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Somnium and Other Trips to the Moon by John Miller, Tim Smith
adventurous
funny
lighthearted
3.0
1) ["Somnium," Johannes Kepler]
"In the year 1608, when quarrels were raging between the brothers, Emperor Rudolph and Archduke Matthias, people were comparing precedents from Bohemian history. Caught up by the general curiosity, I applied my mind to Bohemian legends and chanced upon the story of the heroine Libussa, famous for her magic art. It happened then on a certain night that after watching the stars and moon, I stretched out on my bed and fell sound asleep."
2) [Ibid.]
"Brahe, greatly delighted with the letter I gave him, began to ask me many questions which I, unfamiliar with the language, did not understand except for a few words. He therefore imposed upon his students, whom he supported in great numbers, the task of talking with me frequently: so it came about, through this generosity of Brahe and a few weeks' practice, that I spoke Danish fairly well. I was no less ready to talk than they were to question and I told them many new things about my homeland in return for the marvels they related to me.
Finally the captain of the ship that had brought me returned. But when he came to fetch me, he was sent away. And I was very happy."
3) [Ibid.]
"Volva waxes and wanes no less than our moon, the cause being the same: the presence of the sun or its departure. Even the time is the same, if you look to nature; but they reckon in one way, we in another. They consider as a day and a night the time in which all the waxings and wanings of their Volva occur."
4) [Ibid.]
"Those to whom breathing is more necessary introduce the hot water into the caves by means of a narrow canal, in order that, being taken into the innermost parts through a long course, the water may gradually become cool. They stay there for the greater part of the day, and use the water for drinking; and when evening approaches they go forth to seek food. In the case of plants, bark, in the case of animals, skin, or whatever may take its place, accounts for the major part of the corporeal mass, and it is spongy and porous; if anything is caught in the daylight, it becomes hard and burnt on top, and when evening approaches the outer covering comes off. Things growing from the soil, although on the mountain ridges there are few, are usually produced and destroyed on the same day, new growth springing up daily.
A race of serpents predominates in general. It is wonderful how they expose themselves to the sun at midday as if for pleasure, but only just inside the mouths of caves, in order that there might be a safe and convenient retreat."
5) ["The First Men in the Moon," H. G. Wells]
"'I suppose anyhow—on any planet, where there is an intelligent animal, it will carry its brain case upward, and have hands and walk erect...'
Presently he broke away in another direction.
'We are some way in,' he said. "I mean—perhaps a couple of thousand feet or more.'
'Why?'
'It's cooler. And our voices are so much louder. That faded quality—it has altogether gone. And the feeling in one's ears and throat.'
I had not noted that, but I did now.
'The air is denser. We must be some depth—a mile even we may be—inside the moon.'
'We never thought of a world inside the moon.'"
6) ["Journey to the Moon," Cyrano de Bergerac]
"'Oho,' they said, taking me by the arm, 'so you want to play the clown. My Lord the Governor will know you all right!'
They led me towards their troop, where I learned that I was indeed in France—in New France. Some little time later I was presented to the Viceroy, who asked me my country, my name, and my quality. I satisfied him by relating the happy outcome of my voyage and, whether he believed it or only pretended to do so, he had the goodness to arrange for me to be given a room in his house. My joy was great at meeting a man capable of lofty reasoning, who was not at all surprised when I told him that the earth must have revolved during the course of my levitation, since I had begun my ascent two leagues away from Paris and had come down almost perpendicularly in Canada."
7) [Ibid.]
"After fortifying my courage with a bottle of a cordial essence, I returned to look for my machine. I did not find it, however, for some soldiers, who had been sent into the forest to cut wood to build a fire for the feast of St. John, had chanced upon it and brought it to the Fort, where several explanations of what it could be were advanced. When the device of the spring was discovered, some said a quantity of rockets should be attached to it, so that when their speed had lifted them high enough and the motor was agitating its great wings, no one could fail to take the machine for a fire dragon.
Meanwhile I spent a long time searching for it, but at last I found it in the middle of the square in Quebec just as they were setting fire to it. My dismay at discovering my handiwork in such danger so excited me that I ran to seize the arm of the soldier who was setting light to it. I snatched the fuse from him and threw myself furiously into my machine to destroy the contrivance with which it had been surrounded, but I arrived too late, for I had hardly set my two feet inside it when I was borne up into the blue."
8) ["The True History," Lucian]
"The storm went on for seventy-nine days, but on the eightieth the sun suddenly shone through and revealed an island not far off. It was hilly and covered with trees, and now that the worst of the storm was over, the roar of the waves breaking against the shore had died down to a soft murmur. So we landed and threw ourselves down, utterly exhausted, on the sand. After all we had been through, you can imagine how long we lay there; but eventually we got up, and leaving thirty men to guard the ship, I and the other twenty went off to explore the island.
We started walking inland through the woods, and when we had gone about six hundred yards we came across a bronze tablet with a Greek inscription on it. The letters were almost worn away, but we just managed to make out the words: 'Hercules and Dionysus got this far.' We also spotted a couple of footprints on a rock nearby, one about a hundred feet long, and the other, I should say, about ninety-nine. Presumably Hercules has somewhat larger feet than Dionysus."
9) [Ibid.]
"The infantry numbered approximately sixty million, and special steps had to be taken before they could be suitably deployed. There are, you must understand, large numbers of spiders on the Moon, each considerably larger than the average island in the Archipelago, and their services were requisitioned to construct a continuous cobweb between the Moon and Lucifer. As soon as the job had been done and the infantry had thus been placed on a firm footing, Nycterion, the third son of Eudianax, led them out on to the field of battle."
10) [Ibid.]
"Well, that is what it was like on the Moon. If you do not believe me, go and see for yourself."
"In the year 1608, when quarrels were raging between the brothers, Emperor Rudolph and Archduke Matthias, people were comparing precedents from Bohemian history. Caught up by the general curiosity, I applied my mind to Bohemian legends and chanced upon the story of the heroine Libussa, famous for her magic art. It happened then on a certain night that after watching the stars and moon, I stretched out on my bed and fell sound asleep."
2) [Ibid.]
"Brahe, greatly delighted with the letter I gave him, began to ask me many questions which I, unfamiliar with the language, did not understand except for a few words. He therefore imposed upon his students, whom he supported in great numbers, the task of talking with me frequently: so it came about, through this generosity of Brahe and a few weeks' practice, that I spoke Danish fairly well. I was no less ready to talk than they were to question and I told them many new things about my homeland in return for the marvels they related to me.
Finally the captain of the ship that had brought me returned. But when he came to fetch me, he was sent away. And I was very happy."
3) [Ibid.]
"Volva waxes and wanes no less than our moon, the cause being the same: the presence of the sun or its departure. Even the time is the same, if you look to nature; but they reckon in one way, we in another. They consider as a day and a night the time in which all the waxings and wanings of their Volva occur."
4) [Ibid.]
"Those to whom breathing is more necessary introduce the hot water into the caves by means of a narrow canal, in order that, being taken into the innermost parts through a long course, the water may gradually become cool. They stay there for the greater part of the day, and use the water for drinking; and when evening approaches they go forth to seek food. In the case of plants, bark, in the case of animals, skin, or whatever may take its place, accounts for the major part of the corporeal mass, and it is spongy and porous; if anything is caught in the daylight, it becomes hard and burnt on top, and when evening approaches the outer covering comes off. Things growing from the soil, although on the mountain ridges there are few, are usually produced and destroyed on the same day, new growth springing up daily.
A race of serpents predominates in general. It is wonderful how they expose themselves to the sun at midday as if for pleasure, but only just inside the mouths of caves, in order that there might be a safe and convenient retreat."
5) ["The First Men in the Moon," H. G. Wells]
"'I suppose anyhow—on any planet, where there is an intelligent animal, it will carry its brain case upward, and have hands and walk erect...'
Presently he broke away in another direction.
'We are some way in,' he said. "I mean—perhaps a couple of thousand feet or more.'
'Why?'
'It's cooler. And our voices are so much louder. That faded quality—it has altogether gone. And the feeling in one's ears and throat.'
I had not noted that, but I did now.
'The air is denser. We must be some depth—a mile even we may be—inside the moon.'
'We never thought of a world inside the moon.'"
6) ["Journey to the Moon," Cyrano de Bergerac]
"'Oho,' they said, taking me by the arm, 'so you want to play the clown. My Lord the Governor will know you all right!'
They led me towards their troop, where I learned that I was indeed in France—in New France. Some little time later I was presented to the Viceroy, who asked me my country, my name, and my quality. I satisfied him by relating the happy outcome of my voyage and, whether he believed it or only pretended to do so, he had the goodness to arrange for me to be given a room in his house. My joy was great at meeting a man capable of lofty reasoning, who was not at all surprised when I told him that the earth must have revolved during the course of my levitation, since I had begun my ascent two leagues away from Paris and had come down almost perpendicularly in Canada."
7) [Ibid.]
"After fortifying my courage with a bottle of a cordial essence, I returned to look for my machine. I did not find it, however, for some soldiers, who had been sent into the forest to cut wood to build a fire for the feast of St. John, had chanced upon it and brought it to the Fort, where several explanations of what it could be were advanced. When the device of the spring was discovered, some said a quantity of rockets should be attached to it, so that when their speed had lifted them high enough and the motor was agitating its great wings, no one could fail to take the machine for a fire dragon.
Meanwhile I spent a long time searching for it, but at last I found it in the middle of the square in Quebec just as they were setting fire to it. My dismay at discovering my handiwork in such danger so excited me that I ran to seize the arm of the soldier who was setting light to it. I snatched the fuse from him and threw myself furiously into my machine to destroy the contrivance with which it had been surrounded, but I arrived too late, for I had hardly set my two feet inside it when I was borne up into the blue."
8) ["The True History," Lucian]
"The storm went on for seventy-nine days, but on the eightieth the sun suddenly shone through and revealed an island not far off. It was hilly and covered with trees, and now that the worst of the storm was over, the roar of the waves breaking against the shore had died down to a soft murmur. So we landed and threw ourselves down, utterly exhausted, on the sand. After all we had been through, you can imagine how long we lay there; but eventually we got up, and leaving thirty men to guard the ship, I and the other twenty went off to explore the island.
We started walking inland through the woods, and when we had gone about six hundred yards we came across a bronze tablet with a Greek inscription on it. The letters were almost worn away, but we just managed to make out the words: 'Hercules and Dionysus got this far.' We also spotted a couple of footprints on a rock nearby, one about a hundred feet long, and the other, I should say, about ninety-nine. Presumably Hercules has somewhat larger feet than Dionysus."
9) [Ibid.]
"The infantry numbered approximately sixty million, and special steps had to be taken before they could be suitably deployed. There are, you must understand, large numbers of spiders on the Moon, each considerably larger than the average island in the Archipelago, and their services were requisitioned to construct a continuous cobweb between the Moon and Lucifer. As soon as the job had been done and the infantry had thus been placed on a firm footing, Nycterion, the third son of Eudianax, led them out on to the field of battle."
10) [Ibid.]
"Well, that is what it was like on the Moon. If you do not believe me, go and see for yourself."
Critical Hits: Writers Playing Video Games by J. Robert Lennon, Carmen Maria Machado
emotional
inspiring
reflective
fast-paced
4.0
1) [Introduction]
"...an anthology that holds space for writers who are compulsive gamers, former gamers, parents of gamers, and game writers. Reluctant gamers and avid gamers and people who wouldn't call themselves gamers at all. This book—the first of its kind, as far as I and my coeditor can tell—has more room inside it than you'd expect. What a pleasure and a gift to be at its helm." [A bold claim!!]
2) ["This Kind of Animal," Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah]
"You look at your sisters weeping, your mother dry-eyed.
Empathy: 'You couldn't have been different. You are all you knew.'
Suggestion: 'You could have been anything. There's so many ways to be.'
Logic: 'What you are is what you are.'
Inland Empire: 'Everything is nothing and nothing is everything.'
To his body, as a way to speak to him, you say, 'I love you and I wish you were here.'
Inland Empire: 'I love you and where I am now, love is all that's left.'
3) [Ibid.]
"I'm not here to tell you to play the game. I'm here to say that Disco Elysium is a magnificent literary experience. Literary is a slippery and sometimes problematic word, but in this context I mean: via the precise use of language, it changes the reader. It makes you grow, gives you a new way of looking at the world, which is a mirror of all of us together, and it asks you really, truly, honestly, Who are you? Who are your dead? And gives you the space to try to answer."
4) ["Staying with the Trouble," Octavia Bright]
"We know the world that made the story of Leisure Suit Larry all too well, but how do we stay with the trouble it presents? By not letting it slip into the soothing fog of nostalgia, or under cover of the so-called harmless joke? By facing the fact that the trouble at the heart of the story it tells, and the world that story then goes on to make, is that masculinity is something a person can win or lose at? If, as Haraway argues, 'it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts,' then it also matters what games game games."
5) ["The Cocoon," Ander Monson]
"I remember the sudden jump scares, too, as you came out of an airlock or around a corner and anything could be there. It was cheap but effective: more visceral than you'd think, considering this was 1994. Video was ascendant, not games, which of course still came on cartridges. My friends and I consumed a ton of both, often in whoever's apartment had the system we wanted to use. It was walking distance to downtown, I think. Someone or someone's brother worked at Very Video in Hancock, across the bridge, and was allowed to bring home for the weekend whatever systems they hadn't rented, one of which was this new one: the Atari Jaguar."
6) [Ibid.]
"Playing as a human becomes a game of collection. Shotgun rounds collected. Food collected. Medkit collected. Pulse Rifle rounds collected. Security card #03 collected. Collecting is central to many of my passions: I collect for pleasure. But here you collect to survive. The Aliens collect for reproduction only. The Predator collects too. It keeps skulls as trophies. It seems to be having the most fun, which is probably why it's most fun to play as it. After all, it doesn't have to be here. This isn't about survival. It's about sport.
What is fun is the Alien area, with its labial doorways, its green-and-black palette, its gooey strands of whatever, its weird reptilian wall textures. For an early game, the design is well done. It's weird enough to convey the alienness. The Predator area is similarly distinctive, if a little less so on account of there being less Predator decor on offer to work with from the movies. Its yellow-and-brown tie-dye-looking textures gives the impression of being inside some kind of psychedelic animal ship or a college dorm room circa 1995."
7) ["Ninjas and Foxes," Alexander Chee]
"The draw to play is still there. I see games now that interest me, like Ghost of Tsushima, but I'm almost an old man now, and I'm getting along fine without them. More importantly, I feel like the main character in my life now. I don't need the game to offer me the cheap alternative.
As I think about what I've learned about the impulse to play in a world that is like the world I want but not that world, I ask myself: Why would I want to be a samurai, or a ninja, or a martial arts legend, in America now? And on whose terms? Is there something about being in this country that makes me long for that? My late father actually was a martial artist, and I think of the amused disgust he would feel at seeing me play this game from the afterlife, though it is maybe even the case that playing these games was and is a way of missing him. It may also be there is still something I need to figure out this way, and in the end, that is how I will think of it: each game just another mask to wear in search of the truth, whatever that truth might be. One truth might be this: it may be that now I could play a game like that just for the fun of it. At last."
8) ["No Traces," Stephen Sexton]
"The work of poetry, which often stretches into the early hours, is play. When it's going well, I feel outside myself, strange to myself, outside the usual flow of time. I don't know how to get there, but for the briefest time, I sense that circuit—subject and object, writer and reader, player and icon—complete itself through me. It's like catching your reflection in the glass of your front door as you reach for the handle, either leaving or coming home—you can't, for the moment, tell which."
9) ["We're More Ghosts Than People," Hanif Abdurraqib]
"The building where I worked as a debt collector in the 2000s looked like it could have been a portal to anywhere. Like anything could have been inside of it. This is how all the debt collection buildings looked in Columbus, Ohio. Large, gray, nondescript slabs. Brick sometimes, if you were lucky. All of them on the outskirts of the city, nudging up against a suburb's borders but never in the suburb. Places where good people went to do bad work because they had to survive.
I needed a job. I had, by that point, accumulated a small criminal record, with a larger one to come. I had to find a place where I could build some form of legitimacy, and no one else would hire me. Debt collection companies would take anyone. There was a boom in the industry. This was right after the early-2000s recession but before the more robust late-2000s recession. Broadly, this meant that there were more people in dire straits than there had been before. Misery as a gateway to opportunity; you might even call it the American Dream."
Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany
challenging
mysterious
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
1) "to wound the autumnal city.
So howled out for the world to give him a name.
The in-dark answered with wind.
All you know I know: careening astronauts and bank clerks glancing at the clock before lunch; actresses cowling at light-ringed mirrors and freight elevator operators grinding a thumbful of grease on a steel handle; student riots; know that dark women in bodegas shook their heads last week because in six months prices have risen outlandishly; how coffee tastes after you've held it in your mouth, cold, a whole minute.
A whole minute he squatted, pebbles clutched with his left foot (the bare one), listening to his breath sound tumble down the ledges.
Beyond a leafy arras, reflected moonlight flittered.
He rubbed his palms against denim. Where he was, was still. Somewhere else, wind whined.
The leaves winked.
What had been wind was a motion in brush below. His hand went to the rock behind.
She stood up, two dozen feet down and away, wearing only shadows the moon dropped from the viney maple; moved, and the shadows moved on her."
2) "Across the water the city flickered."
3) "This parched evening seasons the night with remembrances of rain. Very few suspect the existence of this city. It is as if not only the media but the laws of perspective themselves have redesigned knowledge and perception to pass it by. Rumor says there is practically no power here. Neither television cameras nor on-the-spot broadcasts function: that such a catastrophe as this should be opaque, and therefore dull, to the electric nation! It is a city of inner discordances and retinal distortions."
4) "'Which way does the sun come up?'
Loufer chuckled. 'I know you won't believe this—' they walked again—'but when I first got here, I could have sworn the light always started over there.' As they stepped from the curb, he nodded to the left. 'But like you can see, today it's getting light—' he gestured in front of them—'there.'
'Because the season's changing?'
'I don't think it's changed that much. But maybe.' Tak lowered his head and smiled. 'Then again, maybe I just wasn't paying attention.'
'Which way is east?'
'That's where it's getting light.' Tak nodded ahead. 'But what do you do if it gets light in a different place tomorrow?'
'Come on. You could tell by the stars.'
'You saw how the sky was. It's been like that or worse every night. And day. I haven't seen stars since I've been here—moons or suns either.'
'Yeah, but—'
'I've thought, maybe: It's not the season that changes. It's us. The whole city shifts, turns, rearranges itself. All the time. And rearranges us...' He laughed. 'Hey, I'm pulling your leg, Kid. Come on.'"
5) "What is this part of me that lingers to overhear my own conversation? I lie rigid in the rigid circle. It regards me from diametric points, without sex, and wise. We lie in a rigid city, anticipating winds. It circles me, intimating only by position that it knows more than I want to. There, it makes a gesture too masculine before ecstatic scenery. Here, it suggests femininity, pausing at gore and bone. It dithers and stammers, confronted by love. It bows a blunt, mumbling head before injustice, rage, or even its like ignorance. Still, I am convinced that at the proper shock, it would turn and call me, using those hermetic syllables I have abandoned on the crags of a broken conscience, on the planes of charred consciousness, at the entrance to the ganglial city. And I would raise my head.
'You...' he said, suddenly. It was dark. 'Are you happy, I mean, living like this?'
'Me?' She breathed a long breath. 'Let me see... before I came here, I was teaching English to Cantonese children who'd just arrived in New York's Chinatown. Before that, I was managing a pornographic bookstore on 42nd Street. And before that, for quite a while, I was a self-taught tape-jockey at WBAI-FM, in New York, and before that, I was doing a stint at her sister station KPFA, in Berkeley, Cal. Babes, I am so bored here that I don't think, since I've come, I've ever been more than three minutes away from some really astonishing act of violence.'
And suddenly, in the dark, she rolled against him."
6) "'When it began, I mean after it began—first we thought that whole side of the city was on fire—after we could see what it was—' he shook his head at somebody who started a comment—'no, no, I don't know what the fuck it was. Don't ask me. After we could see it, we went up the steps to watch. Didn't we?'
Dragon Lady sat, smiling and shaking her head, which, when she noticed the shift of attention, changed to nodding: the smile stayed.
'We just climbed up there and watched the whole thing. Go up. And go down.' Nightmare whistled. 'Jesus Christ!'
We live, Kid thought; and die in different cities."
7) "Kamp laughed. 'I'm dissatisfied with my life on earth. How's that? Not clear, I guess. Look—I'm not the same person I was before I went to the moon—maybe this is the sort of thing you were asking about. Perhaps it's the sort of thing that should only be told to one person. But I've told a couple of dozen: You know the world is round, and that the moon is a small world circling it. But you live in a world of up and down, where the land is a surface. But for me, just the visual continuity from that flat surface to a height where the edge of the earth develops a curve, to where that curve is a complete circle, to where the little soap-colored circle hanging in front of you enlarges to the size the Earth was, and then you come down. And suddenly that circle is a surface—but up and down is already not quite the same thing. We danced when we got out on the moon. What else could we do with that lightness? You know, seeing a film backward isn't the same experience as seeing it forward in reverse. It's a new experience, still happening forward in time. What falls out is all its own. Returning from the moon was not the same as going, played backward. We arrived at a place where no one had walked; we left a place where we had danced. The earth we left was peopled by a race that had never sent emissaries to another cosmological body. We returned to a people who had. I really feel that what we did was important—folks starving in India notwithstanding; and if there's a real threat of world starvation, technology will have to be used to avoid it; and I can't think of a better way to let people know just how far technology can take us. I was at a point of focus, for six and a half hours. I'm happy with that focus. But I'm not too terribly satisfied with the life on either side. The things that are off are like the things off about the way Bellona looked when we were driving through the first day I got here: there aren't many people, but there's no overt signs of major destruction—at least I didn't see any. It's grey, and some windows are broken, and here and there are marks of fire. But, frankly, I can't tell what's wrong. I still haven't been able to figure out what's happened here.'
'I'd like to go to the moon.'
'Cut your hair and stop taking dope.'"
8) "They play me into violent postures. Adrift in the violent city, I do not know what stickum tacks words and tongue. Hold them there, cradled on the muscular floor. Nothing will happen. What is the simplest way to say to someone like Kamp or Denny or Lanya that all their days have rendered ludicrous their judgments on the night? I can write at it. Why loose it on the half-day? Holding it in the mouth distills an anger dribbling bitter back of the throat, a substance for the hand. This is not what I am thinking. This is merely (he thought) what thinking feels like."
9) "At Bunny's gesture, Kid closed the door.
'Thank you, thank you. A million times, thank you. I've got to run along to greet my audience with—' Bunny thrust out a hip and closed an eye— 'the real thing. You're a perfect love. Ta-ta!' Halfway up the hall Bunny turned back and flung out one hand while the other wound among the optic beads. 'And have a fabulous time at your party. You were too good to ask me. Thank you, thank you. You really are too good. Drink a glass of champagne for old Bun-buns, and remember, whatever happens, give 'em hell!'"
10) "The falsification of this journal: First off, it doesn't reflect my daily life. Most of what happens hour by hour here is quiet and dull. We sit most of the time, watch the dull sky slipping. Frankly, that is too stupid to write about. When something really involving, violent, or important happens, it occupies too much of my time, my physical energy, and my thought for me to be able to write about. I can think of four things that have happened in the nest I would like to have described when they occurred, but they so completed themselves in the happening that even to refer to them seems superfluous. What is down, then, is a chronicle of incidents with a potential for wholeness they did not have when they occurred; a false picture, again, because they show neither the general spread of our life's fabric, nor the most significant pattern points.
To show the one is too boring and the other too difficult. That is probably why (as I use up more and more paper trying to return the feeling I had when I thought I was writing poems) I am not a poet... anymore? The poems perhaps hint it to someone else, but for me they are dry as the last leaves dropping from the burned trees on Brisbane. They are moments when I had the intensity to see, and the energy to build, some careful analog that completed the seeing.
They stuck at me for two weeks? For three?
I don't really know if they occurred. That would take another such burst. All I have been left is the exhausting habit of trying to tack up the slack in my life with words."
A History of the Arab Peoples by Albert Hourani
challenging
informative
slow-paced
3.0
1) "A more important question is that of the originality of the Qur'an. Scholars have tried to place it in the context of ideas current in its time and place. Undoubtedly there are echoes in it of the teaching of earlier religions: Jewish ideas in its doctrines; some reflections of eastern Christian monastic piety in the brooding on the terrors of judgement and the descriptions of Heaven and Hell (but few references to Christian doctrine or liturgy); Biblical stories in forms different from those of the Old and New Testaments; an echo of the Manichaean idea of a succession of revelations given to different peoples. There are also traces of an indigenous tradition: the moral ideas in some ways continue those prevalent in Arabia, although in others they break with them; in the early revelations the tone is that of the Arabian soothsayer, stammering out his sense of an encounter with the supernatural.
Such traces of the past need cause no anxiety to a Muslim, who can regard them as signs that Muhammad came at the end of a line of prophets who all taught the same truth; to be effective, the final revelation might use words and images already known and understood, and if ideas or stories took a different form in the Qur'an, that might be because adherents of earlier prophets had distorted the message received through them. Some non-Muslim scholars, however, have drawn a different conclusion: that the Qur'an contains little more than borrowings from what was already available to Muhammad in that time and place. To say this, however, is to misunderstand what it is to be original: whatever was taken over from the religious culture of the age was so rearranged and transmuted that, for those who accepted the message, the familiar world was made anew."
2) "In the space of a few years, then, the political frontiers of the Near East had been changed and the centre of political life had moved from the rich and populous lands of the Fertile Crescent to a small town lying on the edge of the world of high culture and wealth. The change was so sudden and unexpected that it needs explanation. Evidence uncovered by archaeologists indicates that the prosperity and strength of the Mediterranean world were in decline because of barbarian invasions, failure to maintain terraces and other agricultural works, and the shrinking of the urban market. Both Byzantine and Sasanian Empires had been weakened by epidemics of plague and long wars; the hold of the Byzantines over Syria had been restored only after the defeat of the Sasanians in 629, and was still tenuous. The Arabs who invaded the two empires were not a tribal horde but an organized force, some of whose members had acquired military skill and experience in the service of the empires or in the fighting after the death of the Prophet. The use of camel transport gave them an advantage in campaigns fought over wide areas; the prospect of land and wealth created a coalition of interests among them; and the fervour of conviction gave some of them a different kind of strength."
3) "The absorption of such a large area into a single empire had in due course created an economic unit important not only by its size but because it linked together two great sea basins of the civilized world, those of the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. The movement of armies, merchants, craftsmen, scholars and pilgrims between them became easier, and also that of ideas, styles and techniques. Within this vast sphere of interaction it was possible for there to grow up strong governments, large cities, international trade and a flourishing countryside, maintaining the conditions for each other's existence.
The creation of the Muslim Empire, and then of states within its former territories, led to the growth of large cities, where palaces, governments and urban populations needed foodstuffs, raw materials for manufacture, and luxuries to display wealth and power, and where the changes and complexities of city life led to a desire for novelty and for imitation of the fashions of the powerful or the stranger. Urban demand and the relative ease of communications gave new directions and methods of organization to the long-distance trade which had always existed. Very bulky goods could not profitably be carried a very long way, and for most of its food the city had to look to its immediate hinterland; but on some goods the return was such as to justify their being carried over long distances. Pepper and other spices, precious stones, fine cloth and porcelain came from India and China, furs from the northern countries; coral, ivory and textiles were sent in return. The Middle Eastern cities were not only consumers but producers of manufactured goods for export as well as their own use. Some of the production was on a large scale - armaments of war produced in state arsenals, fine textiles for the palace, sugar refineries and paper mills - but most took place in small workshops for textiles or metalwork."
4) "A similar process took place in Egypt and Tunisia but ended differently, in the imposition of direct control by a European state; both these were countries where, for various reasons, a single state was able to intervene decisively. In Tunisia, the growth of indebtedness to European banks had the same immediate result as in the empire: the creation of an international financial commission in 1869. There followed a further attempt to reform the finances, reorganize justice and extend modern education. The more the country was opened to foreign enterprise, however, the more it attracted the interest of foreign governments, in particular that of France, already installed across the western frontier in Algeria. In 1881 a French army occupied Tunisia, partly for financial reasons, partly to forestall the growth of a rival influence, that of Italy, and partly to secure the Algerian frontier. Two years later an agreement was made with the bey by which France would assume an official protectorate and take responsibility for administration and finance.
In Egypt too larger openings for foreign enterprise gave greater incentives to intervention. Under the successors of Muhammad 'Ali, and particularly under Isma'il (1862-79), the attempt to create the institutions of a modern society continued. Egypt became virtually independent of the empire. Education was extended, some factories were opened, above all the process by which the country became a plantation producing cotton for the English market was carried further. The American civil war of 1861-5, which cut off the supply of cotton for a time, was an incentive to increased production. This continued after the war, and involved expenditure on irrigation and on communications; Egypt entered the railway age early, from the 1850s onwards. Another great public work was carried out: the Suez Canal, built with mainly French and Egyptian capital and Egyptian labour, was opened in 1869. Its opening was one of the great occasions of the century. The Khedive Isma'il took the opportunity to show that Egypt was no longer part of Africa, but belonged to the civilized world of Europe. The guests included the Emperor of Austria, the Empress Eugénie, wife of Napoleon III of France, the Crown Prince of Prussia, French writers and artists - Théophile Gautier, Émile Zola, Eugène Fromentin - Henrik Ibsen, and famous scientists and musicians. Ceremonies were conducted by Muslim and Christian men of religion, and the Empress in the imperial yacht led the first procession of boats through the new canal; at almost the same time, the Opera House in Cairo was opened with a cantata in honour of Isma'il and a performance of Verdi's Rigoletto. The opening of the canal inevitably drew to Egypt the attention of Britain, with its maritime trade with Asia and its Indian Empire to defend."
5) "The creation of an educated élite by means of higher education was, of course, a process which had begun long before in some of the Arab countries, but the pace increased with the winning of independence. In 1939 there had been half a dozen universities, most of them small and foreign-controlled; by 1960 there were some twenty full universities, three-quarters of them national, and several other institutions of higher learning. The number of university students was of the order of 100,000, excluding those studying in Europe or America. Far the largest number were in Egypt, with Syria, Lebanon and Iraq coming next. The increase was less rapid in the Maghrib, however. When the French left Tunisia, there were only 143 indigenous doctors and 41 engineers; in Morocco, there were only 19 Muslim and 17 Moroccan Jewish doctors, 15 Muslim and 15 Jewish engineers, but rather more lawyers, teachers and officials. The training of an élite therefore had to start from a lower level."
Such traces of the past need cause no anxiety to a Muslim, who can regard them as signs that Muhammad came at the end of a line of prophets who all taught the same truth; to be effective, the final revelation might use words and images already known and understood, and if ideas or stories took a different form in the Qur'an, that might be because adherents of earlier prophets had distorted the message received through them. Some non-Muslim scholars, however, have drawn a different conclusion: that the Qur'an contains little more than borrowings from what was already available to Muhammad in that time and place. To say this, however, is to misunderstand what it is to be original: whatever was taken over from the religious culture of the age was so rearranged and transmuted that, for those who accepted the message, the familiar world was made anew."
2) "In the space of a few years, then, the political frontiers of the Near East had been changed and the centre of political life had moved from the rich and populous lands of the Fertile Crescent to a small town lying on the edge of the world of high culture and wealth. The change was so sudden and unexpected that it needs explanation. Evidence uncovered by archaeologists indicates that the prosperity and strength of the Mediterranean world were in decline because of barbarian invasions, failure to maintain terraces and other agricultural works, and the shrinking of the urban market. Both Byzantine and Sasanian Empires had been weakened by epidemics of plague and long wars; the hold of the Byzantines over Syria had been restored only after the defeat of the Sasanians in 629, and was still tenuous. The Arabs who invaded the two empires were not a tribal horde but an organized force, some of whose members had acquired military skill and experience in the service of the empires or in the fighting after the death of the Prophet. The use of camel transport gave them an advantage in campaigns fought over wide areas; the prospect of land and wealth created a coalition of interests among them; and the fervour of conviction gave some of them a different kind of strength."
3) "The absorption of such a large area into a single empire had in due course created an economic unit important not only by its size but because it linked together two great sea basins of the civilized world, those of the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. The movement of armies, merchants, craftsmen, scholars and pilgrims between them became easier, and also that of ideas, styles and techniques. Within this vast sphere of interaction it was possible for there to grow up strong governments, large cities, international trade and a flourishing countryside, maintaining the conditions for each other's existence.
The creation of the Muslim Empire, and then of states within its former territories, led to the growth of large cities, where palaces, governments and urban populations needed foodstuffs, raw materials for manufacture, and luxuries to display wealth and power, and where the changes and complexities of city life led to a desire for novelty and for imitation of the fashions of the powerful or the stranger. Urban demand and the relative ease of communications gave new directions and methods of organization to the long-distance trade which had always existed. Very bulky goods could not profitably be carried a very long way, and for most of its food the city had to look to its immediate hinterland; but on some goods the return was such as to justify their being carried over long distances. Pepper and other spices, precious stones, fine cloth and porcelain came from India and China, furs from the northern countries; coral, ivory and textiles were sent in return. The Middle Eastern cities were not only consumers but producers of manufactured goods for export as well as their own use. Some of the production was on a large scale - armaments of war produced in state arsenals, fine textiles for the palace, sugar refineries and paper mills - but most took place in small workshops for textiles or metalwork."
4) "A similar process took place in Egypt and Tunisia but ended differently, in the imposition of direct control by a European state; both these were countries where, for various reasons, a single state was able to intervene decisively. In Tunisia, the growth of indebtedness to European banks had the same immediate result as in the empire: the creation of an international financial commission in 1869. There followed a further attempt to reform the finances, reorganize justice and extend modern education. The more the country was opened to foreign enterprise, however, the more it attracted the interest of foreign governments, in particular that of France, already installed across the western frontier in Algeria. In 1881 a French army occupied Tunisia, partly for financial reasons, partly to forestall the growth of a rival influence, that of Italy, and partly to secure the Algerian frontier. Two years later an agreement was made with the bey by which France would assume an official protectorate and take responsibility for administration and finance.
In Egypt too larger openings for foreign enterprise gave greater incentives to intervention. Under the successors of Muhammad 'Ali, and particularly under Isma'il (1862-79), the attempt to create the institutions of a modern society continued. Egypt became virtually independent of the empire. Education was extended, some factories were opened, above all the process by which the country became a plantation producing cotton for the English market was carried further. The American civil war of 1861-5, which cut off the supply of cotton for a time, was an incentive to increased production. This continued after the war, and involved expenditure on irrigation and on communications; Egypt entered the railway age early, from the 1850s onwards. Another great public work was carried out: the Suez Canal, built with mainly French and Egyptian capital and Egyptian labour, was opened in 1869. Its opening was one of the great occasions of the century. The Khedive Isma'il took the opportunity to show that Egypt was no longer part of Africa, but belonged to the civilized world of Europe. The guests included the Emperor of Austria, the Empress Eugénie, wife of Napoleon III of France, the Crown Prince of Prussia, French writers and artists - Théophile Gautier, Émile Zola, Eugène Fromentin - Henrik Ibsen, and famous scientists and musicians. Ceremonies were conducted by Muslim and Christian men of religion, and the Empress in the imperial yacht led the first procession of boats through the new canal; at almost the same time, the Opera House in Cairo was opened with a cantata in honour of Isma'il and a performance of Verdi's Rigoletto. The opening of the canal inevitably drew to Egypt the attention of Britain, with its maritime trade with Asia and its Indian Empire to defend."
5) "The creation of an educated élite by means of higher education was, of course, a process which had begun long before in some of the Arab countries, but the pace increased with the winning of independence. In 1939 there had been half a dozen universities, most of them small and foreign-controlled; by 1960 there were some twenty full universities, three-quarters of them national, and several other institutions of higher learning. The number of university students was of the order of 100,000, excluding those studying in Europe or America. Far the largest number were in Egypt, with Syria, Lebanon and Iraq coming next. The increase was less rapid in the Maghrib, however. When the French left Tunisia, there were only 143 indigenous doctors and 41 engineers; in Morocco, there were only 19 Muslim and 17 Moroccan Jewish doctors, 15 Muslim and 15 Jewish engineers, but rather more lawyers, teachers and officials. The training of an élite therefore had to start from a lower level."
Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Volume One: Summary: Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future by Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada
challenging
emotional
hopeful
informative
medium-paced
1) "For over a century, the central goals of Canada's Aboriginal policy were to eliminate Aboriginal governments; ignore Aboriginal rights; terminate the Treaties; and, through a process of assimilation, cause Aboriginal peoples to cease to exist as distinct legal, social, cultural, religious, and racial entities in Canada. The establishment and operation of residential schools were a central element of this policy, which can best be described as 'cultural genocide.'
Physical genocide is the mass killing of the members of a targeted group, and biological genocide is the destruction of the group's reproductive capacity. Cultural genocide is the destruction of those structures and practices that allow the group to continue as a group. States that engage in cultural genocide set out to destroy the political and social institutions of the targeted group. Land is seized, and populations are forcibly transferred and their movement is restricted. Languages are banned. Spiritual leaders are persecuted, spiritual practices are forbidden, and objects of spiritual value are confiscated and destroyed. And, most significantly to the issue at hand, families are disrupted to prevent the transmission of cultural values and identity from one generation to the next. In its dealing with Aboriginal people, Canada did all these things."
2) [Survivor, Ina Seitcher] "'I went to Christie residential school. This morning I heard a priest talking about his Christie residential school. I want to tell him [about] my Christie residential school. I went there for ten months. Ten months that impacted my life for fifty years.'"
3) [Survivor, Gilles Petiquay] "'I remember that the first number that I had at the residential school was 95. I had that number—95—for a year. The second number was number 4. I had it for a longer period of time. The third number was 56. I also kept it for a long time. We walked with the numbers on us.'"
4) "Indian Affairs officials believed that because the department had spent money educating students, it had gained the right to determine whom they married. Government officials feared that if students married someone who had not also been educated at a residential school, they would revert to traditional 'uncivilized' ways. The control of marriage was part of the ongoing policy of forced assimilation. In 1890, Indian Commissioner Hayter Reed criticized Qu'Appelle principal Joseph Hugonnard for allowing female students from the Qu'Appelle school to marry boys who had not gone to school, without first getting Indian Affairs' approval. Reed argued, 'The contention that the parents have the sole right to decide such matters cannot for one moment be admitted.'"
5) "Simon Baker's brother Jim died from spinal meningitis at the Lytton, British Columbia, school. 'I used to hear him crying at night. I asked the principal to take him to the hospital. He didn't. After about two weeks, my brother was in so much pain, he was going out of his mind. I pleaded with the principal for days to take him to a doctor.'
Ray Silver said that he always blamed the Alberni school for the death of his brother Dalton. 'He was a little guy, laying in the bed in the infirmary, dying, and I didn't know 'til he died. You know that's, that was the end of my education.' The death of a child often prompted parents to withdraw the rest of their children from a school. One former student said her father came to the school when her sister became ill at the Anglican school at Aklavik, Northwest Territories. 'He came upstairs and there we were. He cried over us. He took me home. He put her in a hospital, and she died.'
The high deaths rates in the schools were, in part, a reflection of the high death rates among the Aboriginal community in general. Indian Affairs officials often tried to portray these rates as simply the price that Aboriginal people had to pay as part of the process of becoming civilized. In reality, these rates were the price they paid for being colonized."
6) "The general Indian Affairs policy was to hold the schools responsible for burial expenses when a student died at school. The school generally determined the location and nature of that burial. Parental requests to have children's bodies returned home for burial were generally refused as being too costly. In her memoirs, Eleanor Brass recalled how the body of one boy, who hung himself at the File Hills school in the early twentieth century, was buried on the Peepeekisis Reserve, even though his parents lived on the Carlyle Reserve. As late as 1958, Indian Affairs refused to return the body of a boy who had died at a hospital in Edmonton to his northern home community in the Yukon.
The reluctance to pay the cost of sending the bodies of children from residential schools home for burial ceremonies continued into the 1960s. Initially, for example, Indian Affairs was initially unwilling to pay to send the body of twelve-year-old Charlie Wenjack back to his parents' home community in Ogoki, Ontario, in 1966. When Charles Hunter drowned in 1974 while attending the Fort Albany school, it was decided, without consultation with his parents, to bury him in Moosonee rather than send him home to Peawanuck near Hudson Bay. It was not until 2011, after significant public efforts made on his behalf by his sister Joyce, who had never got to meet her older brother, that Charles Hunter's body was exhumed and returned to Peawanuck for a community burial. The costs were covered by funds that the Toronto Star raised from its readership."
7) "The legacy of the schools remains. One can see the impact of a system that disrupted families in the high number of Aboriginal children who have been removed from their families by child-welfare agencies. An educational system that degraded Aboriginal culture and subjected students to humiliating discipline must bear a portion of responsibility for the current gap between the educational success of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Canadians. The health of generations of Aboriginal children was undermined by inadequate diets, poor sanitation, overcrowded conditions, and a failure to address the tuberculosis crisis that was ravaging the country's Aboriginal community. There should be little wonder that Aboriginal health status remains far below that of the general population. The over-incarceration and over-victimization of Aboriginal people also have links to a system that subjected Aboriginal children to punitive discipline and exposed them to physical and sexual abuse.
The history of residential schools presented in this report commenced by placing the schools in the broader history of the global European colonization of Indigenous peoples and their lands. Residential schooling was only a part of the colonization of Aboriginal people. The policy of colonization suppressed Aboriginal culture and languages, disrupted Aboriginal government, destroyed Aboriginal economies, and confined Aboriginal people to marginal and often unproductive land. When that policy resulted in hunger, disease, and poverty, the federal government failed to meet its obligations to Aboriginal people. That policy was dedicated to eliminating Aboriginal peoples as distinct political and cultural entities and must be described for what it was: a policy of cultural genocide."
8) "The Commission is convinced that genuine reconciliation will not be possible until the broad legacy of the schools is both understood and addressed. Governments in Canada spend billions of dollars each year in responding to the symptoms of the intergenerational trauma of residential schools. Much of this money is spent on crisis interventions related to child welfare, family violence, ill health, and crime. Despite genuine reform efforts, the dramatic overrepresentation of Aboriginal children in foster care, and among the sick, the injured, and the imprisoned, continues to grow. Only a real commitment to reconciliation will reverse the trend and lay the foundation for a truly just and equitable nation."
9) "Aboriginal peoples' right to self-determination must be integrated into Canada's constitutional and legal framework and civic institutions, in a manner consistent with the principles, norms, and standards of the [UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples]. Aboriginal peoples in Canada have Aboriginal and Treaty rights. They have the right to access and revitalize their own laws and governance systems within their own communities and in their dealings with governments. They have a right to protect and revitalize their cultures, languages, and ways of life. They have the right to reparations for historical harms."
10) [Honourary Witness, Wab Kinew] "'We were abused. Our languages were assaulted. Our families were harmed, in some cases, irreparably. But we are still here. We are still here.'"
Physical genocide is the mass killing of the members of a targeted group, and biological genocide is the destruction of the group's reproductive capacity. Cultural genocide is the destruction of those structures and practices that allow the group to continue as a group. States that engage in cultural genocide set out to destroy the political and social institutions of the targeted group. Land is seized, and populations are forcibly transferred and their movement is restricted. Languages are banned. Spiritual leaders are persecuted, spiritual practices are forbidden, and objects of spiritual value are confiscated and destroyed. And, most significantly to the issue at hand, families are disrupted to prevent the transmission of cultural values and identity from one generation to the next. In its dealing with Aboriginal people, Canada did all these things."
2) [Survivor, Ina Seitcher] "'I went to Christie residential school. This morning I heard a priest talking about his Christie residential school. I want to tell him [about] my Christie residential school. I went there for ten months. Ten months that impacted my life for fifty years.'"
3) [Survivor, Gilles Petiquay] "'I remember that the first number that I had at the residential school was 95. I had that number—95—for a year. The second number was number 4. I had it for a longer period of time. The third number was 56. I also kept it for a long time. We walked with the numbers on us.'"
4) "Indian Affairs officials believed that because the department had spent money educating students, it had gained the right to determine whom they married. Government officials feared that if students married someone who had not also been educated at a residential school, they would revert to traditional 'uncivilized' ways. The control of marriage was part of the ongoing policy of forced assimilation. In 1890, Indian Commissioner Hayter Reed criticized Qu'Appelle principal Joseph Hugonnard for allowing female students from the Qu'Appelle school to marry boys who had not gone to school, without first getting Indian Affairs' approval. Reed argued, 'The contention that the parents have the sole right to decide such matters cannot for one moment be admitted.'"
5) "Simon Baker's brother Jim died from spinal meningitis at the Lytton, British Columbia, school. 'I used to hear him crying at night. I asked the principal to take him to the hospital. He didn't. After about two weeks, my brother was in so much pain, he was going out of his mind. I pleaded with the principal for days to take him to a doctor.'
Ray Silver said that he always blamed the Alberni school for the death of his brother Dalton. 'He was a little guy, laying in the bed in the infirmary, dying, and I didn't know 'til he died. You know that's, that was the end of my education.' The death of a child often prompted parents to withdraw the rest of their children from a school. One former student said her father came to the school when her sister became ill at the Anglican school at Aklavik, Northwest Territories. 'He came upstairs and there we were. He cried over us. He took me home. He put her in a hospital, and she died.'
The high deaths rates in the schools were, in part, a reflection of the high death rates among the Aboriginal community in general. Indian Affairs officials often tried to portray these rates as simply the price that Aboriginal people had to pay as part of the process of becoming civilized. In reality, these rates were the price they paid for being colonized."
6) "The general Indian Affairs policy was to hold the schools responsible for burial expenses when a student died at school. The school generally determined the location and nature of that burial. Parental requests to have children's bodies returned home for burial were generally refused as being too costly. In her memoirs, Eleanor Brass recalled how the body of one boy, who hung himself at the File Hills school in the early twentieth century, was buried on the Peepeekisis Reserve, even though his parents lived on the Carlyle Reserve. As late as 1958, Indian Affairs refused to return the body of a boy who had died at a hospital in Edmonton to his northern home community in the Yukon.
The reluctance to pay the cost of sending the bodies of children from residential schools home for burial ceremonies continued into the 1960s. Initially, for example, Indian Affairs was initially unwilling to pay to send the body of twelve-year-old Charlie Wenjack back to his parents' home community in Ogoki, Ontario, in 1966. When Charles Hunter drowned in 1974 while attending the Fort Albany school, it was decided, without consultation with his parents, to bury him in Moosonee rather than send him home to Peawanuck near Hudson Bay. It was not until 2011, after significant public efforts made on his behalf by his sister Joyce, who had never got to meet her older brother, that Charles Hunter's body was exhumed and returned to Peawanuck for a community burial. The costs were covered by funds that the Toronto Star raised from its readership."
7) "The legacy of the schools remains. One can see the impact of a system that disrupted families in the high number of Aboriginal children who have been removed from their families by child-welfare agencies. An educational system that degraded Aboriginal culture and subjected students to humiliating discipline must bear a portion of responsibility for the current gap between the educational success of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Canadians. The health of generations of Aboriginal children was undermined by inadequate diets, poor sanitation, overcrowded conditions, and a failure to address the tuberculosis crisis that was ravaging the country's Aboriginal community. There should be little wonder that Aboriginal health status remains far below that of the general population. The over-incarceration and over-victimization of Aboriginal people also have links to a system that subjected Aboriginal children to punitive discipline and exposed them to physical and sexual abuse.
The history of residential schools presented in this report commenced by placing the schools in the broader history of the global European colonization of Indigenous peoples and their lands. Residential schooling was only a part of the colonization of Aboriginal people. The policy of colonization suppressed Aboriginal culture and languages, disrupted Aboriginal government, destroyed Aboriginal economies, and confined Aboriginal people to marginal and often unproductive land. When that policy resulted in hunger, disease, and poverty, the federal government failed to meet its obligations to Aboriginal people. That policy was dedicated to eliminating Aboriginal peoples as distinct political and cultural entities and must be described for what it was: a policy of cultural genocide."
8) "The Commission is convinced that genuine reconciliation will not be possible until the broad legacy of the schools is both understood and addressed. Governments in Canada spend billions of dollars each year in responding to the symptoms of the intergenerational trauma of residential schools. Much of this money is spent on crisis interventions related to child welfare, family violence, ill health, and crime. Despite genuine reform efforts, the dramatic overrepresentation of Aboriginal children in foster care, and among the sick, the injured, and the imprisoned, continues to grow. Only a real commitment to reconciliation will reverse the trend and lay the foundation for a truly just and equitable nation."
9) "Aboriginal peoples' right to self-determination must be integrated into Canada's constitutional and legal framework and civic institutions, in a manner consistent with the principles, norms, and standards of the [UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples]. Aboriginal peoples in Canada have Aboriginal and Treaty rights. They have the right to access and revitalize their own laws and governance systems within their own communities and in their dealings with governments. They have a right to protect and revitalize their cultures, languages, and ways of life. They have the right to reparations for historical harms."
10) [Honourary Witness, Wab Kinew] "'We were abused. Our languages were assaulted. Our families were harmed, in some cases, irreparably. But we are still here. We are still here.'"
Content Warnings
Minor: Child abuse and Suicide
Dissolution by C.J. Sansom
adventurous
mysterious
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.0
1) "'Oh, a few orders live straitly. But don't forget the Carthusians died because they refused to recognize the king as head of the Church. They all want the pope back. And now it seems one of them has turned to murder.' I sighed. 'I am sorry you must be involved in this.'
'Men of honour should not be afraid of danger.'
'One should always be afraid of danger.'"
2) "'On what evidence? And how question them, the torture? I thought you disapproved of such methods.'
'Of course not. But — stiff questioning?'
'And what if I am wrong, and it is not one of them at all? And how would we keep such a mass arrest secret?'
'But — time and danger press.'
'Do you think I don't know that?' I burst out in sudden anger. 'But bullying won't fetch out the truth. Singleton tried that and look where it got him. You untangle a knot with slow teasing, not sharp pulling, and believe me we have here a knot such as I have never seen. But I will unpick it. I will.'"
3) "He stared at me. When he spoke again it was almost a whisper.
'You should have seen this house just five years ago, before the king's divorce. Everything ordered and secure. Prayer and devotion, the summer timetable then the winter, unchanging, centuries old. The Benedictines have given me such a life as I could never have had in the world; a ship's chandler's son raised to abbot.' He gave a sad flicker of a smile. 'It's not just myself I mourn for, Commissioner; it's the tradition, the life. Already these last two years order has started to break down. We all used to have the same beliefs, think the same way, but already the reforms have brought discord, disagreement. And now murder. Dissolution,' he whispered. 'Dissolution.' I saw two great tears take form in the corners of his eyes. 'I will sign the Instrument of Surrender,' he said quietly. 'I have no alternative, have I?'
I shook my head slowly."
4) "Looking at the stone cadaver I had a sudden vision of Orphan's decomposed body rising from the water, then of the diseased rickety children at Smeaton's house. I had a sudden sick feeling that our revolution would do no more than change starveling children's names from those of the saints to Fear-God and Zealous. I thought of Cromwell's casual mention of creating faked evidence to hound innocent people to death, and of Mark's talk of the greedy suitors come to Augmentations for grants of monastic lands. This new world was no Christian commonwealth; it never would be. It was in truth no better than the old, no less ruled by power and vanity. I remembered the gaudy, hobbled birds shrieking mindlessly at each other and it seemed to me like an image of the king's court itself, where papists and reformers fluttered and gabbled, struggling for power. And in my wilful blindness I had refused to see what was before my eyes. How men fear the chaos of the world, I thought, and the yawning eternity hereafter. So we build patterns to explain its terrible mysteries and reassure ourselves we are safe in this world and beyond."
[spoilers]
5) "'She is right, there is nowhere safe in the world now, no thing certain. Sometimes I think of Brother Edwig and his madness, how he thought he could buy God's forgiveness for those murders with two panniers of stolen gold. Perhaps we are all a little mad. The Bible says God made man in his image but I think we make and remake him, in whatever image happens to suit our shifting needs. I wonder if he knows or cares. All is dissolving, Brother Guy, all is dissolution.'
We stood silent, watching the seabirds bobbing on the river, while behind us echoed the distant sound of crashing lead."
Ask Iwata: Words of Wisdom from Satoru Iwata, Nintendo's Legendary CEO by Satoru Iwata
hopeful
informative
inspiring
lighthearted
medium-paced
3.0
1) "After we found ourselves in dire straits, and I took over as president and tried to make things right, the staff gave me the benefit of the doubt, since I had won their trust as the most well-rounded member of the development team. On the flip side, everyone had basically lost faith in the company. Let's put it this way: if your company is on the brink of bankruptcy, all you can see as one of its employees is a heap of problems. After all, it's only natural to look at things and say, 'Is this what happens when we take orders from corporate?'
This is why I spent my first month as president interviewing everybody at the company. The discoveries were endless.
My plan was to be a sounding board and to get a sense of what was happening, but when I sat down with each person individually, I was blown away by how much I was learning. The idea was to figure out everybody's strengths and weaknesses. Without this kind of knowledge, I knew I couldn't make decisions on behalf of the whole company."
2) "[When] presented with a fact, my first reaction is to come up with a hypothesis for why it happened. Once you have a hypothesis, you test it out, then come up with another. Pretty soon you can see further off, from angles that weren't available to you before.
I learned to see the world this way from Shigesato Itoi, who has a knack for seeing the future. More often than not, the things he likes catch on and become the next big hit. Working alongside him, I've seen this happen time and time again.
I'm always asking Itoi, 'How did you know half a year out that this would be so popular?'
Without fail, Itoi answers the same way: 'I don't predict the future. I simply notice the world starting to change a little before everybody else.'"
3) "I think the sort of ideas that Miyamoto talks about, ideas that can solve multiple problems in one go, become harder to find the closer you examine things. The sort of details you won't notice unless you change your point of view are lost on the average person.
Because Miyamoto is so ready to change up his perspective, he's able to arrive at actual solutions rather than implementing stopgap measures that save one life by sacrificing another.
I think most people out there think of Miyamoto as an artist—something of a genius, who puts stock in inspiration and thinks with the right side of his brain, coming up with unlikely observations one after another, as if guided by divine inspiration.
But that's not the case. Miyamoto is an extremely logical person. But that's not all. His mind is capable of both extraordinarily logical, left-brained considerations and the sort of speeding-bullet thinking you might hear from someone who has pursued a career in the arts. I hate to say it, but I envy him."
4) [Shigeru Miyamoto] "By the way, did you know that we sometimes called Iwata 'Kirby' at the office? If you're stuck in a long meeting, and there's a pile of candy, it's easy to eat a ton, right? Well, doing that earned him the nickname 'Kirby,' and we made sure there was always lots of candy close at hand.
[...]
Iwata may have passed on, but the company is going strong. Thanks to all the ideas and systems that he left behind, our young hires have been able to thrive. What makes me sad is that if I have a crazy idea over the weekend, there isn't anybody I can tell about it on Monday morning.
When I'm eating lunch, he isn't there to say, 'I think I've figured out your problem,' which leaves me feeling stuck sometimes. I really miss him."
5) [Shigesato Itoi] "Iwata thoroughly enjoyed seeing people smile. This was behind his management philosophy for Nintendo. I think his life's work was to foster happiness.
And he was the kind of guy who spared no effort to achieve that goal. He loved supporting people, loved to understand things, and loved the communication so essential to the process.
That's what made his Monday lunches with Miyamoto so important to him. They were a combination of all the things he loved. A chance for him to say 'I think I've got it' and work through an idea that would make his close acquaintances and customers smile."
6) "It's always like this, whenever we release things. It's scary, every time. That's why I think it's always worth a try."
This is why I spent my first month as president interviewing everybody at the company. The discoveries were endless.
My plan was to be a sounding board and to get a sense of what was happening, but when I sat down with each person individually, I was blown away by how much I was learning. The idea was to figure out everybody's strengths and weaknesses. Without this kind of knowledge, I knew I couldn't make decisions on behalf of the whole company."
2) "[When] presented with a fact, my first reaction is to come up with a hypothesis for why it happened. Once you have a hypothesis, you test it out, then come up with another. Pretty soon you can see further off, from angles that weren't available to you before.
I learned to see the world this way from Shigesato Itoi, who has a knack for seeing the future. More often than not, the things he likes catch on and become the next big hit. Working alongside him, I've seen this happen time and time again.
I'm always asking Itoi, 'How did you know half a year out that this would be so popular?'
Without fail, Itoi answers the same way: 'I don't predict the future. I simply notice the world starting to change a little before everybody else.'"
3) "I think the sort of ideas that Miyamoto talks about, ideas that can solve multiple problems in one go, become harder to find the closer you examine things. The sort of details you won't notice unless you change your point of view are lost on the average person.
Because Miyamoto is so ready to change up his perspective, he's able to arrive at actual solutions rather than implementing stopgap measures that save one life by sacrificing another.
I think most people out there think of Miyamoto as an artist—something of a genius, who puts stock in inspiration and thinks with the right side of his brain, coming up with unlikely observations one after another, as if guided by divine inspiration.
But that's not the case. Miyamoto is an extremely logical person. But that's not all. His mind is capable of both extraordinarily logical, left-brained considerations and the sort of speeding-bullet thinking you might hear from someone who has pursued a career in the arts. I hate to say it, but I envy him."
4) [Shigeru Miyamoto] "By the way, did you know that we sometimes called Iwata 'Kirby' at the office? If you're stuck in a long meeting, and there's a pile of candy, it's easy to eat a ton, right? Well, doing that earned him the nickname 'Kirby,' and we made sure there was always lots of candy close at hand.
[...]
Iwata may have passed on, but the company is going strong. Thanks to all the ideas and systems that he left behind, our young hires have been able to thrive. What makes me sad is that if I have a crazy idea over the weekend, there isn't anybody I can tell about it on Monday morning.
When I'm eating lunch, he isn't there to say, 'I think I've figured out your problem,' which leaves me feeling stuck sometimes. I really miss him."
5) [Shigesato Itoi] "Iwata thoroughly enjoyed seeing people smile. This was behind his management philosophy for Nintendo. I think his life's work was to foster happiness.
And he was the kind of guy who spared no effort to achieve that goal. He loved supporting people, loved to understand things, and loved the communication so essential to the process.
That's what made his Monday lunches with Miyamoto so important to him. They were a combination of all the things he loved. A chance for him to say 'I think I've got it' and work through an idea that would make his close acquaintances and customers smile."
6) "It's always like this, whenever we release things. It's scary, every time. That's why I think it's always worth a try."
Diaspora by Greg Egan
adventurous
challenging
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
3.0
1) "The conceptory was non sentient software, as ancient a Konishi polis itself. Its main purpose was to enable the citizens of the polis to create offspring: a child of one parent, or two, or twenty—formed partly in their own image, partly according to their wishes, and partly by chance. Sporadically, though, every teratau or so, the conceptory created a citizen with no parents at all.
In Konishi, every home-born citizen was grown from a mind seed, a string of instruction codes like a digital genome. The first mind seeds had been translated from DNA nine centuries before, when the polis founders had invented the Shaper programming language to re-create the essential processes of neuroembryology in software. But any such translation was necessarily imperfect, glossing over the biochemical details in favor of broad, functional equivalence, and the full diversity of the flesher genome could not be brought through intact. Starting from a diminished trait pool, with the old DNA-based maps rendered obsolete, it was crucial for the conceptory to chart the consequences of new variations to the mind seed. To eschew all change would be to risk stagnation; to embrace it recklessly would be to endanger the sanity of every child."
2) "Yatima's clone started up in the gleisner body and spent a moment reflecting on vis situation. The experience of 'awakening' felt no different from arriving in a new scape; there was nothing to betray the fact that vis whole mind had just been created anew. Between subjective instants, ve'd been cross-translated from Konishi's dialect of Shaper, which ran on the virtual machine of a womb or an exoself, into the gleisner version which this robot's highly un-polis-like hardware implemented directly. In a sense, ve had no past of vis own, just forged memories and a secondhand personality... but it still felt as if ve'd merely jumped from savanna to jungle, one and the same person before and after. All invariants intact.
The original Yatima had been suspended by vis exoself prior to translation, and if everything went according to plan that frozen snapshot would never need to be re-started. The Yatima-clone in the gleisner would be re-cloned back into Konishi polis (and re-translated back into Konishi Shaper) then both the Konishi original and the gleisner-bound clone would be erased. Philosophically, it wasn't all that different from being shifted within the polis from one section of physical memory to another—an undetectable act which the operating system performed on every citizen from time to time, to reclaim fragmented memory space. And subjectively, the whole excursion would probably be much the same as if they'd puppeted the gleisners remotely, instead of literally inhabiting them.
If everything went according to plan."
3) "Twelve dimensions? Ve'd felt so besieged by the realist backlash that ve'd never even considered doing more than defending Kozuch's six against the charge of 'abstractionism.' Twice as extravagant? It certainly would have been in the twenty-first century, when no one knew how long wormholes really were.
But now?
Blanca shut down the avatar and began a fresh set of calculations. Kozuch herself had never said anything so explicit about higher-dimensional alternatives, but the avatar's educated guess turned out to be perfectly correct. Just as a 2-torus was the result of expanding every point in a circle into another circle perpendicular to the first, turning every point in a 6-sphere into a 6-sphere in its own right created a 12-torus—and a 12-torus as the standard fiber solved everything. The symmetries of the particles, and the Planck-Wheeler size of their wormhole mouths, could arise from one set of six dimensions; the freedom of the wormholes to take on astronomical lengths could then arise from the remaining six."
4) "'I keep asking myself, though: where do we go from here? History can't guide us. Evolution can't guide us. The C-Z charter says understand and respect the universe... but in what form? On what scale? With what kind of senses, what kind of minds? We can become anything at all—and that space of possible futures dwarfs the galaxy. Can we explore it with out losing our way? Fleshers used to spin fantasies about aliens arriving to 'conquer' Earth, to steal their 'precious' physical resources, to wipe them out for fear of 'competition'... as if a species capable of making the journey wouldn't have had the power, or the wit, or the imagination, to rid itself of obsolete biological imperatives. Conquering the galaxy is what bacteria with spaceships would do—knowing no better, having no choice.
'Our condition is the opposite of that: we have no end of choices. That's why we need to find another space-faring civilization. Understanding Lacerta is important, the astrophysics of survival is important, but we also need to speak to others who've faced the same decisions, and discovered how to live, what to become. We need to understand what it means to inhabit the universe.'"
The Cairo Trilogy: Palace Walk / Palace of Desire / Sugar Street by Naguib Mahfouz
challenging
emotional
reflective
sad
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
1) "She woke at midnight. She always woke up then without having to rely on an alarm clock. A wish that had taken root in her awoke her with great accuracy. For a few moments she was not sure she was awake. Images from her dreams and perceptions mixed together in her mind. She was troubled by anxiety before opening her eyes, afraid sleep had deceived her. Shaking her head gently, she gazed at the total darkness of the room. There was no clue by which to judge the time. The street noise outside her room would continue until dawn. She could hear the babble of voices from the coffeehouses and bars, whether it was early evening, midnight, or just before daybreak. She had no evidence to rely on except her intuition, like a conscious clock hand, and the silence encompassing the house, which revealed that her husband had not yet rapped at the door and that the tip of his stick had not yet struck against the steps of the staircase.
Habit woke her at this hour. It was an old habit she had developed when young and it had stayed with her as she matured. She had learned it along with the other rules of married life. She woke up at midnight to await her husband's return from his evening's entertainment. Then she would serve him until he went to sleep. She sat up in bed resolutely to overcome the temptation posed by sleep. After invoking the name of God, she slipped out from under the covers and onto the floor. Groping her way to the door, she guided herself by the bedpost and a panel of the window. As she opened the door, faint rays of light filtered in from a lamp set on a bracketed shelf in the sitting room. She went to fetch it, and the glass projected onto the ceiling a trembling circle of pale light hemmed in by darkness. She placed the lamp on the table by the sofa. The light shone throughout the room, revealing the large, square floor, high walls, and ceiling with parallel beams. The quality of the furnishings was evident: the Shiraz carpet, large brass bed, massive armoire, and long sofa draped with a small rug in a patchwork design of different motifs and colors."
2) "She could not keep herself from saying with a laugh, 'What a man you are! On the outside you are dignified and pious, but inside you're licentious and debauched. Now I really believe what I was told about you.'
Al-Sayyid Ahmad sat up with interest and asked, 'What were you told? ... May God spare us the evil of what people say.'
'They told me you're a womanizer and a heavy drinker.'
He sighed audibly in relief and commented, 'I thought it would be criticism of some fault, thank God.'"
3) "She was filled with resentment and anger but concealed that deep inside her so as not to appear displeased by her sister's happiness. She did not care to expose herself, as her suspicious nature made her think she might, to the abuse of anyone wishing to revile her. In any case, there was no alternative to suppression of her emotions, because in this family that was an ingrained custom and a moral imperative established by threat of paternal terror. Between her hatred and resentment on one side and concealment and pretended delight on the other, her life was a continual torment and an uninterrupted effort."
4) "Although members of this family, like most other people, were subject to feelings of anger, they never were so afflicted that their hearts were hostile in a consistent or deep-rooted fashion. Some of them had a capacity for anger like that of alcohol for combustion, but their anger would be quickly extinguished. Then their souls would be tranquil and their hearts full of forgiveness. Similarly in Cairo, during the winter, the sky can be gloomy with clouds and it even drizzles, but in an hour or less the clouds will have scattered to reveal a pure blue sky and a laughing sun."
5) "'You should be serious about serious things and playful when you play. There's an hour for your Lord and an hour for your heart.'"
6) "The breakfast group broke up. Al-Sayyid Ahmad retired to his room. The mother and Zaynab were soon busy with their daily chores. Since it was a sunny day with warm spring breezes, one of the last of March, the three brothers went up on the roof, where they sat under the arbor of hyacinth beans and jasmine. Kamal got interested in the chickens and settled down by their coop. He scattered grain for them and then chased them, delighted with their squawking. He picked up the eggs he found.
His brothers began to discuss the thrilling news that was spreading by word of mouth. A revolution was raging in all areas of the Nile Valley from the extreme north to the extreme south. Fahmy recounted what he knew about the railroads and telegraph and telephone lines being cut, the outbreak of demonstrations in different provinces, the battles between the English and the revolutionaries, the massacres, the martyrs, the nationalist funerals with processions with tens of coffins at a time, and the capital city with its students, workers, and attorneys on strike, where transportation was limited to carts."
7) "Once the revolution knocked on his door, threatened his peace and security and the lives of his children, its flavor, complexion, and import were transformed into folly, madness, unruliness, and vulgarity. The revolution should rage on outside. He would participate in it with all his heart and donate to it as generously as he could. ... He had done that. But the house was his and his alone. Any member of his household who talked himself into participating in the revolution was in rebellion against him, not against the English."
8) "He felt temptation inside and outside him. But which was the voice and which the echo? Even more marvelous was the life throbbing in material objects around them. The flowerpots whispered as they rocked back and forth. The pillars exchanged secrets. As the sky gazed down with starry, sleep-filled eyes at the earth, it spoke. He and his companion exchanged messages expressing their inmost feelings while a glow, both visible and invisible, confounded their hearts and dazzled their eyes. Something was at work in the world, tickling people until they were plunged into laughter. A look, word, gesture, anything was enough to induce all of them to laugh. Time fled as quickly as youth. The waiters carrying the fermented germ of exuberance distributed it to all the tables with grave faces. The tunes of the piano seemed to come from far away and were almost drowned out by the clattering wheels of the streetcar. On the sidewalk rowdy boys and men collecting cigarette butts created a commotion like the drone of flies, as night's legions set up camp in the district."
9) "In the shadows he had no hesitation or embarrassment about talking to himself. The canopy of branches shielded him from the sky, the fields stretching off to his right absorbed his ideas, and the waters of the Nile, flowing past him on the left, swallowed his feelings. But he had to avoid the light. He needed to be careful not to get caught by its bright ring, for fear of having to take off like a circus wagon trailed by boys and curiosity seekers. Then he could kiss his reputation, dignity, and honor goodbye. He had two personalities. One was reserved for friends and lovers, the other presented to his family and the world. It was this second visage that sustained his distinction and respectability, guaranteeing him a status beyond normal aspirations. But his caprice was conspiring against the respectable side of his character, threatening to destroy it forever.
He saw the bridge with its glowing lights ahead of him and wondered where he should go. Since he wanted more solitude and darkness, he did not cross over but continued straight ahead, taking the Giza road."
10) "They all laughed. Kamal removed his spectacles and began to clean the lenses. He was capable of losing himself rapidly in a conversation, especially if he liked the person and if the atmosphere was relaxed and pleasant.
Kamal said, 'I'm a tourist in a museum where nothing belongs to me. I'm merely a historian. I don't know where I stand.'"
11) "Shortly thereafter the all-clear siren sounded, and the shelter's denizens voiced a profound sigh of relief. Kamal said, 'The Italians were just teasing us.'
They left the shelter in the dark, like bats, as doors emitted one ghostly figure after another. Then a faint glimmer of light could be seen coming from windows, and the world resumed its normal commotion.
In this brief moment of darkness, life had reminded careless people of its incomparable value."
12) "'I consent to your conditions. But let me tell you frankly that I was hoping to win an affectionate woman, not merely an analytical mind.'
As her eyes followed the swimming duck, she asked, 'To tell you that she loves you and will marry you?'
'Yes!'
She laughed and inquired, 'Do you think I'd discuss the details if I had not agreed in principle?'
He squeezed her hand gently, and she added, 'You know it all. You just want to hear it.'
'I'll never grow tired of hearing it.'"
13) "Turning to the silent bride, Sawsan asked affectionately, 'What does Karima think about her husband's beard?'
Karima hid her laughter by ducking her crowned head but said nothing. Zanuba answered for her, 'Few young men are as pious as Abd al-Muni'm.'
Khadija remarked, 'I admire his piety, which is a characteristic of our family, but not his beard.'
Laughing, Ibrahim Shawkat said, 'I must acknowledge that both my sons - the Believer and the apostate - are crazy.'
Yasin roared his mighty laugh and commented, 'Insanity is also a characteristic of our family.'"
14) "'She's paralyzed, and the doctor says it will all be over in three days.'
Riyad looked glum and inquired, 'Can't anything be done?' Kamal shook his head disconsolately and remarked, 'Perhaps it's lucky that she's unconscious and knows nothing of the destiny awaiting her.' When they were seated, he added in an ironic tone,'But who among us knows what destiny awaits us?'
Riyad smiled without replying. Then Kamal continued: 'Many think it wise to make of death an occasion for reflection on death, when in truth we ought to use it to reflect on life.'"
15) "He told the man, when Yasin was finished, 'A black necktie, please.'
Each one took his package, and they left the store. The setting of the sun was washing the world with a sepia tint as side by side they walked back to the house."
Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon
challenging
reflective
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
2.0
1) "Adult male in a suit, carrying a briefcase, standing in the middle of the sidewalk traffic screaming at his kid, who looks to be about four or five. The volume level grows abusive, 'And if you don't—' the grown-up raising his hand ominously, 'there'll be a consequence.'
'Uh-uh, not today.' Out comes the full auto option again, and presently the screamer is no more, the kid is looking around bewildered, tears still on his little face. The point total in the corner of the screen increments by 500.
'So now he's all alone in the street, big favor you did him.'
'All we have to do—' Fiona clicking on the kid and dragging him to a window labeled Safe Pickup Zone. 'Trustworthy family members,' she explains, 'come and pick them up and buy them pizza and bring them home, and their lives from then on are worry-free.'"
2) "'We don't know what Vyrva's told you about DeepArcher,' sez Justin, 'it's still in beta, so don't be surprised at some awkwardness now and then.'
'Should warn you, I'm not too good at these things, drives my kids crazy, we play Super Mario and the little goombas jump up and stomp on me.'
'It's not a game,' Lucas instructs her.
'Though it does have forerunners in the gaming area,' footnotes Justin, 'like the MUD clones that started to come online back in the eighties, which were mostly text. Lucas and I came of age into VRML, realized we could have the graphics we wanted, so that's what we did, or Lucas did.'
'Only the framing material,' Lucas demurely, 'obvious influences, Neo-Tokyo from Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Metal Gear Solid by Hideo Kojima, or as he's known around my crib, God.'"
3) "Silicon Alley in the nineties provided more than enough work for fraud investigators. The money in play, especially after about 1995, was staggering, and you couldn't expect elements of the fraudster community not to go after some of it, especially HR executives, for whom the invention of the computerized payroll was often confused with a license to steal. If this generation of con artists came up short now and then in IT skills, they made up for it in the area of social engineering, and many entreprenerds, being trusting souls, got taken. But sometimes distinctions between hustling and being hustled broke down. It didn't escape Maxine's notice that, given stock valuations on some start-ups of interest chiefly to the insane, there might not be much difference. How is a business plan that depends on faith in 'network effects' kicking in someday different from the celestial pastry exercise known as a Ponzi scheme? Venture capitalists feared industrywide for their rapacity were observed to surface from pitch sessions with open wallets and leaking eyeballs, having been subjected to nerd-produced videos with subliminal messages and sound tracks featuring oldie mixes that pushed more buttons than a speed freak with a Nintendo 64. Who was less innocent here?"
4) "Vip is known to be doing business with shadowy elements in Quebec, where the zapper industry is flourishing at the moment. Back in the dead of last winter, Maxine got added to a city budget line, on the QT as always, and flown to Montreal to chercher le geek. Manifested into Dorval, checked in to the Courtyard Marriott on Sherbrooke, and went schlepping around the city, one fool's errand after another, down into random gray buildings where many levels below the street and down the corridors you'd hear cafeteria sounds, round a corner and here'd be le tout Montréal having lunch in a lengthy series of eating rooms, strung in an archipelago across the underground city, which in those days seemed to be expanding so rapidly that nobody knew of a reliable map for it all. Plus shopping enough to challenge Maxine's nausea threshold, back ends of Metro stations, bars with live jazz, crepe emporia and poutine outlets, vistas of sparkling new corridor just about to be tenanted by even more shops, all without any need to venture up into the snowbound subzero streets. Finally, at a phone number obtained off a toilet wall at a bar in Mile End, she located one Felix Boïngueaux, who'd been working out of a basement apartment, what they call a garçonnière, off of Saint-Denis, for whom Vip's name didn't just ring a bell but threatened to kick the door in, since there were apparently some late-payment issues. They arranged to meet at an Internet-enabled laundromat called NetNet, soon to be a legend on the Plateau. Felix looked almost old enough to drive."
5) "They get off at 8th Street, find a pizza joint, sit for a while at a sidewalk table. Reg drifts into a patch of philosophical weather.
'Ain't like I was ever Alfred Hitchcock or somethin. You can watch my stuff till you're cross-eyed and there'll never be any deeper meaning. I see something interesting, I shoot it is all. Future of film if you want to know someday, more bandwidth, more video files up on the Internet, everybody'll be shootin everything, way too much to look at, nothin will mean shit. Think of me as the prophet of that.'"
6) "Eric lives in a fifth-floor walk-up studio in Loisaida, a doorless bathroom wedged in one corner and in another a microwave, coffeemaker, and miniature sink. Liquor-store cartons full of personal effects are stacked around haphazardly, and most of the limited floor space is littered with unwashed laundry, Chinese take-out containers and pizza boxes, empty Smirnoff Ice bottles, old copies of Heavy Metal, Maxim, and Anal Teen Nymphos Quarterly, women's shoe catalogs, SDK discs, game controllers and cartridges for Wolfenstein, DOOM, and others. Paint peels from selected ceiling areas, and window treatments are basically street grime. Eric finds a cigarette butt a little longer than the others in a running shoe he's been using for an ashtray and lights up, lurches over to the electric coffee mess, pours out some cold day-old sludge into a mug with a rectangular outline on it and the words CSS IS AWESOME running outside the frame. 'Oh. Want some?'"
7) "Instead of rows of urinals, there are continuous sheets of water descending stainless-steel walls, against which gentlemen, and ladies so inclined, are invited to piss, while for the less adventurous there are stalls of see-through acrylic which in more prosperous days at Tworkeffx also allowed slacker patrols to glance in and see who's avoiding work, custom-decorated inside by high-ticket downtown graffiti artists, with dicks going into mouths a popular motif, as well as sentiments like DIE MICROSOFT WEENIES and LARA CROFT HAS POLYGON ISSUES.
No Felix here. They hit the stairs and proceed upward floor by floor, ascending into these bright halls of delusion, prowling offices and cubicles whose furnishings have been picked up from failed dot-coms at bargain prices, too soon in their turn destined for looting by the likes of Gabriel Ice.
Partying everywhere. Sweeping into it, swept... Faces in motion. The employees' lap pool with champagne empties bobbing in it. Yuppies who appear only recently to have learned how to smoke screaming at each other. 'Had a brilliant Arturo Fuente the other day!' 'Awesome!' A parade of restless noses snorting lines off of circular Art Deco mirrors from long-demolished luxury hotels dating back to the last time New York saw a market frenzy as intense as the one just ended."
8) "She pretends to sigh. 'It's about the poutine isn't it, you'll never forgive me, once again, Felix, I'm sorry I said that dumb remark, cheap shot.'
Going along with it, 'In Montreal it's a diagnostic for moral character—if somebody resists poutine, they resist life.'"
9) "Putting their street faces back on for it. Faces already under silent assault, as if by something ahead, some Y2K of the workweek that no one is quite imagining, the crowds drifting slowly out into the little legendary streets, the highs beginning to dissipate, out into the casting-off of veils before the luminosities of dawn, a sea of T-shirts nobody's reading, a clamor of messages nobody's getting, as if it's the true text history of nights in the Alley, outcries to be attended to and not be lost, the 3:00 AM kozmo deliveries to code sessions and all-night shredding parties, the bedfellows who came and went, the bands in the clubs, the songs whose hooks still wait to ambush an idle hour, the day jobs with meetings about meetings and bosses without clue, the unreal strings of zeros, the business models changing one minute to the next, the start-up parties every night of the week and more on Thursdays than you could keep track of, which of these faces so claimed by the time, the epoch whose end they've been celebrating all night—which of them can see ahead, among the microclimates of binary, tracking earthwide everywhere through dark fiber and twisted pairs and nowadays wirelessly through spaces private and public, anywhere among cybersweatshop needles flashing and never still, in that unquiet vastly stitched and unstitched tapestry they have all at some time sat growing crippled in the service of—to the shape of the day imminent, a procedure waiting execution, about to be revealed, a search result with no instructions on how to look for it?"
10) "'OK', soothingly, 'like, total disclosure? It's been happenin to me too? I'm seeing people in the street who are supposed to be dead, even sometimes people I know were in the towers when they went down, who can't be here but they're here.'
They gaze at each other for a while, down here on the barroom floor of history, feeling sucker-punched, no clear way to get up and on with a day which is suddenly full of holes—family, friends, friends of friends, phone numbers on the Rolodex, just not there anymore... the bleak feeling, some mornings, that the country itself may not be there anymore, but being silently replaced screen by screen with something else, some surprise package, by those who've kept their wits about them and their clicking thumbs ready."
11) "'Welcome to the bridge, Ms. Loeffler.' A loutish youth, un-shaven, in cargo shorts and a stained More Cowbell T-shirt. There is a shift in the ambience. The music segues to the theme from Deus Ex, the lights dim, the space is tidied by invisible cyberelves."
12) "They're up on the bridge again, as close to free as the city ever allows you to be, between conditions, an edged wind off the harbor announcing something dark now hovering out over Jersey, not the night, not yet, something else, on the way in, being drawn as if by the vacuum in real-estate history where the Trade Center used to stand, bringing optical tricks, a sorrowful light."
13) "'And Windust—'
'Dotty said he came here more than once after 11 September, haunting the site. Unfinished business, he told her. But I don't think his spirit is here. I think he's down in Xibalba, reunited with his evil twin.'
The condemned ghost structures around them seem to draw together, as if conferring. Some patrolman from the karmic police is saying move along folks, it's over, nothing to see here. Xiomara takes Maxine's arm, and they glide off into a premonitory spritzing of rain, a metropolis swept by twilight.
Later, back in the apartment, in a widowlike observance, Maxine finds a moment alone and switches off the lights, takes the envelope of cash, and snorts the last vestiges of his punk-rock cologne, trying to summon back something as invisible and weightless and inaccountable as his spirit...
Which is down in the Mayan underworld now, wandering a deathscape of hungry, infected, shape-shifting, lethally insane Mayan basketball fans. Like Boston Garden, only different.
And later, next to snoring Horst, beneath the pale ceiling, city light diffusing through the blinds, just before drifting downward into REM, good night. Good night, Nick."