"He can feel a kind of shadow life pull across him like a cloud scudding across the sun, and he can picture Jonah: a grubby and wiry-tough little kid, beloved of no one but fiercely loyal nonetheless, and he feels oddly guilty, aware of all the ways he would have broken that imaginary younger brother's heart".
Oddly, Paterniti seems somewhat aware of this problem.
If you're the kind of person who looks at the names above the titles, Say Anything is one of the first showcases for the John Cusack persona: nerdy, wisecracking, anxious, but also self-aware and oddly attractive.
Indeed, one of the reasons why I tried to get him to retract his damning words during the interview was that I felt oddly protective of him - aware, however heedless he seemed to be about the implications, what their impact might be upon publication.
Then he oddly added: "I am well aware that what my character [a serial killer of women] is doing is wrong.
Oddly, he says he is not aware of a law that limits overtime work to 36 hours a month (a law that many factories in southern China ignore).
These aren't heroicizing or mournful portraits: however historically aware, they're secondhand, distanced, dandified and oddly unsensual, as if their homoeroticism was taken for granted, or beside the point, or part of some larger, still-developing content or style.
But oddly, Tumblr is running PSAs, NEDA was just not aware of this.
But their oddly unharmonised contributions add up to a delightful, highly self-aware sketch show, featuring racist radio plays, murderous pirate captains and a spectacularly clumsy barista.
For someone so aware of the way news travels now, his performance was oddly benign — expert, sure (in his decades of pop stardom, Timberlake has never been anything less than expert), but eerily un-self-aware.
