All of DeLillo’s novels (all the ones I’ve read at least, 8 out of 15 plus three plays) have a closed, geometrical structure, overtly self-conscious. Not incidentally they never have an index. The one exception was White Noise, and with good reason: the deconstructed, wilfully episodic narrative was well served by the loose structure. Point […]
Category Archives: English
Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis
Tuesday, June 11, 2013
“The logical extension of business is murder”. In an April day of the year 2000, 28-year-old multibillionaire finance whiz Eric Packer gets up from a sleepless night. He watches the day dawn over Manhattan, then crosses the rooms of his triplex (which he paid, as we will learn, $ 104 mln) and summons his stretch […]
Don DeLillo, The Body Artist
Tuesday, June 11, 2013
In extremis: slow, spare and painful. DeLillo’s first novel since Underworld, preceded in 1999 by Valparaiso, his second stageplay. As if marking the distance from its predecessor, it is very, almost impossibly terse; to the point that I find it difficult to consider it a novel(la), and not because of its brevity. Commentators variously describe […]
Leonard Orr, Don DeLillo’s White Noise
Tuesday, June 11, 2013
My second foray into the Continuum Contemporaries series of Continuum Books (on which more to come): I had already picked up the brilliant and neatly-packed guide to Underworld, written by DeLillo scholar John Duvall. It is obvious that Underworld and White Noise are wildly different novels in terms of scope, complexity and sheer volume, and […]
Matthew Stearns, Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation
Tuesday, June 11, 2013
Complete and well-researched analysis of the most important album by arguably the most important and innovative band of their time. The author, musical critic Matthew Stearns, works backwards from the recent official acknowledgment as a true historical document: in 2006 the US Library of Congress added Daydream Nation to the permanent archives of the National […]
Bill Janovitz, Rolling Stones’ Exile On Main St.
Tuesday, June 11, 2013
“The single greatest rock’n’roll record of all time, okay?” If you agree with the opening sentence of the book, you don’t need to read this comment. You need to go out (or simply open another Firefox window) and buy the bloody thing. If you don’t, stick around and learn one or two things about music. […]
Jeph Loeb, The Witching Hour
Wednesday, June 5, 2013
“Do you believe in the Wiccan Rede? That everything we do comes back to us threefold?” There are five of them, like points of a pentagram. Gray is a charmer. In more than one sense of the word. Black is a mulatto child prodigy, who only talks through quotes from Victorian writers. And he loves […]
Grant Morrison, We3
Wednesday, June 5, 2013
My first encounter with les enfants terribles Grant Morrison & Frank Quitely was through the New X-Men run, although both were already famous. They are each masters in their respective fields, and to see them at work together is always a pleasure. The storyline is here razor-sharp; as in the textbook example of the silent […]
Grant Morrison, Kid Eternity
Wednesday, June 5, 2013
By now I’ve learned that Grant Morrison is positively out of his mind. A chaos magician unwinding deadpan on his allucinations, how they affected his comics, and how comics affected both his life and his hangouts with the gods. All this in a heavy Scottish accent, dig it. Apparently this miniseries from the early nineties […]
