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I Don't Really Ask Of Myself A Given Word Or Page Count Or Number Of Hours. To Work Every Day, That's My Only Fetish. And There Is A Physical Quality To It When A Novel Is Thriving.

-Jonathan Lethem

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I Don't Really Ask

Jonathan Lethem

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I Don't Really Ask Of Myself A Given Word Or Page Count Or Number Of Hours. To Work Every Day, That's My Only Fetish. And There Is A Physical Quality To It When A Novel Is Thriving.

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Some People Have Things Written All Over Their Faces; The Big Guy Had A Couple Of Words Misspelled In Crayon On His.

The Computer Is The Way I'm Making Books, But I Still Think About The Physical Properties. I Visualize The Length Of A Book, The Proportions Of A Book, In Material Terms.

Art Is About Eliminating Almost Everything In Order To Focus On The Thing That You Need To Talk About.

Yet I'm Making A Book And I'm Going To Care Immensely About What Words Get Bound In The Pages, And I Want The Object To Look Good. I Won't Believe In It And It Won't Be Real To Me Until There's A Finished Book I Can Hold.

The Book Is Openly A Kind Of Spiritual Autobiography, But The Trick Is That On Any Other Level It's A Kind Of Insane Collage Of Fragments Of Memory.

Nerds Are Just Deep, And Neurotic, Fans. Needy Fans. We're All Nerds, On One Subject Or Another.

Insomnia Is A Variant Of Tourette's--the Waking Brain Races, Sampling The World After The World Has Turned Away, Touching It Everywhere, Refusing To Settle, To Join The Collective Nod. The Insomniac Brain Is A Sort Of Conspiracy Theorist As Well, Believing Too Much In Its Own Paranoiac Importance--as Though If It Were To Blink, Then Doze, The World Might Be Overrun By Some Encroaching Calamity, Which Its Obsessive Musings Are Somehow Fending Off.

One Of The Things That Novels Have Tended Not To Concentrate On Over The Centuries Is The Fact That People Read Books.

Waves, Sky, Trees, Essrog - I Was Off The Page Now, Away From The Grammar Of Skyscrapers And Pavement.

There's Something About The Rhythms Of Language That Correspond To The Rhythms Of Our Own Bodies.

It Wasn't For Children, Seventh Grade. You Could Read The Stress Of Even Entering The Building In The Postures Of The Teachers, The Security Guards. Nobody Could Relax In Such A Racial And Hormonal Disaster Area.

I've Been An Advocate Against The View Of The Writer As A Partitioned Genius Hanging In Conceptual Space, Or Up On A Mountain, A Bringer Of Promethean Fire, Some Unique Transmission That Comes Out Of Nowhere. I Prefer The Opposite View - That Writers Come From Somewhere. They Read Things, And They Think About Them, And They Incorporate Other People's Thoughts.

What I'm Constantly Striving For In My Prose Is Clarity. So That, Ideally, The Writing Will Become So Transparent That The Reader Will Forget That The Medium Of Communication Is Language.

When The Civil Rights Battle Was Won, All The Jews And Hippies And Artists Were Middle Class White People And All The Blacks Were Still Poor. Materially, Not Much Changed.

Comics? Honestly, That's More A Matter Of Nostalgia For Me. I Think Most Of That Energy Has Gone To My Love Of Literature, And My Love Of Film...

When I Write Lyrics, I Really Do Go Into An Automatic Folk Appropriation Mode... I See The Vernacular Register Of 20th Century Song As Being A Bunch Of Forms To Adapt And Reconfigure.

I Definitely Care About How The Concept Of New York Punk Was Constructed, And Why It Mattered. But I Wasn't Gonna DoÂ That. Partly Because I'm Not A Great Journalist...

I Don't Paint Anymore. I Haven't Since I Abandoned It At 19, In Order To Begin Writing Seriously.

You Can't Be Deep Without A Surface

Artists Freeze Themselves Into These Weird Postures That Are Meant To Be Impressive And Involving, Then They Fling Them Out Into The World Like Polaroids, And Then They Move On. And I'm Stuck In This Intense Relationship To The Polaroid.

Fantastic Writing In English Is Kind Of Disreputable, But Fantastic Writing In Translation Is The Summit.

As I Get Older I Find That The Friendships That Are The Most Certain, Ultimately, Are The Ones Where You And The Other Person Have Made Substantial Amounts Of Money For One Another.

Consensual Reality Is Both Fragile And Elastic, And It Heals Like The Skin Of A Bubble.

I Don't Write About Anything I Don't Love Even If That Love Sometimes Gets All Screwed Up And Tormented.

I Guess They Needed A Maze In Japan, Where Everything's Neat And Tidy. In America Everybody's Already Wandering Around Lost.

I Believe That Written Stories Will Continue To Survive Because They Answer An Essential Human Need. I Think Movies Might Disappear Before The Novel Disappears, Because The Novel Is Really One Of The Only Places In The World Where Two Strangers Can Meet On Terms Of Absolute Intimacy.

Music Still Sort Of Hangs Up There In The Sky For Me As This Thing That Moves Me So Much, But I Can't Really Make It. It's Like A Car I Can't Drive.

I Tend To Think Of Myself As A Highly Emotional Writer. It's All Coming Out Of The Deepest Feelings, Out Of Dreams, Out Of The Unconscious.

I Hate Libraries For The Way They Put Stickers On Things. I Don't Approve Of Folding Over Pages, Or Of Writing In Books. God, Forget Scissors - That's Beyond The Pale.

Writing Is A Necessity And Often A Pleasure, But At The Same Time, It Can Be A Great Burden And A Terrible Struggle.

I'm Gregarious With Writers And Never With Manuscripts . . . I [like To] Create The Illusion Of Seamless Perfection, So I Alone Know The Flawed Homely Process Along The Way.

I Don't Know Why The World Has Changed So Much That Writers Are Now Expected To Appear In Public And Talk About Their Work. It's Something I Find Very Difficult. And Yet, One Does Have Some Sense Of Responsibility Towards One's Publishers, To The People Trying To Sell The Book.

I Had An All-fear Of Music Ipod, Just Versions Of The 11 Songs From The Record. No Other Songs Allowed.

So Much Of The Effort That Goes Into Writing Prose For Me Is About Making Sentences That Capture The Music That I'm Hearing In My Head. It Takes A Lot Of Work, Writing, Writing, And Rewriting To Get The Music Exactly The Way You Want It To Be.

I'm Not A Sociologist, And The Novel Has Often Concerned Itself With Sociology. It's One Of The Generating Forces That's Made Fiction Interesting To People. But That's Not My Concern. I'm Interested In Psychology. And Also Certain Philosophical Questions About The World.

The Level At Which My Ocd Enters My Writing Process Isn't That I Slap The Keyboard - It's More Along The Lines Of A Compulsive Need To Swap Syllables Around, Rework Words And Sentences - I Revise For The Pleasure And Satisfaction Of It, Rather Than Out Of A Sense Of Duty.

You Could Grow Up In The City Where History Was Made And Still Miss It All.

Being Blocked, Being Uncertain, Sitting There Not Knowing, Waiting, Abiding With It: This Is The Work. If You Don't Have The Tolerance For That You're In Great Trouble. If You Want To Call It A Writer's Block... That Doesn't Seem A Very Useful Name For That Kind Of Abiding That I Think Is The Essence Of The Work.

Context Is Everything. Dress Me Up And See. I'm A Carnival Barker, An Auctioneer, A Downtown Performance Artist, A Speaker In Tongues, A Senator Drunk On Filibuster. I've Got Tourette's. My Mouth Won't Quit, Though Mostly I Whisper Or Subvocalize Like I'm Reading Aloud, My Adam's Apple Bobbing, Jaw Muscle Beating Like A Miniature Heart Under My Cheek, The Noise Suppressed, The Words Escaping Silently, Mere Ghosts Of Themselves, Husks Of Empty Breath And Tone.

How Often Had That Hydrant Even Been Opened? Did You Jet Water Through A Car Window, What, Twice At Best? Summer Burned Just A Few Afternoons Long, In The End. As For Flying, Dose Never Even Glanced At The Sky. Flying Was A Summer Within A Summer, A Whim. So Why Think Of It At All?

As A Child Growing Up In Pre-gentrification Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, I Went Everywhere By Bicycle. My Bike Was In Many Ways The Key To My Neighborhood, Which, At The Time, Was Boerum Hill, Brooklyn. This Was In The 60s And 70s, Before All The White People And Restaurants. I Really Can't Underscore Boldly Enough The Fact That I Grew Up In Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, Before It Was Gentrified. You Could Get Mugged!

I Plan Less And Less. It's A Great Benefit Of Writing Lots, That You Get Good At Holding Long Narratives In Your Head Like A Virtual Space.

But The Day I Can't Shrug Off A Twinge Of Self-pity, Is The Day I'm Washed Up For Keeps.

Once You Fall Into Habits, I Think, You're Dead As An Artist. You Have To Challenge Yourself And Never Rest On Your Laurels, Never Think About What You've Done In The Past.

I Have No One To Blame For The Construction For Myself, Of Course, But I'm Always Surprised And Slightly Sulky When I RealizeВ People Are Buying The Whole Thing.

Writing Is A Private Discipline, In A Field Of Companions.

Listen To Me. I’m Shy. I’m Not Stupid. I Can’t Meet People’s Eyes. I Don’t Know If You Understand What That’s Like. There’s A Whole World Going On Around Me, I’m Aware Of That. It’s Not Because I Don’t Want To Look At You, Lucinda. It’s That I Don’t Want To Be Seen.

Yes! I'm The Slowest Comic-book Writer On Earth.

I'd Have Been A Filmmaker Or A Cartoonist Or Something Else Which Extended From The Visual Arts Into The Making Of Narratives If I Hadn't Been Able To Shift Into Fiction.

It's Impossible To Overstate How My Relationship To Music Forms A Preserve For The Esoteric Or Even Spiritual Aspect Of My Relationship To Cultural Stuff, To Human Expressivity... It's A Safe Enclosure.

I Met Someone Who Lives In An Elevator.

I've Just Finished Reading Reality Hunger And I'm Lit Up By It-astonished, Intoxicated, Ecstatic, Overwhelmed. . . . It Really Is An Urgent Book: A Piece Of Art-making Itself, A Sublime, Exciting, Outrageous, Visionary Volume.

With A Book You Can Read The Same Paragraph Four Times. You Can Go Back To Page 21 When You're On Page 300. You Can't Do That With Film. It Just Charges Ahead.

I'm A Firm Believer That There Are No Rules In Art. Every Trajectory Is Different.

I Want To Write Books That Can Be Read A Hundred Years From Now, And Readers Wouldn't Be Bogged Down By Irrelevant Details.

Nature, Or At Least Birds And Women, Abhorred The Invisible Man.

I Try Not To Become Too Regular An Addict Of Any One Subculture.

Life Is Fundamentally Up For Grabs

I Work On A Laptop Specifically So I Can Work In Cafes And Pretend I'm Part Of The Human World.

I Can't Bear The Silent Ringing In My Skull.

Reading And Writing Are The Same Thing; It's Just One's The More Active And The Other's The More Passive. They Flow Into Each Other.

My Inner Chemistry Had Been Hijacked By A Mad Scientist, Who Poured The Fizzy, Volatile Contents Of My Heart From A Test Tube Marked Sober Reality Into Another Labeled Sunny Delusion, And Back Again, Faster And Faster, Until The Floor Of My Life Was Slick With Spillage.

There Were Days When No Kid Came Out Of His House Without Looking Around. The Week After Halloween Had A Quality Both Hungover And Ominous, The Light Pitched, The Sky Smashed Against The Rooftops.

I Got Into Underground Comics Fairly Early On And Kind Of Wandered Away From The Superhero Stuff, But I Was An Art Student And I Was Drawing A Lot As A Kid.

...don't Rupture Another's Illusion Unless You're Positive The Alternative You Offer Is More Worthwhile Than That From Which You're Wrenching Them. Interrogate Your Solipsism: Does It Offer Any Better A Home Than The Delusions You're Reaching To Shatter?

What Exactly Is Postmodernism, Except Modernism Without The Anxiety?

What's Lucky About My Career In General Is That I Stumbled Into What Every Writer Most Wants. Not Repeating Myself And Doing Strange Things Has Become My Trademark.

It Was Only As I Wrote About Fear That I Began To Find Paths Of Access To Feelings That Were Intolerable To Me Then.

When Rolling Stone Handed Me This Crazy Assignment To Be In The Studio With James Brown, They Had The Misapprehension That I'd Written For Them Already Just Because I Claimed My Character Had.

Someday I Would Change My Name To Shut Up And Save Everybody A Lot Of Time.

I Learned To Write Fiction The Way I Learned To Read Fiction - By Skipping The Parts That Bored Me.

The Less You Offer, The More Readers Are Forced To Bring The World To Life With Their Own Visual Imaginings. I Personally Hate An Illustration Of A Character On A Jacket Of A Book. I Never Want To Have Someone Show Me What The Character Really Looks Like - Or What Some Artist Has Decided The Character Really Looks Like - Because It Always Looks Wrong To Me. I Realize That I Prefer To Kind Of Meet The Text Halfway And Offer A Lot Of Visual Collaborations From My Own Imaginative Response To The Sentences.

I Prefer Old Books And Find Them More Relevant. I Dislike New Books. It's Like Drinking Wine That's Not Ready.

I Suppose In A Way Most Of My Characters Are Non-consumers, Not Terribly Interested In All The Little Baubles And Artifacts Of Contemporary Life.

I'm Not Too Embarrassed To Say I'm The Definition Of The Target Audience. This Is My Generation, The One Of Exalting Music In Album Form.

Target Audience

You Discovered Yourself And What Really Mattered Only After You Passed Through The Lens Of The Fairy Tale, Imposed On Every Human Female And Male Alike, That Someone Existed Out In The Forest Of The World For You To Love And Marry.

Good Films Demand To Be Looked At Several Times In Order To Be Observed Completely.

The Past Is Still Visible. The Buildings Haven't Changed, The Layout Of The Streets Hasn't Changed. So Memory Is Very Available To Me As I Walk Around.

I'm Learning To Hate The Sound Of My Own Voice.

I Grew Up With An Artist Father, And My Parents' Friends Were Also Mainly Artists Or Writers, So He Connects What I Do With His Example.

The Key To Mostly Anything Is Pretending Your First Time Isn't.

I've Discovered That Like Every Writer, I'm Helpless Myself - And That Means I Find Myself Unconsciously Or Semi-consciously Repeating Motifs And Themes And Even Using Certain Words Or Images Recurrently In My Work, No Matter How Much I Think I'm Starting Fresh. But I've Always Admired Artists Who Made A Specific Sport Of Trying To Visit Different Kinds Of Genres Or Mediums Or Modes - Not Just 'western' Or 'detective', But Comedy/tragedy, Epic And Miniature, Traditional/experimental.

Writing Is Physical For Me. I Always Have The Sense That The Words Are Coming Out Of My Body, Not Just My Mind.

I Keep One Simple Rule That I Only Move In One Direction - I Write The Book Straight Through From Beginning To End. By Following Time's Arrow I Keep Myself Sane.

I Never Take Any Notes Or Draw Charts Or Make Elaborate Diagrams, But I Hold An Image Of The Shape Of A Book In My Head And Work From That Mental Hologram.

The Arts And A Belief In The Values Of The Civil Rights Movement, In The Overwhelming Virtue Of Diversity, These Were Our Religion. My Parents Worshipped Those Ideals.

I Hate Feeling Too Complacent When I Write. I Like To Be Solving New Problems.

I Don't Want To Indulge Myself In The Luxury Of Writing Beautiful Paragraphs Just For The Sake Of Making Beautiful Writing. That Doesn't Interest Me. I Want Everything To Be Essential.

The More Film I Watch, The More John Ford Looks Like A Giant. His Politics Aren't So Good, And You Have To Learn To Accept John Wayne As An Actor, But He's A Poet In Black And White.

Black And White

Poetry Is Supposed To Be Musical. But People Don't Understand Prose. They're So Used To Reading Journalism - Clunky, Functional Sentences That Convey Factual Information - Facts, More Than Just The Surfaces Of Things.

As Much As I Revere Great Writing, And Am Still Humbled By It, Literary Activities Are No Longer Esoteric To Me. When I Read A Great Novel - Something That I Could Never Have Written Myself - I'm Still Looking At It A Little Bit Like A Technician.

As Much As I Care About Historical Context - I'm Very Eager To Read A Really Great Historical Account.

What Age Is A Black Boy When He Learns He's Scary?

All Paths Lead Nowhere; Choose One With Heart...

Apologies Aren't Something You Want To Get In The Habit Of Practicing In The Mirror

Teenage Life - Possibly Adult Life Too Is All About What You Want And Can’t Have. And Then About What You Receive And Misuse.

I Have A Horror Of Silence While I'm Writing. It's Like The Universe Is Howling At Me If I Don't Have It.

I've Always Been Passionately In Love With Movies, To Such A Degree That Even As A Young Person Of About Nineteen Or Twenty I Thought Maybe I Would Try To Become A Film Director. The Reason I Didn't Do It Was Because I Felt I Didn't Have The Right Personality. At That Time In My Life, I Was Mortally Shy.

In The Sea Of Words, The In Print Is Foam, Surf Bubbles Riding The Top. And It's A Dark Sea, And Deep, Where Divers Need Lights On Their Helmets And Would Perish At The Lower Depths.

I Try To Write Every Day. I Don't Beat Myself Up About Word Counts, Or How Many Hours Are Ticking By On The Clock Before I'm Allowed To Go And Do Something Else. I Just Try To Keep A Hand In And Work Every Single Day, Even If There Are Other Demands Or I'm On A Book Tour Or Have The Flu Or Something, Because Then I Keep My Unconscious Engaged With The Book. Then I'm Always A Little Bit Writing, No Matter What Else I'm Doing.

I'm Not Planning What I Listen To, Except When I Think The Music Can Guide Me To Some Emotional Place I Want To Be Reminded Of.

My Writing Life Is Pretty Simple - I Try To Work Every Day, Almost Always In The Mornings - And I Can Only Write Fiction Effectively For About Three Or At The Most Four Hours. No Big Mysteries, I Just Sit Down And Try To Advance The Cause A Little Bit Every Day.

I Listen To Music All The Time. I Write While Listening To Music. And I Tell Myself That The Music Nourishes The Art Forms That I Do Master And Domesticate, And Have Authority Over.

Novelists Get To Direct The Perfect Films. We Get To Cast Every Part. We Dress The Set Exactly As We Wish.

It's Now Expected Of Me That I Will Defy Expectation, So I Really Generally Seem To Be Free To Write What I Want.

I Don't Have A Lot Of Paper In My Immediate Work Environment, Except When I'm Doing Things Like Checking The Godforsaken Proofs.

Develop Your Pawns Or Hulk Will Smash.

No Matter How Enormous A Novel May Become, The Physical Act Of Reading Determines That There's No Way It Can Become A Communal Experience. To Read Is Intimate. It's Almost Masturbatory.

By Removing The Stories From The Morass Of Things That Surround Us, I'm Hoping To Achieve Some Kind Of Purer Approach To Emotional Life.

When People Call Something "original," 9 Out Of 10 Times They Just Don't Know The References Or Original Sources Involved.

To The Resentment That Hides Inside Love, To The Loneliness That Hides Among Companions.

The Kernel, The Soul - Let Us Go Further And Say The Substance, The Bulk, The Actual And Valuable Material Of All Human Utterances - Is Plagiarism.

Those Promises We Make To Ourselves When We Are Younger, About How We Mean To Conduct Our Adult Lives, Can It Be True We Break Every Last One Of Them? All Except For One, I Suppose: The Promise To Judge Ourselves By Those Standards, The Promise To Remember The Child Who Would Be So Appalled By Compromise, The Child Who Would Find Jadedness Wicked.

Every Book Is A Kind Of Experiment In Doing Something That Feels Impossible.

I’ve Always Been Uninterested In Boundaries Or Quarantines Between Tastes And Types, Between Mediums And Genres.

The World's Large Enough And Interesting Enough To Take A Different Approach Each Time You Sit Down To Write About It.

Tourette's Is Just One Big Lifetime Of Tag, Really. The World (or My Brain---same Thing) Appoints Me It, Again And Again. So I Tag Back. Can It Do Otherwise? If You've Ever Been It You Know The Answer.

Discomfort Is Very Much Part Of My Master Plan.

It Was Often This Way, Life Consisted Of A Series Of False Beginnings, Bluff Declarations Of Arrival To Destinations Not Even Glimpsed.

My Heart, To Put It More Simply, Got Nostalgic For The Present. Always A Bad Sign.

My Heart And The Elevator, A Plummet Inside A Plummet.

I've Always Felt That The Writing I Responded To Most - The Novels And Stories That Compelled Me, That Felt Like They Described The World I Live In, With All Of Its Subjectivity, Irrationality, And Paradox, Were Those Which Made Free Use Of Myths And Symbols, Fantastic Occurences, Florid Metaphors, Linguistic Experiments, Etcetera - To Depict The Experiences Of Relatively 'realistic' Characters - On The Level Of Their Emotions And Psychology, Rather Than In Terms Of What Kinds Of Lives They Led Or What Kind Of Events They Experience.

For Me, Music Is Sort Of The Art That I Can't Incorporate Into My Person The Way I Want To.

I Just Noticed Recently That In One Book After Another I Seem To Find An Excuse To Find Some Character Who, To Put It Idiotically Simply, Is Allowed To Talk Crazy.

I Don't Really Ask Of Myself A Given Word Or Page Count Or Number Of Hours. To Work Every Day, That's My Only Fetish. And There Is A Physical Quality To It When A Novel Is Thriving.

However Appalling To Consider, However Tedious To Enact, Every Novel Requires Furniture, Whether It Is To Be Named Or Unnamed, For The Characters Will Be Unable To Remain In Standing Position For The Duration Of The Story.

I Want What We All Want," Said Carl. "to Move Certain Parts Of The Interior Of Myself Into The Exterior World, To See If They Can Be Embraced.

A Reader, Encountering A Sentence About A Barking Dog, Would Have To Dwell On Why That Choice Was Made At That Moment. Everything In A Novel Is Explicitly Chosen, Whereas Some Of What A Film Captures Feels Incidental, According To The Vagaries Of Photography And Sound Recording.

I'm A Serial Deconstructor Of My Own Authority In Certain Areas.

Every Artist Has Limits. No One Can Do Everything. It's Impossible.

What's Beautiful About Art Is That It Circumscribes A Space, A Physical And Mental Space. If You Try To Put The Entire World Into Every Page, You Turn Out Chaos.

I've Never Related To The Work Geek At All-it Sounds Much More Horrible Than Nerd. Like A Freak Biting A Chicken's Head Off In A Sideshow.

I Had Always Wanted To Be A Writer Who Confused Genre Boundaries And Who Was Read In Multiple Contexts.

Anyone Could See It All Coming And No One Could Possibly Stop It And That Was The Beautiful Thing. Friday Night Was Open Wide And Writ In Stone

I'd Excluded New York From My Writing, And Then I Came Back And I Fell In Love With It All Over Again... The Energy Comes From An Absence, That Yearning For New York When You Are Not There.

Apparently Brooklyn Needn't Always Push Itself To Be Something Else, Something Conscious And Anxious, Something Pointed Toward Manhattan.... Brooklyn Might Sometimes Also Be Pleased, As Here On Flatbush, To Be Its Grubby, Enduring Self.

Making Books Has Always Felt Very Connected To My Bookselling Experience, That Of Wanting To Draw People's Attention To Things That I Liked, To Shape Things That I Liked Into New Shapes.

I've Had The Odd Good Luck Of Starting Slowly And Building Gradually, Something Few Writers Are Allowed Anymore. As A Result I've Seen Each Of My Books Called The Breakthrough. And Each Was, In Its Way.

There's Never Any Percentage In Being Ahead Of Your Time.

You Don’t Have The Slightest Idea Of What It Means To Write A Scene And A Character In The English Language, With Images And Words Chock Full Of Received Meaning.

I Never Have Been A Musician; I'm Not Actually Capable. Because I Can't Even Pretend To Acquire The Gift, All Of My First Feelings About Art Are Still Attached To Music. I Look At It Yearningly, I Look At It Wonderingly. I Behold It From Afar, As Something Unattainable, Something Outside Of Myself, From Which I Can Take Nourishment, But I Can't Domesticate And Master.

For Those Whose Ganglia Were Formed Pre-tv, The Mimetic Deployment Of Pop-culture Icons Seems At Best An Annoying Tic And At Worst A Dangerous Vapidity That Compromises Fiction's Seriousness By Dating It Out Of The Platonic Always, Where It Ought To Reside.

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