Lunar Crater Culture Center, "Top 20" place competition entry, suckerPUNCH, 2011
Impressionist image, Channing c. 1982
Hotel Del Coronado
I was born in 1944 and raised in Mission
Beach, San Diego, California.
Early years were heavily influenced by WWII. Houses were scarce, large ones often shared by three
generations of a family and friends, and many were small perhaps around 1,000
sf. We lived on the ocean front
and blinds and curtains had to block all light from escaping at night due to
the threat of Japanese landings guided by lights on shore. There was not much to eat, a rabbit or
chipped beef in a jar requiring a coupon.
Houses had little furniture and almost no belongings. A popsickle stick collection was a
treasure. I remember having one
jacket and a pair of shoes. I
survived misunderstandings about dolphins my Mom pointed out just as a
motorcycle passed by on the wet sand at the waters edge. When I was 5 my father Carl, an
architect, purchased two surplus barracks buildings from Camp Callan and
renovated them into houses on lots in Pacific Beach. This was a lesson in salvage and reuse I never forgot. We shortly moved to Mission Cliff
Gardens and my father had built a small two bedroom house on a side canyon of
the magnificent Mission Valley.
Many days were spent on hikes to Mission Valley truck farms, fossil
digging, and climbing through the rich smelling sagebrush covered canyon walls.
Once when telling the story of the scarcity of home existence during WWII a listener asked about the outside, or neighborhood, condition. I commented that there was little to nothing there either. There was one partially paved street in Pacific/Mission Beach, Garnet, that went nowhere to the east. The other streets were dirt trails, mud bogs in the rain. We had electricity sometimes, and a collection of candles. They were useless out of doors. Out of doors meant an introduction to a vast vacant wasteland stretching as far as one could see. There were a few houses, Brown Military Academy, The Frosty Shop, a grammar school up on Tourquoise, and a small market at Mission Blvd. Going outside resembled an exit through a door that should not have been opened, like in Maeterlink, The Blue Bird of Happiness, or in sci-fi plots when a door is opened into a sea of sand with random dangerous swimming creatures. There were no roads, lawns, bushes, trees, signs, streetlights, cars, shops, or people. The land was a coastal scrub with buckwheat and sagebrush. Perhaps this is where I developed an attachment to “two-step axiality” as described by Hillier where one focuses on the goal objective, as well as the immediate surroundings, in a journey with realizable visual attachment. I have always wanted to see where I was going before stepping of into the sea of sand, and be sure to get there as soon as possible.
Geographical
Rhetoric: Modes and Tropes of Appeal
Jonathan
M. Smith
Abstract
.
Geographers
are frequently enjoined to identify and satisfy the interests of their
audience, as performance of this service is the ultimate justification for the
field's continued existence. There is, however, little agreement on how best to
render this service, largely because there has been little thought about the
nature of the audience, or about its role in shaping geographical discourse. Geographers
must recognize the existence of multiple audiences, and understand that these
audiences are not identical to existing institutional and epistemological
categories. Audiences are constituted by rhetorical prejudices and preferences.
To satisfy an audience, and earn its trust, the writer must confirm their
prejudices and respect their preferences. I present two alternative maps of
geographical audiences, using selected examples from twentieth-century
Anglophone geography. First, I describe prejudices about the nature of action,
which a writer must confirm if he or she is to be regarded as "good,"
and consequently re-map geographical discourse in terms of Northrop Frye's
fictional modes (romance, tragedy, comedy, and irony). Second, I describe
preferences for types of representation, which a writer must respect if he or
she is to be regarded as "speaking well," and consequently re-map
geographical discourse in terms of Kenneth Burke's master tropes (metaphor,
metonymy, synecdoche, and irony). I conclude that geographical rhetoric is
primarily shaped by the need to win the trust of an audience. The rhetorical
cultivation of trust does not preclude the pursuit of truth as a goal of
geographical writing, but it must be regarded as primary.
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