Dandelion Magazine sent me their Mapping Issue for a review.
It's hard to know where to start.
I guess I could talk about the sheer volume of this text. It's a freaking book. With a DVD included. The issue contains work from almost fifty authors who spread their work over nearly two hundred pages and over fifty minutes of material on disc.
So, naturally, it would be a book-length project in itself to review each piece in Dandelion Magazine 37.1. But it's not necessary to map out my reactions to each piece when I can give a sort of lightly theoretically informed impression of the whole dang shabang.
When in doubt, retreat to theory and stuff.
The first thing to note about The Mapping Issue is the degree to which mapping saturates the text. Even the table of contents is a map. I mean, a table of contents is always a map, but this one's a colorful one with vectors and whatnot. Each author in the issue interprets the journal's theme in a unique way. For instance, in his piece Local Colour, derek beaulieu (to whom I'm not related, if you're wondering) maps out the narrative of Paul Auster's Ghosts through the use of black and blue colour blocks (and possibly white ones that are invisible on the page, given his quick summary of Ghosts). No words, just blue and black rectangles.
One of my favourite pieces in the issue is Nikki Reimer's "benevolent despot," which seems to map birth and death records in such a fashion that the two literally bleed and blur together and become unnavigable. Kristian Carlsson's "Ahead of Directions" maps language before removing language entirely from the map with two beard maps. Jérôme Ruby's "Cités Voraces" illustration suite maps the intertextual nature of the urban/rural tension, displaying the consumerism that even the natural world has now taken as standard. Andreas Rutkauskas' excerpt from "Caché" is a film documentation of the shaping of a mountainous topography.
Why am I going on like this? Because the diversity of texts published in Dandelion Magazine 37.1 points to an important social phenomenon; not only does mapping saturate this issue, it saturates our lives. Canada and the United States of America are mapping-obsessed cultures. In fact, most of the world is. This is not a new phenomenon, as anyone with any ounce of historical education knows. We map our lives through birth and death records, our bodies, our level of success, our possessions, our land. And boy, do we map our land. Did you know you can creep Tiger Woods' backyard on Google Earth?
The sheer size of The Mapping Issue and the diversity of texts within indicates that each individual negotiates mapping processes in a different way. Mapping, then (whether you're making maps or reading them), is a subjective experience. In the summer of 2009, what was a precise and indispensible navigational handbook to me in the French countryside was total gibberish to my travel mates. This issue of Dandelion Magazine, then, is an important literary text. Is brings those subjective experiences to the artistic individual and says, "Here, interpret these." Reading the products that those individuals have come up with is a second process of interpretation (and one which I, admittedly, fell short from with several of the pieces). Dandelion Magazine's Mapping Issue is a reminder that as much as we attempt to log and trace our lives, everyone negotiates their space within the world—both literally and figuratively—in a different way. And the results are often beautiful.
