… SNL noticed.

VOLVO CRASHES INTO WHOLE FOODS IN BETHESDA

Just down the block from ol’ UD. For other DeLillo headlines, some eerily similar to this one, go here.

This one comes from just around the corner!

MERCEDES CRASHES INTO AMAZON FRESH STORE IN CHEVY CHASE

For details on The Don DeLillo Headline, go here.

The $3million coral art Sphinx destroyed when a 66-year-old Florida woman smashed her Rolls Royce into it was designed by British artist Damien Hirst and owned by hedge fund magnate Steven Tananbaum.

You may recall an earlier DeLilloesque headline:

Florida ferry accident off exclusive island results in deaths of 2 socialites as Mercedes rolls into water

All postmodern headlines must include:

1. an accident, preferably involving cars
2. the car must be a luxury car, and its make must be specified in the lead or headline
3. there must be at least three wealth-markers packed into the headline (Rolls Royce, Hirst, hedge fund; exclusive, socialites, Mercedes).

Both of these headlines would have appeared in DeLillo’s White Noise had he written it more recently.

Longtime readers know some of UD’s musical enthusiasms: Among singers, Julia Lezhneva; among pianists, Yuja Wang. UD tried to score a ticket for Wang’s upcoming Rachmaninoff blowout but failed.

I love the observation Wang makes in my headline: When a genius is fully inside of a musical piece, it becomes hers.

In my own primitive playing and singing of Purcell’s song Music for A While, I’ve felt something (very distantly) like this: The notes and the emotions and the ideas sometimes flow out of you so spontaneously and deeply — in such a known way — when you’ve played (and in my case sung) a piece so many times, that the fact of a person named Sergei or Henry actually empirically sweating the thing out vanishes completely, and it’s you and this music that your throat and fingers and soul squeeze out. And shouldn’t that be what the geniuses who wrote the stuff want? They didn’t just generate a ditty; they moved a collection of notes and silences into some generous super-artistic realm of universal expressivity.

Think of what James Axton, the protagonist of Don DeLillo’s novel The Names, says about the Parthenon:

 I hadn’t expected a human feeling to emerge from the stones but this is what I found, deeper than the art and mathematics embedded in the structure, the optical exactitudes. I found a cry for pity. This is what remains to the mauled stones in their blue surround, this open cry, this voice which is our own.

In great art (architecture) there is some value-added thing, some permanent, accessible … cry for pity, say; and if you enter and listen hard and vulnerably enough, you can not only hear it. You can reproduce it. You can even feel as if you are generating it anew.

Thomas Pynchon was very big on boredom, very big on the idea that postmodern Americans are just really bored, and that a lot of their behavior can be understood as a reaction to boredom.

UD’s favorite pomo novelist, Don DeLillo, features, in several of his novels – but especially White Noise – postmodern American deaths, which typically occur when someone is having expensive, boredom-suspending, fun: surfing in Hawaii, skiing in Austria. Many such deaths, in DeLillo, add high tech to the fun: In Players, well-heeled golfers are suddenly mowed down by a group of terrorists who use sophisticated weaponry against them. Visual technology also may make an appearance in these scenarios — they may be filmed, and go viral to tens of millions of bored voyeurs. Pomo death headlines are like Malfunction at Dreamworld. Explosion at the Gender Reveal Party. Superbowl Blimp Goes Down.

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Think back to the congressional baseball game interrupted by a madman with a rifle who almost killed the majority whip. That had all the DeLilloesque elements: a sudden assault with lots of techno-weaponry (SKS rifle, 9mm Smith & Wesson handgun) while affluent, high-profile Americans are out having fun …and of course someone with a camera to film it all for Youtube.

In the news today appears another variant on the postmodern American way of death. This one has many pertinent elements: Boredom, affluence, cutting edge technology, videotape. I have in mind the wealthy Texas doctor who, at 11:30 on a Saturday night, decided to drive his $80,000 Tesla onto a private road in his gated community, take a seat in the back, rev it up to a million mph or whatever, and see how its driverless feature functioned.

At least that’s the speculation – he was found burned to death (along with a friend in the front seat), and no one was in the driver’s seat. Witnesses report they’d barely gotten out of his driveway, going at high speed, when the car drove straight into a tree and burst into flames. Rescue squads were unable to get anywhere near the car because (another high-tech pomo ingredient) the Tesla’s state of the art battery kept reigniting.

Okay so Bob Dylan wins the literature Nobel and everyone – specially ol’ UD – is astonished. UD is thrilled. It’s good. It’s great. Instead of spending her pre-election-day hours in a snit, she gets to spend them in a ‘sixties trance.

But I want once again (check the DeLillo category on this blog for earlier posts) to try to get at why Don DeLillo is perennially close to his own Nobel Prize in Literature.

UD could choose glorious passages describing postmodern cities and the countrysides to which people in those cities escape; she could visit the streams of consciousness in the heads of characters like the mother of Lee Harvey Oswald and a conscience-stricken CIA agent. She could show you how DeLillo throughout his novels lyricizes political as well as metaphysical thought, and even infuses the commercial detritus of American culture with poetry.

But instead she’ll show you what he could do with just a sentence, a casual seemingly unimportant sentence of the sort you see in this post’s headline.

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The divorced narrator of The Names (1982) recalls his ex-wife, with whom he remains in love — a woman now fanatically engaged in archeology, wanting no human intimacy but only to be left alone to spend her days digging for fragments. (The novel’s narrator is at the opposite terrestrial extreme: a consultant in risk management, he’s almost always in the air, flying from one turbulent country to another.) He remembers her, even when they were married, engaged in a sort of domestic archeology:

She used to go through the house groping in dark closets for a lone Salem left faded in some coat pocket.

DeLillo’s prose somehow ennobles this mundane and even grubby act of tobacco scrounging; the poetic language conveys the pathos of her archeological disposition, ever-engaged in obscure searches for faded goods, for old and hidden (and therefore somehow more authentic) forms of sustenance.

Obviously the sentence gets its greatest weight from the larger context of The Names itself, as you read it. But let’s anyway go ahead and try to clarify how DeLillo lyricizes these words.

Go/groping/lone/coat – Assonance and near-rhyme pull the sentence into a coherent mood of melancholy, with the mournful murmur of all those O‘s. But there are many more O‘s in the sentence: to/through/house/closets/pocket. The sentence is a veritable exploration of the tonal range of O. In this second group of words, we find exact rhyme (to/through) as well as very close rhyme (closets/pocket).

All of this conveys not only the sadness and occasional panic of not being able to fix yourself meaningfully in the world (here, you’re after your tobacco fix, if you will), but also the sense of being – as Thomas Wolfe (another player of variations on O) put it in one of his titles – O Lost. You are in search of (Wolfe’s subtitle) the buried life. All three main characters in The Names are in various ways digging for clues, for a sense of balance, a sense of reality, a sense of situatedness in some deep and true cultural actuality, amid a simulacral, drifty, and menacing postmodern world. As the narrator puts it:

It seemed we’d lost our capacity to select, to ferret out particularity and trace it some center which our minds could relocate in knowable surroundings.

DeLillo’s prose, however, does relocate; he has what all great artists have — singular control over his medium. The world may be out of balance, but his sentence has balance – and not merely tonal balance. There’s a nice metrical regularity here too, as in the repetition of similarly stressed phrases:

dark closets
lone Salem
coat pocket

Even that “Salem” cigarette is carefully chosen, no? To be sure the gentle two-syllable word, a sibilant whisper, fits the soft sad insinuating feel of this sentence; more than that, though, the word derives from peace (Salaam, Shalom)… And though as our eyes run over these words we’re not going to stop and say Hey Salem peace, if we’re reading this as it wants to be read, as a species of prose-poetry, we may obliquely pick up on that connotation, especially if the rest of the novel’s text has been amplifying the idea of peace.

Within the aesthetically ordered and meaningful world of DeLillo’s novels we can encounter and explore our own driftiness, embodied in characters and places, and even gain a bit of insight into/leverage over it.

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Indeed a major theme of many DeLillo works involves the very serious trouble we get ourselves into when our desire for meaning and groundedness and belonging gets so desperate that we form or join cults.

My life is going by and I can’t get a grip on it. It eludes me. It defeats me. My family is on the other side of the world. Nothing adds up. The cult is the only thing I seem to connect with.

Cults tend to degenerate into violence. At the moment, in America, we have a ringside seat.

This was the first question my American Literature students asked me as we arranged ourselves in a tight circle outside yesterday.

Outside? UD doesn’t do outside! Teaching outside is a waste of time! Too many distractions! (GW ain’t Kenyon.) No one can hear anything! I’ve tried it before!

But it’s the end of the semester; it was a spectacularly beautiful day; and my students, who charm me right down to the ground, were insistent. They pointed out that we were discussing one of Annie Dillard’s nature essays (we trashed her), and it was all too inescapably appropriate for us to talk about her while staining our slacks with grass.

And so we sat in the mild sunlight, surrounded by flowering cherry trees and daffodil beds. A few yards away, a student from my DeLillo course gently played a guitar.

Everyone heard everyone else perfectly, and we had a terrific discussion in which almost every member of the seminar (there are fifteen students in it) took part…

But first they wanted to express their anger at the now-famous Fox News headline: GW SUICIDE TRAGICALLY COINCIDES WITH OBAMA SPEECH.

Fox has taken the story down, but as The Daily What says: Fox News: Just like the Onion, minus the kidding.