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“I’m tired of fighting, maybe, for a little while. I fight, and I am fighting some more, and it just makes me have less hope, not more. I need to do something
… something that will be great, you know, instead of trying always to be Good.”
“What about the Japs?” he said.
he would never be able to visit again.
luftmensch obliviousness
U-328, an intelligent and cultivated career officer named Gottfried Halse,
The evacuation had proceeded in an orderly fashion, and the transfer of all passengers to the lifeboats might have been effected safely and without incident if, immediately after the firing of the torpedoes, a storm had not appeared out of the northeast, overwhelming the boats
“They were children,” he said. “We were wolves.”
Tomorrow, as everyone knew, he and Tracy were leaving for the West Coast, to take up their new life together as scenarist and serial star.
sent Ruth, at long last, to the telephone. “Miss Ebling,” the report reads, “was exaspirated [sic] by the recent imprisonment of her brother Carl and happened in a bedroom to stumble upon a comic strip book of a type which she held responsible for many of the brother’s mental problems.
Kelvinator Station.
Research and detail by Chabon…
Kelvinator was an appliance company founded in 1914 ….made refrigerators and ice boxes “ which is a whole other story”…..
Named after Lord Kelvin a British mathematician who theorized the concept of absolute zero ….degrees Kelvin “ is named for him
He reached an instant of bodily equipoise, during which the rapture of his survival to breathe and be burned by the wind perfectly balanced the agony of his exposure to it.
It was the fucking stove.” “The stove?” “It was carbon monoxide from Wayne.” The Antarctic Waldorf was heated by a gasoline stove, affectionately known as Wayne
because of the legend FT. WAYNE IRON WORKS INDIANA USA stamped on its side.
Terezin once,
The joy, spontaneous and unreasoning, that had come over him as he heard his little grandfather’s sweet voice for the first time in five years subsided quickly under the swelling unease that was inspired in him by the idea of the old man singing Schubert in a prison town for an audience of captives.
convinced that the pasteboard cheeriness and vocational training masked some dreadful reality, a witch’s house made of candy and gingerbread
to lure children and fatten them for the table.
conclusion: there were Germans on the Ice. This had been a fear of the
viridian ring
Ensign Kavalier was awarded the Navy’s Distinguished Service Cross.
A few would linger a moment longer, puzzling over an enigmatic drawing that lay on the workbench, done in colored pencil, frozen solid and somewhat the worse from long-ago folding and refolding. Clearly the work of a child, it appeared to show a man in a dinner jacket falling from the belly of an airplane. Although the man’s parachute was far beyond his reach, the man was smiling, and pouring a cup of tea from an elaborate plummeting tea service, as if oblivious of his predicament, or as if he thought he had all the time in the world before he would hit the ground.
he had begun his career as a publisher in the lean Depression years before two foolish young men laid the Escapist in his lap.
amour propre
But knowing the secrets of the Ultimate Demon Wonder Box would never get him through the door to Tannen’s back room,
where travel-hardened men concocted private wonders for their own melancholy amusement.
