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.

In Episode Eight, DDSWTNP take in the wide range of DeLillo’s corpus through passages chosen and recorded by listeners. Great renditions of DeLillo’s many voices abound, from the sinister to the hilarious to the highly lyrical, and we offer our analysis of the language he brings to power, embodiment, and violence. His most popular novels, White Noise and Underworld, are well represented, but so too are some excellent, more obscure picks from Ratner’s Star, Libra, The Body Artist, and more. Huge thanks to all those who celebrated DeLillo by reading and submitting a passage! #vegetoid #americansinourschools #uncollectedgarbagedistrict #bodywork #peace 

Readers, texts, and page numbers in this episode:

Americana: Andrew (36), Dave (134)

End Zone: Donna (239)

Ratner’s Star: Jae (131)

The Names: Robert (235), Mike (266)

White Noise: Gavin (147), Andy (12), Mike (302), Matt (311)

Libra: Matt (393)

Underworld: Sam (41), Ben (785), Ursula (826)

The Body Artist: Yonina (59)

Cosmopolis: Matt (99)

Point Omega: Raoul (28)

“Human Moments in World War III” (The Angel Esmeralda): George (43)

In Episodes 6 and 7: Ratner’s Star (1) and (2), DDSWTNP go spelunking and digging in the myriad caves, holes, and burrows of DeLillo’s mind-bending, encyclopedic novel of “serious play,” his exploration of outer space, the sedimented history of Earth, and so much in between. Mathematical, scientific, and theological insights and uncertainties mingle on every page as DeLillo follows Bronx native Billy Twillig, numbers prodigy and pubescent teenager, in his encounters with message-decoders, nonsense-speakers, and slapstick philosophers, human aliens of every stripe. Amidst much laughter and awe at passages inane, profound, and often simultaneously both, Ratner’s Star emerges in our analysis as a neglected early metafictional masterpiece, a book that set the stage for more famous mega-narratives of hidden connections like Libra and Underworld. #pantsonfire #boomerang #manmoreadvancedthedeeperwedig #batguanomarket #k.b.i.s.f.b. #mymouthsayshello

We also announce the extended deadline for recording your favorite DeLillo passages and having your voice be part of an upcoming DDSWTNP episode! By January 15, 2024, record a contribution at https://www.speakpipe.com/delillopodcast. Happy new year to all!

Texts used in the making of these episodes:

David Cowart, Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language. U. of Georgia P., 2003

Tom LeClair, In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel. U. of Illinois P., 1988.

Mark Osteen, American Magic and Dread: Don DeLillo’s Dialogue with Culture. U. of Pennsylvania P., 2000.

David L. Pike, Cold War Space and Culture in the 1960s and 1980s: The Bunkered Decades. Oxford UP, 2022.

Michael Streit, “Tertium Datur: Making Contact in Don DeLillo’s Ratner’s Star.” MA Thesis, U. of British Columbia, 2018. https://open.library.ubc.ca/soa/cIRcle/collections/ubctheses/24/items/1.0366140

“Writing is a form of personal freedom.It frees the mass identity we see in the making all around us . . . If serious reading dwindles to near nothingness, it will probably mean that the thing we’re talking about when we use the word ‘identity’ has reached an end.” –Don DeLillo, Letter to Jonathan Franzen, 1994, cited in Franzen’s “Why Bother?” in How To Be Alone: Essays (FSG, 2002)

In Episodes 6 and 7: Ratner’s Star (1) and (2), DDSWTNP go spelunking and digging in the myriad caves, holes, and burrows of DeLillo’s mind-bending, encyclopedic novel of “serious play,” his exploration of outer space, the sedimented history of Earth, and so much in between. Mathematical, scientific, and theological insights and uncertainties mingle on every page as DeLillo follows Bronx native Billy Twillig, numbers prodigy and pubescent teenager, in his encounters with message-decoders, nonsense-speakers, and slapstick philosophers, human aliens of every stripe. Amidst much laughter and awe at passages inane, profound, and often simultaneously both, Ratner’s Star emerges in our analysis as a neglected early metafictional masterpiece, a book that set the stage for more famous mega-narratives of hidden connections like Libra and Underworld. #pantsonfire #boomerang #manmoreadvancedthedeeperwedig #batguanomarket #k.b.i.s.f.b. #mymouthsayshello

We also announce the extended deadline for recording your favorite DeLillo passages and having your voice be part of an upcoming DDSWTNP episode! By January 15, 2024, record a contribution at https://www.speakpipe.com/delillopodcast. Happy new year to all!

Texts used in the making of these episodes:

David Cowart, Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language. U. of Georgia P., 2003

Tom LeClair, In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel. U. of Illinois P., 1988.

Mark Osteen, American Magic and Dread: Don DeLillo’s Dialogue with Culture. U. of Pennsylvania P., 2000.

David L. Pike, Cold War Space and Culture in the 1960s and 1980s: The Bunkered Decades. Oxford UP, 2022.

Michael Streit, “Tertium Datur: Making Contact in Don DeLillo’s Ratner’s Star.” MA Thesis, U. of British Columbia, 2018. https://open.library.ubc.ca/soa/cIRcle/collections/ubctheses/24/items/1.0366140

“Writing is a form of personal freedom.It frees the mass identity we see in the making all around us . . . If serious reading dwindles to near nothingness, it will probably mean that the thing we’re talking about when we use the word ‘identity’ has reached an end.” –Don DeLillo, Letter to Jonathan Franzen, 1994, cited in Franzen’s “Why Bother?” in How To Be Alone: Essays (FSG, 2002)

Happy 87th birthday, Don DeLillo. In Episode 5: The Lives of DeLillo (1), the first in a planned series about biography, DDSWTNP offer long-time and first-time readers alike new avenues into his work by discussing the first 30 years of his life, as he grew from the son of Italian immigrants and student of Jesuit scholars to the writer of his first published stories. This episode’s many topics include teenage DeLillo reading the modernist canon in a New York park, his time as “failed ascetic” during college at Fordham, the weight of the Bronx on his earliest fiction, his pivotal copywriting work under advertising guru David Ogilvy, and how the eventual author of Libra reacted on the day JFK was shot. #mythologyofamerica #spaghettiandmeatballs #howtowriteabiography #catholicritual #quittingtowrite #dregsofhiswork

We also announce in this episode our call for recorded contributions from our listeners! Be a part of our end-of-2023 tribute to our favorite DeLillo passages by heading to Speakpipe and recording yours, in two minutes or less. Deadline is December 10. Go to https://www.speakpipe.com/delillopodcast

Critical texts, stories, and essays referred to in this episode:

Don DeLillo, “The River Jordan,” Epoch 10.2 (Winter 1960): 105-120.

 

---, “Take the ‘A’ Train,” Epoch 12.1 (Spring 1962): 9-25.

---, “Spaghetti and Meatballs,” Epoch 14.3 (Spring 1965): 244-250.

---, “Coming Sun. Mon. Tues.,” Kenyon Review 28.3 (June 1966): 391-394.

---, “Baghdad Towers West,” Epoch 17.3 (Spring 1968): 195-217.

---, “A History of the Writer Alone in a Room.” Acceptance speech for the Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society, 1999.

DeRosa, Aaron, “Don DeLillo, Madison Avenue, and the Aesthetics of Postwar Fiction,” Contemporary Literature 59.1 (Spring 2018): 50-80.

Veggian, Henry. Understanding Don DeLillo. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2014.

Interviews with DeLillo referred to in this episode:

Tom LeClair (1979) and Anne Arensberg (1988):

Collected in Thomas DePietro, ed., Conversations with Don DeLillo, University Press of Mississippi, 2005.

Vince Passaro (1991):

https://www.nytimes.com/1991/05/19/magazine/dangerous-don-delillo.html

Gordon Burn (1991):

“Wired Up and Whacked Out,” The Sunday Times (London), August 25, 1991 (magazine): 6-39.

Adam Begley (1993): 

https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1887/the-art-of-fiction-no-135-don-delillo

Mark Binelli (2007): 

https://www.guernicamag.com/intensity_of_a_plot/

PEN (2010): 

https://pen.org/an-interview-with-don-delillo/

Robert McCrum (2010):

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/aug/08/don-delillo-mccrum-interview

Finally, a great source for interview excerpts and so many other things DeLillo:

Don DeLillo’s America: http://perival.com/delillo/delillo.html