Words&Dirt

“Why not endless till the farthest star? Darkly they are there behind this light, darkness shining in the brightness, delta of Cassiopeia, worlds. Me sits there with his augur’s rod of ash, in borrowed sandals, by day beside a livid sea, unbeheld, in violet night walking beneath a reign of uncouth stars. Endless, would it be mine, form of my form? Who watches me here? Who ever anywhere will read these written words?”

––Ulysses, by James Joyce, pg. 53-4

“The arrival of a shore-landing operation at a place like Lan Tao Island must look something like this to the locals: suddenly, it is difficult to obtain hotel rooms because a plethora of small, unheard-of offshore corporations have blocked out a couple of dozen rooms for a couple hundred nights. Sunburned Anglos begin to arrive, wearing T-shirts and carrying luggage emblazoned with a logos of Alcatel, AT&T, or Cable & Wireless. They fly in from all points of the compass, speaking in Southern drawls or Australian twangs or Scottish burrs and sometimes bringing their wives or girlfriends, not infrequently Thai or Filipina. The least important of them has a laptop and a cell phone, but most have more advanced stuff like portable printers, GPS units, and that ultimate personal communications device, the satellite telephone, which work anywhere on the planet, even in the middle of the ocean, by beaming the call straight up to a satellite.

Sample conversation at Papa Doc’s:

Envious hacker tourist: ‘How much does one of those satellite phones cost, anyway?’

Leathery, veteran cable layer: ‘Who gives a shit?’

Within a day or two, the cable layers have established an official haunt: preferably a place equipped with a dartboard and a few other amenities very close to the waterfront so they can keep an eye on incoming traffic. There they can get a bite to eat or drink and pay for it on the spot so that when their satellite phones ring or when a tugboat chugs into the bay, they can immediately dash off to work. These men work and play at completely erratic and unpredictable hours. They wear shorts and sandals and T-shirts and frequently sport tattoos and hence could easily be mistaken, at a glace, for vacationing sailors. But if you can get someone to turn down the volume on the jukebox, you can overhear them learnedly discoursing on flaw propagation in the crystalline structure of boron silicate glass or on seasonal variation of currents in the Pearl River estuary, or on what a pain in the ass it is to helm a large ship through the Suez Canal. Their conversation is filled with references to places like Tunisia, Diego Garcia, the North Sea, Porthcurno, and Penang.

One day a barge appears off the cove, and there is a lot of fussing around with floats, lots of divers in the water. A backhoe digs a trench in the cobble beach. A long skinny black thing is wrestled ashore. Working almost naked in the tropical heat, the men bolt segmented pipes around it and then bury it. It is never again to be seen by human eyes. Suddenly, all of these men pay their bills and vanish. Not long afterward, the phone service gets a hell of a lot better.”

–– “Mother Earth, Mother Board,” Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing, by Neal Stephenson, pg. 154-5