do you think don delillo speaks like a character from a don delillo novel in real life

He may speak like that, but it would have to be in small runs of a few words at a time.

"He may speak like this. In fragments."
"He may speak."
"Intransitively, is what you're saying."

do you think when he shakes a carton of orange juice it stretches out into infinity

"I want to say something but what."

I've never heard him speak, but I'm sure I read that he sounds like Bugs Bunny

how they speak is in american. delillo is too. an american i mean. so how else would he speak.

He speaks in your voice, American, and there's a shine in his eye that's halfway hopeful.

great thread

he has a slight lisp
he 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 yorker
i 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 feels
i drew a picture of it once,

https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-7ip6pGqBtgc/UH3P0UPKfiI/AAAAAAAAAEA/y_n1bF7qDjU/s600/29.gif

beautiful

it is 10 foot tall & painted in black gloss paint on each wall of my bedroom fyi

quiet dreams about miscommunication every night

floor and ceiling included

He is looking beyond the now. Way beyond. Point Omega.

A slight lisp. Softly spoken.

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)

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.

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.

Tell me you're going. Would be nice to have one thread reach resolution today.

Not there, but this may help:

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

point omega was p bad i think? i don't know. reminded me of late anthony powell.

not on topic I know but o! how the wheel becomes it is total shat.

i was going to agree with that but then i couldn't remember whether i was thinking of 'the fisher king' or not

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.

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.

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.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

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

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.

books

In his books.

zero k coming in may
http://books.simonandschuster.com/Zero-K/Don-DeLillo/9781501135392

lol, good thread

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/10/12/magazine/don-delillo-interview.html?action=click&module=Editors%20Picks&pgtype=Homepage

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.”

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