Our potassium levels are suspect but nonetheless we’ve made it to the start of Week 6, in which we’ll make a wee leap to the back of the book.
Thanks again for taking the trek. I have missed these group reads, and the book is much richer for having all of your thoughts in the swirl.
Last week the thread included ruminations on mortality, faith, and pleasure, and a defense of nostalgia, to which: amen! There were also questions about how exactly one walks like a European, and a hat tip to the permanent-patient status that blinks above our heads.
A few of us — me included — were struck by the Gotham-esque moment of the insane asylum burning down, and our characters watching like it was another show on TV. And we survived the Hitler convention, with their terrifying (at least to me) name tags, and their love of sweets.
All of which added to a general feeling of life and decay (“the time of dangling insects”), creation and ruin, garbage-sorting mayhem, and a sort of death-worshipping vibe that jangles the air in Blacksmith and environs.
As my nemesis Murray noted, you can be homesick even when you’re home. Which is a little like spending your life in mourning for your inevitable death. Be here now, Jack. Before the bracketed numbers with little stars have their say.
This week: It’s the last time you’ll need to comment to qualify for magnetized glory! Shout out as you finish, and let’s meet up at the bottom of page 310 aka the end of our tale….
Be sure to check back for next week’s post when we’ll get a preview of the magnet from the artist herself (“so-called eb”).
Say pally, how’s this work again? Finish on time, comment each week, and stay in the hunt for a free “I Survived the White Noise Meander” magnet. Oh, and in case you were wondering: This is the post for comments on Chapters 37-40 as well as any last contributions you’d like to make to The White Noise Meander Playlist (with a big thanks to Alyssa for volunteering to make that a real thing once our journey is complete).
Just finished…
Wow, I didn’t think everyone would die at the end!
hahahahahahahhahhahhaha!
I was not braced for the surprise appearance by Brundlefly. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brundlefly)
“Finished.” Partially surprised that the book’s ‘reality’ occurs in Hitler’s dog Wolf’s dreams. Since we are all characters in our dreams (Carl Jung), less partially surprised by the scarcity of chew toys. Tellingly, dogs are obsessed with death, and modernity’s erosion of the self.
The Fly or the Band?
the fly! He liked sweets too btw….
A reference I happened to look up and am glad I did:
“The Cloud of Unknowing (Middle English: The Cloude of Unknowing) is an anonymous work of Christian mysticism written in Middle English in the latter half of the 14th century. The text is a spiritual guide on contemplative prayer in the late Middle Ages. The underlying message of this work suggests that the way to know God is to abandon consideration of God’s particular activities and attributes, and be courageous enough to surrender one’s mind and ego to the realm of ‘unknowing,’ at which point one may begin to glimpse the nature of God.”
It is also a song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7H73jpgX3U
The payoff of the Orest Mercator saga is priceless.
In recognition of WHO declaring a pandemic today, the book has one usage of the word “virus”. The passage (Jack and Murray exchange) is not at all synonymous with today’s news, but the under/overlying (?) message resonates.
“But I have a feeling it’s not much protection against the intelligence and adaptability of the modern virus.”
Note: I’m not belittling the current pandemic one iota.
“What kind of a name is Willie Mink?” asks Jack. And under the circumstances I can’t help but think of Elon Musk, a teenager living in South Africa when this book was written. But let it also be noted: “Mink DeVille (1974–86) was a rock band known for its association with early punk rock bands at New York’s CBGB nightclub” – a band formed around lead singer and songwriter Willy DeVille. Coincidence? Seems unlikely.
“The total package.”
I have a copy of the book – not as mystical or as enlightening as one might hope; but if you are into strict prayer, meditation, and fasting it might be useful…
At the end this is just a saga about the fear that comes from lack of control; we can’t control the inevitability of death, we can’t control the movement of the toxic cloud, we can’t control our emotional cognition (and we surrender even more control when we try) – and all of this is manifest in the scene of Wilder on his tricycle peddling across the freeway – we watch with horror the things we can’t control and perhaps the lesson is pay closer attention to what you are supposed to be doing in your life (minding your child), be present where you are, and worry less about the future that is not your’s to define anyway. Peace out!
One thing that struck me was in Ch 37 “There’s something artificial about my death. It’s shallow, unfulfilling. I don’t belong to the earth or sky.” Seems like abstract thought separates humans so much from nature that even death, with its necessary returning of ones elements to nature, can’t bring us (or at least Jack) back. But Wilder’s death-defying ride at the end & Jack’s sparring of Mr. Gray, with German nuns doubting heaven, provide some kind of contrast.
Also a thought on Mercator – the Mercator projection isn’t accurate, but it did help us understand the world. Orest’s projection of facing death isn’t accurate, but it seems to help Jack understand his “dying.”
I also feel like there should be a Smith’s song for all of this, but I haven’t narrowed it down to one
My memory of reading this book will be forever entwined with memories of our current pandemic. This might be the best time to read White Noise, or maybe it’s the worst? I can’t quite decide. It’s been a wild ride either way.
Maybe Death at One’s Elbow?
I keep thinking, OK mercator I get, but Orest? Does it allude to the Orient? To an entirely different option JAK could consider to deal with his obsession with death (“or est”?). Is that character the most or character of all? It almost means you would pray or he would pray in Latin (ores and oret), but now I am surely overrthinking it.
final string of annotations (I backfilled the last one for anyone keeping score at home):
270: “a byproduct of insectide” (JAK killed like an insect)
“I eat bland foods.”
“No you don’t”
272: “Exact dates would drive many to suicide, if only to beat the system.”
276:
“I exercise. I take care of my body.”
“No, you don’t,” he said.
they are vampiring Wilder! cherish, breathe him in
278: for the last time we hear about plot (metafiction move) “But every plot is a murder in effect.” On some level is DeLillo saying that the author, in causing characters to die, is getting those points Murray talks about vs. the author’s own death?
279: “a fund, a pool, a reservoir of potential violence in the male psyche… Is it biology or geology?” (proto-toxic masculinity critique)
281: final paragraph, classic DeLillo. quotidian text flattened into narration, as metaphor
283: DeLillo is such a sharp observer especially on observation: “They were like childhood things you might come across after forty years, seeing their genius for the first time.”
284: “If I had a gun, why was I scared?”
286: “The Germans are gone, of course.”
287: “‘Babette doesn’t speak like this.'” — JAK addresses her in third person, both treating her as an object, and continuing the metafictional text flattening that DeLillo loves.
288: “‘Wear your ski mask,’ I told her.” Ouch!
288-289: The exhilaration of leaving the orbit of bourgeois propriety at the head of a mini crime spree.
“I drove past the abandoned car district, the sniper-fire district, the districts of smoldering sofas and broken glass.” (1970s-80s cities as seen by surburbanites)
289: To me this is the archetypal paragraph in the whole book:
“Random Access Memory, Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, Mutual Assured Destruction.”
On one level he is savoring the words themselves. He is also colliding these literal and metaphorical connotations, like a poet. He has also unpacked great acronyms (no mere initialisms): ram. aids, mad. If you stack them, you get ram twice, too:
RAM
AIDS
MAD
also very very very 1984-85.
290: “I drove twice around the foundry looking for signs” (no Google maps, also this would be a good first line for a song:
So funny that he is multitasking: avenge cuckolding, get the pills
291: feeling noir (or meta-noir?) again. Also has anyone every deciphered NU MISH BOOT ZUP KO (or tried <a href="https://new.wordsmith.org/anagram/anagram.cgi?anagram=NU+MISH+BOOT+ZUP+KO"?rearranging the letters?)
“Gibberish but high-quality gibberish,” we are told.
292: The idea that entering a room entails certain behavior or commitments interesting aligns with radical embodied cognition and the reasons why we forget things when we cross thresholds.
293: Having trouble picturing Mink. Hair is long and spiky?
“I had American sex the first time in Port-O-San, Texas” is comedy gold and probably coastal elitism too.
295: I had forgotten about the side effects of the medicine.
“caused users to confuse words with the things the referred to” — that is to confused the signifier with the signified. getting very continental here, almost revealing the word games at play.
“White noise everywhere.” BOOM
299: Gladney’s trouble giving Mink mouth-to-mouth echoes his (racist?) reflections on how hard it must have been to kiss Mink’s concave face.
301: “We are the last of the Germans.”
303: “If we did not pretend to believe these things, the world would collapse.”
309: bewildered when the supermarket changes, it’s the cry of the slow dying of obsolescence, saying this is not the world I knew
“The men consult lists, the women do not.”
310:
“wary of a second level of betrayal”
“decode the binary secret of every item”
“giving us time”
Very satisfying final paragraph, well ended!
How has this never been made into a film? too wordy? too arch?
too on the nose?
Finished. Thanks for the meander friends. Not sure where I ended up, but interesting views along the way. Looking forward to heading out again.
That summary I like! I’ve been struggling telling people who saw me read the book what it is about. I will quote you if I may.
Finished, and very happy I joined this meander. Thanks Dan for starting it and thanks to everyone for sharing your very personal insights. It made the experience even better than the pure act of reading and finishing an interesting book. Thanks!
What’s next? I’m in! 🙂
Recently found myself awake and thinking in the early hours, “What’s the opposite of White Noise?” Black silence, I supposed.
Throughout the book, I interpreted language in all its forms — the television noise, the banal chatter, the commercial jingles, and spurious gossip — that create the swirling soundscape of life as a kind of static that distracts and separates us humans from the experience of “objective” reality, the thing itself. I got to wondering though, when JAK described the “auditory scraps, tatters, whirling speaks. A heightened reality,” in the moments before shooting Mink whether white noise couldn’t describe the experience of collective stimuli that defines being alive.
Last week, I wondered if the medical establishment hadn’t replaced the church; if a mortal body is all you get, you’ll want to keep it tuned up. This week, the German nun got me thinking about art. If, for some, religion used to provide comfort against death (by saying that it is no death at all), maybe art serves that same comfort for some now.
I think of Marie Howe’s “What the Living Do.”
And in the closing scene of the grocery store, when JAK describes “the language of waves and radiation, or how the dead speak to the living,” I thought of favorite a passage from Tess of the d’Ubervilles (shout out to Neil, a fellow Hardy fan) in which the young protagonist goes to church:
“Parishioners dropped in by twos and threes, deposited themselves in rows before her, rested three-quarters of a minute on their foreheads as if they were praying, though they were not; then sat up, and looked around. When the chants came on, one of her favourites happened to be chosen among the rest—the old double chant “Langdon”—but she did not know what it was called, though she would much have liked to know. She thought, without exactly wording the thought, how strange and god-like was a composer’s power, who from the grave could lead through sequences of emotion, which he alone had felt at first, a girl like her who had never heard of his name, and never would have a clue to his personality.”
Finally, I think of my last suggestion for the WN playlist, Songs: Ohia’s “Farewell Transmission” — fitting, I believe, on a few levels.
These are all things that bring comfort and joy because they remind me of the transcendence within mortality, the privilege of watching a technicolor sunset before all goes dark.
What a delightful meander it’s been, reading DeLillo’s transmissions from the past and all of yours from the near present. Stay healthy, safe, and in the words of Warren Zevon, “Enjoy every sandwich.”
I agree with everyone who has mentioned reading this book in the midst of a snowballing pandemic. Every day has seem to escalate in panic, in gravitas from the day before. Chapter 39, while Jack is in Willie Mink’s hotel room. “I recalled Babette’s remarks about the side effects of the medication, and I said, as a test, ‘Falling plane.’ He looked at me, gripping the arms of the chair, the first signs of panic building in his eyes. ‘Plunging Aircraft,’ I said, pronouncing the words crisply, authoritatively. He kicked off his sandals, folded himself over into the recommended crash position, head well forward, hands clasped behind his knees.” I’m certainly feeling like I’m in crash position every day of this Covid-19 commotion. And I can’t help but wonder about how Murray would pontificate about the toilet paper hoarding situation. Generic? Brand name? Double-Ply?
Thank you for the fellowship, fellow travelers. And thank you, Dan, for your eloquent intros, your insight, and your stick-to-it-iveness. With that, I’ll leave you all with an excerpt from an interesting poem about death, “The Last Day,” by George Seferis. It’s almost like Jack is speaking in this poem….
How does a man die? Strange no one’s thought about it.
And for those who thought about it, it was like a recollection from old chronicles
from the time of the Crusades or the battle of Salamis.
Yet death is something that happens: how does a man die?
Yet each of us earns his death, his own death, which belongs to no one else
and this game is life.
And here’s the whole poem.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/51354/the-last-day-56d22f084483f
Stay well, fellow meanderers!
More than a few of us noted, or were annoyed by, the DeLillo’s literary intentionality (for lack of a better term). Sometimes it just felt like he was trying too hard. But I gotta hand it to him, when Jack shoot’s Mink in the bathroom, I had to give the author props. “The sound snowballed in the white room, adding on reflected waves.” Talk about tying a ribbon on the package. But wasn’t it rather pathetic that everything that had come before was reduced to a sloppy, botched murder in a skanky motel bathroom? I have to wonder, was the “delicate arc” referring to blood squirting from Mink’s midsection or was DeLillo being ironic about where this story landed?
Finished. I agree so much about the painful reflections of our current situation.
I did love this bit juxtaposing J&B’s dreading of death with Wilder’s lack of awareness:
“Why do I feel so good when I’m with Wilder?
“He doesn’t know he’s going to die. He doesn’t know death at all. You cherish this simpleton blessing of his, this exemption from harm. You want to get close to him, touch him, look at him, breathe him in.”
More Wilder in our lives, please. More Wilder.
Amanda: black silence – I immediately thought of space. Interestingly enough, one of the headlines on Google right now is “We’re not saying Earth is doomed…but 139 minor planets were spotted at the outer reaches of our Solar System. Just an FYI, that’s all.”
My 80s song selection of the week: REM’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It.”
“Fear is unnatural. Lighting and thunder are unnatural. Pain, death, reality, these are all unnatural.” So much of what is stated in this book is upside-down.
I’ve never really thought of room behavior. “The point of rooms is that they’re inside. No one should go into a room unless he understands this. People behave one way in rooms, another way in streets, parks and airports. To enter a room is to agree to a certain kind of behavior.” …
”I agreed completely.”
To which I respond, “Say what???”
…only the generic foodstuffs remain. Interesting.
Reading the Willie Mink attempted murder passage definitely made me long for the book’s earlier Vonnegut-esque passages. So it goes.
DeLillo seemed intent on disempowering and destroying societal norms, structures, and belief systems: governmental authorities, religion, corporations, families, science, teenage innocence, academia, marriage, at least one church form, etc. Jack’s exchange with the nun (which was delightful) made me wonder whether, in contrast to the nun’s message (“Someone must appear to believe…We surrender our lives to make your nonbelief possible”), DeLillo was ravaging all norms/structures/beliefs so the reader must become the believer. We are the yang to his yin. “The nonbelievers need the believers”.
DeLillo’s White Noise voice needs us.
Huge thanks to Dan for guiding us on an incredibly enjoyable meander. Thanks!
And, bonus, WN uses “meander” once:
“The long walk started at noon. I didn’t know it would turn into a long walk. I thought it would be a miscellaneous meditation, Murray and Jack, half an hour’s campus meander. But it became a major afternoon, a serious looping Socratic walk, with practical consequences.”
True! It did.
well, that’s it then: i’m destined to be forever behind the rest of you. but i’ve enjoyed your comments (yes, indeed, i’ve been reading your thought-provoking spark notes–thank you all). onward!
In an odd twist of fate I was listening to that beautifully tragic song (Farewell Transmission) one minute before I read your comment. Big fan of Hardy here, too.
Alyssa! That’s wild. Happy to hear we’re in sonic solidarity 🙂
nice catch!
It’s been great to read the comments of people way more intellectually attuned than I am. And how is it that Dan and the universe brought us this contemplation of society and death during our very own semi-airborne toxic event? I appreciate the underlying ideas, assisted by your explications, yet my favorite part of White Noise is the language–the lists, the non-sequiturs, the perfect rhythms. For my quote of the day, I’ll choose “I see you as a heavyset white man about fifty. Does this describe your anguish?” Thanks to all, and to Dan for starting us meandering again.
“fear that comes from lack of control” — true that….
🙂
Great Zevon quote for the book and the moment….
Thank you, Computilo! You too….
Amen, so-called “Mike Monaco”….
With all the hunkering this week, the idea of “the point of rooms” really resonated with me….
Just finished… Thanks to you all for this excellent thread! I can’t remember a meander/march that ended with more comments than we started with. So glad to join you all on the journey.
The last post will be a day late but not a dollar short — tune in late Monday for the magnet’s grand reveal. 🙂 More soon! – Cecil
Thanks Cece!
While I most definitely do not qualify for what is sure to be an excellent magnet, I just want to note for the record that I finished. It was more a series of sprints than a measured, consistent meander as I was really not into it for the first half or so of the book — it felt so dated, so “stuff white people like” — but I really got into the second half and just went back and enjoyed everyone’s commentary. Now to go try to win the recurring “I get to die first” argument with Anna….
Finished. I planned out my post very carefully: open the browser, navigate to Cecil, post three times for maximum coverage, close out the page, exit the browser, get up from the computer, make tea. Man, the best laid plans, right? Me and Jack, we’ve learned a thing or two. But now I’ve posted. Magnetize me, Cecil!
And I’m done.
Will mirror what Barbara L. said above: “It’s hard to tell people what exactly this book is about.” I gave it a shot yesterday and totally sucked at it – did not gain another “White Noise” fan in said conversation, probably due to the fact that I’m not a big fan myself.
So, I said it, right out: Did not enjoy the book, sorry to report.
I enjoyed sentences and scenes here and there, did connect to some ideas, but the book on its totality was definitely not fully up my alley.
Good thing therefore that this was my 2nd meander and not my 1st! Always good to start out with a book one likes (and “The Blind Assassin” was GREAT”).
Excellent viewpoint. Be present. Healthy fear of the inevitability of death is perfectly normal.