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9ff1961
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Insomnia is a variant of Tourette's--the waking brain races, sampling the world after the world has turned away, touching it everywhere, refusing to settle, to join the collective nod. The insomniac brain is a sort of conspiracy theorist as well, believing too much in its own paranoiac importance--as though if it were to blink, then doze, the world might be overrun by some encroaching calamity, which its obsessive musings are somehow fendin..
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sleep
tourette-s
insomnia
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Jonathan Lethem |
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5175994
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I want what we all want," said Carl. "To move certain parts of the interior of myself into the exterior world, to see if they can be embraced."
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music
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Jonathan Lethem |
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dc9bdc1
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What age is a black boy when he learns he's scary?
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racism
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Jonathan Lethem |
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4040788
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Listen to me. I'm shy. I'm not stupid. I can't meet people's eyes. I don't know if you understand what that's like. There's a whole world going on around me, I'm aware of that. It's not because I don't want to look at you, Lucinda. It's that I don't want to be seen.
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shy
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Jonathan Lethem |
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dfe62fe
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You can't be deep without a surface
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Jonathan Lethem |
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fc8f234
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As I get older I find that the friendships that are the most certain, ultimately, are the ones where you and the other person have made substantial amounts of money for one another.
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Jonathan Lethem |
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f57b84e
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You could grow up in the city where history was made and still miss it all.
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witnessing-history
missing-out
new-york-city
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Jonathan Lethem |
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6ecb4bb
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Someday I'd change my name to Shut Up and save everybody a lot of time.
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Jonathan Lethem |
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763ce81
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Every room I've lived in since I was given my own room at eleven was lined with, and usually overfull of, books. My employment in bookstores was always continuous with my private hours: shelving and alphabetizing, building shelves, and browsing-- in my collection and others-- in order to understand a small amount about the widest possible number of books. Such numbers of books are constantly acquired that constant culling is necessary; if I..
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Jonathan Lethem |
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90e44c0
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Dylan's friend Linus Millberg appears out of the crowd with a cup of beer and shouts, 'Dorothy is John Lennon, the Scarecrow is Paul McCartney, the Tin Woodman is George Harrison, the Lion's Ringo.' ' ,' commands Dylan over the lousy twangy country CB's is playing between sets. 'Easy,' Linus shouts back. "Kirk's John, Spock's Paul, Bones is George, Scotty is Ringo. Or Chekov, after the first season. Doesn't matter, it's like a Scotty-Chekov..
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Jonathan Lethem |
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cefe7f3
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Dylan's friend Linus Millberg appears out of the crowd with a cup of beer and shouts, 'Dorothy is John Lennon, the Scarecrow is Paul McCartney, the Tin Woodman is George Harrison, the Lion's Ringo.' ' ,' commands Dylan over the lousy twangy country CB's is playing between sets. 'Easy,' Linus shouts back. "Kirk's John, Spock's Paul, Bones is George, Scotty is Ringo. Or Chekov, after the first season. Doesn't matter, it's like a Scotty-Chekov..
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Jonathan Lethem |
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e3dbcbd
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My inner chemistry had been hijacked by a mad scientist, who poured the fizzy, volatile contents of my heart from a test tube marked SOBER REALITY into another labeled SUNNY DELUSION, and back again, faster and faster, until the floor of my life was slick with spillage.
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Jonathan Lethem |
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bdc823f
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My heart, to put it more simply, got nostalgic for the present. Always a bad sign.
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Jonathan Lethem |
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29a8c11
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There were days when no kid came out of his house without looking around. The week after Halloween had a quality both hungover and ominous, the light pitched, the sky smashed against the rooftops.
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Jonathan Lethem |
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5afdcc7
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Some people have things written all over their faces; the big guy had a couple of words misspelled in crayon on his.
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Jonathan Lethem |
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83f635f
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Anyone could see it all coming and no one could possibly stop it and that was the beautiful thing. Friday night was open wide and writ in stone
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Jonathan Lethem |
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425dae8
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Don't rupture another's illusion unless you're positive the alternative you offer is more worthwhile than that from which you're wrenching them. Interrogate your solipsism: Does it offer any better a home than the delusions you're reaching to shatter?
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Jonathan Lethem |
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c1a6466
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Consensual reality is both fragile and elastic, and it heals like the skin of a bubble.
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Jonathan Lethem |
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93040ab
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My heart and the elevator, a plummet inside a plummet.
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Jonathan Lethem |
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19fc589
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Enough of this. Does every conversation with you have to be the director's cut? Get out of the car.
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verbal-diarrhea
talking
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Jonathan Lethem |
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c680718
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It was often this way, life consisted of a series of false beginnings, bluff declarations of arrival to destinations not even glimpsed.
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Jonathan Lethem |
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41a2f12
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To the resentment that hides inside love, to the loneliness that hides among companions.
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Jonathan Lethem |
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b719b13
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A shadow strolled past the car, indifferent to our curbside melodrama. This was my second time imperiled in a a parked vehicle in the space of three hours. I wondered what goonish spectacles I'd overlooked in my own career as a pavement walker.
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Jonathan Lethem |
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f5ad129
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I jotted the name down mentally on that tattered notepad I call a memory. The pen skipped.
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Jonathan Lethem |
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a3624e4
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But the day I can't shrug off a twinge of self-pity, is the day I'm washed up for keeps.
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Jonathan Lethem |
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6fb2575
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Tourette's is just one big lifetime of tag, really. The world (or my brain---same thing) appoints me it, again and again. So I tag back. Can it do otherwise? If you've ever been it you know the answer.
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Jonathan Lethem |
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46242b9
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Nobody said anything while I opened the bag and took out the egg salad sandwich. It was one of those funny moments when a bit of normal human activity embarrasses everybody out of their bluster and hostility, and roles are momentarily laid aside.
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Jonathan Lethem |
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d997fd4
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She craned up on her toes and kissed my cheek..."Don't do that", I said. "You just met me. This is New York."
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Jonathan Lethem |
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8a2c596
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Eighth grade's a distant rumor, a tabled issue, and Dylan knows from experience that the summer between might change anything, everything. He and Mingus Rude too and even Arthur Lomb for that matter are released from the paint-by-numbers page of their schooldays, from their preformatted roles as truant or victim, freed to an unspoiled summer, that inviting medium for doodling in self-transformation.
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vacation
summer
school
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Jonathan Lethem |
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b00b555
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The voices may propel you to warble along, or to dance, they may inspire you to seduction or insurrection or inspection or merely to watching a little less television. The voices of Barrett Rude Jr. and the Subtle Distinctions lead nowhere, though, if not back to your own neighborhood. To the street where you live. To things you left behind. And that's what you need, what you needed all along.
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memories
liner-notes
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Jonathan Lethem |
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e226955
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I'd underestimated him. I assumed anyone who started out gut-punching you in an elevator couldn't have all that much else in his arsenal. For instance, I had no idea he could smile, let alone at such an inappropriate time.
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Jonathan Lethem |
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c568576
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Apparently Brooklyn needn't always push itself to be something else, something conscious and anxious, something pointed toward Manhattan.... Brooklyn might sometimes also be pleased, as here on Flatbush, to be its grubby, enduring self.
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grubby
enduring
self
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Jonathan Lethem |
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87543ba
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It wasn't for children, seventh grade. You could read the stress of even entering the building in the postures of the teachers, the security guards. Nobody could relax in such a racial and hormonal disaster area.
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school
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Jonathan Lethem |
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72bd669
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The wind was picking up off the ocean now and the whole coastal scene had a bleak, abandoned look, as though Maine in November really belonged to the ragged gulls who wheeled over the sun-worn pier, and the humans had just gotten the news and taken a powder.
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Jonathan Lethem |
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64406d1
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Fifth grade was fourth grade with something wrong. Nothing changed outright. Instead it teetered. You'd pushed futility at Public School 38 so long by then you expected the building itself would be embarrassed and quit. The ones who couldn't read still couldn't, the teachers were teaching the same thing for the fifth time now and refusing to meet your eyes, some kids had been left back twice and were the size of janitors. The place was a ca..
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school
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Jonathan Lethem |
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f5c2459
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We were in a middle space then, in a cone of white, father and son moving forward at a certain speed. Side by side, not truly quiet but quiescent, two gnarls of human scribble, human cipher, human dream.
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Jonathan Lethem |
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43e101b
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I was playing it existential, and maybe a bit stupid, but it was the only way I knew how to play it.
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Jonathan Lethem |
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8d7feef
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May one plead, Your Honor, postmodernism as an involuntary condition?
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Jonathan Lethem |
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cbfaaaa
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The cars rushing below knew nothing. People in cars weren't New Yorkers anyway, they'd suffered some basic misunderstanding. The two boys on the walkway, apparently standing still they were moving faster than the cars. Nineteen seventy-five.
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driving
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Jonathan Lethem |
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edf2e39
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The revving heart of my hopefulness, kicked into gear anew, is the most precious thing about me, I refuse to vilify it.
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Jonathan Lethem |
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795f79d
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Have you ever felt, in the course of reading a detective novel, a guilty thrill of relief at having a character murdered before he can step onto the page and burden you with his actual existence? Detective stories always have too many characters anyway. And characters mentioned early on but never sighted, just lingering offstage, take on an awful portentous quality. Better to have them gone.
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Jonathan Lethem |
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c21d2f0
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The stumbling block will turn out to be the traditional one for students of consciousness: the flashlight is incapable of shining on itself, so we can't trust what its light reveals.
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Jonathan Lethem |
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f9d6ebc
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The key to mostly anything is pretending your first time *isn't*.
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Jonathan Lethem |
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22bbea5
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The dentist swiveled on his heels and disappeared, leaving me there to massage my jaw back into feeling after its brief, masochistic marriage to the top of my wooden desk.
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sci-fi
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Jonathan Lethem |