Oh We'll Know Each Other

And Alex Understood That Scotty Hausmann Did Not Exist. He Was A Word Casing In Human Form: A Shell Whose Essence Has Vanished.

Everybody Sounds Stoned, Because They're E-mailing People The Whole Time They're Talking To You.

When The Clock Stops On A Life, All Things Emanating From It Become Precious, Finite, And Cordoned Off For Preservation. Each Aspect Of The Dead Person Is Removed From The Flux Of The Everyday, Which, Of Course, Is Where We Miss Him Most. The Quarantine Around Death Makes It Feel Unlucky And Wrong--a Freakish Incursion--and The Dead, Thus Quarantined, Come To Seem More Dead Than They Already Are.... Borrowing From The Dead Is A Way Of Keeping Them Engaged In Life's Daily Transactions--in Other Words, Alive.

He Remembered His Mentor, Lou Kline, Telling Him In The Nineties That Rock And Roll Had Peaked At Monterey Pop. They'd Been In Lou's House In La With Its Waterfalls, The Pretty Girls Lou Always Had, His Car Collection Out Front, And Bennie Had Looked Into His Idol's Famous Face And Thought, You're Finished. Nostalgia Was The End - Everyone Knew That.

I Felt More Doubtful Than Usual With 'goon Squad,' Because I Knew That The Book's Genre Wasn't Easily Named - Novel? Stories? Novel-in-stories? - And I Worried That Its Lack Of A Clear Category Would Count Against It. My Hopes For It Were Pretty Modest.