Greetings gentle reader! And welcome to the last Sunday before the first Sunday of the rest of your Meander.
What are we talking about?
A group read of Don DeLillo’s it’s-a-little-early-to-call-it-immortal White Noise!
You can find all the deets in last week’s post.
Can’t you sum it for me here?
What the heck — you seem nice! Here goes:
- Join the gang
- Read along as we tackle around 50 pages a week
- Comment on each weekly post
- Finish the book…
- …and qualify for an original “I Survived the White Noise Meander” magnet, designed by long-time meanderer Elisabeth Beller!
And now? Now’s a wonderful time to hydrate, to buy a copy of the book, to take faded black and white photos of yourself with loved ones.
Today? Today’s not a great day to actually start reading the book, tempting though that might be.
But next Sunday? Yes! Next Sunday we’ll hit the road en masse! Meet back here on Feb 2 for the Week 1 post and the exciting reveal of the first target. The very Web trembles with fear and/or excitement!
Feel free to leave a comment below sharing hopes, dreams, and wishes. And remember: Any good meander is all about the curve in the road.
See ya in 7!
-Cecil
Enjoying reading about DeLillo. While hydrating.
As well as the influence of modernist fiction, DeLillo has also cited the influence of jazz music – “guys like Ornette Coleman and Mingus and Coltrane and Miles Davis” – and postwar cinema: “Antonioni and Godard and Truffaut, and then in the ’70s came the Americans, many of whom were influenced by the Europeans: Kubrick, Altman, Coppola, Scorsese and so on. I don’t know how they may have affected the way I write, but I do have a visual sense.”[9] On the influence of film, particularly European cinema, on his work, DeLillo has said, “European and Asian cinemas of the 1960s shaped the way I think and feel about things. At that time I was living in New York, I didn’t have much money, didn’t have much work, I was living in one room…I was a man in a small room. And I went to the movies a lot, watching Bergman, Antonioni, Godard. When I was little, in the Bronx, I didn’t go to the cinema, and I didn’t think of the American films I saw as works of art. Perhaps, in an indirect way, cinema allowed me to become a writer.”
From and more:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_DeLillo
In ’94, I presented a paper on Great Jones Street on a DeLillo panel at the North East MLA conference.One of the other panel members did a paper on White Noise. Turns out he and I were both ABD at the time, with similar interest, and we got to talking, even stayed in email contact for a time, but then lost touch. But in weird twists of fate, that other scholar has been one of my supervisors for the last 7.5 years