In Episode Sixteen: “DeLillo’s Sentences,” DDSWTNP take a brief break from analyzing full novels to do some very close reading of single sentences from across DeLillo’s career. Style and craft, sound and rhythm, and what makes DeLillo (as one critic puts it) a poet writing prose—these are subjects we consider as we look closely at the lines noted below and try to figure out what DeLillo means when he says in 1997, “At some point you begin to write sentences and paragraphs that don’t sound like other writers’.” This episode is a deep dive into DeLillo’s language but also a pretty good introduction for those just starting to read him. #donutmaker #thehemingwayand

DeLillo lines analyzed in this episode:

“Much of the appeal of sport derives from its dependence on elegant gibberish. And of course it remains the author’s permanent duty to unbox the lexicon for all eyes to see—a cryptic ticking mechanism in search of a revolution.” End Zone (113)

“New York seemed older than the cities of Europe, a sadistic gift of the sixteenth century, ever on the verge of plague.” Great Jones Street (3)

“Around the great stadium the tenement barrens stretch, miles of delirium, men sitting in tipped-back chairs against the walls of hollow buildings, sofas burning in the lots, and there is a sense these chanting thousands have, wincing in the sun, that the future is pressing in, collapsing toward them, that they are everywhere surrounded by signs of the fated landscape and human struggle of the Last Days, and here in the middle of their columned body, lank-haired and up-close, stands Karen Janney, holding a cluster of starry jasmine and thinking of the bloodstorm to come.” Mao II (7)

“The last sentence was, ‘In future years, of course, men and women, in cubicles, wearing headphones, will be listening to secret tapes of the administration’s crimes while others study electronic records on computer screens and still others look at salvaged videotapes of caged men being subjected to severe physical pain and finally others, still others, behind closed doors, ask pointed questions of flesh-and-blood individuals.” Point Omega (33)

Other texts cited in this episode:

“Tom LeClair.” Interview by Andrew Mitchell Davenport. Full Stop, May 19, 2015. https://www.full-stop.net/2015/05/19/interviews/andrew-mitchell-davenport/tom-leclair/

“‘Writing as a Deeper Form of Concentration’: An Interview with Don DeLillo.” Interview by Maria Moss. Conversations with Don DeLillo. Ed. Thomas DePietro. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2005. 155-68.

“Exile on Main Street: Don DeLillo’s Undisclosed Underworld.” Interview by David Remnick. Conversations with Don DeLillo. 131-44.

In Episode Fifteen, DDSWTNP take on The Names, a Greece-based story of a strange “abecedarian” murder cult, a novel regarded by DeLillo as his turn toward more “serious” writing and placed at or near the top of many a reader’s list of favorites. We discuss The Names as an examination of the “Depravities” and guilt of being an American in the complex late-1970s world of corporations, risk analysis, bank loans, and intelligence covers that narrator James Axton navigates, and we ask why The Names puts this geopolitical tumult (including the 1979 Iranian Revolution) in the context of ancient languages, ritual sacrifice, and a dissolving marriage and family life for James. Language-obsessed Owen Brademas (the archeologist and “epigraphist” who is drawn relentlessly to the fascinating cult) and filmmaker Frank Volterra (perhaps a sly satire of a certain American auteur?) figure in this story of religion, aesthetics, and the enduring appeal of violence, but we turn at the end of this episode to the nine-year-old author Tap, Axton’s son, whose misspelled, highly spirited tale of the spirit to which his tongue might “yeeld” lets DeLillo showcase all the ways to use the alphabet to salutary and generative ends. #getwet #themindslittleinfinite

We also announce the winner of our Amazons raffle and say thanks to all who have supported and continue to support us at buymeacoffee.com/delillopodcast.

Texts mentioned and discussed in this episode:

Burn, Stephen J. “‘A Paradigm for the Life of Consciousness’: The Pale King.” David Foster Wallace and “The Long Thing”: New Essays on the Novels, ed. Marshall Boswell. New York: Bloomsbury, 2014. 149-168.

“Don DeLillo: The Art of Fiction CXXXV,” Interview with Adam Begley, The Paris Review 128 (1993): 274-306.

“A Talk with Don DeLillo,” Interview with Robert Harris, in Thomas DePietro, ed., Conversations with Don DeLillo, University of Mississippi Press, 2005, 16-19.

The Godfather (1972) and Apocalypse Now (1979), dir. Francis Ford Coppola. (We have the dates on both films slightly wrong in the episode.)

Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse (1991), dir. George Hickenlooper and Fax Bahr

Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer. Grove Press, 2015.

In Episode Fourteen, DDSWTNP turn our attention for the first time to DeLillo’s drama – and to a largely unknown work by DeLillo as playwright, a 1966 radio play and disturbing take on U.S. race relations titled Mother. We cover the circumstances of the play’s original broadcasts, its re-emergence in an internet archive recording more than 50 years later, and the strange way in which this story’s armchair progressives and Billie Holiday fans, Ralph and Sally, end up making a fetishizing travesty of civil rights and racial integration in the play’s brief 27 minutes. Topics include the importance of radio to Mother’s themes of media occlusion, moral numbness, and erasure; what DeLillo means by Ralph’s “white malady” of transparency and how it reworks images from another Ralph’s Invisible Man; and what this play has to do with contemporaneous issues like interracial marriage in Loving v. Virginia. We talk extensively as well about how Mother presages parts of the early novels, from jazz love in Americana to Taft in End Zone and Azarian in Great Jones Street. Before (and after) listening to our analysis, take in this troubling 27-minute play at https://archive.org/details/pra-BB3830.01

Our raffle for a hardcover Amazons has been extended to August 1 – donate and enter to win at https://buymeacoffee.com/delillopodcast

Texts mentioned and discussed in this episode:

James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time. Dial Press, 1963.

Samuel Beckett, Endgame. 1957.

Don DeLillo, The Mystery at the Middle of Ordinary Life. 2000.

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/30660/pdf

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man. Random House, 1952.

“The writer is driven by his conviction that some truths aren’t arrived at so easily, that life is still full of mystery, that it might be better for you, Dear Reader, if you went back to the Living section of your newspaper because this is the dying section and you don’t really want to be here.” (Thomas LeClair, “An Interview with Don DeLillo,” Contemporary Literature 23.1 (1982): 19-31)

Eugene Ionesco, Rhinoceros. 1959.

Mark Osteen. “Chronology.” In Don DeLillo, Three Novels of the 1980s. Library of America, 2022.

Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit. 1944.

In Episode Thirteen, DDSWTNP follow the puck into the corners with Cleo Birdwell, first female NHL player and ostensible author of the farcical, sex-fueled, “intimate” memoir Amazons, the 1980 satire of a “pseudo-profound” America that DeLillo co-wrote with Sue Buck. Amazons is a sports novel with perhaps more interest in “strip Monopoly” than hockey, more investment by Cleo in her Badger Beagles youth softball team than the New York Rangers. We discuss how this odd book came to be, how it was marketed, how DeLillo never fully owned up to it, and its nevertheless surprising place in his career’s development, a comedic lark and palate cleanser in which he makes significant moves toward the vision of White Noise. These include a disease called Jumping Frenchman, simulated death in the American home, and the character Murray Jay Siskind, seen here writing about athletes and a deeply corrupt snowmobile industry before becoming the Elvis scholar readers of the later novel know. In an episode with insights for those who have read this rare book and those who haven’t, we show that Amazons, least-discussed of DeLillo’s works, really should not be that!

Support our work and enter the raffle to win a hardcover Amazons: buymeacoffee.com/delillopodcast

Discussed in this episode:

Gerald Howard, “The Puck Stopped Here” (2008)

https://www.bookforum.com/print/1404/revisiting-cleo-birdwell-and-her-national-hockey-league-memoir-1406

David Marchese, “We All Live in Don DeLillo’s World. He’s Confused By It Too” (2020)

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/10/12/magazine/don-delillo-interview.html

An excerpt:

You know who else shows up in two of your books? Murray Jay Siskind. Both times described as having an “Amish” beard.

Murray Jay! Remind me, what book is he in?

“White Noise.”

And where else?

“Amazons.”

Oh god. How do you remember that? I don’t remember that.

I think I just got a scoop. I don’t know if you’ve ever publicly acknowledged that you wrote “Amazons.”

I probably did, somewhere or other. [Laughs.] Maybe to an interviewer from Thailand.

Susan Sontag, “The Pornographic Imagination” (1967), in Styles of Radical Will (1969).

Idries Shah: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idries_Shah

Jumping Frenchmen of Maine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumping_Frenchmen_of_Maine

In Episode Twelve, DDSWTNP interview Curt Gardner, creator and keeper of “Don DeLillo’s America,” a prolific and comprehensive website that for nearly 30 years has been the go-to spot for information about DeLillo, from reviews, appearances, and novel publication histories to news of film adaptations and play performances. We cover Curt’s stories of first discovering DeLillo in 1981, what he learned about the writing of Amazons at the Harry Ransom Center, and the letters he’s exchanged with the man himself as he’s built his site. We had a really fun time trading stories, insights, and interpretive connections with Curt. After listening to this in-depth interview, check out the riches of “Don DeLillo’s America” at http://www.perival.com/delillo/delillo.html

Support our work: https://buymeacoffee.com/delillopodcast

Mentioned and discussed in this episode:

Ant Farm, “The Eternal Frame” (1975):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mg1FCjvZ_jA

DeLillo, Don. “Notes Toward a Definitive Meditation (By Someone Else) on the Novel ‘Americana.’” Epoch 21.3 (Spring 1972): 327-29.

---. “The Sightings.” Weekend Magazine (Toronto) 4 August 1979: 26-30.

---. “Total Loss Weekend.” Sports Illustrated Nov. 27, 1972.

https://web.archive.org/web/20090210115257/http://vault.sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1086811/index.htm

“Is cyberspace a thing within the world or is it the other way around? Which contains the other, and how can you tell for sure?” (Underworld)

Game 6: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0425055/

LeClair, Thomas. “Missing Writers.” Horizon Oct. 1981: 48-52.

Episodes Ten and Eleven: Running Dog (1 and 2) unpack DeLillo’s frightening post-Vietnam War vision of a nation marked by pornographic personhood, corrupt politics, and an openness to fascistic fantasy, all centered on the quest for a rumored film of an orgy in Hitler’s crumbling Berlin bunker. Pornographers and their well-armed henchmen, obsessive collectors of erotic art, and military men driven by profit saturate this narrative of New York and the Texas desert, while attempts to expose and subvert their cons by a journalist and a strangely spiritual intelligence agent reveal that all who resist these forces may end up mere lackeys and running dogs. DDSWTNP also draw clear links to U.S. politics in 2024, with orange make-up on a senator and a satire-proof dictator who dons the look of a clownish entertainer turning Running Dog, read now, into another of DeLillo’s uncanny prophecies of an image-mad American culture’s very grim potentials. #imperialistlackeys #thegreatdictator #hitlerhumanized #acourseindying

In this episode we also announce your chance to support our podcasting work and contribute to our trip this year to DeLillo’s huge archive at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas! If you enjoy this podcast we hope you’ll support us at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/delillopodcast

Texts and sites referred to in this episode:

Mark Binelli, “Intensity of a Plot” (interview with Don DeLillo), Guernica, July 17, 2007. https://www.guernicamag.com/intensity_of_a_plot/

Don DeLillo, “Silhouette City: Hitler, Manson, and the Millennium.” Dimensions 4:3 (1989: 29-34. Rpt. In Mark Osteen, ed., White Noise: Text and Criticism (Penguin Books, 1998), 344-352.

“Don DeLillo’s America – A Don DeLillo Site”: http://perival.com/delillo/delillo.html

Vince Passaro, “Dangerous Don DeLillo.” New York Times Magazine, May 19, 1991. https://www.nytimes.com/1991/05/19/magazine/dangerous-don-delillo.html

Episodes Ten and Eleven: Running Dog (1 and 2) unpack DeLillo’s frightening post-Vietnam War vision of a nation marked by pornographic personhood, corrupt politics, and an openness to fascistic fantasy, all centered on the quest for a rumored film of an orgy in Hitler’s crumbling Berlin bunker. Pornographers and their well-armed henchmen, obsessive collectors of erotic art, and military men driven by profit saturate this narrative of New York and the Texas desert, while attempts to expose and subvert their cons by a journalist and a strangely spiritual intelligence agent reveal that all who resist these forces may end up mere lackeys and running dogs. DDSWTNP also draw clear links to U.S. politics in 2024, with orange make-up on a senator and a satire-proof dictator who dons the look of a clownish entertainer turning Running Dog, read now, into another of DeLillo’s uncanny prophecies of an image-mad American culture’s very grim potentials. #imperialistlackeys #thegreatdictator #hitlerhumanized #acourseindying

In this episode we also announce your chance to support our podcasting work and contribute to our trip this year to DeLillo’s huge archive at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas! If you enjoy this podcast we hope you’ll support us at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/delillopodcast

Texts and sites referred to in this episode:

Mark Binelli, “Intensity of a Plot” (interview with Don DeLillo), Guernica, July 17, 2007. https://www.guernicamag.com/intensity_of_a_plot/

Don DeLillo, “Silhouette City: Hitler, Manson, and the Millennium.” Dimensions 4:3 (1989: 29-34. Rpt. In Mark Osteen, ed., White Noise: Text and Criticism (Penguin Books, 1998), 344-352.

“Don DeLillo’s America – A Don DeLillo Site”: http://perival.com/delillo/delillo.html

Vince Passaro, “Dangerous Don DeLillo.” New York Times Magazine, May 19, 1991. https://www.nytimes.com/1991/05/19/magazine/dangerous-don-delillo.html

In Episode Nine: Players, DDSWTNP follow the bored, hollow lives of Pammy and Lyle Wynant as they pursue “the glamour of revolutionary violence” and the hope for pastoral peace, taking them from the World Trade Center and New York Stock Exchange to a Maine island and a Toronto motel room. While at heart DeLillo’s first major analysis of the mind of terrorism, Players is a surprisingly personal novel that unravels the form of the political thriller and shows him writing about sex and grim seduction in ways he did nowhere else. Our topics include terrorist intrigue and indoctrination, uncanny prophecies of 9/11, a JFK assassination conspiracy, the troubling immateriality of money, the psychology of suicide, and the pervasive power of fear. #mistersofteevoice #themovieandthemotel #terrorispurification #weknownothingelseabouthim

References in this episode:

Tom LeClair, In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel. U. of Illinois P., 1987.

“I was sailing in Maine with two friends, and we put into a small harbor on Mt. Desert Island. And I was sitting on a railroad tie waiting to take a shower, and I had a glimpse of a street maybe fifty yards away and a sense of beautiful old houses and rows of elms and maples and a stillness and wistfulness—the street seemed to carry its own built-in longing. And I felt something, a pause, something opening up before me. It would be a month or two before I started writing the book and two or three years before I came up with the title Americana, but in fact it was all implicit in that moment—a moment in which nothing happened, nothing ostensibly changed, a moment in which I didn’t see anything I hadn’t seen before. But there was a pause in time, and I knew I had to write about a man who comes to a street like this or lives on a street like this. And whatever roads the novel eventually followed, I believe I maintained the idea of that quiet street if only as counterpoint, as lost innocence.”—“Don DeLillo: The Art of Fiction CXXXV,” Interview with Adam Begley, The Paris Review  128 (1993): 274-306.