“words”

That’s your run-of-the-mill —even white-bread (blue liquid… how intriguing)— kind of paragraph, ne? I thought so too but then there was that word,

and it casts the whole scene into a wholly different light, doesn’t it? It wasn’t evident at first but that’s not the omniscient narrator speaking—it’s our lovingly perverted BDSM geek protagonist, Manny, painting the world with his colors.

And that’s what I mean when I say Accelerando is dense: it is chock-full of such all-important words. Since they are generally very technical or speculative, and since Stross has the habit of studding them like raisins into any given sentence, you’ll be tempted to just skip over them. Don’t.

The subject of the U.S.-Mexico migration (the biggest in the world, one hears) is everywhere right now. But unfortunately, almost all one always hears is pessimism, fear, nationalism, and prejudice. Most people don’t realize there’s something new and wonderful emerging. It’s a shame one doesn’t hear more often from Richard Rodriguez, a profoundly polemical Mexican-American writer. In his books, his essays, and his interviews he reinvents the concept of being Mexican. He lies about it, of course (he is the first to acknowledge it), but his is a fiction that describes me, his is a fiction I want to believe in.

You’ll have to excuse me but I’ve never felt as a victim of the US, I am American! I’ve been devouring the US all my life! But then again, that’s just weird old me—always suffering from multiple-nationality-disorder, from dislocation (I’m of the web! How could it be otherwise? “My kingdom is not of this world”); perpetually naive, perpetually “falling in love with cultures not my own”, perpetually imbued with the “arrogance” that “the individual is in control of the culture.”

I’ve compiled here a long list of quotations from several of Rodriguez’s interviews and articles. I tried to stick with the topic of migration but I did a lousy job at that, this man is too interesting.