atlas(t)

fight club map

all of the jokes I could make here are way, way too easy, so I'll just let you have it. If you come up with a good one, go ahead and put it in the comments.

A dude maps out the plot elements of "Fight Club" with legos.

Via book ninja

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?

literary maps

ain't it purty? The webpage where I found it sez:

The Voyage of the Pequod is one of a series of twelve literary maps based on British and American literary classics produced by the Harris-Seybold Company of Cleveland between 1953 and 1964. The map was part of a calendar printed to advertise the capabilities of the company's lithographic printing equipment. Illustrator Everett Henry was a well-known New York commercial artist also noted for his mural paintings. The Library has more than 225 literary maps that record the location of places associated with authors and their literary works or serve as a guide to their imaginative worlds.

I love how the needs of advertising "the capabilities of the company's lithographic printing equipment" spurred the illustrator to such rainbow effects. On the one hand, couldn't they just have printed out a few simple figures? On the other, why doesn't anyone take the opportunities offered by advertising to create such silly/beautiful things anymore? I mean, 40 years isn't that long ago.

The "library" referred to as possessing more than 225 literary maps is, of course, The Library of Congress, more specifically the geography and map division (about which I'll have much more to say later), which possesses quite a collection of cultural and literary artifacts, not a few of them "literary maps" of various types.

The John Steinbeck Map of America features popular images from Steinbeck's novels such as Tortilla Flat (1935), The Grapes of Wrath (1939), and The Pearl (1947). The outline of the map shows the route of Travels with Charley (1962), and the central portion consists of detailed street maps of the California towns of Salinas and Monterey, where Steinbeck lived and set some of his works. Numbers on the maps are keyed to lists of events in Steinbeck's novels. A portrait of the author appears in the upper right corner. Research and design of the map were done by Molly Maguire, who produced a series of literary maps in the 1980s.

There are, of course, millions of ways to do this kind of thing. I think it's fun to compare the map of a novel (an encyclopedic novel, but a single novel nonetheless) to a map of the entire imaginary world of an author, over the course of several books. The Moby Dick map maps not just a journey over space, but also over time, with its representations of key scenes from the book as they happened along the ship's route. The portraits of the characters above and below are not necessarily fixed in time and space, but rather present the abstractions of the characters as archetypes. The impact of the book, the integrity of its singular, fictional world, is what is important here. The map is not metafictional, but rather a companion volume to the book, maintaining its illusion, smitten by and infused with its fancifulness.

The Steinbeck map, on the other hand, is coming from such a meta position that it can't give in to fictional integrity even to the extent of following a fictional journey. The journey here is from Travels With Charley, Steinbeck's memoir of a journey with his poodle. The journey is represented as a route, a static road, not a journey through time, from event to event. You can start anywhere, and choose to go nowhere if you'd like. Along the road are points of interest from different novels. The concern here is clearly to flatten the differing worlds of Steinbeck's differing novels into one integral world that encompasses all the dramatic moments. There's an anxiety that the various worlds Steinbeck created don't match up. Cathy Ames, for example, doesn't belong on the same map with Tom Joad, so they become symbolic sprouts of a (once) extant tree.

And if you look at the map of the landscape covered by America's "first western" genre novel, The Virginian below, about which book I know nothing, no route is followed at all. All of the sites on the map are presented as store fronts, facing outward, almost terraced. What does it mean?

The point is: there's more than one way to skin a map.

Therefore, I declare the next few days/week/s to be literary map week/s. There will be more comin'!

map of the marvel comics world

from the "too much time on my hands" file, comes this incredibly cool site-in-progress, mapping out the locations of events and significant sites in the Marvel comics universe. The Marvel Atlas Project (note the clever arrangement of initials into "M.A.P.") was founded by someone named Sean Kleefeld, and handed off to someone named as "The Beetle". Significance lost on me. Although it is still in progress, you can get to some cool sites with it. You start with the map of the world (above) and click through continent, country and region to find a list of significant sites. Like The Avengers West Compound (below), which gets into even more detail if you click on it, to show you floorplans of the main building. How cool is that? In a previous post I noted an ongoing project to timeline significant events in fictional films. Then there's that recent Orwell quote about the "false map of the world" we create in our heads from books. But I think Orwell was referring to map of how to move through the socialities and necessities of the world, not a literal map of land or space in the head. But all of this makes sense -- so much sense. As the globe gets smaller, we get more and more of a handle on its dimensions -- we have more and more of a map inside our heads of what ground we are walking on and how it relates, spatially, to other ground. We have become extremely sophisticated at physical mapping. The new GIS services are a result of this sophistication, not the cause. So it's only natural that in the arts we are taking great pleasure in using the map and chart as a formal construct; and it then only makes sense that we try -- all over, everywhere -- to map out the fictional landscapes that form our romance -- our ideal worlds -- in real space. For years -- for as long as there has been tourism -- there have been literary walking tours, where people see the locations where someone who never existed died of tuberculosis, or said yes to her man, or realized that nothing was ever going to be right again ... ever. A direct interaction between the imagination and space. Why not a middle man? Maps are the intermediary between the idea of space, and the space itself. So why not an intermediary between fictional spaces and real spaces?

random invisible city

Cities & Names 4

clarice, the glorious city, has a tormented history. Several times it decayed, then burgeoned again, always keeping the first Clarice as an unparalleled model of every splendor, compared to which the city's present state can only cause more sighs at every fading of the stars.

In its centuries of decadence, emptied by plagues, its height reduced by collapsing beams and cornices and by shifts of the terrrain, rusted and stopped up through neglect or the lack of maintenance men, the city slowly became populated again as the survivors emerged from the basements and lairs, in hordes, swarming like rats, diriven by their fury to rummage and gnaw, and yet also to collect and patch, like nesting birds. They grabbed everything that could be taken from where it was and put it in another place to serve a different use: brocade curtains ended up as sheets; in marble furnerary urns they planted basil; wrought-iron gratings torn from the harem windows were used for roasting cat-meat on fires of inlaid wood. Put together with odd bits of the useless Clarice, a survivors' Clarice was taking shape, all huts and hovels, festering sewers, rabbit cages. and yet, almost nothing was lost of Clarice's former splendor; it was all there, merely arranged in a different order, no less appropriate to the inhabitants' needs than it had been before.

The days of poverty were followed by more joyous times: a sumputous butterfly-Clarice emerged from the beggared chrysalis-Clarice. The new abundance made the city overflow with new materials, buildings, objects; new people flocked in from outside; nothing, no one had any connection with the former Clarice or Clarices. And the more the new city settled triumphantly into the place and the name of the first Clarice, the more it realized it was moving away from it, destroying it no less rapidly than the rats and the mold. Despite its pride in its new wealth, the city, at heart, felt itself incongrous, alien, a usurper.

And then the shards of the original splendor that had been saved, by adapting them to more obscure needs, were again shifted. They were now preserved under glass bells, locked in display cases, set on velvet cushions, and not because they might still be used for anything, but because people wanted to reconstruct through them a city of which no one knew anything now.

More decadences, more burgeonings have followed one another in Clarice. Populations and customs have changed several times; the name, the site, and the objects hardest to break remain. Each new Clarice, compact as a living body with its smells and its breath, shows off, like a gem, what remains of the ancient Clarices, fragmentary and dead. There is no knowing when the Corinthian capitals stood on the top of their columns: only one of them is remembered, since for many years, in a chicken run, it supported the basket where the hens laid their eggs, and from there it was moved to the Museum of Capitals, in line with other specimens of the collection. The order of the eras' successsion has been lost; that a first Clarice existed is a widespread belief, but there are no proofs to support it. The capitals could have been in the chicken runs before they were in the temples, the marble urns could have been planted with basil before they were filled with dead bones. Only this is known for sure: a given number of objects is shifted within a given space, at times submerged by a quantity of new objects, at times worn out and not replaced; the rule is to shuffle them each time, then try to assemble them. Perhaps Clarice has always been only a confusion of chipped gimcracks, ill-assorted, obsolete.

-- Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

orwellage

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

window seat

above displayed are sample pages of Window Seat: Reading the Landscape from the Air, a fabulous book by my fellow Other magazine staffer, Gregory Dicum. The book is so cool I got it for my Dad for Christmas without once looking at the name of the author, and didn't realize who had written it until I was directed to his website by a link he posted on the othermag blog.

The book is a guide to reading the landscape of the United States from the window of an airplane. This includes maps, lots of aerial photography, and information about geology, geography, history (especially of land use), as well as explanations of how to recognize what you're looking at. It's heavily designed (without corners!) and easy on the eyes. It almost gives me a reason to sit in the window seat, despite my mild claustrophobia. (I said, "almost" ... that's why I gave it to my Dad.)

Window Seat was published in 2004 and a European Window Seat is due out this year.