Gerhard’s Reviews > The Book of Elsewhere > Status Update

The Life Project had been born of the Glad Project, which was a development of the You’re OK! Project, which was begotten of a merger of refugees from Keep Light and the Yes Group.

B had sometimes, over the centuries, pursued research into subjects that did not naturally light a spark in him—among his seventeen PhDs were those in accountancy, land economy, and food science—but there were other skills at which he had only ever acquired adequate expertise.

Sixty winters gone. Stranger came, fought a bear. Penis torn off. The man’s. This is it (another grew where it had been). I have kept it in honey.

“For a long time,” B said at last, “I’ve kept a diary.”
“ ‘Are You There God?’ ” Keever said. “ ‘It’s Me, Berserker.’ ”

“I’ve told you that the usual story is bullshit. That it goes: Paleolithic ignorance, then”—he clapped his hands—“Neolithic Revolution! Then you give it a few more thousands of years and—poof!—you’ve got writing. And now finally the party begins.”

The impossible new science they were all there to advance, that field that shaded from morphology to speculative biology to quantum physics to fulminology, thence to mythography and ontology, sometimes even fucking theology.

Diana Ahuja had dutifully read Sontag; she had a Tom of Finland coffee-table book; she’d shaken her stuff to the Village People now and then: it was hardly a revelation to her that the machismo of the military was camp.

“I return, and I kill and kill and kill again, and eventually I die again, and the whole merry-go-round continues. So please tell me, Herr Doktor,” he said to me, “what sort of man am I?”