"I was influenced by the American Beat writers like Jack Kerouac and fantasized about aimless wandering," he writes, a fascination that led both to a penchant for one-night stands and a job as a truck driver on the Sichuan-Tibet highway.
According to biographer David Buckley, who wrote Strange Fascination: David Bowie Thee Definitive Story, Bowie's diet in 1976 consisted almost entirely of red peppers, cocaine and full fat milk.
Smith admits as much, writing of her "fascination for melancholia" and the poetic potential that resides in her "numinous malady".
Even the Florentine Ghiberti was susceptible to their fascination, writing of Martini and Memmi that "they were gentle masters, their paintings done with great diligence, and most delicately finished".
The 'life of stammering' from which he emerged in the Sixties survives here only as an unhurried fondness for variorum reprise: 'What I am trying to say... ' This is not just a stylistic tic, for there is, in all of Thomson's writing, a fascination with what eludes his gaze and verbal grasp.
Lethem starts off by discussing his own lifelong love for Mailer's writing and fascination with Mailer's persona: Challenged once by a friend to name a single immortal literary character from postwar fiction — someone to rival Sherlock Holmes or Madame Bovary in terms of bleed-through to popular consciousness — I blurted out "Norman Mailer!" I was halfway serious.
The projected writing changes to: "Inappropriate Fascination".
You get to relive the childhood fascination of writing with fingers on a steamed-up car window — the window becoming legible-illegible, transparent-opaque.
"The whole 'doom wop' tag was more just our fascination with writing doomed love songs that maybe can come across kind of sugary, but buried in it is something kind of sinister," Mr. Kattner said.
First, we have to understand the fascination with writing instruments.
