i've been very bad about posting here, I know, but it's because I've been busy with a bunch of things. One of these is a chapbook being published by Aqueduct Press, which is out now!
(Although someone pointed out that, because it's perfect bound, it's not technically a chapbook.)
Yay! My little book, called Slightly Behind and to the Left: Four Stories and Three Drabbles, and is available NOW at Aqueduct Press' website! (Click on the "orders" button and scroll down.)
Right
now, for the holidays, the book, usually $12, is $9, so get it now!
Also, the book is part of a series called "Conversation Pieces," which
you can subscribe to at $80 for 10 consecutive subscriptions (and you
can choose which title to start with.) I've read a handful of these
titles and they're all worth it, so you might consider a subscription,
or make it a gift for the feminist or progressive geek in your life.
I've been working with Kaya Press for about a year now, and we've produced two book trailers, each one for a book that it's really difficult to describe in words. The one above is for our new title -- available next week -- HYPERART: THOMASSON by Genpei Akasegawa. Akasegawa is a Japanese conceptual artist -- a contemporary and colleague of Yoko Ono -- who came up with the concept of "Thomassons" in the late seventies, early eighties.
When an urban structure loses its usage, but remains standing, attached to the property it used to serve, and still being aesthetically maintained, then it is a "Thomasson." We're talking about staircases that lead to nowhere, bricked up ticket windows, outside doors in the third story of a building, etc. Akasegawa contends that these things are not stairs, windows, and doors, but rather art shaped like stairs, windows, and doors: unintentional art created by the city; hyperart.
He and his colleagues refined the name to "Thomasson" because at that time, 1982, American baseball player Gary Thomasson was playing for the Japanese team the Yomiuri Giants ... or rather, NOT playing, because he couldn't seem to manage to hit a ball. Yet they still paid him to be there. Akasegawa thought him the perfect, living hyperart, and named the whole phenomenon after him.
In the mid-eighties, Akasegawa had a column in a Japanese photo magazine about Thomassons, where he accepted submissions of thomassons: photographs, and descriptions. He published these and discussed whether or not they were thomassons, why, and what kind. These columns were eventually collected into a book in the 80's which quickly became a cult classic among Japan's youth.
This publication is the first time that Hyperart: Thomasson has been translated. To mark the occasion, translator Matt Fargo created a Thomassons website where people can submit their own thomassons, as well as vote on whether or not submissions are thomassons, and discuss these.
And I'm working with Kearny Street Workshop to develop a guided performance tour of local San Francisco thomassons. The project is called "SF Thomassons" and there's a special page on Matt's Thomassons website for local exemplars from our stable of photographers.
And finally, Kaya and KSW are having a book launch partay on December 18 in San Francisco, where you can get a free preview of the tour. Yay!
i'm genuinely uncertain of the purpose of the article, but the BBC News reported recently on a nonfiction prize given to a Brit research fellow for a book she's writing on the history of the UK's Ordnance Survey, the body that mapped the Isles. The article is actually the fellow's (Rachel Hewitt's) thoughts on the book and why she wrote it.
Founded in 1791, it was the product of a very different type of
revolution: the French Revolution and its threat to English's south
coast.
A military survey became essential, and the Ordnance Survey was born.
It was also a revolution in itself. The OS was the very first
complete, accurate map of the British Isles conducted on a uniform
scale. The story of its birth and progress is therefore a story of the
history and identity of the United Kingdom and its landscape.
... British writers found themselves enamoured with Ordnance Survey maps
from the start. William Wordsworth befriended the early surveyors; Jane
Austen adored the sense of order that the maps gave to the nation in an
otherwise disorderly, revolutionary period; and, more recently, Brian
Friel has considered the OS's Irish map to encapsulate the brutal,
imperial nature of England's rule.
I am writing a 'biography' of this iconic national institution.
Her whole article is weirdly fragmented and nonlinear, and it's hard to figure out why they asked her to publish the piece, rather than just interviewing her and writing a more coherent -- and cohesive -- article.
But I'm still interested in the book, and may request a review copy when it comes out next year.
Speaking of reviews, up next is a review of Experimental Geography as soon as I get some room in my schedule to breathe.
i've written so. Damn. Many. giftguides and year-end lists in the past couple of weeks that I can't think in any other mode. Such is the life of a blogger.
So, since my head's in this space already, might as well do a gift guide for the mappy and geographically inclined geek in your life. This is an ENTIRELY SUBJECTIVE list. I will not consider gifts that SOME OTHER map/geo geek than myself might like. This is just what you should send me if you wanna get on my good side.
A brand new series of what I can only imagine to be lenticular maps, in which three maps of the same city -- streets, subways, neighborhoods and landmarks -- are arranged like those postcards of Jesus so when you tilt the map one way, you'll see one image, and when you tilt it another way, you'll see another image. Three maps in one! Whether it works well or not, it's a collector's item. There are currently maps of Manhattan and Chicago.
A wonderful series comprising one boxed deck of cards for each city. There are 50 cards per city, and each card contains a simple walking tour of a route of particular interest: either a neighborhood, or a themed tour. On one side of the card is a map of the route, and on the other side is the text explaining what you're seeing. The cards are the size of a mass market paperback, i.e. easy to carry around, and this is the perfect gift for someone going to a city with an extra day or two to spend walking around. The series covers 14 major metropolises at this point.
Two books that offer a detailed and well-designed guide to reading landscapes from the window seat of an airplane. There's one for the US, and one for Europe. I don't know if this series will continue, but I sure hope so. This is the perfect gift for a frequent flyer.
At £90.00, it's not cheap. But this accurate globe of Mars, with the whimsical inclusion of the site
where an Elvis statue was found in 1989, according to a British tabloid, is the perfect gift for a Mars fan. My folks won years' worth of brownie points by getting this for me for Christmas a few years back. Greaves and Thomas also has a number of other historical and beautiful globes, including Cassini's 1790 terrestrial and celestial globes, and the first antipodean globe, which simply reverses the direction of the globe so we can see what the world looks like to an Australian.
When I was trying to figure out, for my feng shui on Mars novel, what constellations one would see from Mars, an astronomy professor turned me on to the Starry Night software which, among other things, enables you to see what the night sky looks like from other points of view than from Earth. Awesome. They've just released a new version, which is a bit pricey ($150) but great for your astronomer or star chart geek.
Cheap historical facsimile maps
For those mapping geeks who just like to see -- or hang on their walls -- maps from historical periods, you can't go too far wrong by looking online for facsimile reproductions.
Blue Monocle Maps has a whole historical collection, which you can get in a variety of sizes and on your choice of paper, including world cities like this one of Beijing. These start at around £30.
Historic Urban Plans has smaller maps of cities the world over that start at around $10.
Historic Maps Restored has a series of higher-quality maps starting at $30 which are mostly of the US -- railroad maps, topographical maps, panorama maps, etc. There is a small collection of international maps.
The Old Map Company sells maps of mostly England, starting at around £6. There's a small collection of international maps.
(ETA): Here's one more I just found ... MAP PLATES! From Signals.com, these plates represent some of the countries of Europe, not all. But how cool is a series of plates in geographical shapes that fit together to make a map? I WANT.
There's much more along the lines of interdisciplinary books on geographical ideas, but I don't want to recommend very many books right now. I think the above is enough to go on for now, don't you?
But please feel free to add your ideas to the comments below!
And here's the opening shot, an amazing, eight minute rolling shot of row after row of worktables on a factory floor. You start out thinking, oh this is just a boring factory scene ... an interior. And after about a minute of row after row after row going by, you start to get it: this is a landscape, not an interior.
And here's a segment with Burtynsky himself speaking from a Canadian tv show.
I still haven't seen the film, but this whole things excites me to no end. I'm gonna go consume some of his product and then report back (maybe).
The books one reads in childhood, and perhaps most of all the bad and good bad books, create in one's mind a sort of false map of the world, a series of fabulous countries into which one can retreat at odd moments throughout the rest of life, and which in some cases can survive a visit to the real countries which they are supposed to represent.
-- George Orwell
Geography and space are always gendered, always raced, always economical and always sexual. The textures that bind them together are daily re-written through a word, a gaze, a gesture.
-- Irit Rogoff
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