He existed now in a liminal zone

"Such a shame that a tough fellow like him could pass away in the blink of an eye," Sister Zhou said, and sighed. "I can't help but to think that sometimes a man can be as frail as a mosquito! One swat might not kill a mosquito, but it can surely kill a man."

This novel is grim, but not quite in the way the title might imply. The Morgue Keeper, by Ruyan Meng, does not delve into the tedium or unpleasantness of the occupation per se. Rather Qing Yuan, framed by his proletarian experience, bears witness to all manner of death, physical and spiritual. 

Set amid Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution, Qing Yuan's existence is indeed meager, but he seems to hold no resentment against the regime that executed his father for hiding some gold. He is kind and compassionate with his coworkers, his neighbours, the local beggars.

When an identified female corpse, mutilated beyond recognition, comes into the morgue — "a heap of gore and waste" — and no one claims her, he starts asking questions, looking to restore her dignity. This clinging to humanity allows Qing Yuan to rise above his day to day, and even harbour hopes of having a family one day (a neighbouring widow becomes a romantic interest).

One day, Qing Yuan is arrested. He is carted away along with several other employees of the hospital and imprisoned. Then the torture begins.

The charges relate to his family's capitalist past. But it's clear that anyone disgruntled or overzealous might've played a role. This is a state where neighbours denounce neighbours, children denounce their own parents. Struggle sessions, akin to Two Minutes Hate, punish transgressors and strike fear in everyone. This is an intense read, a dystopia that's a direct descendent of 1984, only it's real. It's 1960s China, the squalor and desperation of Worker Villages.

Qing Yuan is ultimately released by the authorities but he is shunned. His actions are scrutinized, his home repeatedly vandalized. He seems broken beyond repair.

He had long since given up on the city. Nothing stirred any connection to his past. In fact, he realized, he was wrong to say he had given up on the city. The city had given up on him, discarded like a dead baby from the hospital the moment he’d been conscripted to the morgue. He existed now in a liminal zone, between a past to which he could never return and a future that would never come. The eternal present, what many a sage declared the one true refuge, had seized him like a spider in its web. He had become a shadow whose life had been bent to a single purpose, the cleaning of humans, dead, on their way to becoming shadows themselves.

 And then there's a kitten.

Excerpts 
Chapter 1 
Chapter 9 

Review 
Metropolitan Review: The Exilic Style 
Interviews
Bookish: Quiet Tragedies and Small Acts of Kindness 
Zona Motel: It's Terrible to Be Yourself  

Perspective gave us depth

Michelangelo Buonarroti to Giorgio Vasari; Rome, 21 June 1557:

Brunelleschi's discovery of the laws of perspective was like Prometheus stealing fire and giving it to mankind. Thanks to him, we have been able not only illuminate our walls as Giotto once did with his golden fingers, but to reproduce the world as it is, identical in every detail. And so it was the the painter could imagine himself God's equal: because now, we too could create reality. And that was how we came to try, poor fishermen that we are, to surpass Our Lord. We  could copy the world as faithfully as if we had made it ourselves, but that was not enough to quench our thirst for creation, because our ambition as artists, intoxicated by this new power, now knew no limits. We wanted to paint the world in our own style. We didn't merely wish to rival God, but to alter His work by redrawing it to suit our desires. We distorted perspective, we abandoned it. We erased the chequerboard floors of our predecessors and let our figures float in the ether. We played with perspective the way a dog plays with a ball, or a cat with the corpse of a sparrow it has killed. We turned away from it. We scorned it. But we never forgot it.

How could we? Perspective gave us depth. And depth opened the gates of infinity to us. A terrible spectacle. I can never recall without shivering the first time I saw Masaccio's frescoes at the Brancassi Chapel. The wonder of his foreshortened figures! There stood man, life-sized at last, having found his place in space, his substance given weight, cast out of paradise but standing on his own two feet, in all his mortal truth. Far from constricting the imagination of artists, perspective gave us the image of infinity on Earth. The image only ... yes, of course. In reality, we could not claim to equal the Creator of all things, but we could, better than any priest, proclaim His word through mute images or stone statues. Painters, sculptors, architects: the artist is a prophet because, more than any other man, his mind contains the idea of God, which is infinity itself, that unthinkable, inconceivable thing.

Perspective(s), by Laurent Binet, is a historical epistolary novel, some 176 letters involving some twenty correspondents, including the likes of Michelangelo, Catherine de' Medici, Benvenuto Cellini,

I had high hopes for this mystery (artist stabbed dead with a chisel! scandalous painting gone missing!) but mostly it's boring and confusing.

Sadly, with a few exceptions, the voices don't vary. I had trouble keeping the characters straight (it's probably easier to read this on paper vs digitally, to be able to flip back a page or two to identify who is writing to whom and reference the list of characters). There were times it didn't seem worth the effort.

I'm betting Binet is a gamer (hmm, a quick google search confirms the influence of video games on his previous novels), and specifically a fan of Assassin's Creed (and why not? indeed, Ezio's adventures constitute the basis of my knowledge of Borgia-era Italy). In one (rare) action-packed sequence, Cellini's parkour efforts to elude the palace guards seem lifted out of the Brotherhood's playbook:

As I descended from the ramparts, I heard some guards climbing the stairs. Since I had no business being up there, I would have had no excuse to justify my presence if they had seen me. So I hurried back to the roof. But you know the palace better then I, so you know that there are no hiding places up there. I ran to the wall; a leap from that height could be fatal, even to me. But God rewards the brave: at the foot of the wall was a cart loaded with hay, left there by some groom. It all happened in a flash: the decision, then the execution. I climbed onto the parapet, arms outspread like Christ on the cross. I closed my eyes and I dived. During my fall I heard the cry of an eagle. My landing was as soft as on a feather bed, and in a second I was up on my feet again, completely unscathed.

The video game immersion affords a suspension of disbelief; here it feels laughably out of place. (But yeah, I kinda loved this bit.) On the whole, this novel of art theory and politics comes off as dry. 

The novel did make me consider how trends in art are formed by outside forces (it's simply not as obvious me in work predating the twentieth century) and artists throughout history use their work to voice their agreement or dissent. Of course a change in the papacy would dictate whether or not nudes were held in disgrace. "We other Florentines still understand and appreciate the beauty of the human body rather than considering it a diabolical obscenity." 

As Vincenzo Borghini notes to Giorgio Vasari, "You know as well as I that it is not men who change their tastes, but politics that change men." And Michelangelo recognizes, "These are cruel times, my friend, for the defenders of art and beauty." Another action sequence plays out through a Calvinoesque slo-mo lens, the intersection of math and art overlaying reality.

I saw the lines being drawn through space, forming a geometric grid, and I recognised Alberti's diagram, his pyramid of spokes converging on a single point. It was the laws of perspective taking shape before me, as clearly as if I had traced them myself with a ruler; I touched the surface of things, because it was no longer the real world that I could see in all its depth. Or rather, it was the real world, but I saw it as if through the camera obscura devised by Master Brunelleschi — may his name be honoured until the end of time! — and in the space of a second the world appeared to me as a flat surface, adroitly squared, in all the dazzling clarity of the theory that was revealed to us by those supreme geniuses: Brunelleschi, Alberti, Masaccio ... may you all be crowned in glory, you eternal Tuscan heroes! And so, as the killer was about to fire at me, because the fuse, as I told you, had almost completely burnt down (this too, I could perceive with perfect lucidity), I saw — yes, I saw! — the vanishing point drawn on his forehead as if by Alberti himself and (recalling those words of the great master that gave me heart: "It is in vain that you bend your bow, if you do not yet know where to aim your arrow!" — and I knew; in that instant, I knew exactly!) I pulled the trigger, and the bold shot from my crossbow, following the perfect trajectory that my mind had calculated and that an invisible hand had traced through the air, embedding itself exactly midway between his eyes. He fell backwards, his shot missed, and — hearing the detonation — I felt as if I had been woken from a long dream that had lasted no more than a second.

But I hadn't dreamed it. I had remembered perspective. And this is what I want to tell you, Master Michelangelo, my dear Master. In our thirst to find a new style of painting so that we can surpass (or, rather, circumvent) the perfection achieved by our forefathers [...] have we not forgotten what underlay the very essence of that perfection? It is not that we are unaware of it; we all studied Alberti's theory. But, little by little, all of us, [...] we have attempted to free ourselves from it, we have left it behind, we have disdained it. And we have begun to elongate our bodies, to make them float through space, to stretch out where we should foreshorten, to turn our landscapes into dreamscapes, and rather than cutting them up in accordance with mathematical principles that we consider too severe, to twist reality. Order and symmetry have become anathema to us. 

The resolution, if I understand who dun it correctly, is a ridiculous bit of fiction squeezed between verifiable historical facts — it remains historically plausible, but kinda pointlessly so. (And I'm relieved — not for the sake of any historical personage's reputation, but for Truth — that Binet's readership is relatively limited in number and generally smarter than the average bear so that the none of this gets mistaken for historical fact. I fear for humanity not having sufficient general knowledge to accurately recognize dramatizations and artistic license.)

See also 
The French Exception: On Laurent Binet and French Literature. 
For a substantial excerpt of the novel, see the US publisher's publicity page.

What happens to a person in solitude?

I want to shake off a day full of words and meanings. Not that they're superfluous, just that I don't need them anymore.

The Cut Line, by Carolina Pihelgas, follows a young Estonian woman's reclamation of self during the long hot summer after she leaves a fourteen-years-long relationship. Liine was 18 when she met Tarmo; when it's revealed that he is fifteen years older than her, the toxic control he held over her becomes apparent.

What if he's right that no one else would have a use for me. Doubt is like a cobweb — very delicate, but when you touch it, it clings to your fingers. Gray and sticky.

I can picture cut lines: wounds from the knife the narrator brandishes in her imagination, against herself or her ex (the epigraph is a line from Ariana Harwicz; for more knives and toxicity see Die, My Love). Or the cut line is how she mows the grass as short as possible. Metaphorically, it's a line between past and future. It's the line Liine draws that delineates her self from others.

We feel the tone shift from despondency toward occasional langour and back again.

The sheet metal that covers the woodpile is rattling the wind. The hooded crow sways on the oak tree and caws. The quiet murmur of the clover and golden silence of the mayweed. They sing inside me as if my innermost being is the center of everything, both living and dead.

Liine is staying at the family cottage farm. She works the garden, the land. She becomes attuned to the insects. The sound of helicopters and gunshots at the nearby military base is a constant reminder that there's a world outside, that there's a war in Ukraine. Her feed relays extreme heat, water shortages, famine, hurricanes. She scrolls articles about climate anxiety. While a relationship breakup may be a universal experience, a timeless story even (one remarkable if negative effect of this book is how it managed to permeate my mood, stirring up bad relationship memories of my own.), the backdrop is very today.

The language is beautiful. This is not a plot-driven novel. Liine's mother and sister provide counterpoints, in their living situations, how they process the past, what they value. But Liine is determined to find her own way. She comes across a stash of letters belonging to her great-aunt, which open her eyes to the possibility of other, affirmative ways of being. Liine's evolution over the summer is subtle and authentic. 

And then I'm in a place where nothing moves forward anymore, everything only goes backward, turns back on itself, tells me about the meaninglessness of my existence. Reality is a snake coiling up, but there's no room for me here. I'm excluded from all living things, from all breathing things. Without other people, do I even exist? What happens to a person deep down, right at the bottom, in solitude?

I breathe. I breathe. Is it possible that here in this old house, far from everything, I could turn into something else, into a plant, say? Doesn't that make me like something that's poked its head out of the ground; something pale green that's stretched out, caught some sun, maybe even managed to grow some flowers, but not borne fruit? And is then cut down and trampled to pieces. Don't I have roots, then, somewhere deeper still? I should just go back to bed, curl up under the blanket and cry a bit. I need to stay beneath the soil, in the ground, here in a safe remote place until I find the strength within me to sprout new shoots.

I will have no part of this

What will always flummox the state is the prospect of the individual — of many individuals — employing negation as a political tactic. What to do with someone who doesn't rush the podium, doesn't spit on the flag, doesn't do anything to ease the state's transition into the comfortable arena of violence? What to do with someone who says: I will have no part of this, when the entire functionality of the system is dependent on active participation? Forced into this kind of space, power becomes enraged, and behaves accordingly. Legislators rush to pass bills outlawing boycotts, not only in obvious violation of the same freedoms those legislators are sworn to protect, but also a practical impossibility, this quest to stop people from not buying something. Terms like "economic terrorism" are tossed around by the same people who are quite happy to pull their donations from universities and literary festivals and anywhere that doesn't sufficiently silence whatever voices they want silenced. University administrators express shock at the utter inappropriateness of students' demands to cut ties with weapons makers and institutes complicity with occupation, and punish those students by withholding their degrees.

The idea that walking away is childish and unproductive is predicated on the inability to imagine anything but a walking away from, never a walking toward — never that there might exist another destination. The walking away is not nihilism, it's not cynicism, it's not doing nothing — it's a form of engagement more honest, more soul-affirming, than anything the system was ever prepared to offer.

(But how does one walk away from capitalism?)

I don't know what to do with this book. Sit with it, I guess. Sit with the guilt of my general inaction and inadequacy. 

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, by Omar El Akkad, is a takedown of the West, its hypocrisy and faulty foundations. It's less about Gaza than I thought it would be, more about the inability of anybody (westerners) to do anything about it.

A central privilege of being of this place becomes, then, the ability to hold two contradictory thoughts simultaneously. The first being the belief that one's nation behaves in keeping with the scrappy righteousness of the underdog. The second being an unspoken understanding that, in reality, the most powerful nation in human history is no underdog, cannot possibly be one, but at least the immense violence implicit in the contradiction will always be inflicted on someone else. [...] It's the person who in self-image professes to be a rule-breaker, untamable, wile — and in the next breath sides unquestioningly with every facet of state power. [...] My first impulse is to mock the contradiction, but there's no contradiction, not really, because the bedrock of this particular identity isn't conformity or nonconformity — it's self-interest. Anyone who buys into both the narrative of American rebelliousness and the reality of American authority understands that both have been created to serve them.

Of course, we're against genocide, it's morally deplorable. Of course, we're against apartheid, and Nazism, and racial inequality. Of course, we're against cruelty to animals. Of course, women should have the vote, and we should protect our planet. So why the fuck does it take us so long to do anything about it? (And when we do, it's only because it's become advantageous to do so.)

I expected it to be a difficult book — depressing in its chronicle of the genocide of Palestinians. In fact, it was unputdownable, and not nearly as grim as the barrage of bad news I compulsively seek out daily. I'm not sure who this book is for — it preaches to a choir of leftists. This book it will not convince the fascists who walk among us of the error of their ways; they may hold it up to us as proof, "See what hypocrites you are!" 

The very act of praising this book could be seen as merely performative — that I'm on the right side of history, or so it will be seen some day.

I feel scolded for not doing anything about the state of world. That is, I feel that what I do doesn't make a difference (and I sense that this sentiment is shared by the author). But I do what I can. I read, I educate myself. I engage in discussion with others, even if it's just the girls over drinks on Friday night — it helps me hone my own opinion, occasionally it shifts someone else's. I march, I protest, I show up — at least sometimes, and even if it's only when it's convenient, my being there still counts (numbers matter, optics matter). I don't buy Israeli products. I don't buy US products. Etc. I try. This week I joined the New Democratic Party of Canada, because I want to do more than just vote (radical democracy! "public" shouldn't be a dirty word!). 

Francine Prose says, "There is one story: our country is on the brink of an authoritarian takeover." Everything else is a distraction. Is it? The Epstein files are a distraction from Venezuela. Venezuela is a distraction from Gaza. The weather is a distraction from Ukraine. Tariffs are a distraction from changes to immigration policies. Do you even know what's going on in Cuba? Why is it not bigger news that the NRA is breaking from the GOP? News stories I read one day are buried the next. Two plus two equals five. I long thought I knew which issues should take priority. Today I am surprised to find myself thinking that maybe it's the lasciviously scandalous one that's most important after all — the one where the men in power protect the men in power.

And they just keep killing more Palestinians.

It would be nice to go back to caring about the moon. So many of my favorite authors care about the moon. So much of my favorite literature orients in the direction of beauty. But surely any true appreciation of beauty would admit, exclaim even, that no descriptions of the moon, no matter how stunning, how true, reflects as much beauty back into the world as a missile obliterating a family in their home takes out of it.

[...]

What is this work we do? What are we good for?

The literary critic Northrop Frye once said all art is metaphor, and a metaphor is the grammatical definition of insanity. What art does is meet us at the site of our insanity, our derangement, the plainly irrational mechanics of what it means to be human. There comes from this, then, at least a working definition of a soul: one's capacity to sit with the mysteries of a thing that cannot in any rational way be understood — only felt, only moved through. And sometimes that thing is so grotesque — what we do to one another so grotesque — that sitting with it feels an affront to the notion of art as a conduit of beauty.

Still, sit. Sit.

And then maybe walk away. Use your imagination, and be better.

A vague miasma of misery

Jackson was surprised that more women hadn't simply killed their husbands. Maybe they had, maybe women were better at covering up murder than people knew.

What a joy to spend a recent sunny, snowbound day ensconced in my chair with a coffee and my cat, devouring Death at the Sign of the Rook, by Kate Atkinson. Coincidence abounds ("A coincidence is just an explanation waiting to happen"). From "the maw of oblivion" and through "a vague miasma of misery," there is warmth and kindness, and also snow.

Jackson Brodie continues to age, but then, so do I. Thankfully, he has a chorus (jury) of women in his head to keep him in check.

Set in modern day, Atkinson pays homage to Agatha Christie and the detective novels of that era and ilk (fittingly, I spend the evening watching The Seven Dials, which is charming and light while alluding to larger things than our small lives).

You went to bed one night, in a happy daze because you had waltzed all night with eligible young men, and you woke up the next day and found yourself living on a bleak planet inhabited by alien creatures.

The novel's central mystery involves a stolen work of art. Art is not something Brodie knows a lot about, but he won't turn away from a bit of research if it means catching his crook, or at least uncovering the truth.

Brodie's reading leads him to the story of Jerry and Rita Alter, who stole a de Kooning and hung it on the back of their bedroom door. Admirable, no? Crazy. Through Brodie, I learn about Montreal's own 1972 Skylight Caper.

I love me a good art heist as much as the next person. A couple years ago I read Michael Finkel's The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession; for months afterwards I would "case" every museum and gallery I walked into, checking for cameras, exits, sightlines, security guard routines. (I want to steal the art, get away with it, and have it.) Who steals art, anyway? How do you unload a stolen Rembrandt? Who buys it? (I recall reading Trevanian when I was 16, an assassin gazing upon his treasured canvasses in his private quarters.) I recently watched The Mastermind, a unique art heist film that provides a dismal reality check (and an extraordinary soundtrack). I'm thinking I may be better suited to a career in art forgery.

"Without faith, there is no refuge," she repeated, and rang her small bell several times. The Full Auras saw the signs in the sky. The Diaphanous Spirits heard them in the buzzing of the insects, in the slightest shift of the clouds, in the plants' growth. The Minor Saints warned us with celestial song, and the Enlightened, the emissaries of the light, declared it to be acid rain.

The House of the Sacred Sisterhood was founded by Him (who only the Chosen and the Enlightened have the privilege of seeing) and the Superior Sister (they say she fought in the water wars).

A climate catastrophe has left the outside unlivable: contaminated water, toxins carried by the wind, extreme temperatures, the thick haze that lasts for days on end. Occasionally a hare is trapped but it's often a deformed abomination. The relentless chirp of crickets betrays their main source of protein.

There are three orders of the Chosen (mutilated).

The Minor Saints have ethereal voices:

After a dramatic silence, the Minor Saints resumed their song. I saw thousands of white petals leave their mouths, filling the air, lily petals that glimmered until they disappeared. Their voices can reach the universal notes, vibrate with the light of the stars. (That's why their eyes are sewn shut, so they're not distracted by the mundane, so they capture the reverberations of our God.)

The Diaphanous Spirits have perfect pitch. Their tongues are cut out when they are chosen, so they communicate in writing to the Superior Sister. 

They can perceive the bitter, lurking sound of sickness, the slow absorption of bone tissue; they've heard the soft swell of the dark where our organs reside; they can tell by our pulse whether our heart seeks only possession or wants to redeem itself, whether it seeks to wound or to dissolve into another heartbeat; they can discern the damp movement of the bacteria that inhabit us, the microcosm we carry around without feeling it. Sometimes they spend long hours in the field trying to detect human words in the wind, messages from God. It's common to see them turning in circles, the palms of their right hands open to the sky and the left to the earth. But no one knows why they do this.

With perforated eardrums, the Full Auras can orate purely. "God's messages leave traces on their bodies"; they have the gift of prophetic vision.

The Enlightened embody all the virtues of the three orders of Chosen. They are the mediators with the ancestral, hidden God, the one before those that men created.  

The rest are unworthy. Their continuous sacrifices are necessary for God to protect their small world. It is forbidden to invoke "the erroneous God, the false son, the negative mother."

There is a lower class still, the nameless servants:

They whisper poison because their bodies carry the marks, the signs, of contamination, and though they can no longer infect us, they have to work to clean our filth and the filth that runs through their veins. They hate us because they have to serve us. The marks are the remnants of the pustules, wounds, infections. The rashes are the filth of evil, the filth of collapse, the filth of failure. This filth absorbed from the sick earth has blighted them permanently, lest we forget that corruption lurks and the Enlightened are the only ones who can quell it. This filth, nesting in the servants' skin, in their cells, is the anger of the sea, the fury of the air, the violence of the mountains, the outrage of the trees. It's the sadness of the world.

The Unworthy, by Agustina Bazterrica, is an unsettling account of a sheltered postapocalyptic community. The unnamed, unworthy narrator secretly keeps a journal of the goings on while struggling to recall the path that brought her to this (un?)holy place.

One day, a new wanderer happens upon the Sisterhood. Her presence, her very being, seems miraculous, and she is instrumental in helping the narrator tap into her past (including a poignant, tear-inducing relationship with the enchantress Circe).

The beauty of the language masks something sinister (I'm reminded of Piranesi). The Sisterhood is built atop the destruction of the world and the violence of men. 

While Bazterrica's previous novel, Tender Is the Flesh, verged on the ridiculous, The Unworthy creeps toward the sublime.

Something nearly nothing

The empty house had the floor of one of its rooms strewn with flowers and a smell of earth and greenness all through its downstairs all night. Each morning for the next few days I scraped them up together, carried them into the garden and left them on the paving in the corner where they dried away to something nearly nothing and blew nothingly around in the paved yard for the rest of our time in that house.

Two teen siblings live off-grid, navigating difficult circumstances, with a slow reveal of the nature of the society they’re on the fringes of — a near-future dystopian surveillance state.

They don’t see the world the same way, and they come to exercise resistance very differently. 

Gliff, by Ali Smith, depicts a tender sibling relationship. It's also a love letter to language. (Because. Words are knowledge. And knowledge is power.) "It was always exciting to me the number of things a single word could mean." Very Alice in Wonderland. Naïve, to surreal effect. "You are bullying me with words longer than the length of my life, she said."

One of the epigraphs (from Valeria Luiselli) appears to apply less to the characters than to Smith's motivation: "it is never inspiration that drives you to tell a story, but rather a combination of anger and clarity." Smith demonstrates a lot of clarity regarding the state of the world today — surveillance, data collection, real estate economics, manufacturing and warehouse practices, consumerization of education (and the devaluing of knowledge) — and there's good reason to be angry about it, as the gap widens between the haves and the have-nots. The privileged "were smoothed as if airbrushed, as if you really could digitally alter real people."

But Gliff clearly takes some inspiration from Aldous Huxley. Beyond the permutations of the words "Brave new world" heading the later chapters, there are nods to that dystopia's indoctrination methods and soma. 

She's still speaking: all took stuff. We had to, we all had body shit and we loved Patchay, best of the painkillers, just zapped it, blanked it out, blanked us out too. We all took it except her and she had this word for us, for it. She'd sit against the wall and watch out for us while we were on it, and she'd always say what we were was gliffed. We reckoned she was riffing on the old word spliff. So we all started calling it, whatever we took after that, gliff.

I love that Patchay is also a play on pace, Latin for "peace." 

[I hate that I can't google a confirmation that Smith intended this, as the AI that generates overviews is clueless, and Google expects me to articulate searches in natural language, and I resent that our natural language has changed to be something that machines can recognize, why in my job search do I need to build a machine-readable CV shouldn't you build a machine that reads what I actually need to say. I remember when I first searched terms on internet and they were boolean and unnatural in a different way, often my queries were simplified, broadened, but it was mostly using an artificial system of operators to frame my natural thought, I don't know what my natural thought is anymore, maybe I modified my search practices to conform to the principles of the technology in play, but before the internet I could walk into a library and would have to consider how my question, if I had one, might be categorized, what subjects it encompassed, what ideas intersected, and if I had a specific question, I could ask a librarian, or an expert, they might know, but more likely I would engage them in a discussion about the subject, and new information might come to light, and new associations would spawn, facts may be confirmed but ideas could be explored and pursued rather than shut down, our current "natural language" machine searches anticipate a certain kind of answer, the answer is already contained in the question. I wonder how our grammar is changing, you'd think it would be more careful, to formulate searches with more precision, how sensitive is AI to our grammar, surely it knows the rules of grammar but does it understand how sloppy we are and under what circumstances we tend to get it wrong, we're so dumb we won't even notice when AI misreads our question to answer something else entirely. When I'm searching for something, it does not necessarily mean I have a specific question in mind, I have what Edward de Bono termed a "fuzzy situation," a kind of (pre-?)word cloud in my brain, and I'm looking for associations more than answers, even if problem-solving strategies typically involve distilling a specific question from all the fuzziness. I guess my issue is that I don't have a problem to solve, a question to answer, I'm interested in exploring, and it occurs to me that this is, broadly speaking, a male-female divide (or it used to be, in an earlier version of studies on gender dynamics, fuck, how old am I, oh how angry am I, how much clarity do I have now), men fix things, women want to talk about them, and this is what happens when men fix the internet. For the sake of this rant, I reformulated my search as "is the naming of patchay in Ali Smith's gliff a play on the latin word pace and what evidence is there for this" and AI returned: There is no evidence in the provided literary analyses or reviews of Ali Smith's novel Gliff to suggest that the naming of "patchay" is a play on the Latin word pace. In fact, the name "patchay" does not appear in any of the search results, which extensively discuss the wordplay surrounding the novel's title, "gliff." I wonder if the search result will have evolved after this post is published to acknowledge my original thought, I wonder also about the comprehensiveness of the "provided literary analyses or reviews," who provided them, what do you know anyway.]

A lot is left unanswered. Was the siblings' abandonment deliberate or accidental? What's the other sibling's story when they part ways? Who's running this world? How did we let this happen?

Why would people do that? she said.

People are people, Leif said, people are mysterious, why does anybody do anything?

Excerpt.