#245

White Noise by Don DeLillo.

My initial love affair for this book has waned down, as most relationships do with time.  I will blame this on my lover's over-dramatic tendencies, though of its sometimes ludicrous behavior, I was quite fond.  I enjoy some silliness here and there.

What I had initially found so attractive was the dialogue - which I still hold in high regard - the author shapes his characters by the things they say rather than the things they do, and I think that's really neat (Even the children are impossibly brilliant...and we all know how much I love unrealistically smart kids).  DeLillo really has a talent for engaging, intelligent thoughts and conversations (unpretentiously).  Some highlights from the beginning:

 -"Where are you living, Murray?"
-"In an old rooming house.  I'm totally captivated and intrigued.  It's a gorgeous old crumbling house near the insane asylum.  Seven or eight boarders, more or less permanent except for me.  A woman who harbors a terrible secret.  A man with a haunted look.  A man who never comes out of his room.  A woman who stands by the letter box for hours, waiting for something that never seems to arrive.  A man with no past.  A woman with a past.  There is a smell about the place of unhappy lives in the movies that I really respond to."

(that one might just reflect my own writing style so I'm biased)

and

"I can't help being happy in a town called Blacksmith...I'm here to avoid situations.  Cities are full of situations, sexually cunning people...The irony is that I love women.  I fall apart at the sight of long legs, striding, briskly, as a breeze carries up from the river, on a weekday, in the play of morning light.  The second irony is that it's not the bodies of women that I ultimately crave but their minds...The third and related irony is that it's the most complex and neurotic and difficult women that I am invariably drawn to.  I like simple men and complicated women."

and finally,

"...Now she watched him with a tender sympathy, a reflectiveness that seemed deep and fond and generous enough to contain all the magical counterspells to his current run of woe, although I knew, of course, as I went back to my book, that it was only a passing affection, one of those kindnesses no one understands."

Love love.

Everything that I read afterwards about this book really highlighted the topics of commercialism, mass culture, and technology...and maybe that was the intent at the time...but I find those topics to be so base in comparison to the glaring topic of death and emotion.  DeLillo randomly scatters these little name-brand groupings at the end of paragraphs throughout the work, and I never really understood why; it didn't seem to be adding anything to the text, and it really just kind of made me think of bullshitting (and forcefully cramming in) concept just for the sake of conceptuality into a work that is otherwise solid.
Is humanity's consciousness and fear of death not a complex enough issue without having to force some outer crap about technology ruining our lives into the mix?  Unless this was the intent...to distract and to confuse...but...somehow I don't think it was.  SparkNotes says:

"Throughout White Noise, Jack Gladney, the narrator, constantly connects seemingly random events, dates, and facts in an attempt to form a cohesive understanding of his world. Behind that attempt lies a deep-seated need to find meaning in a media-obsessed age driven by images, appearances, and rampant material consumption."

Who knows.

Well now that I've overloaded everyone with a mass assembly of quotations, I will leave you with just one more.  Fall has officially arrived in Chicago and it is pitch black at 7:30pm.
"It was the time of year, the time of day, for a small insistent sadness to pass into the texture of things"

Started Reading

...White Noise by DeLillo.

And I am in love.

In other news, I tried to find some short stories I had worked on in college and abandoned, but found they are missing from my computer.  Hopefully they are backed up somewhere, but I managed to find excerpts that I'd saved and scrapped...and...

Hey, I wasn't half bad.

“The case of the chubby Ferrari”

Howard Louis was the owner of the dandelion-colored Ferrari that inexplicably and unmistakably was growing wider and, frankly larger, each day.  The ordeal had everyone in the neighborhood perplexed; the hot rod, which once coasted with sexy charm through the streets of Seaport was now finding itself lodged in not-so-tight spaces.  The roar of the engine too, having already been ferocious, was now unbearably loud leaving a deafening ring in the ears of passerby as the vehicle clumsily trudged along in its obesity.

          Howard Louis cursed his bad luck.  At dinnertime, he squinted at the French Bordeaux served in his crystal wine glasses with spite.  He regretted buying the Ferrari.  He regretted having voted for the president.  He regretted meeting and marrying her.  He regretted the friends he had had in grammar school.  He regretted not having yelled at his father before he had passed away. He regretted the days of his youth when he had believed in God. 

Makes me kind of sad.

Adventures on high seas and highways

Wooooo more progress.

So I never really got around to cracking open a paperback, but I opted to continue on with the e-book offerings I had at my disposal.  Which means I just finished Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island.  I guess I can see why it's popular among young readers, as it's very straightforward and exciting in a way that I can see little boys dreaming about.

It's written in the traditional adventure format - though, it could very well be one of the first in its kind so maybe it wasn't traditional then.  Regardless, it's read in just a way one might tell a story around a campfire; with a solid plot, antagonist/protagonist, and well-rounded end.  If only life were actually so, to have a goal so clearly defined that one hopes to attain.  I'm basically just sitting stagnantly in the middle of the sea without the fear of starving - which makes me less apt to struggle for whatever I'm supposed to be struggling for.  Apathetic suffering.

I have been doing a little bit of adventuring myself the past month.  Nothing involving plunder and murder, but I did get to visit a friend in Madison, WI who I hold very dear to my heart.  Madison is a very pleasant place, and we spent the weekend drinking like pirates (though not rum) and traveling about on bicycles.

I have also spent this last week revisiting my love for Woody Allen films.  I'm convinced I'm living the life of one of his neurotic characters, in a world of second-guessing and anxiety.  And I'm not saying that because I want to be a pretentious cool kid...I'd rather be a shallow obliviously happy person.  To be comparable to Mr. Allen brings a little bit of sadness to my heart.  Rain cloud Minami, as my coworker says. (Here, I tried to write a heart emoticon, but apparently that fucks with the html, so I will just say...*heart*)

Curious Pancakes

Up to 76/1001 to date!

A coworker (or...boss, maybe? I'm not quite sure at this point) of mine gave me The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien to read a few weeks back in E-book format.  I've taken longer than appropriate to get through it, but that was owing, I think, to the fact that it was being displayed to me in digital (laptop) format on a free Kindle app. It's probably different to actually be reading off of a real Kindle as opposed to the way I was doing it, but I found myself greatly missing paper (and page numbers) and the naturalness of rolling around in bed with a book.

For the duration of the story I was feeling a bit confused and disoriented...a little like being left behind.  I found this review on GoodReads among a bunch of raves and chuckled at how accurately it seemed to describe how I was feeling.

"Aug 17, 2010

Paul rated it

Shelves: novels

If you ever want to find out what it's like being the only sober person in a room full of professors telling each other jokes in Latin and heffing and hawing and pulling each others' beards, here's a good place to start.

Otherwise not."

I read this review 2 chapters from the book's end.  After those 2 chapters were finished, I now disagree, as the conclusion was a very satisfying and resolute one...but I still stand by the way I felt for most of the adventure.

The story is very darkly curious.  The benefactor who supplied the novel to me prefaced it as something along the lines of one of the funniest books ever (I may be putting words in his mouth but I am just going to roll with it). I was questioning this the entire time, as I couldn't quite shake the uneasy feeling that I was getting from every circumstance that the protagonist encountered.  It was a bit like Alice in Wonderland but with a weird old man blindly traipsing about...but at least he had the comfort of a friend in his own soul - he was a bit like Pantalaimon from His Dark Materials in the way he was so endearing.  It's nice to know that even in Hell (?) your soul is there to guide you.

I was charmed by the idea of a two-dimensional house, as well as the police station within the walls of Mathers' home.  Something about hiding places and curiosities of that kind appeals to me.  In that way, I love the tiny door that looks into the Queen of Hearts' garden in Alice.  Heck, while we're at it, the unattainable light in Mathers' window had me thinking of her Looking Glass.

Also,  Joe's fancy of becoming a flower's scent in another life is very pleasantly beautiful in it's simply stated form.

So what happens now that Divney has now joined the wanderer?  Will they just be redirected to Fox's station again, or will they, this time, be hanged?  And then where from there?

My Kindle app came with Pride and Prejudice and Treasure Island already downloaded into it.  Though I don't much like the digital format, I'll take what I can get - I'm a sucker for freebies.  Lucky me that those two are surely on the list.  Perhaps I'll read one digitally while simultaneously working on another of Colleen's books to balance my insatiable need for rolling.  Lazy.