Well, thanks, Shannon, Frances.
It's great to be back.
I've been back in Tucson since 1985.
I actually left Tucson in 1986, but I've been back a few times.
But it's been a while, so it's good to be here.
And it's great to have the chance to talk here
in the beautiful building.
I am a contributor to the new Poetry Center.
I believe I paid for somebody's stapler, I think,
is what I contributed.
But it's a remarkable place.
I'm proud to have at least sent in one check
to do my little bit.
And happily a few other people were more generous
apparently because it's an amazing place.
And we only wish there were more of them.
Obviously, the Poetry Center was here when I was a student.
When I was an undergrad at a place called Washington College
on the eastern shore of Maryland,
there was something called Richmond House, which
was the Literary House there.
And it's actually where AWP was housed for either one or two
years.
When I got there, it went away.
Most buildings was given to writers.
It was bulldozed.
It had been condemned.
And it was unsafe to live in, but they
let the writers live in there for two more years.
And then they finally bulldozed it.
And I'm happy to see that the Poetry Center is
going the other way and improved tremendously than what it had.
A couple of things about what I'm going to do.
I'm delighted and a little worried about the fact
that this was underwritten in part by the Geography
Department and in part by the great folks that you are here.
I need to say this.
Even though I've written the book, Maps of the Imagination,
I know nothing about cartography or geography.
In fact, I've never taken a class
in geography, which I regret, along with so many things.
But I regret that.
What I do have is kind of an amateur's interest
in these things.
And that actually led me to discover,
among other things when I was here,
the Mapping the Transmississippi West
by Carl Wheat I think it is.
Right [INAUDIBLE] Does somebody here know?
I think it was--
I assume it's still-- nobody would have walked out with it.
It's an enormous book.
It was down in special collections here.
And I remember spending time with it
as a grad student and just kind of poking my nose around maps
for the longest time.
And then at Warren Wilson, the program that I direct now
at the graduate, program I direct,
it's a low residency program.
The faculty and students only come to campus 10 days
at the beginning of the semester.
And there's this strange tradition
of giving talks, giving lectures about craft
among the fiction writers in particular, oddly enough, that
have some metaphorical basis.
And so our friend Charlie Baxter has
written about talking forks, which
is about the role of objects in fiction.
Michael Martone did a terrific lecture on camouflage,
actually talking about military camouflage among other things.
But what he was interested is the way
things can be made to appear or disappear in a story
depending on how they're treated.
For instance, you've been to the airport
and seen somebody in army fatigues who is not
camouflaged in the airport.
Nobody stands out more than the guy
walking through the airport in camouflage.
Right.
Camouflage has everything to do with context and what
you're trying to disguise for what reasons.
Anyway, so when it was my turn, I somehow--
I decided to run with this interest I
had in maps and a few books I had
read, in particular a book by a fellow named
Denis Wood called The Power of Maps that inspired me.
Because it was clearly the work of a passionate eccentric.
A strange guy, very much fired up
about ideas I'd never heard before.
And it seemed to me that one could
adapt these to the kinds of things writers
consider all the time.
When I finally met Denis Wood after the book was done,
I realized that it made perfect sense because he
had an English background.
He, in fact, had transferred ideas
into cartography and geography.
So I guess there's a natural conversation that
goes on with these things.
What I'm going to talk about tonight
is rigorous geometry business.
And I appreciate all of you who showed up,
who might be worried about the math angle of this.
But there will be no quiz, and you
don't have to really know anything about geometry.
I'm going to tackle--
I don't usually discuss this part of the book
with people for reasons you may understand in a few minutes.
But when I first turned in the book
when I was at the University of Georgia Press,
it went out to several readers who
were passing their opinion on it and telling the press
whether they should publish it.
I got these anonymously, but the first person was clearly either
my mother or my aunt or somebody [INAUDIBLE] person--
I loved it.
Everything was wonderful.
And I was feeling pretty good about it.
And then the next one was pretty glowing as well.
And then they said, well, we just need the third one.
And then we'll go ahead and get this started.
And the third one came in.
And this guy said, well, not bad.
He said, but when we get to this chapter called "A Rigorous
Geometry," said the whole thing falls apart.
He said, first of all, the geometry
has nothing to do with maps.
And he said, so it doesn't belong in the same book.
And second of all, he essentially
said-- but he took a page to say that he didn't
know what I was talking about.
And so my first--
I went through the-- what-- seven stages.
Anger, grief, denial, all that.
And then, finally I just realized
that I needed to rewrite it first to prove that, of course,
geometry does have something to do with maps
or vice versa, but more importantly
to try to demonstrate why this consideration of what I'm
calling the geometry that underlies fiction
was particularly important to me and to this discussion I
was trying to make in the book.
So I'm going to give it a whirl here.
I'm going to give some pieces of that here,
and we'll see what you think of it by the time we're through.
And there won't be a lot of geography in it.
I'm afraid although.
We'll have a couple of quick references.
I do want to show you one thing.
Here's the motivation for the chapter.
The motivation for the chapter is this.
When I was here as a student in the graduate program-- maybe
it's all changed now.
You, guys, can tell me later-- but the majority of the fiction
students were writing in the realistic tradition,
the great majority.
There are few people doing funkier stuff.
David Wallace came and he overlapped
with me and some of the other people
who were working in the age old tradition.
And obviously, David was shaking things up even then.
But most people were working in the realistic tradition.
And I was interested in all kinds of things even then
and taking various lit courses.
And I was surprised then that there
were people who were writing in that mode who really didn't
want to read Barth and Kundera, and Calvino,
and some of the other folks I'll talk
a little bit about tonight.
And, now, even though I've directed this program
in North Carolina for 15 years and we get wonderful students,
we still get more writers working
in the realistic vein in fiction than in anything else.
And we get relatively few kind of--
whatever they want to call themselves
as post-modernist or experimental writers, whatever.
And that's fine.
But what always worries me is when the realistic writers say
they don't want to read this work that to them seems false.
It doesn't do what they think fiction should do.
And when people are interested in experimentation,
aren't willing to look at Chekhov
to see what he was up to and, where, what they're doing
came from--
so that's what this is about.
It's about realism.
It's about work that isn't realistic.
And it's about how the two talk to each other in some ways.
Yeah, thanks.
Somebody said the United States, which is the correct answer,
or a correct answer.
How do you know?
Shape.
Yeah, correct.
We know about the shape.
Correct.
But have you ever seen this?
I don't mean to see the map.
I mean, have you ever seen this thing depicted?
No.
Yeah.
Yeah?
Yeah, you climbed a mountain and turn around and seen this?
No.
No?
Google Earth.
That's that Google Earth.
God love Google Earth.
A variation on this.
Has anybody ever gone far enough away to see this thing?
Some people?
Astronaut.
Astronauts.
So usually somebody-- thank you.
So usually somebody says an astronaut.
And we'd said, OK, but-- and then
we start in with the facts.
For instance, this portrayal of the United States
is surrounded by blackness, which is a little odd.
And so [INAUDIBLE] context certainly.
But even if we just look at the depiction of the 48 states
themselves, clearly this map is color coded, right?
It happens to be color coded for rainfall, right?
It's color coded.
If you could see a little better, if this were a better
scan, you'd be able to see there are city names
and other demarcations on it.
There are no clouds, right?
In almost any given time, there's
going to be a cloud somewhere over the United States,
but those have been erased so that we
can see the whole country.
Canada and Mexico--
Canada-- sorry.
Mexico are, as we said, missing.
The oceans are missing.
So it starts to make what's defining this map.
And then, of course, what else is missing?
[INAUDIBLE]
Hawaii and--
Yeah, Hawaii and Alaska.
Why are they not here do you think?
[INAUDIBLE]
Yeah, they don't fit.
It's an alarming reason to be left off a map,
don't you think?
Sorry.
Yeah, too far away.
For millions of people, this is a little bit annoying,
more than a little bit annoying.
You're not on the map because it would
be a very big piece of paper, and most of it would be blank.
And so either most mapmakers deal with this
by having a little insets of Alaska and Hawaii.
Usually to a different scale, right?
Because Alaska's huge.
Or as Raven, the company that made this map,
they have to make separate maps of Alaska and Hawaii.
And so this is just the continuous 48.
What interests me about this image,
though, is that-- and there are many maps just like this.
We can all look at it.
We all know what it is, and we all
might be tempted to say, oh, yeah.
That's a roughly accurate map.
That's a realistic map.
That seems to be a scientific map of the United States.
But this thing that we're looking at
doesn't exist, right?
It's not flat.
There's nothing in this context.
There's nothing with this writing on it.
There's nothing that's color coded like this.
This thing that we're looking at is an idealized representation
of something that does exist, right?
But we tend to think of this as a kind of objective portrayal
in some way.
It's a dangerous way to think about maps
but also a different way to think about fiction writing.
If we're trying to use a map, if you're
trying to get from the rental car
counter to your hotel in Tucson, or Phoenix, or anywhere else,
you don't need to think about any of that.
You just have to hope the roads are right.
You know you can find your way from where you
started to where you're going.
But if you're trying to make a map,
you need to think about all those things.
You need to think, are we going to color code it?
Why?
Why do we even know about rainfall
for this particular map?
What is this map about?
What story does this map tell?
Do we need cities name?
If so, which ones?
Do you do it by population?
Do you do it by your favorite cities?
I have maps.
There's no end it.
But there are maps online.
I found one that says, Our Trip.
And it has-- obviously, a family made a trip across the West.
And there are certain towns named,
and you figure that must've been where they stopped, but also
places they had lunch.
And it just says Lunch.
Instead of the city name it says Lunch.
So the story of this map could be anything.
It could be a political map.
It could be a map about vegetation.
It could be about birds.
But they've chosen to include information
that they think their viewer will be interested in.
Mapmakers are constantly making those decisions
as are, of course, fiction writers and poets.
All right.
Here we go.
Well, mathematics may or may not be
the language of the universe.
It's one of the man-made tools that have long helped
us to understand our world.
From the very start, people wanted
to know more about the Earth-- how much of it there was,
what shape it was, if and where there were other people on it.
By paying attention to the sun and the stars, the moon
and the sea, even the ancients understood
that the Earth was more or less a ball,
and they knew it was a big ball.
How big?
Too big to measure by foot.
Eratosthenes, credited as the first man
to measure the girth of the Earth
with any kind of accuracy, acted on one crucial assumption,
that the Earth is a sphere.
A few observations, that the sun appears to move across the sky.
And as it does, shadows change length.
Also, that over the course of the year, the sun
appears to be higher or lower in the sky and the knowledge
of geometry.
He knew that if the sun's rays are essentially parallel when
they reach the Earth, then by measuring
the angle of a shadow in Alexandria
and the height of the object casting it
at the time the sun shines straight down onto shadowless
Syene in the tropics, he could learn
what fraction of the Earth's circumference
was represented by the distance between the two cities.
There's a photograph taken at the time.
[LAUGHTER]
This is a kid's book about Eratosthenes.
It's a beautiful little book.
The Librarian Who Measured the Earth I think
is the name of it.
By his calculations, the answer was nearly 150th,
that is the distance he measured was nearly 150th of the 360
degree circumference of the globe, right?
Multiplying that figure by the distance
between Syene and Alexandria produced the circumference
of the Earth.
And it was a shockingly close approximation
given how he was working.
Early man had taken note of the movement of the sun
and the change of seasons and recognized
that in spring and fall the sun changed directions.
Its northernmost and southernmost paths
are the imaginary lines we call tropics
after tropes, which is Greek for turn for the apparent turning
of the sun across the sky.
The tropics are named after the constellations Cancer
and Capricorn, imaginary figures in the sky,
remnants of an ancient game of Connect The Dots.
Those are constellations.
The Equator is another imaginary line.
This one on the Earth itself.
Long before any man was able to stand or sit far enough
away to see the entire planet, people
conceived of the Earth as a ball with imaginary lines
of latitude parallel to the equator and imaginary lines
of longitude running perpendicular to it connecting
the poles, points determined not by a natural feature
of the land but by mathematicians.
For much of our existence then, mankind
has used the invented system of geometry
to gain a better understanding of the Earth.
We have literally imposed geometry on the planet.