Where do reading lists come from, anyway? Wouldn’t we love to know exactly what Plato’s students were required to read? In Aristotle and other ancient writers we have tantalizing glimpses of works and writers now lost. But even if we had them, those works would be subject to two millennia of thinking about the world, including the world of these ancient texts. Medieval pedagogues, for whom the university was a new invention, operated within a restricted universe of texts and an even more restricted universe of materials and approaches with which to teach them.
The chewing is a physical release for my anxiety. It feels a little wrong that before I’ve even had my first cup of coffee or made a bowl of yogurt, I’m smacking loudly on a cube of watermelon bubble gum, blowing huge, loud bubbles in my empty kitchen as I open the shades. I’m chewing a bright-pink square of gum! At 8 a.m.! The artificially sweet thrill fades right around when I check the news, but those few moments of happiness give me the energy to wash my face and put on real-ish clothes, and when the gum has lost all integrity, there’s always another piece ready to be unwrapped. That’s because I’ve taken to buying bubble gum by the boatload.
There is something quixotic about what DeLillo has done: writing about contemporary culture even as it collapses into subcultures, and even as the democratic dream of a collective center is derided as suspicious in identitarian terms. He has succeeded, by my estimation, chiefly by treating the topical not as a bid for relevance but as a yearning for commonality, mutuality, something to share. The news, for DeLillo, is the last culture that all of us share, and not the news as a set of agreed-upon facts, but as a disaggregated and constantly refreshable cache of sensation to be interrogated, debated and then forgotten.
Wallace’s strong grasp of the mythos of this universe will satisfy the die-hard Star Wars fan and serve as a fine introduction to those taking a first-time dive into one of pop culture’s most important creations.
Yes, this is a very silly book — in the best of ways — and West, the Seattle-based author of the bestselling nonfiction books “Shrill” and “The Witches Are Coming,” knows it. In the introduction, she describes the book as “this silly, inconsequential, ornery, joyful, obsessive, rude, and extremely stupid book.” But silliness is exactly what we need these days, particularly when we can’t gather our friends to giggle and throw popcorn at a TV screen.
Speak the body’s thrift, the blood
and breath sustained by a candle
flame, remembrances