Monday, December 25, 2006

telephone wires

Too many passages to quote: I finished my library copy of White Noise in a little over a week (will definitely have to procure my own copy; the book seems near-inexhaustible), which for me these days is fairly astonishing. The text is dense too, as visual as it is lyrical; DeLillo says the story was unraveled from his own experience of A/V overload at the local supermarket.

"Wouldn't he sense that something transcending is about to happen to him in the midst of all this brightness ... a sense of something extraordinary hovering just beyond our touch and just beyond our vision."

Well-positioned light sources (lately in my case, the sun) have a way of completely changing the nature of things without calling attention to themselves. Light literally defines what we see, but we usually take for granted what we find around us. Those things are there simply because they are. One strategy of re-imagining the visual world is to re-frame it piece by piece, collecting a series of miracles which together constitute a miraculous world. I'm partially interested in this. But if all photographs are lies, then I'm also interested in exploring the seams of their fabrications, rather than wiping them away--interested, I suppose, in exploring the process of light-drawing, and the subjective implications of my engagement thereof. Grain, flares, flaws. I sometimes wish I could simply allow myself to believe, for myself, what this medium clamors for all to believe, but I can't help but remain self-reflexive--at least, until I can find an infinitely sexier medium.

DeLillo's book obviously succeeds, leaves a plastic taste on the tongue, but also reads just like a script for a video. A pair of (disembodied) talking heads, mundane household tasks rendered in elaborate detail, soundbites periodically jutting in. The words themselves seem to buzz, like the picture Jack Gladney immediately forms of his nemesis, a faceless shapeshifter made of static.

I'm excited to dig into Libra and Underworld...!

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