Don DeLillo Should Win the Nobel Prize

Episode 4: Great Jones Street

Episode Summary

In Episode 4: Great Jones Street, DDSWTNP listen in on a rock icon in retreat on the Lower East Side, Bucky Wunderlick, who leaves his fame and music career behind as other characters descend into terrorism and fascism in pursuit of a drug said to wipe out language itself. Will Bucky “return with a new language,” fall prey to a violent hippie commune that seems to evoke the Weather Underground, or engage some other “terminal fantasy”? Subjects include the aesthetics of poetry, silence, and guttural sounds; the contradictory American quest for “revolutionary solitude”; and what a “counter-archeology” of 1970s New York has to offer. #dogboys #preemptingthemarket #beastislooseleastisbest #diamondstylus #pulseredactor #yapplesyapplesyapples #doubledfeat

Episode Notes

In Episode 4: Great Jones Street, DDSWTNP listen in on a rock icon in retreat on the Lower East Side, Bucky Wunderlick, who leaves his fame and music career behind as other characters descend into terrorism and fascism in pursuit of a drug said to wipe out language itself. Will Bucky “return with a new language,” fall prey to a violent hippie commune that seems to evoke the Weather Underground, or engage some other “terminal fantasy”? Subjects include the aesthetics of poetry, silence, and guttural sounds; the contradictory American quest for “revolutionary solitude”; and what a “counter-archeology” of 1970s New York has to offer. #dogboys #preemptingthemarket #beastislooseleastisbest #diamondstylus #pulseredactor #yapplesyapplesyapples #doubledfeat

 

Texts referred to in this episode:

 

Definition of “nonce” words: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonce_word

 

One rendering of Hugo Ball’s Dadaist poem “Gadji Beri Bimba”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aiKHSeDlU1U

 

John Cage on visiting an anechoic chamber in “Indeterminacy”: https://www.lcdf.org/indeterminacy/s/6

 

DeLillo reads from a CIA memo on torture (“here several lines are redacted”) at the 2009 PEN event “Reckoning With Torture”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZFf6NYTkrM&t=26s

 

DeLillo and Greil Marcus discuss Bob Dylan and Great Jones Street at the 2005 Telluride Film Festival: https://greilmarcus.net/2014/10/17/greil-marcus-and-don-delillo-discuss-bob-dylan-and-bucky-wunderlick-2005/

 

Rainer Maria Rilke, “Ninth Duino Elegy”: https://web.ics.purdue.edu/~felluga/eng241/rilke.html

 

William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming”: 

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-coming