New at The Point: an incisive look at Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis that calls it “the most prescient American novel of the past fifteen years” and asks,”is it possible to mount any meaningful resistance to capitalism on the level of culture?” The latest print issue features this essay as well as a symposium on privacy, and will be launched at a release party in Hyde Park on Saturday night.
The Point Issue 9: On Art, Commerce, and the Prescience of DeLillo’s Cosmopolis
London Calling
London is the most popular literary city. Graphic designer Edgard Barbosa made an infographic that visualizes the number of English-language books written about 10 international cities from 1800 to 2000. The locales include Rome, New York City, London, Paris, Tokyo, Madrid, Beijing, Chicago, Cairo, and Mumbai.
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Drunk Texts From Famous Authors (Part II)
A year and a half later, Jessie Gaynor returns to The Paris Review to follow up her much-appreciated “Drunk Texts From Famous Authors” series. (Part one is here.) On tap this time: T.S. Eliot, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Samuel Beckett, Roald Dahl, Jorge Luis Borges, Guillaume Apollinaire, William Blake, and a Flarf poet.
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Mad Money
Modern day celebrities aren’t the only victims of Photoshop. Paula Byrne, a Jane Austen biographer, believes that Austen has been “airbrushed” on her £10 Bank of England note. The portrait makes her look like “a pretty doll with big doe eyes” and diminishes her reputation as an author, Byrne argues.
Woot Twilight Parody
Today only at Woot, a Stephenie Meyer parody qua flashlight advert: “I was just watching you sleep. Isn’t that dark and brooding and romantic?” Edward brooded darkly.
Morgan Jerkins on Exposing History’s Omissions
Morgan Jerkins reflects on the importance of researching and telling her family's story, a project she set off on for her book, Wandering in Strange Lands.
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Point Omega is a wonderful book as well. The literary establishment, and those prone to pick their books according to the latest hype and fashion, wrote off DeLillo after Underworld, acted as if he was an old man with nothing left to say, or, that what he had to say was of little importance and derivative of his earliest work. But The Body Artist, Cosmopolis, and Point Omega and three of his best novels. DeLillo is a brilliant diagnostician of American culture, and that ability hasn’t abated with time, it’s only gotten more acute. The problem is you have to work, really work, while reading his prose, and some people just don’t want to. They want their truth to go down easy. DeLillo is not easy, but he’s essential. Always has been, always will be. When Cosmopolis came out it was waved off with a sigh. In this way late DeLillo reminds me of late Kubrick (of The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, and Eyes Wide Shut), in that he is only getting better with age, but no one will admit it, because in this country, to be old is tantamount to being invisible at worst, or being considered irrelevant at best.