"Jeff VanderMeer - Quin's Shanghai Circus" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vandermeer Jeff)

of the city, the scenes of the city, that had torn their way from my
mind
to the holo, forever lost -- never even shown at a galleria, and not
likely to have been, either. Veniss, huh! The adder defanged. The snake
slithering away. When did anyone care about the real artists until
after
they were dead? And I was as close to Dead as any Living Artist ever
was.
I had no supplies. My money had all run out on me -- plastic rats
deserting a paper ship. I was a Goner, all those Artistic Dreams so
many
arthritic flickers in a holoscreen. (You don't have a cup of water on
you,
by any chance? Or a pill or two?)

I think I always had Artistic Dreams.
When we were little, my twinned sister Nicola and I made up these
fabric
creatures we called cold pricklies and, to balance the equation, some
warm
fuzzies. All through the sizzling summers of ozone rings and water
conservation and baking metal, we'd be indoors with our make-believe
world
of sharp-hard edges and diffuse-soft curves, forslaking the thirst of
veldt and jungle on the video monitors.
We were both into the Living Art then -- the art you can touch and
squeeze
and hold to your chest, not the dead, flat-screen scrawled stuff.
Pseudo-Mom and Pseudo-Dad thought us wonky, but that was okay, because
we'd always do our chores, and because later we found out they weren't
our
real parents. Besides, we had true morals, true integrity. We knew who
was
evil and who was good. The warm fuzzies always won out in the end.
Later, we moved on to genetic playdoh, child gods creating creatures
that
moved, breathed, required attention for their mewling, crying tongues.
Creatures we could destroy if it suited our temperament. Not that any
of
them lived very long.
My sister moved away from the Living Art when she got older, just as
she
moved away from me. She processes the free market now.

So, since Shadrach certainly wouldn't move in to protect me and my art
from the cold pricklies of destruction -- I mean, I couldn't go it
alone;
I had this horrible vision of sacrificing my ceramics, throwing them at
future Pick Dicks because the holo stuff wouldn't do any harm of a
physical nature (which made me think, hey, maybe this holo stuff is