Well I finished White Noise by Don DeLillo.

First novel read on the Kindle. A satisfying milestone in itself. The book is impressive, and makes a statement about literature in its time (mid-1980s), and as I've said elsewhere it's clearly a book by "a Major Talent writing in His Prime." It is certainly one of the texts that expounders and expositors will point to (or at) in their discussions of Postmodern fiction. It contains many of the themes and telling character details of PMF, to be sure – a family populated by variously related (and unrelated), precocious, mostly verbal kids, none of whom belong jointly to the protagonist and his current spouse. The exception to the verbal precocity is (of course) a kid who doesn't speak at all. It contains characters who verbalize a lot more than they actually DO anything, who are seemingly completely caught up in expounding on their inner lives. Well not entirely. They have occupations, these characters, but at times these occupations seem a little surreal – It is necessary, it seems, that the prot. can't just be a professor of Victorian poetry or some vanilla subject, he has to be head of the Hitler Studies department. It is necessary that a jester/chorus character talk like Woody Allen (a LOT like Woody Allen; he practically has "Smartass New York Jew" tattooed on his brow like a mezuzah). It is necessary that an adolescent male character deconstruct everything to the point where you wouldn't bother asking Heinrich (that's necessary too) "what time is it" even if it meant maybe missing an appointment. You'd miss it anyway as a result of his diatribe on "does anybody really know what time it is" or worse "what is time?"
I don't mean to sound as if I don't respect the book – it's extraordinarily well-written and powerful. Perhaps some of its predictability comes from the fact that so much of what constitutes it has – over the 25 or so years since its publication – found its way into much other literature (not that I think DeLillo invented this stuff, it was just less common in 1985 than it is now). It is a book in which ideas jostle to be taken seriously, but you're not sure which ones are being taken seriously by the author. Certainly most of the people in the book can't be taken terribly seriously, unlike some of Yates's or Carver's folks, who are a lot more like you & me than these wackos.

I'm impressed with Don DeLillo, though I admit

I may not be up to a competency in Post-Modern fiction (however it's capitalized and hyphenated). "White Noise" is a work clearly written by a Major Talent in his Prime, and I'm sure that the places where it leaves me in its dust are artifacts of the datedness of my own literacy.

However - what do you think of this? I'd really appreciate it if anyone browsing past who hasn't ordinarily commented would stick his or her oar in on this. I happen to think this little blurt is quite smart and well put. The speaker is an "early 30 something" brilliant lab chemist in a university. She's a caution unto herself, a minor character in the book but frankly worth reading it for on her own account.

She says to Jack (the protagonist & narrator)

"… I think it's a mistake to lose one's sense of death, even one's fear of death. Isn't death the boundary we need? Doesn't it give a precious texture to life, a sense of definition? You have to ask yourself whether anything you do in this life would have beauty and meaning without the knowledge you carry of a final line, a border or limit."

Well I finished Bryson's "At Home" and found it thoroughly enjoyable, if not

100% reliable in its array of "Things you might not have known or perhaps hadn't thought of." I'm quite sure it won't be my last hardcopy book, but by golly this e-Reading thing has its charms. I'm about 1/3 of the way through "White Noise" by Don DeLillo, and - for next to no money - have stocked the Kindle with some "dipping" material (Wodehouse & Saki). Breakfast of Champions came for holidays too. Shopping for the thing is nearly as much fun as reading. So far, there is no doubt in my mind, e-Readers are an unmitigated boon to the distribution of text. What their effect on literature will be is going to be great fun to watch over the next few years, especially when combined with the capabilities for individual publishing opened up by the other features of our connected/electronic age.

I was doubtful about posting this, but only about three people read this blog anyway so...

I was trading comments with carolina, below/above about Bill Bryson's At Home and I offered that I had wondered about a few of his assertions, and didn't need to wonder about a couple of others. Now mind you, I'm not saying the guy's full of it, or that nothing he says can be trusted. I certainly didn't look up everything he asserted. But when he opens throwing out all the wondrous stats about the Crystal Palace and follows up with all sorts of architectural and scientific hoo-hah, then I spots a couple of things that I was pretty sure weren't kosher. So I did indeed check them (though there wasn't much checking to do, actually).

For example - in his screed about whaling, in support of the stuff about the oil industry & what-all, he mentions whaling as a source of the original wealth of such New England towns as Salem and Nantucket. Well, nevermind that Nantucket is more commonly referred to as an island rather than a town, but my eyebrows rose a la Spock at the notion that Salem's wealth arose from whaling. Not the case - Far East trade, all the way. I knew this, but checked anyway, and nary a mention of a whisper of a whale in the wealth of Salem.

In several places (at least two, then) he is fundamentally confused about the relationships of weights and measures. He is convinced, for example, that a litre is smaller than a quart, as he cites a bushel as 32 US quarts (which it is), then converts that to 35 litres - which it ain't, since a litre is bigger than a quart. 32 quarts is a little over 30 litres.

This is more a math error, but he states that before fossil fuel, in the woodburning days, an average home required 20 cords of wood to heat. He doesn't (I don't think) state whether that's a winter season or year-round, since wood-fueled existence really needed wood year round, but for my money 20 cords is reasonable. But then says that 20 cords would be a stack of wood 80 feet wide by 80 feet tall by 160 feet long. And even he acknowledges that "that seems like a lot of wood" and that's true because it's about an order of magnitude out of whack from 20 cords, which would be a stack of wood 4x4x160 (you don't multiply all 3 dimension by 20 to get the volume of 20 cords). Picky picky, but...

He speaks of family fortunes that arose out of America's industrial success, the era of the rise of the robber barons and financiers. And as is his wont, he needs to cite a laundry list of examples - and along with Morgan and Carnegie and Vanderbilt and the DuPonts he lists "the Astors." Well the Astors were rich before anybody got industrialized; their wealth arose from the 18th century fur trade and expanded into New York real estate.

So all this mightn't add up to the proverbial hill o'beans, except that when someone is attempting to dazzle you with these lists and all the impressive data, and some of it ain't so, when he mentions that the fogs in London in the mid 19th century were so bad (pea-soupers we all love from Sherlock Holmes) that "one night seven people in a row walked into the Thames" - I wonder if it's true. And if I can wonder whether that's true, I guess the impact of the rest of it is diminished. But I do enjoy his style, and I'm willing to believe that - on the whole, and in the grand scheme of things - most of what he says is true enough.

So, it snowed this morning.

Didn't last long, didn't amount to much, but when I put out the trash barrels for pickup at about 0600, it was real, honest-to-god snowing, and there was white on the ground. There were some flakes floating around a week or so ago, but not even enough to constitute a single flurry, never mind flurries, so I'm saying "Snow" started today this year. It hasn't been terribly cold (though cold enough for many in my immediate circle, who are doing the "old fart" puffing & blowing about not being able to stand the cold the way they used to. Some of them, I assure you, could never stand it they way they think they used to. A pal says he's disliking the cold more & more with each passing winter, and is pretty sure his wife would never move away, to someplace warmer like the Carolinas or Florida. I wouldn't either, at least not from this vantage point. Who knows if I make it to 90 I might feel differently. But I spent a bit of time in the South, and in Texas (which, though south, is not South) and it is not with jocularity that I point out that the South may be warm, but you have to rub elbows with Gomer & Goober, and put up with fairly primitive social structures. Mrs. Lewis, my landlady in Colonial Heights Virginia (across the river from Petersburg, just up the road from Fort Lee) was a nice enough old bird, but she baked spoon bread that made a stink like to gag a maggot, and on Sunday mornings thought she was doing the Lord's Work by putting on hour after hour of "come-to-JEEzusss" on her TV and cranking the volume up to 11. No thanks, if I learned anything in the years I spent elsewhere (Virginia, Florida, Syracuse NY, Korea) I learned that I am a New Englander, bred in the bone. Had a conversation the other day about MAssachusetts vs. New Hampshire, and feeling "At home" and I guess, after 25 years, I do feel at home in New Hampshire, but no less so in Massachusetts, and only slightly less so in Maine and Vermont. Upstate New York is not bad in terms of hominess, so I"m thinking it has to do with "northeastern" as much as "New England" - but when I'm away from New Hampshire/Massachusetts very long, I truly do get homesick, and when I get up country in the boonies, up in the hills, it is as if there's a compatibility of the landscape with my makeup that sorta comforts me (though I was not aware of being uncomfortable - does that make sense?)

Ya can take the boy outta New Hampstah, but...

We need a Skiffle Revival and it should start right away. Sign up.

I don't know what prompted it, who knows what prompts these things, but I've just been browsing Youtube's collection of Lonnie Donegan clips. I think it's high time we had a Skiffle revival in this country, I really do. Check out some of the 40+ years of Donegan's taped oeuvre, and even in his last years, he was quite clearly having a complete blast. And not just in the cliched "Chewing Gum" clips, but in his handling of Lead Belly stuff like Rock Island Line, and Midnight Special, into the gospel "I Shall Not Be Moved" (which is a terrific song, as proven not only by Dongean's rockout take on it, but others from Mississippi John Hurt to Greg Brown).

Some time ago in this symposium I rambled on about the morphology of the many incarnations of "The Ship That Never Returned" through The Wreck of Old 97 up to "MTA", and in that vein I point fans of either Woody Guthrie's Grand Coulee Dam or Roy Acuff's Wabash Cannonball to this clip, which is terrific.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Jc2efqj5Js&feature=list_related&playnext=1&list=MLGxdCwVVULXfiPeMzM9ZSvoaYOzHFO369