Podcasts about delillo

So who killed JFK? We still don't know, but we're concluding our series on DeLillo's conspiratorial history with Episode 27: Libra (3). This episode begins by focusing on the unexpected injection of humor and depth that comes with Jack Ruby, another reluctant shooter, in the novel's second part. We draw into this episode some comparisons of Libra to other artists' paranoid visions of conspiracy, including Oliver Stone, Norman Mailer, and Thomas Pynchon. We spend ample time on the newspaper-clipping and TV-watching of CIA wife Beryl Parmenter, one of several figures here who make Libra a canny narrative of media and information history. And we close with detailed debate and speculation about why DeLillo's concluding “Author's Note” – with its powerful notion that “readers may find refuge here” – has changed over the years. Like Nicholas Branch, we're overwhelmed by all that still could be said about Libra (and we may still say it in a future episode!), but we conclude our three-part analysis here. References and corrections for this episode: “Don DeLillo: The Word, the Image, and the Gun.” BBC Documentary, September 27, 1991. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DTePKA1wgc Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia.” chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Freud_MourningAndMelancholia.pdf JFK (dir. Oliver Stone, 1991). Frank Lentricchia, “Libra as Postmodern Critique.” In Frank Lentricchia, ed., Introducing Don DeLillo (Durham, NC: Duke U. Press, 1991), 193-215. George F. Will, “Shallow Look at the Mind of an Assassin.” Washington Post, September 22, 1988. Correction and references on Carmine Latta and Sam Giancana: DeLillo's character Carmine Latta is indeed based on Carlos Marcello (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_Marcello), but we misstate the name of mobster Sam Giancana (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Giancana). Interlude clips include the voices of Jack Ruby and Marguerite Oswald.

In Episode 26: Libra (2), DDSWTNP continue our deep dive into DeLillo's story of Oswald and CIA plotters, taking on the distinctions between lone-gunman and systems theories, the unique role of Bobby Dupard in Oswald's arc, and all this novel has to teach us about “diminishing existence” and the taste for mediated violence as it's grown since the watershed moment of 1963. Major segments here focus on the remarkable, Mephistophelean voice of David Ferrie, the work done by secret CIA historian Nicholas Branch, and DeLillo's prefatory essay “Assassination Aura,” which brings Libra's enduring mystery into the twenty-first century through the promises and failures of technology embodied by “Dictabelt No. 10.”  An episode best listened to, of course, after Episode 25: Libra (1)! Stay tuned next week for the release of our concluding episode on Libra. References and corrections for this episode: Don DeLillo, “American Blood: A Journey Through the Labyrinth of Dallas and JFK.” Rolling Stone, December 8, 1983. Rpt. in Osteen, Mark, ed., Novels of the 1980s: The Names, White Noise, Libra. Library of America, 2022. 1045-1061.  Don DeLillo, “Assassination Aura” (May 2005). Included as preface in 2006 edition of Libra (Penguin). “I was able to acquire a copy of the [Zapruder] film before it became legally available, which made me feel slightly conspiratorial”: Don DeLillo, “Preface, 2022.” In Osteen, ed., Novels of the 1980s: The Names, White Noise, Libra. Library of America, 2022. 633-634. Linda Hutcheon, “Historiographic Metafiction: The Pastime of Past Time.” In A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1988. (The first instance of a concept much discussed by Hutcheon and many others.) Tom LeClair, In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel. U. of Illinois P., 1988. Dante correction: We say “circling the square” in Paradiso 33, but it's of course the problem of “squaring the circle.” Interlude clips include the voices of General Edwin Walker and Lee Harvey Oswald.

Who killed JFK? What forces made the mind and actions of Lee Oswald? And what does it mean to be an agent of history or something called fate? DDSWTNP probe these and other big questions in multiple new episodes on Libra released over the coming month. June may be the time of Gemini, another sign of doubles in the Zodiac, but for us it's a month for the balance scale, tipping one way or the other, with some Librans like Lee not balanced at all but (as David Ferrie puts it) “somewhat unsteady and impulsive . . . Poised to make the dangerous leap.” In Episode 25: Libra (1), we discuss where DeLillo began in the 1970s in his build-up to Libra, as far back as Americana and other early novels' mentions of JFK, Oswald, the CIA, and the overwhelming Warren Report. We examine what makes DeLillo's Oswald a great but frustrating character and a portal for new dimensions in the author's examination of language, naming, and self-making. We ask what's behind the clear shifts in style, tone, and humor DeLillo makes for this historical novel, as well as the power of his place/date chapter structure, the influence of existentialist fiction, and some alternate titles he considered. And we begin working our way through all the figures and ideas surrounding Oswald, from Marxist beliefs and CIA practices of “unknowing” to Cold War obsessions with the Bay of Pigs, life in the U.S.S.R., and a losing war in Vietnam that DeLillo and readers know is coming but his characters importantly don't.  Stay tuned in our Libra episodes to come for investigation of the Murray-like wit of David Ferrie, how DeLillo regards the lone gunman theory, the mysterious edits made to his “Author's Note,” the theological musings of Nicholas Branch, and much more. Texts and historical figures mentioned in Episode 25: Ann Arensberg, “Seven Seconds” (1988), in Thomas DePietro, ed., Conversations with Don DeLillo, University of Mississippi Press, 2005, 40-46. Don DeLillo, “American Blood: A Journey Through the Labyrinth of Dallas and JFK.” Rolling Stone, December 8, 1983. Rpt. in Osteen, Mark, ed., Novels of the 1980s: The Names, White Noise, Libra. Library of America, 2022. 1045-1061.  ---. “Preface, 2022.” In Osteen, ed., Novels of the 1980s: The Names, White Noise, Libra. Library of America, 2022. 633-634. Don DeLillo Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. “Don DeLillo: The Word, the Image, and the Gun.” BBC Documentary, September 27, 1991. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DTePKA1wgc DeLillo: “I was hoping it was Scorpio, because I liked that word. But his birth sign turned out to be Libra, the scales. I settled for that.” David Marchese, “We All Live in Don DeLillo's World. He's Confused By It Too” (2020)https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/10/12/magazine/don-delillo-interview.html Everette Howard Hunt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._Howard_Hunt Correction: the character Aleksei Kirilenko, Oswald's Soviet handler in the novel (and source for one of many Lee aliases, Alek?), is DeLillo's creation, not historical! Branch later reveals Kirilenko's real name is Sergei Broda (301). No claim about DeLillo's basis for Kirilenko/Broda, but here is information on yet another shadowy figure, defecting KGB agent Yuri Nosenko, who claimed to have been in charge of Oswald's case file in the Soviet Union: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuri_Nosenko

Já só se pode contar com os brutos para levar isto ou aquilo por diante, seja o que for, uma vez que, pelos seus próprios modos, estão familiarizados com o estrago, e não os tolhe a falta de um nexo óbvio, estão habituados a pegar por onde der, e ajudam-nos a partir do momento em que nos assumimos também como monstros folhetinescos, desses que dão corda a uma intriga qualquer, até porque se nos calamos logo mergulhamos num silêncio predador, assim, repetindo os mesmos tiques, tomamos balanço no que houver, mesmo em semanas como esta em que parece mais fácil apontar aqueles que nos falham, em que vamos de ausência em ausência, e, numa altura em que a terra já vai parecendo escassa para enterrar tantos, fica-nos a sensação de que, deste lado, a própria luz parece arquivada, uma "luz-mortalha", para nos servirmos de uma expressão de Rui Nunes, um dos poucos que continuam a dar com o isqueiro nalgum cano e a transmitir o seu morse exasperado que soa pelo edifício e por trás do solene e displicente papel de parede. Diante do desconchavo de tudo, em vez de milagres, suplicamos por desastres que tomem conta de tudo, engulam a vida, façam um pouco de justiça, dando cabo dos planos a quem tem a arrogância de fazê-los, e que são, na sua maioria, os safardanas responsáveis pelo estado das coisas. Mas voltando a um desses impulsos plagiados, desta vez a partir do Vargas Llosa, já ia sendo altura de um romance arrancar por estas bandas questionando-se em que momento preciso é que Portugal se fodeu de vez, e isto homenageando também o coronel que tantas vezes deu trela a essa indagação, e apontou algumas datas, algumas hipóteses bastante firmes, fazendo-nos espreitar as coisas por uma brecha, ver como se deu cabo de um período de suspensão, de quase irrealidade e sonho, que se viveu por aqui durante uns quantos meses, tendo sido talvez a última possibilidade antes de sermos engolidos pela vertigem. Alguém nos avisou: "Quando o tempo for apenas velocidade, instantaneidade e simultaneidade, e quando o temporal, entendido como esse acontecer histórico, houver desaparecido da existência de todos os povos, então, precisamente, as perguntas: para quê? para onde? e depois?, começarão a assombrar-nos como fantasmas"... E aí está, "esse motor de aceleração que comprime séculos em segundos", escreve Rui Nunes. “Nós, civilizações, sabemos agora que somos mortais”, proclamava Valéry naquele célebre texto sobre a “crise do espírito” no final da Primeira Guerra, e agora o que nos diz o escritor português é que a ruína se tornou o próprio material de construção deste tempo, adiantando que a ruína exprime hoje a intimidade das civilizações. De resto, à volta, por toda a parte, ouve-se um zumbido e vêem-se as luzes dos monitores ligados, sente-se essa fetidez constante "do silencioso arquivo dos computadores, essa vala comum da modernidade". Por estes dias são as nossas próprias consciências que já arrastam e fazem alastrar esse mesmo sinal doentio, essa condenação que trazemos misturada no hálito. "Os noticiários tornam-se tão poderosos que já não precisam de televisão nem de jornais. Existem na percepção das pessoas. Elas próprias inventam as notícias, suficientemente poderosas para parecerem genuínas. São os noticiários sem os media", escreve DeLillo. Mas se não podemos sentir um verdadeiro ânimo, podemos ter vergonha de termos também caído nisto, e assim vimos pedir muitíssimas desculpas, e então damo-nos conta do motivo porque fazemos isto, porque insistimos em pôr uma frase à frente da outra, ultrapassando o desgosto, buscando o que vem depois, e desde logo também porque, como vincava Georges Perec nas últimas linhas de um dos seus livros… “Escrever: tratar de reter algo meticulosamente, de conseguir que algo sobreviva: arrancar umas migalhas precisas ao vazio que se escava continuamente, deixar nalgum lugar um sulco, um rastro, uma marca ou alguns sinais.” Aqui está o motivo por que quando não se tem mais nada ao menos podemos virar-nos para os nossos fantasmas, que não nos deixam falar sozinhos.

What does the déjà vu allegedly caused by the Airborne Toxic Event have to do with a disease called Jumping Frenchman? How is Jack Gladney's “day of the station wagons” connected to the first female NHL player's longing for quaint hometown holidays? In Episode 24, DDSWTNP continue our White Noise residency by showing listeners all the hidden connections between DeLillo's most famous novel and his most obscure: Cleo Birdwell's Amazons, his pseudonymous 1980 collaboration with Sue Buck, written as a kind of lark but we think absolutely integral to the satiric vision of White Noise five years later. Our discussion suggests all the ways in which DeLillo seems to have used Amazons as a “laboratory” of sorts, developing Cleo's thoughts on ad shoots, celebrity athletes, Americana, and an ex-player in a deathlike suspension into the richer, more in-depth meditations on similar topics in White Noise. Naturally we give major attention to Murray Jay Siskind, a sportswriter in Amazons who's become an Elvis scholar in White Noise, expressing above all our gratitude that DeLillo came back to him and transformed him, reshaping an already very funny snowmobile obsessive into a Mephistophelean wit and one of the darkest, most memorable characters in the corpus. Those who haven't gotten to read Amazons but know other DeLillo will get a ton out of this episode, for we end up drawing surprising connections not just to White Noise but Americana, End Zone, Great Jones Street, Underworld, Zero K, and others. Turns out this prank of a novel in 1980 paid many dividends for DeLillo. Tune in to hear some fun thoughts as well about a prank of our own: an April Fool's post about a brand-new DeLillo novel we put on social media a few weeks ago. Texts and quotations referred to in this episode: “Pynchon Now,” including short essay on Pynchon's example by Don DeLillo, Bookforum (Summer 2005). https://web.archive.org/web/20050729023737/www.bookforum.com/pynchon.html Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (Free Press, 1973).  John N. Duvall, “The (Super)Marketplace of Images: Television as Unmediated Mediation in DeLillo's White Noise.” In Mark Osteen, ed., White Noise: Text and Criticism (New York: Penguin, 1998), pp. 432-55. Adolf Hitler, “Long Live Fanatical Nationalism” (text of speech). In James A. Gould and Willis H. Truitt, Political Ideologies (New York: Macmillan, 1973), p. 119. Gerald Howard and Mark Osteen, “Why Don DeLillo Deserves the Nobel: A Conversation with Gerald Howard and Mark Osteen,” Library of America, January 17, 2024 (source for Howard's remark that DeLillo's manuscripts need no editing).https://www.loa.org/news-and-views/why-don-delillo-deserves-the-nobel/

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Roll film! In Episode 23, DDSWTNP continue our White Noise residency by heading to the movies (or the TV screen) and examining Noah Baumbach's 2022 film adaptation of the novel. We discuss the drive over the years to adapt the supposedly “unadaptable” DeLillo for the screen, the 2020s context of this film, and our varied reactions to successive viewings of it over the two-plus years since its release. Other topics include the central performances (especially Adam Driver as an unexpectedly good Jack Gladney and Don Cheadle as a refashioned Murray Siskind); Baumbach's successes and failures at re-ordering DeLillo's dialogue and visually distilling certain themes; and his shaping of the narrative as a “meta-cinematic” journey through his personal film history and a mixture of genres. Reviews by Tom LeClair, Marco Roth, and Jesse Kavadlo figure in our analysis, and we close by considering whether we do in fact “need a new body” in the film's concluding supermarket song and dance number, which in our view captures some of the novel's themes and distorts others. We'd love to hear on Instagram or email what you think of the film and our reactions, too! We also take a little time to correct a historical error in our Episode 19 on Rachel Kushner's Creation Lake. Texts and sources for this episode: White Noise (dir. Noah Baumbach, 2022) (Netflix). Film adaptation pages at “Don DeLillo's America”:http://www.perival.com/delillo/whitenoise_film_2022.htmlhttp://perival.com/delillo/ddoddsends.html Patrick Brzeski, Alex Ritman, “Noah Baumbach on Getting LCD Soundsystem to Create New Track for ‘White Noise,'” The Hollywood Reporter, August 31, 2022.https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/venice-noah-baumbach-white-noise-lcd-soundsystem-1235209318/ Jesse Kavadlo, “Don DeLillo's ‘White Noise' Remains Unfilmable,” Pop Matters, January 11, 2023.https://www.popmatters.com/white-noise-noah-baumbach-unfilmable Tom LeClair, “The Maladaptation of White Noise,” Full Stop, December 29, 2022.https://www.full-stop.net/2022/12/29/features/tomleclair/the-maladaptation-of-white-noise/ Jon Mooallem, “How Noah Baumbach Made ‘White Noise' a Disaster Movie for Our Moment,” New York Times Magazine, November 23, 2022.https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/23/magazine/white-noise-noah-baumbach.html Marco Roth, “Don DeLillo on Xanax,” Tablet, November 3, 2022.https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/don-delillo-xanax-white-noise-noah-baumbach

Allt viktigt ska hända sedan, inte nu. Mattias Hagberg söker en motlitteratur som visar oss bort från en värld där alla vill äga undergången. Lyssna på alla avsnitt i Sveriges Radio Play. ESSÄ: Detta är en text där skribenten reflekterar över ett ämne eller ett verk. Åsikter som uttrycks är skribentens egna.Don DeLillos sjuttonde roman ”Noll K” från 2016 inleds med en mening som jag har svårt att släppa:”Alla vill äga världens undergång.”Det är en märklig rad. Nästan obegriplig.”Alla vill äga världens undergång.”Vad betyder den? Hur kan den ens vara möjlig?Jag återkommer till den där meningen, med ett möjligt svar, men för att nå dit måste vi gå en omväg, en omväg som börjar i samma roman, men som snart kommer att ta oss någon helt annanstans.”Noll K” är en text om döden, och om det eviga livet. I en nära framtid håller tekniken på att göra verklighet av kristendomens löfte om evigt liv. På en hemlig ort i Centralasien finns en högteknologisk anläggning, kallad Konvergensen, där världens miljardärer kan frysa ner sina kroppar för att en dag bli upptinade när medicinen gjort sådana framsteg att de kan leva för alltid.Konvergensen är uppståndelsen från de döda som teknologisk vision. Ja, mer än så. ”Noll K” är en roman om tidens slut, som bär tydliga paralleller till kristendomens urmyt – föreställningen om undergång och pånyttfödelse.Don DeLillo är en författare som ständigt återvänt till domedagen. Redan i de första romanerna från början av 1970-talet är motivet tydligt. Som i ”End Zone” från 1972, om en ung amerikansk fotbollsspelare, Gary Harkness, som blir besatt av kalla krigets massförstörelsevapen och av den ömsesidiga utplåningen. Det är en roman som slutar i ett sammanbrott – inför det moderna kriget verkar förståndet inte räcka till – kapprustningen har, vad man skulle kunna kalla, bibliska proportioner, som så många andra av våra samtida globala hot.Och mycket riktigt gör Don DeLillo just den kopplingen. I ”End zone” låter han huvudpersonen, Gary Harkness, spekulera:“Science Fiction har precis börjat komma i kapp Gamla testamentet... Polarisen smälter. Världens mineralreserver minska. Krig, svält och pest…”Ja, det sena 1900-talet och det tidiga 2000-talet är onekligen en apokalyptisk tid – i ordets ursprungliga bemärkelse. De latenta faror som legat förborgade i det moderna samhället har slutligen börjat uppenbara sig, och världen skälver.Men det som intresserar Don DeLillo är inte i första hand samtiden globala kriser, utan undergången som litterär genre, som social konstruktion, som ett raster som lägger sig över verkligheten och erbjuder vissa snäva tolkningar.“Science Fiction har precis börjat komma i kapp Gamla testamentet…”Han vet att vi måste gå tillbaka till ”Bibeln” för att förstå något väsentligt om vår samtid, för att kunna se apokalypsen för vad den också är – en berättelse, en fabel som format och omformat vår förståelse för världen, och därmed vår förmåga att agera.Den antika judendomen var en religion, om man nu ens kan prata om religion vid den här tiden, som särskilde sig från andra kulter kring östra medelhavet genom att fokusera på tiden och på historien, och på en gud som ingriper i världen.Under århundradena kring vår tideräknings början renodlades sen denna syn på tiden till en egen litterär genre – apokalypsen – först av judiska skriftlärda och profeter, senare av kristna intellektuella. Apokalypsen blev en litterär stil, med en egen och tydlig form, enkel att sammanfatta: Tiden har en riktning, den har en början och ett slut, och innan slutet kommer skall allt viktigt uppenbaras – ofta under katastrofala former.Strukturen finns i judiska apokalypser som ”Daniels bok” och ”Enoks bok”, och den finns i nästan alla kanoniserade kristna texter, som ”Markusevangeliet”, Paulus brev och ”Uppenbarelseboken”.Med andra ord: Den västerländska synen på tiden och historien är en litterär konstruktion, sprungen ur ”Bibelns” berättelser, en konstruktion som format hela den västerländska förståelsen för världens som framåtskridande, kris och återfödelse.Och därmed blir det också möjligt att förstå Don Delillos märkliga påstående att ”alla vill äga världens undergång.”Vad han vill ha sagt, tror jag, är följande: Om föreställningen om undergången och pånyttfödelsen är en av våra starkaste kulturella bilder – en sorts rotmetafor som dyker upp överallt i vårt samhälle – blir det oerhört väsentligt vem som kontrollerar den bilden.Tänk bara på de socialistiska staterna i öst som levde på föreställningen om den kommande förlösningen när det klasslösa samhället äntligen skulle bryta fram.Eller tänk på nyliberalismen med sitt löfte om marknadens frälsning.Eller på högerradikalernas tro på det gamla lyckorikets återkomst.Eller på föreställningen om att ny teknik plötsligt ska rädda oss från klimatkrisen.Allt viktigt skall hända sedan, i framtiden. Inte nu. Inte här. Utan sedan.Men, om allt detta bara är litterära bilder frammanade ur judendomens och kristendomens grundläggande förståelse för historiens riktning, då måste det också gå att erbjuda alternativ – andra slags berättelser. Ja, jag tror det. Och det är just detta som gör Don DeLillo så relevant. Hans romaner är inga regelrätta berättelser, de har ingen tydlig början eller tydligt slut, snarare handlar det om tillstånd. Om en sorts motlitteratur som betonar det varande, i motsats till det kommande. En sorts litteratur som vilar i nuet, i språket. Det är som om han vill säga: Allt det viktiga kommer inte hända sen. Det enda vi äger är detta nu.Nästan alla Don DeLillos romaner bär på en scen där allt detta blir extra påtagligt. Det handlar om ett slags vardagliga mirakel; ofta en soluppgång eller solnedgång. Och ”Noll K” är inget undantag. På romanens sista sidor åker huvudpersonen buss över Manhattan, när han upplever ett ögonblick av ordlös närvaro i stunden:”Bussen gick tvärsöver stan, från väst till öst, en man och kvinna satt nära chauffören, en kvinna och en pojke längst bak. Jag satte mig mitt i någonstans, utan att titta på något särskilt, tom i skallen, nästan åtminstone, tills jag började lägga märke till ett sken, en flodvåg av ljus.Några sekunder senare var gatorna fyllda av detta ljus av det döende dagsljuset och bussen verkade vara bringaren av detta strålande ögonblick. Jag såg på skimret över mina händer. [–-] Vi var mitt på Manhattan, med fri sikt västerut och han pekade och tjöt mot den flammande solen som med kuslig precision stod och vägde precis mellan raderna av skyskrapor.” Mattias Hagbergförfattare och journalistLitteraturDon DeLillo: Noll K. Översättning Rebecca Alsberg. Albert Bonniers förlag, 2016.

We've arrived at the big one, the breakthrough book of 1985 – White Noise. In Episodes 21 and 22, DDSWTNP extend our White Noise “residency” and turn in-depth attention to DeLillo's most popular piece of fiction in another double episode.  Episode 21: White Noise (1) takes an expansive view of the novel's narrative and goes into depth on (among many other subjects) the iconic opening chapter's commentary on America and Americana, the meaning of Mylex suits, Jack's relationships with Heinrich and Orest Mercator, and what it means to be a rat, a snake, a fascist, and a scholar of Hitler in this book's universe. Episode 22: White Noise (2) interprets passages mainly from the book's second half, including scenes featuring the dark humor of Vernon Dickey and of SIMUVAC, the meaning of DeLillo's desired title “Panasonic,” Jack's shooting of Willie Mink (and what it owes to Nabokov), a riveting fire and a fascinating trash compactor cube, and the Dostoevskyan interrogation of belief by Sister Hermann Marie. Every minute features original ideas on the enduring meanings of White Noise in so many political, social, technological, and moral dimensions – what it teaches us about the roots and implications of our many epistemological crises, how it does all this in writing that somehow manages to be self-conscious, philosophical, hilarious, and warm all at once. Texts and artifacts discussed and mentioned in these episodes: Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (Free Press, 1973).  Adam Begley, “Don DeLillo: The Art of Fiction CXXXV,” The Paris Review 128 (1993): 274-306.            (DeLillo: “And White Noise develops a trite adultery plot that enmeshes the hero, justifying his fears about the death energies contained in plots. When I think of highly plotted novels I think of detective fiction or mystery fiction, the kind of work that always produces a few dead bodies. But these bodies are basically plot points, not worked-out characters. The book's plot either moves inexorably toward a dead body or flows directly from it, and the more artificial the situation the better. Readers can play off their fears by encountering the death experience in a superficial way.”) Buddha, Ādittapariyāya Sutta (“Fire Sermon Discourse”). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%80dittapariy%C4%81ya_Sutta Don DeLillo, White Noise: Text and Criticism, Mark Osteen, ed. (Penguin, 1998). ---. “The Sightings.” Weekend Magazine (August 4, 1979), 26-30. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (Routledge, 1966). Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (1880). Franz Kafka, “A Hunger Artist” (1922). Édouard Manet's Olympia (1863). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympia_(Manet) Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955). Mark Osteen, “‘The Natural Language of the Culture': Exploring Commodities through White Noise.” Approaches to Teaching DeLillo's White Noise, eds. Tim Engles and John N. Duvall (MLA, 2006), pp. 192-203. Ronald Reagan, “Farewell Address to the Nation,” January 11, 1989. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjECSv8KFN4            (“I've spoken of the ‘shining city' all my political life . . .”) Mark L. Sample, “Unseen and Unremarked On: Don DeLillo and the Failure of the Digital Humanities.” https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/untitled-88c11800-9446-469b-a3be-3fdb36bfbd1e/section/be12b589-a9ca-4897-9475-f8c0b03ca648(See this article for DeLillo's list of alternate titles, including “Panasonic” and “Matshushita” (Panasonic's parent corporation).)

We've arrived at the big one, the breakthrough book of 1985 – White Noise. In Episodes 21 and 22, DDSWTNP extend our White Noise “residency” and turn in-depth attention to DeLillo's most popular piece of fiction in another double episode.  Episode 21: White Noise (1) takes an expansive view of the novel's narrative and goes into depth on (among many other subjects) the iconic opening chapter's commentary on America and Americana, the meaning of Mylex suits, Jack's relationships with Heinrich and Orest Mercator, and what it means to be a rat, a snake, a fascist, and a scholar of Hitler in this book's universe. Episode 22: White Noise (2) interprets passages mainly from the book's second half, including scenes featuring the dark humor of Vernon Dickey and of SIMUVAC, the meaning of DeLillo's desired title “Panasonic,” Jack's shooting of Willie Mink (and what it owes to Nabokov), a riveting fire and a fascinating trash compactor cube, and the Dostoevskyan interrogation of belief by Sister Hermann Marie. Every minute features original ideas on the enduring meanings of White Noise in so many political, social, technological, and moral dimensions – what it teaches us about the roots and implications of our many epistemological crises, how it does all this in writing that somehow manages to be self-conscious, philosophical, hilarious, and warm all at once. Texts and artifacts discussed and mentioned in these episodes: Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (Free Press, 1973).  Adam Begley, “Don DeLillo: The Art of Fiction CXXXV,” The Paris Review 128 (1993): 274-306.            (DeLillo: “And White Noise develops a trite adultery plot that enmeshes the hero, justifying his fears about the death energies contained in plots. When I think of highly plotted novels I think of detective fiction or mystery fiction, the kind of work that always produces a few dead bodies. But these bodies are basically plot points, not worked-out characters. The book's plot either moves inexorably toward a dead body or flows directly from it, and the more artificial the situation the better. Readers can play off their fears by encountering the death experience in a superficial way.”) Buddha, Ādittapariyāya Sutta (“Fire Sermon Discourse”). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%80dittapariy%C4%81ya_Sutta Don DeLillo, White Noise: Text and Criticism, Mark Osteen, ed. (Penguin, 1998). ---. “The Sightings.” Weekend Magazine (August 4, 1979), 26-30. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (Routledge, 1966). Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (1880). Franz Kafka, “A Hunger Artist” (1922). Édouard Manet's Olympia (1863). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympia_(Manet) Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955). Mark Osteen, “‘The Natural Language of the Culture': Exploring Commodities through White Noise.” Approaches to Teaching DeLillo's White Noise, eds. Tim Engles and John N. Duvall (MLA, 2006), pp. 192-203. Ronald Reagan, “Farewell Address to the Nation,” January 11, 1989. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjECSv8KFN4            (“I've spoken of the ‘shining city' all my political life . . .”) Mark L. Sample, “Unseen and Unremarked On: Don DeLillo and the Failure of the Digital Humanities.” https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/untitled-88c11800-9446-469b-a3be-3fdb36bfbd1e/section/be12b589-a9ca-4897-9475-f8c0b03ca648(See this article for DeLillo's list of alternate titles, including “Panasonic” and “Matshushita” (Panasonic's parent corporation).)

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Looking to start reading Don DeLillo, or already a fan and looking for ways to persuade your friends, relatives, or students to finally access the wonders of White Noise? In Episode Twenty, DDSWTNP offer an introduction to White Noise for the first-time reader of DeLillo, focusing on elements of plot, action, character, humor, and voice that often present stumbling blocks to initiates. We help listeners navigate DeLillo's most popular novel, the “gateway drug” to the joys and challenges that a lifetime of reading his corpus holds in store. We also answer key questions like how to regard Hitler Studies and whether you need to know anything about “postmodernism,” philosophy, or how a media theorist might read the Most Photographed Barn in America before entering DeLillo's world (spoiler: no!). Longtime listeners to the pod will find here, we hope, an episode to send along to anyone they've given a copy of White Noise for Christmas or ever told, “Hey, you should read Don DeLillo.” The first of several episodes to come from us on White Noise as the novel turns 40, this podcast will be followed in 2025 by our deep dives into the novel itself, its massive body of criticism, and the recent film adaptation – so stay tuned, and may you be immensely pleased. First-time readers of White Noise looking for illuminating critical and contextual reading should try some of the essays and excerpts collected in Mark Osteen, ed., White Noise: Text and Criticism (New York: Penguin, 1998), as well as the many excellent resources at Curt Gardner's website “Don DeLillo's America” (http://perival.com/delillo/delillo.html). But as we suggest in the episode, mainly we advise just going back and re-reading all your favorite scenes, or even the whole thing!

In Episode Nineteen, DDSWTNP turn outward to a discussion of Rachel Kushner, whose Booker Prize-nominated Creation Lake, a 2024 novel about the folly of espionage, revolutionary violence, life underground, and confronting modernity with ancient practices in rural France, solidifies its author's reputation as a key inheritor of DeLillo's influence and themes. Creation Lake is narrated by a nihilistic spy named Sadie Smith who infiltrates a farming commune called Le Moulin and grows enchanted with the claims of their cave-dwelling philosophical advisor, who argues that Neanderthal life thousands of years ago holds the key to reshaping humankind. In it Kushner explores the legacy of France's 1968 while echoing The Names, Great Jones Street, Ratner's Star, Mao II, and other DeLillo works, as we outline in our discussion. We find rich references as well in Creation Lake to Nathaniel Hawthorne, Joan Didion, Michel Houellebecq, and Kushner's own previous works, especially The Flamethrowers and The Mars Room. Listeners looking for new writing reminiscent of DeLillo and those already knowledgeable of Kushner's works will find plenty here, and we hope this episode will be the first of several over time dedicated to DeLillo's massive influence on exciting new world literature. Texts and quotations mentioned and discussed in this episode, in addition to Creation Lake and those by DeLillo: Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays (1970) and Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) Dana Goodyear, “Rachel Kushner's Immersive Fiction,” The New Yorker, April 23, 2018 (includes discussion of Kushner's friendship with DeLillo) Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance (1852) and The Scarlet Letter (1850) Michel Houellebecq, Serotonin (2019) Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers (2013) and The Mars Room (2018) ---. “Rachel Kushner: ‘The last book that made me cry? The Brothers Karamazov,” The Guardian, October 5, 2018 (source of this answer: “The book that influenced my writing: Probably novels by Joan Didion, Denis Johnson and Don DeLillo. But a whole lot of other books, too”) “In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.” (F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Crack-Up” (1936)– a line mangled slightly in the episode)

In Episode Eighteen, DDSWTNP wish our author a happy 88th birthday and talk about the international life he led between the mid-1970s and early 1980s. We follow DeLillo abroad, covering his year in Canada (1975) and his much-discussed time living in Athens (1978-1982), tracing influences of these experiences on portrayals of national identity and language in The Names especially but other works too. Central to understanding this period is the powerful change in method that DeLillo made at his manual typewriter that inspired slower, more “serious” work. For those who already know the biography pretty well we also have in this episode some surprising details garnered from his letters in these years to editor and friend Gordon Lish, the remarkable story of DeLillo's response to a Utah banning of Americana in 1979, and connections between the 1981 Athens earthquakes DeLillo lived through and the 1988 short story “The Ivory Acrobat.” We end by considering the “toxic spill” of the news that greeted DeLillo on his return to America in 1982 and energized the writing of White Noise, and we announce too some upcoming episodes that will close out 2024! As is often true, we get significant help in this episode from interview excerpts and more collected at Don DeLillo's America: http://perival.com/delillo/delillo.html Texts referred to and quoted from in this episode: Ann Arensberg, “Seven Seconds” (1988), in Thomas DePietro, ed., Conversations with Don DeLillo, University of Mississippi Press, 2005, 40-46. Adam Begley, “Don DeLillo: The Art of Fiction CXXXV,” The Paris Review 128 (1993): 274-306. Don DeLillo, The Engineer of Moonlight, Cornell Review 5 (Winter 1979), 21-47. [Incorrectly placed in Epoch in episode.] ---, “The Ivory Acrobat,” Granta (Issue 108, 1988) (and collected in The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories). Robert Harris, “A Talk with Don DeLillo” (1982), in DePietro, ed., 16-19. Gordon Lish Manuscripts (1951-2017), Lilly Library, Indiana University (https://archives.iu.edu/catalog/InU-Li-VAC9786). Mervyn Rothstein, “A Novelist Faces His Themes on New Ground” (1987), in DePietro, ed., 20-24. Jim Woolf and Dan Bates, “Davis Official's Action Dismays, Horrifies Author of ‘Americana.'” The Salt Lake Tribune, August 31, 1979.

Lauren Oyler's “Revenge Plot”, a literary diary of her trip to this year's Republican convention in Milwaukee, is the cover story of this month's Harper's. So when I talked today with the Berlin based writer, we discussed both the revengefulness of the Republican party and what she calls the “risk aversion” of the Democrats. While Oyler cares a lot about the outcome of today's election, she is wary of what she calls the “constant catastrophizing” both on the left and right of American politics. While this probably won't be the final election in the history of American democracy, she suggests, it might be the first 21st century Presidential contest not dramatically shaped by the internet. LAUREN OYLER's essays on books and culture appear regularly in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, London Review of Books, Harper's Magazine, Bookforum, and other publications. Born and raised in West Virginia, she now divides her time between New York and Berlin.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.TRANSCRIPTAndrew Keen: Hello, everybody. The day has come, it's Tuesday, November the 5th. Election Day. We don't know who's won, but many people are going to the polls. One person who won't be going to the polls is my guest today, Lauren Oyler. She's a distinguished American writer, bestselling writer, essayist, critic. But she happens to be, as I joked before, we went live in exile in Berlin. She lives there in Germany, but she's also the author of an excellent piece, it's the cover story of Harper's this week: "Reunion or Revenge: The GOP Identity Crisis." According to Lauren, they're on the brink. I'm not sure of what. Lauren is joining us from Berlin in Germany. Lauren, what's the view from there? Americans looking as crazy as ever?Lauren Oyler: We're looking for a bar to go to. To be honest, we've been we've been we've been caucusing, trying to figure out where we can watch the the results. And we just found there's one place. But, you know, it doesn't the results aren't really start coming in until midnight here. So the debate is about whether we will stay up--or, people have some bad memories of doing that in 2016. I personally have a bad memory of doing that in 2016 as well. So the view is we're looking at our phones.Keen: So I assume the bad memory was not that you drank too much or ate too much.Oyler: No, I did. I certainly did. I'm just I was with my boyfriend at the time and we had gotten in a fight earlier that day about Hillary Clinton. And I, I just remember being like, I just don't care. I just don't care. And then we went to the bar with our friends and got quite drunk. And and then we were walking home and I didn't live here at the time, so I didn't have we didn't have cell phone service. So we walked home at like three in the morning. We were really drunk and we were like, Well, we won't know anything. And then we got home and we like, laid in bed in the dark and and looked at our phones and we were like, no, this is terrible. So and then just laid in bed again, really drunk looking at our phones.Keen: It's something that could have occurred in one of your books or maybe in a in a DeLillo book. So are the Germans shocked? I mean, they they they've made a culture out of being a shock to other people that they particularly shocked this time around?Oyler: No, I don't think so. I remember right before I went to report this story, I was in a restaurant down the street from my house and I listened to--I was overhearing a conversation with this German guy, was talking to these people and he was like, he was he was like, Yeah, have you heard they have the plague in Colorado now? He's like, Yeah, this is crazy. Imagine if we had the plague in Berlin. Like, it was really like, I don't really think they sort of like, Yeah, this is crazy, but it's, you know, it's not it's not the first time. And I think to and in Europe, it used to be that you were reviled as an American. Certainly when I first moved here in 2012, there was still that kind of anti-American sentiment. But now far right populism has spread across the West and everybody is sort of commiserating with with you and just kind of like, you know, it could happen. It could happen to us at any time. It basically is the idea.Keen: The plague has come home to Germany from Colorado. So let's get to the piece, Lauren, you went to Milwaukee to cover the GOP's identity crisis. And it's a long essay. Very...to use the word Oyler-ish in the sense that it's it's a very creative piece of work, creative nonfiction, although some people might say there's a fictional element there. What was your overall take on this odd convention and why was it that it's almost five months ago now?Oyler: Yeah. Well, I think the big the the big concern that I had going into it was that, you know, you're right, it would be coming out it came out in the middle of October, and I would be reporting on something that had happened in July, which, of course, in the past would have been perfectly normal for this kind of piece of this kind of like literary new journalism type thing. Many, many great pieces about political conventions that I'm sure your listeners, listeners will be familiar with, things like Norman Mailer, they come out late. But, you know, now--Keen: It's timeless as well in their own way. I mean--Oyler: It's supposed to be timeless, but now everybody's sort of attitude towards the news is like, I need to hear it right now. And then it the cycle, the cycle, the cycle and it goes away. So you sort of forget about it. So I kind of was grateful for the assignment because the assignment was basically like write something of lasting literary value about about the circus and spectacle, which was very interesting. And, you know, it was sort of you're following the news as it's happening and you're like, well, I can't really like you just have to be aware of the general narrative as time has gone on, you can't really be too obsessed with anyone's story because as I learned when former President Trump was almost assassinated while I was on the plane there, like something can just completely derail the whole plan. But I had never been to a political convention before. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed doing that kind of reporting. And I was surprised at how at the dissonance between what was being reported by these live up to the minute coverage, like blogs or social media or things like this. The difference between the analysis that those those journalists would generally produce and what I was interested in or even like what I thought the mood was, frankly, as, as the title of the piece and the sort of the tag line suggests, like it was a bit fraught, I think, for the Republicans. I think I think the liberal media generally tends to want to keep to the storyline that they are evil masterminds of the chaos that they saw. But I what I saw there at least, was kind of a fracturing basically.Keen: Right? I mean, I think that the more I watch or listen to liberal media or mainstream media, they behave as if they're the grownups and. And perhaps some of these photos actually underline the fact that it's the Republicans who were the children. For better or worse, they're out of control. They need to be sent to their room and perhaps spanked, although I'm guessing most liberal media people don't believe in spanking anymore. I'm curious, Lauren. I had lunch with Rick MacArthur, the publisher of Harper's few months ago in New York. And like all publishers of traditional magazines, he claims poverty, not enough money to go around. Couldn't you find someone a bit closer? I mean, I assume he paid for you to fly from Berlin to Milwaukee. That's quite a long way. Why didn't he find a local person, or do you think he chose you, or they chose you, the editor chose you because you bring a slightly foreign perspective?Oyler: Do you don't think I'm such a good writer that it's worth flying me over there?Keen: Did they pay for first class?Oyler: No, it was was economy, which was good, actually, because I got I had some interesting conversations with my senior and they did say, you know, we won't pay for paper business, but I did buy the expensive internet in the end. But and I think I was staying in a Hampton Inn. Do you know how do you know how the--Keen: My God. So they put you up in a Hampton Inn?Oyler: Do you know how it works? So when you go to a convention, there's like the convention as the press, the press corps or the convention, if you like, a place to stay. And so many of the delegates were staying like in Madison, Wisconsin, or in Illinois, and I was in the same hotel as the USA Today people. So that speaks to me being like the, you know, the national and the the government's like belief in the value of Harper's magazine in comparison to other other places. So it was maybe like 20 minute drive away anyway. Non sequitur. So why do you think they asked me to go? Maybe because I do have a little bit of foreign perspective, I think to it is not you know, it is nice to have a literary writer juice politics coverage. You know, there's a long history of this. Norman Mailer is a wonderful introduction to this book that I have about ranting about journalists and reporters and why it's important to bring a novelistic eye to things. Joan Didion, obviously famously, and all sorts of other examples. George Saunders did a did a Trump rally in 2016. I think Patricia Lockwood did one as well. So I think there's that kind of tradition that that Harper's is a part of and wants to sort of continue in the face of maybe people saying that literary writing has no place in society anymore. But also, I assume that my being from Appalachia has something to do with it because, yes, as you say, I live in Berlin, but I was born and grew up in West Virginia, and although we did not know J.D. Vance was going to be selected as the VP when they assigned me this piece, it wasn't always a strong possibility. And I think the region sort of exerts a pull on the national media at least every four years. So I would assume that that also has something to do with it.Keen: That's interesting that, you know, the the other side of the Appalachian coin from J.D. Vance. You mentioned earlier, Lauren, that the the media reported on this differently from bloggers and some of the online crowd. What are the differences? Can you generalize about how the USA Today crowd covered it verses bloggers who perhaps weren't there or watching online?Oyler: Yeah, well, I think there is a certain kind of convention story that is just like we're here, there's someone on TV, they're doing a stand up. They have someone shooting them and they're just like, I'm here live at the convention. Like, here's how crazy it is. But the thing that I talk about in the piece especially is this Ezra Klein sort of blog about the convention. And I believe the headline that he wrote was for his podcast about it was I watched the Republican National Convention. Here's whatever, and that kind of dramatic headline style that that has been honed on the Internet--Keen: And this was a New York Times piece--Oyler: Well, the New York Times Piece...I watched the Republican National Convention on television. Why does that...anyone can watch the Republican National Convention on television. And they want it to be like a dramatic sort of...a little bit dangerous feeling that it did have at points. But but the thing that was surprising to me was how unenthusiastic many of the people there were or who were just there because, you know, they go every been ten times or whatever.Keen: I mean, you have some great photos in the piece of people looking pretty miserable, which of course probably makes most of us feel better about it. And I mean this one in particular for people watching a couple of white middle class people with cheese hats, one with a "Make America Great Again" sign, the other, "bring back common sense." They look most uncommon and most miserable.Oyler: And it's not to say that there wasn't, there were many sort of disturbing moments of enthusiasm, I think. But they weren't always the people on stage that you would--the biggest applause that I remember was not for Trump or for J.D. Vance. Of course, those went on forever. But this sort of passion, like the sort of scary passion that the media wants to find it in the Republicans. I noticed it most with Peter Navarro, who had just gotten out of prison that day and offering to give a trial, which was so bizarre and people were just screaming their heads off for him.Keen: And he's a China hater.Oyler: Yes, I can never remember what the sort of White House department of something that they invented that he was the head of. It was some kind of trade council.Keen: Like Go to War with China Department.Oyler: Yes. Yes. And he had just been let out of prison and he was missing a tooth. Which was really bizarre. And then Tucker Carlson, everybody was going crazy for it because he's like a celebrity. But there was not this kind of excitement for, say, Kid Rock or something like this. Or even Hulk Hogan.Keen: Yeah. So here's the question for you. Lauren, I think you're as well-positioned in every sense to to answer this question, which is the question I struggle with and I've talked to I've talked about endlessly on this show and I haven't resolved I'm sure I've bored most of my viewers and listeners. You mentioned Hulk Hogan, of course, the ultimate wrestler. In fact, I had Peter Osnos on the show last week. It was the original editor of Art of the Deal, and he said when he was editing out of the deal, he went with Trump to a wrestling contest, and Trump was enormously popular there back then, 30 or 40 years ago. To what extent is this whole--and I use this word carefully--spectacle, just wrestling. To what extent is it just another version of reality television and everyone understands in an odd kind of way that they're participating in this weird narrative. You've done a lot of thinking and writing on this in terms of the Internet, although some of the people participating in this are pre-Internet people. I mean, Trump is Mr. Reality television. So this goes back before the Internet. But to what extent is this, I don't know, reality, hyper reality, beyond reality, and how does it connect with--there is a reality of America on November the 5th, 2024. I hope that's a--I'm not sure it's a particularly clear question, but gives you an opportunity to talk about how you perceive this whole spectacle or circus.Oyler: Well, I think it's I think that the Republican Party and I think the American society in general, certainly American media, has been in a kind of transitional phase since 2020. Don't quote me on that, but like generally, like since Trump's term was a very crystal clear political moment in the country, I think. And it did make a lot of people sort of immediately think back and say what, what did I miss about the last ten, 15 years that led to this? Like, why didn't I see this coming? Why didn't I expect Donald Trump to be elected president in 2016? And that led to all this kind of--the things that you're referencing, which are, you know, reality, the effects of reality television and the effects of social media, you know, the sort of the the sense that--the desire for kind of like a more immediate relationship to our media that develops--all these things kind of developed in tandem, which is to say that, you know, someone who's watching the Hills on MTV, which is sort of my demographic, is not going to be the same kind of person who's watching wrestling per say. But there are many things that those two kinds of programing have in common, right? And it is kind of the ironic presentation of reality and scare quotes, right? And I think that Donald Trump, obviously a reality television host himself and and and certainly involved in professional wrestling can like sort of tap into could tap into that. But I don't think we're in that period anymore. I don't you know nobody is we aren't I hope we don't have graduate students writing dissertations on the on the Kardashians anymore which is what, you know that was such a prominent force in the media and in the sort of 2010s during Obama's administration. And I don't know exactly like what is next, right? The conversations we're having now are all about AI. They're all about Elon Musk. But it's certainly not this like pro-wrestling spectacle thing anymore. And I think you can see that because it's not as if that was that was not new, part of part of the spectacle that was created by the by the Hulk Hogan stuff was like that it was so surprising. But you can't keep bringing Hulk Hogan out every for, you know, you can't have them every four years. I'm sorry.Keen: An immortal Hulk Hogan or for that matter, Trump.Oyler: Yeah, yeah. And I do think that--picking J.D. Vance as the vice presidential nominee does indicate that they are trying to sort of move forward and kind of set the path for Trumpism after Trump. As many...that's not my phrase. It's a phrase everybody everybody uses, because also Trumpism is the most successful kind of Republican movement in a long time. You might remember the Tea Party didn't arrive. But there's a lot of dissent about that, I think. I think a lot of older people in the party that I talked to when I was at the convention were dissatisfied with Trump. And they would say, you know, I actually never liked him. I didn't vote for him in the primary in 2016. I would prefer he not do this. I overheard a man giving an interview to some some wire service and he, he really sounded like he was having an identity crisis. Like he was like, I don't know. This is not the party I grew up with. This is not the party I joined. What am I going to do? So there are lots of these older guys who feel that way. And then on the other side, there are lots of these young guys who I talked to who are kind of young Republicans in their early 20s, and they also don't really care. It's not like they're excited about Donald Trump. They're like excited by the kind of meme-ified free market capitalism opportunities that the Republicans sort of scoop up, right? Like they like crypto. They like, you know, they're like they have some really confused ideas about tariffs, which if you if you press them on it a little bit, you would say maybe you actually should vote for a Democrat because Trump is just putting more tariffs on things, just all sorts of things.Keen: By the way, it's the first time in this conversation, Lauren, I've heard the the West Virginian twang when you when you said tariffs. Say it again.Oyler: Tariffs? I mean, I can do it all day if you want. I was anticipating you asking me to perform the accent. Maybe when we talk about a little bit more about J.D. Vance.Keen: Yeah.Oyler: But but, yeah--Keen: Tariffs, and what about China? Could you do China?Oyler: Well, you know, I lived in Beijing for about two months.Keen: I mean, JD, is he the fool here or is he the one who's being made to look like a fool, do you think?Oyler: I think he's allowing himself to be made to look like a fool. I don't think that...Keen: Does he know what he's doing here?Oyler: Yeah. I mean, does he know what he's doing entirely? No. Does he know what he's doing? More than, like, Donald Trump's kids? Yes.Keen: It isn't hard, especially the boys. The girls disappeared, right? I think our girls have disappeared.Oyler: And yeah, good for them. I think I saw on Twitter that it's Ivanka's 43rd birthday today.Keen: Maybe a happy birthday, Ivanka, if you're well, I'm sure you've got better things to do. Although, she does seem to be participating. I'm sure she's severely embarrassed now by the whole thing.Oyler: Yeah, I think that that's a big issue for, you know, they're just they're struggling to have like a base for Trump anymore. And there is like a base for Republican, like a Republican Party base. But it doesn't seem like there's that many.Keen: Yeah, and your essay is entitled "The GOP's Identity Crisis." Maybe it should be "The Trump Family's Identity Crisis."Oyler: Yeah. I mean, he's he's not going to be around for that much longer.Keen: Yeah. I mean, what you said was interesting about talking to a lot of older people who suggested they don't like Trump. I mean, if he loses today, who knows what's going to happen? But if he does indeed lose and relatively decisively in the sense that it's clear that he lost. Do you think the knives are going to be out in your experience in Milwaukee? Yeah, there are enough people in the Republican Party will say enough is enough. This guy's a loser and we need to move on.Oyler: I mean, I think you can't lose two times in a row. You know, I mean, I think that there is enough...It's it's hard to say, well, what are the billionaires going to do? Like, what's Elon Musk going to do? What? Like, where's the money going to go? I don't know. I think they are trying to set up...to me at the convention, it seemed to me that, like J.D. Vance and Vivek Ramaswamy are the are the people that are sort of creating the most enthusiasm. But at the same time, you do have this kind of thing which the Democrats start with in 2016 and in 2020, which is that the younger members of the party have sort of radically different kind of Internet inflected ideas about what they want from the party. And the older guard is sort of scandalized a little bit by that. And it's kind of like a power struggle that will be interesting to watch if if Trump loses. And even if he wins, frankly.Keen: The narrative, the traditional narrative in mainstream media over the last few days has been mostly about men. Men, male and female voters, black and white voters, which is always a feature. And young and old voters. What wisdom did you derive on those fronts from from Milwaukee? Were there any young people there or any black people there? Were there any women there?Oyler: Were there any young people, black people or women there? Yes, there were there. It does skew older. It's very white. And, you know, the women who are there generally wives, even if they're also delegates, like they're not the main event. They don't have a Sarah Palin at this point right? There was...many of the women who spoke on stage were given a pink backdrop. They're very welcoming to women and minorities and young people. The rhetoric is all very much, we're not racist. America is not racist country. This is not a racist party. Over and over again, Tim Scott gave a big speech about how the Republicans aren't racist. Amber Rose Kanye West's ex-girlfriend, gave a big speech about how Republicans aren't racist. There was all this kind of state saying how not racist they were. And, you know, on the ground, obviously most people are white, most people are old, and most people are men. So, it was not super convincing, but it is kind of interesting to watch them say that because, of course, even ten years ago, they would have never cared about any of that, any of those kinds of points.Keen: Early on in the piece, you mentioned DeLillo. To what extent did he, especially in White Noise, did he predict all this? I mean, not just him, but that school of American writing.Oyler: But do you think they're predicting it or they're just observing their own time, and actually, it hasn't changed?Keen: I guess, yeah. I remember a review, I think it was Andrew Hagan's review in the New York Review of Books after 9/11, in which they were reviewing one of one of DeLillo's books about terrorism. I know Hagan wrote about DeLillo in the sense that reality kind of overtaking, maybe, his prediction or his his kind of work. It must be, again, to use a word, surreal here to to see this world that DeLillo already imagined in practice.Oyler: Well, I think he's probably talking about Underworld. But I think it's maybe our idea of of history being kind of flawed rather than DeLillo's being overtaken. I do think DeLillo has some struggles writing about the Internet, but that's fine. But I think, too, because I was reading so much of these convention pieces from the 60s and 70s, the conversation is the same. And that's nonfiction, right? And so I actually think this kind of like apocalyptic rhetoric and and ever greater spectacle, it does sort of get ever greater, but it has always been getting ever greater. And so I don't know that DeLillo has been like overtaken, because also people can read. People read, you know, Libra now, which is all about in the wake of the failed assassination attempt on Trump. Everybody was talking about Libra, which is about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and the kind of, let's say, deep state apparatus surrounding that event. And also, you know, White Noise is a satirical novel. But but I think there was sort of some airborne toxic events in the United States.Keen: Yeah. I mean, he actually did write that in the book. I think about that. In a small town.Oyler: Exactly. But I believe White Noise is based on also a real incident. And DeLillo tends to work with actual news stories. Underworld is also sort of heavily researched and based on on on real, real events. So I think actually, maybe we we have to sort of admit that like as as as writers, as pundits, as journalists, as as whatever, it's in our best interest to say now is totally different. Right now, more than ever, everything's totally different. We're in a new paradigm. We're in a new era. This is especially bad. You know, you keep hearing this is the most important election of our lives. And we've been hearing that for every single election. And it's always been that kind of story. I can't really remember what your question was, but my my feeling about DeLillo is, like, amazing author. One of the best we have.Keen: Yeah, I know. I agree. And this idea of it being the most important election and of course, until the next one. This idea of an identity crisis. Lauren, what is an identity crisis? You noted that America is in a transitional stage. I mean, countries are always in transitional stages. They're always changing. Gramsci I think wrote that these kind of periods are a time for monsters. So we imagine the worst. What, to you, is an identity crisis, and why is the GOP going through it and not the Democrats? Might one argue that it's actually much healthier to face up to this crisis than to basically ignore it as the as the Democrats seem to be doing?Oyler: Yeah. Well, I think the Democrats, for all their faults, sort of dealt with this in the last two elections. And actually, you could say too the election of Barack Obama in 2008 was also a kind of identity crisis moment for them because the party didn't really want him, right? And Hillary's people, I believe, in 2008 were really critical of anyone who would go work for Obama, and it was it was actually like quite a big conflict. So you could say that basically the Democrats have been going through it as well. And now they've kind of they lost so humiliatingly in 2016 that they kind of had to do something about it, and they basically strong armed the left wing of the party in 2020, which for people of my generation, it was quite upsetting or like, galvanizing in some way, but you just don't really see so much...for someone who was really paying attention in 2020, the dissent against Kamala Harris is so much less than the dissent against Joe Biden in 2020. Does that sound right to you?Keen: Yeah, but I'm not sure you...I mean, if America is indeed in what you call this transitional stage where things the nature of the country, perhaps what we might think of as its kind of operating system is changing so dramatically. The Republicans are trying to face up to it and perhaps making fools of themselves, but at least they're addressing it. Why? Why the Republicans? Why the Democrats? So maybe America really isn't...I mean, this idea of a transitional stage is always true. So it's no more transitional in 2024 than it was in 2020 or 1920.Oyler: Yeah. Well, I think the Democrats have proven themselves to be quite denialists, right? Like they're very centrist. So the radical wing of the Republican Party. You could argue that J.D. Vance is part of part of the radical wing of the Republican Party. So I just think that the the Democrats are risk averse. They're very risk averse. And the things that they want are a return to normalcy when Republicans want like a radical reshaping of the government and society. They want...I went to some Moms for Liberty event where, you know, they weren't talking about this on the convention floor, but the Republicans give hearing to people who want to abolish the Department of Education. I can't remember what Trump's specific view on that is, but that's an incredibly radical proposal.Keen: I mean, Michael Lewis wrote a whole book on that: The Fifth Risk.Oyler: Yeah. But, it's not inconceivable that they would do that.Keen: Well, they did it. I mean, they did it in in 2016. I don't know if you're with the Department of Education, but some of these departments, they essentially shut down or appointed people with so hostile to the bureaucratic state that they by definition were going to ruin it.Oyler: Yeah. And then there was the the acronym R.A.G.E, Retire All Government Employees, and this kind of stuff. So but my point is that they you know, they see themselves as a revolution--the Republicans see themselves as a revolutionary party, and the Democrats are emphatically not. They're defining themselves against Republicans. So they're like, of course we're not America is not in an identity crisis. We just need to, like, get back to normal. But to go back to the phrase identity crisis, I think, too, is a reference also to J.D. Vance, whose whole career is, I argue, based on a sort of perversion of liberal identity politics, or an appeal to a kind of liberal identity politics. And the Republican Party's use of him or his use of them, is also based on this kind of Appalachian identity he has has created for himself in the media.Keen: Lauren, whatever happens today, the country's still profoundly divided. One side's going to win, one side is going to lose, but not by much. Lots of people have written about America in a process of divorce. You've presented the Democrats as denialists and the Republicans as so aggressively trying to figure themselves out in a slightly absurd way. Is this like a kind of traditional divorce where one partner denies there's any problems and the other exaggerates them? I don't know what the outcome of that kind of divorce usually is.Oyler: I don't know. Are you divorced?Keen: Yeah, but I'm not a denialist.Oyler: So you're so you're like--Keen: I mean, I was divorced.Oyler: What?Keen: I mean, I was. So...I've married and divorced.Oyler: Okay. But you have been through that. You've experienced--Keen: Yeah, I've done a divorce. Have you?Oyler: No. Never been married.Keen: But you've written about maybe not marriage, but you've written about...split ups, shall we say? I mean, you book Fake Accounts, which was a big hit, is about individuals and how they relate to one another. Is this like, maybe not a divorce, but a breakup in a in a weird kind of way, which, you know, you can't really breakup because you can't split the country in two?Oyler: Well, I don't think so, because I think it's probably...the thing about a romantic relationship is generally you are choosing in some way at least, to be in it and you're sort of declaring your your desire to be in it at some point in time. So if you're breaking it up, you're kind of it's seen as a failure, right? Whereas if you're an American citizen and you were just born in the country, you can't really control where you were born and you can't really, you know, there are only so many things you can do about that, and about your stake in the American political system and whether it breaks out. But are you asking for going is if this sort of south is going to secede or something like that--Keen: No, I'm saying, does this all tie into perhaps our therapeutic culture? I mean, is it coincidental that the kind of language that's being used both by the participants and observers like yourself is the same kind of language used by therapists, people addressing marriage breakups, relationship breakups, denialism, risk aversity, revenge plots, all this sort of thing?Oyler: Well, I think all the political parties are just made up of individual people, and as an individual person, the metaphors that we have at hand are our personal interpersonal metaphors. But I believe I'm a little rusty on this, but I believe Civilization and Its Discontents by Freud makes a similar kind of argument, right? Which is that there's a interpersonal metaphor that can be expanded to encompass the society. And you can read society psychoanalytically. I'm not a Freudian or even pro psychoanalysis per say, but it's not like it's actually not a new tendency that we we want to speak in these terms, especially in politics, which is different from government, right? Like in politics, all of the rhetoric, all of the language that politicians use and that they construct in order to make their case is incredibly personal and incredibly designed to incite emotion. That may remind you of things that happen in in private life, say. But I mean, are we getting a divorce? Like, we can't get a divorce. The Democrats or Republicans can't get a divorce. Maybe they need to grow up rather rather than split up.Keen: Finally, Lauren, I think your latest collection of essays is, No Judgment, I'm being critical...one of your strengths as a writer, thinker, or broadcaster, is your distance. I saw you had two interviews recently, one with GQ that says you don't take your work too seriously and then one with Vanity Fair, which suggests you care a lot. I wonder, and that's probably true of most of us, that we both hopefully don't take ourselves too seriously, but we also, in our own way, care a lot. Is this something that we should care about? I mean, so much hysteria. You noted earlier, every election is the most important election in American history. 2028 will no doubt be the same. You write without judgment, I think, that the piece also is written, in a sense, without judgment. But are you concerned with America? I mean, is this something to really worry about, or is it just one more scene and in the surreal history of the United States of America?Oyler: Well, I think, of course, it's something to care about. The idea I don't really care about things is obviously not totally true. But I think you can't care about the horse race aspect of of politics and you can't...the constant catastrophizing in the media hasn't worked. It's not accurate and it doesn't work. But of course it would be...I would prefer Donald Trump not win. Like, that will have many effects on even the country where I live, which is Germany. But to that point, I don't live in the United States and I don't live in the United States kind of for political reasons. And, of course, it shouldn't be a horrible catastrophe there the way that it is. Should care about it? Yeah. I think that if people don't care about it, or especially if young people don't care about it, it is a sense of that nothing that you do really matters, and like throwing stuff at the wall to see if it sticks politically. And that moment where everyone thought that they could do sort of political activism on social media has thankfully gone away. But there's been nothing to replace it to produce the kind of political subject for young people. So, I don't you know, I don't know what to do.Keen: Yeah,  it's interesting. I mean, I want to end this now because you've been very generous with your time. But I think your point, which hasn't really been made before...2024 is the first post-Internet election. Before, everyone was always obsessed with the Internet, always talking about how important it is. And now, you just don't read much about it. It's either it's the electric system, so it's just sort of ingrained into the system, or we've gone beyond the Internet, God knows where. But the Internet doesn't really feature in the discussion anymore.Oyler: No, I think that that's true. And I think that that's good because people are sort of accepting that it's a part of life now. I think the reason we focused on it so much in the previous two decades was because it felt like things were really radically changing. And maybe this sense that I have that we're transitioning into a new era and we don't really know what is the important thing to focus on is because it was so clear, I think, for many people that things were changing in a particular way with social media and social media was having these kind of drastic facts. And some people were in denial about that, and they would say, social media does matter. It's not real. Now, you can't really say that. But I think I noticed just before we got on the call that there was a New Yorker news, a breaking news story that The New Yorker published that that Russia was sort of inserting like kind of really bizarre election interference propaganda that was so bad. And it's not even going to be a big news story, right? Whereas that was such a huge news story in 2016 and 2020. And now we just sort of accept, yes, the foreign governments are going to attempt to use the Internet to interfere in our elections and we will almost certainly do the same. So, to relate this back to your question, should we all care? I think it's good to be realistic about these things, but it's hard to know where to put the emphasis at this point.Keen: Well, Lauren, Lauren Oyler, the author of Revenge--Revenge Plot, Not Revenge Post.Oyler: I thought you were going to say "romantic movie," which is cool.Keen: You've given me the title of this piece. 2024 is the first post-Internet election. I think that's very profound of you. Thank you so much, Lauren. And I hope I hope you're happy, because I think you and I probably agree on the kind of outcome of the election. But it's not the end of the plot, the revenge plot, whatever other kind of plot you want. We have to get you back on the show, Lauren, once the fog has cleared and we have a better idea of America post-2024. Thank you so much. And keep well and safe in Berlin. Really, I really appreciate it.Oyler: Thanks. Have a good night. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

In Episode Seventeen, DDSWTNP briefly discuss new Nobel Laureate Han Kang before digging into “A History of the Writer Alone in a Room,” DeLillo's acceptance speech for an award he did win, the 1999 Jerusalem Prize. In this unpublished, hard-to-find text, DeLillo tells the humbling story of the novelist at frustratingly slow work, “shaped by the vast social reality that rumbles all around him,” in a narrative that conjures scenes that resonate with Libra, Mao II, and other of DeLillo's portraits of the artist (while also raising the question of whether DeLillo has a cat). Novelists Thomas Mann, Philip Roth, and William Gaddis make their way into our analysis of this miniature fiction, and we consider as well the meaning of the Jerusalem Prize, the “nonchalant terror” of everyday life, and the young woman writer the essay at its end envisions taking up this legacy of lonely work. Texts mentioned or cited in this episode: Don DeLillo, “A History of the Writer Alone in a Room,” 1999 Jerusalem Prize For the Freedom of the Individual in Society acceptance address. Jerusalem: Jerusalem International Book Fair, 1999. Reprinted in German translation (“Der Narr in seinem Zimmer”) in Die Zeit (March 29, 2001). See also: https://collections.library.yale.edu/catalog?op=AND&sort=score+desc%2C+pub_date_si+desc%2C+title_si+asc&search_field=advanced&all_fields_advanced=&child_oids_ssim=17371596&commit=SEARCH ---. “On William Gaddis.” Conjunctions (Issue 41, Fall 2003). https://web.archive.org/web/20031123133017/http://www.conjunctions.com/archives/c41-dd.htm[Incorrectly placed in Bookforum in the episode.] ---. “The Artist Naked in a Cage.” The New Yorker, May 26, 1997. “Don DeLillo: The Word, the Image, the Gun.” Dir. Kim Evans. BBC Documentary, September 27, 1991. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4029096/ and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DTePKA1wgc&t=63s William Gaddis, The Recognitions. Harcourt Brace & Co., 1955.

In Episode Sixteen: “DeLillo's Sentences,” DDSWTNP take a brief break from analyzing full novels to do some very close reading of single sentences from across DeLillo's career. Style and craft, sound and rhythm, and what makes DeLillo (as one critic puts it) a poet writing prose—these are subjects we consider as we look closely at the lines noted below and try to figure out what DeLillo means when he says in 1997, “At some point you begin to write sentences and paragraphs that don't sound like other writers'.” This episode is a deep dive into DeLillo's language but also a pretty good introduction for those just starting to read him. #donutmaker #thehemingwayand DeLillo lines analyzed in this episode: “Much of the appeal of sport derives from its dependence on elegant gibberish. And of course it remains the author's permanent duty to unbox the lexicon for all eyes to see—a cryptic ticking mechanism in search of a revolution.” End Zone (113) “New York seemed older than the cities of Europe, a sadistic gift of the sixteenth century, ever on the verge of plague.” Great Jones Street (3) “Around the great stadium the tenement barrens stretch, miles of delirium, men sitting in tipped-back chairs against the walls of hollow buildings, sofas burning in the lots, and there is a sense these chanting thousands have, wincing in the sun, that the future is pressing in, collapsing toward them, that they are everywhere surrounded by signs of the fated landscape and human struggle of the Last Days, and here in the middle of their columned body, lank-haired and up-close, stands Karen Janney, holding a cluster of starry jasmine and thinking of the bloodstorm to come.” Mao II (7) “The last sentence was, ‘In future years, of course, men and women, in cubicles, wearing headphones, will be listening to secret tapes of the administration's crimes while others study electronic records on computer screens and still others look at salvaged videotapes of caged men being subjected to severe physical pain and finally others, still others, behind closed doors, ask pointed questions of flesh-and-blood individuals.” Point Omega (33) Other texts cited in this episode: “Tom LeClair.” Interview by Andrew Mitchell Davenport. Full Stop, May 19, 2015. https://www.full-stop.net/2015/05/19/interviews/andrew-mitchell-davenport/tom-leclair/ “‘Writing as a Deeper Form of Concentration': An Interview with Don DeLillo.” Interview by Maria Moss. Conversations with Don DeLillo. Ed. Thomas DePietro. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2005. 155-68. “Exile on Main Street: Don DeLillo's Undisclosed Underworld.” Interview by David Remnick. Conversations with Don DeLillo. 131-44.

In Episode Fifteen, DDSWTNP take on The Names, a Greece-based story of a strange “abecedarian” murder cult, a novel regarded by DeLillo as his turn toward more “serious” writing and placed at or near the top of many a reader's list of favorites. We discuss The Names as an examination of the “Depravities” and guilt of being an American in the complex late-1970s world of corporations, risk analysis, bank loans, and intelligence covers that narrator James Axton navigates, and we ask why The Names puts this geopolitical tumult (including the 1979 Iranian Revolution) in the context of ancient languages, ritual sacrifice, and a dissolving marriage and family life for James. Language-obsessed Owen Brademas (the archeologist and “epigraphist” who is drawn relentlessly to the fascinating cult) and filmmaker Frank Volterra (perhaps a sly satire of a certain American auteur?) figure in this story of religion, aesthetics, and the enduring appeal of violence, but we turn at the end of this episode to the nine-year-old author Tap, Axton's son, whose misspelled, highly spirited tale of the spirit to which his tongue might “yeeld” lets DeLillo showcase all the ways to use the alphabet to salutary and generative ends. #getwet #themindslittleinfinite We also announce the winner of our Amazons raffle and say thanks to all who have supported and continue to support us at buymeacoffee.com/delillopodcast. Texts mentioned and discussed in this episode: Burn, Stephen J. “‘A Paradigm for the Life of Consciousness': The Pale King.” David Foster Wallace and “The Long Thing”: New Essays on the Novels, ed. Marshall Boswell. New York: Bloomsbury, 2014. 149-168.  “Don DeLillo: The Art of Fiction CXXXV,” Interview with Adam Begley, The Paris Review 128 (1993): 274-306. “A Talk with Don DeLillo,” Interview with Robert Harris, in Thomas DePietro, ed., Conversations with Don DeLillo, University of Mississippi Press, 2005, 16-19. The Godfather (1972) and Apocalypse Now (1979), dir. Francis Ford Coppola. (We have the dates on both films slightly wrong in the episode.) Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse (1991), dir. George Hickenlooper and Fax Bahr Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer. Grove Press, 2015.

Join Monica and I as we discuss the classic, White Noise. The book describes an academic year in the life of its narrator, Jack Gladney. It's a strange and funny book about death. Questions and comments may be sent to broadsbookandbooze@gmail.com Theme music by Dee Yan-Kay

In Episode Fourteen, DDSWTNP turn our attention for the first time to DeLillo's drama – and to a largely unknown work by DeLillo as playwright, a 1966 radio play and disturbing take on U.S. race relations titled Mother. We cover the circumstances of the play's original broadcasts, its re-emergence in an internet archive recording more than 50 years later, and the strange way in which this story's armchair progressives and Billie Holiday fans, Ralph and Sally, end up making a fetishizing travesty of civil rights and racial integration in the play's brief 27 minutes. Topics include the importance of radio to Mother's themes of media occlusion, moral numbness, and erasure; what DeLillo means by Ralph's “white malady” of transparency and how it reworks images from another Ralph's Invisible Man; and what this play has to do with contemporaneous issues like interracial marriage in Loving v. Virginia. We talk extensively as well about how Mother presages parts of the early novels, from jazz love in Americana to Taft in End Zone and Azarian in Great Jones Street. Before (and after) listening to our analysis, take in this troubling 27-minute play at https://archive.org/details/pra-BB3830.01 Our raffle for a hardcover Amazons has been extended to August 1 – donate and enter to win at https://buymeacoffee.com/delillopodcast Texts mentioned and discussed in this episode: James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time. Dial Press, 1963. Samuel Beckett, Endgame. 1957. Don DeLillo, The Mystery at the Middle of Ordinary Life. 2000.https://muse.jhu.edu/article/30660/pdf Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man. Random House, 1952. “The writer is driven by his conviction that some truths aren't arrived at so easily, that life is still full of mystery, that it might be better for you, Dear Reader, if you went back to the Living section of your newspaper because this is the dying section and you don't really want to be here.” (Thomas LeClair, “An Interview with Don DeLillo,” Contemporary Literature 23.1 (1982): 19-31) Eugene Ionesco, Rhinoceros. 1959. Mark Osteen. “Chronology.” In Don DeLillo, Three Novels of the 1980s. Library of America, 2022. Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit. 1944.

We were joined by Kevin Kautzman and Brad Kelly from the Art of Darkness podcast for this episode! We talked about Point Omega, by Don DeLillo, a short, mysterious novel published in 2010. If you haven't listened to Art of Darkness, we highly, highly recommend you do.VERY IMPORTANT INFORMATIONhttps://artofdarkpod.com/If you ever cared about us, you'll send Art of Darkness your money: https://www.patreon.com/artofdarkpodJack has published a novel!Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Tower-Jack-BC-ebook/dp/B0CM5P9N9M/ref=monarch_sidesheetApple Books: http://books.apple.com/us/book/id6466733671Our Patreon: www.patreon.com/TheBookClubfromHellJack's website: www.jackbc.meJack's Substack: jackbc.substack.comLevi's website: www.levioutloud.comwww.thebookclubfromhell.comJoin our Discord (the best place to interact with us): discord.gg/ZMtDJ9HscrWatch us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0n7r1ZTpsUw5exoYxb4aKA/featuredX: @bookclubhell666Jack on X: @supersquat1Levi on X: @optimismlevi

In which we finish the Underworld Triptych. 

Ask literary critics to name the greatest American novelists of the past 50 years and Don DeLillo's name is sure to be there. DeLillo, now 87, has written more than 18 novels and has won awards ranging from the National Book Award and PEN/Faulkner Award to the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction.   Discussing his career during this episode are Jesse Kavadlo and Aaron DeRosa, both members of the Don DeLillo Society. Kavadlo is also a professor of English and humanities and the director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Maryville University of St. Louis, and DeRosa is also an assistant professor of 20th and 21st century American literature at California State Polytechnic University.  Learn more about Don DeLillo here: https://delillosociety.com/  Novelist Spotlight is produced and hosted by Mike Consol, author of “Lolita Firestone: A Supernatural Novel,” “Family Recipes: A Novel About Italian Culture, Catholic Guilt and the Culinary Crime of the Century” and “Hardwood: A Novel About College Basketball and Other Games Young Men Play.” Buy them on any major bookselling site. Write to Mike Consol at novelistspotlight@gmail.com. We hope you will subscribe and share the link with any family, friends or colleagues who might benefit from this program.

In this episode, we navigate the challenging and beautiful middle sections of DeLillo's Underworld. Before that, though, we listen to an excerpt from cohost Patrick Barney's new novel, Gusano. 

In Episode Thirteen, DDSWTNP follow the puck into the corners with Cleo Birdwell, first female NHL player and ostensible author of the farcical, sex-fueled, “intimate” memoir Amazons, the 1980 satire of a “pseudo-profound” America that DeLillo co-wrote with Sue Buck. Amazons is a sports novel with perhaps more interest in “strip Monopoly” than hockey, more investment by Cleo in her Badger Beagles youth softball team than the New York Rangers. We discuss how this odd book came to be, how it was marketed, how DeLillo never fully owned up to it, and its nevertheless surprising place in his career's development, a comedic lark and palate cleanser in which he makes significant moves toward the vision of White Noise. These include a disease called Jumping Frenchman, simulated death in the American home, and the character Murray Jay Siskind, seen here writing about athletes and a deeply corrupt snowmobile industry before becoming the Elvis scholar readers of the later novel know. In an episode with insights for those who have read this rare book and those who haven't, we show that Amazons, least-discussed of DeLillo's works, really should not be that! Support our work and enter the raffle to win a hardcover Amazons: buymeacoffee.com/delillopodcast Discussed in this episode: Gerald Howard, “The Puck Stopped Here” (2008)https://www.bookforum.com/print/1404/revisiting-cleo-birdwell-and-her-national-hockey-league-memoir-1406 David Marchese, “We All Live in Don DeLillo's World. He's Confused By It Too” (2020)https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/10/12/magazine/don-delillo-interview.htmlAn excerpt:You know who else shows up in two of your books? Murray Jay Siskind. Both times described as having an “Amish” beard. Murray Jay! Remind me, what book is he in?“White Noise.”And where else?“Amazons.”Oh god. How do you remember that? I don't remember that.I think I just got a scoop. I don't know if you've ever publicly acknowledged that you wrote “Amazons.”I probably did, somewhere or other. [Laughs.] Maybe to an interviewer from Thailand. Susan Sontag, “The Pornographic Imagination” (1967), in Styles of Radical Will (1969). Idries Shah: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idries_Shah Jumping Frenchmen of Maine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumping_Frenchmen_of_Maine

Blamison talk about the 2018 film You Were Never Really Here directed by Lynne Ramsay and starring Joaquin Phoenix as well as the soundtrack by Jonny Greenwood. We dig into why Phoenix is a great actor and whether or not the ending of this movie is actually good. Other topics discussed: the Emerald Triangle, Missing 411, and Delillo's Underworld. Clip from I Think You Should Leave Season 1, Episode 5 --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/flybyfilms/message

The first in a three-parter in which we tackle DeLillo's meganovel, Underworld. In this episode we discuss just about the first third of the novel. And: We crack ourselves up imagining a Werner Herzog baseball documentary.  

In Episode Twelve, DDSWTNP interview Curt Gardner, creator and keeper of “Don DeLillo's America,” a prolific and comprehensive website that for nearly 30 years has been the go-to spot for information about DeLillo, from reviews, appearances, and novel publication histories to news of film adaptations and play performances. We cover Curt's stories of first discovering DeLillo in 1981, what he learned about the writing of Amazons at the Harry Ransom Center, and the letters he's exchanged with the man himself as he's built his site. We had a really fun time trading stories, insights, and interpretive connections with Curt. After listening to this in-depth interview, check out the riches of “Don DeLillo's America” at http://www.perival.com/delillo/delillo.html Support our work: https://buymeacoffee.com/delillopodcast Mentioned and discussed in this episode: Ant Farm, “The Eternal Frame” (1975):https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mg1FCjvZ_jA DeLillo, Don. “Notes Toward a Definitive Meditation (By Someone Else) on the Novel ‘Americana.'” Epoch 21.3 (Spring 1972): 327-29. ---. “The Sightings.” Weekend Magazine (Toronto) 4 August 1979: 26-30.  ---. “Total Loss Weekend.” Sports Illustrated Nov. 27, 1972.https://web.archive.org/web/20090210115257/http://vault.sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1086811/index.htm “Is cyberspace a thing within the world or is it the other way around? Which contains the other, and how can you tell for sure?” (Underworld) Game 6: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0425055/ LeClair, Thomas. “Missing Writers.” Horizon Oct. 1981: 48-52. 

Often hailed as the quintessential exemplum of Reagan-era postmodernism, Don DeLillo's eighth novel, White Noise (1985), is part academic satire, part media excoriation, and part exploration of the "simulacrum" or simulated feel of everyday life. With its absurdist asides on the iconicity of both Elvis and Hitler, the unrelenting stress of consumer choices (the supermarket is the site of modern neuroses), and the pharmacopic management of anxiety, the novel can sometimes feel a little smirky, a little too self-consciously zany, in its treatment of 1980s' suburban life. But readers interested in what DeLillo has to say about the emotional connections between husbands and wives and fathers and children will find a deeper, more somber effort to de-clutter the static of misinformation systems and chemical controls, whether in the blood or in the air, to forge organic bonds. To call White Noise the Babbitt of the "Greed is Good" era is no slight---DeLillo may have written better and more important books (including Libra, his treatment of the conspiracy theories surrounding the Kennedy assassination) but this is the novel that best captures the weird unease of the second-to-last decade of the twentieth century.    

The pals ditch Dave to talk about Noah Baumbach's 2022 Netflix adaptation of DeLillo's novel.

The spiders consider the novella Pafko at the Wall, the first fifty pages of Don DeLillo's Underworld. Does its careful examination of its period kitsch reveal a deeper thematic weight? I mean, probably.

Episodes Ten and Eleven: Running Dog (1 and 2) unpack DeLillo's frightening post-Vietnam War vision of a nation marked by pornographic personhood, corrupt politics, and an openness to fascistic fantasy, all centered on the quest for a rumored film of an orgy in Hitler's crumbling Berlin bunker. Pornographers and their well-armed henchmen, obsessive collectors of erotic art, and military men driven by profit saturate this narrative of New York and the Texas desert, while attempts to expose and subvert their cons by a journalist and a strangely spiritual intelligence agent reveal that all who resist these forces may end up mere lackeys and running dogs. DDSWTNP also draw clear links to U.S. politics in 2024, with orange make-up on a senator and a satire-proof dictator who dons the look of a clownish entertainer turning Running Dog, read now, into another of DeLillo's uncanny prophecies of an image-mad American culture's very grim potentials. #imperialistlackeys #thegreatdictator #hitlerhumanized #acourseindying In this episode we also announce your chance to support our podcasting work and contribute to our trip this year to DeLillo's huge archive at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas! If you enjoy this podcast we hope you'll support us at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/delillopodcast Texts and sites referred to in this episode: Mark Binelli, “Intensity of a Plot” (interview with Don DeLillo), Guernica, July 17, 2007. https://www.guernicamag.com/intensity_of_a_plot/ Don DeLillo, “Silhouette City: Hitler, Manson, and the Millennium.” Dimensions 4:3 (1989: 29-34. Rpt. In Mark Osteen, ed., White Noise: Text and Criticism (Penguin Books, 1998), 344-352. “Don DeLillo's America – A Don DeLillo Site”: http://perival.com/delillo/delillo.html Vince Passaro, “Dangerous Don DeLillo.” New York Times Magazine, May 19, 1991. https://www.nytimes.com/1991/05/19/magazine/dangerous-don-delillo.html

Episodes Ten and Eleven: Running Dog (1 and 2) unpack DeLillo's frightening post-Vietnam War vision of a nation marked by pornographic personhood, corrupt politics, and an openness to fascistic fantasy, all centered on the quest for a rumored film of an orgy in Hitler's crumbling Berlin bunker. Pornographers and their well-armed henchmen, obsessive collectors of erotic art, and military men driven by profit saturate this narrative of New York and the Texas desert, while attempts to expose and subvert their cons by a journalist and a strangely spiritual intelligence agent reveal that all who resist these forces may end up mere lackeys and running dogs. DDSWTNP also draw clear links to U.S. politics in 2024, with orange make-up on a senator and a satire-proof dictator who dons the look of a clownish entertainer turning Running Dog, read now, into another of DeLillo's uncanny prophecies of an image-mad American culture's very grim potentials. #imperialistlackeys #thegreatdictator #hitlerhumanized #acourseindying In this episode we also announce your chance to support our podcasting work and contribute to our trip this year to DeLillo's huge archive at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas! If you enjoy this podcast we hope you'll support us at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/delillopodcast Texts and sites referred to in this episode: Mark Binelli, “Intensity of a Plot” (interview with Don DeLillo), Guernica, July 17, 2007. https://www.guernicamag.com/intensity_of_a_plot/ Don DeLillo, “Silhouette City: Hitler, Manson, and the Millennium.” Dimensions 4:3 (1989: 29-34. Rpt. In Mark Osteen, ed., White Noise: Text and Criticism (Penguin Books, 1998), 344-352. “Don DeLillo's America – A Don DeLillo Site”: http://perival.com/delillo/delillo.html Vince Passaro, “Dangerous Don DeLillo.” New York Times Magazine, May 19, 1991. https://www.nytimes.com/1991/05/19/magazine/dangerous-don-delillo.html

In Episode Nine: Players, DDSWTNP follow the bored, hollow lives of Pammy and Lyle Wynant as they pursue “the glamour of revolutionary violence” and the hope for pastoral peace, taking them from the World Trade Center and New York Stock Exchange to a Maine island and a Toronto motel room. While at heart DeLillo's first major analysis of the mind of terrorism, Players is a surprisingly personal novel that unravels the form of the political thriller and shows him writing about sex and grim seduction in ways he did nowhere else. Our topics include terrorist intrigue and indoctrination, uncanny prophecies of 9/11, a JFK assassination conspiracy, the troubling immateriality of money, the psychology of suicide, and the pervasive power of fear. #mistersofteevoice #themovieandthemotel #terrorispurification #weknownothingelseabouthimReferences in this episode:Tom LeClair, In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel. U. of Illinois P., 1987.“I was sailing in Maine with two friends, and we put into a small harbor on Mt. Desert Island. And I was sitting on a railroad tie waiting to take a shower, and I had a glimpse of a street maybe fifty yards away and a sense of beautiful old houses and rows of elms and maples and a stillness and wistfulness—the street seemed to carry its own built-in longing. And I felt something, a pause, something opening up before me. It would be a month or two before I started writing the book and two or three years before I came up with the title Americana, but in fact it was all implicit in that moment—a moment in which nothing happened, nothing ostensibly changed, a moment in which I didn't see anything I hadn't seen before. But there was a pause in time, and I knew I had to write about a man who comes to a street like this or lives on a street like this. And whatever roads the novel eventually followed, I believe I maintained the idea of that quiet street if only as counterpoint, as lost innocence.”—“Don DeLillo: The Art of Fiction CXXXV,” Interview with Adam Begley, The Paris Review  128 (1993): 274-306.

In this episode, I speak with the political theorist Patrick Deneen about Don DeLillo's award winning novel, White Noise.  We explore the novel's undercurrents of existential angst in a world of distraction, amnesia, and unfulfilled longings. I hope you enjoy our conversation.

In this episode, I speak with the political theorist Patrick Deneen about Don DeLillo's award winning novel, White Noise.  We explore the novel's undercurrents of existential angst in a world of distraction, amnesia, and unfulfilled longings. I hope you enjoy our conversation. www.sacredandprofanelove.com

In today's flashback, an outtake from Episode 331, my conversation with Atticus Lish. It first aired on November 19, 2014. Lish is the author of the novel The War for Gloria, published in 2022 by Vintage, and the debut novel Preparation for the Next Life, which won the 2015 Pen/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the 2016 Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine. *** Otherppl with Brad Listi is a weekly literary podcast featuring in-depth interviews with today's leading writers. Available where podcasts are available: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, etc. Subscribe to Brad Listi's email newsletter. Support the show on Patreon Merch @otherppl Instagram  TikTok Email the show: letters [at] otherppl [dot] com The podcast is a proud affiliate partner of Bookshop, working to support local, independent bookstores. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Episode Eight, DDSWTNP take in the wide range of DeLillo's corpus through passages chosen and recorded by listeners. Great renditions of DeLillo's many voices abound, from the sinister to the hilarious to the highly lyrical, and we offer our analysis of the language he brings to power, embodiment, and violence. His most popular novels, White Noise and Underworld, are well represented, but so too are some excellent, more obscure picks from Ratner's Star, Libra, The Body Artist, and more. Huge thanks to all those who celebrated DeLillo by reading and submitting a passage! #vegetoid #americansinourschools #uncollectedgarbagedistrict #bodywork #peace  Readers, texts, and page numbers in this episode: Americana: Andrew (36), Dave (134)End Zone: Donna (239)Ratner's Star: Jae (131)The Names: Robert (235), Mike (266)White Noise: Gavin (147), Andy (12), Mike (302), Matt (311)Libra: Matt (393)Underworld: Sam (41), Ben (785), Ursula (826)The Body Artist: Yonina (59)Cosmopolis: Matt (99)Point Omega: Raoul (28)“Human Moments in World War III” (The Angel Esmeralda): George (43)

In Episodes 6 and 7: Ratner's Star (1) and (2), DDSWTNP go spelunking and digging in the myriad caves, holes, and burrows of DeLillo's mind-bending, encyclopedic novel of “serious play,” his exploration of outer space, the sedimented history of Earth, and so much in between. Mathematical, scientific, and theological insights and uncertainties mingle on every page as DeLillo follows Bronx native Billy Twillig, numbers prodigy and pubescent teenager, in his encounters with message-decoders, nonsense-speakers, and slapstick philosophers, human aliens of every stripe. Amidst much laughter and awe at passages inane, profound, and often simultaneously both, Ratner's Star emerges in our analysis as a neglected early metafictional masterpiece, a book that set the stage for more famous mega-narratives of hidden connections like Libra and Underworld. #pantsonfire #boomerang #manmoreadvancedthedeeperwedig #batguanomarket #k.b.i.s.f.b. #mymouthsayshello We also announce the extended deadline for recording your favorite DeLillo passages and having your voice be part of an upcoming DDSWTNP episode! By January 15, 2024, record a contribution at https://www.speakpipe.com/delillopodcast. Happy new year to all! Texts used in the making of these episodes: David Cowart, Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language. U. of Georgia P., 2003 Tom LeClair, In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel. U. of Illinois P., 1988. Mark Osteen, American Magic and Dread: Don DeLillo's Dialogue with Culture. U. of Pennsylvania P., 2000. David L. Pike, Cold War Space and Culture in the 1960s and 1980s: The Bunkered Decades. Oxford UP, 2022. Michael Streit, “Tertium Datur: Making Contact in Don DeLillo's Ratner's Star.” MA Thesis, U. of British Columbia, 2018. https://open.library.ubc.ca/soa/cIRcle/collections/ubctheses/24/items/1.0366140 “Writing is a form of personal freedom.It frees the mass identity we see in the making all around us . . . If serious reading dwindles to near nothingness, it will probably mean that the thing we're talking about when we use the word ‘identity' has reached an end.” –Don DeLillo, Letter to Jonathan Franzen, 1994, cited in Franzen's “Why Bother?” in How To Be Alone: Essays (FSG, 2002)

In Episodes 6 and 7: Ratner's Star (1) and (2), DDSWTNP go spelunking and digging in the myriad caves, holes, and burrows of DeLillo's mind-bending, encyclopedic novel of “serious play,” his exploration of outer space, the sedimented history of Earth, and so much in between. Mathematical, scientific, and theological insights and uncertainties mingle on every page as DeLillo follows Bronx native Billy Twillig, numbers prodigy and pubescent teenager, in his encounters with message-decoders, nonsense-speakers, and slapstick philosophers, human aliens of every stripe. Amidst much laughter and awe at passages inane, profound, and often simultaneously both, Ratner's Star emerges in our analysis as a neglected early metafictional masterpiece, a book that set the stage for more famous mega-narratives of hidden connections like Libra and Underworld. #pantsonfire #boomerang #manmoreadvancedthedeeperwedig #batguanomarket #k.b.i.s.f.b. #mymouthsayshello We also announce the extended deadline for recording your favorite DeLillo passages and having your voice be part of an upcoming DDSWTNP episode! By January 15, 2024, record a contribution at https://www.speakpipe.com/delillopodcast. Happy new year to all! Texts used in the making of these episodes: David Cowart, Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language. U. of Georgia P., 2003 Tom LeClair, In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel. U. of Illinois P., 1988. Mark Osteen, American Magic and Dread: Don DeLillo's Dialogue with Culture. U. of Pennsylvania P., 2000. David L. Pike, Cold War Space and Culture in the 1960s and 1980s: The Bunkered Decades. Oxford UP, 2022. Michael Streit, “Tertium Datur: Making Contact in Don DeLillo's Ratner's Star.” MA Thesis, U. of British Columbia, 2018. https://open.library.ubc.ca/soa/cIRcle/collections/ubctheses/24/items/1.0366140 “Writing is a form of personal freedom.It frees the mass identity we see in the making all around us . . . If serious reading dwindles to near nothingness, it will probably mean that the thing we're talking about when we use the word ‘identity' has reached an end.” –Don DeLillo, Letter to Jonathan Franzen, 1994, cited in Franzen's “Why Bother?” in How To Be Alone: Essays (FSG, 2002)

Happy 87th birthday, Don DeLillo. In Episode 5: The Lives of DeLillo (1), the first in a planned series about biography, DDSWTNP offer long-time and first-time readers alike new avenues into his work by discussing the first 30 years of his life, as he grew from the son of Italian immigrants and student of Jesuit scholars to the writer of his first published stories. This episode's many topics include teenage DeLillo reading the modernist canon in a New York park, his time as “failed ascetic” during college at Fordham, the weight of the Bronx on his earliest fiction, his pivotal copywriting work under advertising guru David Ogilvy, and how the eventual author of Libra reacted on the day JFK was shot. #mythologyofamerica #spaghettiandmeatballs #howtowriteabiography #catholicritual #quittingtowrite #dregsofhiswork We also announce in this episode our call for recorded contributions from our listeners! Be a part of our end-of-2023 tribute to our favorite DeLillo passages by heading to Speakpipe and recording yours, in two minutes or less. Deadline is December 10. Go to https://www.speakpipe.com/delillopodcast Critical texts, stories, and essays referred to in this episode: Don DeLillo, “The River Jordan,” Epoch 10.2 (Winter 1960): 105-120. ---, “Take the ‘A' Train,” Epoch 12.1 (Spring 1962): 9-25. ---, “Spaghetti and Meatballs,” Epoch 14.3 (Spring 1965): 244-250. ---, “Coming Sun. Mon. Tues.,” Kenyon Review 28.3 (June 1966): 391-394. ---, “Baghdad Towers West,” Epoch 17.3 (Spring 1968): 195-217. ---, “A History of the Writer Alone in a Room.” Acceptance speech for the Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society, 1999. DeRosa, Aaron, “Don DeLillo, Madison Avenue, and the Aesthetics of Postwar Fiction,” Contemporary Literature 59.1 (Spring 2018): 50-80. Veggian, Henry. Understanding Don DeLillo. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2014. Interviews with DeLillo referred to in this episode: Tom LeClair (1979) and Anne Arensberg (1988):Collected in Thomas DePietro, ed., Conversations with Don DeLillo, University Press of Mississippi, 2005. Vince Passaro (1991):https://www.nytimes.com/1991/05/19/magazine/dangerous-don-delillo.html Gordon Burn (1991):“Wired Up and Whacked Out,” The Sunday Times (London), August 25, 1991 (magazine): 6-39. Adam Begley (1993): https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1887/the-art-of-fiction-no-135-don-delillo Mark Binelli (2007): https://www.guernicamag.com/intensity_of_a_plot/ PEN (2010): https://pen.org/an-interview-with-don-delillo/ Robert McCrum (2010):https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/aug/08/don-delillo-mccrum-interview Finally, a great source for interview excerpts and so many other things DeLillo:Don DeLillo's America: http://perival.com/delillo/delillo.html

The pals all read Don DeLillo's 1985 novel, White Noise. Should it be enshrined int he canon or blasted into the sea by cannon?

In Episode 4: Great Jones Street, DDSWTNP listen in on a rock icon in retreat on the Lower East Side, Bucky Wunderlick, who leaves his fame and music career behind as other characters descend into terrorism and fascism in pursuit of a drug said to wipe out language itself. Will Bucky “return with a new language,” fall prey to a violent hippie commune that seems to evoke the Weather Underground, or engage some other “terminal fantasy”? Subjects include the aesthetics of poetry, silence, and guttural sounds; the contradictory American quest for “revolutionary solitude”; and what a “counter-archeology” of 1970s New York has to offer. #dogboys #preemptingthemarket #beastislooseleastisbest #diamondstylus #pulseredactor #yapplesyapplesyapples #doubledfeat Texts referred to in this episode: Definition of “nonce” words: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonce_word One rendering of Hugo Ball's Dadaist poem “Gadji Beri Bimba”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aiKHSeDlU1U John Cage on visiting an anechoic chamber in “Indeterminacy”: https://www.lcdf.org/indeterminacy/s/6 DeLillo reads from a CIA memo on torture (“here several lines are redacted”) at the 2009 PEN event “Reckoning With Torture”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZFf6NYTkrM&t=26s DeLillo and Greil Marcus discuss Bob Dylan and Great Jones Street at the 2005 Telluride Film Festival: https://greilmarcus.net/2014/10/17/greil-marcus-and-don-delillo-discuss-bob-dylan-and-bucky-wunderlick-2005/ Rainer Maria Rilke, “Ninth Duino Elegy”: https://web.ics.purdue.edu/~felluga/eng241/rilke.html William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming”: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-coming

In this special episode timed to the 2023 Nobel Prize announcement, DDSWTNP do a brief history and theorization of the Nobel, talk about DeLillo as a global author, and read in detail his astonishing, Kafka-inspired 1997 speech in support of a Chinese dissident writer, “The Artist Naked in a Cage.” #hungerartists #communalmakebelieve #bitingtheswede Texts referred to in this episode: Don DeLillo, “The Artist Naked in a Cage.” May 26, 1997. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1997/05/26/the-artist-naked-in-a-cage Cornelius Collins, “The World: DeLillo Abroad.” Don DeLillo in Context, ed. Jesse Kavadlo. Cambridge University Press, 2022. 39-46. James F. English, The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value. Harvard University Press, 2005. https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674030435

In Episode 2: End Zone, DDSWTNP do not so much tackle as infringe upon DeLillo's 1972 novel of “footbawl,” nuclear wargames, and jargon-addled, surprisingly human characters in wasted desert spaces. Topics include race and sports in American culture, football's dependence on the “word signal,” Rilke's Ninth Duino Elegy, and some alternate titles for the novel from DeLillo's archive. #getfetal #hokethatbickie #theuntellable #lowlyformofamericansainthood Texts referred to in this episode: Don DeLillo, “An Interview with Don DeLillo” by Thomas LeClair. Conversations with Don DeLillo, ed. Thomas DePietro. University Press of Mississippi, 2005. 3-15. Rainer Maria Rilke, “The Ninth Elegy” (Duino Elegies): https://web.ics.purdue.edu/~felluga/eng241/rilke.html “There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates” (Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms).

In Episode 1: Americana, DDSWTNP takes on DeLillo's ravishing first novel, published in 1971 and the herald of a remarkable career to come. We discuss beguiling and beautifully sarcastic David Bell's nihilistic road trip west, his insights into advertising and art, and his quest to make a film about his past and his country that risks “being crushed by darkness spreading from the edges of the screen.” #countingthehouse #godsavegod

durée : 00:59:03 - Entendez-vous l'éco ? - par : Tiphaine de Rocquigny - La critique de l'économie dans l'œuvre de Don DeLillo interroge sa toute puissance dans le destin des individus et sa place dans l'Histoire. Don DeLillo rend-il l'économie, et plus spécifiquement la finance, responsable des maux qui frappent l'Amérique ? - invités : Florian Tréguer Maître de conférences en littérature américaine à l'Université Rennes 2; Pierre Arnaud Maître de conférences en civilisation américaine à l'université Paris Ouest Nanterre la Défense, spécialiste des TIC et de l'économie américaine dans ses dimensions sociales et culturelles

Lee Klein https://www.litfunforever.com/about/ @leeklein0 twitter @lee.klein_ Instagram Buy Chotic Good here: @saggingmeniscus https://www.saggingmeniscus.com/catalog/chaotic_good/ Gateway Books Peter Pan. Where the Wild Things Are. The Big Book of Jokes and RiddlesBlack Stallion series. D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths. Gary Gygax (D&D)  Judy Blume's ForeverNarnia/LOTRs (competitively read)Sherlock HolmesThe Bounty Trilogy (Mutiny on the Bounty)Count of Monte Cristo  Gatsby, Prufrock, The WastelandBorges (in Spanish)Crime and Punishment (2x)Narcissus and Goldmund   Steppenwolf, Demian, Siddhartha, Journey to the EastKafka storiesKerouac (Subterraneans, Dharma Bums, Big Sur)One Flew Over the Cuckoo's NestFear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Electric Kool Aid Acid Test, The Doors of Perception, Island Another Roadside Attraction and Still Life with Woodpecker by Tom Robbins Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse Five, Cat's Cradle, Deadeye Dick)The Crying of Lot 49Red-Dirt Marijuana and Other Stories by Terry SouthernThe Beat Reader – Burroughs, Corso, Ginsberg >> Blake  BelovedLight in AugustSee Under: Love (Grossman -> Bruno Schulz)Maus (graphic novels, Raw vols 1 and 2, Richard McGuire, Here)Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog/Adventures in the Skin Trade (Dylan Thomas) The Tin Drum, A Personal Matter, The Box Man, Carver, Steinbeck short novels, Hamsun (Hunger), Cheever stories, Auster, Beckett, Kafka, Handke, Artaud, Barthelme, Maupassant, Chekhov, TC Boyle, Philip Roth, Sontag essays, Ulysses, Moby Dick DFW essays, Mark Leyner, DeLillo, Moody, The Recognitions, George Saunders, Pnin, The Last Samurai, Bernhard, Sebald, Gogol stories, Salinger stories, Geoff Dyer, Philip Pullman (His Dark Materials)    War and Peace, Proust, Musil, Mann, Hamsun Bolano (Between Parentheses) Knausgaard, Rachel Cusk, Houellebecq, Enard, Gracq, Perec, Zweig, Grace Paley, Hrabal, Aira, The Waves   Currently reading Ute Av Verden, Knausgaard (in Norsk)  Reader's Block, Markson Henri Cartier-Bresson interviews Ubik, Philip K. Dick Looking forward to Middlemarch, Trollope The Wolves of Eternity, KOK MJ Nicholls stories  Steinbeck (shorter novels)  The rest of Hrabal in English (four books) Cormac McCarthy (his first four books) BTZ-inspired purchases: Monument Maker (David Keenan), The Salt Line (Shimoni), The Logos (Mark de Silva), Traveler of the Century and How to Travel Without Seeing (Andreas Neuman), The Kindly Ones (Littel), Too Much Life (Lispecter), Kafka Diaries Recently read All of Us Together in the End, Matthew Vollmer Bang Bang Crash, Nic Brown All Dag Solstad in English (Novel 11, Book 18) All Tomas Espedal in English (Love, Tramp) I Served the King of England, Hrabal  The Belan Deck, Matt Bucher Annie Ernaux (Happening, A Man's Place, I Remain in Darkness) Philip Roth (Zuckerman Unbound, Patrimony, The Facts, The Counterlife) The Magus, John Fowles Desert Island Books   The Birds, Tarjei Vesaas (Archipelago)Weight of the World, Handke  A Time to Live and a Time to Die, Erich Maria Remarque Garden, Ashes, Danilo Kis A Balcony in the Forest, Julien GracqA Musical Offering, Luis Sagasti (Charco, Fionn Petch)Atomik Aztex, Sesshu Foster (Grove Press)Amazons, Cleo Birdwell (DeLillo)A Time for Everything, KOK (Archipelago)Joseph and His Brothers, Thomas Mann (John E. Woods translation; Modern Library)  

Don DeLillo (White Noise, Underworld) is a writer's writer's writer. Often called one of the most important novelists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, his themes and style have made him one of the most highly regarded and influential writers of our time. In this episode, Jacke talks to Professor Jesse Kavadlo, the President of the Don DeLillo Society, about the new book he has edited, Don DeLillo in Context, which examines how geography, biography, history, media studies, culture, philosophy, and the writing process provide critical frameworks and ways of reading and understanding DeLillo's prodigious body of work. Help support the show at patreon.com/literature or historyofliterature.com/donate. The History of Literature Podcast is a member of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate Network. Learn more at www.thepodglomerate.com/historyofliterature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

durée : 00:55:00 - Le masque et la plume - par : Jérôme Garcin - Nos critiques ont-ils aimé "À prendre ou à laisser" de Lionel Shriver, "Tsunami" de Marc Dugain, "Reste" d'Adeline Dieudonné, "End Zone" de Don DeLillo, "Le Nageur" de Pierre Assouline ? - réalisé par : Xavier PESTUGGIA