It's Friday, Issue #132
The DeLillossance
In case you missed it, I announced the spring session of my accountability group, Fuck You, Write Your Pages. Enrollment is open and the session starts March 16th.
We’re in the last days of my birthday sale! Get 30% off until Monday, 3/1.
I’m holding a Study Hall this Sunday from 9 am to 11 am, Pacific Time, for paid subscribers only. Let’s get together and write!
The Zoom link is below the paywall…
You know what I did instead of subjecting myself to the State of the Union? I watched professional clown Courtney Pauroso do her hilarious, grotesque, provocative, goofy sex robot show, my second time seeing it. If Vanessa 5000 comes to your town, go—or you can watch it online. Trump feeds off attention so, no, he may not have mine.
I loved this interview with Ethan Hawke (that’s a gift link, btw) about his Oscar-nominated role in “Blue Moon,” directed by Richard Linklater—Rick to his pals. The conversation is all about selling out (or not), being creative, and how hard it is to make films these days. This particular exchange got me:
Being a young actor, you think, “When is the spotlight going to move on and will I survive it?” When Rick and I were first becoming friends, I’d had early fame and I was incredibly suspicious about the ways it dips you in formaldehyde and asks you to stop growing. He thought this part might speak to me because it’s something I live in absolute fear of.
When the journalist, Kyle Buchanan, asks him, “Can you tell when the spotlight moves on from you to some other guy?” Hawke answers:
Oh, the ways that other people interact with you are so obvious. There’s a buzz that happened in my life with “Dead Poets Society” [1989], then it would go quiet. Then “Reality Bites” [1994] would come out and the buzz is back. The heat of the spotlight is something a person feels, but I learned pretty early that some of the best periods of my life were when that buzz had quieted down. That’s a great teacher because then you stop acting out of fear. You have to let yourself shed skins and make mistakes and try again.
May we all make art without that buzz in our ears.
I plan to watch “Blue Moon” over the weekend. If you’ve seen it, tell us what you thought in the comments.
I was tickled by this newsletter from Stephen Piccarella, ranking every Don DeLillo novel; the list includes capsule comments on each book.
Since I haven’t read all of DeLillo’s books, and since I haven’t read his work in years, I can’t weigh in on Piccarella’s rankings.
However!
I read Underworld an absurd eight times in college because I was doing my (eventually abandoned) honors thesis on it.
Take a minute to imagine little Edan back then, in low-rise jeans and cherry red clogs, no bra, ever, underlining DeLillo passages between scurrying to her library pile of Jacques Lacan and Linda Hutcheon and Frank Kermode, trying to fashion an argument for DeLillo’s big book about the secret histories of America in the latter half of the twentieth century that uses a famed baseball and a huge art installation in the desert and garbage management to do it. Oof. I still have my notebooks from this era:
It’s been over twenty years but I still believe I’d love this book, its ambition and sprawl, its sentences.
What sentences!
“She looked famous and rare, famous even to herself, famous alone making a salad in her kitchen” (67)
and
“The truth of bridges is that they made him feel he was doing some möbius gyration, becoming one-sided, losing all purchase on name and place and food-taste and weekends with the in-laws—hanging sort of unborn in the generic space” (167).
and
“Brian thought he resembled some retired stand-up comic who will not live a minute longer than his last monopolized conversation” (168).
So good!
I want to transcribe the last breathless page but I won’t. Instead, I’ll give you this single image from the passage:
“the apple core going sepia in the lunch tray” (827).
(That phrase used to be at the bottom of my email signature…?!)
I said it already on Substack Notes and I’ll say it again here: Underworld deserves a renewed appreciation, like my other favorite, Lonesome Dove. It’s high time we had a DeLillo Renaissance (er, a DeLillossance), and it would be nice if it happened before the man died. He’ll be 90 in November!
The DeLillossance rides on women deciding to read him. So, come on, ladies, let’s do this!
(Also, I humbly request some credit for the renewed interest. You know I’m miffed that the New York Times didn’t interview me about the McMurtry trend…)
Here’s the Zoom link for Sunday’s Study Hall. If you plan to come, please comment below or reply to this email.