Registers of Affect #14: being alive to the "smallest registers of motion"

This was the point. To see what’s here, finally to look and to know you’re looking, to feel time passing, to be alive to what is happening in the smallest registers of motion.

-- Point Omega

DeLillo Book Reviews: Point Omega

"Review: Don DeLillo's Point Omega"

Even though this review wasn't written for a higher end publication, perhaps it should have been. Its author, Joshua Willey, gives an honest and fair appraisal of Point Omega while also taking into account the career path that DeLillo has been treading since the publication of The Body Artist in 2001 -- or, as Willey calls it, "the formal transformation of Don DeLillo."

Willey observes that we once associated DeLillo with "oversaturation," but now "we find him at his most empty." Yet instead of lamenting the loss of DeLillo's old style, Willey acknowledges that "DeLillo is breathing deeply now, and it suits him well." He even speculates on what may have actuated these formal changes in DeLillo's prose:

It is almost as if his subjects crossed a failsafe line. Perhaps it was no longer possible for him to write honestly about America in 2010 in the same voice he'd used in 1990.

This speculation is something that we could use a little bit more of right now. I applaud Willey for reviewing DeLillo's latest novel on its own terms, something that other, more "reputable" critics have had a tough time doing for the past decade or so.

Personally, I think we've yet to realize the full implications of DeLillo's "formal transformation," but I have suspicions that this period could turn out to be the most important one of his career. (Of course, some critics would certainly disagree with me. See, for example, Michiko Kakutani's review of Point Omega for The New York Times.)

DeLillo Interviews: NPR radio interview with DeLillo about Point Omega

"DeLillo's Man in the Desert, Up Against the Wall"

Above I have provided a link to a 2010 radio interview with DeLillo. Listen to DeLillo as he talks about many of the familiar themes in his work (war, images, death, mass media, etc.) and a few that are perhaps not so familiar (time as anxiety and the sublime).

In addition, he also speaks about being a writer and about his attraction to people in small rooms (Lee Harvey Oswald in Libra, Bill Gray in Mao II, etc.).

Finally, in another self-referential moment, he comments on "living in dangerous times."

DeLillo was nearly 75 at the time of the interview, so one can't help but smile when he says, "I'm still 22 in my mind."

Favorite Passages: "It's all about time"

What more could be said about the relationship between contemporary existence and literature?

It's all embedded, the hours and minutes, words and numbers everywhere, he said, train stations, bus routes, taxi meters, surveillance cameras. It's all about time, dimwit time, inferior time, people checking watches and other devices, other reminders. This is time draining out of our lives. Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature. There's an endless counting down, he said. When you strip away all the surfaces, when you see into it, what's left is terror. This is the thing that literature was meant to cure. The epic poem, the bedtime story.

-- Point Omega

Registers of Affect #13: those familiar yet rousing and shaping scenes of life

These were scenes that normally roused him, the great rapacious flow, where the physical will of the city, the ego fevers, the assertions of industry, commerce and crowds shape every anecdotal moment.

-- Cosmopolis

Registers of Affect #12: connectivity

Everything is connected.

-- Underworld

DeLillo News & Notes: has Jonathan Franzen learned anything from DeLillo?

An early exchange was typical of the entire interview. Franzen asked how important meaning was to DeLillo’s writing. “Not much,” the older writer deadpanned. “I’m a writer of sentences … I don’t know where meaning comes from.” Franzen was visibly chastened by this anti-response.

---

I recently came across this story on Artforum, which interests me insofar as it provides insight into the relationship between Jonathan Franzen and DeLillo, from whom Franzen claims influence. Although I have already published a few posts on the relationship between DeLillo and DFW (see "commemorating the four-year anniversary of DFW's suicide" and "DFW's 'miglior fabbro'"), I'll admit that I haven't spent any time heretofore discussing the relationship between him and Franzen. Partly, this is because I haven't much read Franzen -- though, this news story has me itching to do so.

Now, I'll say up front that I'm not sure if the writer of this story, Andrew Hultkrans, has some sort of bias against Franzen, but frankly, I don't care, as he offers enough good points to make up for it.

The best of these points, about the notion of "overexplaining," Hultkrans borrows from the critic James Wood (I've read Wood, yet I'm not exactly sure where this notion springs from -- perhaps a review of Franzen?). According to Hultkrans, Wood has criticized Franzen and other young writers as being "overexplainers." Adding his own two cents to this debate, Hultkrans writes that Franzen will "have to stop worrying so much about meaning and learn how to be coy when interviewed. [...] It's hard to continue the striptease when you're already naked."

While I can only say so much about Franzen, I can comment on how DeLillo has evaded this charge of overexplaining. In short, DeLillo has remarked on his work by saying that it shouldn't much be remarked on -- at least, not by him. By using DeLillo's first published interview, with Tom LeClair in 1982, we can clarify what he means. Responding to the very first question that LeClair asked -- "Why do reference books give only your date of birth and the publication dates of your books?" -- DeLillo offered this deft response:

Silence, exile, cunning, and so on. It's my nature to keep quiet about most things. Even the ideas in my work. When you try to unravel something you've written, you belittle it in a way. It was created as a mystery, in part. [...] If you're able to be straightforward and penetrating about this invention of yours, it's almost as though you're saying it wasn't altogether necessary. The sources weren't deep enough. Maybe this view is overrefined and too personal. But I think it helps explain why some writers are unable or unwilling to discuss their work.

In answer to a later question, DeLillo built on the above point:

There's an element of contempt for meanings. You want to write outside the usual framework. You want to dare readers to make a commitment you know they can't make. That's part of it. There's also the sense of drowning in information and in the mass awareness of things. Everybody seems to know everything. Subjects surface and are totally exhausted in a matter of days or weeks, totally played out by the publishing industry and the broadcast industry. Nothing is too arcane to escape the treatment, the process. Making things difficult for the reader is less an attack on the reader than it is on the age and its facile knowledge-market. The writer is driven by his conviction that some truths aren't arrived at so easily, that life is still full of mystery, that it might be better for you, Dear Reader, if you went back to the Living section of your newspaper because this is the dying section and you don't really want to be here.

While he may be incapable of being "straightforward and penetrating" about his own work, DeLillo is very much so about writers overexplaining their writing: Don't do it. Instead, DeLillo says, simply cherish and trust the fact that "life is still full of mystery." A writer fails to recognize this truth when he or she attempts to overexplain his or her work.

With this information in mind, perhaps we can better understand why, according to Hultkrans, "DeLillo's eyes widened" when he heard that he "meant more to [Franzen] than any other writer": Franzen, it seems, does not understand the role of the novelist in the same way as DeLillo.

Now, I'm not a novelist myself, so I can't exactly comment on which is the better method, but I can at least say this: If DeLillo, as Hultkrans writes, did indeed designate Franzen as "'the future of the novel,'" then let's hope that Franzen starts coming to class and taking some notes because it's evident that he really hasn't learned anything from DeLillo.

At least, not yet.

Favorite Passages: "soccer in history"

Another humorous yet insightful comment from DeLillo about the world's most famous sport and its relationship with America.

I thought about soccer in history, the inspiration for wars, truces, rampaging mobs. The game was a global passion, spherical ball, grass or turf, entire nations in spasms of elation or lament. But what kind of sport is it that disallows the use of players' hands, except for the goalkeeper? Hands are essential human tools, the things that grasp and hold, that make, take, carry, create. If soccer were an American invention, wouldn't some European intellectual maintain that our historically puritanical nature has compelled us to invent a game structured on anti-masturbatory principles?

-- "Hammer and Sickle,"
The Angel Esmeralda

Registers of Affect #11: bodily forces

She felt the uneasy force, the strangeness of seeing a man who had lived in her mind for years as words alone--the force of a body in a room.

-- Mao II

DeLillo News & Notes: a DeLillo-esque moment: Mitt Romney pumping his own gas

We knew that nothing is too absurd to happen in America.

-- End Zone

"It is pretty amazing that in such a short period of time you can go from missing becoming the leader of one of the most powerful countries in the world by a couple % to pumping your own gas like everyone else."

Image and passage reproduced from Reddit. See more HERE.

11/22/12: in commemoration of Libra

I think every emotion we felt is part of that film, and certainly confusion is one of the larger ones, yes. Confusion and horror. The head shot is like some awful, pornographic moment that happens without warning in our living rooms--some truth about the world, some unspeakable activity people engage in that we don't want to know about. And after the confusion about when Kennedy is first hit, and when Connally is hit, and why the president's wife is scrambling over the seat, and simultaneous with the horror of the head shot, part of the horror, perhaps--there's a bolt of revelation. Because the head shot is the most direct kind of statement that the lethal bullet was fired from the front. Whatever the physical possibilities concerning impact and reflex, you look at this thing and wonder what's going on. Are you seeing some distortion inherent in the film medium or in your own perception of things? Are you the willing victim of some enormous lie of the state--a lie, a wish, a dream? Or, did the shot simply come from the front, as every cell in your body tells you it did?

-- Don DeLillo

Registers of Affect #10: the affective power of small rooms

Men in small rooms. Men reading and waiting, struggling with secret and feverish ideas.

There is a world inside the world.

-- Libra

---

See: DeLillo, "The History of the Writer Alone in a Room" (I'm still struggling to find a link to this essay)

DeLillo News & Notes: Don DeLillo is DFW's "miglior fabbro"

In a recent review of DFW's new collection of nonfiction essays, Both Flesh and Not, D.T. Max -- staff writer for The New Yorker and author of Every Love Story is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace -- makes several references to Don DeLillo.

Specifically, Max mentions the DD-DFW correspondence, which I plan to sift through in the spring when I visit the Harry Ransom Center in Austin. (This correspondence, I'm sure, has yet to receive the attention it deserves.)

This review is also particularly interesting to me because Max, drawing on T.S. Eliot's dedication to Ezra Pound in The Waste Land, refers to DeLillo as Wallace's "miglior fabbro." 

Here's the link:

"D.F.W.'s Nonfiction: Better with Age"

Enjoy!

DeLillo Interviews: a seminal interview (1993)

"Don DeLillo: The Art of Fiction No. 135"

In 1993, Adam Begley put together what may just be the best interview with DeLillo to date. Here DeLillo discusses everything from language and the process of writing to literature and film. Because there is really no way to boil this interview down, I have opted to reproduce the highlights from this interview into four sections below:

---

Process of Writing:

A young writer sees that with words and sentences on a piece of paper [...] he can place himself more clearly in the world. Words on a page, that's all it takes to help him separate himself from the forces around him, streets and people and pressures and feelings. He learns to think about these things, to ride his own sentences into new perceptions.

You want to control the flow of impulses, images, words, faces, ideas. But there's a higher place, a secret aspiration. You want to let go. You want to lose yourself in language, become a carrier or messenger. The best moments involves a loss of control. It's a kind of rapture, and it can happen with words and phrases fairly often--completely surprising combinations that make a higher kind of sense, that come to you out of nowhere.

But the basic work is built around the sentence. This is what I mean when I call myself a writer. I construct sentences.

But I'm aware of the fact that time is limited. Every new novel stretches the term of the contract--let me live long enough to do one more book. How many books do we get? How much good work?


Language:

I'm completely willing to let language press meaning upon me.


But before everything, there's language. Before history and politics, there's language. And it's language, the sheer pleasure of making it and bending it and seeing it form on the page and hearing it whistle in my head--this is the thing that makes my work go.


The State of Literature Today:

[...] I think we need to invent beauty, search out some restoring force. A writer may describe the ugliness and pain in graphic terms but he can also try to find a dignity and significance in ruined parts of the city, and the people he sees there.

We have a rich literature. But sometimes it's a literature too ready to be neutralized, to be incorporated into the ambient noise. This is why we need the writer in opposition, the novelist who writes against power, who writes against the corporation or the state or the whole apparatus of assimilation. We're all one beat away from becoming elevator music.

Today, the world has become a book--more precisely a news story or television show or piece of film footage. And the world narrative is being written by men who orchestrate disastrous events, by military leaders, totalitarian leaders, terrorists, men dazed by power. World news is the novel people want to read. It carries the tragic narrative that used to belong to the novel.


Film:

Kennedy was shot on film, Oswald was shot on TV. Does this mean anything?

The [Zapruder] film represents all the hopefulness we invest in technology.

Film allows us to examine ourselves in ways earlier societies could not--examine ourselves, imitate ourselves, extend ourselves, reshape our reality. It permeates our lives, this double vision, and also detaches us, turns some of us into actors doing walk-throughs. [...] This is the world narrative, so they play it until everyone in the world has seen it.

Favorite Passages: "the simplest greeting"

So true.

What pleasure in the simplest greeting. It's as thought one friend says to another, "How good is it to say 'How are you?'" The other replying, "When I answer 'I am well and how are you,' what I really mean to say is that I'm delighted to have a chance to say these familiar things--they bridge the lonely distances."

-- The Names

Registers of Affect #9: the "heaving and breathing" of systems

"Systems heaving and breathing all around you. Tell us. That sort of essence in the air. That sort of underbreath of powerful thrilling systems."

-- Valparaiso

DeLillo News & Notes: ALA 2012: DeLillo and Film

The Don DeLillo Society will be hosting a session at the ALA (American Literature Association) Conference in Boston in May of 2013. The topic is "DeLillo and Film." As described by the DD Society:

Topic: DeLillo and Film. David Cronenberg’s _Cosmopolis_ marks the long awaited adaptation of a Don DeLillo novel. But DeLillo has long been interested in film, from his screenplay for _Game 6_, use of real and imagined films throughout his novels (_Americana_, _Running Dog_, _Underworld_, _Point Omega_), references to filmmakers in interviews (“I began to understand the force that movies could have emotionally and intellectually in what I consider the great era of the European films: Godard, Antonioni, Fellini, Bergman . . . Kubrick and Howard Hawks”), and use of cinematic technique in the novels themselves. Papers may develop these or other topics related to DeLillo and film.

Please send a title, abstract (300 words), AV needs, and brief bio to Jesse Kavadlo, Maryville University, at jkavadlo@...<mailto:jkavadlo@...> by January 1, 2013.

More information can be found HERE.

Registers of Affect #8: the "secret" energies of television

Weary as he was, blanked out, bored by all these posturing desperadoes, he could easily have watched through the night, held by the mesh effect of television, the electrostatic glow that seemed a privileged state between wave and visual image, a secret of celestial energy.

-- Players

DeLillo News & Notes: 125 Boxes of DeLillo at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, TX!

Doing early preparation for my trip to the Harry Ransom Center in the spring, I came across this interesting article in The New Yorker written by D.T. Max, who recently published a biography on DFW. The middle-third of the article provides a nice description of the DeLillo collection. For my own part, I'm excited to see and touch the pages of the drafts themselves, especially given DeLillo's penchant for emphasizing the importance of the visual nature of his typewriter-produced manuscripts.

Here's the link: "Final Destination: Why do the archives of so many great writers end up in Texas?"

Enjoy!

Favorite Passages: "The true life"

Just another reason why I think that this novel is a masterpiece.

The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever. The true life takes place when we're alone, thinking, feeling, lost in memory, dreamingly self-aware, the submicroscopic moments.

-- Point Omega

Registers of Affect #7: events

He felt they shared something, we three, that’s what he felt. It was the kind of rare fellowship that singular events engender, even if the others didn't know he was here.

-- Point Omega 

---

See: Registers of Affect #1: events

Registers of Affect #6: sex

Sex finds us. Sex sees through us. That's why it's so shattering. It strips us of appearances.

-- Cosmopolis

DeLillo News & Notes: DeLillo receives the Carl Sandburg Literary Award

On October 17, 2012, both DeLillo and Walter Isaacson (author of Steve Jobs, Einstein: His Life and Universe) received the Carl Sandburg Literary Award (DeLillo for fiction, Isaacson for nonfiction).

According to the article that I read, the Carl Sandburg Literary Award "is presented annually to an acclaimed author in recognition of outstanding contributions to the literary world and honors a significant work or body of work that has enhanced the public's awareness of the written word."

Congratulations to DeLillo!

Favorite Passages: "not a crash but a crash landing"

The way in which we use language to envelope ourselves from danger. One can almost hear the echo of Derrida ("I SHALL SPEAK, THEN, OF A LETTER ...").

Certain elements in the crew had decided to pretend that it was not a crash but a crash landing that was seconds away. After all, the difference between the two is only one word. Didn't this suggest that the two forms of flight termination were more or less interchangeable? How much could one word matter?

-- White Noise

DeLillo Interviews: "Living in dangerous times"

DeLillo recently gave an interview about "Living in dangerous times."

There are a few reasons why I chose this interview for the month of October. Not only is it recent, but DeLillo also talks a little bit about his upcoming novel (though he doesn't reveal much). Above all else, this interview amazes me precisely because it tells us almost nothing new. In fact, it's amazing to compare the responses here with the responses that DeLillo has given in previous interviews. In the "Introduction" to Conversations with Don DeLillo, editor Thomas DePietro calls attention to this fact: "[DeLillo] often repeats himself and even quotes himself" (ix).

I can't explain why, but this almost self-referential quality of his interviews doesn't surprise me in the least.

---

DePietro, Thomas, ed. Conversations with Don DeLillo. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2005. Print.

Registers of Affect #5: "See it and leave"

Sometimes I see something so moving I know I’m not supposed to linger. See it and leave. If you stay too long, you wear out the wordless shock. Love it and trust it and leave.

-- Underworld

DeLillo News & Notes: an odd website about White Noise

I recently came across an odd website that relates to DeLillo. Called "White Noise on White Noise," it is basically just a collection of 36 fragments from DeLillo's novel that the user can experience one-by-one.

According to the home page, the purpose of the website is "to provide an experience akin to quickly browsing through the novel in a bookstore."

It also links parts of the the text to other websites in order to "bring forth the appropriate emotional or cultural response."

Frankly, I'm not sure what to make of this website, but playing with it is interesting. I would suggest browsing through it at least once.

Enjoy!

Registers of Affect #4: accumulated energies

"Can you feel it, Jack? An accumulation of nameless energies."

-- White Noise

DeLillo Book Reviews: The Angel Esmeralda

This summer, I wrote a review of DeLillo's The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories for Goodreads. Given the nature of the site, the purpose of the review is not so much to analyze the work, but rather to get readers who are unfamiliar with DeLillo to be interested in him.

Here's the link: Review of The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories

I've also reproduced the review below.

Enjoy!

- - - - -

THE PERFECT INTRODUCTION TO DON DeLILLO

Don DeLillo is currently my favorite writer, and I've been on a quest to read all of his works over the past few months. Whenever anyone asks me about DeLillo and to recommend a book by him, my response has usually been something like this: 

"I think he's an amazing writer, but I also recognize that he's certainly not for everyone. My suggestion is to read White Noise, since it's relevant, easy to find, and highly accessible, and then decide for yourself." 

After having completed The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories, however, I revoke this past statement of mine. It's not that White Noise is a bad book with which to expose yourself to DeLillo; it is a phenomenal piece of fiction, and if you choose to read it first (as I did), my bet is that you won't regret it. 

But, as a novel alone, White Noise (1985) perhaps paints an unfair portrait of DeLillo's writing career, which has spanned more than fifty years (1960-present). In other words, if you read this particular novel first, you may -- for better or for worse -- come to expect this kind of writing in all of DeLillo's works, and consequently you may find yourself a bit disappointed when you get around to his post-Underworld works (The Body Artist, Cosmopolis, Love-Lies-Bleeding, etc.).

The Angel Esmeralda, on the other hand, manages to cover more ground than White Noise in terms of DeLillo's career, seeing as the nine stories that comprise it were published between 1979-2011. But it is not for this reason alone that I believe The Angel Esmeralda represent the perfect introduction to this hilarious, haunting, and rather enigmatic American author, the litmus test for deciding whether or not to get involved with DeLillo.

Without spoiling the stories themselves, I will at least say that here readers will find many of the qualities and themes that make DeLillo the celebrated author that he is. To name just a few: his masterful discussion of airports; his passion for describing New York City; his belief that "the future belongs to crowds"; the influence of mass media; the impending financial collapse (as he predicted in his 2003 novel Cosmopolis); the way in which people almost systematically impose stories and backgrounds on other people in order to make sense of them; his interest in art; his insightful and ironic humor; and, finally, not only his admirable command of language, but his interest in language itself.

Although it is difficult to do so, I will pick a single passage from The Angel Esmeralda to quote, from "Midnight in Dostoevsky" (2010): 

If we isolate the stray thought, the passing thought, the thought whose origin is unfathomable, then we begin to understand that we are routinely deranged, everyday crazy.

Anyway, if you are one of those readers who's teetering on whether or not to pick up a book by Don DeLillo, then The Angel Esmeralda is where to begin -- and it may just push you over the edge.

DeLillo News & Notes: Why you shouldn't pay attention to New York Magazine's "Guide to the Don DeLillo Oeuvre"

In 2007, New York Magazine published this "Guide to the Don DeLillo Oeuvre" on their website. While I think that this is a great idea, especially for a writer like DeLillo, I think that it could have been executed much better.

For example, I cannot understand why Mao II -- a short, accessible book with big ideas about images, terrorism, and novelists, a book that won the Pen/Faulkner Prize and was a Pulitzer Prize Finalist -- is listed as "Recommended" instead of "Classic." Nor can I fathom why End Zone -- an early, eerie, and deeply funny book about the relationship between war and football -- is "For Fans Only"; certainly it should be "Recommended."

This guide, following in the footsteps of many critics, asks us to disregard DeLillo's post-Underworld writings, including Valparaiso, The Body Artist, Cosmopolis, and Love-Lies-Bleeding. Though I understand why someone might criticize these works, I just cannot get on-board with it. I would recommended Valparaiso and especially Cosmopolis (which, we can say with hindsight, proved part of its worth when the American economy recessed.) The only exception, perhaps, is the Body Artist: I am still searching for a way to redeem this book.

Finally, Libra, one of my favorite DeLillo novels, is, I must say, something of a departure from his usual writing style. So, even though it is an enjoyable read, it does not give someone a good introduction into DeLillo's sensibilities as a writer. For this reason, it may not be the best place to begin. At the same time, the highlight of Libra -- i.e. the assassination of President Kennedy -- does provide the basis on which all of DeLillo's work is built, and this may be sufficient justification for reading it first.

As I wrote in a previous review that I expect to publish on this blog tomorrow, I believe that DeLillo's recently published short-story collection, The Angel Esmeralda, provides the best introduction to his work because it is accessible, easy to read, features classic DeLillo themes, and spans the better part of his writing career (1979-2011). (Of course, this short-story collection was not in print when the New York Magazine created its guide.)

Or, if it must be a novel, then I would recommend that one begin with White Noise. It's difficult to find a better representative text of DeLillo than this.

Favorite Passages: "all plots tend to move deathward"

This passage is so good, DeLillo wrote it twice.

"All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots. Political plots, terrorist plots, lovers' plots, narrative plots, plots that are part of children's games. We edge nearer to death every time we plot. It is like a contract that all must sign, the plotters as well as those who are the targets of the plot."

-- White Noise

Plots carry their own logic. There is a tendency of plots to move toward death. He believed that the idea of death is woven into the nature of every plot. A narrative plot no less than a conspiracy of armed men. The tighter the plot of a story, the more likely it will come to death. A plot in fiction, he believed, is the way we localize the force of the death outside the book, play it off, contain it."

-- Libra

Registers of Affect #3: "dreams, visions, intuitions, prayers"

"Think of two parallel lines [...] One is the life of Lee H. Oswald. One is the conspiracy to kill the President. What bridges the space between them? What makes a connection inevitable? There is a third line. It comes out of dreams, visions, intuitions, prayers, out of the deepest levels of the self. It's not generated by cause and effect like the other two lines. It's a line that cuts across causality, cuts across time. It has no history that we can recognize or understand. But it forces a connection. It puts a man on the path of his destiny."

-- Libra

DeLillo News & Notes: using DeLillo to understand Hurricane Isaac

As a resident of New Orleans, Louisiana, I had the pleasure of "experiencing" Hurricane Isaac earlier this month -- that is to say, I watched all of the different things that the media had to say about Isaac on television from the safety of a hotel room in Jackson, Mississippi. Perhaps it's only because I was reading DeLillo at the time, but I was struck by how much the media's presentation of Isaac resembled the "airborne toxic event" of White Noise.

As I constantly flipped through news channels (it seems that everyone, even me, likes a little disaster (imagery) in life), I kept hearing different things: "Isaac's just a tropical storm"; "Isaac is bordering on a Category One"; "Isaac expected to turn into a Category Two when it makes landfall." Not only did every news channel seem to have a competing opinion about what Isaac was, I also kept thinking that all of these arbitrary names -- "tropical storm"; "Category One"; "Category Two" -- were supposed to signify some hopefulness on our part that we could use language to control this event.

As I mentioned above, all of these thoughts that I was having reminded me of the "airborne toxic event" of White Noise. Readers familiar with White Noise are also aware that there is a mysterious toxic spill that occurs about halfway through the novel. This spill takes on new identities as the media decides to issue them. I have reproduced the three-part progression of this incident from "a feathery plume" to "a black billowing cloud" to an" airborne toxic event" (the names and backgrounds of the characters aren't important in order for me to make my point):


An hour later he was back in the attic, this time with a radio and highway map. I climbed the narrow stairs, borrowed the glasses and looked again. It was still there, a slightly large accumulation, a towering mass in fact, maybe a little blacker now.

"The radio calls it a feathery plume," he said. "But it's not a plume."

"What is it?"

"Like a shapeless growing thing. A dark black breathing thing of smoke. Why do they call it a plume?"

"Air time is valuable. They can't go into long tortured descriptions." (111)

...

"That was the Stovers," she said. "They spoke directly with the weather center outside Glassboro. They're not calling it a feathery plume anymore."

"What are they calling it?"

"A black billowing cloud."

"That's a little more accurate, which means they're coming to grips with the thing. Good." (113)

...

"It affects the false part of the human memory or whatever. That's not all. They're not calling it the black billowing cloud anymore."

"What are they calling it?"

He looked at me carefully.

"The airborne toxic event."

He spoke these words in a clipped and foreboding manner, syllable by syllable, as if he sensed the threat in state-created terminology. (117)


The best thing about this section of White Noise is twofold. On the one hand, DeLillo uses the medium of the novel to (re)present the media (re)presenting the news through the medium of television. At the same time, he also manages to critique this very (re)presentation when, for instance, he speaks of "the threat in state-created terminology." (This level of threat is taken to an entirely new level in Cosmopolis. Expect a post on this soon.)

So, what we should make of this relationship between DeLillo and real life? The answer to this, unfortunately, is not so clear. Using his satire, has DeLillo now authorized us to laugh at the media, thus consoling us? Or, is laughter not enough, and should we still worry about how much control the media has over reality? With DeLillo, of course, we often have to balance more than one answer at a time. Yet these answers certainly don't feel like solutions.

Maybe this, then, is DeLillo's flaw as a writer: he cuts to the heart of the problem, yet fails to offer a solution. David Foster Wallace seems to say as much in his brilliant reading of DeLillo (see: "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction").

---

DeLillo, Don. White Noise. New York: Penguin, 1986. Print.

Registers of Affect #2: the way terror "hovers and shimmers"

DeLillo is the laureate of terror, of modern or postmodern terror, and the way it hovers and shimmers in our subliminal minds.

-- Martin Amis

See the full review of The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories:
"Laureate of Terror: Don DeLillo's prophetic soul"

DeLillo Book Reviews: a review of Falling Man

"Racing Against Reality"

In June of 2007, Andrew O'Hagan reviewed DeLillo's novel Falling Man for the New York Review of Books. The first half of O'Hagan's review contextualizes Falling Man better than any other that I've read. In short, he takes us through Players, White Noise, Libra, Mao II, Underworld, and The Body Artist in order to show us that DeLillo -- with his discussions of plots, death, terrorism, and the World Trade Center -- had been leading us up to that "day of days" for a long time. As O'Hagan writes, 

To have something exist as your subject before it happens is not unprecedented in the world of literature [...] but the meeting of September 11 and Don DeLillo is not so very much a conjunction as a point of arrival [...]

The second half of his review, however, takes a turn. O'Hagan writes that this connection between DeLillo and 9/11 is too strong, so that when the day actually comes, it "instantly blows DeLillo's lamp out." O'Hagan then builds on this point:

DeLillo the novelist prepared us for September 11, but he did not prepare himself for how such an episode might, in the way of denouements, instantly fly beyond the reach of his own powers. In a moment, the reality of the occasion seems to have burst the ripeness of his style, and he truly struggles in this book to say anything that doesn’t sound in a small way like a warning that comes too late. Reading Falling Man, one feels that September 11 is an event that is suddenly far ahead of him, far beyond what he knows, and so an air of tentative rehearsal resounds in an empty hall.

Although I respect O'Hagan's review, particularly the first half, I am not inclined to side with him and his dismissal of Falling Man. (In fact, I would like to spend a future blog post showing how DeLillo does succeed in this novel.) O'Hagan's review, like many that I've read, appears to argue for DeLillo's post-9/11 irrelevance. With the power of hindsight, one can reliably say that Point Omega has disproved this flimsy generalization about DeLillo.

DeLillo News & Notes: he confirms that he is working on a new book

In late April, DeLillo confirmed that he is working on a new novel (though, seeing as it's now September, perhaps he's already finished it). Not only am I very excited to learn this news, but I'm also not surprised in the least about the book's purported subject matter: images, disasters, footage, all classic DeLillo themes. Below I have reproduced the section of the interview where he talks about this upcoming novel:

It is because when I write, I need to see what is happening. Even when it is just two guys in a room, writing dialogues is not enough. I need to visualize the scene, where they are, how they sit, what they wear, etc. I had never given much thought about it, it came naturally, but recently I became aware of that while working on my upcoming novel, in which the character spends a lot of time watching file footage on a wide screen, images of a disaster. I had no problem describing the process, that is to say to rely on a visualization process. I am not comfortable with abstract writing, stories that look like essays: you have to see, I need to see.

(See the full interview HERE.)

The great thing about this quote is how DeLillo manages to bury a golden nugget of information within a great insight into his writing process. One day, I hope to put together insights like these, of which there are many, and further develop an interpretive approach that I have tentatively been calling "cross-media theory."

Still, no one is blind to the fact that DeLillo is getting up there in his years, and he probably doesn't have much time left for writing (though, I'm sure he has no shortage of ideas). Anyway, this realization reminded me of a moment near the end of the interview that he gave with Adam Begley in 1993. Asked about his future plans, DeLillo confessed:

[...] I'm aware of the fact that time is limited. Every new novel stretches the term of the contract--let me live long enough to do one more book. How many books do we get? How much good work?

Registers of Affect #1: events

The event gathered force.

-- The Names

A Shared Event at a Coffee Shop: Living in a DeLillo-esque World

It is safe to say that I spend a rather disproportionate amount of my time in coffee shops (even as I write this post, I am sitting in one!). This summer I would estimate that on average I've visited a coffee shop at least once per day, sometimes even twice. I do this not only because I enjoy the atmosphere, the internet, and, of course, the coffee, but also, and perhaps most importantly, because there is so much to be observed here. Indeed, I have observed so much in my time at coffee shops, especially this summer, that I'm beginning to think it wouldn't be unwise for me to dedicate a blog solely to reading them as public spaces.

Most of us visit coffee shops on a regular basis, but what is the purpose of this space? Just off the top of my head, I can say that I, personally, have used the coffee shop this summer as a place for: caffeine; observation; homework; learning German; reading; Facebook; internet surfing; composing e-mails; blogging; writing; socializing; meeting new people; playing board games; hanging out with friends; breakfast, lunch, & dinner; working on a children's book; etc. And this is just me! Now, most of these may sound like rather trivial, everyday tasks, but for one person to be able to accomplish -- no, to want to accomplish -- all of these tasks in a single space is so endlessly strange and interesting to me. I fear that I've reached the point where I'm more addicted to the coffee shop itself than the coffee they offer.

Still, I've yet to mention the enigmatic "shared event" that titles this post. I'm drawing the concept from Don DeLillo, an American author whose ouevre I am currently working through. DeLillo often speaks of "events" and how they "gather force." One of his characters in The Names (1982) even speaks of feeling "involved in events." The idea has always been rather interesting to me, not only because I seldom find this idea mentioned in writing or everyday life, but also because it seems totally relevant to contemporary existence.

Anyway, the point is, I tend to feel a hidden tenseness in coffee shops, as if everyone who shares these spaces, this internet, and this air, everyone who chooses to have private conversations in a public place for all of us to hear -- it's as if we all still wish to maintain a separate space, our own privacy or secrecy, despite our behavior in this space. I often wonder what can be done to break down this sense of a wall. Why, I think, is it so difficult for me, or anyone for that matter, to engage the person who sits no more than two feet away from me, the person whom I openly allow to see what I'm doing on my computer and who provides me with the same freedom?

The other day, while sitting in this very coffee shop, this tenseness was alleviated somewhat. For over an hour, I had been sitting next to the same person, a person who, I think, attends the same university that I attend and was writing a paper for school much like I was. On top of this, we were sharing the same internet, the same air, both drinking coffee. As one says in English, there was something "in common" between the two of us. Yet I still felt that there was something inaccessible there, something unbridgeable.

The solution to this proved to be no less than a power outage, which was caused by a passing thunderstorm. It wasn't our sharing of internet or air that brought us together; rather, it was a "shared event" -- a power outage, a taking away, a negative -- that reminded us of our commonality. Consequently, we were able to engage in conversation, we were able to find "common ground," able to "break the ice." But the power outage did more than this. Ironically, the loss of power proved to be a spark of another type, erupting a chain of laughter throughout the coffee shop. The event "gathered force," we might say. The whole atmosphere of the coffee shop was affected, if only for a few moments. It wasn't long, however, before the generators were signaled, the power restored, and the measurable change, the realized community, was submerged once again.

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DeLillo, Don. The Names. New York: Vintage, 1989. Print.

DeLillo News & Notes (Special): commemorating the four-year anniversary of DFW's suicide

In lieu of DeLillo-related news, I would like to commemorate the four-year anniversary of DFW's suicide by providing a handful of links to sources that all highlight his relationship with DeLillo in some way.

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- "I don't enjoy this war one bit"

This is a letter that DFW wrote to DeLillo in October, 1995. The letter seems to carry so much more weight when we remember that at this time, both writers must have been working on what would become arguably their most important books (for DFW, Infinite Jest; for DeLillo, Underworld). While it is difficult to choose just one passage from this letter to excerpt, one can't not be moved by these candid words:

I sent it to you because your own fiction is important to me and because I think you're smart and because, if you do end up reading it and end up saying something to me about it, I stand a decent chance of learning something.

One sees in this letter just how much DFW is struggling with his fiction psychologically. It is unfortunate that he did not live a longer life, or he may have been able to realize these words, which DeLillo wrote back to him in November:

At this point discipline is inseparable from what I do. It's not even definable as discipline. It has no name. I never think about it. But there's no trick of meditation or self-mastery that brought it about. I got older, that's all. I was not a born novelist (if anyone is). I had to grow into novelhood.

- "See the inside of some of Wallace's books"

The Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas has a collection of books that belonged to DFW. A few of these, including Players and Ratner's Star, DeLillo wrote. While this website only provides a quick glimpse into these books, it's enough for one to see how much value DFW placed on DeLillo, seeing as he inscribed voluminous notes onto the title pages of both of these books.

- "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction"

This essay, which I was pleased to find on the Internet, is still one of the best readings of DeLillo, and it is certainly the best reading of the scene in White Noise about "the most photographed barn in the world." Again, it is difficult to extrapolate a single passage from this brilliant essay, so I would just recommend reading it for yourself. Like the two links above, this essay again demonstrates how important DeLillo was to DFW.

DeLillo Interviews

In 1987, The New York Times published the following interview with DeLillo, which I like for a few reasons. It is straight to the point, and it discusses his work thematically (death, theater, culture, illusion v. reality, hospitals/motels, and television). And, as always, DeLillo here offers insights into his own work.

His comments on the relationship between death and theater are particularly interesting:

And I began to sense a connection, almost a metaphysical connection, between the craft of acting and the fear we all have of dying. It seemed to me that actors are a kind of model for the ways in which we hide from the knowledge we inevitably possess of our final extinction.

[...] I can't imagine a culture more steeped in the idea of death. I can't imagine what it's like to grow up in America today.

He always provides a few valuable notes about The Day Room, the highlights of which I have reproduced below:

But it's not the kind of play one can easily discuss because it doesn't involve interrelationships between characters--it involves a sense of theater, and of acting, and of human identity.

Act Two was a different matter completely--in a way, Act Two is an attempt to explain the first half of the play to myself; in a way it's the play about the play.

I guess I'm interested in the way the play forms a kind of unending circular structure--it bends back on itself. This has greater significance to me than any sense of what is real and what isn't.

I would simply say that a hospital room is an extreme condition, and much of the writing I've done, I think, is set in extreme places or extreme states of mind.

A motel is a peculiar reality [...] particularly motels in undefined parts of the landscape. You don't know quite where you are, and for a brief time perhaps not quite who you are.

Readers familiar with Players will remember, as DeLillo himself noted in a later interview, that "At the beginning of the novel we hear a discussion about motels, which is where the novel ends" (35). Perhaps the motel itself is one artifact -- both a contemporary and an American one -- through which to read DeLillo.

Update:

As I was rereading End Zone, I noticed that during Chap. 16, Major Staley lectures Gary Harkness about nuclear war, and it occurs in a motel, "a gray building, barely distinguishable from the land around it" (79).

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DePietro, Thomas, ed. Conversations with Don DeLillo. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2005. Print.
DeLillo, Don. End Zone. New York: Penguin, 1986. Print.

Favorite Passages: "How do they endure all those terrible things?"

I came across this passage as I was reading The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories (New York: Scribner, 2011). The story is called "Human Moments in World War III," and it was originally published in 1983 (Esquire, July). The story is about two men in orbit around the earth, the narrator and a younger man named Vollmer. The passage consists of the latter's sublime musings from their bird's-eye perspective. The emphasis on the names of the things themselves -- the deserts, the oceans, the volcanoes, the hurricanes -- and the theme of catastrophe strikes me as classic DeLillo. For, as he writes in White Noise, "Only a catastrophe gets our attention."

Anyway, it is, I feel, a piece of writing to be admired.

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It's almost unbelievable when you think of it, how they live there in all that ice and sand and mountainous wilderness. Look at it," he says. "Huge barren deserts, huge oceans. How do they endure all those terrible things? The floods alone. The earthquakes alone make it crazy to live there. Look at those fault systems. They're so big, there's so many of them. The volcanic eruptions alone. What could be more frightening than a volcanic eruption? How do they endure avalanches, year after year, with numbing regularity? It's hard to believe people live there. The floods alone. You can see whole huge discolored areas, all flooded out, washed out. How do they survive, where do they go? Look at the cloud buildups. Look at that swirling storm center. What about the people who live in the path of a storm like that? It must be packing incredible winds. The lightning alone. People exposed on beaches, near trees and telephone poles. Look at the cities with their spangled lights spread in all directions. Try to imagine the crime and violence. Look at the smoke pall hanging low. What does that mean in terms of respiratory disorders? It's crazy. Who would live there? The deserts, how they encroach. Every year they claim more and more arable land. How enormous those snowfields are. Look at the massive storm fronts over the ocean. There are ships down there, small craft, some of them. Try to imagine the waves, the rocking. The hurricanes alone. The tidal waves. Look at those coastal communities exposed to tidal waves. What could be more frightening than a tidal wave? But they live there, they stay there. Where could they go?

Registers of Affect #0: What Are They?

Each week, I will post one example of what I am calling "Registers of Affect." These will be brief passages (often from DeLillo's texts, sometimes from his interviews, and occasionally from secondary literature) that speak in the language of affect theory. Admittedly, you may ask: What does this language sound like?

In her book Ordinary Affects (2007), Kathleen Stewart asks us to be attentive to the affective dimensions of the everyday. As she writes,

The ordinary is a shifting assemblage of practices and practical knowledges, a scene of both liveness and exhaustion, a dream of escape or of the simple life. Ordinary affects are the varied, surging capacities to affect and to be affected that give everyday life the quality of a continual motion of relations, scenes, contingencies, and emergencies. They're things that happen. They happen in impulses, sensations, expectations, daydreams, encounters, and habits of relating, in strategies and their failures, in forms of persuasion, contagion, and compulsion, in modes of attention, attachment, and agency, and in publics and social worlds of all kinds that catch people up in something that feels like something.  (2-3)

While one could interpret this passage as being too broad ("it can mean anything!"), I would caution against doing so. For Stewart is in fact saying something quite unordinary. By calling attention to those moments of the everyday that are so frequent, mysterious, and routine that we do not usually try to account for them, Stewart reveals just how much we ignore the fabric of everyday existence.

If we are going to develop a sound politics, we need to be attentive to how things happen, how we are affected to act. And we should consider doing this in a way that may not necessarily be scientific, but certainly is committed to "speculation, curiosity, and the concrete" (1).

Using these "Registers of Affect," I will argue that DeLillo is attentive to the affective dimensions of everyday life. Note, too, that I will not offer any commentary about them (though I may occasionally point to connections between two or more).

Please, just enjoy and contemplate these "Registers of Affect."

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Stewart, Kathleen. Ordinary Affects. Durham: Duke UP, 2007. Print.