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