On the Road: (Penguin Orange Collection)

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That flaw, as so often in Miller’s work, was to be sexual, not least because there seemed a sexual flavor to the language of those who confessed to possession by the devil and who were accused of dancing naked in a community in which both dancing and nakedness were themselves seen as signs of corruption. But that hardly seemed possible when Abigail Williams and John Proctor, who were to become the central characters in Miller’s drama, were eleven and sixty, respectively. Accordingly, at Miller’s bidding she becomes seventeen and he thirty-five, and so they begin to move toward each other, the gap narrowing until a sexual flame is lit. Elizabeth Proctor, who had managed an inn, now becomes a solitary farmer’s wife, cut off from communion not only with her errant husband, who has strayed from her side, but also in some degree from the society of Salem.

How strange it is. We have these deep terrible lingering fears about ourselves and the people we love. Yet we walk around, talk to people, eat and drink. We manage to function. The feelings are deep and real. Shouldn’t they paralyze us? How is it we can survive them, at least for a while? We drive a car, we teach a class. How is it no one sees how deeply afraid we were, last night, this morning? Is it something we all hide from each other, by mutual consent? Or do we share the same secret without knowing it? Wear the same disguise.” White Noise takes place in a realm one small step removed from an easily recognisable reality – or “just outside the range of human apprehension”, as DeLillo puts it. On face value none of its characters or events are quite credible – the characters are too eloquent, the scenes too stage managed. Why, for example, would people choose to go out in the open on foot to escape from a toxic cloud? Why not get in their cars or simply stay barricaded in their homes? So DeLillo can give us an image of a nomad biblical exodus because Delillo wants to strip down humanity to its rudiments in this novel – the fear of death and subsequent gullibility it induces to submit to all kinds of generalised information that will keep us safe. He wants to show us how information is used to cower us into a herd mentality. The Hitler warning always stalking the outer corridors of the novel. “Put on a uniform and feel bigger, stronger, safer''. So......I finally read this.....enjoyed it. I found myself comparing this book to a new family TV series with Eugene Levy called 'Schitt's Creek'. The most entertaining-FUNNY show, I've seen in years.

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The characters are all strange, the dialogue and prose is weird. It is perhaps not rare for authors to create characters that are unsentimental, and totally incapable of having a normal conversation. But I find it difficult to appreciate such a use of artistic license if it doesn't make any point at all and serves no purpose. I put this book on my 2009 Literary Resolutions List, which comprises 15 books culled from Time's List of the 100 Greatest Novels since 1920. I thought it was a novelization of that movie where Michael Keaton hears dead people. I was wrong. Compere: Yes folks, welcome to Gym Combat, Nottingham’s premier gym and home to Saturday Night Fight Night. Tonight …what…what… But mostly what gets me about this book is Delillo's ability to blend hundreds of different philosophies into single moments in the book. It is the perfect distillation of the post-modern condition, to live under the weight of the thousands of different ideas and philosophies all crashing down into the present moment. It is difficult to find any meaning out of the hodge-podge of modern life. Not only that, but the characters endure hundreds of meaningless facts and bits of tabloid information; studies show this, no studies show that. How can one possibly handle all these things coming in at once? Delillo's answer is brain fade. The brain fade causes everyone to dumb down everything. The only way to process so much of the information being thrown at us is to compartmentalize it all, sort it into manageable figures. It all desensitizes us to the emotional and moral attention that reality ought to have. Frequently imitated and widely influential, Howard Philips Lovecraft reinvented the horror genre in the 1920s, discarding ghosts and witches and instead envisioning mankind as a tiny outpost of dwindling sanity in a chaotic and malevolent universe. S. T. Joshi, Lovecraft's preeminent interpreter, presents a selection of the master's fiction, from the early tales of nightmares and madness such as "The Outsider" to the overpowering cosmic terror of "The Call of Cthulhu." More than just a collection of terrifying tales, this volume reveals the development of Lovecraft's mesmerizing narrative style and establishes him as a canonical- and visionary-American writer.

Il college mi verrebbe da collocarlo nel New England, o forse più a sud. Ma invece apprendo (non però da DeLillo che nel romanzo non specifica mai) trovarsi nel Midwest. La novela, como nuestras vidas, parece girar únicamente en torno al concepto de sociedad de consumo, pero la narración es difusa como el sonido del título. En el texto, el ruido de fondo lo forman digresiones no relacionadas con la trama, conversaciones intrascendentes, y por supuesto la omnipresente televisión, emitiendo sin parar mensajes inconexos en segundo plano. La prosa de DeLillo, densa, compacta, plagada de referencias, es perfecta para reproducir ese murmullo homogéneo e indiferenciado. Draws a clearer parallel with Mr Gray's disconnected TV dialogue and the kids' constant trivia - he is more pitiable in movie, but the "he was there the whole time" detail is not in the book and felt unnecessary What happens to Mr. Gray at the end? At one moment he is about to die, then the next it cuts away to an argument about religion. In 1692 nineteen men and women and two dogs were convicted and hanged for witchcraft in a small village in eastern Massachusetts. By the standards of our own time, if not of that, it was a minor event, a spasm of judicial violence that was concluded within a matter of months. The bodies were buried in shallow graves or not at all, as a further indication that the convicted had not only forfeited participation in the community of man in this life, but in the community of saints in the next. Just how shallow those graves were, however, is evident from the fact that the people buried there were not eradicated from history: their names remain with us to this day, not least because of Arthur Miller, for whom past events and present realities have always been pressed together by a moral logic. In his hands the ghosts of those who died have proved real enough even if the witches they were presumed to be were little more than fantasies conjured by a mixture of fear, ambition, frustration, jealousy, and perverted pride.There is an "airborne toxic event" caused by a train accident that forces the Gladneys to evacuate their home for a short period. According to the book flap, this was supposed to be a central event in the novel, but this novel has no center. It just sort of meanders on, a supposdedly razor-sharp satire of our consumer-driven culture.

It is nice to live in the land of plenty – food is merchandise, technology is merchandise, health is merchandise, education is merchandise, culture is merchandise… And everything is mass-produced and second-rate… And you can’t consume it all.Powerful, poetic realism…makes the tired old subject of life in a mental hospital into an absorbing Orwellian microcosm of all humanity.” —Life. I want to believe [Atilla the Hun] lay in his tent, wrapped in animal skins, as in some internationally financed movie epic, and said brave cruel things to his aides and retainers. No weakening of the spirit. No sense of the irony of human existence, that we are the highest form of life on earth and yet ineffably sad because we know what no other animal knows, that we must die."