{"id":66852,"date":"2014-02-18T09:28:01","date_gmt":"2014-02-18T14:28:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=66852"},"modified":"2014-02-18T08:52:09","modified_gmt":"2014-02-18T13:52:09","slug":"the-world-is-upside-down-and-other-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/02\/18\/the-world-is-upside-down-and-other-news\/","title":{"rendered":"The World Is Upside Down, and Other News"},"content":{"rendered":"<div style=\"width: 610px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/mcarthur-corrective-map.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt=\"mcarthur corrective map\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/mcarthur-corrective-map.jpg\" width=\"600\" height=\"400\" \/><\/a><p class=\"wp-caption-text\">McArthur\u2019s Universal Corrective Map of the World, 1979.<\/p><\/div>\n<ul>\n<li>It\u2019s time to reconsider in earnest that elusive, anxious thing: the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.salon.com\/2014\/02\/16\/american_literatures_holy_grail_the_hunt_for_the_great_american_novel\/\" target=\"_blank\">Great American Novel<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>Why do we love maps of imaginary places? <a href=\"http:\/\/www.brainpickings.org\/index.php\/2014\/02\/17\/legendary-lands-umberto-eco\/?utm_content=buffer0806f&amp;utm_medium=social&amp;utm_source=twitter.com&amp;utm_campaign=buffer\" target=\"_blank\">Umberto Eco has some ideas<\/a>. (And some fine maps of imaginary places.)<\/li>\n<li>Relatedly, <a href=\"http:\/\/america.aljazeera.com\/opinions\/2014\/2\/maps-cartographycolonialismnortheurocentricglobe.html\" target=\"_blank\">how did the north come to be the default direction for the tops of maps<\/a>? It\u2019s the thirty-fifth anniversary of McArthur\u2019s Universal Corrective Map of the World, which famously flipped things around so that south faced up.<\/li>\n<li>Roger Angell at ninety-three: \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/reporting\/2014\/02\/17\/140217fa_fact_angell?currentPage=all\" target=\"_blank\">I\u2019m feeling great<\/a>. Well, pretty great, unless I\u2019ve forgotten to take a couple of Tylenols in the past four or five hours, in which case I\u2019ve begun to feel some jagged little pains shooting down my left forearm and into the base of the thumb.\u201d<\/li>\n<li>A personal ad from a seventeenth-century British alchemist might read something like this: \u201cWhen I\u2019m not busy attempting to turn various substances into gold, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.chemheritage.org\/discover\/media\/magazine\/articles\/31-3-double-vision.aspx\" target=\"_blank\">I like to have Dutch masters paint portraits of me in my workshop<\/a>.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It\u2019s time to reconsider in earnest that elusive, anxious thing: the Great American Novel. Why do we love maps of imaginary places? Umberto Eco has some ideas. (And some fine maps of imaginary places.) Relatedly, how did the north come to be the default direction for the tops of maps? It\u2019s the thirty-fifth anniversary of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2512],"tags":[12908,12909,12905,12906,12907,1137,4907],"class_list":["post-66852","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-the-shelf","tag-alchemists","tag-dutch-masters","tag-great-american-novel","tag-imaginary-maps","tag-mcarthurs-universal-corrective-map-of-the-world","tag-roger-angell","tag-umberto-eco"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.4 (Yoast SEO v25.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>The Morning News Roundup for February 18, 2014<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"February 18, 2014 \u2013 It\u2019s time to reconsider in earnest that elusive, anxious thing: the Great American Novel. 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