(1) Take Me Out to the…Cricket Match (WSJ – Registration Required)
“When much of the world map was painted British red, cricket served as a key expression of imperial values. It flattered the British to imagine their empire as the geopolitical equivalent of playing a straight bat. Their colonial subjects, confronted by this conviction, might have been expected to end up thoroughly loathing the sport. Instead, they did something altogether more subversive: They made it their own. ‘Cricket,’ as the cultural theorist Ashis Nandy wittily put it, ‘is an Indian game accidentally discovered by the English.'”
(2) A quote from Trap Streets by James Bridle
“Not all errors on maps are intentional. ‘Paper streets’ are the result of failed planning applications that have festered long enough to appear on speculative, proposed maps of city’s futures and have thus been incorporated into the official cartographies without ever making the leap to macadam. As such, they may appear on official city maps and land deeds, and even constitute legal rights of way, approved by courts and enforceable by them, and yet undriveable, unnavigable, unobtainable.”
(3) A quote from Paper: An Elegy by Ian Sansom
“Over the past five hundred years, paper has helped to create and define landscapes, peoples, and nations. Maps have assisted and determined the colonial and military explorations of the Dutch, and the French, he commercial activities of the British East India Company, and countless other enterprises. At home as well as abroad, maps defined and legitimated places: rulers who could literally see and grasp their territories could define and defend them.”
(3a) Will Self reads ‘On Exactitude in Science’ by Jorge Luis Borges
(4) A quote from The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs
“We are all accustomed to believe that maps and reality are necessarily related, or that if they are not, we can make them so by altering reality.”
(5) Moleskine notebooks seek growth in digital age
(6) Frederick at Paper Bicycle
(7) A Book Entitled to Your Attention (WSJ)
“I once compared my sister to St. Thérèse of Lisieux, the 19th-century French nun who died young from tuberculosis. Thérèse Martin, a plain village girl, embraced the virtues of simplicity and humility. After Thérèse’s passing, her Carmelite sisters published her spiritual autobiography, ‘Story of a Soul,’ in which the nun described her ‘petite voie,’ or little way, to healing and holiness. ‘What matters in life are not great deeds, but great love,’ Thérèse wrote.”
(8) A quote from Pensione Eolo by André Aciman
“Ultimately, the real site of nostalgia is not the place that was lost or the place that was never quite had in the first place; it is the text that must record that loss.”