August 13th, 2010 / 12:27 pm
Power Quote
Amy McDaniel
Power Quote
Critics on Criticism: Don Delillo
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If I were a writer, how I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature. Lovely.
Don Delillo, The Names
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Tags: Don DeLillo
Love you, Don
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Commenting on blog threads is dead.
Precisely why I’ve never finished a novel. Ahem.
Really. Seriously: it’s all been planned out this way from the very beginning.
(Incidentally: What happens, after all, if you die at the end of your own novel?)
“[F]inished” writing or “finished” reading?
“Finished” meaning finished writing one.
They all die in the process of being fed. Like cacti.
The novel is dead. I can barely make my way through a sentence.
Thankfully, Don Delillo is alive and well.
Underworld > Almost Everything
One night (as we enter narrative time)
(The “Pafko At The Wall” opening of) Underworld > Actually Everything
Love you, Don
A++
Commenting on blog threads is dead.
Precisely why I’ve never finished a novel. Ahem.
Really. Seriously: it’s all been planned out this way from the very beginning.
(Incidentally: What happens, after all, if you die at the end of your own novel?)
“[F]inished” writing or “finished” reading?
“Finished” meaning finished writing one.
They all die in the process of being fed. Like cacti.
The novel is dead. I can barely make my way through a sentence.
Thankfully, Don Delillo is alive and well.
Underworld > Almost Everything
One night (as we enter narrative time)
(The “Pafko At The Wall” opening of) Underworld > Actually Everything
For a long time I stayed away from the Acropolis.
For a long time I stayed away from the Acropolis.
Joyce is the writer I remember (falsely? accurately of a false quotation?) saying that one doesn’t finish writing a novel, but rather one stops writing that particular book.
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Is novels dying from metabolism better than the writer dying “in the process of” feeding one?
‘Better’ how?
That is a stand-alone thing of many wonders but the whole book maintains a level of that standard, with minute fluctuations, to the end. And notice that the opening line of “Pafko” (and Underworld itself, therefore), is: “He speaks in your voice, American, and there’s a shine in his eye that’s halfway hopeful,” which is about a Black kid *before* the Civil Rights Act of 1964. DeLillo is one sly sage. And nobody else could compare vomit to the flannel of taupe pajamas.
I’m paging randomly through the paperback edition (I try to keep the hardcover clean) as I write this and every page I come to is dense with marvels. This book is DeLillo’s high-point (and “our” answer to Ulysses)… he’ll never do better. Which is fine. Actually, Underworld, Libra and Mao ll should be released as a boxed triptych (unofficially called THE 20th CENTURY)… Libra and Mao ll could’ve been passages in Underworld (you’d just have to turn Brita Nilson into Klara Sax).
Wait: I just noticed your “Actually” in place of my “Almost”, Joseph… good call!
Hey Deaders… didn’t see you, initially
Joyce is the writer I remember (falsely? accurately of a false quotation?) saying that one doesn’t finish writing a novel, but rather one stops writing that particular book.
—
Is novels dying from metabolism better than the writer dying “in the process of” feeding one?
‘Better’ how?
That is a stand-alone thing of many wonders but the whole book maintains a level of that standard, with minute fluctuations, to the end. And notice that the opening line of “Pafko” (and Underworld itself, therefore), is: “He speaks in your voice, American, and there’s a shine in his eye that’s halfway hopeful,” which is about a Black kid *before* the Civil Rights Act of 1964. DeLillo is one sly sage. And nobody else could compare vomit to the flannel of taupe pajamas.
I’m paging randomly through the paperback edition (I try to keep the hardcover clean) as I write this and every page I come to is dense with marvels. This book is DeLillo’s high-point (and “our” answer to Ulysses)… he’ll never do better. Which is fine. Actually, Underworld, Libra and Mao ll should be released as a boxed triptych (unofficially called THE 20th CENTURY)… Libra and Mao ll could’ve been passages in Underworld (you’d just have to turn Brita Nilson into Klara Sax).
Wait: I just noticed your “Actually” in place of my “Almost”, Joseph… good call!
Hey Deaders… didn’t see you, initially
Yeah, well, we all have those days. You are the ghoul of literature.
Steve: This is why we’ve distinguished ourselves with indentation.
dg: Well… problem with that quote/line/suggestion is that it seems to refer, without actually doing so, to the ‘natural’ length of a novel vs. the forced length. I suspect that the line (and I don’t remember, either, whom it comes from) was taken out of context.
In other words: modern writers, as contrasted with earlier writers, seem to have a somewhat lesser patience for b.s., and a somewhat greater grasp of what makes really good, satisfying writing. So… while a few writers (whom I won’t name lest some smart-ass tries to sting me with a shorter novel that said writer also wrote) seem to remain obsessed with writing long novels to prove their own literary weight . . . many, many writers, more than before it seems (though admittedly I’m not old enough to have a long enough scope to make a really definitive judgment) are holding back all the nonsense and the filler that doesn’t belong in the work and does nothing to enhance the work, and allowing the work itself to lead the author and define its own length, and in the end publishing works which, very often, prove to be comparatively short.
This, I suppose, ends up resurrecting, in the minds of too many critics, that way-too-old question “is the novel dead”. Well, the answer is always “no, but the concept is becoming less imposing”. The ‘novel’ will never ‘die’, but there should come a point where that word’s meaning and relevancy is put into proper context and writers and readers and editors are no longer burdened by the ludicrous neurosis that the word ‘novel’ has engendered: that books need to be at the very least 275 words long in order to be respectable.
So… in my view: there ought to come a time when people stop using words like ‘novella’ and ‘novelette’ because those words have finally come to describe too large a field of literary output and therefore have become, descriptively, rather less useful . . . although I suspect that people won’t [stop using those words], at least not for a long, long time.
(‘Twould be nice, too, if they’d stop using words like “experimental”.)
Yeah, well, we all have those days. You are the ghoul of literature.
Steve: This is why we’ve distinguished ourselves with indentation.
dg: Well… problem with that quote/line/suggestion is that it seems to refer, without actually doing so, to the ‘natural’ length of a novel vs. the forced length. I suspect that the line (and I don’t remember, either, whom it comes from) was taken out of context.
In other words: modern writers, as contrasted with earlier writers, seem to have a somewhat lesser patience for b.s., and a somewhat greater grasp of what makes really good, satisfying writing. So… while a few writers (whom I won’t name lest some smart-ass tries to sting me with a shorter novel that said writer also wrote) seem to remain obsessed with writing long novels to prove their own literary weight . . . many, many writers, more than before it seems (though admittedly I’m not old enough to have a long enough scope to make a really definitive judgment) are holding back all the nonsense and the filler that doesn’t belong in the work and does nothing to enhance the work, and allowing the work itself to lead the author and define its own length, and in the end publishing works which, very often, prove to be comparatively short.
This, I suppose, ends up resurrecting, in the minds of too many critics, that way-too-old question “is the novel dead”. Well, the answer is always “no, but the concept is becoming less imposing”. The ‘novel’ will never ‘die’, but there should come a point where that word’s meaning and relevancy is put into proper context and writers and readers and editors are no longer burdened by the ludicrous neurosis that the word ‘novel’ has engendered: that books need to be at the very least 275 words long in order to be respectable.
So… in my view: there ought to come a time when people stop using words like ‘novella’ and ‘novelette’ because those words have finally come to describe too large a field of literary output and therefore have become, descriptively, rather less useful . . . although I suspect that people won’t [stop using those words], at least not for a long, long time.
(‘Twould be nice, too, if they’d stop using words like “experimental”.)
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