional red light districts. (Yeah, the "maiden" is ironic.) This particular example is further complicated by the fact that Nazis, with their strange secular paganism and their totalitarian control of sexuality, would neither wish to memorialize prostitution, nor honor Catholic nuns, and therefore would rename the street entirely differently, possibly to promote their own ideal of girlhood, maybe "Bund Deutscher Mädel Straße"?

But that's the whole problem with this map. Gould spent oG knows how many hundreds of hours recreating this map, recreating the system of street and place names, and then replacing those street and place names with others. And yet she didn't bother to do the first leetle bit of research on German (especially Nazi) and American street and place-naming conventions. She didn't bother to use her damned imagination, either. Can you say "wasted effort"?

This trips all of my wires, seriously. Street renaming is my thing -- it's the systematic and massive renaming of streets in Berlin while I was living there in the nineties that first got all my geographic juices flowing. I spent a semester doing a project on it, and in 2001 I did a street renaming performance in San Francisco. To rename four streets I did decades of hours of research. And alternate history is seriously my thing. I'm writing an alternate history novel now, which takes place fifty years after the historical event that changes the timeline. Believe me, the amount of research, thinking, and imagining you have to do to get that kind of distance from an alternate timeline is not small. And that's before you begin writing.

Gould just didn't do her brain work. When renaming a conquered territory, you don't try to recreate the sound and feel of the capital city of your empire. The capital city is special. The conquered city is now a province. It must feel its inferiority, not feel as if it can compete with the capital. You also don't rename everything. It's impractical and stupid. Nobody would be able to find their way around. It would take years to figure the new streets out. And the Nazis weren't stupid, if anything, they were bureaucratic geniuses.

You start out by renaming only the major streets, the ones people know without names. You give those streets the names of the most important people or events or concepts in the pantheon of your political system. So the major streets of a Nazi-conquered New York City would be: Adolf Hitler St. or Führer St., Reich St., Lebensraum St., etc. Actually, that's not even true. They wouldn't try to change the geographical grid to German, so the German names would remain the same (next to "street", "avenue", and "way") but the concepts would probably be translated into English, at least at first. So make that "Elbow Room St." and "Empire St.".

Street names are also a spoils system to a symbology-ready regime like National Socialism. In the second wave of street renaming, everyone jailed in the Beer Hall Putsch (who didn't get purged later), everyone killed in street skirmishes with lefty factions, every high-ranking general killed in the war, every wartime battle of particular emotional weight -- either great victories or great defeats -- would have a street named after it. Also, historical cronies like those "scientists" or philosophers or poets whose work contributed to the philosophy of National Socialism would have a street (this might come as late as the third wave of street renamings.)

And in New York, being a symbolic center of conquered nation, all American "allies", both contemporary and historical, would have major streets. George Washington, as a slave owner, might have a street. Any eugenics "scientists", any racial "scientists", and especially political thinkers whose work contributed to totalitarian socialist ideals would get streets and alleys named after them. Nazi-won battles on American soil would have center stage on large streets and squares. In the third and fourth waves, poets, artists and musicians found to be somehow sympathetic to National Socialism would get streets. Ezra Pound might have a street.

Almost as remarkable as the changes would be what remained. Names characteristic of New York City but with no political significance would remain, such as Canal St, Broadway, or Park Ave. Names with mild political significance, like Holland Tunnel, might remain as a reminder that the Netherlands were now also part of the Reich, or that the city was founded by the Germanic Dutch, and not the English who took over. Speaking of which, Greenwich would almost certainly be removed. And undoubtedly the numbers would remain until they were replaced in succeeding waves by more politically significant names. The larger streets, regardless of their numbering, would go first, leaving a strangely broken up number system: Forty-first and Forty-third would be seperated by Himmler St., perhaps, or between Fourth Avenue and the Park you'd drive along Speer Ave.

See? This is the fun part, the interesting part. Making the physical changes is labor intensive and difficult, but it's not challenging. Using this map-making as an opportunity to really think about what life would have been like under Nazi rule, to really imagine the sorts of things that could have happened, the push and pull of history and culture, power and resistance, passivity and energy -- that's the sort of thing that gets me out of bed in the morning.

This missed opportunity, this mechanical replacement art, is what gives identity-based -- trauma-based -- art a bad name. I don't know what gets Melissa Gould out of bed in the morning. Maybe dust bunnies? Fingerprints on her water glasses? Filing?

love map

from the Yale Library's cartographic collections (check 'em out here. There's some cool stuff here, which I'll be putting up later) comes this 18th century German map of love.

The regions of love, as seen by a somewhat quirky 18th century German, are fascinating. Although the text is a little blurred and pixelated in places, and the language is archaic, I'll try to translate. From left to right, then top to bottom we have:
• Meer der Verzweifelung The Sea of Suffering
• an unnamed region including "divorce", "hate", and "displeasure"
• Land der Glucklichen Liebe The Land of Happy Love, which includes "enjoyment", "soul's rest", "tenderness", and "the stream of joy"
• Land der Traurenden Liebe The Land of Sad Love, which includes "morass of deep feelings", "Werther's grove" (presumably the character from Goethe's book), "melancholy", and "the hopeless mountains"
• Land der Luste Land of Lusts, including, "sensuality" and "weakness"
• Land der Hagestolze Land of (narrow pride?) which includes "the village of stupidity", "frigidity", "revulsion", and "annoyance"
• Gebiet der Fixen Ideen Region of Fixed Ideas, including "bridge of hope", "city of dreams", "restlessness", "the brook of sweet tears", "field of sighs", "plain of demands", and "infidelity"
• Land der Jugend Land of Youth including "trifling games", "river of wishes", "hill of stimulation", "spring of joy", and "funland"
• Land der Ruhe Land of Rest including "grandfather's lull", "even-temperedness", and "man's sensibility"

Of course, all of this is from the male viewpoint. I mean that this is a map of men's love, or love as it was supposedly experienced by men at that time. Women, of course, being the objects of love, aren't on the map; women's experiences of love aren't mapped. Or maybe I'm wrong about that, but the "grandfather's rest" and "man's sensibility" locations in "Land of Rest" are gender specific.

The language, even in my poor translation, is old-fashioned, but has this map changed all that much? I love the "region of fixed ideas" (a "fixed idea" being also an "idee fixe", or obsession) for its own name, and also for the fact that it is centered on the map. The fixed ideas themselves are not mentioned, but rather the results of having fixed ideas about love, which keeps this map relevant. I'd find it more historically interesting if the fixed ideas themselves were spelled out, but there's a general wisdom to this section of the map that might be upset by specifics.

And I love that "Werther" was already a marker for sad love, three years after its publication. It sort of still is, isn't it?

(from A Guide to Unusual Maps, via fluid thinking.)

biggest map of the universe

it's exciting, so I feel like I have to post this, although I really don't understand it.

Astronomers (or is it astrologers ...?) have completed the largest map of the universe to date.

I can't show you what it looks like, cuz it's massive and it's 3-D, but here's what goes on:

Using the light of distant, dying galaxies, astronomers have produced the largest, three-dimensional map of the universe yet. Encompassing roughly 600,000 so-called luminous red galaxies--ancient galaxies with only old, red stars left that are uniquely brilliant--the map extends 5.6 billion light-years out into space, or 40 percent of the way to the edge of the visible universe.

Astrophysicists Nikhil Padmanabhan of Princeton University and David Schlegel of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories led a team of international colleagues that painstakingly surveyed the color and redshift of 10,000 of these unique galaxies. Using data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey in New Mexico and from a telescope in Australia, the researchers were able to map a fan-shaped slice of the cosmos that covers a tenth of the sky in the Northern Hemisphere. They then applied these measurements to the broader sample to create their three-dimensional map.

The third and fourth words in the next paragraph are "statistical" and "uncertainty" so my brain turned off and the rest of it reads like "blah blah blah ..." Does anyone out there know a good way to deal with science block? It's a big liability for a science fiction writer.

housekeeping

given my short attention span, it's not surprising that, after only 5 or 6 literary mapping posts, I'm bored. Can I stop now? Gimme a coupla days to catch my breath and we'll start in on a new tack.

waterboro travel fiction/fiction of place

i am recently, but desperately, in love with the librarians of Waterboro, Maine. Some (or one) of them got their literate, precious, beautiful heads together and came up with this links page of "booklists for fiction whose geographical setting is important to the story."

The lists are broken down by:

General Travel Fiction / Fiction of Place
Set in Africa and The Middle East
Set in the Americas (including the U.S.)
Set in Asia
Set in Australia and The Pacific
Set in Europe/Britain/Ireland

The lists they link to are all lists produced by other libraries. It's a library geography literature orgy. They even have an extra list for travel and place in mystery fiction. Will they marry me?

The only thing that could possibly make me love them more would be ... wait for it ... a world map that I could click on to take me to the lists of each continent. Yes! But that would be almost too much happiness! It would almost undo me! Or perhaps it would be so too much that I would round the bend of happiness and excitement and become bored and ashamed.

new york times' literary travel section

"the greater part of the vast floor of the desert under us was as black as ink, and apparently smooth and level; but over a mile square of it was ringed and streaked and striped with a thousand branching streams of liquid and gorgeously brilliant fire! It looked like a colossal railroad map of the State of Massachusetts done in chain lightning on a midnight sky. Imagine it — imagine a coal-black sky shivered into a tangled network of angry fire!"

Mark Twain on visiting a lava lake in Hawai'i.

"Man, the imperfect librarian, may be the product of chance or of malevolent demiurgi; the universe, with its elegant endowment of shelves, of enigmatic volumes, of inexhaustible stairways for the traveler and latrines for the seated librarian, can only be the work of a god."

Jorge Luis Borges, inspired by working in a Buenos Aires library.

"New York was an inexhaustible space, a labyrinth of endless steps, and no matter how far he walked, no matter how well he came to know its neighborhoods and streets, it always left him with the feeling of being lost."

Paul Auster on New York City, a literary travel article of which is to be found at this link. (Do not neglect to click on the "Literary Map of Manhattan" to the left of the article, from which the above image is taken. It's very very cool.)

I'd include pictures and quotes from the article on the books that triggered writers' wanderlust, but the article was remarkably boring (not the writer's fault.) When I think about it now, why should I care what books made a bunch of writers want to travel? Most of them didn't actually end up traveling there in any case. The article is one of those things that sounds like a good idea if you don't really think about it, but if you give it a minute's hard think, you'll have to wonder about the relevance. Unless of course, you're asking specifically writers who write about: 1) traveling, 2) people in places furren or exotic to the article's audience, or 3) writers who came to the article's audience's milieu from someplace furren or exotic. Which most of these writers are not. Walter Mosley? Mary Gaitskill? Lorrie Moore? E. L. Doctorow? And especially ... Tom Wolfe? Love some of 'em (and not others), but why wouldn't I go to, like, Linda Watanabe McFerrin, or Michael Ondaatje, or Ruth Ozeki, or Douglas Coupland, or Yann Martel, or Dave Eggers, or, like, Chris Abani or Marjane Satrapi, first? Ya know? Appropriateness, people, let's not be knee-jerk.

The New York Times' Sunday travel section featuring literary landscapes is available on their website now. Read these stories this week before they go behind the firewall. And be sure not to miss the "interactive" part: mini-doc video, interactive map, and slideshows.

map of speculative fiction

michael Chabon sez:

Maybe, as I suggested above, the most useful way to think of the various literary genres is not as linked but discrete rooms in a house or red-lined sections in a bookstore, but as regions on a map, the map of fiction. I would put the country of romance at the center of this map, but as with all maps there is no real center, only a set of conventions. And as with the regions on a map, on the map of fiction there is overlap: sometimes it can be hard to say where science fiction shades unambiguously into fantasy, or horror into gothic romance, or mainstream, literary fiction, into any of its neighboring genres.

(thanks to Marrije for directing me here.)

A couple years ago I taught a couple of speculative fiction writing classes: one to adults and one to high-schoolers. My definition of "speculative fiction" (which broadly includes science fiction, fantasy, magical realism, and supernatural horror) depended upon Darko Suvin's: that speculative fiction contains a "novum". Suvin's "novum" refers to the "new" element, the element of the world or the narrative that does not exist in consensus reality, or in the "realistic" world mimicked in "literary fiction", which I took to calling "mimetic fiction".

The novum can be something simple and singular, like the possibility of a ghost in Henry James' The Turn of the Screw. Or it can be complex and infuse the world, like the entirety of Tolkiens' Lord of the Rings, from the species of the protagonists to texture and objects and landscapes and languages of the world they live in.

To make this concept more clear, I created a diagram, which you see above. Please note that I created this merely to explain how the various speculative genres were (broadly) defined, not to recast the literary world with spec fic as its ruling perspective.

But the result, I think, is interesting. In dividing "speculative" from "mimetic" fiction, the one with a novum, the other without, I set up an artificial distinction that grouped the "realism" of literary fiction with the exaggerated, but nevertheless "realistic" (because they do not deal with nova) genre tropes of romance, mystery, thriller, western, etc. This in itself is pretty cool, because it forces literary fiction into bed with dirty genre (as if all characters thinking and speaking in poetic, revelatory, Joycean diction were "realistic" rather than generic.)

But more than this incidence of strange bedfellows, the diagram seperates fiction entirely according to type of content. If it deals with objects not of this world, on this map it is centered. If it deals with things herein findable, it is marginalized. "Meta" fiction, that which acknowledges a reality external to the fiction, is thrust entirely out of the diagram altogether.

It's a strange view, not the view of literature that a science fiction fan has. It's a very peculiarly biased academic view, created for a specific pedagogic purpose, and offering a terribly distorted vision of literature.

But then why "terribly" distorted? Why, in fiction, have we decided to privilege mimesis (such as it is) rather than untrammeled fantasy? Why in fiction, where virtue lies in untruth, or maybe unfact? Why isn't the diagram above true to our predominant literary view?

(cross-posted at Seelight.)

gnod literature-map

we continue our "literary maps week/s" with the gnod literature-map, a cool way to use (presumably) amazon.com's software examining people's book-reading habits.

You just go to the link above, type in the name of an author you're interested in (in this case, "Octavia Butler"), and a map will appear, like the one above, showing you the names of other authors "similar" to the one you typed in. The closer they are to the author on the map, the more "similar" they are. The similarity, of course, lies in the fact that people who bought books by your author, also bought books by these other authors -- or maybe just expressed interest? Maybe the similarity is people typing in data specifically. I don't know. Each author name on the map is itself a link to a map for that author. The author names (except for the name of the author whose map it is -- that name remains fixed in the center) move around, according to some little software pattern, and eventually end up lined up along the outsides of the map, like this:

If you leave it overnight, they'll be perfectly lined up the next morning, all in order. I love that. I love that George Eliot, John Fowles and H.D. made it onto Octavia's map. I love that, with everyone else going off to the sides, her friend Steven Barnes still stubbornly sticks close to her. I love that Roald Dahl and Georges Bataille are next to each other, and that they're both on Octavia's map. I can't wait to publish a book so that I can have my own map.

I also love that this is a sort of hidden taxonomy, with the method of organization hidden, but suggested by the relationships of names in space. We don't know, and never will know, on this map, why people bought these various authors, or were interested in these various authors, at the same time. All we know is that we can create a consensus taxonomy of authors in each area of interest. "These are Octaviesque authors. Those are Barthian authors. Some are both." We can say that now.

As for gnod itself, there's not much information on the website. It's built by someone in Hamburg named Marek Gibney. The hopepage sez:

Gnod is my experiment in the field of artificial intelligence. Its a self-adapting system, living on this server and 'talking' to everyone who comes along. Gnods intention is to learn about the outer world and to learn 'understanding' its visitors. This enables gnod to share all its wisdom with you in an intuitive and efficient way. You might call it a search-engine to find things you don't know about.

There are areas for books, movies, music, and people. There's a similar map for each (books, movies and music) and also an area where you can go to discuss books or to feed data to the gnod AI, letting it get to know your tastes. In the end, you will be offered the opportunity to buy, through Amazon, natch. The people site seems like a crude sort of friendster or yahoo personals except for one key difference: you don't get to do any searches. The software throws up a profile and you either respond to it, or you don't. Presumably (this is all speculation since there is no information on the site about how this works) the software tracks your interest and tries to bring people to you who match your interests. But I'm not sure. I wish there was more info on this site.

I'd have more to say about this whole system if there were more information about how it works. As it is, there's not even enough there for me to know if it would be useful to me or not. For example, is the site using Amazon data about buying habits or is the site relying solely on the input of users? If the latter, I'm not sure I'm interested in the writers such a small, self-selected group of people think are similar to my favorites.

I'm also not sure how useful these "information cloud" thingies are. They're pretty, sure, and that's worth something in my world. But do they reveal or hide information about how they work, what they're supposed to represent? A cloud would be the only way to represent this exact type of information: how "close" are writers to one another. But since the term "close" is never defined, I don't know what it means. And the fact that the names wander and end up lining up at the edge makes me suspicious that this model doesn't quite work the way it's supposed to.

Anyone out there less ignorant about such things than I?