tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-48444586873699552742024-03-04T21:49:16.046-08:00mapHeadI'm a cartographer and a Quaker. I think the two are related, and the common threads seem to be a regular theme here. This blog started out exploring what it means to make maps—the ontology of cartography. Then I spent some serious time working on issues surrounding theological diversity among Quakers. Lately it's become even more freeform, though I'm still interested in both these areas.natcasehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18058664776852941599noreply@blogger.comBlogger172125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4844458687369955274.post-55264961888440163572017-09-30T02:38:00.000-07:002017-09-30T02:40:03.729-07:00Dual belongingApparently I'm going to be <a href="http://wnpr.org/programs/colin-mcenroe-show" target="_blank">on the radio</a> in a couple weeks. The topic for the radio show is "dual belonging," or how to be part of two groups that differ. I think. Don't quote me on that.<br />
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The reason they called me is the <a href="https://aeon.co/essays/i-m-an-atheist-so-how-did-i-end-up-such-a-committed-quaker">essay</a> I wrote a few years ago about being a Quaker and a non-theist. It seems like a difficult divide. And I certainly have run into a number of people who agree that I shouldn't be calling myself a Quaker and an atheist at the same time. But membership in a Quaker meting is decided by each local (monthly) meeting, and the three meetings I've been members of let me in even though I was explicit about my beliefs. They seemed to think it was "rightly led" for me to be part of the group.<br />
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Here's the weird thing: I actually feel more comfortable in the group I am in now, that was formed in part to provide a place where more overt scriptural and theistic language was not only tolerated but encouraged. It's my observation that the spiritual life of this group gains focus and clarity when we use less vague language. As I put it when I joined the Quakers in 1997, instead of going to the Unitarians, which I had been a member of with where I lived previously, it feels like there's more of a spiritual spine. There's more "there" there. When I was married the second time, there was always the option of coming up with our statement before the group that were specific to our situation, but I (and my wife) felt really comfortable and happy with simply using the <a href="https://neym.org/faith-practice/appendix-3/marriage-certificate" target="_blank">language</a> embedded in our yearly meeting's book "Faith and Practice." The fact that it was a time-tested tradition was not a minus. We were leaning on something large instead of depending on our four spindly legs to carry all the weight.<br />
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The phrase I am using this year is that I believe in the experience—religious experience—but not the conventional explanation of why and how it happens. And I believe in the power of some fo the "trappings" of that experience, of things like "scripture" and "prayer" and "congregation" and "sacrament." I think they are very strong juju. I also think that they fill places in us individually and corporately that are not disposable. Even when I do not believe that prayer is "talking with God," I understand that asking a question or expressing gratitude to persons and powers unknown is a really instinctive and powerful and important thing to do. Anne Lamott's book <i><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/21421044-help-thanks-wow-the-three-essential-prayers" target="_blank">Thanks, Help, Wow</a></i> is an excellent tool for getting at that. She's unapologetically theist, but also very much understands that prayer is not just about the being being talked to; it's about the shape of that conversation, and it what it does to have that kind of discourse.<br />
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So, I believe in the power and reality of what we experience as a group of worshippers, and I believe in the fact that something happens that gets described as a relationship with God. I do not think that explanation is accurate, but I do think it's true. And this is not such a paradox as it sounds. We all think things from fiction are true, just not in the same way that "I have eight eggs in the fridge" is true. No, wait. I went to confirm that hypothesis. There are five. The point is, that dependence on common, confirmable fact is not all we have to pay attention to in the world. And so I can belong among a group that explicitly believes something to be factually real, and not have that be the determining factor in whether I belong with them. I can find a way (and I have) to respect, and hear, and get great value, from their understanding, without making it literal. If I said otherwise, I would be telling my friends their experience was somehow a lie. And it's not.<br />
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We had a terrible mess in our group shortly after our family joined. About half of the group left. And there were a lot of things it was about, but one of the things was simple whether we beleived one another. Some of us, I think wanted to believe a promise of sacredness over the clear expressions of hurt and fear we heard coming from other people (Is that vague enough for you?). It took a long time for us to get through to that point, those of us who stayed in the group, but what we came back to was a kind of trust, a thing we needed to have. Believing the essential story people told, even if we didn't believe in the factual details necessarily.<br />
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It's very much like what I see in issues around categorical bias: there's believing and believing (for example) women's stories of what it's like to be a woman who is regularly catcalled and harassed on the street when she goes for a run (this is my wife we're talking about here), or black people's stories of what it's like to be black. We keep wanting to turn to factuality, and there is factuality there, but there's something viscerally different about believing a person's personal story abouf her experience.<br />
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I remember a few years ago, Ingrid telling me about how she expected (was pissed off at profoundly, but expected) shit from random passers-by, commenting on her body and what it should do. And how she had to very carefully plan her route for safety, in what I think of as a basically safe neighborhood. Because rape is something she has to plan around, and I don't. And that conversation, something clicked. It's not that I didn't know factually that women get harassed and raped. Duh. But knowing it was Ingrid, and knowing that this was her story, moved something internally in me. It really was like a click. The story went from accepted to believed. And believed in a way we've lost clarity about in our language. We used to have a clear set of social constructs described by words like loyalty, trust, truth, faith, obedience, and so on, that descibed a network of who and what was "with" you. Many of those words have been diluted in their meaning as more of our society becomes dependent on formal systems and rules over individual and corporate allegiance and "with-ness." But that doesn't mean the basic function disappears.<br />
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And I think that's the root of any "belonging." That "with-ness" (etymological red herring: with and witness are not related), the sense of trusting loyalty and faithfulness, both to one another and to the thing that the group carries in the middle of the group, or that it sees as carrying it.<br />
<br />natcasehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18058664776852941599noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4844458687369955274.post-46135487523580193292017-03-04T02:50:00.000-08:002017-09-30T02:51:24.692-07:00Backwaters<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I was walking along the Stone Arch Bridge in Minneapolis in the summer of 2010, and the group that made this film was grabbing random people off the street to answer questions about why we live here. And I talked a little about how friends from the coasts (the ones who I didn't go to college here) sometimes think of this place in flyover country.<br />
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We don't live in a cowtown. The Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St Paul are the urbane, artsy, funky, cosmopolitan hub for a big swath of the Upper Midwest. It's a city that people from smaller cities come to when their fish pond isn't big enough. But as a professional in a small and shrinking market, I am also well aware that I would be "in the mix" for bigger things if I moved. Many of my genuinely ambitious colleagues work in DC or NY or SF. They are Hotter Places To Be on a global level.<br />
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I've been reading about the staggering Brexit vote, and about Trump supporters here in the US. I was particularly struck by<a href="http://gu.com/p/4my2k/sbl" target="_blank"> this piece by John Harris</a> in today's Guardian. Essentially, it argues that the Leave vote (at least around Manchester) was a vote by forgotten backwaters. And this message, and the splintering of the major parties in both the US and Britain (and elsewhere in the industrialized world, presumably) should be paid attention. Backwaters vote.<br />
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People like to blame globalization, and the exporting of jobs is certainly a big factor in the rebel alliances that are making themselves felt this year. But more than that, people in backwaters are tired of simply being ignored. This is the era of flattening social media, but also one of globally concentrating culture and economies. We have ever more efficient markets that consolidate around more profitable production lines, and discard less profitable ones (like business has done since forever). And those efficiencies make it ever harder to live satisfyingly where the money isn't. There is less and less room for those quiet backwater eddies that Tolkien's Shire embodied: happily forgotten and largely satisfied with a closed economy.<br />
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Backwaters nest in other backwaters. My friend Derek moved about a decade and a half ago from St Paul to the small town of Springfield, Minnesota, which is maybe two notches back on the backwater totem pole. He runs a business from a room upstairs in a big house (one he couldn't have afforded here in the Cities) that uses practitioners from around the world to make maps. It's a field where he was able to make it work. But if you're a business that depends on local customers, in a field that is seeing internet competition (bookstores, for example, or shoe stores), backwaters are particularly problematic places to be.<br />
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Here's the thing I don't see people trying to sort out in the political arena: Lives are always local.<br />
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People like to say "all politics are local," but really not all politics are. Politics are built at the scale they cover, and international diplomacy is the least local, even if negotiations are always carried out in places where people are. National politics has always had one leg in a world of finding the best balance for the whole, while letting other places slide. I'm reminded of the kind of predatory attitude London had towards the distant North in centuries past: the press gangs described so heartbreakingly in the Yorkshire song "<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLgpdqAXB4c" target="_blank">Here's the Tender Coming</a>" were the tendrils of a careless cruelty. The song was a protest about men being taken away from real, deeply rooted lives like they were weeds, and from the standpoint of strategists at the Admiralty in London, they were like weeds.<br />
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Weeds are plants that don't fit your pattern, and human patterning ability focuses on a particular range of scale. And that's really the big problem with trying to organize big human systems and control them. Once we're past a certain point, the people who are that much of a mass, that far away, simply stop being people.<br />
<br />natcasehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18058664776852941599noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4844458687369955274.post-67540377722739367192017-03-03T11:27:00.000-08:002017-03-03T11:27:50.738-08:00To build the bridge, first survey the canyon.<div class="tr_bq">
So there was this video, which pro wrestler John Cena did for the No Labels campaign and the Ad Council. It was released in July 2016.</div>
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I'm not going to tell you it's an any way a bad video. It makes the point that a love of country based on a limited view of what makes someone a "real American" is a problem, and it <i>is</i> a problem. It really gets to the core of what many liberals like me see as disingenuous about some of the rhetoric from the right: that Islam is un-American, or black people protesting are thugs but white people protesting are fighting for authentic American values. It pushes back against the idea that it's “American” to use freedom of religion to tell gay people or women or <i>any</i> group that they are not worthy.<br />
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And yet, as I look at the right-left split in our country, it feels like something is missing from the ad. It feels good to the left, and I can hear exasperated eye-rolls from the right... and here's where I think the problem lies: Diversity is not enough. Diversity is not the thing that makes us whole. Diversity is not, despite what the video seems to want to claim, the same thing as patriotism.<br />
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I had a conversation a decade or so ago with friend Marshall Massey. We disagree on a lot of things, although we are part of the same wider Quaker community. A point he especially wanted to make then, as I was looking at ways that liberal and even non-theist Quakers (yes, there are people who belong to our religious community who do not profess belief in God. It's complicated. In my case you can read more about it <a href="https://aeon.co/essays/i-m-an-atheist-so-how-did-i-end-up-such-a-committed-quaker" target="_blank">here</a>), was that there is something fundamental and important about immersion in a religious tradition—something that in his case made it important that it was that specific tradition. It matters who and what you are faithful and true to. And the repeated return to that object of faithfulness helps train you to have a kind of moral and spiritual spine.<br />
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I grew up, as I like to say, nothing in particular. My spiritual touchpoints are all over the map. But I am also aware of and am drawn to that spine. It's one of the reasons I ended up among Quakers, and not just joining a book group. It's one of the things that drew me to Quakers over Unitarians, which is where my parents met and where my fathers parents spend the latter half of their lives. It just felt that there was more of a "there there" among the liberal Friends.<br />
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But I also inherited my parents' suspicion and even reflexive allergy to the merest hint of orthodox rigidity. So much spiritual tradition is rooted in faithfulness not just to a teaching but to a teacher. Again, this makes sense: to be loyal to a person is more hardwired into us that being loyal to an abstract idea. But the ways we've seen that charismatic trust betrayed in modern mass society—the demagogues, charlatans, would-be prophets who want power above all—are also hard to ignore. And a lot of a-religious and a-political liberals have learned this lesson as gospel: people with a religious message are trying to sell you something, and that something is probably a rip-off.<br />
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And so many of us gravitate to a kind of syncretism, a do-it-yourself judgment of the appropriate materials for a spiritual life. Instead of the Singular Book, we study the library. The whole library, or as much of it as we can manage. The liberal arts as a whole becomes the basis for our faith. And those who value singular faithfulness recoil in kind, and so we are left with this great cultural chasm that's been playing out now for well over two centuries: the universalist, pan-humanists and the Keepers of a bunch of True Faiths.<br />
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I think Jesus was way ahead of us. And I say this as one of those atheists I mentioned. Actually, it was my wife who pointed out to me that this divide between straight and narrow on one hand, and broad and all-encompassing on the other, was essentially restating what Jesus said about the two central commandments, in Mark 12:<br />
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28 Then one of the scribes came, and having heard them reasoning together, perceiving[a] that He had answered them well, asked Him, “Which is the first commandment of all?” </blockquote>
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29 Jesus answered him, “The first of all the commandments is: ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. 30 And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ This is the first commandment. 31 And the second, like it, is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’There is no other commandment greater than these.”</blockquote>
As Ingrid likes to say, doing these two things, and doing them both at the same time, is damned near impossible. "If I've managed it more than a few minutes in my entire life," she says, "I'd say I'm doing pretty well." And the two are twinned, that pattern repeating not just in our spiritual life, but in any activity in which we need in some way to follow someone or something, or in which we need to open ourselves to the experience of loving the strange. We need the singularity to hold us onto the world, and not let us become loopy floaters in the whatever-sphere; and we need the love of the other to keep us from becoming uptight, pious jackasses about pretty much anything.<br />
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It's tempting to try and just put these two into one soup. The video does that in a way. It was specifically written to argue against a straight-and-narrow conservatism that seeks not to "love your neighbor as yourself" but instead just to love "the country." But—and here's the problem—it fails to address that initial patriotism itself. Like so many liberal appeals to diversity, it doesn't really face the value of the unitary and disciplining love of country. It just argues that that unity isn't as unitary as the (supposed) viewer thinks.<br />
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And if we look hard, those of us who don't get why it's so important, may begin to understand why arguments over the Trinity end up feeling so important that you might break a church up over them. Without a sense of singularity of focus, of path, of leadership, the first part of the triad loses its power. It stops being as meaningful a counterbalance to loving your neighbor, whoever that neighbor is. And in a sense, that imbalance is exactly what liberals are experiencing when we try to make diversity a defining unitary principle. It's trying to make the yin and yang of this dynamic into a single thing.<br />
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So this I think is where we find ourselves as a country, divided into yin and yang, dependent on each other but insisting in large part that we each can be a closed-set solution: that diversity will give us spine, or that our patriotism will be loving and just in and of itself. It's just not so. We need to have a central guiding thingie. "Conservatives" know we need that root source of patriotism, and "liberals" know we need the sense of diversity and openness. What we can't seem to figure out is a kind of strong patriotism that liberals can trust, or a way to frame justice and diversity in a way that conservatives can trust. Without a monarchy, or a unifying religion or language or Ancient Nationhood, without those things that satisfy us that something unitary is in place, our job is cut out for us. But other nations in a sense are living the same dilemma, propping it up with illusory commonalities. We don't have that luxury. That specific bridging of the two halves of our national culture is, I think, our biggest national task.natcasehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18058664776852941599noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4844458687369955274.post-5093179159886402592014-12-06T08:16:00.000-08:002014-12-06T08:34:19.847-08:00Voices, late 2014<div class="p1">
The fierce voice that argues. Eloquently laid out thoughts crystalizing hard and unswerving. Experience laid out incontrovertible. An argument between two giants, prizefighters offering up a spectacle of dialectic, and between their verbal punches, a diamond of pure truth is created.</div>
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The quiet voice, almost silent, that doubts itself, water running out of cupped hands: drink from it now and it’s gone back to ground. Evidence shifting, hiding like a rabbit that knows from birth what it is to be hunted. Nothing is certain, nothing is safe, except the dark place, which no one has discovered. Not yet.</div>
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Which voice wins? Which voice is correct? Which voice needs our attention and listening? Which voice will lead us to success? Which voice are we called to be faithful to?</div>
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What does it mean to win? Is accuracy a kind of voice? Do we follow our instincts in who we pay attention to, and how are those instincts formed? How do we define success? What does it mean to be faithful, and how is that different from being loyal?</div>
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What then must we do?</div>
natcasehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18058664776852941599noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4844458687369955274.post-67914626647964786862014-11-12T02:52:00.000-08:002017-09-30T02:53:26.174-07:00Mapping the Holocaust<div class="p1">
The keynote speaker at NACIS 2014 described (along with her students) a recent project to map Holocaust survivors stories, and in so doing to “tell stories” with maps. This has been a catch phrase in mapping circles the last few years, especially with ESRI’s Story Map product. But when presented with stories that demand to be told and interpreted inn there own terms—where respect for those stories and storytellers is paramount, telling the story with maps has turned out to be a challenge.</div>
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It was a striking presentation, Two comments in particular stuck out. The first was that early drafts of the obvious sorts of maps that might illustrate the Holocaust: showing where camps were located, transportation networks that connected labor and extermination camps, even the routes that survivors recounted, were reviewed by survivors, and that a persistent comment was that they were “like the maps Nazis would have made.”</div>
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The second resulted from attempts to map the survivors’ stories in time: it was that narrative—good narrative—does fit in a strict, measured, linear sleeve. Real stories linger in some places, gloss over others, They are specific about geography sometimes, too, and in other times the intimate spaces of a habitual life stop being geographic and the spatial relationships stop being part of the story.</div>
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I think these two comments are telling, and reflect back on critiques of cartographic thinking I’ve discussed here over the years in a number of ways.</div>
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Godwin’s Law is had to enforce when you are actually talking about the Nazis and the Holocaust, but I would assume that saying someone’s descriptions of the Nazi era are themselves “like something the Nazis would do” is not a comment made lightly. And I can see how the stark diagrams of the Reich and its huge network of detention and extermination facilities, printed with abstract symbols on a white background, would produce this reaction. Because the Nazi crimes were in part grounded in dehumanization: the branding of prisoner numbers, the shaving of hair and wearing of uniforms all stripped outward individuality away from the individuals detained and murdered by the Nazis.</div>
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One reaction occurred to me. I’ve been holding Richard M Kelly's <a href="http://www.friendsjournal.org/3011121/" target="_blank">essay</a> on riding a train in Switzerland, watching two Jewish man arguing over their religious text, and this arguing is a part of narrative that is missing from maps, Mark Denil says that maps present an argument, but it’s not an argument <i>with</i> anyone. One of the defining characteristics of the monstrous political regimes of our era has been that they brook no dissension; their arguments are one-sided. And so it is with most maps: even if there is a counterargument to be made, it isn’t made <i>on the map. </i>The map, after all—a good map—is supposed to be a well-supported statement of fact.</div>
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What if the map of these survivors stories was a series of enactments on a stage-sized base map of Central Europe, an argument with different survivors stories bumping into one another and disagreeing, funny and unembarrassed, as art of a holy search for the elusive truth? What if the best way to map this kind of story was as a performance? What lies would be traced? How much of the argument would be scripted? What would remain of the map when the performance was over?</div>
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There is something oddly cowardly about trying to map the numbers of the holocaust, or any of the great disasters of the modernizing world. When professed objectivity becomes a mask for greed, violent hatred, fear and murder, it feels kind of off base to the seek to redeem that objectivity without first offering a ritual obeisance. Maybe there are things that are offensive to map, ot the same time wen wish to celebrate the humanity of.</div>
natcasehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18058664776852941599noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4844458687369955274.post-6195021841740435972014-10-08T15:34:00.000-07:002014-10-12T07:51:59.578-07:00Commodities and Experts, Part 2<div class="p1">
<i>[Edited for clarity, October 11]</i><br />
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It’s respectable—a mark of prestige—to say you are a professional. We still talk about “the professions,” practices that require advanced education and licensure. Like the last vestiges of the medieval guilds, they are meant to ensure quality, but these professional bars also serve to create elites.</div>
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Not all fields that aspire to this kind of professionalism achieve it using formal licensure. Accountants, teachers, doctors, nurses, architects, and lawyers do, and so do the trades: bricklayers, plumbers, electricians... but cartographers? journalists? graphic designers and printers? When it comes to the communications fields, our desire for an open public forum has meant we haven't put restrictions on professional practice we take for granted in the “professions.”</div>
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And yet, here we are, practiced and respected professionals. We are hired on the basis of our portfolio, and we pride ourselves on satisfies clients and audiences, and on the technical qualities of our work. Much of our “quality,” as with experienced practitioners in any field, is simply consistency: when you you go to a doctor, you may not be looking for the next mad genius; you want someone whose is <i>consistently</i> trustworthy, knowledgable, and understanding.</div>
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This is very much like the standard we might call “commodifiction” in the industrial world. <i>Any</i> product becomes a commodity when there is little difference in quality from example to example. This can occur within a brand: a Toyota Corolla is a Toyota Corolla, or it should be. It can also be true of a type of material: a bag of flour is a bag of flour, more or less, though any given mill may want to differentiate their product in the marketplace. Do you really choose one gas station or another because their gasoline is "better?"</div>
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I want to be treated as a professional whose work is consistently of high quality. But I do not want my products to be treated as commodities, though I also want them to be of consistently high quality. This is because, in a commodified world, price rules all, and in a global economy if my maps are just maps and I am paid for them accordingly, I cannot hope to earn a living wage in Minneapolis, competing with cartographers in the Philippines or Bangladesh.</div>
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Professions are a way of maintaining elites. What is the difference between the uniform standards of quality a lawyer must maintain to be admitted to the bar and the uniform standards a McDonald’s line cook must maintain? The major difference is the amount of education the lawyer must put in to achieve a legal standard, and the complexity of the system they must exercise their experience within. The degree of uniformity, of conformity to a standard, is virtually the same.</div>
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And so, what happens when a field no longer requires the accumulated knowledge it used to? When machines do more of the knowing and balancing and precision that it used to take an apprentice years to acquire? What happens, in short, to the cartographers of today?</div>
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Fifty years ago, map makers were a mysterious little cabal. We've never lived on gilded perches, like doctors or lawyers, or teachers in some parts of the world. We've always been a kind of hodgepodge, even when we tried to reach a more uniform respectability in the academy, coining ourselves "cartographers." We included people with backgrounds in printing, surveying, drafting, and the arts. One of the things that unified us was the specialized tools used to make published maps—whether abstract like the mathematics of map projections, or concrete like the scribers and scribe-coat, the rubylith, and the vacuum tables that road map publishers of my youth used. Today there are still specialized tools—GIS and graphics software—but they are ever more broadly used by fields outside cartography.<br />
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You didn't see cartographers on talk shows, but you saw maps, and these maps told you about the world in an omniscient, distant, authoritative way.</div>
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Today, and for a while now, anyone can make a map. They may have power and use, but they are hardly mysterious. And so, we cartographers—old-fashioned static cartographers—find ourselves in a gradually shrinking field.</div>
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Our situation is not new, nor is it hopeless. Expertise has been replaced by commodification over and over in our continuing industrial revolution. In my college years, it happened to graphic design. What was typographically sophisticated in my youth—this blog for example—is commonplace. It's templated, standardized, and those templates and standards come with the software. For many purposes, you don't need a professional.</div>
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And yet, there are professional designers. They create templates, they put a unique spin on products for high-paying clients, they engage in stylistic antics in the name of creativity. And they perform like consistent professionals. They deliver what is requested, without fail.</div>
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Plumbing isn't really mysterious. But it takes skill. I can now do very simple plumbing, but we still call the pro when it comes to leaks in hidden places. The risk of my being an inconsistent amateur and messing up is too big. Our spongy kitchen floor is a result of my thinking I could hook up a new dishwasher, for example. So, there are still places where you want a professional cartographer.</div>
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The question is (and this is not at all clear): where is that line for us? What are the things that cannot be reliably automated, or figured out by the equivalent of me with a wrench? When is it important, even where there is a consistent system in place, to have someone experienced behind the mapmaking wheel? When the constant change of geotechnology slows, what will it look like to be a "professional cartographer"? And will I want to do that work?</div>
natcasehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18058664776852941599noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4844458687369955274.post-49757729279254869282014-08-20T20:09:00.003-07:002014-08-24T14:55:43.165-07:00Commodities and Experts, Part 1Hearing Sandeep Jauhar <a href="http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2014/08/19/341632184/cardiologist-speaks-from-the-heart-about-americas-medical-system" target="_blank">interviewed by Terry Gross</a> yesterday about the changing world of being a physician got me thinking about something that's been on the edge of my awareness for a while now: the conflict in our society between what I'll call "commodification" and "expertise." It's not strictly speaking an economics argument, though economics do certainly play a central role. It actually has to do more with the creation of a commons, the kind of thing I ascribed to "the grid" and other pidgin mindpaces, <a href="http://maphead.blogspot.com/2009/10/rules.html" target="_blank">several years ago here</a>.<br />
<br />
Jauhar's point, or at any rate the piece that grabbed me, was that doctors are being steered from private practice into larger, integrated environments like hospitals, so their care will be more integrated with other specialists, and can be shared instead of overlapping inefficiently. And these arguments from efficiency really do make a lot of sense. I don't want to have doctor one take a full medical history and draw blood only to have doctor two do the same exact thing two days later. Talk to each other, people!<br />
<br />
But doctors also feel a lot of stress. Jauhar ascribes this to the mechanical, no-time-for-hands-on-medicine life doctors have to lead these days, but I also think part of it is related to what Atul Gawande referred to in his book and <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/12/10/the-checklist" target="_blank">article</a> about the need for checklists in modern medical treatment: in essence, medicine has now gotten complex enough and the consequences of forgetting a step (especially in regards to infection) so great, that seat-of-the-pants reliance on a doctor's orderly mind is not enough. You need to conform to a system, rigorously, in order to be as good a doctor as you can be.<br />
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I know why doctors get nervous about this. It's not just the adrenaline rush, the cowboy scalpel-jockey thing. It's that their own aura of expertise disappears, the more dependent that they become on an external system. I know this because I'm a cartographer. It's kind of hard to imagine today, with ubiquitous data and maps, that maps used to have a kind of mystery to them, and the making of them was kind of an arcane skill. Like being a scribe in an age of illiteracy. It's not that we were superhuman, but we had a kind of mysterious cabal going: we knew how to make these elaborate, complex things. And you didn't.<br />
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Except, now you do. Or you can. It's not that hard. And there are fewer of us as a result.<br />
<br />
But something interesting happened on the way to this glut of cartographers: maps got noticeably better, especially bad maps. It used to be there were companies that made terrible, hard-to-read, really almost illegible maps, but they were cheaper, and so people used them. Now? The cheapest map is a screen-shot from Google Maps (not legal, but lots of people do it), and you know, they don't look half bad.<br />
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At my former employer, we made a point of not entering what we called the "commodity map" market. This was a situation where a map retailer or distributor just wanted a generic "road map" or "street map" and didn't actually care how good it was. Like selling milk or windshield fluid: get something in the rack that people will buy if they just want a map. We specialized in a cut above that: maps for people who actually cared about <i>which</i> map they were buying. Selective buyers...<br />
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And it's not a bad niche to try and fill, if you can persuade people your product is better. You can get it placed, and maybe you can sell it for a little more. Not always, but sometimes.<br />
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The thing is, the way you persuade anyone that your product is better, is by comparing it to those products that are not as good as yours. And so the rising quality of the worst maps has made it harder to market oneself as a "premium" map publisher. The gap just isn't as dramatic as it used to be.<br />
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I was listening to a CD of the Cars on my car stereo this week, and thinking about the incredible time and technical expertise that went into their work and some of the other top acts of the 1960s through 1980s. When I was growing up, in the mid-1970s, the technical difference between the music of thirty years prior and then was enormous: Glenn Miller vs the Eagles. That same gap doesn't exist today. Recordings aren't really all that different from 30 years ago, c 1984. Heartbeat City, which apparently took months of excruciating work to get to sound like Ric Ocasek wanted... to sound like a lot of pop records today. And that's the difference: you don't have to be a genius or have tens of thousands of dollars floating around to make a pop record that sounds like a top-quality recording. The bottom bar has raised.<br />
<br />
And in a lot of ways, this is a really good thing. The overall technical quality of our stuff is better. Cars routinely last for way more than a decade and 200,000 miles is not freakish. I remember our old Volvo was <i>old</i> at ten years and 100,000 miles back in 1976. And that was a Volvo. They would run <i>forever.</i><br />
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Commodification—the creation of standards—also allows things like recipe books. A cup of flour is a cup of flour now, in a way that it wouldn't have been before flour mills became national operations in the late 19th Century. What variance there is in gluten or moisture content is the kind of thing an epicure, or a commercial baker, might care about. If you want to make a cake yourself? Pillsbury, Gold Medal, King Arthur... all will do the job just fine.<br />
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But this commodification also meant that the hands-on tinkering that local millers engaged in, the learning and re-learning what this machine will do at that time of year, and how to adjust to make the best flour from the local fields... this kind of expertise is now put into a context where responsibility is given to a higher order. That miller, now working for ADM or General Mills or whatever, is working in much less forgiving conditions, in a marketplace where there are seemingly faceless competitors ready to wipe you aside in the unlikely event that you should fall off of the pretty precise standards for "flour" in todays market.<br />
<br />
About 15 years ago, I abruptly learned from a fellow actor what "professionalism" meant in his world. He had worked in the professional world, and was now doing high-end community theater. He was good at his craft, but what he defined professionalism as was not quality but consistency. It was his employer knowing that he could be called upon to show up on time, and deliver the same quality of performance he'd demonstrated previously. Obviously, he'd be paid more and get better gigs if the quality was better. And there are plenty of examples of performers whose performance is anything but consistent... except that even these are mostly consistent in their eccentricity. Robin Williams and especially Andy Kaufmann would deliver a surprise. That was their promise. And they did.<br />
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And speaking as broadly as possible, that kind of genius is one end of what I mean by expertise. When you are selling your ability to solve a problem and deliver a finished result—whether it's by a doctor or a plumber or a comedian or a cartographer—what you are selling is expertise. But it's harder and harder to escape the fact that you are also selling the consistency of the results you deliver. So much of our economy is now based in comparison shopping for equivalent results within a narrow range of acceptable standards, it takes an effort to carve out a space where expertise is actually valuable.<br />
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In some fields (writing for example), this has been true for a long time. "Everyone's a novelist, and anyone can sing/But no one talks when the TV's on," as Moxy Früvous <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MliGuUjv-4s" target="_blank">sang</a>. Writers who work for non-publishers regularly face the fact that "lots of people can write." Not as consistently, but most college educated people can put together a letter in written English that will be understood by the recipient. 500 years ago, this was not so true. Also way fewer people went to college.<br />
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Others of us are just getting used to this mode of working for pay in a technology that "anyone can do." But more and more of us are living in a data-rich world, where our special knowledge isn't all that special anymore. And as the distance between what anyone can do and what only a few can do continues to narrow, will we really end up with experts anymore? Those of us who grew up into an expertise really <i>want</i> to find a way to hang on to that, but is it really necessary? What happens to the place experts hold in our society?<br />
<br />
We're seeing some of that now in America, with the declining respect given to experts: scientists, doctors... what do they know? This anti-elitism is nothing new, but it's backed up now by a diffusion of knowledge—not wisdom, but knowledge—that gives those expert elites less to stand upon.<br />
<br />
I think those elites—the knowledge and technical cabals of old—are really evidences of imbalance. I'm not sorry to see them go, except that I kind of like it when people say, "Oooh, you make maps?!?!" at dinner parties. I like it, but it gets kind of old, honestly. I'd rather focus on what makes a humane way to be "professional," in the sense that actor meant. There the expertise was not black-box magic hocus-pocus. It was a practiced skill, an ability to perform consistently. <i>That</i> is valuable and it's healthily sustainable.<br />
<br />
So why then does commodification sound so unpleasant, like <i>The Prisoner</i>'s "I am not a number, I am a human being!"? What is the difference between professionalism and commodification? I'll discuss that in the next post.natcasehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18058664776852941599noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4844458687369955274.post-31694526197500850552014-08-14T07:12:00.002-07:002017-09-30T02:54:47.283-07:00Odd SocksIn high school, some friends formed a group they called something like "The Caffeine Addicts and Silly Walkers Appreciation Society." SF fans, Whovians, Trekkies, Monty Pythonites... A rag-tag collection of odd socks.<br />
<br />
And it didn't feel right to me, even though by every measure I belonged there. It wasn't even a particularly principled stand—I probably justified staying away by thinking of the conforming non-conformist paradox (see the immortal scene from Life of Brian:)<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/QereR0CViMY?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe>but this was basically me being ornery about signing on with any group. I didn't trust groupthink in any form.</div>
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And so here I am among the Quakers. And diversity and variety are very much on Quakerdom's mind. But here's the question I keep coming back to: diversity to what end? If diversity itself is a defining value, then what of our human desire to hang around with people like us? If diversity is a defining value, then what do we have besides being a collection of odd socks.</div>
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The thing is, there<i> is</i> push-back in a lot of communities, a commandment to conform. Indeed, this seems to be some kind of deep-rooted human social thing. It's what we do. And so people get pushed to act in ways they do not as individuals feel right acting. They are asked to put on what feels like someone else's skin.</div>
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And the ones who get pushed hard enough they just can't take it, or people like me who are just ornery about getting pushed... we leave, or we put up a big stink. And we often develop a whole philosophical approach to life that decries conformism and conformity, sees conforming as an insidious disease. We think about the kind of cookie-cutter conformity that stereotypically characterized middle-class America in the 1950s.</div>
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And as liberal Quakers, we see a religiousness that doesn't really have a moral foundation, but that tells you to go to church because that's what nice people do. And so we look for a religious experience based in "realer" things: peace, the experience of worship, justice, diversity... and we end up gathering people around us who believe in those things. And soon enough we become a group of people with a common odd-sock-ness.</div>
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It is so bloody hard to gather a people who share values or dance moves or dietary restrictions or whatever, and then not enforce conformity on individuals. The gathering itself brings out a kind of mirroring, as we seek to be "better" at whatever it is we are gathered together by. And if that thing that gathers us is a value of diversity, How much time to we spend worrying if we are being "diverse enough?"</div>
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There are plenty of broad societal reasons why we as a culture, as a nation, as a community, need to fight against the biases that have condemned races, genders/preferences, religious affiliations, languages, physical limitations, etc to second-class citizenship. Conformity has been used as a weapon of power to broadly keep "you people" down so I can be higher up. And I as a white, male, straight, American-English-speaking, basically able, American citizen, am right at the top of that heap. So I shouldn't be writing this at all, probably. By many lights, I should sit down and shut up.</div>
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But I resist being told to sit down and shut up. I resist conforming "because." I'm ornery.</div>
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Here's what I think: We need to be gathered. And we need to not be in denial about this. It is part of being human. That gathering is not about deciding who we are gathered with, but neither is it based on divine mandate. We need to be with people we can trust, and who will be our team, our company, our gathered place. And within that group, we need to enforce that trust: if you will not behave in a trustworthy manner, we need to be able to kick you out.</div>
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natcasehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18058664776852941599noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4844458687369955274.post-27042622852388078842014-05-16T21:51:00.000-07:002014-05-16T21:54:40.720-07:00The Audience<div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">We went, my son and I, to see a performance by Zenon Dance Company, our premier local modern company. My wife and son went last spring, and thought it was fantastic. This time... it was mixed. The single piece in the second half, <span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Danny Buraczeski's <i>Ezekiel's Whee</i>l, was really superb. it had flow, it had depth, it connected with the audience. The other dances... well, they had some lovely phrases, memorable pieces, but it didn't feel lilke they were paying much attention to the audience. </span></span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: inherit;">I was interested to read in a <a href="http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/jazzdance-by-danny-buraczeski/Content?oid=911869" target="_blank">2003 review</a> of Buraczeski's work:</span></div>
<div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Ezekiel's Wheel, which he completed in 1999, seems to have been a pivotal work: interviewed shortly after the piece premiered, Buraczeski said, "[That] concert was my most personal yet, my most vulnerable. I don't make dances for audiences any more, I make them to explore my feelings....But I leave the door open so people can bring their own lives in." </span><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br /></span></blockquote>
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<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Which is odd given my experience of alienation from the other pieces in the program tonight. Or it seems odd at first. But I think it points to a false way we think of audience, and that audiences think of performance.</span><br />
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<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">In the pub sings I've been involved in the last few years, audience and performer are much closer together than most people are used to, I think. The setting helps: people just get up and lead a song, often from where they are sitting in the bar. There's ambient noise, sometimes annoyingly if there are clueless patrons talking loudly just outside the circle of song (or even, incredibly, right next to the singer). But that noise also serves to ground us: we are not in a temple of perfect sound: we are in the middle of our lives. Our audience are our friends around us. We are all part of the same group, and we are sharing those functions of audience and performer in a way that feels like a deep conversation. </span><br />
<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br /></span>
<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">What Buraczeski I think is talking about, is that he is not saying what he thinks the audience wants. He is not trying to fill their appetite. And because his work is interesting, because the ideas and shapes he presents in "leaving the door open," it's like that part of a conversation. It's something we care about.</span><br />
<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br /></span>
<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Where I think Zenon did a poor job in the first half, is in talking about things the audience just didn't especially care about—at least not the section I was in. It was technically excellent, but it just wasn't interesting.</span><br />
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<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;">Artists of all kinds like to guard against "pandering." We don'r want to just spoon-feed the audience. My yearbook quote from college sums it up (it's by Duane Preble): "Aesthetic is the opposite of anaesthetic." Good art in this model has the urgency of gospel: Listen! it says, This is important! We don't have forever to learn this!</span><br />
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<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;">Sometimes, though, the desire to not pander means we turn our back as performers on the audience. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Good evening. Welcome to Difficult Listening Hour. The spot on your dial for that relentless and impenetrable sound of Difficult Music. So sit bolt upright in that straight-backed chair, button that top button, and get set for some difficult music.</span><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">-Laurie Anderson</span></blockquote>
Well, OK, if you have a consensual relationship with a particular audience, where they know they are in for a hard grind. Fine. But me, I want art that reaches out not to pluck my heartstrings, but to grab me by the hand, to meet me halfway between the stage and the audience.<br />
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natcasehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18058664776852941599noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4844458687369955274.post-37968714863335213212014-01-26T22:14:00.001-08:002014-01-27T05:25:30.035-08:00Harley essay and map reproduction: followup and posted filesAmongst the things I have learned the last few months is that crowd-sourcing campaigns, however well-intentioned, do not always result in the desired results. So, I did not get the amount needed to <a href="http://maphead.blogspot.com/2013/11/harley-essay-reproduction.html">print the Ordnance Survey map</a> that J.B. Harley so eloquently wrote about in his 1987 essay, "The Map as Biography." It's regrettable, but that's often how learning experiences go. I did however acquire a high-resolution scan of the map from the Library of Congress, and I offer a cleaned-up version of it to anyone interested <a href="http://incasellc.com/z/harley/SO60095BMclean.tif">here</a>.<br />
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A few notes about this image: it is high resolution and bit-mapped, rather than grayscale. This may strike some as odd, as the on-screen quality of a grayscale image allows for more accurate viewing online. But this image is meant for printing, and it's my belief that a high-resolution bitmap ends up resulting in a crisper printed image. It's a difficult compromise, because the original imprint involved microscopic smudging and spreading which will probably not be duplicated on your plotter. If you would like a grayscale image, please <a href="http://incasellc.com/ser/index.php?/pages/contactform.html">get in touch with me</a>, and I'll see if I can get it to you. a quick warning: the bitmap I've made available is 6.7 MB. You can view the image as a pan-and-zoom <a href="http://incasellc.com/z/harley/" target="_blank">here</a>.<br />
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<br />
I've also re-set the original essay as two 8.5 x 11 sheets, <a href="http://incasellc.com/z/harley/Harley_essay_layout-letter.pdf">here</a>. Thanks to Paul Laxton, Harley's literary executor, for his permission to reproduce this. I hope you will find the result of interest and will find it as rich a reading to come back to as I do.natcasehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18058664776852941599noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4844458687369955274.post-5440868588065903122013-11-18T17:02:00.002-08:002013-11-18T18:26:30.689-08:00Harley Essay reproductionMany of you are familiar with J.B. Harley's 1987 essay from<i> </i><i>The
Map Collector</i>, "The Map as Biography." It discusses a 1904
1:10,560 ("six-inch") Ordnance Survey sheet of the town where he
spent many years. The essay has been a touchstone to me, but I've
never actually seen the map until now, except for the extract printed with the
essay.<br />
<br />
I've mentioned it several times on this blog and elsewhere:<br />
http://maphead.blogspot.com/2013/10/maps-for-strangers.html<br />
http://maphead.blogspot.com/2008/06/home-and-away.html<br />
http://nat.case.home.mindspring.com/nacis07G.pdf<br />
<br />
I'm using Rockethub (similar to Kickstarter) to presell a short
edition of the map and essay, printed on opposite sides of a 22 x 17
sheet. I have the blessing of Harley's estate (Paul Laxton,
executor). 25% of anything I eventually make over out-of-pocket
costs will go to the Harley Fellowships.<br />
<br />
The maps will be printed on heavy paper (Mohawk 100lb text vellum,
warm white), and the map image will be printed as black and white,
NOT gray scale, so the details should be crisp and not fuzzy from
the dot screen.<br />
<br />
Folded maps are $10, with a $15 option to buy one for your self and
one for your favorite map library. Rolled maps are $20. <br />
<br />
Here's the site: <span style="color: #0000ee;"><u><a href="http://rkthb.co/34637">http://rkthb.co/34637</a></u></span><br />
<span style="color: #0000ee;"><u><br /></u></span>
You only have until midnight, November 30, and as of today we're 28% of the way there!<br />
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<iframe height="400" src="http://incasellc.com/z/harley/" width="400"></iframe>natcasehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18058664776852941599noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4844458687369955274.post-89215030401221519632013-10-30T20:52:00.003-07:002013-10-30T20:54:18.393-07:00Wooden TestimoniesAt a recent small gathering of Friends, the subject of Quaker testimonies was raised. Modern liberal Friends formulate these "fruits of the spirit" as Simplicity, Peace, Integrity, Community and Equality (SPICE). This formulation, <a href="http://laquaker.blogspot.com/2009/10/how-how-brinton-invented-spice-quaker.html">as LA Quaker pointed out a few years</a> ago, is Howard Brinton's, from 1943. Previous to that, Quaker Books of Discipline and Faith and Practice had a hodgepodge of advices (the word "testimony," prior to Brinton, was reserved for the Peace Testimony).<br />
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There's nothing wrong with the content of these formulated testimonies. They are all full of virtuous and productive models... but there's something missing from the fact of this formulation—the fact of their being, in fact, formulaic.<br />
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Formulas make remembering things easy. They give us a pattern to organize ourselves. They also give a sense of completeness which may or may not be justified.<br />
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The point of these testimonies, to me, is that they are the product of a faithful (dedicated) life in a certain way: they summarize statements from three centuries of Friends who live their life into their faith, and in living those lives, discovered these important things.<br />
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When we adopt these formulated testimonies, we are not necessarily growing and living in a way that will add to these fruits. We are not listening for new instructions, but settling for the perfectly good-sounding instructions already offered to us. And this, I think, is not what George Fox et al. had in mind.<br />
<br />
This is the metaphor that occurred to me in this meeting: We need a house. And so we cut down trees, and if they are good wood, they make the beams of a good house. But they are no longer living wood. We can't live out under the trees, not entirely. Maybe in L.A. you could, but we need houses here in Minnesota. But we also need to be sure when we cut down that timber to build that house, that we replant and tend the grove that wood came from. Because sooner or later the beetles will come and infest the old wood, and then where will you be?<br />
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How does Brinton's formulation give us an excuse to avoid the living wood? Would we know good wood outside that formulation if we saw it? And how about those old beams in our house? Have we inspected them for rot or beetles lately?natcasehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18058664776852941599noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4844458687369955274.post-43781039538030130262013-10-18T13:35:00.000-07:002013-10-18T20:39:42.202-07:00Where is crazy?It's easy for a liberal like me to conclude that there's something psychogenic in the water to my north. Michele Bachmann, one of the nuttiest nuts of the far right, a fact-challenged, mean-spirited demagogue, has been elected four times to the Minnesota Sixth Congressional District. It changed shape before the 2012 election, but she still pulled it out.<br />
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So I wonder about that place up there. And I wonder, where exactly is the crazy coming from? Here's the answer, more or less:<br />
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<iframe height="400" src="http://incasellc.com/6thdistrict/" width="400"></iframe>
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To be fair, this is also a test of the MaPublisher Web Author tool. I'm not as impressed as I hoped: you'll note that there are voting districts that you can't get data from on rollover, and there were issues with export from Illustrator. But it's good enough for here and now.<br />
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There is texture to the district: rural Cokato and Luxemburg Townships are up close to 70% for Bachmann, and the areas that include St Cloud State and the twinned College of St Benedict and the University of St John all track in the mid 20s. But there's a lot of 45-55, both in rural (lean toward Bachmann) and town (lean away) precincts.<br />
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Bachmann squeaked out an overall win in 2012 over Jim Graves, 180,131 to 175,923. So it's not as simple as "how can level-headed Minnesota keep sending that nutbar back to DC?!?"<br />
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So here's a bigger-scale question: why does farm country breed the kind of attitude that permits Bachmanns? And not just farm <i>country</i> but farms themselves: the small towns vs the townships are distinctly tilted further away. I'm a city boy, and I just don't get it, even when I talk with rural classmates. Is there something fundamental about farming that makes the kind of society I live in here in Minneapolis abhorrent in and of itself? Or does it work the other way around: the sort of person who thrives on egalitarian, diversity-driven-ness tends to flock to the city? In a mobile society, like finds like?natcasehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18058664776852941599noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4844458687369955274.post-84722065399987537622013-10-10T15:25:00.001-07:002013-10-10T15:25:36.600-07:00Overmapped<div>
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Flying out of O'Hare, bearing southeast, the strict crosshatch of Chicago's streets and close-set houses gives way to more liquid suburban subdivisions, and then to Indiana's fields, green and tan and brown, sections and half sections and quarter sections and little rectagular subsubsections.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">They call it a checkerboard, as if Jefferson's curse was a game. It's a game that doesn't end. There is no checkmate. Chess, checkers, Scrabble, go, the gridiron of the football field... each contains our ambitions to eviscerate the opponent, each outlines the field of play. We walk off th field, and the game is over. But we cannot walk off of Jefferson's gameboard without leaving home.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Ptolemy never meant his latitude and longitude to be inscribed back onto the ground, to guide roads and property lines. He wanted to create a guide, a system to transfer his sketch map of places and coastlines into the freshly-plastered wall. He wanted others to draw the same picture of the vast world he had recorded, over and over.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">One and a half millennia later, transplanted rationalists saw in the New World a clean slate, and so city after American city rose, squared and aligned with the next. The people who lived here prior to these rationalists worshipped the four directions; the Europeans carved them over and over into the ground, they used them to worship their own dreams of empire.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Here's what I think we need: storytellers who walk new dreamlines, or find the old dreamlines, in our world. We need to unmap ourselves, ungrid the land. Then we can map lightly, the lines left imaginary. We can measure without cutting, and know without pretending to own.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">With thanks to the Harrisons.</span></div>
natcasehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18058664776852941599noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4844458687369955274.post-75302229165198839862013-10-10T12:35:00.000-07:002013-10-10T21:12:31.599-07:00Maps for Strangers<div class="p1">
My paper for NACIS, delivered October 10, 2013:</div>
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I think there is a fundamental misunderstanding in how we view maps for land navigation—road maps, street maps, and topographic maps. This misunderstanding colors what we think the historical place of such maps is, and how we view the role of maps in the new mobile era.</div>
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Here's the problem: when we say a map is a travel map or a visitors map, we assume that the map itself—the laying out of the landscape—is the means by which a stranger will figure out how to get from point A to point B. Are maps the best, most fundamental way to find a path? I want to argue that they are not, that the two-dimensional “mappiness” we take for granted is essentially irrelevant to that process, and that we are now witnessing the devolution of that idea—the idea that maps are how you <i>ought</i> to find your way—and its replacement by the resurgence of the itinerary as the foremost tool for wayfinding.</div>
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I grew up with this image, from Peter Spier's 1967 picture book <i>London Bridge is Falling Down</i>, illustrating the old nursery rhyme:</div>
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See-saw, sacradown, </div>
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Which is the way to London Town?</div>
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One foot up, and the other foot down</div>
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That is the way to London town!</div>
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See-saw, jack in the hedge,</div>
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Which is the way to London Bridge?</div>
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Put on your shoes and away you trudge</div>
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That is the way to London Bridge</div>
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The rhyme, and some aspects of the scene pictured, are in fact spot on in showing how people traveled before stage coaches and railroads. People walked, or rode. But they didn't, as far as we know, customarily take a map with them until well into the nineteenth century, and even then it would be a topographic map to guide in hiking or bicycling, not more conventional town-to-town road travel. Instead people used a combination of an itinerary, a prepared list of points one should travel to in order, and, as here, asking people the best way to get to the next point.</div>
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Catherine Delano Smith tracks the emergence of European, especially British, maps that relate to travel from late Middle Ages through the eighteenth century in her chapter "Milieus of Mobility" in <i>Cartographies of Travel and Navigation</i>. What she finds are that while <i>some</i> maps that show travel information, they were not tools for travelers on the move. Early strip maps were parts of portfolios with their own agenda of promoting local prosperity, and purchased by wealthy collectors. Other early network maps may have been used to plot itineraries, but the itineraries themselves consistently form the heart of how travelers made sense of any specific, longer journey. They were the linear framework within which one customarily then made up the details of the journey along the way, by asking for local information.</div>
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The key point I want to emphasize here, is that it is not the two-dimensional sense of a whole landscape that travelers needed. What they were intent on was their path through that landscape. Any other information may have been potentially interesting or at least diverting, but with the exception of triangulating by distant landmarks, they were inconsequential for the purposes of <i>navigating</i>.</div>
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It's been demonstrated by a number of people, especially Jim Akerman, the editor of the book that Smith's chapter is part of, that modern American route networks developed in the early 20th Century as part of the improvement and development of roads. Thus the opening of the Lincoln Highway 100 years ago this year spurred improvement of the existing roadways it used and signing them in common. Back and forth, these three tasks—designation and signing, mapping, and physical improvement—created the American network of Interstate, US, state, county and local roads we live within today.</div>
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This iterative development in the US may have blinded us, at least somewhat, to the difference between a route and a road, a designation vs. a piece of pavement. Modern vehicles' dependence on paved surfaces—not as extreme as railways, but still pretty strict—makes drivers forget that the network of roads is a subset of <i>possible</i> routes, in a way that foot-travelers never did. As Smith notes, before the modernization of roads and fights over the commons in the 17th century, traveling out across meadows was not seen as trespassing, but as the usual way of things. This is still true in parts of the British Isles, notably in the highlands of Scotland, where there are few linear rights of way and the law generally favors the right to cross open land.</div>
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We can get a taste of the older way of thinking in terms of itineraries, by looking at early auto guides like The American Automobile Association's Blue Books, which were popular motoring guides before the First World War. This was how you got from city to city before routes were blazed—indeed many of the very earliest road markings were made by the publishers of such guides to help their buyers find their way. And note that it doesn’t work entirely without maps—but that maps are clearly subordinate information to the detailed directions.</div>
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So why do we use maps today? Part of it is that our idea of a destination changed along with the motorcar. One no longer rode from a railroad terminus in Milwaukee to a railroad terminus in Chicago, but from one house in one part of the state to another, over a road network where one had to make choices many more times than on a rail network. And those choices, in America, are mostly anonymous crossroads rather than named places, as in Europe. America’s road system, especially in the center of the country, is based on an artificial grid constructed before European settlement, rather than organic, point-to-point networking.</div>
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So, while American road development focused on routes, even down to the local level, European roads and mapping used an already well-developed system of ways between towns and named places. Today, American road signs emphasize the route numbers and names, while European road signs emphasize destinations. In Europe, topographic maps formed much more of the basis of early road mapping, as navigation was much more a matter of finding one's way over an existing network of roads and lanes that connected named villages and towns, and less on following a developing system of routes.</div>
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I think also that the idea of maps’ primacy comes out of a desire for efficiency on the part of information providers. If we are going to produce a <i>product</i> in large editions that aids navigation, it needs to serve everyone with every conceivable route. But this does not mean that maps are what people wanted. The popularity of routing services like the American Automobile Association’s Trip-Tik program, or this knockoff concept by Universal Printing for a competitor to AAA, should indicate that really what people wanted is a linear route. Maps provide useful information, but they require the extra step from users of extracting that linear route out of the web of lines across the landscape. We have used maps because they work acceptably in huge single editions, and that gave oil companies, and later map retailers, something cheap to give or to sell people.</div>
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No more. This spring, I got lost in Hamilton Township, New Jersey. I got to an intersection with a CVS pharmacy, a RiteAid pharmacy, a 7-11 and a BP service station. And in those four stores on three corners, there was one map—not one map for sale, but one map, period, and it was a ten year old county atlas in the clearance bin at RiteAid.</div>
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As cartographers, we look at the <i>mapping</i> in Google and Bing, but I think this isn't what people are choosing over paper maps. It's the itineraries, the turn-by-turn directions. That's my hunch, anyway. What I see from the centuries before the oil company map, as described by Smith, tells me that people really want and need <i>this</i>, and that on our modern road network, what online map services and GPS direction can deliver in terms of custom point-to-point itineraries, delivered on a uniform, one-size-fits all background, is simply better. It certainly beats this, a 1952 map marked up by a AAA advisor.</div>
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The dominance of printed maps for land navigation was a detour, a really big one-time glitch on the way to improving the itinerary.</div>
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So. Where does that leave us, the map makers? I talked earlier about our having made a mistake in thinking about the place of maps, and you may think this finishes that line of discussion, but every mistake has two sides. Maps are not the central communicative medium for wayfinding, but they are a central tool for something else. They allow us to construct a more coherent sense of place.</div>
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Itinerary: line, journey. Map: area, place.</div>
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In 1983, I spent a month in London, and took a bunch of walks. I had destinations, but the process of exploring the city by winding my way through it, was wonderful. And I specifically remember back in the dorm room at night, going back over my route on this Bartholomew’s London Plan map, realizing connections I hadn’t realized I’d made—walking one day around the back of a building I’d been inside the day before; passing by a tube stop I’d rumbled through the week before. Approaching Admiralty Arch first from the front, then from the back. I used the map to get un-lost a few times, but what I remember most is constructing a two-dimensional memory of the city after the fact on top of this dense artwork.</div>
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When we travel—when I travel—I am aware of how I essentially ignore large swaths of territory I am traveling through. I don't think this is just a product of the motor age, though the hermetically sealed automobile has emphasized this phenomenon. The plain fact is, most of the time we don't care much about the space we travel through—we just want to get through it. But we have a different relationship with the places where we stop. When we stop travel for a rest break, we move around, even if it's to get a sense of the relationship between the car park, our motel room, and the office. This most rudimentary geography sets up an understanding of space in more than one dimension, giving us a field within which we can carry out our "settled" functions of eating, sleeping, eliminating, washing, and maintaining our physical goods.</div>
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This is the kind of territory which, if it is complex enough that we can't easily hold it in our heads, we want a map for.</div>
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J.B. Harley was right on top of this understanding when he wrote his essay, “The Map as Biography.” To him, the map in question, a 1904 topographic sheet of Newton Abbot in Devonshire, reveals familiar truths to him: the history of an English town in its layers of development; the history of British mapmaking in the surveyors and draftspersons who compiled and published the map; and finally his own history, memories of a long residence, a marriage, births and deaths and burials. He wrote the essay after he had left Newton Abbot to live in Milwaukee, so it truly was an<i> aide memoire</i> to him, a reminder of where he had deeply been from. When David Woodward memorialized his colleague and this essay in a broadsheet for the History of Cartography project, he went a bit further, and talked about maps, and this map in particular, as a repository for memory.</div>
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Strangers in a territory—true strangers—don’t have these memories, and so I want to suggest that maps are fundamentally not for strangers. They may call out aspects of a familiar place we did not realize. They may correct misunderstandings our limited ground-based perspective gave us. But their real value is giving us a framework on which to construct our own familiarity—not from ground zero, but from some pieces of already-existing memory or knowledge. One must be familiar with a place in some way to fully make use of a map.</div>
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There’s a chimera I've been chasing since I started making maps: the idea that a map could somehow transmit poetic, profound sense of place. I’ve made a variety of arguments why it just isn’t so, mostly centered around how the construction of the fine arts and of cartography are incompatible. So here’s another reason:</div>
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We are all strangers to our audience. It's not just us. Almost every piece of published, broadcast, or publicly performed work operates this way. But a lot of work in other forms—memoir or poetry or landscape painting—slips a little trick in, creating, for the duration of the audience’s experience, the illusion that something personal, even intimate, has been shared. The subject might be actually personal, as in a memoir, or it might be fictional. But this is not the default condition for mass-disseminated media: this illusion of familiarity must be constructed by the author and/or performer and then agreed to by the audience. Now, the creator of this personal work may in fact be speaking truth, and we may be reading something personal. But the connection, the actual relationship between any individual audience member and the artist, is illusory. Of this fact all sorts of awkward fan encounters are born.</div>
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What we makers of modern maps do generally avoids this: we present what users take as simple, impersonal facts. But as Harley notes, it is upon these facts that a profound sense of place can be constructed by the audience. This is what we potentially have to offer: not a million people with one text. Instead, a toolset on which a million people create their own texts.</div>
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And this is why I so loved Becky Cooper’s <i>Mapping Manhattan</i> project: a blank map, handed to people to draw their own relationship to the most important island in America. it’s simple, it’s brilliant, and to me it’s a template for where we recorders of our geography need to go. The book at first seems to show a series of maps, but I suggest we should better look at it without the assumption that each new image is a separate map. These are each examples of the placement of individual memory upon a common map—the visualization of the internal processes all of use when we use maps as repositories of memory. This is how people at root use and <i>want </i>to use maps. It’s up to us to create maps that most effectively allow people to do that.<br />
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">That is where this paper ended on Tuesday, but after a day at NACIS, I want to add a postrscript.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">When we assume ahead of time what our maps must be made of, we pass on to our users assumptions about what kinds of texts, what kinds of memories, are permissible in the stories they are going to tell. This outline of Manhattan gives permission for a huge variety of responses. If Becky Cooper had handed her New Yorkers a URL to a mashup site where they could pin responses in digital form on a detailed OpenStreetMap zoomable base, would we have ended up with nearly as interesting and rich a set of responses? </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">If we build our maps, our bases for public conversation, on data—if we ground our understandings insistently on data-driven mapping, we end up excluding whole classes of memory, of communication. To me this is real challenge: from a data-driven perspective, there are centrally important modes of human understanding that are just too sloppy and vague to be admissible. The way we cartographers have learned to think excludes sloppiness. And, yes, sloppy thinking within a precise, complex system has arguably gotten us into the political mess we're in right now. But only part of the problem is the sloppy thinkers insisting on equal standing. The other part of the problem is the insistence of non-sloppy thinkers that we don't have a fully legitimate place for this sloppiness. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">I think that's the root problem: our insistence that our human response to the world around us not be sloppy. When we insist on this, we have overstepped our place.</span></div>
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natcasehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18058664776852941599noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4844458687369955274.post-46812620637854659852013-08-26T09:59:00.000-07:002013-08-26T10:16:12.836-07:00new essay in Aeon MagazineA 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: <a href="http://www.aeonmagazine.com/world-views/im-a-quaker-but-i-dont-believe-in-god/">"I contradict myself."</a><br />
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As always, comments welcome, here or on the article itself. Enjoy!natcasehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18058664776852941599noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4844458687369955274.post-81881168580564275282013-08-24T08:26:00.001-07:002013-08-26T10:19:03.340-07:00Why decoration is important<span style="color: black;">There's a piece of Dalia Varanka's paper on the rise of the "Plain Style" in mapping around 1700 that has been gnawing at me. I referred to it in my <a href="http://www.cartographicperspectives.org/index.php/journal/article/view/cp73-case/html">recent essay on cartography and aesthetics</a> in Cartographic Perspectives, but I think it deserves some deeper pulling-out.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">[FYI, Varanka's paper is not available online: it's “The manly map: the English construction of gender in early
modern cartography.” in <i>Gender and Landscape: Renegotiating the Moral Landscape</i>, edited by J. Carubia, L. Dowler, and B. Szczygiel. New York/London: Routledge.]</span><br />
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The piece that's bugging me is this: why is decoration trivial? I take it as a given, something that doesn't need further explanation: form follows function, and decoration is an add-on. Flourishes, trills, scrollwork and so on, are less "honest," in this view, than plain, unadorned, prose. Manly prose—you know, like Hemingway.<br />
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See what I mean? This thread of appearance being false, of truth being deep, runs to the bone in our culture. And it isn't true everywhere: saving "face" is seen crucial in many cultures. Even in our culture, there is a long and deep divide which has not been entirely settled, between those who think God cares about what we do and those who think what we <i>are</i> is essential: in Christian terms, works and faith.</span><br />
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<span style="color: black;">Outwardness and inwardness were a part of my formative pop-psych thinking: I remember M&M's being a popular metaphor in high school: the hard exterior and the soft, delicate inside. The astrological notions of sun-sign (true inner self) and ascendant (what you feel the need to appear like) also made an appearance.</span><br />
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<span style="color: black;">That latter, though I do not believe in the functional idea (that when you were born determines who you are) does I think provide a way to think of decoration as essential. Because it says that how you want (or even need) to be seen is itself an essential part of who you are. It's not a "fake" thing you can change at will. Some seemings will fit you better than others, just as your true inner self is what it is.</span><br />
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<span style="color: black;">Adolph Loos' <i>Ornament and Crime</i> posited that ornament was a waste of time, because fashion changes. And we have come to see outward presentation as synonymous with fashion. Being changeable, fashion is not trusted. We want our truths to remain on a single, unwavering course. That's what faith is: sticking with your allegiance to a person or an idea no matter what. Even if, as with Mother Teresa, you never actually achieve that numinous moment, you still get counted as saintly if you stick with a strict goodness.</span><br />
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<span style="color: black;">But some ornament is not especially prone to fashion. Traditions include ornament, whether it be in religious decoration, folk dances and music, or traditional costume. Even when radical technological change steps in (as with aniline dyes and many fiber traditions), there is seen to be a deep well of sameness and conformity that is valued, even as it is all about "unnecessary" patterning on functional objects.</span><br />
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<span style="color: black;">So why is ornament important? I think of patterns of tile, or of geometric grillwork, that I see when passing time. I especially notice it in bathrooms. These provide a place for the mind to work and rest simultaneously. A field of play, perhaps. They are certainly better for the mind than an utterly blank slate (or tile). We like to play off of patterns. I do anyway. And so decoration, on surfaces and tools we use every day, give us something to work with.</span><br />
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<span style="color: black;">It's the idea of play that I think is the stickler here. The arguments against ornament are mostly serious. Ornament is seen as silly, a distraction perhaps. And I suppose in places where total concentration is necessary, it is. The question is, should our lives be spent in that kind of concentration? I don't think that's very healthy-sounding. We need to build in play, just to keep ourselves sane. Our lives can't be built so thoroughly on importance and concentration; there's a reason U.S. Presidents seem to age so quickly.</span><br />
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<span style="color: black;">Decoration, then, keeps us young. Perhaps. Or at least keeps us from getting too old, too fast.</span><br />
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<span style="color: black;">What I see as a deeper problem, then, is not that we need decoration, but that we need to build our lives where decoration and underlying form come together inseparably. Again, the astrological model is one I hold up: that the healthiest approach to decoration is that form and function are in fact one, that the object and the patterns we see in it are the same, not a core and an add-on. That the M&M is one candy, not two parts adhered together.</span><br />
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<span style="color: black;">And this doesn't mean (in maps for example) that every pixel must carry inward meaning. Some marks do not mean anything about the core structure of a place. Sometimes, they are texture. But that texture is part of what the place is about. That paisley print is not coded with instructions; it's an abstract design. But that design, if it fits, becomes part of what you are when you are wearing it. And that texture, that added noise, as it were, <i>even though it is not consciously spoken by you or even understood by you</i>, is part of what you are.</span><br />
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<span style="color: black;">I think this is the root of our modernist discomfort with decoration: we want to be in control. Just like the English Empiricists who promulgated the Plain Style, we want to exercise our conscious power over as much as we can, and to eliminate that which we do not consciously control. This obsession with maintaining an order we can understand is arrogant in the extreme. And in the end it will kill what we love, which is <i>not </i>entirely under our command. That decoration, that patterning we make, turns out to be an imitation of the vast, intricate, impossible to entirely comprehend web of processes that keeps us and this world alive.</span>natcasehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18058664776852941599noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4844458687369955274.post-66106632614863421052013-08-08T05:22:00.001-07:002013-08-26T10:17:47.131-07:00Function and Beauty (In Defense of Useless Maps) - new essayIn a new essay for Cartographic Perspectives, the journal of the North American Cartographic Information Society, called <a href="http://www.cartographicperspectives.org/index.php/journal/article/view/cp73-case/html">"Function and Beauty (In Defense of Useless Maps)"</a>, I discuss some potential pitfalls and opportunities in discussing maps in terms of aesthetics. It ends up dipping heavily into some wider issues. I hope you all enjoy! All comments welcome.natcasehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18058664776852941599noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4844458687369955274.post-72184503122209910442013-07-27T00:43:00.002-07:002013-07-27T00:44:37.288-07:00Climate and weatherIt's become a commonplace in discussions of climate change that climate is not the same as weather. And yet, it remains so tempting to say "Summer's hot. Must be climate change." We want to relate ideas back to a scale we are directly familiar with, and when it comes to surface conditions on the earth, weather—what is it doing outside right now and what will it be doing outside soon—is a natural, instinctive way to think and talk. And so climate change people, over and over, have to emphasize that any given day's weather is not "because of climate change."<br />
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I was struck recently, in reading followup commentary about the verdict in George Zimmerman's murder trial of Trayvon Martin, how similar the relationship is between racism and any given incident informed by race. Zimmerman's trial, because it was a trial of a single person for a single alleged crime, had to be about <i>his</i> state of mind and motivation. That's how the criminal justice system works: you don't get charged individually for broad-based social injustices, but for acts you have performed yourself. But clearly there was an underlying climate, and Zimmerman's defenders have tried to deny this or avoid this question, by and large. The fact that this was an individual trial and not a trial of the stand-your-ground statute he used, made that disconnect easier.<br />
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We humans do this kind of thing all the time, and modern society has given us legal tools (like stand your ground) that make it easier to separate out weather from climate, to claim that all our actions are self-interested, and that in essence there is no such thing as climate, only weather that follows more weather. Consider, for example, how quarterly returns and share prices make it possible to govern a public corporation without regard to long-term consequences. Consider how gun laws relentlessly focus on individual rights instead of overall public safety. Consider how a retail-based model of spirituality ("if I don't like religious group X I can always go down the street") has changed the purpose of religious groups from group commitment to individual fulfillment. Consider education for specific skills vs education for the whole citizen.<br />
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I'm in Germany right now, which 70-80 years ago suffered the consequences of over-climatizing the population, and then turning that climate over to monsters. We've done this over and over in the last century or so: the emphasis on big-picture nation-states crushing individual experience under the ever-turning wheel. So there is reason to celebrate the opportunity of individuals to not have to be a cog, or a statistical point, but to be themselves. But we all also do live in a climate, and a society. We are all parts of larger wholes. Surely there is some simple, if difficult dance we can perform to balance these two. Surely we can wear a raincoat and prepare for the flash flood at the same time as we prepare for slowly rising oceans. And we can recognize the possibility that George Zimmerman did not shoot Trayvon Martin "for being black," but that if he had been white, this almost certainly never would have happened.<br />
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<br />natcasehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18058664776852941599noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4844458687369955274.post-12498669813982685042013-05-23T16:49:00.001-07:002013-05-23T19:37:35.005-07:00A bowl filling with waterI had a lovely lunch the other day with Bob Schmitt, who has for some time been involved in Quaker circles around the topic of "eldering." Now, I've mostly heard this in terms of imposing discipline: lovingly reproving or correcting someone you believe to be headed off the rails. In a liberal context of people-can-believe-what-they-want-to-believe, it's kind of a touchy subject: one person's batpoop-crazy is another's touched-by-the-noodly-appendage.<br />
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What I had not understood, and what I got to understand in a fairly brief discussion at the end of our visit, was that among many Friends (early Friends and presently mostly Conservative Friends), "elders" are not just the disciplinarians. They are specifically a sort of <i>yin</i> to the <i>yang </i>of ministry (or maybe I got that backwards). Quakers do "record" or officially recognize ministers, who then may travel to speak and witness. Historically, traveling ministers were usually accompanied by an elder, whose job was specifically to "hold" that ministry in prayer, to offer a kind of grounding to the potentially wild electrical field generated by powerful ministry (I'm speaking metaphorically here—just want to be sure that's clear).<br />
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I find this sense of a counterbalance to ministry very intriguing. It goes along with the idea of discernment, which I've long found one of the most useful parts of Friends' practice: you aren't supposed to just follow every harebrained scheme you think God's tossed at you, but to be deliberate in following the fiery finger of command, to try and approach closer a grounded certainty that you are in fact being asked to do what you think you are being asked.<br />
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In meeting a few months ago, I asked (silently) what we were doing there, and the image that popped almost instantly into my mind was of a shallow bowl, designed to hold water. Our job was to support and pay attention to this bowl, into what would be poured what was needed. OK then, I thought. A week or two later, at a very raw-emotion-filled meeting, I found myself doing what I had heard of other Friends doing, really concentrating on listening to the whole, both said and unsaid. And it was a lot like holding that bowl. Apparently this is what is meant by "eldering" by "holding the meeting." Go figure.<br />
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For most of my time as a Quaker, I've been very focused on ministry: I speak in meeting, probably more than I ought. I'm interested in what people do and how they do it in a way that ministers to others and to the world, and I've thought of that for a long time as what being a Friend is largely about. And I've been frustrated by something just... <i>off</i> about how Friends, in particular liberal Friends, approach what it means to be a Quaker. Never been able to put a handle on it, but I think this is it: we are chronically out of balance between ministry and eldering.<br />
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It's like a gaggle of kids who have been sent out to fetch the water. Everyone wants to pull the pump-handle, and it gets so that people think "getting the water" means manning the pump. But what about the people holding the bucket to receive that water?natcasehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18058664776852941599noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4844458687369955274.post-81375488928681623372013-04-20T14:54:00.002-07:002013-04-20T14:55:07.459-07:00Old Books 4: The Bone People<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHOXOL9hq_WP43zYLpH4P1keTe2zN98rlpr5h5rE3RzPDMHlll7oYb8a8P4g_tMjOOR2uv2bJaITI3NMGVvVYkKM8HInH4z41ZQERALlinFWx09a3wpADkCnyhxV8TFoL8pWMjBJgPvvTT/s1600/9780330293877.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHOXOL9hq_WP43zYLpH4P1keTe2zN98rlpr5h5rE3RzPDMHlll7oYb8a8P4g_tMjOOR2uv2bJaITI3NMGVvVYkKM8HInH4z41ZQERALlinFWx09a3wpADkCnyhxV8TFoL8pWMjBJgPvvTT/s320/9780330293877.jpg" width="210" /></a></div>
I got this book in Cornwall in 1986, for no particular reason, and read it the peculiar haze of being a barkeep at a holiday resort on a bluff near Perranporth. It was an odd and stranded summer, and this is an odd and haunted book.<br />
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It is filled with fierceness: fierce humor, fierce love, and fierce violence. It concerns a trio of characters: Kerewin Holmes (an obvious counterpart to the author, Keri Hulme), a woman who won the lottery, and saw her talent for painting and life shrivel into the tower she built with the proceedings; Joseph Gillayley, whose beloved wife and son died, and who is left caring for Simon, who is autistic and prone to violent rage. Joe gives back in kind, savagely beating the boy.<br />
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You'd think with a set up like that you'd end up with a gothic abbatoir of a book. But it isn't. Love and violence are not mutually exclusive in this world—indeed, in reading bell hooks'<i> Something About Love </i>many years later, I found I simply couldn't stomach her calm assurance that "where there is violence, there is no love" precisely because the vision of Joe and Simon kept returning.<br />
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It's not that they like hurting each other. It's not S&M in family form. But they do enact their rages back and forth around the room. In what some critics say should have been the finale, Simon smashes Kerewin's beloved guitar, and she tells him to go to hell. Joe enraged, beats him senseless. Before losing consciousness, Simon pulls out a long sliver of glass he has saved away, and neatly inserts it into his stepfather's gut. So, yes, I guess it is an abbatoir.<br />
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But it isn't the finale. Broken—Kerewin with a cancer, Joe with time in prison and lost relationship with his family, Simon made deaf and permanently injured by the final beating—they each go to the land in one way or another, and are healed. And that's the message Hulme gives to us in the end: that the fires of fierceness that tie us to the land are the same fires of violence that are a part of Maori culture (did I mention that all of this takes place on the South Island of New Zealand, and that Kerewin and Joe are Maori?), and that it's not a matter of putting those flames out, but of turning them on to what needs the flame.<br />
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The whole thing makes me question the smug way we liberals often talk about violence as inherently, utterly wrong. It's not that any character in this book is happy about being violent towards anyone else (although Kerewin smugly puts Joe in his place once with advanced aikido moves). But I think Hulme is saying that neither is violence something we can cut out of ourselves. To me, this book is a puzzle. After more than 25 years, I'm still working on it.natcasehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18058664776852941599noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4844458687369955274.post-79229066772250005752013-02-17T20:27:00.000-08:002013-02-17T20:27:24.566-08:00Old Books 3: The Lathe of Heaven<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEif0rEM3E_sVPkVJPh7Pk8ZiJFLCvN2-nQ4fHFQ99OUm8yZpUkHZR6SF-KQI2kUH5EXkEBVtGxZyUJaBRv1WiHFPPOQCTV37B9oZA5ev_0QSKcRiNXGYNsMRaBi0DvI51Muw_s31EI4qjjg/s1600/loh.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEif0rEM3E_sVPkVJPh7Pk8ZiJFLCvN2-nQ4fHFQ99OUm8yZpUkHZR6SF-KQI2kUH5EXkEBVtGxZyUJaBRv1WiHFPPOQCTV37B9oZA5ev_0QSKcRiNXGYNsMRaBi0DvI51Muw_s31EI4qjjg/s320/loh.jpg" width="185" /></a></div>
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 <i>that's</i> where I got this idea of that kind of Virtue from.”<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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. <a href="http://maphead.blogspot.com/2008/11/tattoo-rumba-man.html">The Tattoo-Rhumba Man</a> does it, the son of Croesus does it in a play I wrote in high school. It's like <i>The Lion King,</i> except in my versions of the story, the runaway monarch does not return to reclaim the throne.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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Here's a moment in chapter 9, where Orr truly comes into himself:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Without premeditation and without timidity Orr said, “Dr Haber, I can't let you use my effective dreams any more.”<br />
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“Eh?” Haber said, his mind still on Orr's brain, not on Orr.<br />
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“I can't let you use my dreams any more.”<br />
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”’Use’ them?”<br />
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“Use them.”<br />
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“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.”<br />
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Orr's gods were nameless and unenvious, asking neither worship nor obedience.<br />
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“Yet I do say it,” he replied mildly.<br />
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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.</blockquote>
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.<br />
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As I say, this speaks a great deal to me.natcasehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18058664776852941599noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4844458687369955274.post-25477396469389353072013-02-05T00:21:00.000-08:002013-02-21T05:42:22.485-08:00False Appearances<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1f/As08-16-2593.jpg/272px-As08-16-2593.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1f/As08-16-2593.jpg/272px-As08-16-2593.jpg" /></a></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b id="internal-source-marker_0.47818081662990153" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">With just one hand held up high</span><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I can blot you out, out of sight.</span><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Peek-a-boo, peek-a-boo, little Earth.</span><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> - Kate Bush, “Hello Earth”</span></b></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6e/Scott_1371,_Apollo_8.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6e/Scott_1371,_Apollo_8.jpg" /></a><b id="internal-source-marker_0.47818081662990153" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In late December 1968, an astronaut on Apollo 8, Probably William Anders, became the first human to take a picture of the the earth in one frame. It wasn't the first photo to show the earth in one frame—unmanned satellites had created images at least two years earlier. Nor is this the iconic <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_marble">Blue Marble</a> photo, which showed an entire illuminated face of the earth—that was taken four years later by Apollo 17. But I still like it, and tie it to the view of Earthrise from the Moon shown on the Apollo 8 commemorative stamp, which in turn ties to the reading from Genesis that was made by the crew on Christmas from the spacecraft.</span></b></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b id="internal-source-marker_0.47818081662990153" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></b></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b id="internal-source-marker_0.47818081662990153" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The old spiritual goes "He's got the whole world in his hands" and when I heard Odetta sing that as a child, I thought of that new image of the world from space. It's become a cliche children learn from their youngest days: children entering the <a href="http://children.library.carleton.ca/index.htm">Barbara Petchenik Children's Map Competition</a> often locate their version of the blue marble as an object of care, cared for by people... variants of the hands-around-the-world designs that in my growing up years symbolized the desire for world peace.</span></b></span></span></div>
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<a href="http://image.shutterstock.com/display_pic_with_logo/437/437,1284649477,2/stock-vector-children-s-hands-carrying-a-globe-vector-61163218.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://image.shutterstock.com/display_pic_with_logo/437/437,1284649477,2/stock-vector-children-s-hands-carrying-a-globe-vector-61163218.jpg" width="143" /></a></div>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b id="internal-source-marker_0.47818081662990153" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">These derivative images, the logos and illustrations and photo-montages... they are all lies. Their intentions are good, and the message of an interconnected world, a world that can be polluted and made much less habitable by humans, has been a powerful one. But that picture of giant hands or giant people distorts the real scale of things. It makes it look like the planet could be crushed.</span></b></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b id="internal-source-marker_0.47818081662990153" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></b></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b id="internal-source-marker_0.47818081662990153" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It's hard to visualize at the scale of a screen or a textbook page; even <a href="http://www.planetaryvisions.com/Project.php?pid=2403">well-done, to-scale graphics</a> still give the sense of a planet that can be held in hand, of a kind of fragility we could blot out with one mistake.</span></b></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b id="internal-source-marker_0.47818081662990153" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></b></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b id="internal-source-marker_0.47818081662990153" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The planet, in fact, is staggeringly huge, especially compared to the way we commonly understand space directly, the way we make ourselves at home. There's a basic graphic in the<b> </b></span></b><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Science Museum of Minnesota that brought this home to me last week: it shows a cross-section of a small arc of the Earth's surface, with the thin thin layer of atmosphere over the top. The distance from the top of Everest to the bottom of the Marianas Trench, a little over 12 miles difference in elevation, is about 3/1000 of the average radius of the Earth. Proportionally, it's less than the elevation distance between most people's worst pimple and the deepest scar on their skin. OK, I made that up, but it's <i><b>miniscule</b></i>.</span></span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Why does this matter?</span></span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It matters because we tend to bring abstracted space into human scale, and it just isn't. We look at a map of the United States, and it's a friendly looking shape (or an unfriendly one, depending how you're thinking). We don't see "vast space it would take you more than a year to walk across." And so we make incorrect assumptions how things like nations and continents and the world as a whole are unified</span></span><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i> </i>in ways they simply aren't,</span></span> and or can simply be understood<i> in toto</i> in ways they can't.</span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This is not to say they cannot be understood, but our understanding of these big spaces is, by necessity, abstract. It is not direct and personal.</span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span></span></span>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Which brings me to theology. This is actually where I've been heading all along—sorry if it feels like bait and switch. But the problem of mismatched scale is one that is frankly a big one for us as modern humans. We know there are supernovae and colliding galaxies and all kinds of stuff going on in an incomprehensibly vast universe, and yet we think the God of Everything cares about our petty pain? Or on the other hand, we experience grace and love and beauty, here on our very local and personal scale, and expect that to match up with the Crab Nebula? The scale differences in how we now understand the universe to be constructed, the impersonal hugeness and incomprehensible smallness of the subatomic world (not to mention the atomic world)—these things tend to make the universality of a single (loving) God really hard to reconcile. I think (anecdotally, talking to one of my relatives, and thinking about the<a href="http://youtu.be/HhGuXCuDb1U?t=7m26s"> "amazing universe" speech</a> I keep hearing variants of from atheists) that looking at the stars and really thinking about them has made a lot of atheists in our world.<br /><br />It's one of the things that makes me just stop cold at anything even remotely like Biblical literalism. I love the story of Adam and Eve and that tree of Knowledge. There's something really important that snakes its way up through it. And reading Lloyd Lee Wilson's</span></span> <a href="http://www.quakerbooks.org/essays_on_the_quaker_vision_of_gospel_order.php">Essays on the Quaker Vision of Gospel Order</a>, I understand finally the sha<span style="font-size: small;">pe of the earl<span style="font-size: small;">y Friends<span style="font-size: small;">' understanding of the<span style="font-size: small;">ir place in history: restoring, through Jesus<span style="font-size: small;">, Mankind's state before the fall, when the world was rightly ordered. Essentially, if humans could all join in that Gospel Order, the universe would all be right again.<br /><br />That vision of right order is <i>so</i> powerful. And it's a beautiful thing to thin<span style="font-size: small;">k about as we<span style="font-size: small;"> look around us, right here: our ho<span style="font-size: small;">m<span style="font-size: small;">e, our friends and <span style="font-size: small;">family, our life<span style="font-size: small;">, all in order with what sh<span style="font-size: small;">ould be.<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"> I wan<span style="font-size: small;">t that too. But our rightness wo<span style="font-size: small;">n't make the next asteroid not hi<span style="font-size: small;">t the planet and make a giant tsunami that wipes out every coastal civilization on the planet<span style="font-size: small;">. It won't ma<span style="font-size: small;">ke the even<span style="font-size: small;">tual </span>death of our planet a<span style="font-size: small;">s the sun expands</span> disappear. It <span style="font-size: small;">may not even prevent global warming from radically changing what we mean by "habitable planet."</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;">Order is scalar. R<span style="font-size: small;">ight o<span style="font-size: small;">rder among people is different from right order among planets, and right order among quarks. And this is <i>OK. </i>It needs to be OK. W<span style="font-size: small;">hat I think <span style="font-size: small;">our job is<span style="font-size: small;">, living here in 201<span style="font-size: small;">3, <span style="font-size: small;">is to figure out how to make it OK, how to live rightly in a universe that we are not, after all, at the center of. We can be the center of so<span style="font-size: small;">mething—that<span style="font-size: small;">'s important—<span style="font-size: small;">but we canno<span style="font-size: small;">t hold the worl<span style="font-size: small;">d in our hands, and there are no hands that can. <span style="font-size: small;">We're not actually bl<span style="font-size: small;">otting out the moon, <span style="font-size: small;">or the<span style="font-size: small;"> earth, with one hand. We're <span style="font-size: small;">covering</span> our <span style="font-size: small;">e<span style="font-size: small;">yes.</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><i> </i></div>
natcasehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18058664776852941599noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4844458687369955274.post-11978350007132654492013-02-04T22:37:00.000-08:002013-02-04T22:38:03.657-08:00Corlis Benefideo Award for Imaginative Cartography: call for nominationsMay as well spread the word one more way:<br />
<br />
I'm part of the committee for a new award by <a href="http://nacis.org/">NACIS</a> (the North American Cartographic Information Society): <b><span style="font-size: large;"> </span></b><br />
<br />
<b><span style="font-size: large;">The Corlis Benefideo Award for Imaginative Cartography.</span></b><br />
<br />
From the <a href="http://nacis.org/index.cfm?x=53">page describing the award</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: x-small;">This award recognizes imaginative
cartography. Cartography is often seen by the public as work opposed to
imagination, grounded entirely in established fact. While this devotion
to reflecting what is forms the heart of cartographic thinking,
cartographers and artists who use maps as a basis for their work can
(and do) take that grounding in fact and use it to venture into the
world of the possible. Some explore real places from perspectives that
allow us to see it fresh and full of possibility, and some take our
established traditions of mapmaking, and indeed take fully-constructed
maps themselves, and turn them on their heads to make us see ourselves
anew. This award is to recognize this work and the perspective it brings
to the field of cartography, and the contributions it makes to the
world as a whole.</span></blockquote>
<br />
Sound daunting? I hope not. I hope it sounds exciting. There's details on nominating <a href="http://nacis.org/index.cfm?x=53">here</a>, and nominations are due March 15. I hope you'll consider submitting a nomination!<br />
<br />
Also, please share and encourage your friends to submit a nomination. <br />
<br />
Oh, and who is Corlis Benefideo? Click <a href="http://maphead.blogspot.com/2008/10/corlis-benefideo.html">here</a> if you don't recognize the name... and thank you <a href="http://www.barrylopez.com/">Barry Lopez</a>.<br />
<br />
<br />natcasehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18058664776852941599noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4844458687369955274.post-5415145091881794192013-02-04T20:53:00.000-08:002013-02-04T20:55:25.912-08:00Storm Still: Comings and Goings in Ancient Britain<b>King Lear's Palace.</b><br />
Enter Kent, Gloucester, and Edmund. Kent and Gloucester converse. Edmund stands back.<br />
Edmund comes forward.<br />
Sound a sennet.<br />
Enter one bearing a coronet; then Lear; then the Dukes of Albany and Cornwall; next, Goneril, Regan, Cordelia, with Followers.<br />
Exeunt Gloucester and Edmund.<br />
Lear lays his hand on his sword.<br />
Exit Kent.<br />
Flourish. Enter Gloucester, with France and Burgundy; Attendants.<br />
Flourish. Exeunt Lear, Burgundy, Cornwall, Albany, Gloucester, and Attendants.<br />
Exeunt France and Cordelia.<br />
Exeunt.<br />
<br />
<b>The Earl of Gloucester's Castle.</b><br />
Enter Edmund the Bastard solus, with a letter.<br />
Enter Gloucester.<br />
Edmund puts up the letter.<br />
Exit Gloucester.<br />
Enter Edgar.<br />
Exit Edgar.<br />
Exit Edmund.<br />
<br />
<b>The Duke of Albany's Palace.</b><br />
Enter Goneril and her Steward Oswald.<br />
Horns within.<br />
Exeunt.<br />
<br />
<b>The Duke of Albany's Palace.</b><br />
Enter Kent, disguised.<br />
Horns within. Enter Lear, Knights, and Attendants.<br />
Exit an Attendant.<br />
Exit an attendant.<br />
Enter Oswald the Steward.<br />
Exit Oswald.<br />
Exit a Knight.<br />
Enter Knight.<br />
Exit Knight.<br />
Exit an Attendant.<br />
Enter Oswald the Steward.<br />
Lear strikes him.<br />
Kent trips up his heels.<br />
Kent pushes him out.<br />
Lear gives Kent money.<br />
Enter Fool.<br />
Fool offers Kent his cap.<br />
Enter Goneril.<br />
Enter Albany.<br />
Lear strikes his head.<br />
Exit Lear.<br />
Enter Lear.<br />
Exeunt Lear, Kent, and Attendants.<br />
Exit.<br />
Enter Oswald the Steward.<br />
Exeunt.<br />
<br />
<b>Court before the Duke of Albany's Palace.</b><br />
Enter Lear, Kent, and Fool.<br />
Enter a Gentleman.<br />
Exeunt.<br />
<br />
<b>A court within the Castle of the Earl of Gloucester.</b><br />
Enter Edmund the Bastard and Curan, meeting.<br />
Exit Curan.<br />
Enter Edgar.<br />
Exit Edgar.<br />
Enter Gloucester, and Servants with torches.<br />
Exeunt some Servants. <br />
Tucket within.<br />
Enter Cornwall, Regan, and Attendants.<br />
Exeunt. Flourish.<br />
<br />
<b>Before Gloucester's Castle.</b><br />
Enter Kent and Oswald the Steward, severally.<br />
Kent beats him.<br />
Enter Edmund, with his rapier drawn, Gloucester, Cornwall, Regan, Servants.<br />
Edmund parts them.<br />
Stocks brought out.<br />
Kent is put in the stocks.<br />
Exeunt all but Gloucester and Kent.<br />
Exit Gloucester.<br />
Kent Sleeps.<br />
<br />
<b>The open country.</b><br />
Enter Edgar.<br />
Exit Edgar.<br />
<br />
<b>Before Gloucester's Castle</b><br />
Kent in the stocks.<br />
Enter Lear, Fool, and Gentleman.<br />
Exit Lear.<br />
Enter Lear and Gloucester.<br />
Exit Gloucester.<br />
Enter Cornwall, Regan, Gloucester, Servants.<br />
Kent here set at liberty.<br />
Lear lays his hand on his heart.<br />
Lear kneels.<br />
Tucket within<br />
Enter Oswald the Steward.<br />
Enter Goneril.<br />
Lear Points at Oswald.<br />
Exeunt Lear, Gloucester, Kent, and Fool.<br />
Storm and tempest.<br />
Enter Gloucester.<br />
Exeunt.<br />
<br />
<b>A heath.</b><br />
Storm still.<br />
Enter Kent and a Gentleman at several doors.<br />
Exeunt severally.<br />
<br />
<b>Another part of the heath.</b><br />
Storm still.<br />
Enter Lear and Fool.<br />
Enter Kent.<br />
Exeunt Lear and Kent.<br />
Exit Fool.<br />
<br />
<b>Gloucester's Castle.</b><br />
Enter Gloucester and Edmund.<br />
Exit Gloucester. <br />
Exit Edmund.<br />
<br />
<b>The heath. Before a hovel.</b><br />
Storm still.<br />
Enter Lear, Kent, and Fool.<br />
Exit Fool.<br />
Enter Fool from the hovel.<br />
Enter Edgar disguised as a madman.<br />
Storm still.<br />
Storm still.<br />
Lear tears at his clothes.<br />
Enter Gloucester with a torch.<br />
Storm still.<br />
Exeunt.<br />
<br />
<b>Gloucester's Castle.</b><br />
Enter Cornwall and Edmund.<br />
Exeunt.<br />
<br />
<b>A farmhouse near Gloucester's Castle.</b><br />
Enter Gloucester, Lear, Kent, Fool, and Edgar.<br />
Exit Gloucester.<br />
Enter Gloucester.<br />
Exeunt all but Edgar.<br />
Exit Edgar.<br />
<br />
<b>Gloucester's Castle.</b><br />
Enter Cornwall, Regan, Goneril, Edmund the Bastard, and Servants.<br />
Exeunt some of the Servants.<br />
Enter Oswald the Steward.<br />
Exeunt Goneril, Edmund, and Oswald.<br />
Exeunt other Servants.<br />
Enter Gloucester, brought in by two or three.<br />
Servants bind Gloucester.<br />
Regan plucks his beard.<br />
Cornwall and servant draw and fight.<br />
Regan takes a sword and runs at servant behind.<br />
Servant dies.<br />
Exit one with Gloucester. <br />
Exit Cornwall, led by Regan.<br />
Exeunt.<br />
<br />
<b>The heath.</b><br />
Enter Edgar.<br />
Enter Gloucester, led by an Old Man.<br />
Exit Old Man.<br />
Exeunt.<br />
<br />
<b>Before the Duke of Albany's Palace.</b><br />
Enter Goneril and Edmund the Bastard.<br />
Enter Oswald the Steward.<br />
Goneril gives a favour.<br />
Exit Edmund.<br />
Exit Oswald.<br />
Enter Albany.<br />
Enter a Gentleman.<br />
Exit Goneril.<br />
Exeunt.<br />
<br />
<b>The French camp near Dover.</b><br />
Enter Kent and a Gentleman.<br />
Exeunt.<br />
<br />
<b>The French camp.</b><br />
Enter, with Drum and Colours, Cordelia, Doctor, and Soldiers.<br />
Exit an Officer.<br />
Enter Messenger.<br />
Exeunt.<br />
<br />
<b>Gloucester's Castle.</b><br />
Enter Regan and Oswald the Steward.<br />
Exeunt.<br />
<br />
<b>The country near Dover.</b><br />
Enter Gloucester, and Edgar like a Peasant. <br />
Gloucester kneels. He falls forward and swoons.<br />
Enter Lear, mad, fantastically dressed with weeds.<br />
Enter a Gentleman with Attendants.<br />
Lear exits running. Attendants follow.<br />
Exit Gentleman.<br />
Enter Oswald the Steward.<br />
Edgar interposes.<br />
They fight.<br />
Oswald falls.<br />
He dies.<br />
Edgar reads the letter.<br />
A drum afar off.<br />
Exeunt.<br />
<br />
<b>A tent in the French camp.</b><br />
Enter Cordelia, Kent, Doctor, and Gentleman.<br />
Enter Lear in a chair carried by Servants.<br />
Music.<br />
Exeunt Lear, Cordelia and Doctor. Manent Kent and Gentleman.<br />
Exit Gentleman.<br />
Exit Kent.<br />
<br />
<b>The British camp near Dover.</b><br />
Enter, with Drum and Colours, Edmund, Regan, Gentleman, and Soldiers. <br />
Exit an Officer. <br />
Enter, with Drum and Colours, Albany, Goneril, Soldiers. <br />
As Goneril and Regan are going out, enter Edgar, disguised. <br />
Exeunt all but Albany and Edgar. <br />
Exit Edgar. <br />
Enter Edmund. <br />
Exit Albany. <br />
Exit Edmund.<br />
<br />
<b>A field between the two camps.</b><br />
Alarum within.<br />
Enter, with Drum and Colours, the Powers of France over the stage, Cordelia with her Father in her hand, and exeunt. <br />
Enter Edgar and Gloucester. <br />
Exit Edgar. <br />
Alarum and retreat within. <br />
Enter Edgar. <br />
Exeunt.<br />
<br />
<b>The British camp, near Dover.</b><br />
Enter, in conquest, with Drum and Colours, Edmund; Lear and Cordelia as prisoners; Soldiers, Captain.<br />
Exeunt Lear and Cordelia, guarded. <br />
Edmund gives a paper. <br />
Captain Exits. <br />
Flourish. <br />
Enter Albany, Goneril, Regan, Soldiers. <br />
Albany points to Goneril. <br />
Albany throws down a glove. <br />
Edmund throws down a glove. <br />
Exit Regan, led. <br />
Enter a Herald. <br />
A trumpet sounds. <br />
First trumpet. <br />
Second trumpet. <br />
Third trumpet. <br />
Trumpet answers within. <br />
Enter Edgar, armed, at the third sound, a Trumpet before him. <br />
Alarums. <br />
Fight. <br />
Edmund falls. <br />
Albany shows Goneril her letter to Edmund. <br />
Exit Goneril. <br />
Exit an Officer. <br />
Enter a Gentleman with a bloody knife. <br />
Enter Kent. <br />
Exit Gentleman. <br />
Exit Edgar. <br />
Edmund is borne off. <br />
Enter Lear, with Cordelia [dead] in his arms, Edgar, Captain, and others following. <br />
Enter a Captain. <br />
Lear dies. <br />
Exeunt with a dead march.natcasehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18058664776852941599noreply@blogger.com1