NOTES Introduction 1. Plato’s concerns about memory and writing have now resurfaced in a classic history-repeats-itself way. A recent newspaper headline reads: “Electronic gadgets may make human memory obsolete,” and the story cites one hundred million mobile phones (all with speed dialing) and eight million personal organizers as evidence for the decline in people’s ability to retrieve once-accessible information , like telephone numbers or birth dates—the type of factual information that electronic devices store. 2. My reading of Phaedrus has been most influenced by Jasper Neel, Plato. 3. Chapter 1 discusses thirdspace in some depth, but I borrow the term from postmodern geographer Edward Soja’s 1996 book titled Thirdspace. His analysis of this concept begins with Henri LeFebvre, but also draws from Gloria Anzaldúa, Gayatri Spivak, Edward Said, Homi Bhaba, and Michel Foucault. 4. This distinction between strategies and tactics comes from de Certeau (xix– xx). See also Probyn 86–87. 1. Between Metaphor and Materiality 1. Space and place are two distinct terms here; of the two, space is probably the less understood or the more-taken-for-granted. As logic or common sense would indicate, space is “bigger” than place, but the two are intricately related. Places emerge from space with the passage of time: “Spaces become places as they become ‘time-thickened.’ They have a past and a future that binds people together round them” (Crang 103). Space is the more conceptual notion—a realm of practices —while place is defined by people and events. In one sense, places are fixed positions on a map, or you can follow directions to get there. Space, if you will, structures our habitats but cannot be inhabited. Places touch people’s lives and evoke memories and emotions. 2. See Philip Eubanks’s argument regarding conduit metaphors, referred to again below, which he says elicit “nearly unanimous condemnation” (93). While he does cite several articles or theorists in rhetoric and composition, Bowden isn’t included in his analysis; I assume he would disagree with her about the limitations they enforce in theorizing or teaching writing. 3. But see Merrifield’s account of how LeFebvre’s work was initially ignored, at least by Althusserian Marxists (“Henri LeFebvre” 167–70). 4. For examples of embodied rhetorics see Selzer and Crowley’s volume Rhetorical Bodies. 5. As Lester Faigley points out in Fragments, it’s perhaps easiest to contrast modernism and postmodernism through architecture (4–5). 6. This perceived loss contributes, in part, to the desire for substitute—i.e., electronic—spaces, in on-line environments and through satellite communications. 2. Reading Landscapes and Walking the Streets: Geography and the Visual 1. On the discourse of crisis, precipitated by such outcries as Newsweek’s 1975 piece “Why Johnny Can’t Write” (Sheils), see Faigley’s chapter 2 in Fragments of Rationality and Trimbur’s “Literacy and the Discourse of Crisis.” 2. So what happens for those who cannot see? I’m intrigued by the tension in geography studies between 1) an expanding literature on geographies of disabilities ; and 2) the continued persistence of the visual epistemology of geography. I cannot adequately address here the contributions that visually impaired people can make to geography and cultural studies, but “learning to see” is not entirely dependent on 20/20 vision; it draws on all the senses, on a type of embodiment or inhabitance. For example,Tom, the cultural geography lecturer mentioned “smellscapes ” when introducing the streetwork project to students (see chapter 4). 3. Cultural geography is also being mined for its connections to literary studies . Writing in American Literary History, Sara Blair surveys “the common ground between Americanist literary studies and the new geography” (550) and speculates about what literary critics and historians might contribute “to new understandings of spatial practices, of the production of spatial and social differences, and of space, time, and nature as material frames for everyday life” (549). She finds, as I do, that “each field of inquiry . . . encompasses habits, histories, a mode of attention , from which the other can richly profit” (545). The new models and vocabularies of cultural geography can lead to a remapping of not just American studies but also other fields interested in the social. “In a very real sense, the new geography constitutes a powerful expressive form, giving voice to the effects of dislocation , disembodiment, and localization that constitute contemporary social orders” (Blair 545). 4. What would an abstract notion of culture be? The idea that culture is generally “good...