“You broke, eh?”
“I been shaking two nickels together for a month, trying to get them to mate.”
I said: “Anybody home, son?”
“How would I know?”
“Go ——— yourself [sic].”
“That’s how people get false teeth.”
“Whoever had done it [killed Geiger] had meant business. Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.”
“Often, when realistic fiction interests me – and it very often does- it must do what all art can do, and to quote the painter Lisa Yuskavage ( an idol of mine), prove that there is “not an uninteresting person alive.’”pr @ <HTMLGIANT> (via: “shocked, Amused, Moved To Pity And Rage” - The Rumpus.net)
“Linguist Geoff Nunberg has made a living out of parsing phrases. His new book, The Years of Talking Dangerously, analyzes the buzzwords, stock phrases and metaphors that were made popular during the Bush administration’s tenure.”
As a follow-up to my weak post on DeLillo’s Cosmopolis, I want to provide some 
highlights from an excellent review of the book by The American Prospect’s Mark Greif.
In my last post, I was trying to put my finger on why DeLillo’s musings on the supermarket in White Noise succeeded, but why his musings on hip-hop in Cosmopolis failed. According to Greif:
DeLillo’s strength in the past came from his ability to show the limitations of people trying to hold on to the patterns they craved. He stood characters on the pivot between sense and senselessness. There is a moment in White Noise (1985) when Jack Gladney, exposed to vapors from a toxic cloud, has his chances of survival calculated by an infallible computer. It concludes he’s already dead. That moment captured what it feels like to live enmeshed in numbers, patterns, algorithms — and still be able to look down at your two hands and see nothing changed. DeLillo wanted to know what it was like to be a statistical person, or a historical personage (as in Libra or Underworld), and still a living person.
In Cosmopolis, the patterns Eric finds in hip-hop are not essential but superfluous. Eric does not “hold on” to hip-hop, or “crave” it. And hip-hop is such a flamboyant system that it hardly holds the same allure as one undiscovered, a pattern not yet traced.
The best part, according to Greif:
The texture of the novel is its most interesting feature. Characters appear and disappear. Eric’s route isn’t mapped and the chronology isn’t altered. Only one aspect of space-time is affected: The narration starts to take apart our experience of interior, of private spaces. Eric’s apartment unfolds, revealing a fantastic existence. We discover its expansion, as details grow like crabgrass: A rotating room erupts here, a shark tank there, and the apartment itself has “forty-eight rooms.” Eric’s limousine perfects this strangeness. Visitors stand up and leave it as if it were a bedroom. The floor is made of marble. The space contracts and widens.
And the worst:
As for the politics of the novel, don’t even bother. You can’t doubt that DeLillo’s heart is in the right place. In the mouth of Eric’s “chief of theory,” however, a semi-academic named Vija Kinski, the book repeats watery versions of the stupidest analyses of the present, which are so unmindful of real conditions as to be neither of the left nor the right.
“It is no surprise, then, that The Wire’s opening credits are not an ordinary credits sequence, but a series of four short films that distill each season’s themes, goals, and motifs… . Working in concert, the audio and the visuals create a 90-second mini-narrative that alludes to each season’s victims and assailants, its legal and political strategies, its criminal schemes, its surveillance devices, and its instruments of death. The entire assemblage is scored to a mournful biblical cautionary tale about the necessity and difficulty of resisting temptation and sin.”Andrew Digman dissects the opening sequence of The Wire: The House Next Door: The Wire and the Art of the Credit Sequence
TV critic Alan Sepinwall started his “summer of The Wire,” where he reviews an episode of The Wire each week this summer. This summer it is season two in two versions: the Veterans version, for viewers who have already watched the series; and the newbies edition, for people like me who just started watching the show. 
Apparently, he did the same thing last summer with season one. I am glad to have found so much written about this TV show, which I (and everybody else) thinks is the best show on television, not to mention quite literary. Since I started watching the show last month, I have wanted to read some critical response, but never expected to find something as dense as Sepinwall’s treatment of season one.
After season one, I started digging around for critical responses to the show and found a quote from David Simon on Wikipedia (I know, I was digging deep) that I found particularly illuminating:
“[The Wire is] really about the American city, and about how we live together. It’s about how institutions have an effect on individuals, and how whether you’re a cop, a longshoreman, a drug dealer, a politician, a judge [or] lawyer, you are ultimately compromised and must contend with whatever institution you’ve committed to.”
Season one was full of individuals “contending” with their institutions, whether it be the Chain of Command or the Game. The series asks the question: Is it possible to live a modern life outside of the institution? Wallace and D’Angelo both imagine such a world. Wallace, hearing the sounds of the crickets for the first time doesn’t know what they are. For his entire life, he has been a part of the Game, where drug shouts replace the natural chirp of the crickets. D’Angelo’s mother questions him about his dream of living outside the institution: “You can’t live without your people.”
On the police side of things, individuals face a choice, as Daniels tells Ellis, confronting him about snitching, between “themselves and the work.” This choice could also be understood as one between the institution and the truth. My question is, and I think the series asks the same question, is there such a thing as the truth (or life) outside of the institution? Will the search for the truth inevitably intersect with the institution? When the police chief tells Daniels that if he asked the right questions, he could expose dirt about Daniels too. Asking questions seems to be only about obtaining the truth, but in The Wire—and in the institution—asking questions is inevitably political.
Salt Lake City.
THE FRAME is a commonplace book compiled by Marshall Hogan. Contact me at marshponds[at]gmail.com.
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