i don't see how he writes like an essayist
― jazzgasms (Mr. Que), Monday, 14 December 2009 21:34 (fourteen years ago) link
is there a DeLillo for people who have only read White Noise and hated it?
― 囧 (dyao), Tuesday, 15 December 2009 10:17 (fourteen years ago) link
white noise owns, but whenever i try to read underworld i am just like i want to fart on this book
― farting irl (cankles), Tuesday, 15 December 2009 10:36 (fourteen years ago) link
totally understandable
underworld is really the most spotted delillo now, which i find kind of weird
― thomp, Tuesday, 15 December 2009 16:43 (fourteen years ago) link
underworld is all about the first 50 pages
― that sex version of "blue thunder." (Mr. Que), Tuesday, 15 December 2009 16:44 (fourteen years ago) link
those first 50 pages are boring as hecku
― farting irl (cankles), Tuesday, 15 December 2009 18:42 (fourteen years ago) link
never read delillo, where 2 start
― being being kiss-ass fake nice (gbx), Tuesday, 15 December 2009 18:45 (fourteen years ago) link
The only book of his I've really liked is White Noise. Not sure how I would feel about it today though. Read about five others for some reason, even though I've only got a so-so feeling (at best) off them. A good friend of mine with pretty good taste swears by The Names. I remember liking parts of Underworld (when it was new), but big sections that just left me cold - definitely couldn't imagine putting the effort into reading something like that these days...
― Jeff LeVine, Tuesday, 15 December 2009 19:00 (fourteen years ago) link
gbx i would try White Noise or Libra or End Zone.
― that sex version of "blue thunder." (Mr. Que), Tuesday, 15 December 2009 19:03 (fourteen years ago) link
i have only read libra but it's fucking awesome
― like having an eternal kazoo in your underwear (acoleuthic), Tuesday, 15 December 2009 19:03 (fourteen years ago) link
It's interesting that after the bloated Underworld his books have gotten shorter and shorter. Has he ever addressed that?
― Jeff LeVine, Tuesday, 15 December 2009 19:07 (fourteen years ago) link
I think Underworld is magnificent - so many great images, and at least two-thirds of it has people you'd care about. Libra looks great too, and I liked White Noise well enough. But everything since has seemed inconsequential. It never even crossed my mind that he could make the ILX book of the 00s nominations thread. Excuse me.
― Ismael Klata, Tuesday, 15 December 2009 20:47 (fourteen years ago) link
GBX def try White Noise first.
― ★彡☆ ★彡 (ENBB), Wednesday, 16 December 2009 00:31 (fourteen years ago) link
thx dudes and dudettes
― being being kiss-ass fake nice (gbx), Wednesday, 16 December 2009 00:32 (fourteen years ago) link
gbx i would recommend running dog or end zone i think - white noise has some weight-of-seriousness issues. or mb i have some w.-of-s. issues with it.
ppl who have read white noise: do you know there is a band called The Airborne Toxic Event? isn't that peculiar? i wonder if they are any good. i sort of doubt it, though.
― thomp, Wednesday, 16 December 2009 18:52 (fourteen years ago) link
Yeah, I thought that was quite cool. I imagine them as a lite-industrial combo.
― Ismael Klata, Wednesday, 16 December 2009 19:17 (fourteen years ago) link
that is horrible
xpost lol
― just sayin, Wednesday, 16 December 2009 19:17 (fourteen years ago) link
I sure did not like The Body Artists. Still waiting to have a good experience with this dude.
― The Hood Won't Jump (Eazy), Friday, 18 December 2009 14:33 (fourteen years ago) link
i have now listened to the airborne toxic event, they were sort of too-snide-to-be-twee american indie thing
i quite like the body artist, though the ending is unsatisfying
― thomp, Friday, 18 December 2009 14:38 (fourteen years ago) link
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_-mTuzE8-xIs/SrBRd-oU9LI/AAAAAAAAAzw/sshwgGXajUI/s400/whitenoise-front-cover.jpg
nice cover.i haven't quite finished because i got distracted but am loving the new yorker story from a couple of weeks ago.
― high-five machine (schlump), Friday, 1 January 2010 19:24 (fourteen years ago) link
Like it. Four kids in the back though - is that right?
― Ismael Klata, Friday, 1 January 2010 22:01 (fourteen years ago) link
I really liked "Point Omega." Anyone else read it yet?
― Romeo Jones, Sunday, 14 February 2010 20:34 (fourteen years ago) link
that cover is some terrible twee-ass bullshit
― oh, wrinkle... pause (Whiney G. Weingarten), Sunday, 14 February 2010 20:54 (fourteen years ago) link
Someone at Penguin design is causing havoc. Check out the one for Wuthering Heights.
― alimosina, Sunday, 14 February 2010 22:11 (fourteen years ago) link
i seem to be starting to reread 'underworld'—i'm not sure how far i'll get. but since it's been a long time since i first read it, i've been exposed to all sorts of other things in the meantime that help me to better understand what i'm reading. or, help me better understand things that i was able to perceive the first time through.
alfred's remark above about delillo as an essayist creating novelistic materials strikes me as off base. i think because it ignores the point of delillo's prose style (including paragraph-level stuff like scene-setting, interventions from the narratorial voice, free indirect style effects, and so on, but all the way down to the ways individual sentences can be formed). the effect i care about there is his way of putting into words the multi-aspected sense of self, and sense of what's going on around you (in the social, institutional, ritual world), that is probably part of what earns dlillo the praise / criticism of being 'antihumanist'.
that might come out more unequivocally in other books (maybe 'white noise', from what i recall from my one, even earlier read of it), but my sense is that two important, and certainly 'novelistic', further purposes this part of delillo's style serves are a) to express a kind of emersonian sense that the significance of ordinary life surpasses what we take it to be in our ordinary business of living—which is sometimes expressed in a very emersonian way by juxtaposing forms of description appropriate to the ordinary, everyday self, with forms appropriate to grand world-historical processes and concepts (which will make delillo look anti-humanist, in some moods);
and b) to do something like the same, but in a different register that pertains to threatening impersonal aspects of ordinary life that usually pertain to the historical state of society, development of technology and media and the role they play in our lives, etc. etc.
it seems like different ways of taking note of, or being aware of, or giving prominence to, these two aspects of how we see ourselves and the positions of our everyday lives in the greater sweep of life, are laid out pretty distinctly for the different characters in the 'pafko' sequence at the beginning. but not in the manner of an essay. they're each depicted in ways that are just as perceptible by readers as those of any novel.
i googled and found that tony tanner wrote a book called 'the american mystery: american literature from emerson to delillo'. anyone ever looked at it? is it any good?
― j., Saturday, 7 August 2010 23:21 (fourteen years ago) link
relevant inasmuch as it touches on emerson:
Unlike his friend Paul Auster, there's no part of his creative make-up that owes much to the 19th-century American masters. "I was too much of a Bronx kid to read Emerson or Hawthorne." Instead, he listens to jazz: "Charlie Mingus, Miles Davis, the same music I listened to when I was 20."
there's an okay interview with delillo in today's observer. it's frustrating for cutting off just before the writer, delillo and paul auster head to carnegie deli to bullshit about typewriters, which sounds more interesting than standard q-and-a stuff.
― baby i know that you think i'm just a lion (schlump), Sunday, 8 August 2010 12:47 (fourteen years ago) link
I liked that, he talks seriously about complexity but comes across well. That usually makes writers seem like complete douches.
― Ismael Klata, Sunday, 8 August 2010 18:28 (fourteen years ago) link
Not read a novel by DeLillo however I think the novel-essay has probably to some of the my favourite fiction that I've read in the last 18 months and Point Omega does look like its in that vein? Might chase that up.
― xyzzzz__, Sunday, 8 August 2010 20:10 (fourteen years ago) link
i quite liked point omega but its very... delillo. obtuse and distant and kind of bullshitty but very smart. its only like 120 pages itll take you less than an afternoon. and yes it is very very essay like. it wouldnt be much of a stretch to call it a book length essay on douglas gordon's '24 hour psycho'
― max, Sunday, 8 August 2010 20:15 (fourteen years ago) link
It's double-spaced as well! You wouldn't mind 112 pages of dense text (which to be fair it might be in the non-literal sense), but it does look like taking the piss a bit.
― Ismael Klata, Sunday, 8 August 2010 21:22 (fourteen years ago) link
q:
does delillo's prose read as 'fast' or 'slow' to you?
― j., Monday, 10 January 2011 08:26 (thirteen years ago) link
Does anyone's?
Good question, possibly.
― the pinefox, Wednesday, 23 February 2011 12:17 (thirteen years ago) link
I read it (several years ago) and can't remember a huge amount about it, although he wasn't very complimentary about Underworld iirc.
― Matt DC, Wednesday, 23 February 2011 12:24 (thirteen years ago) link
A friend once wrote a paper in which he proposed first that Molly Bloom's monologue was fast; then, alternatively, that it was slow. Both seemed quite plausible.
― the pinefox, Wednesday, 23 February 2011 12:29 (thirteen years ago) link
“Slow films in which everyone gallops and gesticulates; quick films in which people hardly move” - Robert Bresson
― Ward Fowler, Wednesday, 23 February 2011 13:54 (thirteen years ago) link
Rhythmically slow, if only because of my compulsion to narrate the next few hours of my day in his voice after I've read a section of his books - it seems slow in my head.
― The Future Of The Internet is Computers (R Baez), Wednesday, 23 February 2011 16:25 (thirteen years ago) link
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/15/sports/baseball/for-branca-an-asterisk-of-a-different-kind.html?hp
― j., Monday, 15 August 2011 04:38 (thirteen years ago) link
The Angel Esmerelda: Nine Stories
I found out by accident that this is out this week. I'm not sure I've ever read any short stuff by him, except Pafko At The Wall by default I suppose. I find him quite hard to imagine in short format, actually.
― Ismael Klata, Tuesday, 8 November 2011 22:24 (twelve years ago) link
the recent new yorker one - midnight in dostoyevsky - is one of my fav things i've read in the magazine. & i like the harper's one also. am psyched to pick this up, though postponing to get the one w/the photographic (blue?) cover rather than the 'neat' new black illustrative edition thing.
― Abattoir Educator / Slaughterman (schlump), Wednesday, 9 November 2011 01:20 (twelve years ago) link
is it that he's kinda...college-y? i'm trying to be tactful. its just strange how much i was into him in my 20s, and i mention on this thread that i want to go back and re-read, but in the end...i don't really want to. tactful, cuz there are younger people than me on here who might feel what i felt way back when. when i read his stuff. i'm sure i'd still like some of the books. or it could be that he just lost the plot and me circa underworld.
― scott seward, Wednesday, 9 November 2011 02:25 (twelve years ago) link
i also feel like critically he is no longer the BIG DEAL he was circa underworld. always feels strange to think of writers in rock band terms. people really wanted other people to know that cormac was the genius of the century back then too. not so much now. not that people don't still dig both of them, but they don't have that distant mystique that they once had. writing zombie books will do that to a guy.
― scott seward, Wednesday, 9 November 2011 02:28 (twelve years ago) link
woah, had no idea this thing existed! thanks y'all
― markers, Wednesday, 9 November 2011 02:31 (twelve years ago) link
is it that he's kinda...college-y? i'm trying to be tactful
Not sure if you're addressing the new book or the thread title, Scott, but I don't know if I'm picking you up right. I'm quite encouraged by the little I've been able to find out about this new collection, especially that a lot of it's older stuff, because it gives me hope that it'll be about real people in real situations rather than the literary theory side of the guy.
If that makes sense. By way of explanation I adore Underworld and Libra, but now maybe mostly for their treatment of domestic concerns - LHO's marriage, say, or the adultery or NY Italian sections in Underworld. The meta bits (I'm sure they're there) hold no interest for me; so eg White Noise, while wryly amusing and all, feels more like an exercise I don't need to be a part of.
Maybe that's the 'college-y' you're talking about? For me that sort of thing is a layer of meaning I don't need, I'm already working hard enough to follow the real story underneath. Writers who prioritise the metalayer and forget the other bit are the worst imo - DeLillo can do both ime so yeah, I'm intrigued by this new collection.
― Ismael Klata, Wednesday, 9 November 2011 11:26 (twelve years ago) link
oh yeah i was just thinking of delillo in general. not the new collection.
see, i had no interest in libra, but i'm not a huge fan of fictionalized/alternate history fiction. and the same can be said about underworld. the original pafko intro turned me off so much when i read it that i didn't want to read the book. but i most definitely WAS inspired by his earlier stuff in a big way. i thought he was kinda brilliant! my tastes did change over time though. i don't really have anything BAD to say about him now. and i mention the rock band thing just cuz i was thinking about the earlier/better cliche and how unfair it can be. i dunno. i REALLY should pick up some of the old stuff and see how i feel about it.
― scott seward, Wednesday, 9 November 2011 16:15 (twelve years ago) link
i haven't liked anything that i've read post-underworld. i think that's more it than that he's college-y. i still love him, though. i should pick up some of the old stuff, i guess, though i don't want to find out i don't like him as much!
― horseshoe, Wednesday, 9 November 2011 16:18 (twelve years ago) link
by "that's more it" i mean, i think it's more that he's kind of lost the plot a little.
― horseshoe, Wednesday, 9 November 2011 16:19 (twelve years ago) link
hes kind of too serious now! i liked point omega but its not funny at all, and without the humor he ends up sounding sort of like a parody of himself
― max, Wednesday, 9 November 2011 16:21 (twelve years ago) link
hes certainly not writing anything now that would win over skeptics
yeah i feel like his reputation has faded a bit. haven't read anything after underworld, tho maybe i read the body artist? don't remember much about it. funny scott mentions cormac. . . reading and loving suttree right now, though it's still early. and i finally finished blood meridian! loved it once i realized it was meant to be boring in the middle.
― Mr. Que, Wednesday, 9 November 2011 16:23 (twelve years ago) link
i think he writes/wrote amazing sentences, but they don't always add up to a novel that would sustain my interest anymore, i'd suspect. i should reread end zone, that book was kind of crazy!
― Mr. Que, Wednesday, 9 November 2011 16:24 (twelve years ago) link