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Friends, Both The Imaginary Ones You Build For Yourself Out Of Phrases Taken From A Living Writer, Or Real Ones From College, And Relatives, Despite All The Waste Of Ceremony And Fakery And The Fact That Out Of An Hour Of Conversation You May Have Only Five Minutes In Which The Old Entente Reappears, Are The Only Real Means For Foreign Ideas To Enter Your Brain.

-Nicholson Baker

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Friends, Both The Imaginary

Nicholson Baker

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Friends, Both The Imaginary Ones You Build For Yourself Out Of Phrases Taken From A Living Writer, Or Real Ones From College, And Relatives, Despite All The Waste Of Ceremony And Fakery And The Fact That Out Of An Hour Of Conversation You May Have Only Five Minutes In Which The Old Entente Reappears, Are The Only Real Means For Foreign Ideas To Enter Your Brain.

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I Really Practiced Hard And Got To A Certain Level Of Technical Proficiency. I Overcame Some Of My Limitations. I Was A Hard-working, Dedicated Bassoonist, But I Have To Say I'm Not A Natural Musician.

The Force Of Truth That A Statement Imparts, Then, Its Prominence Among The Hordes Of Recorded Observations That I May Optionally Apply To My Own Life, Depends, In Addition To The Sense That It Is Argumentatively Defensible, On The Sense That Someone Like Me, And Someone I Like, Whose Voice Is Audible And Who Is At Least Notionally In The Same Room With Me, Does Or Can Possibly Hold It To Be Compellingly True.

While I Was Writing I Assumed It Would Be Published Under A Pseudonym, And That Liberated Me: What I Wrote Was Exactly What I Wanted To Read.

You Need The Art In Order To Love The Life.

Each Decision - To Kill, To Sign A Petition, To Write A Letter, To Make A Speech, To Attack, To Lie, To Surrender - Was Made At Some Point In Somebody's Day.

Sometimes I Think With The Telephone That If I Concentrate Enough I Could Pour Myself Into It And I'd Be Turned Into A Mist And I Would Rematerialize In The Room Of The Person I'm Talking To. Is That Too Odd For You?

You Can Tell It's A Poem Because It's Swimming In A Little Gel Pack Of White Space. That Shows It's A Poem.

I Woke Up Thinking A Very Pleasant Thought. There Is Lots Left In The World To Read.

Some After-the-fact Storytelling Is Inevitable, And, In Fact, Very Good And Useful. But Then We Want Always To Be Able To Enrich The Stories, Or Maybe Change The Stories With A Fresh Infusion Of Specificity.

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I Certainly Felt I Had An Idea Of World War Ii, And It's Probably The Idea That Many People Share: There Was This Insane Aggressor, And There Was Really Only One Way To Proceed In Resisting Him. What I Didn't Realize Is That There Were Many Voices Belonging To Reasonable, Interesting, Complicated People Who Had A Different Way Of Interpreting The Possible Responses To The Hitlerian Menace.

I Wanted To Apprentice Myself To The Dailiness Of The War's Beginning Phase. It's Truer And More Frightening That Way - When You're Afloat On A Little Dingy In The Midst Of It All.

Writing Has To Do With Truth-telling. When You're Writing, Let's Say, An Essay For A Magazine, You Try To Tell The Truth At Every Moment. You Do Your Best To Quote People Accurately And Get Everything Right. Writing A Novel Is A Break From That: Freedom. When You're Writing A Novel, You Are In Charge; You Can Beef Things Up.

One's Head Is Finite. You Pour More And More Things Into It - Surnames, Chronologies, Affiliations - And It Packs Them Away In Its Tunnels, And Eventually You Find That You Have A Book About Something That You Publish.

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I Wrote About World War Ii Because I Didn't Understand It. I Think That's The Reason That Historians Are Drawn To Any Subject - There's Something About It That Doesn't Make Sense. I Wanted To Work My Way Through What Happened Slowly, And Look At Everything In The Order In Which It Took Place.

Churchill Was A Brilliant And Inspiring Rhetorician, But One Of The First Things He Did As The Head Of The British Nation Was To Put German Jews In Jail. Tens Of Thousands Of Jews - Who Had Just Been Fortunate Enough To Get Out From Under Hitler Only A Few Years Before - Spent The Entire War In Jail.

Gandhi Was Such An Important Figure To The Pacifists Of The '30s, And He Was Such An Extraordinary Embodiment Of Nonviolence, That I Thought It Was Necessary To Have Him In There. When He Would Say Something About The War, It Was To Some Extent News - And He Was Sure To Have A Response That Was Different From That Of Other World Leaders.

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There's A Time And Place For The Kindle, And I Own One Now And Have Books On It That I Don't Otherwise Have. But I Don't Find That My Hand Reaches Out For It The Way It Does For A Trade Paperback, Or (in The Middle Of The Night) For The Ipod Touch.

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Friends, Both The Imaginary Ones You Build For Yourself Out Of Phrases Taken From A Living Writer, Or Real Ones From College, And Relatives, Despite All The Waste Of Ceremony And Fakery And The Fact That Out Of An Hour Of Conversation You May Have Only Five Minutes In Which The Old Entente Reappears, Are The Only Real Means For Foreign Ideas To Enter Your Brain.

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When I First Wanted To Be A Writer, I Learned To Write Prose By Reading Poetry.

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Perforation! Shout It Out! The Deliberate Punctuated Weakening Of Paper And Cardboard So That It Will Tear Along An Intended Path, Leaving A Row Of Fine-haired Pills Or Tuftlets On Each New Edge! It Is A Staggering Conception, Showing An Age-transforming Feel For The Unique Properties Of Pulped Wood Fiber.

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It's Troubling To See How Often Winston Churchill Is A Proponent Of Massive Programs That Are Really Aimed At Civilians - Starvation Blockades And Chemical Warfare Stockpiles And So On.

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I Think I Am Done With Wikipedia For The Time Being. But I Have A Secret Hope. Someone Recently Proposed A Wikimorgue - A Bin Of Broken Dreams Where All Rejects Could Still Be Read, As Long As They Weren't Libelous Or Otherwise Illegal.

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In Fact, You Could Make The Argument That A Historian Like Shlomo Aronson Does In Passing In One Of His Books, That The Bombing Campaign United The German Nation Behind Hitler, And Actually Contributed To The Sustaining Of His Power.

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Maybe The Kindle Was The Bowflex Of Bookishness: Something Expensive That, When You Commit To It, Forces You To Do More Of Whatever It Is You Think You Should Be Doing More Of.

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Most Writers Are Secretly Worried That They're Not Really Writers. That It's All Been Happenstance, Something Came Together Randomly, The Letters Came Together, And They Won't Coalesce Ever Again.

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What's Somewhat Puzzling Is That Churchill Himself Knew What The Reaction Would Be To Any Sort Of Aerial Attack On Cities, Because In 1938 He Said That In A Future War British Cities Would Be Attacked By Bombing, And That The Response Would Be That All Men Would Want To Join The Fight Because They Would Be So Incensed By This Cowardly Manner Of Attack. Which Is A Very Natural Response: When Something Drops On You From The Air And Blows Up A Bunch Of Buildings And Kills People In Their Sleep, The Reaction Is Going To Be Rage, Confusion, And A Search For Something To Destroy In Retaliation.

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For Me, As A Beginning Novelist, All Other Living Writers Form A Control Group For Whom The World Is A Placebo.

I Don't Do All That Well In The Writerly World. I'm Happier Being Outside The Flow.

I Hadn't Played Any Music Since Freshman Year Of College, More Than Thirty Years Ago, So I Had To Relearn Everything. I Started Writing Songs. Some Were Dance And Trance Songs (i Listen To Them A Lot While I'm Writing), And Some Were Love Songs, Because That After All Is What Music Is About - Dancing And Trancing And Love And Love's Setbacks.

I Blush Easily. I Have Difficulty Meeting People's Eye, Difficulty With Public Speaking, The Normal Afflictions Of The Shy, But Not To A Paralysing Degree.

I'm Often Called Obsessive, But I Don't Think I Am Any More Than Anyone Else.

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In My Case, Adulthood Itself Was Not An Advance, Although It Was A Useful Waymark.

I Ordered A Kindle 2 From Amazon. How Could I Not? There Were Banner Ads For It All Over The Web. Whenever I Went To The Amazon Web Site, I Was Urged To Buy One.

The Job Of The Novel Is To Be True To The Confusion, But Not So Confusing That You Turn The Reader Off.

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