silence kit #10

Iron & Wine
Our Endless Numbered Days [Sub Pop, 2004]

I have been re-reading Don DiLillo's Americana (my third time around), possibly my all-time favorite by the writer. I love the minutiae of DeLillo's prose, the bits and small descriptions of things in the language that only he could conjure, almost to an extent that what he's writing about often doesn't matter. There is a part in the first chapter where the protagonist David Bell describes one of the boring social parties he attends, DeLillo wrote: This is the essence of Western civilization. But it didn't matter really because an hour later we were all bored. It was one of those parties which are so boring that boredom itself soon becomes the main topic of conversation. One moves from group to group and hears the same sentence a dozen times. "It's like an Antonioni movie." But the faces were not quite as interesting. Bell, a young television executive, would spend the rest of the novel exploring "America in the screaming night" and I would somehow try to visualize in my mind what the experimental road movie Bell was shooting would end up looking like; I imagine it ending up as these endless reels of rich brown cinemaphotography that would not make much narrative sense to most people. Sam Beam's exploration of the old weird America through the folk song medium, as Iron & Wine, is easily much more consumer friendly, but I can't help but feel that both Beam and DeLillo's character (or DeLillo himself) are working from the same vantage point.