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Kraken by China Mieville

(some reading notes)

It would hang, an absurdly massive tentacled sepia event. Architeuthis dux. The giant squid. 

<span>12 March 2012</span>

&middot; <span class=“location”>at 3%</span>

It was a Linnaean décor; species clined into each other. 

<span>18 September 2013</span>

&middot; <span class=“location”>at 3%</span>

the edges of deep, the fringe of the dysphotic zone

“First-ever observations of a live giant squid in the wild” the paper was called, as if ten-year-olds had taken control of the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. First ever. 

<span>18 September 2013</span>

&middot; <span class=“location”>at 7%</span>

<span class=“time”>07:53 &middot; 07 October 2013</span>

The FSRC is the Fundamentalist and Sect-Related Crime Unit. 

<span>19 September 2013</span>

&middot; <span class=“location”>at 9%</span>

It’s not so much ‘plausible denial’—that’s not the best strategy these days. It’s more ‘plausibly uninteresting.’ 

<span>19 September 2013</span>

&middot; <span class=“location”>at 9%</span>

That reconstitutive intelligence, berserker meme-splicing, seeing in nothings first patterns, then correspondence, then causality and dissident sense. 

<span>19 September 2013</span>

&middot; <span class=“location”>at 11%</span>

We live,” he said, too flatly for any humour to be audible, “in the epoch of competing ends.” 

<span>19 September 2013</span>

&middot; <span class=“location”>at 12%</span>

And in this world where you now are, everything represents something. Get it? It’s really important you get that. Everything represents something. 

<span>19 September 2013</span>

&middot; <span class=“location”>at 13%</span>

“It’s the ends of the world.” “End of the world?” “Ends.” 

<span>20 September 2013</span>

&middot; <span class=“location”>at 18%</span>

BUILDINGS SELF-AGGREGATED OUT OF ANGLES AND shade 

<span>20 September 2013</span>

&middot; <span class=“location”>at 18%</span>

INTO SLEEP’S BENTHOS AND DEEPER. A SLANDER THAT THE DEEPEST parts are lightless. There are moments of phosphor with animal movement. Somatic glimmers, and in this trench of sleep those lights were tiny dreams. 

<span>20 September 2013</span>

&middot; <span class=“location”>at 18%</span>

What you’re trying to do with planurgy is get things into other spaces, you know? Real things, with edges and surfaces, and all that. With origami you’re still dealing with all that surface area. There’s no cutting, you know? The point is you can unfold it, too. 

<span>21 September 2013</span>

&middot; <span class=“location”>at 19%</span>

Constable. Pre-Steenstrup, so it’s what we call the atramentous epoch. Before we emerged from the ink-cloud. 

<span>21 September 2013</span>

&middot; <span class=“location”>at 21%</span>

Architeuthis is kraken-spawn. Gods are oviparous. Not just our gods, all gods. God-spawn’s everywhere if you know where to look. 

<span>21 September 2013</span>

&middot; <span class=“location”>at 21%</span>

Architeuthis, Mesonychoteuthis, unknowns. After all those years of silence. They’re rising. 

<span>21 September 2013</span>

&middot; <span class=“location”>at 21%</span>

London was full of dissident gods. Why? Well they have to live somewhere. A city living in its own afterlife. Why not? 

<span>21 September 2013</span>

&middot; <span class=“location”>at 22%</span>

Theurgic vermin, those once worshipped or still worshipped in secret, those half worshipped, those feared and resented, petty divinities: they infect everybloody-where. The ecosystems of godhead are fecund, because there’s nothing and nowhere that can’t generate the awe on which they graze. 

<span>21 September 2013</span>

&middot; <span class=“location”>at 22%</span>

“You have to persuade the universe that things make sense a certain way. That’s what knacking is.” 

<span>21 September 2013</span>

&middot; <span class=“location”>at 22%</span>

unfamiliarly verbed 

<span>21 September 2013</span>

&middot; <span class=“location”>at 22%</span>

A Tibetan Book of the Dead by the Bhagavad Gita, by two or three Qur’ans, testaments old and new, arcana and Aztec theonomicons. Krakenlore. Cephalopod folklore; biology; humour; art and oceanography; cheap paperbacks and antiquarian rarities. Moby-Dick, shapes etched onto its cover. Verne’s 20,000 Leagues. 

<span>21 September 2013</span>

&middot; <span class=“location”>at 24%</span>

He read the names Dickins and Jelliss, Alice Chess. A spread about mutant versions of the game with arcane rules, bishops and pawns given strange powers, transmogrified pieces called saurians, torals and anti-kings, and one called a kraken. The “universal leaper” was usually thought the most powerful piece, he read, as it could go from where it was to any other square on the board. But it was not. Kraken was. Kraken = universal leaper + zero, he read, = universal sleeper. It could move to any square including the one it was already on. Anywhere including nowhere.  

<span>22 September 2013</span>

&middot; <span class=“location”>at 24%</span>

You can’t see the future, there’s no such thing. It’s all bets. You’ll never get the same answer from two seers. But that doesn’t mean either of them’s wrong. 

<span>22 September 2013</span>

&middot; <span class=“location”>at 24%</span>

But it’s all degrees of might. You want your prognosticators to argue. 

<span>22 September 2013</span>

&middot; <span class=“location”>at 24%</span>

ANY MOMENT CALLED NOW IS ALWAYS FULL OF POSSIBLES. 

<span>22 September 2013</span>

&middot; <span class=“location”>at 25%</span>

A flattening of the dark, coming up out of dark. Beggaring perspective. 

<span>22 September 2013</span>

&middot; <span class=“location”>at 26%</span>

Fortune-telling was quantum betting, a competitive scrying of variably likely outcomes. That variation, the disagreements, indispensable to the calculation. Triangulating possibilities. 

<span>22 September 2013</span>

&middot; <span class=“location”>at 26%</span>

Entomonomicon 

<span>23 September 2013</span>

&middot; <span class=“location”>at 34%</span>

“Oh no, there’s certainly something to it. The difficult thing is working out exactly what.” 

<span>23 September 2013</span>

&middot; <span class=“location”>at 35%</span>

The mnemophylax is the angel of memory. There’s one in all the memory palaces. 

<span>24 September 2013</span>

&middot; <span class=“location”>at 39%</span>

They were not beings, precisely, not from where most Londoners stood, but derived functions that thought themselves beings. 

<span>24 September 2013</span>

&middot; <span class=“location”>at 39%</span>

The Londonmancers had been there since Gogmagog and Corineus, since Mithras and the rest. 

<span>24 September 2013</span>

&middot; <span class=“location”>at 40%</span>

there were the reality-smiths of the TV generation. 

<span>25 September 2013</span>

&middot; <span class=“location”>at 47%</span>

The man’s dead. And the man at the other end only thinks he’s the same man. He ain’t. He only just got born. He’s got the other’s memories, yeah, but he’s newborn. That Enterprise, they keep killing themselves and replacing themselves with clones of dead people. That is some macabre shit. That ship’s full of Xerox copies of people who died. 

<span>25 September 2013</span>

&middot; <span class=“location”>at 48%</span>

Time time time. Time’s always a bit more fiddly than you reckon 

<span>25 September 2013</span>

&middot; <span class=“location”>at 49%</span>

metropolitopoiesis 

<span>25 September 2013</span>

&middot; <span class=“location”>at 51%</span>

MEMORY versus the inevitable 

<span>25 September 2013</span>

&middot; <span class=“location”>at 51%</span>

Like many groups devoid of real power and realpolitik, the church was actually constrained by its aesthetics. Its operatives could not have guns, simply, because guns were not squiddy enough. 

<span>26 September 2013</span>

&middot; <span class=“location”>at 52%</span>

What’s the point of the theological turn? Is godness a particularly resilient kind of grubbiness? Maybe the turn is like an ultraviolet torch at a crime scene, showing up spattered residue on what had looked clean ground 

<span>26 September 2013</span>

&middot; <span class=“location”>at 53%</span>

The Communion of the Blessèd Flood prayed for the restoration of the wet. Marge read of their utopias, sunk not in ruination but reward: Kitezh, Atlantis, Tyno Helig. They honoured their prophets: Kroehl and Monturiol, Athanasius, Ricou Browning, and John Cage’s father. They cited Ballard and Garrett Serviss. They gave thanks for the tsunami and celebrated the melting of the satanic polar ice, which mockingly held water in motionless marble. It was a sacred injunction on them to fly as far and often as they could, to maximise carbon emissions. And they placed holy agents where they might one day help expedite the deluge. 

<span>29 September 2013</span>

&middot; <span class=“location”>at 57%</span>

projection, remote viewing, sensory tickling, nightwalk sniffery, drift-jamming and a codewar flutter 

<span>30 September 2013</span>

&middot; <span class=“location”>at 61%</span>

Invented streets inserted into maps to right copyright wrongs, to prove one representation was ripped off from another. It was hard to find any definitive lists of these spurious enmapped locations, but there were suggestions 

<span>01 October 2013</span>

&middot; <span class=“location”>at 65%</span>

an endless skirmish between angles and emptiness. 

<span>02 October 2013</span>

&middot; <span class=“location”>at 74%</span>

They quoted the Mahavamsa, the reassurance to King Dutthagamani after he slaughtered thousands of non-Buddhists. “Only one and a half human beings have been slain here by thee. Unbelievers and men of evil life were the rest, not more to be esteemed than beasts.” 

<span>03 October 2013</span>

&middot; <span class=“location”>at 75%</span>

With script, a new kind of memory, grimoires and accounts. Traditions could be created, lies made more tenacious. History written down sped up, travelled at the speed of ink. 

<span>04 October 2013</span>

&middot; <span class=“location”>at 83%</span>

seelie, unseelie, abseelie, paraseelie

<span>05 October 2013</span>

&middot; <span class=“location”>at 88%</span>

the drably vulgar contingent weak godlessness that had absolutely nothing going for it at all except, infuriatingly, its truth

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