Tourism - that march of stupidity

Some of Dom de Lillo's musings below: his characters ride their hobby-horses hard and on a loose rein, apparently indifferent as to whether or not they fall off.

Tourism is the march of stupidity. You’re expected to be stupid. The entire mechanism of the host country is geared to the travellers acting stupidly. You walk around dazed, squinting into fold-out maps. You don’t know how to get anywhere, what the money means, what time it is, what to eat or how to eat ... Together with thousands, you are granted immunities and broad freedoms. You are an army of fools, wearing bright polyesters, riding camels, taking pictures of each other, haggard, dysentric, thirsty. There is nothing to think about but the next shapeless event.

 

On  the Writer

In this century there has been, running alongside the motif of the writer as drunk, another motif of the writer as anchorite, as recluse, as invisible man, as absconder from celebrity. The tradition, whose great precursor and prefigurer is Rimbaud, but has perhaps never flourished anywhere quite as much as it is flourishing in the United States at the moment, where the reputations of celebrity hermits such as Salinger and Brodkey swell inexorably with every book they fail to publish.

Conversely, when Thomas Pynchon finally broke his silence to publish Vineland two years ago, there was a strong sense of anticlimax, of a man having performed an act of vandalism on his own reputation: in going to such lengths to focus our attention exclusively on his work, Pynchon had paradoxically made it very difficult for any novel to compete with the wonderfully satisfying, wonderfully interesting fiction he has made of his life

 

The writers famous reluctance to appear

When a writer refuses to show his face,’ Gray muses, ‘he becomes a local symptom of God’s famous reluctance to appear.’ (DeLillo has said that Mao II was prompted in part by that famous picture of a terrified Salinger flinging up an arm to ward off a photographer

 

Trying to sell yourself and the market

There’s a cruel kind of poetry to the market. The big wheel spins and gyrates and makes firecracker noises, going faster and throwing off anybody who can’t hold on. The market is rejecting me but I’m not blind to the cruel poetry in it. The market is phenomenal, bright as a hundred cities, turning and turning, and there are figures everywhere trying to hold on with one hand but they’re getting thrown off into the surrounding night, the silence, the emptiness, the darkness, the basin, the crater, the pit. But the son of a bitch won’t get rid of me that easily. I’m  tenacious...I am a writer, damn it and I have something to say...if only people would listen.

Plots are contracts we must all sign
All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots. Political plots, terrorist plots, lovers’ plots, narrative plots, plots that are part of children’s games. We edge nearer death every time we plot. It is like a contract that all must sign, the plotters as well as those who are the targets of the plot

On parents dropping their children off at first day at University: The women crisp and alert, in diet trim, knowing people’s names. The husbands content, accomplished in parenthood, something about them suggesting massive insurance coverage.

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