White Noise
a film based on the novel by Don DeLillo, FCRH ’58

Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise has aged well since it won a National Book Award in 1985. Darkly funny, it parodies academia and captures the media, technology, and consumer culture of the mid-’80s—what one character calls the “incessant bombardment of information,” much of it unreliable. People commune in the supermarket like it’s a kind of church, and when a train crash releases a cloud of chemicals, the “airborne toxic event” leads to sickness, evacuation, and the threat of ecological disaster. The novel is also about the anxieties and wonders of family life (“the cradle of misinformation”) and the fear of death. And now, it’s a smart, funny Netflix film, faithfully adapted and directed by Noah Baumbach and starring Adam Driver. Driver plays Jack Gladney, a middle-aged professor of Hitler studies who lives with his fourth wife, Babette (Greta Gerwig), and their blended family of four kids. “I’m tentatively scheduled to die,” he tells her, explaining that he’s been exposed to the toxic cloud. She confesses that she has exchanged sex for Dylar, an experimental drug meant to relieve her intense fear of death. How they deal with their fears, their envy and infidelity, is the heart of the film.

—Ryan Stellabotte

Looking for Violet
a podcast by Carmen Borca-Carrillo, FCLC ’20, GSAS ’21

During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Carmen Borca-Carrillo watched a lot of romantic comedies, or rom-coms, with her partner. “What we both figured out pretty quickly was that there really weren’t many lesbian rom-coms,” she said. That’s how Looking for Violet was born. The four-part podcast was her capstone project in the public media master’s degree program at Fordham. In it, she examines why queer love stories are scarcely told in American film comedies. The podcast earned her multiple honors, including a Mark of Excellence Award from the Society of Professional Journalists. “We always say representation in media is important, and I hope that [listeners] take away from it a little bit more of the concrete examples of why it’s important,” said Borca-Carrillo, who is now a junior producer at Wonder Media Network, a women-led podcasting company she said is “dedicated to lifting up underrepresented voices.”

—Kelly Prinz, FCRH ’15

All the Women in My Brain
by Betty Gilpin, FCLC ’08

In 2016, not long before her breakout, Emmy-nominated role as a wrestler in the Netflix series GLOW, Betty Gilpin returned to the Lincoln Center campus to speak with a group of Fordham Theatre students. She said her own student days in the program continue to motivate her. “Especially as a woman, it’s totally different. You’re going to be told things like, ‘Don’t make that weird face when you cry,’ or, ‘Great, just wear more makeup next time,’” she said. But “what you’ve built here is invaluable. You’ve built this ocean of weird to draw on, to love from, that not everybody has.”

With humor and wit, Gilpin generously shares her “ocean of weird” in this debut essay collection. The title, she writes, is a reference to all the personalities who “take a turn at the wheel” in her brain—some “cowering in sweatpants, some howling plans for revolution.” She skewers the “glossy cringe” of Hollywood and writes about her struggles between ambition and self-doubt. After 15 years as a working actor, she has come to see her experiences as a “perfect allegory for being a woman in this world. Having to cycle through identities to give whoever is in front of you the girl they want.” And she credits the Fordham Theatre program for helping her realize that the craft she chose “wasn’t just sequined escape, it was naked examination.” “Make your demons trade knives for paintbrushes,” she advises young artists. “And like yourself enough to do it out loud.”

—Ryan Stellabotte

Counting down by sevens in the future that takes shape too soon.

There were six candles placed around the living room and Diane had just put a match to the last of them.

She said, “Is this a situation where we have to think about what we’re going to say before we say it?”

“The semi-darkness. It’s somewhere in the mass mind,” Martin said. “The pause, the sense of having experienced this before. Some kind of natural breakdown or foreign intrusion. A cautionary sense that we inherit from our grandparents or great-grandparents or back beyond. People in the grip of serious threat.”

“Is that who we are?”

“I’m talking too much,” he said.

“I’m grinding out theories and speculations.”

The young man was standing at the window and Diane wondered if he planned to head home to the Bronx. She imagined that he might have to walk all the way, up through East Harlem to one of the bridges. Were pedestrians allowed to cross or were the bridges for cars and buses only? Was anything operating normally out there?

The thought softened her, made her think that she might offer to accommodate him for the night. The sofa, a blanket, not so complicated. Stove dead, refrigerator dead. Heat beginning to fade into the walls. Max Stenner was in his chair, eyes on the blank screen. It seemed to be his turn to speak. She sensed it, nodded and waited.

He said, “Let’s eat now. Or the food will go hard or soft or warm or cold or whatever.” They thought about this. But nobody moved in the direction of the kitchen.

Then Martin said, “Football.” A reminder of how the long afternoon had started. He made a gesture, strange for such an individual, the action in slow motion of a player throwing a football, body poised, left arm thrust forward, providing balance, right arm set back, hand gripping football.

Here was Martin Dekker and there was Diane Lucas standing across the room, puzzled by the apparition.

He seemed lost in the pose but returned eventually to a natural stance. Max was back to his blank screen. The pauses were turning into silences and beginning to feel like the wrong kind of normal. Diane waited for her husband to pour more whiskey but he showed no interest, at least for now. Everything that was simple and declarative, where did it go?

Martin said, “Are we living in a makeshift reality? Have I already said this? A future that isn’t supposed to take form just yet?”

“A power station failed. That’s all,” she said. “Consider the situation in those terms. A facility along the Hudson River.”

“Artificial intelligence that betrays who we are and how we live and think.”

“Lights back on, heat back on, our collective mind back where it was, more or less, in a day or two.”

“The artificial future. The neural interface.”

They seemed determined not to look at each other.

Martin, speaking to no one in particular, raised the subject of his students. Global origins, assorted accents, all smart, specially selected for his course, ready for anything he might say, whatever assignment, whatever proposal he might advance concerning areas of study beyond physics. He’d recited names to them. Thaumatology, ontology, eschatology, epistemology. He could not stop himself. Metaphysics, phenomenology, transcendentalism. He paused and thought and kept going. Teleology, etiology, ontogeny, phylogeny.

They looked, they listened, they sniffed the stale air. This is why they were there, all of them, students and teacher.

“And one of the students recited a dream he’d had. It was a dream of words, not images. Two words. He woke up with those words and just stared into space. Umbrella’d ambuscade. Umbrella with an apostrophe d. And ambuscade. He had to look up the latter word.

How could he dream of a word he’d never encountered? Ambuscade. Ambush. But it was umbrella with an apostrophe d that seemed a true mystery. And the two words joined. Umbrella’d ambuscade.”

He waited for a time. “All this in the Bronx,” he said finally, making Diane smile. “There I stood listening to the young men and women discuss the matter, the students, my students, and I wondered, myself, what to make of the term. Ten men with umbrellas? Preparing an attack? And the student whose dream it was, he was looking at me as if I were responsible for what happened in his sleep. All my fault. Apostrophe d.”

There was a knock on the door. It sounded weary, elevators not working, people having to climb eight flights. Diane was standing right there but paused before reaching for the doorknob.

“I was hoping it was you.”

“It’s us, barely,” Jim Kripps said.

They took off their coats and tossed them on the sofa and Diane gestured to Martin and spoke his name and there were handshakes and half embraces and Max standing with one clenched fist raised in a gesture of greeting. He saw the bandage on Jim’s forehead and threw a few counterfeit punches.

When everyone was seated, here, there, the newcomers spoke of the flight and the events that followed and the spectacle of the midtown streets, the grid system, all emptied out.

“In darkness.”

“No street lights, store lights, high-rise buildings, skyscrapers, all windows everywhere.”

“Dark.”

“Quarter-moon up there somewhere.”

“And you’re back from Rome.”

“We’re back from Paris,” Tessa said.

Diane thought she was beautiful, mixed parentage, her poetry obscure, intimate, impressive.

The couple lived on the Upper West Side, which would have meant a walk through Central Park in total darkness and then a longer walk uptown.

The conversation became labored after a while, shadowed in disquiet. Jim spoke looking down between his feet and Diane waved her arms indicating events taking place somewhere beyond their shallow grasp.

“Food. Time to eat something,” she said. “But first I’m curious about the food they served on your flight. I know I’m babbling. But I ask people this question and they never remember. Ask about the last restaurant meal even if it was a week ago and they can tell me. No problem. Name of restaurant, name of main course, type of wine, country of origin. But food on planes. First class, business class, economy, none of it matters. People do not remember what they ate.”

“Spinach-and-cheese tortellini,” Tessa said.

No one spoke for a moment.

Then Diane said, “Our food. Here and now. Football food.”

Martin went with her to the kitchen. The others waited quietly in candlelight. Soon Tessa started counting down slowly by sevens from two hundred and three to zero, deadpan, changing languages along the way, and eventually the food arrived, prepared earlier by Max, and all five individuals sat and ate. The kitchen chair, the rocking chair, the armchair, a side chair, a folding chair. None of the guests offered to go home after the meal even when Jim and Tessa got their coats off the sofa and put them back on, simply needing to get warmer. Martin closed his eyes as he chewed his food.

Was each a mystery to the others, however close their involvement, each individual so naturally encased that he or she escaped a final determination, a fixed appraisal by the others in the room?

Max looked at the screen as he ate and when he was finished eating he put the plate down and kept on looking. He took the bottle of bourbon off the floor and the glass with it and poured himself a drink. He put the bottle down and held the glass in both hands.

Then he stared into the blank screen.

From The Silence: A Novel by Don DeLillo. Copyright © 2020 by Don DeLillo. Reprinted by permission of Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., and the Robin Straus Agency, Inc.

Don DeLillo, FCRH ’58, is the author of 17 novels, including Libra, Underworld, Falling Man, Zero K, and White Noise, which earned the National Book Award in 1985. He has won the Jerusalem Prize for his complete body of work and the William Dean Howells Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2013, he earned the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, and in 2015, the National Book Foundation awarded him its Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

Zero K by Don DeLillo, FCRH ’58 (Scribner)

Don DeLillo’s haunting 16th novel begins as the narrator, Jeffrey Lockhart, a mid-30s New Yorker who spends his “days in middling drift,” approaches the Convergence—a mysterious facility in the steppes of southern Kazakhstan, where the dead and dying are cryogenically preserved in anticipation of a time when their minds and bodies can be “restored, returned to life.” Videos of natural and man-made disasters are shown in the facility’s hallways, reminders of what the techno faithful are leaving behind. Jeffrey’s father, Ross, a billionaire financier, is deeply invested in the utopian project. He’s brought his son to the remote facility to say goodbye to Artis, Ross’ terminally ill second wife, before she makes the “transition to the next level.” When Ross informs a skeptical, increasingly angry Jeffrey that he intends to join his wife on the journey, father and son move toward their own fateful convergence—and readers are moved toward a sense of wonder at the fragile beauty of our daily lives amid the “intimate touch of earth and sun.”

It was no ordinary first edition of the book.

Earlier this year, DeLillo spent several days revisiting the novel. He made handwritten notes on nearly half of the book’s 800-plus pages, commenting on characters and themes and his creative process.

The auction, hosted by Christie’s New York, featured 74 other well-known books annotated by their authors.

Called “First Editions/Second Thoughts,” the benefit raised $1 million for PEN American Center, the largest branch of PEN International, which promotes literature and freedom of expression.

DeLillo’s copy of Underworld—with its original cover featuring Andre Kertész’s iconic image of the Twin Towers, a church in the foreground and a lone bird flying near the buildings—brought in the second-highest bid of the evening. (Only one other work, Phillip Roth’s American Pastoral, with a winning bid of $80,000, raised more money for PEN.)

For years, DeLillo has participated in PEN-sponsored public readings to raise awareness of human rights abuses and help persecuted writers throughout the world speak truth to power.

“Writers who are subjected to state censorship, threatened with imprisonment, or menaced by violent forces in their society,” he said in a 2010 interview, “clearly merit the support of those of us who enjoy freedom of expression.”

The Shots Heard Round the World

DeLillo’s magnum opus opens with a bang—two bangs, actually, both based on actual events.

At the Polo Grounds in Manhattan on Oct. 3, 1951, Bobby Thomson hits a home run to help the New York Giants win the National League pennant. The game-winning blast is dubbed the Shot Heard Round the World.

Meanwhile, on the same October day, the U.S. government learns that the Soviet Union has successfully tested an atomic bomb.

The two events are fused in the novel through a fictionalized version of J. Edgar Hoover, real-life director of the FBI, who was at the Polo Grounds that day.

In one of his notes on the book, DeLillo describes the front page of the October 4, 1951, edition of The New York Times, which featured matching headlines about the dramatic game and the atomic bomb test, each headline the same size, in the same typeface.

“I discovered this coupling at a local library—on the microfilm device—while reading a news story in Oct. 1991 on the 40th anniversary of a famous ballgame,” DeLillo writes.

The juxtaposition fired his imagination. He once told an interviewer that he felt the events marked a “transitional moment” in American history, a change in the tenor of the times.

“The ballgame was a unifying and largely joyous event, the kind of event in which people come out of their houses in order to share their feelings with others. … With the onset of the bomb, the communal spirit becomes associated with danger and loss rather than celebration,” he said.

“And the sense of catastrophic events, framed and defined by TV, grows ever stronger: assassinations, terrorist acts, even natural disasters.”

An Underground History, Five Years in the Making

In a note on the book’s title page, DeLillo explains why he called the novel Underworld. “Title applies to a number of events and themes ranging from J. Edgar Hoover’s presence in the Prologue to an underground nuclear explosion in the Epilogue,” he writes, “from subway graffiti to a (fictional) movie directed by Sergei Eisenstein (etc.).”

After the prologue, the novel jumps to Arizona in the early 1990s and introduces one of the book’s central characters, middle-aged Nick Shay, a waste-management executive with a deeply troubled past.

When Nick was 11 years old, growing up in the Bronx, his father went out to buy Lucky Strike cigarettes and never returned home. Nick imagines that his dad, a small-time bookie, was whacked by the mob. And his young life becomes defined by his father’s absence and an ever-present sense of violence.

The narrative of Underworld moves backward in time, from the 1990s toward a reckoning with the day—Oct. 4, 1951—when a 17-year-old Nick kills someone. He serves time in a juvenile correctional facility and is later sent to a Jesuit reform school before establishing a more stable, middle-class life for himself.

Throughout the novel, Nick and various other characters reckon with historical events and cultural forces that shaped the second half of the 20th century: the rise of the Internet and global capitalism, nuclear proliferation and waste, the construction of the Twin Towers, the Vietnam War, rock and roll, the ’60s counterculture, and the Cuban Missile Crisis, among others.

DeLillo’s Bronx, Jesuit Roots

Like the fictional Nick Shay, DeLillo grew up in the Belmont section of the Bronx, a stone’s throw from Fordham’s Rose Hill campus.

In some of his notes on the book, he calls attention to the parts of Underworld that were drawn from his own experiences.

“I didn’t realize until now,” he writes on one page, “that there was so much of the Bronx in this novel.”

DeLillo, who earned a bachelor’s degree at Fordham in 1958, recently told an interviewer that he felt he was “the only guy in America who walked to college.” On another occasion, years ago, he said that at Fordham “the Jesuits taught me to be a failed ascetic.”

The University is mentioned a few times in Underworld, and there’s even a fictional Jesuit, Andrew Paulus, S.J., who holds “a chair in the humanities at Fordham” and later instructs Nick at a Jesuit reform school in Minnesota.

In one scene, a Bronx high school teacher tries to persuade Father Paulus to talk with Nick, then a 16-year-old boy he describes as bright “‘but lazy and unmotivated.’”

“‘I’m speaking on behalf of the mother now,’” the teacher says to the priest. “‘She wondered if you’d be willing to spend an hour with him. Tell him about Fordham. What college might offer such a boy. What the Jesuits offer.”

At the reform school, Father Paulus introduces Nick to the word quotidian, calling it “an extraordinary word that suggests the depth and reach of the commonplace.”

As an adult, Nick reflects on the education he received and how it shaped his life and career. “The Jesuits,” he says, “taught me to examine things for second meanings and deeper connections.”

“He speaks in your voice, American … ”

The first sentence of Underworld was the last one that DeLillo wrote for the novel. In his notes, he refers to it as “a final addition to what I’d previously considered a complete manuscript.”

The reference to an American voice calls to mind the title of DeLillo’s first novel, Americana, and his stature as one of the country’s most celebrated literary voices.

In September 2013, more than 40 years after he published his first novel, he received the inaugural Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction.

The award “seeks to commend strong, unique, enduring voices that—throughout long, consistently accomplished careers—have told us something about the American experience.”

The national prize, given annually, honors outstanding works of fiction by living American writers. Also nominated for this year’s award are Russell Banks (Lost Memory of Skin), Anita Desai (The Artist of Disappearance), Steven Millhauser (We Others: New and Selected Stories), and Julie Otsuka (The Buddha in the Attic).

“The influences of Catholicism can be found in the vocabulary, rhetorical structures and syntax and the very substance of every poem I write,” said Lawrence Joseph, a professor of law at St. John’s University and author of five volumes of poetry. Joseph listed several artists who drew heavily from their Catholic roots, including novelist Don DeLillo (FCO ’58) short-story author Flannery O’Connor, film director Martin Scorsese and Pulitzer Prize-Winning historian Gary Wills.

Scorsese, Joseph said, found “a strong sense of the oscillation between the sacred and the profane” in Catholicism and Wills called the religion “its own field of tangible and intangible truths . . . not a bad world for a poet to have been born into or to have grown up in.”

The discussion of “The Indelible Mark: The Writer and a Catholic Childhood,” was preceded by the authors’ individual readings of their work. Panel member Stuart Dybek, distinguished writer-in-residence at Northwestern University and a 2007 MacArthur Fellow, read sections from his short story Thread, about a fourth-grade boy who accidentally swallows a gold thread from his Knights of Christ uniform sash during Mass and suddenly realizes he has broken his fast. As he stands before the priest for communion, he realizes that receiving communion without having fasted would be a mortal sin; he doesn’t know what to do.

Dybek outlined two approaches that Catholic writers can take toward their religious upbringing. Writers, he said can embrace the mythos of Catholicism, so that their own writing mirrors the religious in its primitivism, incantation and metaphor. The second approach, he said, is writing from a point of view of “the rational mind realizing how the faith of religion is not living up to itself.”

“In my story, the moment the kid loses his faith is when he realizes the ridiculous stuff he has to go through because he’s swallowed a thread,” Dybek said.

He cautioned, however, that it’s hard to put religious influence into categories. He cited several Jewish writers whose work inspired him to write some of his best work on his relationship to his Catholicism.

“If I had to divide things up, though, I’d divide it between fundamentalism in all religions and liberalism,” he said. “[Approaches] to religion have more in common with each other than individual religion.”

Patricia Hampl, a memoirist and the McKnight Distinguished Professor at the University of Minnesota, moderated the event. Hampl questioned whether Post-Vatican II writers would experience the same nostalgia for Catholicism as previous generations of Catholic writers, and whether a strong Catholic identity was beginning to slip away in younger generations.

Panelist Valerie Sayers (FCLC ’73), author of five novels and recipient of the Pushcart Prize for fiction, said that creative writers would always step around the rational to get to the religious mystery of something in their work.

“When I was a child, I thought it was very clever [of the Catholic Church]that whenever you had a question, it was a ‘mystery,’” she said. “What a great church.”

“But I embrace it now,” she added.