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Western-imperialist propaganda.

1) "Demeter's hair was yellow as the ripe corn [sic] of which she was mistress, for she was the Harvest Spirit, goddess of farmed fields and growing grain."

2) "These conflicting forces—all the rages and outrages of gods and men—seemingly balanced in an endless seesaw, will in the end produce a result, the fall of Troy. In the view of the ancients, however, to which Homer is here giving expression, this result is but another swing of the seesaw, which will eventually be balanced in its turn by an opposite result. This view of the ancients, then, is a true worldview, that is, an attempt to see the reality of human experience as a totality, both psychological (in its assessment of human motivations) and theological (in its assumption that heaven intervenes in human affairs). The results of human motivations and heavenly interventions make for preordained results, but preordained only in a way so complicated and with so many conflicting strands that no one but a seer or prophet could sort it all out beforehand and identify in the present the seeds of future results."

3) "Hanson's interpretations of ancient military history are much in favor among those, such as Dick Cheney, who are influential with George W. Bush. These advisers have signed on to the Greek view of war as 'terrible but innate to civilization—and not always unjust or amoral if it is waged for good causes to destroy evil and save the innocent,' as Hanson puts it in An Autumn of War."

4) "For the strutting aristoi of the symposia, the nature of life was obvious: you gave it or you got it. To represent ancient Greece as a homosexual society is to miss the central lesson. It was a militarized society that saw everything in terms of active and passive, swords and wounds, phalloi and gashes. Aristocratic boys were courted by aristocratic men as part of a puberty ordeal, the last step before adulthood, during which the man was to act as a model and help the boy achieve bristling manhood. He could masturbate between the boy's thighs but was not allowed to come in his mouth or sodomize him. He was not, therefore, allowed to make him into a passive partner. Of course, he—and any male citizen—could do whatever he liked to anyone else, male or female, adult or child, so long as his object was not another citizen or a properly married woman. If she were divorced, as Medea was about to be, she was as fair game as anyone. The Homeric insights into longtime love between two people—Hector and Andromache, Odysseus and Penelope—are never spoken of again in Greek literature after the close of the Odyssey. Sappho's expressed preference for love of an individual—'black earth's most beautiful thing'—over the beautiful cavalries, infantries, and navies that entranced most Greeks remains a solitary preference, never again voiced after her death in the early sixth century. Rather, the Greeks became ever more striving, ever more competitive, ever more bellicose. Sometimes, all they seemed to be left with was fucking or getting fucked."

5) "What faced them every day, however, was not the eternal but the mutable—all the multiplicity, diversity, motion, and change they perceived in individual beings that go from nonexistence to birth and life and, finally, to death, decay, and nonexistence. Likewise, the earth beneath their feet and even the sky above their heads presented them with panoramas of constant change. It is not possible, they reasoned, to make sense of what is mutable, what is becoming, what passes so fleetingly into existence and then is gone forever. But because there is also in our experience a quality of permanence—individuals die but humanity remains, the crops return each year, the orchards bloom once more, the zodiac comes full circle—we do not live in an arbitrary universe but a patterned one. If this is so, there must be an underlying... thing that never changes, never has changed, and never will change, the uncreated material out of which all the mutable things spring."

6) "There is a difference between being realistic about sexual passion—admitting its existence, naming it openly, enjoying it blatantly—and giving it pride of place in the agora. An orgy could therefore be the very thing for a drinking goblet or lovemaking be prized as an apt subject for a boudoir mirror, but neither belonged in a public space, where only ideal dignity should reign. Better to draw and sculpt male genitals with a certain reticence—retracted against the groin as they might appear in combat or during a hard workout or emerging from what Joyce, parodying Homeric epithet, called the 'scrotum-tightening sea.' Athletes were even known to tie up the foreskin as if it were sausage casing, so as to prevent the comedy of an involuntary erection in the course of exercise."

7) "There was nothing the ancient Greeks did not poke their noses into, no experience they shunned, no problem they did not attempt to solve. When the world was still young, they set off at the first light and returned early from the agora, their arms full and their carts loaded down with every purchase, domestic and foreign, natural and artificial, they could lay their hands on. Whatever we experience in our day, whatever we hope to learn, whatever we most desire, whatever we set out to find, we see that the Greeks have been there before us, and we meet them on their way back."

@throatmuppet@ramblingreaders.org yeah she goes into that a little bit in the foreword to this omnibus. alas, if it hain't broke...

@throatmuppet@ramblingreaders.org

Got the two-book Hainish Cycle omnibus; I've only ever read Left Hand of Darkness. Eager to work my way through all of them.

1) "It was YouTube's algorithm that catapulted me to prominence with an essay on a hidden secret in Shadow of the Colossus and that algorithm (for now) continues to favor even my most esoteric topics. Is it a deeply alienating experience to surrender success to an unknowable piece of code that understands neither quality nor morality? Yep!!!!!! But that code also helped most of you find this book, and for that, I'm appreciative."

2) "While writing this book, the entirety of Game Informer's website was unceremoniously shut down; decades of reviews, interviews, and more (like everything I wrote as an intern), flushed into the same non-existence as my original blogs. Every disappeared article, every piece of lost media, hurts our understanding of its subject. Simply playing a game (or watching a movie, or reading a poem) cannot contextualize its impact. Conversation defines a piece of art's cultural legacy. This is how a game dies: when all the context of its life is stripped away."

3) "This tendency for conceptual art to provoke thoughts even after the viewer rejects it is what makes it defensible as art. It is also what makes it threatening to fascists."

4) "Part of being a kid is wondering why a grown-up is crying while reading a book about a tree out loud, and a part of being an adult is being the crying reader."

5) "I will not attribute my current-day politics to Animorphs. I do not think they're the reason I don't like war. But I read these books so much as a kid. I read them far before I read about World War II, or Vietnam, or Iraq. And Applegate knew that, one day, I and all the other kids reading her books would read books, and watch movies, and consume propaganda, about war. She knew that the world we lived in wasn't frictionless, and to pretend it was would be doing us a disservice. The darkness wasn't just Animorphs' hook — it was central to the series ethos."

6) "The problem, ultimately, is what that darkness leaves you with. I could write 90% of an essay on how any of these games are the darkest in their series, but then you get to the end, and... what? 'Isn't it crazy how messed up this is?' It's an empty reading, substanceless. Ironically, it's juvenile. Being 'messed up' is not a theme. Darkness is not a narrative. Violence on its own is not mature. Every description I've given thus far is missing the crucial piece, the so what, the why should I care? [...] Every Zelda is the darkest Zelda because every Zelda is about growing up. Every Zelda is about gathering the strength and grace you need to face a world that is fundamentally harsh, alienating, and unjust."

7) "It seems like every few months, we have the same conversation about game reviews: should they factor hour count into their assessment? Is a 100-hour game inherently better for the money than a two-hour one because you get this much entertainment per dollar? I, as expected, don't like this idea. I don't judge my favorite TV shows on number of episodes, my favorite songs on their runtime. While I understand the desire to stretch one's money as far as possible, this equation just seems like another way to throw the dial all the way toward games-as-product. I have an alternative proposition, although even more impossible to implement. What is the hour count that a game lives in your memory? How often do you think of it, reference it, dream about it?"

1) "In the dim morning light of the cabin bedroom, Rita squinted, listening for the loon. Now that the climate was in chaos, now that the Atlantic coast fell to flame and choked on wildfire smoke earlier and earlier each summer, the rhythms were off. The sweltering, stifling spring humidity had tricked all life, disrupting the cycles that had existed from time immemorial. Everything was tainted, including her."

2) "Incense and murmured prayers had filled the thick basement air of the reserve church. Prayers her tongue couldn't shape. She had neither the full grasp of the Mi'kmaw language at her disposal, nor the religious background of her cousins or her brother. Maybe if she had grown up on the rez it would be different; the community was ninety percent Catholic, eight percent Baha'i, and traditional in their own admixtures."

3) "[Time] in nature, a chance to engage with land that was new to her and ancient to her ancestors, something outside of the city parks, the outskirts of town on so-called Crown Land. She was a landscape painter forever seeking new landscapes. Perhaps it would be good for her to be alone with herself, her grief, her work, just her and the pond, with the pain of inspiration still pricking somewhere in the back of her mind or some unknowable place in her heart. Rita gave herself the same reassurance that all poets and artists and writers gave themselves when something was unbearable: perhaps it would be good for her art."

4) "On those sweltering days, Rita felt like a pallid moth, beating her wings against the window of the world, trying to fly by a moonlit path to a safer place. She had always felt drawn to darkness, and in this world of blazing sunlight and forest fires, its pull was even more alluring."

5) "Each day she'd been at the residency, she'd walked the same path, and yet she still couldn't quite remember the deep woods stretching to embrace the pond and its surrounding trails. Every encounter felt brand new — the sighing reeds and thick mosses that consumed the sound of her steps, the branches like tiny fingers grasping her legs, begging her to stay, to forego worries about things like property or locks or the quiet threat of small-town gas station cashiers and their weird friends."

6) "When Lichen Woman's finger touched the water, fog rolled over the pond in a dense gauze bloodied with night, so thick Rita couldn't see the trees on the other side of the water. Nighthawks darted to the water's surface and back into the sky, their flight punctuated with nasal chirps as they hurtled in and out of the welcoming void. In a jack pine leaning over the water, the raven watched, its eye restored to a glowing moon in the night of its face. Three black rabbits danced at the woman's feet."

1) "How can you tell the legend from the fact on these worlds that lie so many years away?—planets without names, called by their people simply The World, planets without history, where the past is the matter of myth, and a returning explorer finds his own doings of a few years back have become the gestures of a god. Unreason darkens that gap of time bridged by our lightspeed ships, and in the darkness uncertainty and disproportion grow like weeds. In trying to tell the story of a man, an ordinary League scientist, who went to such a nameless half-known world not many years ago, one feels like an archeologist amid millennial ruins, now struggling through choked tangles of leaf, flower, branch and vine to the sudden bright geometry of a wheel or a polished cornerstone, and now entering some commonplace, sunlit doorway to find inside it the darkness, the impossible flicker of a flame, the glitter of a jewel, the half-glimpsed movement of a woman's arm. How can you tell fact from legend, truth from truth?"

2) "Semley the Fair, Semley the Golden, Semley of the Necklace. The Clayfolk had bent to her will, and so had even the Starlords in that terrible place where the Clayfolk had taken her, the city at the end of the night. They had bowed to her, and given her gladly her treasure from amongst their own. But she could not yet shake off the feeling of those caverns about her where rock lowered overhead, where you could not tell who spoke or what they did, where voices boomed and gray hands reached out—Enough of that. She had paid for the necklace; very well. Now it was hers. The price was paid, the past was the past."

3) "'Will you lend me a windsteed, Lord Mogien?' 'And my company, if you will.' 'With thanks!' 'The Clayfolk are bad hosts to lone guests,' said Mogien, looking pleased. Not even the thought of that ghastly black hole blown in the mountainside could quell the itch in the two long swords hitched to Mogien's belt. It had been a long time since the last foray. 'May our enemy die without sons,' the Angya said gravely, raising his refilled cup. Rocannon, whose friends had been killed without warning in an unarmed ship, did not hesitate. 'May they die without sons,' he said, and drank with Mogien, there in the yellow light of rushlights and double moon, in the High Tower of Hallan."

4) "'You're not all one people, then, the Starfolk?' 'Many hundred peoples. By blood I'm entirely of my mother's race; my father, who was a Terran, adopted me. This is the custom when people of different species, who cannot conceive children, marry. As if one of your kin should marry a fian woman.' 'This does not happen,' Yahan said stiffly. 'I know. But Terran and Davenanter are as alike as you and I. Few worlds have so many different races as this one. Most often there is one, much like us, and the rest are beasts without speech.' 'You've seen many worlds,' the young man said dreamily, trying to conceive of it. 'Too many,' said the older man. 'I'm forty, by your years; but I was born a hundred and forty years ago. A hundred years I've lost without living them, between the worlds. If I went back to Davenant or Earth, the men and women I knew would be a hundred years dead. I can only go on; or stop.'"

5) "'I saw it on the plains, where it was seeking me. And twice in the hills while we sought the pass. Whose death would it be if not mine? Yours, Yahan? Are you a lord, an Angya, do you wear the second sword?' Sick and despairing, Yahan tried to plead with him, but Mogien went on, 'It's not Rokanan's, for he still follows his way. A man can die anywhere, but his own death, his true death, a lord meets only in his domain. It waits for him in the place which is his, a battlefield or a hall or a road's end. And this is my place. From these mountains my people came, and I have come back. My second sword was broken, fighting. But listen, my death: I am Halla's heir Mogien-do you know me now?' The thin, frozen wind blew over the rocks. Stones loomed about them, stars glittering out beyond them."

1) "For a young writer, reading the Russian stories of this period is akin to a young composer studying Bach. All of the bedrock principles of the form are on display. The stories are simple but moving. We care about what happens in them. They were written to challenge and antagonize and outrage. And, in a complicated way, to console. Once we begin reading the stories, which are, for the most part, quiet, domestic, and apolitical, this idea may strike you as strange; but this is a resistance literature, written by progressive reformers in a repressive culture, under constant threat of censorship, in a time when a writer's politics could lead to exile, imprisonment, and execution. The resistance in the stories is quiet, at a slant, and comes from perhaps the most radical idea of all: that every human being is worthy of attention and that the origins of every good and evil capability of the universe may be found by observing a single, even very humble, person and the turnings of his or her mind."

2) "Characterization, so called, results from just such increasing specification. The writer asks, 'Which particular person is this, anyway?' and answers with a series of facts that have the effect of creating a narrowing path: ruling out certain possibilities, urging others forward. As a particular person gets made, the potential for what we call 'plot' increases. (Although that's a word I don't like much-let's replace it with 'meaningful action.') As a particular person gets made, the potential for meaningful action increases. If a story begins, 'Once there was a boy who was afraid of water,' we expect that a pond, river, ocean, waterfall, bathtub, or tsunami will soon appear. If a character says, 'I have never once in my life been afraid,' we might not mind it so much if a lion walks in. If a character lives in perpetual fear of being embarrassed, we have some idea of what might need to happen to him. Likewise with someone who loves only money, or confesses that he has never really believed in friendship, or who claims to be so tired of her life that she can't imagine another."

3) "We put this aside for now. But notice that, even as we do, we're again enacting an expectation of efficiency―if it turns out that this tendency of hers isn't somehow used later, we will feel it (slightly) as wasteful. Yes: it's a harsh form, the short story. Harsh as a joke, a song, a note from the gallows."

4) "A story is not like real life; it's like a table with just a few things on it. The 'meaning' of the table is made by the choice of things and their relation to one another. Imagine these things on a table: a gun, a grenade, a hatchet, a ceramic statue of a duck. If the duck is at the center of the table, surrounded closely by the weapons, we feel: that duck is in trouble. If the duck, the gun, and the grenade have the hatchet pinned down in one corner, we may feel the duck to be leading the modern weaponry (the gun, the grenade) against the (old-fashioned) hatchet. If the three weapons are each hanging precipitously over one edge of the table and the duck is facing them, we might understand the duck to be a radical pacifist who's finally had enough. That's really all a story is: a limited set of elements that we read against one another."

5) "I once heard the great Chicago writer Stuart Dybek say, 'A story is always talking to you; you just have to learn to listen to it.' Revising like this is a way of listening to the story and of having faith in it: it wants to be its best self, and if you're patient with it, in time, it will be. Essentially, the whole process is: intuition plus iteration."

6) "We get none of that daily, calendar-tending, mere accounting. Why not? Because those days don't matter. They aren't meaningful. By whose standard? The story's. The story is telling us, by skipping those days, that nothing meaningful happened during them and that it intends to set us down in front of the next thing it judges meaningful, i.e., relevant to its purpose. The boldness of this leap teaches us something important about the short story: it is not a documentary or rigorous accounting of the passage of time or a fair-minded attempt to show life as it is really lived; it's a radically shaped, even somewhat cartoonish (when held up against the tedious real world) little machine that thrills us with the extremity of its decisiveness."

7) "One thing Chekhov did, back in the early pages of the story, was to make Olenka a particular person by giving her a specific trait: when she loves someone, she becomes that person. As we saw in our discussion of 'In the Cart,' once a specific person has been made (via facts), we then know, of all the many things that could happen to her, which would be meaningful. We might say that in specificity lies nascent plot. Story: 'Once upon a time there was a woman who became whatever she loved.' Chekhov: 'Really? How about we test that supposition? Hmm. How to do that? Oh, I know: kill off her first love and present her with a second.' So, 'good writerly habit' might consist of continually revising toward specificity, so that specificity can appear and then produce plot (or, as we prefer to call it, 'meaningful action')."

8) "So: a chance for us, again, to think about how stories end. What allows them to end? When they bypass a place where they might have ended, what must they then go on to accomplish? Given the extreme efficiency of the form, what will those pages need to do, to not be felt as extraneous? To our accruing list of universal laws of fiction (Be specific! Honor efficiency!), which, by the way, we should continually remind ourselves to distrust, we might add: Always be escalating. That's all a story is, really: a continual system of escalation. A swath of prose earns its place in the story to the extent that it contributes to our sense that the story is (still) escalating."

9) "[Even] in translation, one of the pleasures of Gogol's prose is the way a genuine emotion, passed through the distortive skaz filter, comes out the other side, still genuine but twisted. I heard a version of this growing up. Late at some neighborhood party, cornered by some pal of my parents' who'd had too much to drink and longed to convey to someone, anyone, how the world seemed to him (beautiful, unfair, full of hidden messages he'd missed), a sort of Chicago skaz got performed: 'You got moxie but, trust me, the fucks are gonna fuck with you, and you gotta give 'em this'—insert raised middle finger—first time they try that shit!' Every soul is vast and wants to express itself fully. If it's denied an adequate instrument (and we're all denied that, at birth, some more than others), out comes... poetry, i.e., truth forced out through a restricted opening."

10) "Five writers might be sitting in a row at a long table in the same café, all believers in specificity, but at the moment of truth, some of them will find a charming way of being specific and others won't. So, that's harsh. But it's also freeing. It narrows the number of things we have to worry about down to just one: the moment when, reading a line of our work, we decide whether to change it. We can reduce all of writing to this: we read a line, have a reaction to it, trust (accept) that reaction, and do something in response, instantaneously, by intuition. That's it. Over and over. It's kind of crazy but, in my experience, that's the whole game: (1) becoming convinced that there is a voice inside you that really, really knows what it likes, and (2) getting better at hearing that voice and acting on its behalf."

11) "The writer and the reader stand at either end of a pond. The writer drops a pebble in and the ripples reach the reader. The writer stands there, imagining the way the reader is receiving those ripples, by way of deciding which pebble to drop in next. Meanwhile, the reader receives those ripples and, somehow, they speak to her. In other words, they're in connection. These days, it's easy to feel that we've fallen out of connection with one another and with the earth and with reason and with love. I mean: we have. But to read, to write, is to say that we still believe in, at least, the possibility of connection. When reading and writing, we feel connection happening (or not). That's the essence of these activities: ascertaining whether connection is happening, and where, and why. Those two people, in those postures, across that pond, are doing essential work. This is not a hobby, pastime, or indulgence. By their mutual belief in connection, they're making the world better, by making it (at least between the two of them, in that small moment) more friendly."

1) "A city is a machine with innumerable parts made by the accumulation of human gestures, a colossal organism forever dying and being born, an ongoing conflict between memory and erasure, a center for capital and for attacks on capital, a rapture, a misery, a mystery, a conspiracy, a destination and point of origin, a labyrinth in which some are lost and some find what they're looking for, an argument about how to live, and evidence that differences don't always have to be resolved, though they may grate and grind against each other for centuries. Nonstop Metropolis is the last volume in a trilogy of atlases exploring what maps can do to describe the ingredients and systems that make up a city and what stories remain to be told after we think we know where we are. The project began in my hometown, San Francisco, and went onward to New Orleans, where I'd been drawn to report on Hurricane Katrina and stayed to fall in love with the various kinds of warmth and presence there, the way people show up. It was inevitable that the third city would be my mother's hometown, New York."

2) "New York, as we talked to David van der Leer and Sarah Farwell at Van Alen Institute, an architectural forum in Manhattan, came to seem like a huge heart forever pumping an exceptionally fluid population in and out of the city. When your heart stops, you die; the city never stops; and New York in particular is a nonstop metropolis, throbbing and rushing at all times of day and night."

3) "The old notion of the central city as a place where bohemia and dissent thrive has been withering away as cities become enclaves of the affluent and the corporate—or empty zones. Many of the condominiums and luxury apartments are often unoccupied, either because they're not primary residences, or because they're places to park money for the transnational super-wealthy or their corporations. In the thicket of super-high-rises going up near Central Park South, it's anything but rare to read of apartment sales like the $95 million recently fetched by the penthouse at 432 Park Avenue, a ninety-six-story needle in the sky. That particular building, with over 400,000 square feet of usable interior space, contains only 104 units for people to live in. But as Fortune magazine reported of those units' owners-oil magnates from the Middle East, Chinese and Russian oligarchs, billionaires from Latin America—they 'all have one thing in common: More money than they know what to do with and a desperation to get as much of it out of their home countries as possible.' The tower casts a shadow on Central Park, making it all too perfect an emblem of the sacrifice of the public to the private in the neoliberal age."

4) "[This] was a town founded by liberal traders, not religious zealots. Compared with their European contemporaries, the seventeenth-century Dutch were much less given to discriminating against anyone with coins to pay. And that ethos remained key to a town whose first permanent foreign trader was a Hispaniola-born mulatto called Rodrigues, whom the Dutch left to set up shop by the Battery in 1614, and where in 1654 twenty-three Sephardic bankers fleeing Catholic Brazil came to forge the first Jewish community in the northern Americas. The English, who took over the colony and renamed it New York in 1664, were less tolerant. But plenty of Dutch and other traders remained, and so too did something of their willingness in 1657 to hear a 'remonstrance' concerning local Quakers, insisting not merely that they should be allowed to worship as they pleased, but that all followers of all faiths be allowed the same freedom. New York remained a market town uniquely open to people of all lands for commerce—unless, of course, they were commerce. For enslaved Africans were present from the start. When Peter Stuyvesant decreed that a high spiked fence be built along New Amsterdam's northern edge in 1653, it was the 'Company's Negroes' who built the rampart giving Wall Street its name. Where Wall Street abutted the East River, the English built an auction block, from which thousands of slaves were bought or loaded onto boats in the 170os, bound for southern slave ports or for the Caribbean."

5) "The Temple of Dendur at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is one of the most New York places for many reasons, but one of them is because if you sit there long enough, everyone in New York will pass by, from dowagers to schoolkids to tourists to locals to the young woman I once saw spend several minutes unsuccessfully trying to vomit in front of the temple, on the grounds that it was imperialist."

6) "The shadow city of tunnels that brings water into New York extends as far down into the earth as the Chrysler Building is high. The shadow city of electricity stretches as far away as the La Grande hydroelectric project located on the Canadian taiga, a complex that spreads out across as much space as the entire state of New York. The first year that Hydro-Québec—which owns the plant—began controlled flows down the Caniapiscau, 10,000 caribou drowned trying to migrate across the now-unfamiliar, much larger river that the dam had created. Was that New York's fault? Hydro-Québec said no. Some New Yorkers wondered anyway. How connected were studio apartments with television sets and Mixmasters to the lives of caribou?"

7) "In a subtler way, names perpetuate the gendering of New York City. Almost every city is full of men's names, names that are markers of who wielded power, who made history, who held fortunes, who was remembered; women are anonymous people who changed fathers' for husbands' names as they married, who lived in private and were comparatively forgot-ten, with few exceptions. This naming stretches across the continent; the peaks of many western mountains have names that make the ranges sound like the board of directors of old corporations, and very little has been named for particular historical women, though Maryland was named after a Queen Mary who never got there. Just as San Francisco was named after an Italian saint and New Orleans after a French king's brother, the duc d'Orléans, so New York, city and state, were named after King Charles I's brother, the duke of York (later King James II), when the British took over the region from the Dutch. Inside this city and state named for a man, you can board the 6 train at the northern end of the line in Pelham Bay, named after a Mr. Pell, in a borough named for a Swedish man, Jonas Bronck, and ride the train down into Manhattan, which is unusual in the city for retaining an indigenous name (the Bronx was said to be named Rananchqua by the local Lenape, Keskeskeck by other native groups). There the 6 travels down Lexington Avenue, parallel to Madison Avenue, named, of course, after President James Madison."

8) "Out on the quiet sidewalk, I looked around. No one was waiting to accost me. I stared up at the building and the darkness in the windows tugged at me—were people up there waiting for hands willing to work on the Sabbath? Would they shout for assistance if they saw me? The only sound I heard was the whistle of a wind that rushed down to push me along, as if someone had whispered that I was late. Suddenly these sidewalks where I had walked dozens of times before became a place more revealing, and more mysterious. New York City does that to you—it sneaks up on you. It sneaks up on you and promises that there is always more to see, to hear, to know. It surprises you with its inexhaustibility. At the same time, it reminds you that there is much that is hidden, because of the basic algebra in which knowledge equals identity. Behind what is revealed lie layers of national histories and cultural rituals and religious traditions and family lore. The city is a fossil record, and every layer you peel back exposes another layer whose contours reveal only our limitations in knowing the city. And yet, New York is as ready to give of itself as it is apt to withhold itself. Nowhere is this tendency to announce its marvels while simultaneously whispering its secrets as interwoven as within its immigrant communities."

9) "Late in the 196os the RAND Corporation, the Defense Department's research center, opened up an urban subsidiary. In the early Nixon years, governments at every level were cutting social services, but all of them were uneasy about charges of racism. It then became an intellectual problem to find a formula for service cuts that didn't look blatantly racist. RAND's idea was to base all service policy on gains or losses in population. In neighborhoods that were losing people, cities would have a supposedly color-blind way to cut. In neighborhoods losing lots of people, the cuts could be wholesale. The Bronx seems to have been one place this formula was tested: in the years the South Bronx was burning down, and people were fleeing the fires, the Bronx lost a third of its fire services. Touché! Observers of the Bronx's troubles, including many New Yorkers, developed an elaborate vocabulary of deflection and denial, which very soon would be used against New York itself. 'What's wrong with these people? Why are they doing this to themselves?' Magic words like these transform victims of misery and misfortune into perverse perpetrators of malice. Social scientists got millions of dollars in grants, from foundations and federal agencies, to explore the character defects of poor people from the Bronx that led them—here was another dehumanizing cliché of those days—'to foul their own nest.' No one found an answer, maybe because there's really no way to imagine hundreds of thousands of people burning down their homes and getting themselves and their children killed. The mayor's Arson Task Force, probably New York's most thoroughly New Left government agency, and an unlikely ally, the insurance industry, proposed to change the questions and to shift the focus from the tenants to the landlords. The giant insurance companies, which had bought up Bronx insurance pools in the pastoral early 1960s, suffered enormous losses there in the 1970s. Finally, in the early 1980s, the big companies resolved together to stop paying claims on tenement fires. All at once, as if by magic, tenement fires ceased. In the last year of payoffs, the Bronx lost about 1,300 buildings to fire. In the first year without payoffs, it lost 12. In the second year, it lost 3. Isn't it nice when, as happens every now and then, very complex human questions have very simple answers and when the answers keep poor people in their homes, not put out in the street?"

10) "The mighty Laurentide ice sheet carved vast landscapes—the Finger Lakes, the Hudson River Valley—but it ground to a halt in Brooklyn. Evidence of its defeat is all around us. The ice mass was like a titanic bulldozer thrown into reverse, and that left behind a great pile of crap—what we know today as Long Island."