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3276a35
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I smoked and looked down at the bottom of Pittsburgh for a little while, watching the kids playing tiny baseball, the distant figures of dogs snatching at a little passing car, a miniature housewife on her back porch shaking out a snippet of red rug, and I made a sudden, frightened vow never to become that small, and to devote myself to getting bigger and bigger and bigger.
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Michael Chabon |
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8c546a4
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Having lost his mother, father, brother, an grandfather, the friends and foes of his youth, his beloved teacher Bernard Kornblum, his city, his history--his home--the usual charge leveled against comic books, that they offered merely an escape from reality, seemed to Joe actually to be a powerful argument on their behalf... The escape from reality was, he felt--especially right after the war--a worthy challenge... The pain of his loss--thou..
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Michael Chabon |
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0fc2b5d
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It was the kind of promise a father makes easily and sincerely, knowing at the same time that it will be impossible to keep. The truth of some promises is not as important as whether or not you can believe in them, with all your heart. A game of baseball can't really make a summer day last forever. A home run can't really heal all the broken places in our world, or in a single human heart. And there was no way that Mr. Feld could keep his p..
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summerland
fatherhood
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Michael Chabon |
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c64e874
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Every work of art is one half of a secret handshake, a challenge that seeks the password, a heliograph flashed from a tower window, an act of hopeless optimism in the service of bottomless longing. Every great record or novel or comic book convenes the first meeting of a fan club whose membership stands forever at one but which maintains chapters in every city -- in every cranium -- in the world. Art, like fandom, asserts the possibility of..
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Michael Chabon |
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5fdc329
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Jesus Fucking Christ," she says with that flawless hardpan accent of hers. It is an expression that always strikes Landsman as curious, or at least as something that he would pay money to see."
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Michael Chabon |
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16650a0
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But he believed that every great love was in some measure a terrible mistake.
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Michael Chabon |
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8f0e2f9
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Take care-there is no force more powerful than that of an unbridled imagination.
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Michael Chabon |
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ebec8b9
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His dreams had always been Houdiniesque: they were the dreams of a pupa struggling in its blind cocoon, mad for a taste of light and air.
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Michael Chabon |
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5307e6f
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There were so many Pittsburgh poets in my hallway that if, at that instant, a meteorite had come smashing through my roof, there would never have been another stanza written about rusting fathers and impotent steelworkers and the Bessemer convertor of love.
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Michael Chabon |
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70b7541
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It struck me that the chief obstacle to marital contentment was this perpetual gulf between the well-founded, commendable pessimism of women and the sheer dumb animal optimism of men, the latter a force more than any other responsible for the lamentable state of the world.
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Michael Chabon |
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dbc76e9
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The world is so big, so complicated, so replete with marvels and surprises that it takes years for most people to begin to notice that it is, also, irretrievably broken. We call this period of research "childhood." There follows a program of renewed inquiry, often involuntary, into the nature and effects of mortality, entropy, heartbreak, violence, failure, cowardice, duplicity, cruelty, and grief; the researcher learns their histories, and..
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Michael Chabon |
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693cf00
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He had no idea of how long his life would one day seem to have gone on; how daily present the absence of love would come to feel. "Just watch me," he said."
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Michael Chabon |
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dbfbba6
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Bina, thank you. Bina, listen, this guy. His name wasn't Lasker. This guy-' She puts a hand to his mouth. She has not touched him in three years. It probably would be too much to say that he feels the darkness lift at the touch of her fingertips against his lips. But it shivers, and light bleeds in among the cracks.
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love
reconciliation
detective
noir
mystery
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Michael Chabon |
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6d8cdc7
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Not only would I never want to belong to any club that would have me for a member--if elected I would wear street shoes onto the squash court and set fire to the ballroom curtains.
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Michael Chabon |
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2fe0615
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There was something unmistakably exultant about the mess that Rosa had made. Her bedroom-studio was at once the canvas, journal, museum, and midden of her life. She did not "decorate" it; she infused it."
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mess
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Michael Chabon |
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06b28f6
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My heart was simultaneously broken and filled with lust, I was exhausted, and I loved every minute of it. It was strange and elating to find myself for once the weaker.
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Michael Chabon |
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9db21da
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He has the memory of a convict, the balls of a fireman, and the eyesight of a housebreaker. When there is crime to fight, Landsman tears around Sitka like a man with his pant leg caught on a rocket. It's like there's a film score playing behind him, heavy on the castanets. The problem comes in the hours when he isn't working, when his thoughts start blowing out the open window of his brain like pages from the blotter. Sometimes it takes a h..
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humor
hollywood
satire
jewish
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Michael Chabon |
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aacfc13
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When some drunken fool asked if she was a lesbian, she would say, 'In everything but sexual preference.
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Michael Chabon |
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8f3ce14
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That was the purpose of habit, in my grandfather's view: to render memory unnecessary.
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Michael Chabon |
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af7fb13
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The midnight disease is a kind of emotional insomnia; at ever conscious moment its victim--even if he or she writes at dawn, or in the middle of the afternoon--feels like a person lying in a sweltering bedroom, with the window thrown open, looking up at a sky filled with stars and airplanes, listening to the narrative of a rattling blind, an ambulance, a fly trapped in a Coke bottle, while all around him the neighbours soundly sleep.
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Michael Chabon |
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8633178
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I thought, I fanced, that in a moment, I would be standing on nothing at all, and for the first time in my life, I needed the wings none of us has.
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Michael Chabon |
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73db1bd
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It was, in part, a longing - common enough among the inventors of heroes - to be someone else; to be more than the result of two hundred regimens and scenarios and self-improvement campaigns that always ran afoul of his perennial inability to locate an actual self to be improved
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Michael Chabon |
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e8502e5
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Get dressed,' Bina says. 'And do yourself a favor? Clean this shit up. Look at this dump. I can't believe you're living like this. Sweet God, aren't you ashamed of yourself?' Once Bina Gelbfish believed in Meyer Landsman. Or she believed from the moment she met him, that there was a sense in that meeting, that some detectable intention lay behind their marriage. They were twisted like a pair of chromosomes, of course they were, but where L..
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Michael Chabon |
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a50b62a
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All literature, highbrow or low, from the Aeneid onward, is fan fiction....Through parody and pastiche, allusion and homage, retelling and reimagining the stories that were told before us and that we have come of age loving--amateurs--we proceed, seeking out the blank places in the map that our favorite writers, in their greatness and negligence, have left for us, hoping to pass on to our own readers--should we be lucky enough to find any--..
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Michael Chabon |
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7c45460
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That's a big trunk," James said, as we jammed in the leathery old case that looked so much like the black heart of some leviathan. "It fits a tuba, three suitcases, a dead dog, and a garment bag almost perfectly." "That's just what they used to say in the ads," I said..."
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dead-dogs
garment-bags
trunk-space
tubas
suitcases
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Michael Chabon |
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af0e07a
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Back in the summer of 1941, they had stood to lose so much, it seemed, through the shame and ruination of exposure. Sammy could not have known that one day he would come to regard all the things that their loving each other had seemed to put at so much risk - his career in comic books, his relations with his family, his place in the world - as the walls of a prison, an airless, lightless keep from which there was no hope of escape....He rec..
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Michael Chabon |
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a7d60c7
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That evening I rode downtown on an unaccountably empty bus, sitting in the last row. At the front I saw a thin cloud of smoke rising around the driver's head. 'Hey, bus driver,' I said. 'Can I smoke?' 'May I,' said the bus driver. 'I love you,' I said.
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Michael Chabon |
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c32363e
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What would she be saying if she did? That she did want to marry him? For ten years, at least, since she was twelve or thirteen, Rosa had been declaring roundly to anyone who asked that she had no intention of getting married, ever, and that if she ever did, it would be when she was old and tired of life. When this declaration in its various forms had ceased to shock people sufficiently, she had taken to adding that the man she finally marri..
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Michael Chabon |
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4b68299
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I hate it that they even count errors,' Ethan said. . . . 'What kind of game is that? No other sport do they do that, Dad. There's no other sport where they put the errors on the freaking scoreboard for everybody to look at. They don't even have errors in other sports. They have fouls. They have penalties. Those are things that players could get on purpose, you know. But in baseball they keep track of how many accidents you have.' * * * E..
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Michael Chabon |
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8e4606a
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Every Messiah fails, the moment he tries to redeem himself.
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Michael Chabon |
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4ff2116
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And then the man reminded Max, with a serious but suave and practiced air, that freedom was a debt that could be repaid only by purchasing the freedom of others.
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Michael Chabon |
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c03ee7d
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I'm a man who falls in love so easily, and with such reckless lack of consideration for the consequences of my actions, that from the very first instant of entering into a marriage I become, almost by definition, an adulterer.
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Michael Chabon |
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0e6c63d
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Walter broke off a piece of a smile and tucked it into his left cheek as if reserving it for future use.
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Michael Chabon |
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d8c47be
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Like 90 percent of the television they watch, it comes from the south and is shown dubbed into Yiddish. It concerns the adventures of a pair of children with Jewish names who look like they might be part Indian and have no visible parents. They do have a crystalline magical dragon scale that they wish on in order to travel to a land of pastel dragons, each distinguished by its color and its particular brand of imbecility. Little by little, ..
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Michael Chabon |
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ef3d394
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Every day is like a kid's drawing, offered to you with a strange mix of ceremoniousness and offhand disregard, yours for the keeping. Some of the days are rich and complicated, others inscrutable, others little more than a stray gray mark on a ragged page. Some you manage to hang on to, though your reasons for doing so are often hard to fathom. But most of them you just ball up and throw away.
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Michael Chabon |
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67269bc
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And that was when you realized the fire was inside you all the time. And that was the miracle. Just that.
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Michael Chabon |
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2532245
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Fuck what is written," Landsman says. "You know what?" All at once he feels weary of ganefs and prophets, guns and sacrifices and the infinite gangster weight of God. He's tired of hearing about the promised land and the inevitable bloodshed required for its redemption. "I don't care what is written. I don't care what supposedly got promised to some sandal-wearing idiot whose claim to fame is that he was ready to cut his own son's throat fo..
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Michael Chabon |
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585035a
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But there was always a shortfall, wasn't there? Between the match that the Holy One, blessed be He, envisioned and the reality of the situation under the chuppah. Between commandment and observance, heaven and earth, husband and wife, Zion and Jew. They called that shortfall 'the world.' Only when Messiah came would the breach be closed, all separations, distinctions, and distances collapsed. Until then, thanks be unto His Name, sparks, bri..
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Michael Chabon |
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a00f1fd
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Landsman doesn't buy that. Bina never stopped wanting to redeem the world. She just let the world she was trying to redeem get smaller and smaller until at one point, it could be bounded in the hat of a hopeless policeman.
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Michael Chabon |
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d3b445f
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The handy thing about being a father is that the historic standard is so pitifully low.
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Michael Chabon |
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f61755d
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Long life wore away everything that was not essential.
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Michael Chabon |
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b96d3b0
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The first and last duty of the lover of the game of baseball," Peavine's book began, "whether in the stands or on the field, is the same as that of the lover of life itself: to pay attention to it. When it comes to the position of catcher, as all but fools and shortstops will freely acknowledge, this solemn requirement is doubled."
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Michael Chabon |
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92585ee
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Fathering imposed an obligation that was more than your money, your body, or your time, a presence neither physical nor measurable by clocks: open-ended, eternal, and invisible, like the commitment of gravity to the stars.
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Michael Chabon |
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1ae6141
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Most science fiction seemed to be written for people who already liked science fiction; I wanted to write stories for anyone, anywhere, living at any time in the history of the world.
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writing
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Michael Chabon |