maps

Taking Off #4: Glimpses of an Itinerary

September 7, 2019 by John 4 Comments

[Map: zeroing in (maybe) on a vicinity for destination #1; you can skip the brief introduction and skip right to the details if you want.]

Over the couple of weeks since I last posted about EuroTour2020 (as I’ve come to think of it), I haven’t at all been ignoring the subject. Over the next few days, I’ll be updating my page of questions-and-answers with some new information. In the meantime, I thought I’d talk about the process of organizing our list of destinations.

In the previous post about the trip, I covered the first-cut list of “we need to visit here” cities. That list was vaguely organized chronologically, top to bottom (not counting the USA cities at the end), but we hadn’t given really serious thought to much beyond the names of the cities themselves.

The current “official” list includes about a half-dozen more cities (with — yes — a few more thrown in even later). It’s also better organized to suggest, y’know, first we’ll go here, then we’ll go there, and so on.

I tinkered with the sequence quite a bit, and even started to drill down to consider how we might go from place to place. But the more I thought about it, the more I recognized in the process a waste of time and energy: we plan, you see, to plan almost no specific details along the way. We don’t know how long we’re going to stay at place X (or whether indeed we’ll stay there at all, vs. just blow through for a brief visit). We consquently can’t make lodging arrangements much in advance, book transit in advance, purchase event tickets in advance…

…except: we need a place and a time to start. That’s the focus of the rest of this post.

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Taking Off #3: Weather

August 19, 2019 by John 1 Comment

[Image: monthly weather averages for the 30 proposed destination cities in our 2020 “EuroTour.” (Details below.) Click for a larger version.]

As The Missus and I think about where in Europe we’d like to visit, an obvious corollary is: “…and when?”

To some extent, we’re constrained by our personal calendar. We both retire in March, and our lease is up in June, but we’ve got a few family visits in mind in that little ~~three-~~two-month window. Ergo, we assume, we’ll depart these shores sometime in ~~June~~ late May. But with thirty possible cities, scattered all over what’s currently still lumpable together as “Europe,” where to head first? and where second? …and so on.

When one has been working with software as long as I have, one tends to consider thorny questions in terms of data. The data which I think drives an answer to this question: the weather we can expect to encounter.

I started by building a spreadsheet, one row per city, with one column per month between June and January. (We’re not likely to stay that long, but I wanted to leave some wiggle room at the tail end.) Each of those monthly columns was further divided into three columns: average high temperature, average low temperature, and average rain days. I also added a three-column group for “annual” averages of those three figures, across that eight-month period. And for comparison’s sake, I threw in rows for a half-dozen US cities with whose weather we were familiar. (This enables us to observe, for example, “In terms of its average weather, Bath in June resembles Philadelphia in October.”)

When I looked at what I had in the spreadsheet, I confess I felt overwhelmed. So I imported the whole thing into a little database program; from there I could generate a “report” of it all, with color-codings and other ways to highlight information of interest. The result I exported to PDF (converted to a .jpg image) in for display as the image above.

The color coding for the temperature and rain-days figures is explained in a legend at the bottom center. Other things to notice:

The six months we’ll most likely be traveling (June-November) are boxed with a heavy black line.
Three green rectangular boxes start at the top left and then kind of march down and to the right. There’s no magic data analysis going on with those boxes: the rows enclosed in each are those in each proposed “leg” of the tour — British Isles, northern Europe, southern Europe — and the columns cover the approximate range of months we’d be doing that “leg.” [Aside: I really want a better word than “leg.” Ideas?]
The green boxes overlap at their ends, because we don’t (yet? ever?) know exactly when we’ll hop off from one portion of the itinerary to the next.
One interesting thing about those three boxes: across all three of them, we wouldn’t expect to encounter any really severe differences in weather — that is, we only have to pack for one sorta-kinda-the-same climate. This should simplify packing, and make less worrisome the moving around from one region to another.

Of course, the best-laid plans, etc. etc. Famous last words, so on and so forth. If you want the gods to laugh, tell them your plans — all that. But we’ve got to start making some assumptions, on which we can build further assumptions, and so on.

At an Intersection Not So Much Seen as Glimpsed

November 23, 2018 by John 3 Comments

[Image: “The Abbeycwmhir Panoramic,” by Andrew Bowden. (Discovered it on Flickr, and use it here under a Creative Commons license; thank you!) The photographer’s caption to this photo of a “crossroad” says, “On the left was a forest road plunging into a deep and dark woodland. On the right, a barren and strangely alien mound. And straight on, our path”… which you have to look hard to see. It helps to enlarge the photo by clicking on it, especially if you’ve got a nice wide monitor. Even better, visit the Flickr link above to see the original — a 9,000-pixels wide monster.]

From whiskey river:

If we knew we were on the right road, having to leave it would mean endless despair. But we are on a road that only leads to a second one, and then to a third one and so forth. And the real highway will not be sighted for a long, long time, perhaps never. So we drift in doubt. But also in an unbelievable, beautiful diversity. Thus the accomplishment of hope remains an always unexpected miracle. But in compensation, the miracle remains forever possible.

(Franz Kafka [source: searched high and low for a definitive one, but this must be a paraphrase — possibly (according to numerous sources which phrase it thusly) from his Diaries])

…and:

[Describing an incident where he felt suspended several feet above the ground enclosed in a white sphere of light, when a voice spoke to him. This was what it said:]

From now on you need never await temporal attestation to your thought. You think the truth. You do not have the right to eliminate yourself. You do not belong to you. You belong to the Universe. Your significance will remain forever obscure to you, but you may assume that you are fulfilling your role if you apply yourself to converting your experiences to the highest advantage of others.

(R. Buckminster Fuller [source])

…and:

Metonymy as an Approach to a Real World

Whether what we sense of this world
is the what of this world only, or the what
of which of several possible worlds
—which what?—something of what we sense
may be true, may be the world, what it is, what we sense.
For the rest, a truce is possible, the tolerance
of travelers, eating foreign foods, trying words
that twist the tongue, to feel that time and place,
not thinking that this is the real world.

Conceded, that all the clocks tell local time;
conceded, that “here” is anywhere we bound
and fill a space; conceded, we make a world:
is something caught there, contained there,
something real, something which we can sense?
Once in a city blocked and filled, I saw
the light lie in the deep chasm of a street,
palpable and blue, as though it had drifted in
from say, the sea, a purity of space.

(William Bronk [source])

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Waypoints

March 8, 2013 by John 4 Comments

[Image: possibly the oldest surviving map of the world. Mesopotamia/Babylon, about 700-500 BCE. Click to enlarge; see the note at the foot of this post for more information.]

From whiskey river:

In general, lives seem to veer abruptly from one thing to another, to jostle and bump, to squirm. A person heads in one direction, turns sharply in mid-course, stalls, drifts, starts up again. Nothing is ever known, and inevitably we come to a place quite different from the one we set out for.

(Paul Auster [source])

…and (italicized portion):

The spiritual life — or the writing life — depends above all on fidelity to objects.

I wrote that sentence and looked out the window. It has rained for three days and in today’s sun the late roses strain, soggy as wet tissue, toward light coming just in time. Fidelity, I was saying, to objects…

Whatever your eye falls on — for it will fall on what you love — will lead you to the questions of your life, the questions that are incumbent upon you to answer, because that is how the mind works in concert with the eye. The things of this world draw us where we need to go.

It doesn’t matter how unprepossessing the world we look at, though it may seem to the lust of the eye that blue sky and late roses are more amusing to look at than dead winter growth. This mistake I make over and over.

(Mary Rose O’Reilley [source])

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Just Finding Your Way Around the Map

December 28, 2012 by John 2 Comments

[Video: “Sailing to Philadelphia,” by Mark Knopfler (performed with James Taylor) (lyrics)]

From whiskey river:

Desire is never on the map

it’s that unnamed lake you found
once, driving a gravel road, not
where you thought you were going,
fast, window down, hair
loose to the dry wind,
bare foot pressing metal,
soft feathers of cottonwood
drift through, maple seed
spinning in its wild gyre.
Bugs spatter on the windshield
in Rorschach you want to
read like tea leaves, imagine
you might learn how you’ve
come to this road, which
left turn at midnight, which
wrong side of town.

Then there it is before you,
glittering pure and cold and
suddenly you want
that stone-skipping ache
more than your life, even
knowing how the cold water
makes each hair stand on end
as you enter, one foot at a time
sand crumbling underfoot,
the delicious submersion,
as you slip the laws of
surface tension, gravity…

and so it is you push off from shore,
not caring, this lake, as you knew
the moment you saw it,
has no bottom.

(Holly J. Hughes [source])

…and:

Going home does not come naturally to me. If my father’s medium was silence, mine had tended to be escape. But there’s no future in escape because the world is round. So the faster you run away, the faster you end up, right back where you started, face to face with whatever you were running from in the first place. Your worst fears, they’re always the most patient. They’ll wait up for you. That’s what makes them the worst.

(Holly J. Hughes)

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Mapping the WIP

May 19, 2009 by John 6 Comments

I once read advice from a… novelist? playwright? not sure — anyhow, someone who said something like, “The hardest job in writing a story is getting a character from one room to another.” This stuck in my head because at the time I was struggling with just this difficulty. I kept trying to account for the characters’ every movement: He walked to the door and reached for the doorknob. He turned it. He pulled the door open, hesitated, and then stepped over the threshold onto the bathroom tile… or whatever it was.

Even after I [knock on wood] grew out of that clumsiness, though — it’s a wonder more of my characters didn’t break their necks as I drove them past furniture, pets, fireplaces — I’ve always liked to have a sense of where characters are, relative to their landscapes and to one another. Of all the fears I have of a critic, somewhere, sometime, taking potshots at my stories, one of the biggest is that s/he will be able to sneer, y’know, something like the following:

Simpson can’t even keep his geography straight. In one chapter he refers to a character walking three blocks and turning right; four pages later, the same character — taking the same route — is said to count five traffic signals and then turn left. Well, which is it, Mr. Simpson? Which is it?

[shudder]

Anyhow, when I started on ~~Grail~~ Seems to Fit, I knew I’d be making up a locale from scratch. This seemed clever at the time, because no one would be able to trip me up on mismatches with the real world.

Alas, it also meant that I occasionally got confused when navigating the action around the fictional world.

So then I went back through what I had written to that point, and laid out the town in question, in pencil, on a sheet of lined notebook paper: block by block, labeled with store names, residents’ names, and so on.

I found that map this morning. On one hand, the discovery annoyed me; I’d just typed the words “Chapter 1, Caerleon, Pennsylvania: 1991” at the top of page 1, when I suddenly thought Gee — didn’t I do a map of the town once…? I even knew right where I could find a copy of it. And once I found it, I spent the rest of my morning writing session inspecting it, trying to recall all the details I’d labeled (more or less legibly) 17-18 years ago and why I’d thought they were important.

So there went today’s writing down the drain. Tomorrow ought to go smoother. (Or at least, I’ll have one less excuse for not being productive.)

[For more information about the map in question, including what details I remembered and a larger, more legible copy, see here.]

Fellow writers, how about you? Do you make maps of your world(s) — not just maps in your head, but on paper? Do you draw floor plans? Or is this just some highly localized form of obsessive-compulsive disorder on my part?

Edit to add: Although I never did a map of any of the locations in the Welsh backstory, I do know exactly where the (fictional) village was where the main character lived in the 1700s. It was a village named Cymer Bach (roughly, “Little Confluence”); if you look at the Google Maps “terrain view” of Cymer Bach you can see why.

Getting There, vs. There

December 18, 2008 by John 5 Comments

From an appreciation of novelist (and biographer, etc.) Penelope Fitzgerald, by novelist (etc.) Julian Barnes, appearing in The Guardian in July:

Novels are like cities: some are organised and laid out with the colour-coded clarity of public transport maps, with each chapter marking a progress from one station to the next, until all the characters have been successfully carried to their thematic terminus. Others, the subtler, wiser ones, offer no such immediately readable route-maps. Instead of a journey through the city, they throw you into the city itself, and life itself: you are expected to find your own way. And their structure and purpose may not be immediately apparent, being based on the tacit network of “loans, debts, repayments and foreclosures” that makes up human relationships. Nor do such novels move mechanically; they stray, they pause, they lollop, as life does; except with a greater purpose and hidden structure. A priest in [Fitzgerald’s] The Beginning of Spring, seeking to assert the legibility of God’s purpose in the world, says “There are no accidental meetings.” The same is true of the best fiction. Such novels are not difficult to read, since they are so filled with detail and incident and the movement of life, but they are sometimes difficult to work out. This is because the absentee author has the confidence to presume that the reader might be as subtle and intelligent as she is.

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Where It Was

April 25, 2008 by John 2 Comments

As I’ve mentioned, the events of the How It Was series of booklets took place in the real world as well as in the world of The Boy’s imagination (then and now). The real town where all this happened is in southern New Jersey, on the Delaware River and a few miles north of Philadelphia.

The Missus knows how tightly I cling to memories of that place and time and, accordingly, has set up on eBay some kind of early-warning system for herself, to let her know that something tagged with the town’s highly unusual (almost certainly unique) name has come on the market.

This past Christmas, she came up with some winners: a series of maps, dated 1876, and a couple of postcards. (That’s a thumbnail of one of the maps at the top of this post; click on it for the original as scanned, which will open in a new window or tab.) My friend Jimmy still lives in that area, and occasionally drops me a line to let me know of some item of interest. Recently, the local post office celebrated its 150th anniversary, and issued a series of commemorative postcards — reproductions of the originals; Jimmy sent me a few of them.

One of the things I’d like to do sometimes here at Running After My Hat is to try filling in some background on the town — not necessarily what it’s like now, or even how it really was… but at least how it was in The Boy’s latter-day memory. I’m going to start with this map — a larger-scale, annotated version of -which you can see “below the fold.”

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