Death the Sound of Static

While reading White Noise, I've been thinking of what the book is about, what its primary concern is. I began to think that, along with its concern with how mass media and consumerism have changed our social landscape, the novel centered mainly around the issue of death, our fear of it, and the fact that all of our technological advances have not made a dent in either our fear of death and its inevitability. Then I came along the title passage:

"I do want to die first," she said, "but that doesn't mean I'm not afraid. I'm terribly afraid. I'm afraid all the time."
"I've been afraid for more than half my life."
"What do you want me to say? Your fear is older and wiser than mine?"
"I wake up sweating. I break out in killer sweats."
"I chew gum because my throat constricts."
"I have no body. I'm only a mind or a self, alone in a vast space."
"I seize up," she said.
"I'm too weak to move. I lack all sense of resolve, determination."
"I thought about my mother dying. Then she died."
"I think about everyone dying. Not just myself. I lapse into terrible reveries."
"I feel so guilty. I thought her death was connected to my thinking about it. I feel the same way about my own death. The more I think about it, the sooner it will happen."
"How strange it is. We have these deep terrible lingering fears about ourselves and the people we love. Yet we walk around, talk to people, eat and drink. We manage to function. The feelings are deep and real. Shouldn't they paralyze us? How is it we can survive them, at least for a while? We drive a car, we teach a class. How is it no one sees how deeply afraid we were, last night, this morning? Is it something we all hide from each other, by mutual consent? Or do we share the same secret without knowing it? Wear the same disguise."
"What if death is nothing but sound?"
"Electrical noise."
"You hear it forever. Sound all around. How awful."
"Uniform, white."

I just finished the novel, and I would have to say that I recommend it. One of the things that I enjoy most about reading a book by a new author is being startled by the writing style. Delillo's writing really is distinct. He gives you the sense that he is saying something new.

For those of you who haven't seen me much in the past two years, you may not know about my new obsession: board games. My college friends will probably only remember that they refused to play the one board game, Axis and Allies, that I brought to school, even though one year for my birthday all I asked for was for people to play it with me (for shame!).

However, since my exodus down south, I have broadened my horizons some. It all starts with the Spiel des Jahres (German game of the year) for 1995, The Settlers of Catan. My acquaintance with this game occurred somewhat circuitously. My friend Otto mentioned to me that I might like it probably my junior year at Wash U. Then, shortly after I came back to Fayetteville, I joined a once-a-month game night group who introduced it to me. Not long after that, my step-brother Brian got a copy and the craze spread from Brian and me to the rest of our family.

After a while of playing Settlers, I began to thirst for a little more variety in my gaming. I soon began buying other European games, and now I have quite the collection. Not yet the collection of my friend George, the host of our game night who owns probably over fifty games, but I’m working on it.

You may have noticed that my favorite website is boardgamegeek.com. You should check it out sometime if you haven’t already.

This begins my series of posts about gaming. I will devote an entire post to different games that I own and that are out there. You should think about trying out some of them.

Man the Sum of What Have You

What is man?

What The Sound and the Fury says:

"Man the sum of his climactic experiences Father said. Man the sum of what have you. A problem in impure properties carried tediously to an unvarying nil: stalemate of dust and desire."
............................
"Father said that man is the sum of his misfortunes. One day you'd think misfortune would get tired, but then time is your misfortune Father said. A gull on an invisible wire attached through space dragged. You carry the symbol of your frustration into eternity."
............................
"Father was teaching us that all men are just accumulations dolls stuffed with sawdust swept from the trash heaps where all previous dolls had been thrown away the sawdust flowing from what wound in what side that not for me died not."

What White Noise says:

"But you said we had a situation."
"I didn't say it. The computer did. The whole system says it. It's what we call a massive data-base tally. Gladney, J. A. K. I punch in the name, the substance, the exposure time and then I tap into your computer history. Your genetics, your personals, your medicals, your psychologicals, your police-and-hospitals. It comes back pulsing stars. This doesn't mean anything is going to happen to you as such, at least not today or tomorrow. It just means that you are the sum total of your data. No man escapes that."
............................
"Everything that goes on in your whole life is a result of molecules rushing around somewhere in your brain."
"Heinrich's brain theories. They're all true. We're the sum of our chemical impulses."


Interesting the difference 57 years make.

Church Street

With my newfound free time, I decided to start a book club at my church. I've wanted to get more involved and to give something to the church body for awhile, and I felt this was the answer. It also gives me a reason to keep reading good books and to continue to read scholarly articles about them. Over the past two years I found that I really love reading scholarship, but for some reason I often lack the impulse to read it. Hopefully being the "leader" of the book club will guilt, shame, or somehow force me to do the research. We'll see.

Since we are meeting at our house on Church Avenue, I thought Church Street Book Club was an apt name. Having a name is important; otherwise I don't know how we would strike fear into the heart of our enemy or even have a rallying cry. We're working on a theme song.

We just had our first meeting. We ended up at fifteen members, which is about maximum capacity. I only expected about half that many, so I was pleasantly surprised. At the meeting I handed out a questionaire to see which of the books I was interested in reading the members had already read. Here's the list:

The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
Franny and Zooey by J. D. Salinger
On the Road by Jack Kerouac
Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
American Pastoral by Phillip Roth
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
The Night in Question by Tobias Wolff
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime by Mark Haddon
Life of Pi by Yann Martel
Another Bullshit Night in Suck City by Nick Flynn
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

Not a bad list, if you ask me. The result of the questionaire is that we're reading Slaughterhouse Five first. It's one of my favorite books, so I'm pretty excited.

It begins like this:
Listen:
Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time.
It ends like this:
Poo-tee-weet?

Soulmates

Last night, Sara and I were eating from a tub of Ben and Jerry's together and she spilled chocolate on her shirt. This is annoying because she tends to do this often, and I am the one who cleans the stains out of her shirts (how domestic!). I took her shirt and went into the bathroom, and then I heard her following me in to defend herself. She insisted that she really wasn't that messy, and then I turned to see:


Lovely. Absolutely lovely. For those of you who have known me long, these antics might seem familiar.

The Human Buzz of Some Vivid and Happy Transaction

To prepare for the comprehensive exam for my master's, I was given a reading list that I could choose my books from. The list specified that some books had to be read, but other times it had a list of several from which I had to choose 3 or 5. When I was narrowing down the twentieth century American literature section, one of the professors on my committee began by stating that he assumed that I chose White Noise by Don Dilillo, but I didn't. The reason for that is that I hadn't read White Noise yet, which for someone who supposed is focusing on twentieth century American literature is surprising. Thus, after I finished with the exam, I felt sufficiently shamed to go check it out from the library. It's a book that I've wanted to read since my last year of undergrad, so this has been long overdue.

Here I should say that whenever I talk about books that I'm reading, I'm likely to quote from them or to reveal something about them, so if you don't want to have your reading experience spoiled, you might want to skip these posts. I'll try not to mention anything that would ruin the book for you, but still, consider yourself forewarned. Now back to White Noise.

So far it's been quite delightful. I'm only a third of the way through it, but it has lived up to my expectations. Like most post-modern literature, it's about life in our modern world that is so saturated by mass media and consumerism. Also, holding with the trend of postmodernism, it has a somewhat whimsical view of reality; exaggeration and the outlandish are expected and everyday experiences are cast in a new light. It recalls William Thackery's observation that "the two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, familiar things new." That certainly seems the case with Delillo.

Two passages stick out to me as I think about the novel. In the first, one of the main characters, who is a professor of cultural studies, is reflecting on America while in a supermarket:

"Dying is an art in Tibet. A priest walks in, sits down, tells the weeping relatives to get out and has the room sealed. Doors, windows sealed. He has serious business to set to. Chants, numerology, horoscopes, recitations. Here we don't die, we shop. But the difference is less marked than you think."

I remembered this first passage after reading the next one. Later, the main character, Jack, who is also a professor, comes across a colleague outside of work. On campus, Jack is one of the more famous professors, achieving almost celebrity status among colleagues. Devoid of his flowing academic robes, and his pomp and circumstance, however, Jack's formidable presence has diminished. His colleage tells him, "you look so harmless, Jack. A big, harmless, aging, indistinct sort of guy."

What follows is one of the best passages I've read in a while. Jack consoles himself by a frenzied shopping spree that spans a page and a half:

"We moved from store to store, rejecting not only items in certain departments, not only entire departments but whole stores, mammoth corporations that did not strike our fancy for one reason or another. There was always another store, three floors, eight floors, basement full of cheese graters and paring knives. I shopped with reckless abandon. I shopped for immediate needs and distant contingencies. I shopped for its own sake, looking and touching, inspecting merchandise I had no intention of buying, then buying it..."

As the passage progresses, both the characters and the language itself build in intensity and crescendo out of control, ending in:

"Voices rose ten stories from the gardens and promenades, a roar that echoed and swirled through the vast gallery, mixing with noises from the tiers, with shuffling feet and chiming bells, the hum of escalators, the sound of people eating, the human buzz of some vivid and happy transaction."

I'll post again about the book after I've finished it.