… 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.

… (I haven’t read it yet) is getting bad reviews. Here’s the most thoughtful I’ve seen so far, in New York Magazine. It agrees with the other critics that the book’s too short, too cold, too static.

Point Omega, like 24 Hour Psycho [an art installation featured in the novel, in which the Hitchcock film is slowed down to a running time of twenty-four hours], offers many uncategorizable points of entry — which is to say that nothing much happens, and it happens very, very slowly. The book is narrated by Jim Finley, an unsuccessful thirtysomething director of conceptual documentary films. (His first movie consists of 57 minutes of old Jerry Lewis footage spliced together to a soundtrack of random sounds.) Finley has chosen as the subject of his next film the 73-year-old Richard Elster, an intellectual who has just finished helping the U.S. government plan the war in Iraq—although he’s done so in the most abstract and DeLillo-y way possible, as a kind of guru responsible for giving long oracular speeches that sound something like this:

“Haiku means nothing beyond what it is. A pond in summer, a leaf in the wind. It’s human consciousness located in nature. It’s the answer to everything in a set number of lines, a prescribed syllable count. I wanted a haiku war. I wanted a war in three lines. This was not a matter of force levels or logistics. What I wanted was a set of ideas linked to transient things. This is the soul of haiku. Bare everything to plain sight. See what’s there.”

Elster has retired from the war effort to take a “spiritual retreat” in the middle of the California desert, where he fills his days with poetry, sunsets, and even more oracular speeches. Finley visits him there, hoping to persuade Elster to participate in the documentary. Speechifying ensues, much of it about Elster’s obsession with an idea he calls “omega point”: humanity’s secret collective desire to wipe out the burden of human consciousness forever with some kind of cataclysmic event.

The closest the book comes to real action is when Elster’s daughter shows up—although “shows up” is a strong phrase to use for a character who hardly seems to exist at all. “She was sylphlike,” Finley tells us, “her element was air.” Or, as her father puts it: “She was imaginary to herself.” When she disappears, mysteriously—the only major event of the novel—it seems like a formality.

None of the reviewers has mentioned Teilhard de Chardin, the Jesuit philosopher who originated the term and concept omega point. I’m wondering if the novel gets explicit about Teilhard. I’m also wondering, given descriptions of the novel, whether anyone has made a connection between Point Omega and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which also features a young man battling to encounter an older man (DeLillo puts the older man in a desert; Conrad puts him in a jungle) who speaks to him about horrors.

… the imprisonment of a Chinese dissident writer.

Crystal, one of my students, emailed me an hour ago about this short story by Don DeLillo, in the latest New Yorker.

It’s sweet and rich, and, as we say in the biz, intertexual, its title, Midnight in Dostoevsky, taken from “Meditations in an Emergency,” a poem by Frank O’Hara.

(Odd coincidence: I spent the day before yesterday laboring over a poem by O’Hara…)

DeLillo’s story is told from the point of view of Robby, an undergraduate at a wintry upstate New York campus. He likes to take snowy walks through a nearby town (as I read DeLillo’s descriptions of its faded-grandeur houses and frowsy diners I picture Worcester, a place near UD‘s house in Summit, New York) with his friend Todd. While walking, they have endless quarrels about what they see around them — how many boxcars there were in a passing train; what sort of jacket a man they see on the street is wearing. Their quarrels are as charming and funny as the same sorts of quarrels the Gladney family enjoys in White Noise — an endless amiable nattering among people insistent on the rightness of their own take on things.

White Noise, though, presents a postmodern world in which no one’s right, a world whose every aspect surpasses the ability of even highly-educated people to understand it. The humor in the natterings, in fact, lies in the patent inadequacy of everyone’s descriptions and interpretations of everything. Underneath the confident assertions lies total intellectual futility.

The upstate town the characters in “Midnight in Dostoevsky” walk through is largely deserted; always a little dusky on these short winter days, it seems to them a haunt of what they call “souls” and “spirits” departed. Subdued even more than it ordinarily is by the heavy snow that’s fallen, the town appears to Robby a sort of nothingness, a vagueness onto which he and Todd try to project some clarity, some reality, some meaning.

The only way they can do this is through their quarrels: “Even in matters of pure physical reality, we depended on a friction between our basic faculties of sensation, his and mine…” Dialecticians, they generate a sense of event, a sense of the real and the true, only from the clash of their minds.

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Their Logic professor is a depressive disengaged man who stares into space pronouncing one disconnected phrase after another: the causal nexus; the atomic fact. “He didn’t want to know who we were. We were passersby to him, smeary faces, we were roadkill….He did not bring books to class, never a sign of the textbook or a sheaf of notes, and his shambling discourses made us feel that we were becoming what he saw before him, an amorphous entity. We were basically stateless.”

But Robby and the other students like this. They like sitting in silence (there’s no discussion), pondering the professor’s pronouncements. “He challenged our reason for being, what we thought, how we lived, the truth or falsity of what we believed to be true or false. Isn’t this what great teachers do, the Zen masters and Brahman scholars?” What the Logic professor’s really doing is flattening the students themselves into nothingness, emptying them of their reason for being, etc., so they can enter a sort of radical thought. The students might not know how to do radical thought, but they instinctively understand that they’re being emptied out and prompted toward it.

A fellow student tells Robby about having by chance sat across the aisle from the professor at a local diner.

“He said he was reading Dostoevsky. I’ll tell you exactly what he said. He said, ‘Dostoevsky day and night.’ ”

“Fantastic.”

“And I told him my coincidence, that I’d been reading a lot of poetry and I’d read a poem just a couple of days earlier with a phrase I recalled. ‘Like midnight in Dostoevsky.’ ”

“What did he say?”

“Nothing.”

So here’s the relevant section of the O’Hara poem, the poem with the phrase the student likes in it. The speaker, just dumped by a lover, expresses anger at how badly he’s been wounded by the rejection, and wonders how to live an invulnerable life:

St. Serapion, I wrap myself in the robes of your whiteness which is like midnight in Dostoevsky. How am I to become a legend, my dear? I’ve tried love, but that hides you in the bosom of another and I am always springing forth from it like the lotus—the ecstasy of always bursting forth! (but one must not be distracted by it!) or like a hyacinth, “to keep the filth of life away…”

I checked. There are at least five St. Serapions. I think O’Hara liked the name because serape — a cape — is implied in it. The saint of white robes, the saint of temporary shelter from the storm, from the filth of life — the saint who whites out the world, uncolors it with the pure uncolor of Russia’s white nights — the poet yearns toward that saint’s dissolution because of the intensity of his pain.

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“Imagine a surface of no color whatsoever,” he said.

That’s back in the DeLillo story. That’s one of the Logic professor’s weird isolated statements.

“I’m emptied. Ready to go,” says Charles Wright in Disjecta Membra.

The discipline of self-emptying, the practice of wrapping yourself in robes of white so as to be able to emerge again, ready to go, seems at the center of this story and these poems.

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Todd and Robby become obsessed with an old man who lives in the town and who walks the same route they do. Who is he? What’s his story? Like Quentin and Shreve in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, they go back and forth in conversation, imagining together, constructing together, a detailed life story for him. They tussle in particular about the sort of jacket he’s wearing. What is his serape? How is he wrapping himself up against the wound of the world?

Walking in the town alone one day, Robby thinks:

In snowfall, the town looked ghosted over, dead still at times. I took walks nearly every afternoon, and the man in the hooded coat was never far from my mind. I walked up and down the street where he lived, and it seemed only fitting that he was not to be seen. This was an essential quality of the place. I began to feel intimate with these streets. I was myself here, able to see things singly and plainly, away from the only life I’d known, the city, stacked and layered, a thousand meanings a minute.

The town is a surface of no color, its absence of feature allowing Robby, whose urban life weighs on him with too many meanings, a new clarity of perception.

He reads Dostoevsky in the library. He listens, as usual, to the Logic professor:

“If we isolate the stray thought, the passing thought,” he said, “the thought whose origin is unfathomable, then we begin to understand that we are routinely deranged, everyday crazy.”

We loved the idea of being everyday crazy. It rang so true, so real.

“In our privatest mind,” he said, “there is only chaos and blur. We invented logic to beat back our creatural selves. We assert or deny…”

The obsessive to and fro, the everlasting assertion and denial, between Todd and Robby, is a kind of living logic, is itself you could say the logic of living. It’s a vibrancy and an ordering teased out of the mental chaos and blur of the singular mind.

The highest order version of this practice, let’s say, is the art of fiction, the making of stories, the generous act of non-creaturing other creatures through the fashioning of clear and ordered narratives for the vague and disordered beings we glimpse along the street.

“I was myself here,” says Robby, praising the empty town which allows him to perceive his own emptiness — the same thing his Logic instructor is trying to make him see. Emptied, he’s ready go, ready to narrate the world more truly.

Via the indispensable website (indispensable for DeLillo fans like UD), Don DeLillo’s America, the first advertising for the next DeLillo novel, due out February 2010. Here’s Simon and Schuster’s page about it, and Scribner’s catalogue entry (scroll down).

The book’s plot has many elements familiar to DeLillo veterans:

In the middle of a desert “somewhere south of nowhere,” to a forlorn house made of metal and clapboard, a secret war advisor has gone in search of space and time. Richard Elster, seventy-three, was a scholar – an outsider – when he was called to a meeting with government war planners. They asked Elster to conceptualize their efforts – to form an intellectual framework for their troop deployments, counterinsurgency, orders for rendition. For two years he read their classified documents and attended secret meetings. He was to map the reality these men were trying to create “Bulk and swagger,” he called it.

At the end of his service, Elster retreats to the desert, where he is joined by a filmmaker intent on documenting his experience. Jim Finley wants to make a one-take film, Elster its single character – “Just a man against a wall.”

The two men sit on the deck, drinking and talking. Finley makes the case for his film. Weeks go by. And then Elster’s daughter Jessie visits – an “otherworldly” woman from New York – who dramatically alters the dynamic of the story. When a devastating event follows, all the men’s talk, the accumulated meaning of conversation and connection, is thrown into question. What is left is loss, fierce and incomprehensible.

Bucky Wunderlick of Great Jones Street, Bill Gray from Mao II, and now Richard Elster — all are brilliant artistically, or brilliant intellectually, and all run aground, retreat to the desert (as do, for that matter, various characters in Underworld) or to the countryside or to shabby apartments in New York City — anywhere they can leave the fallen world and contemplate their implication in it.

… that until UD embraces an actual religion, her bible is White Noise, by Don DeLillo.

The artist who created the covers for the (not-yet released) twenty-fifth anniversary edition of the novel describes, in detail, on his blog, how he did it.

Here’s the front cover.

Great stuff.

But because they named themselves The Airborne Toxic Event, the central plot element in Don DeLillo’s White Noise, I’ve sort of kept up with them anyway.

When I phone-interviewed Mikel Jollett of the L.A.-based indie-pop-rock band the Airborne Toxic Event, it surprised me when he said:

“We wanted a name that was a big fuck-you to names,” he said of the Don DeLillo-novel-inspired band name. “People say, ‘It really turned me off when I first heard that name.’ And I say, ‘Good, I’m glad.'”

… Jollett’s a smart dude. He’s an aspiring fiction writer and has written stuff for Filter magazine and the L.A. Times. He was mid-novel when he felt called to become a rockstar.

“I came to this crossroads. I had to decide whether to finish my novel or play music,” he said. “I had a literary agent and I was getting published and I had a column at NPR and my writing was going really well. It [had taken] years to get to that point. But then I was like, ‘I’m gonna start a band.'”

That was in 2006 and the ATE has since released a multi-hit record and are touring extensively around the world (“there’s definitely a lot of globetrotting going on,” Jollett said). He continues to make progress with his novel, though — an excerpt was recently published in McSweeney’s.

“You know that Bukowski poem, ‘How To Be A Great Writer‘?** ‘If you want to be a great writer, first of all you have to fuck a great deal of women,'” Jollett quoted. “I don’t think that’s true, actually. I doubt Steinbeck fucked that many women.”

Not knowing exactly how many women Steinbeck laid pipe to, Jollett continued, citing his interesting upbringing as being something of, but not completely, an inspiration for his music and writing.

“My parents had a healthy disrespect for all things conventional. They met in a commune, and I was born on that commune. They were kinda hippies, like starcrossed lovers. You know how the ’60s produced all these odd couplings? That was one of them,” he said….

I know, I know. A very weirdly written article. SOS can’t even figure out how to fix it…. Is the writer high?

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** Pot-banging piece of crap. But don’t take my word for it. Read it yourself.

It’s true. The popular film The Proposal (Les UDs saw it the other night) mentions the sainted Don DeLillo twice in its first ten minutes. UD wasn’t expecting this. It certainly got her attention.