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There were images from anatomy texts, an exploded musculature of the human leg, a pictorial explanation of peristalsis.
dream-apocalypse had the heads and calm, horizontal gazes of Hindu princes and goddesses. A seafood cookbook, rich with color photographs of boiled crustacea...
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Sometimes she inscribed text across ...
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He told her about his experiments with a film vocabulary, his sense of the emotional moment of a panel, and of the infinitely expandable and contractible interstice of time that lay between the panels
he felt a resurgence of all the aches and inspirations of those days when his life had revolved around nothing but Art,
feeling horny reminded him of a passage f...
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crimson paint in an otherwise uninteresting Velázquez made him hungry for...
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two men, each wearing, with the overdetermination of a dream, a necktie and a mustache, embracing, their mustaches interlocked in a way that had reminded Sammy, for some reason, of the way his mother used to fit his comb into the bristles of the brush on top of his dresser when he was a kid.
had never occurred to him that two men, even homosexual men, might kiss in that way.
Was such a kiss really possible? “Is he a fairy?”
“He has the feel,”
Hermann Hoffman. He was dimpled and plump, with a trim Vandyke,
his brand of cigarette, Thoth-Amon, imported from Egypt, was excellent.
Ark of Miriam.
A trim liner, its plimsoll colored bold red, steamed across a bottle-green sea under a heliotrope sky.
in spite of all the vigilance they could bring
to bear, they were being deceived. What bewitched Bernard Kornblum, on the contrary, was the impersonal magic of life, when he read in a magazine about a fish that could disguise itself as any one of seven different varieties of sea bottom,
this type of enchantment was often, though not always, a sadder business—sometimes beautiful, sometimes cruel.
enormous moth. It rested, papillating its wings with a certain languor like a lady fanning herself, iridescent green with a yellowish undershimmer, as big as that languid lady’s silk clutch.
called a luna.”
On this steely autumn afternoon,
our destination is a place a long way from the horns and the hoohah.
to Office 99,
sits young Miss Judy Dark, Under-Assistant Cataloguer of Decommissioned Volumes.
She is a kind of human umbrella, folded, with her strap snapped tight.
Like a diver, she rises slowly to the surface of the city.
Book of Lo, though she is dying to see it. She meant to go on her lunch break, but the crowd around its case was too big. She wonders what the book is, if not lovely.
the sacred book of the ancient and mysterious Cimmerians.
It is the oldest book in the world, three hundred ancient pages, in a leather
the outcome was foreordained. Men took over the world, Lo was banished to the nether kingdoms, and the Queendom of Cimmeria was plunged into its legendary perpetual night.
“And since Cimmeria fell into eternal darkness,” Lo says, “men have been making a hash of things. War, famine, slavery. Things got so bad after a while that I felt obliged to send help. A champion, out of the land of darkness, to fly in darkness but always to seek the light. A woman warrior with power enough to help right the world’s many wrongs.”
girl worthy of donning the witchy green wings of the great luna moth.
“Take care—there is no force more powerful than that of an unbridled imagination.”
“Usually the girls come up with something involving boots. I don’t know why.”
Norman Bel Geddes,
“She’s not showing anything any kid can’t see at Jones Beach”
The idea of a moth-woman was also, in its way, a natural.
“That’s another thing: we can’t say ‘mistress.’ Already I’m getting fifty letters a week from priests and ministers.
“So what’s the matter with you? Why can’t you ever enjoy anything you get?”
it’s just like they do at the Bell Laboratories. Any invention a guy comes up with there, no matter who thought it up or how long they worked on it, even if they did it all by themselves, it doesn’t matter,
it belongs to the laboratory.”
Let people be reasonable whose families were not held prisoner. “There is only one sure means in life,” Deasey said, “of ensuring that you are not ground into paste by disappointment, futility, and disillusion. And that is always to ensure, to the utmost of your ability, that you are doing it solely for the money.”
“I guess I’m going to go in there and offer to perjure myself,” he said.
Why do you think they invented the pseudonym?”
novel,” Joe said, peeling a Chiquita. He seemed
American Disillusionment out of his bottom desk drawer, rolled a fresh sheet of paper into his typewriter, and tried to work, but the conversation with Rosa had left him uneasy.
he felt only the faintest itch for her.
Rosa had no compunction about lounging around the apartment with her underpants covered only by the flapping tails of one of Joe’s shirts,
The real question was, why wasn’t he more jealous of Rosa?
He can bring that girlfriend of his, too.”
