(from HARPER’S, June 2005)
I’ve been taken lately with maps and storytelling. It started at Cambridge, where I did these rough “psychological” maps of London in Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend, continued during my senior project, and it got started again when I read a book called Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer. In Maps, Peter Turchi, (who edited a book with Charles Baxter and teaches fiction at Warren Wilson College), writes about fiction using the metaphor of making maps. The sociology article containing the above graphic can be found here, and a collection of crazy network maps, here.
Yeah, hey, I taught about this in my class last spring (the “human nature” course). It’s fascinating stuff, and kinda depressing, cuz my high school romantic life wasn’t nearly as interesting as some of these people.
Yeah, we could put out a little survey:
Which diagram best portrays your high school love life?
Hopefully, not just a dot.