AdamMansbach

A.k.a, Dondi’s father. Shots fired.

This idea is thematically central to the book: “doofus superheroes' is a pretty apt description of a lot of the characters here, and the graff writers in particular, who have all these skills and powers and knowledge-bases that have been rendered irrelevant or severely limited by a changed city. Billy Rage, in particular, flees the country with the intention of becoming a shaman, accumulating a set of superpowers that prove ill-suited for the environment to which he’ll return.

But for every doofus superhero, there’s one perfect scenario, one situation where those particular skills will come in handy.

This paragraph is one of the most important in the whole book. It encapsulates Dondi’s whole attitude about “magic” — and it does so by means of direct polemic (undergirded by humor) and outright confrontation of the reader by the narrator. It acknowledges the literary tradition of magic realism, and pushes it away – because this shit is real. It tells you what is and isn’t going on here, and lets you know that if you’re not feeling it, you ought to step the fuck off.

All of this comes out of my own thinking about what magic realism is, how it’s dependent on cultural specifics, from Murukami’s Japan to Marquez’s Colombia, and how we don’t have that framework here, so instead we have disbelief, skepticism, discussions of the magic instead of blithe acceptance of it. It’s never gonna fly under the radar in contemporary NYC, like it does in the work of those writers.

Now that I think about it, you know where this paragraph sort of comes from, kind of, in a very different way? The Princess Bride, which is one of the great screenplays. Remember all those moments when Fred Savage’s grandfather (Peter Falk?) is like “yo, motherfucker, this is the book, either accept it on its own terms or go the fuck to sleep?”

I paraphrase, of course.

The rules are important, especially since Dondi is about to a) explain how he discovered this, and b) muse on how useless it is. It’s also important that he not act like the notion of time travel exists in a cultural vaccuum, so acknowledging the movie serves a kind of purpose here, contrasting the mundane reality with the crazy Hollywood version.

Shout out to Biff.

A pretty accurate representation of the book’s approach to the magical and mysterious, too.

Dondi’s putting the cart before the horse, the punchline before the build-up — as so that he can deliver the actual information as flatly (and believably) as possible in the next paragraph. Partly for effect, but also because by having him tell it this way, it makes the revelation itself more believable; if it’s so much a part of a the fabric of his existence that he can flutter and dance around it like this, with jokes and stuff, it must be real: it’s like the opposite to taking a deep breath and looking you in the eye.

This is meant to sound tossed off, but also very visual and accurate — the Hollywood version, immediately recognizable, but not what happened.

I made this word up. That shit is fresh.

The book takes place in 2005, when DUMBO really was brand new as a yuppie enclave, the newest site of rapid redevelopment.

The offhanded rawness of this line — and its honesty — sets up the flip that begins in the next paragraph, as I lead up to the revelation about time travel, and set Dondi up to sell the reader on it.