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My daily routine, now that I’m finally over the jet lag: wake up at 6:00 A.M., write for four hours, get to Hummus Beit Lechem just when it opens. Order a hummus with egg, which is served with pita, pickled veg, and half a raw onion. Eat while reading Haaretz. Buy cigarettes and smoke my way back t…

The two literatures have similar origins: They both began as the tralatitious lore of the peasantry, of the poor and uneducated village and town, as opposed to the city

from high-minded entr’acte harangues

Musil’s remains the prototypical modernist confusion—a book so coterminous with life that it could end only outside its covers

Because the book that descends is not the same book that was hovering so peacefully in the empyrean. The book that descends is never that same book. It’s rather like a parody or satire of that book, but it’s not funny. Or it’s not funny to you.

The book that you now have in front of you, worded …