The Anti-Architecture of H.P. Lovecraft

H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937)

Literary works are especially pernicious when deployed as instruments of architectural criticism. So much so that even that most revered of writers, Leo Marx, is often taken to task for using the 19th century novel as a type of spatial critique. More recently, art historian W.J.T. Mitchell alluded to the spatialization of narrative as a new frontier in the annals of literary criticism. And yet he claims that the spatialization of narrative has been a consistent part of literary history: "[S]patial form is a crucial aspect of the experience and interpretation of literature in all ages and cultures. The burden of proof, in other words, is not ... to show that some works have spatial form but ... to provide an example of any work that does not" [1]

That being said, it does not bring us any closer to understanding how a novel can help us better understand issues relating to architecture and urbanism. While some may will still invoke the works of J.G. Ballard or Samuel R. Delany as examples of writers who tackle buildings and cities as the object of their narrative, we still are at the initial conundrum that informs this post: these, and other works are primarily representational in nature. The authors of the Concrete Islands, Dhalgrens, and Make Room, Make Room's of the world provide very little guidance as to how to operationalize their critique.

One way to approach this problem is via the architectural metaphor. Thus, some critics will deploy the language of architecture critique to analyze a narrative. The word "architectonic" is often use to understand a novel's expansive length, or perhaps even its materiality. On the other hand, an author's biographical facts are brought to bear: an early interest in architecture or urban planning is thus made an important critical fulcrum on which arguments are carefully balanced.

The works of the famously misanthropic fantasy novelist H.P. Lovecraft provide an interesting and plausible take on this situation. And this is the case not only because Lovecraft is one of those writers who successfully deploys architectonics and materiality in service of profoundly architectural observations. This is so because Lovecraft lived a manic intellectual existence where an unabashed love for historic preservation was counterbalanced by a deep hatred for modern architecture.

Timothy H. Evans, an American folklore scholar, has written about Lovecraft's personal involvement in preservation issues in Providence and New York. This interest, he argues, is also reflected in Lovecraft's writings. A decisive, malevolent undercurrent thus connects his xenophobia and his anti-modernist inclinations. This becomes especially noticeable in Lovecraft's science fictions. Evans thus writes:

Lovecraft's stories about extraterrestrials also rely heavily on architecture. A familiar sense of place, embodied in Colonial New England architecture, was central to Lovecraft's sense of security; hence, an actual Italian Catholic church may be an abode of monsters, as it becomes in "The Haunter of the Dark" (1935). But if "foreign" architecture is frightening, the ultimate embodiment of fear is non-human architecture, which has no relationship to familiar forms or aesthetics. Lovecraft criticized modern architecture for rejecting tradition and believed that a new architecture, to be livable, must draw on traditional symbols (a rather post-modern idea); it follows that architecture lacking in such symbols would be a terrifying embodiment of cosmic alienage [...] Lengthy descriptions of non-human architecture are used to create such an atmosphere in "The Call of Cthulu" (1926), At The Mountains of Madness (1931), and "The Shadow Out of Time" (1935) [2]

Others have detected similar strains in Lovecraft's work. The novelist John Banville, writing in a 2005 issue of Artforum, even notes when Lovecraft moved to New York in 1924 with his wife, he "found the city a great and, despite an initial period of uncharacteristic uncheeriness, terrible shock; the baroque metropolises of his fiction, infested with monstrous beings, are his response to the spectacle of New York in the early years of the Roaring Twenties." Banville then quotes a particularly gruesome bit from Lovecraft's "He" (1939): "Garish daylight shewed only squalor and alienage and the noxious elephantasis of climbing, spreading stone ... the throngs of people that seethed through the flumelike streets were squat, swarthy strangers with hardened faces and narrow eyes" [3].

Michel Houellebecq (Source: New York Magazine)

But perhaps the greatest enthusiast of Lovecraft's architectural pretense is French novelist Michel Houellebecq. His strange meditation, H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life (2005), plays up the architectural musings in Lovecraft's fiction. Houellebecq is so fascinated by this most "anti-literal" of authors that he begins deploying Lovecraft's own persona into his writing. At the beginning of the second section, Houllebecq (or is it Lovecraft?) writes,

The surface of the earth today is overlaid with a irregular, dense web of fibres, entirely fabricated by humans.
In this web circulates the life-blood of the social. The transport of people, of commodities, of provisions; multiple transactions, orders to buy, orders to sell, facts to be believed, other, more intellectual or affective, exchanges ... This incessant flux continues regardless of humanity, absorbed in the lifeless convulsions of its own activity.
[...]
At the intersections of their channels of communication, men build giant ugly metropolises, where each, isolated in an anonymous apartment identical to all the rest, believes himself the centre of the world and the measure of all things. But, underneath the excavated earth with its burrowing insects, very ancient and very powerful creatures are waking slowly from their slumbers. They were there already during the carboniferous period, they were there during the Triassic and Permian; they have known the stirrings of the first mammal, and they will know the agonized cries of the last. [4]

For Houellebecq, this Lovecraft-inspired threnody deploys the forces of architecture for a deeply cynical purpose. Houellebecq continues, this time commenting on Lovecraft's fascination with the Gothic:

Because the dream-architecture which he describes is, like that of the grand gothic and baroque cathedrals, a total architecture. The heroic harmony of the planes and volumes are felt violently; but also, the bell-turrets, the minarets, the bridges overhanging great chasms are overloaded with exuberant ornamentation, in contrast to the gigantic smooth stone surfaces. Reliefs and bas-reliefs and frescoes cover the titanic vaults which lead from one inclined plane to another, in the bowels
of the earth. Many recount the grandeur and the decadence of a race; others, more simple and geometric, seem to evoke disquieting mystical suggestions [5].

Here is an architecture of urgency. An architecture realized by Houellebecq's and Lovecraft's oscillations between the monolithic and microsopic, the decaying and the verdant, the dead and the living. This interplay of extremes is "An effect of scale, effect of vertigo. A procedure borrowed, once again, from architecture" [6].

The words "once again" betray Houllebecq's belief in the essential architecture that is Lovecraft's fiction. It is as if, in reading this most cryptic of authors through the critical lens of an unabashedly unpleasant French anti-liberal, one must admit that the darkest literary impulses carry forth an architectural imprimatur.

Lovecraft's literary predilections certainly echo the works of earlier avatars of the Gothic. In fact, his musings on style would no doubt remind a student of architecture of the strange, proto-modernist musings of Eugene Emmanuel Viollet-Le-Duc (who, in a particularly Lovecraftian take, signed all his documents with an ink rendering of a bat's wing). What is fascinating, if not totally convincing, is that architecture springs forth from a most unlikely of sources: the work of H.P. Lovecraft.

Notes:

[1] W.J.T. Mitchell, "Spatial Form in Literature: Toward a General Theory", Critical Inquiry, Vol. 6, No. 3 (Spring, 1980), p. 541

[2] Timothy H. Evans, "A Last Defense against the Dark: Folklore, Horror, and the Uses of Tradition in the Works of H.P. Lovecraft" Journal of Folklore Research, Vol. 42, No.1 (2005), p. 118

[3] In John Banville, "Futile Attraction: Michel Houellebecq's Lovecraft" Artforum (1 April 2005) (available at http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Futile+attraction:+Michel+Houellebecq's+Lovecraft-a0131433355)

[4] Michel Houellebecq, H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, Robin Mackay, trans (2004), p.10 (accessed at http://blog.urbanomic.com/dread).

[5] Ibid., p. 18.

[6] Ibid., p. 23.

Theorizing the American City

"One of the major problems between architecture and urbanism today," so declares Italian architecture theorist Pier Vitorio Aureli," is that ... the contemporary city is constantly researched, but it is no longer theorized." This quote, from Aureli's lecture at Yale School of Architecture this past fall, seems to act as a corrective (or tonic) to the current state of thinking that permeates architecture schools. Formalism and politics are linked together in Aureli's world view -- a point made more poignant by his observation that site has lost importance in the "recent history of architecture."

And before arm-chair critics invoke the hallowed banner of "context", consider how the "c" word has very little relevance for Aureli. Site is not context. Siting (the act of creating a site) is the "establishing of appearance within the public space of a project." These are highly-charged and provocative statements, to be sure. Yet Aureli's opening statement -- that cities are no longer theorized -- is a little too conclusive for this writer's own taste.

This is precisely what makes Fred Scharmen's eloquent and passionate "love letter" to Baltimore so refreshing and so poignant. Here, in this short, sweet feature for Archinect entitled "Baltimore, Place of Yes and Yes", Scharmen does much more to resuscitate what Aureli sees as lacking in current architectural thinking. Here is a vital piece of writing that theorizes the city. Not Dubai. Not Beijing. But Baltimore.

Scharmen begins his piece with a Molly Bloom-esque affirmative:

Baltimore is Postindustrial, Multilayered, Patinated. It's made of brick. Cold in the winter, hot in the summer, Baltimore is full of colleges, nonprofits, art schools, universities, bars, but also, according to the 2000 census, over 40,000 vacant housing units. There's a lot of crime and rent is cheap. The contradictions are there in the slogans: 'Bodymore Murdaland' aka 'The City that Reads' (or 'Bleeds'). 'Stop Snitchin' or just 'BELIEVE.'

What's the proper reaction to these conditions? Resignation? Hope? Irony? Is it possible to appreciate the aesthetic consequences of Urban Decay while decrying the socio-economic forces that have produced it? Is it possible to make a living city that retains its Authenticity without producing a Generic Monoculture?

As my first studio critic used to say, whenever we asked him an either/or question: 'Yes and Yes'.

Scharmen then takes us through a photographic tour of his city. We see abandoned water fronts, dilapidated brick curtain walls, and various other ephemera that we normally associate with the (now here's a term) postindustrial. We even get to know Baltimore through the critically-acclaimed TV series, The Wire. It's all there: networked urbanism, infrastructural reckoning, and architecture. Yes, architecture.

But I cannot do the article justice. Kudos to Fred, and to Bryan Boyer, for instigating what promises to be a fantastic piece of architectural and urbanistic thinking. And be sure to check our Fred's photostream. You see, the city is being theorized.

Laredo is The Reason

I've just come up for air from a prolonged excursion to the Texas-Mexico border with my family. It was hot, dusty, and windy (yes, 60+ mph winds only a couple of days ago). I also witnessed a couple of things I had never experienced before, such as a Mexican illegal hiding in my parents' property, en route to Houston, and even bobcats. Several nights ago, I was out on the deck, and noticed a strange, infernal glow coming from the southwestern sky. A brush fire. It looked as if the horizon was aflame.

I also spent a long afternoon in Laredo, Texas. The last time I was there was back in 1986, when we crossed the border to take my grandfather to see a dentist in Nuevo Laredo. This goes without saying, but Laredo's transformation has been equally alarming and stunning. Now known as a locus of Cormac McCarthy-esque vioence, Laredo is one of the United States' most important ports of entry. Taking these two aspects into consideration -- it's bordertown woes and infrastructural significance -- one wonders why writers on urbanism and infrastructure have neglected this very important city along the Rio Grande River.

Take this, for example, from a report published by the U.S. Department of Commerce:

[T]he port of Laredo is ranked first among ports along the Southwest border and fourth among all U.S. land ports for the value of goods that are shipped through the area. In 2004, $130.8 billion worth of goods and merchandise passed through the port of Laredo, an increase of 13 percent over the previous year. Over 40 percent of northsouth traffic that crosses our international border with Mexico drives across one of the international bridges in Laredo.

Laredo’s primary industry is transportation and warehousing. In 2003, these industries contributed 16.2 percent of the total earnings of the area. Crossing the Rio Grande River into Nuevo Laredo, one finds numerous maquiladoras. The Delphi and Sony manufacturing plants are the top two employers for all the maquiladoras in Nuevo Laredo.

And even this snapshot of the Port of Laredo, taken after a momentary glance through Google Earth, gives an idea of the sheer amount of truck traffic exchanging through this city:

Port of Laredo Trailer Docks (intersection of Bullock Loop and Interstate 35)

And for those of you of have an interest in the prehistory of cybernetics, consider that the old Laredo Army Air Field (now known as Laredo International Airport), was the site where the U.S. Army Air Force calibrated their computerized gunsights.

AAF Gunnery Crews test nose turret configurations in Laredo, Texas (source: LiberatorCrew)

Driving north along the Bullock Loop, I even noticed some windowless DC-9 aircraft. These are freight forward aircraft operated by Kalitta Air that fly directly to Willow Run, Michigan. Yet the ones I saw bore no markings, and in fact, bore a striking resemblance to the red-flashed Janet aircraft Trevor Paglen often writes about (see previous post on this very topic). That Laredo International Airport is a site with bustling DHS aerial operations is no surprise, as it is one of the facilities used to ferry illegal aliens and other personae non grata to various locations throughout the hemisphere.

A series of articles (and perhaps a book) needs to be written on different types of urban and infrastructural phenomena in Texas. Perhaps it will begin here.

The Bligh Cosmos

Plan and Section of the H.M.S. Bounty's Stern (Source: Project Gutenberg)

Way back in the day, many careers ago, I actually studied maritime law. It was a specialization in the truest sense of the word: its tangled skein of laws and lore were esoteric enough to sustain my interest. It was a simple choice, really. Should I bog myself in the minutae of corporate and securities law, or should I read about naval battles, perilous salvage operations, sunken treasures, and hot pursuit across international waters?

I quickly learned that the field of admiralty had some very interesting peculiarities. For example, ships have juridical power in American maritime law. A sloop, steamer, tugboat, frigate is chattel that not only merits a special type of jurisdiction, but that also has "rights". In other words, a ship can have the same legal status as a person. A chance look at an admiralty docket thus reveals a type of poetry in which ships with wonderfully evocative names sue each other in Federal court.

It thus follows that as a piece of chattel, a vessel is subject to the same matrix of property laws that would extend to real estate. A ship was literally a floating piece of property, a mobile island, so to speak. These rights also extended to the arena of public international law, where a ship enjoyed a certain amount of territorial sovereignty. A ship was therefore governed by the laws of its flag of convenience. A ship flying an American flag was covered by U.S. Law, a French by French law, and so on.

Hans Hollein, Aircraft Carrier City in Landscape (1964) (Source: MoMA)

What my law professors failed to convey was that a ship was a place. A vessel's riggings, superstructures, et cetera all comprise a spatial configuration addressing a particular programmatic need. In other words, a ship can be thought of in architectural terms. It is no surprise that when the Austrian architect Hans Hollein declared that "Everything is Architecture", he chose to depict a gigantic nuclear-powered aircraft carrier in the middle of a grassy landscape in service of his point.

The most eloquent statement of a ship's architectural-ness comes from the Australian historian Greg Dening. In his 1993 book, Mr. Bligh's Bad Language: Passion, Power, and Theatre on the Bounty, Dening provides an in-depth look at the events leading to Fletcher Christian's 1789 uprising aboard the H.M.S. Bounty. Dening rightly portrays the insurrection as one with a particularly spatial origin. On the Bounty's fateful expedition, its officers' compartments (see above) were fitted to carry breadfruit and other plants -- a situation that surely infuriated the Bounty's subordinate officers.

Dening captures the Bounty's significance as a space of habitation in the following passage:

Space and the language to describe it make a ship. Space was inseparable from the authority it displayed and the the relationships it enclosed. The 'quarterdeck' in naval parlance was a place -- the upper deck abaft of the mainmast. It was also a social group -- those who had the privilege of walking the quarterdeck and and using the space associated with it, usually the great cabin and the wardroom. From the earliest times the quarterdeck had been a sacred place for shrines of the gods of the sea ans seamen. By the eighteenth century, the quarterdeck was sacred to the presence of sovereign power in displays of etiquette and privilege. It was the captain's territory -- his to walk alone, his to speak from but not to be spoken to unless he wished it. But the captain himself also owed the quarterdeck a deference. He too saluted this shrine as a sign that he was subordinate to the power that others saluted in him. The quarterdeck embodied this commission from the King. It was the space of his sovereign's power, and all its trivial gestures and etiquette were its geography. The quarterdeck, for officers of a fighting ship, was a space for very deep plays. It was there that an officer was expected to stand exposed, shielded only by his honour, when others on the ship might fight with more protection. The dread possibility but also the hope that any officer might have of treading where captains trod touched even the most trivial gesture with solemnity (1992: 19-20).

The H.M.S. Bounty was Captain Bligh's literal and figurative cosmos. It was also an architectural object freighted with power. This view is not uncommon with Herman Melville's passages describing the Pequod as a maritime abbatoir, a seagoing slaughterhouse plowing the mains in search of more ambergris -- all in service of a captain's maddening quest.

Unseen Sun (or, Ten Notes on Chris Marker's Sans Soleil)

Digitized Footage from Sans Soleil (1983) (Source: DVD Beaver)

1. During the opening moments of Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil (1983), three Icelandic children are walking along an ashen road. There is a moment of pause as they slow down and stare intently at the camera. The viewer only has a moment to look at their elfin features and white hair before everything turns to black. While all this is happening, a female narrator (whose name is Alexandra Stewart) begins reading a fictional letter from a mysterious Eastern European cinematographer named Sandor Krasna:

The first image he told me about was of three children on a road in Iceland, in 1965. He said that for him it was the image of happiness and also that he had tried several times to link it to other images, but it never worked. He wrote me: one day I'll have to put it all alone at the beginning of a film with a long piece of black leader; if they don't see happiness in the picture, at least they'll see the black.

From the footage of the ethereal children, the film moves deftly to show an A4 Skyhawk descending into the inner sanctum of an aircraft carrier, and finally to passengers sleeping on a ferry returning from the Japanese island of Hokkaido. One critic remarks that the whole world of the film resides in this juxtaposition of images. From light, to dark, and back to light.

2. Marker’s film consists of footage from Japan, Iceland, and Africa. The images match Krasnor’s letters. One gets the sense that they are watching footage taking by Krasnor. This mysterious cinematographer is Chris Marker’s alter ego. Some of the footage is from San Francisco.

3. The two chief frames of reference are Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo and Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker. The former is especially poignant. At one point, Sandor Krasna goes to those very same places that Jimmy Stewart's character visits in Vertigo. It is a pilgrimage of sorts. Strange how many of the sites from 1958 San Francisco (the year Hitchcock made Vertigo) still exist in 1982 San Francisco. The latter film becomes more important towards the end of Sans Soleil.

4. Most of the footage is unmistakably urban. Some of it is familiar. We see a high-traffic street crossing bearing a distinct similarity to Shibuya, for example. In others, the rusty spans of the Golden Gate bridge rise from a bank of mist. In another image, an Icelandic village is buried under meters of volcanic soot.

5. A note on sound. Modest Mussorgorsky's Sans Soleil is played on different instruments. Sometimes it is a Moog. On others, it is a theremin. One can also hear curious, bubbly, reverb-saturated synth effects in the background. They give the film a science-fiction feel.

6. The name Unseen Sun may immediately recall the similarly-titled track, "Invisible Sun", from the Police's 1982 album The Ghost in the Machine. It is also the translated German title for Chris Marker's 1983 film, Sans Soleil (Sunless). That these two works -- an album and a film -- were released within a year of each other is coincidental. And to add to the coincidences, I only remind the reader that only three years later, in 1986, German media theorist Friedrich Kittler published his influential Grammophon, Film, Typewriter (Brinkmann & Bose Verlag, 1986). The introduction to this book, translated into English for the summer 1987 issue of October was one of the first English crossovers of Kittler's writings. It also features Kittler's famous "derivation" of the Lacanian real, imaginary, and symbolic "from the data channels of phonograph, cinema, and typewriter."

7. This is heady stuff, to be sure, but consider Kittler's invocation of one of Sans Soleil's many poignant moments. It is a scene where two dogs are seen playing in the sand. Kittler quotes the narrator:

Lost at the end of the world, on my island Sal, in the company of my dogs strutting around, I remember January in Tokyo, or rather I remember the images that I filmed in January in Tokyo. They have put themselves in the place of my memory, they are my memory. I ask myself how people remember if they do not make movies, or photographs, or tapes, how mankind used to go about remembering.

8. Sans Soleil features many images of television and urban screens. In a series of stills, celluloid images of television screens are depicted as lantern slides. These images feature ghostly circles of light radiating from within. The juxtaposition of media technologies is striking.

Lantern-Slide Deer, from Sans Soleil (source: DVD Beaver)

9. More on Kittler. What if Sans Soleil can be thought of in terms of data storage? Film footage becomes a repository of Sandor Krasna's memories about the various cities he visited (see #7 above). In another part, Krasna's letter reads:

I've spent the day in front of my TV set—that memory box. I was in Nara with the sacred deers. I was taking a picture without knowing that in the 15th century Basho had written: “The willow sees the heron's image... upside down.”

10. Why Sans Soleil? Think of the last couple of moments. Think of when Krasna's friend Hayao, a video game designer, begins digitizing the footage from Sans Soleil, and when that last digital footage becomes the film's coda (see above). Within the space of a 103-minute film, Krasna's memories suddenly become code. Stalker becomes the frame of reference:

He showed me the clashes of the sixties treated by his synthesizer: pictures that are less deceptive he says—with the conviction of a fanatic—than those you see on television. At least they proclaim themselves to be what they are: images, not the portable and compact form of an already inaccessible reality. Hayao calls his machine's world the 'zone,' an homage to Tarkovsky.

Mapping Undersea Urbanisms

Images from a 2005 GIS project where I attempted to map oil/gas pipelines in the North Sea. The data came from the Olje Direktoratet (Norway's Oil/Gas Administration) and the UK's Department of Trade and Industry. The idea was to develop a purely spatial comparison between British and Norwegian undersea pipeline networks. The results are far from visually stunning, evidence of GIS software's own visual and graphical limitations.

Emotional Atlas

(No, this is not a thread about Giuliana Bruno's wonderful book.) Christian Nold is an artist who, using Google Earth with GPS technologies, creates "emotional" maps of well-known spaces. According to this website:

Bio Mapping is a participatory methodology for people to talk about their immediate environment, locality and communal space. I'm trying to use 3D visualisation as a way of talking about the space. It's not representational. As part of this method I have developed a device, which can be used by lots of people. It consists of a lie detector connected to a GPS (Global Positioning System) unit, which measures your location and your physiological arousal at the same time. By combining the two I can talk about physiological arousal in certain locations. A Galvanic Skin Response sensor in the form of finger cuffs measures the sweat level. Fitted out with this device, people go for a walk and when they return their data is visualised and annotated.

Although these maps are not rendered using GIS software, they nevertheless have the look and feel of a TIN polygon. The above map, for example, from an "emotional map of Greenwich, England", combines real-time emotional data and assigns corresponding colors and shapes to these metrics. The project is fascinating. Like the work of Spain's ecosistema urbano architecture and urbanism collective, Nold's project places a premium on the participatory process.

(via CNN and Bio Mapping.net)

Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles

link (via Archinect)

Projection Reference Relief

Back on the blog detail ... Harvard History of Science/Architecture PhD Bill Rankin has created a truly excellent projection reference table. Although Rankin claims that this is a "cheat sheet" that allows him to see what types of projections he can mine from ESRI's otherwise clunky GIS, this table contains excellent comparison diagrams. You can see exactly how the projections look compared to each other. Not only that, but the table is organized according to three types of maps (and their corresponding projections): wall maps, continental maps, and regional maps. This is an excellent resource for spatial analysts everywhere.

From Yoknapatawpha to Canady: Imaginary Cartographies in Fiction

I have an affinity for maps of nonexistent places. I'll admit up front that one of the things that drew me to William Faulkner's novels is that they took place in Yoknapatawpha County in Mississippi. In fact, there is even a map. You can trace your finger along the roads and rivulets of this phantom county, seeing where the Bundren family lived in As I Lay Dying (1930), or where Joe Christmas committed a murder in Light in August (1932). The fact that these events take place, that these characters stalk locations that are suspended somewhere between fact and reality perhaps give the novels added dramatic quality. But Faulkner's imaginaty geographies are not limited to Mississippi. Pylon (1935) may very well be his most flawed novel -- a tale of veteran war pilots who test their skills in air races, often dying at the throes of a dangerous new technology in a town called New Valois. In reading the decadent, sometimes violent passages describing New Valois, one wonders if this is really Faulkner's own private New Orleans.

Vladimir Nabokov's bloated masterpiece, Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969) opens with an amazing cartographic conceit. The various cities, geographical regions are an offbeat mix of the Russian and North American. For example, "Canady" is the country that borders the United States. Nabokov has even invented the state of "New Cheshire" -- according to Brian Boyd's meticulous annotations to the Vintage Edition of the novel:

... since the New England state of New Hampshire echoes the English county of Hampshire, and New York the English city and county of York, since American names in fact were frequently duplicated "across the ha-ha of a doubled ocean" (18.01), Nabokov invents the state of New Cheshire, in honor of the English county of Cheshire but perhaps also, with a grin at Lewis Carroll's Cheshire Cat, in honor of New York's Catskill Mountains (cf. Appel, Ada 167). There is also a Cheshire County in New Hampshire, less than fifteen miles from West Wardsboro, Vermont, where Nabokov spent two summers (1940 and 1942).

The imaginary therefore is rooted on the personal. But the imaginary is also historical. Take Nabokov's invocation of the Durmanov clan's origins in New Estoty. According to Boyd:

Estotiland was a name given by early explorers to the northeastern part of North America, now northeast Labrador. Old mapmakers let it stretch as far north as their conjectured coastline ventured. Cf. John Milton, Paradise Lost, X.686: "From cold Estotiland." "Estotiland" is listed, along with Eden and Arcadia, under the heading "utopia, paradise, heaven, heaven on earth" in Roget's International Thesaurus (New York: Crowell, 1962). "'Russian' Estoty" may contain an echo of "Russian" Estonia.

The idea that a novel has a specific geography is alluring. But when the geography is conjured, fantastic, or rooted in the esoteric or weird -- that is truly inspiring.

The Geodet

Successful location of ground targets necessarily begins with a proper understanding of the size and shape of the earth’s surface. During World War II, the United States Army relied on geodesy for such a task. Geodesy is a “branch of applied mathematics which determines the figures and areas of large portions of the earth's surface, and the figure of the earth as a whole.” Geodesy thus became vitally important, as one geodetic field control crewmember – or geodet -- remarked

When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, the U.S. Army general staff was well aware that the U.S. could soon be involved in a war with Germany or Japan. It might have to defend itself against a powerful Germany bent on invading our hemisphere in an ambitious march to subjugate the world. One of the strategic needs for defense of our hemisphere would be reliable maps of poorly charted and unexplored areas of the Arctic and the forested and undeveloped areas of Central and South America. The establishment of the 1st Photographic Squadron in early 1940 was therefore authorized to undertake the role of remedying this strategic deficiency.

Geodesy became an indispensable link in the United States Army and Army Air Force reconnaissance collective. The geodet would go out in the field and take measurements that would be incorporated by photography units for accurate mapping.

Geodesy depends on a variety of instruments and techniques for the accurate determination of points on the earth’s surface. After French-made prismatic astrolabes became unavailable with the fall of France to German forces, an American version of the instrument, the equiangulator, was designed and built by the Eastman Kodak Company. The equiangulator became the geodetic instrument of choice for Army Air Force geodets from 1943 onward.

Successful geodesy relied on the establishing of accurate geodetic control points. To determine the longitude and latitude of a geodetic control point, a geodet used an equiangulator to observe a series of stars “at a fixed and invariable angle of 60 degrees.” Looking through the eyepiece, the geodet looked for two images formed by a passing star, one “produced by the light of the observed star that falls on the upper side of the [equiangulator’s] prism and the other image is formed by the light reflected into the underside of the prism from the artificial mercury horizon.” At the moment the two images would meet, a stopwatch was used to record the time of their formation, and that measurement is calibrated with a coded signal from Greenwich, England or the United States Naval Observatory in the District of Columbia. Readings are then recorded into a logbook, and can be used to interpolate other geodetic control points.

The trimetrogon camera system was an indispensable element of successful geodesy. Consisting of three cameras placed in a single, static mount, the trimetrogon system allowed accurate and level aerial photography. The trimetrogon utilized three K-3 cameras. One was placed vertically, enabling an direct photograph. The other two were placed on either side of the vertical camera at oblique 60-degree angles. Combined, the three cameras allowed for one vertical photo, and two others depicting the horizon on either side of the aircraft. Successful trimetrogon photography also enabled photo crews to determine the pitch and yaw angles of the aircraft from the photos. Geodets would compare geodetic control point readings with trimetrogon photos to create accurate navigation and target maps. Geodetic and photo crews would thus calibrate the results, referencing specific topological and geographic points on the photos and referencing them to the established geodetic control points.

The development of geodetic control systems during World War II had consequences for future military planners. Along with the 1st Photographic Squadron, The Army Map Service (AMS) was created in 1942 as a Field Office of the Army Corps of Engineers. AMS used geodetic data to provide cartographic support for ground forces. Floyd W. Hough, the first appointed head of the AMS, even became a legend in geodet circles. Moving into Germany in 1945, Hough’s team captured tons of geodetic data and cartographic materials in enemy hands. Hough’s most dramatic find, however, was the entire geodetic archives of the German Army, including the military maps and geodetic data that the Germans had captured from the Russians.

Hough later utilized his knowledge of world geodetic data for postwar guided missile programs. A meeting with higher-echelon War Department brass noted that “an accurate figure of the earth becomes more and more important to the War Department when we consider the use of guided missiles and other long range weapons.” In August 1947, after further negotiation, the Army General Staff ordered the Chief of Engineers to develop a “Geodesy for Guided Missiles.” The purpose of this secret project was “To establish a rapid method for computing exact azimuths and lengths of long geodetic lines; [and] to resolve to a common datum all existing world wide geodetic surveys.” In the end, such reports led both the AMS and its United States Air Force counterpart, the Aeronautical Chart and Information Center, to develop a series of World Geodetic Systems (WGS’s), each calibrated to a specific guided and ballistic missile program.

Images from Chombart de Lauwe's "La Decouverte Aerienne du Monde" (1948)

Paul-Henry Chombart de Lauwe (1918-1998) is often cited by for his contributions to urban sociology, cartography, urban studies, and even ethnography. For those of us who are more spatially-minded, and who have an unabashed predilection towards aircraft, we love Chombart de Lauwe's magisterial La Decouverte Aerienne du Monde (1948). What amazes me, first of all, are a series of pictures towards the beginning of the book. In the picture below, we see a reconnaissance P51 Mustang (with Free French livery) flying over Sudan. The caption reads:

Un P.51 sue le Soudan, avion monoplace de la 33me Escadre de chasse de l'Armée de l'air, en mission photographique en A.O.F. Un grande nombre des vues publiées dans ce livre ont été prises par cette formation militaire sur les avions de ce type.

A second photgraph shows an F5 (reconnaissance variant of the Lockheed P-38 Lightning), also flying over French territories. One may recall that French aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupery was flying an F5 on his last, and perhaps most famous mission.

Here, the caption states:

Gao, la Dune Rose. Deux avions militaires français en mission photographique au-dessus de l'A.O.F. Sur le sol sablonneux se distinguent nettement les ombres des appareils. L'observation aérienne fait entrer dans l'vision de l'homme les phénomènes se déroulant dans un cadre trop vaste por être saisi d'un seul regard.

Taking into account that Chombart de Lauwe appreciates the civilan applications of military technologies for land-surveying purposes, he posits a methodology for "extracting" geospatial information from aerial photographs. The photos below gives an idea of this: