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I feel the same way. DeLillo can lie to me and I will read it and enjoy it thoroughly.

Libra
by Don DeLillo

#TombofSand
#GeetanialiShree

What the heck are you on about? You know perfectly well this has been a headache for both countries, that neither has been able to figure out to this day who has the right to live where, who belongs where….
#TheWriteWomen

#MobyDick
#HermanMelville

…after repeated, intrepid assaults, the White Whale had escaped alive; it cannot be much matter of surprise that some whalemen should go still further in their superstitions; declaring Moby Dick not only ubiquitous, but immortal…
#MelvilleMonday 🐳

#DucksNewburyport
#LucyEllmann

…the fact that Ethan got me to promise him long ago that if I was ever really desperate,like suicidal or something,that I would tell him,which still really comforts me…the fact that everybody should have that promise from somebody,a guaranteed listener…
#TheWriteWomen

#InvisibleCities
#ItaloCalvino

“So then, yours is truly a journey through memory!" The Great Khan…sat up in his hammock every time he caught the hint of a sigh in Marco's speech… “You return from your voyages with a cargo of regrets…confess what you are smuggling: moods, states of grace, elegies!"

#Libra
#DonDeLillo

Create coincidence so bizarre they have to believe it…Desperate men give their solitude a purpose…If the world is where we hide from ourselves, what do we do when the world is no longer accessible? We invent a false name, invent a destiny, purchase a firearm through the mail.

#AgainsttheDay
#ThomasPynchon

“Well you are presentable, there's no avoiding that. When you transmigrate into your next body, you might consider something a bit less eyecatching….I suppose I only mean, be cautious.…”
"Of the flesh but not the world….”

Finished #TheAgeofWireandString
#BenMarcus

SHE WAS the first grass guard of American shelters…the girl wielded her shade stick so that the sun might never collaborate with the grass in destroying the house.

For as long as I used to see drifting past me those parts of the other the world, I used to wonder about the place where all the drifting parts drift together. But I no longer wondered....”

And with #Inland, #GeraldMurnane became one of my favorite authors.

#GeraldMurnane
Born February 25, 1939

From #Inland
“There is another world, and I have seen parts of that world on most days of my life. But the parts of that world are drifting past and cannot be lived in….

...Checking records and files. Making phone call after phone call. Successful oppression depends on this. So I would say in conclusion that they are struggling against the struggle. But I wouldn't want to say porta rickens, commanists, what-have-you. It be no bomb, remember. It be a gun, ping."

#Players
#DonDeLillo

“I wouldn't want to say porta rickens…coloreds…the well-meaning white folks who have taken up the struggle against the struggle,not knowing…that the capitalist system…power structure…pattern of repression are themselves a struggle. It's not an easy matter,being the oppressor…

#Pnin
#VladimirNabokov

Electric devices…Plastics swept him off his feet. He had a deep admiration for the zipper. But the devoutly plugged-in clock would make nonsense of his mornings…The frame of his spectacles would snap in mid-bridge…
And he still did not know that he was on the wrong train.

#Dhalgren
#SamuelRDelany

she asked, "when they got the first astronauts to the moon…next time…you looked up and saw the moon in the sky instead of on television…I realized that for the last fifty thousand science-fiction novels it had still been just a light hanging up there…now it was...a place."

I agree wholeheartedly.

#MobyDick
#HermanMelville

The cabin; by the stern windows;
Ahab sitting alone, and gazing out.
I leave a white and turbid wake; pale waters, paler cheeks, where'er I sail. The envious billows sidelong swell to whelm my track; let them; but first I pass.
#MelvilleMonday 🐳

Invisible Cities
by Italo Calvino

…Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you….

#InvisibleCities
#ItaloCalvino

Kublai Khan interrupted him…”Does your journey take place only in the past?"
All this so that Marco Polo could explain…the past it was a past that changed gradually as he advanced on his journey…the traveler's past changes according to the route he has followed…

…the President…was the final object of their protective instincts. They all knew that JFK wanted Castro cooling on a slab but they weren't allowed to let on to him that his guilty yearning was the business they'd charged themselves to carry out. The White House was to be the summit of unknowing.

…The Attorney General wasn't to know the queasy details. Just get results. Each level of the committee was designed to protect a higher level…A man needed special experience and insight to work true meanings out of certain murky remarks. There were pauses and blank looks…

…The Joint Chiefs were not to know. The operational horrors were not for their ears…The Secretaries were to be insulated from knowing. They were happier not knowing, or knowing too late. The Deputy Secretaries were interested in drifts and tendencies. They expected to be misled…

#Libra
#DonDeLillo

Knowledge was a danger…the Director of Central Intelligence, was not to know important things. The less he knew, the more decisively he could function. It would impair his ability to tell the truth at an inquiry or a hearing, or in an Oval Office chat with the President…

#AgainsttheDay
#ThomasPynchon

he was certain…that none of these figures were his real fellow crewmen…rather a ghost-Unit,from some Abode he wished never to visit, resolved on working him mischief…masked to look like Chums of Chance.
But then Darby Suckling caught sight of him,and the moment passed.

#TheAgeofWireandString
#BenMarcus

Where a house is, this man will maul it with noise and steam…producing an exit of life that is marked by the inception of a shadow. And the shadow takes up residence inside the world. And the shadow is a scar that will not soon be put off.

…Oh, I may do many things! History permitting, I may sail back to my recovered kingdom…I may huddle and groan in a madhouse. But whatever happens, wherever the scene is laid, somebody, somewhere, will quietly set out-somebody has already set out…and presently he will ring at my door….

Finished #PaleFire
#VladimirNabokov

an old-fashioned melodrama with three principles: a lunatic who intends to kill an imaginary king, another lunatic who imagines himself to be that king, and a distinguished old poet who stumbles by chance into the line of fire, and perishes in the clash…

William H. Gass: The Tunnel | KCRW Author William H. Gass discusses the evolution and style of his thirty-years-in-the-making new novel, finally published this month.

Michael Silverblatt was a great reader, a great talker, and a great champion of so many Dalkey Archive Press authors. We’ll be posting some of our favorite interviews all week.

Tonight, listen to his conversation with William H. Gass about “The Tunnel”: www.kcrw.com/shows/bookwo...

Finished #PafkoattheWall
#DonDeLillo

He speaks in your voice, American, and there's a shine in his eye that's halfway hopeful.