White Noise: (Penguin Orange Collection)

DeLillo is a true American oddball, in the best way, and one who knows it, too. His unique skill lies in the casual ways he injects maximally absurd details and arcs into what could have been an ordinary or straightforward story in lesser hands. This book immediately thrusts you into a world where “Hitler Studies” is not only a normal field of academic research but a respected one. The comedy, the laughs, they are there and in spades, but never (I think, anyway) intended to read as purely comedic, both in general and within the logic of the story in particular. He has an ease regardless of how tragic or painful the material is which requires a difficult balancing act that for most would tip towards callousness or bitter mockery. His words and ideas and themes are no doubt sordid, but you don’t come away from every reading session feeling sleazy. Few have had such an early and complete grasp on the modern condition that results from informational overload and the interspersing (or constant streaming, depending on the perspective taken) of and resulting desensitization towards advertisements. Commercialization, yes, being convinced of things we needn’t be convinced of, yes, normalization of anything reducible to buying and selling, yes—but most of all, the hollowing out, the forgetting who we are because we’re always being told to be something or that we already are that thing, the emptiness of a God who has orders strictly confined to pecuniary and base interests, the searching for something but no longer knowing how to search or what to search for, the fallacy that anything can ever just be white noise, the wrongness of believing you can let something live in the background of every moment and not be affected or captured by that thing. Kendrick Lamar on “Feel” aptly describes the essence of what this book gets at: “The feelin’ of an apocalypse but nothin’ is awkward.” We numb and pacify and stuff our brains with this and that, we eliminate total silence, and we do this without thinking of it as a buffer between us and the material realities of existence. We (at least at the time) have unwittingly separated ourselves from death with cheap and thin nothingness, and wonder why something feels off and out of place or somehow unsatisfactory or that there’s a greater story being told or that we’re disconnected from something we can’t name or even be sure is or ever was real. Total silence, always there, never destroyed—the core point is white noise can distract and distance all it wants but never accomplish what it sets out to do and cannot replace or drown out the soundless scream of life happening all around us at all times.

Reread because I wanted to watch the White Noise movie. Originally read it in grad school at some point. I remember last time I liked it a bit but didn't like the second half of the book for some reason. I think I didn't know what to make of the ending? This was like 20 years ago, so who knows. But this time around I found it much more consistently entertaining, interesting, and focused. Some of the wackier elements - Hitler studies for example - can give you the impression it's a little more on the satiric, episodic side than it actually is. It helps if you just follow the main thematic idea - fear of death and the ways American culture helps us try to avoid thinking about it. Then think about how each little wacky exchange between characters addresses that theme. I certainly laughed more this time around.

I did end up watching the movie and it is amazing how faithful it is. I never would have guessed something so weird could have got the financing. But it was also interesting because when you read and then watch right afterward, you really get the sense of the difference in the two mediums. It seems like virtually every line of dialogue in the 2 hour movie, which is very talkative, it is ripped straight from the pages, and yet you don't get anywhere near the same focus on the fear of death as you do in the book. Part of this is because quite a lot of the explicit discussion in the book is internal to the narrator. But the film flies past you so quickly and the delivery adds so much naturalism to what, when you read it, feels a little more Beckett-ish and strange, that you just don't have the time to really dwell and make connections. Obviously the movie focused more on the comedic and strict plot aspects too. In other words, you need to read the book. It's a classic for a reason.

One of the stranger books I’ve read, but then I also couldn’t put it down. I think this one will stick with me a while.
And, I finally learned where the band Airborne Toxic Event got their name!

This is an actually funny satire, that's also interesting and true. I'm very hard to please on the humor front, and I still didn't laugh out loud, but I found myself smirking and smiling a lot as I read along. I really enjoyed the exploration of how people do or don't conceptualize death. The main characters are a professor and his wife who are fearful of death to an obsessive degree. I definitely recommend this one.

The second book we read in the Postmodernism course I took where we discussed authors before/after 9/11.