something I said

My efforts to publish a bit more frequently have met with resistance in the form of conflicting priorities. Priorities like looking for work, working, recovering from work, and tending to the other things that I need to do that have been put aside for the same reasons.

Rather than delay any longer, I’m going to combine the unfinished posts. This is a bit like the way lots of other people do a ‘Links I’ve Seen’ page. It’s a roundup of things that I can’t give full attention to. These three are substantially under way. There are others that haven’t got this far, that are only assembled in my mind.

Literary Birmingham

Way back in March I started looking for ways to make a map of the city using text for lines. The idea was prompted by these maps of St. Petersburg and San Francisco, by Katy Parry’s design for a CiB charity campaign and by various thoughts about text and mapping like this post about Thomas Jefferson using a cut-up technique 150 years before William Burroughs got around to it.

Except that they are mostly blocks of text. I was thinking of something more like a map using road names as lines.

But that gets awkward, as the streets get longer.

So I tried waterways and narratives about them.

This works a little bit better, but I still need to find sentences long enough to do the roads. The map becomes a narrative - a songline - to recite as a way of tracing the city.

So I started looking for evocative passages, and this is where an encyclopaedic knowledge of Birmingham’s literary culture and heritage come in, because that’s what’s needed in order to thresh out the evocative bits from all the other mentions of street names. But guess what I don’t have. My knowledge of this stuff stops at about 1880. So the available resources are being queried: ye intrewebs, the Central Library literature section, and local cultural mavens.

Pretty quick like a few items, authors, and resources popped up.

Birmingham Goldsmith by Sue Hubbard, this bit about Conroy Maddox,

and then I got stuck into drawing.

… and that’s as far as I got in writing it up. There’s more material on my hard drive, but no time for it.

On to the next bit of unfinished business.

Granarian Birmingham

There are many reasons to visit Birmingham’s seasonal Frankfurt Market - and I can think of exactly two.

First there’s the ambience. It’s nice to wander around among the people. They’re having a good time, probably in just the same way, although various of them are also buying things. It’s a simple pleasure, and since it’s damn near impossible to get anywhere in a hurry, or in a straight line, the enforced leisure is a good thing.

Second, there’s the opportunity to see and acquire things. I like to see the space lit up. Birmingham has done very well with theTown Hall lighting, and had a nice Eastside lighting festival in 2006. So when I’m in town and it’s dark outside, I prop my camera on something and get a few snaps of this scene or variants thereof. I particularly like catching the moon in passing.

But there’s one thing about the German Market that it alone can do, and that’s provide this bread.

… which is where this has halted.

I meant to get this next one out in early November. I failed.

Political Geography

This story starts in the US, but is relevant to us here too.

To help kick off the US version of Geography Awareness Week (whereas the UK version is set out here), National Geographic invited all 100 U.S. Senators to draw a map of their home state from memory. So I’m thinking, if I wanted to suggest a parallel activity here, what would it be?

It’s a bit tricky. For starters, there’s a question of whether the separate countries of Britain would be the best parallel, or whether it should be regions or even counties? Then there’s the question of an equivalent to Senators. In the US system, each of the 50 states elect two Senators (and a varying number of Representatives). The British system, especially since devolution, has no similar setup. So I’d need some other way of figuring out an equivalent. Since MP’s are the nearest equivalent, one solution is to do is ask them to draw the boundaries of their constituencies.

By and large I’d expect them to know the boundaries, because constituency boundaries are subject to change every few years through Boundary Commission review, and every MP is bound to keep up to date with those. The next boundary change will be within a year, at the date of the next general election. Those changes were set out some time ago, and prospective candidates will have memorised them - perhaps to the point of being able to draw an outline.

Let’s have a look at the current and future boundaries for the constituency I’m in.

I live in Moseley, which is currently in the Selly Oak constituency, but as of next election, will be part of Hall Green constituency. The map on the left is how it was at the last election; on the right is at the next election. The red dot is the junction of Vicarage Road and the High Street in Kings Heath. The junction stays where it is, but the name of the place changes from Selly Oak to Hall Green, as does the political profile. (Go here to see the boundaries for your area).

As mentioned, it’s pretty likely that each of the current candidates (…, ) already knows the outline of this place.