All Thinking is Wishful.
Jonathan LethemEvery 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 slouch in this discipline, the books erupt. I've also bricked myself in with music--vinyl records, then compact discs. My homes have been improbably information-dense, like capsules for survival of a nuclear war, or models of the interior of my own skull. That comparison--room as brain-- is one I've often reached for in describing the rooms of others, but it began with the suspicion that I'd externalized my own brain, for anyone who cared to look.
Jonathan LethemI‘ve always agreed with the view that — with science fiction — its predictive powers were the least important or least relevant aspect of its public profile. I always loved stuff like Orwell‘s 1984, where he explicitly said “It‘s 1948, reversed.” I liked writers that were doing allegorical, satirical, fantastical versions of everyday life.
Jonathan LethemEnough of this. Does every conversation with you have to be the director's cut? Get out of the car.
Jonathan LethemTags: humor talking verbal-diarrhea
Yeah, maybe you look a little less familiar yourself.
Jonathan LethemI'm learning to hate the sound of my own voice.
Jonathan LethemSomeday I'd change my name to Shut Up and save everybody a lot of time.
Jonathan LethemShe craned up on her toes and kissed my cheek..."Don't do that", I said. "You just met me. This is New York.
Jonathan LethemMay one plead, Your Honor, postmodernism as an involuntary condition?
Jonathan LethemJust handling this ocean of different books—new and used, in and out of print, famous and forgotten—it was literature as this giant mosaic of texts and experiments and attitudes. I think it’s just very liberating to break out of a great man’s theory of history.
I guess I’ve always liked working from that sense of—what would you call it?—license that the margins permit. I always just visualize myself writing books that were meant one day to be dusty, forgotten volumes being encountered by intrepid browsers in a used bookstore. It was a much less freighted way to think about trying to enter the conversation than to imagine I had to write The Great Gatsby.
Tags: bookstores-writing
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