The White Noise Meander, Week 2

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And just like that, we’ve made it to the start of Week 2!

Thanks to everyone who’s Meandering and commented on Week 1. Really happy to have you along for the amble!

Last week while we braced for what feels like a bad breeze or perhaps just the next person to fall into a rack of paperbacks at the supermarket, the comments were filled with dogs taking a stand against generic food, suggestions for emotionally aligned tunes from the ’80s (make mine “Cities in Dust”), and visions of peacocks wandering around parking lots.

Figure 2.1: Artist’s rendering of what the magnet won’t look like…

Meanwhile I was trying hard not to think about a Professor of Hitler Studies naming his son Heinrich, by underlining sentences like “a scrape and gargle that sounded like the stirring of some beast’s ambition,” while pondering “a dull and unlocatable roar, as of some form of swarming life just outside the range of human apprehension.”

This week: The pace feels right, the company’s fab, and you’re tan, rested, and ready for week 2. Let’s meet up at the bottom of page 104, aka the end of Part I, where someone appears to be “crying softly, uncertainly, in low heaves and swells, as Murray took notes.”

Wait, how’s this work again? Finish on time, comment each week, and stay in the hunt for a free “I Survived the White Noise Meander” magnet. Oh, and in case you were wondering: This is the post for comments on Chapters 12-20.

Comments

27 responses to “The White Noise Meander, Week 2”

February 11, 2020

So-Called Bill

This morning I was reading the passage about the family devouring disaster footage and mentally transposing it into the YouTube age. One wonders (fears) where they might end up.

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February 11, 2020

Dr. Vitz

I read the first 2 pages of chap. 17’s discussion of misinformation and had a similar thought to SC Bill. How prescient it seems of our current condition. Though this is mostly simple mistakes being treated as facts, you can see the movement from that, to credence given to urban legends, to today’s “news” cycles.

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February 12, 2020

So-Called Bill

I have this sentence highlighted from my first reading of this book: “The family is the cradle of the world’s misinformation.” And there you have it, social media explained: By forming people into gigantic “families,” it has created misinformation feedback and amplification loops of unprecedented size.

Is there any way back from this? Do we even want one? Or are we, in some sense, happier in our echo chambers, glad to have families at the cost of truth? Please discuss.

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February 13, 2020

Dr. Vitz

I too underlined that sentence from a previous read. My initial thought is that within my bubble, there is call out on misinformation. The large problem is that I have no idea what is happening in bubbles I cannot enter, but I even if there is call out in them, there are plenty of cases where misinformation grows in all bubbles simply because certain issues & perspectives are excluded

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February 13, 2020

Maggie Harmon

Echoing previous comments – I was struck by the line “the family is the cradle of the world’s misinformation.” I agree with the previous thoughts on how we have self-formed families of like thinkers to justify our own perspectives. That said, I really read this on a micro-level thinking about family units as related groups and the emotional/psychological misinformation we create through family habits that we the carry with us into the broader world. How much of our being is truly about us and what we like, believe, feel and how much is what we were told we like, believe, and feel and then we work to justify our behavior through our larger interactions? Also I generally like the book though I find the author working very hard to show us how smart and clever he is – the pretension seeps through.

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February 13, 2020

xian

yes one thing that I didn’t love the first time is that sort of Woody Allen-ish effect where every character sounds like Don DeLillo and gives epic monologues.

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February 14, 2020

Computilo

My grown children frequently remind me just how much misinformation I passed on to them during their childhood. That said, I’ve decided to make the misinformation I am passing on to my grandchildren more authentic. Therefore, I am proud to be a promulgator of authentic misinformation.

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February 15, 2020

Alyssa

Agreeing with above comments that so much of this book is oddly reminiscent of where our society is at right now with social media, fake news, and all the rest. I The part that lingers with me most from this latest section is Wilder’s hours and hours of crying, or wailing for all of the world so it seems.

Oh, my eighties song at the moment is definitely “Slide of Life” by Bauhaus.

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February 15, 2020

Barbara

I am thinking about this: “We were being shot through with Babette. Her image was projected on our bodies, swam in us and through us.” I think, maybe this is why I don’t like to watch the news now–I don’t want those personalities swimming through me. Also, I enjoyed Tweedy in all her K Hepburn-ness.

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February 15, 2020

Dr. Vitz

One more thought – there is a term (not exactly a genre) “plastic fiction” for anything that doesn’t even try to feel real (Vonnegutt, Pynchon, Robbins). Pretty much everything DeLillo wrote before White Noise fits the category, and pretty much everything after Libra is much more realistic. But those two are sort of his Rubber Soul/Revolver, where you feel the pull in both directions. This is my third read of this one, and it’s never felt more real to me.

And my 80’s song – “Slippery People” Talking Heads

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February 15, 2020

xian

Ok, this week I felt compelled to revert to schoolboy habits and started underlining certain sentences or ideas, most without comment, and occasionally annotating them or relating them to something else. here’s a summary from pp. 54 – 104:

p. 55: “It was important for him to believe he’d spent his life among people who kept missing the point.” (we all know or are this type)

p. 61: “he believed there was something ominous in the modern sunset” (foreshadowing)

p. 63: “wear a favorite color” … “carry a gun” … “put on a uniform and feel bigger, stronger, safer” => black trenchcoat / trenchcoat mafia school shooters

pp. 63-64: Heinrich’s “Come on.. crash footage” echoed in a DeLillo essay in Harper’s or Atlantic in which he notices that we subject our loved ones to share the horror of TV news

p. 64: “I walked into my office on Monday to find Murray…” (Newman!)

p. 65″ “He had once told me the art of getting ahead in New York… express dissatisfaction in an interesting way…. no tolerance for your particular hardship unless you knew how to entertain”

p. 66: “in our hearts we feel California deserves what it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.”

“I don’t know whether to feel good or bad about learning that my experience is widely shared.”
“Feel bad.”

😀 😀 😀

p. 74: “I realized we were now a crowd”

p. 79: “They watched him with something like awe. Nearly seven straight hours of serious crying. It was as though he’d just returned from a period of wandering in some remote and holy place”

p. 81 “you can’t copyright titles” = writer arcana

pp. 83-84 “I shopped for its own sake…. I began to grow in value and self-regard”

p. 85 “For a moment I thought Bee was dead” =( =( =( intense

p. 86: “She wants to be a travel writer as a matter of fact. Sits a horse well.” (channeling John O’Hara?)

p. 87: “Janet has been drawn to Montana, to an ashram…” “Janet Savory?…” “Her name is Mother Devi now.” (channeling Pynchon?)

p. 88: we now know the end of the Qaddafi story

p. 91: oh, crash landing!

p. 92: “Where’s the media?….” “There is no media….” “They went through all that for nothing?”

p. 95: “her eyes… seemed to contain two forms of life, the subject matter and its hidden implications”

p. 99: what Attila surely did not say

p. 104: soundless unexpected TV appearance combines apparition with theme of irradiation waves of information. just seeing the name of part ii gives me a chill.

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February 15, 2020

Barbara L.

Late delivery of the book aside, I’m finally catching up with y’all. 🙂
The part about the catastrophes stuck with me. “Because we’re suffering from brain fade. We need an occasional catastrophe to break up the incessant bombardment of information.” This was written in 1985, pre internet, pre social media, pre smart phones, but it sounds so current (and scary).

What’s absolutely grotesque to me are the Hitler sections – casually taking “Mein Kampf” to read it over dinner, discussing Hitler’s / Elvis’ moms.

BTW: I never read this book before and didn’t have the slightest clue what it was about. I ordered a used copy and the person who owned/read it before highlighted many phrases and scribbled some notes as well. So I enjoy reading about the notes all of you were taking during your first read, and comparing them to the notes in my own book that a stranger made (be)for(e) me…

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February 15, 2020

Susan C

I got bogged down in the Elvis/Hitler mother set piece, and now I’m going to have to do a little death marching to catch up. I did like the exchange where Denise notes that Hitler was on TV last night and Jack responds, “He’s always on. We couldn’t have television without him.” Nazi Mega Weapons, anyone?

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February 15, 2020

Peaseblossom

Week 2 Random Thoughts

I have two favorite lines this week: “To become a crowd is to keep out death.” Not anymore, DeLillo. I kept thinking about all the school shootings and the shootings at concerts, night clubs, and churches. How large a crowd is needed to find safety in numbers?

Favorite line #2: “The family is the cradle of misinformation.” I literally laughed aloud when I read this sentence! It’s so true! Computilo, go down in family lore by serving up some whoppers of misinformation! My grandmother had a plethora of gems, so I’ll limit what I share here. (1) The pronunciation of the word Pennsylvania, and (2) my personal favorite, the moon is bigger than the Earth.

I am enjoying how DeLillo sprinkles his writing with the concepts of waves and radiation–the title of the first section– and other notions of science. I’m waiting for a full discourse on the duality of light and hoping he can fold the Schrodinger wave equation into a paragraph.

Comparing Hitler to Elvis–hmm, that’s almost as crazy as having a Department of Hitler studies. No, no thank you, ma’am.

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February 15, 2020

Peaseblossom

My 80s song this week is Don Henley’s Dirty Laundry.

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February 16, 2020

MIke M

The misinformation thing is interesting to me too. I think things have changed: Now, anyone can purvey misinformation to anyone via the internet, with equal credibility to the Washington Post because the words are all type-written, and without any real reason (like a family connection) to trust the writer. It’s not like someone trusting their mom that space aliens (always loved that term) are housed in Area 54, it’s like there are a million National Enquirers getting equal space (or more prominent space!) on the shelves next to the NYT and Washington Post. Also: it’s now more actively becoming disinformation as opposed to misinformation….

On a lighter note, I love this: “A band played live Muzak.” If we could have more of that, I’d happily enjoy some new misinformation and/or disinformation….

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February 16, 2020

KT

Screeching in at the last minute, procrastination is an art form.

A new read for me and I’m struck by a sense of dread in the reading that I can’t quite pin on something specific.

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February 16, 2020

Neil

While meandering through White Noise, I’ve also been speed walking through The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff, a book I highly recommend in case you need ~327 solid reasons to get off Facebook. But I digress. Others have noted DeLillo’s prescience about much of what we’re experiencing today. To which the scene with Murray visiting the the Gladney home to investigate “the society of kids” stood out to me. Line of the week: “There were huge amounts of data flowing through the house, waiting to be analyzed.” From Murray’s perspective, it all sounds very academic. It’s easy to dismiss it as creepy behavior because… well, because Murray. But now we’re numb to things like WhatsApp, TikTok, and other apps that also investigate the society of kids. The only difference is that they’ve figured out a way to monetize it.

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February 16, 2020

Itto Ogami

The Elvis / Hitler mom scene was one of the most bizarre chapters I’ve read in any book in recent memory. Humorous and well structured because he can write well, but insanely dark. What would the students think? Are we to suppose they would passively accept the comparison, and if yes, is DeLillo suggesting that society’s pop culture obsession (strong then, beyond the pale now) has displaced what should be sincere investigation and/or moral disgust? Fits his misinformation theme. To the extent we should care about Hitler’s relationship with his mother, and related points (crowds and death), how could we conceive of adding Elvis’ mom? We can’t. But he does and Murray and the students accept. They are all willing participants in the societal crime, violating objective criteria for sense of purpose, self, caring, morals, priorities and so on. True then, hard and soft wired into societal DNA now. Collective criminal cognitive dissonance. Welcome to the Misinformation House (appropriating Vonnegut).

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February 16, 2020

xian

Oh yes. Definitely there. Ominous.

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February 16, 2020

elisabeth

so, the meander: well, i stopped for a cup of tea, and the weather was lovely, and the view…so i lost the group and haven’t caught up yet. and that’s where it’s at for me. but i’m enjoying everyone else’s comments.

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February 16, 2020

eb

i feel constrained by my inability not to “like” both of these comments immediately.

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February 16, 2020

Amanda

I read the bulk of the pages this week on a flight to Montana – a weird, if appropriate, setting.

Reading, I kept returning to thoughts of the signified and the sign. Last week, Jack described the “Most Photographed Barn in America” – an object that cannot be captured by a supposedly objective medium because the physical entity is bound to the buzzing aura of human significance projected onto it. Jack is really no different. He’s wrapped himself in a cloak of associations – the dark glasses, the catastrophic weight of the historical figure he’s used to charge his own identity. When he runs into his coworker, Massingale, at the mall, and Massingale, notes that Jack seems like a mortal without his “glasses and gown,” the following shopping spree seems like a corrective – Jack both distracting himself and shoring up a sense of personal power by playing the part of benevolent deity to his family.

If the mall scene shows the delicacy of identity, the near crash landing reveals the thin varnish between the hum of daily life and the panicked reality of death. Made me think of Larkin’s “Aubade.” It was weird indeed to read the pandemonium of this flight scene, put the book down, and find myself sitting on a quiet plane flying through the air. Outside, the dark mountains were snowed over in places, punctuated by lights of the odd building, obscured by mist. Superimposed onto all of this geographical mystery was the neon reflection in the window of the guy sitting in front of me playing Tetris on his phone. Whatta world.

80s song? One?! Maybe “Hounds of Love” or “Summer’s Cauldron,” though “Enola Gaye” seems the better fit for this book.

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February 16, 2020

Leo

Elvis and Hitler moms. Ok, that was, well…unexpected but I should have expected it.

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February 17, 2020

Willem

Still meandering! The most highlighted bit on Kindle (912 highlighters) is “No sense of the irony of human existence, that we are the highest form of life on earth and yet ineffably sad because we know what no other animal knows, that we must die.”

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February 17, 2020

Kathy Smith

Still reading the guy obsessed with death and Hitler. Onward….

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June 23, 2020

Ute

I’m still fascinated by Delillo’s descriptions of the German language or better, a German language learner’s difficulties: “When it was time for me to repeat the noises I did likewise, …, twisting my mouth, shutting my eyes completely, conscious of an overarticulation so tortured it must have sounded like a sudden bending of the natural law, a stone or tree struggling to speak.”
I wonder, is this what I look/sound like when speaking German?

Also, the son’s names sound just like my Dad’s: Heinrich Gerhardt vs Egbert Erhard Gunter – I wonder if my grandparents also thought they would make my Dad unafraid by gving him these names?!

Moving on from all things German:
The idea of us needing some catastrophe from time to time to unblock our “brain fade” is simply genius, because let’s be honest: we humans are absolutely fascinated by catastrophes (the bigger and more horrible, the better – of course only if they happen far away from us!) and this is as good an explanation of the why as it gets.
And yeah, maybe it’s our fascination with catastrophes that makes California such a yearned for place (for Europeans at least).

The random sentences continue, too:
MasterCard, Visa, American Express.
Still not sure where they’ll lead…

And lastly: I love this idea of children flying across the globe: “The sooner we get them in the air, the better. Like swimming or ice skating. You have to start them young.”

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The White Noise Meander, Week 2

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27 responses to “The White Noise Meander, Week 2”

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