Map-Making

“That’s another thing we’ve learned from your Nation,” said Mein Herr, “map-making. But we’ve carried it much further than you. What do you consider the largest map that would be really useful?”

“About six inches to the mile.”

“Only six inches!” exclaimed Mein Herr. “We very soon got to six yards to the mile. Then we tried a hundred yards to the mile. And then came the grandest idea of all! We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile!”

“Have you used it much?” I enquired.

“It has never been spread out, yet,” said Mein Herr: “the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well."

Caroll, Lewis. 1894. Sylvie and Bruno Concluded. New York and London: Macmillan and Co. Via Project Gutenberg, URL https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/48795.

See also Jorge Luis Borges, "On Exactitude in Science," URL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Exactitude_in_Science.

Verbiage

We'll see if this can work as a scratchpad for verbiage I encounter that has nowhere else to go.

"the mass-produced commodity is made by no one in particular and is intended for any purchaser at all" (Scott 1998, 31).

"the Enlightenment fostered a strong aesthetic that looked with enthusiasm on straight lines and visible order" (Scott 1998, 55).

We always need to "reduce an infinite array of detail to a set of categories that will facilitate summary descriptions, comparisons, and aggregation" (Scott 1998, 77).

“Nothing perhaps distinguishes modern masses as radically from those of previous centuries as the loss of faith in a Last Judgment: the worst have lost their fear and the best have lost their hope” (Arendt 1985 [1951], 446).

"The belly comes before the soul, not in the scale of values but in point of time" (Orwell, "Looking Back on the Spanish War" [1943], quoted in Scott 1985, 241).

The Fetish for Variation

Political science, and maybe all causal science, is better with variance than with invariance, with change than with constancy.

I didn't know where else to put this, so here it is.

Nietsche: "what we are used to is most difficult ... to see" (quoted in Zerubaviel 2018, 8). So this is like a drunk under the lamppost issue.

Let this serve as a scratchpad for this theme.

Commonwealth Before Common Market

Commonwealth Before Common Market | Join the Anti-Common Market League | 40/41 St. Andrew's Hill, London EC.4.

Anyone know the year of this one? Could be around the 1975 referendum, but I think it's earlier, just like the little booklet from ca. 1969.

BRITAIN, Not Europe! Anti Common Market League Booklet c1969

BRITAIN, Not Europe! Anti Common Market League Booklet c1969.

See also a poster with the same "Commonwealth Before Common Market" slogan.

Here is Your Chance to See France and the Rhine

Liberté et économie ... Grâce à ma bicyclette

"Liberté et économie ... Grâce à ma bicyclette | le moins cher des moyens de transport"

This was put out by the Chambre Syndicale Nationale du Cycle, with art by Jacquemins. I would love to know the year. There seem to be lots of posters with this kind of message. They could become an obsession.

Les 100 Jours de France

1944 propaganda booklet full of florid phrases Gaulliennes about the genius of France and its sons and daughters who gave their lives in the struggle. Great graphic novel style cover art!

United Nations Day, 1951

My how times have changed.

Hommage à l'Amérique, 1947