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| There is no natural or best way to classify anything; all categories are useful rather than true...
- David Lowenthal, "Geography, experience, and imagination: towards a geographical epistemology," published in Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 51(3), 1961
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| "I've seen many American cities," Zamyatin expounds. "Nearly every building in them has been demolished so that no one can revisit their past except in memory, and people's memories now must accommodate a great many things because of what they see on television. Maybe when they think of their old house, they substitute for it a Venetian palazzo, a Mongol yurt, or a Buddhist temple from a travel documentary. It must be exhausting to squat in someone else's memories."
- Andrei Codrescu, Wakefield (p. 260)
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| The only traveling Zamyatin does anymore is to ballparks; old, intimate ones like Wrigley Field, and newer ones like the Astrodome in Houston, and he always comes back happy. Stadiums define cities, he often claims, more than the teams do: "Baseball players are traded and sold and have no problem playingfor their old enemies, an that's great. The stadium is a commnity, the people eat hot dogs and drink beer and love their team no matter where the pitcher is from."
- Andrei Codrescu, Wakefield (p. 252)
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| While the party parties on, Wakefield keeps up a mental conversation with Redbone, thinking of things he should have said. Redbone himself has disappeared again and Wakefield resists, graciously, he hopes, the assaults of Persephone, Mrs. Redbone, and his new stripper friends, who are all trying to get him to dance. Redbone, his fantasy conversation continues, you're suffering from a mental illness. A very American illness, I must say. Going it alone, making it in the wild, surviving a hostile environment, that's us. The fort was our model and necessity until, lets' face it, the genocide of the Native Americans was complete. But even then, the fort mentality and the terror of the outside didn't leave us for long. In the fifties people had backyard bomb shelters, and they expected to be nuked any minute. And after the nukes, what? Eating Spam in the dark for years? Wakefield tries to imagine himself underground after the nuclear war, seated eternally between Mrs. Redbone and Persephone, taking lit cigars from a solicitous Mr. Redbone. He'd rather die in a plane crash. The only good thing about bomb shelters was that they gave teenagers a place to lose their virginity. The best efforts of this country were not spent on bunkers. During the Depression and the Second World War, Americans pulled together and built highways, dams, bridges. Why then, in the wide-open age of the Internet, do you want to hide, Mr. Redbone? And not just hide, but hoard the wealth of several small nations? a future architectural psychologist will look at your doomsday structure and will find in you a perfect example of millennial psychosis. America has served the world as a place of escape from fortified homelands for three hundred years; why turn the place into an armed camp now?
Wakefield wishes he'd made these arguments to Redbone, but somehow he can't even convince himself. Why does Redbone's vision of the threatened "Homeland" disturb him so? He believes, or thought he did, that humanity lives in an uprooted, deracinated, global, nomadic, and permanently exiled state now that we've traded the territorial idea of "homeland" for teh freedom of living peacefully nowhere. In cyberspace, or hyperspace. But Redbone has put a major dent in his recently acquired feelings of well-being, joy, and spiritual satisfaction. Damn.
- Andrei Codrescu, Wakefield (pp. 242-243)
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| What is culture? And what culture is being imperiled? Beyond this balcony the bay is a gray cypher, the mountains invisible. Should he feel sad because the French are unable to resist Big Mac? Since his experience with the hate-filled micronations in the Wintry City, he just can't feel sentimental about this antiprogress, this defense of the past. He enjoys (intellectually) Baroque mittel-Europa for its hint of decadence, its illuminism and Mozart, but would he defend overpriced hot chocolate and a putti-filled Viennese café against McDonalds? Not a chance. Where are you more likely to find somebody like the neo-Nazi Heider of Austria or another Milosevic? At Café Mozart or at the McDonalds down the street from it? Whatever idea of European "culture" is hiding in Heider's chocolate, they can keep it.
Still, there is something disappearing from the world, something composed of many instances of tradition and skill, or maybe not disappearing, but translating. Maybe culture, like physical matter, doesn't disappear, but is subject to infinite play, and the world is a vast workshop for making and remaking everything, including people, and the engine of this play is desire.... Enough, Wakefield warns himself, you'll end up dematerializing.
- Andrei Codrescu, Wakefield (pp. 225-226)
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