Don Delillo reviews Taylor Swift's 'White Noise'

This is just too meta for words, so here's some words by the author of "White Noise":

Taylor Swift
1989
"Track 3," 2014

Reviewed by Don DeLillo

It is possible to be homesick for a place even when you are there. "Track 3," the latest release from Taylor Swift's 1989, explores the dropped pin, uniting the past and present—the now, the then—with the sharp pangs of its own absence. White noise. Black hole. The gravitational pull of nothingness. The silence's soft ecosystem, nourished by Apples and Cokes and plotted upon plastic products whose names begin with i. On the Internet, it is always spring. It is every season. It is any season. It is the time of year, the time of day, for a small insistent sadness to pass into the texture of things. Dusk, silence, iron chill. Something lonely in the bone.

In the silence, there is solitude. In the solitude, there is silence. This is the whole point of technology. It creates an appetite for immortality on the one hand. It threatens universal extinction on the other. Technology is lust removed from nature. It is purity. It is clarity. It is bravery. The world is full of abandoned meanings. In the commonplace I find unexpected themes and intensities.

The noise evolves. It succumbs to the inertia of music, of industry, of reality. All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots.

Fear is unnatural. Lightning and thunder are unnatural. Pain, death, reality, these are all unnatural. We can't bear these things as they are. We know too much. So we resort to repression, compromise and disguise. This is how we survive the universe. This is the natural language of the species. This is the language of waves and radiation, or how the dead speak to the living. And this is where we wait together, regardless of our age, our carts stocked with brightly colored goods. A slowly moving line, satisfying, giving us time to glance at the tabloids in the racks. Everything we need that is not food or love is here in the tabloid racks. The tales of the supernatural and the extraterrestrial. The miracle vitamins, the cures for cancer, the remedies for obesity. The cults of the famous and the dead.

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertai...ise-reviews-taylor-swifts-white-noise/381771/

No smirking or catcalls please, let us enjoy this moment for what it is—absolutely surrealism.

 

My favorite Taylor Swift song! Right up there with Drake and Kayne's best.

 

Again, we seek respectful silence or at least a chance to peruse "US" magazine in peace, quietly moving forward in the checkout line.

 

...........

 

I loved White Noise back in the day, and read many of his other books. I guess you are highlighting the irony of this?
I remember one line from one of his lesser books- Great Jones Street, maybe- guy gets into a Rolls (or some other hi-line car) and remarks to the thugs driving him, 'wow, nice car,' to which one of the thugs replies, 'Yep, Rolls-Royce, the Cadillac of motorcars.'
I actually have a hardback first edition of White Noise - found it at a book sale years ago. Brilliant, life-changing book at the time.

 

The surrealism more than the irony, as this simply goes off the charts. Also love "Underworld." Don't know Taylor Swift from Adam, do know that any new or unfamiliar music will be bashed by someone on this forum, enjoy Music Concreté more than most.

 

Funny, I struggled with Underworld when it came out, and put it down at the time without getting very far. Recently, going through stacks and stacks of hardbacks to donate (I've been a Kindle user for a long while, so the only hardcovers I buy now are 'art books' or out of print stuff that I cannot buy digitally), I found Underworld and put it on my nightstand to read.

 

I have to think it's a joke.

 

If nothing else, this reminds me why I haven't read any Don DeLillo novels.

 

I hope Don DeLillo gets back with Stone Temple Pilots.

 

Dry wit is one of the author's chief virtues.

 

He was great in those Smokey/Bandit films...so I've heard...

 

I think that is his brother - much lesser known but a successful character actor in his own right.

 

I know, but still, he's not one to spend his time on something like this. (He's not Thomas Pynchon.) It's a joke, man.

 

Looking forward to Taylor's soon to be completed collaboration with Gavin Bryars.

 

I'm looking forward to Delillo's review of this 90s gem.

 

White Noise was pretty out there at the time- a professor of Nazi studies who doesn't read or speak German, living the 'dream' of mid-nowhere suburbia- when a 'toxic event' occurs in his town. I think the book also included references to people with dementia getting lost in shopping malls, but maybe that was another book. It's been a while since I read it.
As literary fiction goes, it was pretty cynical.

 

I think the "by Megan Garber" byline at the top of the article is a clue as to who really wrote it...

 

The language of that novel is a variety of Academiese, obfuscation beyond the call of duty and a denial of reality much like any other isolated tribe. Tons of fun for the whole family!