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
Tom Stoppard’s Pink Floyd Play
“Sir Tom Stoppard has written a play for BBC Radio 2 to mark the 40th anniversary of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon featuring Bill Nighy and Rufus Sewell.” Huh, so it looks like Stoppard still isn’t slowing down.
When Good Doesn’t Win the Day
Recommended Listening: On NPR’s All Things Considered, Petra Mayer offers advice to “literature’s unpunished villains.”
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Poignant Sci-Fi Variety Hour
In the early ‘70s, Kurt Vonnegut helped produce a TV adaptation of his work, Between Time and Timbuktu, that aired on the public TV program NET Playhouse. The adaptation brought together elements from several of the author’s most famous works, including Sirens of Titan, Cat’s Cradle and “Harrison Bergeron.” At Black Balloon Publishing’s blog, you can find YouTube clips and links to the printed script. (Related: our own Lydia Kiesling read Vonnegut’s Letters.) (h/t The Rumpus)
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Profiling Edward P. Jones
The Washington Post offers a long profile of the still underappreciated Edward P. Jones. We learn he hasn’t put a word of fiction to paper in four years but has been writing in his head. “‘I write a lot in my head,’ he says. ‘I’ve never been driven to write things down.'” (via @keelinmc)
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Murakami’s latest out in Japan
The third volume of Haruki Murakami’s mega-hit 1Q84 went on sale Friday morning in Japan.
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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.