What I'm
reading
Denis
Wood, Everything Sings: Maps for a Narrative Atlas (Siglio Press, Los Angeles,
2010) $28
Yes!
That
would be the brief yet exhaustively thorough review of this great thing, or
rather what the author calls a "process-thing."
I could
slow down and say, well, what I like is...in fact I will slow down and say that
what I like is...
That he
insists on what other cartographers leave out. He cites John Cage's amused discovery
that no matter what he did to randomize and remove the controlling human hand
from his musical activity, there would still be melody at times.
DW insists that the same goes for what
pretends to be merely instrumental or objective:
Those
objects still sing.
In other words,
narrative is inescapable. Mapmakers, as
he says or perhaps rants/sings in his interesting and enthusiastic (in the
Whitman sense) introduction, try to make a map as merely a set of directions.
Yet
sneakily they imply that this map, this set of official lines and numbers and
names, is all that is the case. The map
shows what there is. The rest is not
relevant.
DW says,
o no, not so fast, the rest is everything and not only that, everything is
singing.
Essentially
he maps not a neighborhood as a set of streets but a neighborhood as the
experience of the people who live there, in accordance with his theory that a
place is not just a place, that people and place together transform each
other.
So there
are hilarious and sweet "maps" of things that don't ever get mapped
like a color density and shade map of the neighborhood in autumn that is a word
cloud of color names.
And also serious reminders of the political and
economic forces and artifacts -- restrictive covenants, for example -- that
give a neighborhood its shape and look and flavor.
A wonderful book/ process-thing....In the same way that DW says a neighborhood
is a "process-thing" (not just a thing-thing, a silent motionless object) that
transforms anywhere into here and here into everywhere, his book transforms person plus pages covered
with stuff into something more interesting or at least something smiling with
delight, if not actually singing, since it could be early in the morning and
besides the birds are taking care of it here in South Frankfort right this
minute.
If all books were this good, I would use my secret powers to stop time
so I could read books forever without either of us -- me or the books --
disintegrating.
