Reviews and Comments

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."

1) "It was predictable, in hindsight. Everything about the history of the Society of Jesus bespoke deft and efficient action, exploration and research. During what Europeans were pleased to call the Age of Discovery, Jesuit priests were never more than a year or two behind the men who made initial contact with previously unknown peoples; indeed, Jesuits were often the vanguard of exploration. [...] The Jesuit scientists went to learn, not to proselytize. They went so that they might come to know and love God's other children. They went for the reason Jesuits have always gone to the farthest frontiers of human exploration. They went ad majorem Dei gloriam: for the greater glory of God. They meant no harm."

2) "And then there was Rome itself. At the impromptu farewell party, everyone was so excited for him. 'Rome, Johnny!' All that history, those beautiful churches, the art. He'd been excited too, dumb shit. What did he know? John Candotti was born to flat land, straight lines, square city blocks; nothing in Chicago had prepared him for the reality of Rome. The worst was when he could actually see the building he wanted to get to but found the street he was on curving away from it, leading him to yet another lovely piazza with yet another beautiful fountain, dumping him into another alley going nowhere. Another hour, trapped and frustrated by the hills, the curves, the rat's nest of streets smelling of cat piss and tomato sauce. He hated being lost, and he was always lost. He hated being late, and he was late all the time. The first five minutes of every conversation was John apologizing for being late and his Roman acquaintances assuring him it was no problem."

3) "At 3:57 A.M. on Sunday, August 3, 2019, James Connor Quinn pulled off his headset and sat back in his chair, sweating and sucking air, sure now, but hardly able to believe what he alone in all his world knew. 'Jesus Christ,' Jimmy breathed, meeting the future by turning to the ancient past. 'Holy Mother of God.' He rubbed his eyes and combed his fingers through his tangled, scribbly hair and sat, staring blankly, for a few moments longer. Then he called Anne."

4) "Smiling and in love with God and all His works, Emilio at last held out his arms and Askama settled happily into his lap, thick-muscled tapering tail curling comfortably around her as she nestled down and watched him greet the other children and begin to learn their names in the tripled sunshine that broke through the clouds. He felt as though he were a prism, gathering up God's love like white light and scattering it in all directions, and the sensation was nearly physical, as he caught and repeated as much of what everyone said to him as he could, soaking up the music and cadence, the pattern of phonemes on the fly, gravely accepting and repeating Askama's quiet corrections when he got things wrong."

5) "'Similarly, there is a word for the space we would call a room but no words for wall or for ceiling or floor, as such,' he continued, resting his arms on the table, careful not to scratch its polished surface with the wires. 'It's the function of an object that is named. You can refer to a ceiling, for example, by noting that the rain is prevented from taking place in this space because of it. Furthermore, they have no concept of borders, such as separate our nations. They speak in terms of what a geographic region contains—a flower for making this distillation, or an herb which is good for that dye. Eventually, I came to understand that the Runa do not have vocabulary for the edges that we perceive separating one element from another. This reflects their social structure and their perceptions of the physical world and even their political status.'"

6) "Supaari VaGayjur profited from the presence of the Jesuit party on Rakhat before he knew of its existence. This was both characteristic of him and unusual. Characteristic, in that he had recognized a potential Runa fad before anyone else and took steps to capture the market just before the trend took off in Gayjur. Unusual, in that he was not in command of the facts underlying the market before he moved. It was unlike him to risk so much without investigating first. The gamble paid off handsomely but even as the profits were totaled, it left him feeling uneasy, as though he had just missed being killed in a ha'aran duel undertaken while drunk."

7) "So here it was. A time to ratify or to repudiate a vow made in youth and ignorance, to be lived out in maturity and in full understanding. A time to weigh the extraordinary and spiritual and fathomless beauty that God had shown him against the ordinary and worldly and incalculable sweetness of human love and family. A moment to consider if he would trade everything he had hoped for and had been given as a priest for everything he yearned for and desired as a man. He did not flinch from the knife. He cut the thread cleanly, a priest in perpetuity. God had been generous with him. He could not stint in return."

8) "The Jana'ata merchant's chin lifted slightly in acknowledgment. He had planned their arrival thoughtfully, bringing them around the headland and into Radina Bay a little before second sundown. Ringed by three mountains, white stonework and red clay masonry gleaming in the lush pearlescent light, Gayjur embraced the crescent harbor in a long sweep from southeast to northwest; the deepening darkness hid the tangle of ships and derricks and warehouses and shops nearest the docks and their eyes were drawn upward toward Galatna Palace, set like a jewel in the deep aquamarine vegetation of the central mountain. This was the best time of day to see the city-when the sky took on colors that always reminded Supaari of marble from Gardhan. It was also the safest time to bring the foreigners into port."

9) "He sat back in the bench and stared at the ancient olive trees defining the edge of the garden. 'There's an old Jewish story that says in the beginning God was everywhere and everything, a totality. But to make creation, God had to remove Himself from some part of the universe, so something besides Himself could exist. So He breathed in, and in the places where God withdrew, there creation exists.' 'So God just leaves?' John asked, angry where Emilio had been desolate. 'Abandons creation? You're on your own, apes. Good luck!' 'No. He watches. He rejoices. He weeps. He observes the moral drama of human life and gives meaning to it by caring passionately about us, and remembering.' 'Matthew ten, verse twenty-nine,' Vincenzo Giuliani said quietly. ''Not one sparrow can fall to the ground without your Father knowing it.'' 'But the sparrow still falls,' Felipe said. They sat for a while, wrapped in their private musings."

1) "'Fathom' is an Old English word that meant outstretched arms and an embrace by those arms. It came to mean a measurement of about 6 feet, the width a man's arms could reach, as well as the embrace of an idea. To fathom is to understand. Sailors kept the word in circulation as a measurement of depth, and it survives into the present day mostly as a negative, as unfathomable, the water so deep its depths cannot be plumbed, the phenomenon that cannot be fully grasped. New Orleans is all kinds of unfathomable, a city of amorphous boundaries, where land is forever turning into water, water devours land, and a thousand degrees of marshy, muddy, oozing in-between exist; where lines that elsewhere seem firmly drawn are blurry; where whatever you say requires more elaboration; where most rules are full of exceptions the way most land here is full of water. A fathom was an embrace, but you can put your arms around a mystery, and maybe you truly love something only by granting it its full complexity, its unknowability. And maybe love is always an attempt to embrace what cannot be fathomed and to embrace the mystery of it, too. In a sense, every place is unfathomable, infinite, impossible to describe, because it exists in innumerable versions, because no two people live in quite the same city but live side by side in parallel universes that may or may not intersect, because the minute you map it the map becomes obsolete, because the place is constantly arising and decaying. Cincinnati has its enigmas and Albuquerque its contradictions, but New Orleans is particularly rich in these things. We have mapped New Orleans and its surroundings twenty-two times, sometimes with two or more subjects per map, but we have not drained the well with these few bucketloads."

2) "So much of the richness of this place is fleeting and forever being renewed: the pleasures of sociability, of festivals and Carnival, of dancing and music, of smiles and greetings and contact, of improvisations that sail out on the night air never to be recaptured but always to be renewed and succeeded. This is not the immortality of dry endless life but of continual regeneration and reincarnation. The measure of time here is not years or centuries, but the annual cycle that repeats: the old Catholic calendar with Jazz Fest and some other secular occasions thrown in. Not just the Christian holidays celebrated elsewhere in the United States, but the older, richer, wilder calendar, in which Christmas leads to Twelfth Night, and Twelfth Night is the launch of the Carnival season, which runs for many weeks, up until Fat Tuesday. Then the forty days of Lent begin with Ash Wednesday, marching soberly along to Easter—except that few are sober on St. Patrick's Day, and St. Joseph's Day is pleasure galore, with Italians sharing altars of baked goods and Mardi Gras Indians donning their hand-sewn suits that night and one last time the following Sunday—Super Sunday—before they draw a sketch of next year's outfits. The calendar also includes hurricane season, the season when the city's mortality is on everyone's mind."

3) "There are no straight lines in nature. Nor are there any right angles. Rather, intricate tangles and irregular arcs merge and bifurcate recurrently. Look at any plant leaf, or spider web, or the veins of your arm for evidence. Nowhere is this sinuous geometry more apparent than in river deltas, where flowing waters, lacking the discipline that topography imposes, lazily meander in hairpin crescents, ever shifting, eroding, and depositing sediment—until they lunge into an adjacent channel and replicate the process nearby, all the while turning sea into land. So formed the Mississippi Delta, over the span of a mere seven thousand years, producing what Mark Twain called 'the youthfulest batch of country that lies around there anywhere.' Dynamic, fluid, soft, warm, humid, tempestuous: flora and fauna flourish in such conditions, but humans resist them and endeavor to impose rigidity and rectitude upon them, so as to exploit the delta's resources and nodalities. The urban developmental history of New Orleans is essentially the story of overlaying orderly orthogonality on unruly curvaceousness."

4) "At the base of the world's seventh largest river delta, antebellum plantations and petrochemical industries occupy lands where the First Nations of the Mississippi River Delta once lived. The ancient bottomland hardwood and cypress forests exist no more. Where villages once stood, suburbs and cities now sprawl. The federal government has refused to recognize the Houma for over two hundred years, denying us the fulfillment of the promise of colonial treaties. Now, our ancestors' refuge, Rosalie's land, is disappearing before our eyes. For the first time in our history, in the shadows of the BP drilling disaster, we are facing the threat of losing our food sovereignty as we bear witness to the realities of a delta ecosystem under stress. One day, we Houma may be forced to forever evacuate the wetlands of coastal Louisiana that we call home. Until that time, we will continue to make our last stand on sinking land."

5) "In most parts of New Orleans, if you plunge your arm into the ground to the depth of your elbow, your fingertips will touch water. Your fingertips might also touch other fingertips. It took more than a century for the city's early settlers to realize that the ground beneath New Orleans is too low, and the water table too high, to allow traditional Christian burial. As a body decomposes, it fills with gases—cadaverine and putrescine—that cause it to bloat. A coffin containing a bloated corpse will rise through mud like a bubble in a carbonated drink. The only thing holding it back is the hard topsoil. But after a storm, once the topsoil is agitated and diluted, the coffin will pop out of the ground, like a buoy pushed under water and then released. This is what happened for more than a hundred years after New Orleans was founded: every time it rained, bodies popped out of the ground. As late as the mid-nineteenth century, the city was known throughout the United States as the 'Wet Grave.'"

6) "It is these logics of confinement and containment that have shaped New Orleans's approach to public safety for centuries. While it has been forcefully argued that the policies of levees-only and mass incarceration have made southern Louisiana more secure, what these policies have actually done is illuminate whose lives are deemed valuable and who has been rendered disposable time and time again. Yet, regardless of how many policies are enacted, neither human beings nor the river have been easily contained. The urge for freedom is too strong to be put down, no matter how high the walls."

7) "Congo Square, in Treme on the edge of the French Quarter, itself came up in the conversation as the pivotal site for American and perhaps world music. You can imagine the rich musical traditions enslaved Africans brought with them squeezed through the narrow waist of an hourglass—a narrow waist called Congo Square—before broadening out again and mixing and mingling with other sources to become jazz, rhythm and blues, rock and roll, funk, and so much more, including, eventually, hip-hop. And hip-hop is now the global sound of resistance: just as rock and roll played by the Plastic People of the Universe assumed a crucial role in Czechoslovakia's path to liberation, so hip-hop played a meaningful role in the Arab Spring of 2011, which might have as accurately been called the North African Spring. This was only one of the many ways that what began in Africa, survived uniquely in Congo Square, and grew and changed and bloomed in the United States went back to that continent as liberation and power."

8) "Many people fell in love with the city and stayed. In the first few years after Katrina, I met many who told me they came for a week and stayed months or went back and packed up and moved to New Orleans. Newcomers arrived, and many natives discovered a newly fierce affection for their city. Post-Katrina, some racial lines were crossed, some corruption was rooted out, some environmentally strong and hurricane-resistant buildings went in, and some important conversations were launched. The nation learned from it, too, which became evident when Hurricane Sandy struck seven years later and several hundred miles northeast. New Orleans is built on the instability of mud and lowlands, and it is a place of many kinds of violence; but it is also built on love, pleasure, public joy and affection, memory, and faithful attachment. By some estimates, in the wake of the disaster more than a million volunteers visited the city for periods ranging from a few days to years to provide medical care, demolition and construction, community kitchens, advocacy, and more. New Orleans was nearly destroyed by hate, but it was saved and restored by love."

1) "Writing is not narrative design, and narrative design is not writing. One of the common misconceptions in videogames around storytelling is that narrative designers can write and vice versa. Sometimes you get people who do both (often you will be expected to be a dual narrative designer/writer in a small indie development team), but this problem is endemic and often means that the actual brief or recruitment copy for a piece of work isn't clear about what's wanted. And it's even possible the people writing the job description don't know what they need. So, let's set this out as clearly as possible: Narrative design is the practice of game design with story at its heart. You are the advocate for the story in the design of the game. Narrative is (and we will dig down more into this in the next chapter) the design of the telling of a story. Not just a plot in a world with characters, but also the decisions around in what order the plot is communicated, how characters and the environment build together, structure, pacing, choice design, voice, perspective, role-play relationships, UI, the key decisions around tools, player agency, and much else. It is storytelling through design. Writing is the building of characters, worlds, plot, structure pacing, cadence, dialogue, UI text, choice text, exposition, characterisation, character journeys, format, genre, and medial expressivity (i.e. What is this sentence to be read as? Is it a line of dialogue like in a script, a book, for speaking, a comic?). It is storytelling through words."

2) "You will often need to find ways of making broken tools sufficient and will often be dealing with systems for writing which have none of the word processing features you're used to. I wrote much of Mutazione without an undo button, with manual save only, and, until the final year, no copy and paste. There were also bugs in the tool I worked in, which sometimes meant saves didn't take, and workflows which might have made sense to a programmer in setting it up, but when I had to select a character from a dropdown box for every single line I wrote, I quickly knew I would need to request being able to search the box by pressing a letter, or get a severe repetitive strain injury (RSI)."

3) "One thing about writing in games is defining and understanding scope, and how it can balloon. If someone asks you to add something into your writing which they think seems simple, it's useful to be able to respond carefully about how many hours of work that would add. One of the most useful phrases I've learned to use is 'that's not a small change.'"

4) "Here's the piece of advice I think is the most universally useful thing I say to early-stage practitioners: Your practice is not your career. That is, your practice and development as a storyteller is in your hands. The people who hire you, on the other hand, are in control of your career."

5) "Here are some discussion prompts for a crit club: · How did the game make you feel? · How did it achieve this? · Was there a central character? How was the player supposed to relate to them? · How did you feel about the character voices and journey? · How did the writing and story interact with gameplay? · What did you think about structure, pacing, and formal constraints? · How did the game use choice and agency? · How did it use genre conventions? · What do you feel wasn't so successful? · If you were to change one major aspect of the game/genre/story, how would it change? · What might you have done differently?"

6) "If you have to or want to read reviews, I recommend deciding how, why, and when. Don't read them obsessively every time you get a Google alert. Set aside time, absorb them, gather your pull quotes, note your bug reports, respond to anything you need to, and jot down any reflections for your practice in one of the practice/reflection note-taking systems you will have diligently built after this book's advice. If you might need to respond to reviews on storefronts, you might want to create 'form' responses in a sheet you and colleagues can copy and paste from if there's a known bug. Having such a sheet could also be useful if you need to take a breath before responding. Draft it in the sheet, and take five minutes to come back to it before posting."

1) Samuel de Champlain founded his famous habitation at what's now Quebec City in 1608, but continued to be on the lookout for other places where French settlers could also make their homes in the New World. Late in the spring of 1611, he journeyed up the Saint Lawrence River to where Jacques Cartier, in 1535, had been stopped by the Lachine Rapids. There, from the Iroquoian village of Hochelaga, Cartier had climbed the wooded eminence he called "le mont Royal." It was the name that, a little modified, would eventually be applied to the city it one day would overlook and the island where it stands. During his 1611 expedition, Champlain, like Cartier, would also halt at the fearsome rapids, which he called le Grand Sault Saint Louis. And, two years later, well into the writing of his Voyages, we can imagine him reflecting with satisfaction on the passage where he describes discovering, on that island, point de lieu plus propre for settlement. Here, following John Squair's translation, is how Champlain spent about two weeks near the rapids:

I examined the country very carefully, but after looking everywhere found no place more suitable than a little spot ... which we named Place Royale, at a league's distance from Mount Royal.

2) [The] very day that Cuvillier and Aylwin's advertisement appeared, a major fire struck Notre Dame Street, home to their auction house, and the surrounding neighbourhood. The jail, near today's city hall, the Collège de Montréal, housed in the former Château de Vaudreuil on Saint Paul Street, and many houses were among the structures destroyed. But out of the ashes, some remarkable opportunities arose. We see the results today. The most important was Place Jacques Cartier. As urbanist Jean-Claude Marsan of the Université de Montréal has related, the square owes its existence to "a neat, speculative deal." About six months after the fire, a pair of wheeler-dealer merchants named Joseph Périnault and Jean-Baptiste-Amable Durocher bought the ruins of the Château de Vaudreuil and its extensive grounds for about £3,500. Then, "with calculated generosity" as Marsan has put it, they presented the city with about a third of the land on condition that a public market be established there. The offer was quickly accepted, whereupon Périnault and Durocher immediately subdivided the remainder of the tract into seven building lots. They set the price high, calculating that proximity to the new market would make the lots especially attractive. Sure enough, all seven lots sold within two days. "Périnault and Durocher had made a small fortune," Marsan concludes, "and Montreal had a new public square."

3) He was one of the best known men in Montreal, though not as Charles McKiernan. Throughout the city, indeed elsewhere in Canada and into the United States, he was hailed as Joe Beef, and there was ample reason for his fame. Joe Beef's waterfront saloon was as remarkable a Montreal landmark as, in its own way, Notre Dame Church or the palatial, brand new Windsor Hotel. Booze was served, of course, but so was food, and if a man couldn't pay for what he ate, that was all right with Joe. Those with money might enjoy great lashings of beef, bread and tea; but those without could still count on a bowl of soup. Each day at noon, hundreds of down-and-outers might line up for a handout. There were rooms upstairs where the poor could stay for next to nothing. In winter, Joe would send one of his men through the nearby streets to pick up any drunks trying to sleep it off in the snow.

4) Few things proclaim Montreal so unmistakably as the illuminated cross on Mount Royal. It was erected in 1924 by the Société Saint Jean Baptiste as a "perpetual monument to the faith of Canada." Yet the cross might never have been built had another project for the mountain gone ahead thirty-six years before. In April 1888, city council received a petition from prominent Catholics led by Archbishop Édouard-Charles Fabre. It asked that land be set aside at the summit of Mount Royal for a huge statue of the Virgin Mary. This was not the first time that something monumental had been urged for the mountain. In 1867, French sculptor Louis Rochet proposed that a statue of Jacques Cartier be placed there. City council turned him down. Rochet tried again in 1874 and again was rejected. That same year on June 24, Saint Jean Baptiste Day, Reverend Alexandre Deschamps preached a sermon in Notre Dame Church calling for a cross on the heights of Mount Royal. It would be a deliberate echo of the far more modest cross that Paul de Maisonneuve, Montreal's founder, raised on the mountain early in 1643 to thank God for preserving the infant settlement from a disastrous flood. This proposal, too, came to naught, perhaps an ill omen for Archbishop Fabre.

5) In comedy, timing is everything, and Mrs. John Buckland would surely have appreciated the moment. One of the great comic actors of the Montreal stage, she had pre-empted the Gazette's report of her grave illness by inconveniently dying the day before.

6) Thompson was cashing in on a fad then at full throttle in the United States. The cakewalk itself - high-stepping while bending backward, hands waving, then allowed to fall - had grown out of shows that black slaves had put on for their own amusement in which they parodied the ballroom manners of their white masters, and the prize for the best display was a cake. By the 1890s, in an ironic twist, the cakewalk had crossed over into mainstream white society. Public dances, even into the 1920s, would feature contests in which couples would promenade extravagantly across the stage, each hoping to - well - take the cake.

7) The Gazette was one of seven major newspapers then in Montreal, four English and three French, and none of them disturbed the Lord's Day by publishing. "I am passing a Sabbath in a city where there is no seven-day-a-week paper, and Sunday is the day omitted," Hall noted. "There is a weekly Sunday paper here of very modest proportions, but the clergy certainly have no reason to complain of the Sunday newspapers of Montreal detracting from devotional exercises." The city now boasted a population of perhaps 250,000, of whom about 175,000 were French-speaking. For the doubtless unilingual Hall, however, it was the minority that caught his eye - or rather his ear. Consider this odd linguistic observation: "From the frequency one hears the ejaculation 'Scotch' as a sort of time-of-day greeting, one might almost imagine a considerable portion of the population hailed from the land of The Bonnie Briar Bush." For all his flippancy, Hall was enjoying himself and was sorry to return home. "Montreal is glad I am here," his report concluded, "and so am I. Scotch!"

8) Bitter cold had come early that winter - which, in one way, was a blessing. The low temperatures promised the annual ice harvest would be a good one. Surrounded as we are by electric refrigerators and freezers at home, coolers in our supermarkets and air-conditioning everywhere, it's easy to forget what a challenge it used to be to cool ourselves, our food and anything else. The challenge was met in Montreal by half a dozen or more ice companies whose crews would be dispatched to the frozen Saint Lawrence as soon as conditions were right. That winter of 1903-04, cutting began four days after Christmas and, thanks to slightly milder weather early in January, was proceeding rapidly. Not only did that early cold snap mean ice two feet thick could be on the market a week sooner than usual, the Gazette reported, but in addition light snowfalls and strong winds had kept the frozen surface of the river free of snow. "There is very little snow frozen on the surface of the cubes, which glisten in the sun like emeralds."

9) Millie de Leon was loving it. When a policeman in the audience stood up, marched on stage, and made to arrest her, she planted a kiss on the officer's cheek, "which," the Gazette recorded, "was much envied from the front rows." Millie, also known as The Girl in Blue, was a famous American burlesque queen. Her original stage name had been Mlle. De Leon, but the raucous world of burlesque soon ensured that the fancy French honorific would become the no-airs first name Millie. She knew exactly how risqué she could be, and delighted in going just a little further. Often she'd throw a garter to the audience, even invite a man onstage to remove it himself. She had been known to forget to put on her body stocking before appearing. Late in April 1909 she was packin' 'em in at the Theatre Royal on Côté Street with her dancing, which we described as "a combination of the Salome and the houchee couchee." It was too much for Police Chief Olivier Campeau, though he could not go to the theatre himself to enforce decency. He was too well known and knew that, if he turned up, "the more peppery parts" would be "eliminated out of respect for his feelings." He sent a Constable Lepage in plainclothes instead.

10) By the following weekend, the [zoot suit riots] had generally calmed down, however, though not the search for what had caused it in the first place. Surely part of it was sex. Perhaps one too many zoot-suiter had cut in on a sailor, or vice-versa, in some dance hall or night club. Testosterone was not in short supply, on either side. Consider, too, the servicemen's resentment of boys virtually their own age having it easy in civilian life. Too many in uniform had suffered in real battles already, and with the invasion of Europe just getting under way, vastly more would soon fall in combat. And let's not forget the extravagant zoot suits themselves, surely an affront to those in more sober military attire. "The pants of the zoot suiters flare out at the top," one Montrealer told the Gazette. "Sailors' pants flare out at the bottom. So, it's just natural that they clash."

1) Alex Dumas first came to the army's attention when, still a lowly corporal, he single-handedly captured twelve enemy soldiers and marched them back to his camp. Not long afterward, he led four horsemen in an attack on an enemy post manned by over fifty men—Dumas alone killed six and took sixteen prisoner. As a Parisian society journalist in the early nineteenth century summed up, "Such brilliant conduct, on top of a manly physiognomy and extraordinary strength and stature, secured his quick promotion; it wasn't long before his talents proved he deserved it."

2) "Among the Muslims, men from every class who were able to catch sight of General Bonaparte were struck by how short and skinny he was," wrote the chief medical officer of the expedition. "The one, among our generals, whose appearance struck them more was... the General-in-Chief of the cavalry, Dumas. Man of color, and by his figure looking like a centaur, when they saw him ride his horse over the trenches, going to ransom prisoners, all of them believed that he was the leader of the expedition." [At] over six feet, with an athletic physique, Alex Dumas cut a dashing figure among the French elite. But how was it that he could enter the elite—and indeed be celebrated as a national hero—at a time when the basis of French wealth was black slavery in the colonies?

3) Many of the Founding Fathers themselves foresaw that their compromise with southern states was a poison pill that would eventually lead to tragedy. But the French stalwarts of the new America found every way of glossing over the problem. Paris theaters staged plays about the idyllic life in Virginia, where black slaves and their masters sang songs of liberty as they worked together side by side.

4) In those days, most Parisian cafés didn't spill into the street but served their customers in great interior rooms with marble-topped tables, gilt walls, mirrors, and chandeliers. But in the Palais Royal, with its large, protected courtyards, the cafés could set up outdoor tables where customers could read or talk amid the throng. Nearby were open-air billiard tables, musicians playing bawdy songs, magic-lantern shows, displays of electromagnetism, and political satires of all kinds—often distributed by freethinking agents of the Duke d'Orléans—mocking the king. Men and women crowded into these courtyards day and night; at the tables sat groups of men in intense discussion on the matters of the day. Anyone could read what they liked here and argue as loudly as they wished about it. The brilliant thing was that since the Palais Royal belonged to the duke, the entire space was off limits to the Paris police. Only the duke's own guards held sway within these walls, and the family had given strict instructions to allow the public a long leash. Philosophers, politicians, doctors, lawyers, workmen, and aristocrats all bumped up against one another, and many political clubs of the French Revolution began their debates here. (A little over half a century later, Karl Marx would first meet Friedrich Engels at a Palais Royal café, making this birthplace of eighteenth-century revolution that of twentieth-century revolution as well.)

5) Until the Committee's downfall, in 1794, Dumas would be forced to correspond with it on a regular basis about nearly all logistical, tactical, and strategic matters of his command. He received many letters a week signed by Carnot and the other members of the Committee. He must have been aware of the situation when he received his promotion, but Alex Dumas was brave, self-confident, and stubborn. Also, his own zeal gave him the kind of protective faith that true believers have. Dumas had thrown his life and soul fully behind the Revolution, even though he was not inherently a political man. For him, there was no going back. Unlike many others, he couldn't emigrate if pushed too far—where would he go? In a world where men of his color were slaves, revolutionary France was his promised land, even if he had to share it with some unsavory characters.

6) In mid-August, the Committee decided to send "the hero of Mont Cenis" to lead the Army of the West, whose mission was to combat a bloody royalist rebellion—some called it a civil war—in the Vendée, in western France. While the majority of the revolutionary armies fought external enemies, a few targeted internal rebellion and counterrevolution. The Army of the West was particularly notorious in this respect: its task was to suppress the motley collection of aristocrats and peasants who called themselves the Catholic and Royal Army. Many factors had made the Vendéeans rebels: many of them opposed the Revolution from the beginning or were alienated by the persecution of priests and the confiscation of Church property or by the 1793 execution of the king. But the biggest cause of the rebellion seems to have been Carnot's implementation of the levée en masse.

7) A decent man could not last long in the Vendée without becoming either a bloodthirsty killer or a victim. This was the case for Dumas's old commander General Biron. Biron had been sent to the Vendée in May 1793 to fight the insurgency. He had achieved immediate military successes, but the insubordination and continued violence toward civilians on the part of his troops caused him to resign. Another general then accused him of incivisme because he had been too lenient with the insurgents. This was enough to land Biron on the guillotine in December 1793, the very month that the Army of the West declared provisional victory over the insurgency.

8) The current Committee members' lack of extreme ideological convictions also made it a target for all sides, and Paris was rife with plots against the middle-of-the-road government. In spring hyperinflation and bread riots had sparked a rise in what was called "neo-Jacobinism," and in May these far-left radicals staged an uprising; it was brutally suppressed. But the repression of the neo-Jacobins on the far left created an opening for the neo-royalists on the far right. On October 5, 1795, the royalist-leaning sections of the city erupted in insurrection against the central government. Thirty thousand insurgents marched on the government, which had at most six thousand troops to defend it. The government called on a man of influence, a provincial noble named Paul Barras—Viscount Paul de Barras—who was promoted overnight to command the Army of the Interior. Barras looked to the army and specifically to an up-and-coming general living in Paris. Napoleon Bonaparte did not disappoint him.

9) In January 1797, Napoleon reorganized the French Army of Italy into three main columns, with the goal of driving the Austrians up into the Alps and out of Italy. If the French columns succeeded in this, they might even follow their enemy and burst down into the heartland of Austria itself, from which the enemy's capital, Vienna, would be just a day's ride away. For the first two weeks of February 1797, Dumas and a small band of dragoons under the command of General André Masséna advanced relentlessly, driving the Austrian army ever farther north toward their own border. "[Dumas] flies from one city to another, from one village to another, hacking everything to pieces," runs one account, "capturing two thousand prisoners here, one thousand there, he performs truly fantastic charges." The Austrians came up with a name for the relentless French general who stalked them through the snow: die schwarze Teufel, the "Black Devil."

10) Napoleon, who styled himself an intellectual and was proud of his membership in the French Academy in Paris, showered the Institute with problems both great and small: How do we purify Nile water? Which would be more practical in Cairo, windmills or watermills? What is the civil and criminal law in Egypt and what elements should we keep or throw out? Is there a way of brewing beer without hops?

11) That night a group of allied deputies stayed up late with the plotters, working by candlelight, taking votes and drafting papers, to make it all legal. By 3 a.m. it was finished. France had a new government, with Napoleon appointed first consul at the head of a ruling body of three consuls. Naturally, the other two would do his bidding. "Consul" was an evocation of Rome, and everyone could see that, as in Rome, one Caesar had emerged supreme. The fate of everything and everyone in Europe would soon hang on the whim of this dictator in a tricolor sash. The decade of French republicanism and democracy—the age of seemingly infinite emancipation, with all its expansive horrors and hopes—was over.

12) Dumas attributed his own salvation to the "forty enemas in three hours."

13) By the time he returned to France, in June of 1801, the Revolution and the nation Alex Dumas loved had declined almost as precipitously as he had. He must have felt like Rip Van Winkle returning from the hills—only Rip Van Winkle had found a king replaced by a revolution, while Dumas found a revolution replaced by a king, of sorts. And it was the same king he had left Egypt to escape. When Dumas arrived on French shores, Napoleon had had over a year to remake France in his image and to turn the gains of the Revolution to his own purposes.

14) During the 1790s, the National Colonial Institute in Paris had taken the revolutionary step of educating black, mixed-race, and white children together. Now Napoleon's government cut the Institute's funding and ended its experiment in color-blind education.

1) The new century was a new opportunity, he'd decided. If they survived Y2K, if the world didn't end, he was going to be a better man. Also if they survived Y2K he hoped never to hear the term Y2K again.

2) There were aspects of the fairy tale that Vincent was careful not to think about too much at the time, and later her memories of those years had an abstracted quality, as if she'd stepped temporarily outside of herself.

3) Her life in those days was so disorienting that she often found herself thinking about variations on reality, different permutations of events: an alternate reality where she'd quit working at the Hotel Caiette and returned to her old job at the Hotel Vancouver before Jonathan arrived, for example, or where he decided to get room service that morning instead of sitting at the bar and ordering breakfast, or where he did sit at the bar and order breakfast but he didn't like Vincent; an alternate reality where she still lived in the staff quarters of the Hotel Caiette, serving drinks to wealthy tourists all night, years passing. None of these scenarios seemed less real than the life she'd landed in, so much so that she was struck sometimes by a truly unsettling sense that there were other versions of her life being lived without her, other Vincents engaged in different events. [...] Imagining an alternate reality where there was no Iraq War, for example, or where the terrifying new swine flu in the Republic of Georgia hadn't been swiftly contained; an alternate world where the Georgia flu blossomed into an unstoppable pandemic and civilization collapsed.

4) An unsettling thought while standing in line for the commissary: when he dies in prison, will he die in the counterlife too?

5) [The] line, for Oskar, had been crossed eleven years earlier, when he'd first been asked to backdate a transaction. "It's possible to both know and not know something," he said later, under cross-examination, and the state tore him to pieces over this but he spoke for several of us, actually, several of us who'd been thinking a great deal about that doubleness, that knowing and not knowing, being honourable and not being honourable, knowing you're not a good person but trying to be a good person regardless around the margins of the bad.

6) "I know what you mean," Leon said. "It's the surprise that bothers me, personally, the way everyone I talk to seems shocked by the downturn in the industry." "Yeah, so, true story, one of our colleagues pulled me aside today, I'm not naming names, and he said, 'I just can't believe what's happening to our industry, can you?' And I'm trying to be patient with these people, I really am, but I had to ask him, which part is surprising to you? Let's break this down. What is it you can't believe, exactly? That people don't want to buy goods when the economy collapses, or that people don't want to ship goods that nobody's buying?"

7) Leon knew that he and Marie were luckier than most citizens of the shadow country, they had each other and the RV and enough money (just barely) to survive, but the essential marker of citizenship was the same for everyone: they'd all been cut loose, they'd slipped beneath the surface of the United States, they were adrift.

1) “what the ocean said to the black boy” they call me blue because they don’t understand how the sky work they call you black because they don’t understand how god work

2) "Counting Descent" I celebrate every breath, tried to start counting them so I wouldn’t take each one for granted. I wish I could give my breath to the boys who had theirs taken, but I’ve stopped counting

because it feels like there are too many boys & not enough breath to go around.

3) "James Baldwin Speaks to the Protest Novel" I want to see all of the complexity and mess and joy and distress of being a complex human being, which is to say a human being. Because isn’t this the problem? That we must write the most exaggerated versions of ourselves to show them something they have already chosen not to see? How can they think us more human if we don’t write ourselves as such?

4) "An Evening at the Louvre" why waste time sculpting when I could make you pancakes in the morning

5) "what the cathedral said to the black boy" close your eyes those stained glass shadows all we got is what we name ourselves otherwise I am just a room you are just body & we know how wrong that is

1) Video games have always been queer. Even games that appear to have no LGBTQ content can be played queerly, and all games can be interpreted through queer lenses. This is because queerness in video games means more than the representation of LGBTQ characters or same-sex romance. Queerness and video games share a common ethos: the longing to imagine alternative ways of being and to make space within structures of power for resistance through play. From the origins of the medium, to the present day, and reaching into the future, video-game worlds have offered players the opportunity to explore queer experience, queer embodiment, queer affect, and queer desire-even when the non-heteronormative and counterhegemonic implications of these games have been far from obvious. Through new critical perspectives, queerness can be discovered in video games, but it can also be brought to games through queer play and queer players, whose choices to engage with games on their own terms and for their own pleasures can profoundly transform the meaning of games and unleash their queer potential. In this way, playing queer, like queer interpretation and queer game design, can be seen as a transformative practice that reframes and remakes games from the inside out.

2) [All] video games can become platforms for playing at the boundaries of heteronormativity-or for disrupting and dismantling heteronormativity itself. The queerness in a video game may lie in the opportunity to resist structures of power, or partake in alternative forms of pleasure, or inhabit embodied and affective experiences of difference. Queerness can be found in how video games construct or disrupt notions of desire, temporality, success, meaning, life, and death.

3) Pong is a classic arcade game, later brought to a number of home game platforms, inspired by the sport of ping-pong. The original Pong is a rudimentary game; only the paddles, the ball, the net, and the score appear on-screen. It has no narrative, no characters, and certainly no explicitly LGBTQ content. By contrast, Between Men is all about characters, narrative, and what would likely today be called queerness. In her book, Sedgwick uses examples from British novels to articulate a system through which she sees male same-sex bonds forming via a triangulation of desire through women. Video games are not mentioned in Sedgwick's book, and the abstracted forms represented in Pong make for an unexpected match with the detailed stories and dialogue analyzed in Between Men. Despite their many differences, however, these two classics can be seen to speak to one another in powerful ways. The dynamic structures that appear in both works in fact closely mirror one another: the erotic triangle described by Sedgwick and the geometric movement of the ball bounced back and forth between paddles in Pong. Both can be understood as interactive systems through which desire is communicated, connection is built, and queer intimacy takes form.

4) At the end of the long, hard struggle in Portal, there is the promise of cake-a girly prize made by women's labor to reward women's labor-but that cake is the very epitome of deception.

5) Specifically, to de-gamify is to strip away the game-like structures already imposed onto life and to remake the world without the imposition of those structures. This process takes place in three steps. First, de-gamification entails identifying instances in which society has already mapped game-like systems of goals, achievements, points, etc., onto human experience in an attempt to regulate, normativize, and exploit that experience. Second, de-gamification entails breaking down those structures and liberating the human experience that they oppress. Third, de-gamification entails creating opportunities for exploring-and thereby playing with-those experiences outside of the game-like structures that have been imposed upon them. This last step speaks to the complexity and even contradiction within the work of de-gamification. At the same time that de-gamification tears down game-like structures, it also facilitates play, which is itself commonly understood in game studies as being fundamentally bounded by rules.

6) I close by reasserting this intentionally incendiary conjecture: that if we accept failure as fundamental to games and we accept failure as coded as queer, all games become queer, in a non-representational sense. This does not just apply to games in which players willingly blow themselves to pieces. If we accept the premise that no game can exist without failure, then no game can exist without a mode of experience that might be called queerness.

7) When we, as players and scholars, talk only about fun experiences, we exclude from our discussions all of those moments in otherwise enjoyable games when we in fact had no fun. We also shut out of sight all of those games we have picked up and played for only a few hours, even a few minutes, and never played again because we found them boring, frustrating, or bad. These too are meaningful experiences, meaningful games, games worthy of attention, not because they are good but because their badness is itself a rich site of meaning. Attending to no-fun-ness allows us to return to these moments of interaction previously dismissed, discarded, and forgotten.

8) On the surface, it would seem that speedrunning and slow strolling are opposite approaches to playing video games. Speedrunners run; slow strollers walk. Speedrunners play to achieve a goal as quickly as possible, by necessity ignoring the nuances and distractions of the game world; slow strollers take their time, soaking in a game's details and tangents. Yet, crucially, what these forms of play have in common is that they both enact alternative-and indeed queer-relationalities to space and time. Both speedrunning and walking simulators resist the standard logics that determine how players should move through video games and at what speed.

9) If this is the future of video games, the future of video games is queer. Queerness describes a way of remaking the world as well as a way of desiring within it.

1) Cape Breton used to export fish, coal, and steel; but in 2005, its main export is people. It's not a unique story in Atlantic Canada. Nor is it a new one. Every Cape Breton family has had its share of empty chairs around the table, for a hundred years. Fathers, siblings, cousins; gone to the "Boston States," gone to Ontario, gone to Alberta—gone to be cheap labour where booming industries demanded it. The only message we got about a better future was that we had to leave home to find one. We did not question it, because this is the have-not region of a have-not province, and it has not boomed here in generations. I need to tell you this—there is no knowing Cape Breton without knowing how deeply ingrained two diametrically opposed experiences are: A deep love for home, and the knowledge of how frequently we have to leave it to find work somewhere else.

2) "How's the dead hour treating you?" "It is quiet, why?" "'Course it is. It's the Newfoundland radio hour. Everyone is sitting in their trucks." "No mistaking that, I guess." "Aren't you from there?" "No. Cape Breton." "Same thing." "Excuse me, two different places! They're accordians and codfish, we're fiddles and lobster." "For god's sake."

3) "These young ones! Spending their money like fools." "That's not true now. I works hard for my pay!" "Jesus, got to enjoy life a bit too." "Wife's got the house she wants." "Houses too big, brand new trucks, piles of toys—you're only digging a hole." "Ha. Yeah, a hole that's full of oil for a hundred more years." "The Grand Banks were full too." "Jumpin' dyin' Jesus bah we's on a dory is it! The Grand fuckin' Banks is it!" "All I'm saying is you only knows the good times, don't you. Let me tell you my son, that don't last. You can't make it. It's not up to you." "..." "Ambrose—were you a fisherman, before?" "I'm still a fisherman. I'm just here."

4) "Doug, why are there so many of us here?" "Who?" "From home. Why are there so many of us here. Why here?" "Why not." "Well, people could go anywhere. But we're all here instead." "This is where the jobs are." "I know not just us. Half of Newfoundland is here. The U.K. The Philippines. But still, you could go to Toronto, somewhere else." "Toronto! And what am I going to do in Toronto! Why didn't you go to goddamned Toronto!" "I know. I know! I know I couldn't pay my debt there. I'm just... thinking. Do you think this place makes people better or worse?" "Wha??" "Well, camp's not a normal place, is it? Nobody likes it here. Everyone wishes they were somewhere else." "I've seen worse. Got a bed here, food. And the money." "Do you like it here?" "Doesn't matter." "Doug?" "What." "What did you do before you came here?" "I did it all. I did everything." "Were you a coal miner?" "Jesus, was I a coal miner? Coal, fishing, steel... But that's all gone, isn't it."

5) "You draw comics? You should make a website. Me and my friend have a comics website." "Really? How do I do that?"

6) "Did you hear about those ducks?" "Ducks?" "Yeah. Like three hundred of them got stuck in a tailings pond down by Syncrude or somewhere." "Really? Ugh, I used to work there."