“Even without booths, telephone conversations create locations, circumferences of absorption in which we sit, stand, circle, pace, gesticulate, think, and feel. Like the spaces we inhabit as readers, they are locations in which we are both here, and elsewhere—I can be staring something or someone, but if I am engrossed in the conversation I will see only an internal landscape, what is visible to me and no one else.”
“The destruction of the airship Hindenburg on May 6, 1937, at Lakehurst, New Jersey, was one of the most visually shocking events of the midtwentieth century: it was the first time that a large-scale disaster was recorded on film, then coupled to a live, first-person account of the unfolding drama, and the result presented to the masses on larger-than-life motion picture screens.”
“Harold Beaver leaned over the engine and shook his head. “I don’t know about this,” he said. “I just don’t know.” He played with a torque wrench, spinning it around on his fingertips. “What if you’ve got a leak from the cooling system into the oil? I think you might.”
