Oh wait…I forgot.

I’ve read Great Jones Street three times – and only once because I wanted to. It’s the topic of the second chapter of my thesis on How Don DeLillo Writes the Same Novel Over and Over Again. Okay, that’s not my official topic, but it’s what my Thesis Monster is really about. Translated: I read through this novel really, really quickly so I can read what I want to read. Which is not Don DeLillo.

That said, I’m not saying the novel is bad or that DeLillo isn’t a fantastic writer. Because it’s not, and he is. Great Jones Street is the “least interesting and most plotted of DeLillo’s Novels,” according to Michael Oriard. I’m not sure that I agree. Surprisingly, I generally enjoyed Great Jones Street this time around.

It’s about a jaded rock star, Bucky Wonderlick (supposedly modeled after Bob Dylan). As with most of DeLillo’s protagonists, he’s surrounded by media, which is imposing an identity on him. In this case, he’s supposed to commit rock star suicide. Instead, he holes up in his girlfriend’s apartment, trying to escape the music industry and his fans. But he can’t really escape, and he becomes involved with a superdrug, and he’s swept up into chaos again.

It’s really not a bad novel, but one read was enough. The vast majority of DeLillo novels (I’ve read most of them) follow a general formula, and they all sound the same. I hear all of his novels like Michael Douglas is reading them to me. All of the characters follow the same speech patterns, which isn’t terrible: my favorite thing about DeLillo is his writing style. It’s beautiful. Here’s the first paragraph of the novel:

Fame requires every kind of excess. I mean true fame, a devouring neon, not the somber renown of waning statesmen or chinless kings. I mean long journeys across gray space. I mean danger, the edge of every void, the circumstance of one man imparting an erotic terror to the dreams of the republic. Understand the man who must inhabit these extreme regions, monstrous and vulval, damp with memories of violation. Even if half-mad he is absorbed into the public’s total madness; even if fully rational, a bureaucrat in hell, a secret genius of survival, he is sure to be destroyed by the public’s contempt for survivors. Fame, this special kind, feeds itself on outrage, on what the counselors of lesser men would consider bad publicity–hysteria in limousines, knife fights in the audience, bizarre litigation, treachery, pandemonium and drugs. Perhaps the only natural law attaching to true fame is that the famous man is compelled, eventually, to commit suicide.

Michael Douglas read it in your head, too, didn’t he.

What having read this book yet again means to me is that I have to start on chapter two of my thesis tomorrow. Meh.

If Great Jones Street seems interesting to you, give it a try. If DeLillo sounds interesting, read White Noise first. It’s so much better.

I don’t even wanna talk about this one.

I hadn’t read a DeLillo novel in quite a while – we’re faaaar away from the glory days of the DeLillo Binge. While I was working on the Thesis Monster (which I still have to finish), I read most of his novels and realized that he’s just writing the same novel over and over with different characters and settings. Once I saw that, I lost all interest in DeLillo and all interest in the Thesis Monster. Which is why I haven’t worked on it in a while.

Here’s the plot of every DeLillo novel I’ve read (except, maybe, of Underworld, which I didn’t finish): A guy (always a guy: DeLillo writes Man Novels) experiences some sort of postmodern angst related in some way to the media. He runs away from his life or otherwise destroys it. Sometimes he attempts to return and is unsuccessful in reintegrating himself.

There. I’ve just told you the plot of Cosmopolis. And Americana, Great Jones Street, Mao II (the three novels included in the Thesis Monster), Libra, White Noise, Point Omega, Falling Man, and all the others I’ve read. That’s right: all of them.

Really, Don DeLillo? I thought you were better than that. Or at least a bit more creative.

I still say I’ll finish the Thesis Monster, and now I have a wee bit of incentive. Next August, I want to start Librarian School, which means another master’s. Which also means I need to finish the one I’m “currently” working on. I only need thirty more pages, and I have until early April to do it. I need to get my shizz together.

I don’t really have much to say about O Pioneers! I generally enjoyed it, but it’s entirely forgettable. When I was in college, I reluctantly read My Antonia, also by Willa Cather, and thoroughly enjoyed it though I expected to hate it. O Pioneers! is the same type of novel – you know, pioneers and things, and I thought I’d like it more than I did.

I only finished reading it yesterday, and I’ve forgotten most of it. It’s about a family of (what?) pioneers, the Bergsons, in the Great Plains, trying to survive and add land to their farm. The father dies and leaves his land to his two sons and one daughter, and they quibble about what happens to it. Then, there’s a Steinbeck-type tragedy (a la Of Mice and Men or The Grapes of Wrath), and, as in another Steinbeck trend, Life Goes On. That’s about it. It’s short.

Again, I liked it well enough, but I think O Pioneers! might go into the Wait.-I-Read-That? pile with Franny and Zooey and other novels I’ve totally forgotten I’ve read. If you’re trying to choose between this one and My Antonia, go with the latter. I need to read that one again.

In Cather’s defense, there are lots of DeLillo-ish quotes that make me want to work on the DeLillo Project again and expand it.

The great fact was the land itself, which seemed to overwhelm the little beginnings of human society that struggled in its sombre wastes. It was from facing this vast hardness that the boy’s mouth had become so bitter; because he felt that men were too weak to make any mark here, that the land wanted to be let alone, to preserve its own fierce strength, its peculiar, savage kind of beauty, its uninterrupted mournfulness.

A pioneer should have imagination, should be able to enjoy the idea of things more than the things themselves.

We’ve liked the same things and we’ve liked them together, without anybody else knowing.

It fortified her to reflect upon the great operations of nature, and when she thought of the law that lay behind them, she felt a sense of personal security.

This kind of language is what I like best about O Pioneers!

The Savage Detectives is kind of a hard read. It’s also really, really long. It’s also worth getting through. I’m not sure how I came across it, though Roberto Bolaño‘s 2666 has been on my radar for quite some time. I haven’t tackled it yet because it’s even longer than this one. Until recently, I’ve never been a fan of long books, probably because I was conditioned in college to read short ones quickly. Longer books, though, like One Hundred Years of Solitude and Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, are steadily growing on me.

The Savage Detectives is split into three parts. The first is somewhere under two hundred pages, and it’s a nice, easy read. It’s generally about this early college-age kid, Juan Garcia Madero, who fancies himself a poet and joins a sort-of movement in Mexico called the visceral realists. He meets other people, some of whom are poets and others who pretend to be poets, and Things Happen. The most important of these other characters, we figure out later, are Ulises Lima and Arturo Bolano. They end up running off withe Garcia Madero and a prostitute named Lupe. Then we get to the second part, the bulk of the book, told by lots of narrators. All of the stories at least mention Ulises and Arturo, but some only tangentially. Wikipedia (I know) has a good list of the various characters telling the stories. Ulises and Arturo went to Europe for a few years, then back to Mexico, and got into mischief. They kind of turned people off. They didn’t seem to write much poetry. Finally, we reach the third part, which is a continuation of the first. After leaving town (they were all trying to hide Lupe from her pimp), they drive to the Sonora Desert to search for the founder of visceral realism, Cesárea Tinajero, and Things Happen.

I really loved this novel, though it took me forever to read. It seems like the kind that you need to reread and study: it’s really complex, and working on wrapping your head around all of it would probably be rewarding. That said, I’m not going to reread it – at least not in the near future.

For a novel about poets, there’s very, very little poetry in it, and we only get to see one official visceral realist poem by Cesárea Tinajero, which is basically a series of drawings. It’s interesting that we don’t hear anything from Ulises Lima or Arturo Bolano themselves, that it’s all stories surrounding them. Even Garcia Madero, to my knowledge, only appears in the first and last parts.

A funny bit: At some point while I was reading, I tweeted that Bolaño shares Don DeLillo’s love of lists, even that he puts DeLillo’s lists to shame. Then, toward the end (page 574), Bolaño talks briefly about DeLillo, calling him a “phenomenon.” That gave me a chuckle.

It would actually be pretty interesting to compare Bolaño to DeLillo. The Savage Detectives fits pretty squarely under the Postmodernism bracket (vague as it is), and there are lots of Deserts and unhappiness and motels. Bolaño almost makes DeLillo interesting again.

This is the third time I’ve read Americana. I really need to work on the Thesis Monster, and it had been a year since I’d read the book, so I figured rereading it would be a good start. I loved it the first two times: it was probably my favorite DeLillo book (hovering there with White Noise). This time, though, I was bored out of my mind. Michael Douglas narrated it in my head (a la Wonder Boys), and he just droned on and on.

I’ve come to the conclusion that my love affair with Don DeLillo is permanently over. The turning point is when I was researching the Thesis Monster and realized that he just writes the same book over and over: some dude with postmodern angst is running away from identity-creating media to find his own identity. Okay, that’s not exactly the case with all of DeLillo’s novels, but they’re all basically about the same thing.

So much for the DeLillo Binge.

As much as I didn’t enjoy Americana this time around, there are things about DeLillo that I still do love. His language is beautiful. If I could make myself sit down and write a novel, I’d want it to sound like his.

Literature is what we passed and left behind, that more than men and cactus. For years I had been held fast by the great unwinding mystery of this deep sink of land, the thick paragraphs and imposing photos, the galop of panting adjectives, prairie truth and the clean kills of eagles, the desert shawled in Navaho paints, images of surreal cinema, of ventricles tied to pumps. Chaco masonry and the slung guitar, of church organ lungs and the slate of empires, of coral in this strange place, suggesting a reliquary sea, and of the blessed semblance of God on the faces of superstitious mountains. Whether the novels and songs usurped the land, or took something true from it, is not so much the issue as this: that what I was engaged in was merely a literary venture, an attempt to find pattern and motive, to make of something wild a squeamish thesis on the essence of the nation’s soul. To formulate. To seek links. But the wind burned across the creekbeds, barely moving the soil, and there was nothing to announce to myself in the way of historic revelation.

DeLillo’s style is beautiful. It’s just that I’ve become as jaded as the characters in his novels. David Bell would have no interest in reading Americana.
So. On to the Thesis Monster. Now, as reconnected with the novel as I can be, I have no excuse not to write. My outline is done: all I have to do is fill in the blanks between quotes. Because that’s what the Thesis Monster is: a series of quotes. The postmodern problem.
I’ve made a schedule of sorts. On weekday mornings, I work on the Thesis Monster, and that’s that. I’ve never been good for much after lunch, so the afternoon is mine. If I can be productive in the mornings, it’ll be done soon, and I’ll never have to look at it again. I’ll also be done with academia, which is another – much scarier – issue. But I have some time left.

This afternoon, I’ll ride my bike up to Palmer‘s, water some plants, and try to tackle The Moviegoer. I hated it when I read it at least ten years ago, but I change my opinions of books pretty frequently. The weather is nice, and I’m looking forward to propping my feet up and giving Walker Percy a second chance.

In other news, the Shreveport Library Book Sale was last Saturday. I usually don’t buy much of anything since everything is so disorganized and it’s so crowded. Here’s what I got this time:

I discovered once I got home that I already had The Poisonwood Bible, so I donated my copy to Charlotte. I haven’t read any of them.

I’ve certainly begun my 52 books with a bang. One Hundred Years of Solitude just might be the best novel I’ve ever read. It’s definitely the most epic. It follows a family and a town from birth to death, through wars and colonialism and personal tragedy. The family line is so complicated, with the vast majority of names involving Jose Arcadio or Aureliano in every generation, that the publisher was kind enough to include a family tree just before the first chapter begins. At one point, one Aureliano begets seventeen more Aurelianos.

It’s also very long and a rather slow read – not to say it’s boring: it held my interest throughout. I should also say that listing it as the first book of the year is somewhat of a cheat because I started reading it at least a couple of weeks ago and only read the second half of it since the first of the year.

The funny thing is that most of the things I’m saying about it seem bad when I think I’ve found a new favorite novel. It beats any Murakami I’ve read hands-down. I read somewhere that Murakami lists Marquez as an influence on his own work, and I can see how: One Hundred Years of Solitude is infused with the same kind of magical realism that Murakami’s is. It’s like the supernatural elements – like flying carpets, benign ghosts, and an ascension into heaven – are fully integrated into reality.

I’m half tempted to gorge myself immediately on the rest of Marquez’s books, but I’m not going to. I’ll spread him out like I did Murakami, stretching his novels into a couple years, at least – and not ruining him for myself like I did DeLillo.

One Hundred Years of Solitude isn’t my first Marquez book, though it’s the first one I’ve finished. Years ago, I tried reading Autumn of the Patriarch, which I didn’t finish because it seemed impossible to read. It’s around three hundred pages, split into eight chapters, and each sentence is almost the length of the whole chapter. I read it for a challenge, and I lost. Reading this one, though, makes me want to give it another try.

“I’ll tell you a true story right out of one of the country’s most distinguished scientific journals. They pulled an experiment on these two monkeys. They gave them electric shocks every sixty seconds. Now the first monkey had a button and all he had to do was press it and he wouldn’t get any shock. The second monkey also had a button but it was completely useless. Eventually monkey-A caught on to the gimmick and started pressing the button like mad to avoid that juice. Whereas monkey-B realized his button wasn’t worth shit and he just squatted in the corner, scratching himself and getting jolted every minute. So what happens? The first monkey gets stomach ulcers and kicks off in two weeks. The second monkey, who had resigned himself to the shocks, lives happily ever after. That little experiment is a moral for our time. It shows the price you have to pay for working yourself up to a decision-making post. I’ll have to show you around the office sometime. You’lll see sixty-five executive monkeys weeping into their telephones and pissing blood. That’s the kind of business your old man is in. But don’t worry about me, kid. I’ve got cast iron in my guy and I’m an odds-on favorite to pull through. In my heart I’m deeply conservative. I come from a long line of secret Presbyterian drinkers. My father was a blacksmith in Sag Harbor. What was the point I was trying to make?” ¹

This, ladies and gentlemen, is why I plan everything (though sometimes – like now – I wish I was better at sticking to said plans). It is also why I like academia. Or academia through a naive rose-colored lens.

“Why are you driving when you can fly?” she said. “Don’t you love to fly? I love it. It’s the sexiest thing there is.”

“This is a religious journey,” I said. “Planes aren’t religious yet. Cars are religious. Maybe planes will be next.”

“Planes are sexy.”

“That’s right, the way cars used to be. But cars are religious now and this is a religious trip.” ¹

Yesterday I went to The Desert. (My mom asked, “What desert?” I said, “The Desert. Like if you drive far enough west and you hit sand.”) I had never seen the desert before, so I figured yesterday was a good time to do it. I needed to sort some things out in my head, so I hastily packed a bag late Friday afternoon and headed west. I made it to the very southwestern corner of Fort Worth around 10:30 before crashing in a hotel. It’s not exactly like I was roughing it. I got up reasonably early yesterday morning and drove from there to Abilene and Odessa, then to Monahans Sandhills State Park, on the edge of the desert. And I took lots of pictures.

I’m trying to spin it as a sort-of thesis research instead of the Jesus-Christ-I-need-to-get-out-of-town last-minute trip that it was, though I’m sure I’m not convincing anyone. Here’s my pitch: DeLillo loves deserts, right? Part of his first novel is set there, and his second novel is set at a college right on its edge. Then there’s Underworld and Point Omega (in its entirety) and so on. And whenever his novels aren’t set in the desert, they at least mention it. I love this part of Americana:

This too, then, moon and painted ponies, seemed the coming and going of time set free from whatever binds it. Literature is what we passed and left behind, that more than men and cactus. For years I had been held fast by the great unwinding mystery of this deep sink of land, the thick paragraphs and imposing photos, the gallop of panting adjectives, prairie truth and the clean kills of eagles, the desert shawled in Navaho paints, images of surreal cinema, of ventricles tied to pumps, Chaco masonry and the slung guitar, of church organ lungs and the slate of empires, of coral in this strange place, suggesting a reliquary sea, and of the blessed semblance of God on the faces of superstitious mountains. Whether the novels and songs usurped the land, or took something true from it, is not so much the issue as this: that what I was engaged in was merely a literary venture, an attempt to find pattern and motive, to make of something wild a squeamish thesis on the essence of the nation’s soul. To formulate. To seek links. But the wind burned across the creekbeds, barely moving the soil, and there was nothing to announce to myself in the way of historic revelation. Even now, writing this, I can impart little of what I saw. The Cadillac averaged close to ninety and its windows were tinted bottle green for the benefit of Clevenger’s sunbaked eyes. (349)

There’s also a big chunk of End Zone I’d like to post, but I know photos are more interesting, so I’ll get to them quickly. All I’m sayin’ is that DeLillo’s characters tend to go to the desert to think, to find some kind of purity, and so on. Which is what I did, and I was pretty successful. It was beautiful and totally worth going, even if most of the thinking I did happened during the twenty-plus hours I spent driving there and back.

Just west of Abilene. I realize this isn't the desert.

Odessa

A cactus!

The sky was perfect.

The Desert!

A huge wind farm near Loraine. I saw hundreds of windmills.

Bonus: Here’s a video of these windmills. They make a quiet hissing sound, and they totally creep me out.

Keep in mind that I shot all the pictures and the video with my sparkly new iPhone 4. Most of them look as good as they would have with my fancy Nikon, which I didn’t even bring on my trip.

Oh! And there are lots more photos. Here’s the set on flickr.