… “Afghan human rights activist, ex-minister and burka opponent Sima Samar is …seen as a possible winner” of this year’s Nobel Peace prize. This would be spectacular publicity for the effort to get women and children out from under this grotesque garment.

Plus of course UD‘s beloved Don DeLillo is again being shortlisted for the literature prize. He and Philip Roth always show up together on this list.

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I thought of DeLillo’s novel Mao II tonight while reading again – for the first time in forty or so years – Catcher in the Rye. Almost at the end of that novel, Holden Caulfield has a heart-to-heart with one of his teachers, the very smart, alcoholic, Mr Antolini. Antolini recognizes Caulfield’s intelligence, sensitivity, moral rigidity, and self-destructiveness. He understands how the trauma of Holden’s beloved brother’s death has set on him on a nihilistic, existence-loathing path. He also sees how this rage, combined with Caulfield’s restless intellect, could make him some sort of dangerous fanatic. Here’s one of the things he says to Holden:

“Something else an academic education will do for you. If you go along with it any considerable distance, it’ll begin to give you an idea what size mind you have. What it’ll fit and, maybe, what it won’t. After a while, you’ll have an idea what kind of thoughts your particular size mind should be wearing. For one thing, it may save you an extraordinary amount of time trying on ideas that don’t suit you, aren’t becoming to you. You’ll begin to know your true measurements and dress your mind accordingly.”

This know-yourself haberdashery put me in mind of a very similar piece of advice DeLillo’s hero, the totally Salingeresque writer Bill Gray, recalls having read and heard growing up:

He remembered the important things, how his father wore a hat called the Ritz, gray with a black band, a raw edge and a snap brim, and someone was always saying “Measure your head before ordering” which was a line in the Sears Roebuck catalogue…”

As he’s dying, Bill repeats this phrase to himself.

Know your true measurements and dress your mind accordingly. Measure your head before ordering.

… the new film based on Don DeLillo’s novel of that name —

Cronenberg focuses on the psycho-biological forces that resist a man’s best-laid plans: the lust for chaos and destruction latent in an optimized order, the need for degradation that’s fed by a rigid discipline of self-exaltation, the sickness manifested in an excessive concern for health, the trend to self-mutilation in obsessive grooming, the hunger for colossal failure in the drive for success and for death in the vigilant and violent defense of life all emerge in the course of the film and invest it with an oppressive tension that Cronenberg maintains skillfully.

— reminds UD of these lines from Adam Phillips, a British psychoanalyst:

There are parts of ourselves – that don’t want to live, that hate our children, that want ourselves to fail… [T]here is something strange about humans: they are recalcitrant to what is supposed to be their project.

Geoff Dyer’s excited appreciation of his favorite novel – Don DeLillo’s The Names – inspires UD to share some notes from her final lecture, last April, in her George Washington University course devoted to DeLillo’s work.

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DeLillo today is arguably America’s highest-profile, most-respected writer of serious fiction. He has the status of Hemingway, Faulkner, Mailer, Bellow. Every new novel occasions much attention and discussion. A big new film about Cosmopolis (a novel so weak I didn’t assign it to you) is about to come out; a play of DeLillo’s – about climate change, and it sounds quite dreary – will soon open in London. DeLillo is also politically engaged – as a free speech and human rights advocate.

He is, in other words, a significant force in the culture.

Although unlike Hemingway and Mailer DeLillo is the opposite of a self-promoter, much less a self-mythologizer (he’s a small, soft-spoken man) he has gained a huge audience for his work, and he is the major influence on many important younger American writers.

He is the opposite of the restless neurotic macho writer – only ever married to one woman, long-resident in one town – and though he shares some of Mailer’s anger at American culture and American foreign and domestic policy, his novels reveal a profound love of America, an anguished and profound love of New York City. The son of immigrants, he seems to share the appreciation of American freedoms and opportunities that such families often exhibit. His post-9/11 essay, “In the Ruins of the Future,” is a love song to the diversity and democracy of New York.

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If asked to name the core value I associate with DeLillo, I’d say seriousness. You see it in his affect, his photos. He’s not grim, but his brow is always knit, and he always looks thoughtful and concerned. He has the sly satirical humor we see in White Noise, but it’s hard to imagine him writing a broad farce or a psychedelic romp.

It’s equally hard to imagine DeLillo writing a romance. Unlike, say, the author of The English Patient, who makes a love affair the center of a serious historical novel, DeLillo doesn’t, I think, have the disposition to create and follow passionate lovers. Can you think of any in his work? As we’ve noted, DeLillo seems rather embarrassed and inept in his sex scenes; his characters tend to be divorced or estranged, in a fog of pained confusion about erotic relationships. His most intense relationships are father and son, or friends.

This reflects, I think, his belief that the postmodern American landscape, with its sense of unreality and menace, makes it enormously difficult to trust other people, let alone open your intensest and truest self to them. The verbal and emotional transparency we might imagine for real lovers seems invisible in DeLillo’s world, where even the children are prematurely old, self-conscious, and skeptical (like Heinrich, in White Noise) even of natural events, like rainfall.

One of our few young married couples, Lyle and Pammy in Players, are a horror – self-hating, cynical, “too complex,” tempted – as so many DeLillo characters are – toward withdrawal from the world and from one another. Both move in the career world of Manhattan with seeming success, but both actually hate their lives, one drawn to pointless terrorist violence, the other to what she sees as the nothingness of Maine, which is the setting for her best friend’s self-immolation.

Indeed, far from living vivid passionate lives, the characters of Don DeLillo always seem on the verge of self-immolation or implosion. Many seem to have desperately unfurnished, unfinished selves, their time taken up with the search for a cult or a cult figure whose charismatic personal energy might somehow vitalize them.

This parasitic half-life cannot be sustained, and at some point DeLillo’s barely-there characters must either disappear like a puff of smoke or reckon with the half-life they’ve assumed. The combination of high intellect and low identity generates the minimalist characters we’ve particularly seen in his most recent novels: post-9/11-traumatized Keith in Falling Man, catatonically guilt-ridden Elster in Point Omega. Everyone’s sort of autistic, standing in a silent room all day watching a version of Psycho that takes 24 hours to play, or sitting in the desert quietly thinking.

The entropic tendency in DeLillo has things in common with Teilhard’s own omega point theory, in which we’re reaching levels of complexity we can’t sustain, and are heading toward nothing less than the end of the world. One critic calls DeLillo’s writing “pre-apocalyptic” — it’s elegiac, but the elegy seems increasingly to be for the earth itself, as in the film Melancholia, as if the proper attitude – emotional, philosophical, spiritual – to take toward our very planetary life is a kind of awed, observant love at what we were as we vanish. Think of the bizarre and beautiful sunset scene at the end of White Noise.

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But you can understand this posture in simple, human, non-apocalyptic terms. Reflective people reflect on the transience of all separate lives; even more reflective people on the transience of all cultures (hence Owen Brademas, anti-hero of The Names).

And yet all the reflection takes place within the cloud of unknowing – it doesn’t endow you with sharper Being, move you toward a life of greater, more meaningful action. The American malady in all of DeLillo, writes one critic, “is one of spellbound fixation.” Voyeur-culture, looking, gazing, staring, indeed seems at the center of DeLillo’s work, in which the traditional “plot” and “action” and “characters” elements of the novel have thinned, because, DeLillo suggests, we have thinned.

… in Turkey. She has no idea why, but her referral log has lit up with tons of readers from there, all of them interested in her analysis of the Don DeLillo story, “Midnight in Dostoevsky.”

So here’s this: I am a huge fan of Don DeLillo. I would say acolyte, but as far as I know, there is not yet a Church of DeLillo where I might light candles and hum reverently.

A writer for the LA Times takes the words out of my mouth.

Should be a lot of fun to read. I’m doing that right now.

Live blogging my responses… Okay, we both love DeLillo. Our lists of books of his that we don’t love (we love most but not all of him) are pretty similar, but I disagree about The Names. It took me a number of rereadings to warm up to this oddball, philosophically ambitious, beautifully written novel, but it’s now gotten to the point where I feel ardor for it. I understand why Amis – why anyone – would have trouble with The Names – it can feel portentous, pretentious, as it digs down for spiritual meanings – but it’s actually a grounded and compassionate inquiry into the human soul.

The phrase “midnight in Dostoevsky,” we’re told, comes from a poem, and is probably intended to conjure some epiphany of willed despair.

Well, I tell you what the poem is, and offer some analysis of it and its connection to the story, here.

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[It] is his general receptivity to the rhythms and atmospheres of the future that we should value… [T]he gods have equipped DeLillo with the antennae of a visionary.

Yes.

… Libra, is “the megaton novel James Joyce would have written if he’d moved to Iowa City and lived to be a hundred.”

But Joyce is more likely to have written the upcoming fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The DSM’s predecessor, four, has a thousand pages, and we may be sure that five will have many more than that. It’s a megaton psychotropic prescription machine. As Allen Frances, editor of earlier, more sane, DSMs, writes, “DSM-5 is suggesting many new and untested diagnoses and also markedly reduced thresholds for old ones.”

Frances offers an example:

‘Attenuated psychosis syndrome’ will have a ridiculously high false positive rate ( 80-90%), no effective treatment, would promote unnecessary exposure to harmful antipsychotics, and would cause needless worry and stigma. Since studies prove conclusively that the symptoms are so very rarely predictive of psychosis, why in the world would DSM-5 give someone the stigmatizing and absurdly misleading label ‘attenuated psychosis syndrome’ and open the door to inappropriate antipsychotic use? Recognizing all these risks, a large portion of schizophrenia and prodromal researchers are sensibly opposed to the inclusion of ‘attenuated psychosis syndrome’ in DSM-5. But unaccountably, the work group stubbornly clings to its proposal and, without the petition, there is a good chance it may sneak into DSM-5.

In great part, the DSM-5 is a work of the imagination. Like all ambitious novels, it exhibits enormous scope and imaginative energy. Told from the point of view of a detached omniscient narrator, it chronicles the plummeting of populations into pre-psychosis, and their ultimate rescue by “the number one revenue producer of all classes of drugs,” anti-psychotics. Its pages evoke a les misérables America, massively prodromal, holding out its butyrophenone-bowl on every street corner.

… as they used to say on Sesame Street.

With the literature Nobel looming, people are talking about UD‘s beloved Don DeLillo (her work on him appears here, and here, and here).

UD‘s friend Jeff sends her this appraisal of him as insular and narcissistic. Read it alongside this (“The American Writer as Bad Citizen”), by Frank Lentricchia. (Scroll down.) It says the exact opposite. Decide for yourself.

Michiko Kakutani, in the New York Times, writes a nice, concise appreciation of DeLillo’s 1997 novel, Underworld.

In the 234 years since Boswell knocked at Hume’s door, we have moved, if only in the way we talk about it, from death’s centrality to its banality.

Robert Zaretsky talks death and religion.

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And listen – If it’s banal talk about death you want, there’s no better door to knock at than Don DeLillo’s White Noise.

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“Cotsakis, my rival, is no longer among the living.”

“To be so enormous. Then to die.”

… Don DeLillo, Tom Stoppard, and others, hold a fundraiser for the Belarus Free Theater.

… wins the PEN Saul Bellow Award.

Excerpts from a PEN interview with him:

I still have my old paperback copy of Herzog (Fawcett Crest, $0.95), a novel I recall reading with great pleasure. It wasn’t the first Bellow novel I encountered—that was The Victim, whose opening sentence (“On some nights New York is as hot as Bangkok.”) seemed a novel in itself…

The theme that seems to have evolved in my work during the past decade concerns time—time and loss. This was not a plan; the novels have simply tended to edge in that direction. Some years ago I had the briefest of exchanges with a professor of philosophy. I raised the subject of time. He said simply, “Time is too difficult.” Yes, time is a mystery and perhaps best examined (or experienced by my characters) in a concise and somewhat enigmatic manner…

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So…. maybe we make a little mixed cocktail? A little Bellow, a little Mitchell Heisman, author of Suicide Note [details here].

In Herzog (UD‘s got the same old Fawcett Crest edition DeLillo’s got, and she’s been pawing through it), our seriously fucked up hero, Moses Herzog (his name taken, as you may already know, from a very minor character in James Joyce’s Ulysses) is visiting his seriously fucked up friend Luke, a University of Chicago scientist who can’t deal with people at all, but who so loved his recently deceased monkey that as the monkey was dying he gave it mouth to mouth resuscitation.

Since the monkey’s death Luke has been deeply, dangerously depressed.

“It really threw me into a spin. I thought that palling around with Rocco was a gag. I didn’t realize how much he meant to me. But the truth is, I realized that no other death in the world could have affected me so much. I had to ask myself whether the death of my brother would have shook me up half as much. I think not. We’re all some kind of nut or other, I realize. But…”

He finds a psychotherapist who tells him to imagine himself dead, in a coffin, with all the people who meant something to him in his life passing by his body. He’s supposed to think of what he wanted to tell them in life, what the real truth was between them, within him, etc.

But it doesn’t work. All he can think about are memories of farcical events involving fat aunts and cornfed showgirls from his urban youth…

Herzog says to him:

A man may say, ‘From now on I’m going to speak the truth.’ But the truth hears him and runs away and hides before he’s even speaking. There is something funny about the human condition, and civilized intelligence makes fun of its own ideas…

Human life is far subtler than any of its models. …

Do you have to think yourself into a coffin and perform these exercises with death? As soon as thought begins to deepen it reaches death, first thing. … I really believe that brotherhood is what makes a man human…. When the preachers of dread tell you that others only distract you from metaphysical freedom then you must turn away from them. The real and essential question is one of our employment by other human beings and their employment by us. Without this true employment, you never dread death, you cultivate it. And consciousness when it doesn’t truly understand what to live for, what to die for, can only abuse and ridicule itself.

“The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever,” writes Don DeLillo, in Point Omega. A Guardian writer quotes this line by way of explaining DeLillo’s modernist commitment to difficulty and complexity in his novels. “As a champion of ‘difficulty’, albeit in an American mode, [DeLillo] is an heir of modernism and says that he sees himself as ‘part of a long modernist line starting with James Joyce’. …Readers who want neat plots and tidy endings should leave now,” warns the Guardian writer, who goes on to describe a recent afternoon spent interviewing DeLillo in Manhattan.

Like Joyce, DeLillo takes up the stark and daunting task of rendering consciousness as it ceaselessly expresses itself to itself over the length of a human life. But he does this, as his interviewer notes, “in an American mode.” Indeed DeLillo says to him: “When I get a French translation of one of my books that says ‘translated from the American’, I think, ‘Yes, that’s exactly right.'”

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I don’t know if it’s because I spent a year in England when I was eight, but I’ve always leaned toward the British mode. I think I’m a very American person, but many of the writers I love – Robert Graves, T.S. Eliot, Orwell, Larkin, Auden, Hitchens, and now, having read his short essays about dying of ALS, Tony Judt – are British.

Is it possible to distinguish a British mode of essay writing, or, in the case of Eliot and Larkin and Auden, poetry? Is there a British writerly dialect, as it were? A modern one, since we’re talking here about twentieth and twenty-first century British writers?

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In their obituaries for Tony Judt, many people are quoting this line from his New York Review series about his disease:

[T]here I lie: trussed, myopic, and motionless like a modern-day mummy, alone in my corporeal prison, accompanied for the rest of the night only by my thoughts.

I think that sentence, like these from Hitchens about his chemotherapy, displays the British inflection I have in mind:

I sometimes wish I were suffering in a good cause, or risking my life for the good of others, instead of just being a gravely endangered patient. Allow me to inform you, though, that when you sit in a room with a set of other finalists, and kindly people bring a huge transparent bag of poison and plug it into your arm, and you either read or don’t read a book while the venom sack gradually empties itself into your system, the image of the ardent soldier or revolutionary is the very last one that will occur to you. You feel swamped with passivity and impotence: dissolving in powerlessness like a sugar lump in water.

Aside from the obvious marks of careful writing both men exhibit — going to the trouble of finding a spectacularly good simile (like a modern-day mummy; like a sugar lump in water); using alliteration as if it were the most natural thing in the world (myopic motionless modern mummy; people poison plug passivity impotence powerlessness); using unusual words and phrases, some of which feel uncomfortably multiple or medieval in meaning (trussed, gravely, myopic, venom sack) — there’s the stoic attitude to be noticed here, a mental position at some distance from the self, watching the self as it suffers, watching it with a grim and wry intelligence whose absolute fidelity to reality and candor gets us as close to what DeLillo calls “the true life” as words are liable to get us.

Although when we are with these men we are

In a drifting boat with a slow leakage,
The silent listening to the undeniable
Clamour of the bell of the last annunciation.

we are nonetheless oddly buoyed by their writing, for it is after all muscular, finely rippled.

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“[The act of writing my first] novel had become an incentive to deeper thinking,” says DeLillo. “That’s really what writing is – an intense form of thought.”

Strong writing is the intensest form of strong thought, and strong thought in a condition of entropy feels to us heroic, cutting edge, thrilling. This is humanity resisting to the last its reduction to an object by powering up subjectivity to a sort of hyper-controlled shriek. “[W]hile the world moves / In appetency, on its metalled ways,” the en-graved or gravely endangered writer, immobilized, fights that much more fiercely for consciousness, for the words to encompass consciousness.

Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Will not stay still.

At the point of greatest tension, under the heaviest burden of fear and despair, the writer, with courage, gathers his wits about him and continues, even now, to get the better of words.

“I get satisfaction out of understanding what I’m going through, which I can only achieve by describing it with an almost externalised dispassion,” said Tony Judt. “It makes me feel like I’m not dead yet.”

… beautifully about Don DeLillo:

… Of all our novelists, Don DeLilllo is perhaps the most priestly; indeed, it is his example of high-minded renunciation that makes any literary behavior but the writing of rigorously modernist texts seem at best a vulgarity, at worst a betrayal. He is the most purposefully removed of our novelists this side of Thomas Pynchon or Philip Roth; and yet because he is concerned with a very specific condition of modernity — private befuddlement in the face of incomprehensible public events — he is engaged to the point of being oracular. Thanks to his unsurpassed talent for capturing and conjuring free-floating dread, he even has the reputation of something of a prophet; there can be no event so horrific but that DeLillo seems to have anticipated it, from 9/11 to the financial collapse and now to the spill or the blowout or the hemorrhage in the Gulf.

No, he has never written about Top Kills and Junk Shots and the odd flutter of hope elicited by the words “Containment Dome.” But in their suggestion of corporatized violence and above all in the violence they do to the language, they are DeLilloesque. In what is known as his breakthrough novel, 1985’s White Noise, he made his signature contribution to the American language when he wrote of an “airborne toxic event” that results from an accident of chemical cars in a trainyard. The chemical that he created for the occasion, Nyodene D, is less important than the fact that the airborne toxic event is just that — an event that people talk about, argue about, even as it tragically envelops them. And of course what they talk and argue about most of all is what to call it: “They’re not calling it the feathery plume anymore,” one character says. “They’re calling it the black billowing cloud.”

What DeLillo understood, long ago, is the end of the world would be experienced not as the end of the world but rather as a way of thinking and talking about the end of the world. What he understood is that the toxic cloud that has our name on it would be defined by its lack of definition; that we would never have as much information about it as we need to have or that someone else has; that it would turn into a free-floating void, exactly as withholding as it is encompassing; that it would become part of the landscape and that the landscape would become part of it; and that, of course, there would be footage, endlessly recycled but ultimately inconclusive.

No, Don DeLillo has never written about what about BP, Transocean, the MMS, and our thirst for oil have wrought in the Gulf of Mexico. But 25 years ago he imagined the name for a disaster that would come with its own excruciating and tantalizing Zapruder, and that would allow us to talk it — and ourselves — to death:

The underwater toxic event.

… for a longer, more existential view.

Don DeLillo, in the New York Times.

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DeLillo’s getting sketchy: The NYT review of Point Omega.