Oh wait…I forgot.

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.

So I’ve had a hard time starting my thesis. It’s one thing to sit around and read a bunch of stuff about DeLillo, Postmodernism, Existentialism, etc, etc, and a whole other thing to start writing. I’m starting today, and that’s that. At the very least, I’m getting an outline done. I guess I also need to talk a little about the DeLillo Binge.

I know you’ve been anxiously awaiting the next DeLillo Binge post on (what was it?) Great Jones Street, which, I will note, is fantastic. So fantastic, in fact, that it’s one of the three novels I’ll talk about most in my thesis. The other two are Americana and Mao II, both of which I can fit securely into Postmodernism not only subject-wise, but time-wise, making things much easier for me. Oh, and now I think I can Officially Announce the Topic of My Thesis:

(drumroll, please…)

Construction of Identity in Don DeLillo’s Novels (and maybe a few short stories)

That topic should be broad enough that I can talk about whatever I want, including the first chapter I’m working on,

Renouncing the media while passively allowing it to construct identity

I’ll come up with suitable titles later. In this chapter, I’ll talk about how the protagonists of Americana, Great Jones Street, and Mao II purposely run away from the media while still allowing it to define them. I should be able to get ten or fifteen pages out of that pretty easily.

And finally, about the DeLillo Binge. I’m putting it on indefinite hold because I have so much to do. Not only do I have my thesis to worry about: I’ll be taking the GRE Lit Test around October and the general test around November, and I MUST do well on them if I’m going to get into a decent grad school. So, instead of enjoying DeLillo, I’ll be studying, especially since I’m TERRIFIED of the Lit Test because I did pretty badly on it back in 2003, just after I finished my English degree. I specialized far too early (Shakespeare!) and was stupid enough to go into it not having studied. It was terrible. But now I’ve totally learned my lesson, and I’m starting with the Romantics. I’d forgotten how much I love Wordsworth. So, sadly, I don’t have time for DeLillo unless it’s explicitly for my thesis. I imagine I’ll get back to the Binge once all this is over in January.

The thing that sucks about increasingly long, more…academic(?) posts is that I’m beginning to have to psych myself up to write them. So this one’s gonna be short since I’m almost done with the next book in my DeLillo Binge, and I’ve been putting this one off.

I just finished End Zone a few days ago. I liked it more than I thought I would. This was my first impression:

I ended up liking it more than I thought I would. There is, though, a really long description of a football game, which almost bored me to tears, except that in introducing it, DeLillo made it just a bit more palatable:

(The spectator, at this point, is certain to wonder whether he must now endure a football game in print – the author’s way of adding his own neat quarter-notch to the scarred bluesteel of combat writing. The game, after all, is known for its assault-technology motif, and numberous commentators have been willing to risk death by analogy in their public discussions of the resemblance between football and war. But this sort of thing is of little interest to the exemplary spectator.  As Alan Zapalac says later on: ‘I reject the notion of football as warfare. Warfare is warfare. We don’t need substitutes because we’ve got the real thing.’ The exemplary spectator is the person who understands the sport as a benign illusion, the illusion that order is possible.) (111-112)

And he goes on and on. I like that he self-consciously acknowledges the reader. While I was reading the ridiculously long account of the game, I kept thinking of this little interlude-of-sorts, and it made me feel better. (Okay, so it’s not that long, but that thirty pages seems to take forever.)

This novel is really interesting in that it goes back and forth between vast, detailed descriptions of football and postmodern theory. After practice, the players sit around and have “real” discussions about not-football, like this conversation about a course one of the team members is taking:

“People keep bringing up that course you’re taking. The untellable. I keep hearing about that course. Nobody talks about it but I keep hearing.”

“So do I,” Ted Joost said.

“There’s not much I can say about it,” Billy said.

“You can tell us what goes on.”

“We delve into the untellable.”

“How deep?” Bobby Iselin said.

“It’s hard to tell. I don’t think anybody knows how deep the untellable is. We’ve done a certain amount of delving. We plan to delve some more. That’s about all I can tell you.”

“But what do you talk about?” Howard said. “There are ten of you in there and there’s some kind of instructor or professor. You must say things to each other.”

“We shout in German a lot. There are different language exercises we take turns doing. We may go on a field trip next week. I don’t know where to.”

“But you don’t know German. I know damn well you don’t. I’m your damn roommate. I know things about you.”

“Unfortunately I’ve picked up a few words. I guess that’s one of the hazards in a course like this. You pick up things you’re better off without. The course is pretty experimental. It’s given by a man who may or may not have spent three and a half years in one of the camps. He doesn’t think there’ll be a final exam.”

“Why things in German?” Ted Joost said.

“I think the theory is if any words exist beyond speech, they’re probably German words, or pretty close.” (181).

There are lots of conversations like this one in End Zone, which is why I think I like it so much. It’s definitely Thesis Material. So far, if I can get my act together, I’ll probably use White Noise, Americana, and End Zone. Using five novels would probably be easiest since I can write a chapter on each, but I think it might be overkill, and when I get to the revision phase and people are actually reading it, I might find my thesis expanding exponentially, which I really don’t want to happen.

Since this is supposed to be a short post, I’ll stop now. I’m almost finished with Great Jones Street, and I’m pretty sure I won’t have much at all to say about it, though it’s not too bad. At least it’s not about Lee Harvey Oswald.

And my DeLillo Binge continues. The 7 in the title takes into account White Noise and The Body Artist, a couple of DeLillo’s books that I’d already read. I’ll probably reread White Noise when I get down to it, but I’m pretty sure I didn’t like The Body Artist since I remember nothing about it. Maybe that means I should read it again.

This time it’s Americana, DeLillo’s first novel. After Libra, I kind of shifted into an I-want-to-study-DeLillo mode, so I figured it was best to start at the beginning. So here I am. I really liked Americana. DeLillo’s style didn’t change between this one and, say, White Noise, like I’d assume it would: my last post included lists (he loves his lists!) from both novels that had lots in common. I can, though, see marked differences between Americana and Point Omega. But I’ll talk about that later. For now, here’s another list in Americana that definitely brings White Noise to mind:

I visualized my apartment then, empty and dark and quiet, furniture from John Widdicomb, suits from F.R. Tripler and J. Press, art books from Rizzoli, rugs from W&J Sloane, fireplace accessories from Wm. H. Jackson, cutlery from Bonniers, crystal by Steuben, shoes by Banister, gin by House of Lords, shirts by Gant and Hathaway, component stereo system by Garrard, Stanton and Fisher, ties by Countess Mara, towels by Fieldcrest, an odd and end from Takashimaya. (353)

The narrator, David Bell, says all this as he’s hitchhiking along the edge of the desert, having left his apartment, his job, and all this stuff behind in New York City. DeLillo addresses consumerism in some form in all his novels.

Speaking of consumerism and other Postmodern issues, I’ve begun studying DeLillo in earnest. I’m even seriously considering changing my entire thesis from Shakespeare (i’m totally burnt out on him) to DeLillo. So I figured it’d be good if I learn something about Postmodernism since I only had vague ideas about it. I ordered Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge and The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism, and, in the meantime, I discovered that I owned Butler’s A Very Short Introduction to Postmodernism, which I read while I was waiting for Amazon to send the first two. Once I started to get a better idea about what Postmodernism really is, the types passages I found myself marking in Americana changed: they went from “I like this passage” to “Oh! I can probably use this in a paper!” You can see from this photo about where it hit me:

DeLillo is ridiculously postmodern. Ridiculously. Here’s another list that directly addresses consumerism. It’s a dialogue between David and another character, Glenn Yost:

“We begin, simply enough, with a man watching television. Quite possibly he is being driven mad, slowly, in stages, program by program, interruption by interruption. Still, he watches. What is there in that box? Why is he watching?”

“The TV set is a package and it’s full of products. Inside are detergents, automobiles, cameras, breakfast cereal, other television sets. Programs are not interrupted by commercials; exactly the reverse is true. A television set is an electronic form of packaging. It’s a simple as that. Without the products there’s nothing. Educational television’s a joke. Who in America would want to watch TV without commercials?”

“How does a successful television commercial affect the viewer?”

“It makes him want to change the way he lives.”

“In what way? I said.

“It moves him from first person consciousness to third person. In this country there is a universal third person, the man we all want to be. Advertising has discovered this man. It uses him to express the possibilities open to the consumer. To consume in America is not to buy; it is to dream. Advertising is the suggestion that the dream of entering the third person singular might possibly be fulfilled.” (270)

So maybe I should talk about consumerism, but that’s another post. This one is getting too long already. Here’s one more quote (then I’ll stop!). At one point, David is filming a sort of autobiography, and he films an actor who is playing him (David). This section not only involves consumerism but what I’m pretty sure is self-conscious reflexivity, which I really don’t understand but am better able to identify now. This dialogue is scripted, and they’ve just begun filming.

I sighted on Austin against the wall and then started shooting, my voice a cheerful machine designed for the interrogation of the confused and the dislocated.

“Marital status.”

“Divorced.”

“Children.”

“None.”

“Appendix.”

“Excised.”

“What do you think of the war?” I said. [The novel is set in the 1960s.]

“I’ve seen it on television. It’s sponsored by instant coffee among other things. The commercials are very tasteful in keeping with the serious theme of the program’s content. Some of the commercials are racially integrated. Since I worked for seven years as an employee of the network responsible for the warcasts, I am in a position to point out that the network and the agency joined forces in order to convince the sponsor that integrated commercials were desirable. Their argument was that the war itself is integrated. Balanced programming has always been one of the network’s chief aims.” (283-284)

The interview continues, and has Austin address the camera rather than himself: “Can you tell the camera why you didn’t have children?” and later, “The camera dislikes evasiveness,” and so on.

I’ll stop talking now.

Up next is End Zone, DeLillo’s second novel, which is about football. I’m slowing down because it’s the end of the semester (papers!), and I’ve added all those books about Postmodernism to the list.

Now that I’ve read a few DeLillo novels, I’m continuing my binge from the beginning. Right now I’m reading Americana, DeLillo’s first novel. I’ll talk more about it later, but I just can’t help posting this passage:

What we really want to do, he said, deep in the secret recesses of our heart, all of us, is to destroy the forests, white saltbox barns, colonial inns, riverboats, whaling villages, cider mills, waterwheels, antebellum mansions, log cabins, lovely old churches and snug little railroad depots. All of us secretly favor this destruction, even conservationists, even those embattled individuals who make a career out of picketing graceful and historic old buildings to protest their demolition. It’s what we are. Straight lines and right angles. We feel a private thrill, admit it, at the sight of beauty in flames. We wish to blast all the fine old things to oblivion and replace them with tasteless identical structures. Boxes of cancer cells. Neat gray chambers for medication and the reading of advertisements. Imagine the fantastic prairie motels we could build if only we could give in completely to the demons of our true nature; imagine the automobiles that might take us from motel to motel; imagine the monolithic fifty-story machines for disposing of the victims of automobile accidents without the bother of funerals and the waste of tombstones or sepulchres. Let the police run wild. Let the mad leaders of our nation destroy whomever they choose. That’s what they really want, Black Knife told me. We want to be totally engulfed by all the so-called worst elements of our national life and character. We want to wallow in the terrible gleaming mudcunt of Mother America…We want to come to terms with the false anger we so often display at the increasing signs of sterility and violence in our culture. Kill the old brownstones and ornate railroad terminals. Kill the rotten stinking smalltown courthouses. Blow up the Brooklyn Bridge. Blow up Nantucket. Blow up the Blue Ridge Parkway. We must realize we are living in Megamerica. Neon, fiber glass, Plexiglass, polyurethane, Mylar, Acrylite.

Doesn’t it sound like White Noise? DeLillo published this novel almost fifteen years before White Noise. It’s really funny that he has such an identifiable style even from the beginning. For comparison, here’s the very first paragraph of White Noise:

The station wagons arrived at noon, a long shining line that coursed through the west campus. In single file they eased around the orange I-beam sculpture and moved toward the dormitories. The roofs of the station wagons were loaded down with carefully secured suitcases full of light and heavy clothing; with boxes of blankets, boots and shoes, stationery and books, sheets, pillows, quilts; with rolled-up rugs and sleeping bags; with bicycles, skis, rucksacks, English and Western saddles, inflated rafts. As cars slowed to a crawl and stopped, students sprang out and raced to the rear doors to begin removing the objects inside; the stereo sets, radios, personal computers; small refrigerators and table ranges; the cartons of phonograph records and cassettes; the hairdryers and styling irons; the tennis rackets, soccer balls, hockey and lacrosse sticks, bows and arrows, the controlled substances, the birth control pills and devices; the junk food still in shopping bags–onion-and-garlic chips, nacho thins, peanut creme patties, Waffelos and Kabooms, fruit chews and toffee popcorn; the Dum-Dum pops, the Mystic mints.

DeLillo loves him some lists. They are, of course, about different things, and the second is more of a list in the strictest sense of the word. Something about them rolls off the tongue when spoken aloud like a super-postmodern poem of sorts. I think I could probably get a whole dissertation out of these things: they’re everywhere!

I finished the second of my three term papers yesterday, a day ahead of schedule, so I declared today a Mental Health Day and spent a good chunk of the day at Starbucks finishing Libra, the fourth novel of my Don DeLillo Binge. I had a hard time getting through this one because it’s a historical novel, and I don’t like historical novels. It’s about Lee Harvey Oswald and conspiracy theories and things (as Jacob says, SPOILER ALERT: he dies at the end). Lots of FBI and CIA people lurking about. It’s not exactly my kind of novel.

DeLillo is a brilliant novelist, though, and even though I wasn’t interested at all in the subject matter, his writing is fantastic, and that makes up for a lot. Here are a couple of snippets I particularly liked:

Spy planes, drone aircraft, satellites with cameras that can see from three hundred miles what you can see from a hundred feet. They see and they hear. Like ancient monks, you know, who recorded knowledge, wrote it painstakingly down. These systems collect and process. All the secret knowledge of the world…I’ll tell you what it means, these orbiting sensors that can hearus in our beds. It means the end of loyalty. The more complex the systems, the less conviction in people. Conviction will be drained out of us. Devices will drain us, make us vague and pliant.

Well, that’s about it. Libra definitely isn’t White Noise. But he did call Bossier City “a place where you could get a social disease leaning on a lamppost” (!) and Dallas “the city that proves God is really dead.” Those were the best two parts of the whole damn novel. And there’s the disturbing description of Jackie Kennedy crawling over the back of the car in which her husband has just been shot trying to recover a piece of his skull. Every time I mention that description, someone tells me it really happened. I know.

And that’s about all I have to say about Libra. It’s not bad or anything – I just didn’t like it. I think it’s better-written than Falling Man. Next up is Americana, DeLillo’s first (published?) novel. I have no idea what it’s about, and that makes me happy. I’m going to do my best not to read the blurb on the back. I’ve decided to tackle the rest of the novels in the order they were published, though if I get too close to the end of the summer before I get to Underworld, I’ll skip to that one because it’s so damn long.

Oh, how I love Don DeLillo.

I found this quote in an article by Joe Moran called “Don DeLillo and the Myth of the Author: Recluse,” and it makes me happy:

“There is something predatory in the act of taking a picture. To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as the camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a sublimated murder – a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.” – Susan Sontag, On Photography

That is all.

(And yes, I’ve branched out into critical articles. This DeLillo binge is getting out of hand.)

So. Remember when I talked about going on a DeLillo binge? Well, that’s what happened. I finished Point Omega and couldn’t stop. And I still can’t stop. I went to Marshall, TX, last weekend and bought a lightly-used copy of Falling Man from a little bookstore called Prospero’s. Falling Man is the novel DeLillo wrote just before Point Omega, and it’s about 9/11. I’m not a big fan of historical (or historically-based) novels, so I wasn’t too enthusiastic. Turns out it’s pretty mediocre. It’s short and about what happens to a family post-9/11. Post-trauma, etc. The second half is much better than the first. This isn’t a review, so I’ll stop there. Here’s the paragraph on which I stuck a post-it note:

But that’s why you built the towers, isn’t it? Weren’t the towers built as fantasies of wealth & power that would one day become fantasies of destruction? You built a thing like that so you can see it come down. The provocation is obvious. What other reason would there be to go so high and then to double it, do it twice? It’s a fantasy, so why not do it twice? You are saying, Here it is, bring it down.

That’s Falling Man, and it was acceptable, though I have almost nothing to say about it.

You’d think a mediocre experience like that might make me wander off to another author, at least for a while, but no! I’m obsessed and insatiable. So, before I even finished Falling Man, I ran off to Barnes & Noble and bought a copy of Mao II, which I thought was supposed to be a historical novel, which explains why I hadn’t read it already. This one is fantastic, a relatively close second to my beloved White Noise. It’s about a reclusive writer, his assistant, his assistant’s girlfriend, and a photographer who takes photos of writers. And Beirut. And a few other things. It’s incredibly DeLillo in all of his listing, sometimes flat ways. I loved every second of it. A couple quotes:

Sitting for a picture is morbid business. A portrait doesn’t begin to mean anything until the subject is dead. This is the whole point. We’re doing this to create a kind of sentimental past for people in the decades to come. It’s their past, their history we’re inventing here. And it’s not how I look now that matters. It’s how I’ll look in twenty-five years as clothing and faces change, as photographs change. The deeper I pass into death, the more powerful my picture becomes. Isn’t this why picture-taking is so ceremonial? It’s like a wake. And I’m the actor made up for the laying-out.

And

The novel used to feed our search for meaning…It was the great secular transcendence. The Latin mass of language, character, occasional new truth. But our desperation has led us toward something larger and darker. So we turn to the news, which provides an unremitting mood of catastrophe. This is where we find emotional experience not available elsewhere. We don’t need the novel…We don’t even need catastrophes, necessarily. We only need reports and predictions and warnings.

I’ve stopped writing in books and started putting little post-it notes over paragraphs that stick out of the side of the book just enough to be detected. I don’t know where this aversion to writing came from, but it started last semester in a modern fiction class when I was reading White Noise. I just couldn’t bring myself to write in it. I don’t think I’ve ever written in a DeLillo book, which is strange because I tend to write everywhere. I’ve even been known to pencil notes into the margins of library books, and I sometimes forget to erase them. But that’s neither here nor there.

Speaking of the library. Just after I finished Mao II, I shut down the Writing Cave for a few minutes to run to the library and pick up Libra. They also had The Names, so I grabbed that one too. I couldn’t decide which to read first, so I chose the former since that was the original plan. They’re both historical novels, and I’m already having a hard time reading Libra, which almost immediately involves CIA and Cuba and other Historical and Political Things I Don’t Really Care About. But it sounds like DeLillo, and, I think, in the end, that’s all that really matters.

ALSO: As a brief interlude between novels, I read a lovely short story DeLillo wrote called “Midnight in Dostoyevsky” that was published in last November 30′s issue of The New Yorker. It’s about two college boys who basically make up the life of an old man they see walking on the street nearly every day, kind of like the game Grady Tripp and Terry Crabtree play with Vernon in Wonder Boys. (As a side note, can you imagine if DeLillo had written Wonder Boys? It would have been even more fantastic. Seems like his kind of novel.)

My favorite thing about Spring Break is that it’s a little glimpse of the more substantial vacation just four or five torturous weeks away. It gives me some much-needed time to lie on the sofa or sit at a coffee shop, my legs propped up, and read books I haven’t been told to read.

Yesterday, I picked up Don Delillo’s Point Omega, which I’d been wanting to read since I saw a fantastic review a month or two ago. It’s super-short, and I read it in only three or four hours. And I read slowly. This isn’t a book review (I don’t write book reviews), so all I’m going to say is that it’s fantastic. The whole thing is basically a slowing down of time:

It’s all embedded, the hours and minutes, words and numbers everywhere, he said, train stations, bus routes, taxi meters, surveillance cameras. It’s all about time, dimwit time, inferior time, people checking watches and other devices, other reminders. This is time draining out of our lives. Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature. There’s an endless counting down, he said. When you strip away all the surfaces, when you see into it, what’s left is terror. This is the thing that literature was meant to cure. The epic poem, the bedtime story.

I liked this novel in the same way I liked White Noise – it’s the same kind of cultural critique that makes you feel a bit empty at the end. Makes me want to go on a Delillo binge, though I have a feeling I’d somehow emerge disappointed.

I spent a week reading White Noise for my modern fiction class. This book was why I signed up for the class in the first place, and I was terribly excited. It’s totally different than how I remembered it.

I read White Noise the summer after my freshman year of high school. Before summer break, I asked a teacher who I idolized what books I should read over the summer, which I would be spending in the no man’s land of Minden, LA. She gave me three suggestions: Hard Times, A Handmaid’s Tale, and White Noise. I read and adored all three, but White Noise was, by far, my favorite. It also changed my life by filling my head with crazy (and reasonable) ideas.

Here’s one that occurs very early in the book. Throughout my childhood, just before I’d fall asleep, I’d jerk awake because I felt like I was falling. It was terrible. It happened almost every night. One of my very first memories was lying in my Strawberry Shortcake-themed bed at my dad’s house, trying to sleep, and being jarred awake. I couldn’t have been older than three or four. Of course, I kept it a secret, as so many kids keep secret anything they think is wrong with them. For a long time, I was convinced that I had a disease. And here’s what White Noise has to do with my problem: it explained what it was and how it happened. I’ve never bothered actually looking it up, but, according to the novel, it’s called a myoclonic jerk, and it’s a “more or less normal muscular contraction.” That’s all I’ve ever found out about it, but it’s enough for me. It hasn’t happened often since I was a kid, but every time it does, that phrase goes through my head. I’d forgotten where it came from.

Life-changing bit number two: I idolized Heinrich. I wanted to be just like him: brilliant and brooding. And I think I might have pulled it off for a while, though that’s another post.

And number three: I don’t remember, but my airplane phobia must have been exacerbated by the terrible near-crash description. This is only part of it:

The plane had lost power in all three engines, dropped from thirty-four thousand feet to twelve thousand feet. Something like four miles. When the steep glide began, people rose, fell, collided, swam in their seats. Then the serious screaming and moaning began. Almost immediately a voice from the flight deck was heard on the intercom: “We’re falling out of the sky! We’re going down! We’re a silver gleaming death machine!” This outburst struck the passengers as an all but total breakdown of authority, competence, and command presence and it brought on a round of fresh and desperate wailing.

Here’s a story: When I was little, having divorced parents, I used to fly alone a lot. A lot. I was generally okay with it until, when I was eight or nine, my dad put me on a plane from New Orleans or Baton Rouge to Shreveport. It was terrible. It was a little puddle-jumper from an airline that doesn’t exist anymore, and we were flying behind a 757. It flew through a thunderhead, and, for whatever reason, the pilot of my plane decided that it would be a good idea for us to go through it too. Once we got into it, though, we started falling. Like two hundred feet at a time, which took seconds. After each fall, we would climb back up and fall again. I, of course, was alone, and I was surrounded by adults who were screaming and crying and holding hands and praying. How could I not be traumatized? For years after that, I gripped the armrests and said rosaries through whole flights, convinced that I was about to die. When I turned eighteen, I got a car, and I SWORE I’d never fly again. And I didn’t for six years, when I was faced with a free trip to Disney World. It was a phobia: I would have nightmares not about planes crashing, but about being forced to board them. I can deal with planes now, I think, only thanks to a combination of NLP and a book called Flying without Fear.

ANYWAY, I’m sure you can see how the description in White Noise might affect my fourteen-year-old psyche (after reading Cat’s Cradle, I wanted to be a Bokononist!). I remember sitting in an airport sometime around then, watching several people exit a plane with IVs and casts and the like. I think I assumed that something terrible had happened on the plane, but now, of course, I realize that planes probably don’t carry IV or cast-making supplies.

And, finally, there’s the athiest nun at the end. I won’t explain the circumstances for the benefit of those of you who STILL NEED TO READ THIS NOVEL. This includes you, Charlotte. I know that, being fourteen, I took that part way too seriously. In fact, I didn’t think White Noise was a funny novel at all. I’m especially amused that I only remembered the first half of it – I guess I was just too young to understand what in the hell was going on.