truthfront

Tag: writing

  • Zero K: The Master Speaketh

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    Every time another Don DeLillo novel is published I wonder if it will be his last. He is 79 this year, the author of 16 masterful novels, three plays, and a story collection. I eased into his latest novel Zero K with the master’s age in mind, reading gingerly at first, cautious; it pains me to imagine DeLillo’s mighty pen reduced by the erosion of age. But soon I’m reading at that familiar tempo that lives in his novels, a pulse of language that carries the reader through, slowly, returning over almost every sentence to examine the breadth and beauty of them.

    Just as the pulse of language runs through each novel, there’s also a feeling, an ethos of paranoia, intelligent detachment, but also something unique to each work. White Noise makes us afraid and self-aware, Great Jones Street isolates us. We are particles adrift in the great expanse of Underworld. All DeLillo’s works carry an electric hum, Kubrickian overtones, post-modern antiseptic, and the desperate search for perfection. Zero K is no different. What makes it unique among DeLillo’s works is its ability to pull humanity from inhuman subjects and abstract space. It’s largely a novel about science, or cryogenics, in particular. From the book jacket:

    Jeffrey Lockhart’s father, Ross, is a billionaire in his sixties, with a younger wife, Artis Martineau, whose health is failing. Ross is the primary investor in a remote and secret compound where death is exquisitely controlled and bodies are preserved until a future time when biomedical advances and new technologies can return them to a life of transcendent promise. Jeff joins Ross and Artis at the compound to say “an uncertain farewell” to her as she surrenders her body. 

    “We are born without choosing to be. Should we have to die in the same manner? Isn’t it a human glory to refuse to accept a certain fate?” 

    These are the questions that haunt the novel and its memorable characters, and it is Ross Lockhart, most particularly, who feels a deep need to enter another dimension and awake to a new world. For his son, this is indefensible. Jeff, the book’s narrator, is committed to living, to experiencing “the mingled astonishments of our time, here, on earth.” 

    Don DeLillo’s seductive, spectacularly observed and brilliant new novel weighs the darkness of the world—terrorism, floods, fires, famine, plague—against the beauty and humanity of everyday life; love, awe, “the intimate touch of earth and sun.” 

    But as with all DeLillo’s novels, it’s about so much more. It might not be his final novel but it is one of his best. DeLillo masterfully weaves readers through themes of suspension (physical and metaphysical), re-immersion, immortality, and our growing dependence on technology. But there’s also something soft at work here, burrowing, delicate as human flesh. There is love and grief and human sacrifice. The novel cuts but kisses our wounds. And I’ll probably not forget it for months.

  • virtual voyeurism

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    “Bite the serpent’s head off!- so it cried out of me; my horror, my hatred, my loathing, my pity, all my good and bad with one voice out of me.” – Nietzsche, Zarathustra

    *

    Today’s video games are hyperrealist and meticulously designed cinematic experiences. The first-person shooter (FPS) is the second-most popular video game genre[1] among gamers, and FPS games possess some of the most profound examples of hyperrealism. The violence in these games is astounding. One of the gentlest people I know freely heaps bullets onto her virtual enemies as often as her personal schedule allows. A woman who wouldn’t hurt a fly in non-virtual reality eagerly awaits loading her latest game to dissolve her enemies with an impossible array of virtual gunfire. It’s fun, this recklessness. It’s also morbid. I eagerly seize the control, wondering why I enjoy playing these games or watching others play them. What instinctive horror does this virtual violence satisfy?

    [1] https://www.statista.com/chart/3599/americas-favorite-video-game-genres/

  • Ourselves

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    …as we proceed across fenced-in ghetto landscapes and through urban and suburban war zones infested with drugs and weapons designed to infiltrate homes like cockroaches; as we proceed through flooded wastelands comprised of failure—failure of the community, of elected officials, failures of mothers and fathers—a tangled mess of failed systems with THIS PLACE (and places like it) as the webbed epicenter; as we proceed through blighted examples of failed capitalism, failed cold-war policy, failed environmental and social policies, and failed educational infrastructures; as we proceed through desolate, insignificant prairies reserved for shattered generations of people, through packed penitentiaries full of history’s patsies; as we proceed we must look closely lest we overlook the mirrors of time, for EVERYWHERE we find ourselves.

     

  • Lights

     

    I stood in the doorway watching the lights in the night sky. It was hot for March. My daughter tugged at my leg. What’s that? she asked, pointing at the lights. I picked her up to hold her and we watched the lights together. The laundry machine churned in a room behind us. A neighbor pulled his crammed sedan into the street and exited the neighborhood in haste. Some of the lights in the sky hovered still while others slid slowly, almost imperceptibly, arbitrarily. My daughter wriggled uncomfortably and I set her down. Her mother darted determinedly about the house, asking questions and answering them. I watched the lights.

  • coincidence

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    I wonder what he thought as he crossed the threshold from his house out to the bright day, knowing he’d never return, that his memories would remain within those walls and the vast majority of them would be forgotten and discarded, occupied by strangers. Everything he wondered about the end was just like he thought it would be and nothing like he thought it would be. He thought of his wife and five decades built in that house and other houses and he believed he was one step closer to joining her, and for that he was relieved. The house, how fiercely he clung to it and how easily the two medics lifted and carried him into the windy morning to their chariot. How confused he must have been, how eager to get it all over with. Maybe at the end he realized he’d fought so hard for all those years for nothing. All of it just a huge coincidence. When he finally let go, maybe he laughed.

  • study in repose

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    The young man looked at Desmond Paul, at his face, an expression grave and elsewhere, his eyes tense and electric. Paul walked with his head down, bent slightly forward, one hand stuffed tightly into a trouser pocket and the other clutching his notebook. This is the most intense human being I have ever met, the young man thought, and walked alongside him, following him and not, past another set of large lobby windows looking out upon the rote morning ascent toward noon, windows looking inward toward nothing familiar at once save the careful arrangement of mystery inside us all.

  • god’s country

    LionscrestDuskGod’s country, I wrote, is simple in its grandeur. Rolling landscapes of green and brown cut suddenly steep by jutting buttes a million feet tall, or so it seems, one foot for each year on this rock, a billion light years from nowhere. Clouds misshapen unfurling to the blue, leading nowhere, leading to us; the changing colors of everything we inhabit luminous beneath the star responsible. It’s difficult to breathe at this altitude, well over a mile above the Florida swamps, which don’t exist from here. They can’t exist. The Earth is a ruin, a controlled burn, a series of bloated mirrors. It’s difficult to look out over this expanse of beauty, this treasure for the senses, and not believe in some kind of god, in something greater than all of us, in the ability to traverse it all, forward and reverse, as the earth slides soundless in the void.

  • Excerpt from The Novel Paradox, author unnamed

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    It all started with the notes. Everything starts with notes. In the early days he was swept up so briskly by the preliminary ideas that it was almost like possession, as if he suddenly belonged to someone or something else. He was no longer an autonomous creature but forever subservient to the novel, that nefarious plaything between his ears. But even then it took him three months to fill an entire notebook with his first sketches of The Nerve of Time, the characters and their illustrations, the storylines, outlines of intersection, flow charts of time travel and its implications upon the narrative. He wrote as he’d never written before, in a frenzy of words and different inks, a pain in his hand and wrist that, when he wasn’t writing, he was rubbing.

    And now at the very end he writes through the pain, he sweats and grinds his teeth, he mumbles in tongues, and the pain rushes from his hand to his head in a zip line of white fire but he keeps writing, his little room stacked with notebooks, all used, the order of them long lost, with new words flooding new blank lined pages by the hundreds. Now he fills at least one of those notebooks each day, his handwriting coarse and illegible, his face a mask of terror.