“There are photographs in the book, but no maps, and in the prologue Borges writes, “Each and every man is a discoverer. He begins by discovering bitterness, saltiness, concavity, smoothness, harshness, the seven colors of the rainbow and the twenty-some letters of the alphabet; he goes on to visages, maps, animals and stars.” That strikes me as a curious order for discovering things. I’d have thought maps came well after animals and stars, though only a fool would argue with Borges.”
“The genre includes Unruly Spaces (2004) by Alastair Bonnett, subtitled “Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies””
“Tom Lutz’s And the Monkey Learned Nothing and Drinking Mare’s Milk on the Roof of the World”
“There’s also the recent Atlas Obscura (2016), “An Explorer’s Guide to the World’s Hidden Wonders””
“Travis Elborough. You might think he was a good man to have on such an expedition, being the author last year of A Walk in the Park: The Life and Times of a People’s Institution and now Atlas of Improbable Places: A Journey to the World’s Most Unusual Corners”
“Marc Augé’s Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (1995)”
““Grand Tourers were definitely fond of a ruin, hence the presence of Venice and Rome on their itineraries, but I too wonder about just how subversive it might be. It seems to me that just as the Romantics forged a new aesthetic of beauty in the wake of industrialization, we have worked out our own criteria of interest to meet the needs of a post-industrial, digital society.””
“Even I find myself dozing off when I hear the phrases ‘liminal’ or ‘edge lands’ these days … I am often left wondering about the ‘dead centers’ of cities, the bits that only tourists and increasingly only the very wealthy (and their poorly paid minions) really spend any time in.””
“That had me thinking of Borges again, specifically his one-paragraph story “On Exactitude in Science,” the one in which “the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it,” which of course is a variation on an idea found in Lewis Carroll’s “Sylvie and Bruno Concluded.””
“Lutz is indeed a man of the library, in fact a man with an urge to visit every country on Earth, and (just as important) write about them. Here he writes,
People who saw me looking at my map came up to help. As far as I could tell, none of them knew how to read a map. They studied mine, sometimes turning it over or sideways, never able to say where we were. But they went through the motions of being helpful very cheerfully, finally made a guess, and bowing, invariably pointed in the wrong direction.”
“There is quite a skill, it seems to me, whether you have a map or not, whether you know how to read it or not, in remaining cheerful even when you’re completely lost, and that may be the best way to end up in some improbable places.”