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Denis Wood: Everything Sings: Maps for a Narrative Atlas
With artful wit and rigor, the cartographer Denis Wood has written numerous books (including the influential bestseller The Power of Maps ) that reorient his readers not only to our neighborhoods, homes and bodies, but also to our own very human instinct to understand where we live by mapmaking. At the heart of Wood's investigations is a near-legendary the Boylan Heights maps, begun in 1982, and now published in Everything Sings . Surveying his century-old, half-square mile neighborhood Boylan Heights in Raleigh, North Carolina, Wood began by paring away the inessential "map crap" (scale, orientation, street grids) and, in searching for the revelatory in the unmapped and the unmappable, he ended up plotting such phenomena as radio waves permeating the air, the light cast by street lights and Halloween pumpkins on porches. As radio host Ira Glass writes in his introduction to this volume, "we see which homes have wind chimes and which ones call the cops. We see the route of the letter carrier and the life cycle of the daily paper. Wood is writing a novel where we never meet the main characters, but their stuff is everywhere." Together, Wood's maps accumulate into a multi-layered story about one neighborhood that tells the larger story of what constitutes the places we call home.
Denis Wood (born 1945) is a geographer, an independent scholar and the author of several books on maps, including the popular and highly influential The Power of Maps (which originated as an exhibition Wood curated for the Cooper-Hewitt National Museum of Design). His most recent publications include The Natures of Maps (co-authored with John Fels) and Rethinking the Power of Maps (with Fels and John Krygier). Selected maps from Everything Sings have been exhibited internationally such as at the Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College, as well as included in a variety of publications, including Katherine Harmon's You Are Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination.
Denis Wood (born 1945) is a geographer, an independent scholar and the author of several books on maps, including the popular and highly influential The Power of Maps (which originated as an exhibition Wood curated for the Cooper-Hewitt National Museum of Design). His most recent publications include The Natures of Maps (co-authored with John Fels) and Rethinking the Power of Maps (with Fels and John Krygier). Selected maps from Everything Sings have been exhibited internationally such as at the Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College, as well as included in a variety of publications, including Katherine Harmon's You Are Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination.
112 pages, Paperback
First published November 12, 2010
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Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
April 10, 2012
very neat concept of making a narrative atlas, in this case of boylan heights in raleigh north carolina, in where the maps tell stories about the history and sociology of the place. so he maps the electric poles and the wires running via them, but also as the squirrel highway of the neighborhood and maps slumlord ownership and distance they live from their rent houses = crappiness of their rent houses and maps the tress, but not just as a tree but in categories like stumps, deformed or butchered trees from utility company "trimming" them, healthy trees, young one, old ones, etc. turns out there is only one (out of over 1700) water oak that is healthy, in a front yard away from power lines, and has a reasonable expectation of living for 200 or more more years. if you have the slightest interest in maps or atlases, this would be a wonderful and informative book. he maps the sun (and its intensity) through the months, i want to do that for the moon in my backyard, so now have some clues on how :)
May 18, 2011
Wonderfully transforms your neighborhood: makes you participate in its ephemerality and infinity; becomes an invitation to map or, at the very least, be aware of your surroundings: their sounds, texts, reflections, textures. These abstract, art-book illustrations, that often need their nub of stripped-down text to make somewhat sense could seemingly, sievingly (if you will) be dismissed. But do not be deceived, this is a powerful and political book (it comes from the same author as "The Power of Maps"-ahem) that decenters the power inherent in maps. Resonance = re + sonare = resound resound resound resound. These echoes create the infinite in a fixed, ordinary, transformed place.
June 23, 2025
“I don’t want to, but I will” (!)
Want to read
April 28, 2011Very offbeat idea, introduced by Ira Glass, OF COURSE ;) (I meant that with love - sometimes I think Ira Glass has found every good offbeat story in the country).
A man collects all possible maps of his neighborhood. The book is like a loveletter to maps and the neighborhood they depict. Kind of like an artist painting one muse in a hundred styles.
I saw Denis read tonight and he joked about reading maps out loud and then read a moving passage about how maps capture a single moment in the life of something...poetic and poignant.
A man collects all possible maps of his neighborhood. The book is like a loveletter to maps and the neighborhood they depict. Kind of like an artist painting one muse in a hundred styles.
I saw Denis read tonight and he joked about reading maps out loud and then read a moving passage about how maps capture a single moment in the life of something...poetic and poignant.
May 24, 2015
A strange collection of maps that reveal different shapes of the Boylan Heights neighborhood near Raleigh NC. It's really quite lovely in the way it paints a picture of the whole by layering these invisible streets on top of each other. A few words in a review can't really do it justice. You sort of need to see the photos. It's maps as poetry, song, revelation, and record.
wish-to-read
September 25, 2020As heard 3 Jan 2013 on This American Life Episode 110 Mapping: "Denis Wood talks with host Ira Glass about the maps he's made of his own neighborhood, Boylan Heights in Raleigh, North Carolina. They include a traditional street locator map, a map of all the sewer and power lines under the earth's surface, a map of how light falls on the ground through the leaves of trees, a map of where all the Halloween pumpkins are each year, and a map of all the graffiti in the neighborhood. In short, he's creating maps that are more like novels, trying to describe everyday life."
March 6, 2018
tedious and uninteresting collection of maps masquerading as literature. didn't inspire me
July 25, 2020
One of my fave books of all time.
August 10, 2016
"These maps are completely unnecessary. The world didn't ask for them. They aid no navigation or civic-minded purpose. They're just for pleasure. They laugh at the stupid Google map I consult five times a day on my phone. They laugh at what a square the map is. At its small-mindedness. They know it's a sad, workaholic salaryman." (Ira Glass)
"Geradus Mercator called his great work of 1595 - from which our contemporary use of "atlas" to describe a collection of maps is derived - Atlas sive cosmographica meditationes de fabrica mundi et fabricata figura, which might be tranlated as Atlas, or Cosmographic Meditations on the Fabric of the World and the Figure of the Fabrick'd. Maps were only part of what Mercator had intended as a cosmographical meditation of encyclpedic proportions: the creation of the universe, ancient and modern geographies, the histories of states, a universal chronology. In Mercator's vision, "Atlas" encompassed...everything" (Denis Wood)
On the independence of maps:
"We begin to see that they are servants of this way of thinking as opposed to that, they're involved in storytelling, they're not compendia of facts. This is why any intentionality in the ordering is so ferociously denied: the map essay on the causes of poverty that pretends not to be an essay at all is a uniquely powerful way to naturalize poverty. It suggests that poverty arises naturally from the earth itself, that there is nothing we can do about it. This is the power of what Barthes called myth." (Denis Wood)
On neighborhoods:
"The idea is this: the neighborhood is a process, a process-place or a process-thing, that transforms anywhere into here, and her into everywhere, the city into the space of our lives, the citizen into the individual, and vice versa...What neighborhoods do is make the city real. They transform the common, ordinary stuff of the city - water and sewer (Intrusions under Hill), electricity (Squirrel Highways), streets (Streets) - into the real stuff of our lives. This is the part the neighborhood plays in the life of the city, the part of a Proteus capable of turning a perfectly ordinary lamp post (Pools of Light) or crab apple tree (Flowering Trees) or stretch of sidewalk (Sidewalk Graffiti) into that power pole whose cables hum and sing at night as you fall asleep, that crab apple beneath which you played as a child, that stretch of sidewalk in which your kids wrote their names while the concrete was still wet. It transforms the stars that shine on everyone alike into stars that you wish on (The Night Sky)."
"Geradus Mercator called his great work of 1595 - from which our contemporary use of "atlas" to describe a collection of maps is derived - Atlas sive cosmographica meditationes de fabrica mundi et fabricata figura, which might be tranlated as Atlas, or Cosmographic Meditations on the Fabric of the World and the Figure of the Fabrick'd. Maps were only part of what Mercator had intended as a cosmographical meditation of encyclpedic proportions: the creation of the universe, ancient and modern geographies, the histories of states, a universal chronology. In Mercator's vision, "Atlas" encompassed...everything" (Denis Wood)
On the independence of maps:
"We begin to see that they are servants of this way of thinking as opposed to that, they're involved in storytelling, they're not compendia of facts. This is why any intentionality in the ordering is so ferociously denied: the map essay on the causes of poverty that pretends not to be an essay at all is a uniquely powerful way to naturalize poverty. It suggests that poverty arises naturally from the earth itself, that there is nothing we can do about it. This is the power of what Barthes called myth." (Denis Wood)
On neighborhoods:
"The idea is this: the neighborhood is a process, a process-place or a process-thing, that transforms anywhere into here, and her into everywhere, the city into the space of our lives, the citizen into the individual, and vice versa...What neighborhoods do is make the city real. They transform the common, ordinary stuff of the city - water and sewer (Intrusions under Hill), electricity (Squirrel Highways), streets (Streets) - into the real stuff of our lives. This is the part the neighborhood plays in the life of the city, the part of a Proteus capable of turning a perfectly ordinary lamp post (Pools of Light) or crab apple tree (Flowering Trees) or stretch of sidewalk (Sidewalk Graffiti) into that power pole whose cables hum and sing at night as you fall asleep, that crab apple beneath which you played as a child, that stretch of sidewalk in which your kids wrote their names while the concrete was still wet. It transforms the stars that shine on everyone alike into stars that you wish on (The Night Sky)."
June 3, 2013
Everything can be mapped.
Put simply, a map is a visual reference of space, a diagram, a representation. This stands in for that.
They are only useful really if they remove everything but what we think we need to know.
But what do we know?
I recently attempted to memorize all the names of trees in my neighborhood. What had once been simply “trees” had become Weeping Bottle Brushes, Norfolk Pines, Indian Laurels, Canary Island Palms. They had names I had not known, and not knowing their names, I did not see them. Now the streets are filled with exotic friends from far-flung places, each with a unique story, twist, bend, rudely trimmed or lushly let wild.
Like Francis Bacon the essayist said, faces are but a gallery of pictures when there is no love.
Read the full review by Andrew Berardini on the Art Book Review:
http://theartbookreview.org/2012/12/0...
Put simply, a map is a visual reference of space, a diagram, a representation. This stands in for that.
They are only useful really if they remove everything but what we think we need to know.
But what do we know?
I recently attempted to memorize all the names of trees in my neighborhood. What had once been simply “trees” had become Weeping Bottle Brushes, Norfolk Pines, Indian Laurels, Canary Island Palms. They had names I had not known, and not knowing their names, I did not see them. Now the streets are filled with exotic friends from far-flung places, each with a unique story, twist, bend, rudely trimmed or lushly let wild.
Like Francis Bacon the essayist said, faces are but a gallery of pictures when there is no love.
Read the full review by Andrew Berardini on the Art Book Review:
http://theartbookreview.org/2012/12/0...
September 17, 2013
It's really rather a dry book, being rooted, as it is, in a cartographer's intellectual push against cartographic norms, in which a map is treated as an objective object. If you can push through the boredom that most will feel at the very thought of wading through the philosophical treatise I just laid down for you, you will find that first, the ideas are actually quite interesting, and second, that the maps themselves are almost as interesting, in what they seem to being saying about he town of Boylan Heights (the author's place of residence) as the are beautiful. This is a small project that has taken decades to complete, and it is only a partial, woefully unrepresentative sample of life, and yet it feels pure and true and striking.
The second edition of this book adds in some interviews and essays at the end, which are pretty decent, but feel more like a dutiful addition to the reprint than a necessary one.
The second edition of this book adds in some interviews and essays at the end, which are pretty decent, but feel more like a dutiful addition to the reprint than a necessary one.
November 10, 2015
"these maps are completely unnecessary...they describe human lives without ever showing us any people." ira glass in the introduction. in the 70s and 80s a design class maps a raleigh neighborhood thoroughly, making maps which will not help you find anything in particular but will let you know it deeply. by repeating the same neighborhood over and over in different ways, wood lets the data build, until you know precisely where these jack-o-lanterns, and wind-chimes, and absentee landlords are even without any streets marked. wood has gone on to write many more authoritative books but this early, oddball work still comes up when people talk about alternative cartography because it blew the field wide open.
mapping and neighborhoods, two of my favorite obsessions, combined in a collaborative slightly subversive academic project in a funky southern town. i couldn't ask for more, except to get cracking on doing this myself.
mapping and neighborhoods, two of my favorite obsessions, combined in a collaborative slightly subversive academic project in a funky southern town. i couldn't ask for more, except to get cracking on doing this myself.
September 6, 2016
"I wanted to destroy existing modes of map making through which millions were repeatedly killed. I wanted to emancipate dream and desire as subjects of the map."
Efficient maps vs. inefficient : maps of a single subject, i.e. pools of light, the "poetics of cartography," narrative reading as inescapable.
A personal atlas! i found these maps as documents to wonder, keys to what makes a place real, to understanding the charm of a neighborhood. (map of jack o lantern distribution, squirrel highways, windchimes, city sounds, newspaper delivery routes (w/ a spacetime ticker))
love love love<3<3<3<3
Efficient maps vs. inefficient : maps of a single subject, i.e. pools of light, the "poetics of cartography," narrative reading as inescapable.
A personal atlas! i found these maps as documents to wonder, keys to what makes a place real, to understanding the charm of a neighborhood. (map of jack o lantern distribution, squirrel highways, windchimes, city sounds, newspaper delivery routes (w/ a spacetime ticker))
love love love<3<3<3<3
October 5, 2011
I was introduced to this book by Rebecca Solnit as part of her work spreading the word about atlases and how communities can reimagine themselves through mapping projects. Wood is nothing if not idiosyncratic in his choice of what (and how) to map in his comunity of Boylan Heights, NC. The results are fresh, odd (in a good way), beautiful, and thought-provoking. I've been sharing the book with friends who are writers and/or visual artists. Their reactions are always wondrous. Check out EVERYTHING SINGS if you can.
January 20, 2016
The book aims to break conventional perceptions on cartography, it is as far as i could get to narrative cartography, but as a spatial professional, i could not grasp the structure which binds the maps chosen for them to perform a role in spatial knowledge. maybe that was not the author's point in the first place or maybe it would ring a bell for those living in the chosen neighborhood, but for me it was merely a beautifully provocative introduction on what mapping should and should not be - extremely inspirational - followed by a documentation of a set of disparate elements
August 11, 2012
What a joy to read a book that looks at things in such a different manner! My road atlas seems very boring after reading Wood's book.
Want to read
December 29, 2012Heard the author on this episode of This American Life:
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio...
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio...
September 11, 2016
Very-local maps. Interesting to get thinking about creative mapmaking.
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews