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‘—burn through the book at 20 pages per second—his body lightening—coming back to life inch by inch—The cigarette scorches a black-rimmed hollow right through Songs of Chu, like a creature burrowing through—He picks up the now numberless book & looks through the hole at the next book on the shelf—Bai Juyi’s Collected Works. The phone rings—he thinks about the Cao Zhi line, ‘Such sorrowful wind on this high terrace.’’

‘—they still had—memories of—Taiping episode, 1851–64, which had led to widespread secessionism in the south of the Empire in the name of Christian values. In other words—from the Chinese perspective—news from Europe—& notably the Paris Commune—provided an opportunity—reinvested w/ the interplay of wholly different tensions. The situation in Algeria—somewhat similar—the transition—its struggles—dynamics intersected—’

‘Elizabeth Gaskell wrote a biography of Charlotte that gave a portrait of E as—enigmatic—mostly unpleasant misanthrope. I present a portrait of a consummate artist—Fugitive, at odds w/ conventions—almost impossible to grasp—The past, whether geological / ancestral, is never laid to rest—The terrible beauty—the wuthering—of nature’s wrath—not to mention her—obsession with spirits, & objects reappearing from long ago—’

‘Globe amaranths thrived alongside the ditch—Lantana shrubs grew next to the—disintegrating wall. Wild lilies bloomed near the garbage hole—The coastal morning glory—bamboo poles leaned against the kapok tree. Further plantings came in—hibiscus—jungle flame—bougainvillea—Last were orchids planted in coconut shells—the arrival of the monsoon season, & some began to bud—amid the jungle—Dead plants fertilised the soil—’

‘Here I will discuss the cases of China & Algeria—visible in the archives—of how these events played out on both sides of imperial domination—caught up in other power relations, retranslated into these spaces, and became part of other regional histories. Let us start with the ‘affair’ of the Tientsin, 1870—the mandarins involved had been exiled—primarily because they had tried to escape the wrath of their sovereign.’

‘—grandmother—loved to talk about our ancestors—loved being part of the thread, and I can see now that with—anecdotes she was beginning to tie the knot that would extend the thread into the future through me. Can you imagine? Being an avid reader, she had answers to—my wider historical questions—During this—period—she did her best to pass all her stories down—our closeness anchored me—across time—infinite starlings—’

‘French culture—spiked w/ creole to charm the peasants. He was born a double agent & never changed. I may be Haitian by nationality & charm, he said, but I’m European & American when it comes to money—austere on the surface, greedy at heart. From what I came to later understand about how history was recorded—if it’s written in English, Haitians will always look bad—this tropical hellhole—I didn’t have time to dwell—’

‘Questions remain. Some are simple: Who were these men & women? What did they do? What did they want? Some are more general: How can we explain the fact that, despite everything, these seventy-two days had such a significant political & symbolic impact in the twentieth & twenty-first centuries, and on the national, European and global scales? March 1871, the interpreter Zhang Deyi noted what he had seen in Paris—’

‘Being stuck in the same spot turned my stomach. Everyone revisits the old memories, staring at the cold cuts—tuna casserole, mostaccioli—waiting for the food line to dwindle—small talk—as mushroom soup is ladled out—The sour Midwestern accents have deepened—calcified in their throats—What we say never changes—Whether this is sad I can’t say—but it endears me to this messy band—for a moment—&—I take off by instinct.’

‘Even if it goes against my self-interest as a pincher, I believe in groups that achieve more with less. Absence was only the promise of future presence. The setting sun reached the facades w/o having to compete with sodium & neon lights. There was freedom in dissolution, joy in disorder. Those quiet moments seemed necessary for her—memories—to coalesce—Her tone—tentative—as if there was something rude in certainty.’

‘I hated the football. I hated how much my happiness depended on how well I touched it and got rid of it. Strikers—don’t get to touch the ball all that much—unlike, say, midfielders—we seduced that little black-and-white bastard after our teammates desperately sent it to us past walls of defenders. Tell yourself you’re going to live forever? Not us. Our arrogance hits different. That’s your best tease, death?’

‘Does it—make coders more efficient? That doesn’t seem to be the case for junior coders whose “vibe coding” efforts—produce quick-and-dirty tools for one-off usage—w/o the hard-won experience of creatively solving a succession of programming challenges they may never develop the requisite depth of expertise—AI art—oft dismissed as 'soulless' but I think a better term is 'eerie' (Mark Fisher). It’s pretty disgusting.’

‘—the odour—maple syrup & gasoline—the exhaust of a couple hundred idling taxicabs. I’ve missed even them. Here the sky yawns white all day, then rips your head off like afterburners once the sun falls off the horizon. But when the cold comes, it comes like a dream, lugging the dark in a big black sack. And my body readjusts to the old song it knows by heart—For a long time I believed her touch cured the migraines.’

‘Anything can be priceless or worthless, depending on the person and the circumstances—what seemed to be junk would turn out to be the essential part needed to complete a repair. He was an archivist of obsolescence—the centre of the tinkering world. The real aristocracy had left—generations ago—leaving behind a shipwrecked world of dilapidated bygone grandeur. Dead luxury feeds a particular kind of squalor.’

‘Maybe, in the heart of this book, there is nothing other than—blinding, apocalyptic howling—in the carbonic rose, what of you remains after you meet the living you, what can have a revelation—It is the centre of the rose of our death, because there in the centre of our carbonised body, among the petals of char—a petunia’s soft, fibrous petals. In just a few seconds, the sound gained corporeality, and became yellow.’

‘—you aren’t the audience for AI companies’ hype. The real audience is the finance sector. To the extent—you are targeted by AI msgs—in hopes of getting you to evince some kind of behaviour that makes investors think there’s something to this AI business. Tech workers—especially those early workers, were often people whose lives had been transformed for the better—& wanted to bring those benefits to the whole world—’

‘I live on the wrong side of the river by choice—The river—where we dispose of our dead—superstitious loathing—swelled into—taboo. Hickory, fir, gingko, sumac. Strange—how memory sometimes blinks—abolishing cause—presenting us w/ pure effect—perhaps I retained images while losing the sound. The stubbornness of irrelevant details—she could—reproduce the narrative of how it had come to being—finding beauty in function’

‘—it isn’t what the machine does—it’s who it does it for & who it does it to—all who fall for the hype is dreaming of—human needs fulfilled w/o having to extend moral consideration—AI girlfriend weirdos & bosses who—replace 1/2 their workers & terrorise remainders—workers who are frightened of starvation & do as they’re told. An AI girlfriend—demands nothing of you, except those things you tell it to demand of you.’

‘A reverse centaur—a human who is conscripted into acting as an assistant to a machine—made to work at a pace that exceeds all human capacity (until calamity ensues)—to serve as peripherals for the warehouse’s automation systems. This centaur/reverse centaur distinction is the heart of the paradox at the heart of the debate—It’s been a long time since I last held factory jobs—SF is an anti-inevitabilist literature.’

‘—stories passed between successive storytellers across—generations. As the ylang-ylang rapidly blossomed—so did the champak—In her whole life, Ma Rabiah had never evicted a soul. The settlers came & went as they pleased—never even collected rent—Many years before—the area was nothing but a jungle of shrubs—plots of land had no owners at all—rice fields—coconut plantations. This lasted until people began to arrive—’

—the insistence that there is only one conceivable way to do things—problems you’re experiencing aren’t anyone’s fault, they’re just inescapable reality—high-tech Thatcherism—a bully who insists that they’re only doing what implacable reality demands of them. This is a book about what AI can and cannot do, but even more important—it’s about the possible social arrangements of AI—from not using—AI technology at all—’

‘—whispering to each other—cooking up their own versions of what had happened—palm trees—a starfruit tree—By the roadside a majestic flame tree—The scene forever burned into her retinas—unexpunged for decades—& still standing there was Margio, his face a mask of gore—For a moment they exchanged a glance at the strangest threshold of conscience, in a state where both comprehended the hideousness of what had happened.’

‘On mountainside—bare land—raw, like scars from a bad burn—he went down to the ocean to pray. When a group of killer whales came by, he took water in his mouth and blew it toward one of the whales and asked it for help. Later the whale beached itself in front of him, sacrificing its life, and then his grandfather recovered. “I really am a whale person. They are my relatives. That is how we see them in my culture.”’

‘The me of today englobes the me of yesterday, who encompasses the one from the day before yesterday and so on—until I am an immense line of Russian dolls—my astral body is nothing else but the clairvoyant light of the future. From the dark toward the light—the absurd trajectory of our lifetime tapers off—And the I of every moment is connected to the one before—braid of blue—violet capillaries inextricably—synapses—’

‘ A scent of brine wafted through the coconut palms—cacao plantation—leaves were of use only to the tempeh factories—Not long after the plantation was declared bankrupt, people had arrived to put up boundary stakes, clear away the water hyacinths and vast tangles of kangkong—Rice required too much &—peanuts—were more resilient—less trouble—people were no longer bound to the soil—They had no interest in a dead hog.’

‘—such children—began expressing their memories of earlier lives—& displayed inexplicable, linguistic abilities. Another unusual pattern—was the carrying over of physical traces of an earlier life, in the form of birthmarks and scars. Often these traces would indicate the location of wounds that had resulted in the termination of earlier life—‘Don’t you see how the world is burning up and drowning at the same time?’’