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.

Close Reading "Molly's Body" draft

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 then 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 where “Case felt the blades move, very slightly, beneath her nails” (178). The other implant was the mirror shade glasses that allows her to see the dark, the time, and 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 also 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 before. 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. 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 be a stronger person. It extend her body into space differently than a non-altered body by giving her more protection and strength then what she 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 from anyone that gets in the way giving Case more confidence to not hide in bars or alleys and to just follow along and feel protected. Neuromancer shows the reader how technology could really affect one’s personality and changes in one’s actions like Molly. These alterations show a huge change in a world of reality and a world of technologically enhanced human beings.

Citations:

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

Close Reading and Mapping in General

Cindy Lee

Professor Frey

English 103

November 2, 2011

Close Reading and Mapping in General

Reading "Neuromancer" has made me realize the importance of close reading. I used close reading a lot on the science fiction book called "Neuromancer" because of the fact that the book was not understandable for me to read. This book was the first science fiction book that I have ever read which is why this book was very new for me to manage with. But even though this book was difficult to read and that I’m not really into science fiction, close reading and mapping helped a lot to get through the book without that much hectic confusion and hesitation.  

Mapping is important in science fiction because “mappings discover new worlds within past and present ones …” (Corner 214).  To me, mapping means something that already exists and I just need to search for it by asking people or looking for it online. But for mapping in science fiction, it means to find information that’s given in each chapters and creating the place with those clues. Mapping out the clues that the book has given us gives us further information on where the story is leading to and where we are at while on the journey with the characters. We map through the story for some clues by finding out the places in the story, knowing the characters in the story, understanding what the antagonist is after, what the area on a geographical map looks like, finding the ageographical areas in the story, researching the streets and alleyways mentioned in the story, etc. It’s not given to us that easily in the reading; it’s for us to figure out on our own. “Mapping engenders new and meaningful relationships amongst otherwise disparate parts. The resultant relational structure is not something already ‘out-there’, but rather something constructed, bodied forth through the act of mapping” (Corner 129). Mapping is an act of close reading by helping us understand the story by analyzing the clues and the definitions in the reading.

Close reading helps one to understand the plot of the story. Using close reading on the book gives us more ideas on what the story is about and what we need to know the general facts on what’s going on. Without close reading, one will get lost in a science fiction or a fictional book. It's like mapping but close reading is more of knowing the terms, knowing the context clues given, the story line of the book, and the way the characters play in the story. It helps us to write a summary of a story with more details and a better understanding of the story for the readers and the listeners. I probably read over each chapter more then two times to get a better understanding of the story. But that didn’t help out a lot. After the professor went over close reading, I read the book over again and took out words that I didn’t understand, looked them up on the Internet or a dictionary, and replaced those words with the ones that I know. I took out phrases from each chapter and asked myself what it could mean by combining them with other phrases that seemed close with the phrase. With this it helped me have a better understanding of the story.

It was hard to visualize what Chiba City looked like in “Neuromancer” while reading the book at home or on my way to somewhere in the subway. But in class, when the professor taught us about mapping out and close reading, I could finally start seeing what Chiba City looked like by close reading the characters on their behaviors and the way they are represented in the book, finding the areas that are mentioned geographically and ageographically, mapping out where the stores and buildings that Case or other characters has been to, characterizing the automobiles that the characters take, etc. “Long affiliated with the planning and design of cities, landscapes, and buildings, mapping is particularly instrumental in the construing and constructing of lived space” (Corner 10). This is exactly what I did with mapping out Chiba City.

Close reading and mapping out Science Fiction in general has its way in words, phrases, and sentences in the reading to map out what will happen next in the chapters, what we know now from it, and what we need to understand to solve it. The author would write a science fiction book knowing that he doesn't know what will happen next in the chapter and making it an open ended part for the readers to figure out on their own. With mapping and close reading, it will help us guide through the end and get a better understanding on where we are within the story.

Citations:

Corner, James. Mappings: the Agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique and Invention. Print.






THIS IS THE RIGHT ESSAY TO WRITE !!! 

For Wed: Finish Reading Neuromancer

Close Reading Respons: Due Wed, Nov. 3

In 1-2 pages, use close reading to discuss one of the following topics.  Your response should have a working claim that is generated based on your close reading. (Think of this response as the generating a set of observations and relationships that might be used to generate a map of Neuromancer.)

1.     Molly’s body as it moves through and creates space. Focus on the technological alterations of her body, and consider the way that these affect how she inhabits the various spaces of Neuromancer. How does it extend her body into space differently than a non-altered body?  How doe these alterations create a different mode of interacting with the world--a different “skin” through which to mediate sensory input and spatial relationships? Look at specific moments in the text that refer to Molly’s embodied experience of the world and analyze the text to support your reading.

2.     Case’s navigation of geographical and ageographical space: Consider how Case’s experience of the two spheres (physical, embodied space & the “non-space” of the matrix) inform each other. How is the physical world in which he exists as a body (“meat”) marked by the un-space of the matrix? And vice versa? In what way are they connected? Disconnected? Look at specific moments in the text that refer to Case’s embodied (or disembodied) experience of the world and analyze the test to support your reading.  

Guiding questions for Neuromancer

13. What does social life look like in Chiba City? How are relationships structured? Mediated?

The social life of Chiba City isn't that great. It's pretty scary and dark. The humans create themselves with technologies on their bodies. The people talk not with friendship but with dealership. If they work together or want something from each other there's aways a catch to it. Some are tricked into something like in Case's case, he was in the Matrix and he found out just when Linda came in into the picture. "Case lowered the gun. `This is the matrix. You're Winter-mute.'" Julie Dean = Wintermute (AI artificial intelligence). This is where we readers first get to see Case's internal vision. Rue Jules Verne (fake, hologram) talks about being rich and on vacation there.

Rue Jules Verne - being rich,feels like they're rich and on vacation there. Being tan and makeup and pretty. Computer generated place. "Case went out onto their balcony and watched a trio of tanned French teenagers ride simple hang gliders a few meters above the spray, triangles of nylon in bright primary colors. One of them swung, banked, and Case caught a flash of cropped dark hair, brown breasts, white teeth in a wide smile. The air here smelled of running water and flowers. `Yeah,' he said, `lotta money.'"

14. How does history function as an aspect of the city in Neuromancer? How is this related to the centrality of technology to the city?

History functions by the use of taxis, shops, casinos, bars, drug dealers, clinics, the development of new technology.

15. How alterations of the body fictionalized in Neuromancer provide insight into the everyday world of its inhabitants? What kinds of alterations are made? How does this affect the embodied habitation of the city? How does this affect the experience of the body as a map of self?

Molly's different alteration- her classes, her claws, meat puppet (a prostitute)

Free Write on Mapping

1. How can science fiction (or even fiction more generally) be understood as a kind of mapping project? What does it map?
2. In what way is mapping an act of close reading? Critique? Intervention? (e.g. mapping as an aid to reading, writing, critical thinking)


Science Fiction in general has its way in words, phrases, and sentences in the reading to map out what will happen next in the chapters, what we know now from it, and what we need to understand to solve it. It's kind of like being a detective. The author would write a science fiction book knowing that he doesn't know what will happen next in the chapter and making it an open ended part for the readers to figure out on their own. This is where the mapping comes in. We map through the story for some clues by finding out the places in the story, knowing the characters in the story, understanding what the antagonist is after, what the area on a geographical map looks like, finding the ageographical areas in the story, researching the streets and alleyways mentioned in the story, etc. With mapping, it will help us guide through the end and get a better understanding on where we are at.

Mapping is an act of close reading by helping us understand the story by analyzing the clues and the definitions in the reading.  Using close reading in the book gives us more ideas on what the story is about and what we need to know the general facts on whats going on. Without close reading, one will get lost in a science fiction or a fictional book. It's like mapping but close reading is more of knowing the terms, knowing the context clues given, and the way the characters play in the story. It helps us to write a summary of a story with more details and a better understanding of the story for the readers and the listeners.