Don DeLillo...a disappointment?

reading 'underworld' i feel like how i felt when i was seven and would get lego sets for my birthday. like just opening them up and holding a couple of blocks in my hand and toying with them and understanding how one or two fit together but just being completely incapable of connecting these single blocks to the race car on the cover of the box, that these were somehow constituent parts of the whole

Ha, Lamp that is a good description. I also feel that way about the other guy whose initials are TP

Tom Petty?

toilet paper

btw this thread title is so gruesomely ilx, really just unbearable

i should rescreen underworld maybe some day

btw when it came out my sister gave me a signed copy, but its a galley not a 1st edish hardcover the jerk

lol i think this thread title is abominable but is it particularly ilx-ish?

'don delillo: dud or topiary-spanking DUD'

its this pernicious tactic of implicating everyone in the most banal challop

also like weirdly passive agressive defensive thread titles 'dont read if you dont like...' 'is there a thread for X yet'

i quite like 'is there a thread for x yet' but it seems like a device whose time is past

i was looking at these two posts:

http://www.guernicamag.com/incl/img/upl/2007/07/DeLillo_Don3.jpg

― max, Tuesday, 24 January 2012 00:59 (2 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

probably reading too much into it but that "look" seems so delillo to me: grave and joking and slightly confused all at once

― max, Tuesday, 24 January 2012 01:00 (2 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

& for a good ten seconds i was trying to work out how a windcheater and buttondown could be grave and joking and slightly confused

when i worked in a photo lab that picture was on the bulletin board in my darkroom

how were you able to see it?

man u can feel those eyes on u

i enjoy this thread titles qn mark

I am so sick of this 'challops' word.

think it's used rather indiscriminately.

just like yr mom

lamp's mom.... a disappointment?

When it got cold they banged the pipes to let the super know. They had a right to decent heat.

beautiful!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VGtUrVOz8o&feature=related

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NS9uojwaN7E

'save the rosenbergs':

http://www.apimages.com/OneUp.aspx?st=k&kw=rosenberg%20leaflets&showact=results&sort=relevance&intv=None&sh=10&kwstyle=or&adte=1339582174&pagez=60&cfasstyle=AND&rids=70e2e64fb75044a6be919c6a4dc0951f&dbm=PY2000&page=1&xslt=1&mediatype=Photo

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CEkQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fvault.fbi.gov%2Frosenberg-case%2Frosenberg-referrals%2Frosenberg-referrals-part-89-of%2Fat_download%2Ffile&ei=oGXYT-yZKOGW2QX43ayADw&usg=AFQjCNGHAPoMY3UjCMKDw6O9Hs61Doajiw&sig2=Y9LDHQHyoI8KPb9SFATvSQ

i got to that 'nature spelled backwards' sentence and looked at it for a while going : serutan? what? huh?

what was with the american fifties and laxatives, by the way, i don't understand that either

another thing i don't understand, the kid making fun of little lee harvey oswald repeating "i say all right"

basically i don't understand this book/america very much

i kind of assumed it was a foghorn leghorn thing cuz little lee was from the south? as this was when they were in new york.

ha, i started looking up foghorn leghorn catchphrases when i read it. was that actually a thing that he said? i have not actually seen a foghorn leghorn cartoon for a decade and a half.

i did too, to go with my other videos, but i couldn't find any of him saying that. still i am convinced that that is what the kids' teasing is meant to allude to. i dunno. maybe it's some other southernism.

in that picture above he looks like an ex-cia agent going to seed.

i wish that the rest of libra were as on-all-cylinders as the first couple chapters.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/1/16/Don_delillo_nyc_02.jpg/800px-Don_delillo_nyc_02.jpg

I think it is. What's lacking for you?

an investment in voice? i don't know. maybe it was a bad book to be picking up and putting down.

huh, that's about where i'm paused at the moment. lee in the army.

you know, i do not understand your reading habits

so i am making a conscious effort to barrel through the second half and it is working a lot better, i like the jack ruby sections a lot

Tony Astorina walked in, doing a friendly little boxer's bob and weave. It looked like all the motion he was capable of. He had that expression of where's the coffee. Jack had coffee right here.

i gotcher…

my reading habits = get pulled into the wake of something else, go with it. and now i have a course to prep so all other reading is effectively dropped.

i started rereading white noise the day after i finished this and that i finished in a day. to be fair i didn't have anything else to do that day. to be fair i did but i didn't do it.

reading the names now. delillo sort of rewards this kind of thing. after coming off libra's conspiracies-and-death bit there's the narrator in noise talking about how plots are an attempt to stave off death. and murray jay siskind's "two kinds of people in the world: killers and diers."

there was something in the first couple dozen pages of the names that seemed retrospectively redolent of the succeeding novel, too, but i forgot to mark the page, so nevermind.

and there's more ordinary train-spotting like Running Dog (the magazine) in one of the books before Running Dog (the book), and Murray Jay Siskind is apparently in his pseudonym sports novel

i wasn't sure how i felt about libra in the end. i found myself wondering how i would feel about it if JFK's death had some significance for me as an originary event of whatever. ('the society i lived in', enh.) i read stephen king's jfk-dies! novel recently and i found it much easier to triangulate where i stood on that one, on how-i-feel-about-this vs how-this-novel's-implied-author-does vs its-implied-reader. w/r/t libra i am adrift.

i don't know that i care so much about that - seems too old - but it does perhaps have some kind of 'lyfe in america' resonance that it wouldn't for you. i like delillo, of course, but i got interested in libra lately because i was thinking about why the creators/writers of 'homicide' chose to link the atmosphere of paranoia/conspiracy on the show to the lincoln assassination rather than kennedy.

with delillo it seems you're supposed to do that triangulation partly as mediated by what you think abt History, which i think fuck all about, so yeah i dunno. did you ever read that berube (?) essay on marvin lundy in underworld?

i did not. should i? i don't actually like underworld very much. homicide as in the show with munch? where does lincoln come into it?

i dunno about History as such -- seems like that's only really a concern of the two big ones -- but there's this longstanding fascination with recent events, recent developments, whatever's-in-the-culture. this is sort of a nascent thought but i feel like he's starting to date in this really interesting way, that white noise in depicting a society we've recognisably moved in from has this whole extra patina of interest. in terms of content and in terms of affect.

i only ever read white noise in college, don't remember if it was my first delillo or after/during underworld, but i found it pretty lame, i think partly because of that. it seemed WAY moved-on-from. maybe that's just the way 80s novels work though. or it's a 'late academia' thing. from what i recall my impression of white noise was vaguely like the one recently to chris kraus' 'i love dick'. like, god, nobody wants to read about academics being themselves. or academics made grotesque.

i don't know, i thought the berube was good. yeah, homicide. crosetti is always going around reading about lincoln, obsessed with figuring out whether some different way it went down could plausibly have been covered up all these years. (he sounds basically like the kennedy assassination obsessives that are familiar to us, except about lincoln.) it really sets the tone, but it's not a feature of the show they take much care to thematize / explain.

white noise is probably his most "obvious" novel, at least of what i've read.

Reading Underworld was one of the more dispiriting experiences with a book in recent years. I wanted more Sinatra and Jackie Gleason telling bad jokes and crunching on popcorn.

or at the very least, it is hard to get past how primitive the technology he is freaking out about now seems.

Libra as a Novel About History is significantly more interesting to me than Libra as a book about the Kennedy assassination. In purely formal terms it's one of my favourite novels, its construction is ingenious. I love the way the internal narrative lags behind the external one and gradually catches up until they're running in tandem.

i enjoyed that david ferrie points out to the reader that that's happening

how many of you imagined Oliver Stone's JFK actors saying these lines?

why on earth would anyone actually have seen oliver stone's jfk i don't understand