It's the End of the World As We Know It

Lee Harvey Oswald and I Rock Out in a Dream

Last night I dreamed I was playing guitar with Lee Harvey Oswald.

We were warming for our festival slot, and came up with a new song: "Born to Run."

We went out and played (yes, the Springsteen song) "Born to Run," and it was the best possible version of "Born to Run." On stage, we blew the crowd away. We killed it. We slayed it.

This dream had some easy-to-grasp source material. I am reading Jeff Tweedy of Wilco's memoir Let's Go (So We Can Get Back). He grew up in Belleville, Ill., which is not far from St. Louis but too far if you don't drive. In the book, he writes that when he was in third grade, he told everyone that he was the guy who did that song on the radio, "Born to Run." Wrote it and recorded it. That's him on the radio. He was lying, but in Belleville, 1975? Who would know? It seems like the Indiana town where Stranger Things was set.

I am reading it because there is a new Wilco album, Cousin, that I would like to write about when I get to spend more time with it. Wilco and Tweedy in their many incarnations are prolific. I admire more than I love them, but some Wilco songs I love. "Standing O," is one of them, and Lee Harvey and I might have played it for an encore but there was no point after "Born to Run."

In my Literature, Flm, and the Visual Arts class this semester, I have thrown caution to the wind because I want to spend a little time on Don DeLillo, my favorite author. Noah Baumbach's 2022 movie adaptation of DeLillo's 1985 novel White Noise is the best screen interpretation of DeLillo's work I have seen. Sometimes I identify with the protagonist, Jack Gladney, who runs the Hitler Studies department at College-on-the-Hill, somewhere in the midwest. Or I identify with his best friend on campus, Murray Siskind, a former New York sportswriter now teaching Pop Culture, or as DeLillo calls it, "American Environments." With an evidently Jewish New York name, he is played in the movie by Don Cheadle. His goal to is do for Elvis Presley studies what Gladney has done for Hitler studies. Gladney's wife is taking part in a study of an experimental drug whose purpose is to alleviate the fear of death. There is an Airborne Toxic Event, such a compelling name for an environmental disaster that a 1990s alt-rock band took that as its name.

(Substack superstar E. Jean Carroll, posted one of her fabulous questions in Ask E. Jean, to which I am a paid subscriber. The question was, who would you like to play you in your life story? My answer: Tilda Swinton. Or Don Cheadle.)

The “Supermarket Scene” at the end of White Noise. Music: New Body Rhumba, LCD Soundsystem

The A.T.E. described by DeLillo in the book is almost exactly like the Norfolk Southern railroad train that derailed near East Palestine, Ohio, on Feb. 3, 2023. When Jeff Tweedy was born, in 1967, his father was a diesel mechanic for the Alton & Southern Railway. DeLillo would be hard-pressed to invent a better name of a town for the disaster he envisioned in White Noise than East Palestine.

I plan to show the movie White Noise to my class (which meets for three hours, once a week) on Wednesday. I didn't order the book White Noise to do a compare/contrast essay. I have discovered, to my chagrin and disappointment, that the conventional wisdom that students do not read books is true. In another class, a student was reading a book by a popular author. When she said that she was reading the book for pleasure, I almost did backflips of joy.

I assigned DeLillo's collection of short fiction, The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories. The title story is about Sister Edgar, an old-school, germophobic nun doing service (delivering food, consoling the homeless) in the burning Bronx of the 1970s, who has a vision of a murdered and mutilated 12 year old Bronx girl she had hoped to help. Esmeralda’s image appears facing an elevated subway on orange juice billboard at around dusk. Hundreds of others see it too. The first time I read it, I thought DeLillo had proved the existence of God. Or god.

Some students have had difficulty acquiring the book; some cannot afford ordinary textbooks, overpriced as they are by the Academic Publishing Cartel. I read aloud a paragraph from "Human Moments in World War III," in which two astronauts are in months-long orbit of Earth when war breaks out. The narrator says his partner, Vollmer, is an engineering, communications, and weapons genius. The narrator, the senior officer, is the "mission specialist" which, DeLillo writes, "refers here to someone who does not specialize."

Wednesday, on the way to class, I got in the car and LCD Soundsystem's "New Body Rhumba" was playing. I saw it as a good sign, since this song is the coda of Noah Baumbach's White Noise, the song to which everyone is dancing in a supermarket. I played it in class. I'm not sure that this song, from the 2022 movie and oft-played on the radio and in clubs, had ever appeared on any student's playlist. I was grooving, but the students were on their phones.

I tried to introduce DeLillo and his themes of American dishabituation through technology, death, thermonuclear war (our subtext for the semester which has also included The Day After Trinity, the documentary about Robert Oppenheimer, and Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove). Conspiracies, television, advertising, the power of crowds, paranoia, all thrive in DeLillo's work, as do disasters, system breakdowns, and deadly attacks conducted by people who are not clear about the line between terrorist and freedom fighter.

The assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 would seem to be the dividing line in DeLillo's vision of America, and it is mine as well. It is the only conspiracy theory worth believing in. Fiction, especially great fiction, is much better at getting at the truth than documentaries or official conclusions, such as the weak fib called the Warren Report.

DeLillo's book about Lee Harvey Oswald, Libra, to me solves the Kennedy assassination, in conjunction with two other books: James Ellroy's The Cold Six Thousand and Joan Didion's Miami. Oswald and his mother lived in the Bronx not far from DeLillo's neighborhood. He was the patsy; he was supposed to miss; something else happened.

I showed the class the video footage of Lee Harvey Oswald's murder at point blank range by small time local mob-affiliated strip club owner Jack Ruby inside Dallas Police Headquarters on live television as Oswald, two days after being charged with the most heinous crime since J.W. Booth shot Abraham Lincoln, was being transferred to a cell on a different floor of the jail. I asked if it was plausible Ruby was a heartbroken patriot, as he claimed at the time or whether Ruby silenced Oswald before the real Kennedy assassination conspiracy could be told. Class response: crickets. Maybe I had to explain who JFK was. I keep leaving this stuff out, based on my own ebbing faith that there are certain facts and names all Americans know.

"The Angel Esmeralda" appears, as almost a standalone chapter, at the end of Underworld, DeLillo's 827-page-long masterpiece (1997). "The Angel Esmeralda" originally appeared in Esquire magazine, in the May 1994 issue.

The beginning of Underworld also appeared in a somewhat altered form as a short story called "Pafko at the Wall" in Harper's magazine in 1992. It is about the 1951 sudden death playoff game between the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants at the Polo Grounds. Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason, saloon keeper Toots Shor, and J. Edgar Hoover are all at the game.

I should have realized that I needed to explain the names of all of these people (I described Gleason as a TV star and Shor as a celebrity bar owner). But it occurred to me that my students lacked familiarity with J. Edgar Hoover and even Frank Sinatra. I set them up with the scenario and played, from You Tube, the newsreel video of "the shot heard around the world": Bobby Thomson's ninth inning walk-off home run at the Polo Grounds, the Giants' Harlem ballpark, that sent the Giants to the World Series (against the New York Yankees) and the dejected Dodgers back to Brooklyn.

But there's an inside joke that DeLillo found in his research (Bronx guy he was and is, he was neutral ,a Yankees' fan) regarding "the shot heard around the world": During the game, FBI chief Hoover is told that the Russians exploded an atomic bomb in the Soviet state of Kazhakstan.

I had told the students a paraphrase of something DeLillo told one of his rare interviewers: That while every routine or exceptional play in any sport can be seen and rewatched for days on ESPN and social media, TV had not infiltrated American life very deeply in 1951: Most people saw Thomson's blast in grainy movie theater newsreels.

I went to You Tube for the video. It is barely two minutes long. I played it, and surveyed the class. Out of 25 or so students, all but about four were staring down at their phones. I flipped out. With an hour left, when we would watch a BBC documentary on DeLillo they could also watch on You Tube, I dismissed the class. I threw them out. The most magical moment in baseball history and they would not lift their heads from their phones. I couldn't handle their disinterest. I repeat: I threw them out.

After my dream, this morning, I read two things. I needed to make amends to my students, so I bought a subscription to Esquire online, so I could access "The Angel Esmeralda," and send it to my students as a PDF. Esquire's email blast this morning had some appealing click bait in a story called "35 Songs That Were Almost Sung by Someone Else." One of them was a Springsteen song that he wrote intending to give to the Ramones: "Hungry Heart." According to Esquire, as told by Springsteen to Jimmy Fallon, Bruce played it for Johnny Ramone, who response was: "Nah, you better keep that."

Then I read the Laurie Stone Substack essay about the poet Diane Seuss. Laurie, whose Substack, Everything is Personal, to which I am also happy to have a paid subscription, happened to mention in passing that her birthday is coming up. One she shares with, among others, Lee Harvey Oswald.