World of Leaves

Enjoying literature is not an easy thing to do. At least not if you try to lead a normal life, that is, whatever that is. Because there is so much of it around. Nothing but letters in endless combinations. Sometimes I wonder if I would go mad or start a philosophical or armed war in Borges's Library of Babel, engage in bare-knuckle-fights, bludgeon the skulls and smash the brains of fellow searchers with uncreased spines of books that have never been opened. Would I take a pencil with me and scribble in the margins, multiplying the already infinite number of possible texts further or would I stab my own eyes and pierce my tongue and throat with it to free myself from the curse of written and spoken language? I would have to pierce my eardrum as well as my own brains, too, writing my last unreadable message with lines of dripping blood.

Having just finished Cosmopolis, I am confronted with choices that I can hardly grasp. Every step from now can lead me in the wrong direction. What should I read next? Should I go back to DeLillo's beginnings and read him in chronological order or rather go directly to Underworld? What about Pynchon? Gravity's Rainbow or start with V.? What about the still not finished Barthelme and Barth? Robert Coover's Universal Baseball Association, because DFW mentioned it in some interview? And DFW himself. Besides Infinite Jest and The Pale King and some of his journalism, I haven't read anything else. What about rereading Infinite Jest? And Don Quixote, the new 70,- € German translation is still waiting for me, as well as Bolano's 2666 and Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. Paul Auster after The New York Trilogy, another round of House of Leaves, Catcher in The Rye or turn to Franny & Zooey and Salinger's other writings? Donna Tartt's The Little Friend is waiting on my bookshelf for the last 6 years or so. Maybe 8. I was a totally different being back then (well, not so radically different as I wished I would be.) The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay or some more Vonnegut or Safran Foer's Tree of Codes, Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, what about Proust and Nabokov and every single Sherlock Holmes story? William Gibson, James Ellroy, William Gaddis, Zadie Smith and Flannery O'Connor. Toni Morrison. I could go on for days, literally, and weeks, losing much of the precious time I would otherwise spend reading some of that (or other) novels. One thing at least seems to be pretty clear to me: After finishing Franzen's self-indulging The Discomfort Zone, he will be off my reading list for a long, long time.

desperately needing a new haircut?

I just finished Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis and once again discovered that he's a tremendously good writer. After encountering him with Falling Man (which I really didn't like too much; maybe I just wasn't ready for him, then) and giving him a second chance with the brilliant White Noise I thought, why not putting in between that self-indulging Franzen blabber the as-of-then unread 209 pages of Cosmopolis which I hadn't read for a seminar two years ago?

Just to lead you in on this: Multi-billionaire Eric Packer decides one morning that he needs a new haircut, gets into his limo on First Ave and orders his driver to make a cross-town trip to Manhattan's far West Side for his favourite barber. Due to a presidential visit to Manhattan, anarchist riots, the public funeral of a famous rap-star (I'm having a déja vu right now, remind me to read White Noise again) and other NYC hassles, this trip takes the whole day, during which he meets various business associates in his car and loses all of his money. Eric has an asymmetrical prostate and is about to be killed at the end of the day.

This novel is dedicated to Paul Auster and since I haven't read anything by him but the New York Trilogy I cannot fail to notice why this is so. At the core of Cosmopolis is language itself:

'There's a rumor it seems involving the finance minister. He's supposed to resign any time now,' she said. 'Some kind of scandal about a misconstrued comment. He made a comment about the economy that may have been misconstrued. The whole country is analyzing the grammar and syntax of this comment. Or it wasn't even what he said. It was when he paused. They are trying to construe the meaning of the pause. It could be deeper, even, than grammar. It could be breathing.'

Here's another one:

I thought I would spend whatever number of years it takes to write ten thousand pages and then you would have the record, the literature of a life awake and asleep, because dreams too, and little stabs of memory, and all the pitiful habits and concealments, and all the things around me would be included, noises in the street, but I understand for the first time, now, this minute, that all the thinking and writing in the world will not describe what I felt in the awful moment when I fired the gun and saw him fall. So what is left worth the telling?

Paragraphs like this reveal the true power of DeLillo's writing method. Consider this answer from his Paris Review Interview:

When I was working on The Names I devised a new method—new to me, anyway. When I finished a paragraph, even a three-line paragraph, I automatically went to a fresh page to start the new paragraph. No crowded pages. This enabled me to see a given set of sentences more clearly. It made rewriting easier and more effective. The white space on the page helped me concentrate more deeply on what I’d written. And with this book I tried to find a deeper level of seriousness as well.

And consider this from Paul Auster's Paris Review Interview ten years later, in 2003, just after Cosmopolis was published:

The paragraph seems to be my natural unit of composition. The line is the unit of a poem, the paragraph serves the same function in prose—at least for me. I keep working on a paragraph until I feel reasonably satisfied with it, writing and rewriting until it has the right shape, the right balance, the right music—until it seems transparent and effortless, no longer “written.” That paragraph can take a day to complete or half a day, or an hour, or three days. Once it seems finished, I type it up to have a better look. So each book has a running manuscript and a typescript beside it. Later on, of course, I’ll attack the typed page and make more revisions.

Okay, okay, you might say. All this is very nice and interesting but why the fuck do I have to bear that Twilight-fucker Pattinson's face in this post? The answer is very simple, my friends: Because he, like Eric, desperately needs a new haircut. And because he is too ambivalent about changing his style big time all by himself, he gets a little encouragement from David Cronenberg, who is filming Cosmopolis right now and chose Pattinson for the role of Eric Packer. And who else but Cronenberg could provide Cosmopolis as well as Pattinson's career and hairstyle with a surreal twist worthy of DeLillo's writing skills? Did I mention the video screens in Packers white limo? Note: Eric's haircut will also be asymmetrical at the end of the day.