Bound by rods to their machines, the crew of a five man bicycle hurtle across Europe and Asia in a grotesquely dehumanised race against an express train. The riders, who are paced by jet cars and flying machines, reach speeds of 300 kilometres an hour thanks to their diet of Perpetual Motion Food, a volatile mixture of alcohol and strychnine. One of the riders dies in the saddle, an event hardly noticed in the farcical pandemonium of technology in which the race ends after ten thousand miles. The race is a key episode in ‘The Supermale’, a French novel written in Paris in 1902, which speculates on how our minds and bodies may be overwhelmed by technology. The author, Alfred Jarry, was fascinated by bicycles, and they often appeared in his barbed and often shocking writings. He was also notorious for his wild eccentricity and his outrageously unconventional cycling. First, the scene needs to be set, since neither Jarry the writer nor Jarry the cycling subversive make much sense away from their context.

But the best paragraph goes like this:

Jarry soon became notorious. He took, for example, to riding around Paris with two revolvers tucked in his belt and a carbine across his shoulder. Some say that Jarry fired off a revolver to warn people of his approach. But it is known for certain that at one point he fixed a large bell from atramcar onto his bicycle. All the same, Jarry was an athletic, no-nonsense cyclist and enjoyed tearing around the countryside. He criticised those who “thinking themselves poets, slow down en route to contemplate the view”.

And, while you’re at it, be sure to read “The Crucifixion Considered as an Uphill Bicycle Race” by Alfred Jarry.  For the record, I stumbled upon Jarry through Hilo Hero’s new series of 12 “Bicycle Kick.”  Their post on Jarry is the first.

I had hoped that I would be offering something new to the field with my dissertation.  Apparently I was wrong.  Jefferson wrote in 1916, “But a rather extended investigation of cities and their relation to the land shows the essential unity of city and country” (page 6).  I’m doomed.  Of course Cronon didn’t really say anything new either: “Thanks to modern shipping a, city may now make distant lands its countryside” (also on page 6). So there is still hope.

And the push back against efforts to separate human and physical geography (where earlier he criticized the facile conclusions of many of the determinists).  Here’s Jefferson reconfiguring the equation of geography in his conclusion: “Geography is not to be regarded in its human aspects as the story of Earth and Man, but as the study of Man using and living on the Earth” (page 15).

Now that's a map of the American West

I get the sense throughout the talk that Jefferson is taking veiled shots at folks throughout the discipline, quietly destroying down theories before building his own.   It would have been interesting to get the mood of the crowd.  Alas, none of that carries over into the Annals.  Jefferson’s talk seems more contextual than others, like it fits within the debates of the time in more specific ways.  Or, perhaps I’m feeling acutely aware of my own ignorance of those debates. Unfortunately I’m having trouble getting through the Pres. addresses, I’m not able to really dig into all of the Annals articles these days.  Maybe next year.

Jefferson, Mark (1917). “Some Considerations on the Geographical Provinces of the United States.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers vol. 7 pp. 3-15.

Papa didn’t seem to hear.  He pulled a pulled a piece of white chalk from his pocket, stepped up to the canvas covered mattress, and began scowling at it as though he and the mattress were having an argument.  When the scowl deepened, I figured that the mattress must be winning.  Sighing every bit as theatrically as the McLoughlin High kid who’d recently played Hamlet in the worst play anybody in Camas, even Grandawma, had ever seen, Papa commenced to draw.  There wasn’t much to the drawing he did though. He just chalked up a rectangle maybe fifteen inches wide and three feet tall.  Didn’t even bother to get the sides straight.  I understood now that he was making a target at which to aim his pitches, and that he intended to paint it Dutch Boy white when he was done. What I didn’t understand was why this simple process had him looking as though it were taxing his brain to the limit.  Slapping a tape measure against his chalked in rectangle, he swore under his breath, grabbed a rag, furiously erased it, then chalked up another rectangle slightly shorter than the first. But after a few seconds he threw his tape at it, cursed, and erased this one too.  Then he spun on me and snapped, “it’s nonsense to paint a strike zone at all!”

Knowing it wasn’t safe to speak, let alone sulk, I snapped out of my slouch, grabbed a screwdriver, pried open the paint, found a stick and started stirring, striving all the while to look as innocuous as the Dutch Boy on the can.

“Why?” Pap demanded, “Why is a fixed strike zone nonsense?”

I was perfectly honest.  I shrugged.

“Think about it!” he huffed. “Say we make our rectangle about the size of a six-foot hitter.  This leaves out shorter and taller hitters, that’s an obvious defect.  But the deeper defect, the crucial defect is, where the hell is the strike zone on a six foot hitter?  Where is it on any hitter?”

I thought about it, as commanded, but was forced to shrug again.  But this time Papa cried, “Exactly” and whammed me happily on the back.

…

“The reason no one can say where the strike zone is,” he said with vehemence, “is that the actual strike zone has almost nothing to do with the width of the plate or the size of the hitter.  The real strike zone is located somewhere else entirely.  Isn’t it Kade? Isn’t it.”

Heck if I knew.  What I did know was that he’d begun to remind me of someone.  But before I could think who, he was proclaiming “Damn right it is!  The strike zone that matters, the only one we’ve got to work with really, is the one that’s locked up inside the skull of the plate ump.  And that, m’boy, is why it’s no rectangle, no well defined shape, no sort of plate wide knee high armpit low configuration at all.  A strike zone is a damned illusion is what it is Kade.  It’s a figment.  It’s a geometrical will-o’-the-wisp perched on a twig inside the umps law abiding little brain.”

The Brothers K by David James Duncan.  pages 125-126.  Still the best baseball novel I’ve ever read.

Lumitectura from barno on Vimeo.

I’m a sucker for this kind of stuff.

At some point it would probably be interesting to compare the AHA’s addresses to the AAG’s, or to start some sort of discussion about the 2.  Does anyone want to take responsibility for the AHAs? I’ll cover the AAG’s and we’ll discuss the differences between the 2 on a year by year basis?

Also, if you are interested, here is the visual part of the presentation.  If you are absurdly interested, send me a note and I’ll send you the written form of the paper to go along with the visuals.

ABOUT eleven o’clock, Lucille Henderson, observing that her party was soaring at the proper height, and just having been smiled at by Jack Delroy, forced herself to glance over in the direction of Edna Phillips, who since eight o’clock had been sitting in the big red chair, smoking cigarettes and yodeling hellos and wearing a very bright eye which young men were not bothering to catch. Edna’s direction still the same, Lucille Henderson sighed as heavily as her dress would allow, and then, knitting what there was of her brows, gazed about the room at the noisy young people she had invited to drink up her father’s scotch. Then abruptly, she swished to where William Jameson Junior sat, biting his fingernails and staring at a small blonde girl sitting on the floor with three young men from Rutgers.

Story XVI, March-April 1940, pages 26-36

They…brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks’ bells.  They willingly traded everything they owned… They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features… They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance.  They have no iron.  Their spears are made of cane… They would make fine servants… With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.

These Arawaks of the Bahama Islands were much like Indians on the mainland, who were remarkable (European observers were to say again and again) for their hospitality, their belief in sharing.  These traits did not stand out in the Europe of the Renaissance, dominated as it was by the religion of popes, the government of kings, the frenzy for money that marked Western civilization and its first messenger to the Americas, Christopher Columbus.”

-A People’s History of the United States

But, Dodge did give a talk and addressed some important issues concerning geographic education (incidentally, this is a topic that AAG presidents seem to hold close to their collective heart.  If they have hearts.  It is possible that they are robots.  Unlikely, but possible).  His complaints and solutions have become cliches.  If we want geography to be valued, we need to find places for it in the general curriculum, adopt new teaching technologies, explain better what it is we do and why it is important.  ”We lament the poor teaching of geography in high schools but do not aid in its betterment either by showing how to get the real spirit of geography into the formal work, or by paying heed to the tendencies of educational thought” (14).

The problem with geography and the public schools is that it is simultaneously everything and nothing.  Dodge argues that the history books being taught are essentially geography texts, yet we can’t get geography recognized.  Our expansiveness is our blessing and our curse.  We can choose to bury ourselves with it, or use it to dig.   I vote “dig,” and we can still find ways to play soccer between the trenches.