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/

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

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).)