I tried to read Don DeLillo's "White Noise" at some point in the late 80s or early 90s, I don't remember. It was published in 1985 and it wasn't then but not too long after. There were a lot of clever post-modernist books floating around my periphery then, and some I liked and some I just didn't. John and I would go rounds on them and I wanted to like what he liked or know why I didn't, so I'd try. Bret Easton Ellis. Mark Leyner. I liked more the older stuff - Vonnegut, Stoppard. Not a lot of women on the list in either direction. Anyway. I read "White Noise" and that was, as I remember now, the beginning of my quitting that kind of writing, the spectacular warp of a sentence that served no purpose other than to marvel at its own warp. There's a scene when two men are circling each other and talking about Elvis and Hitler and it is very quotable, and also very meaningful because it's a commentary on the blurring of pop culture and human history or something equally important and I just felt tired.
One July day in 1993 I was driving to a job, this was when I was working in the Bay Area and going around to elementary schools giving speeches about multicultural education which seemed very meaningful but were really just the foot in the door for the sales company I worked for. That is, I was doing a good thing, maybe a very good thing, but for a fairly weak or even bad reason. On the way to work I drove through Richmond, the town next to mine, where there was a train yard and there was an explosion, and I drove through a cloud of toxic smoke. I went and gave my presentation with tears streaming down my face, and then I went out to the parking lot of the school and threw up, and then I drove home, and they'd closed the freeway so I took surface streets because I didn't somehow grasp the situation. I drove through a cloud of poisonous gas that was engulfing the place where I live. Twenty-four thousand people were affected, there were lawsuits, but I didn't think that way; I thought: this is very unpleasant. By the time I got home I'd caught up with things on the news and I understood that it was more than just a cloud but I didn't know what I could do. I didn't have health insurance so it didn't seem like I could go to the hospital. I took a cool shower and went to bed and I guess I was okay, because I don't remember much else other than a sense of vague embarrassment for having thrown up in the parking lot.
And then later when I was talking to John I called it an "airborne toxic event", which is what it's called in the book when a train crash releases toxins into the air, and we laughed because it was in a book and then it was real and I thought about re-reading the book to learn more about the future but I didn't because it didn't feel like a wry commentary on the possible state of things or whatever, it felt too close to home. And of course now we know, if we didn't know then, that such things happen and happen again, past present and future.
Noah Baumbach directed a film version of "White Noise" and I have to tell you the internal dialogue on whether to watch it was exhausting even for me. I have complicated feelings about Noah Baumbach because I think he's clever in the same self-congratulatory way that yes yes it's wonderful but I'm tired of it. On the other hand, Greta Gerwig is with him and she seems like someone who wouldn't be with a bore. On the other hand, he seems to have left Jennifer Jason Leigh for her and I like Jennifer Jason Leigh. I can't ignore the whole "younger woman" thing either which I'm sure is a very unique and special circumstance for each person but you do see it piling up behind all the dudes who are sooner or later problematic. And I didn't love "Marriage Story". And I don't really like Adam Driver, I understand that you might but I don't; don't take it personally. But I like Greta Gerwig. And Andre Benjamin bonus (though he isn't in it very much, it turns out). Plus Danny Elfman on the soundtrack.
Friends, I fell asleep four times and had to wake up and go back and try again. I can see how well done it was etc and there were certainly parts I enjoyed very much and I even forgive them for leaving out the barn, which was one of the parts in the book I liked. My takeaway is that I do really like listening about death and dying but to a much lesser extent listening about fear of death and dying, and basically this was two hours of that fear, even more that than the "we're wasting our lives looking at things instead of living" that I got from the book. I'd recommend it for insomnia. That's about that.
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