The Onion Magazine cover for April 18, 2008.
This page, as is probably obvious, contains various references to DeLillo that have been uncovered in some likely and some unlikely places. Most recent findings on top.
The Onion Magazine cover for April 18, 2008.
Jeanne Layton in the early 1990s
A number of recent news stories have run on the passing of Anna 'Jeanne' Layton at age 77, a Utah librarian who fought back against the censorship of Don DeLillo's first novel 'Americana' in 1979 and temporarily lost her job for it. From the story:
Layton set Utah abuzz and grabbed national headlines in 1979 when she was fired for refusing to pull the titillating novel Americana from the shelves of the Davis County Library.
She fought the dismissal and eventually won back her job.
The Davis County Commission labeled the book by Don DeLillo "obscene." But Layton argued that library patrons had a right to choose what they read.
"It's not the library's role to determine choices for adults," she told The Salt Lake Tribune in 1990 as she prepared to retire after 30 years. "It's important for the library to serve everyone in the community, not just select groups."
The full story by Christopher Smart from the Salt Lake Tribune, ran on Jan 23, 2008, Jeanne Layton: Librarian who fought Davis County censorship dies at 77.
(Jan 27, 2008)
Here's a real rarity - a DeLillo candid shot! It was taken by the owner of the Gotham Book Mart, Andreas Brown, at Yankee Stadium, showing DeLillo along with Paul Auster and two Gotham employees. Posted on the FineBooks blog back in May 2007.
(Dec 23, 2007)
News has been trickling out about a project to film End Zone. In summer 2007 a story appeared in Time Out London reporting that "Hartnett enters 'End Zone'", actor Josh Hartnett signing up for the project set to start filming in January 2008 in Texas.
The project is headed up by George Ratliff, and this interview from IFP.org gives some background on him. Interesting note: "Just after attending film school at the University of Texas, Ratliff returned to his hometown of Amarillo, Tex., to make Plutonium Circus (1995), an offbeat look at a nuclear-weapons factory and the community it supports." Here's Ratliff writing the script for End Zone:
I was interested in adapting Don DeLillo's End Zone. I had begged for the rights for two years. I sent DeLillo a spec script, which he liked enough to give me an option. That's when I teamed up with David Gilbert to help me write a much better draft. In the end, we had a great script but had a hard time setting it up.
Ratliff makes mention of the End Zone project in another story on his film "Joshua" that ran in the Boston Globe on July 11, 2007, "His fear really is close to home" by Joel Brown.
Having completed a hot genre picture, Ratliff and Gilbert might be expected to consolidate their gains via a similar film with a slightly higher budget and bigger stars.
But no, they're adapting -- gulp -- a Don DeLillo novel, "End Zone."
"This is the DeLillo that people don't know about," Ratliff said. "This is his second novel. It's a very funny football satire, but it's sort of football obsessed with, you know, apocalyptic warfare."
People are always saying how easy it is to film DeLillo, right? Ratliff laughed. "Yeah," he said. "DeLillo is sooo adaptable."
A story in Variety "Hartnett runs to 'End Zone'" on November 8, 2007 seems to confirm that all is set to go on the project. Filming now to commence in February 2008 in New Mexico, and will also star Sam Rockwell.
Enjoy the video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=laqRHrrp3xo
Thanks to Chris for this one.
(Dec. 12, 2006)
In another multimedia item, a story from Dec. 7, 2006 reports that a New York theater company has been awarded a grant that will be used for a DeLillo-related production. The pertinent info:
The Collapsable Giraffe will use its award to allow costume designer Tara Webb to incorporate wireless video and sound devices into her costumes for their upcoming production Pee Pee Maw Ma, inspired by Don DeLillo's novel Great Jones Street.
The story was found on the TheaterMania website, in a story
titled "A.R.T/New York Awards $67,500 in Design Grants
to NYC Theaters". I asked Collapsable Giraffe for more info, and they
report that the current plan is to put the production up in Fall
2007.
(Dec. 12, 2006)
Acey told me she was at a party and she said to a man, What do men really want from women, and he said, Blowjobs, and she said, You can get that from men.
Hitchens mentions WWII, Deep Throat and better dentistry
as primary causes. Read the piece: "As American as Apple Pie".
(June 26, 2006)
A.O. Scott has written an essay on the results that appears May 21, 2006 called "In Search of the Best"
Like "American Pastoral," "Underworld" is a chronologically fractured story drawn by a powerful nostalgic undertow back to the redolent streets of a postwar Eastern city. Baseball and the atom bomb, J. Edgar Hoover and the science of waste disposal are pulled into its vortex, but whereas Updike and Roth work to establish connection and coherence in the face of time's chaos, DeLillo is an artist of diffusion and dispersal, of implication and missing information.
P.S. It's important to understand how this survey was conducted.
Each of the 125 voters got just a single vote - their pick for
single best work of American fiction. Underworld was chosen
by 11 people, White Noise by 3 or 4 (it's unclear) and
Libra got 2 votes. Beloved was chosen by 15 voters,
and various novels by Philip Roth garnered a total of 21 votes,
with American Pastoral getting the most at 7 votes. I think
that the format of this survey was not fully grasped by many pundits
who complained about the lack of diversity.
(May 19, 2006)
The only disappointment was that the patron he really wanted didn't quite come up with the goods. 'When I was at college, I and half the young men I knew wanted to be Don DeLillo,' he says, when I ask which contemporary writers he does read. 'I sent him a copy of the book, hoping he might give me a blurb. I didn't get one, but he sent me a postcard that just said 'Kunkel? Wasn't there a pitcher for the Yankees named Kunkel?' It's displayed prominently in my apartment.'
Kunkel went to Harvard, and is one of the folks responsible
for n + 1.
(Nov. 21, 2005)
It was as though, in some odd quantum stroke, Hemingway died one day and Pynchon was born the next. One literature bends into another. Pynchon has made American writing a broader and stronger force. He found whispers and apparitions at the edge of modern awareness but did not lessen our sense of the physicality of American prose, the shotgun vigor, the street humor, the body fluids, the put-on.
I was writing ads for Sears truck tires when a friend gave me a copy of V. in paperback. I read it and thought, Where did this come from?
The scale of his work, large in geography and unafraid of major subjects, helped us locate our fiction not only in small anonymous corners, human and ever-essential, but out there as well, in the sprawl of high imagination and collective dreams.
(May 26, 2005)
I've rarely read Don DeLillo since the binge years, when I feverishly read and reread every one of his novels, and now, when I do, I find myself stirred but confused. The moment Don DeLillo became in any way fallible to me, I experienced a rupture I'm still traumatized by, one that colors my ability to situate him reasonably in my internal landscape of "contemporary letters" -- he's either as great as I thought he was when I thought he made all other writing look silly or he's a total disaster.
..
By trying to export myself to a place that didn't fully exist, I was asking works of art to bear my expectation that they could be better than life, that they could redeem life. I asked too much of them: I asked them to also be both safer than life and fuller, a better family. That, they couldn't be. At the depths I'd plumb them, so many perfectly sufficient works fo art became thin, anemic. I sucked the juice out of what I loved until I found myself in a desert, sucking rocks for water.
The was especially true of anything that assumed a posture of minimalism or perfectionism, or of chilly, intellectual grandeur. Hence my rage at Stanley Kubrick, Don DeLillo, Jean-Luc Godard, and Talking Heads.
(February 26, 2005)
"Gold Mine Gutted" finds Oberst chasing "Don DeLillo whiskey" with a farewell to the "sorrowful Midwest" as his band whips up a chilly soundtrack that the Cure's Robert Smith could proudly call his own.
(January 29, 2005)
The film is described as follows:
Game 6 / U.S.A. (Director: Michael Hoffman; Screenwriter: Don DeLillo) - Combining real and fictional events and centered around the historic 1986 World Series, this is a day-in-the-life snapshot of a playwright who skips his own opening night to watch the momentous game. World Premiere.
(December 1, 2004)
The news can be found here, at the City of New York Mayor's Office of Film, Theatre and Broadcasting site, in a report dated August 1, 2004. Here is the pertinent paragraph:
Also choosing New York City as a prime location is director Michael Hoffman, who is shooting "Game 6", starring Michael Keaton and Robert Downey, Jr. The film follows a playwright on the day of the legendary game six of the 1986 World Series between the New York Mets and Boston Red Sox, and is scheduled to shoot through August 11.
I imagine it may be a year or so before it is released.
(September 3, 2004)
Barry Sonnenfeld has teamed with Cherry Road Films on Don DeLillo's White Noise, which he will direct and produce, reports Variety.
Stephen Schiff adapted the script for White Noise, winner of the 1985 National Book Award. Sonnenfeld told the trade that casting would begin immediately. He also hopes the project will regain sole claim over its title, which is shared by an upcoming Michael Keaton thriller from Universal Pictures.
The story is a dark comedy in which a professor must contend with a wife who's possibly drug-addled, four kids who are too progressive for anyone's good and a chemical plant that has accidentally released a cloud of potentially lethal gas.
Given the way these things usually go, I wouldn't recommend
holding your breath!
(July 31, 2004)
Singer Rhett Miller (from the Old 97's) name-drops DeLillo on his 2002 solo album, in the song "World Inside the World."
In the Rolling Stone of 8 Aug. 2002, Mim Udovitch's
"Q & A: David Bowie" (p. 30) features the
following exchange.
[DB:] What I'm good at is low-level nagging fear.
[MU:] But of what?
[DB:] My shoes. I mean, they're just not right.
[MU:] Seriously. A fear of what?
[DB:] What did Don DeLillo call it? The hum of anxiety? In one
of his novels, he describes the thing that permeates the city.
But, you know, it's a thing like that.
(thanks to Phil Nel for this one)
Then in the 9 June 2002 New York Times Arts & Leisure
section (p. 30) in an article entitled "Bowie the Entrepreneur,"
Bowie is talking about a song written prior to Sept. 11th:
"I hope that a writer does have these antennae that pick
up on low-level anxiety and all those Don DeLillo resonances within
our culture," he said. "But I don't want to say that
it was in any way trying to suggest that it was going to happen.
It's not like it's something new to me. These are all personal
crises, I'm sure, that I amnifest in a song format and project
into physical situations. You make little stories up about how
you feel. It is as simple as that."
(thanks to Craig Brown)
"It is so much simpler to bury reality than it is to dispose of dreams."
David Bowman's This Must Be the Place: The Adventures of Talking Heads in the 20th Century (New York: HarperCollins, 2001) has this on the dedication page: "This history is for my good friends Brian Breger and Bucky Wunderlick." On the next page, two epigraphs:
Baba Baba Baba
Gadung Gadung Gadunt
Uma childa nobo
Distiptics in wine
Insane today
I was born with all language in my mouth
-- Don DeLillo, Great Jones Streetfa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa
-- David Byrne
"Technology is our fate, our truth," the novelist Don DeLillo writes in the December 2001 issue of Harper's magazine. "We don't have to depend on God or the prophets or other astonishments. The miracle is what we ourselves produce." Mr. DeLillo argues that our technological civilization is what the Islamic fundamentalists hate most. "It brings death to their customs and beliefs."
D'Souza seems to generally agree, and goes on to argue that technology often produces moral gains, for instance the emancipation of women, the extension of human life span, and the abolition of slavery. He doesn't say much about Islamic customs and beliefs.
The Great American Social Novel, which strives to capture the times, to document American history, has been revivified by Don DeLillo's Underworld, a novel of epic social power. Lately, any young American writer of any ambition has been imitating DeLillo - imitating his tentacular ambition, the effort to pin down an entire writhing culture, to be a great analyst of systems, crowds, paranoia, politics; to work on the biggest level possible.
...
For who would dare to be knowledgeable about politics and society now? Is it possible to imagine Don DeLillo today writing his novel Mao II - a novel that proposed the foolish notion that the terrorist now does what the novelist used to do, that is, "alter the inner life of the culture"? Surely, for a while, novelists will be leery of setting themselves up as analysts of society, while society bucks and charges so helplessly. Surely they will tread carefully over their generalisations. It is now very easy to look very dated very fast.
Check out the full story at: http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,6000,563868,00.html
The image came back like lightning: I went out to the hall and pulled the book from the shelves, and there it was, the two towers, dark and enshrouded (by fog, much as they had been by smoke early Tuesday morning); before them, the stark silhouette of the belfry of a nearby Church; and off to the side, a large bird, a gull or large pigeon, making its way toward Tower One.
(See also the writeup on the documentary film Dial H.I.S.T.O.R.Y. below)
Here's a piece from McSweeney's by Neal Pollack entitled "DeLillo in the Outback" which is The Body Artist on Survivor II, I think. It begin's like this:
You sit in the airplane preparing for the adventure of your life. Only you don't know it is your life, and as the plane descends you hear a sound, a piercing of the air, and it is someone barfing. You are amound strangers, sixteen in number, yet they are, also, familiar, a mote of memory in a schism of time.
October 1, 2000, in Gerald Marzorati's article on Radiohead, the following parenthetical comment sneaks in:
(If Don DeLillo's "Underworld" were a rock album, it would sound like
"OK Computer.")
http://www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/20001001mag-radiohead.html
In a September article on Salman Rushdie's first year in New York City, we are told of his meetings with other authors:
HE SAYS HE IS RELIEVED that New York has less of the 'backbiting and incestuous' literary culture of London. He had dinner in April with Thomas Pynchon and discussed baseball. He knew a bit about this, having already gone to both of the city's ballparks. With Don DeLillo he went to a Yankees game. 'I must say, going to the ballgame with Don was one of the great things, because he goes with his mitt. He's up there for every fly ball.' Paul Auster in turn took him to see the Mets, 'because that's his orientation'.
I suspect there have been quite a few more, not that we need
to list them all!
"Authors purchased are said to include A-list biggies Bellow, Updike, Roth, Salinger, Brit bad boy Martin Amis, movie-legit scribe Tom Stoppard, and Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau, as well as lesser-knowns William Gaddis, Walker Percy, Don DeLillo, Laurie Colwin, David Foster Wallace, Lorrie Moore, Robertson Davies, GOP speechwriter Mark Helprin, and porn-lit scribbler Nicholson Baker."
"Maybe our generation has found its Don DeLillo."
The first column appeared on October 17, 1998, the second on October 24, 1998, and a third on October 31, 1998.
Thanks to Sebastien La Rocque for these links.
If reality has been supplanted by the image, then violent acts can be seen as the retrival of a lost authenticity. Johan Grimonprez's gut-wrenching Dial H.I.S.T.O.R.Y. shows us one spasmodic attempt at reality recovery, the airline hijacking, and it throws in a mini-history of the revolutionary impulse as well. Assembled Frankenstein-fashion from exhumed newsreel footage of hijacking scenes, terrorist attacks and their gruesome aftermaths (and with a little "Do the Hustle" for good measure), Grimonprez's pseudo-documentary follows the flight path of skyjacking, concentrating on the glorious double decade of the 60s and 70s when violent assaults were as predictable as lost luggage. The cavalcade of crises is familiar: Tel Aviv, Athens, Tokyo -- each a distant image of some lethal act. The reductive details are often frightening in their simplicity: on one flight hijackers demand birthday cake and champagne for a flight attendant; on another the pilot orders sandwiches for his famished terrorists lest the slaughter begin. Grimonprez culls the writings of novelist Don DeLillo for the intermittent flight announcements; one compelling quote declares that artist have disappeared from the radar screen, having lost the air to terrorists who still have a grip on reality.
The film was made 1997 and is 68 minutes long. Several reviews were quite good.
One segment of my readership is marginal, but beyond that I find it hard to analyze the mail I get and make any conclusions as to what kind of readers I have. Certainly White Noise found a lot of women readers, and I don't think too many women had been reading my books before that. So I really can't generalize. In the past I got a lot of letters from people who seemed slightly unbalanced. This hasn't been happening for the past three or four years. It seems that the eighties have been somewhat more sane than the seventies, based on my own limited experience of measuring letters from readers. I've reached no conclusion about the kind of readers I have based on the mail I get. There are all sorts.
When White Noise was published, it read like an apocalyptic satire. Sure, it was a dazzling virtuosic meditation on death and the terrors of ordinary life, but it was also a darkly comic sendup of a futuristic America, tottering on the brink of extinction. Today the novel's characters -- scholars who specialize in Elvis and cereal boxes, ashram dwellers in Montana, doctors who dispense drugs that promise to alleviate the fear of death -- have grown decidedly more recognizable. Who knows, by 2096 the novel may be read as a grimly naturalistic portrait of millenial America, an America in which people turn to cults and obsessions and conspiracy theories in a desperate effort to lend a sense of order to their lives, an America in which everyone is mesmerized by the 'sealed-off, timeless, self-contained, self-referring' narcotic of television, and 'everything we need that is not food or love is here in the tabloid racks' (178).
Gordon Lish wrote a strange little article entitled "What I know about Don DeLillo and certain other unnamed persons," which unsurprisingly doesn't really tell too much. He ends by saying that "What Don DeLillo is really like is just like the three other literary geniuses I know. Indefatigably nice. Heroically sane. Hugely polite. Inexhaustably responsive. And a model of good citizenship besides." From Saturday Review, Sept 16, 1978.
Lish dedicated his books My Romance and Mourner at the Door to DeLillo. Lish's new book Epigraph (Four Walls Eight Windows, 1996) is also dedicated to DeLillo.
Lish also wrote an afterword to the publication of DeLillo's first play, "The Engineer of Moonlight", in which he attacks those who would call DeLillo's vision bleak. "Where we are and where we are going is where DeLillo is. He is our least nostalgic writer of large importance."
Mao II is dedicated to Gordon Lish. In The Names, an acknowledgement is given to Atticus Lish, who is Gordon's son. DeLillo says he used the childhood writing of Atticus to help create the last chapter of The Names.
Vanity Fair ran a short profile on Lish and DeLillo in the June, 1991 issue. It's called "The Sunshine Boys" by James Wolcott. DeLillo is described as "America's leading literary diagnostician."
A letter from DeLillo to Lish is quoted in the article "The Carver Chronicles" by D.T. Max, published in The New York Times Magazine, August 9, 1998. The article concerns Lish's role as editor for Raymond Carver, and the extent to which he shaped the early stories. DeLillo's letter advises Lish to keep quiet about his influence: "It is too much to absorb. Too complicated. Makes reading the guy's work an ambiguous thing at best."
The DeLillo/Lish connection makes another appearance in Gerald Howard's article I was Gordon Lish's Editor published at slate.com on October 31, 2007. The pertinent bit:
It was Don DeLillo's fault. I was working for W.W. Norton in 1991 when he gave me a call. I'd had the privilege of being his editor on Libra, and we'd stayed friends. Lish had also been Don's editor at Esquire, and DeLillo had dedicated one of his novels to him. After some pleasantries, Don came to the point:
"Gordon Lish is looking for a new publisher."
DeLillo is a 7 compared with Pynchon at 8 and Salinger at 10.
DeLillo is described as being made famous by "the 1985 novel
White Noise, a bible for disenchanted yuppies." Claims
he "frequently uses his fictional characters to dis the whole
celebrity thing."
(This silliness may explain why some smart authors choose to be
"reclusive"!)
"The Image and The Crowd" Creative Camera (April 1993)
The Creative Camera piece consists of a two-page photograph of a television screen tuned to a dead channel--or maybe just a very fuzzy channel--with on-screen information scrolled across the top "CH.01 27-SEPT-9? 22:34:40." Scrolled across the bottom is the following superimposed text: "I keep thinking, without too much supporting evidence, that images have something to do with crowds. An image is a crowd in a way, a smear of impressions. Images tend to draw [people?] together, create mass identity ...". In the very bottom right side of the right-hand page, beneath the quotation, are the words "Don DeLillo."
Thanks to David Thomson for the description.
