Don DeLillo Should Win the Nobel Prize

Episode 34: An Interview with Tom LeClair

jeffsevers@gmail.com (Jeffrey Severs & Michael Streit) — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 12:00:00 +0000

In Episode 34 DDSWTNP sit down for a revelatory talk with Tom LeClair, a founding critic in the study of DeLillo, his longtime friend and liaison to the literary world, and a figure who has both written fiction shaped by DeLillo’s and (he suggests) seen his own stories turned into scenes and dialogue by DeLillo himself. We get into LeClair’s relationship with DeLillo going back more than forty years, starting from the time the author sent him a copy of Ratner’s Star and proceeding to a 1979 interview in Athens that illuminated a then rather reclusive and secretive writer, including the story behind a card DeLillo handed out in those years reading “I don’t want to talk about it.” We also ask LeClair questions about his many readings of DeLillo’s and others’ works over the years, starting from his major books In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel (1987) and The Art of Excess: Mastery in Contemporary American Fiction (1989), studies that initiated LeClair’s career-long examination of encyclopedic works that form categories of “systext,” “monsterpiece,” and others he has defined in his many major magazine and newspaper reviews and in his current substack. What does LeClair make of the many mentions of “systems” in Underworld? What does a line from Point Omega suggest to him about the possibility someday of a DeLillo biography? What does LeClair mean when he calls DeLillo a thoroughly “intuitive” writer and an artist obsessed his whole life with embodiment, birth, death, and fear? Is “mystery” the right word for what drives DeLillo’s narrative seeking, and is Catholicism a useful lens? What to make of the ending of Zero K? Why did DeLillo want to visit Beirut with LeClair? And what do these two talk about when they have lunch together? The interview also gets into depth on the many comparisons LeClair sees with his own fiction, its set of Kierkegaardian maneuvers through the Greece-based world of basketball player Michael Keever, the hero of Passing Off (1996) who begins for LeClair a series of examinations of games, terrorism, and some familiar DeLillo territory that extends through the four other Passing novels that LeClair has published in the thirty years since.

Cover photograph by Kinga Owczennikow. A native of Poland, Kinga Owczennikow is currently based in New York City. She holds a BA (Hons) in Photography from the University for the Creative Arts in the UK. Kinga is an Associate of the Royal Photographic Society, a member of the Center for Photographic Art in Carmel and an exhibiting member of the Soho Photo Gallery in New York City. Kinga had a solo exhibition “The secret paths of Hong Kong” at the Asia and Pacific Museum in Warsaw, in 2011. Her photographic work has also been exhibited internationally in group shows. Her first photobook "Framing the World" was published by Ephemere in Tokyo, in 2025.

Texts by Tom LeClair and others discussed in this episode:

“Don DeLillo: The Word, The Image, The Gun.” BBC, 1991. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4029096/

Amy Hungerford, “Don DeLillo’s Latin Mass.” Contemporary Literature 47.3 (Autumn 2006): 343-380.

Tom LeClair and Larry McCaffery, eds. Anything Can Happen: Interviews with Contemporary American Novelists. U. of Illinois P., 1983.

Tom LeClair. In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel. U. of Illinois P., 1987.

---. The Art of Excess: Mastery in Contemporary American Fiction.U. of Illinois P., 1989.

---. “Me and Mao II” (1993). https://perival.com/delillo/meandmaoii.html

---. Passing Off. Permanent Press, 1996.

---. “An Under-history of Mid-Century America” (review of Underworld). The Atlantic, October 1997.

---. “Two On One: Writing a Basketball Novel.” In What to Read (and Not): Essays and Reviews. Dzanc Books, 2014.

---. “Serious But Not Dangerous Don DeLillo” (review of The Silence). American Book Review 42.4 (May/June 2021): 10-11.

—-. Harpooning Donald Trump: A Novelist’s Essays. Mediacs, 2017.

---. Passing Again. 2022.

Tom LeClair’s Substack: https://tleclair.substack.com/

Vince Passaro, “Dangerous Don DeLillo.” New York Times Magazine, May 19, 1991. https://www.nytimes.com/1991/05/19/magazine/dangerous-don-delillo.html

Lawrence Weschler, Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology. Vintage, 1995.

Episode 33: Mao II

jeffsevers@gmail.com (Jeffrey Severs & Michael Streit) — Mon, 2 Feb 2026 20:59:35 +0000

“Here they come, marching into American sunlight.” In Episode 33, DDSWTNP follow Mao II from this opening line into a chilling view of a mass Moonie wedding at Yankee Stadium, and on into the story of reclusive novelist Bill Gray, whose work, maybe, has a chance of deprogramming the mind and language of Karen Janney, one of the participants in that wedding – but maybe not, given the totalizing dominance by images that this novel documents. Our conversation delves into the several rich dialogues Mao II is known for, especially that about (quoting Bill) the “curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists,” the differing attempts by writers and bomb-makers to “alter the inner life of the culture” and “make raids on human consciousness” that DeLillo juxtaposes in this novel, which follows the writer from his cloying “bunker” to London, Athens, and (almost) Lebanon, while also taking in scenes from Iran, China, and the homeless encampments of lower Manhattan. Throughout we discuss the many followers of and sequels to Mao and Maoism DeLillo analyzes, all the ways his characters foolishly seek, outside the values of deep reading and the novel, scenes of “total vision” and messianic “total being,” the “lightning-lit” language of information and the terrorist’s mastery of “the language of being noticed.” We examine in detail as well the effects of Andy Warhol’s work as DeLillo sees it; what it means that readers never learn much at all about the content of Bill’s famous novels; the commonalities he has with Rushdie, Salinger, Pynchon, and DeLillo himself; and why terrorist go-between George Haddad loves word processors so much. We also have a lot to say about the ailing, injured body and spirit of Bill Gray, as well as the simplicity of spoons and what they might teach us about objects and art. Mao II is a book that, as we say in the episode, sums up much of the DeLillo that came before it, lays the groundwork for the masterpiece to come, and contains so many of what have come to seem over the years since 1991 (and over the run of our episodes) the foundational DeLillo ideas and questions, especially ones about politics, violence, and images. Hope you’ll have a listen and, if moved, tell us what you think!

Texts referred to in this episode:

David Cowart, Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language. Athens: U. of Georgia P., 2002.

“Mao II is a sort of rest-and-motion book, to invent a category. The first half of the book could have been called ‘The Book,’ Bill Gray talking about his book, piling up manuscript pages, living in a house that operates as a kind of filing cabinet for his work and all the other work it engenders. And the second half of the book could have been called ‘The World.’ Here, Bill escapes his book and enters the world. It turns out to be the world of political violence . . . I was nearly finished with the first half of the book before I realized how the second half ought to be shaped. I was writing blind . . .” –“Don DeLillo: The Art of Fiction CXXXV,” The Paris Review 128 (1993): 274-306. Interview by Adam Begley.

“I called him Bill Gray just as a provisional name,” DeLillo says. “I used to say to friends, 'I want to change my name to Bill Gray and disappear.’ I've been saying it for 10 years. But he began to fit himself into the name, and I decided to leave it.” –Vince Passaro, “Dangerous Don DeLillo,” New York Times Magazine, May 19, 1991 (https://www.nytimes.com/1991/05/19/magazine/dangerous-don-delillo.html)

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

Sources of interlude clips from Warhol and Moon:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vCKc7r8U8E

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiCYKJc_VwI

Episode 32: Thomas Pynchon's Shadow Ticket

jeffsevers@gmail.com (Jeffrey Severs & Michael Streit) — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 12:59:06 +0000

We do have our favorite but surely wouldn’t mind if Thomas Pynchon won the Nobel Prize too . . . and in Episode 32 we finish off 2025 by considering Shadow Ticket, the noir detective take on the 1930s by a writer who was surely a key influence on the early DeLillo (we read from an unpublished DeLillo letter summarizing that relationship) but who also seems to have been reading works like Running Dog over the years (or so we imagine in unpacking Shadow Ticket scenes invoking Chaplin and a “German Political Celebrity” named Hitler). We try to understand how Pynchon’s latest examination of historical and potential fascism works in its 1932 setting, ranging from Milwaukee to Hungary, where reluctant protagonist and “sentimental ape” and “sap” Hicks McTaggart keeps adding on to his P.I. “tickets” in a strange search for a Wisconsin heiress and her Jewish musician lover but also what might ultimately be justice (a far from simple thing). Shadow Ticket is loads of serious fun, where Pynchon manages to examine the direst of turning points amidst scenes of bowling alley and motorcycle lore, dairy strikes, Prohibition’s black markets, dance hall and speakeasy glamour, and something called “Radio-Cheez.” Bela Lugosi, vampires, a beautiful pig in a sidecar, and some of the most tasteless lamps in the world also play a role. The real content here for Hicks, though, is the prospect of spiritual and other forms of peace in a world where weapons from clubs to guns and submarines operate according to mysterious laws of “apport” and “asport,” occult material that interweaves with Hicks’s strike-breaking past and raises connections to Gravity’s Rainbow.

Is Hicks’s fellow orphan and young protégé Skeet Wheeler the father of Vineland’s Zoyd, headed out to California as the novel ends? What’s the meaning of Hicks failing to return to his home country, and what does cheese gangster Bruno Airmont’s submarine fate have to do with Bleeding Edge? Are Hungary’s shifting borders a new kind of “Zone”? What’s going on in the novel’s many Statue of Liberty references and its anachronistic allusions to a “Face Tube” for flirtation in bars? And how does this always funny writer, now in his late eighties, keep coming up with all these absurd songs (we sing some) and hilarious mock-movies like the one featuring “Squeezita Thickly” swimming in soup pots (Shirley Temple, is that you?)?

Teasing out many connections to Gravity’s Rainbow, Against the Day, and Vineland, this episode makes reference to just about all of Pynchon’s other works, including even V. and his earliest short stories. At the same time, you need come to it with nothing but an interest in Pynchon’s life and work. We doubt that we get every reference to history or previous Pynchon right or mount interpretations we won’t later want to revise, but on this brand-new and captivating late work from a masterful author, we hope in nearly three hours of deep conversation and laughter that we’ve made a good start on the many critical readings to come.

A partial list of references and quotations that we mention or paraphrase in this episode . . .

On “prefascist twilight”: “And other grandfolks could be heard arguing the perennial question of whether the United States still lingered in a prefascist twilight, or whether that darkness had fallen long stupefied years ago, and the light they thought they saw was coming only from millions of Tubes all showing the same bright-colored shadows. One by one, as other voices joined in, the names began, some shouted, some accompanied by spit, the old reliable names good for hours of contention, stomach distress, and insomnia – Hitler, Roosevelt, Kennedy, Nixon, Hoover, Mafia, CIA, Reagan, Kissinger, that collection of names and their tragic interweaving that stood not constellated above in any nightwide remoteness of light, but below, diminished to the last unfaceable American secret, to be pressed, each time deeper, again and again beneath the meanest of random soles, one blackly fermenting leaf on the forest floor that nobody wanted to turn over, because of all that lived, virulent, waiting, just beneath.” (Pynchon, Vineland (1990))

On “second sheep”: “Our common nightmare The Bomb is in there too. It was bad enough in ’59 and is much worse now, as the level of danger has continued to grow. There was never anything subliminal about it, then or now. Except for that succession of the criminally insane who have enjoyed power since 1945, including the power to do something about it, most of the rest of us poor sheep have always been stuck with simple, standard fear. I think we all have tried to deal with this slow escalation of our helplessness and terror in the few ways open to us, from not thinking about it to going crazy from it. Somewhere on this spectrum of impotence is writing fiction about it.” (Pynchon, “Introduction,” Slow Learner (1984))

The “Sloth essay paragraph” mentioned midway through: “In this century we have come to think of Sloth as primarily political, a failure of public will allowing the introduction of evil policies and the rise of evil regimes, the worldwide fascist ascendancy of the 1920's and 30's being perhaps Sloth's finest hour, though the Vietnam era and the Reagan-Bush years are not far behind. Fiction and nonfiction alike are full of characters who fail to do what they should because of the effort involved. How can we not recognize our world? Occasions for choosing good present themselves in public and private for us every day, and we pass them by. Acedia is the vernacular of everyday moral life.” (Pynchon, “Nearer, My Couch, To Thee” (1993))

Don DeLillo Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas-Austin

The Motherland Calls statue, Volgograd: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Motherland_Calls

Pareidolia defined: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia

Episode 31: An Interview with Gerald Howard

jeffsevers@gmail.com (Jeffrey Severs & Michael Streit, Gerald Howard) — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 12:49:04 +0000

In Episode 31 DDSWTNP get the chance to talk about DeLillo with his friend, colleague, and editor Gerald Howard, whose distinguished career in publishing at Viking Penguin, Norton, and Doubleday spanned nearly 50 years and was marked by his work not only on Libra but important books by David Foster Wallace, Paul Auster, and so many others. We hear Gerry recount first reading the DeLillo of Americana and “Total Loss Weekend” in the 1970s, seeing a book titled “Panasonic” (eventually, White Noise) arrive at Viking Penguin, and having an 800-page manuscript about the JFK assassination later hit his desk. So many great stories mark this episode, including DeLillo’s funny “speech” upon receiving the National Book Award for White Noise, his reasons for seeking a new publisher after The Names, the legal reasoning behind the Author’s Note at the end of the hardcover Libra, and what Gerry for personal reasons regards as one of the funniest of DeLillo’s many funny passages: an editor’s remarks to Bill Gray about the literary marketplace in Mao II. Gerry talks as well about Catholicism, DeLillo’s massive influence on younger writers, and who, along with DeLillo, comprised his personal “trinity” of greatest authors.

And at the end we wish a happy 89th birthday to Don DeLillo! With this interview episode, we also extend the biographical “Lives of DeLillo” series we began with our November 20 releases the past two years. Huge thanks to Gerry for sharing so many remarkable stories, insights, and readings. Be sure to pick up Gerald Howard’s new book, The Insider: Malcolm Cowley and the Triumph of American Literature, available this month from Penguin Random House and discussed at the end of this episode.

Finally, a note on production: when other technology failed us, we decided to record this interview as a phone call, with obviously a lower sound quality than our listeners are used to. Gerry was wonderfully patient and flexible through it all, and his voice comes through clearly, in a recording that, in its crackles, we’d like to think, captures some spirit of DeLilloan Ludditism.

Image of Mao II woodcut in episode cover art is courtesy of Gerald Howard.

List of works mentioned in this episode:

A. Scott Berg, Max Perkins: Editor of Genius. New York: Dutton, 1978.

Don DeLillo, “Total Loss Weekend,” Sports Illustrated, Nov. 27, 1972. https://web.archive.org/web/20110822080327/http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1086811/index.htm

Gerald Howard, “Stockholm, Are You Listening? Why Don DeLillo Deserves the Nobel.” Bookforum, April/May 2020. https://www.bookforum.com/print/2701/why-don-delillo-deserves-the-nobel-23926

---. “The Puck Stopped Here: Revisiting ‘Cleo Birdwell’ and her National Hockey League Memoir.” Bookforum, December/January 2008. https://www.bookforum.com/print/1404/revisiting-cleo-birdwell-and-her-national-hockey-league-memoir-1406

---. “The American Strangeness: An Interview with Don DeLillo.” Hungry Mind Review, 1997. https://web.archive.org/web/19990129081431/www.bookwire.com/hmr/hmrinterviews.article$2563

---. “I Was Gordon Lish’s Editor.” Slate, October 31, 2007. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2007/10/editing-the-infamous-gordon-lish.html

---. The Insider: Malcolm Cowley and the Triump of American Literature. Penguin Random House, 2025. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/561292/the-insider-by-gerald-howard/9780525522058

Listeners interested in Gerald Howard’s huge impact on publishing in general might turn to the pages about his achievements in Dan Sinykin’s Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature (Columbia UP, 2023) and D.T. Max’s Every Love Story is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace (Penguin, 2012).

A correction: DeLillo’s remark on “around-the-house-and-in-the-yard” fiction is from Robert R. Harris’s “A Talk with Don DeLillo,” New York Times Book Review, Oct. 10, 1982.

Episode 30: "So What?"

jeffsevers@gmail.com (Jeffrey Severs & Michael Streit) — Thu, 16 Oct 2025 12:00:00 +0000

In Episode 30, DDSWTNP once again use the occasion of the Nobel Prize (which on October 9, 2025, was awarded to Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai) to talk about a prize Don DeLillo did win: the 2013 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. We dig into the award presentation and an interview he gave then about his whole career, from how he begins his novels and finds their structures, to the reading he did on a park bench in the 1950s, the influence advertising work had on his writing, and the inspiration he has found in the artistry of jazz and film. This episode culminates on the title question, “So what?”, which is the revealing remark DeLillo remembers making upon seeing Americana in published form – and a key, we think, to understanding the humility, ambition, and restless work ethic that has driven his work over the five decades since.

For the reader new to DeLillo, this interview and episode offer a good overview of his major concerns and literary techniques. And for readers at any stage with DeLillo’s fiction, this one also goes well with our previous two Nobel episodes, 3 and 17, where we discuss his “The Artist Naked in a Cage” and “A History of the Writer Alone in a Room.” Listen to this episode too for many other callbacks to our earlier episodes, including 5 and 28.

For video of the Library of Congress Prize presentation and the interview of DeLillo conducted by Marie Arana, an editor at the Washington Post, go to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AObZbCKlEc8&t=722s

Thanks for pointing out and providing some sources for this episode to: Tim Personn (https://linktr.ee/timpersonn), Joel in Toronto, and Curt Gardner (https://perival.com/delillo/delillo.html).

Texts and passages referred to in this episode:

John Freeman, “Q & A: Don DeLillo – It’s not as easy as it looks,” San Francisco Chronicle, March 5, 2006. (On DeLillo seeing the film Satantango; see an excerpt at https://perival.com/delillo/ddinterviews.html)

From William Gaddis’s J R, Gibbs’s thoughts on writing a novel: “Sixteen years like living with a God damned invalid sixteen years every time you come in sitting there waiting just like you left him wave his stick at you, plump up his pillow cut a paragraph add a sentence hold his God damned hand little warm milk add a comma slip out for some air pack of cigarettes come back in right where you left him, eyes follow you around the room wave his God damned pillow change bandage read aloud move a clause around wipe his chin new paragraph God damned eyes follow you out stay a week, stay a month whole God damned year think about something else, God damned friends asking how he’s coming along all expect him out any day don’t want bad news no news rather hear lies, big smile out any day now, walk down the street God damned sunshine begin to think maybe you’ll meet him maybe cleared things up got out by himself come back open the God damned door right there where you left him . . .”

David Foster Wallace, “The Nature of the Fun” (1998). Reprinted in Both Flesh and Not: Essays (2012).

Episode 29: "Human Moments in World War III"

jeffsevers@gmail.com (Jeffrey Severs & Michael Streit) — Mon, 8 Sep 2025 12:00:00 +0000

In Episode 29, DDSWTNP go to space to get a good look at the earth in a time of war, turning to one of DeLillo’s greatest short stories, “Human Moments in World War III,” first published in July 1983. We examine this tale of two future astronauts who have become soldiers for its strategic engagement with the tropes of science fiction, its eerie portrayals of the so-called “Overview Effect” available from a spacecraft window, and its compression and renewal of motifs from Americana, End Zone, and Ratner’s Star. Nostalgia, patriotism, history, the soldier’s mindset in following inhuman commands, and even the role of poetry and voice – all these come to be recast in DeLillo’s shrewd take on an era of “Star Wars” defense initiatives, a Cold War giving way to hot wars, and very tricky ways out of Mutually Assured Destruction. Along the way we read the 1980s thoughts of an expert on lasers in space, consider what it means to have an alien perspective on one’s earthly home and diurnal rhythms, and speculate on connections between “Human Moments” and White Noise still to come.

Texts referred to and discussed in this episode:

Don DeLillo. “Human Moments in World War III.” Published in Esquire (July 1983) and reprinted in The Angel Esmeralda (2011).

Philip M. Boffey. “Laser Weapons: Renewed Focus Raises Fears and Doubts.” New York Times, 9 March 1982. https://www.nytimes.com/1982/03/09/science/laser-weapons-renewed-focus-raises-fears-and.html

Summary of the Overview Effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overview_effect

The first scene of War Games (1983): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6aCpS0-yls

Our intro’s clip of DeLillo reading from “Human Moments in World War III” comes from this October 2012 event at the New York Public Library: https://www.nypl.org/audiovideo/angel-esmeralda-don-delillo-conversation-jonathan-franzen

The interlude sound effect is from Burns and Allen, featuring Ray Noble, “Rah Rah in Omaha” (1940).

Episode 28: Librarama

jeffsevers@gmail.com (Jeffrey Severs & Michael Streit) — Thu, 7 Aug 2025 12:00:00 +0000

We’re still not done with Libra – or Libra is not done with us! In Episode 28, DDSWTNP pick up threads left hanging after our three-part treatment of DeLillo’s JFK novel. While tackling a wide variety of subjects, this episode homes in on Anthony DeCurtis’s 1988 interview with DeLillo for Rolling Stone (and later re-published in expanded form), “An Outsider in This Society.” We’re led to discuss DeLillo’s canny interview articulations in general, his method of writing by day and reading more history by night, and his reply to the suggestion that on the basis of Libra some readers regarded him as “a member of the paranoid left”: “I don’t have a program.” Along the way we also draw in vivid evidence of how DeLillo subtly reworked the voice of Marguerite Oswald from testimony in the Warren Report, what fellow Oswald novelist Norman Mailer had to say about Libra, and all that is illuminated by an exchange of letters to the New York Times between DeLillo and one of the Warren Report investigators. We also try here to understand as fully as possible the nuances of DeLillo’s ideas about historical fiction that emerge in the incredible DeCurtis interview: what DeLillo means when he says Libra is “a piece of work which is obviously fiction,” touts novels’ ability to “redeem” readers’ “despair,” and makes the powerful claim that “fiction rescues history from its confusions.” We quote enough that listeners will get plenty of insight even without having read the DeCurtis interview in full, and we look forward to applying many of the lessons about history learned here to future works like Underworld.

“Some stories never end,” as DeLillo writes to begin “Assassination Aura,” and that’s true of this episode’s cover image, which uses a National Enquirer cover from March 2025 about new releases of JFK files. The interlude clip near the beginning is from Oswald’s August 1963 interviews on WDSU-TV in New Orleans. Finally, as we note in the episode, thanks to Joel in Toronto for an Instagram comment (we’re @delillopodcast) that inspired our return to the DeCurtis interview.

Texts mentioned and discussed in this episode:

Aristotle, Poetics. Trans. S.H. Butcher. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1974/1974-h/1974-h.htm

Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author.” Trans. Richard Howard. https://writing.upenn.edu/~taransky/Barthes.pdf

David W. Belin, “‘Libra’ and History.” Letter to the editor, New York Times, September 4, 1988. https://www.nytimes.com/1988/09/04/books/l-libra-and-history-487988.html

Mark Binelli, “Intensity of a Plot [interview with Don DeLillo].” Guernica, July 17, 2007. https://www.guernicamag.com/intensity_of_a_plot/

Marc Caputo, “CIA admits shadowy officer monitored Oswald before JFK assassination, new records reveal.” Axios, July 5, 2025.

https://www.axios.com/2025/07/05/cia-agent-oswald-kennedy-assassination

Hal Crowther, “Clinging to the Rock: A Novelist’s Choices in the New Mediocracy.” In Introducing Don DeLillo, ed. Frank Lentricchia, Duke UP, 1991, 83-98.

Anthony DeCurtis, “‘An Outsider in This Society’: An Interview with Don DeLillo.” South Atlantic Quarterly (1990) 89 (2): 281-304.

(Expanded version of Rolling Stone interview published November 17, 1988 (see https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/qa-don-delillo-69452/). Also published in this expanded form in Introducing Don DeLillo, ed. Frank Lentricchia, Duke UP, 1991, 43-66; and in Conversations with Don DeLillo, ed. Thomas DePietro, Jackson: U of Mississippi P, 2005, 52-74. See as well https://perival.com/delillo/ddinterviews.html.)

Don DeLillo, “Jack Ruby’s Timing.” Letter to the editor [reply to David W. Belin], New York Times, October 2, 1988. https://www.nytimes.com/1988/10/02/books/l-jack-ruby-s-timing-312488.html

Paul Edwards, “Libra at Steppenwolf: John Malkovich Adapts Don DeLillo.” Text and Performance Quarterly (1995) 15:3, 206-228.

Gerald Howard, “The American Strangeness: An Interview with Don DeLillo.” Hungry Mind Review, 1997. (“Mailer calls him Doctor Joyce. You and I know that he’s a priest.”)

http://web.archive.org/web/19990129081431/www.bookwire.com/hmr/hmrinterviews.article$2563

Douglas Keesey, Don DeLillo. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1993. On DeLillo’s creation of Marguerite Oswald, see pp. 194-96.

Thomas LeClair, “An Interview with Don DeLillo,” Contemporary Literature 23.1 (1982): 19-31. (Republished in DePietro, ed., Conversations.)

Norman Mailer, Letter to Don DeLillo, August 25, 1988. In Selected Letters of Norman Mailer. Ed. J. Michael Lennon. New York: Random House, 2014. 1092.

David Remnick, “Exile on Main Street [interview with Don DeLillo].” New Yorker, September 7, 1997. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1997/09/15/exile-on-main-street-don-delillo-profile-remnick

Jean Stafford, A Mother in History. New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1966.

David Streitfeld, “Don DeLillo’s Gloomy Muse.” Washington Post, May 13, 1992. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1992/05/14/don-delillos-gloomy-muse/5187a6b7-f1f4-4199-9c05-f0b78cc77777/

George F. Will, “Shallow Look at the Mind of an Assassin [review of Libra].” Washington Post, September 22, 1988 (Libra as “an act of literary vandalism and bad citizenship”).

Errata: It was Voltaire – not Pascal or Rousseau – who said, “If God did not exist it would be necessary to invent him.” And Underworld’s 1990s scenes begin in 1992, not 1991.

Episode 27: Libra (3)

jeffsevers@gmail.com (Jeffrey Severs & Michael Streit) — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 12:00:00 +0000

So who killed JFK? We still don’t know, but we’re concluding our series on DeLillo’s conspiratorial history with Episode 27: Libra (3). This episode begins by focusing on the unexpected injection of humor and depth that comes with Jack Ruby, another reluctant shooter, in the novel’s second part. We draw into this episode some comparisons of Libra to other artists’ paranoid visions of conspiracy, including Oliver Stone, Norman Mailer, and Thomas Pynchon. We spend ample time on the newspaper-clipping and TV-watching of CIA wife Beryl Parmenter, one of several figures here who make Libra a canny narrative of media and information history. And we close with detailed debate and speculation about why DeLillo’s concluding “Author’s Note” – with its powerful notion that “readers may find refuge here” – has changed over the years. Like Nicholas Branch, we're overwhelmed by all that still could be said about Libra (and we may still say it in a future episode!), but we conclude our three-part analysis here.

References and corrections for this episode:

“Don DeLillo: The Word, the Image, and the Gun.” BBC Documentary, September 27, 1991. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DTePKA1wgc

Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia.” chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Freud_MourningAndMelancholia.pdf

JFK (dir. Oliver Stone, 1991).

Frank Lentricchia, “Libra as Postmodern Critique.” In Frank Lentricchia, ed., Introducing Don DeLillo (Durham, NC: Duke U. Press, 1991), 193-215.

George F. Will, “Shallow Look at the Mind of an Assassin.” Washington Post, September 22, 1988.

Correction and references on Carmine Latta and Sam Giancana: DeLillo’s character Carmine Latta is indeed based on Carlos Marcello (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_Marcello), but we misstate the name of mobster Sam Giancana (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Giancana).

Interlude clips include the voices of Jack Ruby and Marguerite Oswald.

Episode 26: Libra (2)

jeffsevers@gmail.com (Jeffrey Severs & Michael Streit) — Mon, 9 Jun 2025 12:00:00 +0000

In Episode 26: Libra (2), DDSWTNP continue our deep dive into DeLillo’s story of Oswald and CIA plotters, taking on the distinctions between lone-gunman and systems theories, the unique role of Bobby Dupard in Oswald’s arc, and all this novel has to teach us about “diminishing existence” and the taste for mediated violence as it’s grown since the watershed moment of 1963. Major segments here focus on the remarkable, Mephistophelean voice of David Ferrie, the work done by secret CIA historian Nicholas Branch, and DeLillo’s prefatory essay “Assassination Aura,” which brings Libra’s enduring mystery into the twenty-first century through the promises and failures of technology embodied by “Dictabelt No. 10.”

An episode best listened to, of course, after Episode 25: Libra (1)! Stay tuned next week for the release of our concluding episode on Libra.

References and corrections for this episode:

Don DeLillo, “American Blood: A Journey Through the Labyrinth of Dallas and JFK.” Rolling Stone, December 8, 1983. Rpt. in Osteen, Mark, ed., Novels of the 1980s: The Names, White Noise, Libra. Library of America, 2022. 1045-1061.

Don DeLillo, “Assassination Aura” (May 2005). Included as preface in 2006 edition of Libra (Penguin).

“I was able to acquire a copy of the [Zapruder] film before it became legally available, which made me feel slightly conspiratorial”: Don DeLillo, “Preface, 2022.” In Osteen, ed., Novels of the 1980s: The Names, White Noise, Libra. Library of America, 2022. 633-634.

Linda Hutcheon, “Historiographic Metafiction: The Pastime of Past Time.” In A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1988. (The first instance of a concept much discussed by Hutcheon and many others.)

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

Dante correction: We say “circling the square” in Paradiso 33, but it’s of course the problem of “squaring the circle.”

Interlude clips include the voices of General Edwin Walker and Lee Harvey Oswald.

Episode 25: Libra (1)

jeffsevers@gmail.com (Jeffrey Severs & Michael Streit) — Mon, 2 Jun 2025 12:00:00 +0000

Who killed JFK? What forces made the mind and actions of Lee Oswald? And what does it mean to be an agent of history or something called fate? DDSWTNP probe these and other big questions in multiple new episodes on Libra released over the coming month. June may be the time of Gemini, another sign of doubles in the Zodiac, but for us it’s a month for the balance scale, tipping one way or the other, with some Librans like Lee not balanced at all but (as David Ferrie puts it) “somewhat unsteady and impulsive . . . Poised to make the dangerous leap.”

In Episode 25: Libra (1), we discuss where DeLillo began in the 1970s in his build-up to Libra, as far back as Americana and other early novels’ mentions of JFK, Oswald, the CIA, and the overwhelming Warren Report. We examine what makes DeLillo’s Oswald a great but frustrating character and a portal for new dimensions in the author’s examination of language, naming, and self-making. We ask what’s behind the clear shifts in style, tone, and humor DeLillo makes for this historical novel, as well as the power of his place/date chapter structure, the influence of existentialist fiction, and some alternate titles he considered. And we begin working our way through all the figures and ideas surrounding Oswald, from Marxist beliefs and CIA practices of “unknowing” to Cold War obsessions with the Bay of Pigs, life in the U.S.S.R., and a losing war in Vietnam that DeLillo and readers know is coming but his characters importantly don’t.

Stay tuned in our Libra episodes to come for investigation of the Murray-like wit of David Ferrie, how DeLillo regards the lone gunman theory, the mysterious edits made to his “Author’s Note,” the theological musings of Nicholas Branch, and much more.

Texts and historical figures mentioned in Episode 25:

Ann Arensberg, “Seven Seconds” (1988), in Thomas DePietro, ed., Conversations with Don DeLillo, University of Mississippi Press, 2005, 40-46.

---. “Preface, 2022.” In Osteen, ed., Novels of the 1980s: The Names, White Noise, Libra. Library of America, 2022. 633-634.

Don DeLillo Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

“Don DeLillo: The Word, the Image, and the Gun.” BBC Documentary, September 27, 1991. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DTePKA1wgc

DeLillo: “I was hoping it was Scorpio, because I liked that word. But his birth sign turned out to be Libra, the scales. I settled for that.” David Marchese, “We All Live in Don DeLillo’s World. He’s Confused By It Too” (2020)

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/10/12/magazine/don-delillo-interview.html

Everette Howard Hunt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._Howard_Hunt

Correction: the character Aleksei Kirilenko, Oswald’s Soviet handler in the novel (and source for one of many Lee aliases, Alek?), is DeLillo’s creation, not historical! Branch later reveals Kirilenko’s real name is Sergei Broda (301). No claim about DeLillo’s basis for Kirilenko/Broda, but here is information on yet another shadowy figure, defecting KGB agent Yuri Nosenko, who claimed to have been in charge of Oswald’s case file in the Soviet Union: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuri_Nosenko

Episode 24: From Amazons to White Noise

jeffsevers@gmail.com (Jeffrey Severs & Michael Streit) — Mon, 14 Apr 2025 12:00:00 +0000

What does the déjà vu allegedly caused by the Airborne Toxic Event have to do with a disease called Jumping Frenchman? How is Jack Gladney’s “day of the station wagons” connected to the first female NHL player’s longing for quaint hometown holidays? In Episode 24, DDSWTNP continue our White Noise residency by showing listeners all the hidden connections between DeLillo’s most famous novel and his most obscure: Cleo Birdwell’s Amazons, his pseudonymous 1980 collaboration with Sue Buck, written as a kind of lark but we think absolutely integral to the satiric vision of White Noise five years later. Our discussion suggests all the ways in which DeLillo seems to have used Amazons as a “laboratory” of sorts, developing Cleo’s thoughts on ad shoots, celebrity athletes, Americana, and an ex-player in a deathlike suspension into the richer, more in-depth meditations on similar topics in White Noise. Naturally we give major attention to Murray Jay Siskind, a sportswriter in Amazons who’s become an Elvis scholar in White Noise, expressing above all our gratitude that DeLillo came back to him and transformed him, reshaping an already very funny snowmobile obsessive into a Mephistophelean wit and one of the darkest, most memorable characters in the corpus. Those who haven’t gotten to read Amazons but know other DeLillo will get a ton out of this episode, for we end up drawing surprising connections not just to White Noise but Americana, End Zone, Great Jones Street, Underworld, Zero K, and others. Turns out this prank of a novel in 1980 paid many dividends for DeLillo. Tune in to hear some fun thoughts as well about a prank of our own: an April Fool’s post about a brand-new DeLillo novel we put on social media a few weeks ago.

Texts and quotations referred to in this episode:

“Pynchon Now,” including short essay on Pynchon’s example by Don DeLillo, Bookforum (Summer 2005). https://web.archive.org/web/20050729023737/www.bookforum.com/pynchon.html

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (Free Press, 1973).

John N. Duvall, “The (Super)Marketplace of Images: Television as Unmediated Mediation in DeLillo’s White Noise.” In Mark Osteen, ed., White Noise: Text and Criticism (New York: Penguin, 1998), pp. 432-55.

Adolf Hitler, “Long Live Fanatical Nationalism” (text of speech). In James A. Gould and Willis H. Truitt, Political Ideologies (New York: Macmillan, 1973), p. 119.

Gerald Howard and Mark Osteen, “Why Don DeLillo Deserves the Nobel: A Conversation with Gerald Howard and Mark Osteen,” Library of America, January 17, 2024 (source for Howard’s remark that DeLillo’s manuscripts need no editing).

https://www.loa.org/news-and-views/why-don-delillo-deserves-the-nobel/

Episode 23: The White Noise Film

jeffsevers@gmail.com (Jeffrey Severs & Michael Streit) — Mon, 3 Mar 2025 13:30:00 +0000

Roll film! In Episode 23, DDSWTNP continue our White Noise residency by heading to the movies (or the TV screen) and examining Noah Baumbach’s 2022 film adaptation of the novel. We discuss the drive over the years to adapt the supposedly “unadaptable” DeLillo for the screen, the 2020s context of this film, and our varied reactions to successive viewings of it over the two-plus years since its release. Other topics include the central performances (especially Adam Driver as an unexpectedly good Jack Gladney and Don Cheadle as a refashioned Murray Siskind); Baumbach’s successes and failures at re-ordering DeLillo’s dialogue and visually distilling certain themes; and his shaping of the narrative as a “meta-cinematic” journey through his personal film history and a mixture of genres. Reviews by Tom LeClair, Marco Roth, and Jesse Kavadlo figure in our analysis, and we close by considering whether we do in fact “need a new body” in the film’s concluding supermarket song and dance number, which in our view captures some of the novel’s themes and distorts others. We’d love to hear on Instagram or email what you think of the film and our reactions, too!

We also take a little time to correct a historical error in our Episode 19 on Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake.

Texts and sources for this episode:

White Noise (dir. Noah Baumbach, 2022) (Netflix).

Film adaptation pages at “Don DeLillo’s America”:

http://www.perival.com/delillo/whitenoise_film_2022.html

http://perival.com/delillo/ddoddsends.html

Patrick Brzeski, Alex Ritman, “Noah Baumbach on Getting LCD Soundsystem to Create New Track for ‘White Noise,’” The Hollywood Reporter, August 31, 2022.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/venice-noah-baumbach-white-noise-lcd-soundsystem-1235209318/

Jesse Kavadlo, “Don DeLillo’s ‘White Noise’ Remains Unfilmable,” Pop Matters, January 11, 2023.

https://www.popmatters.com/white-noise-noah-baumbach-unfilmable

Tom LeClair, “The Maladaptation of White Noise,” Full Stop, December 29, 2022.

https://www.full-stop.net/2022/12/29/features/tomleclair/the-maladaptation-of-white-noise/

Jon Mooallem, “How Noah Baumbach Made ‘White Noise’ a Disaster Movie for Our Moment,” New York Times Magazine, November 23, 2022.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/23/magazine/white-noise-noah-baumbach.html

Marco Roth, “Don DeLillo on Xanax,” Tablet, November 3, 2022.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/don-delillo-xanax-white-noise-noah-baumbach

Episode 22: White Noise (2)

jeffsevers@gmail.com (Jeffrey Severs & Michael Streit) — Mon, 3 Feb 2025 13:00:00 +0000

We’ve arrived at the big one, the breakthrough book of 1985 – White Noise. In Episodes 21 and 22, DDSWTNP extend our White Noise “residency” and turn in-depth attention to DeLillo’s most popular piece of fiction in another double episode.

Episode 21: White Noise (1) takes an expansive view of the novel’s narrative and goes into depth on (among many other subjects) the iconic opening chapter’s commentary on America and Americana, the meaning of Mylex suits, Jack’s relationships with Heinrich and Orest Mercator, and what it means to be a rat, a snake, a fascist, and a scholar of Hitler in this book’s universe.

Episode 22: White Noise (2) interprets passages mainly from the book’s second half, including scenes featuring the dark humor of Vernon Dickey and of SIMUVAC, the meaning of DeLillo’s desired title “Panasonic,” Jack’s shooting of Willie Mink (and what it owes to Nabokov), a riveting fire and a fascinating trash compactor cube, and the Dostoevskyan interrogation of belief by Sister Hermann Marie.

Every minute features original ideas on the enduring meanings of White Noise in so many political, social, technological, and moral dimensions – what it teaches us about the roots and implications of our many epistemological crises, how it does all this in writing that somehow manages to be self-conscious, philosophical, hilarious, and warm all at once.

Texts and artifacts discussed and mentioned in these episodes:

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (Free Press, 1973).

Adam Begley, “Don DeLillo: The Art of Fiction CXXXV,” The Paris Review 128 (1993): 274-306.

(DeLillo: “And White Noise develops a trite adultery plot that enmeshes the hero, justifying his fears about the death energies contained in plots. When I think of highly plotted novels I think of detective fiction or mystery fiction, the kind of work that always produces a few dead bodies. But these bodies are basically plot points, not worked-out characters. The book’s plot either moves inexorably toward a dead body or flows directly from it, and the more artificial the situation the better. Readers can play off their fears by encountering the death experience in a superficial way.”)

Buddha, Ādittapariyāya Sutta (“Fire Sermon Discourse”). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%80dittapariy%C4%81ya_Sutta

Don DeLillo, White Noise: Text and Criticism, Mark Osteen, ed. (Penguin, 1998).

---. “The Sightings.” Weekend Magazine (August 4, 1979), 26-30.

Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (Routledge, 1966).

Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (1880).

Franz Kafka, “A Hunger Artist” (1922).

Édouard Manet’s Olympia (1863). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympia_(Manet)

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955).

Mark Osteen, “‘The Natural Language of the Culture’: Exploring Commodities through White Noise.” Approaches to Teaching DeLillo’s White Noise, eds. Tim Engles and John N. Duvall (MLA, 2006), pp. 192-203.

Ronald Reagan, “Farewell Address to the Nation,” January 11, 1989. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjECSv8KFN4

(“I’ve spoken of the ‘shining city’ all my political life . . .”)

Mark L. Sample, “Unseen and Unremarked On: Don DeLillo and the Failure of the Digital Humanities.” https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/untitled-88c11800-9446-469b-a3be-3fdb36bfbd1e/section/be12b589-a9ca-4897-9475-f8c0b03ca648

(See this article for DeLillo’s list of alternate titles, including “Panasonic” and “Matshushita” (Panasonic’s parent corporation).)

Episode 21: White Noise (1)

jeffsevers@gmail.com (Jeffrey Severs & Michael Streit) — Mon, 3 Feb 2025 13:00:00 +0000

Texts and artifacts discussed and mentioned in these episodes:

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (Free Press, 1973).

Adam Begley, “Don DeLillo: The Art of Fiction CXXXV,” The Paris Review 128 (1993): 274-306.

Buddha, Ādittapariyāya Sutta (“Fire Sermon Discourse”). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%80dittapariy%C4%81ya_Sutta

Don DeLillo, White Noise: Text and Criticism, Mark Osteen, ed. (Penguin, 1998).

---. “The Sightings.” Weekend Magazine (August 4, 1979), 26-30.

Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (Routledge, 1966).

Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (1880).

Franz Kafka, “A Hunger Artist” (1922).

Édouard Manet’s Olympia (1863). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympia_(Manet)

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955).

Ronald Reagan, “Farewell Address to the Nation,” January 11, 1989. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjECSv8KFN4

(“I’ve spoken of the ‘shining city’ all my political life . . .”)

(See this article for DeLillo’s list of alternate titles, including “Panasonic” and “Matshushita” (Panasonic’s parent corporation).)

Episode 20: Discovering White Noise

jeffsevers@gmail.com (Jeffrey Severs & Michael Streit) — Wed, 1 Jan 2025 07:55:00 +0000

Looking to start reading Don DeLillo, or already a fan and looking for ways to persuade your friends, relatives, or students to finally access the wonders of White Noise? In Episode Twenty, DDSWTNP offer an introduction to White Noise for the first-time reader of DeLillo, focusing on elements of plot, action, character, humor, and voice that often present stumbling blocks to initiates. We help listeners navigate DeLillo’s most popular novel, the “gateway drug” to the joys and challenges that a lifetime of reading his corpus holds in store. We also answer key questions like how to regard Hitler Studies and whether you need to know anything about “postmodernism,” philosophy, or how a media theorist might read the Most Photographed Barn in America before entering DeLillo’s world (spoiler: no!). Longtime listeners to the pod will find here, we hope, an episode to send along to anyone they’ve given a copy of White Noise for Christmas or ever told, “Hey, you should read Don DeLillo.” The first of several episodes to come from us on White Noise as the novel turns 40, this podcast will be followed in 2025 by our deep dives into the novel itself, its massive body of criticism, and the recent film adaptation – so stay tuned, and may you be immensely pleased.

First-time readers of White Noise looking for illuminating critical and contextual reading should try some of the essays and excerpts collected in Mark Osteen, ed., White Noise: Text and Criticism (New York: Penguin, 1998), as well as the many excellent resources at Curt Gardner’s website “Don DeLillo’s America” (http://perival.com/delillo/delillo.html). But as we suggest in the episode, mainly we advise just going back and re-reading all your favorite scenes, or even the whole thing!

Episode 19: Rachel Kushner's Creation Lake

jeffsevers@gmail.com (Jeffrey Severs & Michael Streit) — Tue, 10 Dec 2024 13:30:00 +0000

In Episode Nineteen, DDSWTNP turn outward to a discussion of Rachel Kushner, whose Booker Prize-nominated Creation Lake, a 2024 novel about the folly of espionage, revolutionary violence, life underground, and confronting modernity with ancient practices in rural France, solidifies its author’s reputation as a key inheritor of DeLillo’s influence and themes. Creation Lake is narrated by a nihilistic spy named Sadie Smith who infiltrates a farming commune called Le Moulin and grows enchanted with the claims of their cave-dwelling philosophical advisor, who argues that Neanderthal life thousands of years ago holds the key to reshaping humankind. In it Kushner explores the legacy of France’s 1968 while echoing The Names, Great Jones Street, Ratner’s Star, Mao II, and other DeLillo works, as we outline in our discussion. We find rich references as well in Creation Lake to Nathaniel Hawthorne, Joan Didion, Michel Houellebecq, and Kushner’s own previous works, especially The Flamethrowers and The Mars Room. Listeners looking for new writing reminiscent of DeLillo and those already knowledgeable of Kushner’s works will find plenty here, and we hope this episode will be the first of several over time dedicated to DeLillo’s massive influence on exciting new world literature.

Texts and quotations mentioned and discussed in this episode, in addition to Creation Lake and those by DeLillo:

Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays (1970) and Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968)

Dana Goodyear, “Rachel Kushner’s Immersive Fiction,” The New Yorker, April 23, 2018 (includes discussion of Kushner’s friendship with DeLillo)

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance (1852) and The Scarlet Letter (1850)

Michel Houellebecq, Serotonin (2019)

Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers (2013) and The Mars Room (2018)

---. “Rachel Kushner: ‘The last book that made me cry? The Brothers Karamazov,” The Guardian, October 5, 2018 (source of this answer: “The book that influenced my writing: Probably novels by Joan Didion, Denis Johnson and Don DeLillo. But a whole lot of other books, too”)

“In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.” (F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Crack-Up” (1936)– a line mangled slightly in the episode)

Episode 18: The Lives of DeLillo (2)

jeffsevers@gmail.com (Jeffrey Severs & Michael Streit) — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 12:32:19 +0000

In Episode Eighteen, DDSWTNP wish our author a happy 88th birthday and talk about the international life he led between the mid-1970s and early 1980s. We follow DeLillo abroad, covering his year in Canada (1975) and his much-discussed time living in Athens (1978-1982), tracing influences of these experiences on portrayals of national identity and language in The Names especially but other works too. Central to understanding this period is the powerful change in method that DeLillo made at his manual typewriter that inspired slower, more “serious” work. For those who already know the biography pretty well we also have in this episode some surprising details garnered from his letters in these years to editor and friend Gordon Lish, the remarkable story of DeLillo’s response to a Utah banning of Americana in 1979, and connections between the 1981 Athens earthquakes DeLillo lived through and the 1988 short story “The Ivory Acrobat.” We end by considering the “toxic spill” of the news that greeted DeLillo on his return to America in 1982 and energized the writing of White Noise, and we announce too some upcoming episodes that will close out 2024!

As is often true, we get significant help in this episode from interview excerpts and more collected at Don DeLillo’s America: http://perival.com/delillo/delillo.html

Texts referred to and quoted from in this episode:

Ann Arensberg, “Seven Seconds” (1988), in Thomas DePietro, ed., Conversations with Don DeLillo, University of Mississippi Press, 2005, 40-46.

Adam Begley, “Don DeLillo: The Art of Fiction CXXXV,” The Paris Review 128 (1993): 274-306.

Don DeLillo, The Engineer of Moonlight, Cornell Review 5 (Winter 1979), 21-47. [Incorrectly placed in Epoch in episode.]

---, “The Ivory Acrobat,” Granta (Issue 108, 1988) (and collected in The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories).

Robert Harris, “A Talk with Don DeLillo” (1982), in DePietro, ed., 16-19.

Gordon Lish Manuscripts (1951-2017), Lilly Library, Indiana University (https://archives.iu.edu/catalog/InU-Li-VAC9786).

Mervyn Rothstein, “A Novelist Faces His Themes on New Ground” (1987), in DePietro, ed., 20-24.

Jim Woolf and Dan Bates, “Davis Official’s Action Dismays, Horrifies Author of ‘Americana.’” The Salt Lake Tribune, August 31, 1979.

Episode 17: The 2024 Nobel Prize & The Writer Alone in a Room

jeffsevers@gmail.com (Jeffrey Severs & Michael Streit) — Sun, 20 Oct 2024 13:00:00 +0000

In Episode Seventeen, DDSWTNP briefly discuss new Nobel Laureate Han Kang before digging into “A History of the Writer Alone in a Room,” DeLillo’s acceptance speech for an award he did win, the 1999 Jerusalem Prize. In this unpublished, hard-to-find text, DeLillo tells the humbling story of the novelist at frustratingly slow work, “shaped by the vast social reality that rumbles all around him,” in a narrative that conjures scenes that resonate with Libra, Mao II, and other of DeLillo’s portraits of the artist (while also raising the question of whether DeLillo has a cat). Novelists Thomas Mann, Philip Roth, and William Gaddis make their way into our analysis of this miniature fiction, and we consider as well the meaning of the Jerusalem Prize, the “nonchalant terror” of everyday life, and the young woman writer the essay at its end envisions taking up this legacy of lonely work.

Texts mentioned or cited in this episode:

Don DeLillo, “A History of the Writer Alone in a Room,” 1999 Jerusalem Prize For the Freedom of the Individual in Society acceptance address. Jerusalem: Jerusalem International Book Fair, 1999. Reprinted in German translation (“Der Narr in seinem Zimmer”) in Die Zeit (March 29, 2001). See also: https://collections.library.yale.edu/catalog?op=AND&sort=score+desc%2C+pub_date_si+desc%2C+title_si+asc&search_field=advanced&all_fields_advanced=&child_oids_ssim=17371596&commit=SEARCH

---. “On William Gaddis.” Conjunctions (Issue 41, Fall 2003). https://web.archive.org/web/20031123133017/http://www.conjunctions.com/archives/c41-dd.htm

[Incorrectly placed in Bookforum in the episode.]

---. “The Artist Naked in a Cage.” The New Yorker, May 26, 1997.

“Don DeLillo: The Word, the Image, the Gun.” Dir. Kim Evans. BBC Documentary, September 27, 1991. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4029096/ and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DTePKA1wgc&t=63s

William Gaddis, The Recognitions. Harcourt Brace & Co., 1955.

Episode 16: DeLillo's Sentences

jeffsevers@gmail.com (Jeffrey Severs & Michael Streit) — Tue, 1 Oct 2024 14:58:00 +0000

In Episode Sixteen: “DeLillo’s Sentences,” DDSWTNP take a brief break from analyzing full novels to do some very close reading of single sentences from across DeLillo’s career. Style and craft, sound and rhythm, and what makes DeLillo (as one critic puts it) a poet writing prose—these are subjects we consider as we look closely at the lines noted below and try to figure out what DeLillo means when he says in 1997, “At some point you begin to write sentences and paragraphs that don’t sound like other writers’.” This episode is a deep dive into DeLillo’s language but also a pretty good introduction for those just starting to read him. #donutmaker #thehemingwayand

DeLillo lines analyzed in this episode:

“Much of the appeal of sport derives from its dependence on elegant gibberish. And of course it remains the author’s permanent duty to unbox the lexicon for all eyes to see—a cryptic ticking mechanism in search of a revolution.” End Zone (113)

“New York seemed older than the cities of Europe, a sadistic gift of the sixteenth century, ever on the verge of plague.” Great Jones Street (3)

“Around the great stadium the tenement barrens stretch, miles of delirium, men sitting in tipped-back chairs against the walls of hollow buildings, sofas burning in the lots, and there is a sense these chanting thousands have, wincing in the sun, that the future is pressing in, collapsing toward them, that they are everywhere surrounded by signs of the fated landscape and human struggle of the Last Days, and here in the middle of their columned body, lank-haired and up-close, stands Karen Janney, holding a cluster of starry jasmine and thinking of the bloodstorm to come.” Mao II (7)

“The last sentence was, ‘In future years, of course, men and women, in cubicles, wearing headphones, will be listening to secret tapes of the administration’s crimes while others study electronic records on computer screens and still others look at salvaged videotapes of caged men being subjected to severe physical pain and finally others, still others, behind closed doors, ask pointed questions of flesh-and-blood individuals.” Point Omega (33)

Other texts cited in this episode:

“Tom LeClair.” Interview by Andrew Mitchell Davenport. Full Stop, May 19, 2015. https://www.full-stop.net/2015/05/19/interviews/andrew-mitchell-davenport/tom-leclair/

“‘Writing as a Deeper Form of Concentration’: An Interview with Don DeLillo.” Interview by Maria Moss. Conversations with Don DeLillo. Ed. Thomas DePietro. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2005. 155-68.

“Exile on Main Street: Don DeLillo’s Undisclosed Underworld.” Interview by David Remnick. Conversations with Don DeLillo. 131-44.

Episode 15: The Names

jeffsevers@gmail.com (Jeffrey Severs & Michael Streit) — Tue, 20 Aug 2024 14:09:29 +0000

In Episode Fifteen, DDSWTNP take on The Names, a Greece-based story of a strange “abecedarian” murder cult, a novel regarded by DeLillo as his turn toward more “serious” writing and placed at or near the top of many a reader’s list of favorites. We discuss The Names as an examination of the “Depravities” and guilt of being an American in the complex late-1970s world of corporations, risk analysis, bank loans, and intelligence covers that narrator James Axton navigates, and we ask why The Names puts this geopolitical tumult (including the 1979 Iranian Revolution) in the context of ancient languages, ritual sacrifice, and a dissolving marriage and family life for James. Language-obsessed Owen Brademas (the archeologist and “epigraphist” who is drawn relentlessly to the fascinating cult) and filmmaker Frank Volterra (perhaps a sly satire of a certain American auteur?) figure in this story of religion, aesthetics, and the enduring appeal of violence, but we turn at the end of this episode to the nine-year-old author Tap, Axton’s son, whose misspelled, highly spirited tale of the spirit to which his tongue might “yeeld” lets DeLillo showcase all the ways to use the alphabet to salutary and generative ends. #getwet #themindslittleinfinite

We also announce the winner of our Amazons raffle and say thanks to all who have supported and continue to support us at buymeacoffee.com/delillopodcast.

Texts mentioned and discussed in this episode:

Burn, Stephen J. “‘A Paradigm for the Life of Consciousness’: The Pale King.” David Foster Wallace and “The Long Thing”: New Essays on the Novels, ed. Marshall Boswell. New York: Bloomsbury, 2014. 149-168.

“Don DeLillo: The Art of Fiction CXXXV,” Interview with Adam Begley, The Paris Review 128 (1993): 274-306.

“A Talk with Don DeLillo,” Interview with Robert Harris, in Thomas DePietro, ed., Conversations with Don DeLillo, University of Mississippi Press, 2005, 16-19.

The Godfather (1972) and Apocalypse Now (1979), dir. Francis Ford Coppola. (We have the dates on both films slightly wrong in the episode.)

Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse (1991), dir. George Hickenlooper and Fax Bahr

Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer. Grove Press, 2015.

Episode 14: Mother

jeffsevers@gmail.com (Jeffrey Severs & Michael Streit) — Sun, 21 Jul 2024 13:00:00 +0000

In Episode Fourteen, DDSWTNP turn our attention for the first time to DeLillo’s drama – and to a largely unknown work by DeLillo as playwright, a 1966 radio play and disturbing take on U.S. race relations titled Mother. We cover the circumstances of the play’s original broadcasts, its re-emergence in an internet archive recording more than 50 years later, and the strange way in which this story’s armchair progressives and Billie Holiday fans, Ralph and Sally, end up making a fetishizing travesty of civil rights and racial integration in the play’s brief 27 minutes. Topics include the importance of radio to Mother’s themes of media occlusion, moral numbness, and erasure; what DeLillo means by Ralph’s “white malady” of transparency and how it reworks images from another Ralph’s Invisible Man; and what this play has to do with contemporaneous issues like interracial marriage in Loving v. Virginia. We talk extensively as well about how Mother presages parts of the early novels, from jazz love in Americana to Taft in End Zone and Azarian in Great Jones Street. Before (and after) listening to our analysis, take in this troubling 27-minute play at https://archive.org/details/pra-BB3830.01

Our raffle for a hardcover Amazons has been extended to August 1 – donate and enter to win at https://buymeacoffee.com/delillopodcast

Texts mentioned and discussed in this episode:

James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time. Dial Press, 1963.

Samuel Beckett, Endgame. 1957.

Don DeLillo, The Mystery at the Middle of Ordinary Life. 2000.

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/30660/pdf

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man. Random House, 1952.

“The writer is driven by his conviction that some truths aren’t arrived at so easily, that life is still full of mystery, that it might be better for you, Dear Reader, if you went back to the Living section of your newspaper because this is the dying section and you don’t really want to be here.” (Thomas LeClair, “An Interview with Don DeLillo,” Contemporary Literature 23.1 (1982): 19-31)

Eugene Ionesco, Rhinoceros. 1959.

Mark Osteen. “Chronology.” In Don DeLillo, Three Novels of the 1980s. Library of America, 2022.

Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit. 1944.

Episode 13: Amazons

jeffsevers@gmail.com (Jeffrey Severs & Michael Streit) — Mon, 20 May 2024 13:00:00 +0000

In Episode Thirteen, DDSWTNP follow the puck into the corners with Cleo Birdwell, first female NHL player and ostensible author of the farcical, sex-fueled, “intimate” memoir Amazons, the 1980 satire of a “pseudo-profound” America that DeLillo co-wrote with Sue Buck. Amazons is a sports novel with perhaps more interest in “strip Monopoly” than hockey, more investment by Cleo in her Badger Beagles youth softball team than the New York Rangers. We discuss how this odd book came to be, how it was marketed, how DeLillo never fully owned up to it, and its nevertheless surprising place in his career’s development, a comedic lark and palate cleanser in which he makes significant moves toward the vision of White Noise. These include a disease called Jumping Frenchman, simulated death in the American home, and the character Murray Jay Siskind, seen here writing about athletes and a deeply corrupt snowmobile industry before becoming the Elvis scholar readers of the later novel know. In an episode with insights for those who have read this rare book and those who haven’t, we show that Amazons, least-discussed of DeLillo’s works, really should not be that!

Support our work and enter the raffle to win a hardcover Amazons: buymeacoffee.com/delillopodcast

Discussed in this episode:

Gerald Howard, “The Puck Stopped Here” (2008)

https://www.bookforum.com/print/1404/revisiting-cleo-birdwell-and-her-national-hockey-league-memoir-1406

David Marchese, “We All Live in Don DeLillo’s World. He’s Confused By It Too” (2020)

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/10/12/magazine/don-delillo-interview.html

An excerpt:

You know who else shows up in two of your books? Murray Jay Siskind. Both times described as having an “Amish” beard.

Murray Jay! Remind me, what book is he in?

“White Noise.”

And where else?

“Amazons.”

Oh god. How do you remember that? I don’t remember that.

I think I just got a scoop. I don’t know if you’ve ever publicly acknowledged that you wrote “Amazons.”

I probably did, somewhere or other. [Laughs.] Maybe to an interviewer from Thailand.

Susan Sontag, “The Pornographic Imagination” (1967), in Styles of Radical Will (1969).

Idries Shah: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idries_Shah

Jumping Frenchmen of Maine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumping_Frenchmen_of_Maine

Episode 12: Don DeLillo's America: An Interview with Curt Gardner

jeffsevers@gmail.com (Jeffrey Severs & Michael Streit) — Mon, 29 Apr 2024 12:00:00 +0000

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.

Episode 11: Running Dog (2)

jeffsevers@gmail.com (Jeffrey Severs & Michael Streit) — Fri, 22 Mar 2024 12:00:00 +0000

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

Episode 10: Running Dog (1)

jeffsevers@gmail.com (Jeffrey Severs & Michael Streit) — Fri, 22 Mar 2024 12:00:00 +0000

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

Episode 9: Players

jeffsevers@gmail.com (Jeffrey Severs & Michael Streit) — Mon, 19 Feb 2024 12:00:00 +0000

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.

Episode 8: He Speaks in Your Voice: Listeners' Favorite Passages

jeffsevers@gmail.com (Jeffrey Severs & Michael Streit) — Thu, 18 Jan 2024 22:42:55 +0000

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)

Episode 7: Ratner's Star (2)

jeffsevers@gmail.com (Jeffrey Severs & Michael Streit) — Fri, 29 Dec 2023 22:23:13 +0000

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)

Episode 6: Ratner's Star (1)

jeffsevers@gmail.com (Jeffrey Severs & Michael Streit) — Fri, 29 Dec 2023 22:08:21 +0000

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.

Episode 5: The Lives of DeLillo (1)

jeffsevers@gmail.com (Jeffrey Severs & Michael Streit) — Mon, 20 Nov 2023 14:00:00 +0000

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

Episode 4: Great Jones Street

jeffsevers@gmail.com (Jeffrey Severs & Michael Streit) — Wed, 1 Nov 2023 18:30:35 +0000

In Episode 4: Great Jones Street, DDSWTNP listen in on a rock icon in retreat on the Lower East Side, Bucky Wunderlick, who leaves his fame and music career behind as other characters descend into terrorism and fascism in pursuit of a drug said to wipe out language itself. Will Bucky “return with a new language,” fall prey to a violent hippie commune that seems to evoke the Weather Underground, or engage some other “terminal fantasy”? Subjects include the aesthetics of poetry, silence, and guttural sounds; the contradictory American quest for “revolutionary solitude”; and what a “counter-archeology” of 1970s New York has to offer. #dogboys #preemptingthemarket #beastislooseleastisbest #diamondstylus #pulseredactor #yapplesyapplesyapples #doubledfeat

Texts referred to in this episode:

Definition of “nonce” words: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonce_word

One rendering of Hugo Ball’s Dadaist poem “Gadji Beri Bimba”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aiKHSeDlU1U

John Cage on visiting an anechoic chamber in “Indeterminacy”: https://www.lcdf.org/indeterminacy/s/6

DeLillo reads from a CIA memo on torture (“here several lines are redacted”) at the 2009 PEN event “Reckoning With Torture”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZFf6NYTkrM&t=26s

DeLillo and Greil Marcus discuss Bob Dylan and Great Jones Street at the 2005 Telluride Film Festival: https://greilmarcus.net/2014/10/17/greil-marcus-and-don-delillo-discuss-bob-dylan-and-bucky-wunderlick-2005/

Rainer Maria Rilke, “Ninth Duino Elegy”: https://web.ics.purdue.edu/~felluga/eng241/rilke.html

William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming”:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-coming

Episode 3: The 2023 Nobel Prize & Global DeLillo

jeffsevers@gmail.com (Jeffrey Severs & Michael Streit) — Thu, 12 Oct 2023 02:10:29 +0000

In this special episode timed to the 2023 Nobel Prize announcement, DDSWTNP do a brief history and theorization of the Nobel, talk about DeLillo as a global author, and read in detail his astonishing, Kafka-inspired 1997 speech in support of a Chinese dissident writer, “The Artist Naked in a Cage.” #hungerartists #communalmakebelieve #bitingtheswede

Texts referred to in this episode:

Don DeLillo, “The Artist Naked in a Cage.” May 26, 1997. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1997/05/26/the-artist-naked-in-a-cage

Cornelius Collins, “The World: DeLillo Abroad.” Don DeLillo in Context, ed. Jesse Kavadlo. Cambridge University Press, 2022. 39-46.

James F. English, The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value. Harvard University Press, 2005. https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674030435

Episode 2: End Zone

jeffsevers@gmail.com (Jeffrey Severs & Michael Streit) — Tue, 10 Oct 2023 17:32:49 +0000

In Episode 2: End Zone, DDSWTNP do not so much tackle as infringe upon DeLillo’s 1972 novel of “footbawl,” nuclear wargames, and jargon-addled, surprisingly human characters in wasted desert spaces. Topics include race and sports in American culture, football’s dependence on the “word signal,” Rilke’s Ninth Duino Elegy, and some alternate titles for the novel from DeLillo’s archive. #getfetal #hokethatbickie #theuntellable #lowlyformofamericansainthood

Texts referred to in this episode:

Don DeLillo, “An Interview with Don DeLillo” by Thomas LeClair. Conversations with Don DeLillo, ed. Thomas DePietro. University Press of Mississippi, 2005. 3-15.

Rainer Maria Rilke, “The Ninth Elegy” (Duino Elegies): https://web.ics.purdue.edu/~felluga/eng241/rilke.html

“There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates” (Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms).

Episode 1: Americana

jeffsevers@gmail.com (Jeffrey Severs & Michael Streit) — Fri, 29 Sep 2023 21:16:26 +0000

In Episode 1: Americana, DDSWTNP takes on DeLillo’s ravishing first novel, published in 1971 and the herald of a remarkable career to come. We discuss beguiling and beautifully sarcastic David Bell’s nihilistic road trip west, his insights into advertising and art, and his quest to make a film about his past and his country that risks “being crushed by darkness spreading from the edges of the screen.” #countingthehouse #godsavegod