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“This will hurt,” she said. “But then, in my opinion, almost everything real does.”
“That’s a very gloomy philosophy,” he said, for something to say. “True, though, don’t you find? Love hurts. Loss hurts. Failure hurts. Success hurts. Responsibility hurts.” “… Music doesn’t hurt.” “Doesn’t it? When you take it seriously?” Barrow thought about it. Effort, yes; heartbreak, sometimes; frustration, often; the dive back to the ground again, inevitably, after any spell in which you managed to fly. And the woe the blues was made on. But then that was changed by being uttered.
“So,” he said, “Thrown-Away Boy is the bad guy, right? The bad one of the twosome.” “Uh-uh. Bad versus good is for takata stories, not ours. They aren’t Cain and Abel. Thrown-Away is more like… wild to Lodge Boy’s tame, and both of those qualities usually turn out to be useful in the stories about them.”
Levi-Strauss
“Ah, it is Californian,” said a takata in his forties, gray-tweed-dressed and bearded. “I thought it had a familiar taste.” “This is Professor Kroeber of Berkeley, who’s lecturing tonight,” said Couma.
“I am not sorry,” he began, “to have spent twenty years among the native peoples of California before coming to Cahokia. In those tribes is still discernible the pattern—the very recent pattern—of their lives before contact with the white man. Whereas there is little in Cahokia that has not been molded and blended by the long contact, first with Catholic Europe, then with the myriad of displaced peoples forced west by the expansion of the United States and forming so much, in the end, of the human material for this Mississippian fusion.
When we look at Anopa with the philologist’s eye, for example, we see proof of its origin as an interlingual jargon for the riverlands in the mixed sources for its vocabulary. Muskogean, Creek, Chickasaw, Cherokee, yes; a certain contribution from the Siouan and Algonkian groups, yes; but no words from Nahuatl at all.
“Well,” he said cautiously, “I think someone is… trying to take the city away from the takouma. By, you know, whipping up a crisis over the Land Trust murder.” “Well, thank heavens for that,” said the Man. “If you hadn’t got that far, this would be a very difficult conversation.—Yes, detective. Yes, absolutely. What is being attempted here is a repetition of the strategy that worked in Texas and in California, last century, and in Hawaii only twenty or so years ago. Make trouble; demand outside intervention to restore order; when you get it, make sure that the order that is restored
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But he said this last sentence with such harshness that for a moment it made the limousine, the city, the whole takouma inheritance here, seem uncertain. Mere wisps, thinner than fog. As if one strong wind could blow it all away in favor of another vista, in which a remnant of the takouma, poor and desperate, camped out in the last worst scraps of the continent.
The world turns, but it is not a clockwork mechanism, detective. It is a circular dance, from birth to death to resurrection, through arches of flowers, and arches of bread, and arches of skulls. We dance the turning world, and it dances us.”
Phenylisopropylamine.
Amphetamine
After a while the cold of the stone reminded him of the existence of his fingers. Spread out on the granite. Big. More than octaves-wide. If he could make music—silent music—on zinc counters, table edges, the wheel of an automobile, he could play a stone wall too, without bothering anyone. There was another French piece he knew, meant for a dead princess not for a live princess mourning, but it seemed close enough to be right. It was full of grief but intricate, composed, shape-making.
“phenylisopropylamine”
Can also be a hallucinogen, e.g. DOM
Lazar Edeleanu
Synthed meth also a method of cracking oil
“Which is why, according to takouma wisdom, backed up by the teaching of the Church on the subject of just war, it is not safe to let the men decide whether to fight. That decision belongs to the Red Council, not the White. To the Moon, not the Sun. To the women, Mr. Barrow. To the ones who will lose brothers, husbands, sons, fathers, lovers. They have the proper caution.”
“Symbols have power. Yeah, I got that.” “Sorry, am I starting to lecture? A deformity of the profession, I’m afraid.” “No, no. It’s just it seems like half the people I’ve spoken to this week want to tell me that same thing.” “That’s what you get for living where the mythic order of things is alive and well. You want less magic, you should move to Indianapolis.”
“The bullets don’t care how brave you are,” he bawled in her ear. “They shot my Matisse!” she said. “So buy another one.”
Trench broom, yeah. Sweeps everything away. Thank you, Colonel John T. Thompson, and the Auto-Ordnance Corporation.
“I am not an ‘Indian,’ ” he said. “That is a name for a navigation error.
“We have to win every time. They only have to win once.”
“You sewed me up. You fixed me. But I ain’t been whole since.”
The language of the city, Anopa, is a slightly altered version of the real Mobilian Trade Jargon. In our history, this was a lingua franca used up and down the Mississippi and across the wider southeast of the continent to allow speakers of the Muskogean family of languages, like Chickasaw and Choctaw and Creek, to talk to their neighboring peoples, and then later to French and Spanish and English speakers. The last people to be familiar with it were elderly Native Americans in Louisiana in the 1980s. In the timeline of Cahokia Jazz however it evolved and expanded as pidgins do, to become
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He adopted her two sons, and with her had two more children, equally loved. His daughter Ursula Kroeber Le Guin, born in 1929, became a great American writer and creator of worlds. This book is dedicated to her memory. She wouldn’t necessarily approve of the foundation on which this particular ambiguous utopia stands. “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” suggests not. But I remember Estraven explaining to Genly Ai in The Left Hand of Darkness why the keystones of Erhenrang are always set in a red cement: “Without the blood bond, the arch would fall, you see.”
