some quotes from Galatea_2.2, by Richard Powers. Our life was a chest of maps, self-assembling, fused into point-for-point feedback, each slice continuously rewriting itself to match the other layers' rewrites. In that thicket, the soul existed; it was that search for attractors where the system might settle. The immaterial in mortal garb, associative memory metaphoring its own bewilderirment. Sound made syllable. The rest mass of God. -- Helen knew all that, saw through it. What hung her up was divinity doing itself in with tire irons. She'd had the bit about the soul fastened to a dying animal. What she needed, in order to forgive our race and live here in peace, was faith's flip side. She needed to hear about the animal fastened to a soul that, for the first time, allowed the creature to see through soul's parasite eyes how terrified it was, how forsaken. I needed to tell her that miraculous banality, how body stumbled by selection onto the stricken celestial, how it taught itself to twig time and what lay beyond time. -- "I hate to be the one to break this to you. Your version of literary reality is a decade out of date." "What, they've issued a Hopkins upgrade since my day?" A. snorted. "They should." "Don't tell me you didn't have to read him." "Nobody has to read anyone anymore. There's more to the canon than is dreamt of in your philosophy, bub. These days, you find the people you want to study from each period. You work up some questions in advance. Get them approved. Then you write answers on your reparation." "Wait. You what? There's no List? The Comps are no longer comprehensive?" "A lot more comprehensive than your white-guy, Good Housekeeping thing." "You mean to tell me that you can get a Ph.D. in literature without ever having read the great works?" A. bent her body in a combative arc. Even her exasperation turned beautiful. "My God, I'm dealing with a complete throwback. You're not even reactionary! Whose definition of great? Hopkins ain't gonna cut it anymore. You're buying into the exact aestheticism that privilege and power want to sell you." "Wait a minute. Weren't you the woman who was just teaching me how to play pinball?" A. did her thai dancer imitation. She blushed. "Yeah that was me. You got a problem with that?" "All of a sudden you want to set fire to the library." "Don't put words in my mouth. I'm not trying to burn any books. I'm just saying that books are what we make of them. And not the other way around." I took the list back from her. "I don't know much about books. But I know what I like." "Oh, come on! Play fair. You make it sound as if everything anyone has ever written is recycled Bible and Shakespeare." "Isn't it?" She hissed and crossed her fingers into a vampire-warding crucifix. "When were you educated, anyway? I bet you still think New Criticism is, like, heavy-duty. Cutting-edge." "Excuse me for not trend-surfing. If I fall far enough behind I can catch the next wave." "Those who reject new theory are in the grip of an older theory. Don't you know that all this stuff" -- she slapped my six pages of titles -- "is a culturally constructed, belated view of belle lettres? You can't get any more insular than this." "Well, it is English-language culture that we wanted to teach her." "Whose English? Some eighty-year-old Oxbridge pererast's? The most exciting English being written today is African, Caribbean --" "We have to give her the historical take if she --" "The winner's history, of course. What made you such a coward? What are you so scared of? Difference is not going to kill you. Maybe it's time your little girl had her consciousness raised. An explosion of young-adulthood." "I'm all for that. I just think you can get to the common core of humanity from anywhere." "Humanity? Common core? You'd be run out of the field on a rail for essentializing. And you wonder why the posthumanists reduced your types to an author function." "That's Mr. Author Functions to you, missy." A. smiled. Such a smile might make even posthumanism survivable. I loved her. She knew it. And she would avoid the issue as long as she could. Forever. "So, Mr. Author Function. What do you think this human commonality is based on?" "Uh, biology?" I let myself sound snide. "Oh, now it's scientism. What's your agenda? Why would you want to privilege that kind of hubris?" "I'm not privileging anything. I'm talking about simple observation." "You think observation doesn't have an ideological component? Stone Age. Absolutely Neolithic." "So I come from a primitive culture. Enlighten me." She took me seriously. "Foundationism is bankrupt," she said. Her zeal broke my heart. She was a born teacher. If anyone merited staying in the profession, it was this student for whom themes were still real. "Why science? You could base your finalizing system on anything. The fact is --" "The what?" A. smirked. "The fact is, what we make of things depends on the means of their formulation. In other words, language. And the language we speak varies without limit across cultures." I knew the social science model, knew linguistic determinism. I could recite the axioms in my sleep. I also knew them to be insufficient, a false split. And yet, they never sounded so good to me as they did coming from A.'s mouth. She convinced me at blood-sugar level, deep down, below words. In the layer of body's idea. [It wasn't til i finished the novel that i realized the irony of the bookmark i'd been using: "100 best novels of the 20th century"]