FMI Radio: Immigrant Song

An immigrant living in the United States wakes up one day to discover that their country has disappeared from the map and no one else seems to remember it.

Notes:

Films mentioned:

• The Trial (Criterion)

• Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (Hulu)

• Incendies (Tubi)

• This Must Be the Place (Prime, Kanopy, Tubi, Plex)

Bonus:

I made the mistake of calling the short story “On Exactitude in Science” by Jorge Luis Borges The Map and the Territory, which is a novel by Michel Houellebecq. I regret the error.

Below is the short story, reprinted in full:

“On Exactitude in Science”

. . . In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

—Suarez Miranda,Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV,Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658

FMI Radio: Katie the Grenade

·

Aug 1

A potential “Bond girl” who gets ghosted (for her own protection) decides she needs to find out why she got dumped.