Catchin' up — New Believer! — Free e-Stark — &c.

I haven't been blogging—I was in Taiwan and couldn't figure how to work Blogger. Did you miss me? [Tumbleweed.]

Now—to business!

I. The September Believer is out. On the site, you can read a Gregory Kornbluh's wonderful piece on master palindromist Barry Duncan, as well as Ross Simonini's (about whom, more later) interview with Jason Schwartzman. But you need to get the whole print issue in your hands. It's great. THERE IS A CONVERSATION BETWEEN DON DELILLO AND BRET EASTON ELLIS. (One of the many things I learned: DD excised 15 pages from a paperback reprint of Americana. I wonder which 15? I wonder why?)

Marc Katz has a mouth-watering essay on Huysmans' Against Nature (which has been lingering on my bookshelf for approximately 9 million years, and which I really now must read!), Nate Pedersen looks at the origins of the "butler did it" mystery trope, Meaghan Winter gets wiggy with Orthodox Jewish hairpieces...There's the usual Marcus/Pendarvis/Handler/Hornby columny goodness, filthy comics, reviews, and more...Verdict: Great issue!

II. The one book I read while away was Lawrence Douglas's upcoming novel The Vices, which is excellent—just my cup of tea. I was a huge fan of his debut novel, The Catastrophist (and profiled him for the PTSNBN, in one of my last articles there); this one shares some of the themes but seems to me even more successful—exhilarating, even.

Try the first page and see if you can stop. It's about a stalled novelist's friendship with the Bernhardesque Oliver Vice, and the prose is pure pleasure: elegant, comic, wise. There are subtle pleasures, too, that I'm not sure I can do justice to. For example, a brief passage in the first half of the book gently triggered a memory of a scene in Nabokov's The Real Life of Sebastian Knight...and many many pages later, the narrator and his friend talk about that very novel, in such a way that the book itself becomes suggestively and satisfyingly unmoored.

I will have quotes for you soon.

III. Levi alerted me to two free e-books by Donald E. Westlake—God Save the Mark (which I reviewed for the PTSNBN; it's perfect light reading) and (as Richard Stark) The Score.

Nonmimesis

Genres often classifed as both nonmimetic and non-SF are actually varieties of science fiction that correspond mimetically to specific types of cognitively estranging referents....Slipstream—a relatively young subgenre that has emerged over the past several decades, with prominent examples including Don DeLillo's 1985 White Noise, the 1998 film The Truman Show, and Ed Park's 2008 novel Personal Days—is a type of science-fictional mimesis whose cognitively estranging referent is the partially virtual reality of living in a mainstream hypermediated and rendered half-surreal by technology. —Seo-Young Chu, Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep?: A Science Fictional Theory of Reputation

White Noise? Heyyy—I'll take it!™

*

Chu's book is pretty fascinating! (Where else could you read about Joe Haldeman and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha?) I don't know that anyone else has called Personal Days "slipstream"—but it makes sense. One of my first published stories was in Trampoline, edited by Kelly Link, a/k/a the Queen of the Slipstream:



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Now I'm thinking that titling my SF column "Astral Weeks" was also a way of saying I would cover "slipstream," given the first line of the song...



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I like this bit in the epilogue:

"As these allusions to the many 'chapters that might have been' are meant to imply, Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep? A Science-Fictional Theory of Reputation is a fragment of a much larger hypothetical book containing an infinite number of chapters that correspond to an infinite number of cognitively estranging objects and phenomena."

Now I remember...

...why I called the column "Astral Weeks"!



*

An archive of sorts is available at the L.A. Times site; there are numerous omissions, alas.

Some of my favorite columns concerned a Charles Fort biography; an 1881 New Zealand novel; a discursus on the Ouroboros; secret histories; structural vertigo in Catherynne M. Valente; Joe Haldeman; wow I wrote a lot of columns!; repetition (via Robert Silverberg and Osamu Tezuka); Christopher Miller's overlooked PKD takeoff, The Cardboard Universe; the forgotten pulp writer/physician Miles J. Breuer; Dash Shaw's Bodyworld; a DeLillo rarity; D&D stories; John Crowley (and again).

And then I wrote some things that could only loosely be called "columns": a cento; a J.G. Ballard abecedary; a two-part meditation on short stories; notes (and notes on notes). Editors David Ulin and Nick Owchar were always willing to go with these somewhat unorthodox formats—amazing!

Who was Norton Westermont?

For Bookforum, I've written my meditations on the copy editor's art and the hidden narratives of the evolving Chicago Manual of Style. (Thank you to editor Michael Miller—my former copy-desk colleague [!]—and the U. Chicago Press.)

At 933 pages, the fourteenth was comparable in size to the heralded omnium-gatherums of its era (1996's Infinite Jest, 1997's Mason & Dixon and Underworld). For sheer head-scratching postmodern tricksterism, though, Messrs. Wallace, Pynchon, and DeLillo had nothing on the collaborative deadpan master jam that was the fourteenth. Infinite Jest's reams of endnotes were distinctive but hardly as radical as Chicago's editorial comments for a text that was essentially invisible. "Millicent Cliff was Norton Westermont's first cousin, although to the very last she denied it," 15.47 tells us—but who was Norton Westermont? In this sense, much of Chicago reads like Pale Fire without the poem. On the very next page, 15.51's directions on how to style acknowledgments delivers both a name right out of Pynchonland and a DeLillo-esque consortium: "The author gratefully acknowledges the assistance of Dr. Oscar J. Blunk of the National Cyanide Laboratory in the preparation of this chapter."

This is the first of three articles that have kept me happily occupied this fall...

Of course

Matthew Sharpe gets it (LAT):

The reviews of Don DeLillo's last few novels put me in mind of the sports journalist who, after a certain Yankee game, wrote, " Babe Ruth was not able to make any home runs." Critics of "The Body Artist," "Cosmopolis" and especially "Falling Man" seem to want DeLillo to be the Babe Ruth of novelists, to keep writing "Underworld" and "Libra," those long, magisterial books about big American events. Such people will probably not regard his new novel, "Point Omega," which weighs in at not much more than 100 pages, as a literary home run.

Yet "Point Omega" is a splendid, fierce novel by a deep practitioner of the form. . . .

Midnight in Don DeLillo

It's that time of the month again—wha?—yes, another Astral Weeks!

This month's column is sort of about a new anthology called The Secret History of Science Fiction, but really I just focus on "Human Moments From World War III," an amazing Don DeLillo short story from 1983 that I'd never read before. I also used it as an excuse to revisit Ratner's Star (one of his best)—

As though to change the subject, Cyril explained his assignment at Field Experiment Number One. He was part of a committee formed to define the word 'science.' The committee had begun meeting regularly long before a site had even been chosen for the structure itself. It was thought a definition would be agreed upon about the time ground was being broken. But the debate continued to drag on and the definition at present ran some five hundred pages.

— and to read his latest novel, Point Omega, which is perfect. I'm serious! (I.e., the reviews ar wrong.)

(One thing I didn't have a chance to talk about in the column was DeLillo's excellent recent story "Midnight in Dostoevsky," which appeared last November in The New Yorker. A DeLillo renaissance is underway!)

"Suit your own self"

David Foster Wallace annotates endpage of DeLillo's Players.

(Via New Yorker's Book Bench)

HMMM.

Sweeney alerted me to this: "Cronenberg sets 'Cosmopolis': Director Bringing DeLillo's Novel to the Screen":

PARIS -- David Cronenberg is teaming up with Portuguese producer Paulo Branco to bring Don DeLillo's novel "Cosmopolis" to the screen.

Cronenberg will helm and also adapt the 2003 novel for the screen. Story follows a 28-year-old multimillionaire on a 24-hour odyssey across Manhattan. Considered one of America's leading novelists, DeLillo's most acclaimed works include "White Noise" and "Underworld."

To which I replied, enigmatically, "Hmmm. HMMM. Hmmm."

To which he replied: "Huh?"

To which I replied: Cosmopolis has already been made into a movie—the woefully underrated Game Six!

DeLillo's script is about a guy who goes on an all-day odyssey across 47th Street!

It is blasphemous to say I'm fonder of Game Six than Cosmopolis?

Jay for fake

Is Jacket Copy still doing its Postmodernism Month? Murray Jay Siskind, who steals his scenes in DeLillo's White Noise and the pseudonymous Amazons, reviewed DFW's Oblivion in Modernism/Modernity in 2004. Here's editor Lawrence Rainey's letter sort of explaining it ("Who but a fictional character could be better qualified to review . . . well, new fiction? Isn’t that the very essence of peer reviewing?"), and here's a White Noise–infused extract from the piece:

It is at this point that I must confess to missing something in Wallace, namely the presence of women nearer the center of the narration (setting aside Lenore Stonecipher Beadsman, Jr., the protagonist in Wallace's first novel, The Broom of the System). I admit that I've always been partial to them, i.e. women. I fall apart at the sight of long legs, striding, briskly, as a breeze carries up from the river, on a weekday, in the play of morning light. And what fun it is to talk to an intelligent woman wearing nylon stockings as she crosses her legs. Wallace, I suspect, shares these predilections and could write wonderfully complicated women.

(Via Gawker, from Bret, who writes, "No love for Amazons!"—the piece doesn't mention MJS's appearance in that book; and from Lauren)

(Will post some Amazons-grade Siskind later maybe?)

Crazy for you

There are some days when everyone I see is a lunatic.
—Renata Adler, Speedboat

It was amazing how often kind-looking people turned out to be crazy.
—Don DeLillo, Ratner's Star

I did a bit more wilting. It seemed to me that I was alone in a deserted smoking-room with a homicidal loony. It is a type of loony I particularly bar, and the homicidal loony I like least is one with a forty-four chest and biceps in proportion. —P.G. Wodehouse, Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit

EP on EVP

My hilarious joke yesterday reminded me that I actually saw—and reviewed!—the film White Noise.

"This is the language of waves and radiation, or how the dead speak to the living," wrote Don DeLillo 20 years ago in White Noise. Geoffrey Sax's film White Noise isn't the long-awaited adaptation, alas—no Hitler Studies here—but for much of its running time, it creeps along like a ghoulishly literal take on that D.D. sentence. Beginning with a long quote from Thomas Edison that, unfolding between simulated bad-reception skips, suggests the paranormal-receptive ability of inventions to come, White Noise quickly establishes a crude goosebump factory that goes straight to the spine.

Six months after the mysterious death of his novelist wife, Anna, grieving architect Jonathan Rivers (Michael Keaton) gets a call from her cell phone—but the line goes dead. Rattled, he contacts an expert in electronic voice phenomenon (EVP), a fringe practice whose adherents patiently troll the airwaves for messages from the beyond. Jonathan soon becomes obsessed, finding an ally in fellow practitioner Sarah (Deborah Kara Unger). Pimping out his glass-clad bachelor pad with banks of monitors and recording equipment, Jonathan reads raster as Rorschach, hearing voices of the deceased buried under oceans of static. Anna's voice leads him to the scene of a gruesome accident, where he rescues a baby—but it dawns on him that the swirling spirits on the other side might actually be malevolent, revealing glimpses of deaths before they happen (a tinge of Minority Report).

Keaton's not much more than a plug-in here, though in places he manages some economical emoting that grounds the wilder goings-on. His character resonates as a morbid stand-in for anyone chained to the computer screen, glued to any number of devices: cell phone, car radio, answering machine. As in The Ring, technology is omnipresent but uncanny in its obscurity—what is static, anyway? White Noise teems with whiplash scare tactics, but ably mines the same dead zone previously mapped in flashes: The Outer Limits' vertical-horizontal prologue, the communion with snowed-out screen in Poltergeist.

The transfixingly weird Birth crawled down the slope of reason by the end, to some viewers' chagrin; White Noise vigorously pushes the supernatural line throughout, but unfortunately its final movement is so incoherent that the whole thing collapses. It's as if the cultural white noise of a thousand indifferent suspense flicks has gathered to drown out the initial spark of invention with a knee-jerk flurry of howling demons and unrelenting studio rain. —PTSNBN, Jan. 4, 2005

And...I was one of maybe eleven people who liked the DeLillo-penned Game Six!

If last year's rerelease of 1975's The Passenger felt like the ultimate adaptation of an unpublished Don DeLillo novel, it's because the film resembled a template for his books: urbane and mythic, a circuitous and cryptic death trip. The new Game Six, from a DeLillo screenplay, has an anonymous indie look, but with its absurdist cab ride through gridlocked midtown, airborne toxic disaster, ruminations on personal and public history, and baseball fetishizing, it's like volume one of DeLillo's Greatest Hits. DeLillo's stylized dialogue, part brow-slapping smartitude, part beautiful nonsense, finds an ideal mouthpiece in Michael Keaton. As playwright Nicky Rogan, he gives every line just the right spin: He describes a fellow writer, now half crazed, as "someone who sits in a small, dark apartment eating soft, white bread." Rogan's new play, a deeply personal venture, is opening on the same night of a climactic Red Sox–Mets game. Meanwhile, a dreaded critic (Robert Downey Jr.) girds himself for his assignment in his toiletless hovel, while the lead actor is having memory problems due to a parasite in his brain, a bug contracted in Borneo or perhaps Burma. ("Why are we blaming the third world for our parasites?" someone muses.) For a Greek chorus, there's a radio reporter delivering hilariously unhelpful traffic updates spun into glum meditations ("Birth, death, walk, don't walk"). Despite a late-inning swoon of pat emotional generosity, Game Six is a gratifying playground of high-wire language. —PTSNBN, Feb. 26, 2006*


*This was one of the few times a movie ad quoted from one of my reviews. Check it out!

Zoning out

New DeLillo adaptation, to follow this one and that one.

Frazzled, efficient

Really Good Short Story

Chris Adrian's "Why Antichrist?," in his new collection, A Better Angel. I can't even describe it. It is too great.

Claire Barliant...

...has a website.

Don DeLillo...

...blogger? At The Onion, "D.D." on the Republican National Convention:

Here in Minneapolis, a woman with a clipboard, frazzled, efficient. She reads from a printout to a group of staffers a change in schedule from the coordinating committee: the station wagons arrive at noon. In the Free Speech Zone, a man dangles from a wire, the famous performance artist from New York. Everywhere, security: badges, metal detectors, small plastic cards with magnetic stripes. Police, silent in riot gear, truncheons like humming, efficient software. Someone says: "So she was technically never the actual Miss Alaska?"

Refreshments

"If anyone has the blues over the hard times and trembles for the present and future prosperity of the United States let him make a tour of the great shops of the city on one of these bright and deliciously cool September days, and however deeply financial pessimism may have crept into his soul he will experience of refreshment and will become firmly convinced that all hope is not yet lost." —The New York Herald, 1893

(Via MUG, quoted from Gilded City, by M. H. Dunlop)

What if she had said 'The Believer'?

The History of Literature

There's Joyce, Nabokov, and then nothing for a while...oh and then Park. Heyyy—I'll take it!!!

Portland Bulletin

Dzyds Paul and Deb and others read tonight at The Cleaners!

Two thoughts upon reading 'The Week'

In this week's The Week, David Maraniss picks DeLillo's Underworld as one of his six favorite books. He writes: "My favorite opening chapter in modern fiction, a riot of baseball, Jackie Gleason, J. Edgar Hoover, Frank Sinatra, andy Pafko, the most famous home run in history, and some of the best writing ever. The rest of the book cannot match it, but I don't care, I keep reading this chapter over and over for inspiration.

#1
I remember reading "Pafko at the Wall" in proof form, before it appeared as the very first Harper's Folio. It felt like a home run. And to start a huge, career-capping work like Underworld with such a chapter is like saying, I'm out to hit a home run!

#2
What if: DeLillo had ended with the "Pafko at the Wall" chapter? Everything that came before would then be a solid base hit...and then he'd hit a grand slam...

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Blast from the past: Here's what I picked for The Week...

Slap shot

At Bookforum, Gerald Howard looks at Amazons—one of "DeLillo" 's best? (We thought so!)

"Reviews were appreciative of the book’s off-center humor (one inevitably called it “puckish”), and then a sharp critic for the Worcester, Massachusetts, newspaper decided that, simply on the basis of style, Amazons had to be by Don DeLillo."

Dizzies Newsfeeds for November 13

Andrew Lewis Conn has a long appreciation of Norman Mailer up at The Fanzine: "Let us sing of the man’s ambition: that wild, prodigious, uneven, infuriating, embarrassing, brave and blustery and bruising arc, the longest, greatest song of himself in American letters."...Shades of End Zone: "After Jets linebacker Jonathan Vilma sustained a knee injury this season, Coach Eric Mangini was asked at a news conference if he knew which play the injury occurred on. He said no.

Q: Do you know which knee?

A: Yes.

Q: Are you going to tell us?

A: No.

Q: Right or left?

A: Tricky. It’s one of those two."

—"Paranoia Strikes Deep, Into Your Headset It Will Creep," NYT (via Dizzyhead Jane)...

End zone

The Dizzies is something of a DeLillo-Worship Zone...but what do people think of James Wood's take on Falling Man? Here's Jenny D's post, with a long quote from Wood, who quotes DeLillo at length, plus comments from Lee and from Parkus Grammaticus.

Hot fuzzy

This could be from a DeLillo book, eh?

When Traci Ludwig, the owner, with her husband, Michael, of an 1884 house in Mamaroneck, called in the mold people a few years ago, she was only mildly hysterical.

“We had white and fuzzy mold, we had brown mottled mold, we had black mold,” she said. “It was a scientific study of mold." —NYT

"This Falling Man"

Levi Stahl's blog, I've Been Reading Lately, has an appealingly bookish post about a recent trip to New York in which he didn't and did see John Crowley...

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A new New-York Ghost is winging its way to subscribers—are you one of them?

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Some thoughts on writing and editing, by Samuel Delany (via Jenny D):

In a very real way, one writes a story to find out what happens in it. Before it is written it sits in the mind like a piece of overheard gossip or a bit of intriguing tattle. The story process is like taking up such a piece of gossip, hunting down the people actually involved, questioning them, finding out what really occurred, and visiting pertinent locations. As with gossip, you can’t be too surprised if important things turn up that were left out of the first-heard version entirely; or if points initially made much of turn out to have been distorted, or simply not to have happened at all.

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John Crace gives the latest DeLillo novel the "digested read" treatment over at The Guardian—pretty funny stuff:

He didn't know why he had walked back to her apartment after visiting the hospital.

"Was it for Justin?" Lianne had asked.

"That's the question."

"The boy is out in the yard searching the skies for Bill Lawton."

"He means Bin Laden."

"God could appear in the sky tomorrow."

"Whose God?"

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Great song—with many solid fashion ideas!

DeLillomania

New York breaks down the DeLillo oeuvre into Classic, Recommended, For Fans Only, and Avoid. I love pieces like this—well, maybe just this one, since it's a rare case in which I've actually read every title. (I don't think any of DD's books need to be "avoided," though some are definitely not going to make you a DD fan if you read 'em first.)

Here's DD from best to worst (ranked in order per category), according to the mag:

Libra
White Noise
Pafko at the Wall
The Names
------
Underworld
Players
Great Jones Street
Mao II
------
Ratner's Star
Running Dog
Americana
End Zone
Amazons
Game Six
------
The Body Artist
Cosmopolis
Three Plays

The top four choices are solid, though I weirdly am not a Libra fan—I'd put that together with Mao II and probably place it on the lower half of my list. (Both should be read and are "important," but not my favorites.) Well...OK, I guess I should just do my own list:

THE BEST
The Names — WOW — mysterious and sharp and disquieting and it has an amazing ending (which I've compared—at least in my head!—to that of Days of Being Wild)

Amazons (!?!!)(blasphemy?! And yet my friend Jane said this was her favorite, and it's easily the DD title I dip into most frequently for sheer fun)

Americana (some days this could be #1...but then it's depressing to think, "His first book was the best, it's all been downhill since..."; very good, Godardy, jam-packed with observation and killer similes and wit)

Ratner's Star (weirdly love this one; along with Amazons, a showcase for his comic gift, which to me is as impressive than his serious vein, which gets him the acclaim—I don't think I'd read him if he weren't one of the best comic writers of the last 30 years. Also, this is science-fiction—more SF should be like this!)

White Noise (what can one say?!)

EXCELLENT

"Pafko at the Wall" (I'd request the original Harper's version, though—not the one in Underworld nor the one reprinted as a separate volume; the latter two versions, I believe, contain a different opening line—a minor point. A tour de force!)

Running Dog (after reading this for the first time, I thought it was the best; haven't revisited, though)

Great Jones Street (this would be in the first bracket, so much great stuff here, probably the best rock-and-roll novel I've read...but there's one section that doesn't work for me and that I can't explain away...not a very long section...not a dealbreaker...)

VERY GOOD
Underworld (enjoyed reading; was very excited when it came out, as there'd been a DD drought since Mao II, and the Harper's "Pafko" set abnormally high expectations; slight sum- not-greater-than-parts feel by the end; still, could easily be in the higher bracket)

End Zone (haven't really looked at this in a while, so might belong in upper ranks; did dig it quite a bit upon first read, very enjoyable)

Mao II/Libra/Players (would be higher; ending too freaky for me to think about)

AND...
I don't know that Game Six (screenplay) and Three Plays should even be in the running; I enjoyed the film, and saw a production of Valparaiso that was excellent, and read the other two plays, The Day Room (fun to read) and Love-Lies-Bleeding (maybe not fun, indeed a little bit static, but you could see how it might work well on stage).

Alas...I agree that the more recent novels Cosmopolis and The Body Artist haven't been so strong, overall (though they have interesting elements), and perhaps they don't bode well for the new Falling Man—but of course I'm going to read it anyway...

(Via Confessions)