Don DeLillo Should Win the Nobel Prize Jeffrey Severs & Michael Streit

In Episode Twelve, DDSWTNP interview Curt Gardner, creator and keeper of “Don DeLillo’s America,” a prolific and comprehensive website that for nearly 30 years has been the go-to spot for information about DeLillo, from reviews, appearances, and novel publication histories to news of film adaptations and play performances. We cover Curt’s stories of first discovering DeLillo in 1981, what he learned about the writing of Amazons at the Harry Ransom Center, and the letters he’s exchanged with the man himself as he’s built his site. We had a really fun time trading stories, insights, and interpretive connections with Curt. After listening to this in-depth interview, check out the riches of “Don DeLillo’s America” at http://www.perival.com/delillo/delillo.html

Support our work: https://buymeacoffee.com/delillopodcast

Episodes Ten and Eleven: Running Dog (1 and 2) unpack DeLillo’s frightening post-Vietnam War vision of a nation marked by pornographic personhood, corrupt politics, and an openness to fascistic fantasy, all centered on the quest for a rumored film of an orgy in Hitler’s crumbling Berlin bunker. Pornographers and their well-armed henchmen, obsessive collectors of erotic art, and military men driven by profit saturate this narrative of New York and the Texas desert, while attempts to expose and subvert their cons by a journalist and a strangely spiritual intelligence agent reveal that all who resist these forces may end up mere lackeys and running dogs. DDSWTNP also draw clear links to U.S. politics in 2024, with orange make-up on a senator and a satire-proof dictator who dons the look of a clownish entertainer turning Running Dog, read now, into another of DeLillo’s uncanny prophecies of an image-mad American culture’s very grim potentials. #imperialistlackeys #thegreatdictator #hitlerhumanized #acourseindying

In this episode we also announce your chance to support our podcasting work and contribute to our trip this year to DeLillo’s huge archive at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas! If you enjoy this podcast we hope you’ll support us at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/delillopodcast

Episodes Ten and Eleven: Running Dog (1 and 2) unpack DeLillo’s frightening post-Vietnam War vision of a nation marked by pornographic personhood, corrupt politics, and an openness to fascistic fantasy, all centered on the quest for a rumored film of an orgy in Hitler’s crumbling Berlin bunker. Pornographers and their well-armed henchmen, obsessive collectors of erotic art, and military men driven by profit saturate this narrative of New York and the Texas desert, while attempts to expose and subvert their cons by a journalist and a strangely spiritual intelligence agent reveal that all who resist these forces may end up mere lackeys and running dogs. DDSWTNP also draw clear links to U.S. politics in 2024, with orange make-up on a senator and a satire-proof dictator who dons the look of a clownish entertainer turning Running Dog, read now, into another of DeLillo’s uncanny prophecies of an image-mad American culture’s very grim potentials. #imperialistlackeys #thegreatdictator #hitlerhumanized #acourseindying

In this episode we also announce your chance to support our podcasting work and contribute to our trip this year to DeLillo’s huge archive at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas! If you enjoy this podcast we hope you’ll support us at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/delillopodcast

In Episode Nine: Players, DDSWTNP follow the bored, hollow lives of Pammy and Lyle Wynant as they pursue “the glamour of revolutionary violence” and the hope for pastoral peace, taking them from the World Trade Center and New York Stock Exchange to a Maine island and a Toronto motel room. While at heart DeLillo’s first major analysis of the mind of terrorism, Players is a surprisingly personal novel that unravels the form of the political thriller and shows him writing about sex and grim seduction in ways he did nowhere else. Our topics include terrorist intrigue and indoctrination, uncanny prophecies of 9/11, a JFK assassination conspiracy, the troubling immateriality of money, the psychology of suicide, and the pervasive power of fear. #mistersofteevoice #themovieandthemotel #terrorispurification #weknownothingelseabouthim

In Episode Eight, DDSWTNP take in the wide range of DeLillo’s corpus through passages chosen and recorded by listeners. Great renditions of DeLillo’s many voices abound, from the sinister to the hilarious to the highly lyrical, and we offer our analysis of the language he brings to power, embodiment, and violence. His most popular novels, White Noise and Underworld, are well represented, but so too are some excellent, more obscure picks from Ratner’s Star, Libra, The Body Artist, and more. Huge thanks to all those who celebrated DeLillo by reading and submitting a passage! #vegetoid #americansinourschools #uncollectedgarbagedistrict #bodywork #peace

In Episodes 6 and 7: Ratner’s Star (1) and (2), DDSWTNP go spelunking and digging in the myriad caves, holes, and burrows of DeLillo’s mind-bending, encyclopedic novel of “serious play,” his exploration of outer space, the sedimented history of Earth, and so much in between. Mathematical, scientific, and theological insights and uncertainties mingle on every page as DeLillo follows Bronx native Billy Twillig, numbers prodigy and pubescent teenager, in his encounters with message-decoders, nonsense-speakers, and slapstick philosophers, human aliens of every stripe. Amidst much laughter and awe at passages inane, profound, and often simultaneously both, Ratner’s Star emerges in our analysis as a neglected early metafictional masterpiece, a book that set the stage for more famous mega-narratives of hidden connections like Libra and Underworld. #pantsonfire #boomerang #manmoreadvancedthedeeperwedig #batguanomarket #k.b.i.s.f.b. #mymouthsayshello

We also announce the extended deadline for recording your favorite DeLillo passages and having your voice be part of an upcoming DDSWTNP episode! By January 15, 2024, record a contribution at https://www.speakpipe.com/delillopodcast. Happy new year to all!