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art illustration self_portrait collection delillo author book artist ressource humor critic punk reblog

✖ Via Bloomsbury Auction: Portrait of the Artist ― The Burt Britton Collection, no. 82. Don DeLILLO (American, b. 1936 Self-portrait titled “Perennial street punk”. pen and pencil on paper, 8 1/4 x 8 1/2 inches (210 x 215 mm), signed, Britton, p. 33

About The Burt Britton Collection of artists’ self-portraits:

Picking up a bartending shift at the Village Vanguard, the famous New York jazz joint where he usually worked the door, Burt Britton found himself alone at last-call with just one final patron, Norman Mailer. After pouring the esteemed author a final drink, the question was put to Burt, “What do you want from me, Kid?” Exasperated at the end of the long shift, Burt inexplicably responded, “draw me your self-portrait,” handed him a piece of folded paper, and that, simply put, is how it all began.

That night in the mid-Sixties Mailer produced and gave to Britton an amazing object of self-expression, the first of hundreds to come, a self-portrait of the author more revealing than 1000 words. Inspired by Mailer’s product, Britton started to collect. Still at the Vanguard, he gathered self-portraits by Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock after landmark 1966 concerts, he even got a portrait from a New York high-school basketball phenomenon, Lew Alcindor, later the champion Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Moving to the legendary Strand bookstore in about 1968, Britton encountered novelists, poets, journalists, and critics, both the highly regarded and those just starting out. He would respectfully ask local and visiting literary luminaries such as Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams and Jorge Luis Borges to add their self-portrait to his album with the same democratic spirit that he offered the young John Irving, just months away from the fame that came with The World According to Garp. (Bloomsbury’s auction catalogue : PDF)

Bloomsbury’s catalogue contains every items in the Burt Britton Collection along with details and explanations about the Collection in general and some specific explanations about each self-portrait as well. Alternatively, one can browse the collection over at the Bloomsbury Auctions official website. Back in 2009, there was a story about this collection in The New York Times: “Self-Portraits Speak More Than Words” by James Barron, September 23th, 2009.

Previously on Skandalon : Don DeLillo

• Sep 18, 2010 link notes reblogged from leugenio [via] tagged: art illustration self-portrait collection DeLillo author book artist ressource humor critic punk

I thought all these other people. I thought how did they get to be who they are. It’s banks and car parks. It’s airline tickets in their computers. It’s restaurants filled with people talking. It’s people signing the merchant copy. It’s people taking the merchant copy out of the leather folder and then signing it and separating the merchant copy from the customer copy and putting their credit card in their wallet. This alone could do it.

✖ Via Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo, New York: Scribner, 2003, p. 195

Previously on Skandalon: Cosmopolis, Don DeLillo

• Jul 25, 2010 link notes tagged: art novel book author DeLillo Cosmopolis consumption customer money economy credit debt identity existence reality being

He stood in the street. There was nothing to do. He hadn’t realized this could happen to him. The moment was empty of urgency and purpose. He hadn’t planned on this. Where was the life he’d always led? There was nowhere he wanted to go, nothing to think about, no one waiting. How could he take a step in any direction if all direction were the same?

✖ Via Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo, New York: Scribner, 2003, p. 180

Previously on Skandalon: Cosmopolis, Don DeLillo

• Jun 25, 2010 link notes tagged: art novel book author DeLillo Cosmopolis lost space gnomon direction sense orientation lost loser life

The things that made him who he was could hardly be identified much less converted to data, the things that lived and milled in his body, everywhere, random, riotous, billions of trillions, in the neurons and peptides, the throbbing temple vein, in the veer of his libidinous intellect. So much come and gone, this is who he was, the lost taste of milk licked from his mother’s breast, the stuff he sneezes when he sneezes, this is him, and how a person becomes the reflections he sees in a dusty window when he walks by. He’d come to know himself, untranslatably, through his pain. He felt so tired now. His hard-gotten grip on the world, material things, great things, his memories true and false, the vague malaise of winter twilights, untransferable, the pale nights when his identity flattens for lack of sleep, the small wart he feels on his thigh every time he showers, all him, and how the soap he uses, the smell and feel of the concave bar make him who he is because he names the fragrance, amandine, and the hang of his cock, untransferable, and his strangely achy knee, the click in his knee when he bends it, all him, and so much else that’s not convertible to some high sublime, the technology of mind-without-end.

✖ Via Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo, New York: Scribner, 2003, p. 207-208

Let’s say for the moment that this quote relate to the general problem of the representation of the self: of the innumerable and diverse experiences I had, in my lifetime, how and under which conditions am I able to elaborate a stable representation of myself. Or, to put it in other words : How did I came up with a sense of my own identity?

Compare it with David Hume’s thoughts on mankind, Derrida’s view on the grammar of dreams (after Freud), who Pablo Neruda think he is (along with an excerpt from Paul Valery’s Mr. Teste), Quadrophenia, and finally the problem of translation from the perspective of media theorist Friedrich A. Kittler.

Previously on Skandalon: Don DeLillo

• Jun 18, 2010 link notes tagged: author book novel art technology communication translation computer machine DeLillo Cosmopolis identity self network event effect reality life subject subjectivity apparatus node

We went to the movies because we were trying to learn how to be alone together.

✖ Via Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo, New York: Scribner, 2003, p. 185

Previously on Skandalon: Cosmopolis, Don DeLillo

• Jun 16, 2010 link notes tagged: art novel book author DeLillo Cosmopolis alone lost loneliness movie family together community desintegration destruction

I have become an enigma to myself. So said Saint-Augustine. And herein lies my sickness.

✖ Via Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo, New York: Scribner, 2003, p. 189

The reference is Saint-Augustine’s Confessions, book X, chap. 33 (§50) :

“But do you hear me, O Lord, my God: look upon me and see, have mercy and heal me, for in your eyes I have become an enigma to myself, and herein lies my sickness.” (google books preview)

Previously on Skandalon: Cosmopolis, Don DeLillo

• Jun 13, 2010 link notes tagged: art,n ovel book author DeLillo Cosmopolis enigma confusion anxiety identity knowledge self becoming Saint-Augustine

Widespread throughout Latin America, susto is a folk illness associated with a broad array of symptoms. It is considered by susceptible populations to be a sickness caused by the separation of soul and body which is precipitated by a supernatural force. Most studies of culture-bound diseases have relied on descriptive approaches that focus on pathologies derived from medical textbooks. This study takes an interdisciplinary approach, looking for explanations of susto in the interaction of social, physiological, and psychological factors.

✖ Via Susto. A Folk Illness by Arthur J. Rubel, Carl W. O’Nell, and Rolando Collado-Ardon, University of California Press, 1991, 195 p.

Previously on Skandalon : Hwabyeong, yet another culture-bound somatization disorder.

Both hwabyung and susto are quoted by the same character in Don DeLillo’s novel Cosmopolis.

• Jun 09, 2010 link notes tagged: illness pathology cultural soul sickness separation Cosmopolis DeLillo

What DeLillo understood, long ago, is the end of the world would be experienced not as the end of the world but rather as a way of thinking and talking about the end of the world. What he understood is that the toxic cloud that has our name on it would be defined by its lack of definition; that we would never have as much information about it as we need to have or that someone else has; that it would turn into a free-floating void, exactly as withholding as it is encompassing; that it would become part of the landscape and that the landscape would become part of it; and that, of course, there would be footage, endlessly recycled but ultimately inconclusive.
No, Don DeLillo has never written about what about BP, Transocean, the MMS, and our thirst for oil have wrought in the Gulf of Mexico. But 25 years ago he imagined the name for a disaster that would come with its own excruciating and tantalizing Zapruder, and that would allow us to talk it — and ourselves — to death:
The underwater toxic event.

✖ Via Esquire: “Black Noise: How to Define a Gulf Disaster Beyond Definition” by Tom Junod, June 1st, 2010

Jacques Derrida developed a similar idea about the 9/11 attacks. See Philosophy in a Time of Terror

Tom Junod is an American journalist. He’s also the author of the excellent piece : “The Falling Man” (which is also the name of a great novel by Don DeLillo)

• Jun 02, 2010 link notes tagged: DeLillo Derrida art author catastrophe communication destruction disaster event language name nature novel reality representation technology BP

― The more visionary the idea, the more people it leaves behind. This is what the protest is all about. Visions of technology and wealth. The force of cyber-capital that will send people into the gutter to retch and die. What is the flaw of human rationality?
He said, “What?”
― It pretends not to see the horror and death at the end of the schemes it builds. This is a protest against the future. They want to hold off the future. They want to normalize it, keep it from overwhelming the present.

✖ Via Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo, New York: Scribner, 2003, p. 90-91

Previously on Skandalon: Cosmopolis, Don DeLillo

• May 24, 2010 link notes tagged: DeLillo art author book capitalism critic future market novel protest revolution system representation order chaos community organization anguish anxiety

Not my books, lectures, conversations, none of that. It’s the goddamn hangnail, it’s the dead skin, that’s where I am, my life, there to here. I talk in my sleep, always did, my mother told me back then and I don’t need anyone to tell me now, I know it, hear it, and this is more significant, somebody should make a study of what people say in their sleep and somebody probably has, some paralinguist, because it means more than a thousand personal letters a man writes in his lifetime and it’s literature as well.

✖ Via Point Omega by Don DeLillo, New York: Scribner, 2010, p. 43

Previously on Skandalon: Point Omega

• May 19, 2010 link notes tagged: art book novel author life lost waste junk margin DeLillo

✖ Via Simon&Schuster channel on YouTube: “Don DeLillo reading from Point Omega” Feb. 15, 2010

“From one of our greatest living writers, Don DeLillo, a brief, unnerving, and hard-hitting new novel about a secret war advisor and a young filmmaker.”

DeLillo starts reading at page 17 of his book (Point Omega, New York: Scribner, 2010).

Previously on Skandalon: Point Omega, Don DeLillo.

• May 19, 2010 link notes tagged: art novel author video book movie film war DeLillo

The market culture is total. It breeds these men and women. They are necessary to the system they despise. They give it energy and definition. They are market-driven. They are traded on the markets of the world. This is why they exist, to invigorate and perpetuate the system.

✖ Via Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo, New York: Sribner, 2003, p. 90

Previously on Skandalon: Don DeLillo

• May 14, 2010 link notes tagged: DeLillo art author book capitalism critic integration market novel revolution system Cosmopolis

In future years, of course, men and women, in cubicles, wearing headphones, will be listening to secret tapes of the administration’s crime while other study electronic records on computer screens and still others look at salvaged videotapes of caged men being subjected to severe physical pain and finally others, still others, behind closed doors, ask pointed questions of flesh-and-blood individuals.

✖ Via Point Omega by Don DeLillo, New York: Scribner, 2010, p. 33

Previously on Skandalon: Point Omega.

• Apr 25, 2010 link notes tagged: art novel book author DeLillo politic history future

You know what capitalism produces. According to Marx and Engels.”
“Its own grave-diggers,” he said.
“But these are not grave-diggers. This is the free market itself. These people are the fantasy generated by the market. They don’t exist outside the market. There is nowhere they can go to be on the outside. There is no outside.

✖ Via Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo, New York: Sribner, 2003, p. 90

Previously on Skandalon: Don DeLillo

• Apr 25, 2010 link notes tagged: DeLillo Marx art author book capitalism critic integration market novel resistance revolution Cosmopolis

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

✖ Via NPR’s “Fresh Air” radio program : Interview with Don DeLillo by Terry Gross, October 2sd, 1997. Part 02 of 02.

Listen to it in RealPlayer streaming here or on YouTube (thanks to the great Donologist channel). Learn more about Terry Gross.

Previously on Skandalon : Part 01 of 02

• Apr 16, 2010 link notes tagged: art novel author book interview DeLillo