I carried around my first copy of underworld like a security blanket. It took me over a year to digest all of it, I read parts over and over frustrated and enthralled. If you asked me what this book is about my response is what isn’t it about? It does the thing that the idealized version of the intellectual novel aspires to be. It doesn’t give you a clear meaning it dares to make you conclude it’s meaning according to you. It’s literature in the highest order.
Underworld is great read.Full of angst and puzzled wondee.Listening here to DeLillo discussing his sense of it all is like listening to to Shakespeare explain his sense of Hamlet.Amazing😎
The part where she mentions journalism and fiction , and sayes could this be a danger area is now fascinating because it now is. There has always been propadanda but now their is a thing called fake news. Artist's often perdict or foresee things that happen in the future and because art can cast a wide net often the totality of the work of art is not fully seen be the originator. They are talking about techniques of writing journalism and fiction but the reality now is that of fact news being used to bring down the ligitimate government.
59:00, Are we trippin' to feel DeLillo's resisting the singular layer of being photographed, a point made poetic , when the immediate verse, after the photo op. distraction goes; "(measured in) the density of experience... ” ?
This talk confirms me in my impression after reading this at times brilliant, but mostly frustrating novel. Dellilo mentions all these grand themes: the atom bomb, the cold war, baseball, competition, American society, nostalgia, religion, the Kennedy assassination, serial killers, J. Edgar Hoover, poverty, war, waste disposal, television etc., etc. but really has nothing profound to say about any of it - or if he does, it's not in the book or in this talk. What is he trying to say with these metaphors? I find his faux poetic reading voice annoying as well, but perhaps that's just my perception. I wish he had written a different book, maybe limited to the sections on the Bronx which he makes come alive with such energy and flame. Quit the leaps at being "important." Underworld is a series of brilliant jewels, but the necklace disappoints.
You took the words right out of my mouth. Delillo likes to bandy all these topics about in his books, but he never really does anything with them, or at least doesn't seem to. I find his books frustratingly incoherent; he'll set up a plot arc only to do nothing with it. He's a heck of a writer, in terms of just the actual prose, but his characters talk like no humans I've ever encountered and he's never been able to evoke an emotional response in me. Or an intellectual response, for that matter. He's really pretty to read, but kind of shallow, I feel.
yeah i feel the same way to some degree. I absolutely adored parts of Underworld but a lot of it left me cold. Interestingly i've read that one of my favorite parts (Sister Edgar, ruins of the South Bronx, the feral girl Esmeralda) initially appeared as a short story and was only later incorporated in the novel. The other parts which stood out to me being the baseball game itself, the Lenny Bruce bits and the revelation of that pivotal event in Nick Shay's adolescence. The Klara Sax storyline, the Matthew Shay and Albert Bronzini storylines didn't do much for me and felt these and some of the other fragmentary material detracted from the power of the stronger arcs. I feel like he raised some interesting ideas though(the multivalent symbol of garbage for instance).
Huh, I didn't realize that I've actually read a couple DeLillo novels in the past til seeing these past few critical comments. Said comments sparked my memory by articulating what I felt about his works I experienced, yet have no other lasting impression from
Thunderous applause at end :sublime delight.
thanks for recording and posting this! DeLillo is wonderfully generous,candid and lucid.
DeLillo starts at 09.40
thanks mate
Omg thank you... Lady, we're here for Don
09:40 *Please!*
God bless you
Thanks for uploading this 🙏
the reading, slow-motion chess patterns played out as movies, unconnected comparable ART.
I carried around my first copy of underworld like a security blanket. It took me over a year to digest all of it, I read parts over and over frustrated and enthralled. If you asked me what this book is about my response is what isn’t it about? It does the thing that the idealized version of the intellectual novel aspires to be. It doesn’t give you a clear meaning it dares to make you conclude it’s meaning according to you. It’s literature in the highest order.
Love "white noise" and "Libra" but "Underworld" is his best.
Underworld is great read.Full of angst and puzzled wondee.Listening here to DeLillo discussing his sense of it all is like listening to to Shakespeare explain his sense of Hamlet.Amazing😎
I *do* like to wondee at things and such.
The part where she mentions journalism and fiction , and sayes could this be a danger area is now fascinating because it now is. There has always been propadanda but now their is a thing called fake news. Artist's often perdict or foresee things that happen in the future and because art can cast a wide net often the totality of the work of art is not fully seen be the originator. They are talking about techniques of writing journalism and fiction but the reality now is that of fact news being used to bring down the ligitimate government.
59:00, Are we trippin' to feel DeLillo's resisting the singular layer of being photographed, a point made poetic , when the immediate verse, after the photo op. distraction goes; "(measured in) the density of experience... ” ?
This talk confirms me in my impression after reading this at times brilliant, but mostly frustrating novel. Dellilo mentions all these grand themes: the atom bomb, the cold war, baseball, competition, American society, nostalgia, religion, the Kennedy assassination, serial killers, J. Edgar Hoover, poverty, war, waste disposal, television etc., etc. but really has nothing profound to say about any of it - or if he does, it's not in the book or in this talk. What is he trying to say with these metaphors? I find his faux poetic reading voice annoying as well, but perhaps that's just my perception.
I wish he had written a different book, maybe limited to the sections on the Bronx which he makes come alive with such energy and flame. Quit the leaps at being "important." Underworld is a series of brilliant jewels, but the necklace disappoints.
You took the words right out of my mouth. Delillo likes to bandy all these topics about in his books, but he never really does anything with them, or at least doesn't seem to. I find his books frustratingly incoherent; he'll set up a plot arc only to do nothing with it. He's a heck of a writer, in terms of just the actual prose, but his characters talk like no humans I've ever encountered and he's never been able to evoke an emotional response in me. Or an intellectual response, for that matter. He's really pretty to read, but kind of shallow, I feel.
yeah i feel the same way to some degree. I absolutely adored parts of Underworld but a lot of it left me cold. Interestingly i've read that one of my favorite parts (Sister Edgar, ruins of the South Bronx, the feral girl Esmeralda) initially appeared as a short story and was only later incorporated in the novel. The other parts which stood out to me being the baseball game itself, the Lenny Bruce bits and the revelation of that pivotal event in Nick Shay's adolescence. The Klara Sax storyline, the Matthew Shay and Albert Bronzini storylines didn't do much for me and felt these and some of the other fragmentary material detracted from the power of the stronger arcs. I feel like he raised some interesting ideas though(the multivalent symbol of garbage for instance).
delillo literature is empty: a perfect expressiion of postmodernism. delillo is a blender. delillo is not philip roth.
Huh, I didn't realize that I've actually read a couple DeLillo novels in the past til seeing these past few critical comments. Said comments sparked my memory by articulating what I felt about his works I experienced, yet have no other lasting impression from
Did you read it?