Tag Archives: Internet

White Noise: Always There, Just Like Death and Commercials

In White Noise Don DeLillo notes “All plots tend to move deathward.” I’m not sure if he is surprised by this, but he shouldn’t be. All life moves deathward. So how can plots do otherwise?

Let’s put that question aside and simply agree that DeLillo in White Noise is obsessed with death. But Gladiola, white noise is my favorite noise. How can it be linked to death? Sorry, my friend, white noise is always there in the background. Just like death. And Jack (the narrator) can’t stop thinking about death. Even when he’s thinking with his penis, his penis is thinking about death. He chairs the Hitler Studies Department at a small college on the hill. Why Hitler? “Some people are larger than life. Hitler is larger than death.”

Jack is married to Babette, and they have a blended family with a child from their own marriage but also children from several prior marriages. Babette is taking some kind of medication that she refuses to admit she’s taking. Like Jack, she is terrified by death. Even when she’s thinking with her vagina . . . well, you get it. “We (humans) are the highest form of life on earth and yet ineffably sad because we know what no other animal knows, that we must die.” When a train accident happens on the edge of town, a deadly toxic cloud gets released. Jack is exposed to the poison, and his fear of death becomes all-consuming. The novel explores the reckless ways Jack and Babette try and fail to manage this intense fear.

Published in 1984, the novel also skewers consumerism and our culture’s reliance on television – a precursor of the internet and social media. “When TV didn’t fill them with rage, it scared them half to death.” And it touches on inequality and inequity. During the toxic event, Jack thinks “These things happen to poor people who live in exposed areas. Society is set up in such a way that it’s the poor and uneducated who suffer the main impact of natural and man-made disasters.” The novel succeeds best when it is focused on these themes. But back to death.

The lengths Babette and Jack go to calm their fear are hard to relate to. When they wonder why no one else is overwhelmed by the fear as they are, Jack acknowledges that “Some people are better at repressing it than others.” He’s wrong. Everyone is better at repressing it. They become the poster children for repression and denial being the correct strategy. And that’s good news for me because I repress and deny everything. So I must be healthy as hell.

Gladiola Overdrive, Chief Editor

Dr. Emoji

My wife was making coffee
when the beast flopped on her head
so she screamed and she shook
and I jumped out of bed
to find a leather-clad succubus
spread-eagle on the floor
so I quickly grabbed my broom
and swept it out the door.

Then I gave my wife a tactful kiss, 
before recalling that's a mistake
because every time I touch her lips
my stomach starts to ache.

In the bathroom brushing my teeth
foam gushed down my chin.
It made a frothy bubble beard,
and my head started to spin.

So I hurried to the computer,
went to WhatsWrongWithMeMD,
typed all my ails in a tiny box 
and clicked on the medic emoji
who quickly appeared to look at my face,
and without pausing for thought
said I have herpes, rickets, or rabies
and atrophy in a private spot.

So here I am at urgent who cares
answering why, what, and where
when Dr. Emoji has already seen me
and says I have no time to spare.

Luvgood Carp, Editor-in-Chief

Your Attention is Holy – “No One is Talking About This”

About a quarter into Patricia Lockwood’s No One is Talking About This , a character declares “[y]our attention is holy.” This is true, but it doesn’t seem like it in the portal – Ms. Lockwood’s term for the internet. That’s because everyday your “attention must turn, like the shine on a school of fish, all at once, toward a new person to hate. Sometimes the subject was a war criminal, but other times it was someone who made a heinous substitution in guacamole.” This is among the most apt and poetic descriptions of the internet. And the first half of this thoughtful and engaging story examines the internet’s weird vagaries and addictive adrenaline. And at times you will think you are reading poetry.

The main character, who is never named, is a woman who became famous in the portal (a “communal stream-of-consciousness”) for a single five-word post. After it went Corona-viral, people from all over the world invite her to lecture about the “new communication.” Frequently, her comments are inane, but so is the portal – so it works. She travels everywhere, shares bizarre opinions about everything, and because the world is connected, her name (whatever it is – perhaps it doesn’t matter) is now recognized everywhere. Still, oddly, she feels disconnected. “This did not feel like real life, exactly, but nowadays what did?” It brings her to that universal question asked by anyone who has been on social media for more than one hour straight. Have I been wasting my time? Probably, but let’s see what Twitter has to say about that.

Reality (in the form of a text from her mother – because reality these days always arrives as a text from your mother) soon intrudes on virtual reality. Her mother writes “[s]omething has gone wrong . . . How soon can you get here?” Suddenly, our nameless expert on everything is jolted out of the portal. “She fell heavily out of the broad warm us, out of the story that had seemed, up till the very last minute, to require her perpetual co-writing.”

Indeed, something has gone dreadfully wrong. Her pregnant sister learns that her baby has a rare disease and will probably die in the womb – which also puts her sister’s life in danger. Against all odds, the baby and mother survive the birth, but everyday thereafter the baby’s survival is at risk. So what’s more real than the portal/internet? A baby with a congenital disease. And no one in the real or virtual world (is there a difference?) is talking about it.

The baby now has the nameless aunt’s whole (and holy) attention. “Through the membrane of a white hospital wall she could feel the thump of the life that went on without her, the hugeness of the arguments about whether you could say the word retard on a podcast. She laid her hand against the white wall and the heart beat, strong and striding, even healthy. But she was no longer in that body.” Eventually, the issue of whether the baby will survive is resolved. Then, gradually, the connected world calls our nameless friend back. But how connected is she to it now?

The internet says Patricia Lockwood is a poet, and the internet gets that one right. Her metaphors throughout are incisive and wondrous. Her style is a choppy stream-of-consciousness that would give James Joyce a happy little boner. The style suits an examination of social media’s impact on society. This is a poetic novella filled with humor and sadness. It is a smudge-free mirror reflecting what passes for real life these days.

Thank you for reading. Your attention is holy.

Gladiola Overdrive, Chief Editor