Landscape Can Kill You

(via Married to the Sea)

Canadian Prog Rock Power Trio Future Noir

In Yr. Landscape Pollutin' Yr. Goodz: Rush in the 1970s (Source: Lexrst Land)

Let's assume for a moment that there is a particular variant of Science Fiction writing out there that deals with "green" ideas about sustainability and the environment. Let's assume that this variant operates in a Marxian "middle landscape" somewhere between the techno-fetishist tropes of "hard" science fiction and the character-driven socio-environmental concerns of "soft" science fiction. Let's call this variant "Pastoral Science Fiction."

What, then, would fall under this variant? Certainly those novels, like Frank Herbert's Dune, or even Ursula K. LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness, that have a significant landscape component. I would even hazard that the origins of this type of science fiction lie somewhere in the works of Edgar Allan Poe, Harry Harrison, or H.P. Lovecraft (perhaps something like the latter's At the Mountains of Madness or The Whisperer in The Darkness).

I would also like to think that this fictional variant would provide something akin to an anti-technological impulse. A science fiction pastoral would thus give us overly green vistas, or even verdant fantasies of cities and landscapes overrun with flora and fauna. It would certainly remind us of a verse from Talking Heads' 1989 song, "(Nothing But) Flowers":

Here we stand
Like an Adam and an Eve
Waterfalls
The Garden of Eden
Two fools in love
So beautiful and strong
The birds in the trees
Are smiling upon them
From the age of the dinosaurs
Cars have run on gasoline
Where, where have they gone?
Now, it's nothing but flowers

For the sake of argument, let me offer a corrective to this and other visions of a sylvanic future. For the greatest critic of Science Fiction Pastoralia may not be a writer, but a band. And that band is none other than the Canadian prog-rock power trio, Rush.

Pictures at An Exhibition: Rush's Moving Pictures (1981)

The second track of Rush's most famous and popular album, 1981's Moving Pictures, is "Red Barchetta". This song is, in many ways, standard Rush fare. A near-perfect, Voltron-like assembly of musical prowess and technical sophistication (or in prog-rock parlance, "chops"), Rush's music is best listened while staring at laser beams in a room full of smoke, or marveling at day-glo images of Jimi Hendrix, marijuana leaves, or spacecraft under repeated exposure to black light. Red Barchetta begins with guitarist Alex Lifeson gently picking out major-key harmonics in his guitar's upper registers. Geddy Lee's fuzzed-out Rickenbacker bass follows, only to be accompanied by drummer Neil Peart's acrobatic percussion. The song alternates in a soft-to-loud progression that anticipates Pixies' and Nirvana's dynamic noodlings by, like, almost 10 years. Red Barchetta even features one of the most aggressive uses of roto-toms in a song: their tuneful, machine-gun progression follows in what is a swirling, manic pas-deux between Alex Lifeson's bridge solo and Geddy Lee's bass wranglings.

And then ... the voice. I remind you of slack-rockers Pavement, and their thoughtful invocation of Rush's must underappreciated and misunderstood element: Geddy Lee's voice. (In 1996's "Stereo", Stephen Malkmus thus sings, "What about Geddy Lee? / How did it get so high? / I wonder if he speaks like an ordinary guy?"). So, what exactly does Lee sing about?

"Red Barchetta" takes place in an alternative, not-so-distant future where cars are outlawed. In fact, the inspiration for the song's lyrics is a 1973 short story for Road & Track by Richard S. Foster called "A Nice Morning Drive". In that story, Foster writes,

It was a fine morning in March 1982. The warm weather and clear sky gave promise of an early spring. Buzz had arisen early that morning, impatiently eaten breakfast and gone to the garage. Opening the door, he saw the sunshine bounce off the gleaming hood of his 15-year-old MGB roadster. After carefully checking the fluid levels, tire pressures and ignition wires, Buzz slid behind the wheel and cranked the engine, which immediately fired to life. He thought happily of the next few hours he would spend with the car, but his happiness was clouded - it was not as easy as it used to be.

A dozen years ago things had begun changing. First there were a few modest safety and emission improvements required on new cars; gradually these became more comprehensive. The governmental requirements reached an adequate level, but they didn't stop; they continued and became more and more stringent. Now there were very few of the older models left, through natural deterioration and . . . other reasons.

The MG was warmed up now and Buzz left the garage, hoping that this early in the morning there would be no trouble. He kept an eye on the instruments as he made his way down into the valley. The valley roads were no longer used very much: the small farms were all owned by doctors and the roads were somewhat narrow for the MSVs (Modern Safety Vehicles).

The safety crusade had been well done at first. The few harebrained schemes were quickly ruled out and a sense of rationality developed. But in the late Seventies, with no major wars, cancer cured and social welfare straightened out, the politicians needed a new cause and once again they turned toward the automobile. The regulations concerning safety became tougher. Cars became larger, heavier, less efficient. They consumed gasoline so voraciously that the United States had had to become a major ally with the Arabian countries. The new cars were hard to stop or maneuver quickly, but they would save your life (usually) in a 50-mph crash. With 200 million cars on the road, however, few people ever drove that fast anymore.

The story continues, ending with an account of the narrator going head-to-head against gleaming MSV's (Modern Safety Vehicles). In a tale of obdurant technology winning over new-fangled hard science, the narrator's MG roadster is able to elude the MSV's, so much so that these high-tech vehicles end up as piles of crumpled-up aluminum thanks to an engineered head-on collision.

Foster's Not-So-Red Barchetta, from a 1973 Issue of Road & Track (Source: MG Experience)

The image to the Road & Track story is consistent with the idea of Sci-Fi Pastorals. Here, an MG is seen cradled in a technicolor thicket of deciduous leafiness. In the background, two MSV's, strangely rendered as 30s-era gangster cars, collide amidst a wall of evergreens and a plume of noxious smoke.

As Rush's evocation of Foster's short story, "Red Barchetta" carries forth an even more anti-environmental theme. The song's protagonist uncovers the gleaming red hot rod stored in his uncle's garage. Geddy Lee sings,

I strip away the old debris, that hides a shining car
A brilliant red barchetta, from a better, vanished time
I fire up the willing engine, responding with a roar
Tires spitting gravel, I commit my weekly crime...

The lyrics paint a compelling image. Into the pristine landscape of an environmentally-correct future, a red gasoline guzzler vomits exhaust, rubber, and gravel. The end result is a near-Ballardian hybrid of human and automobile. Lee sings again,

Wind in my hair ---
Shifting and drifting ---
Mechanical music ---
Adrenalin surge ---

Well-weathered leather
Hot metal and oil
The scented country air
Sunlight on chrome
The blur of the landscape
Every nerve aware

Though Geddy Lee would certainly not rank up there in the highest echelons of speculative fiction, "Red Barchetta" nevertheless paints an urgent image -- an image that anticipates the machine's reentry into the garden.

Faraway (So Close)

Trevor Paglen, "Chemical and Biological Weapons Proving Ground, Dugway UT", Distance 42 miles, 10:51 a.m. (Source: Trevor Paglen)

Trevor Paglen's photography is fascinating not only for its content but for its technique. As self-styled "experimental geographer", Paglen's work "deliberately blurs the lines between social science, contemporary art, and a host of even more obscure disciplines in order to construct unfamiliar, yet meticulously researched ways to interpret the world around us." This operation is evident in Paglen's use of limit-telephotography.

Limit-telephotography relies on astronomical equipment to capture subjects that are dozens of miles away. Large telescopes with focal lengths ranging from 1300 to 7000mm thus reveal aspects of the landscape not ordinarily seen with the naked eye. This constraint is quickly transformed into a rhetorical device: Paglen uses limit-telephotography to capture images of military installations that are otherwise inaccessible to the public. The same techniques used to photograph deep-space objects light years away are thus turned inward -- they become the preferred method of documenting military activity in the American landscape.

Paglen's photographs are taken from a variety of distances. A photograph of the barren landscape at Dugway Proving Ground, Utah (above) was taken from 42 miles away. The details are faint and grainy, giving the photograph an eerie Gerhard Richter-like quality. Blotches of vegetation resemble horizontal streaks, as if Paglen were photographing something that was moving quickly across the landscape. The photograph, though taken at a very high magnification, reveals nothing.

Trevor Paglen, "Illuminated Hangars, Tonopah Test Range, NV", Distance 18 miles, 9:08 p.m. (Source: Trevor Paglen)

The same could be said of his photograph of a set of illuminated hangars at Tonopah, Nevada. Although taken from a distance of 18 miles, this photograph reveals very little. Light pours out from two hangars, bathing the tarmac in an immediate and sterile glow. Foregrounded structures only register as mysterious black masses. As with the photograph of the chemical and radiological testing site at Dugway, this photograph also reveals nothing. Yet the absolute mystery that veils these photographs is admittedly tantalizing: you know something is going on there, but you just can't see it.

Trevor Paglen, "Morning Commute (Gold Coast Terminal), Las Vegas, NV", Distance 1 mile, 6:26 a.m. (Source: Trevor Paglen)

The photographs of unmarked passenger jets at the Las Vegas International Airport's Gold Coast Terminal are equally mysterious. These images, captured from a mile away, show the noses of 737 and 727 "Janet" aircraft. Although these aircraft are recognizable (all have white fuselages with a single red stripe along the windows), their purpose has been the topic of frequent internet chatter. Their flightpaths, destinations, and cargoes are unknown. The term "Janet" ("Just Another Non-Existent Terminal") thus alludes to the secrecy surrounding these aircraft, many which are seen flying over Groom Lake and other parts of the now-iconic Area 51.

Trevor Paglen, "Unmarked 737 at Gold Coast Terminal, Las Vegas, NV", Distance 1 mile, 10:44 p.m. (Source: Trevor Paglen)

Paglen's photographs of the Gold Coast Terminal are bathed in shadows and granular barium lighting. People wearing bullet-proof vests and knapsacks are seen entering the aircraft, but we can only see them from behind. Another photograph shows a 737 bathed in darkness. The forward fuselage door is open, and yet the interior is pitch-black.

There is an obvious irony at work here. The closer Paglen gets to his subjects, the more mysterious they become. The photographs thus provide a glimpse of secret activity, and yet the activity remains secret. At first, this may seem to only confirm limit-photography as technique, and nothing mote. Yet this inability to provide any additional meaning is important, as the act of taking these photographs is significant. This is a slight qualification on the concept of apparatus theory: although Paglen's use of technology is a vital part of his method for constructing and depicting subjects, the photographer's physical location is a major contributing factor. Thus Paglen's relentless documentation of distance away from the subject takes on a new significance as it points to a rare combination of scopic voyeurism and territorial trespass.

(For other posts on Paglen, check out Bryan Finoki's articles for Archinect and Subtopia)

Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles

link (via Archinect)

Object Lesson(s)

We love Bruno Latour. We love his books. In fact, his books are even better once we get to hear him speak. They read like the transcript of an intellectually-engaging conversation, yet his writing is never onerous, nor is it turgid. It is what it is. There is something rather public and almost ecumenical about his writings. Yes, he often writes about science and technology, but books like We Have Never Been Modern (1993) and Science in Action (1988) transcend their discipline. There is something -- as I already said -- democratic about his work. There's something for every one.

And this notion of democracy is, in the words of Oliver Wendell Holmes, "the brooding omnipresence" that sifts through the pages of Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (2005). The book is literally hefty and figuratively weighty -- it is the monograph to an exhibition of the same name held at the ZKM (Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie) in Karlsruhe, Germany. It is a heroic compendium spanning a seemingly impossible breadth of thought: from political philosophy to history of science to digital art to speculative architecture.

But, as Latour states in the introduction to the work, the book/exhibit is about the creation of an object-oriented democracy. Latour realizes the incipient double-meaning of the word representation: it not only has a political aspect (elected officials represent the public) but an unmitigated sense of veracity or verisimilitude (this chart represents a summary of our findings). The former thus talks of a matter of fact, the latter talks of representation as a matter of concern.

And they key to Latour's object-oriented democracy rests in mending this schism between representation as matter of fact and representation as matter of concern. He thus advocates moving from a Realpolitik to a Dingpolitik -- literally, a politics of things, an investigation into the significance of the tangible thing. It is as if a thing -- a glass, a video game cartridge, a cookie, or radar screen -- becomes the prism through which the world refracts itself. Dingpolitik mandates a shifting of focus from objects to things. "Back to Things!" is Latour's clarion call:

...the objects of science and technology, the aisles of supermarkets, financial institutions, medical establishments, computer networks -- even the catwalks of fashion shows! --- offer poignant examples of hybrid forums and agoras, of the gatherings that have been eating away at the older realm of pure objects bathing in the clear light of the modernist gaze. Who could dream of a better example of hybrid forums than the scale models used by architects all over the world to assemble those able to build them at scale? Or the thin felt pen used by draughtsmen toimaginen new landscapes? When we say "Public matters!" or "Back to Things!" we are not trying to go back to the old materialism of Realpolitik, because matter itself is up for grabs as well. To be materialist now implies that one enters a labyrinth more intricate than that built by Daedalus (Latour, "From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik, or How to Make Things Public," in Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (MIT/ZKM, 200): 23-24.

So here, a new, urgent klaxon demanding a reexamination of materialism and material culture. We only need to recall Wallace Stevens' elevation of the simple jar, the complex interweavings between subject, object, and context in "Anecdote of The Jar" (1923):

I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion every where.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

The thing is given urgency -- it is not only created, but it orders its surrounding space. In the words of critic Donald Guitierrez:

Being placed on top of a hill gives the jar an apex of human purpose through nature. But the jar asserts authority even more through the implied design of its own rotundity. It is the design of a created object embodying a human, cultural purpose. Further, the roundness is the symbolic design of purpose placed in nature, which in itself lacks purpose or order. The jar's roundness, exerting a centripetal force on the "slovenly wilderness," endows the wilderness (including the hill) with the order of a center. All the natural disorderliness of the wilderness acquires a purposive spatial character through "centering," and is given a figurative order in the way "rounded" and rounding human purpose shapes significance into the raw matter of earthly phenomena. Accordingly, human circularity, human centralization, civilizes "wilderness," not only the wild, that is, but chaos, nullity, meaninglessness, by providing it structure. This governing force is so powerful that even in its plainest, simplest representations ("grey and bare") the jar compels a "surrounding." "Circular Art: Round Poems of Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams." Concerning Poetry 14:1 (Spring 1981).

Philip K. Dick's alternate history masterpiece, The Man in The High Castle (1962) operates in the same realm as as Bruno Latour or a Wallace Stevens. The plot of the novel is familiar, only in that it has spawned similar alternate histories or science fictions: the United States has lost the Second World War; the Eastern seaboard is occupied by Germany, the West Coast by Japan, etc. As it turns out, several of the main characters in the novel traffic pre-World War II Americana, everything including Colt revolvers, Mickey Mouse Watches, Civil War-era Banknotes. These items are counterfeited, a fact that seems inconsequential. Consumers trade these high-priced items, and as long as someone can say that they are authentic, the market remains stable.

The author then considers Frank Frink's jewelry. An expert in manufacturing counterfeit firearms, Frink labors in his basement studios producing handcrafted earrings, lapel pins, and brooches. When presented to local pawners, the jewelry is ignored, unworthy of any market value. But, in the political climate of Dick's novel, where Japanese citizens consult the I Ching on a daily basis to soothe existential concerns and where Nazi forces carry out genocidal experiments in Africa in furtherance of a political mandate, this jewelry offers a new hope -- a salvation borne out of a simple, handcrafted item. Describing an transaction involving a seemingly worthless earring crafted by Frink, Dick writes:

"To have no historicity, and also no artistic, esthetic worth, and yet to partake of some ethereal value -- that is a marvel. Just precisely because this is a miserable, small,worthlesss-looking blob; that, Robert, contributes to its possessing wu. For it is a fact that wu is customarily found in least imposing places, as in the Christian aphorism, 'stones rejected by the builder.' One experiences awareness of wu in such trash as an old stick, or a rusty beer can by the side of the road. However, in those cases, the wu is within the viewer. Here, an artificer has put wu into the object, rather than merely witnessed the wu inherent in it." He glanced up. "Am I making myself clear?"

"Yes," Childan said.

"In other words, an entire new world is pointed to, by this. The name for it is neither art, for it has no form, nor religion. What is it? I have pondered this pin unceasingly, yet cannotfathomm it. We evidently lack a word for an object like this. So you are right, Robert. It is authentically a new thing on the face of the world ... This subject carries authority which compels an abandonment of property, so great is the necessity of delivering theawarenesss itself." (1962: 176-77).

As with Stevens' seemingly worthless Tennessee jar, Dick's wu-laden earring pin may also mark a transition from Realpolitik to Dingpolitik. The earring represents a literal and figural matter of concern.

This Business of Dredging

Did anyone catch the latest epsidoe of Megastructures on the National Geographic Channel, the one about the Port of Rotterdam? Well, before this post divulges one of the many goodies about this particular episode, the port is something to behold. According the the Port of Rotterdam, 370 million tons of goods moved through the North Sea port in 2005. Furthermore,

The port of Rotterdam stretches out for 40 kilometers along the Nieuwe Waterweg canal (also see the Port map). The port and industrial area covers 10,500 hectares. Around 30,000 seagoing vessels and 130,000 inland vessels call at the port each year. Rotterdam is a port of call for around 500 shipping lines that maintain regular services to about 1,000 other ports. Rotterdam is Europe's most important port for oil & chemicals, containers, iron ore, coal, food and metals.

And another thing, the entrance to the port is 78 feet deep. Ornidarily, this would not present any problems to the world's container fleet. But it does present a problem to one specific vessel, the Norwegian container vessel, the MS Berge Stahl.


The Berge Stahl is a monster of a vessel. Besides being about 375 yards in length, it is also has one of the deepest draughts imaginable for a vessel: 75 feet. And only two ports in the world are capable of handling such a giant vessel: the Europort at Rotterdam and the Terminal Maritimo de Ponta da Madeira, in Itaqui, Maranhao, Brazil. When ever the Berge Stahl enters either of these ports, the repsective harbormasters deploy a fleet of dredgers, large ships that literally suck the ocean bottom into their hulls, thereby creating a deeper channel for larger ships.

A great recent posting from Pruned shows these dredging vessels in action. The majority of these vessels are owned by either Van Ord, Boskalis, Jan de Nul Group, and Dredging International, all Dutch or Belgian (read: experts in North Sea reclamation). Two of the largest trailer suction hopper dredgers (or TSHD) are Jan de Nul Group's Vasco da Gama and Boskalis' WD Fairway. Combined, these two vessels have the ability to displace a total volume of about 69,000 cubic meters.

From Pruned.

Thelon River Blues

On the impossibly cold morning of August 8, 1929, Sergeant C. Trundle, an Inspector for the Great Slave Lake Region of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, reported a grisly scene inside a rundown cabin on the banks of the Thelon River in the Northwest Territories. Trundle's affidavit describes the discovery of the skeletal remains of three explorers, all Englishmen. One skeleton was that of John Hornby, whose unpublished manuscript, In The Land of Feast and famine by J. Hornby, or a Life in the Arctic Region, was found alongside his body. Hornby was a seasoned explorer who frequented the Thelon area. Wanting to attract attention to the unspoiled natural beauty of the Thelon River, Hornby embarked on another expedition in early 1927, hoping to prove that he could live in the desolate, wilderness of the area subsisting only on Caribou meat and whatever other game he could procure. Hornby starved to death on April 14, 1927. Next to Hornby's corpse, Sergeant Trundle found the body of Harold Allard, who died only a couple of weeks later, on May 4 1927. The third set of remains belonged to Edgar Christian, a 19-year old amateur explorer.

When RCMP scouts first discovered the old hut by the Thelon, at first they did not notice the bodies. They entered in and noticed a handwritten note affixed to the stove, with four words written in a desperate, almost childish scrawl:

Who ... Look ... In ... Stove

Inside the stove was Edgar Christian's logbook, which presented a day-to-day account of the deadly winter of 1927. There have been different accounts of the story, all suggesting a tragic scene. On the morning of June 1, 1927, Edgar Christian finished his last diary entry, and placed it alongside a note to his mother and father in the ashes of the stove. After writing the note asking whoever discovered their remains to look inside the stove, he crawled inside his red Hudson Bay's blanket and died. Edgar Christian's last diary entry is cryptic, yet somewhat telling:

9 a.m. Weaker than ever. Have eaten all I can. Have food on hand but heart peatering? Sunshine is bright now. See if that does any good to me if I get out and bring in wood to make fire.
Make preparations now.Got out, too weak and all in now. Left things late.

Christian began writing these daily entries in October 1926, before he embarked on the trek with Hornby and Allard. His clipped, pithy style is matter-of-fact, as if he were protecting future readers from the grisly details of starvation. Death was a lonely and personal business, and he only wanted to present a bare minimum of details. Christian also depicts the barren, frozen steppes of the upper Northwest Territories, where gale-force winds and winter temperatures averaging somewhere south of -20 degrees Fahrenheit made exploration a hazardous business indeed. The Thelon River area that Hornby, Allard, and Christian explored in 1926 and 1927 was then terra incognita. Hornby made regular visits to the area, and his growing love for the fecund yet bare Thelon area no doubt inspired Allard and Christian to go along on this last, deadly jaunt.

One morning, almost 50 years later, a group of American and Canadian campers were pitching tents at Warden's Grove, near the Thelon River. Newspaper accounts indicate that Gary Anderson, 30, of Rock Island, Ill.; Chris Norment, 26, of Las Vegas; Kurt Mitchell, 28, of Jackson, Wyo.; John Mordhorst, 28, of Rock Island; Michael Mobley, 26, of Mesa, Ariz., and Robert Common, 33, of St. Anne de Bellevue, Canada were keen outdoorsmen, sharing John Hornby's love for the Thelon wilderness, and recreating the explorer's last, and most famous expedition.

On the morning of January 24, 1978, one of these men noticed a white blazing object streaking across the sky, spewing fiery bits in its wake. Mobley and Mordhorst ventured to the impact site, and on the way, noticed smoldering pieces of metal wreckage. These, however, were actually parts of wreckage from COSMOS 954, a Soviet Radar Ocean Reconnaissance Satellite (RORSAT). COSMOS 954 had a relatively short life span. Launched on September 18, 1977 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhistan, COSMOS 954 featured the latest in Soviet nuclear reactor technology: a Romashka-type reactor carrying a Uranium-235 core. The satellite was designed to monitor naval activity in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, and in January 1978, reports began to surface that COSMOS 954's orbit was beginning to decay. And to make matters worse, the Soviet Space Agency was unable to jettison the satellite's reactor core due to a mechanical malfunction.

During a brief diplomatic spat between the U.S. and Soviet governments, it had been generally accepted that COSMOS 954 would reenter the Earth's atmosphere with it reactor core. This would be an unprecedented type of nuclear disaster -- an airborne, upper-atmospheric release of radioactive debris. There was even speculation that the satellite would crash in India. But it wasn't until January 24th that anyone had any inclination as to where COSMOS 954 would crash. Early that morning, the satellite entered the Earth's atmosphere somewhere over the Queen Charlotte Islands (north of Vancouver), and tumbled in a northeastern direction across Great Slave Lake, Fort Resolution, Yellowknife, Fort Reliance, and finally towards Baker Lake.

After the Soviet government admitted that COSMOS 954 indeed had a nuclear reactor on board, a cleanup operation was commenced by the U.S. and Canadian. Dubbed Operation Morning Light, the cleanup effort not only involved the on-site recovery of radioactive debris, but also utilized spectrometer-equipped Royal Canadian Air Force as well as high-altitude missions by U2 spyplanes.

The clean up effort ended in April 1978. By that time, crews assigned to Operation Morning Light surveyed over 124,000 square kilometers and logged over 4500 hours of flying time, all in search for pieces of the doomed COSMOS 954. In the end, it was determined that the Romashka reactor and its contents burned up in the atmosphere, and that the pieces strewn along the hoarfrost posed very little danger. The most radiologically intense piece, about the size of a nickel, was found on February 23 and appropriately sent to the Whiteshell Nuclear Research Establishment in Pinawa, Manitoba.

What strikes me as interesting about these two narratives is how they both end in the same location. Also, the very first piece of wreckage found by the American and Canadian campers in 1978, with two bent metal rods splaying out in opposite directions, even looked like a pair of Caribou antlers that John Hornsby would have loved to have seen in the deadly winter of 1927-1928. The newspaper accounts even describe them as "antlers." And finally, the satellite crash, how it must have looked like a falling star on that cold January morning, and the terrible, sad ending to Edgar Christian's Thelon adventure ... it reminds me of the last lines of W.H. Auden's "Musee des Beaux Arts"(1940):

In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

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.

For Your Consideration: Paul Shepheard

Although many know Paul Shepheard the English architect and critic, he is an architecture writer who defies categorization. The Cultivated Wilderness (1997), for example, at first seems to be an exegesis on the meaning of landscape. But instead of reeling off some turgid prose about the operative scale of landscape analysis, Shepheard instead uses anecdotes. His stories -- whether a conversation with a tipsy ex-pilot on a transatlantic flight, a brief sojourn in the alps, or even a weekend drive through the sites of some of the bloodiest battles of the First World War -- indeed revive the power of the narrative as a critical device.

And best of all, there is something unassuming and unpretentious about his writing. For the past couple of weeks, Shepheard's book on technology, Artificial Love (2003), has been mandatory reading before bedtime. I love this passage from that book:

And now, Jaques and Maria are zooming toward the Gulf of Mexico to have a day by the sea. She sleeps beside him in the car, his eyelashes resting on her cheeks like mink pelts. No CD. No radio. No sound in the car save that of smooth progress. He does not want to wake this sleeping beauty beside him. Ever since his late-night encounter with Plutarch on the television Jaques has been imagining himself as the protagonist of some ancient Roman love story. They are snares, entanglements, these stories: brushes with divinity. The gods stalk the landscape interfering with human lives as humans interfere with the lives of midges. The humans are riven by desire. It shoots through their bodies and their genitals and forces to them to be ecstatic. To have been one of the first humans, and to have lived before the great pile of information got too big for the unaided brain to handle, that is Jaques' fantasy. To have lived at a time when love was the prime technology, the thing that made all else possible -- now that's what he would call authentic. He is the Lover. So he grips the wheel and drives on in silence, thinking up his own food-of-love music, a silent opera with an audience of one called Cupid and Psyche, hardly daring to breathe, thinking that he must not wake Maria up. The feeling is as strong as a magic spell. Each passing moment seems to fragment from the one before it and hang in the air as delicate as a wisp and as definite as a smack in the head (2003: 92-93).

That, from a book that is ostensibly about architecture.