It’s the writer Don DeLillo’s birthday today. He’s 86. (Ouch.) He was born in NYC and his alma mater is Fordham. His eighth novel, White Noise, published in 1985, won the National Book Award. George Will didn’t like his ninth novel, Libra, on the JFK assassination. Writing in WaPo, Will declared the book “an act of literary vandalism and bad citizenship.” DeLillo said “being called a ‘bad citizen’ is a compliment to a novelist. We ought to be bad citizens. We ought to, in the sense that we’re writing against what power represents, and often what government represents, and what the corporation dictates, and what consumer consciousness has come to mean. In that sense, if we’re bad citizens, we’re doing our job.” DeLillo rejected Will’s claim that he blames America for Lee Harvey Oswald, countering that he instead blamed America for George Will.
The rock band “The Airborne Toxic Event” took its name from a section of White Noise. I recall that event, even though I read the book decades ago. There was an emergency response team that took its drills very seriously. So seriously that they responded to the actual disaster from the standpoint of using it to see how they could improve their drills.
Here’s the band. You like strings?
Some of you know the singer Shakira, — you know, with the hips? She’s 46 now, from Colombia, and has two kids. Well, she couldn’t use those hips to wriggle out of her tax bill in Spain, and nearly wound up in jail. The question was how much time did she spend in Spain during the years at issue. She danced her way into court last Monday in a pink outfit, just a few days after winning two Latin Grammy awards in Seville. A last-minute settlement has her paying around 22.5 million euros to close the books on the matter. Owl Chatter asks — does this look like a tax cheat to you? Don’t pay any attention to those nasty tax people, darling.
Today’s poem is by Charles Simic, from The Writer’s Almanac. It’s called “Rural Delivery.”
I never thought we’d end up
Living this far north, love.
Cold blue heaven over our heads,
Quarter moon like chalk on a slate.
This week it’s the art of subtraction
And further erasure that we study.
O the many blanks to ponder
Before the night overtakes us once more
On this lonely stretch of road
Unplowed since this morning;
Mittens raised against the sudden
Blinding gust of wind and snow,
But the mailbox empty. I had to stick
My bare hand all the way in
To make sure this is where we live.
The wonder of it! We retraced our steps
Homeward lit by the same fuel
As the snow glinting in the gloom
Of the early nightfall.
In the puzzle today, the clue at 25A was “Exasperated cry you might make when being turned over to voice mail.” The answer was PICK UP THE PHONE! It elicited this back and forth between Rex and Pete.
Rex: Why are you shouting “PICK UP THE PHONE!” when it’s already gone to voice? Shouldn’t you be shouting it earlier? I mean, you shouldn’t be shouting it at all, no one can hear you, but for your inherently ineffectual shouting to make any kind of sense, you gotta be doing it earlier.
Pete: You yell PICK UP THE PHONE when you know that the person has a home voice mail system and no caller ID and is screening calls to see who it is and you know that the person they’re screening out is you but you feel obligated to try and make them pick up the phone anyway. (Not that this ever happened to me.)
This song is 45 years old. It’s from the same album (Parallel Lines) that had “Heart of Glass” on it with the lyric:
Once I had a love and it was a gas
Soon turned out to be a pain in the ass
Hands up if you’ve been there. See you tomorrow!
The Wellington Files 