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The ecstasy of influence : nonfictions, etc. / Jonathan Lethem.

by Lethem, Jonathan.

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Doubleday, c2011.

Lethem, Jonathan.

Popular culture.

American essays -- 21st century.

xxiv, 437 p. : ill. ; 25 cm.

My plan to begin with. My plan to begin with, part one ; The used bookshop stories ; The books they read ; Going under in Wendover ; Zelig of notoriety ; Clerk -- Dick, Calvino, Ballard : SF and Postmodernism. My plan to begin with, part two ; Holidays ; Crazy friend (Philip K. Dick) ; What I learned at the science-fiction convention ; The best of Calvino : against completism ; Postmodernism as Liberty Valance ; The claim of time (J. G. Ballard) ; Give up -- Plagiarisms. The ecstasy of influence ; The afterlife of "ecstasy"/somatics of influence ; Always crashing in the same car ; Against "pop" culture ; Furniture -- Film and comics. Supermen! : an introduction ; Top-five depressed superheroes ; The epiphany ; Izations ; Everything is broken (art of darkness) ; Godfather IV ; Great death scene (McCabe & Mrs. Miller) ; Kovacs's gift ; Marlon Brando breaks ; Missed opportunities ; Donald Sutherland's buttocks ; The Drew Barrymore stories -- Wall art. The collector (Fred Tomaselli) ; An almost perfect day (letter to Bonn) ; The billboard men (Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel) ; Todd James ; Writing and the neighbor arts ; Live nude models ; On a photograph of my father ; Hazel -- 9/11 and book tour. Nine failures of the imagination ; Further reports in a dead language ; To my Italian friends ; My Egyptian cousin ; Cell phones ; Proximity people ; Repeating myself ; Bowels of compassion ; Stops ; Advertisements for Norman Mailer ; White elephant and termite postures in the life of the twenty-first-century novelist -- Dylan, Brown, and others. The genius of James Brown ; People who died ; The fly in the ointment ; Dancing about architecture ; Dylan interview ; Open letter to Stacy (the go-betweens) ; Otis Redding's lonely hearts club band ; Rick James ; an orchestra of light that was electric -- Working the room. Bolaño's 2666 ; Homely doom vibe (Paula Fox) ; Ambivalent usurpations (Thomas Berger) ; Rushmore versus abundance ; Outcastle (Shirley Jackson) ; Thursday ( G. K. Chesterton) ; My disappointment critic/on bad faith ; The American vicarious (Nathanael West) -- The mad Brooklynite. Ruckus Flatbush ; Crunch rolls ; Children with hangovers ; L. J. Davis ; Agee's Brooklyn ; Breakfast at Brelreck's ; The mad Brooklynite -- What remains of my plan. Micropsia ; Zeppelin parable ; What remains of my plan ; Memorial ; Things to remember.

"What's a novelist supposed to do with contemporary culture? And what's contemporary culture supposed to do with novelists? In The Ecstasy of Influence, Jonathan Lethem, tangling with what he calls the "white elephant" role of the writer as public intellectual, arrives at an astonishing range of answers. A constellation of previously published pieces and new essays as provocative and idiosyncratic as any he's written, this volume sheds light on an array of topics from sex in cinema to drugs, graffiti, Bob Dylan, cyberculture, 9/11, book touring, and Marlon Brando, as well as on a shelf's worth of his literary models and contemporaries: Norman Mailer, Paula Fox, Bret Easton Ellis, James Wood, and others. And, writing about Brooklyn, his father, and his sojourn through two decades of writing, Lethem sheds an equally strong light on himself."--OverDrive.

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