Nov '03: Cosmopolis - Don DeLillo

I should mention here that Cosmopolis isn't the best of DeLillo that I've read, but it does retain some of the dark poetics that has resonated in all of the others I've read.

After finishing it I felt as if I missed something...Maybe the reread will do it for me.

I will say in these opening remarks as this book sets in front of me that there is a bit of similarity of this one day trip across New York City with Eric Packer and James Joyce's day in the life of Leopold Bloom and his walk around Dublin. Perhaps I'm just fishing here. But here he go; Chapter one....

Oh well, great! Thank you a lot!

Well, I'll read Cosmopolis as well this month for the first time because it was released in late August, I guess, here in Germany .

Here's the copy from the original dust jacket:

It is an April day in the year 2000 and an era is about to end - those booming times of market optimism when the culture boiled with money and corporations seemed more vital and influential than governments.

Eric Packer, a billionaire asset manager at age twenty-eight, emerges from his penthouse triplex and settles into his lavishly customized white stretch limousine. On this day he is a man with two missions: to pursue a cataclysmic bet against the yen and to get a haircut across town.

His journey to the barbershop is a contemporary odyssey, funny and fast-moving. Stalled in traffic by a presidential motorcade, a music idol's funeral and a violent political demonstration, Eric receives a string of visitors - his experts on security, technology, currency, finance, and theory. Sometimes he leaves the car for sexual encounters and sometimes he doesn't have to.

Cosmopolis, DeLillo's thirteenth novel, is both intimate and global, a vivid and moving account of a spectacular downfall.

(i bought the book but have not yet read it..but will do..will do)

okay but someone else is going to have to continue this discussion before I get on my own goddamn nerves

anyone participating here????murdorc???lippy? hornswaggled?

shit..I went back to Toronto yesterday and forgot to pick it up. Will do the next time I go home, I doubt it will be anytime soon. I will point the picture out to my mom and have her bring it or something. She's flying over from Taiwan next week and will defintely want to visit

I suggested DeLillo back in June, right after I read Cosmopolis.

And....what part do you wanna discuss??? That this is a young man that has everything, a 48 room apartment, an overdeveloped chest, an intelligent mind?
or what about the difference between him and his chief of security Torval on what they like about the limos.
Notice how the reason why he said he wanted the car was different than the real reason he wanted the car,,,the tremdous mutant thing...but his chief of security like it for the anonymity.

"Long white limosines had become the most unnoticed vehicles in the city."

and his question to Shiner

"Where do all the limos go at night?"

What about his wife?

well the relationship between him and his wife is interesting they never see each other, always talk about sex but never do it. and it seems that she doesnt care for his sexual life, am I right?

Yeah but the thing about DeLillo is his characters seem in lots of ways to embody ideals(Bill Grey in Mao II).. What a strange relationship of course....But they did have sex. Here is I find the classic/romantic relationship that was going on in Robert Pirgsig work Zen and the Art of Motorcycle maintenance. She is the poet....he is the analysist...but from him wanting the romantic platonic idea of why he wanted the limos it seemed that he battled looking for that part of his mind. He held on the his hope regarding the yen when he was losing it all.

hey, HD? i was just wondering why cosmopolis is "impudent"?

making fun of the "IMPORTANT" threads

ah, the shades of your subtle humor. you've got content and timing...you just might be a comic genius!

Take off your cool.

youve lost me there patioman

Hey, H.D. This one's for you.

I've shied away from DeLillo for a long time, not wanting to read anything labeled postmodern, a term which still cannot make sense to me, and anything specifically by DeLillo because his dust jacket descriptions never seemed to enthrall me. After reading COSMOPOLIS, I feel I've made the right choice all these years.

Yeah, I understand the whole "great man fallen" theme, where a man of great statures slowly degenerates and somehow at the end destroys himself (anybody read Shakespeare lately), but Eric Packer was too far from my own experience for me to associate. Here's a guy who has a 48-room apartment, for Christ's sake.

To be continued...

... and is so obsessed with data and currencies and theories that it reminded me of the Whitman poem where the astronomer's explaining the stars through theories and formulas. The narrator is so bored until he walks outside and looks up at the sky. Then the night magic begins. Unfortunately, it never began for me in Eric Packer's quest to get a haircut.

To continue once more...

The whole theme of important people dying was a tad interesting. I'm only wondering, why didn't the president die? He'd be the most important man in the U.S. Or is DeLillo trying to say that the president is really impotent in light of the true power dogs? An interesting query.

The most interesting part of the novel was the scene at the rave. As I teach high school English on Long Island, NY, I talk and breathe kids like this every day. One particularly compelling line:

"Even as his self-awareness grew weaker, he could see who they were in their chemical delirium and it was tender and moving, to know them in their frailty, their wistfullness of being, because kids is all they were, trying not to scatter in the air."

At the end of every school day, I go down on the corner by the main exit and watch the kids leave. The ebb and flow of human traffic, the rush and then the hush. That paragraph reminded me of my daily experience, and the power of youth.

[QUOTE][i]Originally posted by owenwarland [/i]
[B]The whole theme of important people dying was a tad interesting. I'm only wondering, why didn't the president die? He'd be the most important man in the U.S. Or is DeLillo trying to say that the president is really impotent in light of the true power dogs? An interesting query. [/B][/QUOTE]

One of the main things that i get from DeLillo every time I read him is this floating sense of loss or death...I felt it in white noise and in the body artist its there as well...in Underworld he grasps it perfectly....(gimme a sec to share it)

Lockman looks across the diamond at home. The double he hit is still a presence in his chest, it's chugging away in there, a body-memory that plays the moment over. He is peering into the deltoid opening between the catcher's knees. He sees the fingers dip, the blunt hand make a flapping action up and left. They'll give him the fastball high and tight and comeback with the curve away. A pretty two-part scheme. Seems easy and sweet from here.

Russ says, "Brooklyn leads it four to two."

He says, "Runner down the line at third. Not taking any chances."

Thomson thinking it's all happening too fast. Thinking quick hands, see the ball, give youself a chance."

Russ says, "Lockman without too big of a lead at second but he'll be running like the wind if Thomson hits one.:

In the box seats J. Edgar Hoover plucks a magazine page off of his shoulder, where the thing has lighted and stuck. At first he's annoyed that the object has come in contact with his body. The his eyes fall upon the page. It is a color reproduction of a painting crowded with medieval figures who are dying or dead---a landscape of visionary havoc and ruin. Edgar has never seen a painting quite like this. It covers the page completely and must surely dominate the magazine. Across the red-brown earth, skeleton armies on the march. Men impaled on lances, hung from gibbets, drawn on spoked wheels fixed to the tops of bare trees, bodies open to the crows. Legions of the dead forming up behind shields made of coffin lids. Death himself astride a slat-ribbed hack, he is peaked for blood, his scythe held ready as he presses people in haunted swarms toward the entrance of some helltrap, an oddly modern construction that could be a subway tunnel or office corridor. A background of ash skies and burning ships. It is clear to Edgar that the page is from Life and he tries to work up an anger, he asks himself why a magazine called Life would want to reproduce a painting of such lurid and dreadful dimensions. But he can't take his eyes off the page.

Russ Hodges says, "Branca throws."

Gleason makes a noise that is halfway between a sigh and a moan. It is probably a sough, as of rustling surf in some palmy place. Edgar recalls the earlier blowout, Jackie's minor choking fit. He sees a deeper engagement here. He goes out into the isle and up two steps, seperating himself from the imminent discharge of animal, vegetable and mineral matter.

Not a good pitch to hit, up and in, but Thomson swings and tomahawks the ball and everybody,everybody watches. Except for Gleason who is bent over in his seat, hands locked beneath his neck, a creamy strand of slime swinging from his lips.

Russ says, "There's a long drive."

His voice has a burst in it, a charge of expectation.

He says, "It's gonna be."

There's a pause all around him. Pafko racing toward the left-field corner.

He says, "I believe."

Pafko at the wall.........................

[QUOTE][i]Originally posted by owenwarland [/i]
[B]The most interesting part of the novel was the scene at the rave. As I teach high school English on Long Island, NY, I talk and breathe kids like this every day. One particularly compelling line:

"Even as his self-awareness grew weaker, he could see who they were in their chemical delirium and it was tender and moving, to know them in their frailty, their wistfullness of being, because kids is all they were, trying not to scatter in the air."

At the end of every school day, I go down on the corner by the main exit and watch the kids leave. The ebb and flow of human traffic, the rush and then the hush. That paragraph reminded me of my daily experience, and the power of youth. [/B][/QUOTE]

nice relation.