This actually doesn't really to do with the novel exactly, but I found it interesting

http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Lab/7378/radio.htm

It talks about a chess game that the USSR played vs the US in 1945 just after the end of WWII. We lost by a LOT. What I found interesting was that it related war with chess with radio, all huge themes in Underworld.

So this is kind of a 3-am-feeling-sick musing, but I was thinking about what we talked about in class about modernism being the East and postmodernism the West and I was wondering if it would be possible to classify the characters into these 2 categories. Matt seems to prefer the East Coast, making him represent modernism, while Nick (and possibly Klara?) prefer the West, and therefore representing postmodernism. I don't know too much about the 2 (and wikipedia and my english major friend aren't helping, unfortunately) so I can't make real comparisons, but it does seem that Matt deals more with history and internal stuff (modernism) while Nick does embody the postmodern focus on language with his word obsessions.

"What's the point of waking up in the morning if you don't try to match the enormousness of the known forces in the world with something powerful in your own life?" (323)

We've talked about it before, but more and more as we keep reading I think DeLillo seems to be saying that paranoia is a good thing, that establishing connections to things is absolutely necessary. This quote in particular says that making connections that maybe aren't there is actually necessary to have a sense of purpose in life. The connection between the 'enormous' powers of the world and the relative insignificance of your own life is probably not a real one, but still DeLillo says we need it.

I've noticed that the sections about Manx Martin are blocked off from the rest of the book by blacked-out pages, as I'm sure everyone has. I don't think anyone has brought it up, and I'm wondering why no one has (did I miss it?) and why it is that they're there. I thought maybe it had to do with race, but there are other black people in the rest of the book so I don't know how valid that is. Ideas?

This was supposed to be a comment on kettledrum's post, but it got a little long:

Condoms and gloves made of latex are used for the purpose of protecting oneself against humans, and more specifically their waste. They also provide a barrier to real interaction by 2 people: while touching someone with latex gloves feels real, it's not skin-to-skin contact.

There seems to be a disconnect between the two people involved in an interaction where latex is involved because both sides feel that they're making a human connection when technically that's not the case. This emphasizes the disconnect in human relationships that I think is evident in both Underworld and GR. In both books characters go about searching for love (both romantic and platonic) in ways that they seem to think will ultimately bring them what they want, but that end up just leaving them feeling isolated though they are surrounded by people.

On page 51 DeLillo talks about how secrets and information "This is what he knows, that the genius of the bomb is printed not only in its physics of particles and rays, but in the occasion it creates for new secrets." The CW was really all about who could keep secrets better: everything was kept underground and information had to be hoarded because if the other side found out about anything then they had more power. This calls to mind Pychon's line "Is it any wonder the world's gone insane, with information come to be the only real medium of exchange?" Although the books may or may not relate to different wars (WWII vs.

DeLillo has already brought in the capitalized Us and Them that brings to mind the capitalized words of GR....."And what is the connection between Us and Them, how many bundled links do we find in the neural labyrinth? It's not enough to hate your enemy. You have to understand how the two of you bring each other to deep completion" Us vs Them is necessary for any type of war, including the Cold War: without this idea, how can you hate? And past that, DeLillo says that you need 2 separate entities so that you can decide your place in the world. The power struggle of the Cold War can be seen in terms of two superpowers with differing ideas of how they each brought the other to 'deep completion'.

A link taken from the Wikipedia article on Underworld: http://www.lichtensteiger.de/WTCunderworld.html

Here DeLillo explains how he chose the title of the book:

"While I worked on the book, I gradually compiled a number of titles. I first hit upon Underworld when I started thinking about plutonium waste buried deep in the earth. Then about Pluto, the god of the dead and ruler of the world. New connections and meanings began to suggest themselves, and I recall drawing a circle around the title Underworld on a page filled with prospective titles." — Don DeLillo to Jonathan Bing, 1997

"Ah, they do bother him, these free women in their teens, their spirits are so contagious" and to the side of a 'song', the sidenote "Where did the swing band come from? She's bouncing up and down, she wants to be jitterbugged, he sees she wants to (italics) lose her gravity (end italics)" from page 547 (ya, I still don't know how to do italics...)

This seems to imply that teen women are spirited, and by the dance theme, happy. Teens may be the children of the war, seeing as we haven't actually been introduced to any children who didn't behave like teenagers if not adults. Even Bianca and Ilse, as far as I know the youngest characters, hardly have any child-like attributes. This would mean that teens are the most innocent of all the characters, which as we've talked about is not the case. A teen is also an age between child and adult, between a 0 and a 1.

Can anybody tell me what's going on in the section beginning with all the desserts in the "very extensive museum"(page 546) and ending with Katje and Pirate talking about loving people (page 558)....where are they and how did they get there? I'm really confused and I thought it might come up in class today and someone would mention it, but it didn't and I'm still lost.