Andrew is straight-laced in the way of someone who has had to be, which is to say: the straight-lacedness is real, and also protective, and also occasionally a problem for the people around him. He knows this. He is working on it.
He works with books, media, systems of thought — the architecture of how ideas move through culture, how they accumulate meaning, how they can be navigated and entered and, yes, sometimes gotten lost in. The incident with the book is clinic legend. One week. Everyone thought he was having some kind of episode. He was having the best time. He's not sorry.
The political question — whether psychic people should be visible, organized, legible to the world as a constituency — is the one on which he and Buzz most consistently disagree. Andrew spent his adult life treating his ability as something to manage privately. A disability, not a destiny.
Book II is Andrew and Grace's, and it is, among other things, about the specific ways that care and structural privilege can be entangled so thoroughly that even people who love each other can't always see where one ends and the other begins.
Reads the psychic content of texts — not just what they say but what they carry, who has held them, what has accumulated in the margins of a book that has passed through many hands. The book was extraordinary.
Perceives the architecture of media ecosystems, information networks, and cultural systems as spatial and navigable. Can find pathways through them, locate blockages, identify where meaning is being lost or distorted.
Feels the emotional structure of organizations and institutions. Not individuals — systems. Can diagnose what's wrong with a cultural organism the way Nadine diagnoses what's wrong with a person. This is rarer than it sounds.
Total retention of anything he has read, heard, or deeply attended to. He does not volunteer this information about himself. If you spend enough time with him you notice anyway.
His situationship, his opposite, his ongoing argument. They agree on almost nothing except each other. This turns out to be enough. Book IV is theirs.
View file → GraceHis co-lead in Book II. The person whose care for him is so thorough it occasionally functions as a blindfold. He loves her. He has hurt her in ways he didn't see coming.
View file → Claire RedbudHe respects her completely and finds her slightly frightening, which he considers a healthy response to Claire. They are very effective together anyway.
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