The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing by Nicholas Rombes

The power and pull of the maps today is that they were not created to be art, which lends them a super-charged, ambiguous aura. There, in the color-shaded boundaries and arcane labeling of chromite layers, granular harzburgite, hornblende schist and amphibolite, and weisner quartzite I discovered an alien mental landscape into which I could, temporarily, escape. Because, late at night, when the worst angels of thought seemed to perch at every neural connection, switching every good thought into its opposite, the maps, unfolded and spread out on my office desk or floor, offered me a respite from, well, from me. The maps, during a dark time of my life, helped shore me up against a deep and seemingly bottomless sadness. The fold-out geographical survey maps that come with many of these books are so intricate and detailed and obsessively precise in their design, so unlike any other form of printed material. For someone of my generation these books and pamphlets conjure artifacts from unmade, imaginary episodes of The X-Files, or the obscure small print on the back of a worn copy of an VHS tape from the early 1980s, or a piece of mail delivered, years late, from the dead letter office. The maps-some of them enormous-are tucked into pockets or envelopes attached to the inside boards of books with titles like Geology of the Grey Eagle and Some Nearby Chromite Deposits in Glenn County California (published by the Department of the Interior at the United States Government Printing Office, 1944), Chromite Deposits in Central Part Stillwater Complex, Sweet Grass County, Montana: Geological Survey Bulletin 1015-D (Government Printing Office, 1955), and Deep Wells of Nebraska: Nebraska Geological Survey, Bulletin 4, Second Series, 1931). OLD GEOLOGY SURVEY BOOKS WITH MAP INSERTS

Rombes is a columnist and contributing editor at Filmmaker Magazine, and teaches in Detroit, Michigan.One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of (one of) their nerdy obsessions.

His film The Removals was released in 2016. Nicholas Rombes is author of the novel The Absolution of Robert Acestes Laing (Two Dollar Radio), Ramones, from the 33 1/3 series (Bloomsbury) and Cinema in the Digital Age (Columbia UP). Oh-io, the true-sourced eggs and surprise Now criss-crossed with sewer lines and manufactured peat?įor bed, the cabin darkened now in remote Who in 1510 could leap from Boxelder to Black Cherry How to figure the black slim squirrel, they say, On the purple faded couch in the basementĭisappear but stay invisible for each of them?

The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing by Nicholas Rombes