#don delilo

[priscaren]

The last paragraph of Don DeLilo’s White Noise:

The supermarket shelves have been rearranged. It happened one day without warning. There is agitation and panic in the aisles, dismay in the faces of older shoppers. They walk in a fragmented trance, stop and go, clusters of well-dressed figures frozen in the aisles, trying to figure out the pattern, discern the underlying logic, trying to remember where they'd seen the Cream of Wheat. They see no reason for it, find no sense in it. The scouring pads are with the hand soap now, the condiments are scattered. The older the man or woman, the more carefully dressed and groomed. Men in Sansabelt slacks and bright knit shirts. Women with a powdered and fussy look, a self-conscious air, prepared for some anxious event. They turn into the wrong aisle, peer along the shelves, sometimes stop abruptly, causing other carts to run into them. Only the generic food is where it was, white packages plainly labeled. The men consult lists, the women do not. There is a sense of wandering now, an aimless and haunted mood, sweet-tempered people taken to the edge. They scrutinize the small print on packages, wary of a second level of betrayal. The men scan for stamped dates, the women for ingredients. Many have trouble making out the words. Smeared print, ghost images. In the altered shelves, the ambient roar, in the plain and heartless fact of their decline, they try to work their way through confusion. But in the end it doesn't matter what they see or think they see. The terminals are equipped with holographic scanners, which decode the binary secret of every item, infallibly. This is the language of waves and radiation, or how the dead speak to the living. And this is where we wait together, regardless of age, our carts stocked with brightly colored goods. A slowly moving line, satisfying, giving us time to glance at the tabloids in the racks. Everything we need that is not food or love is here in the tabloid racks. The tales of the supernatural and the extraterrestrial. The miracle vitamins, the cures for cancer, the remedies for obesity. The cults of the famous and the dead.

Noah Baumbach: I know *exactly* how to adapt this 🎶 💃🕺

[sex-ray-spex]

I don’t trust anybody’s nostalgia but my own

Nostalgia is a product of dissatisfaction and rage. It´s a settling of grievances between the present and the past. The more powerful the nostalgia, the closer you come to violence.  -Don DeLilo, White Noise

[beemovieerotica]

dear people with OCD: the next time you have spiraling & intrusive thoughts, what-ifs, or catastrophizing scenarios, I am sending a cardigan-wearing 46-year old NYU professor directly into your brain and he says "Aaaaand scene!!!" and he claps his hands slowly. and he says "Wow. Wow. Powerful stuff. Evocative imagery. A little bit post-modern, a little bit hysterical realism in the vein of Don Delilo but let's pause right here." and you will recognize your thoughts as a perplexing avant-garde film shown to an audience of 15 liberal arts students who are now trying to get a good grade and sleep with their professor.

[crethida]

What is this Jack Gladney ass lecture I’m in?

[everywriterneedsfanart]

The body will hold on Frank Turner, The Fisher King Blues // Don DeLilo, White Noise // Maurice Pirenne, Evening // The Crane Wives, How to Rest // Richard Siken // StarParkDesigns // Birdtalker, Heavy // Dan Clandenin, The Voice of God

[shakespearesdaughters]

Do you have book recommendations?

I will always recommend Donna Tartt

The rules of attraction by Bret Easton Ellis

The Idiot by Elif Bautman

Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

The Patrick Melrose novels by Edward St Aubyn

White Noise by Don DeLilo

Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsey

The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz

Severance by Ling Ma

my year of rest and relaxation by ottessa moshfeg

~ to name a few ~

[thenervebible]

books i've (re-)read recently (cuz i've finished everything on my shelves)

asylum piece by anna kavan. finished reading on the tram & had the urge to throw it down the carriage. didnt want it to end. it never does

cities of the red night by bourroughs. still a bit of a head fuck but went down a treat

the body artist by don delilo. she's just like me

the waves by virginia woolf. always knocks the breath right out of me

symbolic exchange & death by Jean baudrillard. dense & draining but somewhat delightful.

harolds end by jt leroy.. not a re-read. friend gifted it to me for my birthday last year & it was one of the only books i had left waiting to be cracked open. downed it in one gulp. stunning little story

[fantasticalleigh]

LEIGH'S RIDICULOUSLY BIG TBR/TBW LISTS

like i mentioned before i am too busy/hesitant to actually consume a lot of new media (or at least be able to focus on it) so i'm critically behind on so much stuff. don't judge me pls :S lmao

anything in bold is something that i've begun but not finished :P tagging @snow-in-the-desert bc you expressed interest in seeing the lists!

TO READ:

The Love Hypothesis - Ali Hazelwood

The Hurricane Wars - Thea Guanzon

Winter's Promise - Christelle Dabos

The Stand - Stephen King

North and South - Elizabeth Gaskell

The Nightingale - Kristin Hannah

Little Women - Louisa May Alcott

Work - Louisa May Alcott

Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes

Dr. Sleep - Stephen King

The Secret History - Donna Tartt

The Last Duel - Erik Jager

Portrait of a Lady - Henry James

The Song of Achilles - Madeline Miller

The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton

The Great Mortality - John Kelly

Dead by Sunset - Ann Rule

Dracula - Bram Stoker

It's Lonely at the Center of the Earth - Zoe Thorogood

The Great Influenza - John M. Barry

The Monster of Florence - Douglas Preston

The Lottery and other stories - Shirley Jackson

Helter Skelter - Vincent Bugliosi with Curt Gentry

White Noise - Don DeLilo

Icebreaker - Hannah Grace

She Is a Haunting - Trang Thanh Tran

This Thing Between Us: A Novel - Gus Moreno

Parable of the Sower - Octavia E. Butler

^^ This is an incomplete list--I know there are others but these are the books I've bought over the past couple years and have not yet finished/ready. They are stacked on my desk and around my room, silently accusing me of neglect. I wither in shame. The rest of the list escapes me currently. This also doesn't include the tbrs currently on my e-reader since I can't remember where it is to see what's on there.

MOVIES/MEDIA TO WATCH:

Any Adam Driver movie that isn't on Netflix (House of Gucci, Annette, Paterson etc.) I have seen the Last Duel, Blackkklansman, This is where I leave you, Marriage Story, White Noise, Frances Ha and a few others). I know Ferarri is in theaters right now but I've kind of developed a phobia of theaters since 2020 :S

a ridiculous number of documentaries/video essays on youtube that I do not have the energy to go look for right now

Fall of the House of Usher (I love Mike Flanagan's work but I'm still hooked on Midnight Mass and Daddy Father Prewitt)

The Haunting of Bly Manor (I know everyone was obsessed with this and I meant to watch it but I was reading the Turn of the Screw when it came out and didn't want to get spoiled for it so I avoided it like the plague and finished the book but never got to watching the show)

Blue Eye Samurai

The Beguiled

Ugly Betty (I'm actually on season 2 and it's charming and funny but holy shit the amount of body shaming/slut shaming/ homophobia in this show. definitely a product of its time.)

Anne with an E

Fleabag (never finished it but thought it was amazing)

What we do in the shadows (have seen all but the most current season)

Reservation dogs

The Batman (2023)

Black Swan

The Crown

Band of Brothers

Demon Slayer

Whiplash

Wolf of Wall Street

Birds of Prey

Downton Abbey

Peaky Blinders

Nimona

Drag me to Hell

Forgetting Sarah Marshall

Queen Charlotte (halfway through but haven't finished. i hate things that make me cry when i watch them so i have to be in a very specific mood to watch emotional heavy things)

Lady Bird

The Banshees of Inisherin

BARBIE (*ducks thrown rocks* I'll get to it, i SWEAR) (but i'm amazing at avoiding spoilers at this point i still know very little about the movie)

Men

Pearl

The Invisible Man

The Turning

Succession

Suspiria

Promising Young Woman

Shiva Baby

Luca

The Green Knight

Licorice Pizza

Bullet Train

The Menu

Women Talking

Knives Out + Glass Onion (*ducks more thrown rocks*)

Paddington 2!!!!

SHadow and Bone (honestly I lost almost all interest in reading/watching this once I heard the hot villain dies. BOOOO)

Carol

That one newish show with Adam Scott that looks super liminal and sci fi i can't remember the name

The Killing of a Sacred Deer

Oppenheimer

Killers of the Flower Moon

Guardians of the Galaxy 3

M3gan

Turning Red

Everything Everywhere All At once

Nope

Barbarian

Just like the book list, I'm sure there's many other titles I'm forgetting to put here. I actually have branched out and watched a fair amount of new movies this year so i'm going to keep it going! and here's one more list just because this is fun

Stuff I watched or read in 2023 that I loved/recommend (with the caveat that not all of this came out in 2023): (and i'm not including obvious stuff like Spider man across the spiderverse)

White Noise

Don't Look Up

Living in the Time of Dying (documentary on Youtube. It is HEAVY on existentialism and the science/data on the current state of climate change. This WILL ruin your day so I'm warning you now. Definitely don't watch it today. This really affected me and I cried for a long time after watching this but it is incredibly important to keep in mind.)

Blackkklansman (i had to watch this with the volume on the lowest setting bc of all the n words being dropped so frequently lmao but goddamn this was so good and funnier than i expected.)

DIMENSION 20: Burrow's End!!!!! As well as The Unsleeping City season 1. Neverafter and A Crown of Candy are probably at the lower end of the list but I still love them. (thank you to @rogueimperator for cluing me onto how amazing D20 and Dropout are. <3 this is a whole new world lol)

Midnight Sun :)

7. Christine and the Queens - Redcar les adorables étoiles Full show on Youtube. I was supposed to see him live in October but he got injured and had to cancel the rest of his tour :( but this album and the video are incredible! Slight warning for semi nudity.

8. Game Changer on Dropout. he's been here the whole time!

9. The 1975 live at Madison Square Garden. I was lucky enough to see them twice this tour with my twin sister and we had an absolutely amazing time. They always put on amazing shows and this particular tour/their latest album meant so much to us. Even our younger brother has come with us for some of these shows so it's something we all share. (Last time they came to Chicago in 2022 the venue was too small so they didn't have the House set with them so we didn't get to see it in action until this year) Sex and The Sound will always be the perfect closers for their shows and I get so emotional every time I hear them. Core memories for sure.

10. Puss in Boots: the last wish. this seems like another obvious answer that i probably could have left off but this gets an honorary mention because our family cat was diagnosed with advanced bone cancer in August, and we had to put him down very soon after that diagnosis. We spent an agonizing week tending to him and cherishing every last second we could get with him. I've been fortunate enough to never experience the death of a pet until this year, and i almost wish we didn't have any pets at all because I've never felt such excruciating grief. He was a fat, grumpy orange boy with beautiful yellow stripes and a little yellow mustache. I was trying to distract myself and found this movie on Netflix and watched it, then recommended it to my sister (who is actually Thomas's owner but we all shared him) though I warned her the movie did deal with themes on mortality. We all watched it together the night before his final vet visit and Tommy was there with us on a comfy pillow. I hope he approved of the movie, because now any time I think of Puss in Boots i think of him. <3

I could add more to this but my eyes are tired and I'm wired up from coffee. I know this is long as hell so sorry but I had fun making it! I'll probably keep coming back to this post in the future to cross out what I've watched.

[agentravensong]

if i made a post pairing quotes from rosencrantz and guildenstern are dead with quotes from don delilo's white noise would that be one step too deep into the pretension hole even for me

[athousandgateaux]

I find it kind of bizarre that the description of White Noise on Netflix makes no mention of the fact that it's an adaptation of the Don Delilo novel.

Also, why are we making a film adaptation of White Noise in the goddamn year of our lord 2022? Are the kids clambering for that sweet Don Delilo content?

[pianosmasher]

Don Delilo’s White Noise, written in the 80’s, is about this phenomenon

If you think people used to willingly stare off into the distance before smartphones, my dad told me he had this psychology assignment when he was in college in the 80s which was basically

Go to a restaraunt by yourself and eat a meal without a newspaper or journal or anything else to keep you occupied and then write a report about it

Which tells me that this was a way for a professor to inflict psychological torture on their students and that people used to bring little things with them to keep them entertained. Shown by those old pictures of everyone in a trolley reading a newspaper with one hand.

Frankly I think that the human brain has been craving smart phone forever. Perhaps we use it too much at times but if this was 1985 we also wouldn’t be talking to people. We’d just be looking at newspaper or drawing stuff on notepad instead. And the old people would all be shaking their fists about how kids spend too much time looking at that damn TV because yes this discourse has been going on long before smart phone

[grandhotelabyss]

I noticed you restructured the American syllabus for the IC, and after groaning at the extra cash I would have to lay down to buy the readings (and at there being only one week of Dickinson*), I rejoiced that I would finally get introduced to American modernism. Along those lines —

Would you consider postwar literature (through to the millenium) for a future IC? If not (or even if so!) I would love to hear how you’d structure this era/a syllabus on it, which you’ve talked about in glowing terms before. But I’m too young to have picked it up as it happened, and it’s too young to have been really canonised yet (or at least, the culture wars have stopped it from being canonised on its own terms rather than primarily political ones). Or maybe it has been but I don’t know where to look, although you said recently that criticism for that era hasn’t yet lived up to the books themselves.

But like, Morrison and DeLilo and Ellison and Bellow and Roth and Baldwin and Pynchon and McCarthy and Nabokov (kinda) and Wallace (apparently) and who else am I missing, and a handful of romancers like Dick and Le Guin — not to mention poets, playwrights, essayists, or Brits! And I don’t know how it all fits together, since we’ve (as Bloom predicted!) handed over the keys to the cultural narrative to the ‘cultural studies’ people who know only how to read films and magazines, and even then just barely.

*Also, do you think you might be able to include at the end of the syllabus a note on the works you’ve swapped out? The expanded guide would be useful, even though (indeed because!) it includes some of the more obvious picks, which I can return to later.

Thanks! I did address some of your questions about how exactly I changed the syllabus in my most recent Substack. I mainly just deleted a few Emerson essays (Nature, "The Divinity School Address," "Circles," "Experience"), Thoreau's Walden (in favor of two shorter pieces by him), and a handful of Whitman's Civil War poems.

I have the lectures for a course I taught on American Lit from 1945 to the present on YouTube here. I wouldn't do anything differently when it comes to poetry and drama than I did there. With fiction, I focused on the short story because it was an intro-level class; for that reason I omitted some writers mainly known for novels (Ellison, Bellow, McCarthy) but I didn't avoid anyone on strictly political grounds (Roth and Wallace are included, for instance, despite the controversy about them). I don't really think of Nabokov as an American writer! For the criticism of the era, big names include Irving Howe, Lionel Trilling, Elizabeth Hardwick, Gore Vidal, Susan Sontag, and then it becomes more strictly academic...I'm not sure I'd ever teach a course on that per se.

I would consider and have considered an IC course focused on the postwar American novel, though I'd probably cut it off at 2000. (As Roger Shattuck once said quixotically of the Visible College, "Students can read living authors on their own time." The few living authors below are over 80 and effectively beyond criticism.) The reading list would probably look like this:

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

Flannery O'Connor, The Violent Bear It Away

Saul Bellow, Herzog

Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

Samuel R. Delany, Babel-17

Joan Didion, Play It as It Lays

Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony

Cynthia Ozick, The Cannibal Galaxy

Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

Maxine Hong Kingston, Tripmaster Monkey [*]

Don DeLillo, Underworld

Toni Morrison, Paradise

With the postwar British novel, I don't have a list at my fingertips and would have to think about it—and probably read more widely myself. Graham Greene, Christopher Isherwood, Muriel Spark, Iris Murdoch, J. G. Ballard, A. S. Byatt, Angela Carter, Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, Zadie Smith, David Mitchell...who else? I'm probably missing obvious people! (I've never read Penelope Fitzgerald, for example. I want to read The Blue Flower but have to read that Novalis thing first and then it never happens, etc. Never read Kingsley Amis, don't care for Martin Amis...)

___________________________

[*] This one would be aspirational. It's long and ambitious, and I read and was fascinated by some of it while researching for the "U.S. Multicultural Literatures" class I used to teach. I never finished it, though, and keep meaning to get back to it.

[mylifeinscans]

front and back of a barnes and noble receipt. I purchased a copy of white noise by don delilo for a history class I took on disasters in american history. when I checked out, the casher asked me if I'd read before; I said no. He grinned and said it's one of his favorite books, but it took him a second read to really get it. I've only read it once so far. I'm not sure if I'm going to read it again—every time I pick it up I think of that cashier and it makes me feel funny. how strange it is that one little interaction has permanently cemented itself in my brain.

[cristinaboncea]

Mánasteinn. Băiatul care n-a existat niciodată | Recenzie literară

Prima mea întâlnire cu Sjón a fost una plăcută. Îl asemăn cu Don DeLilo ca stil, acum, după ce am terminat de citit scurta poveste despre Mánasteinn. La o primă impresie, cred că mi-ar face plăcere să citesc și alte lucrări de-ale autorului. IntroducereDespre ce este vorbaCe mi-a plăcutConcluzie Introducere Am cumpărat cartea exact pentru că îmi doream să parcurg o carte scrisă de Sjón, după…

[h-polh-kaigetai]

Είδα το tik tok σου και είναι μόνο βιβλία...πρότεινε μου 5 βιβλία να διαβάσω που να μην είναι πολύ γνωστά.

Είναι όντως μόνο βιβλία. Καλύτερο ασκ εβερ ❤️

Βέβαια, θα προτείνω κάποια που μου αρέσουν πολύ, ίσως ειναι γνωστά, δεν ξερω

1. The illuminae files - Jay Kristoff & Annie Kauffman

2. Bunny - Mona Awad

3. The toy makers - Robert Dinsdale

4. White Noise - Don DeLilo

5. Tales from the gas station - Jack Townsend