Klein on DeLillo

If you follow this blog, then you know that my pandemic reading consists mainly of Roberto Bolano's 2666, feminist memoir from the Soviet gulag, and Paul Theroux's travel narratives, but I recently enjoyed learning that novelist and translator Lee Klein has had literature fun forever with his return to the fiction of Don DeLillo. 

you say DeLillo. . .

#FridayReads Fight for Your Long Day by Alex @Kudera & @AtticusBooks. If you said, #DeLillo wrote this, I wouldn't be surprised/disappointed

— James Tate Hill (@JamesTateHill) September 18, 2015

James Tate Hill's new novel, Academy Gothic, won the Nilsen Prize for a first novel.

Exley, Almond, End Zone, and a 3rd round pick for Frank Gifford and future considerations

On Sunday, fittingly, I read that Frank Gifford passed on, and soon after that I googled to learn that many were commemorating Fred Exley's A Fan's Notes for helping keep the legend of Frank alive. Dylan Stableford's piece for Yahoo News captures many of the tweets that recognize Exley's contribution to Gifford lore, and quite possibly, of course, vice versa.

Earlier this summer I read Steve Almond's Against Football and learned that his favorite football novel was Don DeLillo's End Zone (I briefly evaluated the Almond at Goodreads). It's a very understandable selection, and it's also a shame DeLillo's "big books" often crowd out this early slim volume when it comes to shelf or blog space, but I was also disappointed Almond didn't mention Exley in the back section with DeLillo and other writers he acknowledged. So it was with some relief, even satisfaction, when I did see consideration of Exley in the middle of Almond's book. As you might imagine, I recommend all three books.

Since Gifford's passing, I've also considered how there is somewhat of an analogy between Exley's narrator (fictional Ex)'s relationship to Gifford and "Frade Killed Ellen"'s narrator Alan's relationship to Roger Frade (although Alan is no Alex, and Alex no Alan, not even in their dreams). In case that's not clear, what I mean is that Alan is to Frade as Exley is to Gifford. Anyway, I'd recommend my story too.

I may return to this to edit and add more.

working and older working writers

Over at cnn.com, this American life befits the times, or at least the headlines.

In a way, it reminds me of this, possibly paraphrased, Paul Auster quotation about his father:

"work was the country he lived in, and he was his greatest patriot."

Of course, Auster's quotation implies that his father may have believed in work, or even worshipped it, and in his memoir "Portrait of an Invisible Man" we read about an older father clinging to his work, its habits (he quotes Beckett, too, on habit as "the great deadener"), and what seemed to be his entire life even as his real estate holdings were slowly decaying, depreciating, and disappearing.

And in other news, of other writers, America's greatest comic critic of our "Puritan work ethic," Thomas Pynchon, has another novel coming out. It will be interesting to see if The Bleeding Edge is another late long one, a la Mason & Dixon and Against the Day; more or less standard-novel size, a la Vineland and Inherent Vice; or if Pynchon finally succumbs to the short-novel disease that seems to have afflicted more than one novelist late in his years. Roth and Delillo come to mind first for me, and it's amazing that Pynchon, so late in his career, could actually be approaching those two prolific geniuses when it comes to quantity of published pages of fiction. Probably the biggest bullshit measure of a writer one could come up with it, but slightly interesting nonetheless. . .  Roth and Delillo have so many more titles, but I don't quite see that either of them has a Gravity's Rainbow kind of book. At the same time, it seems strange that Delillo hasn't won more awards although he has won some big ones, and my hunch is he appears on more college syllabi than the other writers mentioned in this post.

In my own reading news, the good tweeters at New Directions and Melville House recommended Mating by Norman Rush for something somewhat Bolano-like, and so far, this National Book Award winner has not disappointed. Sixty pages in, and I feel like I'm reading a great novel. . . comedy, politics, detail, Africa, everything. . .

I'll add some links, italicize here and there, correct the typos, and maybe add an interesting sentence or two at some later moment.

Have a reading weekend.

Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century

I've been reading Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March and have stumbled upon another way to assign myself a D

In this case, it concerns the Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century edition I have, a gold and tannish six by nine with quality paper for pages--you've probably seen these around

Anyway, in the beginning they list the twenty books in the series, and as it turns out, I've read thirteen of them--so that's good for a 65, and you can see where this is headed

Well, which ones you ask? The ones by Delillo, Kafka, Pynchon, Kerouac, Golding, Conrad, Morrison, Proust, Steinbeck, Joyce, Marquez, Ford (as in Ford Maddox), and Cather

And who have I failed to read a particular novel of? Wharton, Bellow (as said, am reading, and perhaps ironic that aside from Delillo or possibly Kafka, I've read more of his work than any other writer on the list), Coetzee, Greene (as in Graham), Rushdie, and Lawrence

If you think "Big Book," you can guess the exact title pretty easily for most of these although the Joyce selection is Portrait of the Artist, not what you were thinking, and, yes, this works in my favor

Overall though, to me, this list seems decidedly more "central to the canon" than some of the other lists I've seen floating around the web, and for the most part, the book chosen is absolutely the right one for each author

Or so says this humble D student, relieved to have passed a literature test

PS--My periods have led several other poignant pieces of punctuation on a work stoppage, and I can't have this held against me!

Arghh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  (says the man reduced to the exclamation point)

PPS--I feel a need to confess that I was assigned William Golding's Lord of the Flies three times from grades 8 to 12, got it as a birthday present, and also had it assigned once in college and am almost sure I've read that [redacted] five times! Or, one less than the total number of Bellow's novels I've read (but to an extent, I cheated by dallying about the shorter ones here)

PPPS--Palmetto bug spotted--a huge [redacted]--no doubt from Kafka, his way of reminding me he never would have been a blogger! Or at least not one who overused his exclamation points!!!

PPPPS--[redacted] you, Kafka! At least I've read a title by all but three on the list (Greene, Coetzee, and Kesey)--possibly that means I'm counting a short story by D H Lawrence, yes, okay, I see what you mean, but I wanted to point out that I've read Alan Paton's Too Late the Phalarope, and if I expire tonight I wouldn't mind that this would be the last novel I ever mentioned

PPPPPS--Please God, don't turn me off now, when I was just getting warmed up! Pretty please!!!

PPPPPPS--Oy I really feel I've jinxed myself now

delillo on bellow

Their names share four letters, split between vowels and consonants, and now Delillo has won a PEN award in the more ashen man's name. For lifetime achievement defined by quantity of good to great novels, could there be a post-war American writer greater than these two? Don't give me Roth and don't tell me Bellow isn't only post-war.

Delillo I've read: Americana, End Zone, Great Jones Street, Ratner's Star, Players, The Names, White Noise, Libra, Mao II, Underworld, and Cosmopolis. (I think that's it.) I've also read Delillo's somewhat famous essay on 9/11 as well as a short story or two.

Bellow I've read: Seize the Day, Herzog, Mr. Sammler's Planet, The Dean's December, Ravelstein, and perhaps a short story or two. A short piece by Bellow I like is his introduction to Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, where, to me, he makes it clear that he does not necessarily see things the same way. I'm not sure that the university is still a place where people with even strongly opposing political views might support each other's work or at least respect its place in print. (Well, I guess these days everyone is too busy with their teaching overloads, publication schedules, and "specializations" to read each other's work. And that would more likely be online, yes, indeed.)

OK. In conclusion, I've read more Delillo than Bellow (and I'm willing to wager that you have too) although Bellow would seem to be a more significant influence in my own literary efforts, if either of these guys is any kind of influence at all. (Well, I guess you can't have an alienated male protagonist or antihero in an American novel without implicitly referencing these two.) I've tried to describe Fight for Your Long Day as a cross between novels by Saul Bellow and Dan Fante, but I'm not sure it would be understood that way, and I doubt many of my readers will have read much by those two anyway. (This does not imply I have "many readers" as of this blogging.) I'd probably be better off comparing it to movies. . . ah, humanity.

As an aside on Italian American novelists, I should note that for me, Don Delillo completely kicks Richard Russo's ass--although Russo is said to be a wonderful person, and Straight Man is fun--and is the undisputed lone heavyweight in the category although Dan and John Fante would be my sentimental favorites on this list and I'm pulling for Dan Fante's buddy Mark SaFranko (who was kind enough to let me know soon after this post that in fact he is not Italian; okay, we'll handle that another time but keep his name under the bright lights of USK) as well as two of the guys Dan Cafaro has signed up for publication at Atticus Books. Maybe we'll Jew-list another day. Oy vey.

(Mark's correction just reminded me of a thought I had on the way to the library. Saul Bellow was born in Quebec.)

UPDATE 03/04/2023: Only this past summer, I read Bellow's Humboldt's Gift, and at some point after I wrote this blog entry, I read The Adventures of Augie March.

don delillo in a downturn

I'm back for more White Noise; I'm sure you know what I mean. I'm teaching Don Delillo during our "Great Recession" and am drawn to passages such as this first paragraph of chapter 4:

When times are bad, people feel compelled to overeat. Blacksmith is full of obese adults and children, baggy-pantsed, short-legged, waddling. They struggle to emerge from compact cars; they don sweatsuits and run in families across the landscape; they walk down the street with food in their faces; they eat in stores, cars, parking lots, on bus lines and movie lines, under the stately trees.

(I apologize on behalf of literary Don if you see two places where you might like to add an "and.")

I will confess to my own overeating these days although so far I believe I've avoided "waddling" and am still masking the pounds I could "afford" to lose with shirts tucked in and pants cut close to the thigh and calf. It is funny that the novel is published in the middle of the go-go Reagan 1980s, a time period most of my students have been taught was a very, very good one; if you tell them in fact that not all boats were always lifted during the economic expanse between Carter and Bush I, they may look at you with surprise. I must say that I was surprised to read that unemployment in 1982 (you are welcome to attribute this all to either Reagan or Carter if this is part of your worldview, but other interpretations are also "allowed" here), before Reagan's growth years, was higher than it is now or then it was when I finished undergrad in 1991 (the Bush I/Clinton "tough times"). Although I like Delillo's writing, I suspect our American expansion of the waistline has gone up slowly and steadily and in fact has not carressed the sign-curve waves of our economic ups and downs. It could be that there is a parallel line here one could draw beside the everincreasing numbers of our uninsured. Yes, it is food for thought.

In 2009, during our own troubles but within the context of Delillo's novel, I can't help but wonder if we have greater unemployment lines for Professors of Elvis or Impersonators of Elvis. I'm guessing the bar mitzvah and birthday business catering to celebrity impersonators has pretty much dried up or been replaced by parties with videogame or other high-tech themes. The Professors of Elvis--in other words, recent PhDs in American Studies, Civilization, or "Environments" (as Delillo calls the department at College-on- the-Hill)--can probably at the very least drum up some adjunct work teaching freshman English at a community college and hopefully do much better.

One of my favorite supervisors in academia is in fact a Professor of Magic (PhD in Performance Studies), and in general, solid advanced education in any discipline requiring extensive reading and writing is most likely enough to hold down some sort of employment in these troubled times. There is evidence of a proliferation of online and offline academic journals as well as a small army of small presses and POD shops, so I imagine it is easier than ever before to get one's contribution to the King published. Of course, even more than finding readers for one's words, acquiring the PhD is the hard part, and it could be the case that the hurdles of Heideggar and Habermas are only some of the obstacles in the way of one's diploma in advanced Elvis. I would imagine Nietzsche, Foucault, and Barthes on the deaths of various "gods" and "authors" could also be relevant to such critical work "in the field."

Even within the world of academic Elvis, I imagine some stiff competition, and this New York Times article reminds me that any one of us with employment right now has a lot to be grateful for.
A subtext within the article seems to be that we are somewhat lucky if we felt we could never afford one of the new, expansive homes (and mortgages) offered so freely in the early aughts; several of the seniors reported on are finding it is housing payments that are keeping them looking for work despite social security and even small pensions.

Last, a student told me that there is a television show in which one of the characters plays the literary agent of Don Delillo. This seems even more impressive (or alarming?) than the citing of his name as a reference point for literary success in Roberto Bolano's The Savage Detectives.

For further reading in the Don, Libra and Underworld are longer and more recent, but I highly recommend his early novels, the first three in fact: Americana, End Zone, and Great Jones Street.