atlas(t)

Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship Fundraiser

I know this isn't mappy, but this is one of the reasons I've been a little too preoccupied to post lately.

Come shake off the winter blues and get inspired this Sunday with a terrific reading event supporting a great cause! I'm co-organizing this with Charlie Anders and it's gonna be a great time. Check it out.

The Carl Brandon Society presents an

Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship Fundraiser

with readings by

Nalo Hopkinson
Jewelle Gomez
Susie Bright
Marta Acosta
Jennifer de Guzman
and
Guillermo Gomez-Peña

A fundraiser reading to benefit the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship.
Fabulous fabulists honor one of our great writers and raise funds for the next generation.

Sunday, March 4, 5 - 7 pm

The Starry Plough
3101 Shattuck Avenue
Berkeley, CA.
510-841-2082
http://www.starryploughpub.com/

$5-20 sliding scale.

The Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship will enable writers of color to attend one of the Clarion writing workshops, where Octavia got her start. It is meant to cement Octavia's legacy by providing the same experience/opportunity that Octavia had to future generations of new writers of color. In addition to her stint as a student at the original Clarion Writers Workshop in Pennsylvania in 1970, Octavia taught several times for Clarion West in Seattle, Washington, and Clarion in East Lansing, Michigan, giving generously of her time to a cause she believed in.

writing and other distractions from blogging

so sorry for the disappeary!

I know I keep doing it, but my life is in flux and I cain't get regular (and no, I'm not talking about my bowel movements!) Well, maybe I am talking about bowel movements of a sort, because, you see, I've started a new novel.

I'd been wanting to do National Novel Writing Month, which is in November, for years, but never managed. In fact, I'm not really doing it now, because you have to start on Nov. 1 and register and everything, and I didn't get it together in time. However, I thought, why not just do an Individual Novel Writing Month? Which means: I write a novel in a month, by hacking out (and I do mean "hack") 1500 to 2000 words a day for thirty days (for a total of 50,000 words, which in itself constitutes novel length.)

So as not to shoot myself in the foot, I chose a Young Adult fantasy novel idea to pursue in my crazy month's pursuit of publishy goodness. Being a YA fantasy, it involves a hero's journey, which is manifested in a literal journey across the fantasy landscape. Today is my fourth day writing (I already have ten thousand words and am on Chapter Four), and I'm already getting confused as to where we are, and whether we are traveling east or west ... or what.

So I drew myself a map (above). Yay! My first map! This will not be the definitive map. This is just by way of notetaking so that I can keep track of my landscape. Ain't it cool? No?

In other news, I have several posts coming up (they've been coming up for awhile) whenever I can find the time away from my 2000 words a day:

1. a review of Trevor Paglen and A.C. Thompson's Torture Taxi
2. a further omnibus posting about the class hierarchy of transit vehicle types
3. a final omnibus posting about how I was attacked on MUNI (yes! again!)

Don't hold your breath, though.

gawker's taxonomies of the publishing world

only of interest to those in the publishing industry and those, like me, who wannabe ... oh, and New Yorkers who think they're urbane, but anyhoo, here's Gawker's taxonomy of literary agents.

Also, of editors.

And, of course, a very brief taxonomy of bad blurbing.

map of visual iconography

i've been meaning to post this for awhile, but haven't gotten around to it. Some of you may recognize it as the map of visual iconography Scott McCloud uses in Understanding Comics to show the range of iconic abstraction to photographic representation (horizontal axis) and the range of "pure" abstraction to representation (vertical axis).

But I went to a meeting of geowankers last week or so and somebody mentioned this map, reminding me that I should post about it. There's not that much to say about it, though. The map itself is becoming iconic. You can see it, and an explanation, here on McCloud's website.

While revisiting McCloud's site for this post, I saw that he and his family are taking advantage of the release of his new book Making Comics and resulting inevitable book tour to tour all fifty states. It's gonna take 'em nearly a year, and they're gonna blog about it.

To bring this whole thing back to mapping, here are the maps of McCloud's planned tour, because you just can't not map when you're planning your trip. Looks like he won't make it out to California until next year. I'll be waiting.

Plus, I can't wait until I have a long-suffering wife and kids so that I can buy a mobile home and take them on a year-long tour of the country. We're off to look for America!

local projects

yay for humanity! Local Projects is a New York-based design business dedicated to groovy design, urban landscapes, and storytelling. They use these tools for both public and commercial projects, such as for clothing manufacturers and companies like JetBlue.

Local Projects is an award-winning design studio that seeks to tell stories in public spaces, museums, and over the internet, often simultaneously. By committing to projects that combine information design, media, and interactivity, Local Projects has made high-tech to no-tech interfaces that engage visitors in innovative and effective ways. We design interfaces, information presentations, motion graphics, physical structures, and projection systems to tell unlikely stories in unlikely places.

The image above is from their "Memory Maps" project for the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Washington DC. They displayed several enormous maps of New York City and allowed the visitors to add their memories of certain places directly to those locations on the map. This is the analog version of the digital storytelling projects Organic City and City of Memory: harder on the eye, and less easy to experience, but much easier to add to.

Another terrific project is "Timescapes", a three-screen video installation at the Museum of the City of New York (which I wish I had known about when I was visiting!) This 20-odd-minute video follows the history of the building of New York City using a map and various other images (above). Be sure to check out the video clip from the website.

"The Chronoscope", a piece for the Times Square Centennial exhibit, models Times Square in 3-D, and then lays famous historical photographs over their appropriate places in the model, drilling you down in that history.

Local Projects seems less interested in geography, mapping and urban planning, than they are aware of the essential importance of these in their focus, which is storytelling. Local storytelling, or perhaps more accurately, locale storytelling. Storytelling of place, or telling a place's stories.

This is an interesting trend to me on two fronts: mapping, geography and urban planning, although having a strong tradition in the Bay Area, are not necessarily the first metaphor Bay inhabitants will reach for. The Bay is not a single city, although it can be seen as a single organism, so Bay inhabitants do not think of the urban landscape as the overriding order of their lives, although it clearly is. New Yorkers, on the other hand, no matter of which borough, seem to think of themselves as New Yorkers, city inhabitants, and to be supremely conscious of the metaphor of their lives being an urban one. Thus the trendiness of noticing urban planning and geographical concerns is almost passe already in New York, while still fresh and problematic where I live. (Bottom line: it's fun to watch trend waves go from East to West, and change in meaning in the process.)

Also, this trend of putting a self-explanatory weight on the term "storytelling", as if the telling of stories were an essential virtue of our society, puzzles me. In fact storytelling is a fundamental value, although that value is not one that can be used fundamentally without examination. As an administrator in an ethnicity-based nonprofit with a strong literary program, I used the term "storytelling" myself to denote virtuous activity. I often, without thinking, used the argument that the stories we were bringing to the fore through our programming existed already, but would not otherwise be told.

Being a fiction writer, I cannot argue against the idea that our society, even our species, may be defined (in the same way that some ants may be defined as hill-builders) by its compulsion to narrate. But then to make as one's mission the facilitation of narrative where no narrative would otherwise be seems to be actually redefining our society as one where narrative is not so much an internal as an external compulsion. Simultaneous with this change from internal to external compulsion is the sensation that our casual storytelling is endangered, that it requires an external motive to get these stories told at all.

If, as with singing, there are strata of narrative (casual and formal) and a hierarchy of storytellers (trained professionals, talented amateurs, and levels of everybody else) don't these exist anyway? Aren't we going to tell our stories anyway? The storytelling of Local Projects' projects is definitely the popular, everyman variety. Why are they facilitating the telling, and the hearing, of popular storytelling, a background noise which any frequent flyer or DMV-line queuer can tell you can't be shut off?

I'm wondering if there's a connection between the contemporary city and this apparent unremarked fear that casual storytelling is somehow endangered. Is there some connection between the growing alienation of neighbor from neighbor in the contemporary city and the feeling that stories already extant in people's heads can't/won't be heard? Is it that simple?

Or is it maybe implicit in the digital formats of Organic City and City of Memory, or the limited space of an installation like "Memory Maps", that casual storytelling must be contained, stripped down to a much smaller space ... concentrated like poetry into its utmost meaning?

Or is it that we, in the city, have become such sophisticated story-hearers that we can no longer bear the amateurishness of our neighbors' storytelling, so we must provide a mechanical prop to make their stories bearable?

Saint Joe

okay: if you're the (slightly) adventurous type, and if you don't live in San Jose, California, just call 617-712-3060 or 617-712-3061 on your phone or cell phone. Yes, right now. Use the map above (of the light rail system of Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority) to help you answer the questions you are asked when the phone picks up. Pretend you're on the train.

If you are in San Jose, or can get there easily, take this number and your cell phone with you, and get on the light rail, wherever you may find it. Then call the number once you're on the train.

If you're like me, and can't be manipulated into doing random things by being asked if you are "adventurous" or "spontaneous", this is the latest installation by artist John Klima (whom I interviewed for a post last month, if you'll remember.) Klima is not averse to being manipulated into offering studio visits to visiting bloggers, so I got to tread the sacred boards of his Williamsburg studio during my recent New York visit (the occasion of a transportation adventure of my own, since you can't get to one part of Brooklyn from another part of Brooklyn; welcome to American transit, folks, where the lunatics are running the food service.)

The installation, titled "Saint Joe" and created for the 13th Annual International Symposium of Electronic Art, is simple of conception, and very complex in the experience. The phone number connects you to a computer phone system Klima set up, containing a love story told in fragments of narrative: one for each station in each direction. You begin by telling the system where you are (and to a certain extent, who you are.) The system then tells you the story. You navigate from narrative fragment to narrative fragment by telling the system when you've passed the next station. Or, as the New York Times puts it:

By dialing another number from within the city's light rail system, callers can access a ''sci-fi erotic'' narrative by the New York artist John Klima that will unfold differently depending on your particular train route.

For his sprawling story Mr. Klima cooked up a strange cast of characters, including a modern-day incarnation of St. Joseph of Nazareth, for whom the city was named, and a cross-dressing bicycle acrobat who is based on a historical figure. But the plot varies with your stated romantic orientation and inferred location. Once the computer program at the other end of the line identifies where you are and where you're heading, it will start dropping in chunks of story that incorporate a McDonald's, a church or a public urinal that are visible from the train window.

The story will become more erotic the longer you listen, Mr. Klima promises. ''There is a huge amount of narrative that gets pulled together on the fly,'' he said. ''Everything I do is complicated and baroque. It's all a game with a complex set of rules.

... yeah, just call the number and follow the directions. You'll pick it up.

Klima has done a lot of research into the locations, toponyms, and history of San Jose (named after Saint Joseph, Jesus' stepfather, who is a character in the story.) The locality is woven into the story---and is relevant to the telling as you pass each station. Ideally, you'd experience this from the train. I played around with it with my cell phone and a VTA map in Klima's studio, but I'm saving most of the experience for when I return to the Bay Area. (And I'll post more about it when I have been and done.)

In the meantime, the festival is over, so presumably the signs in the VTA with the number posted on them have been taken down, but Klima is leaving the phone system running as long as there is still interest in it (i.e. as long as people are still calling), and he's also still altering and adding to the narrative as the mood strikes him. So call in from afar and be sure to pass the word on to your friends in the Bay Area.

Here are some links to official text about the installation. (He hasn't gotten around to putting it up on his website yet.) And click here for the New York Times review of the exhibition.

amoeba gap

alexander Trevi, at Pruned has a lovely flight of fancy around the new Japanese machine, AMOEBA, that can write images in water by creating pixels out of vertically-oriented conical waves.

Unfortunately, there is also the possibility of weaponizing AMOEBA waves in the same way one could easily turn any natural earth systems, e.g. earthquakes, into a national security threat. Because once the machine falls into the hands of al-Qaeda, they can then easily wipe Los Angeles off the map with a tsunami. In the shape of Versailles.

It'll be a new kind of maritime warfare. New York comes under attack with an endless barrage of Italianate gardens propagated with Atlantic waters. First the Villa Lante, then the Villa d'Este, next comes the Boboli, and then another one and another. Vaux-le-Vicomte is mathematically translated into a Bessel function and then supersonically launched towards Boston. San Francisco gets torpedoed with dozens of allées. Miami is sieged with zen gardens. No coastal cities would be safe. Unless, of course, you have your own AMOEBA machine, in which case you could simply send your very own waves to cancel out any incoming tsunamis.

Resulting in a tsunami gap. Seriously, subscribe to this blog.

das stadtwappen

anfangs war beim babylonischen Turmbau alles in leidlicher Ordnung, ja die Ordnung war vielleicht zu groß, man dachte zu sehr an Wegweiser, Dolmetscher, Arbeiterunterkünfte und Verbindungswege, so als habe man Jahrhunderte freier Arbeitsmöglichkeit vor sich. Die damals herrschende Meinung ging sogar dahin, man könne gar nicht langsam genug bauen; man mußte diese Meinung gar nicht sehr übertreiben und konnte überhaupt davor zurückschrecken, die Fundamente zu legen. Man argumentierte nämlich so: Das Wesentliche des ganzen Unternehmens ist der Gedanke, einen bis in den Himmel reichenden Turm zu bauen. Neben diesem Gedanken ist alles andere nebensächlich. Der Gedanke, einmal in seiner Größe gefaßt, kann nicht mehr verschwinden, solange es Menschen gibt, wird auch der starke Wunsch da sein, den Turm zu Ende zu bauen. In dieser Hinsicht also muß man wegen der Zukunft keine Sorgen haben, im Gegenteil, das Wissen der Menschheit steigert sich, die Baukunst hat fortschritte gemacht und wird weitere Fortschritte machen, eine Arbeit, zu der wir ein Jahr brauchen, wird in hundert Jahren vielleicht in einem halben Jahr geleistet werden und überdies besser, haltbarer. Warum also schon heute sich an die Grenze der Kräfte abmühn? Das hätte nur dann Sinn, wenn man hoffen könnte, den Turm in der Zeit einer Generation aufzubauen. Das aber war auf keine Weise zu erwarten. Eher ließ sich denken, daß die nächste Generation mit ihrem vervollkommneten Wissen die Arbeit der vorigen Generation schlecht finden und das Gebaute niederreißen werde, um von neuem anzufangen. Solche Gedanken lähmten die Kräfte und mehr als um den Turmbau kümmerte man sich um den Bau der Arbeiterstadt. Jede Landsmannschaft wollte das schönste Quartier haben, dadurch ergaben sich Streitigkeiten, die sich bis zu blutigen Kämpfen steigerten. Diese Kämpfe hörten nicht mehr auf; den Führeren waren sie ein neues Argument dafür, daß der Turm auch mangels der nötigen Konzentration sehr langsam oder lieber erst nach allgemeinem Friedensschluß gebaut werden sollte. Doch verbrachte man die Zeit nicht nur mit Kämpfen, in den Pausen verschönerte man die Stadt, wodurch man allerdings neuen Neid und neue Kämpfe hervorrief. So verging die Zeit der ersten Generationen, aber keine der folgenden war anders, nur die Kunstfertigkeit steigerte sich immerfort und damit die Kampfsucht.

Dazu kam, daß schon die zweite oder dritte Generation die Sinnlosigkeit des Himmelsturmbaues erkannte, doch war man schon viel zu sehr miteinander verbunden, um die Stadt zu verlassen. Alles was in dieser Stadt an Sagen und Liedern entstanden ist, ist erfüllt von der Sehnsucht nach einem prophezeiten Tag, an welchem die Stadt von einer Riesenfaust in fünf kurz aufeinander folgenden Schlägen zerschmettert werden wird. Deshalb hat auch die Stadt die Faust im Wappen.

-- Franz Kafka

The City’s Coat of Arms

At first, the construction of the Babylonian tower was reasonably organized, in fact maybe too organized, too much thought was put into signs, interpreters, accommodations for the workers, and lines of communication, as if there were centuries ahead in which to get the work done. In fact, conventional wisdom held that one could not build slowly enough; very little emphasis on this opinion would have caused anyone to quail before laying the foundations at all. It was argued thus: what's important about this entire undertaking is the idea of building a tower that reaches Heaven. Next to this concept, everything else is irrelevant. The idea, when once grasped in all its greatness, will never disappear, as long as there are people, there will also always be the powerful desire to complete the tower. Looked at this way, no one need worry about the future, rather the opposite: human knowledge grows, the technology of building construction progresses and will continue to progress, a project for which we would require a year will in a century perhaps be accomplished in only half that, and done better, and made more durable. Why then should anyone toil today to the limits of their strength? That would only make sense if there were any hope of completing the tower within a generation. This was, however, not to be expected. It was more probable that the next generation, in their advanced state of the art, would find the work of the previous generation poor, and tear down what they had built to start anew. Such thinking sapped people’s strength, and they took more care about the construction of a city for the workers, than about the construction of the tower itself. Each national contingent wanted the best quarters for itself, thus arose disputes that escalated into bloody battles. These battles never ended; they were the administrators’ new argument that, owing to the lack of proper focus, the tower should be built very slowly or, for a preference, only after general peace was declared. But the time wasn’t passed only in fighting, in the breaks between battles the city was beautified, which then caused fresh envy, and fresh battles. So passed the time of the first generations, but none of the following generations were otherwise, only in artistry did they progress, and therefore also in bloodthirstiness.

To this it must be added: that the second or third generation recognized the senselessness of the heavenly tower, but by that time they were too closely knit together to leave the city. Everything created in this city, sagas and songs, is filled with longing for the prophesied day on which the city, in five fast blows from a giant hand, is smashed. This is why the city's coat of arms portray a fist.

-- translated by me! (my first public translation)

story in space

for all you budding artists out there, Watchword Press is planning a very, very cool exhibition in San Francisco in late August and you can submit a project if you want.

They're going to take one of the stories in their ninth issue and render it into space in an art gallery. Their description is below.

Caveat: I don't have anything to do with Watchword Press and don't know anymore than what is below. But yes, I am considering doing something for this show, and yes, it involves mapping.

Watchword Press is looking for artists to collaborate on a gallery installation this summer for the release of our Ninth Issue!

We are going to install a story!! Our vision is to take a blank gallery space and transform it into the universe that ONE chosen story inhabits. Each piece submitted will be a part of a greater world and
installed or preformed appropriately to create this fictional dimension. The story will be featured in the upcoming issue and the installation will open on the night of its release.

Your piece can be narrative or non-narrative, about what is happening within the parameters of the text, or beyond them. It can be a scene unknown to the reader, a character uncovered, the smallest detail magnified etc. This is the story reflected in many mirrors. It can be what is not being said and it can be about what is.

This is an experiment. It is a bringing together of all mediums!! Anything is possible. Films. Paintings. Drawings. Photographs. Sculptures. Theatrical works. Musical compositions. Concept Art. Architectural design (inside and out). Textiles. Dance. Comic books. Poems. Alternate stories. Ceramics. ANYTHING.

The story will be provided to you by mid-July and the installation and release party will take place late August!!

If you are interested and available this summer, or have any questions, please email:
Tavia Stewart at [email protected] or
Liz Lisle at [email protected].
(Please include proposed medium in initial email.)

We hope to hear from ALL of you soon. Before July 1st would be perfect.

organic city story map

this is, quite simply, the coolest map I've seen in a long time. The geniuses at theOrganic City website are promoting the community of Oakland, California, by collecting and preserving its stories online. These stories are fiction and non-fiction, personal and historical, serious and fun, and pretty much anything else you can think of that relates to Oakland. The stories are also in a variety of forms: text, sound clips of songs and storytelling, and video.

The map you see above is one way to navigate through the storybase. It directs you to the stories fixed in the landscape. The group of blue squares you see to the lower left are points of interest in Oakland Chinatown-raised journalist Bill Wong's video walking tour of Chinatown. The smaller group of blue squares to the upper right are stories performed by storyteller Patricia Bullit. The yellow triangles are sound clips and the red dots are text.

The site also helps you download these clips to your iPod or mobile phone, so you can listen or read or watch as you walk. As yet, a lot of the stories are just reminiscences, or some rather silly art product of the sort that gets a lot of play in the Bay Area. But it's a brilliant idea, and once it gets some traction---and the assistance of more artists, writers, and storytellers---it'll be a brilliant site.