Sunday, July 01, 2007

Disaster as a "Spectator Sport"

In Kevin Rozario's "The Culture of Calamity: Disaster & the Making of Modern America" the author makes reference to Don DeLillo's 1985 novel "White Noise." In the novel a Midwestern professor named Jack Gladney meditates on the power of images, especially apocalyptic ones, to pierce the veil of daily artifice. "Only a catastrophe gets our attention," DeLillo writes in a line Rozario uses to open his introduction. "We want them, we need them, we depend on them. As long as they happen somewhere else." (Photos from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake)

1 comment:

cam balkon said...

nice a picture