#daniel harmon

[andrewdegraff]

My two precious baby books, Plotted: A Literary Atlas from Zest Books, and Cinemaps: An Atlas of 35 Great Movies from Quirk Books are available for all your Christmas-y/holiday needs. You know what I like? Diagonal type!

[andrewdegraff]

One of my favorite maps from my book Plotted: A Literary Atlas mapping Shirley Jackson’s brilliant short story “The Lottery”. Since I’m living in New England for the first time, and just re-audiobooked Maine native Stephen King’s Dark Tower, The Lottery has been on my mind with it’s New England gothic restraint and polite severity.  Living in a small town again, it’s comfortable and isolating. Parades. Mowed lawns. School crossing guards. Little league. It’s my new American bubble, and it’s kinda weird. And it keeps getting popped. The bombing in Manchester, attacks in London, Paris and Nice, the ongoing Syrian, Afghan and Iraq Wars, the semi-annual school shootings, and the escalating number of hate crimes here in the US overall - I have to wonder at what point we deaden our sympathy and just acknowledge these events as routine. The new normal. The Lottery after all isn’t just a horror story, it’s a cautionary tale about a routine complacency and expecting a routine horror to come to someone else, never you. I know we all like to think we care, and care deeply, despite the mounting evidence that we simply don’t, and we should.  If you’ve never read it or haven’t read it since school, give it a read.  

Daniel Harmon, my Plotted co-conspirator summed it up beautifully in his essay  accompanying the map alluding the drawing of the “black spot” that meant death to the recipient, and the fact that story has subsequently been banned from some libraries. He writes “What the black spot ‘means’ means less than the fact that it is there at all. In the meantime, we will continue to write our letters and ban our books. We are not them, we promise.”

[andrewdegraff]

Two of the spreads from “Plotted: A Literary Atlas” and some details of the original drawings based on Melville’s great American masterpiece, Moby Dick. Part of the reason for the breakdown was relevance, and partly because there is already a fantastic illustrated map of Moby Dick by Edward Everett Henry. If you haven’t seen Henry’s work, it’s pretty incredible. My reasons for mapping the Pequod and the whale were simply to give the reader a little reference for all the terminology. As a big fan of Moby Dick, and other seagoing tales like the Patrick O’Brien’s Aubrey-Maturin books, and Richard Henry Dana’s “Two Years Before the Mast”, I would have really liked a sail map and a little more explanation. Often these sailing books dove into paragraphs of sail trimming and rigging, much of which left the land lubbers like me with only a vague notion of what was going on. Let alone the fact that a whaleboat was it’s own idiosyncratic ship-type being half cargo ship, half floating factory. If you’ve never allowed yourself the joy of reading Moby Dick - please do so. It’s a thick sweeping concoction of magic and nature, superstition and realism. After all, Melville was a whaler himself and witnessed first hand the industry’s gruesome, blood thirsty nature, as well as the sublime beauty and hardship of a sailor’s life. 

[youcanmakeitinspiration]

How Angel Studios Is Helping To Guard The Spiritual Heart 

Have you ever watched a movie and felt depressed or down afterward? Maybe your spirit felt like something wasn’t right after watching a certain film. In a world overflowing with entertainment choices, not all content feeds the soul. Movies, television shows, and streaming platforms don’t just pass the time, they shape thoughts, influence emotions, and even impact decisions. That’s why what we…

How Angel Studios Is Helping To Guard The Spiritual Heart 

[pitlover75]

Daniel Harmon

[pitlover75]

Daniel Harmon and his beast arms.