#delillo

[philosophybitmaps]

[longreads]

I Remember the Bookstore - Longreads

Jason Guriel | On Browsing | November 2022 | 4,361 words (15 minutes) Let’s browse a bookstore—a Platonic one, a composite. Let’s wander an aisle, running our fingertips across a wall of spines. One spine, thick and black, juts out: the recent NYRB Classics reissue of William Gaddis’s novel The Recognitions. It’s a block of a book, […]

“Imagine a version of the contemporary web laid out before us, like Gibson’s cyberspace or Stephenson’s Metaverse. Picture an endless plateau, planed flat, with aloof skyscrapers: a gleaming city in draft, a Dubai dispersed. That giant #1 on the horizon is YouTube, that tower of shipping boxes, Amazon. Smaller structures suggest modest websites: businesses, blogs, and more. The buildings roll away, as regular as dominoes, around the horizon. Occasional fissures, venting steam, allude to the catacombs of the dark web.

In this vision, your browser is a pod. You punch in coordinates and zip around at light-speed, passing smoothly through other browsers, whose hulls turn transparent at your approach, as in the Metaverse. Hyperlinks are wormholes: tunnels of swirling light.

One wormhole wings your pod across a digital Atlantic and deposits you in front of a quaint green building on the banks of a pixelated river. Other quaint buildings surround it but are spaced apart to accommodate pods. (It’s as if someone clicked on the edge of a city and dragged it, distending space itself.) You are now at the online shop for Shakespeare and Company, on the banks of the Seine in Paris. It’s never closed, and the door is decoration: you float cleanly through it.”

As social media becomes an increasingly fraught landscape, Jason Guriel’s ode to the bookstore reminds us of an older form of browsing—one rooted in a sense of place. “I Remember the Bookstore” is an excerpt from Jason’s new book On Browsing, which will be published on November 15, 2022, by Biblioasis Publishing.

[weil-weil-lautre]

The power of the dead is that we think they see us all the time. The dead have a presence. Is there a level of energy composed solely of the dead? They are also in the ground, of course, asleep and crumbling. Perhaps we are what they dream.

Don DeLillo, White Noise, 98

[tragicmelpomene]

“The plan was to organize time until she could live again.”

—Don DeLillo, The Body Artist

[oedipavagyok]

"What if death is nothing but sound... electric noise... you hear it forever.. sound all around, uniform, white."

(Don DeLillo: White noise)

[noosphe-re]

It takes close attention to see what is happening in front of you. It takes work, pious effort, to see what you are looking at. He was mesmerized by this, the depths that were possible in the slowing of motion, the things to see, the depths of things so easy to miss in the shallow habit of seeing.

Don DeLillo, Point Omega

[readingsandnotes]

When there is enough out-of-placeness in the world, nothing is out of place.

Don DeLillo, Mao II

[doppisensi]

Tutto è lento e bianco e esangue e tutto accade intorno al verbo sembrare.

Don DeLillo, Body Art