Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence?
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| High Concept Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence? |
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Tuesday, June 10, 2003 The Pitch: It's like Speed meets Dead Poet's Society! This morning, I got on the 52 at 6:26 a.m., about five minutes after it was supposed to show and driver (not anyone I recognized) knew it, too. He almost overshot my stop, braking heavily in the middle of the street and sent all of us on the sidewalk rushing out to board. I stepped on and everyone sitting down had a look of queasy amusement, like someone had just told an inappropriate joke. I made it to my seat just as the driver stomped on the gas, making the bus bound forward. At the corner of Silver and Mission, he realized he couldn't make the light and jammed on the brakes and everyone in the sidelong seats slid into heaps at the front of the bus. I jammed my legs against the seat in front of me and still felt the inertia want to flip me over into the aisle.And then, oddly, the guy next to me, said "New [something that starts with d]?" I would've thought he was saying driver but the meter of the word was all wrong. I turned to him. "I'm sorry, what?" "I said, 'New Delillo?'" I held up the book in my hand. "Oh. This. No, it's from the '70s. Ratner's Star." "I've never seen it before. I've read some Delillo but I haven't read that." "Yeah, it's good." I slipped over the plastic seats against him as the bus veered around a corner. "It's about math." "Huh." He said. "Yeah, that's not one of the ones I'd read." I really did want to ask him which ones he'd read but the drive from my stop to BART station is normally about three minutes--the driver had made it in just under two and I was already getting up to leave. "Have a good one," I said as I lurched to the side door. "Yeah," he said, and then went back to looking out the window. I stumbled off the back door and around the corner of the bus into the street. So I guess I think Ratner's Star is a good book. Or, at least, I'm willing to say so in the midst of experiences one might describe as 'life-threatening' I had just gotten to an excellent paragraph about a visit to the beach that culminates in a riot, and in the next paragraph, there was this: "She was extremely frail, her body quivering as though suspended from the end of an eyedropper." And I'm getting back into the rhythm of a Delillo novel, which means refusing to fall for the alluring dangling carrot of the plot, and choosing instead to walk through the gallery of the chapters at my own pace, admiring the sculpted precision of his sentences. And the rich deadpan wit of his dialogue, of course, which is more abundant in this book than others and yet initially more frustrating: I found it hard to believe a twelve-year old math prodigy would be so understatedly sarcastic to adult peers until I realized he was actually fourteen and from the Bronx. (Delillo was once asked if Bob Dylan was one of his heroes, to which he replied: "Someone from the Bronx doesn't have any heroes.") But I think I can see, even here in one of his more acclaimed early novels, a certain exhausted mannerism in the prose which I'm guessing he goes on to eliminate in The Names. Or maybe since this is the fifth Delillo book I've read in roughly a year (and the fourth from the '70s) I'm the one exhausted by the mannerism, not Delillo. Rather than reading the rest of the books in order, as I have been, I may just skip up to Mao II and/or go on a bit of an extended break as far as Mr. D. goes. posted by Jeff Lester | 10:40 AM | |
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