new essay in Aeon Magazine

A new essay in Aeon Magazine on being a Quaker and an atheist who really believes in magical stories. It's complicated. I originally titled it "In Praise of Gods That Do Not Exist," but I'm OK with the title they assigned to it: "I contradict myself."

As always, comments welcome, here or on the article itself. Enjoy!

Old Books 3: The Lathe of Heaven

I remembered how much I loved this book, but on re-reading I realized that I had forgotten how much the main character, George Orr, had imprinted on me as a hero. Especially towards the end, I found myself saying, “Oh, so that's where I got this idea of that kind of Virtue from.”

George Orr is simultaneously a cypher, a man whose psychology tests come back exactly average in every respect, and a man who it turns out possesses enormous strength. At the opening of the book, he appears to be compared to a jellyfish in the ocean of sleep, who upon waking is cast up on the rocks to be torn to bits. At the end, his solidity and centered strength allowed him to save the world from a nightmare created by a power-mad psychiatrist.

Actually, it was the second time that happened; the book is framed by his saving the world. Orr's particular ability—if you can call what your unconscious accomplishes while you sleep an "ability"—is that certain of his dreams retroactively change reality. At the opening, his dreams unmake the nuclear war that had "burned away his eyelids" and pinned him beneath twisted concrete and steel. He tries to get the dreams to stop, tries to stop himself from changing things out of a sense of responsibility. He desperately wants to abdicate.

This sense of abdication, of consciously pushing away from consciously given position and authority, is a running theme in the stories I hold most dear. The Tattoo-Rhumba Man does it, the son of Croesus does it in a play I wrote in high school. It's like The Lion King, except in my versions of the story, the runaway monarch does not return to reclaim the throne.

George Orr also refuses the throne, the mantle of authority that Dr Haber tries to assume in his place and proves unable to maintain. George Orr's power is not to be king, but to be a humble channeler of the power he has, someone through whom Right Order in the world will be restored. It is not submission to his gift that he performs at the end, when he saves the world again, but the simple effort to press a single off button.

At the center of the book is the Taoist idea of strength through inaction, of virtue through inaction. The image of ocean creatures—jellyfish and later sea turtles—held and moved by ocean currents, is a running theme. One of Orr's dreams' creations is Aliens, mysterious creatures who at first appear to be a threat, but then turn out to be benign and kind of Taoist in their love of paradox and seeming self-contradiction. They are a bringing into the flesh of something missing from the nightmarish North America Orr dreams his way out of: the satanic Enemy. Orr's dreams first create the monsters as a diversion from seemingly impossible political divisions on earth, then convert these monsters into friends and neighbors—at the conclusion, one of the aliens is George Orr's benevolent employer.

Here's a moment in chapter 9, where Orr truly comes into himself:

Without premeditation and without timidity Orr said, “Dr Haber, I can't let you use my effective dreams any more.”

“Eh?” Haber said, his mind still on Orr's brain, not on Orr.

“I can't let you use my dreams any more.”

”’Use’ them?”

“Use them.”

“Call it what you like,” Haber said. He had straightened up and towered over Orr, who was still sitting down. He was gray, large, broad, curly bearded, deep-chested, frowning. Your God is a jealous God. “I'm sorry, George, but you’re not in a position to say that.”

Orr's gods were nameless and unenvious, asking neither worship nor obedience.

“Yet I do say it,” he replied mildly.

Haber looked down at him, really looked at him for a moment, and saw him. He seemed to recoil, as a man might who thought to push aside a gauze curtain and found it to be a granite door.

This passage speaks a great deal to me. It oddly pars up with the heroic ideal in Pullman's His Dark Materials, as neither a total abdication, nor a taking back of a kingdom. It's a denial of power as exercised by the conscious self—of “use”—and a restatement of that power as a slower, bedrock kind of stability: a rooted stillness. A conservatism not of habit and form, but of time and presence.

As I say, this speaks a great deal to me.

Thank you, Diana Wynne Jones

Once upon a time, I was given a book. It was called The Ogre Downstairs, and it was about ordinary kids with the sort of problem a ordinary author would have given an earnest, well-intentioned plot to: they were a newly mixed family, and the two groups of kids hated each other on sight. It was more complicated that that of course, like life is: they liked each other in odd combinations that in real life might or might not be overtaken by their stories about how they hated each other. But in this story, there was a magical chemistry set, which made toys come alive, gave them the ability to fly, made you invisible, and all sorts of other things. And it caused misadventure after misadventure, like a fever-dream that keeps waking up into real life. Bathroom floods, strandings on rooftops, great heaps of toffee that threw themselves onto radiators to melt, a gang of ancient Greek toughs in motorcycle helmets who threatened to beat them up. Over and over, their dreams of Marvelous Things happening went bad.

It was a marvelous book, and the start of almost forty years so far reading Diana Wynne Jones' books.

Once upon a time, I met Diana Wynne Jones. Well, first I sent a letter to her, then bolluxed that up sending a second letter. Then I met her at two science fiction conventions, and I think I was the scary fan who might be mildly schizophrenic or otherwise just a little too much. Someone with the last name Kase, a Dutch SF fan who is a little overenthusiastic, showed up in one of her novels, and I know she put people she encountered into her books, not always in the most complimentary life. I have suspicions. She had a strange relationship with her stories: they kept coming around and coming true in one way or another, and biting her in the rear. She returned the compliment. In one of the pieces in her book of essays, which I'm reading now, she talks about how she drew on her life, but had to tone it back because "no one would be live it." Her life was too full of bizzarities to make a coherent plot (even a coherent fantasy).

Once upon a time, I read another book. It was the Lathe of Heaven, by Ursula Le Guin, and it was about a man, George Orr, whose dreams keep turning, upon his waking, into the way the universe always has been. His dreams change the world, and not in the metaphorical way we expect from Dr Martin Luther King Jr's speech. His unconscious does the most horrible things when he tries to make them stop, and trusts a psychiatrist to work on stopping his dreams. With Dr Haber's Augmentor (an enhanced EEG/biofeedback device), his dreams solve racism by making everybody gray, solve world war by creating invading aliens, solve overpopulation by killing off six out of seven people in a plague. Then one of the aliens his dreams created—a strange, sea-turtle-like Taoist alien who in his changed-upon-changed world is his boss—advises him how to regain balance by handing him a record of the Beatles' "A Little Help From My Friends."

Once upon a time, quite recently, I had a vivid dream where dreams (not mine specifically) came to life. It was enormous, like George Orr's dilemma. Lots and lots of people had died. There was magic elsewhere in the dream, and it was also scary: things catching on fire, and big books in sinister libraries. I don't remember how now, but I was working as a short-order cook and dishwasher, and there wasn't much left to do, because the world was suddenly so empty. So I got off work early and went for walk out in the hills, which somehow looked like an enormous diorama of hills, with little houses with electric lights flickering inside them. It was peaceful, and I felt greatly relieved by the thought of all those people in all those houses, just dealing with their lives.

Once upon a time, about an hour ago, I had a dream that Diana Wynne Jones had come back, in her full self, to visit from the dead. She said she didn't know why. I didn't know why. I realized I was supposed to ask her a question. We went round an round, chatting about other things than what we were there for, and then I half-woke in my real bed, and thought about her books, where dreams and ordinary life twine and twist around themselves, but (usually) all work out in the end. I thought to ask her, half awake, "should we live so that our life is as wonderful as dreams, and dream so our dreams are as vivid as life?" and she answered something like, "well, that would be a neat package, now wouldn't it?" And I remembered George Orr, and how trying to make his dreams follow orders turned out so poorly. That kind of balanced statement is like a bad reflection of the Tao.

No, you can write stories that make things come out in neat packages, but life is not like that. You fall in love and raise a family, but also get into horrible car-crashes and get cancer and die in real life, like Diana Wynne Jones did. And maybe you can make a neat, balanced package even out of that. Maybe your dreams will help you make sense, forget what you need to forget just to stay sane, create a narrative that lets you get on with what you need to. But if we're honest, the kinds of stories that deal with dreams don't end neatly in life itself: the neatness is window-dressing.

Life in and of itself doesn't make sense. Once upon a time I dreamed it did. It's not a coherent plot, and improbable things keep happening at inappropriate times. It's too much, and so we tell stories, to make it make sense. Those come out of us, a part of us that wants life to be fair, that wants to believe in karma and justice and balance. And there is balance in the universe, but not the balance of a judge weighing souls with certified scales. It's the balance of: here's where all the chaotic whirl of the universe has settled for now, every atom doing what it does because that's what atoms do. Plants creating out oxygen, animals breathing out carbon dioxide. Cold breathing out of the arctic, heat breathing out of the tropics. People waking up in the morning and seeing sense and nonsense whirling around them, then going to sleep at night and dreaming dreams.

Thank you, Diana Wynne Jones, for all the marvelous, maddening chaos in your books. Thank you for being alive. And thank you for the visit last night. It didn't end with a neat answer, like your books often went to convoluted ends to achieve. And that's OK. I think maybe that's what you came back to tell me.

I get by with a little help from my friends.

Careful of that dead thing

I had a terrifying dream last week. I was driving my family in the car, on a nearby nondescript suburban road (County Rd C in Roseville, MN, if you care). It was late twilight and cloudy. Suddenly ahead of us, there was a burst of flame: the afterburner engaging as a jet fighter swooped up and to the right. It startled my wife, who yelled. There were flashes in the sky, like lightning behind a cloudbank.

Then off in the distance, way off in the distance, ahead of us and slightly to the left, was a blinding blue-white flash, with a shockwave visible pushing away from it. I knew right away it was a nuclear explosion. Someone had set off an atomic bomb. My immediate question was, what do we do, where do we go? Do I turn the car around and run like hell for home? Would I make it? Would the shockwave get us this far away? Would more bombs explode?

This was the cultural shared nightmare from my growing-up years: nuclear armageddon. I don't remember actually having nightmares about it then—I remember nightmares where I watched passenger jets crash nearby, coming in low and screaming and flying all wrong, and then a cloud of moke from behind a line of trees. But not the Big One. Neither is it really a daylight nightmare for me, and hasn't been since glasnost. Terrorist attacks and pandemics are what tend to set me off in the same way today.

What the heck?

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I've been coming back over and over this spring to how we tend to avoid awareness of mortality—not just ours, but the mortality of those entities we are part of. In particular, when we found an institution, we seldom build into that institution's structure the assumption that it will one day be dissolved. Most legal entities have procedures built into their generic type: how to dissolve a foundation, corporation or church. But when we found most institutions, we expect them to go on "in perpetuity."

I think I had forgotten how viscerally overwhelming it is to actually face the end of our own bodily life. No philosophy, no rationality, just an overwhelming urge to figure out how to go on living; how to get out of this dangerous situation now.

As I keep moving forward in this exploration (can I really call it that? seems like pretty random wandering much of the time), I need to bear this in mind: the subject of endings can touch off a panicked response that seems to come out of left field. No-one who is not facing excruciating pain wants to die. And no-one who feels their very life depends on a larger organization will therefore respond well to suggestions that the organization ought to be left for dead.

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I really enjoyed, earlier this week, listening to Kevin Kling talk about what to him was a new an revelatory way of thinking about storytelling, as part of an interview with Krista Tippett on On Being. He says:

Well... with this post-traumatic stress a few months ago, after years and years, it came back with a vengeance. And I went to a therapist and she said, "You got to understand... it's not time [that heals]— it... doesn't work, it sits in such a deep place that it's not triggered in ways you would think. It's not something that time heals. It will come back." And so what she had me do, which was so right fit just with my weird, Jungian sensibility, she had me tell the story of my motorcycle accident.

It was a bit more complicated than this. She told me the story, but instead of hitting the car, I missed the car, and I went to where I was going. And by retelling the story and having a different outcome, I started sleeping better. I started, all of a sudden the post-traumatic stress really dissipated in a significant way. And it was because I retold the story in another way that had me survive in another way.

Now the struggle with me is, I still wake up in the morning with my arm not working, with all these things. So there's a reality, and then there's another story I've created. And it really seems to fit with the way we work as, as humans, especially these days. We need to rewrite our stories sometimes just so we can sleep at night.

...but it's not the reality. But we can't live in the story that makes us sleep, but we need it to sleep. And so that's my struggle now, putting those two together, taking the myths we form to make ourselves feel better and fitting it with the reality that we live in.

And I think that about sums it up.

Saving the Universe, one novel at a time

Late last year I read my son most of Diane Duane’s So You Want to be a Wizard. I was reminded again of what struck me the first time I read the book (and its sequels): for a young-adult fantasy novel, it brings into unusually clear focus how doing good means setting aside your own needs (and maybe your life) in service of something bigger. Self-sacrifice is one of the central common themes in hero-stories, which make up a lot of fantasy fiction (self-discovery being the other big theme). But there's usually a narrative-distance gap that dulls its emotional impact: either the novel is set far enough away in time and/or space that the behavior seems exceptional to our life and times, or else it's not the character that you as reader really identify with that does the self-sacrificing; your stand-in character is witness, not willing victim.

Meanwhile, I am getting tired of the idea of actually saving the Universe, or the Earth, or Life. I am getting tired of people who overstep their truth. I just get tired of feeling like I need to clean up after radical theoreticians when I read them, like I have to measure every sentence to see if they are still speaking from experience or generalizing out into an barely-tenable conclusion. And I think it's like the idea of our "saving the Earth" or "saving life on Earth": Folks, we'd have to work pretty damned hard to actually wipe out microbial life, or even vertebrate life, or even mammalia, let alone primates, let alone Homo Sapiens. "Western civilization" I can see getting wiped out over some lengthy period of time, though it will take some doing to wipe away so much printed and absorbed knowledge. And what hubris to think we can "save the Earth." It is large, and contains unbelievable multitudes. (see this post by Keith Humphreys that pretty much sums it up for me)

I've noticed for a long time in movies and comic books and fantasy novels, that when there's a battle for the Universe, it usually takes place in the author's backyard. Wherever the author lives, that's where the Ultimate Conflict will be. So Tom Clancy has a showdown in Washington, Harry Potter and Doctor Who in England, Godzilla in Tokyo... somewhere there's a Malaysian hero-movie with the Ultimate Battle in Kuala Lumpur, and a telenovela with the world-saving hero's sword is locked in combat somewhere near Buenos Aires. Probably the dolphins have a long-running series on the Ultimate Battle With the Orcas of Puget Sound.

There is something wonderful about your own backyard becoming the center of the universe. English fantasies do this well: old battles that were, for their participants, the center of creation—the invasions of Celts, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, Normans; the endless wars since—are placed against the determinedly bucolic and ordinary lives of our lead characters, living in undramatic late-twentieth-century England.

American fantasy writers struggle to do this as effectively. I have often wondered why this is. For a long time I wondered if it's because, with the exception of Native American religions and the Mormons, we do not have the Center of the Universe posited here by our religions. But I'm coming to wonder if it has more to do with the fact of fighting over land. The English are just as uncentered religiously: yes there's Canterbury, but the Holy Land is as religio-centric as it is here in North America.

No, I think the depth of people physically battling over land may be the key. There are few battlefields here in North America, and what there are are mostly framed as battles over principle rather than invasions. Really only Euro vs Native wars qualify in the same way as those repeated invasions of England, and those are a still a little crisply engraved in our cultural memory to work as the resonant underpinning to fiction, and the descendants of Europeans remain on the side of the Normans and the Vikings... the bad guy invader side. I wonder what it will take, in terms of action and the erosive quality of time, for us to get past the American equivalent of Ivanhoe-ish divisions.

Tecumseh Sparrow Spivet

[Note: this article presumes reading the book, and contains spoilers]

I have a few things to say about The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet.

The novel was a best-seller when it came out in June of 2009, and initially received press attention because of the monumental advance the author Reif Larsen received for this first novel ($1 million). The reviews were mixed: most reviewers wanted very much to like such an unusually eloquent and evocative voice, but several (notably the New York Times and Washington Post reviewers) found the latter part of the book, especially the parts where T.S. Spivet visits Washington, disappointing.

Well, to be honest, they weren't my favorite bits either. But then, they also weren't T.S.'s favorite, and it kind of shows. The book, like most maps, doesn't entirely work as a linear narrative. It's a puzzle in which the linear progression of time and plot, while certainly straightforward (this is no Memento), is not the dominant, salient feature. Really, the most important moment is about 2/3 of the way through, when, at the conclusion of reading his mother's reconstruction of his great-grandmother's early life story, she abruptly cuts off the narrative, writing the name of T.S.'s dead brother, who perhaps died as she was writing. In this sense, it's a little like the symmetry of Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner", where the second half of the novel has the character working his way from that crux point, the nowhere of a midwestern wormhole, back to his family. Coleridge's Mariner's return journey also suffers somewhat...

The way T.S. simultaneously orbits his brother's death and avoids it that forms the central motion of the book. And an orbit is hardly a linear path: we return again and again to the same basic relationships: T.S.'s distant, formal relationship with both his scientist mother and cowboy father, his typically exasperated coexistence with both his living and deceased siblings, his obsession with drawing diagrams and maps as a way of making sense of the world, and the utter senselessness offered up by the world that he tries to map.

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This is the second book about map people I've read this year. Unlike the author/subject of Map Addict (see my discussion here), the fictional narrator of this book is consumed by the promise of mapping and more generally of scientific study of the universe. It's appropriate that the character be a child—a prodigy with an disturbingly grown-up diction (and who has not known children with disturbingly grown-up diction)—but it is also notable, and lovely, to see a cameo appearance by Corlis Benefideo, the subject of Barry Lopez's short story "The Mappist" (see discussion here). And it's clear that Larsen wants his hero to be like the narrator's daughter in that story—the promise of a new generation who will humbly carry on the Work of mapping the world, piece by piece.

It's not how us cartographers usually see our role, any more than "making myths" being how novelists consciously view their craft as they go about it from day to day. But Larsen is pointing in this circular, spiraling book to the same basic sense Lopez pointed to: the humble recording and exploring and searching and the piece-by-piece processing of it all, is a kind of prayer to the universe. It's a kind of love.

So it really is a peculiar novel. It points toward what it's trying to say, leaving the largest points mostly unsaid, like notes at the edge of the map saying this destination is a certain distance further. We find a genius cartographer running into things that are unmappable and yet that mapping is his tool. We see a desire to be part of a great scientific enterprise crumbled into disillusionment, but not disillusionment with the enterprise, just with the clothes it has to wear—T.S. may be saying goodbye to the Smithsonian and to Washington, but not to the idea of the Smithsonian.

I keep seeing these sorts of orbits underlying some of my favorite books. The orbit in Diana Wynne Jones' Fire and Hemlock is deceptive—it's a love story that orbits a kind of modernist despair. Here, the obvious suppressed and not-so-suppressed grief over T.S. brother's death looks like the focus of the orbit. T.S. clearly thinks it's what he's circling. But in the end, what is revealed a kind of stubborn, slow trust that some of the world is comprehensible. Even the terrible, stupid meaninglessness of his brother's death. In the end, the author (and narrator) point towards the love of parent and child, the care even the most scientific of us end up showing each other, that he has been circling, unaware, for the entire novel.

Anecdotal Evidence

Ingrid has several times remarked to me, “Anecdotes are a lousy basis for public policy.” She knows anecdotal evidence—she's a writer who uses anecdotes as a way of illustrating complex, abstract systems. So, when she talks about anecdotal evidence, I figure she knows whereof she speak.

In public policy, the alternative to anecdotal evidence is statistics and other hard data. So why isn't this evidence universally accepted? Why is anecdotal evidence hard to brush aside?

The conventional reason given by intellectuals and scientists is, because people are idiots. Which is a comforting sort of reason I suppose, if not being an idiot is an important part of your self-image. But it doesn't really quite answer the question.

People gravitate to stories, and lots of people believe personal experience over theory, especially when they are discussing a "territory" they have not themselves explored. This is why stories involving death are so powerful: we aren't going to go there ourselves until we do, and at that point hearing stories about death isn't going to do us a lot of good.

So we have narratives of people dying, and we have narratives of people moving across into what happens after they die. And these narratives are different from "maps" of the afterlife. They are from one individual's point of view and they make no guarantee that your experience will be the same. In fact, some of the most resonant narratives are parallels: X goes to heaven, Y goes to hell. By invoking multiple narratives we give shape to the basic idea of choice.

Alongside these narratives, there are, in fact, maps. All kinds of maps. I'm speaking metaphorically, in that graphic representations are a small subset of the non-narrative descriptions of death and after-death. In fact, many of them are embedded in narrative descriptions—one of the points of the narrative is to get the central character to a point where they can view the structure of after-death, or of the cosmos in general, for themselves. Think Dante. Or think of those ballads like "The House Carpenter" where the hapless person is shown the shores of heaven "where you and I will never be" and the shores of hellfire "where you and I will unite."

Regardless of its pedigree, we are talking about two kinds of evidence. One is narrative: it can be insightful or banal, but it is framed as testimony out of one's journey, whether that frame is reliable or utterly unbelievable. The other is factual: it is a statement of "what is."

So to go back to what Ingrid said, why is one a better basis for public policy than the other?

I think it's basically about scale. Narrative works on an individual basis: in a successful narrative, we imagine ourselves in the story, and can follow a series of actions over time. Narratives are immensely important in understanding how to live. But when one is creating structures for a large number of people, especially when you must include people you are not like (or people who are simply unknown to us), narratives break down.

So it's not the "policy" part that's the problem: actually, narrative provides a pretty good basis for creating personal policy. Maybe that's even its strongest suit. It's the "public" part, because "public" means all the people, including those strange to you.

All of which means creating structures based not on that emotionally "strong force" of narrative flow, but on the "weak force" of reason and description. Which is why advocates love to try and use sad stories to sway voters and their representatives, and why the President always has someone in the balcony at the state of the union to inspire us all. And why Ingrid uses anecdotes to illustrate her points.

The point is not to avoid anecdotes; I think this is the mistake many rationalists make. It's to recognize their limits, and their power. Finding that balance is a hard thing to do—stories have a way of taking over. And to some extent, we need to let them take over. It is what homo sapiens do in order to live happy lives. But we also need to be careful, especially when the limits of our personal experience kick in, not to let anecdotes from within our mortal and limited skin blur what vision we have gained through our measuring and conceptualizing beyond that skin.

magic

We're working our way through the Harry Potter series; a few nights ago we reached the climax of book 6, the battle on top of the tallest tower in Hogwarts, with its unexpected conclusion. Our son has been very anxious about what happens next, who dies, who lives... and he is a kid who is pretty good about fact and fiction (I expect, when the time comes, that he'll take the unmasking of Santa Claus, Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy pretty well). And he really gets riled up—and so do we all, when we let ourselves be taken over by a fiction.

A month or so ago, I picked up a great coffee-table book at a used bookstore in Duluth. It's called Faces of Fantasy, and the most fascinating thing about it, I think, is the degree to which some of the authors admit having magic invade their world, after having spent so much of their lives honing the craft of describing magic in fiction. Not all the writers; some are pretty blasé about what they write, if gracious at having been allowed to make a living having so much fun. And some are so into the sheer Gothicness of writing fantasy as to be laugh-out-loud funny ("Worship me, mere mortals, for I am the Bride of Jim Morrison!" Seriously.). But the authors whose books I most enjoy are thoughtful about the ways that their storytelling work remakes the world, unmasks secrets inside readers, tells stories about the heart of the universe.

As a child, I loved fantasy, and I never totally outgrew it. I think I've mentioned this before. As I grew up, I found ways to get "serious" about my interest, to justify it somehow, but... I recently re-read one of my early favorites, The Summer Birds by Penelope Farmer. I think I can finally admit that plain and simple I loved those stories for the vicarious experience of magic—a kind of hair-tingling, heart-pumping exhilaration. Just the idea that a kid could learn to fly. As I said a couple weeks ago in meeting, these were my miracle stories.

I wrote a couple of years ago about my time in the world of fantasy fiction as a young adult, and how I was kind of surprised to find the creators of these stories not to actually be wizards or Illuminati or whatever. But in reading Faces of Fantasy I see a sentiment among the writers I respect most that is a little like the Quaker line I keep coming back to, about how we abolished not the clergy but the laity. The point is that these writers are not trying to gather magical knowledge in order to empower themselves over others—they are trying to spread a sense of magic diffusely, to reintroduce it back into a culture that frankly doesn't know what to do with miracle stories. Which in turn reminds me of the interesting discussion on the Sheffield Quakers blog which eventually turned to the idea of magic in Quakerism.

Again, as I said in meeting, we Friends don't do miracle stories much. We try to be reasonable, and we try to speak truly from our experience. And I venture to say none of us has had experiences identical to the ones in miracle stories, old or new: literally walking on water, literally flying like a bird, literally returning from the dead.

When I've tried in the past to look critically at fantasy stories, I've tried to figure out what magic means in modern kids' fantasy fiction. Creativity, or aliveness to the world, maybe. Power, in some books. But what I'm seeing in revisiting the topic after some time away, is that fantasy books are, at heart, about Amazing Things Happening. How do Amazing Things change us? How do they pull us away from those who haven't experienced them? How do they push us to attempt Amazing Feats ourselves? How do they clarify the world, and how do they make it more confusing? And so on.

And here I go back to a line of questions I started asking when I first becoming a cartographer. At the time, I asked "Can a map be an independent work of fiction?" My conclusion is that while they can be used as part of a fictional game, or as an illustration to a work of fiction, maps can't stand on their own as works of fiction, because they don't stand on their own as works of fact. They need to refer to the real world in order to fulfill their purpose.

What about miracle maps? What would a miracle map be? I ask without a clear answer. But it's an interesting question.

Daddy Played the Banjo

The more I listen to the first song on Steve Martin's album The Crow, the more impressed I get. Concealed in an utterly banal little song about tradition and learning the banjo from elders is an almost koan-like reflection on how we invent ourselves, and even such eternals as hope and love, out of whole cloth.

The first three verses are sung straight, an idyllic recollection of a youth surrounded by the sounds of the narrator's father's music:

Daddy played the banjo, ‘neath the yellow tree.
It rang across the backyard, an old time melody.
I loved to hear the music; I was only five.
I listened as his fingers made the banjo come alive.

Sometimes I’d wake up at night, and hear a distant tune.
The banjo would echo, ‘round my childhood room.
I’d sneak down the back stairs—Daddy never knew.
I’d grab a broom and make believe, I was pickin’, too.

One day Daddy put my fingers down upon his fist.
He picked it with his other hand, we made the banjo ring;
Now the music takes me back, cross the yellow day.
To the summers with my Dad, and the tunes he made.

It's absolutely standard this-music-came-down-to-me-from-my-ancestors, justify-traditional-styles lyrics. You'll hear it in any modern musical style that somehow pays homage to pre-electronic styles... heck, you'll hear it in homages to "old-time rock and roll." The lyric that came to mind for me was John Denver's "Thank God I'm a Country Boy."

Then comes a bridge and the fourth verse:

But I’m just tellin’ lies ‘bout the things I did—
See I’m that banjo player who never had a kid.
Now I sit beneath that yellow tree.
Hopin’ that a kid somewhere, is listening to me.

Now, if you'll notice, verses 1-3 didn't say anything about the adult narrator and his kids. So his saying he never had kids doesn't show the first three verses as lies. So what's the lie? If he was sweepingly lying about his childhood—and if we take this to be Mr Martin's personal narration, which is of course a risk, then yes, it is made up; he first taught himself the banjo as a teenager and has learned it from friends and collagues since then—if he is lying, then this is supposed to be the "real truth" behind his banjo playing, that it's not about the past and where he learned it, it's about the audience. He hopes a kid will be listening to him.

Daddy played the banjo, ‘neath the yellow tree.
It rang across the backyard and wove a spell on me.
Now the banjo takes me back, through the foggy haze,
With memories of what never was, become the good old days.

The narrator repeats that initial idyllic vision and then closes with a variant on how music takes us back...it takes us back into an invented good old days. It creates nostalgia.

The whole song is performed with comforting old-time instrumentation, and a buttery, comforting vocal (not Martin's own kind of frenetic and always kind of snide vocal style). It's possible to glide right over the words. And in fact, while the words deconstruct the comforting past of folky musics, they also point to its appeal, and slide right into that appeal. The line about the performer sitting under the tree hoping a kid is listening to him, really get to the heart of this constructed fiction.

The point is, we who work in folk idioms (and as a morris dancer and sometimes singer I think of myself that way some of the time) are indeed constructing a fiction. But that fiction isn't about hagiography of country life for its own sake. It's to use comfort and selected older values as the basis for constructing our own lives and offering that to our audience. By calling up aspects of the "good old days" and bringing them into the present, we offer a gentle sort of critique. Why not dance and sing? Why not celebrate the seasons? Why not get closer to the food you eat? Why not listen to friends and family making music, and make some yourself? Here, it can be fun.

I'm reminded of Ray Bradbury's short story "The Toynbee Convector," in which a man invents a time machine, goes forward in time and comes back with a dazzling vision of the future, which the world starts getting behind, and eventually builds. As he nears the end of his life, the inventor reveals the whole thing was a fiction: no time machine, just a detailed model in his basement. But the earth bought it, and now has moved into that dazzling future anyway.

We receive some of our hope and love and Light from outside of ourselves, but we get to make some of it ourselves too. And we can do it out of whole cloth, like the kid from the suburbs who learned to play the banjo from a book and some records, and can construct a whole fictional past which we, too, buy. Mostly. The important bits, anyway.

Trompe l'oueil

First off, I have a warm spot in my hearts for the Mormons. In all seriousness, I do. I love a religion that consciously provides a sense of our continent as sacred space. I really like Orson Scott Card's writing, though I find his expressed political views a little disconcerting. LDS folks I've worked with or run into are generally intensely focused on whatever they are doing, have secure family lives (assuming they are not closeted), and generally nice people. Take it as snide if you will, but I really like a religion that takes wildly tall tales as seriously as they do.

We toured Temple Square this afternoon, on the last full day of visiting my in-laws, who moved here last fall. And I had a revelation of sorts sitting in the Assembly Hall while the tour-guide missionary from Canada blithely went on about the deep love of God that led the early settlers to painstakingly paint the white pine columns as faux marble and the white pine pews as oak...

I suddenly realized I was listening to someone telling me about the movie business. The dream factory.

We Americans have a cultural sense of being realists, hard-headed, plain-speaking, no-nonsense pioneers. And in some ways we are—I'm a big fan of John Kouwenhoven's work, in which he makes a pretty good case for independent, practical thought as a basis for American cultural identity. But we are also a nation that loves to be given a rosier view of things than they really are. More than that, we are a nation that reinvents itself over and over out of whole cloth, then persuades ourselves that we have always been what we have reinvented ourselves as.

Thus we can straight-facedly talk about "traditional family values" while sending wives out to earn a substantial part of family income in the marketplace. We can talk about "traditional marriage" as if women have always enjoyed equal status in our marriages. We can talk about "American health care" as if our network of hospitals and labs and insurance had been with us since the dawn of the Republic, instead of slightly over half a century.

We are a nation of scriptwriters and set decorators.

I was struck by how this observation resonated with Paul Krugman's recent post on horse-race reporting. He blames bad reporting, but I think the public audience for news reporting is also to blame. We want the story, not the analysis and discussion. We want a plot, a narrative.

I observe this, not to say, "Hey, America, get your act and your brain in gear and stop living in Fantasyland!" Though that may be tempting, it misses the point. We're not going to change America's habit of making things up as it goes along, just by wishing it to be so. But we need to be aware of the dream-making, if we are to be good scriptwriters ourselves, and we need to be good scriptwriters if we are going to be part of any real American debate.

Fictional input

I've stumbled across a bunch of really interesting stuff, beginning with the online blog/journal OnFiction. Not all up my alley, but...

I enjoyed the entries (1 and 2) by Valentine Cadieux on dérives and psychogeography as exercises in geographic freeing-from-preconception. Or something. Still not clear what the things are for, but it feels like they relate to my earlier discussions of pilgrimage as a possible metaphor for a modern performative cartography:

However much these mechanisms may be associated with a particular way of exploring places, they are really merely the training wheels of psychogeography: tools to break the habits of everyday automatic interactions with place and perceptions of place as real and given. Disrupting such habits leaves mental resources for more exploratory stances toward the environment, in which explorers tune in to the behaviors or emotions that the situation and setting most afford.

Also enjoyed Keith Oakley's essay on art, which in turn referenced a really interesting (and obvious, in a good way) article in Greater Good magazine, on, essentially, the functional benefits of fiction. This in a way turns me back full circle to things I was reading 20 years ago about children's literature and the "uses of enchantment," to use Bruno Bettelheim's phrase. I ought to go back an read Jane Yolen's Touch Magic, Bettelheim, and some other stuff I have sitting on a shelf downstairs...

So much to learn, so little time.

Silly Stories

From Kenneth Lillington's Josephine:

"Ah, you are thinking of Frankenstein, Miss Tugnutt. By Mary Shelley. Shelley's wife, you know. A very silly story."

"Silly?"

"Dreadfully silly. Frankenstein's monster is eight feet tall. You'd think that would make him a bit conspicuous, wouldn't you? Not a bit of it," said Mr Cropper, chuckling. "He hides in a hut adjoining a remote cottage where he remains undetected for several months. He watches the occupants through a chink in the wall, and learns their language so well that he can speak it in a style indistinguishable from theirs. He also – still depending on the chink – learns to read. His books include Plutarch's Lives and Paradise Lost. He becomes widely informed in geography, metaphysics and natural philosophy. He achieves in a few months what it took mankind, through the more laborious process of evolution, thousands of years –"...

"How did Frankenstein make him?"

"Ah! we never know.... The author simply assures us that "the secret is too terrible to be told."

"An easy way out!"

"Yes, indeed. It is a very silly story."

"Why did anyone ever read it, Mr Cropper?"

"Because, my dear Miss Tugnutt, men have a great need for silly stories."

I do enjoy Kenneth Lillington.

True Stories

Fictions are stories that are admittedly not accurate reportings of the real world, but which are valued because they tell general truths about the world. Non-fictions are stories that are valued as accurate reportings on the world.

So far so good. But then we get into religious stories, where we fight each other over whether the stories are true or not. Fiercely.

Why is it important to us whether these stories are fact or fiction?

There's been a similar (if more restrained) fight in the map-theory world over the "truthiness" of maps, and I think a similar question here can be raised: why is it so important that maps be seen as a reflection of the "real world"? Here, the answer is clearer: we want an accurate portrayal of the earth so we can use it as the basis of discussion of the real world. If it's not accurate, we can't use it the way we want to.

Is the same thing true of religious stories? Fundamentalist approaches to religion take this tack: "Everything in my Scripture is literally true, so I can use that as my Certainty. That's my foundation, my bedrock." But less fundamentalist points of view still need a sense of certainty in their stories... they need to look at their scriptures not as myth, but as something closer to Truth.

I think what often happens is, religious truth goes in a different compartment than everyday truth. Because what is said in religious texts is largely about extraordinariness rather than repeatable-experiment reality, we can put them into a mental space that is neither "made up" nor "verifiable", but is instead "non-verifiable but believed in." And religious texts do contain material that, like good fiction, contains general truths about the world: morals, ethics, love, justice, the very idea of truth.

The reason maps and other reference materials carry that peculiar aura about them is that they can (within limits) be relied upon. That in doing this they satisfy a need says to me there is something inherent in humans that needs this foundation. When people then ascribe to maps a level of "objectivity" or "truth" that we cartographers are aware they don't warrant, this is not an indication that people are stupid. I think it's an indication that people are people.

True Love

Warning: this post assumes you have read Diane Wynne Jones's Fire and Hemlock. If you haven't, it will make very little sense, I suspect. Fair warning.
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Here's a really weird thing I realized recently about Fire and Hemlock: It's a love story (in large part) in which no-one says "I love you."

Ever.

I used the Google Books version of the text, and searched for the word "love." The word appears 24 times in about 420-some pages of the paperback. Mostly it's people saying "Here, love" to Polly. Seb Leroy is rumored to be "in love with" Polly, and later offers to go with her in the "Tunnel of Love" at the carnival. The Dumas quartet signs a letter "with love from the Dumas Quartet." And When Polly plays Pierrot in the school play, Harlequin and Pierrot are discussed falling in love. Apart from that, the instances of the word are all "I'd love to!" and "He'll love this!"

But it's not that Jones doesn't have people trying to talk about love. They just always use different words: Ivy goes on about "happiness," at the end Tom talks about "seeing you" and Nina is boy-mad: "The rest of the time Nina pursued boys."

Laurel does not talk about love. Laurel is, in fact, incapable of real human love. One of the aspects of being of the Fair Folk. She takes, she enjoys, she uses—but she does not love. And her point of view infects the whole story from beginning to end.

---

I'm reaching the conclusion that the reason the ending of the book is so unsatisfying is that the real ending, the place it should have gone, is so depressing that Jones couldn't bear to go there. In order to save Tom, Polly really does have to let go of him. In doing so, she is in essence giving up her love. And in doing that, she is becoming not a little like Laurel. No technicalities, no "Nowhere is somewhere" word games.

The book, in avoiding actually talking about love—real love—swirls around a vortex. It's the pool at the bottom of the garden, which as Polly enters drains her of human emotion and connection, drains her of love.

---

Maybe afterwards, when Tom says "I want to see you anyway," they will be able to write stories together, to meet in that make-believe world where they explored being heroes together. But in the flesh-and-blood world, Tom used her, or tried to anyway. It may have been justifiable, but that's not the point. Polly's heartbreak, her teenaged jealousy of Mary Fields, which was so neatly erased by Laurel in making her "forget about Tom," has been unerased and revealed for the flawed and not-necessarily-based-on-the-real-Tom thing it was. Whatever relationship Polly and Tom go forward with, it will be tinged with the fact that they can never really trust each other the same way again.

---
It's not good to ask too many questions of love, to ask it to justify itself. Basing our decisions in love and life on the patterns we see can leave us blinded to patterns we don't see. That's the part of dancing that's impossible to explicitly teach, that rules can't touch, that explicit labels hide.

Diana Wynne Jones and rules and structure

While I was sick earlier this month, I reread (after entirely too long) Diana Wynne Jones' Fire and Hemlock. It's one of my favorite books; for a while in my early 20's I would have put it atop my list of favorites. As Jones explained later in an essay on the novel, it's at root about the heroic ideal—she has a really great piece of the essay where she summarizes the rise and fall of that ideal—and how it translates into modern ways of thinking. I'll write more fully on it later, and about the truly problematic ending of the book (it's the one thing pretty much everyone ends up compaining about in the book). But what it brought to mind in rereading Tufte, is the difference between structure and rules.

Jones hates rules. No, that's too strong, but a lot of her characters spend their books working their way out of a web of rules, only to discover that those been used by the villains to hide the true state of things from everyone. They've been used to cheat.

On the other hand, discovering the true state of things, which often involves learning about the structure of the story's universe, is often central to the action of her stories. She loves structure, as her nonfiction essays make clear. Fire and Hemlock was built around the structure of T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets, which she admires for their mix of stasis and change. If anything, her fascination with the shape of stories may be a weakness; she get so caught up with the structure sometimes it's hard for her to just follow the story where it needs to go according to emotional logic. Sometimes. Especially at the end of stories.

In her short story "The Sage of Theare," the two ideas are tied together in my mind by this pronouncement, presented as a graffito:

IF RULES MAKE A FRAMEWORK FOR THE MIND TO CLIMB ABOUT IN, WHY SHOULD THE MIND NOT CLIMB RIGHT OUT, SAYS THE SAGE OF DISSOLUTION

I love that. To me it puts structure and rules in precisely the right place: necessary but not exclusive.

Jones's stories though, differentiate between the True Structure of the universe (the way things work we can't do anything about), and rule structures set up to imitate that True Structure and replace it in people's minds. These structures are all about the maintenance of power.

I had a long conversation with Joe tonight, after entirely too long. In regards to rules, he talked about how strange it has been for him to be back in an office environment after a long time away. In particular, he has been reminded of a peculiar dynamic of work environments: everyone is working from their own rulebook. Some are there to earn their paycheck and then go do what they really love, and they pay by rules that follow this way of thinking about work; some are there to do Great Work regardless of what the needs of the company are, and they have a different set of rules; some are there because they are workaholics and they go crazy if they aren't there—another set of rules. And so on. And each person quickly learns who is playing with a comparable rulebook, and who is just weird (i.e. everyone else). In an office environment where people are allowed to play by their own rulebook and where their role in the company fits that rulebook, it can work out fine. Where everyone is expected to play by the same rulebook, those who don't end up in a Dilbertian nightmare sort of job.

It got me thinking about our "what is a map" discussions, here and elsewhere. I think the same thing applies: we want our rulebook to be the rulebook. I'm not saying we don't need rulebooks. It can be really useful to discover what your rulebook is; it can help immensely in clarifying your work. What is more useful to the wider community though is to describe (measure?) the structure we are working in—in my case, the structure of cartographic expression—and then work with that structure with our own rulebooks, without using formulated rules to proscribe that structure.

If we can stand it.

I hope that all made sense.

More soon on E Tufte.

Bad Reviews

Something I've been doing more recently is seeking out negative reviews of stuff I love. Positive reviews all sound alike ("such a wonderful piece of work, it moved me deeply in ways I am only beginning to explain"), but negative reviews can help you suss out what's really going in the experience of viewing a movie or reading a book.

I loved The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. The last few minutes left me bawling, sobbing uncontrollably. So I was really interested to hear from a friend that a friends of hers had hated it, had felt she was being manipulated, and that finding out it was the same director as Forrest Gump suddenly made it all make sense.

The point I take away is that any work of fiction has that manipulative quality to it: the author sets you up, the author puts the puck neatly between your legs. The question is, can you see the system of pulleys by which the puck actually travels into the net? And in the end, it's the willingness to be taken in we bring to the experience. What visible strings are we willing to ignore, and which ones just leave us stranded outside the movie, looking at how it was constructed.

Ingrid and I are working our way through Mary Rose O'Reilley's books. We've both finished The Barn at the End of the World, and loved it, and now she's mostly through The Love of Impermanent Things, and likes it too. I'm waiting my turn.

I doubt I would have read it without knowing Mary Rose from Meeting, without our friend Kit saying she was one of her favorite writers. And I fell for the book, fell into it, fell over it. So I went hunting for the negative reviews.

They were remarkably like the negative reviews for War is the Force That Gives Us Meaning: not enough structure, non-rigorous use of quoted literary material, and a general lack of direction. Which is absolutely right in both cases. Hedges and Mary Rose do not build rigorous arguments. In Hedges' case, his argument just builds in momentum until it's kind of overwhelming. For Mary Rose, there isn't an argument really, except perhaps an argument for sprituality as experiential, and the argument proceed not by any unifying rhetorical device but by the accumulation of 99 little chapters. Many of them feel like spoken ministry in Friends Meeting.

Something I value in what I read is a writer's approaching things from an experiential rather than a formal point of view, which is so totally opposite of what I do in my cartographic life. I enjoy the experience of formalizing and structuring the information (or more properly, coming to understand the underlying formal structure of the data), and of making that structure clearly visible and understood. But what I love to consume as a user of information is this purely experiential plunge-over-your-head-and-paddle-around stuff.

Interesting.

The Tattoo-Rumba Man

This post has nothing whatsoever to do with maps.

I was a Studio Art major at Carleton College. I had a fascination with northern Renaissance painting, especially folks like Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden, whose paintings are essentially visual texts: they are composed of symbolic elements posed to make a theological statement, within an illusionistic "window" into a sacred world.

My senior comps project was designed around this idea of art as text, based on texts and functioning as adjuncts to text. My problem: I didn't have a religious text I believed in as deeply as the painters of 500 years ago.

So I decided to write one. I had some examples of student-written stream-of-consciousness stuff I really liked, and some bits of text I was thinking of as kind of central to me, but it was my friend Adam sending me a scrap of text about the Tattoo-Rumba Man that got me going. I took it and ran (with his permission).

I still like the character, twenty years on, and I recently pulled out the text I wrote (it was edited somewhat over the following three years and then it lay fallow on various hard drives after 1991). It needed some tweaking, but I kinda like it, so I put it up on the web. Enjoy!

home.mindspring.com/~nat.case/id12.html

[After the fact, there was a scene in Strictly Ballroom that to me is the Tattoo-Rumba Man. See here and go to 8:20 on the timer]

Corlis Benefideo

I reread Barry Lopez's short story "The Mappist" on Thursday, and it grabbed me anew by the lapels.
It's a story about a cartographer—a sort of platonic ideal of a cartographer—and writer named Corlis Benefideo. If you haven't read it before, please do. You can read it in his short story collection Light Action in the Caribbean, or pay $2100 for the limited edition by Charles Hobson (again, scroll down), or (I haven't done this but I hear his reading is great) listen to Lopez reading the story.

Go on, read it.

OK, so when I talked about the story last year on CartoTalk, I was unsure about the whole cartographer as ideal hero thing. I'm still not sure, although as Martin Gamache said on that thread, there is a part of me wants to "drink the Koolaid."

What got me this time, in a way it hadn't before, was not so much the wonderful maps Benefideo makes, as it is his revelation of the narrator's situation. From near the end of the story, Benefideo says to the narrator:

“You represent a questing but lost generation of people. I think you know what I mean. You made it clear this morning, talking nostalgically about my books, that you think an elegant order has disappeared, something that shows the way.” We were standing at the corner of the dining table with our hands on the chair backs. “It's wonderful, of course, that you brought your daughter into the conversation tonight, and certainly we're both going to have to depend on her, on her thinking. But the real question, now, is what will you do? Because you can't expect her to take up something you wish for yourself, a way of seeing the world. You send her here, if it turns out to be what she wants, but don't make the mistake of thinking you, or I or anyone, knows how the world is meant to work. The world is a miracle, unfolding in the pitch dark. We're lighting candles. Those maps—they are my candles. And I can't extinguish them for anyone.”

There's a lot packed into that paragraph, and so it's easy to gloss over in the flow of reading fiction.

Benefideo is pointing out our love for "maps the way they used to be made" and that, to the contrary, he is making them not like he was taught, but as he thinks they ought. For all the trappings of old-fashioned tools and craft, he is in fact exploring new territory.

The middle bit echoed for me the old Quaker bit, Margaret Fell quoting George Fox's preaching "What canst thou say?" Except instead of scripture it's pointing to our received knowledge othe world. It's easy and quick to gloss over this as a typical challenge to go out and do good, but it's more subtle than that.

It's a conscious rejection of the idea of "reference" which forms the backbone of the idea of cartography—the idea that there is a certain set of facts about the world that we can start with. It makes reference a much more fluid concept. That bit about lighting candles in the pitch blackness reveals Benefideo not as some sort of super-perceptual being who is expressing what he knows. He is really an explorer who knows nothing but records what he finds.

[edited 2-17-13 to update links to the story]

Soon I Will Be Invincible... and all alone

I finished Soon I Will Be Invincible, by Austin Grossman, last night. It's the first time in quite a while I've been hooked by a book jacket, but it turned out to be a fun read. It's essentially Wicked, but with the world of comic-book superheroes instead of the world of the Wizard of Oz.

Grossman's take on the whole thing is centered on Dr. Impossible, a beat-up-as-a-kid, misunderstood-genius, superiority-complex/inferiority-complex supervillain...the characters are all familiar, but vaguely familiar. Grossman has done a bang-up job of creating a parallel superhero-infested universe to D.C. and Marvel's trademarked and copyrighted realms.

Anyway, putting it down I was reminded of a pretty much universal theme of modern fiction, how we are all alone. Alienation. Overindividuation. Separation. And so on. It's honestly been a while since I even thought much about it. It's old hat, this alienation thing. It's so, like, 1960.

But, ya know, just be cause it's a cliché doesn't mean it isn't true. Superheroes, or Wicked's witch, just weren't on the cultural radar when Baum's original Wizard of Oz came out. Not that people weren't desperately lonely 100 years ago, but as a cultural theme, it kind of took World War I and the Lost Generation to make alienation interesting. Or normal.

It feels to me like there's a bunch of themes I've been carrying around for long time, some of them for decades even, that come together oddly in the Grossman novel. It's odd to me because, honestly, I've never gotten the appeal of superhero comics. I'm an arty-comic kind of person. Neil Gaiman all the way.

• DIY alienation: I think I've mentioned this before on the blog, how it drives me crazy when people figure they have to "do it themselves" if they are to feel justified in the world. People make fun of Academy Award winners who go on and on thanking everyone, but really they're being realistic. No-one does it alone, and anyone who starts to believe the publicity saying he or she does, is setting themselves for a repeat of Lightning McQueen's situation in Cars. But, of course, we are set up to look at single operators. Soloists are heroes, orchestras are like cabals or gangs. Superheroes are like that false value, magnified.
• Alienation and scale: Superheroes are urban. So are most of us who read this kind of blog-stuff. We have a peer group made up of people "like us" in some respect, rather than family or neighborhood. I know my neighbors, but not well. We don't hang out. My family lives in Maine and New Jersey; my wife's in Colorado and Utah. You get a different story when the characters all have lived in the same town for a long time (you get Garrison Keillor or Louise Erdrich), or if family is what they know and do mainly. And even these non-urban writers can't help but write from a viewpoint where most of the world is urban.
• Alienation, science and universalism: Look, what I'm seeing from where I sit is: there are people for whom God is a person. An all-knowing, all-powerful person, like superheroes are imitations of. And there are others (I'm on this side of the argument), for whom God, or the idea of God, is a map-maker, looking down equally at all points. This point of view does not lend itself to a cozy relationship to the divine, because it includes necessarily the idea that God didn't choose you; you aren't on the "cool" side of God's red velvet rope, because there is no rope. God doesn't choose anyone.

Up up and away. Or something.

Stray bit: In looking at others' comments tot he book, I really like burritoboy's notes on supervillians as stand-ins for Hitler. Makes a ton of sense; as in so many things, most of the second half of the 20th century is backwash from The War.

A Long Strange Trip With the Old Maltese

When I try to describe the St Valentine's Day Massacre to friends and colleagues, and I usually get confused looks back.

It's an annual contest run out of La Cañada, California. When you pay your $49 entry fee, you receive a copy of the current Rand McNally Road Atlas and a book of instructions. There are very specific route-following rules a series of directions (e.g. "turn north on interstate highway after going through Minneapolis"). The contest is scored by how well you answer a series of questions about your route (e.g. "How many highway shields have you gone through since Dallas"). You follow the route... and this is where people get confused, because you don't actually drive anywhere. You follow the routes on the maps, "seeing" the sights (in the terms of the contest, seeing is passing with in 1/4" on the map). It isn't really about travel, except that it is. It's about following rules through a complicated piece of cartography, and avoiding getting tripped up by all the false turns and tricky easy-to-miss landmarks [er, mapmarks].

One of the things I enjoy is "driving by" places I know and love: my dad's summer place in Montana, our home in Minneapolis, my wife's family's homes in Colorado. I did part of this year's contest on vacation in Cedar Key, Florida and sure enough there I "drove" past it while I was there.

The contest is fully of corny, geeky humor. The Old Maltese and assorted oddballs (all with the initials "O.M.") show up to give you instructions. You are shifted from obscure vintage vehicle to obscure vintage vehicle. And you get weird place names pointed out to you.

I've talked elsewhere here about gaming as a way to look at maps as fiction. This is a peculiar subspecies of gaming map: using "real" maps as the stage on which real players play and work within a fictional framework. Like Risk adapted to a real world map. Or like (sort of) people who play out war games on maps of real places.

Mostly, though, its an excuse to spend a loving 20-30 hours with a Rand Road Atlas, and that can be just fine.