I Bloody Love Big Pictures

 

 On the last train out of France a week ago, I checked the map on my phone to see if it sould show us going through the channel tunnel, and was surprised to see a shape I didn't recognise: the shape of the channel itself. I was reminded of what I'd felt seeing a map of the Mediterranean in a charity shop window in Clapham. There was nothing here I could recognise as a country, or two countries, or three. Just a place. Just land and water. I zoomed out. 

 And I still didn't recognise anything. I was familiar with the shape on the left, of course, but nothing stood out. Great Britain didn't stand out. And now I could see, for example, why Norwich had had that centuries-long history with the Netherlands, because why wouldn't you? If one pictures the British Isles on a rectangle – which is the shape most pictures appear on, let's face it – all of that land in the bottom right corner is missing, isn't it, airbrushed out like Trotsky? We're not brought up on maps of Britain, but on portraits. Shakespeare's definitely a bit to blame for this. I heard somewhere that countries are actually quite a new idea though*, so I still have hope.

 Here's a zebra-crossing to nowhere.

 * I'll tell you where I heard that, actually. I've only just started listening to the "In Our Time" podcast, and it was in an episode on the battle of Traflagar here. "In Our Time" is brilliant, by the way. In the last episode I learnt that before the dinosaurs, the world was ruled by crocodiles! Some went around on their hind legs! Some had hooves, some had beaks, some were the size of whales! An entire planet of crocodiles! And it was Earth! MERRY CROCMAS!

 

(image source)

"Gruff voices come from inside" (A Nod to John Blanche)

 Thirty-seven years after the publication of Steve Jackson's Sorcery! the townspeople of Kristatanti still wear their hair high on their heads. John Blanche's illustrations are nothing like the meticulously researched environments you'll find in Skyrim or other first-person Fantasy walking simulators, they're actual folk art, immersing you in not a tangible landscape but an eccentrically embellished personal mythology, which is probably, really, what you want to be immersed in when you fantasy role play. Here, for example, is the guard who sees you off on your adventure:

  Now you'd never see that in a video game. There would be too many questions. And no answers because there's no reason for any of this, other than Blanche's joy in making stuff up. They say a camel is a horse designed by a committee, but actually it looks far more like the pet project of someone who worked on the committee that brought out the horse. And pet projects are the substance of fantasy. We associate the genre with mythology, and we're right to, but mythologies are the product of a people, not a hive. Just bunch of people. There's no way to synthesise their differing accounts - mythology is not synthetic - nor any way of extrapolating what actually happened. Someone simply made something up and that happened lots of times, and I think Blanche's work expresses those instances perfectly.

 I mean, what's this? Doesn't matter. You encountered it. Or this is how you remember it. I think I enjoyed reading, or playing, The Shamutanti Hills this week even more than I had as a child. Video games in the interim had probably conditioned me a little better for all the keeping track one has to do, and I bothered learning the spells this time too, which came in very handy when I lost my sword halfway through the book. I also took time to make a map, something I'd always written off as a chore before, but it turns out it's a creative act, part of the game: you can draw a small crow where you saw a crow for example, or rolling hills, or heads on spikes when you encounter heads on spikes, a classic shorthand for the outskirts of sub-human savagery despite heads on spikes marking the boundaries of the City of London well into the seventeenth century. Talk about projection.

Ships, Sea and the Snark

  
A whatsapp map created for refugees,
presented by Professor Marie Gillespie,

in which distances are measured in money.

 This week's episode of Ships, Sea & the Stars from the Royal Museums Greenwich might be the the ships-sea-and-the-starriest one yet, because it deals with navigation. Not just the treasures of cartography, but the Pacific star maps being recommitted to memory by modern Hawaiians like Nainoa Thompson - an account of which you can hear me reading at 5:25 - and the Global Positioning System, or GPS, originally reserved for the American military until it was unscrambled for general use in January 2000. Other systems are now available of course, just not the EU's, because we're leaving it. On a completely unrelated-to-Brexit note, I also get to rattle through some Hunting of the Snark at 34:30. 

"Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes!

   But we've got our brave Captain to thank

(So the crew would protest) "that he's bought us the best—

   A perfect and absolute blank!"  (Source.)

 Marie Gillespie also brings a bag refashioned by a refugee solidarity network on Lesbos from one of a million lifejackets now left on the beaches of Greece, and if you fancy further clicks Extra Credits just produced a nice series on Austronesian navigation which you can watch here, and you can give to the Refugee Council here.

Invisiblish Cities

"I had sent away for a plan of Anaskol and had received this map in return. 

It was accompanied by a note saying Anaskol did not exist, but would this do."

 I wrote before, here, about my ambivalent relationship with maps of non-existent worlds at the beginning of books, but non-maps of non-existent worlds compliment fantasy's undependability far better, and so are fine... Once, last century, when I was allowed to be a film critic for the university paper, I watched Peter Greenaway give an interview in which he said film was the perfect medium for him because he was interested in text and images, and I remember thinking, maybe he should be working in comics instead, because film isn't just words and pictures, it's also time, and his films are quite boring. But I hadn't yet grown to appreciate drifiting in and out of a work, nor had I yet seen his early funny stuff.

"According to Tulse Luper, Antilipe in Syria was the home of a unique species of 

black maritime rook that mated with seagulls. That was obviously another Antilipe."

A Walk Through H (The Reincarnation of an Ornithologist) is a delight, and also forty minutes long. The film can be enjoyed in its entirety here, and if it weren't a film but simply a book of Greenaway's text and images, while I wouldn't feel so hassled by Michael Nyman's score (normally I love minimalism, but normally minimalism doesn't sound so impatient) I also wouldn't get to enjoy Colin Cantlie's brilliant - and swift - narration. A series of excellent sentences doing their thing rather than a saga, the script recalls Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, and Cantlie's delivery of it recalls Simon Jones' Arthur Dent, a perfect match, so I couldn't have been happier when this particular Ollie Evans posted the film on my f*c*book today saying my videos of Defoe had reminded him of it. Thank you, Ollie. Today's reading however is probably a bit too swift. Apologies for the gabble, but within it you will hear of the tribulations visited upon both those who were shut up because of the plague of 1665, and those who had to guard their doors (one of whom gets blown up SPOILERS!!!)

"I am the watchman! How do you do? What is the matter?"

Benchless in Baatu (Jenny Nicholson does some digging)

 "What Walt would later describe as the best weekend of his life..."

 Here's animator Ward Kimball and his boss larking around at the Chicago Railroad Fair in 1948 (and here's the source). This delightful photograph pops up in the video below, another great piece to camera from Jenny Nicholson and the subject of today's post (I blogged about her visit to Pandora here). If you've absolutely no interest in Disneyland, then move on, dear reader, but if, like me, you think it might be the most impressive work of art of the twentieth century, BOY does Nicholson deliver! "Star Wars Land: An Excruciatingly in-Depth Prequel" is an almost literal dissection of the place. Here's a map:

It is a map I grew up with – hung by the front door where we kept our wellies – of Disneyland from 1976. Dad was a huge fan. When I finally visited the park in the nineties – although I didn't take it in at the time – the area depicted just to the left of Fantasyland was unrecognisable. I'll enlarge it a bit:

 Those tracks are a ride called "Nature's Wonderland". Nicholson's video is full of footage showing it was more than just a mine train ride (although "Walt Loved Trains", and Nicholson makes a great argument for the whole of Disneyland being one huge train set). The place was actually crammed with many modes of transport...

  Importantly they served not only as "conveyances" but a "futuristic mode of ornamentation." To quote Nicholson: "they are not just rides for the people who are on them, they are also symbiotically enhancing the experience for everyone in their sightline."

I love talk about sightlines. The reason you can't see any evidence of the rest of Disneyland is that the whole area was dug out to be eight feet deeper than the rest of the park. By the time I visited, twenty years later, it had all been concreted up – animatronic elk, the lot – to be replaced by the Big Thunder Ranch, including a petting farm with real animals, where Jenny would later work (the park's least popular attraction, but "a quiet place to chill for a minute"). All this was then re-excavated a couple of years ago to create the planet of Baatu for Star Wars Land, which is why I said this video is an almost literal dissection.

  I also love talk about seating arrangements, so it's worth noting the end, where things get darkest, as Nicholson interrogates "Project Stardust" – the plans made by the park to help the "flow" of visitors to Baatu by removing "benches and planters", that is, literally anywhere to sit down or find shade, or as Jenny puts it "a place to linger". There's no petting zoo on Baatu. I don't think that's a decision Walt would have made.

Shadow-Unboxing (or: Why I'm totally fine with the map of Earthsea)

"To let understanding stop at what cannot be understood is a high attainment. 

Those who cannot do it will be destroyed on the lathe of heaven." 

                                                                                                                 Chang Tzu

 Try telling that to Dangermouse.

 And still on the subject of maps...

 This is the ball-ache that greets any reader opening Ursula K. Le Guin's "A Wizard of Earthsea". For much of the book, it appears to be an example of exactly the kind of map-at-the-beginning-of-a-book I talked about dreading in yesterday's post – the kind you're meant to constantly refer back to while following the hero's journey, an impediment to reading, crammed with unnecessary detail, imprisoning upon the page a world which the act of reading is supposed to liberate. But Le Guin's brilliant, and clearly knew what she was doing, because SPOILERS! the book's climax takes place off the map. It's only beyond the edge of the world that Ged can name his shadow, and – like Dangermouse in "Custard" – let reality catch up with him. The map isn't here to show us where the hero went, but to show us, physically in fact, what he had to escape. It's an excellent way of depicting magic. I'm guessing. I'm very glad I re-read it.

  

When does this happen in the book though? 

I still do not remember this happening in the book.

 "Every story must make its own rules. And obey them." I was inspired to read more Le Guin because of an excellent documentary no longer available on iplayer but still viewable here. And I haven't read any of the other Earthsea books yet. Nor worked out what the point of the map at the beginning of "The Dispossessed" was either so, you know, maybe I'm wrong and she just liked maps.

 One other takeaway – Character after character offers to tell Ged the name of his shadow and save him his journey, but it's clear he's meant to turn them down, get lost, and work it out for himself, which – taken with what I remember of "The Lathe of Heaven" – leads me to ask: Does anyone know if Ursula K. Le Guin had a beef with therapy?

Why Not Build A World? (Enjoying the Unvisitable)

  I'm very sympathetic to the idea that all the best fiction has a map at the front, but I'm not a complete convert. Different maps serve different puposes: the map in The Hobbit is a call to adventure, while the maps of the Hundred Acre Wood or Moominvalley are more like welcoming gifts. Both types are pretty scant on detail, and both are types I like: maps you don't have to constantly refer to. It's not just laziness that makes me favour these maps, it's that they make no serious attempt to pretend – as some fantasies do – that imagined lands can be depicted objectively.

 It was Nerdwriter's video below that got me thinking about this (that, and the fact I just finished "A Wizard of Earthsea" but I'll write about that map tomorrow). According to Nerdwriter the "bill of goods" of a fantasy is not World-Building, but "the ideas and insights that spring forth from the explosive act of reading":

Or to quote M. John Harrison on his own imagined world:

"Like all books, Viriconuim is just some words. There is no place, no society, no dependable furniture to 'make real'. You can't read it for that stuff, so you have to read it for everything else."

  I was delighted to see Harrison's name pop up. I've always loved "In Viriconium" – there's a detectable Viriconian influence here for example. Like Bastian's Fantasia in "The Neverending Story" the city is unmappable. In my spare periods at school, I used to walk along the then undeveloped South Bank in the shadow of Bankside Power Station (now Tate Britain) looking for places Viriconium might be, scouting liminal locations. And any reader in any other city could do the same.

 That's one of the reasons I love Orson Welles' film of "The Trial", whence all these images (more here). Unable to shoot in Prague, he had to invent his own dream city from bits of Paris, Milan, Rome, Dubrovnik and Zagreb – effectively shooting the film in Viriconium. Terry Gilliam's own stab at Kafka a couple of decades later, "Brazil", would conjure a similar city out of real locations; its setting, according to the opening title – "somewhere in the twentieth century"  – similarly vague.

 So that's why I'm not a-hundred-per-cent a fan of maps at the beginning of books. Fantasy locations are unvisitable. Definitive visualisations are impossible. That said...

  I can't have been the only child to think Tolkein was taking the piss with his illustations to "The Hobbit". Show us the bloody monsters.