Don DeLillo

[version]

I haven't. Sounds intriguing, although I didn't like Bartleby.

 

[woops]

DeLillo's said Ratner's Star's one of his favourites and was the most fun to write.

there's no way he didn't have a good laugh writing americana as well, quit his job and wrote this first novel, just adventures all over america,

 

[version]

 

[luka]

let me tell you about not working

 

[luka]

when i worked i would often be the first person to pass out or whip their cock out in front of management and it was exhaustion and alienation

 

[luka]

ever since i quit work i have never been in that situation becasue my vital spirits are not being drained by Satan

 

[luka]

ive been out of order, ive been intoxicated bt ive never vomited and ive never shit my pants

 

[version]

Never seen him tubby and with a beard before,

 

[version]

The "Airborne Toxic Event" from White Noise actually happening in Ohio is very surreal, especially after the film just came out about a month ago.

Derailed train cars in Ohio drained of toxic chemical amid mass evacuation

Nearly 2,000 residents of eastern Ohio remained under evacuation orders on Monday as railroad crews drained and burned off a toxic chemical from five tanker cars of a freight train that derailed in a fiery wreck three days earlier, officials said.

www.reuters.com

 

[luka]

what is falconry and finance version?

 

[luka]

ever since i quit work i have never been in that situation becasue my vital spirits are not being drained by Satan

they are now mate and i feel subhuman, i feel like a clockwork toy its fucked. my eyes feel wrong.

 

[shakahislop]

watched white noise last night and today. read the book when i was about 20. the film is really annoying stylistically, in particular the dialogue (although possibly that's because it's got that pithy, artificial style that is in delilos writing, where no one speaks anything like how normal people speak.

it is good to see the pandemic start to be addressed in film though. the collective ignoring of all of that, collective forgetting, is really striking to me.

 

[version]

there's no way he didn't have a good laugh writing americana as well, quit his job and wrote this first novel, just adventures all over america,

Reading this now.

 

[version]

"The way I always think of DeLillo's work--and he has described almost exactly like this at some point--is that he is a modernist writing about postmodernism, and I think a big part of that is that he clearly is a theory nut who then filters that stuff through a more mystic/Jesuit/modernist lens."

is there a post modernist fiction writer that hasn't either claimed or been described as that exact sentiment? its like a prerequisite for the title.

Looking at this again, I think that person's right, and no, I don't think I've heard anyone make that claim about themselves beyond the Gass example you mentioned.

When I think of 'postmodernism', I think of trickier writers than DeLillo. People who do things like write themselves into their novels, break the fourth wall, give their characters on-the-nose names and make a point of and draw attention to artifice. The only book of his I feel fits that description is White Noise. The others I've read don't have the same sense of him winking at the reader.

 

[entertainment]

He's got a lot of those little cute ideas hasn't he? Those neat little self-contained thoughts. Reading Mao II and I can't decide if I want these or not.

Like this one:

Sometimes a pain feels familiar even as it hits you for the first time. Certain conditions seem to speak out of some collective history of pain. You know the experience from others who have had it. Bill felt joined to the past to some bloodline of intimate and renewable pain.

They're nice enough but they're peppered on so heavily.

 

[version]

He remained an adman.

 

[version]

'Portentous' is probably the term that best describes him. You get the sense he wants every sentence to hit like a last line.

 

[entertainment]

You do feel like you get to know his tricks don't you? The way he carefully destabilizes the meaning of descriptions that get too commonplace.

 

[mixed_biscuits]

Just read The Silence and can't believe how bad it is. How has he managed to conjure up such a cast of aliens, and stud the text with such uninsightful and poorly expressed aphorisms. I get the feeling that this is literature for people who have no literary sense.

 

[IdleRich]

is good to see the pandemic start to be addressed in film though. the collective ignoring of all of that, collective forgetting, is really striking to me.

If I were a filmmaker I really don't think I would address it cos I didn't enjoy that time much. Hopefully the directors we actually do have are not so shallow as me though. When you think about it, it often takes a little while for good films to emerge about any particular event - I think there is a necessary space of time that must pass for digestion and reflection etc