Moving across landscapes (and one ocean)
At Tesugen, Peter Lindberg takes a close look at Bruce Chatwin’s beautiful novel*, The Songlines. One of my favourite exchanges is this:
Certain phrases, certain combinations of musical notes, are thought to describe the action of the Ancestor’s feet. Once phrase would say, ’salt-pan’; another ‘creek-bed’, ’spinifex,’ ’sandhill,’ ‘mulga scrub,’ ‘rockface’ and so forth. An expert songman, by listening to their order of succession, would count how many times his hero crossed a river, or scaled a ridge–and be able to calculate where, and how far along a songline he was.
“So a musical phrase,” I said, “is a map reference?”
“Music,” said Arkady, “is a memory bank for finding ones’ way about the world.”
Hear hear!
Other good bits about moving across landscapes:
Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Gilroy describes “black identity in Europe and the New World as an ongoing process of travel and exchange across the Atlantic that tried to understand its position in relation to European modernity.” He asks what moved - what people, what objects, what ideas - across the Atlantic, and how they changed along the way.
Urban Editing - Cinematic Architecture in Temple Bar, and especially industrial fatigue
Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century. “Delving into urban planning, psychology, architecture, and economics, as well as the history of technology, Schivelbusch paints a revealing portrait of the role of the railroad in shaping the 19th-century mind.” It’s also about what and who moved across landscapes - but this time on trains.
Mobile Cultures (pdf) by John Urry
Mobility, Information and Social Networks by John Urry and Robert Cooper
abstracts
* (edited 2 June 04) Unlike Calvino with his ‘Invisible Cities,’ Chatwin presents his story as if it were anthropological fact. But I think, quite simply, we tell stories - and we always tell stories from particular perspectives. I also think most people would refer to ‘The Songlines’ as travel-writing, which is considered highly subjective non-fiction. Australian Aboriginees have repeatedly complained that Chatwin didn’t actually spend much time with them, and the stories he shares were not actual conversations. This isn’t the first time that writers - or anthropologists - have blurred the line between fiction and ethnography. Carlos Castenada became (in)famous for making it all up. And certainly, it doesn’t render their work useless or uninteresting or ugly. But it does change it - and what we can do with it.