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.

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.

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.