A musical satire, very atmospheric !

Don DeLillo's third novel, Great Jones Street (1973), is often billed as a classic rock and roll novel, but readers who expect an inside look at the rock scene of the late 1960s and early 1970s will be disappointed. The narrator and protagonist, Buddy Wunderlick, is a rock star, but, for the novel's purposes, he might have been any kind of celebrity artist at all. Great Jones Street shares its purpose with many DeLillo novels, early and late: to investigate what possibilities for intense or numinous experience remain in a world increasingly enclosed within all-encompassing systems of rationality and control.

It is only important that Buddy is a rock star because the rock star, as avatar of the counterculture and bearer of delirious rhythms, was the '60s placeholder for Dionysian frenzies proscribed by the Apollonian administered society. Ironically, though, this eruption of the sonically subversive was captured by that very society when it became commercialized and fell under the control of vast transnational corporations. An early reviewer, Sara Blackburn,  judges Great Jones Street one of a "still-gathering number of depressed obituaries of the sixties." The depression set in once those who had placed their faith in the counterculture's rebellion understood that radicalism itself could be co-opted and sold as just another commodity in the marketplace, a development that has surely reached its apogee in our time of corporations Tweeting about their depression and anxiety or celebrating every shade of queerness, guarded by a phalanx of radicals defending this opportunism on the grounds that #representationmatters.

But Great Jones Street is not quite a tract on those themes, either. A recent and controversial review-essay by Lauren Oyler in the London Review of Books decried the "moral obviousness" of contemporary literature, and DeLillo—who once told an interviewer that his political opinions were "none of your fucking business"—is nothing if not morally opaque, or simply indifferent to moral themes.

While we could construe his novels as satires on postmodern living, they tend not to propose collective alternatives. Their dissatisfied characters—they might all be called, after his 2001 novella, body artists—seek not rebellion but radically private, often mystical, forms of retreat. Moreover, DeLillo's objection to the postmodern or neoliberal or late capitalist or whatever condition is not moral but aesthetic. He doesn't lament a society of inequitable and exploitative labor practices, but rather a world that increasingly makes real sensation, authentic feeling, unavailable to individuals. And while metastases of capitalism to every aspect of life may exacerbate this problem, it is ultimately rooted in the rational mind itself, in its drive to make linguistic sense of all phenomena. DeLillo's heroes and heroines, by contrast, want to experience some sublime outside of reason and language.

In Great Jones Street, then, our narrator, the rock star Buddy Wunderlick, absents himself from his enormous fame and retires to a small apartment room at the eponymous Lower Manhattan address. Having reached the limits of his art, he seeks to learn "how to survive a dead idea" in "endland, far from the tropics of fame." Where better than in the de-modernizing landscape of New York City in its '70s decay, a "city that seemed older than the cities of Europe, a sadistic gift of the sixteenth century, ever on the verge of plague"?

But the world comes to Buddy's door despite his attempt at hermeticism. There are his eccentric neighbors: Mrs. Micklewhite, who lives with her disfigured child downstairs, and Eddie Fenig, a hack writer who paces the floor above as he tries to conquer the literary market from high to low. Then there is Buddy's bandmate Azarian, himself disappearing into the racial masquerade of "blackness," not only "[b]lack music" but "[b]lackness as such," as well as the band's manager Globke, middle-aged representative of Transparanoia, the corporation that owns Wunderlick's music (and, befitting their name, the building he has retreated to). Globke explains his and Transparanoia's business priorities: "Diversification, expansion, maximizing the growth potential."

Buddy is also breifly joined, before her untimely death from countercultural malnutrition, by his lover Opel, a traveler in "timeless lands" who gives him his "mountain tapes," recordings made at a high-altitude retreat that saw his music and lyrics break through the wall of reason into emancipatory and primordial nonsense:

I was born with all languages in my mouth

Baba

Baba

Baba

Most menacing among his visitors, and most eventful plotwise, are the representatives of the Happy Valley Farm Commune, a utopian society committed to returning "the idea of privacy to American life" and finding Buddy's retreat an admirable model. However, representing another aspect of the soured '60s dream, an arm of Happy Valley has gone violent and militant. A spokesman explains the rationale:

"Man the primate has been violent for only forty thousand years. What started it was abstract thought. When man started thinking abstractly he advanced from killing for food to killing for words and ideas. Maybe with mindless violence we're going into a new cycle."

They recruit Buddy into a plot: they've stolen the "ultimate drug"—one that destroys the language center in the brain—from a "U.S. Guv" research facility and are storing it in Buddy's apartment. Eventually, another of his visitors, a callow catspaw of Transparanoia named Hanes, absconds with it, and the Commune returns to Buddy to collect their debt and to sabotage the comeback his "mountain tapes," with their new musical direction, make possible.

The novel reaches its climax when Commune heavies inject Buddy with the drug and chemically amputate his language capacity; but an epilogue informs us that the effects have worn off—obviously, given that Buddy is the novel's linguistically-adept narrator—and Buddy redeems language for the aesthetic and the spiritual by offering as coda to the novel a lyric catalogue of the city's ineffable phenomena.

As inventive as all of the above might sound, Great Jones Street is not a very effective work. The novel often reads like a gallery of imitations. DeLillo relies on a disparate set of influences not yet assimilated and synthesized into his own style.

In Buddy's attempt at withdrawal from the world, we find Beckett-like descriptions of consciousness reduced to total inertia. The Transparanoia and Happy Valley elements of the plot, not to mention the silly names of characters and organizations (have I mentioned Dr. Pepper, "the scientific genius of the underground"?), recall Pynchon's semi-farcical excursions into counterculture, conspiracy, and paranoia. Buddy's neighbors, as well as a few other side characters, comprise a company of comic-grotesques out of Flannery O'Connor. And a lyricism of urban alienation deriving from modernism at large marks the city scenes.

The least successful elements are the Beckettian and the Pynchonian. DeLillo's phenomenology of consciousness-attempting-unconsciousness is not without interest, but it dissipates the novel into abstract prose that defeats attention:

The bed was a vast welcoming organism, a sea culture or synthetic plant, enraptured by the object it absorbed. As I headed deeper into mists and old stories, into windy images poised on the rim of sleep, I began to feel that the bed was having a dream and that the dream was me. One candle burned, this light not quite eluding my awareness. I was barely conscious, being dreamed by a preternatural entity, taken for a mind's ride into the mystery of things. It was all a question of control. I was being dreamed-smoked-created. The dream took form as a man asleep in a bed situated in the middle of a room in which a lone candle burned. This was not real but a dream and I was no more than the stale chemical breath of the dreamer.

But it is the reader who should be dreaming, just by virtue of reading the book. The writer induces that dream by giving us concrete particulars to fix the attention, not vaporous evocations of whatever altered state.

Moreover, while DeLillo borrows Pynchon's effects and themes, he doesn't share Pynchon's corresponding interest in how modern and postmodern social structures actually work. We don't learn anything from DeLillo about how rock bands or multinational corporations function, in contrast, for example, to the more-detail-than-we-need dispensed about military and intelligence organization in Gravity's Rainbow. DeLillo is a novelist of the inner life: he wants to show how living within such systems feels in the interior, how it transfigures the soul. The mismatch between the novel's single-room setting and its "transparanoid" plot is less a worthy experiment in contrasting genres than a simple lapse in coherence.

The O'Connor-like grotesquery, the overt New York gothic material, works well, though, even if it might seem tasteless by today's exacting standards. There is a kind of poignance that only pitilessness can disclose (today's practitioners of "moral obviousness" might take note). DeLillo achieves this frisson, particularly with the only character in the novel who seems to have a moral epiphany at all, the hack writer Eddie Fenig. Fenig's pursuit of uncolonized literary markets leads him to write pornography for children, but he is eventually sickened by the subject and voices the novel's only humanistic cri de coeur, all the more persuasive because it comes from so peculiar a figure:

"I failed at pornography," he said, "because it put me in a position where I the writer was being manipulated by what I wrote. This is the essence of living in P-ville. It makes people easy to manipulate. It puts people on the level of things. I the writer was probably more aware of this than whoever the potential reader might be because I could feel the changes in me, the hardening of mechanisms, the subservience to lust-making and lust-awakening. You have to be half-mad to be a great pornographer and half-Swedish to expose yourself repeatedly to outright porn without losing a measure of whatever makes you human. Every pornographic work brings us closer to fascism. It reduces the human element. It encourages antlike response."

The finest parts of Great Jones Street are those that justify its title. It is unbeatable as a latter-day streetside prose-poem, half-Baudelairean vision of hell and half-Whitmanian catalog of American diversity, detailing the modern city in its terminal phase:

Pigeons and meningitis. Chocolate and mouse droppings. Licorice and roach hairs. Vermin on the bus we took uptown. I wondered how long I'd choose to dwell in these middle ages of plague and usury, living among traceless men and women, those whose only peace was in shouting ever more loudly. Nothing tempted them more than voicelessness. But they shouted. Transient population of thunderers and hags. They dragged through wet streets speaking in languages older than the stones of cities buried in sand.

DeLillo, poet of the end, was only beginning his literary project with this novel; the best work—his own mountain tapes—was ahead of him.

Publicado en http://lecturaylocura.com/la-calle-gr...

“Las señales del comercio fueron apareciendo lentamente por la calle Great Jones, los envíos y las recepciones, el empaquetado de exportaciones, los curtidos por encargo. Era una calle antigua. De hecho, sus materiales eran su esencia, lo cual explicaba la fealdad de hasta el último centímetro. Pero no era una miseria terminal. Hay calles que en plena decadencia poseen una especie de tono redentor, cierta sugerencia de formas nuevas que están a punto de evolucionar, y Great Jones era una de aquellas calles, siempre suspendida al borde de la revelación. Papel, hilo, cueros, herramientas, hebillas, monturas y artículos de regalo. Alguien abrió la puerta de la empresa de pulidos. Por los adoquines de la calle Lafayette llegaban camiones viejos retumbando. Los camiones se turnaban para subirse a la acera, donde varios de ellos se pasaban el día entero, ligeramente escorados, y a su alrededor caminaban hombres barrigudos con sujetapapeles en las manos, con facturas, con recibos de carga entregada, unos hombres que jamás paraban de tirarse de los pantalones para arriba. Una mujer negra emergió de la mancha de un coche abandonado, recitando entrecortadamente una canción. De la bahía llegaba un viento cortante.”
No suelo comenzar con párrafos directamente, no es mi estilo; aunque sí que es cierto que, ahora que ya tengo otras reseñas de diversos autores en el blog ,con su ficha ya no hace falta introducirlos más sino centrarme en los aspectos que interesen de sus obras por estilo, temas tratados y/o sentido final de dicha obra. Tal es el caso con el norteamericano Don Delillo y la obra que traigo a continuación “La calle Great Jones”, tercera obra de su ingente producción literaria y que estaba incluida en mi Proyecto literario que tiene como objetivo terminar toda la obra de mis autores favoritos.
La presencia del párrafo inicial, en este caso, cobra una especial relevancia ya que Delillo tiene la especial habilidad de sorprenderme cuando leo cada una de sus frases; tiene la innata capacidad, el genio creativo para utilizar imágenes, metáforas, comparaciones, etc. aplicadas de una forma tal que, desde luego, se alejan de los lugares comunes transitados por la mayoría de escritores del montón. En este texto que he puesto al principio se resume en un momento parte de estas cualidades que hacen único al norteamericano. “La calle Great Jones” es descrita como su fuera un personaje más (“Hay calles que en plena decadencia poseen una especie de tono redentor, cierta sugerencia de formas nuevas que están a punto de evolucionar”); cuánta belleza en cada una de sus palabras y en el conjunto, esa sensación de que, no solo te “choca” la descripción sino que además funciona en el propio texto y en el conjunto de la obra. Está sensación se produce de tal forma cuando leo a este escritor que me da casi lo mismo lo que est�� contando, lo que sé seguro es que este flujo de sensaciones me lleva y siento un placer hedonista al leerlo.
En el caso de Delillo, afortunadamente, no cuenta solo el cómo lo hace, con ese estilo inigualable que le vuelve uno de los cinco o seis mejores escritores actuales; lo que cuenta también interesa sobremanera, y, a pesar de ser una obra primeriza (como era el caso de “Americana” de la que hablé este mismo año ) de fondo hay una serie de reflexiones que irán evolucionando a lo largo de su imprescindible carrera literaria.
La historia es sencilla en su premisa, tenemos la retirada momentánea del músico Bucky Wunderlick, músico que es el líder de un grupo en su apogeo en los setenta y que siente que tiene que encontrar otra forma de hacer las cosas, encontrarse a sí mismo y demonstrar que puede seguir haciendo algo por la música y la sociedad; la música, en particular se convierte en verdadera protagonista:
“El submundo está todo revuelto por una superdroga. ¿Has oído hablar de ella? Francamente, la noticia me deja frío. La música es el hipnótico supremo. La música consigue sacarme de todo. Me transporta del todo. La música es peligrosa de muchísimas maneras. Es lo más peligroso que hay en el mundo.”
Bucky Wunderlick, álter ego de Delillo en esta ocasión, expresa su preocupación por la degeneración de la música, y, en general, del arte; es consciente de la importancia que debería tener y, sobre todo, de lo que debería influenciar a la sociedad : “El artista verdadero hace moverse a la gente. Cuanto la gente lee un libro o mira un cuadro, están ahí sentados o de pie, pero quietos. Eso estaba bien hace mucho tiempo, molaba, era arte. Ahora todo es distinto. Yo hago moverse a la gente. Mi sonido los levanta del puto suelo. Yo lo consigo. Entiéndanme. Yo lo consigo.”
En esta búsqueda del verdadero arte unido a su crecimiento personal está la clave de lo que busca el escritor a través de su protagonista, el músico, que se topa de frente con un mundo que , por el contrario, no parece interesado, nada más que marginalmente, en esta verdadera extensión de lo que supone el arte, como leemos en boca del periodista de ABC que habla con Buddy al intentar sacar una entrevista:
“-Tengo un espacio en las noticias de media mañana. Por si acaso no me reconoces. Me ocupo de los acontecimientos para jóvenes y de las personalidades del mundo juvenil. Sí, es el mismo lavado de cerebro comercial de toda la vida contra el que todos luchamos, pero, por otro lado, la única forma que tenemos de darles cobertura a ciertas voces es encajarlas en pequeños huecos de la programación que van quedando aquí y allá.”
La búsqueda no la realiza el solo, su amante y alguno de sus miembros del grupo, e incluso su manager Globke ayudarán, aunque sea inconscientemente a que esa identidad se acabe de formar y encuentre lo que pueda hacer más feliz a sus seguidores, la forma en que uno de sus miembros se refiere a la música negra nos eleva al paraíso de la palabra de Delillo:
“Es todo amor y tristeza, Bucky, y me está destruyendo emocionalmente. Esas emociones toscas y estúpidas resultan increíblemente hermosas. Esas baladas tristonas con pasajes esporádicos en falsete. Y hasta cuando escucho los discos me los imagino moviéndose por el escenario, haciendo esos meneítos y arrastrando los pies y agitando las manos. Con el pelo reluciente. Con los esmóquines a medida. Con las dentaduras y las uñas fantásticas. Y las emociones baratas que transmiten las letras me dejan hecho polvo.”
Las emociones primigenias pueden ser la respuesta; el olvido de la complicación, la sencillez por encima de todo, como en palabras de Globke, su mánager, podemos inferir:
“Ya estamos todos hartos de phasings instantáneos y de dieciséis pistas y de sintetizadores La gente quiere algo sencillo. Sencillo pero complicado. La clase de material que tú y solamente tú puedes darles. No me interesan los niveles en la música popular ni siquiera sé si este material tiene niveles o no. [...] Ese es el poder de las citas de la montaña, tal como yo las veo desde mi perspectiva personal. No es mi sonido. No es el sonido que yo escucho cuando miro desde la ventana de mi dormitorio en la otra orilla en la otra orilla del río una noche de verano y mi mujer está sentada en la cama leyendo a los maestros orientales y la luz de la luna se refleja en el río y las grandes torres putrefactas de Manhattan se despliegan a lo largo de la noche y yo apago el aire acondicionado y abro una venta e introduzco un cartucho en mi equipo de música.”
El mismo Delillo nos anticipa una de sus obsesiones, de hecho, de ello hablé en esta otra reseña a propósito de “Los nombres”:
“Ese es el poder de los nombres. La gente actúa en consonancia con sus nombres. Hay un sector diminuto del cerebro humano donde está situado el mecanismo que pone los nombres.”
El poder de los nombres, de la palabra, con toda su extensión bíblica, aplicado al arte, se trate del que se trate: música, libros, pintura…. El arte por encima de todo como verdadero catalizador del sentido y de la identidad de nuestras vidas.
Los textos provienen de la traducción del inglés de Javier Calvo para esta edición de “La calle Great Jones” de Don Delillo para la editorial Seix Barral

Book 3 in my chronological re-read of Don Delillo. It is about 20 years since my first reading of the novel, so it was almost like coming at it completely fresh. It is already interesting, just 3 books in, to be thinking about the way Delillo developed his style. He came out all guns blazing for his debut (Americana), toned it down a bit for End Zone and here seems to be exploring what would become a kind of trademark for him in later books: no one writes dialogue like Delillo writes dialogue. From the vantage point I have because I am re-reading, I have no idea what happened for his next book Ratner’s Star (and I still haven’t decided whether to include it in my re-read). Running Dog News Service gets a mention in this book and becomes the title of his sixth novel.

Bucky Wunderlich is a renowned rock star who is disillusioned with the life that fame, fortune and a “bad boy” image has brought him. He retreats to an apartment on Great Jones Street in New York. If the novel has a plot, it is about a package that is delivered to the apartment which contains an experimental drug that affect the language centres of the brain. A perfect topic for Delillo and his fascination with language. If the novel has a subplot, it is about some tapes that Bucky made which everyone is desperate to get their hands on (cf. Vernon Subutex 40 years later). These tapes (The Mountain Tapes) seem to be inspired by Bob Dylan’s The Basement Tapes: the novel was first published in 1973 and The Basement Tapes were released in 1975. If the novel has a further subplot, it is about how Bucky’s public persona develops a life of its own whilst he hides away in Great Jones Street. Visitors to his apartment keep him updated with where he apparently been seen and what he was apparently doing. Surrounding these plots and subplots, Bucky’s relationships with his girl friend, (Opel) and his neighbours swirl around.

Some of it (this is Delillo we are talking about) is surreal. A lot of it takes aim at America. You would think those bits might have aged a bit in the almost 50 years since publication, and I guess some of them have. But a lot of it still rings true.

It is still true that, for me, Delillo doesn’t really get going until The Names which is still 4 books away from where I am now in my re-read (although Running Dog is the one novel I haven’t read at all, so I may get a surprise then, just 3 books away). I am enjoying reading all these earlier novels, but they don’t have the brilliance of his 1980s/1990s output.

This is my second Don DeLillo novel. The first one I read and liked a lot is "Libra." DeLillo had the right tone to the whole Lee Oswald story - and more likely the truth. There is something very journalistic about the writing of that book - almost a documentary. I almost feel the same way with "Great Jones Street." He captures a certain aspect of New York that I find truthful - and the narrative of a legendary rock figure who decided to disappear in the middle of a major tour is interesting. Like why Oswald even exists on this planet, we wonder the same about the lead rock character Bucky Wunderlick. At first I thought this character is based on Syd Barrett - but I think that is too British for this very American themed writer. Bob Dylan is more likely - especially after his supposed motorcycle accident that seems more myth than true - or... We just don't know, or we will never know. The plotting of the book is not that interesting, but the characters are amusing. The whole political gangster aspect is not as interesting as Bucky sitting in his apartment on Great Jones Street, and commenting on his disappearance from the world. Retreating from one's world or going into another world is an interesting commentary on how one lives on our planet.

As with any DeLillo novel from this period, there are some incredible passages. And it's actually quite a lot of fun to see DeLillo documenting 1970s life and rock and roll. Alas, some of the lyrics and scrapbook press clippings feel more like padding than anything that contributes significantly to the world here. And we also have to contend with the usual problem of all DeLillo characters speaking like Don DeLillo. Still, this is a novel that often bristles with greatness. Not quite up there with WHITE NOISE, MAO II, or UNDERWORLD. But I'll take it. If I had read this when I was a younger man, I think this book would have meshed better with me.

Conclusions can be diminishing. A sprawling epic comes down to a single point at the end. While this age-old way of storytelling does have its merits, it often undermines the experience that the story has to offer. Great Jones Street is about the experience, all the way. The conclusion is itself a part of the experience. A meditation on fame and its aftereffects on the celebrity once they become numb to all the extravaganza and the idol-worship. Some say that the book is a musical satire. That could only be the case if a slight exaggeration of modern music's shallowness can be called a called a satire.

We meet Bucky Wunderlick, a music god, at a time when the shallowness of his life dawns on him. He retreats to his girlfriend's apartment in Great Jones Street and whiles away the day looking out the window and sleeping the chairs and waiting on something he doesn't even understand he is waiting on. He comes to believe that all the things he had done had no meaning to them. He's trying to get out such a reality where meaningless things are being done all the while the world is trying hard to retain its superstar musician. He doesn't budge. Strange people walk into his life and he gets embroiled in a major drug deal. Nothing matters to him. He isn't interested. And at the end, he's back to what he was at the beginning.

Bucky's crisis is too big to overcome. Anybody who feels like they have exhausted all the meaning they can get from one thing, immediately look to other things. Bucky doesn't to that. For somebody so out of it, central involvement in a major drug deal should excite them back to life. That does not happen to Bucky. He's still looking for meaningfulness in things and he seems to be operating on the notion that nothing really is meaningless. But there is a momentary glimmer of hope. He unconsciously gets to the conclusion that there really is no need for meaning. If you keep doing things, meaning will be found. With this hope, he tries to venture back into the music scene with some early works of spontaneous nonsense. But nothing changes, he still feels the same way as the time of his reinduction into the world approaches. So, he gives in, goes back to the life at Great Jones Street and waits for all the plots to unravel. He wants to be free of all burdens, all people. In the end, after suffering or just going through an impairment of his greatest asset, he recovers back to full health. But the world doesn't know that. He chooses to keep on being an impaired person of no use all the while letting the world obsess over him.

Great Jones Street is the beginning of DeLillo's exploration of paranoia. He delivers its epitome in his big book Underworld. With dream-like prose and dialogue that doesn't really sound like real dialogue all the while retaining all the mannerisms and intonations of real speech of real people, Great Jones Street offers a lyrical story which might seem inconclusive in the beginning, but once the story is finished and seen in all of its entirety, no other end seems appropriate.

there's a lot of great stuff in here...it's definitely thought provoking and meta! i think some of DeLillo's writing was rather indulgent than meaningful, but his prose was entertaining.

la privacy, il successo, la droga e la fuga da se stessi...

Bucky Wunderlich, una rockstar che parla come Bob Dylan, decide di mollare a metà un tour con la sua band e di nascondersi in un appartamento lasciato libero dalla sua ragazza del momento...naturalmente essendo un libro di DeLillo il povero Bucky verrà coinvolto in cose losche e avvicinato da strani personaggi che gli parlano di una droga definitiva da lanciare sul mercato e dei suoi Nastri della Montagna, al momento dati per perduti, ma di cui presto spunteranno le tracce...si tratta di un racconto cattivo sulla scia di Cosmopolis, ma non altrettanto definitivo...leggermente più vago circa le motivazioni, ma senza dubbio molto più tormentato circa la fuga da se stessi e il tentativo di definire la natura umana...

For those about to rock, we satirize you!

This is a weird novel, but I kept feeling like this was an older relative of Cosmopolis, and happens in New York like that book, only a couple decades earlier (circa 1971-73, from winter to very early spring). This is DeLillo's third novel, and should, in my opinion, be approached like a movie that flows and doesn't go too strictly from A to B. I mean, some things are left open-ended a bit and the way people talk may read oddly. I did find myself loving the book from around midpoint on.

It tells of how a Dylan-Jaggerlike figure of a singer, Bucky Wunderlick (now there's a name!), a skinny, somewhat sarcastic and detached sort of person, finds himself burnt out and decides to leave his band mid-tour, moving to a Great Jones Street apartment in East Village, New York. His desire is just to chill and see when he again feels like popping up and continuing his career, but finds he just won't be left alone. His manager, Globke, wants Bucky's remaining music, the 'Mountain Tapes', wrapped in a package, and various people want another, similar-looking package that comes in his possession, that holds inside a new drug that's quite new in its effect on people. Much confusion is the result, as the packages go wandering.

This one day of late rain I saw a toothless man circle a cart banked with glowing produce... the man wailed to the blank windows above him. It was a religious cry he produce, evocative of mosques and quaking sunsets.
RED YAPPLES GREEN YAPPLES GOLDEN YAPPLES MAKE A YAPPLE PIE MAKE ALSO A YAPPLE STRUDEL YAPPLES YAPPLES YAPPLES BIG JUICY YAPPLES FROM THE HEART OF THE YAPPLE COUNTRY.

There's more important people around that just Bucky, like of course this Globke with his wife, Michelle, who is interest in all things East, like Upanishads. Azarian, the former guitarist of Bucky's band who is considered the 'next-prettiest', a proud but nervous figure with interest in black music. Opel, Bucky's girlfriend with a restless spirit who travels in warm countries like Morocco (a version of Anita Pallenberg perhaps?), who only briefly reappears as she dies pretty soon after quite sudddenly.
Various members of a commune called Happy Valley: Skippy, a messenger/drug dealer girl; Bohack, a sort of leader with sometimes homophobic edge; Chess, the keeper of the community's greenery. This commune is very important in regards of the drug plotline.
Eddie Fening, a writer that lives upstairs, walking back and forth to be inspired, with various writing ideas and a series of exactly-same looking clothes (and his coffee, tomato soup and crackers). Hanes, Globke's assistant with betrayer's spirit and a feel of desperation. Dr. Pepper, a mysterious figure navigating the crime world, sometimes in disguise, and one who can turn the drug into useful form. Watney, a former musician turned shady business dealer, and a Brit.

And we get to see some lyrics of his band's work as well as his Tapes' lyrics - all very, very bad poetry (I mean, their biggest hit is called 'Pee-Pee Maw-Maw'? XD ). I bet they were written bad very intentionally so *cough*

You really do get a feel of the apartment: phone stays disconnected for a while (then Bucky likes to listen to the empty tone, and a radio left there likewise), the weather (mostly snow, later also rain), the fewness of the food - the hunt for coffee at one point and Bucky prepares a ready-made noodle soup once, the bathtub, the bubblegum cards left behind in a bag, etc. It all feels wintry and grey, but not despairing, more like observing, peaceful, "time of prayerful fatigue". The fire station nearby, the homeless and the drunks and the older people. The underground, the streets and the bus back home. Lots of walking and looking around.

In a millennum or two, a seeming paradox of our civilization will be best understood by those men versed in the methods of counter-archeology. They will study us not by digging into the earth but by climbing vast dunes of industrial rubble and mutilated steel, seeking to reach the tops of our buildings. Here they'll chip lovely at our spires, mansards, turrets, parapets, belfries, water tanks, flower pots, pigeon lofts and chimneys...

The drug, with its effect of turning off the ability to communicate verbally and be nothing but passive does have something to give to Bucky in the end - although he is forced to take the drug to test the effect, as a result he has a good excuse not to go on 'tour' as the Tapes are released. And he can pretend he can't talk even after the effect of the drug goes away, so he can have his peace at his flat. And as I finished the book, leaving Great Jones Street behind, I began to miss it. Yes, the people talk pretentiously. Yes, the lyrics are bad. Yes, the plot is odd and even slow, even digressing a bit. But it's a wonderful experience, at least for me, this book. An odd early gem. :)

Just a thing that happened. A lot of affect but very little effect. No highs. No lows. A unique cadence to it and it evokes a particular frequency which suggests skill but it’s more like a study than a finished thing. Pretty funny. I will not be reading it again.