The Monkey King's Used Primate Emporium and Book Reviews

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Don DeLillo, �Americana�

Started September 18 � Finished October 7, 2002; 377 pages. Posted 08 October 2002

My friend Matty Luv just died. I�m not going to get into it right now. It�s too incredibly depressing for me right now. I tried to go to work today and lasted for about a half-hour before I needed to go home. Shelving books just seemed absurd when somebody I cared about was now gone.

I think Matty would have been annoyed or embarrassed by all this outpouring of grief. As obnoxious as he was on stage, he was quiet and reserved in public, particularly in large groups. And I�m talking about him, which I said I wasn�t going to do. But jesus, this funeral is going to be insane. But somehow I can�t help but think it won�t be much fun.

So the old house is now abandoned. We got as much stuff out as possible, but in the end, eleven years (or however long it was officially a punk house) of crap accumulating in the basement was just too much to handle. After renting and filling a rider truck to haul off to the dump (which cost us over a hundred dollars to get rid of things, most of which weren�t ours in the first place) we ended up leaving quite a bit in our exodus, most notably setting up a diorama of two couches, a lamp, an endtable, a television stand and a television on the front lawn.

Our landlord was a total asshole, scumfuck, dirtbag, fuckface, dickhead, and we knew we would never be able to squeeze out our deposit from him no matter how clean we got the place, even though we tried. Our landlord was the type of crap basket who would ignore your calls for months at a time if something were broken, up until the point where we would have to threaten to withhold rent.

That would usually motivate him to get whatever problem there was fixed, but he would do it so cheaply that it would inevitably break again six months later. And any conversation we did instigate with the cocksucker would always mean we would have to brace ourselves for his demanding a rent increase. Finally I learned that the best way to deal with him was to not deal with him at all. If the shitbag was going to ignore my calls and letters, I certainly wasn�t going to return his.

So when we turned in our 30-day notice, I was kind of relieved. Though I must say that I liked the house � I just hated the fuckstick who owned it. Our notice told him that since he repeatedly said he could get at least $2,500 for the house, and likely up to $3,000 (which was laughable � nobody in their right mind would pay that much � though we were dumb enough to pay $2,300.), we could not, in good conscience, restrict his possibility for financial gain any longer, and we were thus vacating the house in the spirit of altruism.

The little monkeyfucker was elated. You could hear the joy in his voice. I bet he really believed he could jack the rent up even higher for that dump. Imagine how happy I was when he talked to me on the 30th, five days before we were going to be out, offering to reduce the rent if we stayed.

Asshole. Shitbag, Motherfucker.

Oh yeah, the book. Eh. This was DeLillo�s first novel, and it�s better than some of the others I�ve read by him. That�s a good thing, because I was really starting to think that White Noise may have been the only good thing he ever did. And while this ain�t White Noise, it ain�t Visions of Cody either. Marginally good, but not really worth talking about. Hence why I talked about everything but this book for seven paragraphs.

But there was one part that I thought was excellent � there is a recollection of a student who would come to class, tear a few pages out of the book as the teacher was lecturing, and then proceed to eat the every single fucking page. He did this for the entire semester.

Talk about absorbing the material! �One must become a book before one can know what it inside it,� DeLillo writes. What a great idea! If I had done that, I wouldn�t have had to move all those fucking books up the stairs, much less rearrange the shelves three times in order to fit the dimensions of my new room!


Rating: Worth working in a used bookstore and getting for really cheap.

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