When I lived in South Florida, the flocks of non-native parrots and parakeets brought joy, but apparently not so much in London. Clever title for an article about London’s invasive parakeet population: The Pollycrisis. “Do we want tens of thousands of Himalayan parrots squabbling all over our cities?”
Right now I am impatiently awaiting the English translation of book five of On the Calculation of Volume, the acclaimed seven-volume series by Danish author Solvej Balle, which subverts and complicates the speculative premise of a “time loop,” or a single day repeated over and over. The narrator, a rare book dealer named Tara Selter, is already preoccupied with the flow of history and memory before she is marooned in a world that cannot move onward. As a result, she develops a hyperattention to the texture of November 18—the date she cannot escape. Oddly, the book is being released in the States on November 17th.
Cartographer Vicky Johnson-Dahl has dug up her 2016 NACIS presentation on maps in the movies, titled “It’s a Map, Map, Map, Map World,” and resurrected it as a blog post. She assigns movie maps to five categories: maps the audience sees but the characters don’t, maps the characters use, maps that drive the plot (i.e., treasure maps), threat maps (think War Games or Bond villains), and jokes. Fun for cinephiles and map geeks alike.
“Slip cover, dust cover, or dust jacket — whatever you call it, and whether you’re the type to trash or treasure them — have you ever wondered what purpose they serve and when they were invented?”
