Reviews for Great Jones Street

The average rating for Great Jones Street based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-02-12 00:00:00 Kathleen G Pipes Great Jones Street - Don DeLillo's novel published as part of the 1980s Vintage Contemporaries series where a young rock-and-roll artist seals himself off in a Lower Manhattan down-and-out apartment. Well, there's the occasional visit from his girlfriend and members of his rock group and hawkers connected with a Happy Valley Commune yammering about a future miracle drug, enough visits to keep his sharp edge very sharp and enough visits to possibly drive a crazy boy crazy. And here's our man, the one and only Bucky Wunderlick, musing on the mystical nature of his girlfriend and soulmate, the incomparable Opel: "All she desired was the brute electricity of that sound. To forget everything. To be that sound. That was the only tide she heeded. She wanted to exist as music does, nowhere, beyond the maps of language." A batch of reasons why this novel by Don DeLillo is fab: THE BOX MAN, AMERICAN-STYLE Within months of publication of Great Jones Street another new novel hit the shelves addressing many of the same themes: The Box Man by Nobel winning Japanese novelist, Kōbō Abe, where the nameless protagonist surrenders his previous identity and conventional routine to live in a large cardboard box he wears over his head. Great Jones Street and The Box Man - so into yourself, so "society get out of my face." At one point in DeLillo's novel, girlfriend Opel tells Bucky about a new underground counterculture group: "The return of the private man, according to them, is the only way to destroy the notion of mass man." Oh, Opel. Oh, Bucky. Oh, Box Man. This is so 70s! Sidebar: I recall watching a 1970s newscast where a university student wore a black cloth over his head down to his shoes and walked around campus calling himself "the black bag." Actually, I thought this guy really cool. POETRY At one point, Bucky reflects: "Alone I lived in the emergency of minutes, in phases of dim compliance with the mind's turning hand." And here's another of his rock-and-roll reveries: "Euphoric with morphine we'd be wheeled among them, noting proportions and contours, admiring the beauty of what we were." It's as if Bucky's words could have been excerpts from Alan Ginsberg's many page beatnik slam-poem "Howl." And there are numerous other such Bucky rant-lines for fans of DeLillo's poetic, philosophic prose. THE WRITER IN THE APARTMENT ABOVE "Some writers presume to be men of letters. I'm a man of numbers." So says the novelist, essayist, poet, short story writer Fenig, who lives in the apartment on Great Jones Street right above Bucky and who is a writer obsessed with seeking fame and knowing the ups and downs of the writer's market better than a seasoned stock broker knows Wall Street. Don DeLillo, you sly dog, putting a writer who might be the shadow side of yourself in the apartment above your protagonist. ROCK-AND-ROLL, THE NEW MODERN ART In an interview, Bucky pontificates how when people read a book or look at a painting, they just sit there or stand there, but through his music, he makes people move. WOW! The one and only Bucky Wunderlick, shining star, prime mover, kinesthetic force, creator of a new political-erotic-mystical art form that, as sculptor Claes Oldenburg insisted, does more than just sit on its ass in a museum. SOCIAL COMMENTARY Again, Don DeLillo fans will not be disappointed since many are the zingers hurled at contemporary American society. For example, how TV programs are interrupted and announcers sound close to insanity, their voices soaring, as they report on the impending snowstorm: heavy snow, deep snow, drifting snow, big fluffy white flakes are falling and will continue to fall from the sky. (I myself am always both amused and amazed at the panic snow arouses in the media). And, again: Bucky has issues with his hard-earned money having to work . . . no, no, no, he did the work; he wants his money resting in nice big green stacks in some cool bank vault. He's told in so many words: so sorry, Bucky, like it or not, your rich ass is tied into the American financial world! BUCKY'S MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR Inserted into the first-person narrative is the Superslick Mind-Contracting Media Kit featuring The Bucky Wunderlick Story told in various news clips, song lyrics and Zen-like enigmatic responses to interviewers. All very fitting since Bucky's words have that ring of rock-and-roll truth, when he states further on in the story, "Beauty is dangerous in narrow times, a knife in the slender neck of the rational man, and only those who live between the layers of these strange days can know its name and shape." Yea, baby! Hearing such wisdom I have to ask: What's the sound of one Bucky turning at thirty-three and a third, second cut, side one, third album? THE FIGURATIVE DEATH-IN-LIFE JOURNEY Bucky wants us to know his solitary journey on Great Jones Street is only the literal way of looking at things. Figuratively, he tells us, he lived in a remote monastery with the lamas of Tibet, being guided through the mysteries of the highest levels, the most esoteric planes of death. That's what he came to know. Death-in-life. Oh, how cool is that! Thanks, Don D. You rock!

Review # 2 was written on 2016-11-07 00:00:00 Pat Hazelton Human thought moves in mysterious ways… What started it was abstract thought. When man started thinking abstractly he advanced from killing for food to killing for words and ideas The borderline between the sixties and the seventies of the last century was the time of freaks so Great Jones Street is a freaky postmodern mystery. All she desired was the brute electricity of that sound. To make the men who made it. To keep moving. To forget everything. To be the sound. That was the only tide she heeded. She wanted to exist as music does, nowhere, beyond the maps of language. Rock musicians were the only almighty and omniscient prophets of the epoch… For me, Great Jones Street was a time of prayerful fatigue. I became a half-saint, practiced in visions, informed by a sense of bodily economy, but deficient in true pain. I was preoccupied with conserving myself for some unknown ordeal to come and did not make work by engaging in dialogues, or taking more than the minimum number of steps to get from place to place, or urinating unnecessarily. But pushers and movers and shakers kept pushing and moving and shaking those freaks just to make more money… So trashy artistes created trashy pop culture greedily cannibalized by covetous trashy consumers. Read your Kafka. Read your bloody Orwell. The state creates fear through force. The state uses force eight thousand miles away in order to create fear at home. Well, probably any time is the time of freaks and trash.