Don DeLillo...a disappointment?

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

Great Jones Street is pretty cool too. I really don't think any writer has the kind of voice DeLillo has. Maybe I haven't read enough, but the way his dialogue works, the humor, and many other things - he seems singular to me. Oh, how I love the man.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/behold/2014/04/27/luca_zanier_photographs_the_energy_industry_in_his_series_space_and_energy.html?wpisrc=obnetwork

White Noise is hilarious. I should read more of this guy

Libra is hilarious

Body Artist, not hilarious.

also no good.

pro body artist

interested in inverse proportion to square root of length really

http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/06/garbage-everywhere/373118/

https://newrepublic.com/minutes/137755/heres-fun-rumor-nobel-prize-literature

^^^the *only* reason to share it between DL and PR is to troll PR one last vast time

per the thread: pynchon rocks and delillo sucks

The kind of writer that Pynchon is has never won a Nobel so yeah Delillo (by himself) is a good bet

Well, then it's about time! Oh, if Pynchon wins, I will be dancing all day. And then get astonishingly drunk. Fucking hell, I want Pynchon to win so bad.

Oh, just read the article, it's about Philip Roth instead... I think an expert article on the Nobel would know that the prize has actually been split four times (Danes Karl Gjellerup and Henrik Pontoppidan split in 1917) and wouldn't mix up Migeul Asturias with Nelly Sachs. So in conclusion, the article is wrong, therefore Pynchon is destined to win.

👍

btw I only said that bcz -- when I last looked at the list of winners -- it seemed that the really great writers of a particular movement or undercurrent or scene seldom win: Beckett not Joyce, Kawabata not Mishima, Simon not Duras, Marquez not Borges. So the winner of er American encyclopedic novel should be Pynchon but it'll be Delillo.

dude beckett >>>>> joyce

i am not looking forward to the pinefox's return to this thread :)

xp. borges is not a boom writer. marquez and vargas llosa both winning the nobel means the boom is one movement where you can say pretty definitively that the best writers from it won the nobel

I know but I think its fair to say that in people's minds Borges is the father of modern Latin American fiction and a precursor of the boom. I know it doesn't stick.

beckett >>>>> joyce

Flann O'Brien ftw

(Would've agreed, have been off Joyce till I started reading parts of the Wake via that twitter account. But again they aren't like one another anyway, just seen as part of the same 'scene')

LOL now looking at that list on wiki and more exampels: Mann not Rilke, Jelinek not Bernhard, Gide not Proust, Seferis not Cavafy, Canetti not Musil, Pasternak not Tsvetaeva, Saramago not Pessoa.

Even if I like quite a few of the writers that have won its such a load of rub!

marquez and vargas llosa both winning the nobel means the boom is one movement where you can say pretty definitively that the best writers from it won the nobel

― ælərdaɪs (jim in vancouver), Wednesday, October 12, 2016 2:47 PM (six minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

except neruda was not a better writer than borges, but you can argue that borges didn't win it for political reasons, sure

i always thought cortazar was a better writer than marquez. llosa wrote maybe one decent book. yet the writer who encompasses all the boom's qualities is the one who did it the worse in my opinion -- marquez

neruda and borges is the right generation but very different writers. i expect it was more the great mass popularity of neruda that probably swung the judges.

vargas llosa's first three novels are all great imo, and several of his later works are decent

best way to look at the nobel prize is as a pretty arbitrary thing that isn't that important other than for that year's laureate and their fans

A lot of time the best die young. But Marquez was pretty clearly the right boom winner, if only for Autumn of the Patriarch. I used to love Cortazar, but the latest short story collection I tried and make my way through was severely disappointing. I'd take Juan Rulfo every day of the week instead.

best way to look at the nobel prize is as a pretty arbitrary thing that isn't that important other than for that year's laureate and their fans

WHERE'S THE FUN IN THAT?

*starts busily reading all the winners in order*

if you listen to old peruvian dudes tell stories, you'll be reminded of vargas llosa, because he just formalized a type of popular storytelling from peru. his works do get more academic, because i guess he was a fan of russian formalism

i kind of got tired of it because i heard a bunch of old peruvian dudes tell stories in the same fashion

weirdly la catedral is the one i think is his only decent book