MAPHEAD

I've started an interesting new book called "Maphead" by Ken Jennings. I can finally get reading again after finishing The History of Everything : ) and also Kurt Vonneguts book "Galapagos" (extremely strange by the way). Maphead is a book about the culture of geography and how geography shapes our every experiences. I already recommend it for anyone interested in maps as well as those those intrigued by the artistic trance of cartography.

To start out he addresses that maps don't always have to depict data or have to show the route of a physical world. He highlights allegorical maps that illustrate things like emotions or in the example below the idea of success.

Later on he also poses an interesting question...

For a long time I blamed writers like John Bunyon and Dante for this allegorical form of cartacaoethes. Desperate to extract a storyline from a possibly dreary and didactic subject -  the struggle to a life worthy of heaven - they seized on a quest narrative, a "pilgrim's process," and mapmakers were quick to follow suit. I wonder: how would history be different if Bunyan or Dante had chosen to represent life not as a linear journey through a geographic territory but as something a little more holistic - a library, say? or a buffet? What would Western civilization be like in that alternate universe? Would we value different things, set different goals for ourselves, if the governing geographic metaphor of our culture were replaced by something else - recipes instead of maps, cookbooks instead of atlases? Would shallow celebrities still tell interviewers they were "in a good place right now"? Or Would they say things like "I'm at the waffle bar right now, Oprah"?

*copied from chapter two


The Road To Success