Above: a page of map symbols of topography from a world atlas. Below: Saul Steinberg’s “Country Noises.” 
And in today’s mail: Brian Dillon’s latest, Affinities.
“The world keeps showing me these pictures.”
Filed under: convergences
The map is not the territory
After I posted Tuesday’s newsletter about how I hit an “invisible wall” at the edge of a map of my understanding, I came across these two familiar quotes:
1. “A map is not the territory.”
—Alfred Korzybski (via the comments)
2. “It’s not down in any map; true places never are.”
—Melville, Moby-Dick (misquoted in Bob Dylan’s Nobel lecture)
Filed under: maps
Mapping your books
A list is one thing, but making a map of the books you’ve read often reveals connections between them that you might have missed. (More in Tuesday’s newsletter: “A cluster map of books.”)
Morning pages (and variations)
“Of all the self-help tools I’ve tested through the years,” Oliver Burkeman (author of The Antidote) writes in his latest issue of The Imperfectionist, “one has proved more enduring than the rest: Morning Pages.”
Julia Cameron writes about morning pages in The Artist’s Way and her shorter spin-off, The Miracle of Morning Pages. She says:
Morning Pages are three pages of longhand, stream of consciousness writing, done first thing in the morning. *There is no wrong way to do Morning Pages*– they are not high art. They are not even “writing.” They are about anything and everything that crosses your mind– and they are for your eyes only. Morning Pages provoke, clarify, comfort, cajole, prioritize and synchronize the day at hand. Do not over-think Morning Pages: just put three pages of anything on the page…and then do three more pages tomorrow.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aU4pyiB-kq0
Schoolhouse Rock (and De La Soul) taught us: 3 is a Magic Number.
Somewhere in the ancient mystic trinity
You get three as a magic number
The past and the present and the future
The faith and hope and charity
The heart and the brain and the body
Give you three as a magic number
Is this some Hippie Shit? Yes. But, as Oliver notes, it is Hippie Shit that seems to work!
I do three pages minimum in my diary every morning. It’s not exactly freewriting, more old-fashioned diary, mixed with the occasional comics and diagrams.
My method is cribbed from The Sedaris Method: write things down all day in a pocket notebook, then wake up the next morning, fill out my logbook, and then write longhand about yesterday.
When I don’t know what to write about I answer “The Best Thing” prompt or draw until I feel like writing. (This morning I wrote about banana bread and palm trees.)
I often do some combination of mind-mapping or what Janet Burroway in Writing Fiction calls “clustering”: starting in the middle of a page, writing a word, putting a box or circle around it, then writing another word, etc., until I have a tree or web. (Maps are magic, too.)
I do this very slowly, and let one thing sort of lead into the other. It’s like emptying out the junk in your brain. The reason I sometimes prefer it to straight prose on notebook paper is that you can more easily see the connections between all the weird crap on your mind. (There’s a blank “mind map” in The Steal Like An Artist Journal.)
I recently found out that the director Harmony Korine does a deranged version of this kind of non-linear map-writing to come up with ideas for his films. Watch the video above (if you dare) to see it in action.
In David Byrne’s book of tree drawings, Arboretum, he writes that diagrams like these are “an eclectic blend” of:
…faux science, automatic writing, satire, and an attempt to find connections where none were thought to exist — a sort of self-therapy, allowing the hand to say what the voice cannot. Irrational logic, it’s sometimes called. The application of logical scientific rigor and form to basically irrational premises. To proceed, carefully and deliberately, from nonsense, with a straight face, often arriving at a new kind of sense. The world keeps opening up, unfolding, and just when we expect it to be closed — to be a sealed, sensible box — it shows us something completely surprising.
Emphasis mine. (See: “The value of nonsense.”)
“There’s a general attitude here that’s well worth cultivating,” Oliver writes, “a healthy scepticism toward the part of your brain that’s so enthusiastic about controlling how things unfold. You just do the pages, and something else does the rest.”
Here, I think, is something else valuable to be uncovered from the morning pages: just as you let go and let the pages unfold, in some small way, you’re also training yourself to let your day unfold. To, hopefully, be as improvisational and playful in filling your day as you were about filling your notebook.
Ideas spread like the plague
A passage from Ted Gioia’s How To Listen To Jazz:
Strange to say, new art forms are similar to the plague or a virulent flu in how they spread. Art and disease proliferate via contagion, and similar conditions favor both. Densely packed populations, many individuals coming and going via land and waterways, an overheated mixture of people recently arrived from different locales, informal settings where they intermingle in close contact, a culture and environment that emphasize communal activities and get-togethers—these are nightmare conditions for anyone trying to stop an epidemic, but they are the same ingredients that can spur world-changing artistic revolutions.
Jazz, for example, emerged in New Orleans, “one of the unhealthiest cities in the world.” “The first jazz records were released shortly after the 1918 flu epidemic decimated the city.” But before that, the Renaissance emerged around the time the Black Death was spreading through Florence. Plagues in London around Shakespeare’s time. “We talk nowadays of cultural memes going viral, but this isn’t just a poetic way of speaking.”
“Influence and influenza in fact have the same etymology,” notes Elisa Gabbert in her essay, “The Great Mortality,” collected in her forthcoming book, The Unreality of Memory:
“Pandemic” sounds to me like automatic hyperbole, like “pandemonium,” but it’s fairly well defined in epidemiology: Unlike an “outbreak,” which affects limited people in a limited area for a short time, or an “epidemic,” which affects a larger number of people in multiple areas at the same time, “pandemics affect many people in many parts of the world at the same time.”
(It would be interesting to map artistic movements to these terms.)
I’m thinking now of maps of scenius, the networks or scenes that lead to artistic movements, and how much they resemble the maps of viruses spreading:
(Clockwise from top left: a page from Show Your Work!, a MoMA map of modernism, a screenshot of a video game called Pandemic, a Harper’s diagram of the romantic and sexual activity in a midwestern high school.)
Here is a diagram of the spread of SARS, taken from Edward Tufte’s Beautiful Evidence. And an example from the same book, the cover of Cubism and Abstract Art:
Maps of Miró
After reading my post on maps of scenius, my friend Julien sent me these photos of a wall in the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona.
Last year I read Joan Miro: I Work Like a Gardener, which re-publishes a 1958 interview with the artist interspersed with images of his work. He said:
I work like a gardener or a winemaker… Things come slowly. My vocabulary of forms, for example, I didn’t discover it all at once. It formed itself almost in spite of me.
(See: “The gardens where ideas grow.”)
As if providing a future commentary on these maps, he also said, “An artwork should be fertile. It must give birth to a world.”
Reminds me of what Bruno Munari said about trees: “A tree is a slow explosion of seed.”
Maps of teaching
Here’s a particularly great example of showing your work from @derekwalmsley:
A while back, I started drawing a chart of which musicians had studied with others according to passing references in
@thewiremagazine, and six months later (with access to music education still more difficult) we have a brand new special issue
Here’s the special issue online.
In my talks for Newspaper Blackout, I traced the history of blackout poetry backwards, doing what my friend Alan Jacobs calls “swimming upstream.” I got a terrific email from the brilliant Tom Phillips, the granddaddy of the form, who mentioned that he used to do a slideshow called “From Eno to Raphael,” in which he traced his particular teaching lineage from Brian Eno (who was his art school pupil) all the way back to Raphael in something like 20 steps. He wrote, “I ended with Raphael as a big gun though the list perforce goes back to some caveman in Blombos at the Cape.”
See also: climbing your own family tree, maps of scenius
Maps of scenius
Here, courtesy of MoMA, we have an interactive map of scenius, showing the connections between the artists who were involved in the development of abstract art.
Abstraction was not the inspiration of a solitary genius but the product of network thinking—of ideas moving through a nexus of artists and intellectuals working in different mediums and in far-flung places. Its pioneers were more closely linked than is generally understood.
Clicking on Kandinsky, for example, gives you this:
Which looks a lot like this page about scenius from Show Your Work!:
And they both remind me (perhaps perversely) of one of my favorite maps, which ran in Harper’s in 2005, and depicts the sexual activity in one American high school in the Midwest:
And I also couldn’t help but think of Ad Reinhardt and his amazing art comics (collected in the beautiful book, How To Look):
Mapping the music
After seeing my crude teenage maps of the White Album, @tedmills sent me the cover of Paul McCartney’s 1986 single, “Press.”
“The world keeps showing me these pictures.”
Finding your way with maps
I love maps. I love looking at maps and I love thinking about maps and I love collecting maps.
When I was studying at Cambridge, I was writing essays for my tutor about Dickens and Dostoevsky, and they were just awful. I think my tutor thought I was a moron. (Or just an American student. Same thing.) Then one day I came in with a rough hand-drawn map of the London in Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend. He said my scribbled map was the best work I’d done.
I knew then, I think, that my talent was going to be for using pictures and words together, and maps would serve as useful inspiration. A decade ago, I published a blog post collecting a bunch of fictional maps, and I’m thinking of them again, thanks to a beautiful new book, The Writer’s Map: An Atlas of Imaginary Lands.
A few bedtimes ago, both the 5-year-old and I were just lying in his bed looking at maps and talking about him. A rare moment of bliss. (His book was entitled, simply, Maps.)
A while back I read an article about how to you have to get children to fall in love with the world before you ask them to save it. (Gary Snyder: “The first step, I think… is to make us love the world rather than to make us fear for the end of the world. Make us love the world… and then begin to take better care of it.”)
Part of the author’s research was looking at maps children of different ages make of their worlds. He describes the cartography of the different age groups:
From ages four to seven, children’s homes fill the center of their maps, and much of their play is within sight or earshot of the home. Children often describe the worms, chipmunks, and pigeons that live in their yards or on their blocks, and they feel protective of these creatures.
From eight to eleven, children’s geographical ranges expand rapidly. Their maps push off the edge of the page, and they often need to attach extra pieces of paper to map the new terrain they are investigating. Children’s homes become small, inconsequential, and often move to the periphery of the map. The central focus in their maps is the “explorable landscape.”
From 12 to 15, the maps continue to expand in scope and become more abstract, but the favored places often move out of the woods and into town. Social gathering places such as the mall, the downtown luncheonette, and the town park take on new significance.
As Michael Chabon once put it, “Childhood is a branch of cartography.”
Here’s Rebecca Solnit talking about why she loves paper maps (author of, among other books, A Field Guide to Getting Lost and Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas):
Maps are ubiquitous in one sense, and completely missing in another. A lot of younger people don’t own maps and atlases and don’t have the knowledge a map gives you. We call things like MapQuest and Google Maps on your phone interactive… but are they? Are they interactive? It’s a system that largely gives you instructions to obey. Certainly, obedience is a form of interaction. (Maybe not my favorite one.) But a paper map you take control of — use it as you will, mark it up — and while you figure out the way from here to there yourself, instead of having a corporation tell you, you might pick up peripheral knowledge: the system of street names, the parallel streets and alternate routes. Pretty soon, you’ve learned the map, or rather, you have — via map — learned your way around a city. The map is now within you. You are yourself a map.
Many of my favorite artists use maps in their work. Saul Steinberg is famous for his view of New Yorker provincialism, but he drew tons of other maps, including the one above, which was never actually published in his lifetime. Beautiful.
“Maps are arguments,” says Denis Wood. Maps tell stories. (They can also lie.)
Years ago, I found this online migration map that shows you how people move in and out of different counties.
Three maps that tell three stories.
The top map is Cleveland, where I used to live. Everybody’s leaving. It looks like an explosion.
The middle map is Austin, where I live now. Everybody’s moving here. It looks like a black hole.
The bottom map is Pickaway County, Ohio, where I grew up. Hardly anyone leaves. Hardly anyone moves in. It looks like a puddle.
I’m interested in how maps can move beyond geography towards mapping other things in the world. Here’s one of my favorite maps of all-time, from a 2005 Harper’s:
I love looking at those diagrams and thinking about the stories behind them. (For example, where is the single dots, depicting the virgins?)
Just this week I became obsessed with the plot maps on the back of new editions of the Choose Your Own Adventure series:
Around the same time I got interested in maps, I discovered “mind mapping,” and started making my own mind maps of the books I was reading:
When pictures and words are laid out in the same space — broken out of the linearity of normal type — you can see new relationships between them and come up with new ideas. I find this kind of drawing with pictures and words to often be way more powerful than simply writing longhand.
Years ago, I read Peter Turchi’s Maps of the Imagination, and it had a big impact on me. (I later got to interview him about his work.) Turchi suggests that writers are cartographers, in a sense: they help people figure out where they are in the world.
I continue to be taken with this idea. I think of my books as way-finding devices: they show you how to get from where you are to where you want to be.
