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7a5507c
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Her presence was sturdy and watery at once, arms weirdly muscled, nipples like small tongues riding on the mercurial flesh that glided on his surface, thighs smooth to where his fingers plummeted inside, followed by the rest of him. The golf-ball cyst swam too, faintly present against him, a feature, not a bug. Tira, for all her usual chatter, wasn't a screamer or even a moaner. In the silence their breaths fell into concert with the whinin..
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Jonathan Lethem |
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58a8b0c
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The clacking of the checkers on the hardwood points was the music of honest thought, resounding in silence as it navigated the fortunes told by the pips on the dice.
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Jonathan Lethem |
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444b031
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The lowliest European functionary--a border inspector, say--dressed immaculately, and furnished even a cubicle to lend an impression of respectability. A truly wealthy man, like Stolarsky, pronounced his status in paneling, burnished wood, fountain pens, leather volumes. Bruno banished the despondent thought; this baleful room was Europe's nullification. "What's the matter, I trample on your delicate sensibilities?"
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Jonathan Lethem |
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379f919
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His ironies were ghoulish now.
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Jonathan Lethem |
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12c87c4
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Minutes died serially into hours. Bruno
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Jonathan Lethem |
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78df775
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Bruno's brain might have parachuted somewhere over the Atlantic.
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Jonathan Lethem |
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b41f003
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Not everything needed to rise to converge: It could just drift together into the indiscernible middle, and bewilder you.
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Jonathan Lethem |
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2e26d26
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Baader-Meinhof Gruppe, they are called also." "Yes."
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Jonathan Lethem |
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98ed1ad
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On Telegraph, she stopped him in front of Walgreens, put the sack into his hands, a finger to her lips. "I'll come back." He was left to contemplate the sidewalk, full of listless earring vendors ready with their piercing guns."
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Jonathan Lethem |
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ef5b70b
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First, however, and feeling real excitement at the thought, the good burst of adrenaline at last, Behringer wanted to dismantle the sockets and loosen his patient's eyes. Behringer
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Jonathan Lethem |
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bbc41f5
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Hospital" turned out to represent a punctuated tedium, the recurrence of blood pressure and temperature checks, the placement and emptying of bedpans and painful switching of IV lines from the crook of one elbow to the other, and the switching of nurses as day and night were destroyed and replaced with tripartite shifts."
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Jonathan Lethem |
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5fa5c65
|
The house on The Crescent, stepped into the hillside, had no face. In
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Jonathan Lethem |
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35d05ac
|
The world was ersatz and actual, forged and faked, by ourselves and unseen others. Daring to attempt to absolutely sort fake from real was a folly that would call down tigers or hiccups to cure us of our recklessness. The effort was doomed, for it too much pointed past the intimate boundaries of our necessary fictions.
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dreams
ersatz
fiction
jonathan-lethem
lies
reality
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Jonathan Lethem |
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b1d4376
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As Bruno neared, Stolarsky stepped from behind the door. His feet and legs were bare. He held a pistol, loosely, and wore nothing but a thin T-shirt. The darkness beneath its hem revealed as a scribble of genitals and hair, his penis like a second sarcastic nose.
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Jonathan Lethem |
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12b4475
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Yeah, maybe you look a little less familiar yourself.
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Jonathan Lethem |
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face830
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The morning's light danced on the spine of the new bridge, which towered like the guts of a cosmic piano. The same light that agitated the picture windows of the gaudy homes tumbled so recklessly into the seams of the Oakland hills. The
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Jonathan Lethem |
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9df3678
|
Each might have been a week except for night's failure to come and close the deal. When
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Jonathan Lethem |
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5c7d336
|
Her fiercest sincerities were translated by the male ego, on arrival, into daffy flirtation. (p. 24)
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male-ego
translated
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Jonathan Lethem |
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b09b11b
|
Chaos didn't know what this meant. He kept feeling like somehow, intending to travel across land, he'd traveled through time instead.
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Jonathan Lethem |
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8280d99
|
She reassembled her deranged silent treatment of the whole of the twentieth century, but it quit before she could fire it.
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twentieth-century
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Jonathan Lethem |
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ba2a9b1
|
Except science now tells us that luck is there whether you acknowledge it or not. And I'm afraid in your case I see the signs of a history of bad luck. Not even a latency so much as a full-blown case going completely ignored for lack of context.
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Jonathan Lethem |
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fcb852c
|
They were drones, men costumed in independent thought who'd become slaves of party groupspeak. (p. 4)
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group
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Jonathan Lethem |
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92d3686
|
We were all four of us an arrangement around a missing centrepiece, as incoherent as a been less sentence.
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Jonathan Lethem |
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4244d59
|
We were all four of us an arrangement around a missing centrepiece, as incoherent as a verb-less sentence.
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Jonathan Lethem |
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cae630a
|
You could harbor a man in your bed or your body, play on his nervous system like Paderewski at the keyboard, and not shift his brain one inch out of the concrete of dogma. (p. 5)
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dogma
harbor
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Jonathan Lethem |
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95eff24
|
It was entirely possible that one song could destroy your life. Yes, musical doom could fall on a lone human form and crush it like a bug. The song, that song, was sent from somewhere else to find you, to pick the scab of your whole existence. The song was your personal shitty fate, manifest as a throb of pop floating out of radios everywhere.
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soul
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Jonathan Lethem |
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533bdf3
|
You can't be deep without a surface.
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Jonathan Lethem |
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d5081a0
|
Laughing at "Rapper's Delight"'s no revenge, and anyway it wasn't your idea, and anyway it's . Dean Street's another story, a realm of knowledge unapplicable here. You've just about finished leaving Dean Street, and Aeroman, behind. If this means avoiding the one who protected your ass all through junior high, the one you once ached to emulate, the one whose orbit you were happy just to swing in - if it means leaving the million-dollar kid..
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growing-up
music
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Jonathan Lethem |
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b78cfcc
|
Cocaine Suppe Mit Tittenschnakken,
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Jonathan Lethem |
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af323d6
|
Let him get stoned, since everybody must.
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stoned
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Jonathan Lethem |
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ae0503a
|
The Hippie Parents weren't for all their distraction and funk, for their love triangles and LPs and antiwar demonstrations, illiterates...You'd find the books in the downstairs bathroom, or on their bedside tables, or maybe see them unwrapped at holidays as gifts, a cherished revelation passed from one to another, shared like a joint...
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Jonathan Lethem |
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06a8cd0
|
Like other names I censored lately, this was a vote against invoking monsters, against etching their reality into the air.
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Jonathan Lethem |
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8cc9236
|
So I took my phone to a bakery and coffee shop called Some Crust and read Elena Ferrante at an outdoor table and hoped for some amusing college student to hit on me. I got hit on by amusing senior citizens instead. Perhaps they, like the Klan, had been lately emboldened.
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Jonathan Lethem |
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00f89e5
|
Television had elected itself, I figured. It could watch itself too, for all I cared. I read my book.
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Jonathan Lethem |
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88c84f5
|
on the one hand there's mansplaining, and on the other, there's the sound of a woman quoting the mansplaining to another woman.
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Jonathan Lethem |
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5f95a17
|
The big Nazi cat went on raking up thread-loops from my trousers, seemingly intent on single-handedly reinventing Velcro.
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Jonathan Lethem |
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a4356a5
|
To tugboat was to try Minna's patience. Any time you pushed your luck, said too much, overstayed a welcome, or overestimated the usefulness of a given method or approach, you were guilty of having tugged the boat. Tugboating was most of all a dysfunction of wits and storytellers, and a universal one. Anybody who thought himself funny would likely tug a boat here or there. Knowing when a joke or verbal gambit was right at its limit, quitting..
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jonathan lethem |
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8e5c1ab
|
He didn't hide his teeth, which were bright yellow, like the van we'd unloaded.
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Jonathan Lethem |
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cce5cb1
|
Thing is, for me a woman has to have a certain amount of muffling, you know what I mean? Something between you, in the way of insulation. Otherwise, you're right up against her naked soul.
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Jonathan Lethem |
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b9ba9d2
|
Minna Agency errands mostly stuck in Brooklyn, rarely far from Court Street, in fact. Carroll Gardens and Cobble Hill together made a crisscrossed game board of Frank Minna's alliances and enmities, and me and Gil Coney and the other Agency Men were the markers -- like Monopoly pieces, I sometimes thought, tin automobiles or terriers (not top hats, surely) -- to be moved around that game board. Here on the Upper East Side we were off our cu..
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Jonathan Lethem |
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9c14f43
|
Feeling unique is what we all have in common, it's the thing that's always the same.
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Jonathan Lethem |
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e47eff1
|
Scout, that's a good one," said the sergeant. "Danny-boy couldn't scout the inside of his eyelids."
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Jonathan Lethem |
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5ca5d61
|
Don't try to figure me out," I said. "It doesn't work--I've tried it myself."
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Jonathan Lethem |
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f6f3ef9
|
He was a wretched excuse for a human being, but for an inquisitor he wasn't half bad.
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Jonathan Lethem |