Commonplace Book: "DeLillo on Answering Machines"
Daniel A Zellman (dzellman@icarus.cc.uic.edu)
Fri, 15 Sep 1995 10:07:48 -0500 (CDT)
"Do you know how strange it is for me to sit here talking to a machine? I
feel like a TV set playing in an empty room. I'm playing to an empty
room.... The lonliness of voices stored on tape.... The machine makes
everything a message, which narrows the range of discourse and destroys the
poetry of nobody home. People are no longer home or not home. They're
either picking up or not picking up."
--Don DeLillo, MAO II (New York: Viking, 1991) pp. 91-92.