/lit/ - Literature

>>18342661
I have not read it. Please quote your favorite passage. If it is enjoyable I will pick it up.

Yeah

>>18342725
>Please quote your favorite passage

Several days later Murray asked me about a tourist attraction known as the most photographed barn in America. We drove 22 miles into the country around Farmington. There were meadows and apple orchards. White fences trailed through the rolling fields. Soon the sign started appearing. THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA. We counted five signs before we reached the site. There were 40 cars and a tour bus in the makeshift lot. We walked along a cowpath to the slightly elevated spot set aside for viewing and photographing. All the people had cameras; some had tripods, telephoto lenses, filter kits. A man in a booth sold postcards and slides -- pictures of the barn taken from the elevated spot. We stood near a grove of trees and watched the photographers. Murray maintained a prolonged silence, occasionally scrawling some notes in a little book.

"No one sees the barn," he said finally.

A long silence followed.

"Once you've seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn."

He fell silent once more. People with cameras left the elevated site, replaced by others.

We're not here to capture an image, we're here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura. Can you feel it, Jack? An accumulation of nameless energies."

There was an extended silence. The man in the booth sold postcards and slides.

"Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender. We see only what the others see. The thousands who were here in the past, those who will come in the future. We've agreed to be part of a collective perception. It literally colors our vision. A religious experience in a way, like all tourism."

Another silence ensued.

"They are taking pictures of taking pictures," he said.

He did not speak for a while. We listened to the incessant clicking of shutter release buttons, the rustling crank of levers that advanced the film.

"What was the barn like before it was photographed?" he said. "What did it look like, how was it different from the other barns, how was it similar to other barns?"

i didn't really like it that much. wasn't all that funny.

>>18342750
Eh... seems pretty on the nose. I'm sure you could conjure a few examples of times people showed up to events just because others had before, but a barn being photographed simply because the owners claimed it was photographed previously seems like a set-up to one of those "not like the other girls" memes.

Never read it but I'm about to read Libra, rating out of 10?

Part 1 yes. Part 2 was indescribably horrible in every way. Just went off the rails into a heap of shit

>>18342868
It's trying to convey hyperreality and the notion of a "copy without an original"

>>18344233
Libra was good, all the Jack Ruby chapters are the literary version of a top-tier greentext

are all these thread by and involving the same 2-3 people?
the complaints are always 'too straight-forward for me' and everyone only ever remembers the barn scene. weird.

>>18342661
I nearly fell in love with a girl while I was reading that, back in may 2018.
Gabriela, if you're reading this, know that I still think about that bus ride nearly every day.

>>18344716
J-jake?!

>>18342661
Wicked overrated book. Wanted to jump into Underworld, read this for a grad class and realized what a mistake that would have been. DeLillo is an NPR-level, All Things Considered-type take on 'PoMo malaise'

>>18344708
What was your favorite scene? Mine was the one where he talks to the chemist about death while the sun is setting. I also enjoyed all of the dialogue between the narrator and Murray.

Worth reading for the ideas about media and subjectivity. Voices from the tv and radio bleed into the home and the story. Evolving tension

>>18344708
I just finished reading it and the barn scene is the funniest to modern readers because it is what we are currently living through with social media and technology. The rest of the book is about 1980s problems. No one fears death anymore, we yearn for it. No one here is scared of drugs, we know how addictive and bad they are. We know the environment is being ruined by chemical spills and corporations. The closest scene to something that spoke to me besides the barn scene was when they ate chicken in the car. But again, as you said, it was all so straightforward. Would have been cool to read it 35 years ago and be inspired to write infinite jest.

>>18342751
>wasn't all that funny.

I laugh out loud every time a new oddly specific college class is mentioned.

>>18342661
Second-rate autistic Vonnegut

>>18342661
DNF twice. The first time I got to the part where they're in the shelter after the "airborne toxic event" and the second time I made it up to where the main character goes to shoot the guy his wife is fucking. I didn't really enjoy it the first time around and decided to give it another try (years later). The only reason it was a DNF the second time is I misplaced it and just moved on. I didn't enjoy it at all and found the characters flat and the plot contrived and lame (it felt like it became what it was trying to parody).

Murray was an ok character though (but it says something that the most interesting person in the book is the comic relief/character whose purpose is to drum the reader over the head with the book's themes). The book is short but it feels way longer.

I can see some people liking it but it just wasn't for me. Read non-fic about the book's themes instead (something like Amusing Ourselves to Death or even excerpts of Frederic Jameson).

>>18342661
No. But I'm older now so maybe I've changed. The main protagonist seemed an utter unlikable tool to me.

>>18346314
>I teach hitler!
>I like to pound my obese and unlikeable wife!
>I can’t stop getting married to awful people because I’m awful myself!
It’s like his job is to show how insufferable the American dream is.

>>18346392
He also talked like a price. I would rather top myself than hang out with that ponce.

>>18346402
Prick, not price.

>>18342661

Brilliant novel, one of DeLillo's best, and essential postmodern fiction.

>>18342725
At seven p. m. a man carrying a tiny TV set began to walk slowly through the room, making a speech as he went. He was middle-aged or older, a clear-eyed and erect man wearing a fur-lined cap with lowered flaps. He held the TV set well up in the air and out away from his body and during the course of his speech he turned completely around several times as he walked in order to display the blank screen to all of us in the room.
"There's nothing on network," he said to us. "Not a word, not a picture. On the Glassboro channel we rate fifty-two words by actual count. No film footage, no live report. Does this kind of thing happen so often that nobody cares anymore? Don't those people know what we've been through? We were scared to death. We still are. We left our homes, we drove through blizzards, we saw the cloud. It was a deadly specter, right there above us. Is it possible nobody gives substantial coverage to such a thing? Half a minute, twenty seconds? Are they telling us it was insignificant, it was piddling? Are they so callous? Are they so bored by spills and contaminations and wastes? Do they think this is just television? 'There's too much television already--why show more?' Don't they know it's real? Shouldn't the streets be crawling with cameramen and soundmen and reporters? Shouldn't we be yelling out the window at them, 'Leave us alone, we've been through enough, get out of here with your vile instruments of intrusion.' Do they have to have two hundred dead, rare disaster footage, before they come flocking to a given site in their helicopters and network limos? What exactly has to happen before they stick microphones in our faces and hound us to the doorsteps of our homes, camping out on our lawns, creating the usual media circus? Haven't we earned the right to despise their idiot questions? Look at us in this place. We are quarantined. We are like lepers in medieval times. They won't let us out of here. They leave food at the foot of the stairs and tiptoe away to safety. This is the most terrifying time of our lives. Everything we love and have worked for is under serious threat. But we look around and see no response from the official organs of the media. The airborne toxic event is a horrifying thing. Our fear is enormous. Even if there hasn't been great loss of life, don't we deserve some attention for our suffering, our human worry, our terror? Isn't fear news?"

>>18342661
I thought it was very funny and a good picture into the problems/anxieties with 1980s America. But its lost a lot of impact over time - obviously not going to be as impactful 35 years after it was written.
Worth the read. Its not long or hard and you walk away with a better understanding of what the 1980s were like.

>>18346582
Damn, Delillo is insanely pretentious.

>>18342725
Here's a few decent ones that veer off from the "big signpost" ones.

>“Is she still in the CIA?” Steffie said. “We’re not supposed to talk about that. She’s just a contract agent anyway.” “What’s that?” “That’s what people do today for a second income.”

>“Every day on the news there’s another toxic spill. Cancerous solvents from storage tanks, arsenic from smokestacks, radioactive water from power plants. How serious can it be if it happens all the time? Isn’t the definition of a serious event based on the fact that it’s not an everyday occurrence?” ... I tell myself I have reached an age, the age of unreliable menace. The world is full of abandoned meanings. In the commonplace I find unexpected themes and intensities.

people keep saying the book is about 1980s issues but all the issues in the book are still happening in todays society, arguably even more extreme nowadays. corporations are still powerful and cause horrible environmental disasters, spree shooters are more common than ever before, drugs still exist but the government has stopped being excessive about the war on drugs so you hear less about it in the news

>>18347090
Yes, of course you idiot. But in the 80s the way the book portrayed these issues was extreme. Compared to now the issues are rabidly exacerbated. The book makes it all seem quaint in retrospect when, at the time, it seemed radical. Of course the themes still pervade our society, nothing has been solved, that’s why everything is so much worse. Do you think your take is smart? Did you find “deep insight” when you read the bit about mr grey force feeding him selves the pills or the nuns kicking him out for asking stupid questions?

I liked the book overall but his son's character surely worked substantially better before the age of cracked.com/reddit/fedora culture and everything he said was a basic bitch factoid baked into societies collective thoughts

>>18347141
A sign of the times.

>>18347141
i think thats the point even back then

>>18347189
Are you young? Until like 12 years ago the average person knew nothing about anything like that kind of bite sized factoid stuff. Until then large segments of the population had no internet or 56/kbps dial-up. They didn't have the means for his character to be living up to the ~2013 internet atheist, the book was published in the middle of satanic panic for fucks sakes

>>18347217
>>18347130

>>18347380
Ah, I see you are a high quality poster who uses images to represent your thoughts instead of words. I see, by assuming a collection of images one does not ever have to think for themselves. Very interesting. Thank you for sharing.

>>18347394
I'm not the guy you were arguing with.

>>18347394
>Ah, I see you are a high quality poster who uses images to represent your thoughts instead of words. I see, by assuming a collection of images one does not ever have to think for themselves. Very interesting. Thank you for sharing.

>>18347380
This guy
>>18347583
Is also not me, the original guy you replied to. As I said, the son's character probably came across much better before the last 2000s/early '10s fedora IFLS culture

>>18346173
yeah that part was kinda funny i guess. there were some snorts but no big laughs or even chuckles.

>>18346173
>>18347814
Not to be argumentative but why is a comedic quality that provokes 'out-loud' laughter assumed to be a metric of progressive quality? Is it better for funny writing to be so particularly funny it provokes the involuntary reaction of laughter? I read things that I find funny and things that are funny and also provoke laughter, but I don't necessarily see one as a progressively better manifestation of written comedy.
Actually when I think about it I tend to exclaim with laughter more often when an author writes something so particularly bad, inconsidered, or disagreeable that I find it laughable.

>>18348556
i laughed at this post

>>18342661
Underworld is definitely better, but I feel like the ideas in White Noise were more revolutionary in the 80s, and its lost some of its punch as its observations have been synthesized into the broader culture. Kind of a proto-simpsons vibe.

>>18347720
This guy can not be real.

>>18348595
You would not believe what no pussy does to a nigga

>>18348603
He's seemingly not interested in improving his chances.

>>18348595
I thought so too but who would keep that up for 5 years?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cl32h710_wg

>>18342661
It's pretty funny.