The Cartography of Childhood

In his essay "Manhood for Amateurs: The Wilderness of Childhood," Michael Chabon writes about the importance of childhood adventures while growing up. Adventure is being allowed to explore the world to its limits. It means playing in neighbors' yards and vacant lots, riding your bike to visit classmates in their houses across town and knowing what flavor popsicle their mothers serve. These adventures, according to Chabon, provide a child with mental maps of their worlds which they can endlessly revise and refine. "Childhood is a branch of cartography," he says. And childhood is the first and ultimate adventure:

That's because every story of adventure is in part the story of a landscape, of the interrelationship between human beings (or Hobbits, as the case may be) and topography. Every adventure story is conceivable only with reference to the particular set of geographical features that in each case sets the course, literally, of the tale. But I think there is another, deeper reason for the reliable presence of maps in the pages, or on the endpapers, of an adventure story, whether that story is imaginatively or factually true. We have this idea of armchair traveling, of the reader who seeks in the pages of a ripping yarn or a memoir of polar exploration the kind of heroism and danger, in unknown, half-legendary lands, that he or she could never hope to find in life.

This is a mistaken notion, in my view. People read stories of adventure—and write them—because they have themselves been adventurers. Childhood is, or has been, or ought to be, the great original adventure, a tale of privation, courage, constant vigilance, danger, and sometimes calamity. For the most part the young adventurer sets forth equipped only with the fragmentary map—marked here there be tygers and mean kid with air rifle—that he or she has been able to construct out of a patchwork of personal misfortune, bedtime reading, and the accumulated local lore of the neighborhood children.

But in the years since Chabon's growing up years, children have been increasingly forbidden to explore even the very street they live in. Many barriers were put up against adventures: Wear a helmet when riding a bike, don't ride to where your parent can't see you. Don't ride that bike or you break all your bones. The world has become too dangerous for adventuring.

In his essay "Coming of age in the years of living dangerously," Bill Briggs also looks back on this time of childhood daredeviltry with nostalgia. Kids growing up in the '50s, '60s and '70s inhaled second hand smoke from their chainsmoking parents, ate wildberries, were allowed to roam the fields and strange streets without fear. Kids were allowed to live. But now that adventuring--and effectively, living--has been outlawed in favor of a safe and monitored environment, a 47-year-old mortgage broker asks: "Who would have thought 30 years ago that it would be necessary to run public service announcements encouraging parents to get their kids outside playing?”

Choose Your Own Ong

The Institute of Creative Writing Panayam Series hosts Charlson Ong's lecture this afternoon, 2.30 PM at the Claro M. Recto Hall in Bulwagang Rizal, UP Diliman. If you're free, please go. It'll be quite interesting to see what he has to say about novel writing, Facebook, and whether he can beat Bob Ong in a karaoke match.

Harry, Neo, Kirk and Luke: Different Hero, Same Story

In class last week, we were talking about how Harry Potter, Star Wars, Star Trek and even The Matrix are actually the same movie. The journey is the same, or as Brandon Root in Spiteful Critic put it:

Once upon a time, Luke | Kirk | Neo | Harry was living a miserable life. Feeling disconnected from his friends and family, he dreams about how his life could be different. One day, he is greeted by Obi Wan | Captain Pike | Trinity | Hagrid and told that his life is not what it seems, and that due to some circumstances surrounding his birth | birth | birth | infancy he was meant for something greater.

It's not that writers and directors of the last 40 years have not had a single fresh idea since the birth of the summer blockbuster; the similarities of the heroes' journeys, as Kottke.org pointed out, have to do with the persistence of Joseph Campbell's Monomyth.

To illustrate, here's Say No to Crack's point-by-point play of how Harry Potter and Star Wars are really just the same story:



Another interesting read, James Parker's Atlantic Online essay "Sex and the Single Wizard," on how Rowling really doesn't have any idea how to deal with the awakening of adolescent sexuality.

On a side note, I'm a bit pissed that I have acquired "premiere" tickets to HP6 on July 17th, as I learned belatedly, a day after the movie officially opens. At Php225 a pop, I feel like I've been ripped off. I bite my thumb at you, UP Stat Soc.

Facebook: The Movie

Carson Reeves of Script Shadow gives us a glimpse of an Aaron Sorkin penned script about the kids who started social networking Facebook. The premise: "A look at the rise of Facebook and the effect it's had on its founders." It is also described as "an epic story that would capture the drama of late-night status updates, the power of the poke, who and who not to limit profile access to, and of course, the all important and always necessary "delete friend" feature. Okay, well, maybe it wouldn't be about those things per se. But it would be about computers and software and code and snobby rich kids."

It has to do with a kid who gets commissioned by a pair of rich brothers on the rowing team who want a website that's sort of like MySpace, but cooler. The kid teams up with a friend, works on the project and then comes up with something else as a dorm room experiment, TheFacebook. The friends will part ways later with the entrance of another web figure, Sean Parker, founder of Napster and the "informal adviser" who told Mark Zuckerberg to drop the "The" in TheFacebook.

Reeves insists that the Sorkin script is "a story about two friends - one a computer genius, the other a business expert - who began a website that became the fastest growing phenomenon in internet history. Three years later, one was suing the other for 600 million dollars (or 1/30th of Mark Zuckerberg's worth). It's a story about greed, about obsession, about our belief that all the money in the world can make us happy. But it's also unpredictable, funny, touching, and sad. It gives us that rare glimpse into the improbable world of mega-success."

So in the end, the kid who earned a bajillion dollars creating a web tool that connects people is ultimately disconnected with his friends and the rest of the world.

So who's throwing in the money to make "The Social Experiment" possible? Sony and producer Scott Rudin are supposedly attached on the project slated for release in 2011. Plus David Fincher is tagged as potential director. I loved most of the things that Fincher directed (Fight Club, Se7en, esp Zodiac) with the exception of Benjamin Button. If this turns out to be a good movie, then everything will be forgiven.

Judging the Book by its Author Photo

Melanie Marquez had it wrong: Don't judge my brother, he's not a book. But what if the brother is an author whose photo appears on the dust jacket? Then he probably needs a good author photo. What's an author photo for? David Adams weighs in:

To a large degree, they satisfy the vanity of the writer; those small peephole portraits are a way for them to claim ownership, to make their long struggle at the keyboard valid (they also provide a good ID when writing a check at the bookstore). Photos are a publicity tool, of course. Something for publishers to enlarge to poster size -- depending on the author's degree of beauty -- when promoting book signings at the local bookstore (a process that would have hindered, not helped, George Eliot back in the day).

Marion Ettlinger has been taking gorgeous black and white photographs of writers since 1983, some of which were compiled into a book. My favorite is Raymond Carver's:



I have the same reaction as David Adams' when I first saw that photo of Carver's staring at me from the cover of Where I'm Calling From: "He's seated at a table, one arm slung over his chair, the other on the table, forming an L, one-half of a frame which immediately takes you up to his face. His eyes are like cigarettes burning holes in your brain. Carver stares directly at the camera --through the camera -- as if to say, 'Sit down and let me tell you a story. It may not be pretty, but it will be real.'"

But it helps to be real *and* pretty. Like this one:



where Jhumpa Lahiri is just smouldering at you from the back of cover of Interpreter of Maladies. A student of mine saw the photo and said, Wow, I didn't know Jhumpa Lahiri is hot.

If hot is impossible, then perhaps take a few serviceable ones that don't obscure your face, like this:



That's just one way to take a bad author photo. Salt Publishing offers nine other ways, none of them flattering and would never help you sell any books.

Dial up my asterisk

Transient Ink educates us in typography and tart cards, a British term referring to the small advertisement cards that prostitutes leave in phone booths to garner more attention for their services. Or to put it simply: If your typeface were a prostitute, what would her card look like?

Wallpaper.com asked designers from all kinds of backgrounds to create these cards for their favorite fonts. The results range from subtle and coy



to kitschy, like this one by Emma Thorpe reminds me of some t-shirts that teenage boys wear, sometimes with bunnies



and on to the really risque, like the one below: