#Lethem

[brynns-travel-blog]

[the-haylien]

Old Stuff is New

Tryna clear out my storage unit, and I came across a box that had been sealed through at least two moves. Ah-ha! My missing books. You might not think I could tell anything was missing from my tsundoku stacks. But I knew. What a relief to have them back on my shelves. Some read and some not.

In random order, the best finds were:

Dickens' Sketches by Boz

Clarke's 2010 Odyssey Two

Moore's A Dirty Job

Feynman's The Meaning of It All

Cervantes' Don Quixote

Stoker's Dracula (with bookmarks and notes)

Gaiman's Neverwhere

De Pomaine's French Cooking in Ten Minutes

Drucker's Managing Oneself

Hemingway's A Moveable Feast

Hesse's Siddhartha

Burroughs' Mars Trilogy

Shelley's Frankenstein (with bookmarks and notes)

Le Guin's Left Hand of Darkness

Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath

Noon's Vurt

Russell's Sparrow

Poe's Essential Tales and Poems (with bookmarks and notes)

Lethem's gun, with occasional music

[aaronburch]

1/12 — “Narrowing Valley” by Jonathan Lethem

from The New Yorker (October 31, 2022 issue)

Part of me hated this story, part of me loved it! Meta and self-aware that I feel a little tired of, but that also felt like it was doing something a little different and new and unique in kinda exciting ways. Apparently inspired by / a riff on R. A. Lafferty’s “Narrow Valley,” it reminded me a bit of my recent read of Ernaux’s “Returns,” the way stories can be in dialogue with on another, the different ways to be inspired by an old text to create something new, an interesting jumping off point and also way of playing with refraction...

The story acknowledges borrowing the language of its acknowledgment of its occupation of stolen Tongva land from the Web site of a collective of spirit healers, who will go unnamed in this acknowledgment, for they may not wish to be associated. The story admits that it also depends for its existence on an occupation of the text of R. A. Lafferty’s “Narrow Valley,” a text that the story’s author first encountered in the anthology “Other Dimensions,” edited by Robert Silverberg in 1973. The story takes place six years later, in 1979, the year of Three Mile Island, of the Iranian hostage crisis, of the imminence of the Reagan era. The feeling that the Reagan era was coming is a migraine prodrome, a hangover suffered before a decades-long binge on Militarism, Bogus Optimism, and Imperial Fantasy that hasn’t abated yet. Since, really, what is the twenty-first century except the endless unspooling of the implications of the Reagan era? But the writer digresses.

[andybeckerman]

Not exactly sure what he's trying to say with this...???

[quotemadness]

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.

Jonathan Lethem

[thehopefulquotes]

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.

Jonathan Lethem, You Don’t Love Me Yet

[stay-close]

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.

Jonathan Lethem, You Don’t Love Me Yet

[perfectfeelings]

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.

Jonathan Lethem, You Don’t Love Me Yet

[surqrised]

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.

Jonathan Lethem, You Don’t Love Me Yet

[quotespile]

I am relaxed. It's just buried under layers of incredulity and panic. But underneath those I'm very relaxed.

Jonathan Lethem, As She Climbed Across the Table

[quotefeeling]

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.

Jonathan Lethem, You Don’t Love Me Yet

[thoughtkick]

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.

Jonathan Lethem, You Don’t Love Me Yet

[perfectquote]

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.

Jonathan Lethem, You Don’t Love Me Yet

[resqectable]

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.

Jonathan Lethem, You Don’t Love Me Yet

[mqmotivate]

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. Jonathan Lethem, You Don’t Love Me Yet