"The Lawrence Browne Affair", ("Consider Phlebas") +

[fiefoe]

Cat Sebastian's regency matches up an eccentric inventor and a soft-hearted swindler.

• Turner flicked him a cool glance. “Sorting through your correspondence, my lord. Were those bedclothes especially unsatisfactory?”
  Lawrence looked down at the quilt and scissors he still held. “Electrolyte,” he muttered, not intending to deliver a lecture about voltaic piles or anything else. “You’d better not have lost or ruined anything.”
• Even the most mazelike places had a certain logic to them. Georgie, born and bred on the labyrinthine streets of London’s rookeries, could often intuit how a new place was laid out. When he found himself in a new town, at a new house, among a new set of people, he knew how to detect the various currents that led towards money, towards pleasure, towards power.
  That was what Georgie did: he slid into places he didn’t belong. Nobody realized what had happened until the damage was done, like a stiletto in the heart.
• “Damned if I know. I’m not a housekeeper. Perhaps they were lazy. Perhaps they liked rotten paper. Perhaps you ought to get out of here before I lose my patience entirely.” Lawrence narrowed his eyes, a terrible idea occurring to him. “Unless you plan to share my bed. Perhaps all this fuss about a couple of moldy books was only a pretense for you to gain entry to my bedchamber.” Now, that ought to get rid of the man.
• “And a lot of tubing to protect it. Perhaps if it were only one wire,” Radnor murmured. “But I can’t see what use a single signal would be.”
  Georgie was about to open his mouth to agree but then remembered tapping a warning onto a closed door, the night watchman peering through the window of a warehouse Georgie’s friends were burgling. Before he even knew his letters, he had learned the taps and scratches that boys used to communicate with one another during robberies. Georgie was slight and dark and very quick, the perfect lookout. Three taps on the window pane meant the watchman was coming, hold still.
• “Here’s how I see it, my lord.” Turner’s voice was cool and unconcerned. “You’re not quite cut from the same cloth as most people. But you’re hardly mad or dangerous.”
• “But that didn’t happen here. There’s such a quantity of dust and cobwebs around the house that one would see straightaway if anything had been removed, and it’s quite clear that nothing has been disturbed.”
  “What on earth does that have to do with anything?”
  “If you’re such a dangerous monster, such a trial to serve, then why wouldn’t a servant help himself to a bit of silver? In the name of justice, naturally.”
• “I’m afraid so.” Georgie felt that he was quite justified in his smugness. He had not only organized the study, but he had become sufficiently familiar with the earl’s work to offer assistance. This was no mean feat for a man whose only formal education had been sporadic at best, and he found that he wanted to be acknowledged for his work. That was new. Usually Georgie’s efforts were, of necessity, invisible. Now he wanted Radnor to know just how good Georgie was. He wanted Radnor to admire him.
• Lawrence placed the candle on an empty table and took a step closer still. Turner looked very young and unsophisticated while he slept, his beauty unrelieved by the sharp edges of urbanity and archness.
• He took his time cutting a nib, refilling the inkwell, and arranging the paper so it was precisely aligned with the edges of the blotter. This was not a letter he wished to write, but after a lifetime of disappearing like so much smoke, he found that he couldn’t leave Radnor without a word.
  But there were no words to convey what he felt, likely because he didn’t want to put a name to it. Any word he could come up with felt like stolen property, something that rightly belonged to a decent person, not Georgie Turner.
• “I like snow.” He said it with the emphasis on the last word, as he had said “I like cakes” and “I like the sea” the day before. As if he were reminding himself of the things he liked, that there were things he liked, in the face of an otherwise unpleasant world.
• “Mrs. Ferris,” he said suddenly, “is this Cousin Davy in fact David Prouse?” Oh, what a fool he had been. He had been so busy thinking of these people as superstitious peasants that he hadn’t given them any credit for proper criminality.
• “I was friends with poor Lady Radnor.”
  Simon’s mother? Lawrence’s mother? The Mad Earl’s beleaguered wife?
  Medlock plonked his cup into the saucer with a clatter. “The heavens positively overflow with poor Lady Radnors,” he said, echoing Georgie’s thoughts. “She means the most recent one. The current earl’s sister-in-law.”
• “Oh, goodness no.” She actually laughed, a ladylike trill that had no place in this conversation. “I needed money too. Quite badly, in fact.”
  “Do strive for some conduct, Eleanor,” Medlock said wearily. “Not all your private matters need to be aired this morning. Save some for supper.”
• Tired and disoriented from the long, uncomfortable journey from Cornwall, he somehow hadn’t expected it to be winter in London. He had missed all the good parts of autumn while he was at Penkellis, alphabetizing papers and falling in love.
  Georgie had always been careful not to let people at any shop or tavern get too used to the sight of him. Impermanence was almost as good as invisibility.
• “But so help me, Georgie, figure out a way to live your life so you’re not always saying good-bye.” She swept silently out of the room.
  Sarah was right, of course. It had always taken him so much effort to convince himself that he didn’t care for his marks, that his interest and liking for them were only part of the act. In the end he fooled himself better than he ever tricked one of his marks. He had stolen their money, but without even realizing it he had swindled himself out of a life, out of friends and purpose and meaning.

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("Consider Phlebas" / Iain M. Banks)

It's almost a relief to give up this book, since that means I haven't been missing much in all these years. It's amazing how quickly I became apathetic towards the protagnist, who has no discernible personality except for a hack to get into eye-popping dire straits. The book certainly doesn't lack ideas (the high stakes Damage game, the cannibalistic cult, all those lovingly described BDOs), but the plot is at best meandering, and the disastrous adventures by the CAT crew seem pointless.

• It would take a few days for the aged appearance he had assumed to disappear, though already he could feel it starting to slip away from him.  In a Changer's mind there was a self-image constantly held and reviewed on a semi-subconscious level, keeping the body in the appearance willed.
• The Idirans themselves had evolved on their planet Idir as the top monster from a whole planetful of monsters.  The frenetic and savage ecology of Idir in its early days had long since disappeared, and so had all the other homeworld monsters except those in zoos.  But the Idirans had retained the intelligence that made them winners, as well as the biological immortality which, due to the viciousness of the fight for survival back then—not to mention Idir's high radiation levels—had been an evolutionary advantage rather than a recipe for stagnation.
• 'A memoryform.  Wouldn't have turned into a plasma gun, by any chance, would it?'
  'Amongst other things.' The Culture agent nodded.
  'Thought so.  Heard your knife missile took the expansive way out.'
• 'This Mind went underneath the planet in hyperspace?' she said.  'Then warped inside?'
  'That was what it said it was trying to do when it sent the coded message in its destruct pattern.  As the planet is still there it must have succeeded.  Had it failed, at least half a per cent of its mass would have reacted with the planet's own material as though it was antimatter.'
• 'So was the Mind in question, but it was desperate.  The General War Council itself decided that we should try to duplicate the feat, using a similar Mind and a spare planet.'
  'What happened?' Fal asked, grinning at the idea of a 'spare' planet.
• Now it was obvious why the Dra'Azon had made Schar's World one of their Planets of the Dead.  If you were a pure-energy superspecies long retired from the normal, matter-based life of the galaxy, and your conceit was to cordon off and preserve the odd planet or two you thought might serve as a fitting monument to death and futility, Schar's World with its short and sordid history sounded like the sort of place you'd put pretty near the top of your list.
• Horza was pleased; copying somebody's retina pattern was a delicate and tricky operation, requiring, amongst a lot of other things, the careful growth of lasing cells around the iris.  It almost made more sense to go for a total genetic transcription, where the subject's own DNA became the model for a virus which left only the Changer's brain—and, optionally, gonads—unaltered.

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("Hearing Homer's Song" / Robert Kanigel)
The egg tastes pretty good but why do I need to know about the short-lived hen in such detail?

• At age twenty-six, this young man from California stepped into the world of Continental philologists and overturned some of their most deeply cherished notions of ancient literature. Homer, Parry showed, was no “writer” at all. The Iliad and the Odyssey were not “written,” but had been composed orally, drawing on traditional ways that went back centuries.
• In the end, Parry all but proved that for each hero, god, or goddess, in each grammatical case, in each position in the hexametric line, there was normally only a single epithet that went with it. Achilles, in the genitive case, between the penthemimeral caesura and the end of the verse? That would be peleiadeo Achileos—“of Achilles, son of Peleus”—and nothing else.
• appeared with them not when the story decreed but when they were needed to make the poem sound like a poem and not an unmelodic heap of words. Forget about the literary artist grasping for le mot juste; imagine, instead, the traditional bardic world’s common currency of sound and meaning laid at a poet’s feet, the formulaic epithets used as needed to move the great poem along.
• “The fixed epithet is ornamental because it is traditional,” wrote Parry. Being “traditional” meant that it was embedded in the lives of the people who heard it, for whom it was forever linked to the people, gods, objects, or places of which it was part. “An epithet is not ornamental in itself,” wrote Parry, but only by being used again and again with a hero, god, or place it becomes so. In so doing, it bestows “an element of nobility and grandeur.”
• “It could fairly be said,” Adam Parry wrote of his father’s work, “that each of the specific tenets which make up Parry’s view of Homer had been held by some former scholar”; to Düntzer and his 1862 essay, On the Interpretation of Fixed Epithets in Homer, Milman Parry owed perhaps his most substantial debt, one he freely acknowledged. The connection Düntzer forged between the epithet and its metrical value, he wrote, was “undoubtedly the most important step since Aristarchus”—Aristarchus of Samothrace, second century BCE—“towards the understanding of the fixed epithet in Homer.”
• To change the figure, it seems to me that days not planned from the outside are something like tents with no poles; they flap down all over you. I keep putting up poles, such as the [illegible] for Wux’s bath, tea, and the firm resolve to make the beds before breakfast. But there is always a sag. Marian seemed unable to arrange her life to give satisfaction and pleasure.

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("Black Leopard, Red Wolf" / Marlon James)

__ Truth eats lies just as the crocodile eats the moon, and yet my witness is the same today as it will be tomorrow.
__ A dead thing never lies, cheats, or betrays, and what was a family but a place where all three bloom like moss.