The Time I Read a Lot of DeLillo Books and the Things that Happened
It was winter, and I took the bus home, or maybe it was the train, from Massachusetts to New York, so “home” is up for debate, and then a subway, probably, into my little apartment thing with a kitchenette and a big bathroom and no bedroom. Actually, maybe my sister drove me. It’s unimportant. I’d read Part 1 of White Noise, a copy I’d borrowed from the library over winter break. It made me feel happy, the descriptions, the opening chapter which I’d read on the internet several months earlier on a slow day at work. I already knew it was the novel I’d wanted to write the previous summer, the novel I’d abandoned at 30,000 words and character names that seemed true, but also false, and a number of edits that seemed confusing. I laid down on my bed. I think it was mid-morning, or mid-afternoon. The sun was in my window somehow, giving me natural light, but not enough to read by. I read Part 2, and it was about some sort of chemical disaster. I read it in a sitting that day, with the space heater from the bathroom on full blast. Then maybe I slept.
I’d returned from Vermont. We’d stayed at a bed and breakfast, and that week I would announce I was single and she would go to Germany, and I would be unable to read Part 3 of White Noise for several months, glancing through chapters on the subway to Bushwick, feeling drunk after zero beers. By this time, I’d returned my copy to the library and been gifted one from a friend who’d found the author underwhelming. I wondered if I should feel the same. I didn’t. I looked at the words. The sentences. The long paragraphs and the short, sparse dialogue. The radio and the television saying postmodern things. Things I’d later discuss with a friend that seemed similar to Updike’s “A&P” despite his distaste for “postmodernism.”
The semester passed. I was back in the former relationship. Vermont, but actually the next time we went to New Hampshire, stayed in a tent, drank PBR and bourbon and pickle juice. It was 90 degrees and we sweated in a pancake house. This was about two weeks after I’d finished the novel, back in Massachusetts, on a rainy afternoon, within a rainy week, the week before I would start work on a farm and listen to first Blood Meridian on my iPod, and later two other McCarthy novels.
Watching The Twilight Zone
A few weeks ago, the lymph nodes along my neck suddenly swelled up. I had a doctor check it out and he determined I had strep throat, and then a week later, added mononucleosis to the diagnosis. Sort of a one-two punch of undergraduate illness. I didn’t feel that sick, and suffered little symptoms other than the inflamed globules along my jugular, but it became clear to me, getting drunk off three beers and exhausted at 5pm, that I should probably take it easy. My regular leisure, after school, work, and whatever other responsibilities I’ve lined up for myself on a given day, is to kick back with a few-to-several beers and do things on the internet. The doctor recommended I avoid this, so there was only one viable solution to passing time at the same rate and pleasure level: watch TV. I am one of those lucky enough to have acquired a password to my friend’s Netflix Instant Watch account, and, after watching The Larry Sanders Show, Archer, The Stand miniseries, My So-Called Life, and The League in their entireties, I noticed that The Twilight Zone original series had been recently added to the queue. Though perhaps the most referenced and acclaimed cult series in history, I must admit, I’d never seen one episode. I resolved, then, it would be my next big tackle in my imperial takeover of internet television.
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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Interview with Cool Famous Hot Literary Agent Erin Hosier
http://htmlgiant.com/q-a/interview-with-cool-famous-hot-literary-agent-erin-hosier/
Hey. I interviewed Erin Hosier. She’s a literary agent to a couple of fiction writers (Shya Scanlon, Brad Listi) and a lot of memoirists. Okay. I have a doctor’s appointment soon. I think that there is something wrong with me. Interview.
You mostly represent non-fiction writers, but a few fiction writers too, right? What kind of fiction manuscripts catch your eye? Do you want fiction that resembles memoir?
You should ask me more glamorous questions, like what kind of shampoo I use, or who my favorite designers are. I currently represent four literary fiction writers: Paul Jaskunas, Edan Lepucki, Brad Listi, and Shya Scanlon. I represent more illustrators than fiction writers. And more rock stars. Furthermore, these four writers are very different from each other, but I expect great things from each of them. I have represented other fiction writers over the years, but fiction writers tend to switch agents when I can’t sell their work. This is why I don’t handle more of it. My strengths are in writing, editing and pitching non-fiction. That’s my comfort zone. I even prefer documentaries to other movies, and I see way more movies than read books. Also, I’m a slow reader, and fiction comes in long manuscripts. I’ve noticed too that even if a novel is brilliant in so many ways – it makes you laugh or cry or it haunts your dreams or makes you look at the world in a new way, if it entertains – but it has just ONE fatal flaw in the marketing or manuscript department, it’s not going to sell.
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August 10th, 2010 / 12:39 pm
August 10th, 2010 / 12:39 pm
Michael Kimball Guest Lecture #4: Story and Plot
“Fuck the plot.” Edna O’Brien says that in a Paris Review interview. She then goes on to say this: “What matters is the imaginative truth.” I don’t know what she means, exactly, by “imaginative truth,” but I can imagine what she means.
It reminds me of something that somebody told me Rick Whitaker said: “Plot tells you how their life turns out. What the fuck do I care about how their life turns out? I want to know their heart.”
And that reminds me of this quote from Andy Devine: “We all know how the story ends. If you have the baby, then the baby will die. If you fall in love, then the love will end.”
In spite of my affection for those three quotes, I still like to think about story and plot. I still like it when things happen in fiction. In fact, I have always thought that one of the great things about being a fiction writer is that you can make anything happen.
Page Suggestion
Facebook keeps suggesting I become friends with “Don DeLillo.” I’d like that very much, of course, and yet I have yet to seriously consider pushing the little button to connect myself to whatever’s on the other end of the DD-fb page. Ah, but just for a second, imagine if it really was… Playing DD at Mafia Wars. Taking his surveys. Clicking “I like this” when he posts about a good writing day. Sounds kind of nightmarish, actually, when you talk it out like that. No? Here’s some more from Mao II-
In the solitary life there was a tendency to collect moments that might otherwise blur into the rough jostle, the swing of a body through busy streets and rooms. He lived deeply in these cosmic-odd pauses. They clung to him. He was a sitting industry of farts and belches. This is what he did for a living, sit and hawk, mucus and flatus, He saw himself staring at the hair buried in his typewriter. He leaned above his oval tablets, hearing the grainy cut of the blade. In his sleeplessness he went down the batting order of the 1938 Cleveland Indians. This was the true man, awake with phantoms. He saw them take the field in all the roomy optimism of those old uniforms, the sun-bleached dinky mitts. The names of those ballplayers were his night prayer, his reverent petition to God, with wording that remained eternally the same. He walked down the hall to piss or spit. He stood by the window dreaming. This was the man he saw as himself. The biographer who didn’t examine these things (not that there would ever be a biographer) couldn’t begin to know the catchments, the odd-corner deeps of Bill’s true life.
Power Quote: Don DeLillo
Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it and the writer learns how to know it when he finally gets there. On one level this truth is the swing of the sentence, the beat and poise, but down deeper it’s the integrity of the writer as he matches with the language. I’ve always seen myself in sentences. I begin to recognize myself, word by word, as I work through a sentence. The language of my books has shaped me as a man. There’s a moral force in a sentence when it comes out right. It speaks the writer’s will to live. The deeper I become entangled in the process of getting a sentence right in its syllables and rhythms, the more I learn about myself.
- Mao II
Emails from ‘The Littlest Literary Hoax’
The Chronicle of Higher Education recently posted an article about a few years old DFW/Delillo-related prank authored by a Jay Murray Siskind and published in Volume 11, Issue 4 of Modernism/Modernity, a scholarly literary critical quarterly review. According to the Chronicle, Mark Sample, an assistant professor of English at George Mason University, discovered the article, a review of Oblivion, in 2005 when one of his graduate students cited it in an essay. He forgot about it, time passed, then he got curious and dug some more to discover a good bit of humor behind the whole thing. I won’t go on to summarize all of the details, as plenty of information is out there already and many other blogs have covered it – see the following links:
Mark Sample’s original post regarding the ‘hoax.’
The Chronicle of Higher Education article, written by Peter Monaghan.
However, I do have this to add. I’ve got the email exchange between the graduate student, who asked to remain anonymous, and Sample, who kindly gave me permission to share it with you here. It’s a great little exchange, pretty funny. Enjoy after the break.
The Last Time I Buy a Copy of Cosmopolis
You ever have one of those books you just can’t seem to hold onto? For me, Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis is one of them. I’ve bought it several times over now–always in hardback, at the severely discounted price of $5, and always from The Strand–most recently yesterday. And I swear this is the last @#&$%-ing time. What happened to my other copies? I feel like one got left behind in a move. Maybe one is at my friend Amanda’s house in Portland, Ore, or else in storage in Nashville, TN where my parents put my shit when they got divorced and sold their house a couple years ago (unless the Nashville and Portland copies are *different* copies, which is also possible). Basically, by this point I’ve sunk enough money into cheap used Cosmopolises that I could have bought one at regular sticker price, which if I had done I probably would have actually taken care of. The funny thing is that it’s not like Cosmopolis is the greatest book ever, or anything. I’m a big DeLillo fan, to be sure, and I think it’s got a lot to be said for it, but it’s certainly not Underworld or The Names. It’s a short novel, and like all his work incredibly beautiful. It’s about a multi-multi-billionaire taking his limo across town to get a haircut. It’s a poem, really, a sort of elegy-in-advance for technologies that are obsolete before they’re even fully emergent (it’s set in the year 2000), and how money makes a man vast until he is no longer a man at all anymore, but something enormous and organic, powerful in ways the self cannot account for or comprehend. Imagine if the ocean tried to know itself, or a nebula did. I’ve always thought of the book as a sort of working-through of Marx’s proposition that “all that which is solid melts into air.” Maybe you’re getting a sense of why–even though it’s a relatively “minor” work–I keep finding myself drawn back to it. I wake up one day thinking, “Man I’d really like to take another look at Cosmopolis” and I reach for it and then it isn’t there. I’d say I’ve been feeling this way for about a month now, but especially since I read Nick Paumgarten’s “The Death of Kings” in The New Yorker a week or two ago. So, here I am, a humbled but determined owner–yet again–of Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo. I swear I’m going to take care of if this time, to hold it close.
