"Barry N. Malzberg - Those Wonderful Years" - читать интересную книгу автора (Malzberg Barry N)

citizenry who have carried forward the menacing expressions of their
youth and little else, I am stunned again by the energy of that decade, its
fervor and wildness, the way in which it anticipated and sowed the seeds
of so much else to come, but I am also humbled because in a critical way I
have come such a short distance from that time; my responses to the Little
Black Saddle are as they were when I was thirteen, no difference, this is no
Festival of Changes. Of course the '60's were even more significant than
the '50's, I must remember that, and that is to take nothing away from the
'40's which prefigured both of these decades to say nothing of the '70's,
fast receding from us and likely to be remembered as the most moving
decade of all. Tony Annunzio takes off his jacket and tie to sing his final
numbers, just as he did in the old days, and I am shocked at how round he
has become although, of course, my memories of him are unreliable. His
great hit, BROKEN CHAIN OF CIRCUMSTANCE, is the finale of the show
and while standing in tribute with the rest of the audience I find myself
thinking of Elvira. If only we had been able to share this moment together!
but she declined my invitation, of course, hanging up the phone on me
nastily but not before saying that in her opinion my unusual attachment
to certain elements of the past only showed a childish inability to face the
future.

How could I have explained to her that the past is the future? and what
difference would it have made, the spotlight on Tony Annunzio winking
off, the houselights surging on and all five thousand of us rising as one to
cheer the voice of his generation, and Tony, standing on the bare stage to
take those cheers with the same grace and offhandedness with which,
more than twenty years ago, he bowed to us at the old Orpheus, now the
new Orpheus and also the site of many great revivals?

V

Coming home I find Elvira lying naked in my bed, the covers below her
waist, her eyes bright with malice. Try as she may, it seems that she
simply cannot leave me alone. I know the feeling well although I have
never had it with Elvira. "I'll tell you about the nostalgia craze and your
golden oldies," she says with a mad wink, "I've been thinking this through
carefully and now I'll tell you the truth." She is thirty-one years old,
attractive but not exceptional and from the beginning of our relationship
she might have regarded me as her last chance. This has led to much
bitterness in the breakup.

"Let me tell you what I think it is," she says, her voice wavering, her
little breasts shaking, the nipples pursed as if for a kiss, "the nostalgia
craze, this constant digging up of the past for people like you who can't
face the future; it's all a government plot. It comes from the capital.
They're manipulating everything by digging up the past so that people
aren't able to bridge the distance between the present and the future. They
think that they can keep people from seeing what's really been done to
them if they feed them the past like a drug to keep on reminding them of
what they used to be. They're going to keep us all locked in the past so that