No one speaks like don delillos characters in real life.
― Frederik B, Tuesday, 16 October 2012 13:21 (eleven years ago) link
In real life.
― Ismael Klata, Tuesday, 16 October 2012 13:21 (eleven years ago) link
a sure to be popular thread
― Lamp, Tuesday, 16 October 2012 13:44 (eleven years ago) link
He may speak like that, but it would have to be in small runs of a few words at a time.
― Aimless, Tuesday, 16 October 2012 18:07 (eleven years ago) link
"He may speak like this. In fragments.""He may speak.""Intransitively, is what you're saying."
― set the controls for the heart of the congos (thomp), Tuesday, 16 October 2012 19:28 (eleven years ago) link
do you think when he shakes a carton of orange juice it stretches out into infinity
― the late great, Tuesday, 16 October 2012 19:31 (eleven years ago) link
"I want to say something but what."
― the late great, Tuesday, 16 October 2012 19:32 (eleven years ago) link
I've never heard him speak, but I'm sure I read that he sounds like Bugs Bunny
― Ismael Klata, Tuesday, 16 October 2012 19:43 (eleven years ago) link
how they speak is in american. delillo is too. an american i mean. so how else would he speak.
― j., Tuesday, 16 October 2012 20:17 (eleven years ago) link
He speaks in your voice, American, and there's a shine in his eye that's halfway hopeful.
― *buffs lens* (schlump), Tuesday, 16 October 2012 20:22 (eleven years ago) link
great thread
― turds (Hungry4Ass), Tuesday, 16 October 2012 20:58 (eleven years ago) link
he has a slight lisphe is talking to john ("john", like i know him) franzen at NYPL in a couple of weeks, i would totally go if i were a new yorkeri really like that max post a while ago about how much he likes the picture of DD that's on his book jackets, how apposite his expression feelsi drew a picture of it once,
https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-7ip6pGqBtgc/UH3P0UPKfiI/AAAAAAAAAEA/y_n1bF7qDjU/s600/29.gif
― *buffs lens* (schlump), Tuesday, 16 October 2012 21:22 (eleven years ago) link
beautiful
― the late great, Tuesday, 16 October 2012 21:25 (eleven years ago) link
it is 10 foot tall & painted in black gloss paint on each wall of my bedroom fyi
― *buffs lens* (schlump), Tuesday, 16 October 2012 21:29 (eleven years ago) link
quiet dreams about miscommunication every night
floor and ceiling included
― the late great, Tuesday, 16 October 2012 21:31 (eleven years ago) link
He is looking beyond the now. Way beyond. Point Omega.
― Ismael Klata, Tuesday, 16 October 2012 21:46 (eleven years ago) link
A slight lisp. Softly spoken.
― set the controls for the heart of the congos (thomp), Tuesday, 16 October 2012 23:24 (eleven years ago) link
point omega was p bad i think? i don't know. reminded me of late anthony powell.
i could read him writing like that forever really. i read some jonathan rosenbaum article a couple of days ago where he talked about a film with some languors & said that he zoned out but when it made him think about other things it led him to some nice things to think about. i know the sort of frosty, elliptical phrasing of delillo's characters' speech is v prominent, but it really suits how passive the books are to read - how territorial and open, like everything i remember of point omega, the clean warmth of the desert, the weekly car ride, the emptiness once the girl goes away, the realer feeling of the sexual thought of the guy. i don't remember it so well & i don't think i read it & thought it was the best book but i enjoyed occupying its space. i always feel like virginia woolf is meant to pass through you & condition your thoughts more than it's meant to be crystallised into landmarks of memory, & point omega is the same i think. it lets you swim around in people's lost, failing, ineffective communication, briefly occupy some shack they're staying in & wonder what is going on.
(i'm trying to find a stray line from it than i remember an artist quoting in a guardian article, as having really popped for him & influenced his work, & i can't find it. his prose is pretty high-yield that way, though, i think, it being just open enough to let you play with it, to lend itself to working with what you're thinking about)
― *buffs lens* (schlump), Wednesday, 17 October 2012 18:14 (eleven years ago) link
schlump i like your picture
it's only 'pretty bad' in terms of, i don't know, there were a couple dozen sentences that i thought, "that sentence needs fine tuning," and that is like ... that's a lot of sentences that aren't perfect by delillo standards, whatever you think of his novels on a larger level
and the disappearance and the links between psycho and the other sections seem to be both over-telegraphed and inexplicable
i'm starting to wonder now if there was some solution to the puzzle the novel presents that i missed, i assumed it was one of those things where there is no solution. -- but, like, if it opened up and inhabited the position of having-no-solution a little while, that would be a thing. instead it seems like it basically just displays its lack of solution, finishes, which is a bit of a tired aesthetic move, in 2012.
― set the controls for the heart of the congos (thomp), Thursday, 18 October 2012 08:43 (eleven years ago) link
I just noticed that Don DeLillo is giving a reading in Chicago at 6 p.m. tonight. Didn't know he did that kind of public thing.
― pretty even gender split (Eazy), Thursday, 18 October 2012 20:13 (eleven years ago) link
Tell me you're going. Would be nice to have one thread reach resolution today.
― Ismael Klata, Thursday, 18 October 2012 20:17 (eleven years ago) link
Not there, but this may help:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEXGqGkMQTE
― pretty even gender split (Eazy), Thursday, 18 October 2012 23:45 (eleven years ago) link
not on topic I know but o! how the wheel becomes it is total shat.
― Fizzles, Friday, 19 October 2012 06:45 (eleven years ago) link
i was going to agree with that but then i couldn't remember whether i was thinking of 'the fisher king' or not
― set the controls for the heart of the congos (thomp), Saturday, 20 October 2012 23:17 (eleven years ago) link
Mylon Ware stood in a corner talking to no one. He was a folk singer from western Canada, a lean bleak man with strange eyes. His second winter in New York he killed and ate his dog to keep from starving. People had offered him food and urged him to go on welfare but he took nothing, listened to no one, said not a word. The dog was a German shepherd, bought for protection, and very hard to kill. Mylon began by using the long bar that was part of his police lock. The first blow wasn't severe or direct enough and the bar proved too long a weapon for the kind of struggle that followed. However it was useful for holding off the dog while Mylon maneuvered with his hunting knife, also brought for protection. It took him fifteen minutes to kill the animal. When it was over, almost nothing in the small apartment stood in the same place, or was free of blood.
― set the controls for the heart of the congos (thomp), Saturday, 20 October 2012 23:35 (eleven years ago) link
liked yr post btw thomp; think those things probably read true, though are separate from the broadly musical things i get from his prose & mood - i can't hate on him for telling an elliptical story strung loosely & inconclusively along themes of war & the desert &c because that's just so delillo - it's like OH BACK TO NEW JERSEY HUH PHILIP, & also bc he had a hand in foregrounding that stuff in contemporary american lit, i think. like on reflection a part of point omega doesn't sound so distinguishable from americana - the journey in to the landscape, the introspection of the lead, filtered through his industry-speak, &c. it's him working variations on a theme, albeit on a small & modern canvas.
― *buffs lens* (schlump), Saturday, 20 October 2012 23:57 (eleven years ago) link
haha i would probably rather still read it than the 'best' roth novels so = ??
i remember nothing about americana, though i know i've read it. i've started letting myself reread them out of order now though so i don't know when i'll reach that one.
there is a recurring thought that i have been having in this current delillo jag, which i think i had a fairly inarticulate go at explaining in the other delillo thread -- that delillo is spectacularly (in more than one sense!) ill-served by quite how much his stuff appears to align with Things You Teach Kids About Postmodernism 101. too tired to remember what i meant by that actually.
― set the controls for the heart of the congos (thomp), Sunday, 21 October 2012 00:14 (eleven years ago) link
Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.
― System, Monday, 22 October 2012 00:01 (eleven years ago) link
Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.
― System, Tuesday, 23 October 2012 00:01 (eleven years ago) link
I just tried to read The Names, and ugh, that guy's dialogue is sooo lame. His characters use the same syntax and prose as his exposition=boring.
― Mr. Que, Wednesday, 11 July 2007 18:57 (5 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
― set the controls for the heart of the congos (thomp), Tuesday, 23 October 2012 12:11 (eleven years ago) link
i read an interview with him where he claimed that he got every line of dialogue in his book by transcribing verbatim overheard conversations on public transport. which just cannot be true because nobody speaks like they do in his books ever.
― plax (ico), Tuesday, 23 October 2012 12:21 (eleven years ago) link
books
In his books.
― set the controls for the heart of the congos (thomp), Tuesday, 23 October 2012 12:33 (eleven years ago) link
zero k coming in mayhttp://books.simonandschuster.com/Zero-K/Don-DeLillo/9781501135392
― johnny crunch, Sunday, 3 January 2016 01:29 (eight years ago) link
lol, good thread
― big Mahats (mattresslessness), Sunday, 10 January 2016 20:42 (eight years ago) link
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/10/12/magazine/don-delillo-interview.html?action=click&module=Editors%20Picks&pgtype=Homepage
― johnny crunch, Monday, 12 October 2020 14:25 (three years ago) link
lol wow
Let me ask about something that’s not in “The Silence,” at least not anymore. In the first galley copy I read, there’s a scene in which a character is reciting disastrous events and mentions Covid-19. Then I was told there were changes to the book and was sent a second galley. Covid-19 was gone. Why did you take it out?
I didn’t put Covid-19 in there. Somebody else had. Somebody else could have decided that it made it more contemporary. But I said, “There’s no reason for that.”
― lag∞n, Monday, 12 October 2020 14:42 (three years ago) link
Can't read as I've not got a subs but it sounds wild
Don DeLillo really talks like a Don DeLillo novel pic.twitter.com/wPhP3PQtK6— Matthew Zeitlin (@MattZeitlin) October 12, 2020
― xyzzzz__, Monday, 12 October 2020 15:57 (three years ago) link