Tag: Don DeLillo

DeLillo’s Great Jones Street Then and Now

Great Jones Street

When I opened up Great Jones Street, the 1973 novel by then barely known Don DeLillo, my first thought was, “This is going to be dated.” Naturally I was wrong.  Suffused with the gritty, absurdist ethos and aesthetics of punk rock combined with a noir-esque approach to dialogue and story development, DeLillo feels ahead of his time, not behind, and in a strange way, almost timeless.  The novel is the story of a rock star named Bucky Wunderlick, who one day walks out of his life as an international phenom and goes to live in a grubby apartment on Great Jones Street⁠1 in the East Village of New York City.  The reasons for this dereliction of duty are vague at first, but it seems to have something to do with fame.

“Fame requires every kind of excess,”  Wunderlick tells us in the opening sentence.  

The book is written in the first person from the point of view of Bucky.  He tells us about his famous life, so famous that when there is no news about him for more than a day or two, fans just make it up.  These inventions are then reported by the media as “rumored to be.”  As a musician, Wunderlick’s role is to alter the minds of his audience, to blast them into another dimension and fill their emptiness with the new thing, whatever it is.  It is always necessary that there be a new thing to give the fans the fresh stimulation they crave.  It becomes obvious after a while that the fans have no means to provide stimulation for themselves.

Wunderlick is in hiding, but not all that successfully.  People continually pay him visits.  His manager, the manager’s message boy, random druggies off the street, Opel the ex-girlfriend (one pictures a young Shelly Duvall).  There’s the writer upstairs, the mythical drug expert, Dr. Pepper, and representatives from the Happy Valley Commune and drug cartel.  A news team even stops in, but Bucky won’t talk to them, as he does with most of his visitors.  He’s not an outgoing guy, which is why it’s actually a good thing that all these people come to call.  Otherwise, the novel would consist of Wunderlick sitting  silently in a chair, Wunderlick staring out the window, Wunderlick talking to himself.  And even with all the visitors, there’s still a fair amount of Wunderlick talking to himself.

This too is ok — Wunderlick is a post-modern character (which means literally that he is “post-Now” if that means anything—he’s in the future, man). And as a man of the future, he is obsessed with nothing except the fervent desire to escape the sick emptiness of the modern world, a world so empty that it needs famous avatars like Wunderlick to give it life and meaning, something the fans cannot generate for themselves, something the fans will pay to get.  As his manager Globke points out, it doesn’t matter what he does as long as he does something — something that can be commodified and sold.

“I believe in death-in-life,” said Hanes.

Everyone in DeLillo’s novel talks like a character in a Raymond Chandler novel, if they were, at the same time, part-time philosophers and marketing genii.  Which, in a way, they are.

“The tour represents a survival all its own, Bucky, and I know you perceive that truth.  They’re waiting out there… It’s America.  The whole big thing. Popcorn and killer drugs.  You can’t just sit here.”  Says Globke. 

Globke is Wunderlick’s manager.  He and Hanes work for Transparanoia, Wunderlick’s rock star holding company.  It exists solely to use up the cash generated by the rock star and his band, making Bucky the owner and chief exploitee.  The corporation needs one thing above all else — cash flow.  Why?  So it can keep on doing whatever it’s doing, even if that mission is unknown even to its owner.  Only Globke knows all.  Never mind that modernity is nothing but darkness cloaked in glitz and banality.  It sells, or it can sell, and that’s all that matters.

As types, DeLillo’s characters exist to sketch an outline and convey information that our hero and the reader need to know.  Our hero is a philosopher.  He thinks about things. Oddly enough, most of his many visitors are also philosophers — his ex-girlfriend, the Transparanoia lackey, the freelance writer upstairs.  They can render advice, tell him how the world works, warn him of consequences.

Speaking of the world, it is not a pretty one, the world of Great Jones Street.  The apartment is kept in the condition of a junkie’s flop, although our hero does no drugs. Nothing works except the telephone; there’s no coffee, no food, only a grim view out the window, a bubble chair, and a bed.  That’s why it almost makes sense that he is chosen by the shadowy drug people who meander through this novel as the perfect person to leave their brick of experimental drugs with. 

If we were comparing: the novel is a satire but not like Candide, a philosophical novel but not like Dostoevsky, a noir private detective novel without the detective.  Our hero is uninterested in anything anyone says to him, and we’re unsure if we should be either, although we are.   

Enveloping the novel like a cold fog,  there’s a gritty sci-fi ambience reminiscent of Bladerunner/Philip K. Dick.  But in the end, it’s really a twisted amalgamation of all these things, and also an excuse to talk about fame and privacy, pop culture and its effect on people, people and their desire to be dictated to by pop culture, creativity and language and their increasing irrelevance, in short, the death of the artist, who does not die but may as well have.

And that is far from all that one could say about Great Jones Street by Don DeLillo.  Read it and it will haunt you in strange ways, like an unsettling dream about real life as played by characters from a Raymond Chandler novel on existential dope.

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1 A street in No-Ho, Manhattan.  The area of 3rd St. between Broadway and the Bowery. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Jones_Street

Photo credit: Beyond My Ken, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Unraveling Ratner’s Star From The Inside Out – quotations and an excerpt

Quotations

“His mind blunted by the cybernating drone in the distance, he leaned toward the console and put his head on his arms just as he’d done so many times first grade during the two-minute rest period every afternoon, nicks in the wooden desk, sleep pulling, chalk trails in the air.  From a series of three dreams had evolved a life fulfilled in mathematics and philosophy. The dreams occurred within a single night.  The first two concerned the terror of nature not understood and the last of them harbored a poem that pointed a way to the tasks of science. The world was comprehensible, a plane of equations, all knowledge able to be wielded, all nature controllable.”

…

“‘We can discover the truth or falsehood of our own final designs only if we teach ourselves to think as a single planetary mind.  This is the purpose of Field Experiment Number One.’”

…

“‘Consider science itself.  It used to be thought that the work of science would be completed in the very near future. This was, oh, the seventeenth century.  It was just a matter of time before all knowledge was integrated and made available, all the inmost secrets pried open.  This notion persisted for well over two hundred years.  But the thing continues to expand.  It grows and grows…’”

– Don DeLillo, Ratner’s Star, p. 64-65 (Billy and then LoQuadro)

An Excerpt

There are only two characters in the novel Ratner’s Star smarter than Billy and they are both on the far side of the borderland to what we call madness.  There be dragons.  Endor was the last man tasked to solve the alien message.  He fails, and because he failed, he leaves the community of Field Experiment Number One, and moves into a hole of his own creation which he digs by the hour with the hook end of a clothes hanger.  He can tell you about science…

Endor hasn’t completely abandoned his scientific roots, but he has started to butt up against things he doesn’t understand.  And this fucks up his ability to carry on doing what he has always done, which is to do science, to use science to solve problems, explain things, come to conclusions.  The alien transmission evaded his understanding.  There was no math he knew that would unpack it.  And so he went to live in a hole where he ate insect larva and dug himself deeper and ever deeper into the earth.

We will return to Endor but it is worth noting now that he is a thorough-going materialist.  It should also be noted that the primary literary allusion for the name Endor is the biblical Witch of Endor from the Old Testament Book of Samuel.  In the book, the king Saul hires the Witch of Endor to summon the dead prophet Samuel to read his future.  She does and predicts that he and his three sons will all be killed in a battle with the Phillistines.  And so they are, which introduces Philistinism—the quality of having no appreciation or understanding of culture or the arts. Although it’s a cultural reference twice removed, it seems applicable to Endor and the scientific culture that to which he belongs, and indeed , must belong else he loses his very sanity.  What does this say about the scientific view of logic that to admit the existence of anything outside of science is to negate the mind itself, the methodology of reason, the rules of logic, and the ability to engage in rational thinking.  But science is absolutist, a jealous god that will have no other god before it (nor suffer a witch to live).

Another Quote

“‘Mathematics is the only avant-garde remaining in the whole province of art.  It’s pure art, lad.  Art and science.  Art, science, and language.  Art as much as the art we once called art. ‘“

– Don DeLillo, Ratner’s Star, p.85, (Endor)

Use of quotations from DeLillo’s novel Ratner’s Star constitute fair use in this context– the analysis of a work of art.

Writing as Both Noun and Verb

Recently I’ve been trying to figure out ways to increase my writing — the amount I complete, publish, and otherwise bring to fruition; the amount of time I spend doing it.  For some time now, the answer to the first part has been “zilch,” while the second value has hovered just above “very little.”  I spend very little time doing almost no useful (publishable) writing.  So we have that out of the way.

Naturally, this is not the state of affairs I prefer. 

I enjoy writing and once I get started, I can write happily, sometimes for hours.  But the part I steadfastly avoid is getting started.  For some reason, I resist writing, or for that matter, any creative effort, whether it’s what I do naturally (write) or something I do because I need to exercise some different skills (arts and crafts, gardening, cooking).  Is it because I’m not required to be creative that I can’t engage?

Whatever the reason, I find I’m like the cat who can’t decide what to do next. Faced with too many options, the cat will groom.  In a similar position, I plan.

I can plan all day.  I love to plan.  I make lists like it’s nothing.  Think and plan—not do.  When it comes to action, I lose my resolve and fall into what DeLillo calls “drift and lethargy.”  Oh what a relief that even the great DeLillo has problems with procrastination.  But then he has this crazy thing called discipline.

Because it’s relevant and also fun to read, here are a few comments from brilliant and prolific author Don DeLillo on writing and work habits.  He writes:

I work in the morning at a manual typewriter. I do about four hours and then go running. This helps me shake off one world and enter another. Trees, birds, drizzle—it’s a nice kind of interlude. Then I work again, later afternoon, for two or three hours. Back into book time, which is transparent—you don’t know it’s passing. No snack food or coffee. No cigarettes—I stopped smoking a long time ago. The space is clear, the house is quiet. A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it. Looking out the window, reading random entries in the dictionary. To break the spell I look at a photograph of Borges, a great picture sent to me by the Irish writer Colm Tóibín. The face of Borges against a dark background—Borges fierce, blind, his nostrils gaping, his skin stretched taut, his mouth amazingly vivid; his mouth looks painted; he’s like a shaman painted for visions, and the whole face has a kind of steely rapture. I’ve read Borges of course, although not nearly all of it, and I don’t know anything about the way he worked—but the photograph shows us a writer who did not waste time at the window or anywhere else. So I’ve tried to make him my guide out of lethargy and drift, into the otherworld of magic, art, and divination.”

Don DeLillo, from an interview  the Paris Review, 1990s?

How wonderful. I find this statement almost as inspirational as DeLillo finds Borges’ photo.  It’s a “guide out of lethargy and drift.”

Inspired by this snippet of DeLillo, I have begun to read Borges finally, after years of wanting to but never being able to remember his name when I was in a bookstore.  Or pronounce it, for that matter.  His name, the name of this great author, thinker, and student of literature is Jorge Luis Borges.  He writes short pieces, often as short as 2-3 pages, with evocative titles and playfully misleading premises.  People like to talk about how he writes reviews of imaginary books, which he does, but playful as it seems, it’s so much more than just a game.  He’s such a genius at fantasy that after a very short while, the author himself starts to seem fictional too.  But returning to imaginary books—why?

(An answer—suppose a book needs to be written, but no one has written it.  Why go to the trouble of writing this book when you can just take its existence for granted and comment on it yourself? This is Borges.)

I’m reading Borges and like DeLillo, I find Borges’ face haunting, especially his upward gazing eyes on the Grove Press cover of Ficciones.  The silver nitrate-colored oblong that fills most of the front cover portrays Borges in a theater-like space, clearly looking, seeing.  But Borges is blind.  This black and white screen, this tesseract of potential vision, is a cinema of the mind, faceted beyond the limits of imagination.

I’m inspired by Borges, his writing (what little I’ve read), and the man himself, who emanates mystery and, again quoting DeLillo, opens the door “into the otherworld of magic, art, and divination.” How can you not love this?  Eliot would have, T. S. that is, had he read him.  (The two were contemporaries.)  The reader enraptured, the writer enflamed.

Borges says anything is possible in writing, language, and literature. Anything can be created, interrogated, forced to give up secrets. In like manner, Borges sees writing as a tool to approaching life’s knotty questions, all of them really, from “why are people so messed up” to “life, the universe, and everything.”  Borges says that you don’t need thousands of words to do this.  From 5 to 5000, it might be enough.  The goal is simply to answer the questions.

Moving away from my inspirators, who are only peripheral to this narrative, I know there are a lot of things I’d like to sell, but not here babe.  (Every time I turn around, I find I’m shot.)

Why do I mention Malkmus?  What does Pavement have to do with my writing practice?  Oh, I don’t know, maybe the fact that Malkmus read DeLillo, not just the big sexy books like White Noise and Libra, but the quirky, early stuff like Americana, from

which I feel sure Malkmus plucked the line “there’s no coast of Nebraska” on his band’s own tour de force, Brighten the Corners.

Everything connects.

One day recently, after allowing all the fore-written to ramble through my brain for a sufficient amount of time for it to settle comfortably into my subconscious and simmer, I started to get useful directives.   Nothing deep, nothing heavy, man.  Just simple, easy things to do. Here’s one.

1.  Write every day even if only for 30 minutes.  Write every day.  Write for 30 minutes, or longer if you want.  Write for as long as you want but at least for 30 minutes, no matter what you think the outside world wants of you. Write every day.

Here’s another:

2. Publish this writing somewhere, most practically on a blog or other web site.  Your post can be short, very short, indeed.  All that’s necessary is that you say something.

And that’s that.  Do these two things every day.  Do them early and do them with enthusiasm, and you will not go wrong.

Postscript:

Another writer who has inspired me with his description of his work ethic is Ernest Hemingway; chiefly, the bits of avuncular advice  on writing that I’ve been able to glean from his early memoir A Moveable Feast.  There he writes that he likes to write every day, often in a cafe, out of doors, (the Closerie Des Lilas, most frequently).  What makes his approach uniquely useful is the transition from one day to the next.  Specifically, he likes to end his sessions with something juicy to get started with the next day⁠1—a sort of “writer’s cliffhanger,” if you will. And so to that end, the next essay in this series will be about the corruption of the narrative.  Only I know what I’ll say,  but it’ll be good.

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1 “I had learned already never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.” – Ernest Hemingway, “Une Generation Perdue” from A Moveable Feast, p. 26