Freewrite

What aspects of the city/urban environment does style wars map? What does graffiti make visible that a traditional map does not?

-layer of subway
-mobile canvas
-more than aesthetic
-law/city admin ... writer/artists
-tension youth
-express their feelings through art
-graffiti, break dancing, rap
-"all city"- names
-writing on the city- illicit -marginated groups/culture
-marking their territory

Key Concepts of Michel de Certeau (Walking in the City)

about: mapping the city through walking

-Optical Knowledge: Looking from the skyscraper of the World Trade Center "agitation is momentarily arrested" (157) : stopped before the eyes
-Voyeur: connected to the objects of seeing, see's the city from above then coming at it from experience or plan, not being a part of the experience down below "His elevation transfigures him into a voyeur. It puts him at a distance. It transforms the bewitching world by which one was 'possessed' into a text that likes before one's eyes. It allows one to read it to be a solar Eye, looking down like a god." (157). Viewpoint that no one has.
-Walker: "The ordinary practioners of the city live 'down below' below the thresholds at which visibility begins. They walk-an elementary form of this experience of the city; their are walkers, Wandersmanner, whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban 'text' they write without being able to read it. These practioners make use of spaces that cannot be seen." (158). They're using space, inhabit space, making distinctions down below, knowledge they don't have to think about, experience through body and not through eyes, there's connection between wanderers and walkers, movement define city. "geometrical or geographical space" (158): planned and built part of the city, being watched every time or not being watched but feel disciplined, geometrical- planning according to geometry.
-migration: refers to mobility
-citizens to use the city productively, and not only passively
-Practices: "Beneath the discourses that ideologies the city, the ruses and combinations of powers that have no readable identity proliferate" ... "concept city is decaying" (160): everyday practices, not exceptional
-idol footsteps: not productive, not contributing to the cities system, walking that has no set roots
-maps are problematic but walking uses space to Certeau

Style (161)
Rhetorics of Walking (161)
Fiction of Knowledge (157)
Waste Products (159)
Optical Knowledge (158)
Legibility (161)
Spatialized (161)
Threshold (158)
Accepted Frame Work (163)
Imposed Order (163)
Agglomeration (158)
Voyeur (157)
Walker
Concept City
Urban Practices
Migrational, Metaphorical City (158)

Fun Home review in class
-fun home vs everyday: domestic space, urban space, our everyday psychology
-dominant point of reference to the understanding of the author: relationship with her father and the understanding of him
-Fun Home references: funeral home (ironic), own home- gothic revival, NYC, grandmother's place, thinking its like a circus

Topic Proposal

Cindy Lee

English 103

Professor Frey

12/5/11

Topic Proposal

Mon Dec 5:  Topic Proposal.

By no later than Mon in class, you should submit digital and hard copy of your topic proposal. Your topic proposal should include your proposed site, the critical question(s) that are guiding your project, the key concepts from Corner you will use, a tentative outline or abstract, and a bibliography.  Your proposal should answer the following questions:

·       What territory/text did you choose to map/analyze?

·       What specific aspects of the everyday do you intend to map & how?

·       What 4 or more concepts from your Corner will you use and how?

·       What critical questions will you attempt to answer in your project?

·       What interrelationships do you intend to chart and what will that look like? What format will your essay/map take?

·       What kind of research will you need to do develop your map further? Will you be looking for background info on your site? E.g. history, images, literature, films, etc.

1.)  My beginning quote: “For the landscape architect and urban planner, maps are sites for the imaging and projecting of alternative worlds. Thus maps are in-between the virtual and the real” (The Agency of Mapping pg. 225). Mapping behind the mind of a child who went through a though time.

2.)  Mapping an angel named Briana Keefe. –her life (her past), feeling (her going through cancer), action (the medical part) until the end of her life.

3.)  – the visual of mapping

- hidden forces of mapping (214)

- finding the map and connections to the map (225) map isn’t a map (225)

- gathering, working, reworking, ……….. of mapping (228)

4.)  Is this the map Briana Keefe went through in her short life?

5.)  I will map my time with her with the feelings she felt while we were together listening to her feelings.

6.)  My memory of her, my recordings of her, past pictures that I took and her parents took, informations from her parents, feelings that I never thought of but she did … etc. 

Guiding Questions to Robert Smithson

1. What are monuments? How do they work to define a city? Based on the essay, "A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey," how does Smithson re-conceptualize monuments and their function?

When I think of the term 'monument' the first thing that comes to mind is historical buildings that are created to be reminded of such as the Eiffel Tower, the Statue of Liberty, Time Square, etc. In wikipedia, 'monument' is defined as "a type of structure either explicitly created to commemorate a person or important event or which has become important to a social group as a part of their remembrance of historic times or cultural heritage, or simply as an example of historic architecture." A monument could be architectural buildings, sculptures, tombs, tools, ruins, etc.
But in Smithson's term of monuments, they are ideas that represents the importance of the surrounding of the monuments. They're not monuments of big buildings or something that everyone in the world knows such as Paris' Eiffel Tower, they are small monuments that he discovered while traveling around Passaic, New Jersey. Bridges, sand box (model desert), parking lots, pipes is what he defines monuments as because they have had a great impact to the city or the land surrounding it. On page 70, Smithson describes the monument of the bridge that connects the Bergen county with the Passaic County as "photographing a photograph" like as if he's "walking on an enormous photograph that was made of wood and steel, and underneath the river existed photograph that was made of wood and steel, and underneath the river existed as an enormous movie film that showed northing but a continuous blank." These unknown monuments can be described in such details and images even though they are just junks or small tools laying around the area which has been there for years. They work to define a city by telling a story to the area. Even though the area might not be special to others outside of the area, it has histories to those that marked the place which creates ideas to the city. It creates more to the surrounding area of the monument which develops more to the city.

Question 1: Can monuments be replaced but be the same monument? (pg. 74 2nd paragraph)

Question 2: Is it still a monument if the surrounding area changes around the monument?

"Colossus" Response

"'City Limits' The Colossus of New York: A City in Thirteen Parts", by Colson Whitehead, is about how New York City is broken up into parts that creates it into a city such as the subway, walking around in NYC, and leaving memory tracks on the Brooklyn Bridge. 
A sentence that caught me while reading this essay was when he said, "Maybe we become New Yorkers the day we realize that New York will go on without us. To put off the inevitable, we try to fix the city in place, remember it as it was, doing to the city what we would never allow to be done to ourselves" (9-10). This tells me that wherever we are at or wherever we lived and leave to, we are still a part of New York no matter how many times anything changes. When we change, New York will still be New York and it will not change. They might create a new building, a shop, or an apartment near or on the place that was not any of those, it is still New York. Whitehead mentioned that our marks (of being there, walking pass there, living there, etc) at a certain spot of New York City might not be visibly there but a memory that will always last there forever. The place you used to take small coffee breaks at might now be a salon store or the restaurant that you used to eat a lot at is now a new building being created for a huge company. New York City is a memory lane for those that walked or passed (by taxi, subway, car, etc) through it today, days ago, months ago, or years ago. 
In New York City, we won't know who we encounter or when we will encounter someone we know or might not know. Maybe someone you might meet today might've been your next door neighbor years ago. Maybe you'll encounter a friend on the subway randomly without even planning it. Whitehead mentioned in the essay about the relationship through people. Like on the subway, someone that's either crippled, pregnant, or old need a seat to rest on. Some people might be kind enough to move out of the seat and allow them to sit in their spot. Others might just ignore them and just sit there until they get off their destination. Whitehead also talks about other encounters on the subway: people that smells, someone finding the other sex attractive, ones that looks suspicious, etc. These people helps create the subway to become part of the city. 
Everything that Whitehead talks about is him telling us what creates a city. The goods and bads of NY creates a city. The people creates the city. A memory creates a city. Walking on a famous path or a random path creates a city. 

Proposal for mapping

For Monday, write a proposal for an imaginative map of Neuromancer that uses "The Agency of Mapping" as a tool for mapping its ageographical and geographical space. Draw on "The Agency of Mapping," the essay by Gibson on "Meta-Cities" as well as previous blog posts.

Mapping Neuromancer consists of both geographical and ageographical spaces. Without mapping out Neuromancer, the readers would probably have a hard time understanding the layout of it. Geographically the map would include the layout of where the streets and the location of a place would be at. Such as riding a subway, the layout would be set up with street names, dots, and specific train colors on the map (knowing what train to get on by asking someone what color train gets to ones destination). Also when looking at a map in general, there would be lines and path on how long it will take to get you there. There are also transportation, buildings, and people that could help map out geographically of Neuromancer.
Ageographically there would be the Matrix. The Matrix would include technology and power to go into a different world. Going into a different changes the mapping in a different way. It includes new areas, new names of streets, people, buildings, etc. There would be unexpected (unrealistic) use of technology to transport one to places or maybe technologies implanted on humans like the train station that travels far out into space or transportation of body. There would also be the ROM, the hologram, and other use of technologies in Neuromancer that would ageographically map out the layout of the book.

quote: pg 228: "A particularly important aspect of mapping in the regard is the acknowledgement of the maker's own participation and engagement with the cartographic process."

Mapping essay

1. What is this essay about?
2. How could it be used to help us "map the urban space" of Neuromancer?
3. Locate a specific quote, paragraph or section that could be used to help you map that space. 
4. In groups, present the general argument of that section, and discuss how it would be used in a proposal for a map of Neuromancer's urban space. 

1.  This essay is about the definition of mapping, the history of mapping, the use of mapping, the changes of mapping, the architect of mapping, the positive and negative facts about mapping, the science of mapping, the philosophy of mapping, quotes from famous mappers of mapping, and the time and space of mapping. 

2. It helps the reader to understand what the city of Neuromancer looks like. It gives specific details in where we are heading and entering in the space and time of Neuromancer. But the new details and the changes in the city, places, and rides describes the addition of mapping to Case and Molly. 

3. "The experiences of space cannot be separated from the events that happen in it; space is situated, contingent and differentiated. It is remade continuously every time it is encountered by different people, every time it is represented through another medium, every time its surroundings change, every time new affiliations are forged. Thus, as David harvey has argued, planners and architects have been barking up the wrong tree in believing that new spatial structures alone would yield new patterns of socialization. The struggle for designers and planners Harvey insists, lies not with spatial form and aesthetic appearances alone (the city as a thing) but with the advancement of more liberation processes and interactions in time (urbanization)" (227). 

 

classmates: 

1. -summary of the whole thing and the analysis of it

-books and films are part of a cultural understanding of space; all these layers to see the world (214)

-maps can change, not necessarily permanent "Thus, mapping unfolds potential ... and diverse consequences" (10)

-mental imaginative images of space

-mapping agency: power, controlling, delineating border, cultural project in imagination and images and stories, emancipate= to free

citations: 

-book: you italicize 

-essay: you quote

Close Reading: Molly's Body (Revised)

Cindy Lee

Professor Frey

English 103

November 2, 2011

Close Reading: Molly’s Body

Molly -one of the main characters of the science fiction novel, Neuromancer, written by William Gibson- is an attractive, physically strong, mysterious woman who becomes a help to Case (the main character of this novel). She is a strong woman whose interaction with space is stronger than what the outside activity can do to her. She moves through and creates space the way she wants and can exclude those that gets in the way. This is due to her confidence in her strengths. The novel describes Molly as “Her body language was disorienting, her style foreign.  She seemed continually on the verge of colliding with someone, but people melted out of her way, stepped sideways, made room” (55). This tells the reader that Molly wants to connect with someone but because of her personality or her aura, the people surrounding her gives her space; she has a feel or a look that gets the people around her to suspect and move aside from her. Molly expects to be respected from people she interacts with by her attractive looks and strong personality; that is why she walks through her path confidently knowing that those that are in the way won’t cross her. But Molly allows Case to share her space or be her other eye seeker so he could see the world in what Molly sees. Case wanted to take over Molly’s body to go into depth to see the space around her and “For a few frightened seconds he fought helplessly to control her body. Then he willed himself into passivity, became the passenger behind her eyes” (55). With her strong presence, Case cannot connect to her body.

Molly started out in the novel as a girl who wore black leather clothes with some technologies implanted on her. One of the implant was the razor sharp blades that comes out from her own free will. We find out that there are sharp blades sliding out of her nails because “Case felt the blades move, very slightly, beneath her nails” (178). The other implant was the mirror shade glasses that allows her to see in the dark, know the time, and map the world. Case meets Molly for the first time and “he realized that the glasses were surgically inset, sealing her sockets. The silver lenses seemed to grow from smooth pale skin above her cheekbones, framed by dark hair cut in a rough shag. The fingers curled around the fletcher were slender, white, tipped with polished burgundy. The nails looked artificial” (25). 

The technological alteration in her body changed Molly as it was written in Chapter 11. In Chapter 11, Case finds out that Molly was a former cyber prostitute. Instead of being the one in control like she is now, she was controlled by others and lived the life that she didn’t want.  She doesn’t want to go back and remember her past but she started to remember each one bits by bits. This is where technology fails for Molly. She technologically enhanced herself with these alterations to survive from her past and create a new life. She altered her body to forget her past and not to be brought up about being a prostitute again. She enhanced herself with razor sharp blades on her nails to be protected from those that gets in her way. If someone were to attack her or to bother her, she could kill that person in one kill with her sharp nail blades without hesitation. She enhanced herself with glasses so that she won’t be able to cry with tears flowing down from her eyes. When she cries, she swallows her tears instead and splits it out. The glasses also make the person that’s looking into her eyes confused and not able to read her or know how she’s feeling. Because of these technologies implanted on her body, she has the confidence to control herself and become a stronger person. It extended her body into space differently than a non-altered body by giving her more protection and freedom than what she was as a prostitute.

Molly inhabits the various spaces in Neuromancer by helping to map out Chiba City with Case. With her strong presence and her technological body parts, she’s able to create her own map and help Case map out Neuromancer. She’s able to protect herself and Case from anyone that gets in the way by giving Case more confidence to not hide in bars or alleys anymore. He didn’t have the guts to find his way through Chiba City but with Molly by his side, he’s able to map out faster than what he could expect from himself. Neuromancer shows the reader how technology could really affect one’s personality and changes in one’s actions like Molly. These alterations bring a huge change in a world of reality verse a world of technologically enhanced human beings.

Citations:

 Gibson, William (1994). Neuromancer. New York: Ace Books.