Back from the dead - March 2, 2012

What can I say? My laptop broke. Then it got fixed. So now I'm back and I only lost 4 days of blogging.

When it comes to the weather though, it was one heck of a four days. The whole middle of the country got walloped: almost 50 dead from tornadoes Tuesday and today; a foot of snow and howling winds along Lake Superior; every imaginable kind of precipitation.

We had some heavy rain, which turned to snow, which mostly melted into big puddles... but not all that big.

I'm not sorry we got missed by the serious drama. People die in that kind of drama. Our kind of drama was a dog who hates to get her feet wet, whining about having to walk.

In terms of the larger picture of this blog, I've done bugger-all. Well, not that little. I've been reading Arctic Clothing. I'm finding myself distracted by the really enormous range of discourse Inuit people for whom it is a personal experience, paired up with someone giving a dry electron microscopy analysis of caribou and seal hair. It's kind of cool in the same way that I really like NACIS: the conversation ends up being about conversation.

But this has little to do directly with my intended subject. Or maybe it does.

I've been approaching the matter of protection from the elements—wintry elements for another few weeks, until the equinox—from a casually historical direction, mostly. But sometimes I think this approach—a search for running themes and patterns, broad cultural movements and so on—distracts us from what is really going on, which is a much messier, scattershot approach to living.

I got a sense of this when, in 1992, I proposed a paper for the History of Cartography conference. It was to be on the design history of the road map. And the closer I looked, the less pattern I saw. People didn't have the kind of Great Stylistic Ideas that art history is so find of. They used a design until it got tired and they were worried about losing their business, and then they freshened it up for another decade or so. They used new technologies as they became available, most of which were generic to printing, not specifically cartographic technologies. They sometimes experimented with a new look or element (how to draw the Allegheny Mountains was popular place for one-time experiments in inserting relief into the road maps). But mostly, they muddled along.

Not much of a paper, is it? I kind of imploded. I was fresh out of college and had no idea that this in itself was an interesting conclusion. Maybe I should propose it again, 20 years later.

Or not.