Today I received the two calendars I ordered last week. I decided to make this short video to show prospective buyers what the calendar looks like when printed out. In the video above I simply hang the calendar on the wall and flipped through each month of the Color Edition of my 2010 Cartographic Calendar. Its a somewhat simple method of showing the maps in the calendar, but I think it helps to visualize what a 17″ x 11″ calendar would look like on your wall.

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This groundbreaking, trans-genre work—part detective story, part literary memoir, part imagined past—is intensely autobiographical and confessional. Proceeding sentence by sentence, city by city, and backwards in time, poet and essayist Kazim Ali details the struggle of coming of age between cultures, overcoming personal and family strictures to talk about private affairs and secrets long held. The text is comprised of sentences that alternate in time, ranging from discursive essay to memoir to prose poetry. Art, history, politics, geography, love, sexuality, writing, and religion, and the role silence plays in each, are its interwoven themes. Bright Felon is literally “autobiography” because the text itself becomes a form of writing the life, revealing secrets, and then, amid the shards and fragments of experience, dealing with the aftermath of such revelations. Bright Felon offers a new and active form of autobiography alongside such texts as Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee, Lyn Hejinian’s My Life, and Etel Adnan’s In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country.

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From the Book:

You wouldn’t think I would have wanted a beacon. Rather to find myself in the wilderness on my own.

But I did, I always did.

Could there have been someone else like me, not one thing not another, barely able to choose.

A poet, a Muslim, and of a particular persuasion.

When I knew someone like me I barely knew him and we couldn’t bring ourselves to speak of the one thing we needed to speak to each other about.

Silence stretched between us taut as sin.

In 2004 I moved with Marco down the river to Beacon, NY.

Named for the signal fires placed on top of each mountain in chain running from New York City to Albany.

So if either city fell to the British the insurgents at the other end would know about it.

I placed signal fires up and down each street, so anxious I was to belong somewhere.

—From the chapter “Beacon”

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Endorsements:

“Bright Felon will steal your heart and outrage your poetics. Part memoir, part trip book, part literary discourse, there is in it an urgent sense of a life lived in words. The tale is one of both innocence and experience. Rigorous, romantic, experimental, true, and yet mysterious, it is a book for the ages.” —Laura Moriarty, author of A Semblance: Selected and New Poems, 1975–2007

“Kazim Ali writes in Bright Felon a prose shaped by the various cities he has lived and loved in. This is a book that is so much more than memoir or autobiography. It is embodied and questioning and it carries through its politics a grace and generosity. —Juliana Spahr, author of Fuck You, Aloha, I Love You

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KAZIM ALI is the author of two books of poetry, The Far Mosque (2004) and The Fortieth Day (2008). He is an assistant professor of creative writing at Oberlin College and teaches in the low-residency MFA program of the University of Southern Maine. He is one of the founding editors of Nightboat Books.

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The text above was copied from the website of book distributor, University Press of New England

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Below is a detail from my map Manhattan & Brooklyn Bridge Quilt, which is featured on the cover of the book:

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Related New York City Entries:

Starting earlier this month those who are subscribed to my listserv were given the opportunity to purchase a map at the reasonable price of $100. I felt this was a great way to cheaply obtain the different maps I have created over the years. Since I have hundreds of maps to choose from, this monthly opportunity will last for years and ultimately become a great way to collect my maps.

Previously I used to point people to my ImageKind Store, but I wasn’t pleased with some of the cheap papers the maps were printed on, and have chosen to remove the middle man, so to speak, and have all the map purchases go directly through me. This way I can control the materials the maps are printed on, personally sign each map, and ensure the quality for each map that is produced.

For the month of August, the first Monthly Map, I chose was Washington Monument Quilt (above), which I first rendered on January 31st, 2006. Since the area around the Washington Monument was redacted in the 2005 USGS aerial photography, I felt it was a worthwhile piece to start with.

After sending out my initial e-mail about the offering, I had a friend contact me about purchasing the map and decided to document some of the steps involved in the process of ordering the maps through me….

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Step One – Payment

You can either contact me about sending cash or a check or you can quickly & easily pay the $100 by credit card on my PayPal merchant account page. After I receive the payment, I will need your mailing address if you want the map mailed to you. If you live in Washington, DC, I can either mail it to you or meet you in person and hand-deliver the map. I’ve found it easiest to go through PayPal because it’s quick and safe.

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Step Two – Printing

After I receive payment, I send the map to the printer. For the time being, my Monthly Map Sale is featuring 30″ x 20″ prints on Kodak PerfectTouch Paper. Throughout the last 5 years I’ve had the best results on this medium, both in quality of colors and durability of the paper. It’s also the same medium I used when I donated 8 maps to the Library of Congress in 2006. In about 3 days or less, I receive confirmation that the map has been printed and is in transit to me or you.

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Step Three – Shipping

I can have the map shipped directly to you as well (without signature, date, or label) for faster turnaround or I can have it shipped to my house. After the map arrives, I remove it from the shipping tube (above), carefully flip it over, label the name of the map, label the date it was originally rendered, label the date it was printed, and sign the map (below).

After this, I roll the map back up into the tube, add a little extra padding to ensure the map will not be damaged, then I bring it to the post office. Three days later it should be delivered to your mailbox. Or if the map is purchased locally, we can meet up and exchange the map in person.

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THATS IT! I think the whole process is pretty simple. In all this process takes about one or two weeks depending on the speed at which the payment is received and how long it takes for the map to be printed and shipped.

I think the hardest part of it all will be choosing which map to offer each month! Please contact me if you are interested in purchasing this month’s map or have suggestions for future Monthly Map offerings.

In conjunction with my upcoming presentation at next month’s meeting of the New York Map Society, I decided to order a copy of the map and will be donating it to the Lionel Pincus & Princess Firyal Map Division at the New York Public Library. It will printed out quite large at 60″ x 40″ on Hahnemühle Fine Art Pearl 285gsm paper and should be a splendid addition to their permanent collection.

Today I mailed a copy of one of my favorite maps to a company that intends on using the map for an upcoming advertisement. I can’t post too many details until the advertisement has been completed, but I intend on posting the photos when they become available. It should look awesome :-)

I am pleased to announce that my 2008 Urban America Calendar is on it’s way to the Map Collections at the British Libray. Last week the Map and Imagery Laboratory at the University of California, Santa Barbara purchased a copy of the 2008 California Calendar. All in all, I am very pleased with how receptive people have been to the calendars.

Below are the months of the calendar featuring places around the Washington, DC metropolitan area and links to their respective entries so that you can see the map’s full size. Read more about the other calendars here.

Below are the months of the calendar featuring cities around the United States and links to their respective entries so that you can see the map’s full size. Read more about the other calendars here.

As of January 1st, the calendar is no longer available for sale on-line. A big thank you to those who purchased copies!

A viewable copy of the calendar is in the permanent holdings of the Map and Imagery Laboratory at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

In light of the album cover, I decided to make a few more maps of the Pentagon. Using new imagery taken in September of 2005 by Aerial Express and released by the USGS at 0.5 meters (approximately 1.6-foot). The first rendered was a botch. Somehow when I was changing the design around I messed up and created an imperfect map, which I prefer not to publish. Howerver, I was able to sample it to make a derivative tessellation that I used for this map.

View the Google Map of the Pentagon

View the rest of the details:

Click on the image above to be taken to my Geospatial Art On-Line Store.  There are about 200 maps in the store right now!

View the Google Map of Woodley Park in Washington, DC.

View Rendering Details:

View the Google Map of American University in Washington, DC.

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View the Google Map of the Georgetown University Campus

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View the Google Map of RFK Stadium in Washington, DC

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View the Google Map of the Central Intelligence Agency

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View the Google Map of downtown Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

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View the Google Map of downtown Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

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So I made 5 different maps of Pittsburgh and when I was post-processing them I discovered that 2 of the maps were not perfect. I found that a seam was off by a few pixels and I find this to be unacceptable, so I deleted the maps. This isn’t the first time this has happened, but it’s the first time it’s happened when I was making a series.

According to the meta-data, the aerial photography was taken on April 5th, 2005, processed in May of 2005, and released in October of 2005. The source spatial resolution is .3 meters per pixel, which gives a lot of detail.

View the Google Map of downtown Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

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View the Google Map of Eastern Market

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