Don DeLillo...a disappointment?

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

because it's awesome...?

i think i tried to watch it once when it was on tv and i was doing other things, all i remember is kevin costner sitting on a succession of park benches

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.

(...)

― j., Friday, 10 August 2012 02:18 (11 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

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

(...)

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

― judith, Friday, 10 August 2012 02:23 (11 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

there is one section where he dumps in the blurb from a credit card PIN leaflet and you're like err

okay so i think i. white noise needs all the obvious stuff to set up more interesting things. -- that the various overblown sillinesses of the narrator's death-obsession lend a weight to not-quite-entirely-ironisable statements like the one about how watching children sleep is a secular equivalent to stained glass windows.

ii. that the stuff has been way dated in some dull ways for a while, and is starting to become interestingly dated. that he tries to seem up to the moment in particular ways, that the moments he has been up to are a series of moments we have moved on from, but that there's an interesting lag in the way we think we've moved on from the ways he tried to seem up-to-the-moment in those particular moments.

i don't know. a couple weeks ago i picked up briefly, of all things, d. coupland's 'microserfs' recently. there's a tonal glibness in there that's one of the resources delillo taps into all through the early stuff and at intervals later. (i think, more in white noise than in any of the other acknowledged big hitters.) the ways in white noise that delillo is glib about things get a lot more mileage out of being glib about things than the ways in microserfs in which coupland is glib about things. -- but he seems to originate a particular mode of urbanity re: 'modern life' 'the capitalist economy' 'the postmodern capitalist economy' that seems pretty huge in american fiction through, like, '89-'04.

but it seems like this interacts in weird ways with his earnest attempts to bring in the immediate matter of the time -- that someone in the body artist stays up one night watching a webcam feed. the ways the characters talk about iran in the names. (in underworld: the condom store? the riff on buying the rothko chapel? the planes in the desert?) -- that held against the obsessive nature of his writing adds up to something weird i can't nail down yet -- that for all his flaws, for all the moments it doesn't come off, these are not the failures of someone attempting to write a state-of-the-nation novel, that these attempts to capture the now are through a moving eye, an acknowledged observer -- that he doesn't seem ever to be simply nostalgic for the 19th-c novelist's authority or the modernist artist's authority, nor is he ever simply a negative image of it

which probably comes back to 'History' more than i think it does. anyway after all that i don't know if i actually think white noise is very good (i think everything he has written is a total mess, structure-wise, and white noise has a pretty good penultimate fifty pages and then an awful last fifty pages, which really doesn't help it) but it seemed like it had rewards, i don't know.

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also i should watch more of homicide. i watched the first series, once, it was weird recognising about 50-60% of the material from the book and from later use in the wire.

"If a man's name sounds right whether you say it forwards or backwards, it means he went to Yale."

http://perival.com/delillo/amazons.html

this book is certainly something, i'll give it that

there are lots of sex scenes. some of them are 'comic'. there is a character called 'Hughes Tool'.

chauncey worthington

I am partial to DeLillo but everyone I've ever talked to has some problem with his style. I always recommend the more entertaining stuff - Underworld, even though it's long - is fun. Maybe that's trite to say, but the set pieces really are that. It helps to be in the right mood to read him. He seems to me to channel things going on in our culture. A channel is a just a vehicle for communicating something and maybe that's why his prose feels empty.

it's weird that you've only ever talked to people who are rong

Yes. Or they lack good taste in writers.

j. is so confident of winning this case, he can waste the jury's time by reading to them from this article: Rate the Super Hunks.

no jury in the world, man

Running Dog is a treat, certainly, and a good cure for reader's block. I've breezed through the first eighty-five pages; decent action and no haterbait in sight - well there's the odd bit of dialogue where one character repeats the other's words ("One character repeats the other's words.") but I can live with that. And I'm still guessing where it's going.

ha, i found running dog kind of a slog but loved what it pulled out of its hat in the last reel

there's the odd bit of dialogue where one character repeats the other's words ("One character repeats the other's words.")

this is all of his novels!!

the sorta ... distance between participants in conversation in DD's books is one of his strong suits imo