One, James, told me today about a new novel by Don DeLillo, Point Omega, due to be released next year. The great DeLillo website, DeLillo’s America, has a short plot summary:
A young filmmaker visits the desert home of a secret war advisor in the hopes of making a documentary. The situation is complicated by the arrival of the older man’s daughter, and the narrative takes a dark turn.
The other, Mary Anne, will meet up with UD at an Irish bar tomorrow night, where they’ll drink to James Joyce for Bloomsday.
Colum McCann has a pleasant little Bloomsday piece in the New York Times.
… The messy layers of human experience get pulled together, and sometimes ordered, by words.
… The book carried me through to the far side of my body, made me alive in another time. I was 10 years old again, but this time I knew my grandfather, and it was a moment of gain: he was so much more than a forgotten drunk.
Vladimir Nabokov once said that the purpose of storytelling is “to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in the kindly mirrors of future times; to find in the objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity will discern and appreciate in far-off times when every trifle of our plain everyday life will become exquisite and festive in its own right: the times when a man who might put on the most ordinary jacket of today will be dressed up for an elegant masquerade.”
This is the function of books — we learn how to live even if we weren’t there. Fiction gives us access to a very real history. Stories are the best democracy we have. We are allowed to become the other we never dreamed we could be…
… by UD‘s favorite novelist, Don DeLillo, appears in the latest Esquire.
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Update before we go any further: A reader, James, points out that although it stands alone as a story in Esquire, this is in fact an excerpt from the final pages of DeLillo’s novel Cosmopolis. I didn’t recall this at all (I sped through Cosmopolis, disliking it from the first page, so maybe that’s the reason.), and I’m very grateful to James for reminding me.
Since it’s presented as a self-standing story in Esquire, I’m going to keep this post. Just keep in mind that it is also part of a novel.
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DeLillo’s short stories, like his plays, don’t do much for UD. His strange and beautiful writing style needs space to work its magic; it needs space and it needs a shifting around of scenes, a sort of pastichy movement. It also needs to stretch out in terms of presenting us with the complicated fullness of consciousnesses.
Packed tightly, in a very brief narrative, DeLillo’s prose seems to me schematic. If you know his writing, you can see all too clearly in a short story like this one in Esquire his playing out and weaving in of familiar themes — simulacral urban culture, in which real trauma is replaced by play-acted trauma; the replacement of a sense of reality and a sense of privacy by a sense of surreality, and by the public exposure of everyone’s life that constant filming and other forms of voyeurism prompt; a conviction, despite this exteriorization of human life, that you’re radically isolated from other people, even from the person to whom you’re married; the sad pathos of our bodies, emblems of our flickering existence…
As in Advanced Disaster Management’s simulated disaster on the streets of Jack Gladney’s town in White Noise, so here DeLillo’s fascinated by the vague line between contrived human catastrophe and — even as we’re only simulating it — the real disaster of our fragile embodiment inside a dangerous world.
Were they pretending to be naked, or were they naked?
Part of a crowd of naked living bodies lying motionless on a New York City street, posing for a scene in a film, DeLillo’s narrator nicely describes the surface of a city street when it’s right up against your face:
He felt the textural variation of slubs of chewing gum compressed by decades of traffic. He smelled the ground fumes, the oil leaks and rubbery skids, summers of hot tar.
From an interview with Emily Haines, Canadian rock star.
Interviewer: In [a recent] documentary you said that you were unhappy and you weren’t sure where your life was headed. I’m sure a lot of people must have heard that and been like, “What is she talking about? She’s a rock star, how could you be unhappy? There’s no direction? What is she talking about?” What would you say to people who would react like that?
[Haines] I’d say, has nobody read Great Jones Street, by Don DeLillo? [Laughs] That’s what I’d say. You should read it.
[Interviewer] What’s it about?
[Haines] It’s about this rock star who just disappears from the whole reality that he’s in because he just can’t handle it any more. And for me, it wasn’t like a particularly dramatic thing. I think I was just being honest, that the idea of what a life is supposed to be like for a successful musician is such a trap, and it’s a trick. We’re really determined as people to not have our lives be something that we’ve lost control of, and that’s the trade off, you know? Like, that’s the cost of success—that you never have time for anyone but yourself, you’re constantly exhausted, you don’t have a home, your relationships are always in shambles. Like, no fuckin’ way. I’m not doing that. So when we came off of the last run, it was like, we’d been touring for 3 years before Live It Out—you know, 300 shows a year, literally—and then 3 years after Live It Out, and then I put out a solo record, and then I did that for a year, and the day I get home and drop my bag it’s like, ‘Okay, time to write a new record.’
… [Interviewer] Why did you choose Buenos Aires as the place to kind of escape to?
[Haines] Because nobody knew us. I didn’t know a single person. I didn’t know anything about it except things that intrigued me historically, and architecturally. But more importantly, I was just looking for a room that had a piano, and it was literally like a search engine thing, like, ‘PIANO, ROOM, CITY, RENT’.
From an interview with Michael Ignatieff way back when.
“… [M]y own writing isn’t plain enough yet and isn’t transparent enough yet. There’s too much kind of straining and pretending to be a writer in it. I love writing where it just feels so completely natural. So that makes me a great fan of Richard Ford and Raymond Carver and that school. Very, very fond of Don DeLillo.”
DeLillo recently won the Common Wealth Award.
… The Airborne Toxic Event, a Los Angeles band that takes its name from UD‘s adored White Noise, by Don DeLillo. In this interview, the band’s leader explains how he chose the name.
I read that you took your name from the novel White Noise by Don DeLillo. For those of us who are unfamiliar with the work, what is that referring to?
In the novel, the Airborne Toxic Event is a big cloud that is a result of a giant chemical explosion. The huge poisonous cloud threatens a nearby town. The hero, Jack, gets exposed to it. He’s told by the doctors that he’s going to die. When he asks when, the doctor says, “You may live a week; you may live 40 years.” Which is really unhelpful because that is true for everyone. The Airborne Toxic Event [evokes] his fear of death. It changes him in these really important ways. The same thing happened to me in [the] year I formed the band, with my mom dying and my own health problems.