Thursday, July 21, 2011

Patterns persist.

If you map Mobile phone conversations of today, you get The Nine Nations of North American as envisaged by Joel Garreau in 1981.

Smart guy, Garreau. His other book Edge City probably helped me understand the modern built world more than any other book I have ever read.
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2 comments:

M.H.TylerJones said...

He is definitely right about separate cultural regions in the U.S. You can see that from how different the great novels from those regions are. (And this is why there will never be *the* Great American Novel.)
E.g.
New England: Moby Dick
The Foundry: Abraham Lincoln (by Carl Sandburg)
Southeastern Dixie: All the King's Men
Western Dixie: Huckleberry Finn
The Breadbasket: Giliad
The Islands: Their Eyes Were Watching God
Mexamerica: East of Eden
Ecotopia: The Kitchen God's Wife
The Empty Quarter: Blood Meridian
Appalachia: Loosing Battles
He does not seem to be aware of Appalachia, so I will mention it. Appalachia is a distinct cultural region in eastern U.S. mostly in the middle of the Appalachian Mountain Range but also running along the southern range of the Appalachian Mountains. It includes West Virginia, southwestern Pennsylvania and eastern Kentucky. Capital: Huntington, West Virginia.

3:31 pm
Michael said...

It's an old book, and he was figuring things out from personal experience rather than following someone else's guidance. This means an interesting and relatively new perspective, but also that you miss things.

He may have said something about Appalachia in the book. It's a while since I read it, and my copy is in Australia so I can't read it again now.

5:46 pm

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