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1) "Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men."

2) "There is a basin in the mind where words float around on thought and thought on sound and sight. Then there is a depth of thought untouched by words, and deeper still a gulf of formless feelings untouched by thought. Nanny entered this infinity of conscious pain again on her old knees. Towards morning she muttered, 'Lawd, you know mah heart. Ah done de best Ah could do. De rest is left to you.' She scuffled up from her knees and fell heavily across the bed. A month later she was dead. So Janie waited a bloom time, and a green time and an orange time. But when the pollen again gilded the sun and sifted down on the world she began to stand around the gate and expect things. What things? She didn't know exactly. Her breath was gusty and short. She knew things that nobody had ever told her. For instance, the words of the trees and the wind. She often spoke to falling seeds and said, 'Ah hope you fall on soft ground,' because she had heard seeds saying that to each other as they passed. She knew the world was a stallion rolling in the blue pasture of ether. She knew that God tore down the old world every evening and built a new one by sun-up. It was wonderful to see it take form with the sun and emerge from the gray dust of its making. The familiar people and things had failed her so she hung over the gate and looked up the road towards way off. She knew now that marriage did not make love. Janie's first dream was dead, so she became a woman."

3) "The spirit of the marriage left the bedroom and took to living in the parlor. It was there to shake hands whenever company came to visit, but it never went back inside the bedroom again. So she put something in there to represent the spirit like a Virgin Mary image in a church. The bed was no longer a daisy-field for her and Joe to play in. It was a place where she went and laid down when she was sleepy and tired. She wasn't petal-open anymore with him. She was twenty-four and seven years married when she knew. She found that out one day when he slapped her face in the kitchen. It happened over one of those dinners that chasten all women sometimes. They plan and they fix and they do, and then some kitchen-dwelling fiend slips a scorchy, soggy, tasteless mess into their pots and pans. Janie was a good cook, and Joe had looked forward to his dinner as a refuge from other things. So when the bread didn't rise, and the fish wasn't quite done at the bone, and the rice was scorched, he slapped Janie until she had a ringing sound in her ears and told her about her brains before he stalked on back to the store. Janie stood where he left her for unmeasured time and thought. She stood there until something fell off the shelf inside her. Then she went inside there to see what it was. It was her image of Jody tumbled down and shattered. But looking at it she saw that it never was the flesh and blood figure of her dreams. Just something she had grabbed up to drape her dreams over. In a way she turned her back upon the image where it lay and looked further. She had no more blossomy openings dusting pollen over her man, neither any glistening young fruit where the petals used to be. She found that she had a host of thoughts she had never expressed to him, and numerous emotions she had never let Jody know about. Things packed up and put away in parts of her heart where he could never find them. She was saving up feelings for some man she had never seen. She had an inside and an outside now and suddenly she knew how not to mix them."

4) "She didn't read books so she didn't know that she was the world and the heavens boiled down to a drop. Man attempting to climb to painless heights from his dung hill. Then one day she sat and watched the shadow of herself going about tending store and prostrating itself before Jody, while all the time she herself sat under a shady tree with the wind blowing through her hair and her clothes. Somebody near about making summertime out of lonesomeness."

5) "She got up to stir around and see if she could find him, and found herself too worn out to do much. All she found out was that she was too old a vessel for new wine."

6) "All gods who receive homage are cruel. All gods dispense suffering without reason. Otherwise they would not be worshipped. Through indiscriminate suffering men know fear and fear is the most divine emotion. It is the stones for altars and the beginning of wisdom. Half gods are worshipped in wine and flowers. Real gods require blood."

7) "In a little wind-lull, Tea Cake touched Janie and said, 'Ah reckon you wish now you had of stayed in yo' big house 'way from such as dis, don't yuh?' 'Naw.' 'Naw?' 'Yeah, naw. People don't die till dey time come nohow, don't keer where you at. Ah'm wid mah husband in uh storm, dat's all.' 'Thanky, Ma'am. But 'sposing you wuz tuh die, now. You wouldn't git mad at me for draggin' yuh heah?' 'Naw. We been tuhgether round two years. If you kin see de light at daybreak, you don't keer if you die at dusk. It's so many people never seen de light at all. Ah wuz fumblin' round and God opened de door.' He dropped to the floor and put his head in her lap. 'Well then, Janie, you meant whut you didn't say, 'cause Ah never knowed you wuz so satisfied wid me lak dat. Ah kinda thought—' The wind came back with triple fury, and put out the light for the last time. They sat in company with the others in other shanties, their eyes straining against crude walls and their souls asking if He meant to measure their puny might against His. They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God."

8) "'Ah know all dem sitters-and-talkers gointuh worry they guts into fiddle strings till dey find out whut we been talkin' 'bout. Dat's all right, Pheoby, tell 'em. Dey gointuh make 'miration 'cause mah love didn't work lak they love, if dey ever had any. Then you must tell 'em dat love ain't somethin' lak uh grindstone dat's de same thing everywhere and do de same thing tuh everything it touch. Love is lak de sea. It's uh movin' thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from de shore it meets, and it's different with every shore.'"

1) "It is 1305 in Padua, Italy, and Giotto is showing his assistant where to spread today's fresh plaster on the chapel wall. He is going to paint on it while it is still damp using a technique called buon fresco, so his colours sink into the plaster to form a luminous wall painting. It is quite a challenge, knowing just how much plaster to apply. He has to paint the whole lot in one day or it will dry out and his colours will no longer be locked in but will sit on top. He knows what he is doing though - he has been painting frescoes in Enrico Scrovegni's private chapel for over two years now. The chapel will soon be complete, the walls covered in frescoes and the ceiling twinkling with gold stars against a dark blue heavenly sky."

2) "It is midnight on 14 May 1504 as a giant naked man begins to move through Florence's silent streets. The man is David, Michelangelo's most ambitious sculpture to date. It has taken him two years to carve and has taken the cathedral board almost as long to agree on where to locate it. Michelangelo signed a contract to make a colossal sculpture for the top of the cathedral's façade but ultimately the board decided to give it a more public home. It is now to be placed outside the Palazzo della Signoria, home to Florence's government."

3) "Claude's collectors were not Poussin's intellectuals but the aristocracy of Europe. In Claude's paintings, trees again frame the landscape and draw us in to the view. In Pastoral Landscape from 1647 the trees flank the river, which lures us further into the scene as we follow its path to the hazy mountains in the distance. People are present only to give scale and pinpoints of colour. In many of his scenes the sun is rising, casting a golden glow over every leaf and blade of grass. The rich morning light hovers over, under and in front of everything it touches. Landscape is not natural; it doesn't simply exist. Landscape is not the land itself but a carefully selected view that is sketched or painted to tell a particular story of man's relationship to the earth. For Poussin and Claude it is dotted with fictitious Roman temples and harks back to the dawn of classicism. For Dutch artists, by contrast, landscape reflected aspects of contemporary life. Windmills and churches rise from flat swathes of land; boats and ships set sail under heavy skies. The rise in Dutch landscape painting was fuelled by the interests of the middle-class collectors who bought them. They didn't live in private palaces or cathedral cloisters but out there, in the real world, where their ships bobbed at anchor and their windmills turned in the fields. They had fought hard for their land, battling rival nations and even the sea itself, by pumping low-lying lakes dry to create more land for farming."

4) "Shortly after this exhibition [Jacob Epstein] dismantled Rock Drill and amputated the figure at the waist. He removed one arm before casting it in bronze and later exhibited the mutilated torso without the drill. The First World War, which had started in 1914, stripped him of his enthusiasm for futuristic machinery. He wrote that the Rock Drill figure now represented the armed, sinister figure of today and tomorrow. No humanity, only the terrible Frankenstein's monster we have made ourselves into? The battle droids in Star Wars bear an uncanny resemblance to Epstein's original figure - inhuman robots each wielding an automatic weapon."

1) "J'ai loué un petit chalet avec ma fille pour quelques jours, loin de la ville. En fait, c'est elle qui l'a trouvé sur Internet. Une annulation de dernière minute."

2) "— J'ai pris une douche pis toute, ça fait du bien! C'est capoté, cette bécosse-là, mais ça marche bien pareil! C'est quoi, la toune que tu jouais? — Mazurka des planètes. — C'est beau, ça fitte avec ici, je trouve. — Oui, c'est très marin. — J'ai faim, je fais ma spécialité: grilled-cheese-cretons, t'en veux? — Pour sûr!"

3) "Quelques semaines après les obsèques, je suis allé chercher des trucs qu'il désirait nous laisser, à ma sœur et à moi. Ça tenait dans deux sacs IGA. Il ne nous a pas laissé d'argent, il n'en avait pas, ce qui n'était pas vraiment une surprise. Dans le premier sac, il y avait des enveloppes avec des photos de ma grand-tante, de ma grand-mère et de mon grand-père, des certificats de naissance, des passeports, des papiers d'immigration datant de leur arrivée au Canada dans les années 1930. Il y avait aussi tout un fatras de vieilles correspondances, des cartes postales écrites par des gens dont je n'avais jamais entendu parler, des médailles de guerre, des chaînettes, des breloques, quelques bijoux sans valeur, deux vieilles montres qui ne fonctionnaient plus, quelques décorations à chapeaux et des fleurs en corde que ma tante Janette fabriquait."

4) "Comment en suis-je arrivé là? Il y a des jours où je ne le sais plus vraiment. Avec le temps, c'est devenu flou. J'admets que je suis en grande partie responsable de mon naufrage, mais tout de même. Il y a cinq ans que le navire a sombré et que je flotte, encore accroché aux débris. Il faudrait tout de même avancer un peu, regarder vers l'avenir, tirer des plans, ce genre de chose. Le passé ne revient pas et l'avenir n'est pas encore là, seul le moment présent importe. Shit, je l'ai-tu entendue à toutes les sauces, celle-là. Aujourd'hui est le premier jour du reste de votre vie! Ben oui! Pis hier est le jour d'avant le premier jour du reste de votre vie et demain est le jour qui vient après le premier jour du reste de votre vie. Gimme a break, simonac! Bon, inutile de s'énerver, on parle pour parler. C'est pour ça qu'on fume sur un rocher en regardant le fleuve. C'est fait pour ça, le fleuve: regarder au loin en fumant la pipe comme un vieux pêcheur de morue brodé au point de croix."

5) "C'est des affaires ben simples. Les petites joies de la vie sont autour de nous, pas à Disneyland. Le bonheur, c'est pas spectaculaire."

1) "Art was born around 25,000 years ago, when the subhuman Neanderthal evolved into our human ancestor, Cro-Magnon man. With greater intelligence came imagination and the ability to create images in both painting and sculpture." [yeesh.]

2) "For Western civilization the nineteenth century was an age of upheaval. The church lost its grip, monarchies toppled, and new democracies suffered growing pains. In short, tradition lost its luster and the future was up for grabs. Unfamiliar forces like industrialization and urbanization made cities bulge with masses of dissatisfied poor. The fast pace of scientific progress and the ills of unrestrained capitalism caused more confusion."

3) "American midwestern architect Louis Sullivan's credo of 'form follows function' became the rallying cry of the day. The new designs were to express a building's commercial purpose, without any overlay of historical ornament. It was somehow fitting that the first new school of architecture to emerge in centuries was born in Chicago, 'Stormy, husky, brawling, /City of the Big Shoulders,' as poet Carl Sandburg would later call it. Chicago was a city without a past, a city of new immigrants that seemed to be making itself up as it went along."

1) "I have three great loves in life: Roberta, computers and boats. That said, this is not a book about any of those things, although the first two of those are important to the story."

2) "If you want to win in life, find something to sell, and sell it. Learn to accept and even cherish rejection. [...] The newspaper had never seen anyone like me. I was a selling machine. I loved selling, and I especially loved making money. I claimed every sales award and couldn't stop selling."

3) "Did I mention that I know how to sell? Being a starving seventeen-year-old, our first date was not particularly amazing. We went to a local Mexican restaurant and talked for hours. A couple weeks and a handful of dates later, I informed Roberta that we were to be married. She thought I was insane or joking, but that's only because she didn't know me. That was about to change. Her dad became my strongest ally, and saw in me a chance to rescue his errant daughter. He pushed Roberta from his end, and threw roadblocks in the way of other suitors. It took a few dates to sell Roberta on the idea of marriage but closing a sale is what I do best."

4) "We needed to form a real corporation for her to buy part of, transfer ownership of all the games into the corporation, and then sell her some stock. With the help of lawyers she referred us to, all of that was quickly accomplished. Unfortunately, during this process I discovered that there was already a large company that had our company name, 'On-Line Systems.' I was very proud of my background dealing with networks and knew, even at the time, that networking would someday be key to Sierra's future. I wanted to keep the 'on-line' part of the business name. Renaming the company did not require a lot of creativity. We were located near Yosemite National Park in the Sierra Nevada mountains, near the famous landmark Half Dome. So, overnight we became Sierra On-Line, with Half Dome as our logo."

5) "Instead of just doing a revved up version of Wizard and Princess, Roberta had started a new game, to be called King's Quest. IBM was giving us upfront money, as royalty advances, to help fund the development of the game. In hopes of bringing back some of the laid off employees, I flew to IBM and pitched them on additional games, and even a word processor! During that meeting I showed them the progress we were making on King's Quest and they were blown away."

6) "We overworked our developers, and this resulted in union organizing. This was a low point for morale around the company. I was personally devastated. From my perspective, I was doing whatever it took to provide jobs and grow the company. However, the employees felt the company was abusing them. In fact, both sides were correct."

7) "As Sierra would rise and fall over the years there would be employees who were laid off, or just didn't make the cut. DJ, our older son, was bullied in school by the children of former Sierra employees who had a grudge against Sierra. One parent, an ex-Sierra employee, even slugged DJ. Question: What adult slugs an elementary school kid? The answer, 'Someone with a grudge against their employer.' It was a company town, with all the good and bad that goes with it."

8) "One day toward the end of 1996, I received an email. In it, Gabe Newell said he had an early build of a game ready for presentation. Sierra had no interest in publishing games that we hadn't developed internally, but given the circumstances, I took the meeting. I figured that, in the worst case, I'd get the inside scoop on how they were able to obtain rights to the Quake engine. In November, Sierra and Valve had set a meeting, which ended up happening during a rare Washington snowstorm. I do not recall many details from the meeting itself, except that within half an hour of Valve's presentation of their game, called Half-Life, I made my pitch and offered to publish their game."

9) "Walter Forbes and his management team had lied to Sierra and were destroying the company we had spent seventeen years of our lives building. At that point, all Roberta and I wanted was to get away from CUC. I tried to put the best possible face on the disaster, but there was no denying that the merger was a total mess. That said, I remained convinced that Walter and his team were smart business people and that the software business would recover. Perhaps without the Davidsons and myself the company would shift to focusing on product and stop being sidetracked by anything to do with the former leaders. Roberta was even more upset than I was and insisted that we sell our stock along with my resignation. We talked about selling stock over a long period of time, but there had been a stock market crash in Asia and it rattled us. We decided to just blow out our CUC stock all at once. That decision would turn out to have been a very lucky one."

10) "This book is full of my opinions. I absolutely guarantee you that some of my opinions in this book are bad ideas. The problem is that I don't know which ones."

1) ["Somnium," Johannes Kepler] "In the year 1608, when quarrels were raging between the brothers, Emperor Rudolph and Archduke Matthias, people were comparing precedents from Bohemian history. Caught up by the general curiosity, I applied my mind to Bohemian legends and chanced upon the story of the heroine Libussa, famous for her magic art. It happened then on a certain night that after watching the stars and moon, I stretched out on my bed and fell sound asleep."

2) [Ibid.] "Brahe, greatly delighted with the letter I gave him, began to ask me many questions which I, unfamiliar with the language, did not understand except for a few words. He therefore imposed upon his students, whom he supported in great numbers, the task of talking with me frequently: so it came about, through this generosity of Brahe and a few weeks' practice, that I spoke Danish fairly well. I was no less ready to talk than they were to question and I told them many new things about my homeland in return for the marvels they related to me. Finally the captain of the ship that had brought me returned. But when he came to fetch me, he was sent away. And I was very happy."

3) [Ibid.] "Volva waxes and wanes no less than our moon, the cause being the same: the presence of the sun or its departure. Even the time is the same, if you look to nature; but they reckon in one way, we in another. They consider as a day and a night the time in which all the waxings and wanings of their Volva occur."

4) [Ibid.] "Those to whom breathing is more necessary introduce the hot water into the caves by means of a narrow canal, in order that, being taken into the innermost parts through a long course, the water may gradually become cool. They stay there for the greater part of the day, and use the water for drinking; and when evening approaches they go forth to seek food. In the case of plants, bark, in the case of animals, skin, or whatever may take its place, accounts for the major part of the corporeal mass, and it is spongy and porous; if anything is caught in the daylight, it becomes hard and burnt on top, and when evening approaches the outer covering comes off. Things growing from the soil, although on the mountain ridges there are few, are usually produced and destroyed on the same day, new growth springing up daily. A race of serpents predominates in general. It is wonderful how they expose themselves to the sun at midday as if for pleasure, but only just inside the mouths of caves, in order that there might be a safe and convenient retreat."

5) ["The First Men in the Moon," H. G. Wells] "'I suppose anyhow—on any planet, where there is an intelligent animal, it will carry its brain case upward, and have hands and walk erect...' Presently he broke away in another direction. 'We are some way in,' he said. "I mean—perhaps a couple of thousand feet or more.' 'Why?' 'It's cooler. And our voices are so much louder. That faded quality—it has altogether gone. And the feeling in one's ears and throat.' I had not noted that, but I did now. 'The air is denser. We must be some depth—a mile even we may be—inside the moon.' 'We never thought of a world inside the moon.'"

6) ["Journey to the Moon," Cyrano de Bergerac] "'Oho,' they said, taking me by the arm, 'so you want to play the clown. My Lord the Governor will know you all right!' They led me towards their troop, where I learned that I was indeed in France—in New France. Some little time later I was presented to the Viceroy, who asked me my country, my name, and my quality. I satisfied him by relating the happy outcome of my voyage and, whether he believed it or only pretended to do so, he had the goodness to arrange for me to be given a room in his house. My joy was great at meeting a man capable of lofty reasoning, who was not at all surprised when I told him that the earth must have revolved during the course of my levitation, since I had begun my ascent two leagues away from Paris and had come down almost perpendicularly in Canada."

7) [Ibid.] "After fortifying my courage with a bottle of a cordial essence, I returned to look for my machine. I did not find it, however, for some soldiers, who had been sent into the forest to cut wood to build a fire for the feast of St. John, had chanced upon it and brought it to the Fort, where several explanations of what it could be were advanced. When the device of the spring was discovered, some said a quantity of rockets should be attached to it, so that when their speed had lifted them high enough and the motor was agitating its great wings, no one could fail to take the machine for a fire dragon. Meanwhile I spent a long time searching for it, but at last I found it in the middle of the square in Quebec just as they were setting fire to it. My dismay at discovering my handiwork in such danger so excited me that I ran to seize the arm of the soldier who was setting light to it. I snatched the fuse from him and threw myself furiously into my machine to destroy the contrivance with which it had been surrounded, but I arrived too late, for I had hardly set my two feet inside it when I was borne up into the blue."

8) ["The True History," Lucian] "The storm went on for seventy-nine days, but on the eightieth the sun suddenly shone through and revealed an island not far off. It was hilly and covered with trees, and now that the worst of the storm was over, the roar of the waves breaking against the shore had died down to a soft murmur. So we landed and threw ourselves down, utterly exhausted, on the sand. After all we had been through, you can imagine how long we lay there; but eventually we got up, and leaving thirty men to guard the ship, I and the other twenty went off to explore the island. We started walking inland through the woods, and when we had gone about six hundred yards we came across a bronze tablet with a Greek inscription on it. The letters were almost worn away, but we just managed to make out the words: 'Hercules and Dionysus got this far.' We also spotted a couple of footprints on a rock nearby, one about a hundred feet long, and the other, I should say, about ninety-nine. Presumably Hercules has somewhat larger feet than Dionysus."

9) [Ibid.] "The infantry numbered approximately sixty million, and special steps had to be taken before they could be suitably deployed. There are, you must understand, large numbers of spiders on the Moon, each considerably larger than the average island in the Archipelago, and their services were requisitioned to construct a continuous cobweb between the Moon and Lucifer. As soon as the job had been done and the infantry had thus been placed on a firm footing, Nycterion, the third son of Eudianax, led them out on to the field of battle."

10) [Ibid.] "Well, that is what it was like on the Moon. If you do not believe me, go and see for yourself."

1) [Introduction] "...an anthology that holds space for writers who are compulsive gamers, former gamers, parents of gamers, and game writers. Reluctant gamers and avid gamers and people who wouldn't call themselves gamers at all. This book—the first of its kind, as far as I and my coeditor can tell—has more room inside it than you'd expect. What a pleasure and a gift to be at its helm." [A bold claim!!]

2) ["This Kind of Animal," Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah] "You look at your sisters weeping, your mother dry-eyed. Empathy: 'You couldn't have been different. You are all you knew.' Suggestion: 'You could have been anything. There's so many ways to be.' Logic: 'What you are is what you are.' Inland Empire: 'Everything is nothing and nothing is everything.' To his body, as a way to speak to him, you say, 'I love you and I wish you were here.' Inland Empire: 'I love you and where I am now, love is all that's left.'

3) [Ibid.] "I'm not here to tell you to play the game. I'm here to say that Disco Elysium is a magnificent literary experience. Literary is a slippery and sometimes problematic word, but in this context I mean: via the precise use of language, it changes the reader. It makes you grow, gives you a new way of looking at the world, which is a mirror of all of us together, and it asks you really, truly, honestly, Who are you? Who are your dead? And gives you the space to try to answer."

4) ["Staying with the Trouble," Octavia Bright] "We know the world that made the story of Leisure Suit Larry all too well, but how do we stay with the trouble it presents? By not letting it slip into the soothing fog of nostalgia, or under cover of the so-called harmless joke? By facing the fact that the trouble at the heart of the story it tells, and the world that story then goes on to make, is that masculinity is something a person can win or lose at? If, as Haraway argues, 'it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts,' then it also matters what games game games."

5) ["The Cocoon," Ander Monson] "I remember the sudden jump scares, too, as you came out of an airlock or around a corner and anything could be there. It was cheap but effective: more visceral than you'd think, considering this was 1994. Video was ascendant, not games, which of course still came on cartridges. My friends and I consumed a ton of both, often in whoever's apartment had the system we wanted to use. It was walking distance to downtown, I think. Someone or someone's brother worked at Very Video in Hancock, across the bridge, and was allowed to bring home for the weekend whatever systems they hadn't rented, one of which was this new one: the Atari Jaguar."

6) [Ibid.] "Playing as a human becomes a game of collection. Shotgun rounds collected. Food collected. Medkit collected. Pulse Rifle rounds collected. Security card #03 collected. Collecting is central to many of my passions: I collect for pleasure. But here you collect to survive. The Aliens collect for reproduction only. The Predator collects too. It keeps skulls as trophies. It seems to be having the most fun, which is probably why it's most fun to play as it. After all, it doesn't have to be here. This isn't about survival. It's about sport. What is fun is the Alien area, with its labial doorways, its green-and-black palette, its gooey strands of whatever, its weird reptilian wall textures. For an early game, the design is well done. It's weird enough to convey the alienness. The Predator area is similarly distinctive, if a little less so on account of there being less Predator decor on offer to work with from the movies. Its yellow-and-brown tie-dye-looking textures gives the impression of being inside some kind of psychedelic animal ship or a college dorm room circa 1995."

7) ["Ninjas and Foxes," Alexander Chee] "The draw to play is still there. I see games now that interest me, like Ghost of Tsushima, but I'm almost an old man now, and I'm getting along fine without them. More importantly, I feel like the main character in my life now. I don't need the game to offer me the cheap alternative. As I think about what I've learned about the impulse to play in a world that is like the world I want but not that world, I ask myself: Why would I want to be a samurai, or a ninja, or a martial arts legend, in America now? And on whose terms? Is there something about being in this country that makes me long for that? My late father actually was a martial artist, and I think of the amused disgust he would feel at seeing me play this game from the afterlife, though it is maybe even the case that playing these games was and is a way of missing him. It may also be there is still something I need to figure out this way, and in the end, that is how I will think of it: each game just another mask to wear in search of the truth, whatever that truth might be. One truth might be this: it may be that now I could play a game like that just for the fun of it. At last."

8) ["No Traces," Stephen Sexton] "The work of poetry, which often stretches into the early hours, is play. When it's going well, I feel outside myself, strange to myself, outside the usual flow of time. I don't know how to get there, but for the briefest time, I sense that circuit—subject and object, writer and reader, player and icon—complete itself through me. It's like catching your reflection in the glass of your front door as you reach for the handle, either leaving or coming home—you can't, for the moment, tell which."

9) ["We're More Ghosts Than People," Hanif Abdurraqib] "The building where I worked as a debt collector in the 2000s looked like it could have been a portal to anywhere. Like anything could have been inside of it. This is how all the debt collection buildings looked in Columbus, Ohio. Large, gray, nondescript slabs. Brick sometimes, if you were lucky. All of them on the outskirts of the city, nudging up against a suburb's borders but never in the suburb. Places where good people went to do bad work because they had to survive. I needed a job. I had, by that point, accumulated a small criminal record, with a larger one to come. I had to find a place where I could build some form of legitimacy, and no one else would hire me. Debt collection companies would take anyone. There was a boom in the industry. This was right after the early-2000s recession but before the more robust late-2000s recession. Broadly, this meant that there were more people in dire straits than there had been before. Misery as a gateway to opportunity; you might even call it the American Dream."