Robert's Notebook

A Commonplace Book of notable and quotable things I have read. Full blog at robertsharp.co.uk

[robertsharp]

WHY - THOUGH IN THE EARLY DAYS OF INTERLACE’S INTERNETTED TELEPUTERS THAT OPERATED OFF LARGELY THE SAME FIBER-DIGITAL GRID AS THE PHONE COMPANIES, THE ADVENT OF VIDEO-TELEPHONING (A.K.A. 'VIDEOPHONY') ENJOYED AN INTERVAL OF HUGE CONSUMER POPULARITY - CALLERS THRILLED AT THE IDEA OF PHONE-INTERFACING BOTH AURALLY AND FACIALLY (THE LITTLE FIRST- GENERATION PHONE-VIDEO CAMERAS BEING TOO CRUDE AND NARROW-APERTURED FOR ANYTHING MUCH MORE THAN FACIAL CLOSE-UPS) ON FIRST-GENERATION TELEPUTERS THAT AT THAT TIME WERE LITTLE MORE THAN HIGH-TECH TV SETS, THOUGH OF COURSE THEY HAD THAT LITTLE 'INTELLIGENT-AGENT' HOMUNCULAR ICON THAT WOULD APPEAR AT THE LOWER-RIGHT OF A BROADCAST/CABLE PROGRAM AND TELL YOU THE TIME AND TEMPERATURE OUTSIDE OR REMIND YOU TO TAKE YOUR BLOOD-PRESSURE MEDICATION OR ALERT YOU TO A PARTICULARLY COMPELLING ENTERTAINMENT-OPTION NOW COMING UP ON CHANNEL LIKE 491 OR SOMETHING, OR OF COURSE NOW ALERTING YOU TO AN INCOMING VIDEO-PHONE CALL AND THEN TAP-DANCING WITH A LITTLE ICONIC STRAW BOATER AND CANE JUST UNDER A MENU OF POSSIBLE OPTIONS FOR oRESPONSE, AND CALLERS DID LOVE THEIR LITTLE HOMUNCULAR ICONS – BUT WHY, WITHIN LIKE 16 MONTHS OR 5 SALES QUARTERS, THE TUMESCENT DEMAND CURVE FOR 'VIDEOPHONY' SUDDENLY COLLAPSED LIKE A KÍCKED TENT, SO THAT, BY THE YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT, FEWER THAN 10% OF ALL PRIVATE TELEPHONE COMMUNICATIONS UTILIZED ANY VIDEO-IMAGE- FIBER DATA-TRANSFERS OR COINCIDENT PRODUCTS AND SERVICES, THE AVERAGE U.S. PHONE-USER DECIDING THAT S/HE ACTUALLY PREFERRED THE RETROGRADE OLD LOW- TECH BELL-ERA VOICE-ONLY TELEPHONIC INTERFACE AFTER ALL, A PREFERENTIAL ABOUT-FACE THAT COSTA GOOD MANY PRECIPITANT VIDEO-TELEPHONY-RELATED ENTREPRENEURS THEIR SHIRTS, PLUS DESTABILIZING TWO HIGHLY RESPECTED MUTUAL FUNDS THAT HAD GROUND- FLOORED HEAVILY IN VIDEO-PHONE TECHNOLOGY, AND VERY NEARLY WIPING OUT THE MARYLAND STATE EMPLOYEES' RETIREMENT SYSTEM'S FREDDIE-MAC FUND, A FUND WHOSE ADMINISTRATOR'S MISTRESS'S BROTHER HAD BEEN AN ALMOST MANICALLY PRECIPITANT VIDEO-PHONE-TECHNOLOGY ENTREPRENEUR... AND BUT SO WHY THE ABRUPT CONSUMER RETREAT BACK TO GOOD OLD VOICE- ONLY TELEPHONING? The answer, in a kind of trivalent nutshell, is: (1) emotional stress, (2) physical vanity, (3) a certain queer kind of self-obliterating logic in the micro-economics of consumer high-tech. (1) It turned out that there was something terribly stressful about visual telephone interfaces that hadn't been stressful at all about voice-only interfaces. Videophone consumers seemed suddenly to realize that they'd been subject to an insidious but wholly marvelous delusion about conventional voice-only telephony. They'd never noticed it before, the delusion - it's like it was so emotionally complex that it could be countenanced only in the context of its loss. Good old traditional audio-only phone conversations allowed you to presume that the person on the other end was paying complete attention to you while also permitting you not to have to pay anything even close to complete attention to her. A traditional aural-only conversation – utilizing a hand-held phone whose earpiece contained only 6 little pinholes but whose mouthpiece (rather significantly, it later seemed) contained (62) or 36 little pinholes – let you enter a kind of highway-hypnotic semi-attentive fugue: while conversing, you could look around the room, doodle, fine-groom, peel tiny bits of dead skin away from cuticles, compose phone-pad haiku, stir things on the stove; you could even carry on a whole separate additional sign-language-and-exaggerated-facial-expression type of conversation with people right there in the room with you, all while seeming to be right there attending closely to the voice on the phone. And yet - and this was the retrospectively marvelous part - even as you were dividing your attention between the phone call and all sorts of other idle little fuguelike activities, you were somehow never haunted by the suspicion that the person on the other end's attention might be similarly divided. During a traditional call, e.g., as you let's say performed a close tactile blemish-scan of your chin, you were in no way oppressed by the thought that your phonemate was also devoting a good percentage of her attention to a close tactile blemish-scan. It was an illusion and the illusion was aural and aurally supported: the phone-line's other end's voice was dense, tightly compressed, and vectored right into your ear, enabling you to imagine that the voice's owner's attention was similarly compressed and focused ... even though your own attention was not, was the thing. This bilateral illusion of unilateral attention was almost infantilely gratifying from an emotional standpoint: you got to believe you were receiving somebody's complete attention without having to return it. Regarded with the objectivity of hindsight, the illusion appears arational, almost literally fantastic: it would be like being able both to lie and to trust other people at the same time. Video telephony rendered the fantasy insupportable. Callers now found they had to compose the same sort of earnest, slightly overintense listener's expression they had to compose for in-person exchanges. Those callers who out of unconscious habit succumbed to fuguelike doodling or pants-crease- adjustment now came off looking rude, absentminded, or childishly self- absorbed. Callers who even more unconsciously blemish-scanned or nostril-explored looked up to find horrified expressions on the video-faces at the other end. All of which resulted in videophonic stress. Even worse, of course, was the traumatic expulsion-from-Eden feeling of looking up from tracing your thumb's outline on the Reminder Pad or adjusting the old unit’s angle of repose in your shorts and actually seeing your videophonic interfacee idly strip a shoelace of its gumlet as she talked to you, and suddenly realizing your whole infantile fantasy of commanding your partner's attention while you yourself got to fugue-doodle and make lirtle genital-adjustments was deluded and insupportable and that you were actually commanding not one bit more attention than you were paying, here. The whole attention business was monstrously stressful, video callers found. (2) And the videophonic stress was even worse if you were at all vain. i.e. if you worried at all about how you looked. As in to other people. Which all kidding aside who doesn't. Good old aural telephone calls could be fielded without makeup, toupee, surgical prostheses, etc. Even without clothes, if that sort of thing rattled your saber. But for the image-conscious, there was of course no such answer-as-you-are informality about visual-video telephone calls, which consumers began to see were less like having the good old phone ring than having the doorbell ring and having to throw on clothes and attach prostheses and do hair-checks in the foyer mirror before answering the door. But the real coffin-nail for videophony involved the way callers' faces looked on their TP screen, during calls. Not their callers' faces, but their own, when they saw them on video. It was a three-button affair, after all, to use the TP's cartridge-card's Video-Record option to record both pulses in a two-way visual call and play the call back and see how your face had actu- ally looked to the other person during the call. This sort of appearance- check was no more resistible than a mirror. But the experience proved almost universally horrifying. People were horrified at how their own faces appeared on a TP screen. It wasn't just 'Anchorman's Bloat,' that well-known impression of extra weight that video inflicts on the face. It was worse. Even with high-end TPs’ high-def viewer-screens, consumers perceived something essentially blurred and moist-looking about their phone-faces, a shiny pallid indefiniteness that struck them as not just unflattering but somehow evasive, furtive, untrustworthy, unlikable. In an early and ominous InterLace/G.T.E. focus-group survey that was all but ignored in a storm of entrepreneurial sci-fi-tech enthusiasm, almost 60% of respondents who received visual access to their own faces during videophonic calls specifically used the terms untrustworthy, unlikable, or hard to like in describing their own visage's appearance, with a phenomenally ominous 71% of senior-citizen respondents specifically comparing their video-faces to that of Richard Nixon during the Nixon-Kennedy debates of B.S. 1960. The proposed solution to what the telecommunications industry's psy- chological consultants termed Video-Physiognomic Dysphoria (or VPD) was, of course, the advent of High-Definition Masking; and in fact it was those entrepreneurs who gravitated toward the production of high-definition videophonic imaging and then outright masks who got in and out of the short-lived videophonic era with their shirts plus solid additional nets. Mask-wise, the initial option of High-Definition Photographic Imaging — i.e. taking the most flattering elements of a variety of flattering multi-angle photos of a given phone-consumer and — thanks to existing image-configuration equipment already pioneered by the cosmetics and law-enforcement industries — combining them into a wildly attractive high-def broadcastable composite of a face wearing an earnest, slightly overintense expression of complete attention was quickly supplanted by the more inexpensive and byte-economical option of (using the exact same cosmetic- and-FBI software) actually casting the enhanced facial image in a form-fitting polybutylene-resin mask, and consumers soon found that the high up-front cost of a permanent wearable mask was more than worth it, considering the stress- and VPD-reduction benefits, and the convenient Velcro straps for the back of the mask and caller's head cost peanuts; and for a couple fiscal quarters phone/cable companies were able to rally VPD- afflicted consumers' confidence by working out a horizontally integrated deal where free composite-and-masking services came with a videophone hookup. The high-def masks, when not in use, simply hung on a small hook on the side of a TP's phone-console, admittedly looking maybe a bit surreal and discomfiting when detached and hanging there empty and wrinkled, and sometimes there were potentially awkward mistaken-identity snafus involving multi-user family or company phones and the hurried selection and attachment of the wrong mask taken from some long row of empty hanging masks - but all in all the masks seemed initially like a viable industry re- sponse to the vanity,-stress,-and-Nixonian-facial-image problem. (2 and maybe also 3) But combine the natural entrepreneurial instinct to satisfy all sufficiently high consumer demand, on the one hand, with what appears to be an almost equally natural distortion in the way persons tend to see themselves, and it becomes possible to account historically for the speed with which the whole high-def-videophonic-mask thing spiraled totally out of control. Not only is it weirdly hard to evaluate what you yourself look like, like whether you're good-looking or not—e.g. try looking in the mirror and determining where you stand in the attractiveness-hierarchy with anything like the objective ease you can determine whether just about anyone else you know is good-looking or not—but it turned out that consumers' instinctively skewed self-perception, plus vanity-related stress, meant that they began preferring and then outright demanding videophone masks that were really quite a lot better-looking than they themselves were in person. High-def mask-entrepreneurs ready and willing to supply not just verisimilitude but aesthetic enhancement- stronger chins, smaller eye- bags, air-brushed scars and wrinkles-soon pushed the original mimetic- mask-entrepreneurs right out of the market. In a gradually unsubtlizing progression, within a couple more sales-quarters most consumers were now using masks so undeniably better-looking on videophones than their real faces were in person, transmitting to one another such horrendously skewed and enhanced masked images of themselves, that enormous psychosocial stress began to result, large numbers of phone-users suddenly reluctant to leave home and interface personally with people who, they feared, were now habituated to seeing their far-better-looking masked selves on the phone and would on seeing them in person suffer (so went the callers' phobia) the same illusion-shattering aesthetic disappointment that, e.g., certain women who always wear makeup give people the first time they ever see them without makeup. The social anxieties surrounding the phenomenon psych-consultants termed Optimistically Misrepresentational Masking (or OMM) intensified steadily as the tiny crude first-generation videophone cameras' technology improved to where the aperture wasn't as narrow, and now the higher-end tiny cameras could countenance and transmit more or less full-body images. Certain psychologically unscrupulous entrepreneurs began marketing full-body polybutylene and -urethane 2-D cutouts - sort of like the headless muscleman and bathing-beauty cutouts you could stand behind and position your chin on the cardboard neck-stump of for cheap photos at the beach, only these full-body videophone-masks were vastly more high-tech and convincing-looking. Once you added variable 2-D wardrobe, hair- and eye-color options, various aesthetic enlargements and reductions, etc., costs started to press the envelope of mass-market affordability, even though there was at the same time horrific social pressure to be able to afford the very best possible masked 2-D body-image, to keep from feeling comparatively hideous-looking on the phone. How long, then, could one expect it to have been before the relentless entrepreneurial drive toward an ever-better mousetrap conceived of the Transmittable Tableau (a.k.a. TT), which in retrospect was probably the really sharp business-end of the videophonic coffin-nail. With TTs, facial and bodily masking could now be dispensed with altogether and replaced with the video-transmitted image of what was essentially a heavily doctored still-photograph, one of an incredibly fit and attractive and well-turned-out human being, someone who actually resembled you the caller only in such limited respects as like race and limb-number, the photo's face focused attentively in the direction of the videophonic camera from amid the sumptuous but not ostentatious appointments of the sort of room that best reflected the image of yourself you wanted to transmit, etc. The Tableaux were simply high-quality transmission-ready photographs, scaled down to diorama-like proportions and fitted with a plastic holder over the videophone camera, not unlike a lens-cap. Extremely good-looking but not terrifically successful entertainment-celebrities - the same sort who in decades past would have swelled the cast-lists of infomercials – found themselves in demand as models for various high-end videophone Tableaux. Because they involved simple transmission-ready photography instead of computer imaging and enhancement, the Tableaux could be mass-produced and commensurately priced, and for a brief time they helped ease the tension between the high cost of enhanced body-masking and the monstrous aesthetic pressures videophony exerted on callers, not to mention also providing employment for set-designers, photographers, airbrushers, and infomercial-level celebrities hard-pressed by the declining fortunes of broadcast television advertising. (3) But there's some sort of revealing lesson here in the beyond-short-term viability-curve of advances in consumer technology. The career of videophony conforms neatly to this curve's classically annular shape: First there's some sort of terrific, sci-fi-like advance in consumer tech — like from aural to video phoning which advance always, however, has certain unforeseen disadvantages for the consumer; and then but the market-niches created by those disadvantages - like people's stressfully vain repulsion at their own videophonic appearance - are ingeniously filled via sheer entrepreneurial verve; and yet the very advantages of these ingenious disadvantage-compensations seem all too often to undercut the original high-tech advance, resulting in consumer-recidivism and curve-closure and massive shirt-loss for precipitant investors. In the present case, the stress- and-vanity-compensations' own evolution saw video-callers rejecting first their own faces and then even their own heavily masked and enhanced physical likenesses and finally covering the video-cameras altogether and transmitting attractively stylized static Tableaux to one another's TPs. And, behind these lens-cap dioramas and transmitted Tableaux, callers of course found that they were once again stresslessly invisible, unvainly makeup- and toupeeless and baggy-eyed behind their celebrity-dioramas, once again free - since once again unseen -to doodle, blemish-scan, manicure, crease-check while on their screen, the attractive, intensely attentive face of the well-appointed celebrity on the other end's Tableau reassured them that they were the objects of a concentrated attention they themselves didn't have to exert. And of course but these advantages were nothing other than the once-lost and now-appreciated advantages of good old Bell-era blind aural-only telephoning, with its 6 and (62) pinholes. The only difference was that now these expensive silly unreal stylized Tableaux were being transmitted between TPs on high-priced video-fiber lines. How much time, after this realization sank in and spread among consumers (mostly via phone, interestingly), would any micro-econometrist expect to need to pass before high-tech visual videophony was mostly abandoned, then, a return to good old telephoning not only dictated by common consumer sense but actually after a while culturally approved as a kind of chic integrity, not Luddiris but a kind of retrograde transcendence of sci-fi-ish high-tech for its own sake, a transcendence of the vanity and the slavery to high-tech fashion that people view as so unattractive in one another. In other words a return to aural-only telephony became, at the closed curve's end, a kind of status-symbol of anti-vanity, such that only callers utterly lacking in self-awareness continued to use videophony and Tableaux, to say nothing of masks, and these tacky facsimile-using people became ironic cultural symbols of tacky vain slavery to corporate PR and high-tech novelty, became the Subsidized Era's tacky equivalents of people with leisure suits, black velvet paintings, sweater-vests for their poodles, electric zirconium jewelry, NoCoat LinguaScrapers, and c. Most communications consumers put their Tableaux-dioramas at the back of a knick-knack shelf and covered their cameras with standard black lens-caps and now used their phone consoles' little mask-hooks to hang these new little plasticene address-and-phone diaries specially made with a little receptacle at the top of the binding for convenient hanging. from former mask-hooks. Even then, of course, the bulk of U.S. consumers remained verifiably reluctant to leave home and teleputer and to interface personally, though this phenomenon's endurance can't be attributed to the videophony-fad per se, and anyway the new panagoraphobia served to open huge new entrepreneurial teleputerized markets for home-shopping and delivery, and didn't cause much industry concern.

David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

[robertsharp]

The only thing he knew for certain about Shen was that she wasn't the type to enjoy computer games. She spoke like a telegraph and gave him the impression that she was always extremely cold. It wasn't the kind of coldness that some people put on like mask—hers suffused her all the way through.

Wang subconsciously thought of her as the long-obsolete DOS operating system: a blank, black screen, a bare "C:\>" prompt, a blinking cursor. Whatever you entered, it echoed back. Not one extra letter and not a single change. But now he knew that behind the "C:\>" was a bottomless abyss.

— 刘慈欣 Liu Cixin, The Three Body Problem (2015, Head of Zeus), translated by Ken Liu. p.100

[robertsharp]

The world shifts as you sit on the plane. From Damascus to Berlin on a Lufthansa flight with the sky reddening in the west. From above, the world appears unchanged. You slip from one history to another as though changing your pyjamas. The passengers mutate and change, the seats become slightly more uncomfortable, the air hostesses remain more or less the same. It is a curious facet of alternity travel, the interchangeability of airplane staff. You recline in the seat, look out of the window at that world, one of the verboten spheres, where history took a wrong turn, somehow. The in-flight entertainment system is more primitive than that of where you come from. You turn on the news, on RTL a blonde presenter talks animatedly about the ongoing war in Syria, a car bomb in Iraq, American airplanes attacking targets near Mosul. When you land, security forces question you at length, your body and possessions scanned for weapons and contraband, but at last you are allowed to leave. Berlin, which you have seen in many iterations, where you studied, married, loved. Once you slipped, walking Friedrich- strasse, and saw the street in ruins, Russian tanks patrollin through a scene of apocalyptic devastation. Berlin fragments each time you cross its streets: when you pass the Brandenburg Gate a sidestep into a fragment world brings with it visions of the place lit up brightly, red swastika flags hanging from the gate’s entablature, red-faced beefy men cheering at the sides of the road as a motorcade goes past. Mostly you have learned to control the slippage, though it is harder in Berlin, where many of the homeless that you pass, shivering in shop entrances, have the lost, hollow-eyed look of those who fell between the cracks, who woke up one morning in a world as like, yet so unlike, their own, in which everything that was once familiar had become alien and strange.

Lavie Tidhar, UNHOLY LAND pp108-109

[robertsharp]

“History is not one thing,” an instructor told you. It was spring, and the air was filled with the humming of bees. You had become better at holding the visions at bay controlling them, so that at times it seemed to you that you could simply slip, from one reality to the next, almost without trying. “It is a tapestry, like an old Persian rug, multiple strands of stories criss-crossing. Some are strong, central. Some fray at the ends. or fall off altogether. The places where they meet we call a crosshatch; they are peopled by shadows and doubles. They are places not to be trusted. Stories get muddled easily there.” “I don't understand,” you said, and the instructor said, “You will have to go there.”

Lavie Tidhar, UNHOLY LAND

[robertsharp]

Tirosh left the terminal building behind and stepped into the hot air outside. A row of stunted baobabs lined the road, their severity softened by the blooming jasmine shrubs that pressed against the airport fence. The rain had come and gone swiftly; mosquitoes buzzed drowsily in the air. A row of cars, all local make—Susita, Kaiser-Frazer, Sabra—were queued up in the taxi rank, the drivers leaning against the fibreglass chassis of their individual vehicles, all smoking. He saw the woman ahead, talking animatedly to one of the drivers—arguing the price, he thought—who finally shrugged, tossed his cigarette to the ground carelessly, and gestured at the car. She nodded, and a moment later the car took off. Tirosh raised his head, following the Susita as it drove down the tree-lined road. Wilbusch Airport was located some distance from the city. Ararat rose against the horizon in the distance, and he marvelled at how much it had grown. When he had left, it was a quiet, dusty town, filled with low buildings, wide avenues, small stores which shut, promptly, with the heat of the afternoon and only reopened before sundown, and public parks where old men sat cross-legged on the grass playing bao, and mothers pushed babies around in pram imported from Europe. It was a town filled with little hidey holes and strange, dusty alcoves where tradesmen worked much as they had back in Europe: carpenters, watchmakers, shoemakers, goldsmiths, tailors, and book binders, leather workers, and their like. On Tuesdays the tea and coffee market sprang to life around Wissotzky Square as farmers brought in their produce from all over the countryside, and along Herzl Avenue the latest fashions from Paris and Rome were displayed in the shop windows. On Fridays the whole town quietened, the synagogues shone with light, and a hush descended with the coming of the Shabbat. Tirosh remembered serious-faced, black-clad avreichim followin spellbound, as their rabbi walked ahead, explaining that week's parashah with a raised finger that rose and dipped like a conductor's baton.

It was a city, too, where one could still come, unexpectedly, across a wild animal walking about through the thin traffic, reminding one abruptly of where they were: once he saw a giraffe stop at a red light; at another time, he was pulled forcefully away by an adult as a lioness, far from home, sat hypnotised outside a butcher's window, licking her lips. Now the city had sprouted new towers of metal and glass, office buildings reaching out to the sky like the tower of Babel once had, and it had spread over the plateau in all directions, white house neighbourhoods growing on the outskirts like weeds, erasing the forest and the veld with their merciless encroachment. He did not know this city, he realised. He had been gone too long, and the world he'd thought he knew was no longer there, had been replaced with something mysterious and foreign.

Lavie Tidhar, UNHOLY LAND (Tachyon, 2018), pages 14-15

[robertsharp]

l'm encoding, translating these drily bureaucratic stories of of death into a language I can work with. In a sense I’m encrypting. All translation is encryption, after all. There is no such thing as a plain text; there are only codes you understand and codes you don’t.

— Tom Pollock, WHITE RABBIT, RED WOLF

[robertsharp]

‘The ability to beam wherever we want.’ sighed Marguerite. ‘Like Star Trek.’

‘To be like Captain Kirk, Whose name means church, and Lieutenant Uhura, whose name means freedom,’ Alma agreed. ‘It’s an intoxicating combination, that. The Church of Freedom. Science fiction defined in a single phrase, I would say. A beguiling thought, certainly.’

— Adam Roberts, The Real-Town Murders, pp217-218

[robertsharp]

Clouds scrolled through skies as blue as the blue screen of death.

—Adam Roberts, The Real-Town Murders, p106

[robertsharp]

The sky outside was the colour of liquorice, the window haunted by the ghost of her own face.

—Adam Roberts, The Real Town Murders, p33

[robertsharp]

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Nick Harkaway, GNOMON

[robertsharp]

You could get a phantascopic system planted directly on your retinas, just as Bud's sound system lived on his eardrums. You could even get telæsthetics patched into your spinal column at various key vertebrae. But this was said to have its drawbacks: some concerns about long-term nerve damage, plus it was rumored that hackers for big media companies had figured out a way to get through the defenses that were built into such systems, and run junk advertisements in your peripheral vision (or even spang in the fucking middle) all the time—even when your eyes were closed. Bud knew a guy like that who'd somehow gotten infected with a meme that ran advertisements for roach motels, in Hindi, superimposed on the bottom right-hand corner of his visual field, twenty-four hours a day, until the guy whacked himself.

Neal Stephenson, DIAMOND AGE (1995) p.34

[robertsharp]

She caught the murmur of the men’s voices, and opened the door. Mahmoud was teaching her Arabic, and she recognised some of their words.

‘We have awoken, and all Creation has awoken for Allah, Lord of all the Worlds.

She mouthed the syllables, rolling them on her tongue. She felt a tingling of recognition in her stomach. This was exactly how she had felt in the water, part of a great song, tiny but still significant.

— Ariel Kahn, RAISING SPARKS (Bluemoose Books, 2018), p.198

[robertsharp]

‘My father’s study does not have a ‘do not enter’ sign on the door. It doesn’t need to. The eleventh commandment when I was growing up was simple. His study was the Holy of Holies, and only he, the High Priest, was allowed inside. So as soon as I could walk, I used to stand outside, leaning my forehead against the wood, willing it to open. Imagining that if I concentrated enough, I could pass through. Then, one morning, the door suddenly swung away from me, and I fell across the threshold. When I looked up and saw my father, I was ready to run. But instead of shouting, as I expected, he invited me in.’

‘How old were you?’

‘I was five. I was shocked by what I saw. Hundreds of books lay in drifts across the floor, tumbled across every available surface. The room had been visited by its own private hurricane. The disarray was all the more shocking because my father looked as though he ironed his beard every day.’

‘He still does,’ Moshe laughed. ‘But how can you remember all of this?’

‘When your deepest desire comes true, you remember. He swept a big blue chair clear of papers with one arm. My feet didn’t even reach the edge of the seat. At first I was disappointed that the room was not filled with the trees and magical fruit I’d imagined?

‘You thought there was a forest in your flat?’

She laughed. ‘In a way, there was. When my father started opening books to read to me, I realised that the embossed covers of blue, red, and black were really doorways. They led to places of wonder, of delight. That was why he couldn’t bear to close any of them.’

— Ariel Kahn, RAISING SPARKS (2018, Bluemoose Books), p32

[robertsharp]

One unspoken rule about warfare—some Indian traders instantly recognized this as warfare—is that neither the victim nor the villain is willing to tell what truly happened afterward; the motivation for the former being to minimize the degree of hurt and loss, which intensifies at every bout of recollection; the explanation for the latter being to disguise the full extent to which one’s humanity is diminished by brutalizing others. So the trail of blood left on shop floors was wiped away silently by the women who had lain there spread-eagle—the stream of tears sufficient to wash the drops of blood away—while traders who had lost entire life savings kept under the mattress denied losing more than the day’s collection. Either way, the books were balanced: in one strike, lifetime gains were wiped out, while the inflicted pain left scars that would last a lifetime.

— Peter Kimani, DANCE OF THE JAKARANDA, pp252-253

[robertsharp]

On command, the leading row of Arabs, all of them teenagers with a lengthy history of confrontation, sat down. The hundred young men behind them did the same. Then the front row started clapping. And singing. Benny took a moment to comprehend it, though he was as fluent in Arabic as any Palestinian. We shall overcome We shall overcome We shall overcome some day The TV crews were immediately behind the police. Several of them laughed in surprise at the savage irony of it. One of them was CNN correspondent Pete Franks who summed it up for everyone: “Son of a BITCH!” And in that moment Franks knew that the world had changed yet again. He’d been in Moscow for the first democratic meeting of the Supreme Soviet, in Managua the night the Sandinistas had lost their sure-thing election, and in Beijing to see the Goddess of Liberty destroyed. And now this? he thought. The Arabs finally wised up. Holy shit. “I hope you have that tape rolling, Mickey.” “Are they singing what I think they’re singing?” “Sure as hell sounds like it. Let’s get closer.” The leader of the Arabs was a twenty-year-old sociology student named Hashimi Moussa. His arm was permanently scarred from an Israeli club, and half his teeth were gone from a rubber bullet whose shooter had been especially angry on one particular day. No one questioned his courage. He’d had to prove that beyond doubt. He’d had to face death a dozen times before his position of leadership had been assured, but now he had it, and people listened to him, and he was able to activate an idea he’d cherished for five endless, patient years. It had taken three days to persuade them, then the fantastic good luck of a Jewish friend disgusted with the religious conservatives of his country who’d spoken a little too loudly about the plans of this day. Perhaps it was destiny, Hashimi thought, or the Will of Allah, or simply luck. Whatever it was, this was the moment he’d lived for since his fifteenth year, when he’d learned of Gandhi and King, and how they had defeated force with naked, passive courage. Persuading his people had meant stepping back from a warrior code that seemed part of their genes, but he’d done it. Now his beliefs would be put to the test. All Benny Zadin saw was that his path was blocked. Rabbi Kohn said something to Rabbi Goldmark, but neither turned back to where the police were stopped, because to turn away was to admit defeat. Whether they were too shocked at what they saw or too angry, he would never learn. Captain Zadin turned to his men. “Gas!” He’d planned this part in advance. The four men with gas guns were all religious men. They leveled their weapons and fired simultaneously into the crowd. The gas projectiles were dangerous and it was remarkable that no one was injured by them. In a few seconds, gray clouds of tear gas bloomed within the mass of sitting Arabs. But on command, each of them donned a mask to protect himself from it. This impeded their singing, but not their clapping or resolution, and it only enraged Captain Zadin further when the easterly wind blew the gas towards his men and away from the Arabs. Next, men with insulated gloves lifted the hot projectiles and threw them back towards the police. In a minute, they were able to remove their masks, and there was laughter in their singing now. Next, Zadin ordered the rubber bullets launched. He had six men armed with these weapons, and from a range of fifty meters they could force any man to run for cover. The first volley was perfect, hitting six of the Arabs in the front line. Two cried out in pain. One collapsed, but not one man moved from his place except to succor the injured. The next volley was aimed at heads not chests, and Zadin had the satisfaction of seeing a face explode in a puff of red. The leader—Zadin recognized the face from earlier encounters—stood and gave a command the Israeli captain could not hear. But its significance became clear immediately. The singing became louder. Another volley of rubber bullets followed. One of his marksmen was very angry, the police commander saw. The Arab who’d taken one fully in the face now took another in the top of his head, and with it his body went limp in death. It should have warned Benny that he had already lost control of his men, but worse still was that he was losing control of himself. Hashimi did not see the death of his comrade. The passion of the moment was overwhelming. The consternation on the faces of the two invading rabbis was manifest. He could not see the faces of the police behind their masks, but their actions, their movements, made their feelings clear. In a brilliant moment of clarity, he knew that he was winning, and he shouted again to his people to redouble their efforts. This they did in the face of fire and death. Captain Benjamin Zadin stripped off his helmet and walked forcefully towards the Arabs, past the rabbis who had suddenly been struck with incomprehensible indecision. Would the Will of God be upset by the discordant singing of some dirty savages? “Uh-oh,” Pete Franks observed, his eyes streaming from the gas that had blown over his face. “I got it,” the cameraman said without bidding, zooming his lens in on the advancing Israeli police commander. “Something is going to happen—this guy looks pissed, Pete!” Oh, God , Franks thought. Himself a Jew, himself strangely at home in this barren but beloved land, he knew that history was occurring before his eyes yet again, was already composing his two or three minutes of verbal reporting that would overlay the tape his cameraman was recording for posterity, and was wondering if another Emmy might be in his future for doing his tough and dangerous job supremely well. It happened quickly, much too quickly, as the captain strode directly to the Arab leader. Hashimi now knew that a friend was dead, his skull caved in by what was supposed to be a non-lethal weapon. He prayed silently for the soul of his comrade and hoped that Allah would understand the courage required to face death in this way. He would. Hashimi was sure of that. The Israeli approaching him was a face known to him. Zadin, the name was, a man who’d been there before often enough, just one more Israeli face most often hidden behind a Lexan mask and drawn gun, one more man unable to see Arabs as people, to whom a Muslim was the launcher for a rock or a Molotov cocktail. Well, today he’d learn different, Hashimi told himself. Today he’d see a man of courage and conviction. Benny Zadin saw an animal, like a stubborn mule, like—what? He wasn’t sure what he saw, but it wasn’t a man, wasn’t an Israeli. They’d changed tactics, that was all, and the tactics were womanly. They thought this would stand in the way of his purpose? Just as his wife had told him that she was leaving for the bed of a better man, that he could have the children, that his threats to beat her were empty words, that he couldn’t do that, wasn’t man enough to take charge of his own household. He saw that beautiful empty face and wondered why he hadn’t taught her a lesson; she’d just stood there, not a meter away, staring at him, smiling—finally laughing at his inability to do what his manhood had commanded him to do, and, so, passive weakness had defeated strength. But not this time. “Move!” Zadin commanded in Arabic. “No.” “I will kill you.” “You will not pass.” “Benny!” a level-headed member of the police screamed. But it was too late for that. For Benjamin Zadin, the deaths of his brothers at Arab hands, the way his wife had left, and the way these people just sat in his way was too much. In one smooth motion, he drew his service automatic and shot Hashimi in the forehead. The Arab youth fell forward, and the singing and clapping stopped. One of the other demonstrators started to move, but two others grabbed him, and held him fast. Others began praying for their two dead comrades. Zadin turned his gun hand to one of these, but though his finger pressed on the trigger, something stopped him a gram short of the release pressure. It was the look in the eyes, the courage there, something other than defiance. Resolution, perhaps … and pity, for the look on Zadin’s face was anguish that transcended pain, and the horror of what he had done crashed through his consciousness. He had broken faith with himself. He had killed in cold blood. He had taken the life of someone who had threatened no man’s life. He had murdered. Zadin turned to the rabbis, looking for something, he knew not what, and whatever he sought simply was not there. As he turned away, the singing began again. Sergeant Moshe Levin came forward and took the captain’s weapon. “Come on, Benny, let’s get you away from this place.” “What have I done?” “It is done, Benny. Come with me.” Levin started to lead his commander away, but he had to turn and look at the morning’s handiwork. Hashimi’s body was slumped over, a pool of blood coursing down between the cobblestones. The sergeant knew that he had to do or say something. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. His mouth hung open, and his face swung from side to side. In that moment, Hashimi’s disciples knew that their leader had won. Ryan’s phone rang at 2:03 Eastern Daylight Time. He managed to get it before the start of the second ring. “Yeah?” “This is Saunders at the Ops Center . Get your TV on. In four minutes, CNN is running something hot.” “Tell me about it.” Ryan’s hand fumbled for the remote controller and switched the bedroom TV on. “You ain’t gonna believe it, sir. We copied it off the CNN satellite feed, and Atlanta is fast-tracking it onto the network. I don’t know how it got past Israeli censors. Anyway—” “Okay, here it comes.” Ryan rubbed his eyes clear just in time. He had the TV sound muted to keep from disturbing his wife. The commentary was unnecessary in any case. “Dear God in heaven …” “That about covers it, sir,” the senior watch officer agreed. “Send my driver out now. Call the Director, tell him to get in fast. Get hold of the duty officer at the White House Signals Office. He’ll alert the people on his end. We need the DDI, and the desks for Israel , Jordan —hell, that whole area, all the desks. Make sure State’s up to speed—” “They have their own—” “I know that. Call them anyway. Never assume anything in this business, okay?” “Yes, sir. Anything else?” “Yeah, send me about four hours’ more sleep.” Ryan set the phone down. “Jack … was that—” Cathy was sitting up. She’d just caught the replay. “It sure was, babe.” “What’s it mean?” “It means the Arabs just figured out how to destroy Israel ,” Unless we can save the place. Ninety minutes later, Ryan turned on the West Bend drip machine behind his desk before running over the notes from the night duty staff. It would be a day for coffee. He’d shaved in the car on the way in, and a look at the mirror showed that he’d not done a very good job of it. Jack waited until he had a full cup before marching into the Director’s office. Charles Alden was there with Cabot. “Good morning,” the National Security Advisor said. “Yeah,” the Deputy Director replied in a husky voice. “What do you suppose is good about it? The President know yet?” “No, I didn’t want to disturb him until we know something. I’ll talk to him when he wakes up—sixish. Marcus, what do you think of your Israeli friends now?” “Have we developed anything else, Jack?” Director Cabot asked his subordinate. “The shooter is a police captain, according to the insignia. No name on him yet, no background. The Israelis have him in the jug somewhere and they’re not saying anything. From the tape it looks like two definitely dead, probably a few more with minor injuries. Chief of Station has nothing he can report to us except that it really happened, and we have that on tape. Nobody seems to know where the TV crew is. We did not have any assets at the site when all this happened, so we’re going exclusively from the news coverage.” Again, Ryan didn’t add. The morning was bad enough. “ Temple Mount is shut down, guarded by their army now, nobody in or out, and they’ve closed access to the Wailing Wall also. That may be a first. Our embassy over there has not said anything, they’re waiting for instructions from here. Same story for the others. No official reaction from Europe yet, but I expect that to change within the hour. They’re at work already, and they got the same pictures from their Sky News service.” It’s almost four,“ Alden said, wearily checking his watch. ”In three hours people are going to have their breakfast upset—what a hell of a thing to see in the morning. Gentlemen, I think this one’s going to be big. Ryan, you called it. I remember what you said last month.“ “Sooner or later, the Arabs had to wise up,” Jack said. Alden nodded agreement. It was gracious of him, Jack noted. He’d said the same thing in one of his books several years earlier. “I think Israel can weather this, they always have—” Jack cut his Director off. “No way, boss,” Ryan said. Someone had to straighten Cabot out. “It’s what Napoleon said about the moral and the physical. Israel depends absolutely on having the moral high-ground. Their whole cachet is that they are the only democracy in the region, that they are the guys in white hats. That concept died about three hours ago. Now they look like Bull—whoever it was—in Selma , Alabama , except he used water hoses. The civil-rights community is going to go berserk.” Jack paused to sip at his coffee. “It’s a simple question of justice. When the Arabs were throwing rocks and cocktails, the police could say that they were using force in response to force. Not this time. Both the deaders were sitting down and not threatening anybody.” “It’s the isolated act of one deranged man!” Cabot announced angrily. “Not so, sir. The one shot with a pistol was like you say, but the first victim was killed with two of those rubber bullets at a range of more than twenty yards—with two aimed shots from a single-shot weapon. That’s cold, and it wasn’t any accident.” “Are we sure he’s dead?” Alden asked. “My wife’s a doc, and he looked dead to her. The body spasmed and went limp, probably indicating death from massive head trauma. They can’t say this guy tripped and fell onto the curb. This really changes things. If the Palestinians are smart, they’ll double-down their bets. They’ll stay with this tactic and wait for the world to respond. If they do that, they can’t lose,” Jack concluded. “I agree with Ryan,” Alden said. “There’ll be a UN resolution before dinner. We’ll have to go along with it, and that just might show the Arabs that non-violence is a better weapon than rocks are. What will the Israelis say? How will they react?” Alden knew what the answer was. This was to enlighten the DCI, so Ryan took the question. “First they’ll stonewall. They’re probably kicking themselves for not intercepting the tape, but it’s a little late for that. This was almost certainly an unplanned incident—I mean that the Israeli government is as surprised as we are—otherwise they would have grabbed the TV crew. That police captain is having his brain picked apart now. By lunchtime they’ll say that he’s crazy—hell, he probably is—and that this is an isolated act. How they do their damage control is predictable, but—” “It’s not going to work,” Alden interrupted. The President’s going to have to have a statement out by nine. We can’t call this a ‘tragic incident.’ It’s coldblooded murder of an unarmed demonstrator by a state official.” “Look, Charlie, this is just an isolated incident,” Director Cabot said again. “Maybe so, but I’ve been predicting this for five years.” The National Security Advisor stood and walked to the windows. “Marcus, the only thing that has held Israel together for the past thirty years has been the stupidity of the Arabs. Either they never recognized that Israeli legitimacy is based entirely on their moral position or they just didn’t have the wit to care about it. Israel is now faced with an impossible ethical contradiction. If they really are a democracy that respects the rights of its citizens, they have to grant the Arabs broader rights. But that means playing hell with their political integrity, which depends on soothing their own extreme religious elements—and that crowd doesn’t care a rat’s ass about Arab rights, does it? But if they cave in to the religious zealots and stonewall, try to gloss over this thing, then they are not a democracy, and that imperils the political support from America without which they cannot survive economically or militarily. The same dilemma applies to us. Our support for Israel is based on their political legitimacy as a functioning liberal democracy, but that legitimacy just evaporated. A country whose police murder unarmed people has no legitimacy, Marcus. We can no more support an Israel that does things like this than we could have supported Somoza, Marcos, or any other tin-pot dictator—” “God damn it, Charlie! Israel isn't—” “I know that, Marcus. They’re not. They’re really not. But the only way they can prove that is to change, to become true to what they have always claimed to be. If they stonewall on this, Marcus, they’re doomed. They’ll lean on their political lobby and find out it isn’t there anymore. If it goes that far, then they embarrass our government even more than it already is, and we’ll be faced with the possible necessity of overtly cutting them off. We can’t do that either. We must find another alternative.

Tom Clancy, THE SUM OF ALL FEARS

[robertsharp]

But Aoife tilts her head to one side like a scale model of Holly. ‘If you tickle me I’ll wet myself and then you’ll have to wash my pants.’ ‘Okay.’ I act contrite. ‘Moles don’t tickle.’ ‘I should think so too.’ How she says that makes me afraid Aoife’s childhood’s a book I’m flicking through instejad of reading properly.

David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks (2014, Sceptre) p.215

[robertsharp]

Early the following morning, the inn’s window opened to a panoramic view of Mombasa, then a mishmash of rondavels of coral and lime plaster, their makuti thatch and rusty metal roofs fanning out like a colorful oil painting.

The market was an open space ringed by palms. Although it was still early in the day, the market was almost completely full. Every sound competed for attention. A fetid wind lifted from the sea. A mongrel squeaked from the kick of a brown boot. A monger swished the tail of a tilapia, hailing its freshness. Another vendor sliced soundlessly through a ripe mango. A woman displaying hand-printed garments chuckled, revealing a fake gold tooth. A merchant clanged a knife on ivory. A rooster crowed. A donkey pulling a cart brayed, spilling drops of mnazi. A trader swore at a haggling customer. A mother admonished a child strapped to her back. A worker quarrelled with his tools. The sea roared to assert its authority. The muezzin called the faithful to morning prayers. Mombasa turned into a Tower of Babel as Swahili, Arabic, Punjabi, Gujarati, Hindi, Marathi, and English tongues sought coherence.

— Peter Kimani, Dance of the Jakaranda (Telegram, 2018), pp110-111