Maphead_ Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks - Ken Jennings [138]
† Or boys, for that matter, if the young map fan happens to be female and straight, or male and gay. I know of little work exploring the connections between cartophilia and sexual orientation, but the British travel writer Mike Parker says he has nearly a hundred members in his online discussion group for gay map buffs. The connection between maps and gender has been much more exhaustively studied, as we’ll see in chapter 7.
* The way your eye just wandered down to this footnote.
† Lewis, not surprisingly, was a map fan from a young age. According to his literary executor, Walter Hooper, Narnia itself was named after Narni, an Italian town that Lewis came across in a classical atlas when he was a boy.
‡ Four of the original U.K. hardcovers of The Chronicles of Narnia did contain excellent maps by Pauline Baynes, but they didn’t make it into the American editions. Baynes was recommended to Lewis as an illustrator by his friend J. R. R. Tolkien, who loved her drawings, but luckily she had some cartographic training as well, having drawn maps for the Ministry of Defence during World War II.
* This seemingly backward way of structuring a narrative is surprisingly common in fantasy fiction. Even Brandon has an unpublished “steampunk” manuscript sitting around someplace that was inspired by a map he’d drawn—in this case, a map of the United States with each of the fifty states reimagined as an individual island. The map-first ethos of fantasy novels is also reflected in the genre of fantasy role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons. At their simplest level, these games consist of one player drawing a map on a piece of graph paper and then everyone sitting down to find out together what adventures the map will inspire.
* Our world today is full of oddities that resulted from European surveyors never having visited the territories they mapped. Some are harmless quirks, like Baldwin Street in Dunedin, New Zealand. The world’s steepest street, it plunges into the Lindsay Creek valley at a precipitous 35 percent grade—the accidental result of a neat grid laid out by London city planners who had never set foot on the actual terrain. But other colonial relics are less amusing. The nice, straight borders of the new Middle East must have looked lovely on paper when Britain and France carved up the region after World War I, but in practice those somewhat arbitrary lines haven’t worked out so well over the last turbulent century.
* One of the great moments in cartographic history, which John Keats butchered in its most famous retelling. In his sonnet “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” Keats spends four lines crediting the discovery to “stout Cortez,” even though Hernán Cortés never even visited Panama.
* In fact, our word “paradise” has a perfectly dull, terrestrial etymology—it comes from the ancient Iranian word “apiri-daeza,” meaning a walled garden or estate. Heaven was more concrete then, less ethereal.
* There’s a confidence that comes from studying a subject so completely. When Caitlin was asked, in her second bee, which country is West Africa’s leading producer of bauxite, she didn’t even break a sweat, because she’d made a list of the natural resources of every single country in the world. (The answer is Guinea, but I’m sure you knew that.)
* I was expecting this, though. After seeing firsthand the obsessive study tactics of Caitlin Snaring, I proposed a geography contest: her and me, mano a mano, Jeopardy! megachamp versus high school sophomore. Despite not having studied geography for two years, Caitlin took me up on it. I gave her a list of the twenty toughest geography questions that I’d been asked on various TV shows, assuming I could give her a run for her money. She didn’t just beat me; she demolished me nineteen points to eight.
* The terrifying TV of my Reagan-era childhood was