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There's the geography of maps, where the objects are a town, a river, a mountain, and then there is the subjective map, where the objects are all object-events: getting lost, coming home, being-in-a-strange-apartment. The subjective map has a very different scale - it measures not inches, miles, or kilometers, but uniqueness and repetitions. For instance, the geography of getting lost depends upon  its position in the scale of encounters with a place - getting lost in the same place the second time is a harder thing to do, and eventually, if you keep coming back, you aren't lost at all and the lostness that you once experienced seems like a dream. 

Pissing in the River Watchin' it rise There are two stories about Protagoras. In the hostile account of his life written by Diogenes Laertius, it is said that he was a porter, a relatively humble position, and that he invented a porter’s pad for carrying things. But in Philostratas’s Lives of the Sophists he is given a much grander birth, being the son of a wealthy citizen of Abdera who “amassed wealth beyond most men in Thrace”, and who entertained King Xerxes in his house. Philostratus claims that this Persian connection effected Protagoras’s thinking, since he became versed, to an extent, in the doctrines of the Persian magi. Whereas Diogenes Laertius (writing with all the snobbery of the ancient world at his back) attributes Protagorus’s education to Democritus, who was impressed by Protagoras’s invention of the porter’s pad. Somehow, this story rings with the implication of slander – it gives Protagoras’s cunning all too menial a cast. And yet Diogenes also casually att

Who among us is not aware of shower tourism? By this, I do not simply mean the always tentative exploration of hotel bathrooms, with their varying accommodation for the traveler, their little tubes of cheap shampoo and body gel, which one nevertheless pockets, their towels of varying thicknesses, and their surprisingly common problem with retaining water in the shower or shower/tub area – the latter being home to a curious penchant among hoteliers for what is called, in the industry, the “flexible curtain track”, which allows ample space to pull the curtain shut – but which always produces a sizeable puddle at the end of the lustration process. That puddle into which the showerer plunges his feet, with a light grimace, when removing himself from the shower – how well we know it. Unlike our bathroom, however, the puddle is a matter for someone else to clean up. Yes, the hotel bathroom deserves a whole chapter to itself, but at the moment, I am talking of another facet of this micro-wor