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The White Noise Meander, Week 3

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Hey presto and welcome to the start of Week 3 (and Book II)!

Last week I tried unsuccessfully to keep track of which kid belongs to which parent. (Speaking of which, who’s-whose-kid? cheat sheets will not be deleted from the comments.)

Really appreciated all the thread-goodness on everything from keening kids, to Kate Hepburn, from where White Noise falls on the plastic spectrum, to the pros and cons of DD’s language and style, to a reminder that there’s a grotesque pop culture-ization of Hitler at the heart of our tale.

The White Noise Meander, Week 3
Figure 3.1: The magnet and this image will be easy to tell apart.

From the text these last few days, I’ve been thinking about Chapter 20 and the fact that we all (or is it just me and Jack?) run the numbers on how many years we and our loved ones will get. All the decisions we make, all based on a simple formula where X won’t be resolved until it doesn’t matter much.

It didn’t make me blue, but it did leave me feeling grateful to be spending some of my copious X meandering this trail with all of youse.

This week: Book I done, Book II looks to be a fast flip and a zoom. I’ll see you at 50 more pages and a stretch — the end of Chapter 23 aka the bottom of page 164, where “it might make her suspect that something was wrong.”

Say pally, 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 21-22.

Update! Xian created this lovely family tree for folks like me who were having trouble keeping all the 23andJack deets straight. Enjoy!

Family tree
Figure 3.2: Xian’s handy and quite dandy WN family tree

Comments

29 responses to “The White Noise Meander, Week 3”

  1. Leo Avatar
    Leo

    Yep, still going! A bit behind, but with a work day off tomorrow and a nice coffee beverage or two, I hope to regain my page count.

    Reply
  2. xian Avatar
    xian

    I was gonna guess we’d go to 156… started wanting to map out the family tree (vine) but now going to try lazywebbing it.

    Reply
  3. Cecil Vortex Avatar
    Cecil Vortex

    Your math is good. Page count was me going a little rogue. 🙂 wanted us to get into the first few pages of Book III this week.

    Reply
  4. So-Called Bill Avatar
    So-Called Bill

    Heinrich, Steffie, and Bee belong to Jack. Denise and Wilder are Babette’s (there’s also a son who is Not a Character in This Novel). Am I forgetting anyone?

    Reply
  5. Dr. Vitz Avatar
    Dr. Vitz

    Story time for “The Airborne Toxic Event:” I taught this book as part of a first year comp class in 1996.When I introduced it, I said it would have a section based on a real event they might remember, trailed off, and asked if anyone remembered Three Mile Island. One was born when it happened.

    Reply
  6. xian Avatar
    xian

    yeah, i realize otherwise the entire week would be one long airborne toxic event.

    ok here is what i’ve got so far:

    https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ERAw0b1UwAAhrPn?format=jpg&name=4096×4096

    Reply
  7. Maggie Harmon Avatar
    Maggie Harmon

    I will keep reading but am commenting at the end of Book 2 because my ordered brain likes clear finish lines. I want to not like this book because I find the writing self-important and narcissistic and yet – it is excellent, disturbing me in a way only good fiction can. In Book 2 I am particularly struck by the entitlement of safety which I think is an interesting commentary on how we all engage with the impact of climate change and how much easier it is to make someone else responsible. And in my professional life (or because of my professional life) I am fascinated by Jack’s reaction to being assigned death – which really weren’t we all as soon as we were born? So what do you do as you live, or do you just choose to be stuck in impending death.

    Reply
  8. Maggie Harmon Avatar
    Maggie Harmon

    Thank you for confirming so I don’t have to reread to find that reference; thought I might be going crazy!

    Reply
  9. Dr. Vitz Avatar
    Dr. Vitz

    “In a crisis the true facts are whatever other people say they are. No one’s knowledge is less secure than your own.” (p. 120 in my book)

    My immediately thought is that there is no indication anyone’s knowledge is more secure either. This sort of opposition problem is everywhere, but most especially int he SIMUVAC sequence in which the real evacuation is practice for the simulated evacuation that should be practice for a real evacuation. And it’s through SIMUVAC that Jack learns death has entered his body and he now must die, unless he can outlive it.

    The joys of binaries

    Reply
  10. Mike M Avatar
    Mike M

    Enjoying the book! Much to think about, e.g. these passages —

    “The tabloid future, with its mechanism of a hopeful twist to apocalyptic events, was perhaps not so very remote from our own immediate experience. Look at us, I thought. Forced out of our homes, sent streaming into the bitter night, pursued by a toxic cloud, crammed together in makeshift quarters, ambiguously death-sentenced. We’d become part of the public stuff of media disaster.” And yet despite this and Gladney’s horror at the thought of being one of “those” non-privileged people who suffer disasters, the family seems to return (or be trying to return) to a kind of normalcy after the ATE. I suppose the message can be that the pull of that normalcy — the wish for it — is so strong even when you’ve just been handed a big dose of contrary reality.

    “‘Toyota Celica’ . . . . Whatever its source, the utterance struck me with the impact of a moment of splendid transcendence. I depend on my children for that.“ I liked this thought. That is all. 🙂

    “The greater the scientific advance, the more primitive the fear.” This is so true. As our science becomes more god-like in its power, we can’t help but be threatened by the same feelings of smallness and powerlessness that we would associate with, say, early humans freaked out by solar eclipses, etc.

    “Haven’t we earned the right to despise their idiot questions?“ I am asking this in some form every day….Every day. 🙂

    Reply
  11. Kathy Smith Avatar
    Kathy Smith

    I am longing for the narrative to come from another POV. Being in Jacks head all the time gets some what repetitive- he does like to hear himself think. I’m having fun watching out for this random sentences thrown into the story- kinda like looking for Easter eggs. Just 2 examples:
    Chapter 7- We believed something lived in the basement.
    Chapter 22 – A staticky piece of lint cling to the TV screen.

    Reply
  12. Peaseblossom Avatar
    Peaseblossom

    Xian, thank you for that tree! I downloaded it – that’s how handy it is.

    Reply
  13. Alyssa Avatar
    Alyssa

    A few things came to mind this week as I read through Part II. I just recently finished watching Chernobyl on HBO and had to cross-check dates because it almost seemed like this would’ve been a bit inspired by that event. Interestingly, White Noise came first.

    It also occurred to me that Heinrich would almost certainly have a huge YouTube presence in the present day, though I worry he’d be spouting off in one of the darker corners of the internet.

    And was it really a lifesaver?

    Reply
  14. Computilo Avatar
    Computilo

    “There was a family wrapped completely in plastic, a single large sheet of transparent polyethylene. They walked beneath their shield in lock step, the man and woman each at one end, three kids between, all of them secondarily wrapped in shimmering rainwear. The whole affair had about it a well-rehearsed and self-satisfied look, as though they’d been waiting for months to strut their stuff.” I’m of an age to remember the duck-and-cover practice drills of the 50s, when we just knew the Russians were going to bomb our school at any time. Now, of course, the Russians are still in the news for a variety of reasons; no amount of practice wearing a CVS-branded (but not generic!) face mask will really protect all of us from the Coronavirus; and sadly, duck-and-cover practice is part of armed intruder/active shooter preparedness in today’s schools. Wrapping your family in Saran Wrap sounds like as good an option as any.

    Reply
  15. Neil Avatar
    Neil

    Throughout Part II, I kept having to remind myself that 1985 was a long time ago, if not culturally, then at least technologically. The image of people being herded from one shelter to another without really knowing what was going on struck me as implausible. I kept forming this image in my mind of hundreds of people staring into their mobile phones looking for answers, but yeah, I know, they didn’t have mobile phones in 1985. At least not ones they weren’t still hardwired into the dashboard of a cheesy sports car. And all the stuff about tabloid magazines made me long for those simple days when you could look at those black and white covers with the clearly doctored picture of the alien baby being cradled by the farmer’s daughter in Somewhere, Kansas, and know for a fact that it was complete bullshit. That said, The looming black cloud hovering overhead struck me as too obvious a metaphor at times. Still enjoying the meander.

    Reply
  16. Amanda Avatar
    Amanda

    In past weeks, other meanderers have mentioned the role of television in the book. Jack describes it as a persistent thrum in the background, a bass note, part of the, er, white noise, of domesticity. When the family flees to the Boy Scout camp, streams of auditory input multiply. We hear call-in radio shows, tabloid read alouds, computer printouts, and spoken rumors. Delillo, of course, was prescient to the tsunami of data and sporing misinformation of the internet, but what strikes me is the silence and individuality of accessing the medium. I can just about picture WN recast in 2020: Jack, Babette, and their indeterminate number of children, sitting in silence around the dining room table, each looking at their respective devices, Wilder off somewhere poking mutely at an iPad.

    Reply
  17. KT Avatar
    KT

    Loved this description “He had the skinny neck and jug-handled ears to go with his starved skull – the innocent prewar look of a rural murderer.”

    I also echo feeling tired of being in JAK’s mind. And of being in the gender roles of the 1980’s where once women reach maturity we only get to relate to them in sexualized roles. Sigh.

    On the bright side, if anyone has fears of big data in government – on my last disaster deployment we had difficulty getting information from one side of the medical shelter to another…medical data sharing remains a pipe dream.

    Reply
  18. xian Avatar
    xian

    Life imitates art department: elderly Palo Alto couple found in Tomales Bay drainage ditch one week after disappearing from Inverness:

    https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/02/22/missing-palo-alto-couple-found-alive-extraction-ongoing/

    Reply
  19. Barbara Avatar
    Barbara

    Read this section while on vacation in a warm place, sitting near a pool. There was a big, inflatable pool toy pretending to be a watermelon. Once somebody played with it, but mostly it just rolled around the rec area, alone. Last day I saw it, it had jumped the fence but was lying quietly near a bush. I pointed it out to an employee, but he told me, it’s just what it does. This is true. Also, I like the book’s descriptions of the supermarket.

    Reply
  20. Susan C Avatar
    Susan C

    The man walking around the evacuation center swinging a TV and saying “We’re not on it!” made me wonder when “news” became a 24-hour thing; Wikipedia says that CNN debuted in 1980. Of course the TV-swinging man was not cable-connected, but I’m pretty sure that in today’s world those evacuees would be on the tube 24/7.

    To the random sentence collection, I’d like to add “Today they are food stylists for NASA.”

    And finally, a poignant description of puberty: “He wore his camouflage jacket and cap, an outfit with complex meaning for him, at fourteen, struggling to grow and to escape notice simultaneously, his secrets known to us all.”

    Reply
  21. eb Avatar
    eb

    that is 100% pure insane coincidence.

    Reply
  22. eb Avatar
    eb

    i’m trying to get caught up, to be in sync with the meanderers. it feels like a very important thing to do. and then jack says, “do not advance the action according to a plan.” should i read the chapters crazy-dealing style, jumping back and forth out of sequence? or is that a plan too?

    Reply
  23. eb Avatar
    eb

    ps: thinking about a number of comments above on pulling this story into the present, where everyone would be on their phones or ipads. but jack is already doing that–at a remove from everyone as though watching the whole thing on a little screen. as it is, he’s already almost intolerable. jack in the present would be, well, jacked in (also nonverbal and functionally deaf).

    Reply
  24. Barbara L. Avatar
    Barbara L.

    Book II is a different read. I find myself going back, re-reading passages (non-native English person here). I’m slow, but I meander with you.
    I also made references to Chernobyl in my mind, but the book was published the year before that incident.

    Reply
  25. Peaseblossom Avatar
    Peaseblossom

    Overall, I’m enjoying this book immensely. That being said, however, I read on with a morbid sense of fascination –kind of like watching the aftermath of a traffic accident while passing by.

    Every few weeks, I gather with former co-workers and friends to share dinner and conversation on Friday evenings. I had missed the last few gatherings so I wasn’t privy to plans for this week’s get-together. This week I had the eerie experience of feeling as if I myself were being sucked into DeLillo’s book. After dinner, the game of the night that was placed on the table was none other than Secret Hitler. Coincidence?

    Reply
  26. Computilo Avatar
    Computilo

    There are no coincidences, Peaseblossom.

    Reply
  27. xian Avatar
    xian

    mostly this time i found myself underlying the shifting names for the airborne toxic event.

    Reply
  28. Itto Ogami Avatar
    Itto Ogami

    DeLillo’ White Noise (not sure on his other books) does not have well formed female characters. Much more focused and in depth for Jack, Heinrich, Murray. It is as if DeLillo cannot and makes little attempt to write for voices of women.
    Very disappointing.
    I am curious about where DeLillo is going with Babette’s medical dosages.

    Reply
  29. Ute Avatar
    Ute

    A lot of what is being said in “The Airborne Toxic Event” reminds me of what living in Austria felt like during/after the Chernobyl meltdown. We were, of course, not evacuated, but I do remember my parents seriously talking about taking up some friends’ offer to move us to Spain and stay with said friends while the Chernobyl threat lasted (which would have been similar to an evacuation, albeit a voluntary one).
    I also relate to the simulation described and all the precautions taken in the book – again similar to something that’s still done in Austria to this day: When your kids start first grade you have to give your written consent to have iodine tablets dispensed to the kids in school in case of an atomic event!

    Reply

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