User Profile

1) "Every place deserves an atlas, an atlas is at least implicit in every place, and to say that is to ask first of all what a place is. Places are leaky containers. They always refer beyond themselves, whether island or mainland, and can be imagined in various scales, from the drama of a back alley to transcontinental geopolitical forces and global climate. What we call places are stable locations with unstable converging forces that cannot be delineated either by fences on the ground or by boundaries in the imagination—or by the perimeter of the map. Something is always coming from elsewhere, whether it's wind, water, immigrants, trade goods, or ideas. The local exists—an endemic species may evolve out of those circumstances, or the human equivalent—but it exists in relation, whether symbiotic with or sanctuary from the larger world. Pocatello, Idaho, has had its inventions and tragedies: a heartbreak that can be mapped out in six blocks, with bars and slammed doors and a bedroom; the tale of what happened to the lands of the Shoshone and Bannock; a gold rush; the larger forces of geology and climate and animal migration and watersheds. Petaluma, California, has its radical chicken farmers and Coast Miwok name and its atlas waiting to happen, as do Flint and Buffalo, Yellowknife and Chimayo. The cup of coffee in your hand has origins reaching across the region and the world. A city is a particular kind of place, perhaps best described as many worlds in one place; it compounds many versions without quite reconciling them, though some cross over to live in multiple worlds in Chinatown or queer space, in a drug underworld or a university community, in a church's sphere or a hospital's intersections. An atlas is a collection of versions of a place, a compendium of perspectives, a snatching out of the infinite ether of potential versions a few that will be made concrete and visible. Every place deserves an atlas, but San Francisco is my place, and therefore the subject of this atlas, which springs from my perspective, with all its limits."

2) "A book is an elegant technique for folding a lot of surface area into a compact, convenient volume; a library is likewise a compounding of such volumes, a temple of compression of many worlds. A city itself strikes me at times as a sort of library, folding many phenomena into one dense space—and San Francisco has the second densest concentration of people among American cities, trailing only New York, a folding together of cosmologies and riches and poverties and possibilities."

3) "Such [musical] figures made the bay's eastern shore the most crucial site for the birth of what came to be known as the West Coast blues. Joining the feel and structure of Texas blues to the propulsive harmonies of swing jazz, the groups who played this style employed full horn sections rather than a lone harmonica, forging a music that at once recalled the rural past of ancestors brought to America in wooden slave boats and spoke to the urbane lifeways of people building steel warships in modern cities. The West Coast blues became, during the 1940s and early 1950s, one of the key forerunners of rock 'n' roll."

4) "Some streets function like a core sample through their cities. Fillmore Street runs through San Francisco's wealthiest neighborhood, Pacific Heights; drops into the gritty, African American Western Addition, known as the Fillmore District or just the Fillmore in its heyday; and then continues onward through the lower Haight, to end not far from upper Market Street and the Castro. Pacific Heights is sometimes called Specific Whites, but the 22 Fillmore bus line that traverses the 2.5-mile street and then goes on to cut through the Mission on its way to the Bayview has been nicknamed the 22-to-Life. The war between the states left its traces here, as did the Second World War, and the war on poverty, the war on drugs, the stale and ancient war that is racism, and various forms of freelance violence. As did a lot of potent music and spirituality that mostly went right, though at the Peoples Temple at Fillmore and Geary, it went terribly wrong."

5) "If any city can be understood phrenologically, it must be San Francisco, city of fourteen big bumps and countless smaller irregularities."

1) "Janáček composed his little symphony in 1926. He originally wrote the opening as a fanfare for a gymnastics festival. Aomame imagined 1926 Czechoslovakia: The First World War had ended, and the country was freed from the long rule of the Hapsburg Dynasty. As they enjoyed the peaceful respite visiting central Europe, people drank Pilsner beer in cafés and manufactured handsome light machine guns. Two years earlier, in utter obscurity, Franz Kafka had left the world behind. Soon Hitler would come out of nowhere and gobble up this beautiful little country in the blink of an eye, but at the time no one knew what hardships lay in store for them. This may be the most important proposition revealed by history: 'At the time, no one knew what was coming.'"

2) "I'm here, but I'm not here. I'm in two places at once. It goes against Einstein's theorem, but what the hell. Call it the Zen of the killer."

3) "'Hmm. Real life is different from math. Things in life don't necessarily flow over the shortest possible route. For me, math is—how should I put it?—math is all too natural. It's like beautiful scenery. It's just there. There's no need to exchange it with anything else. That's why, when I'm doing math, I sometimes feel I'm turning transparent. And that can be scary.' Fuka-Eri kept looking straight into Tengo's eyes as if she were looking into an empty house with her face pressed up against the glass. Tengo said, 'When I'm writing a story, I use words to transform the surrounding scene into something more natural for me. In other words, I reconstruct it. That way, I can confirm without a doubt that this person known as 'me' exists in the world. This is a totally different process from steeping myself in the world of math.' 'You confirm that you exist,' Fuka-Eri said. 'I can't say I've been one hundred percent successful at it,' Tengo said."

4) "'I am not a professional, or a pervert, just an ordinary citizen. An ordinary citizen who wants nothing more than to have intercourse with a member of the opposite sex. There's nothing special about me. I'm totally normal.'"

5) "'Do you give them names?' Aomame asked, curious. 'Like dogs or cats?' The dowager gave her head a little shake. 'No, I don't give them names, but I can tell one from another by their shapes and patterns. And besides, there wouldn't be much point in giving them names: they die so quickly. These people are your nameless friends for just a little while. I come here every day, say hello to the butterflies, and talk about things with them. When the time comes, though, they just quietly go off and disappear. I'm sure it means they've died, but I can never find their bodies. They don't leave any trace behind. It's as if they've been absorbed by the air. They're dainty little creatures that hardly exist at all: they come out of nowhere, search quietly for a few, limited things, and disappear into nothingness again, perhaps to some other world.'"

6) "Of course, it's all just a hypothesis, Aomame told herself as she walked. But it's the most compelling hypothesis I can produce at the moment. I'll have to act according to this one, I suppose, until a more compelling hypothesis comes along. Otherwise, I could end up being thrown to the ground somewhere. If only for that reason, I'd better give an appropriate name to this new situation in which I find myself. There's a need, too, for a special name in order to distinguish between this present world and the former world in which the police carried old-fashioned revolvers. Even cats and dogs need names. A newly changed world must need one, too. 1Q84—that's what I'll call this new world, Aomame decided. Q is for 'question mark.' A world that bears a question."

7) "Some time had to pass before she was able to grasp what the difference was. And even after she had grasped it, she had to work hard to accept it. What her vision had seized upon, her mind could not easily confirm. There were two moons in the sky—a small moon and a large one. They were floating there side by side. The large one was the usual moon that she had always seen. It was nearly full, and yellow. But there was another moon right next to it. It had an unfamiliar shape. It was somewhat lopsided, and greenish, as though thinly covered with moss."

8) "With his penis still resting on the palm of her hand, Tengo began to speak. 'The story is about me—or about somebody modeled on me.' 'I'm sure it is,' she said. 'Am I in it?' 'No, you're not. I'm in a world that isn't here.' 'So I'm not in the world that isn't here.' 'And not just you. The people who are in this world are not in the world that isn't here.' 'How is the world that isn't here different from this world? Can you tell which world you're in now?' 'Of course I can. I'm the one who's writing it.' 'What I mean is, for people other than you. Say, if I just happened to wander into that world now, could I tell?' 'I think you could,' Tengo said. 'For example, in the world that isn't here, there are two moons. So you can tell the difference.'"

9) "'They have been called by many different names, but in most cases have not been called anything at all. They were simply there. The expression 'Little People' is just an expedient. My daughter called them that when she was very young and brought them with her.' 'Then you became a king.' The man drew a strong breath in through his nose and held it in his lungs for a time before releasing it slowly. 'I am no king. I became one who listens to the voices.' 'And now you are seeking to be slaughtered.' 'No, it need not be a slaughter. This is 1984, and we are in the middle of the big city. There is no need for a brutal, bloody killing. All you have to do is take my life. It can be neat and simple.'"

10) "Outside the window, the thunder-without-lightning rumbled with increased force. Raindrops pelted the glass. The two of them were in an ancient cave—a dark, damp, low-ceilinged cave. Dark beasts and spirits surrounded the entrance. For the briefest instant around her, light and shadow became one. A nameless gust of wind blew through the distant channel. That was the signal. Aomame brought her fist down in one short, precise movement. Everything ended in silence. The beasts and spirits heaved a deep breath, broke up their encirclement, and returned to the depths of a forest that had lost its heart."

11) "Ushikawa left his camera, leaned back against the wall, and looked up at the stained ceiling. Soon everything struck him as empty. He had never felt so utterly alone, never felt the dark to be this intense. He remembered his house back in Chuorinkan, his lawn and his dog, his wife and two daughters, the sunlight shining there. And he thought of the DNA he had given to his daughters, the DNA for a misshapen head and a twisted soul."

12) "His father's passing didn't particularly shock Tengo. He had spent two solid weeks beside his unconscious father. He already felt that his father had accepted his impending death. The doctors weren't able to determine what had put him into a coma, but Tengo knew. His father had simply decided to die, or else had abandoned the will to live any longer. To borrow Kumi's phrase, as a 'single leaf on a tree,' he turned off the light of consciousness, closed the door on any senses, and waited for the change of seasons."

13) "Aomame mourned the deaths of these two friends deeply. It saddened her to think that these women were forever gone from the world. And she mourned their lovely breasts—breasts that had vanished without a trace."

1) "[These] situations remain fantasies, in which social antagonism is given the shape of alien overlords, supernatural beings, professional assassins or shady politicians and businessmen, rather than institutional inefficiencies or internal systemic contradictions. Even in the more 'real-world' cases, where the adversaries are corrupt elites, the games do not connect their characters' dissatisfactions to hierarchies of power constituted by neoliberal political and economic conditions. Of course, these games never claim to be solving the world's problems, and have no overt pretensions to spark alternative political ideals, but the issue is that, because the deeper social issues they hint at are allegorized rather than consciously formulated, when they reach their endings and the fantasy antagonism is vanquished, they are never quite satisfactory. The characters may be happier than when the antagonism arose, but the 'background' remains largely untouched, so the improved situation appears doomed to expire."

2) "In 'open-world' games, especially, where players are allowed to roam large, non-linear environments and encouraged to 'do anything,' the array of possibilities obscures the underlying rigidity in the system of rules itself, and that all the choices available fulfil individualistic (and violent) desires. In fact, it can be said that videogames structurally embody the neoliberal concept that 'there is no alternative.' In the game, the lack of alternative is literal; we cannot act in ways not coded into it, and must either accept its systems or stop playing completely."

3) "[There] is also a certain logic that connects these disparate injunctions: a kind of instrumentalism that converts all aspects of life into calculable values, and speaks to the individual as a consumer who can define his/her own life through hundreds of micro choices. In a sense, everything from politics to personal relationships is subject to this logic, as each decision apparently counts towards an individualized and commodified ideal of success and satisfaction. As such, it is not that there is no systemic logic, but that the logic itself creates a sense of both freedom and chaos, with a singular demand for individual fulfilment that is full of contradiction in practice. The contradiction occurs because the pressure of success is limitless and covers every area of life, so it seems that we can never do enough, or that some of our efforts actually counteract others. Crucially, in my view, it is a mistake to view these varied demands as a matter of achieving 'work-life balance,' because encoded into the neoliberal ideal of success is a hidden clause that nothing is ever enough; we can always earn more, have more fun, own a bigger house, be more attractive and so on."

4) "According to the brand of hedonism promoted in the [Saints Row III], these options make sense simply because more money equals more opportunity for pleasure, even though it reduces the women to commodities. In SRIII, the female body is an object of enjoyment that is also exploitable for profit, and is thus forced to labour for the hedonist's pleasure. Subsequently, despite never explicitly recognizing this particular tension, SRIV seems unable to stomach it anymore, and no longer seems fully satisfied with hedonism for its own sake. Thus, in a single destructive act it severs fun and freedom from their connection to money and (other people's) labour. In its utopian power fantasy, consumerist, hedonistic pleasure retains a central meaning and purpose, but without the exploitation. However, the only way it can realize this ideal is by exiting reality itself."

5) "So it seems that a select group of humans can now go on to start a new world. But have we not then come full circle, as the aliens become the source of exploitable labour that will serve the desires of the human elite in presumably building and maintaining a more permanent hedonistic utopia? Again, the social order will rest on hierarchical division, where free expression is for the few, maintained by the enslavement of the many. Because the antagonism has not been resolved it returns, and the Saints remain oblivious to it. On one hand, then, the utopian playground city couldn't sustain the presence of the Saints' chaotic ultra-freedom, which tears down the state and with it the whole platform that facilitates their behaviour. It seems that, although consumerist enjoyment always falls short when combined with responsibility, because we can never dedicate ourselves enough to it, without that tempering responsibility the unfettered pursuit of consumerist fulfilment becomes an explosion of libidinal aggression that destroys its own foundations. [...] The irony is that the very thing individualistic hedonism rails against–a network of social institutions that controls and oppresses the majority–is precisely what keeps it alive."

6) "Despite their cynicism, then, and even the criminal nature of their activities, the characters in GTAV are in a sense the perfect capitalist subjects. They find their satisfaction in the power fantasy of entrepreneurial capital accumulation, even as they distance themselves from it, and will do anything to achieve success. The ethics of what they do is hardly important, since everyone in the world of GTAV is corrupt; all that matters is their ability to balance work and enjoyment, which they manage admirably."

7) "The main theme of NMH instead resides in how it reproduces and reflects on the real-world dynamics of playing the game within its own fiction. In particular, its main character's escape into a surreal, violent criminal underworld, which endows him with a clear life goal, mirrors the way we, as players, play the game to escape our commodified reality. That is, its power fantasy is one of evading dominant expectations and forging a path outside social norms, but it is complicated by the lack of a place to go that exists outside the capitalist totality."

8) "Even in strictly economic terms, if the escape is all we live for it still must be funded through labour; the only way to get more escape time is to return to the prison and earn it."

9) "It is only when the Metaverse and the Personas eventually disappear that this impossible demand retreats, at least temporarily. In the game's end sequence, the main character is due to return to his home town, but his friends decide to take him on a farewell road trip, which at last frees them from the restrictions of the city and the calendar. But what is this freedom but one final retreat into irresponsible youth, before they must all return home to become adults and resume the normal routine? P5 frames imprisonment as apathy, resignation, acceptance, yet its characters and players must compliantly submit to its routines in order to advance."

10) "Of course, none of these questions are explicitly articulated in the games I have explored, due to the ideological confines in which they operate. They merely come across in hints of contradiction or dissatisfaction, and often in fact in the games' failure to convincingly resolve the antagonisms they represent. It is their sense of incompleteness, rather than any political ideal, that functions as a demand for a deeper social critique and more convincing answers. In essence, the power of these cultural objects is in what they can't quite say, or what the representation of the city as a playground, battleground, wasteland or prison, and the conflict that creates, stand in for. Clearly these cities are not 'realistic,' but it is because of this we can ask why they are unrealistic in the particular way they are, and receive interesting and potentially significant answers."

1) "What I saw that morning persuaded me that the scrivener was the victim of innate and incurable disorder. I might give alms to his body; but his body did not pain him; it was his soul that suffered, and his soul I could not reach."

2) "My eye ranged over the capacious rolling country, and over the mountains, and over the village, and over a farmhouse here and there, and over woods, groves, streams, rocks, fells—and I thought to myself, what a slight mark, after all, does man make on this huge great earth. Yet the earth makes a mark on him."

3) "Now, as I said before, having long previously sawed my wood, this Merrymusk came for his pay. 'My friend,' said I, 'do you know of any gentleman hereabouts who owns an extraordinary cock?' The twinkle glittered quite plain in the wood-sawyer's eye. 'I know of no gentleman,' he replied, 'who has what might well be called an extraordinary cock.'"

4) "With half a mile of sea between, how could her two enchanted arms aid those four fated ones? The distance long, the time one sand. After the lightning is beheld, what fool shall stay the thunderbolt?"

5) "The beings round me roared with famine. For in this mighty London misery but maddens. In the country it softens."

6) "It lies not far from Temple-Bar. Going to it, by the usual way, is like stealing from the heated plain into some cool, deep glen, shady among the harboring hills. Sick with the din and soiled with the mud of Fleet Street—where the Benedick tradesmen are hurrying by, with ledger-lines ruled along their brows; thinking upon rise of bread and fall of babies—you adroitly turn a mystic corner—not a street—glide down a dim, monastic way, flanked by dark, sedate, and solemn piles, and still wending on, give the whole careworn world the slip, and, disentangled, stand beneath the quiet cloisters of the Paradise of Bachelors."

7) "Immediately I found myself standing in a spacious place, intolerably lighted by long rows of windows, focusing inward the snowy scene without. At rows of blank-looking counters sat rows of blank-looking girls, white folders in their blank hands, all blankly folding blank paper."

8) "In the south of Europe, nigh a once frescoed capital, now with dank mould cankering its bloom, central in a plain, stands what, at distance, seems the black mossed stump of some immeasurable pine, fallen, in forgotten days, with Anak and the Titan. As all along where the pine tree falls, its dissolution leaves a mossy mound—last-flung shadow of the perished trunk; never lengthening, never lessening; unsubject to the fleet falsities of the sun; shade immutable, and true gauge which cometh by prostration—so westward from what seems the stump, one steadfast spear of lichened ruin veins the plain. From that treetop, what birded chimes of silver throats had rung. A stone pine; a metallic aviary in its crown: the Bell-Tower, built by the great mechanician, the unblest foundling, Bannadonna."

9) "A time ago, no matter how long precisely, I, an old man, removed from the country to the city, having become unexpected heir to a great old house in a narrow street of one of the lower wards, once the haunt of style and fashion, full of gay parlors and bridal chambers, but now, for the most part, transformed into counting-rooms and warehouses. There bales and boxes usurp the place of sofas; daybooks and ledgers are spread where once the delicious breakfast toast was buttered. In those old wards the glorious old soft-warfle days are over."

10) "It was nearly midnight, and all were in bed but ourselves, who sat up, one in each chimney-corner; she, needles in hand, indefatigably knitting a sock; I, pipe in mouth, indolently weaving my vapors."

11) "'Yours are strange fancies, Marianna.' 'They but reflect the things.' 'Then I should have said, 'These are strange things,' rather than, 'Yours are strange fancies.'' 'As you will;' and took up her sewing."

12) "At length, when pretty well again, and sitting out, in the September morning, upon the piazza, and thinking to myself, when, just after a little flock of sheep, the farmer's banded children passed, a-nutting, and said, 'How sweet a day'—it was, after all, but what their fathers call a weather-breeder—and, indeed, was become so sensitive through my illness, as that I could not bear to look upon a Chinese creeper of my adoption, and which, to my delight, climbing a post of the piazza, had burst out in starry bloom, but now, if you removed the leaves a little, showed millions of strange, cankerous worms, which, feeding upon those blossoms, so shared their blessed hue, as to make it unblessed evermore—worms, whose germs had doubtless lurked in the very bulb which, so hopefully, I had planted: in this ingrate peevishness of my weary convalescence, was I sitting there; when, suddenly looking off, I saw the golden mountain-window, dazzling like a deep-sea dolphin."