Mapping the Invisible Landscape. - book reviews

Ever found yourself lingering over a passage in a book, a poem or a song that evokes a real sense of the place described? Landscape is rich with stories, folktales, songs, poems, and graphic arts, in "sense of place" literature.

Mapping American Culture includes descriptions of place in American literature, with surprising perspectives on landscapes, such as the shopping mall seen as a modem incarnation of the formal European garden.

Some of Kent C Ryden's explorations in Mapping the invisible Landscape are a wonderful discourse on maps as the first descriptors of place, and the regional folklore of the Coeur d'Alene Mining District of north Idaho.

Both books are full of opportunity to escape from our own place in the modern world, to see it with new eyes when we return.

The labyrinth, the maze of pathways or hedges which confounded the visitor's attempts to find an easy way out and was a favorite device of Renaissance gardens, is now the cleverly laid out pattern of aisles within some department stores which are designed quite successfully to discourage the visitor's easy exit. Shoppers simply cannot find a way out. Bloomingdale's in the Willow Grove Mall in suburban Philadelphia received so many complaints from irate shoppers lost in its mazes that finally small, discrete exit signs were posted. What "may have had .. [its] origins in the penitential mazes of the Christian Church" on

the model of the paths "laid out in stone or tiles" on which "the penitent performed the journey on his knees, saying particular prayers at particular points," and was then moved out into the garden where it was secularized, has now become thoroughly commodified, a journey in which purchases have replaced prayers. Buy enough and we will let you out.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Point Foundation
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group