nickfourtimes's reviews
381 reviews

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."

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."

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.'"

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."

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."

1) "Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That's where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go."

2) "Lost really has two disparate meanings. Losing things is about the familiar falling away, getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing. There are objects and people that disappear from your sight or knowledge or possession; you lose a bracelet, a friend, the key. You still know where you are. Everything is familiar except that there is one item less, one missing element. Or you get lost, in which case the world has become larger than your knowledge of it. Either way, there is a loss of control."

3) "There is no distance in childhood: for a baby, a mother in the other room is gone forever, for a child the time until a birthday is endless. Whatever is absent is impossible, irretrievable, unreachable. Their mental landscape is like that of medieval paintings: a foreground full of vivid things and then a wall. The blue of distance comes with time, with the discovery of melancholy, of loss, the texture of longing, of the complexity of the terrain we traverse, and with the years of travel."

4) "Truth lies not only in incidents but in hopes and needs."

5) "It took some time after he arrived in a Spanish town in Mexico before he could stand to wear clothes or sleep anywhere but on the floor. He had gone about naked, shed his skin like a snake, had lost his greed, his fear, been stripped of almost everything a human being could lose and live, but he had learned several languages, he had become a healer, he had come to admire and identify with the Native nations among whom he lived; he was not who he had been. The language of his report to the king is terse, impersonal; his declarative sentences describe only the tangibles of places, foods, encounters, and even these are given in the starkest terms, with little description, little detail. The terms in which to describe the extraordinary metamorphosis of his soul did not exist, at least for him. He was among the first, and the first to come back and tell the tale, of Europeans lost in the Americas, and like many of them he ceased to be lost not by returning but by turning into something else."

6) "Even in the every day world of the present, an anxiety to survive manifests itself in cars and clothes for far more rugged occasions than those at hand, as though to express some sense of the toughness of things and of readiness to face them. But the real difficulties, the real arts of survival, seem to lie in more subtle realms. There, what's called for is a kind of resilience of the psyche, a readiness to deal with what comes next. These captives lay out in a stark and dramatic way what goes on in every life: the transitions whereby you cease to be who you were. Seldom is it as dramatic, but nevertheless, something of this journey between the near and the far goes on in every life. Sometimes an old photograph, an old friend, an old letter will remind you that you are not who you once were, for the person who dwelt among them, valued this, chose that, wrote thus, no longer exists. Without noticing it you have traversed a great distance; the strange has become familiar and the familiar if not strange at least awkward or uncomfortable, an outgrown garment. And some people travel far more than others. There are those who receive as birthright an adequate or at least unquestioned sense of self and those who set out to reinvent themselves, for survival or for satisfaction, and travel far. Some people inherit values and practices as a house they inhabit; some of us have to burn down that house, find our own ground, build from scratch even as a psychological metamorphosis. As a cultural metamorphosis the transition is far more dramatic."

7) "A city is built to resemble a conscious mind, a network that can calculate, administrate, manufacture. Ruins become the unconscious of a city, its memory, unknown, darkness, lost lands, and in this truly bring it to life."

8) "Once I loved a man who was a lot like the desert, and before that I loved the desert. [...] The desert is made first and foremost out of light, at least to the eye and the heart, and you quickly learn that the mountain range twenty miles away is pink at dawn, a scrubby green at midday, blue in evening and under clouds. The light belies the bony solidity of the land, playing over it like emotion on a face, and in this the desert is intensely alive, as the apparent mood of mountains changes hourly, as places that are flat and stark at noon fill with shadows and mystery in the evening, as darkness becomes a reservoir from which the eyes drink, as clouds promise rain that comes like passion and leaves like redemption, rain that delivers itself with thunder, with lightning, with a rise of scents in this place so pure that moisture, dust, and the various bushes all have their own smell in the sudden humidity. Alive with the primal forces of rock, weather, wind, light, and time in which biology is only an uninvited guest fending for itself, gilded, dwarfed, and threatened by its hosts. It was the vastness that I loved and an austerity that was also voluptuous. And the man?"

10) "A story can be a gift like Ariadne's thread, or the labyrinth, or the labyrinth's ravening Minotaur; we navigate by stories, but sometimes we only escape by abandoning them."

1) "'We schedule rallies on a regular basis, and hold them in predominantly Communist neighbourhoods.

We provoke chaos. Then, we demonstrate order.

The press eats it up.

Berlin needs sensation like a fish needs water.

...

I hate this place.'"

2) "'Your train's tomorrow morning, my dear? I'm hosting a soirée tonight. You should come— Really. Both of you.'

'I don't— Thank you, but...'

'Darling. Nothing like that. Just a little fundraiser for Herr Hitler.'"

3) "'I imagine changing my mind at the last minute.

Shrugging off the demands of family; acting as if I am whole and separate and free to choose.

Not a woman. Not a daughter. Not a citizen of Germany.'

'Charlottenburg. Now arriving, Charlottenburg.'

'I imagine changing my mind and getting off at the next stop.

Leaving my bags behind, stepping into the sunlight.

Turning away from a future that narrows to a single point.

I imagine...

   turning back...

      toward the city...'"

1) ”The creative mind is like a big pile of jigsaw puzzle pieces. Some pieces were made by other people—inspirational words of advice, an intriguing screenshot from a game you've never heard of, a haunting melody—and some are gained through life experiences. Some pieces are already connected, either because they came that way or because while you were walking down the street or taking a shower they somehow found each other. Sometimes a single piece is missing, and once that piece is uncovered, two other pieces from different ends of the pile can finally be connected.

It's important to accumulate many, many jigsaw pieces, since the more you have available, the more things you can build. But eventually you have to sit down and start sifting through the pieces to put them all together. This is the ‘work’ part of creation. It can often be frustrating, like when two pieces seem like they should fit but don't. Sometimes you know that there's a perfect piece around but you're not sure where it is. Is it even in your head? But like any challenging task with a noble purpose, the frustration also gives way to joy, elation, and ultimately satisfaction when you've finished a big part of a new puzzle.”

2) ”I've tried programming a game engine from scratch before, surrounding myself with books like Tricks of the Game-Programming Gurus in an effort to ‘make games the right way,’ but when days of work yield as much as I could make in Game Maker in a few minutes, it's hard to stay motivated. At the beginning of each semester at Berkeley I had the same sort of naive gumption, buying pristine notebooks and attentively jotting down everything the professors said, only to succumb to ennui a week later, my notes devolving into irreverent doodles. Post-school, however, I accepted that I wasn't cut out for academia and programming theory. I no more wanted to program my own game engine than I wanted to fashion my own paintbrushes. This important realization meant I could stop wasting my time trying to be something I wasn't. Instead of being embarrassed about not being a ‘real programmer’ using ‘real programming languages,’ I vowed to make games whichever way felt good to me.”

3) “The Chain's final purpose is to provide permanent features to a randomized landscape. Although randomization gives Spelunky and roguelikes their longevity and makes each playthrough feel unique, it's what stays the same from run to run that makes the world feel real. But without the randomization, playing the game enough times to figure out the Chain would be much more repetitive. The permanence of the Chain and the randomization of the world work in tandem to give you a greater appreciation of the other.”

1) "David Bowie burst on to the international scene at a pivotal point in modern sexual history. The heady utopian dreams of the 1960s, which saw free love as an agent of radical political change, were evaporating. Generational solidarity was proving illusory, while experimentation with psychedelic drugs had expanded identity but sometimes at a cost of disorientation and paranoia. By the early 1970s, hints of decadence and apocalypse were trailing into popular culture. Bowie's prophetic attunement to this major shift was registered in his breakthrough song, 'Space Oddity'

(1969), whose wistful astronaut Major Tom secedes from Earth itself. Recorded several months before the Woodstock Music Festival, 'Space Oddity', with its haunting isolation and asexual purity and passivity, forecast the end of the carnival of the Dionysian 1960s."

2) "Music was not the only or even the primary mode through which Bowie first conveyed his vision to the world: he was an iconoclast who was also an image-maker. Bowie's command of the visual was displayed in his acute instinct for the still camera, honed by his attentiveness to classic Hollywood publicity photographs, contemporary fashion magazines and European art films. His flair for choreography and body language had been developed by his study of pantomime and stagecraft with the innovative Lindsay Kemp troupe in London in the late 1960s. Bowie's earliest ambition was to be a painter, and he has continued to paint throughout his life - especially, he has said, when he is having trouble writing songs. The multimedia approaches that were gaining ascendance over the fine arts during the 1960s also helped foster his desire to fuse music with visuals on stage. While working at an advertising agency when he was 16, he learned story-boarding techniques that he later employed for his videos."

3) "By the time we saw him on the front of an album, Aladdin Sane (1973), Ziggy Stardust was already in eclipse. The cover photograph by Brian Duffy with its red-and-blue lightning bolt crossing Bowie's face has become one of the most emblematic and influential art images of the past half century, reproduced or parodied in advertising, media and entertainment worldwide. It contains all of Romanticism, focused on the artist as mutilated victim of his own febrile imagination. Like Herman Melville's Captain Ahab, whose body was scarred by lightning in his quest for the white whale, Bowie as Ziggy is a voyager who has defied ordinary human limits and paid the price. Aladdin sane in the realm of art is a lad insane everywhere else. A jolt of artistic inspiration has stunned him into trance or catatonia. He is blind to the outer world and its 'social contacts' - Bowie's recurrent term for an area of experience that had proved troublesome for Major Tom as well as himself.

Pierre La Roche's ingenious zigzag make-up looks at first glance like a bloody wound - an axe blow through the skull of a Viking warrior laid out on his bier. Ziggy appears to be in hibernation or suspended animation, like the doomed astronauts in their mummiform chambers in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), which had inspired Bowie's 'Space Oddity'. The background blankness is encroaching like a freezing cryogenic wave upon the figure. It's as clinical as an autopsy, with a glob of extracted flesh lodged on the collarbone. This teardrop of phalliform jelly resembles the unidentifiable bits of protoplasm and biomorphic conglomerations that stud the sexualized landscapes of Salvador Dalí. Also Surrealist are the inflamed creases of Ziggy's arm-pits, which looklike fresh surgical scars as well as raw female genitalia. Like Prometheus, a rebel hero to the Romantics, he has lost his liver for stealing the fire of the gods."

4) "Bowie's theatre of gender resembles the magic-lantern shows or phantasmagoria that preceded the development of motion-picture projection. The multiplicity of his gender images was partly inspired by the rapid changes in modern art, which had begun with neoclassicism sweeping away rococo in the late eighteenth century and which reached a fever pitch before, during and after World War I. Bowie told a TV interviewer in 1976, 'I was always totally bedazzled by all the art forms of the twentieth century, and my interpretation comes out my way of these art forms from Expressionism to Dadaism'. 'Even if the definition isn't understood', he tried to 'break it down' to convey his own 'feeling' to the audience. One of Bowie's leading achievements is his linkage of gender to the restless perpetual motion machine of modern culture. 'I have no style loyalty', he has declared. His signature style is syncretism - a fusion or 'synthesising' (his word) of many styles that is characteristic of late phases such as the hybrid, polyglot Hellenistic era, when religions too seeped into one another. Bowie has in fact used the word 'hybrid' to describe his approach. His stylistic eclecticism in performance genres - combining music hall, vaudeville, pantomime, movies, musical comedy, cabaret, theatre of cruelty, modern dance, French chanson and American blues, folk, rock and soul - created countless new angles of perception and startling juxtapositions."

5) "Broadly speaking, composers of all periods in history can be divided into three groups: genuine innovators, 'second-wave' absorbers who synthesize pioneer developments and adept, polished sweepers who satisfy the public's delayed appetite for what was new five or ten years previously. It is a common misconception that the 'famous', landmark composers like Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Wagner or Gershwin were cutting-edge innovators of the first group, whereas in fact all of the above fall into the second category, as does Bowie.

[...]

What all these 'second-wave' composers have in common is a highly developed sense of what else is in the ether, what styles are emerging and where to find such ingenuity. They are then able to blend new, exploratory ideas with their own well-developed skills, packaging the ensuing mix for the general audience in such a way as to intrigue and delight without leaving them utterly bewildered. These are rare gifts, sometimes - perhaps always - intuitive rather than studied, which is why the number of composers whose work results in a universal change in stylistic direction remains small. Bowie's name is among them."

6) "[Sir Cristopher Frayling]: We keep talking about Bowie, and actually we're talking about the 'myth of Bowie'. I'm not sure even he knows who he is anymore - rather like some actors. [...They've] played the same parts so often, we confuse them with the person they are playing. Bowie has played lots of parts, but we always talk about him as if they exist. I don't know what lies behind those parts. All I know about is the myth, because that is what we are presented with."

1) "Professor Dr Dr (honoris causa) (mult.) Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld came from a distinguished family about whom little is known, other than they had existed, as von Igelfelds, for a very long time. The obscurity of their early history in no way detracted from the family's distinction; in fact, if anything, it added to it. Anybody can find their way into the history books by doing something egregiously unpleasant: starting a local war, stealing the land and property of others, being particularly vindictive towards neighbours: all of these are well-understood routes to fame and can lead to immense distinction, titles and honorifics. Most people who today are dukes or earls are there because of descent from markedly successful psychopaths. Their ancestors were simply higher achievers than other people's when it came to deceit, expropriation, selfishness and murder. That none of these attributes tends to be recorded in family coats of arms is testimony to the ability of people to brush over or even completely ignore the saliences of the inconvenient past."

2) "'And here we have the Librarian,' said the Rector as Dr Schreiber-Ziegler stepped forward to shake his hand.

'Deputy Librarian,' said Dr Schreiber-Ziegler quickly. 'The Librarian is Herr Huber.'

'Of course,' said the Rector. And then, turning to Herr Uber-Huber, he said, 'Another Huber, you see, Herr Uber-Huber. Bavaria's teeming with people of your name.'

'Hubers, yes,' said Herr Uber-Huber. 'But not so many Uber-Hubers, I think.'"

3) "'What are you doing for dinner?' asked Dr Schneeweiss. 'After this, I mean.'

Von Igelfeld looked at his watch. 'I am very tired,' he said. 'I was proposing not to have dinner.'

Dr Schneeweiss looked disappointed. 'What about breakfast?' she asked.

Von Igelfeld struggled. Was this the American way? Were they all like this? Very friendly and charming, but...

'I am not sure about breakfast,' he said quickly. 'I sometimes miss breakfast.'

'You have to eat some time,' said Dr Schneeweiss, playfully.

Von Igelfeld laughed nervously. 'Very funny,' he said. 'Yes, very amusing.'"

4) "The University of Göttingen was proposing to establish a new Chair, with its own new department, and were seeking applicants. The Chair would be in linguistics, with particular reference to historical aspects of the Romance languages. The holder of the Chair would be entitled to twelve assistants and generous grants for academic travel. There were no specified duties, other than to pursue research at the highest level.

Unterholzer looked up. 'This is very significant news,' he said.

'It's obviously a very prestigious Chair,' said Herr Huber. 'Only the very best appointments have no duties at all.'"