Not only is this book a remnant of the past, it is a remenant that is achingly birthing itself and has been, in the pop culture since 2000, finding new the voice of nihilism and "the void" to the youth culture.

Back when Great Jones Street lacked an ATM and Country Blue Grass Blues wasn't a clothing store, there lived a race of children that repopulated a Manhattan that had become, frankly, Escape from New York. But there was some beauty in it.

There must be, or why would Jennifer Clement's book "Widow Basquiat" be interesting? Or former members of Television be lecturing at the Smithsonian about the Bowery?

And, check it out, Houston? This book is, as usual, enigmas and riddles and puns of DeLillo, a brilliant American Etymologist, who reduces Humanity in Time and Space to a specific Species and Studies them, intently and intensely.

Plus if you've ever been around this area bordering the East and West Village in NYC, you can see how it tries to stay the same as it ever was, and how this kind of fame and the inevitability of runningoutofspace...

Read this first and then "The Albertine Notes" in Rick Moody's "3 Novellas". And if you ever lived in New York, you'll be nostalgic, and if you lived below 14th street, you'll be back in the club.

"Fame requires every kind of excess. I mean true fame, a devouring neon, not the somber renown of waning statesmen or chinless kings. I mean long journeys across gray space. I mean danger, the edge of every void, the circumstance of one man imparting an erotic terror to the dreams of the republic. Understand the man who must inhabit these extreme regions, monstrous and vulval, damp with memories of violation. Even if half-mad he is absorbed into the public's total madness; even if fully rational, a bureaucrat in hell, a secret genius of survival, he is sure to be destroyed by the public's contempt for survivors. Fame, this special kind, feeds itself on outrage, on what the counselors of lesser men would consider bad publicity-hysteria in limousines, knife fights in the audience, bizarre litigation, treachery, pandemonium and drugs. Perhaps the only natural law attaching to true fame is that the famous man is compelled, eventually, to commit suicide.
(Is it clear I was a hero of rock'n'roll?)
Toward the end of the final tour it became apparent that our audience wanted more than music, more even than its own reduplicated noise. It's possible the culture had reached its limit, a point of severe tension. There was less sense of simple visceral abandon at our concerts during these last weeks. Few cases of arson and vandalism. Fewer still of rape. No smoke bombs or threats of worse explosives. Our followers, in their isolation, were not concerned with precedent now. They were free of old saints and martyrs, but fearfully so, left with their own unlabeled flesh. Those without tickets didn't storm the barricades, and during a performance the boys and girls directly below us, scratching at the stage, were less murderous in their love of me, as if realizing finally that my death, to be authentic, must be self-willed- a succesful piece of instruction only if it occured by my own hand, preferrably ina foreign city. I began to think their education would not be complete until they outdid me as a teacher, until one day they merely pantomimed the kind of massive response the group was used to getting. As we performed they would dance, collapse, clutch each other, wave their arms, all the while making absolutely no sound. We would stand in the incandescent pit of a huge stadium filled with wildly rippling bodies, all totally silent. Our recent music, deprived of people's screams, was next to meaningless, and there would have been no choice but to stop playing. A profound joke it would have been. A lesson in something or other.
In Houston I left the group, saying nothing, and boarded a plane for New York City, that contaminated shrine, place of my birth. I knew Azarian would assume leadership of the band, his body being prettiest. As to the rest, I left them to their respective uproars- news media, promotion people, agents, accountants, various members of the managerial peerage. The public would come closer to understanding my disappearance than anyone else. It was not quite as total as the act they needed and nobody could be sure whether I was gone for good. For my closest followers, it foreshadowed a period of waiting. Either I'd return with a new language for them to speak or they'd seek a divine silence attendant to my own.
I took a taxi past the cemetaries toward Manhattan, tides of ash-light breaking across the spires. new York seemed older than the cities of Europe, a sadistic gift of the sixteenth century, ever on the verge of plague. The cab driver was young, however, a freckled kid with a moderate orange Afro. I told him to take the tunnel.
"Is there a tunnel?" he said. "

"I went to the room in Great Jones Street, a small crooked room, cold as a penny, looking out on warehouses, trucks and rubble. There was snow on the windowledge. Some rags and an unloved ruffled shirt of mine had been stuffed into places where the window frame was warped and cold air entered. The refrigerator was unplugged, full of record albums, tapes, and old magazines. I went to the sink and turned on both taps all the way, drawing an intermittent trickle. Least is best. I tried the radio, picking up AM only at the top of the dial, FM not at all."

"The industrial loft buildings along Great Jones seemed misproportioned, broad structures half as tall as they should have been, as if deprived of light by the great skyscraper ranges to the north and south."

"Transparanoia owns this building," he said.

" She wanted to be lead singer in a coke-snorting hard-rock band but was prepared to be content beating a tambourine at studio parties. Her mind was exceptional, a fact she preferred to ignore. All she desired was the brute electricity of that sound. To make the men who made it. To keep moving. To forget everything. To be that sound. That was the only tide she heeded. She wanted to exist as music does, nowhere, beyond maps of language. Opal knew almost every important figure in the business, in the culture, in the various subcultures. But she had no talent as a performer, not the slightest, and so drifted along the jet trajectories from band to band, keeping near the fervers of her love, that obliterating sound, until we met eventually in Mexico, in somebody's sister's bed, where the tiny surprise of her name, dropping like a pebble on chrome, brought our incoherent night to proper conclusion, the first of all the rest, transactions in reciprocal tourism.
She was beautiful in a neutral way, emitting no light, defining herself in terms of attrition, a skinny thing, near blond, far beyond recall from the hard-edged rhythms of her life, Southwestern woman, hard to remember and forget...There was never a moment between us that did not measure the extent of our true connection. To go harder, take more, die first."

I surprised myself by quite liking Underworld, so I approached this book with rather more hopes than I usually bring to the mid-cench white males. Alas; earwax. This book purports to be a philosophical meditation on the perils of fame. It’s nothing of the sort. It’s a muddled, uninteresting story about an uninteresting rockstar who becomes an unwitting drug mule and falls into the clutch of uninteresting drug dealers. People who do drugs are like people who are fascinated by their own dreams; they always want to tell you about it. Trust me, drug-takers and dreamers of the world: it's never as interesting to anyone else as it is to you. And the writing is like this:

“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. Beds and bedbugs. Men and lice. Gonococcus curling in the lap of love.”

“Life itself is sheer ambiguity. If a person doesn’t see that, he’s either an asshole or a fascist.”

In case you are wondering whether the improbably named Bucky Wunderlick – who, yes, is supposed to be a ROCK star, and not a country and blues yokel – has any other personality traits aside from ‘drug addict’, then yes! He’s also a paedophile.

“Twelve years old
Tiger soul
She knew what to do with a man”

Yuck.

In 250 pages, there’s one good paragraph. Which is about par for the course with the mid-cench males.

“Television. Maybe it was all a study in the art of mummification. The effect of the medium is so evanescent that those who work in its time apparatus feel the need to preserve themselves, delivering their bodies to be lacquered and trussed, sprayed with the rarest of pressurised jellies, all to one end, a release from the perilous context of time. This is their only vanity, to expect to dwell forever in hermetic sub-corridors, free of every ravage, secure as old kings asleep in sodium.”

" ". . . permanent withdrawal to that unimprinted level where all sound is silken and nothing erodes in the mad weather of language." Presages Cobain, or more so Yorke's "how to disappear completely". Fantastic sentences. Chicks don't dig it because it's ultra a-emotional, but dudes dig it for the cool response in the face of very good reasons for paranoia re: the system. Worth it if you've read Underworld and Libra, but probably not so hot if you haven't and therefore don't recognize nascent expressions of Donny D.'s later awesomeness.

You ever listen to Fitter Happier by Radiohead? Imagine that for an entire novel. The same rhythms and tone, never changing. What was needed was a different perspective, placing it in first person paints everything with the same colors. Though, every single character speaks the same so maybe I'm wrong.


I was fascinated with the premise, the rock star, fandom, stardum, the darker side of rock n roll life but I think Delillo got lost in his own smoke machine here. The novel isn't really about glam, the addiction to an artist's musical output, but rather the paranoia of the time it was written. I kept thinking of Inherent Vice (only seen the film thus far), and while that deals more with the drug scene, I feel like this novel says its about music but really wants to be about that instead. If that makes sense.


Delillo's writing is still quite in tune here, though a lot of the humor hasn't aged well, but I won't fault a 50 year old book for that.

Human thought moves in mysterious ways…

What started it was abstract thought. When man started thinking abstractly he advanced from killing for food to killing for words and ideas

The borderline between the sixties and the seventies of the last century was the time of freaks so Great Jones Street is a freaky postmodern mystery.

All she desired was the brute electricity of that sound. To make the men who made it. To keep moving. To forget everything. To be the sound. That was the only tide she heeded. She wanted to exist as music does, nowhere, beyond the maps of language.

Rock musicians were the only almighty and omniscient prophets of the epoch…

For me, Great Jones Street was a time of prayerful fatigue. I became a half-saint, practiced in visions, informed by a sense of bodily economy, but deficient in true pain. I was preoccupied with conserving myself for some unknown ordeal to come and did not make work by engaging in dialogues, or taking more than the minimum number of steps to get from place to place, or urinating unnecessarily.

But pushers and movers and shakers kept pushing and moving and shaking those freaks just to make more money… So trashy artistes created trashy pop culture greedily cannibalized by covetous trashy consumers.

Read your Kafka. Read your bloody Orwell. The state creates fear through force. The state uses force eight thousand miles away in order to create fear at home.

Well, probably any time is the time of freaks and trash.

I am of the very-late-Gen-X cohort, born in 1979. Sometimes I like to think of myself as part of the Kurt Cobain "I Hate Myself and Want to Die" generation, but naturally the world always has been and always will be teeming with young people who hate themselves and want to die. In high school I was primarily into poetry, literary fiction, cinema, and indie rock. There was no internet to speak of. You encountered things because they were available, written-up in magazines, or you had followed some clandestine trail of breadcrumbs. All complicated by the fact that I only really had one or two friends with any taste at all. You would go into a bookstore in the 90s and they would often have most of the DeLillo Vintage Contemporaries paperbacks. If you were the kind of young fellow fond of poetry, literary fiction, cinema, and indie rock back then it is practically unthinkable that you would not get around to DeLillo. That being said, I only read two DeLillos in high school, AMERICANA and WHITE NOISE. I actually had some weird obsession with AMERICANA, his debut, before having read it, going so far as to special order it from a small bookstore where they often gave me discounts, and liked it even more than I liked WHITE NOISE, which everybody loves, in part no doubt because of its relationship with cinema, which I would go on to study in academia. UNDERWORLD came out during my first year as an undergraduate and I bought the hardcover. It struck me as clearly the finest work of contemporary fiction to have been published during the years I had been sufficiently cognizant to appreciate such matters. I even thought it superior to Pynchon's MASON & DIXON, which I loved very much (Pynchon was my hero) and which had come out a few months previously. Since UNDERWORLD I have read every novel DeLillo has subsequently published excluding FALLING MAN, reviews of which turned me off sufficiently to have caused me to thus far avoid it. I like THE BODY ARTIST and especially POINT OMEGA significantly more than most people seem to. ZERO K is solid but not nearly his finest hour. COSMOPOLIS is mostly extremely strong but is marred by much of the "Benno" material, most of which was carved off for David Cronenberg's extraordinary movie adaptation, which is an insanely underrated masterpiece and one of my very favourite movies of the twenty-first century (after Tsai Ming-liang's STRAY DOGS, Claire Denis' TROUBLE EVERY DAY, Chantal Akerman's LA CAPTIVE, and Bruno Dumont's CAMILLE CLAUDEL 1915). Reading GREAT JONES STREET, DeLillo's third novel, I thought of Cronenberg's film frequently, offering as it did a chance to hear so much of DeLillo's very singular dialogue spoken aloud, with those very precise clipped rhythms, punchy counterpoints, musical repetitions, and all that heady riffing, all these things already amply in evidence in DeLillo's remarkable early fiction. GREAT JONES STREET belongs to a subgenre of literary novels dealing with fictional rock stars, usually massively famous ones, a list of examples of which would invariably contain works like Thomas McGuane's PANAMA and Salman Rushdie's THE GROUND BENEATH HER FEET. DeLillo's rock star is named Bucky Wunderlick. He has walked away from a tour midway through and decamped from Huston for New York City, his hometown, isolating himself in “prayerful fatigue” in the apartment of his absent lover Opal. New York, so often one of the principal characters in DeLillo, "seemed older than the cities of Europe, a sadistic gift of the sixteenth century, ever on the verge of plague.” I though of Joseph McElroy's 1971 novel ANCIENT HISTORY: A PARAPHASE, published two years before GREAT JONES STREET, a novel whose eponymous "paraphase" is achieved when the first person narrator briefly drops out of his life to inhabit the empty New York apartment belonging to another man. GREAT JONES STREET might be said to depict Bucky's paraphase, although we cannot be certain until the end if his sequestration is temporary or a prelude to some form of permanence, a sort of fossilization. I also find it telling that GREAT JONES STREET was published the same year as GRAVITY'S RAINBOW, and other readers may likewise see something eminently Pynchonian in, among so many other things, the name of the consortium of holding companies vouchsafing Bucky's business interests etc., his version of the Beatles' Apple Corps, which happens to be called Transparanoia. There is no mistaking the specter of mind control, spook meddling, MKUltra and whatnot. Much of the narrative revolves around a nexus of interests converging upon Bucky who for a time is in possession of a package, containing some mysterious drug apparently; many parties want to take possession, representing governments, businesses, a bifurcated countercultural groupuscule, and rogue agents. That the world of rock music is subsumed within these other domains speaks to the cultural moment, post-'68, post-Altamont, the horizon discernibly darkening. Rock music is more connected to violence, fascism, and perverse methodologies of crowd control than it is to anything emancipatory or utopian. This is a space between Abbie Hoffman's naive assertion that the counterculture ran rock bands instead of politicians and the rabid aggression of punk, a pervasive sense of co-option and defeat underpinning this. If Bucky has isolated himself in the apartment on Great Jones Street, he nonetheless receives many visitors and varied communications. Take Watney, ex rock star himself, once the frontman of the grotesquely (and all too appropriately) named Schicklgruber (the real surname of Hitler's paternal family), now a kind of secretive operative in service to insidious concerns, who declares: “You’re not the underground. Your people aren’t underground people. The presidents and prime ministers are the ones who make the underground deals and speak the true underground idiom. The corporations. The military. The banks. This is the underground network. This is where it happens. Power flows under the surface, far beneath the level you and I live on. This is where the laws are broken, way down under, far beneath the speed freaks and cutters of smack.” There is the upstairs neighbor, the writer Fenig, who avows: “Fame. The perfect word for the phenomenon it describes. Amef. Efam. Mefa.” There is the Transparanoia underling and drug parcel go-between Hanes who muses: “A junkie’s death is beautiful because it’s so effortless.” In one chapter, evoking for me William Gaddis's THE RECOGNITIONS, depicting a party in the Great Jones Street apartment, a Morehouse Professor of Latent History at the Osmond Institute, who turns out not to have been what he seemed, prompts: “The Nile once flowed into the Amazon. We have sediment to prove it. What dreams did it carry? How much of the blood and poetic impulse of all of us?” And then there is the lithe lover Opal, who shows up for awhile, and whose staunchest belief is that evil, the bottom line of rock music and of the historical moment, "is movement toward void.” The drug at the center of the story would appear to be one which incapacitates and zombifies. Euphoria would not appear to be one of its side effects. It too is evil, mimetic of rock music, a product eminently suited to the culture on display. Buddy sees suicide as "nearer to me than my own big toe.” Loss of privacy and the desire for its reclamation are at the center of things. DeLillo has always been concerned with the individual's relationship to the malign human mass. GREAT JONES STREET, emblematic as such, is about ennui, but it is a keen novel, kinetic, and tremendous fun. It is garrulous and grim, written with panache. It precipitates a giddy high and leaves a metallic aftertaste, like you've had a gun in your mouth or perhaps just good old fashioned blood. It is in possession of a frank and annihiliating genius. Atomizing genius. "One by one, repacked in our sallow cases, we all resumed our breathing."

The beast is loose
Least is best
Pee-pee-maw-maw
Pee-pee-maw-maw

Had I known of Don DeLillo in the 70s, he might have found a place (however imperfectly) in my teenage countercultural canon alongside Tom Robbins, Donald Barthelme and Thomas Pynchon - particularly the latter, as the main plot element here is a mysterious parcel containing what is thought to be a recreational superdrug, that gets stolen from a government lab and carried around the world pursued by multiple crime syndicates, some of which double as record labels, back to the land communes etc.

The main character is a quintessentially 1971 rock star, sort of an American Mick Jagger, but even more (anti)messianic, named Bucky Wunderlick (did I mention this is satire?). He has dramatically dropped out of the public eye at the peak of his fame, to live an almost motionless life in a single room on the titular Great Jones Street. The opening chapters paint an interesting picture of that part of Manhattan before its current trendy loft-living incarnation; the daytime screech of local industrial business contrasts with dystopian nighttime scenes of Bowery denizens warming themselves around 55 gallon drum fires.

The second half of the book accelerates with the actual action getting underway and the set of characters that has been introduced, including Bucky's manager, the erstwhile commune leader, an Owsley-style underground chemist and others. Each has a distinct and somewhat exaggerated verbal style and there are long sequences which each one effectively comes on stage, delivers a signature ranting monologue and exits.

Interspersed are sections of Bucky's lyrics which are awful (I hope intentionally). A secondary plot concerns "the Mountain tapes", Bucky's private recordings from his rural retreat; stream of consciousness home recordings from a musician who has had a tour meltdown. I should certainly think Skip Spence's "Oar" and Syd Barrett's more disjoint solo records were the inspiration for this theme.

This is what I want from a DeLillo

"Did you get to California this trip?"
"Did Canada this trip. It was an all-Canada operation. Laying some groundwork. Feeling things out. New territory more or less. No, missed California this trip. Good friends out there. Out there's different. I liked California. Not the same kind of edgy pace."
"They drink human blood," I said.
"But the weather," he said. "Fantastic streak of weather last time."
"They tear the entrails out of dogs and cats and offer them up as devotions to dead movie stars."
"The weather's the thing out there. I remember the weather."

Surprised that reviewers of Mitchell's Utopia Avenue linked to this DeLillo title even though Great Jones Street is considered a "rock and roll satire". Despite revolving around rock star Bucky Wunderlick and his withdrawal from the world of performance, DeLillo is really writing about New York City in the early 1970's and its ( and society's) decay. With the exception of his wonderful riffs on song lyrics and a keen awareness of the role of sound, this novel is really about a time and place:
"I took a taxi past the cemeteries toward Manhattan, tides of ash-light breaking across the spires. New York seemed older than the cities of Europe, a sadistic gift of the sixteenth century, ever on the verge of plague."
Or a slice of the city between the Bowery and Broadway within that time and place:
"This was an old street. Its materials were in fact its essence and this explains the ugliness of every inch. But it wasn't a final squalor. Some streets in their decline possess a kind of redemptive tenor, the suggestion of new forms about to evolve, and Great Jones was one of these, hovering on the edge of self-revelation."
The overall tenor of the novel introduces themes that to my mind places it closer to some of his works to follow, say like The Body Artist and Point Omega.

It can be hard to wrap your head around Don DeLillo's Great Jones Street, a short novel about a 70s rocker that bails out of a music tour and holes up in a tiny Lower East Side apartment. I picked this one off the "banned books" table at the venerable Strand in Manhattan, but it doesn't seem the least bit taboo (as is admittedly true of most banned books).

Imagine a novel written by Salvador Dali, expressionistic and sometimes annoyingly abstruse with its rocker-riff like poetry prose.

A motley collection of peeps, promoters, artists, and drug dealers pay homage to the troubled legend in his dingy apartment. With the exception of his spaced-out girlfriend Opel, most of the characters sound the same with their run-on, mostly meaningless monologues. Half the characters reminded me of Dennis Hopper in Apocalypse Now, which is probably appropriate for this 70s era fiction and its depiction of drug-addled babble. The author has written so many great novels; I'd start with one of those such as White Noise if you've never read DeLillo before.

My second DeLillo after reading Americana and this is a stronger, more coherent novel. It wasn't over written like the first book and therefore wasn't too long. Some beautiful sentences, stark analysis of what it's like being a man alone in a room, keen appreciation of sound (befitting a book about a lonesome rock star). Though one feels this is still DeLillo's warm up phase. The engine finally fits in the car, and it's nearly time to turn on the ignition. I look forward to ascending to the dizzying heights.