So I just kind of have some random thoughts that I thought I'd stick together:

I've had to stop marking sections that I found funny in the novel because otherwise I'm going to run out of sticky-notes before the end of it. As the novel goes on, I find that it strikes me as funnier and funnier. I think it's because Wallace builds on the characters and incidents so much that the more you read, the more you know and thus the more amusing it becomes.

I thought it was interesting how, on page 548, Wallace includes this little paragraph stating, "except for Pat Montesian's bay-windowed office and the House Manager's phone-booth-sized back office and the two live-in Staff bedrooms down in the basement, none of the doors inside Ennet House have locks, for predictable reasons." I thought this came completely out of nowhere; sure, it's predictable, but I wonder if there's a reason why Wallace decided to put that bit of information in at that moment.

"Doing the Substance now is like attending Black Mass but you still can't stop, even though the Substance no longer gets you high. You are, as they say, Finished. You cannot get drunk and you cannot get sober; you cannot get high and you cannot get straight" (347).

I thought this little section was pretty interesting for a number of reasons. First, the use of the second person was really effective, I thought. There are a bunch of sections like these, all in second person, that are interlaced with the stories of AA members. I found that being directly addressed pulled me in and somehow made me more sympathetic to the story, if that makes sense.

I found the scene on pages 255-257ish to be really thought provoking. This is the scene when Orin and Hal are on the phone; Hal is telling Orin about his grief-therapy after he found his father ("Himself") who had comitted suicide by putting his head in a microwave. This scene was kind of sickly-humorous--like when Hal said that his first thought when he had come home that day was that "something smelled delicious!" (256). But it also kind of gave us some insight into Hal, or at least, I thought it did.

It was interesting how Hal went through anger (vented towards the grief-therapist) and then a kind of guilt-denial and then accepted things and then absolved himself, all within one visit to the therapist's office.

For all the confusion this novel has already invoked in me, there's at least a little bit of humor to keep me going. I thought the application scene (pages 3-10) was hilarious (maybe since it rang so close to home, as Potted Plant mentioned). I also found a bunch of little lines that struck me as particularly humorous:

Page 28: "Good lord she didn't exaggerate did she?" --the professional "conversationalist" to Hal after he recites a dictionary definition. I'm not sure why this struck me as so funny, except that I could see some dumbstruck adult sitting in a chair, shaking his head, and saying exactly this.

"No one talks about the Texas Highway Killer anymore. You never hear the name. The name used to be in the air, always on the verge of being spoken, of reentering the broadcast band and causing a brief excitation along the lined highways, but the shootings have evidently ended and the name is gone now. But sometimes I think of him and wonder if he is still out there, driving and looking, not done with this thing at all but only waiting" (807).

I keep coming back to this idea of history as presented by DeLillo, and even though this isn't exactly talking about "history," I feel like it's definitely talking about it, somehow. When I read this passage, it reminded me a lot of the whole Osama Bin Laden thing after September 11. Everyone was so freaked out and worried about him and what he was capable of, and capturing him was high priority (much the way it was with the Texas Highway Killer). But then, after time, slowly the fear wore off, and now it seems like Bin Laden (like the ficticious Highway Killer) is rarely even mentioned anymore.

"He wondered about being *it* . . . a fearsome power in the term because it makes you separate from the others. You flee the tag, the telling touch. But once you're *it*, name-shorn, neither boy nor girl, you're the one who must be feared. You're the dark power in the street. And you feel a kind of demonry, chasing the players, trying to put your skelly-bone hand on them, to spread your taint, your curse. Speak the syllable slowly if you can. A whisper of death perhaps" (677).

So. Upon reading this a ton of connections rushed into my head. The first was this Nike ad from years ago. The ad began, "'tag' is a complex game involving many complexities," and went on to describe in excruciating detail how the game is played, focusing in particular on what it means to be "it." Anyways, the kind of over-analysis offered in the ad seems similar to this passage.

The more I read this novel, the more I appreciate it--not just for its intricate plot/encyclopedic qualities/ characters/ whatever, but also for DeLillo's writing. There were a few passages in this last reading assignment that blew me away in terms of style and meaning:

"It was a fine beamed room with creepy suburban furniture and they were shy because they hadn't seen or touched each other in a long time and Janet had to get used to this. They'd only slept together several times, planned always in advance. They didn't have a set of understandings, a pace and a glance, the whole hushed protocol of wishes and hints, bodies lightly brushing in the elevator. There was no elevator here" (448).

"She said this in her small voice. She looked and sounded small to herself. People were getting bigger, she was getting smaller, going more or less invisible" (396).

This thought (of Klara's) really stood out to me for some reason. I think part of the reason is because I've felt exactly like this, several times. This feeling seems perfectly articulated here to me.

Even though Klara has been introduced to us and talked about and parts of the story told through her eyes, I still feel as though I don't know all that much about her. I can't form a very concrete picture of her and her personality in my head--almost as though she were quasi invisible? It's funny, though, that her occupation is so visible and so out-there, yet she feels unseen.

"'You need the leaders of both sides to keep the cold war going. It's the one constant thing. It's honest, it's dependable. Because when the tension and rivalry come to an end, that's when your worst nightmares begin. All the power and intimidation of the state will seep out of your personal bloodstream. You will no longer be the main. . . point of reference. Because other forces will come rushing in, demanding and challenging. The cold war is your friend. You need it to stay on top'" (170).

I found this conversation extremely striking for several reasons. First, I feel like, up until this point, the cold war hadn't actully been mentioned outright.

Wow, this book is so much easier to read than Gravity's Rainbow! I really liked the prologue (I think part of that is because I actually understood everything that I was reading!)

One incident that I found particularly interesting was on page 41: "in the box seats J. Edgar Hoover plucks a magazine page off his shoulder, where the thing has lighted and stuck. At first he's annoyed that the object has come in contact with his body. Then his eyes fall upon the page. It is a color reproduction of a painting crowded with medieval figures who are dying or dead--a landscape of visionary havoc and ruin. Edgar has never seen a painting quite like this. It covers the page completely and must surely dominate the magazine . . . it is clear to Edgar that the page is from Life and he tries to work up an anger, he asks himself why a magazine called Life would want to produce a painting of such lurid and dreadful dimensions. But he can't take his eyes off the page." (Sorry for including that long of an excerpt!)